The UK's recovery: a painted façade

Half-timbered houses in Hastings Old Town

The more I listen to government pronouncements about economic recovery, the more I sympathise with the recurring criticism from the Labour front benches of government ministers being out of touch.  Overall statistics are one thing - and it's better for us to have some overall growth than nothing at all - but the truth on the ground is considerably more complicated than these figures would have one believe.  

George Osborne, our Chancellor of the Exchequer (a quaint title for what in any other country would be a Minister of Finance), would have us believe that the present recovery, such as it is, is due to his continuing measures for austerity.  These measures have consisted in brutal cuts on central and local government expenditure, the main impact of which has been felt by the poorest section of society.  Unemployment is said to have fallen, but the figures are distorted by people in part-time work or on so-called "zero-hours" contracts, which give them no guarantee of earning a wage.  Many who are employed are in jobs that pay so low a wage that it is difficult for them to make ends meet.  One of our neighbours is contemplating a job  in a residential care home, at an hourly rate of £6.84, giving him a monthly gross pay of £1,185.  There is a shortage of workers in the care sector, and recurring scandals about the way in which the elderly are treated in residential homes.  But I find it difficult to believe that the situation will greatly improve with wages at this level.  

In the run-up to Christmas this year the Hastings shops are all feeling the pinch.  The welter of cut prices and special offers in the chain stores is an indicator of how hard they are having to fight to maintain turnover.  When goods are being offered so cheap I scarcely dare think what people are being paid further up the supply chain.

But the real sufferers are the small independent shops, deserted because of a shortage of cash on the one hand and the lure of online shopping on the other.  We seem to be becoming a nation of screen-watchers, locked away in our homes.  At a time when the main problem besetting many elderly people is loneliness and isolation, the gradual erosion of our communities augurs ill for the future.  

So don't be fooled by the picturesque façade created by officials; it masks a far grimmer interior than you think.

Antony Mair

Rediscovering Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972)

A year or so ago I told Jo Grigg, leader of the Stanza poetry group I attend in Brighton, that I was reading Pound's Cantos in full for the first time.  She confessed she had never read Pound properly.  Our more erudite next-door neighbour, Tony Sillem, noticed my copy when he called by one day and said "I thought I was the only person I knew who'd ever read those".

I laboured away, with the aid of William Cookson's Guide.  There were flashes of brilliance, but quite a lot of obscurity; also a lot of affectation of language that now seems childish - pseudo-phonetic spelling to mimic accents, for example.  I finally gave up when it came to Chinese history, with the 85th.

But Pound himself remained a puzzle, and more recently I took down Noel Stock's biography of him, which has been sitting on my shelf for a very long time.  It's now rather dated, and is the work of an academic rather than a natural biographer: details, for example, of Pound's son - whisked away from his parents in Italy virtually at birth and deposited with his grandmother in England - and of Pound's natural daughter are sparse in the extreme, so that one gets little idea of Pound's relationship with his nearest and dearest.  But what does come across loud and clear is the key part that Pound played in what is now called Modernism, in the early part of the last century.  He was at university with William Carlos Williams, with whom he remained in close contact for the rest of his life; an intimate of Yeats and of T.S. Eliot (the present form of The Waste Land is largely due to Pound's revisions); and a friend and benefactor of James Joyce.  Indeed, Dubliners and Ulysses would probably never have seen the light of day had it not been for Pound's financial and moral support.  He also championed the younger generation: Hemingway and E.E. Cummings, whom he met in Paris in the early 1920s, and the now largely forgotten Louis Zukofsky, a key influence on the later so-called Black Mountain poets.  

Pound himself had a brilliant mind, although its very brilliance, coupled with his fondness for the arcane (the poetry of the French troubadours, for example, would probably have remained the province of academics without his translations) led him to believe that his opinions were self-evidently right.  It was not so much a case of not tolerating fools gladly; those who disagreed with his trenchant opinions tended also to be dismissed.  

His consignment to obscurity is largely due to his straying from literature into the fields of economics and politics in the 1930s and later.  He demonstrated lamentable judgment in supporting the Fascist movements in Italy and Germany, which led to his being arrested and deported for treason at the end of the War, and to his commitment to a mental hospital until 1958, when he was allowed to return to Italy. 

Posterity is fickle.  It may well be that in the final analysis his poetic reputation will rest more firmly on his translations than on his own original work.  But it's been an eye-opener for me to appreciate the extent to which he was not only at the hub, but indeed the hub itself, of what was happening in literature a hundred years ago.  

Antony Mair

  

Booze cruising in Calais

War Memorial and cranes at the Fishing Port, Calais

Although I no longer drink, as a result of my Chinese doctor forbidding me alcohol, an irritant in the weekly trip to the supermarket in Hastings is the cost of wine: usually a minimum of £5 per bottle for what is indifferent stuff.  It seems to taste the same whatever the label or country of origin.  The last straw was when we went along to the opening of a new specialist wine-shop in St. Leonard's the other day and found it difficult to get anything under £10 per bottle.

Action had to be taken.  So, courtesy of the internet, I arranged a day trip via Eurotunnel to Calais, booked a restaurant near the port and found a wine-merchant of sufficient scale to give a decent choice of French wines, and off we went yesterday.

