A Couple of Stray Notes from Uppsala

Uppsala. At breakfast there was a biker whose jacket said he was from the Uppsala chapter of the Ards Vikings. I didn't know they had clubs for them. He looked pleasant and friendly despite the build, the tattoos and the facial hair and it occurred to me that they might be a bit like elk. Having no natural predators they are calm, clumsy and mostly harmless.

At the river we walked along the bank a few hundred yards. It was full of young people, students I suppose, doing what young people do, hanging out, drinking beer, trying to impress the girls. Being young. I miss being young.

The Gentlemen are Speaking Well of the Gorgonzola

I have heard recently a number of people, who do things related to cultural psychology, literary studies and the artier bits of 'neuroscience', discuss the idea that we like reading or hearing stories because they help us to develop theory of mind. The lecturer in Spanish theatre said that this applied specifically to literary novels, and in a way defined them and set them apart from popular novels, because they expose the empathy between the characters and help us to share it. Thus we grow in an important social skill.

There are clearly other motives for telling and listening to stories.  Whether this is an important one will be determined only by a lot of work in neurobiology, serious anthropology and psycho-linguistics, and we won't have an answer quickly, but the idea has some promise. I cannot comment except to say that I await the results of research with interest.

I was explaining abstract art in 1ºA ESO this morning (12-year-olds). That class can be lively, and they were today at first. I spoke for nearly ten minutes about the distinction between representational and abstract painting, compared it with the use to which elements are more traditionally put in music, and illustrated it with just a couple of slides. Most of this was in English. In some classes I have done it all in English. There was not a sound. Wrapt, they were. It happens that way sometimes. In fact, I know how to exploit it, I've been doing this a long time. Sometimes I tell stories to 6-year-olds, in English, who respond in the same way.

It is clear that they do not understand the whole story. What I was telling them today was not even really a story, and I am by no means an expert in the history and psychology of art. They responded, however, as though a great drama was being played out before them, one so absorbing that they could only hold their collective breath and wait for the ending. And it was true. That drama was me.

More than the words of the story, the drama was my tone, the music of my voice, my body language, the atmosphere that they themselves were unconsciously involved in creating. It is a curious thing to be part of. There is much more to story-telling than stories.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

This book I had only heard about, never read:

It's worth reading, and it is worth reading in the end. It's largely predictable, but then I think it's meant to be. Gordon Comstock can only ever be a failure, even, especially, on his own terms. He runs from the comfortable, satisfactory, though sometimes difficult and dull life of the hard-working family man, and takes refuge in a romantic image of himself which which probably can't exist, and which he, certainly, is quite incapable of living up to. He completely fails to realize that what he is running from is not imposed on anyone. It is what the people who have it want. Not all of them succeed, but those who do are happy. He has chosen not to have it, even though it is the route to everything he wants, including money, which he is far more obsessed with even than the people he pretends to despise, and he cannot have the girl he wants until he becomes like them.

He, not them, is the victim of the money-god. He is the one who measures everyone and everything in terms of money. He is a silly, infantile creature who expects the world to take him seriously because he has chosen to ignore it, to look down on it. He knows he is not what he claims to be but expects other people to believe it and to value it in a way that he himself cannot.

It is not surprising that he ends up a normal working man, nor the mechanism chosen by Orwell to achieve it. He begins to dimly understand that people choose to live the life he tried to renounce, and they so choose for perfectly good reasons, the same reasons that make him choose that life in the end. He wishes to live a symbolic life, as Ravelston does, but Ravelston can afford to live such a life and Gordon can't.

I was surprised he threw away the great poem, some of which wasn't bad, rather than keeping it locked in some desk as a memory of another time. And putting an aspidistra in his window shows a sense of humour and self-awareness that he has never appeared to have before.

