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   

Wired Aerial Theatre on the Stade

Little did I think that the show put on in Hastings tonight would be my introduction to bungee-assisted dance.  Imagine five people dangling from wires on the face of a large screen on which images are projected, and you get an idea of the Wired Aerial Theatre's production of "As the World Tipped".  A crowd of a thousand or so of us stood in the gloom and slight drizzle on the open space of the Stade, by the seafront, as the show began, with some deafening music and a speeded-up simulation of the 2005 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, with voiceovers of delegates and five people onstage whizzing about with files.  When the talks collapsed, the fun started, with the stage first tilting then upending completely, before being raised in the air by a giant crane.  Clever effects followed, with the dancers/acrobats interacting with footage from Yann Arthus-Bertrand's film Home about climate change, and from Gideon Mendel's films about floods in Pakistan and Australia.  As continents fell apart, the actors fell with them; they ran vertically through a grassy meadow and fell off the sides of buildings that were themselves constructs of endless television screens with newscasters broadcasting climate change news.

Do you get a whiff of propaganda?  well yes, this was a work with a message - underscored at the end with the words "Demand Change" projected in capitals on the screen.  My problem with it as a work of art was that the message was over-explicit and over-simple.  Women in saris and small children standing in mud and staring soulfully at the camera have become a cliché for the West's indifference to the problems of underdeveloped countries.  A little more showing and a little less telling would have made a big difference.

As would a slight reduction in the volume of the sound.  With admirable political correctness, a screen had been placed at one side with text for the hard of hearing.  This displayed not only words that were spoken but also the nature of accompanying sound effects - "winds howl", "woman screams".  However, the noise level was such that anyone deaf would probably have got much of the point from the vibrations in the ground beneath our feet.  When the message came up with "Soft piano music" as we were being deafened by some less than tinkling ivories I thought they could do with replacing the sound engineer.

But if you looked at the show just as a spectacle there were some superb moments.  I particularly liked the sequence where a dancer posed in the centre of the screen as Lena Horne singing Stormy Weather.  The running up the screen was also good.  It was a fine way to celebrate the start of the Coastal Currents Festival, about which more later.

Antony Mair

More poetry

The picture above may look a little bit like a primary school, but that's how the world of poetry is: everything pared down and minimalist - usually because there's no cash for anything grander.  The Poetry Café is tucked down Betterton Street, in a virtually unknown hinterland of Covent Garden, and is the ground floor of a building occupied by the Poetry Society.

The Stanza group I've been attending in Brighton for a little over a year now is an offshoot of the Poetry Society.  Earlier this year I'd taken part in a "Stanza Bonanza" in the windowless basement of the Poetry Café, where two Stanza groups fielded six members apiece to read their poems in slots of just under ten minutes.  Then it was Brighton and Walthamstow.  This week it was Brighton and Barnes.  I'd originally volunteered to compère the event, having read before, but then one of the participants dropped out at the last minute and I found myself reading again.

Reading your poems to an audience of unknown people gets easier the more you do it.  This was my fourth time, and I can now see the way it needs to be done - though I'm a long way off doing it right.  The last thing an audience wants to hear is someone droning on in a monotone, not engaging with the listeners. This creates a whole new level of boredom.  Also, I used to think that poems could stand on their own two feet and didn't need an introduction.  But in a reading they do: it's nice to hear the context - what led to them being written, for example, and where you were at the time.  A sense of humour helps as well.  Contrary to what a lot of poets seem to think, people have come along for a good time, not just an earnest bout of severe mental concentration.

Last night three members of our Brighton team recited their poems off by heart.  Two of them - Tommy Sissons and Sue Evans - were admittedly "performance poets", which means that their work is intended to be performed rather than read.  The third, Andie Davidson, just felt that her poems were more effective when delivered that way.  And they were.

Yours truly wasn't sure he could trust his memory sufficiently to equal this.  I adopted the solution of reading three poems, of which two were not too serious.  It's great when you get a laugh from an audience.  You feel somehow that you've not only got their attention but they're on your side.  That's the moment when you give them a poem that's a bit tougher - but not one that's too long, because you'll lose them.

The other pleasure of these events is hearing others read whom you don't know - it's a thrill to hear a poem that's fresh and original.  There were several of these from the Barnes representatives, which I could happily mull over on the long train ride back to Hastings.

Antony Mair             

Seafood and wine at Hastings - where else?

The correspondence columns of the Hastings Observer are well worth a read for measuring outrage against any proposal by the Council.  Hastings residents are not fond of change.  In recent weeks there has been protest against the imposition of an entry charge for the annual Seafood and Wine Festival, which took place over this weekend.  The Council, strapped for cash like all local authorities, had said that the Festival cost them £50,000 to support.  I'm not quite sure how this figure is made up, and whether it is gross or net of, for example, charges to stallholders for the privilege of mounting their stands on a drafty site which, last year, was awash with rain.  However, dire foreboding about the effect was expressed by local Cassandras.  "Look what happened to Eastbourne Air Show", they said darkly.