I hadn't realised just how painless such a trip could be: just over an hour to the Eurotunnel terminal, and

then you drive onto the train and are rocked like a baby in its cradle for half an hour before France appears through the carriage windows.  I'd timed it so we could get to the restaurant for 1 pm.  Le Grand Bleu was full of locals eating in that particular French way of being relaxed at the table but immensely serious about good food.  Cod, scallops, lemon meringue - all excellent fare.  Then on to Calais-Vins, which I'd identified as offering a better selection than the likes of Majestic.  Again, the staff charming and we loaded a mere 120 bottles into the back of the car for the return journey.  There was the added bonus of a rather good cheese shop next door, where we could stock up for this weekend's dinner party.  

Then back to the terminal for another cradle-rocking session in the train, and an easy trip back home.  We'd have been back by 6 pm had I not foolishly left my wallet in the cheese shop - discovered only after we'd crossed passport control so there was a slight delay while we were escorted back through passport control in order to retrieve it.  

We'll see how long it now takes us to get through the stocks.  Did it work out cheaper?  In brief, yes.  We bought wines at varying prices, but the top price we paid for any one bottle was about £5.70.  The clarets were better value than the burgundies.  In purely financial terms, the overall saving paid for the Eurotunnel crossing.  We could have covered the cost of lunch as well, had we gone for the cheaper stuff throughout.  But the most important thing is that the wines we bought should have some character and style to them rather than the bland stuff you get in the English supermarkets.  And, of course, we had the enormous pleasure of a good day out when the weather's dismal - plus of course the chance to speak French again after all this time.  In some ways, I'm hoping we romp through the booze fast so we can go back soon.

Antony Mair

Progressing with Poetry

It's a month since I began my Creative Writing MA with Lancaster University, and so far I've been entirely delighted with the course.  Although I'm the only person out of the 23 participants to be doing poetry only - the majority being concerned with fiction, some with poetry as an add-on - sufficient of my fellow-students are interested in poetry to make their comments worthwhile.  My tutor, Eoghan Walls, seems to be a charmer who can spot both virtues and vices in what I produce: he has the admirable ability to encourage the one and coax me out of the other.

Publication is no longer entirely elusive.  25 poems of mine are out in the ether, 17 in submissions to magazines and eight in competitions.  I have little hope of the competitions, which are something of a lottery, but my guru Eoghan tells me I need to put pieces into them so I am now trying to do so.  Morale was raised at the end of last week when Patricia Oxley, editor of Acumen, responded within a few days to say she was shortlisting two of the ones I'd sent her, for publication in January.  So they've at least got beyond the first hurdle.  I was quite surprised to get her response so rapidly: another editor has still not responded to my letter of 13th July!  We'll see how the others get on...

Meanwhile the anthology of poems I've been working on with other members of the Brighton Stanza group is reaching completion, with a launch next Monday in Brighton.  It's been a great experience, bringing the work of 26 poets together.  I have a real sense of achievement and am looking forward to the launch immensely.

When I went to a life coach, about ten years ago now, to explore what I would do with the rest of my life, I vividly recall him saying "Sometimes you just have to jump"- meaning that if your gut is telling you to do something there are times when you should ignore the workings of the rational process that is holding you back.  I took him at his word and jumped by pulling out of the security of the legal profession ahead of the normal retirement date; I jumped too when we moved to France; and I feel in some ways that there's been another jump with my venture into the world of poetry - although, since I've been writing it on and off since I was a teenager it's less of a jump into the unknown than a return to the start, with the wish to do it properly this time round.

Antony Mair

Eastbourne's Towner Gallery

The Towner Gallery, Eastbourne

In the current edition of the Hastings Observer there is a letter from a disgruntled Hastings resident, complaining about Hastings' Jerwood Gallery:  "Jerwood came to Hastings to regenerate the town and as such it has failed and we, the council tax payers of the town, are picking up the tab".

I've no particular axe to grind in the griping that goes on about the Jerwood.  But I know two things: first, that it's unlikely that any contemporary art gallery will succeed in regenerating a town on its own - it can only be one of a number of factors.  If anyone thought that Hastings would suddenly spring into prosperity as a result of the Jerwood they had to be bonkers.  The second thing I know is that the local community of Hastings residents dislike change - or, I should say, any change that takes them outside their comfort zone. 

The Jerwood is one of a string of recently-opened contemporary art venues along the south coast, including the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, and the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill.  We visited the Towner Gallery on Sunday.  It describes itself as "the contemporary art museum for south east England", which is flying a bit high in the circumstances.  On the first floor there was an installation by the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota.  It consists of five panelled doors that each opens into a series of passages that wind between floor-to-ceiling cobwebs made out of black wool, lit by bare light bulbs behind.  The introductory panel said that the woollen cocoons arise from the artist’s desire to ‘draw in the air’ and represent her own physical anxieties.  We were invited to enter the space and project our own fears and anxieties.  Mmmm.

On the first floor two or three small rooms lit by artificial light had some pieces from the permanent collection, focussing mainly on landscape.  We were underwhelmed.

Lunch in the café comprised sandwiches or processed snacks warmed in a microwave.  I don't think the Michelin inspectors would be impressed.

The Towner is part of Eastbourne Borough Council and is funded by them and by the Arts Council.  Entry is free.  Frankly, I'd rather pay and go to the Jerwood any day.

Antony Mair  

Installation by Chiharu Shiota at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne

More Opera at Hastings Odeon

1899 poster for Puccini's "Tosca"

Attendances for live transmissions of opera in Hastings Odeon are gradually climbing.  Last night there were 24, which is double the number we had last year.  Obviously the message is slowly getting through to the Hastings cognoscenti that these are performances worth going to.

