Steve Johnson's blog

Owing to the number of responses I received about possible solutions to my 12 year old dilemma *, I decided not to reveal the answer until after the Bank Holiday. I realised that some readers must need time to weigh the various motives and impulses at work, and to discuss the problem with like-minded, and indeed non-like-minded, family, friends and colleagues, whom they might be visiting during the long weekend. As indeed was I.

But the August Bank Holiday has now passed and the edge of your seat is surely becoming uncomfortable. So allow me to lay before you the replies I received about the most suitable outcome for the clash of dates between my first Parochial Church Council meeting as the new PCC secretary and the likely final performance in the UK of the King of the Blues. What advice have I received as the solution?

The first was wonderfully succinct: “Concert – no dilemma”. That was all she wrote. Thank you for coming to the point so unquestionably.

Another reader, a former pupil from Watford Grammar, was of much the same mind, though a shade more elaborate in expressing her preferred outcome: “Please say you went to the concert!” This moving plea was accompanied by a modestly smiling, hopeful-looking emoji. But for safety’s sake, and perhaps because she knew, from my Deputy Head days, that my sense of duty can be a pretty strong nuisance, and I might not be sufficiently swayed by her plea and her emoji, she followed up with an ingenious second answer that would have allowed both events to receive my attendance and my attention.

She wrote a hopeful follow-up comment: “Or maybe you managed both – they recorded the meeting and you typed it up afterwards”. This time the emoji had a broad and beaming grin. This indeed would have provided a solution, except for the somewhat awkward conversation it would have had me making to the Rector as PCC Chairperson.

“You see, Rector, I don’t know what to do: I don’t want to miss BB King’s concert, a ticket for which has cost me a largish amount, but having put myself forward to serve as PCC Secretary only a few days ago, I don’t want to let you down the first chance I get – literally at the same time!”

Any reasonable prelate – and most of them are reasonable, in my experience – would have smiled understandingly at my problem and immediately released me from my felt obligation to attend the PCC meeting.

“Don’t worry about the meeting, Steve. We managed the last one with a volunteer scribbling notes; I’m sure we can manage that again, one last time before your delayed debut. Enjoy the concert!”

“Thank you, Rector,” I’d have said, feeling then only slightly guilty.

And I’d have been free and clear of my guilt and general feelings of inadequacy, to revel in BB King’s genius at the Albert Hall – where (have I mentioned?) I had seen him play a few years before, though not in so close a seat as this would have been.

It is probably leaking out of my flabby prose by now that I didn’t go to the concert.

I won’t write about any other written responses for two reasons: firstly, because these that I have discussed with you do direct the reader to a sensible, reasonable solution and carry the clear inference that I fluffed it: secondly, these two responses are all I got! So why worry?

Naively, I put the ticket on eBay at exactly the price I’d paid. It didn’t occur to me to ask for more than it had cost me, though I’d have made a good few quid had I thought to do so – but it never crossed my mind. In fact, it possibly didn’t cross my mind until now! At once, a buyer snapped it up and I got slightly ratty when he asked me for a photo of the ticket to prove it was genuine. How dare he question me after all I was giving up? He explained that this was the usual way such deals were made; I apologised, sent the photo and posted the ticket to him on receipt of his cheque.

There was one other response to my feeble-minded behaviour on this. It was from another former pupil, whom I had taught in a bright and lively sixth form class four or five years before. For some reason, when we met for a chat and a coffee, I recounted this tale to her. At every pause, as I tried to explain (to myself as much as to her), she exclaimed: “But this was BB King!”, as if I was just slow on the uptake. Every time! She was right to do so: I had been an idiot throughout.