We were for once well-prepared.  Smugly armed with wristbands bought in advance at a discount, we were able to wander round an excellent selection of stalls.  I was a little puzzled by the bold advertisement for cheeseburgers from the 1066 Bakery (I thought burgers were made from horse these days, not seafood), but I suppose not everyone wanted fish.  Paul Webbe, owner of the eponymous restaurant just opposite the Stade, was in charge of a small army of staff serving queues of peoples with nicely-cooked delicacies - small fishcakes, sardine fillets and little dishes of whiting.  Pissarro's, opposite, had adopted a more European flavour, including squid stuffed with chorizo.  Mouthwatering.  

Alas, since our Chinese doctor has taken me off alcohol, I didn't sample the local wines from Carr Taylor et al.  But I did notice an attractive stall selling jams and chutneys.  

Along Rock-a-Nore there were further stalls that seemed to have only a marginal connection with seafood.  One man was optimistically peddling sunglasses, while another had a display of lurid coloured soaps.  The fishmongers in Rock-a-Nore were entering into the spirit, with an outside stall selling shrimps and crabs.

Paul, flanked by Polo and Martina Piatti

But the real event of the weekend was the transformation of Winkle Island into Fantasy Island, a fundraising event run by the Winkle Club. Fake palm trees had been erected round the paved island, deckchairs set up round the edge, and a sequence of musical acts entertained passers-by.  Refreshment was also on offer from the indefatigable Polo and Martina Piatti, aided on this occasion by Paul as a genuine Winkler.  A somewhat menacing papier-mâché mermaid cast a disapproving eye on anyone who failed to contribute.  

The numbers at the Festival were such that I wasn't sure the doom-predicters were right.  But certainly some were deterred, and took refuge in the Winklers' deck-chairs, sampling the tea and coffee on  offer and tipping some coins into the collecting box.  It's quite satisfying to think that the Council's loss may be the Winkle Club's gain.

Antony Mair

  

Missing the point with the bedroom tax

Pretty on the outside - beauty salon in George Street

The proliferation of nail boutiques and beauty salons in a time of austerity has reminded me of the occasion when a female friend who has difficulty with her weight explained to me that women in her situation tended to focus on handbags and shoes because it was less depressing than learning your true dress size.  

I like to think of this as an illustration of the predicament facing the present UK government with the so-called "bedroom tax".

Faced with an imbalance in public housing between persons purportedly occupying houses or flats too large for their needs and a growing number of people needing to be housed, the government has decided that there should be more mobility, and a greater matching of resources to requirements.  Sounds good, doesn't it?  Understandably, however, nobody is going to move out of their home unless they have to.  So the government has decided to wield the stick of partial removal of housing benefit if there is deemed to be a "spare bedroom".  So it's not so much a tax as a reduction in income received from the state.

Sounds sensible, doesn't it?  There are however a number of attendant problems.  First, the new rules don't cater for a number of cases that should properly count for exemption.  For example, a bedroom will be counted as spare even where a separated parent keeps it for a child who visits for part of the week.  Equally, a couple sleeping apart because of illness or disability are not recognised as needing the extra room.

More importantly, there's nowhere for these people to go even if they want to.  There's an acute shortage of social housing, inherited from the Thatcher era and the "right-to-buy" policy introduced by the Iron Lady's government.  The proceeds of sale should have gone to the building of replacement stock, but landed up fuelling the riptide economy of the 80s.  You'd have thought that in these circumstances the solution would lie in a massive programme of building, which would have the incidental benefit of kick-starting an ailing construction industry.  But no: the Nasty Party has decided that the construction industry is best assisted by subsidising mortgages for prospective homebuyers, thus fuelling another artificial surge in property prices and increasing the gap between rich and poor.

I was delighted to read in today's Guardian that the UN rapporteur on adequate housing is about to pronounce that the UK's policy infringes the Human Rights convention.  Her findings are being dismissed by the Department of Work and Pensions as the result of anecdotal evidence and a handful of meetings.  "Anecdotal evidence" is however the result of meeting victims on the ground and hearing their concerns.  I'm hoping that the case will find its way into the courts.

Meanwhile the government is championing the construction of a high speed rail link at a cost of £50 billion.  I call that polishing your nails instead of tackling your weight.   

