Pirates Day - and it's more dressing up

Pirates taking a break over a latte

Dressing-up has never really done it for me.  I usually think of it as the last refuge of the bored, like Marie-Antoinette dressing up as a shepherdess at Versailles.  My heart sinks at the thought of those parties of Vicars and Tarts or invitations accompanied by a note that the theme of the evening is Donald Duck.  

But it's difficult to be curmudgeonly on Pirates Day in Hastings, where all and sundry dress as if they're to be auditioned by Johnny Depp for a starring role beside his swashbuckling persona.  Last year we made a firm resolution to make a bit more of an effort this year, but alas the day came upon us without our having acquired even a bandanna, let alone a parrot on the shoulder.

We strolled down George Street for a coffee on Sunday morning, and there was already a good sprinkling of people in three-cornered hats - if you're being serious about the costume, men are expected to wear a hat, a frock-coat sort of garment, breeches and boots with big floppy tops, and above all a belt adorned with pewter mug and various pieces of weaponry.  Parrots on the shoulder are optional.  Women also go in for the three-cornered hat, but after that it's all bodices and boobs bubbling over the top.  As for accessories - sashes, cummerbunds and a plentiful mixture of skulls and crossbones.

A man with a wooden leg came into his own, and pegged his way up and down George Street very convincingly.  Then the drummers came along - I'm not sure what's piratical about drummers, but there are a number of drumming groups in the town who emerge on most civic occasions, so they have to be included.  Buxom wenches with drums are a tad odd, but then the whole day's pretty odd.  It's best to think of cuddly cinema stars rather than Somali thugs boarding oil tankers and holding people to ransom.  And, of course, dressing-up is only part of the deal.  The other element is alcohol.  After the initial appearance and mutual admiration of costumes the serious drinking gets under way.  We had fled by that point, but our painter, whose hangover the following day was so bad that he failed to appear on site, said that "things got messy".  

We'll make more of an effort next year, folks.  Honest we will.

Antony Mair 

Learning about scaffolding

Scaffolding at No. 7

We've been living with workmen for the past few weeks.  The flank wall of the house has been needing attention.  The building is timber-framed on two sides, and brick faced with render on the other two.  This means that it sways slightly in a gale - and last winter we had those in spades.  Timber can sway, of course, but brick and render is rigid - as a result, we had cracks down the flank wall.  During the winter storms the rain found its way in and damp patches appeared on the new lath and plaster inside.

So repairs had to be undertaken, and preventive measures to stop the damage recurring.  First, though, came the question of scaffolding.  Our previous experiences with scaffolders hasn't been great.  Cheeky Cockney types have thrown poles and boards around with wild abandon and asked for cash in the hand.  More like the dark side of the building trade than a business transaction.

But that's all changed.  With our new scaffolders I've learnt how tricky the job is, and how important for the people working high above ground.  It's not an easy task in this case, since the road is narrow, and large trucks need room to turn left into Tackleway, so you can't encroach on the pavement at the top.  The first time we put scaffolding up we succeeded in preventing the bin lorries from collecting from the entire street for several weeks, which doesn't make you popular.  

Enter new master scaffolder Paul Bond, with his newly-formed business Tubetech.  The scaffolding is pinned to the wall with drill holes at regular intervals, and cantilevered at one end to allow trucks to get past.  The projecting poles have been cut short so that they don't project into the street.  The whole structure is so firm that I've lost all fear about going up to the top of it - and at forty feet above ground I can tell you it's a long way up.  Most fascinating of all is speaking to Paul about the technicalities of scaffolding as he looks at other structures round the area - and there's a lot around at the moment, since everyone's repairing damage from the winter storms.  I now understand the extent to which scaffolding needs to be rigid and properly braced so that it provides a safe working environment for the series of builders and painters we've had working on the wall for several weeks.  

The best moment, of course, is when the scaffolding comes down and we're back to normal.  But that's going to take a few days yet.

Antony Mair

Rain doesn't stop play at Fairlight Hall

Concert-goers undeterred by the weather

Glyndebourne has a lot to answer for.  It has spawned the English fashion of summer musical events in the countryside at which stoical Brits are encouraged to defy the vagaries of the weather and listen to music in the open air, with a picnic before or after the event, or in the interval.  Earlier this summer we experienced the best way in which it can work out, with an idyllic evening at Glyndebourne.  Yesterday we had the other end of the scale at Fairlight Hall.

Not that you could blame either the music or the organisers.  The occasion was a recital by the South Korean pianist Taek Gi Lee, winner of the Hastings International Piano Concerto Competition earlier this year.  The main patrons of the Competition, David and Sarah Kowitz, generously host a recital given by the winner each year.  It takes place in a former stable block at the Kowitzes' home, Fairlight Hall.  The horses' quarters have been converted into a music room with the courtyard wall glazed and folding back on itself so that those sitting in the courtyard have the full benefit of the sound, while the musicians are under cover.  A degree of shelter is given to those in the courtyard, by three giant parasols.