It stays with me as one of the stupidest decisions I have ever made. So I have abandoned my plan to follow it with a series called: Other Bad Decisions I Have Made, because that tedious series would certainly have been another one!

~~~~~~~~~

* Footnote: The dilemma is 12 years old; I was older than 12 when this happened, though my reaction – when you see it – might well be judged that of a 12 year old.

A note before I start.. this is the first post I have written since last February. That one was entitled Do You Need a Hand? and was well-received by my loyal readers, and might even have garnered a couple of new ones, who will have since forgotten it. Not to worry. 

The post included an extended comment from me railing against changes to the way the WordPress website now operated in ways that meant I wasn’t able even to delineate paragraphs, despite WordPress’s assurances that nothing had changed. They enthused about ‘Jet Pack’ and how easy it was to use. I find it not so.

After 42 years teaching English, I spend a lot of time trying to get right what I want to say and how I want to say it. To have some updated ‘Jetpacked’ version of the blog’s layout imposing itself on my text is frustrating. I pondered that Do You Need a Hand? might be my final blogpost, but – by popular demand of at least two members of my family – I have decided to have another go.  However, the position and style of the pictures within this text were not matters over which I had much choice.

So not a great start. Let’s see if I manage matters any better this time.

********

PCC v BBK – the start

This is the second time that I have started to write this post while sitting on a train. The first time, in early May, was on a Chiltern Line train into London. I had settled in a carriage with more vacant seats than occupied ones, produced my iPad, and let the words pour forth, which in my memory of that day, is pretty much what the words did….

They were pouring forth….. and so introducing the motivating emotions that had inspired the putative blogpost. I was firing on all cylinders as I explained what had happened regarding a situation that had ended just a few days previously after almost twelve years, about which I was still concerned, but  about which there could be no resolution now.

I had got the opening paragraph hummingly well done as the train neared Harrow-on-the-Hill, where I would change trains for the Underground into London. I do not recall where I was going that day but it isn’t relevant. The episode sticks in my memory – as well as my craw – because those magical opening paragraphs  were not saved by the blogsite; I had assumed the iPad or blog would automatically have saved my draft, but it had disappeared. Ever since that first creative burst on the theme, I have wanted to complete the post, but I have not been able to find the opening section on any app or program, and so I became disillusioned and fed up with its fine start and undermining incompleteness.

Now, on a train into London again, I was the definition of insanity: doing the same as before and expecting a different outcome. Except, the outcome this time was different: you are digesting the pudding of proof as you read. I don’t know why or how the draft was saved this time, while it was not the first time, which of course leaves me vulnerable to it all being not saved again. I hope not.

If you are still reading, thank you for your faith that I would get to the point before the sun set. Now I shall: here is the opening sentence of the lost first draft, followed by my second attempt to referee “PCC v BBK”.

“In April 2023, I stood down as Secretary to the Parochial Church Council (PCC), a position I had occupied for eleven years or so”. I had quite enjoyed the role; it gave me some minor stature as one of the church notables in return for bouts of creating agendas, taking notes at meetings and typing the minutes up afterwards. That was all that was required. Of course my contribution to any topic under discussion would always be welcome, but I hardly ever bothered, being concerned about recording what other members said on the way (sometimes) to a decision.

I had taken up this secretarial existence after receiving indirect instructions from a higher source. Let me explain: every week the Rector produces a parish news sheet which covers many matters. Twelve years or so ago, I noticed an appeal for somebody to take over as PCC Secretary as the current person was unable to continue. All that was required, said the note, was the ability to follow a discussion, make notes of relevant points and publish the minutes of the meeting a week or so later. I did this sort of thing for a living at school, and so was neither daunted nor encouraged about doing it for the parish as well.

I made a pact about offering my services: I wasn’t ambitious and said to myself, after the appeal in the weekly bulletin had appeared twice, that if it appeared on the fourth week, it was obviously targeted at me. The ad duly appeared the third and then fourth time so I accepted the decision must have been taken on a higher plane and stuck to the pact.

“I think this is intended for me,” I said to the Rector, indicating his appeal for a volunteer, and that was all it took was for me to be co-opted onto the Parochial Church Council as the new Secretary.

Now, however, we come to the nub of the matter, its very heart. I was told the date of the next PCC meeting, which was about three weeks away. When I checked my diary at home, I saw at once that the date clashed with an event I had already arranged: I was hugely looking forward to seeing and listening to BB King’s concert in the Albert Hall: BB King, the King of the Blues, on what was likely to be his final tour in the UK, being already in his eighties and not entirely well.