Last week gave us the opportunity of sampling the Royal Opera House's Vêpres Siciliennes as well as the Met's Tosca.  We hadn't seen a transmission from the ROH before, and it was interesting to make the comparison.  It trumped the Met in a number of ways.  First, we were spared the gooey love-ins that pass for interviews with the stars: Kasper Holten, Director of Opera at Covent Garden, acted as guide to the opera, giving a brief synopsis before each act, and at the same time a bit of background to the production itself.  Secondly, I have to say that the production was more challenging and stylish than what we usually see from the Met (I'm excluding the Met's Ring Cycle, which was extraordinary in a number of ways).  I sometimes have the feeling with the Met that they throw a lot of money at a production, with lavish staging and world class singers but at times err a little on the conservative side.  

What let Covent Garden down in the end was, alas, the quality of the sound.  The music seemed to be coming through a fine sheet.  And if I'm to be honest, the director's take on the opera, involving a conceptual overlay of interference with artistic freedom, integrated with the already complex plot, resulted in great style but also an element of the pretentious.  The last act in particular, with conspirator numero uno in a large hooped dress killing people with the end of a flagstaff, tipped into the absurd - and they seemed to have forgotten the final part, when - at the last minute - loyal Sicilians spill onto the stage and slaughter the French.  

The Met's "Tosca" was not without its silliness, either.  In the first act the Madonna, who is supposed to be dominating proceedings from her altar, had been banished to somewhere in the wings, and Cavarodossi's portrait of Mary Magdalen was a dreadful piece of soft porn.  In the second act the villainous Scarpia was depicted in his office with three simpering whores clambering over him, which clashed with his singing that he prefers sex where the woman resists.  The concentration of evil that is the essence of his character didn't come across so well as when he's alone.  His office also seemed to be furnished with Ikea sofas, which didn't seem entirely in period.

But the singing and acting were wonderful: the three principals, Roberto Alagna, Patricia Racette and George Gagnidze, were magnificent and even survived the intermission love-ins with Renée Fleming with a degree of dignity.  With such quality down the road, I'm hoping that the Hastings audience will grow.

Antony Mair

Gilbert & Sullivan in Winchelsea

A scene from "Patience" produced by the Winchelsea Singers

I received a call from a cousin of mine a couple of weeks ago, asking whether we would come to a production of Gilbert & Sullivan's Patience in Winchelsea Village Hall.  This didn't augur well. I greatly enjoyed monthly play-reading evenings organised by some veterans of am.dram when we were in France, but have been subjected to enough wooden acting and poor diction in am.dram productions both here and in France to put me off in a major way.  However, my cousin is dear to me and naturally we agreed to go along.

My forebodings were increased by a performance of Madam Butterfly by Opera South East at the White Rock Theatre in Hastings, after we'd agreed to go to Winchelsea.  I vowed that I wouldn't write a review of the production, since it would be unkind to people who were doing their best.  Suffice it to say that we left at the interval.  

The production of Patience started with a number of handicaps.  The main one was the prominent part  played by a chorus of twenty "love-sick maidens" who could not be fitted on the diminutive stage.  A subsidiary problem was the fact that a number of the lovesick maidens were not in the first flush of youth - my dear cousin has just celebrated her 90th birthday and another much-loved cousin in the chorus is in her eighties.  Both redoubtable ladies of fine voices, but perhaps not entirely maidens.  

The solution found was for the said maidens to be seated in front of the stage, with their soloist members on the stage above them.  In practice it worked well.  To beef up the soloists, some members of Battle Light Opera were imported.  The village hall piano was wheeled into action, a backdrop painted and a bench moved onto the stage, and hey presto we were ready.

The great thing about Gilbert & Sullivan is that it is sufficiently lighthearted for it not to matter if the performance is not of Grade A category.  The dialogue and libretto are fun, and you're swept along by the good-humoured nonsense of it all.  A certain amount of playing to the gallery and ad-libbing went down well, and it all added to the enjoyment when the wig worn by one of the male leads proved a little mobile.  "Just a piece of fun", my cousin had said.  And she was entirely right.

Antony Mair   

The Press: an end to bullying and intrusion?

Photo courtesy of The Daily Telegraph website

To have read some reports of the newly-sealed Royal Charter you would think that politicians are thinly disguised fascists intent on muzzling a gloriously independent Press that is the envy of the world.  The full power of the Press has been manifest in their constant lobbying ever since the publication of the Leveson Report.  We forget that newspaper editors are intimates with, if not friends of, our top politicians; that journalists are the people interviewed on television and radio as experts in their field; and that they frequently count journalists on other newspapers as their friends.  None of this is intrinsically wrong, but it means that we are not dealing here with a group of highminded crusaders issuing informed opinions from their ivory towers, but highly influential opinion-formers with wide-ranging power.  

Just how low-minded some journalists can be has emerged with startling force in the court proceedings involving Rebekah Brooks and her colleagues on the former News of the World.  I was reminded of a dinner-party I was at, some thirty years ago, where there were a number of journalists present from the more eminent broadsheets.  When I suggested that a particular story being run by one of their employers was inaccurate (I can't now remember what it was) one of the hacks laughed and said "Journalism's not about the truth, Antony - it's about selling papers".  Much mirth from his colleagues, but I thought it wrong then and I still think it wrong.  Truthful journalism and selling newspapers are not mutually exclusive.  Nor, for the purposes of truthful journalism, do you need to resort to phone-hacking or payments to public officials for information.  

