Sunday walk to Rokko Farm (3.5km, not a vending machine in sight!)
Back late to the mountain after a first day's teaching, with Justin sleeping rather fitfully across the room, I lack the energy needed to complete the new piece I was intending to publish today. In its place, prompted perhaps by the news of yet more dramatic shaking around Fukushima—the anthropomorph in me wants to ask Poseidon whether he doesn't think those poor souls up North have suffered enough?—and by the countless moral quagmires of Lybia, Gaza, Yemen, Bahrain and Ivory Coast, I offer a piece originally served up in November 2008, which is mostly a vehicle for a Raph McTell cover. Music and literature will solve none of these problems, but they do provide perspective, and make things a little easier to bear: enjoy!
An interest in life...
This I found yesterday at the beginning of Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana, which happened to be sitting on Ayumi's bookshelf at her parent's home, and which I picked up faute de mieux.
—I could give you a medical certificate, said Dr. Hasselbacher. —Do you never worry about anything? —I have a secret defence, Mr Wormold, I am interested in life. —So am I, but... —You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us — I'm sorry; I wasn't referring to your wife. But if you are interested in life, it never lets you down. I am interested in the blueness of the cheese. You don't do crosswords, do you, Mr Wormold? I do, and they are like people, one reaches an end. I can finish any crossword within an hour, but I have a discovery concerned with the blueness of cheese that will never come to a conclusion — although of course one dreams that perhaps a time may come...One day I must show you my laboratory. —I must be going, Hasselbacher. —You should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
[The fact that Dr. Hasselbacher's optimism is later ruined by the shallow carelessness of the protagonist Wormold does not detract from the hope the paragraph conveys.]
Summer Lightning
The second item, only tangentially related, is a song by Ralph McTell called Summer Lightning. It was on the B-side of Streets of London—when there still were B-sides—and was McTell's only real hit (in 1974). Unlike Streets, which is quite mawkish, this song has a simplicity and private sincerity to it that makes it more appealing. The important thing is the message.
Here's the text:
Move over here, c'mon sit down beside me, Come closer now, come and put your arms, put your arms around me, You've had a bad day too, and I feel the same as you, c'mon sit down.
It's just that when I get mad I end up saying things if I thought about I wouldn't ever say, And I think that you already know that, though I'll say it anyway, I'll say it anyway...
(repeated)
Don't let the day go down, the two of us still fighting, It's not a storm at all, no, it's only summer lightning, And we've still got the night, so there's time to put it right...
[Note: this piece is not about about my family, nor does it involve literary or musical criticism. I’m not anticipating any attractive illustrations or other lures, and no musical accompaniment either. So if that’s what you came for, look away now. There will be more such articles in the future, I hope, but this is not one of them. You have been been warned.] Tokushima Naruto Whirlpool (Shikoku Excursion) Events of the last few days have left me, both literally and figuratively, in a painfully disordered state of mind. In plain English, I’m stressed, and my head aches. Actually, it twinges, rather than aches, but the precise description matters little; at all events, the pain ‘comes and goes’, as they say. (Where pain goes to, when it goes, is a puzzle in itself. I have this anthropomorphised image of Pain, like some peripatetic poison dwarf, doing the rounds of the neighbourhood: “Hi, Nigel didn’t want me this hour, so I’ve decided to drop in on you for a while. Don’t worry thoug...
Over the past few days, I've been thinking a lot about my father, Gordon Duffield, who died earlier this year, far too soon, before we had a chance to talk. You might think that in nearly fifty years, we would have had a proper conversation, but though I told him about myself (too much at times, at times too little), and though he always listened, he only rarely shared his innermost thoughts, his personal beliefs as a man apart from his parental role, as a father and breadwinner; even then, when he revealed anything of himself, it was only in writing, never in conversation. My father was the kindest man I have ever known, the most forgiving of others, the hardest on himself: in all my life, I only once saw him lose his temper, and it was not with me. (If I can get through a single day without berating one of my children, it is a rare achievement.) He was a good man, without a trace of self-consciousness, generous and tolerant to a fault, and—until his last weeks—optimistic b...
"I" Staircase, Trinity Hall, Cambridge This weekend past, I returned to Cambridge with Ayumi, Julian and Justin for the first time in seven years. The occasion was a college reunion dinner, marking approximately 40 years of life since matriculation (1980, 1981, 1982, 1983 entrance years): about half of us (~50) from each annual cohort turned up to compare notes, reminisce, squeeze our sagging frames into formal evening wear, and report biographical highlights. It is worth noting that this was a self-selecting group: those with sufficient time, opportunity, income (it wasn't a cheap weekend break), self-regard and retained affection for their alma mater to trundle up; as bushy tailed and 'Hail fellow, well met', as age and misanthropy might allow. Sic transit gloria iuvenum. I didn't have a great time, nor yet was it a disastrous waste. This is hardly surprising, since the curse of middle age is profound ambivalence about almost every extra-familial event or ...
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