I had bought a far pricier ticket than I would usually have done to hear a concert by virtually anyone else. I had paid an enormous amount for a seat about six rows back from the main stage of the Royal Albert Hall, on which the King would perform. The ticket was hugely expensive, but this would be an unforgettable final concert and worth every penny.

But now I had a dilemma. (I was going to write a difficult dilemma, but all dilemmas are difficult or they wouldn’t be dilemmas, would they? But what to do….?)

It must be obvious, from the story so far, that I took up minuting PCC meetings for several years. However, my question to you, Loyal Reader, is: what do you think I did at the time to resolve the problem? Alternatively, what would you have done in my shoes, as it were?

Did I reconcile myself to missing the concert because a brand new duty, for which I had just volunteered, clashed? 

OR

Did I cross out the concert on the calendar, to replace it on that day with “Take minutes at first PCC meeting?”

Dear Readers, please let me have your opinions and reasons by way of a comment on the above in as much or little detail as you like. I am looking  forward to revealing the answer and my reasons, but also to being entertained by your thoughts!

 

Back on the snow for first time in four years! An hour’s delightful ski-ing at the south of England’s top ski resort, the indoor slope in Hemel Hempstead, confirmed that my ability on skis had not slipped below mediocrity and was not being adversely affected by the knee replacement, hernia, and ileostomy of the last few years’ surgical encounters. We dashed home to book a week in the Alps, and a return to St Martin. (Read tales from our seven months there in 2017 in the blog back catalogue.) Day 1: Tentative ski-ing is the way to go today; don’t overdo things on our return to the snowy, but at times patchy, mountains. We didn’t do everything before lunchtime that needed to do done on the first morning, after which we put ski on snow and foot on ski, and it all went ok. Memories of what to do and how to do it returned and all was gentle and good – until our last run homeward. There is a long piste back down  to St Martin which everyone lodged thereabouts has to take, regardless of their experience or ability. It is a blue run (i.e. Not red = difficult. Nor black = forget it. Neither green = almost flat.) and it is peaceably navigated by most skiers, who have an obvious concern for their own safety as well as that of others.  The exceptions to this ethos of mutual care are those who hurtle down at speeds which some of them cannot properly control (though mainly they can): they just don’t care about the rest of us. It’s a wonder there aren’t more accidents, but here’s one coming now!  These speeders appear almost always to be males under the age of 30 or so. I was about to write that I don’t begrudge them their fun, but I plainly do. They hurtle down and dislodge my fragile confidence, which is the prelude to dislodging my equally fragile balance and stability, such that I realise that I am on course, suddenly, to skittle a group of about half a dozen people standing in the middle of the slope, chatting. The Ski-Way Code says they ought to be chatting  at the side of the piste, not in the middle of it.  This is suddenly a minor point of order, diminished in the present circumstances, by the fact of my hurtling toward them. In my imagination,  I see myself in the cartoon scene when someone has stepped on a banana ski: arms waving frantically, one foot off the ground, head thrown back and an unpleasant arrival imminent. I use  the amateur skier’s emergency brake and promptly stage-manage my inevitable fall by baling out: sitting down before impact so I slow to a  gentle stop among their skis, poles and boots, more or less as if I were eager to add a knee-high opinion to their conversation. The group thoughtfully pauses its discussion on my arrival and before I can assemble my French to apologise, and make an even more memorable fool of myself, two of the group ask if I am all right and offer to help me up Helping someone with skis attached (but not necessarily co-operating), to stand up, is not as simple as it sounds. One helper on each side. One pulling me back onto my feet. The other stopping my skis sliding my feet away from taking further responsibility. After a couple of attempts, I am again able to stand upright and to thank the rescue team.  Only then do I realise the two are speaking perfect English, having opened politely with “Do you want a hand?” They didn’t add “Old Chap” but it felt like they ought to have. Day 2: not technically a ski-ing fall, but a very similar outcome. Again English to the rescue  (apparently I’m subconsciously very selective about where I fall).  Thus it was: en route on foot to the piste’s Gents, not wearing skis of course, I choose a way which requires me to walk along a bank of loosely piled snow, the snow thrown aside from digging out the path into the toilets. Snow gives way under my ski boots. Loss of footing. Me rolling on/in pile of loose snow, more and more embroiled in the nettng set there presumably to deter people from trying a short cut to the loo. Two people standing  by watching  my struggle to regain upright status. Realise now I should have gone the other way round them, on the firm snow.  “Do you need a hand?” Clearly, I do – and grateful for it! She reaches down to me. I grab her hand, and for a moment, it is touch and go whether she joins me in the snow pile and we both end in a snowy tangle on the doorstep of the convenient conveniences. This double disaster averted, I clamber clumsily to my feet full of thanks and desperate for a wee. Day 3: the last run down to St Martin. Coffee stop due, then heading back to the apartment. All going well, I feel I’m back in the groove. But here comes the tunnel under the main road which everyone needs to go through in order to get onto the lift back up the  mountain. The approach is very icy. I know I can’t cope with icy snow. Aware of the approaching speeding skier out of corner of my eye. Attention refocuses on him.  