The Independent, more balanced in its views than some of its better-selling rivals, published the full text of the Royal Charter the other day, and I have been going through it with some care.  I had thought that the Charter set out the precise terms of a new regulatory body.  It does not.  Its main purpose is to establishment a Recognition Panel, which will have the function of recognising a new self-regulatory body.  The Charter then goes on to specify the requirements for the members of the Board of that body.  It should not include serving editors, for example, and a majority of the members must be independent of the Press.  In hearing complaints, the Board must balance the interests of freedom of speech against the interests of individuals.  They must act fairly and impartially.

In none of this - nor indeed in any of the other provisions of the Charter - do I discern the attack on press freedom that is heralded by some of the more alarmist journals.  There has been a serious attempt to distort and discredit efforts to implement the recommendations of Mr Justice Leveson with their full rigour - efforts that have redounded less to the credit of our Prime Minister than to the Hacked Off group of individuals who have been the victims of blatant bullying and intrusion.  

One of the objections of the Press to the Leveson Report was that the main abuses established were already breaches of the law.  Whether that is the case or not, the law was either out of reach of many persons affected or, in other instances, lacked teeth.  Hopefully the Charter is the start of a process that will see some rebalancing in favour of the individual, against a group of newspaper-sellers more powerful than we realise.  

Antony Mair

Back to Camber Sands

Yesterday started with stunning weather, and we took advantage of it by going along to Camber for lunch and a walk on the beach with the dogs.  During the summer months Camber is a no-go area, thick with trippers and clogged with traffic.  But once the autumn has come, the crowds and most of the cars have disappeared and dogs are allowed on the beach.

The lunch bit wasn't great: Camber is something of a gastronomic desert, with nothing between the chi-chi motel of the Gallivant, some way before the beach, and some desolate places further in.  We stopped off at the Dunes Bar, where the presence of dogs meant we had to stay on the terrace, which was in shade and invaded by an icy wind.  Our scampi and chips may once have had some contact with a natural origin, but that was way in the past, much processing having intervened.  Inside the pub there was a football match on a large screen and two people exchanging desultory wisdom from opposite ends of a long bar.  "Could do better" would be an understatement.

But the beach was another matter.  When the tide goes out there is a huge expanse of sand, perfect for dogwalking and horse-riding.  Since it was half-term for the schools, there were lots of parents and grandparents herding small children.  But the space is so enormous that there's room for everyone.  The dogs scampered around happily, making a lot of new four-legged friends.  The sky is always dramatic here, with views to the east along to Dungeness.  You can see the weather coming in from the southwest: it turned while we were there, and we got back to the car just before rain and wind set in for good.  But even their arrival was a thing of beauty.

Antony Mair

Surviving St. Jude

I'd been pretty blasé about the great storm that was forecast for Sunday night.  I'd survived 1987 ok in London (though the awning over a neighbouring building site was blown away and landed on top of my car, successfully flattening it).  We were out to dinner on Sunday evening and the wind was getting up, but I thought we'd been there before.  The wind funnels up our road, so there are often times when it's a bit of a battle walking down it - particularly if you're accompanied by two small dogs that might be transformed into kites at any moment.  It's even worse when there's horizontal rain in your face.

We had all of that for the final dog walk on Sunday evening.  But the scary bit was in the early hours of the next morning.  Wind howl down the chimneys is one thing, but feeling the house rock slightly is another.  Again, we'd experienced this when staying next door in No. 8 when the building works were going on here in No. 7 - that part of the building is timber-framed, so there's a degree of give in it.  When the bedside table starts rocking beside you it's a bit scary.  However, I now know that it's even scarier when you're in No. 7, in the brick-built bit, and that starts moving.  Reminding yourself that the place has stood for 200 years becomes quite difficult when the wind is hitting the side of the house like a giant hooligan.

Today, of course, the sky is clear and sunlit and it's difficult to imagine there was any problem at all.  None of the trees on the other side of the valley seem to have been toppled, and we appear to have got off rather more lightly than other places.  But I'd still like to have a good long time before we have a repeat.

Antony Mair

Fairytale endings

The story about the little girl allegedly abducted by a Roma family in Greece - and subsequently found to have been given away by her true mother, another Roma in Bulgaria - happened to surface at the same time as I'd been to see Matilda the Musical  in London, closely followed by Hänsel and Gretel  at Glyndebourne.

Four of us went to see Matilda, and two of us found the ending disconcerting: the parents, who have consistently mistreated their brainbox of a child, go off to sunnier climes, abandon Matilda to the willing care of her loving teacher.  Matilda, who has survived by dreaming of an ideal father and mother, is delighted with the outcome.  There seemed to be a subversive anti-family message here.  One of our number was of the view that it was not untypical of fairytales, where a child manages to escape from wicked parents.  This gave rise to much discussion over a dinner afterwards at Mon Plaisir, round the corner in Monmouth Street.

When it came to Hänsel and Gretel the problem was reversed.  In the Glyndebourne production the parents of the sweet-loving duo are portrayed as, respectively, a harrassed mother who doesn't hesitate to hit her offspring and a well-meaning alcoholic.  When the wicked witch finally meets her deserved end in her oven the children are reunited with their appalling parents in a loving finale that somehow lacks conviction.