Antony Mair 

Hastings International Composers Festival

Musicians from the Hastings Sinfonia and the Osaka Concert Orchestra

As we came out of our third concert in two days of the second International Composers Festival, someone said "In the end, I'd prefer to hear some Beethoven", thus showing he had entirely missed the point of this wonderful event.  Beethoven can be heard in bucketfuls on the radio and in concert halls.  We had had the unique opportunity to hear works recently created by some prodigiously talented composers, and performed by equally talented musicians.

The Festival - the only one of its kind in Europe - exists to promote "accessible" contemporary music.  This sector fills what may seem a narrow gap between the more experimental approach and easy listening.  Not clear?  perhaps you missed the recent performance of Harrison Birtwistle's Moth Requiem at this year's Proms, which is a good example of the former.  As for easy listening, just think of lift music.  So perhaps the gap isn't quite so narrow as you thought.

Amanda's quip about cheap music in Noel Coward's Private Lives has not helped to dispel the prejudice against works that are not part of an established repertoire.  But, as our International Composers Festival has shown, music can be accessible without being cheap.  Nor were the offerings we heard, from seventeen different composers, particularly appropriate for an apartment block's elevator.

The works varied enormously in scope, from full orchestral numbers such as Danse de l'Inconnue by Saint Leonards' own Louise Denny, or Robert Draper's Rondo in A, at one end of the spectrum, to the astonishingly accomplished piano solo piece Amore by fourteen-year-old Sophie Westbrooke.  The  composers were more than distinguished, including Patrick Hawes, one-time Composer in Residence at Classic FM, Nigel Hess, formerly House Composer for the Royal Shakespeare Company and Stephen Warbeck, awarded an Academy Award for his score for Shakespeare in Love.  A strong Japanese element was ensured by the presence not only of the Festival's resident composer Nobuya Monta but also members of the Osaka Concert Orchestra, who bulked out the recently formed Hastings Sinfonia.  If you get the impression that there was a strong element of film music you'd be right.  But at a time when composers such as John Williams are being increasingly recognised in the concert hall it's not the moment to be dismissive.

It's always a pleasure to learn of local talent.  Jonathan Bruce, Hastings born and bred and currently principal cellist with the Lewes Concert Orchestra, turned out to be not only an accomplished composer but also a versatile performer on the piano as well as the cello.  But of course the Palme d'Or of this event goes to its founder, our neighbor Polo Piatti., who contributed a number of pieces, concluding with Sentimental Journey, a suite for piano and orchestra that was a vehicle for his virtuoso playing.

This would not be Hastings, of course, without its touch of eccentricity.  The second half of the morning concert on the Saturday was dominated by three works for handbells, performed by a dozen ladies and token gent behind tables erected on the platform in a U shape.  The effect was slightly Santa Claus meets the Women's Institute.  But it made the occasion nicely inclusive.

For yours truly, however, the nicest touch was an orchestral piece by Peter Byrom-Smith called  Postcard from Hastings.  Contrary to my hopes, it transpired that this was not inspired or dedicated to my blog, but I've been promised an audio file that I'll put on here in due course! 

Antony Mair

Seamus Heaney - shaping the future

Without wishing to sound overly egocentric, Seamus Heaney's death last Friday came at a particularly poignant moment for me.  A month or so ago, some relatives of Paul's were visiting Hastings for a wedding, and I learnt that one of them had grown up on a farm in Co. Derry beside that of the Heaney family, and that she had known the great man and his siblings as a child.  "I liked the poems he wrote about his childhood," she said, "but I didn't really understand a lot of the others."

After she returned to N. Ireland, I took down my copy of Opened Ground, Heaney's poems 1966 - 1996, and read it cover to cover, with joy and total admiration.  I finished it just before returning to Belfast last Thursday for the funeral of Paul's sister-in-law.  The news of Heaney's death came between the two nights of wakes between death and funeral, and contributed to the already keen sense of grief and loss.  I felt it particularly not only because I had immersed myself in his poetry over the preceding month, but also because of the awareness I had gained of his personal attitudes and approach to life.  These deserve to be as influential on society at large as his poetry has been, and will continue to be, on his fellow poets.

At the end of Opened Ground there is a transcript of Heaney's Nobel Lecture, given in 1995 after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.  In it he recounts the incident when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road:

Then one of the masked executioners said to them, "Any Catholics among you, step out here."  As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions.  It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward.  Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don't move, we'll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to.  All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was pushed away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA.

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power... But...the birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.

This quiet, distinguished, erudite genius of a poet spent most of his life trying, through his poetry, to create the future we desire, while acknowledging the music of what happens.  If you read the text of the lecture, or listen to it being read by the great man himself (click here for a link) it is impossible not to be both moved and inspired.  My only regrets are that it has taken me until this late stage of my life to discover the full scope of his genius, and that he will no longer be producing the beautifully crafted work that will survive long after his own disappearance.  

Antony Mair