I do exactly what you’re supposed not to do: lean back, etc. Next moment, I’m grovelling on the A1 with traffic flashing by on both sides and dashing through the icy tunnel. Helper stops, “Let me give you a hand,” says my man from the AA. “It’s a bad place to have fallen.” During our first failed attempt to get me up, I slide away from the fall site and am now spreadeagled in the centre of the piste. “This is a worse one,” I grimace as I am safely restored. For this relief much thanks.  Jane suggests I claim to be carrying out a survey on “The kindness of strangers. Days 4 &5: Couple of almosts, but I manage mainly to remain upright and in motion. The main cause of this success is that we had very little piste to ski on. The higher  of the two lifts out of St Martin – the now ironically named “St Martin Express” – broke down for the second day running, leaving only the worn piste back to the bottom of St Martin’s first stage lift on which to ski. Again and again, if you wished Inevitably, this crowded descent would have meant sharing  the wearing piste with several hundred disappointed people, some of whom would present a hazard to such ski-fogeys as us. We let the first few waves of disgruntled skiers take their justified ire out at the broken lift on reckless ways back down. We then took our time getting back to the bottom and gave up for the day, there being no more buses up the valley. Hence very little ski-ing and no falling at all today. Day 6: in which the failures and faults of the week so far were banished, as lifts worked normally to ferry us up the mountain, their queues featuring far fewer folk. We see the low grey-white cloud filling the valley like water in an overfull bath. Above the cloud, bright sun beamed on us and all things, within reason, seemed possible. These wonders included my remembering how to ski, applying my own recalled maxims to what I was trying to do and finding they worked. We had a great day, and I’ll barely even mention the loss of control on some icy snow which I could see was coming but was unable to regain sufficient control to avoid. Bit like Day 1, but a solo effort in both fall and getting back upright: no-one there to see or offer a hand so it counts as only half a fall, I’d say. I was trying to impress our friend Emma, who had joined us for the final day, but she hadn’t been looking (she said). But a good final session followed by a heavy lunch, and some final, gentle, gliding down the sunny slope to finish. “Why I like ski-ing” was going to be the subtitle of this piece. Not sure I have explained the attraction… March 2023

The fourth book of my Traditional Four-Book Finish, about which you have been reading (I hope), is not a book at all, nor will I ever be finished with it. It is poetry… of a sort: the sort whose humour lasts and whose appeal never wanes, like that of all great literature. So, how did it come to be part of the Traditional Four-Book Finish? Well, it happened to be on the table next to my desk with the other stuff I was reading and so it got “swallowed ‘ole”, like Albert.

A friend has recently re-invigorated my enjoyment of the verses in question by lending me them in a format something between a magazine and comic.

These publications are not dated, unfortunately. There is an almost home-made aspect to them, but the detail of the publisher, Francis, Day & Hunter of Charing Cross Road, counters any thought that they were. The drawings are as amusing as the verses. The cost of each was 4/- (for younger readers, that’s four shillings – 20 pence – but four shilling bought a lot more back whenever, than 20 pence does now!) and they were a bargain. They’d be worth a few bob now so I must remember to return them soon to their owner.

My love of these rhyming monologues has been long-standing. I must have heard The Lion and Albert as a child; it is probably the most well-known of the poems. It was written by Marriott Edgar, and definitively performed by Stanley Holloway. That perhaps was in some variety show, watched on our first TV set in the mid-1960’s, I think. The poem’s northern working-class setting and characters chimed with my childhood circumstances as much as it clashed with my later southern middle-class surroundings: my mild Yorkshire accent (though still often mis-heard in South East London), a flat in Lee and my middle-class job, teaching. I was so attached to The Lion and Albert that, as a grown-up, I acquired my own edition of the collected works of Stanley Holloway and Marriott Edgar, first published in 1979 for £1.95. In 1979, I was 26, and the apotheosis of Albert was afoot.

For this apotheosis, ‘at hand’ would be as adverbially accurate and appropriate as ‘afoot’ because the elevation of this bit of northern culture came about through rugby – Union, of course, not the League game prevalent in the north which I have tried once or twice but didn’t much like. I joined the club of my best mate from university who happened to live up the road from the college where I did my teacher training, and with whom I later rented the flat in Lee. How different, I sometimes think, my life would have been but for that fluky coincidence. Albert might not have got the acclaim he deserved, for one.