The Eye and God

The eye is a magnificent thing. In form and function it could scarcely have been better designed. It is almost perfect in it'sbeauty,  elegance, simplicity of style, and extraordinary usefulness. Only God could have designed the eye, one is tempted to say. The orbit, however, is quite another matter. The orbit was put together from apparently random bits of seven different bones which were strectched, obtruded, pinched, rounded, flattened and squeezed together to form a recipient that will, very roughly, allow the eye to sit in it. The orbit, like most of the skull, in fact, is a complete bloody mess.   

I offer this reflection for what it's worth.

Things to do Before I Die

I seem to have stumbled on several of these lists recently, and it has made me think. There are things I intend to do one day, things I should like to do, things that I imagine would be worth doing, and things which, thinking about it carefully, I believe I will be glad I have done when I reflect on my life as it ends. The items on this list make up a collection of aspirations old and new that may be fitted haphazardly into these or other categories.

Some people seem to copy each other, rather than thinking how they themselves would respond to the experience in later life. And some of the things that regularly crop up are surprisingly mundane. Why does everybody want to swim with dolphins? Or eat at the world’s best restaurant, or stay at the world’s best hotel? Or appear as an extra in a film, or just appear once on the television? I expect all of those things are fun if you get the chance, but I don’t see them as justifying existence in the mind of the moribund. But on the whole they show how different we all are, how individual are our dreams and aspirations and fears, and that fact alone makes life a fascinating adventure. So here are my ideas:

Buy a microlight plane (and fly it, because I find the idea of moving around the country by air and seeing it from above very compelling)

Learn to ski jump (because it looks like tremendous fun and I want to feel it)

Cross Siberia by train (the journey must be very beautiful, and the sense of being lost in a place that is far more interesting than you yourself could ever be must be wonderful)

Travel in northern India (because I think there are things there worth seeing, things to learn about what people have been and can be)

Understand Sanskrit literature as well as I sometimes pretend to (a genuinely satisfying intellectual achievement)

Understand the origins of humanity and human consciousness (I rely on other people to provide the information that I will then try to understand, and at the moment they still have a lot of work to do)

Own a shark (not that I need great pick-up lines anymore, but that one takes some beating. And I like sharks)

Open the bowling for England (overtaken by events many years ago)

Have a passionate affair with Goldie Hawn (also overtaken by events many years ago)

Discover whether there is such a thing as spiritual enlightenment

If there is, achieve it (contingent on previous)

Win a Nobel Prize for (preferably) Literature (this is more something to work towards than to achieve. A kind of distant reference point for my little scribblings)

Learn to accept death (useful in itself)

Learn to play a mean game of chess (I used to be a mathematician, I’m supposed to be good at chess, but I have never got beyond not-quite-embarrassing)

Express something worthwhile by drawing (I would discover something about the world that I had not imagined)

Likewise through music/the guitar, for the same reason

Make a parachute jump (because it is the single most terrifying thing I can think off, and to overcome the irrational fear would be very satisfying and beneficial)

Walk around the world (if that is rather impractical, I would settle for walking across Africa from Port Said to Cape Town, or the Americas from The Magellan Strait to Alaska)

Nº 1 on any such list: Live. Many people forget to do this. They are too busy not dying, or doing other things of minor importance.

Comments, additions, ideas, other people’s lists, are very welcome.

Crowd Control and Self-Fulfilling Fears

Up  to the minute as ever, I’ve been wondering about the enquiry into the deaths at Hillsborough stadium in 1989, and the context in which it happened. To pick the enquiry and the report to bits would take a great deal of time and effort, so it’s a good thing for me that it isn’t my intention to do it. It would be both lazy and cynical to think that, just as at the time, and in the prevailing mood, it was easiest to blame the fans, now, when the public mood has changed, and everyone in a position of responsibility that day is dead or retired, it is easiest to blame the police. Lazy, cynical and possible false.

It is likely that none of those who died that day were directly responsible for the events that led to their deaths. It is not my intention to suggest otherwise. But one day it was going to happen, because of the culture in which football was played, and to a certain extent still is.

Football fans had for decades been accustomed to behaving like animals. The more they behaved like animals, the more they were treated like animals, and the more they were treated like animals, the more they behaved like animals.