In neither case were we left with an entirely comfortable ending: Matilda had arguably already been damaged by her rightful parents, while Hänsel and Gretel were probably heading for some pretty rough times.

Which brings me to the little girl in Greece.  Her rightful mother claims that she had given her to the Greek Roma family because she couldn't afford to keep her.  Now she wants her back.  I'm not sure that the future is particularly rosy for the little girl in either event.

Antony Mair

Hastings Bonfire Night again

I hadn't realised,  until I read the programme issued by the Hastings Borough Bonfire Society, that all this November 5th junketing derives from James I's decree in 1605 that the foiling of Catesby's plot to blow up Parliament was to be celebrated annually for ever after.  Why the good people of Sussex in particular, should have taken it up with such alacrity, and still use the occasion each year for torchlight processions, bonfires and fireworks, still remains a mystery.

Hastings, of course, is not the same as elsewhere, and instead of the November 5th date the townsfolk have chosen to junket at the end of Hastings Week - thus linking the commemoration of the famous battle of 1066 with that of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605.  It's always struck me as a bit curious that the Hastings population should celebrate the 1066 battle - it's rather as if the locals of Waterloo had annual festivities to celebrate a foreign victory.  The Gunpowder Plot was another matter - if you were a Protestant, that is.  And anyway, if the king tells you to have a party, who's going to protest?

So each year at the end of Hastings Week we have the torchlight procession round the town, in which a panoply of bonfire societies parade in full fig to the sound of many drums.  It's an eerie occasion, because of the dark and the torchlight and the strange outfits of the various societies.  Skulls and Victorian undertaker costumes and strange face-paint abounded last night.  Most curious of all were the members of the Burgess Hill Bonfire Society, who were dressed like Aztec Indians.  Not sure what that was about, but it added a touch of the exotic.

We'd been kindly invited to a party in a flat in Pelham Place, right opposite the fireworks on the front.  The display was pretty amazing.   James I would have been proud of it, I'm sure.

Antony Mair

Fireworks seen from Pelham Place

St. Pancras - high speed hub

The new St. Pancras - staircase fit for a ballroom

I was in London the other day, and instead of returning to Hastings had arranged to meet Paul in Rye.  This led to my discovery that little old Rye is now only an hour and a quarter away from London by train - as a result of the high speed connection from St. Pancras to Ashford International.

Café society near the Eurostar gates

My return journey was, as a result, a bit of a voyage of discovery. For starters, I  hadn't been to the new St. Pancras, which left me fairly gobsmacked.  Gone are those old days of draughty platforms and concourses that are wastelands dominated by vast boards with details of departures.  Now the trains are tucked away out of sight and the traveller is lured to shops and bars. (Since this is the departure point for the Eurostar service, it wasn't surprising that the café nearest to it should be called "Le Pain Quotidien", cleverly managing a Gallic whiff and a scriptural allusion at the same time.)

Once I had recovered from the gobsmacking, though, I got a bit lost: the thing is that the station now serves not only Eurostar but also trains to the Southeast and the East Midlands.  Finding the Ashford International train was sufficiently bewildering for me to have to ask someone in a fluorescent jacket (it wasn't clear whether they were staff or not but I thought the jacket was a bit of a giveaway) where to go.  Just as well I'd been warned by London friends to allow extra time.

The next surprise was the speed of the journey - stops at Stratford International, Ebbsfleet International and then suddenly lo and behold Ashford International (the international bit has got a bit devalued, I reckon, but it arguably adds a bit of glitz to the experience).  Until you get to Ebbsfleet International the scenery is pretty dire - a lot of concrete on either side of the tracks, broken by vistas of light industrial estates.  But suddenly, abracadabra, and you're in Ashford and ready to change over to the dinky two-carriage train that chugs along to Rye and then on to Brighton.

Rather less of the café society atmosphere near the Ashford service!

The vast infrastructural cost was all too apparent from the whole experience.  But at the same time, when the world is shrinking and we can jet off to distant lands in a few hours it seems only right to connect parts of the same country more efficiently.  This experience has rather altered my perspective on the disputed HS2 proposals.  London has become such an important economic centre of this country that it needs to be joined up to other parts - otherwise I sometimes feel that the disparity between the metropolis and the provinces is just going to get greater and greater.

There was another thing that struck me: in this hugely costly labyrinth the workers - i.e. the station staff, the barista who served me at Prêt à Manger and then, on the train, the ticket collector - were all well-trained, efficient and charming.  Everything I have read leads me to believe that they are all on low wages, and probably have to travel long distances to get to their workplace.  But you'd have thought that their sole purpose in life was to make me feel good.  No wonder tourists enjoy coming here. 

Antony Mair

Mixed events start Hastings Week

Hastings Town Hall

Michael and Elaine Short

We're now into Hastings Week - a series of local events, commemorating the skirmish that occurred nearby on October 14, 1066, and culminating in Bonfire Night this Saturday.   Last Saturday we had "Books Born in Hastings", a mini-bookfair in the neo-Gothic splendour of the Town Hall's Council Chamber, where local authors and publishers peddled their wares.  Michael and Elaine Short were there, dressed appropriately in a Mad Hatter's hat and what looked like a velvet fez, to publicise their slim volume Utter Nonsense in Hastings about the Hastings connections of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.  This is published by the enterprising Circaidy Gregory Press, a sister company of the Earlyworks Press, run by Kay Green.  Also present was Victoria Seymour, who has created an industry of local social history and writes a weekly column in the Hastings Observer.