I enjoyed playing for my mate’s old boys’ team, OORFC, despite not having attended the school. The first team appreciated having a six foot mobile wing forward, who was handy in the line-outs, join the team to play alongside his best mate. Old Boys’ rugby is a form of not having to be grown up – at least once a week. After the match matters almost as much as the match. It was the habit of OORFC to get changed out of their rugby kit after having a pint or three in the bar. Somewhat anti-social for others there, but there you are. Beer was drunk, so were a few of the players, and in this atmosphere, entertainment was sought. The responsibility for this fell on the captain to set the standard by leading those present in one of the vulgar, sexist and just downright wrong songs, which I am ashamed to say that I tended to join in rather than demur.

After a few seasons, I was elected First XV captain. There might have been a smack of Bugging’s Turn about this, or it might have been on merit for my playing. However it was, I was elected and felt honoured by the responsibility for matters on the pitch, primarily. But I quickly realised that sooner or later, I would be invited to stand on a chair in the bar and do the captain’s part of leading the raucous singing of some licentious, crude and thoroughly objectionable lyric, an example of which I decline to offer here.

As a teacher of English Language and Literature by trade, I believe that I should set an example and try to do the right thing at all times. I was not at all happy about this dubious entertainment but a very dim view would be taken of my captaincy by team and supporters if I didn’t comply. The right thing here would be to do the wrong thing, and I hated the predicament.

Sure enough, a few matches into my first season as captain, after a good victory against local rivals, as triumphant skipper I was plinthed on a chair, and the room fell silent(ish) as my rude song was anticipated: maybe the northerner knew one they didn’t….. A short, understandable, pause ensued, before I cleared my throat and informed my audience that I would not be singing, but reciting some poetry. They knew of course that I was a teacher and some antagonised groans and complaining comments, followed, but they settled to listen. And I began, laying the accent on thickly:

By the end of the first verse, silence. Then laughter. At the end applause, and a tradition was born. From that moment, this was my post-match piece, often requested and always, it seemed, enjoyed. But then I was re-elected captain for the following season, whether on account of my play on the pitch or my verses in the bar was not made clear. However, I was back in the same quandary. But the remedy was at hand – don’t disappoint your audience by giving them something new; stick with what works! I learned The Return of Albert, which has some cracking lines but which I found hard to memorise and which the team didn’t rate as highly as the original episode of the Ramsbottom saga.

So, I spread my wings and learned another Edgar classic, The Battle of Hastings.

And I was on another winner: this time, with a chorus the lads could join in with, which they did enthusiastically, loudly proclaiming three times in the right places in the monologue, including conjubilantly in this final line of the poem: On his ‘orse with his ‘awk in his ‘and –  the three remaining letter aitches went the way of those supposed to be at the start of ‘Arold’s ‘orse, ‘awk and ‘and.

Re-elected for a third season, I reckoned, this time, it must be the poems. I gave them Edgar’s The Magna Charter which went down well too. I would sometimes have to give all three before being permitted to step down. I have to admit that I loved performing the poems, and I still do. I could recite all three for you right now. They are wonderful, humorous and full of character. And they made me feel the same for a while on a Saturday evening.

May 2022

A few weeks ago, I was standing by a lock gate on the scenic Aylesbury Arm of the Grand Union Canal waiting for the lock which has been here since the mid-nineteenth century, to fill so that I could heave open the heavy top gate and let our boat out into the next canal pound, and on to the next lock. Every now and then, while I waited impatiently, I’d strain to open the gate, pushing or pulling at it, back braced against the gate and feet flat against the raised brick blocks, thinking myself part of a rugby forwards’ surge in a scrum of old. Unfortunately, in this instance, the opposition scrum didn’t give ground (as was often the case).

I looked at the the couple of inches difference between the water level inside the filling lock and that of the canal which is feeding water into it. Having gushed violently into the lock as soon as the paddles were opened, it now trickles so seemingly slowly, reluctant to complete the levelling up. How does such a slight a difference in water levels create sufficient resistance to render the gate immovable? Why wouldn’t it shift so we could get on to the next lock?

After the week afloat, with my impatient, futile straining in mind, I ponder water. A small variance of depth in a lock makes the two ton oak beam and lock gate impossible to move on its hinge. But, magically, when the water levels agree, the resistance is easily overcome and the gate opens remarkably smoothly. Two watery episodes come to mind.

The first memory brought to mind was a Doctor Who adventure when some humans on a space station charged I think with growing food for the imperilled and parched home planet, were threatened by malicious alien creatures who were water incarnate, but who could shape shift into frightening monsters. They had infiltrated the space station by posing as the water the plants needed.

I can’t recall during which embodiment of the recurrent Time Lord this episode occurred: Jon Pertwee’s era comes to mind. No matter. The Doctor wisely told them that, for all their elaborate doorway dams, futuristic techno-sandbag equivalents and other ingenious flood defences that haven’t been invented yet, “Water always gets in”, or words to that effect. And it did, and the Doctor had to save everyone and the space ship in some other clever way. I don’t remember how. Perhaps in the Tardis, he had a sonic mop. I just recall his definitive prediction when dealing with water, especially malicious alien water: “Water always gets in.”