I used to go to Highbury in the mid-eighties, and I saw the fans herded like wild dogs from the station to the ground, between lines of police, screaming abuse and making threatening gestures at passers-by. I saw them howling like crazed apes at opposing players, opposing fans, and each other, even when not much was happening. We ignored the lines and walked like human beings towards the gate, were greeted with a ‘good afternoon, sir’, which we returned, showed out tickets, allowed ourselves to be apologised to for having our pockets patted, and were invited to go in and enjoy the game. The police took no notice of us. Because we did not invite them to treat us as animals.

The cages that caused the deaths at Hillsborough were still there in part as a result of the brutish, sub-human thuggery of Liverpool fans at the Heysel stadium in 1985, who caused the deaths of 39 Italian fans simply because they realized that they could.

The decision to open the gate at Hillsborough was taken by the police to prevent a mob forming outside the ground, because they knew very well what a mob like that was capable of. I repeat, one day it was going to happen. In this the clubs and the league are no different from the trades’ unions and other organizations that call violent gangs out onto the streets in the knowledge that there will be trouble, and then wash their hands and pretend it’s someone else’s problem.

It should have been dealt with decades before. Grounds should have been shut, points deducted, clubs relegated even, when the fans didn’t behave. It would have meant legal battles, some clubs, the unlucky ones or those that didn’t take their responsibilities seriously, would have gone to the wall, the press and the public would have been against them, calling it an over-reaction. It would have taken courage, political and commercial courage, which is why the politicians and the FA were never going to do it.

I’m a teacher, and perhaps I see things differently from many people, but the idea of treating people as inhuman, even when that is how they see themselves, is disagreeable to me. The intention should have been to rescue the humanity of the fans, from themselves, rather than accept them at their own estimation, as wild animals. Football could have become what other sports are, entertainment, fun, rather than tribal warfare.

Panta Rhei

There is a bar in Córdoba which is like Heraclitus’ river. Or rather perhaps, like all rivers as described by Heraclitus. You can never, strictly speaking, visit it twice.

I live in a town not so far away, and I have been there many times. It’s not a disco or a jazz club. It isn’t filled with drunks with smelly armpits crying in their beer, or prostitutes pretending to be something else. It doesn’t smell of overused oil and there is never football on the television. It provides food but only symbolically, for show rather than nutrition. It serves coffee in the mornings, wine at midday and strong liquor in many colours at night. It always smells clean and slightly evocative. We might call it a cocktail bar. It is many things, but it is never any of the things you expect a bar to be.

You can hear the music, but you can hear yourself speak as well. You don’t have to dress up to go there, but you do anyway because if you didn’t it would be like going anywhere else. The lighting is sufficient to see the beauty of the women, but too dim to show their flaws. They serve beer, but only out of bottles, and no one would dare drink it after nine in the evening.

Despite being recognisably the same place, and retaining a very distinct feel, which is what takes me back again and again, every time you go there it has changed. The art discreetly hanging on the walls, the tone of the ceiling, the play of the lights on the walls, the nap of the light rugs, the refined shoots of Brazilian bamboo or bonsai behind the bar and in the alcoves, are different. The faces are not the ones you remember. Their clothing changes only slowly, with the seasons, with the fashions, but the people are never the same. The music is always exactly suited to your mood, but you only notice when you hear it that your mood has changed since you were last there, and so has the music.

The barman remembers you, of course, and he knows what you want before you order it. Which is odd, because I’d swear he’s not the same one as last time…

Niche Narratives

Rereading some short stories by O Henry, I was struck, as I often am, by the desire to have written some of them myself. If I could excise him from history, hide the tales from the world for long enough for them to be forgotten, then produce them as my own, I think I would do it. Or possibly not. His style is not mine, his life was not mine, his characters can never be mine, but many of the ideas behind the stories are universal, at least, they are once they’ve been thought of.