Philip Terry

If you're at all interested in poetry you come across small publishing companies all the time.  They are usually run by idealistic and highly-motivated individuals, more for love than money.  Volumes are slim and print runs are short.  It's all the more pleasing when one of their products hits the jackpot.  This has happened to my neighbour Ken Edwards and his company Reality Street, with Philip Terry's book Tapestry, which also featured strongly in last Saturday's event.  Ken describes his company as specialising in "left-field poetry".  This means it is not always immediately accessible to the general reader.  Philip Terry has produced a book written in prose rather than poetry, which is written in what he describes as faux-mediaeval English.  It is about the making of the Bayeux Tapestry by a small convent of nuns, who each have their own story to tell.  The faux-mediaeval spelling conventions took a bit of getting used to, but once into the book I enjoyed its originality enormously.  I was delighted to hear that it had been shortlisted for the newly-established Goldsmiths Prize.

While we were sampling literary delights, classic cars had massed on the Stade for an audience of motor buffs.  Nostalgia hung heavy in the air.  Fortunately the sun also shone from an almost cloudless sky, so that the assembled vehicles glittered.  Everyone likes a bit of reminiscing, and there were lots of people for whom the gathering brought back memories of parents and grandparents: leather seats and walnut fascias, running-boards and chrome radiator grilles, picnic hampers in the boot and a rose in a silver holder on the dashboard.  Lovely stuff.

Antony Mair

It's autumn, and the opera season starts again

Nemorino pleads with the doctor for the love-potion

We were back at Glyndebourne the other evening for the opening night of Donizetti's "L'Elisir d'Amore".  One of the better-kept secrets is the Glyndebourne Touring Company's few weeks in October and November, where you can see a terrific production from the comfort of the stalls for two thirds of the price of a seat up in the gods during the summer.  Ok, you don't have the glitz of black tie and silver service picnics, but I'm happy to settle for a seat where I can see things close up.

Adina dances with the philandering soldier

And this production was worth every penny.  The plot is slight - village dolt adores capricious girl who rejects him; he purchases fake elixir from quack, persuaded this will change her mind; his uncle dies and leaves him rich; village girls pursue him, at which point capricious girl thinks she needs to get in ahead of the competition; happy ending.  The music, however, is divine.  The two leads, sung by Christopher Tiesi, making his Glyndebourne début, and Joélle Harvey, were entirely convincing.  (Nemorino, said village dolt, is thick as two short planks but then, as the person in the seat next to mine at another performance said "He is a tenor", so you can forgive him anything.)

Nemorino pleads with Adina

 There was a lot of stage business, and the cast were obviously enjoying themselves.  So did we.

If Glyndebourne comes and goes, alas, we nonetheless have the Met Opera live transmissions to occupy us in the interim.  Last Saturday we went along to Hastings Odeon and saw the divine Anna Netrebko play Tatiana in Eugene Onegin.  It was the first opera I ever saw, around forty years ago, and I still love every minute of it.  On this occasion Piotr Beczala put in a wonderful performance as Lenski, and I was moved to tears by his aria before the duel.  There's nothing like a good weep to make you feel good.

Hastings Odeon's live transmissions can be a bit capricious, like Adina in Elisir.  There was a famous occasion last year when the subtitles were in Russian throughout the first act.  This time they started off in German, and I shot outside to tell the youthful assistant.  They managed to get them into English, but we had unfortunately lost the initial dialogue, where the whole theme of the opera is outlined by Tatiana's mother, telling of her own experience of love and marriage (basically, they don't go together).  But we got on the rails after that, and the wonders of the plot unrolled with all the sumptuous dignity of a Greek tragedy.

Antony Mair

Nemorino and the doctor's assistant

And it's back to school...

The Chaplaincy spire at Lancaster University

If there's been a bit of a gap since the last post, the reason is simple: there's been a lot happening!  chief of which is my becoming a student again.  I started my MA in Creative Writing with the University of Lancaster a few days ago.  Thanks to the miracle of internet contact, I am able to be a student at this northern establishment while sitting in the comfort of my Hastings study.  

It means, of course, that my fellow students - there are 22 of us on the course - are also in their respective cubby-holes, and that we shall not be meeting either each other or our tutors until the end of the academic year, when we make a pilgrimage to the distant north (I exaggerate - it just seems a long way from this southeastern corner) for a week on campus.

There's been a certain amount of scrambling around and a threat of toys out of the pram (you know what creatives are like) because of the software, which has had a major revision over the summer, as a result of which we are in a slight Natwest situation, with people unable to access parts of the site.  However, there are soothing messages from Lancaster gurus assuring us that these glitches are being resolved, and we have now made tentative incursions to chatrooms and forums like so many timid mice venturing out of their holes in freshers' week.  

I have said that I want to do poetry only, and find myself with Eoghan Walls as a tutor.  Since I have a strong Irish bias, life could hardly be rosier.  The only source of slight panic is that, having loaded up six of my better recent offerings for a pre-tutorial, I find myself having to do another batch for the first tutorial proper on the 21st.  This may be taxing my productivity rate - particularly since I have been battling with one poem for several days without seemingly getting anywhere.  Grrr.  Back to the notebook.