The second episode is from school: not my years as a teacher, but my years as a pupil. This memory is from the early sixties, when I was 12 or 13. As I stood watching the water levels in the canal locks rising or falling until they matched exactly, an ancient Physics lesson came to mind. Physics was my weakest subject (O Level Grade 5, same as I achieved in Chemystery), yet this Physics lesson has stuck with me.

The teacher showed us a strange array of glass vessels of various shapes and sizes, all connected to a longer, regular-shaped glass tube along their joint base. He poured water into the first of these containers to demonstrate how, when the whole structure was placed on a flat horizontal surface, each of the strangely-shaped containers held different amounts of water but all had exactly same level at their surface. This remained true, even when the whole glass structure was tipped at an angle: the amounts of water in each vessel changed, some spilled out, but the new water levels stayed exactly equal. Do this as many different ways as you like, it remains true. Water is implacable. (See lock gates above, and imagine the fate of the space station crew sans DW to save them.)

I still remember this demonstration, and that the point of the lesson – I think – was that ‘water tends to find its own level’ or words to that effect. Obviously, there was a lot more to the phenomenon than the smidgeon I took from it. But watching the water level in the lock inching up or down to match that of the canal water on the other side of the gate, I recalled that Physics lesson. I couldn’t remember the full name of the equipment, other than that it was “vases” with the scientist’s name. Then, suddenly a day or two later my memory gave up the name Pascal and that the odd glass device was Pascal’s Vases.

Unsure if that was correct, I checked online. Pascal was a French scientist and philosopher in the seventeenth century who did a lot of experiments with hydraulics, but according to Wikipedia, the chap with the vases was his near contemporary Simon Stevin, who died two years before Pascal was born. Stevin’s vases don’t seem to have caught on, however; or Pascal nicked the idea.

My point, in this extended reminiscence, isn’t just about the properties of water and the strangeness of memory. There is precious little Physics that I remember from countless other lessons: magnetism being about it. And I am no Doctor Who fanatic, despite recalling this obscure episode. Some things it seems strike a chord in memory which can last unsustained and seemingly unretained for half a century. The problem lies in the way that other far more recent things which I should remember, I don’t.

To open or close the paddles on lock gates, you use a ……….? One day, I was using this tool not five minutes before and I was sitting on the boat looking directly at this essential tool, but not being able to conjure up its name.  Eventually, after running through the alphabet hoping that the initial letter of the word I needed would stand out and trigger the recovery of the rest of the word, I picked up the windlass and went to prepare the next lock.

This is my point: I find increasingly that I have forgotten things I ought to have remembered, principally the names of people I know but perhaps haven’t seen for a while. School staff reunions are a vivid case in point. At a recent retirement get together of present and former colleagues, I was in a room with several people whom I recognised and with whom I had worked quite closely, but whose names I could not recall. I knew that I knew them but I could not bring their names to mind. The potential for accidental upsets was enormous. Some former colleagues recognised me and waved their welcome from tables where they were sitting, chatting with others that I knew I knew, and in some cases that I knew I knew their names. But in other cases, the close friend with whom I was speaking prompted me the missing information. But the situation was embarrassing.

In his poem Old Man Edward Thomas, trying to recapture a memory from a specific herb’s scent, wrote:

“I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
And think of nothing; I see and hear nothing;
Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
For what I should, yet never can, remember.”

Exactly so.

Here’s another trivial, windlass-type example: Sarries played Bath a week or two ago and two seasons back, our very promising reserve scrum half joined Bath, where he has already built a formidable reputation, though he was injured and not playing in this match. His name is Ben…… and I cannot recall his surname, though I’ll know it as soon as I hear or read it. Or there’ll be another Pascal moment and the surname will come to mind. (24 hours plus since I wrote that, and with two hours to kick off, his surname has not returned to me! Nor did it – I had to ask a mate: Spencer, Ben Spencer. And he’d be glad he wasn’t playing: Saracens won 71-17!)

More alarming, this morning I had to tell Jane my second favourite joke because I couldn’t remember my favourite joke. Very Edward Thomas. Fortunately, Jane reminded me what the joke is, though that made telling it rather pointless.
Is this incipient old age? Forgetting things like names or what tools are called? The standing joke is to stop dead, having gone upstairs or into another room, and say to oneself or anyone nearby: “What did I come here for?” It’s a good joke at an old codger’s expense, but a bit worrying when it is happening more often.