Last night I read ‘The Last Leaf’. I am certain I remember the story from another setting, involving a couple of Frenchmen. I don’t know which is the original, or perhaps it comes from some folk tale, or a source older than writing itself, and O Henry and others have taken it and given it a new world and new flesh to live in. His story may be overdramatised, and I would have given it a different title, but the composition is perfectly balanced, and the whole thing is gathered together by its own coherence.

It made me think about other unusual idea which have been repeated (or copied) in writing and in song. I have a little list (now that line rings a bell, too, for some reason) of particularly striking cases:

I’ve always thought that Thomas Hardy pinched the entire plot of The Mayor of Casterbridge from Les Miserables. The story of a man reacting against his own weakness and stupidity, trying to make up for them, rising to achieve great things, and finally losing the daughter who was his main inspiration is common enough, but there are too many similar details for it to be purely chance. I would have to read them both again to explain it more fully, but I am sure there is some influence.

Lope de Vega once wrote a sonnet which is a description of the process of writing itself. (It’s called Soneto de Repente, if anyone wants to look it up). And Leonard Cohen wrote a song called Hallelujah, a rather splendid song if you like that sort of thing, the first verse of which describes its own musical theme (It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift) very cleverly.

Another O Henry story is ‘The Tainted Tenner’, narrated by a ten-dollar bill. The Guy Clarke song, ‘Indian-Head Penny’, is not narrated by the coin, but it tells a similar story of its birth and adventures, and all the places it ends up and the jobs it has to do.

Country music has many niche narratives. Although every second country song ever written is about some guy getting drunk over some girl, among the songs which find other aspects of life there are some unusual themes. Girl who turns to prostitution out of despair is common enough (Townes van Zandt’s ‘Tecumseh Valley’ is one of the best). But there are a couple of songs which refine it further, as ‘mama was a whore because she had to be but she was always good to me.’ ‘Hickory Hollow Tramp’ and ‘Lily of the Alley’ aren’t great songs, but they take a very specific and unusual theme and do something with it.

There is even room for a, very small, ‘Jesus Christ on the highway’ genre. I forget the name of the song in which a truck driver meets Jesus out jogging on the road. He explains that Heaven isn’t a good place for running so He comes down to Earth to do His jogging. And there is the brilliant, and very funny, Terry Allen song ‘Gimme a Ride to Heaven,’ which is worth 5 minutes of anyone’s time.

This has been a series of random thoughts. Indulge me. In a couple of days I must return to the city, where I shall have to think, get up in the morning, organize my mind and my life, and pretend that what I do has a serious purpose. The riffing on odd things seen in the mountains will have to end. But today I can still think random thoughts.

*The photos are of the salt works I wrote about last week. I couldn't upload them then.

Euronymous

I find strangeness fascinating, and this character is very strange, as is the world that he lived in and the way it is described here, in the Wikipedia. I offer a few excerpts:

Øystein Aarseth (22 March 1968 – 10 August 1993), who went by the pseudonym Euronymous, was a Norwegian guitarist and co-founder of the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem.

Dead [Per "Dead" Ohlin, his houseguest] committed suicide while alone in the house. He was found by Euronymous with slit wrists and a shotgun wound to the head. Before calling the police, Euronymous… photographed the body… One of these photographs was later used as the cover of a bootleg live album called Dawn of the Black Hearts.

Øystein called me up the next day ... and says, "Dead has done something really cool! He killed himself… Relax, I have photos of everything".

In time, rumors spread that Euronymous had made a stew with bits of Dead's brain and had made necklaces with bits of his skull.

Faust said "It sounds really silly, but I think there was a little bit of a contest between them to see who could be more evil

…a confrontation began, which ended with Vikernes fatally stabbing Euronymous. His body was found outside the apartment with 23 cut wounds… 

It has been speculated that the murder was… an attempt at "out doing" a stabbing in Lillehammer by Faust.^] Vikernes denies all of this, claiming Euronymous had plotted to torture him to death and videotape the event – using a meeting about an unsigned contract as a pretext. He claims that Euronymous planned to subdue him with a taser, tie him up, take him to a forest and use him to make a snuff film.