Antony Mair

So hard to say good-bye - in England, at any rate

A happy day for many, as George W. Bush and his First Lady said a definitive good-bye to the political scene

One of the things I've noticed on my return to England is the way that the simple word "good-bye" seems to be moving into obsolescence.  For some years now, a lot of people have started to say "See you later" - though there is often not the slightest likelihood of their seeing one again the same day.  What does "later" mean, then?  some vague time in the future?  is this perhaps plumber-speak - like "I'll come round later", meaning in three months' time?

I used to know where I was with polite formulae.  "Thank you" didn't need a reply.  Now, as often as not, it is followed by the thankee saying "No problem".  What problem did they think there was?  Do they mean "Don't mention it" - i.e. the matter was such a trifle I needn't bother to thank?  Or has thanking itself become a problem?  

You can see the existential dilemmas I've been facing in daily social dealings.  But the good-bye thing is a little more fraught.  Even when someone succeeds in saying good-bye it's accompanied by other formulae.  "Drive safely" is an injunction I find slightly offensive, since it implies that I wouldn't drive safely if not told.  (Actually that might be right so I won't go on about it.)  "Take care" is often uttered with a sort of oozing unctuousness that is pretty repellent.  It implies that my life is so fraught with danger that I need to tread warily.  Are there perils that, after over sixty years, I am still unaware of?  I prefer the more blatantly selfish "Look after yourself", though why anyone needs to say that as we part company I don't really know.

I started thinking about all of this after walking the dogs today.  During our promenade along the seafront there were the regular words used by doting parents to their toddling offspring - "Look - a doggie".  I have now developed a total loathing of the word "doggie", and have to restrain myself from a Victor Meldrew-type rant in which I address the proud father and ask whether his child sits in a chairie to eat his mealie.  Becoming a little concerned about my decline into grumpy-old-man-ness I started to think of other phrases I disliked, which led to the good-bye thing.  Not that there's much danger of a rant if someone says "Drive safely", "Take care" or "See you later" - it's just that all of them encourage some further conversation - such as asking whether they know of perils I'm unaware of, or when "later" is referring to.  Much easier really to keep to a simple good-bye, perhaps with a regal wave like George W.

Antony Mair   

Coastal Currents - art, art and more art

Outside 10 The Lawn, St Leonards-on-Sea

 Coastal Currents Arts Festival is now in its fourteenth year.  It's a two-week celebration of visual arts and performance, open studios, exhibitions and events.  And believe me, it's quite difficult to cover everything, even if you live here.

I decided to opt for some of the open studios - partly because of an enjoyable time I'd had last year, partly because we'd been invited to a couple and it seemed a good idea to sample more.  Our neighbours Bob and Claire Humm had asked us round to their house to have a look at what they had been up to.

Outside the Humms' house - no, the figure with his head in the stone is not real

Bob had constructed a diminutive cinema in the form of a compartment comprising six doors, with two cinema seats, one behind the other.  A little claustrophobic, but fun.  A screen showed a film of Claire in one of her Jack in the Green costumes, inspired by folklore.

I followed this up this weekend with a trundle round most of the 22 locations in Saint Leonard's where artists had opened their studios to the public.

Studio at 7 The Lawn, St. Leonard's

 At 10 The Lawn - a slightly dilapidated but beautiful Decimus Burton house - various works had been brought together in the back garden, and I interrupted the various artists over a late lunch.  A few doors away at No. 7 the studios of Nick Snelling and Adrienne Hunter were also in the back garden.  I then found myself in basements, industrial units, and rooms at the top of concrete staircases that might once have been offices.  Artists' resourcefulness never ceases to amaze. Between studios I stumbled on an exhibition entitled "Garden in the Garage", where a group of artists had taken over a large and empty space perfect for exhibiting their conceptual pieces with the theme of the garden.  It was great.

Garden  in the Garage

With some of the studios I was aware immediately that the work wasn't for me.  No criticism there - it's a question of taste.  You're then faced with the awkward question of how to leave without appearing boorish.  I came to the conclusion that a polite "thank you" without further ado was the only way to keep going without being caught up in insincere chitchat.  But if anyone has any better suggestions I'd be interested to hear.  It was a little sad on some occasions, when the artist had obviously been waiting, bored, for an hour or so without anyone crossing the threshold.  But with so much to see, I'm afraid that niceties were sacrificed.

No such scruples were necessary at Studio VII in Shepherd Street, where I spent a very happy time looking at the work of the seven artists exhibiting.  Lynne Bingham does mixed media pieces, a number of which were perspex cases in which old books had been placed with sections cut out and small objects inserted.  I'm not sure what that was about, but I liked them a lot.  Suzie Watts is another mixed media artist, working mainly in bronze and iron, whose small pieces packed quite a punch.  Another member of the group had done some rather fine ceramic bulls.  I'm sorry there isn't another day to go and see them again.

Antony Mair

Lynne Bingham's "Moral Essays"

Afrikàba - Festival of African and Caribbean Art

Sona Jobarteh  - photo courtesy of her website

Afrikàba - the Festival of African and Caribbean Art - is now in its fourth year in Hastings. It overlaps with the higher-profile Coastal Currents festival, which is devoted to the visual arts, so tends to get overlooked. 

I have mixed feelings about anything that combines the words "African" and "Caribbean".  "African" on its own is broad brush enough - what really links the Berbers in Morocco with the Kikuyu in Kenya? but linked with the Caribbean as well?  surely in the latter case only a distant past - yet we continue to lump them together.  It's rather as if a group of people in Nigeria set up an Anglo-Australian festival.  