October 2021   (Wrote this and then forgot all about it until now!)

 

 

Actually, this is a tradition that I have just invented, because within the past few days, I find myself having finished reading two books, resting 79.94% of the way through the third, and having just begun a fourth. I mean – how often does that happen? It must be a traditional thing because it’s not a normal or a sensible one, is it?

“All right, Steve”, you interject, “this is rubbish so far. What about the ‘Finish’ aspect of this innovative four-book tradition?”

I’m glad you asked. But I’d like to deal first with the rubbish element of your interjection: you are quite right. My blog is in large part rubbish; in fact, some of my best posts are utter nonsense. I’m thinking of the one explaining why tea isn’t as hot up a mountain as it is at ground level (High Time, December 2016), as a good example. Please scan the back catalogue and read it – or almost any other.

“Why?” I was asked, apropos of the previous post’s ridiculously long (and probably ungrammatical, unsyntactical) opening sentence.

After a think, I realised it was because there was very little substance and no significant narrative to the central incident which I was reporting. Hence, I tried to make the telling of the tale central to your enjoyment of reading it, because otherwise you would gain no satisfaction from bothering with it. And that is my point: my blog exists to try to make a reasonably entertaining something  out of a fairly uninteresting nothing: a conclusion that I arrived at during Strange events of a day, with no meaning (February 2017, third last paragraph), and which I had misplaced during the blog’s reduction to a book suggesting site.

So, back to where I interrupted myself, posing as you. (The nonsense strand of this post is growing like a weed in springtime.) You asked about the “Finish” element of the Traditional Four-Book Finish, a particularly germane enquiry, because I admitted to having just begun reading one of the four. The Finish element therefore refers not to my ending reading, but to the way in which I have turned my blog into a collection of potted book reviews which is not really what I took up this pastime to achieve. That’s the bit that I want to finish.

So no more! Though the words I write about these four texts will not be the last recommendations or warnings of novels that I ever issue, only that I shall try to return the blog to its original purpose and attach a word of three about something I have read if I think you might enjoy it too. 

So maybe I should turn this newish leaf over by offering thoughts on my university lift companion’s most well-known work, The Female Eunuch. Frankly, I am in awe of her intellect, even more than I was in the lift in awe of her height; the range of her intricate analyses of relationships between male and female seems boundless. She examines history, different societies’ priorities, religions, and much more, including literature (of course). The book has sections: Body, Soul, Love, Hate, Revolution, each with half a dozen or more subsections: Altruism, Egotism, Obsession, Romance, in the section on Love, for example. I wish I understood it better, or at all, at times. This is huge book and hugely important; no wonder it caused a great stir fifty years ago. It still should.

My other near final review/recommendation is a book that was recommended to me via our church weekly newsletter. It is called All’s Well That Ends Well, a title the author, Peter Graystone, borrowed from somewhere. It is a book with forty shortish chapters, one to read on each day of Lent, leading to Easter. Graystone’s intellect is much more on my level; he uses an extract from Shakespeare as the opening, analyses it astutely from a contemporary and modern literary point of view before linking the extract ingeniously and entirely convincingly to Christian understanding and teaching. Enjoyably satisfying from both aspects, so much so that I am telling myself that I shall reread it each year during Lent from now on: get it and do the same! 

Strewth! That’s another tradition……

A good friend has leant me A Last English Summer by Duncan Hamilton, which comprises delightfully written memories of various levels and histories of cricket. As he goes from ground to ground, memories of great players and notable games are wonderfully evoked. It’s a joy to read, despite his understandable feeling that modern cricket has lost sight of its purpose and value and become flashy entertainment merely, which largely explains England’s inability to win test matches. He’s right about that!

That accounts for three  of the Four-Book Finish; I shall write a separate blog about the fourth.

May 2022

You asked for it, Richard, so here it is, a full account of those memorable moments – memorable for me, but, I am sure, utterly forgotten by Ms Greer within two seconds of getting out of the lift on the fifth floor of the Arts Building, University of Warwick, sometime during the Spring Term of 1973 (I think it was the Arts Building, though it might have been the Library, which was the building next to the Arts Block, and the Library definitely had at least five floors; though I seem to remember the Arts Building as having fewer, I cannot imagine why it should have had fewer floors than the building next door – both built in similar style at about the same time, both with lifts as well as stairs), and although I almost invariably even now choose the staircase over the lift as a means of getting to the correct floor, maintaining fitness and prolonging active life [like PAL used to for dogs, who also got to chase after and retrieve a ball as a means of staying fit: playing rugby my equivalent], and the only reason that I can think of to explain my choice of the lift rather than a scamper up a couple of flights of