In interviews, Euronymous said he was a Theistic Satanist and anti-individualist:

“I believe in a horned devil, a personified Satan… Satanism comes from religious Christianity, and there it shall stay. I'm a religious person and I will fight those who misuse His name. People are not supposed to believe in themselves and be individualists. They are supposed to OBEY, to be the SLAVES of religion.”

He said he would "Never accept any band which preaches Church of Satan ideas, as they are just a bunch of freedom and life-loving atheists, and they stand exactly the opposite of me".

Euronymous was a member of the Norwegian Communist youth group Rød Ungdom… he saw [his political leanings] as mutually compatible with black metal – influenced by the repressive nature of his Satanism as well as his intense misanthropy.

Euronymous played a Standard sunburst Gibson Les Paul guitar… [and] his…main influences were Venom, Bathory, Hellhammer, Sodom and Destruction. He played through a slightly modified Marshall JCM800 tube amp and used an Ibanez Tube Screamer pedal as well as an Arion Metal Master distortion pedal.

On Prettiness

This post is the top Google entry for the search string "what's the difference between beauty and prettiness"

I'm glad to have solved that little probloem on behalf of the world.

You Cough, You Die

In Hollywood, where nothing is real, there are rules that cannot be broken. Don't have sex in a horror film, that kind of thing. Retired cops only come back to be exposed as baddies. Regular but not star characters beg for loyalty only when they are about to betray the heroes. The ability to identify a Shakespeare character or a quote from Pope is a sign of great intelligence. And one cough means you are dying.
But why is an industry whose aim is to use money to create a market, to sell an intrinsically worthless product to those sections of the public which have least money to spare, and which depends for its wealth on societies which protect the ideas they disagree with, so quick to denounce, not only in its product but also in the mouths of the people who work in it, both capitalism and freedom of expression? Bloggers are always nutters or weirdos. And they’re always rightwing. Journalists are always good, and are always left wing. Companies are always bad, and invariably pollute the environment causing the deaths of polar beds, Chinese children, hope, civilisation etc. Money grows on trees and only government employees are doing any good for the country and the economy.
So we have established that Hollywood is, for some reason, filled with people who live like capitalists and preach like socialists. Perhaps successful film actors really do feel bad about having ‘obscene’ amounts of money and so they want to stop other people from having it. But footballers and other groups of wealthy, working-class people with access to the public’s ear don’t regularly pour into it the tedious results of undigested political musings quite at odds with their own actions and lifestyle.
But are all bloggers rightwing nutters? Surely not. It’s true that I eat babies (though not during Lent), vote UKIP and think I’m a hedgehog, so it’s just possible that the description might apply to me. And I have come across blogs written by illiterates of unstable character and low forehead, obsessed with any or every aspect of how ‘them’ are secretly conspiring with other ‘them’ to destroy the blogger and people like him who are the only ones who know the truth, even though the evidence is all around us and can be plainly seen. Some of them were rightwing, some were leftwing and in other cases it was impossible to tell whether they had any fixed or even coherent ideas about politics or anything else. A lot of bloggers seem to like young women with no clothes on, but I can understand that (I like them too, I just don’t blog about them). But many bloggers seem fairly normal people, you can imagine them interacting with the rest of human society with such competence that no one would know they blogged unless they brought the subject up. Some of these are clearly leftwing, if they are anything at all.
On the other hand, even if I fit the Hollywood sense of ‘rightwing nutter’, I’m not scheming to bring down civilization as we know it, assassinate Obama, expose the Bilderbergers, or whatever it is they think mad rightwing bloggers do.  So there are nutters, there are non-nutters, there are leftwingers, rightwingers and people who don’t even know what colour their government is. There are weirdos, normal people, clever people, stupid people, people with every interest, skill, information and obsession you can imagine, and quite a lot more that you really wouldn’t want to imagine. There are dull people banging on about the exact texture of the soil required for potting dahlias in early spring, and angry people shouting at the world because they don’t think it’s listening.