All seemed fine to begin with - the mesmerising Taek Gi played a Bach Prelude and Fugue rather mechanically, limbered up with a Haydn piano sonata and then gave us the full percussive works with some Prokofiev.  In the interval we stood around in the beautiful grounds of Fairlight Hall, admiring the view and sipping Pimm's, before returning to the courtyard for Rachmaninoff, Schubert and Lowell Liebermann.

The Rachmaninoff - Variations on a Theme of Corelli - was great, but when it came to a Schubert Impromptu the rain began and the music was drowned out for those in the courtyard by the drumming of rain on the parasols.  Brits being Brits, there was a bit of shuffling of seats to get under the parasols, but no protests.  The Great and the Good were safely banked under cover in the music room, but Sarah Kowitz had elected to place herself in an exposed position in the courtyard.  As a result, some of us felt a tad uncomfortable at seeing her get wetter and wetter as the Schubert proceeded.  

The Lowell Liebermann piece was appropriately titled Gargoyles.  You may recollect that gargoyles are grotesque figures with spouts, designed to convey rain from a rooftop without it touching the walls.  The full irony of this piece was clear when I looked up at the parasols, where each prong was illustrating the music's theme with total success.  Our hostess was now sitting with a waterproof on her knees, though she had managed to ease her head under the parasol.

We all enjoyed it, needless to say, and trudged back with a degree of self-satisfaction through the magnificent grounds of Fairlight Hall to the inevitable field where our cars were parked.  The picnic-goers had done their best to pretend we live beside the Mediterranean.  No gain without pain, as the saying goes - particularly when it comes to culture in the countryside.

Antony Mair

June has shot by...

Paul Muldoon at Charleston Literary Festival

I should correct that heading by saying that May has also shot by, and the flurry of events has not been recorded in this little venture.  Tut.  The fact is that the old creative juices (and they're feeling rather old at the moment) have been entirely devoted to producing poems for the end of my MA's first year.  People say to me "How's the course going?" and I say "Fine", because I'm enjoying it but I haven't got the faintest idea whether I'm writing any better than I was at the beginning.  Perhaps, though, I've got a slightly better idea of what I'm meant to be doing, which is a start.  But, like all subjects, the more you get into it the more difficult it is, and at the moment I'm running the risk of feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all.

Something must be going right somewhere, though, since the rate of acceptance by the wee poetry mags has improved.  It's not like our dog Balzac with the postman, exactly - grabbing my submissions as they come through the letterbox - but the percentage take has I think got a little better than it was.  But we're talking in modest terms here, and I don't think a Nobel Prize is in the offing for a while.

Continuing the poetry theme, I can say that one of the high spots of May was hearing the poet Paul Muldoon give a reading at Charleston Festival.  He read both his own poems and some by his old friend Seamus Heaney, and did it with such wit and charm the whole audience was captivated.  It wasn't just Middle England, either, though there was more than a fair smattering of the well-heeled pensioner set.  It taught me a lot about how to give a reading, though in my case I'm usually limited to eight minutes rather than Muldoon's hour.  

Earlier this month we were in Mallorca, where I was able to continue the theme of Dead Poets (see earlier postings about our trip to Ireland) by visiting Deia, a beautiful and remote village on the west coast of the island where Robert Graves is buried.  We had some difficulty finding his modest grave, but it's nice to add it to the collection. Graves was part of a group of painters and writers who lived in Deia in the second half of the last century.  Their graves, or plaques in their memory, are mostly huddled together at one side - reflecting, I imagine, the way in which they were perceived by the local community.  Graves, however, has a simple stone with an inscription that appears to have been done in freehand while clay was still wet.  There was a group of pebbles on the gravestone, some with messages attached, left by admirers.  It's always interesting to see how far poetry can reach in touching the hearts and minds of others.

The academic term is now over, though we have the joy of a summer school coming up on campus in Lancaster at the end of the month.  A rather intensive week of talks and conferences and hopefully some writing.  Gulp.

Antony Mair   

Morris dancing and bikers - yes, it's May Day in Hastings

The Morris dancing started on the Saturday of the Bank Holiday weekend, though this year it was a little more diffuse and chaotic than last, as a result of the usual venue - Butler's Gap in George Street - being closed off because of the possible danger from a house in partial collapse in the street above.  As a result, confused Morris dancers were found here and there round the Old Town, looking for a place to do their bit.  We caught up with the ones above near the boating lake on the front.  They're of the rhythmic stick-bashing variety rather than the waving-handkerchief ones.  I'm hoping that next year Butler's Gap will be open again and we can get a better look.