But that's a side-issue.  We should probably be grateful for anything we can get that tells us more about the peoples and cultures of African states, and last night's opening event at Hastings Museum certainly did that.  Poetry was contributed by Akila Richards, picture right, originally from Liberia but now living in Brighton.  A performance poet, she recited her pieces with studied and beautiful gestures that were close to dance.  The words were almost shaped by her hands.  A beautiful poem called "Dancing with Grandmothers" went the whole way, with Akila dancing to a recording of her voice against a musical backing. 

Good though Akila was, the real star of the evening was Sona Jobarteh, described on the Afrikàba leaflet as a "Kora virtuosa".  In case that has you puzzled: the kora is a twenty-one stringed West African harp that dates back to the thirteenth century, when Mali was one of three West African empires that controlled trans-Saharan trade.  Sona Jobarteh comes from a Mali family of griots - storytellers and musicians, who act as a repository of oral tradition and advise royal personages.  She explained that only five families traditionally have the right to play the kora, and she is the first woman to do so.  

Accompanied by a drummer and three guitarists, she played several numbers to rapt attention.  One of them was in honour of a nomadic tribe that roams across the northern territory of a number of West African states - a noble and hospitable people, she said.  Looking round at the scattered audience of Guardian-readers in Hastings Museum, I could hardly think of a culture more alien.  But by this stage we were all on our feet at Sona's behest, for her showstopping final number that had us all dancing and clapping with enthusiasm.  

Antony Mair   

Art on the Stade

"Sunbathers" by Jeffery Camp RA

The trouble with things being on your doorstep is that you don't give them the attention they deserve.  This has certainly been true of the Jerwood Gallery's current exhibition of paintings by Jeffery Camp RA, entitled "The Road to Beachy Head".  Nothing in the publicity had particularly tempted me, so my visit to the exhibition was a particular pleasure.

Not that Camp's loose freedom with line and shallow layers of paint are normally my thing.  But after the initial jolt I began to look more closely.  In this group of paintings Camp, who formerly lived in Hastings, concentrates on the landscape of and near Beachy Head, just down the road.  But what makes the paintings unusual is his combination of elemental landscape with human figures or heads.  The impression is of human beings caught in an elemental environment beyond their control - or, as in "Sunbathers" above, rapturously united with nature.  It's not fashionable art, but it has a particular resonance that is usually the key to something important happening.

An incidental pleasure of nipping into the Jerwood Gallery is that they have rehung the permanent part of the collection, removing some and introducing others.  There are some terrific new appearances.  I particularly liked David Bomberg's "Portrait of Eunice Levi", but could happily have pocketed half a dozen or so others for the walls of the Shoebox.

Across the open space of the Stade is the Stade Hall - a featureless large room that is sometimes used for art exhibitions, sometimes for meetings.  At the moment there's an exhibition of paintings by Oliver Crowther called "Guardians of the Stade", with powerful portraits of local fisherfolk.  There's no sentimentality about them, and they're a good complement to the Jerwood's curated show.

Antony Mair

Dealing with death

Skull and crossbones flag flying in the boatyard of Hastings Sailing and Motorboat Club, Rock-a-Nore

I'm about to go to my fourth funeral in a little over three months.  The previous three have been intensely emotional occasions, since the deceased has in each case been in their fifties, only.  Two - Paul's brother and sister-in-law - had died of cancer, the third - Jo Grigg, the leader of the Stanza poetry group I've attended in Brighton for a little over a year - of an inoperable brain tumour discovered only a month before her death.

Tomorrow's funeral promises to be less traumatic, since the lady concerned was over 90, had been unwell for some time and had already expressed the wish for the "Grim Reaper" to come along and take her away.  The Irish funerals of Paul's brother and sister-in-law were a different matter, and I've written of the first of them in a separate post.  There could scarcely have been a greater contrast between the Northern Irish Catholic way of dealing with a funeral and that of Jo last week.  

We had been told to wear bright clothes in celebration of her life.  Both Jo and her husband had been regular attenders at the Bishop Hannington Memorial Church on the edge of Hove.  The service began with a short film projected onto walls on either side of the chancel, showing Jo reading one of her own poems.  It was a close-up, and looked as if it had been done by Jo herself at the computer.  The eulogy, prepared by Jo's husband Peter but read out by the vicar, was a moving tribute but succeeded in being upbeat even in the midst of grief.  

The religious side was present in the optimism of believers in the Resurrection and the next life.  But at the same time there was an absence of the theological paraphernalia I'm used to from my RC background.  The result was moving but at the same time affirmative.

Each of these three deaths has been shocking in its way: in each case a life has been cut off before it has run its course.  When I was speaking about this to my sister-in-law she quoted a friend of hers, who had said that this was the wrong way to look at things: a person dies when it's their time to die.  This may be at any age.

I've been thinking about this but find it unhelpful.  The sadness I've experienced at each of these funerals has of course been partly induced by the heightened sense of my own mortality.  But, even more than this, the sadness has been caused by a death before the normal course is run.  Jo's funeral was all the more striking because, although the family were clearly grieving their loss and in shock at its suddenness, they faced the fact of her death with a firm faith that gave them courage and optimism.  You can mutter about happy-clappy churches and poems being read instead of, or in addition to, Scriptural readings; about the favourite songs of the deceased being played over loudspeakers instead of organ music, and about the appropriateness of photos being projected onto church walls - but in the end it's this courage and optimism that impresses, whatever form the service takes.

Antony Mair