In other words, there is a bit of everything. The blogosphere is the world on a data stream. We’re all there. But in Hollywood, only deranged rightwingers who want to destroy the free world blog. Very odd. If I was a nutter who wanted to destroy the free world I wouldn’t publish it on the blog, I’d just write random stuff about hedgehogs and lakes and keep the details of the conspiracy in little black notebooks like the ones I’ve got hidden over there in my desk…

Fishing?

I have long thought of fishing as the quantum unit of human activity: it is impossible to do less than to fish.

My Thruppence Ha'p'ny on Racism in Football

Málaga FC Undergo Late-Night Sensitivity Training

I didn’t know whether to post this, or merely to tuck it away as a collection of odd thoughts that I might research, analyse, and turn into something worth reading at some point in the future. At the moment it’s more a collection of questions to myself, and if he so wishes, to the reader.

Luis Suárez, a Uruguayan who plays football for Liverpool, has been punished for making racist remarks to Patrice Evra, another football. Punished quite severely, in fact, on the grounds that he made repeated references to Evra blackness in a nasty tone of voice.

It was alleged that he had called Evra a ‘nigger’, (if we’re going to talk about the word I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t exist), but it then appears that he hadn’t used that word, but a Spanish appellative which is only very broadly similar in its semantic charge and the exact meaning of which in the context has not been properly identified. (In Spain in general, to describe someone as ‘negrito’ is quite harmless and inoffensive, though it probably would be if used as a vocative. How it is used in downtown Montevideo I have no idea).

The fact that Suárez insulted Evra in some way does not seem to be in doubt, but, since Evra had just kicked him in the ribs it’s hardly surprising that he had a go at him. (I have frequently pointed this out to people who say that Spanish football fans are racist because at such and such a ground they made monkey noises at such and such a player. There are, and have been, quite a few black players in Spain, though nothing like the number there are in England, and it has not been unusual to see a black player on the field for over twenty years. Some of them were born here. When fans make monkey noises at a player they aren’t picking on him because of his race, but because they don’t like him. There may have no real reason for disliking him, but it isn’t just because he’s black, not in my experience.)

A young lad at Manchester Utd Oldham also complained recently that a spectator repeatedly shouted racial insults at him when he approached the touchline. It would be nice if the players didn’t have to put up with abuse from fans but football isn’t like that. Also, the player, who appears to have been generally upset by it, and I don’t blame him, has just announce to the entire football world that he’s easily wound up. He may well regret it. And it won’t just be the spectators. In the give and take of the penalty area during free kicks and corners, all kinds of things are said, because the referee can’t hear them, and he only sees the resulting punch from the one who loses his cool under provocation.

Football has far bigger problems of behaviour than a few specific insults which are deemed, for some reason, to be worse than the others that fly about constantly. Football fans are no longer the thugs they were for thirty years, until the football authorities were finally persuaded to do something about it before the whole money-spinning circus got itself closed down, but the fact remains that there is a great deal of menace on the terraces, shouting and singing abuse is still considered a privilege you buy when you pay for your ticket, and parts of many towns are effectively closed down on Saturday afternoon so the crowds can be escorted to the match. The fact that home and away supporters still need to be separated by fences and police lines tells you all you need to know. The problem has not gone away, and it’s a very serious one. Only tradition allows football to continue to do this. I don’t think it’s even the money.

On the field, players constantly try to injure each other, to get each other punished and banned from games by faking fouls, they provoke each other verbally, as I said above, whenever they think the referee can’t hear, they claim goals, penalties, corners, fouls and even throw-ins that they know didn’t exist with an extraordinary passion. The clubs and the media conspire to create an atmosphere close to warfare before any big game, and then deny any responsibility for the resulting violence.

All of these problems are far greater than a few cross words between players in the heat of the moment, but there are risks involved in addressing them, so it’s much easier to pick on a few relatively unimportant but uncontroversially bad things, and declare them to be the root of everything that is wrong with the game.