Monday is the full Monty of folk battiness, with the Jack-in-the-Green procession and all and sundry dressed in green and/or wearing green face-paint.  One gym bunny we encountered in the afternoon had bodypainted the full expanse of his overdeveloped torso with green, but that may just have been an excuse to take his shirt off.  The procession wends its way through the Old Town and finally up to West Hill, where there are more jolly japes in the afternoon - including Morris dancing, of course.  You have to be a folk history expert to understand some of the allusions - go to The Merry Wives of Windsor, for example, to understand the man with the stag's head.  During the whole weekend there were quite a lot of ladies of a certain age wafting around in yards of green muslin and tulle.  They came into their own in the procession, equipped with drums or waving hankies or just mincing along in a nice fantasy world of their own, joined by a host of others, beating drums, eating fire, or wearing other strange costumes involving green.  All good harmless stuff.
 Meanwhile the bikers were assembling on the front - row upon row of gleaming chrome, and a lot of chaps in leather, wandering around, a little displaced once they'd got off their bikes, rather like snails without their shells.  Facial hair and pewter tankards seemed to be points of convergence between the green-painted folk and the motorcycle fraternity, but in fact they inhabit very different worlds, and the buxom lady element seemed remarkably absent among the serried ranks of bikes.  This slightly weird combination of events was entirely good-humoured, and the weather was such that everyone drifted around in the sunshine with a smile on their face.  Perfick, as Pop Larkin would have said.

Antony Mair

Will Self and the Death of the Novel

Will Self, courtesy of WIkimedia Commons

I was interested by Will Self’s article in The Guardian last weekend, headed The Novel is Dead (this time it’s for real).  Stripped of the baroque ornament of his prose, Mr Self’s basic thesis is that the digitisation of literature has resulted in destruction of the writer’s ability to earn a living and of the reader’s ability to read in the required way.  As a result, the serious novel “will become an art form on a par with easel painting or classical music, confined to a defined social and demographic group, requiring a degree of subsidy, a subject for historical scholarship rather than public discourse”. 

Personally, I think that this point may already have been reached.  More significantly, however, the fate of the novel, as predicted by Mr Self, somewhat postdates the fate of poetry.  “I’ve come to realise that the kind of psyche implicit in the production and consumption of serious novels… depends on a medium that has inbuilt privacy”, he writes.  Nothing could be more private or intimate than the world of many poems – and I’m not referring here to the declaimed works of performance poets, but the carefully crafted poems intended for the page, which account for the majority of what’s written.

Poetry, however, is not dead.  Far from it.  Its following may be small in number, but seems increasingly vigorous.  The internet teems with poetry blogs, online poetry forums, e-zines and online courses.

Unlike novelists, poets have not usually expected to earn a living from their poetry.  Daytime jobs have been commonplace – often, it is true, in academic life – with the writing squeezed in to spare time.  T. S. Eliot was able to achieve this, so why shouldn’t others?

Poetry has something of a longer history than the novel, going back to the mists of time with Homeric epics, continuing through the Middle Ages with verse both sacred and secular, and stubbornly operating as a medium, even today, for the expression of mankind’s deepest thoughts and feelings.  The serious novel, on the other hand, only came into being in the eighteenth century, and its nineteenth century successes were in part due to publication in serial form.    

Will Self may be right about the serious novel becoming a refuge for the academic and the grey-haired.  But the novel’s loss may turn out to be poetry’s gain.  If the public need for story is satisfied by other media – film, television, computer games – the need to express emotion in words can take no other form than the poem, that brief encapsulation of feeling that finds its echo in the hearts of listeners and readers alike.

Antony Mair

Honouring Louis MacNeice

The grave of Louis MacNeice, Carrowdore, Co. Down

In his introduction to Faber's 2001 selection of Louis MacNeice's poems, the Irish poet Michael Longley tells the story of how, in 1964, he visited Louis MacNeice's graveyard in Carrowdore together with fellow-poets Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon.  MacNeice had died the year before, prematurely at the age of 55.  Mahon was the only one of the three who had met him personally, but all three were shocked by the death.  

Fifty years later, I found myself in the same spot, on our recent trip round the northern part of Ireland.  MacNeice enjoys a special place in my affections.  Not only do I admire him as a poet, but I realised comparatively recently that this admiration is something I inherited from my father - who also died prematurely, at the same age as MacNeice, though seven years later.  Among my books are three slim collections - The Earth Compels (1938), Autumn Journal (1939) and Plant and Phantom (1941), with my father's neat handwriting on the first inside page - the first having been bought in his last year at Oxford, the last during the war, in Edinburgh, when he was working for MI5.

MacNeice's reputation has lasted well, but he is gradually fading into obscurity - the 1988 Selected Poems  is half as long again as its 2001 successor, and there has been no Four Weddings and a Funeral to resuscitate his popularity as there was for his contemporary, Auden.  However, he was a great influence not only on Heaney, Mahon and Longley, but also on the younger poet Paul Muldoon, and consequently he is part of a continuity of influence that began before Yeats and will continue after Muldoon and his Irish successors.  Reading his poems now, I find them uneven, some snared in their time, but others beautiful and hopefully surviving for a long time in anthologies that will encourage people to read more of him.  One I am greatly fond of is Soap Suds:

   This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big

   House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open

   To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop

   To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.

   And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;

   Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;

   A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;

   A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.

   To which he has now returned.  The day of course is fine

   And a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,

   Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball

   Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then

   Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn

   And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!

   But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands

   Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.  

Antony Mair