stairs on this occasion, would be that this happened in the exam season and I was therefore competing with several other early-rising, like-mindedly conscientious students to get to the right floor for Lit students’ research and revision, with its little study cubicles – carrels, (to give them their proper name, a name Christmastised as carols) which you could occupy for the day but which, if you wanted one, an early rise was essential because carrels had to be grabbed as soon as the Library opened its doors, creating a resemblance to the start of an indoor cross country run, through its glass panelled doors and up to the floor which housed your subject’s textbooks, [although if this was so, it makes me wonder whether it can have been the Spring Term when this happened, because exams were set in the Summer Term, so it follows that revision did too, and the securing of a carrel for the day was an essential element of a successful revision session, so much so that getting one induced the satisfying feeling of having achieved so soon a prime objective of the day and therefore, having set out books, pens and papers on the desk so that anyone slower off the mark and peering hopefully over each door along the row of dens would have to accept from the display of randomly opened text books and sheets of scribbled lecture notes that each one was definitely taken, even though the claimant, having gone for a well-earned coffee, was not in situ at that moment – possession being ten tenths of the law during this annual surge of learning], and, in those circumstances, on this memorable occasion with the doors of the lift being on point of closure as I ranwalked toward the door to the stairs, I side-stepped out of the torrent of anxious students and nipped into the lift just as its doors swished shut, and none of this would have occurred in the Spring Term, although I am fairly confident that it was during my second year at Warwick so perhaps the Arts Building did have several floors and lifts as the alternative to walking up and down stairs, hastening or trudging (depending on the topic or text under discussion) on the stairs to or from tutorial or seminar, and this incident actually took place in that more appropriate and indeed more likely setting, since Ms Greer was one of the lecturers in Literature, Augustan poetry being the subject of her lectures: poetry written usually,  but not always, in heroic couplets, between the middle of the seventeenth century and the end of the eighteenth, and to which seeming stiff and inflexibly rational form, Romantic poetry was the nineteenth century reaction ( I say “seeming” because Greer’s excellent lectures opened my eyes to the variety, humour and imagination of the Augustans, so much so that I studied these poets – such as Dryden, Johnson, Swift, Pope – with renewed interest and enjoyment, seeing how the poems of Cowper and Blake, and the Romantic Poets evolved from these precedents), so renewed an interest in fact that I was able to tell when in the 150-odd year Augustan period a slice of poetry had probably been written and sometimes to be fairly confident who had written it, a skill which served me very well in the History of English Poetry exam, and I associate that success with Greer’s lectures, allied to profitable hours in a carrel, despite my other memory of the features of a carrel (which also partly explains their appeal), that  as well as a desk at which to study, carrels historically have a large window – to let in the light in former times, but to draw the attention of wearied students during studylulls – through which I could watch progress on the three building sites which were gradually filling the windy, semi-rural emptiness of the original Warwick campus, so much so that the place was barely recognisable when our year was reconvened for some anniversary (the university probably hoped for money from its now flourishing graduates), and which included a dinner and our  graduates’ scratch rugby team being thoroughly beaten by the current first XV.

So,  there I am, and the more I think about the scene, the less I think it was in the Library or at exam time, and that I hadn’t had to dodge into the lift so as to grab a carrel for the day.  I had entered the lift calmly, doubtless thinking about something or other, head down and not fully focussed on my current location perhaps, but aware that I was not alone when the lift door whispered shut.

There was one other occupant of the lift, a person taller than my six and a bit feet who I quickly realised was my Augustan lecturer, Germaine Greer, then at something of a peak of notoriety for her book The Female Eunuch, first published in 1970. I didn’t read it then, but am trying to do so now in a 50th Anniversary Edition.  Greer’s scholarship belittles my ability to understand her in some chapters, but in others, her insights are startlingly sharp about “women’s struggle to liberate themselves from oppression” as the blurb on the cover asserts. Then as now.

But this person’s taller-than-me-ness, was explained when I stole a glance or two at my towering fellow traveller: looking down, my scruffy trainers were bare flat soles compared to her high-healed boots; looking up at the floor numbers above the doors as we rose, brought her hair into my purview, which seemed to add six inches or more to her height.  Travelling upwards in company with so hugely impressive and so brainy and so imposing a lecturer (and one so tall!), I was a shrunken child and said not a word: what could I have said? “Could I have your autograph, please?”

The lift seemed to take an age to arrive at the fifth floor.

When it did, she strode out doubtless to continue the fight, and I skulked away to my seminar, in the opposite direction along the corridor, feeling small in every respect…

March 2022