Much as I enjoy football, I realized long ago that it should have been given an ultimatum to get those involved in it to behave like decent human beings, or, after a period of grace, be abolished. It was never going to happen, of course, and the business of Suárez and company is just the latest attempt to pretend they are doing something by tinkering around with details.

On Things that Socks Do

St Sebastian Despairs of Finding his Other Sock

It may be true that there is nothing interesting to say about socks, but I shall do my best. Most of the time they get on with their basic functions of keeping your feet warm, stopping your shoes rubbing, distinguishing one 15-year-old girl from another and marking you out as an Englishman when wearing sandals at the beach, but when left unsupervised they will enjoy themselves in quiet and surprising ways which mostly involve playing tricks on their erstwhile wearer.

It is in the nature of socks to be two, but their ability to become one, and sometimes three, between one look in the drawer and another, or between going into the washing machine and coming out, is well known. I have at times found the missing pair in the pocket of a pair of trousers, up the sleeve of a shirt, in the machinery of the washer itself, nested inside another sock, and many have never appeared at all. But it isn’t just that they get lost. They also have the ability to multiply. Where once there was a pair suddenly there will be an extra one, inexplicably (and rather uselessly). Lost socks will reappear the next time you do the washing, caught up in something that wasn’t even in the machine the first time. Douglas Adams would have made a fine job of failing to explain this.

The other day I ran across the best trick I have ever seen performed by a sock. One of the pair had teased out a loose thread from itself, tied it around its own instep with a complex knot (we hedgehogs don’t join the Scouts, so I can’t say exactly what type), trapping the leg of its pair (which went into the machine separately) inside it. If socks were interesting in themselves, and I accept that they may not be, this would be positively Fortean.

One of the reasons I know I’m happy is that I can take pleasure in being frustrated by the behaviour of socks.

Open Sesame

I was introduced to the story of Ali Baba and the forty thieves by a recording from the records section of the public library, back in the early 70’s. It was told by an American actor with what sounded to me at the time like a very broad accent, and an exaggerated and inappropriate prosody. It was part of a series of what could loosely be termed ‘fairy tales’, which we listened to repeatedly, told by the same man, or by a number of people with similar voices. At the start of one of the stories he said, “A legend is a story so old that no one really knows how true it is”, which continues to serve me as a working definition. It also has good metre for an opening line.

I used to hear Open Sesame as open sessally/sesserly, as though it were an adverb, describing a way in which something should open. But I would also think of it as meaning opening in a sesserly manner, so it was an adjective too.

Close sesserly sounded all wrong of course, because it had the wrong number of syllables, and because it was too clearly a mixture of order and password. Open sesserly sounds like it’s all a password (even though I analysed it mentally as an imperative + adverb, it was an unconscious syntactic analysis, and made no attempt at semantic deduction).

Then when he forgot the password and could only remember it was the name of a grain, I was completely confused because I didn’t know that sesame was a grain, or indeed anything at all except a meaningless codeword. It was sometime later when I came across sesame seed buns, and discovered that it was a real plant (though not actually a grain).

In other news, Rahul over here suggests a way of comparing great Test batsmen. It needs some refinement, so such readers of this blog as are both cricket fans and familiar with optimization strategies in statistical analysis might like to pop over and help out. In any case, it’s a good read.

There isn’t any particular point to this post, nor anything especially relevant about the memory, but I don’t know who Jeremy Clarkson is, so I have to talk about something else.

On Eternal Vigilance

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, as someone once said, quite correctly. But he had the time and the energy to be vigilant. Most of us, you know how it is, by the time you’ve done all the things you have to do, then some of the things you want to do, you don’t have much of anything left to be vigilant with. Just about enough energy to moan about how taxes have gone up again and the government wants to ban short-tailed lizard racing because they found someone enjoying it, or to froth a little about what Israel has done in Gaza, or what Hamas has done in Jerusalem, according to whichever newspaper we read last; laugh or frown at the latest nutty remark by a US Presidential candidate, again, according to taste/prejudice/political persuasion, the sort of thing we say in the pub when we’re pontificating on world affairs in the belief that we are experts and that someone cares what we think. But vigilance?

Vigilance is tough. And it’s not just the time and the inclination. We may cheer on the people of Libya as they finally chase their bloodstained despot out of town, but we also notice- or perhaps we don’t- that, although the people, collectively, might be destined for a better, freer, more prosperous and stable life (let us hope so) many individual Libyans have lost their lives, or their homes, their jobs, their families and the majority have probably seen their lives hugely disrupted. They may expect a better future, but the present is difficult and uncertain. People, real people, have lost a lot by standing up for themselves. Belling the cat takes courage, and can get you killed.

In Britain, and in Spain, you can still criticise the government without being visited at dawn by the secret police, so vigilance is a question, not so much of courage, as of energy, effort, study, will and time. And the fact that you can do it without risking your life means that now is the time to take it seriously, before it is too late. I don’t expect to see tyranny in either of my homelands in the near future, but the stranglehold which our rulers*, many of them completely unaccountable, have on every aspect of life is infuriating, and the grip is tightening. In Spain we have Citizenship on the school timetable (guess what that's all about), and historical truth is decreed by law. I read somewhere (I forget where, sorry) that in Argentina exactly the same interference exists in schools. The real danger starts when the protection of the state’s existence and ideology becomes the central goal, and there are signs that the EU is beginning to think in this way. A step on the way, and a warning sign, is when all new laws seem to be created for the convenience of the rulers and their minions, rather than for the protection and prosperity of the people (making it illegal not to fill in a form properly, not to cooperate with the authorities, to possess cash, to own things that can conceivably be used to do harm; responding to every problem not by looking for a solution but by criminalising any action which might require them to look for that solution).

 

*Not leaders, I tend to find them elsewhere. Offhand I can’t think of a single European ruler who I would follow anywhere, physically, intellectually, ideologically or morally. I can’t think of a single one who has ever displayed real, personal leadership or physical courage, which is a sine qua non for any leader. Some appear to have a certain capacity to attract followers, but then so do Meadowbank Thistle. They don’t inspire me. And the idea of anyone at all following Herman von Rompuy to the ramparts is utterly hilarious.

Of Wells

I mentioned the Plaza del Pilar in Saturday’s post. This Pilar has nothing to do with the popular female name Pilar, which comes from La Virgen del Pilar, and refers to a pillar of stone on the banks of the Ebro on which Our Lady allegedly appeared in the 1^st C to encourage St James the Great when he was having a bit of trouble converting the Spanish. That pillar still stands, and was incorporated into the magnificent mediaeval basilica that was built on the site, and which lies at a funny angle because of it.

Anyhow, the Pilar in the town here is not a pillar, it’s a different word meaning ‘spring’. The original village came into being because of that spring, and it grew because it was on the royal road from Toledo to Cordoba. People would rest at the spring, eat, buy things, stay overnight, and it became a sort of 10^th C Watford Gap.

In the 12thC, after some unpleasantness with the Arabs caused the fortified settlement nearby to be abandoned, the King founded a walled town on this site, more or less guaranteeing its existence, growth and protection. But old names of the place, and still existing names of streets and neighbourhoods, reveal a lot about the intricate relationship between the town and its springs and wells.

One of the earliest names of the village on this spot was Pozuelo de Don Gil, (Don Gil’s Well). D. Gil Turro was the semi-legendary founder. Later it was known as Pozuelo Seco (Dry Well), which is partly why the major settlement in the area moved to a hilltop by the river about 8 miles away. There is a street Pozo Dulce (Sweet Well), at the bottom of which there was once a well of drinkable water. Here it’s common to distinguish between sweet and bitter wells, which is reasonable enough.

There’s another street called Pozo Concejo (Council Well) where the corporation dug a public well to provide for an increasing population at some point. It’s long gone, as has the original spring and the other wells in the town itself, but the names live on, and we remember a little of our history therby.