Verse - and worse

At the age of nineteen I left home to work for a religious charity in a different part of my country. I never looked back. However, not being exactly domesticated it was an initial period of adjustment. I remember my mother suddenly (and somewhat guilt stricken) decided to teach me how to iron a shirt the day before I left… I got used to doing up the buttons and putting it over an ironing board and doing it section at a time. I soon learned to just manage doing the bits that showed, collars and cuffs, and then switched to the then delights of nylon drip dry shirts – garments that stuck to you and crackled with static electricity each time you put them on.

But the washing part was initially problematic. We were used to launderettes in London, but the place I went to seemed to initially rely on thumping clothes with boulders on the banks of the Thames. I had to bicycle a round trip of twenty miles to another town each week with my washing on the back of the bike. But then – trumpet sound – my new home finally opened a brand new shiny Launderette.

And a key feature of the place was the automatic vending machine; an idea no doubt imported from America. We had these machines – mainly drinks dispensers – at swimming baths too I remember. At the swimming baths we used to buy a flimsy cup full of what was optimistically described as Cuppa-Soup, but which turned out to be Cuppa-Sludge, because the powder never seemed to dissolve, even though the water was scalding enough to take the skin off the roof of your mouth.

But in the Launderette, coffee was the staple. And at the age of nineteen I wrote a poem. I have recently discovered an embarrassing cache of verse and worse and there – haunting me from another life - was an opus entitled “A few lines on Launderette Coffee Machines.”

Well, you don’t think you are going to escape, do you?

He placed his coin in the slot

And turned the dial to FIVE;

And waited for the “Piping Hot

Fresh Coffee” to arrive.

The mechanism started up.

His sallow features cheered.

He waited for the plastic cup,

But no such cup appeared.

He gave a wan, pathetic smile,

In sadly comtemplating

The coffee, milk and sugar, while

It gurgled down the grating.

And mused when he had seen enough

Upon how strange one thinks it:

“Not only does it make the stuff,

The @%@%  thing also drinks it!”

The Pandy Fields in Winter

A photograph taken by Mrs O. It was taken with color film. It really was a black and white day.

Amy's new CD

So Amy has her new CD out, Only a Dreamer, featuring the songs of John Stewart. Already she has had some nice reviews and airplays including the BBC as well as commercial stations. The DJs all seem to choose different songs to play, which is nice. Many albums have one or two goodies interspersed with dross, but this seems to be appealing across the board.

We went down to Portsmouth a few weeks ago for the launch concert. As is her wont Amy had a stage set built to replicate the cozy corner of her recording studio, and drapes and lights and guitar stands and space for backing singers including ME. There was a lovely review – at least I hope that is what it was – that described my contribution: “father and daughter singing together has a special kind of bond to it, and A’s voice brings a sense of time and generations to the songs.” Ah, “time and generations” – how lovely. Or does he just mean that I sounded OLD…? A new “discovery” Danielle sang with Amy for many of the songs and did some solos and that really worked well.

The whole program was streamed live on a social media platform, so people in America and France as well as the UK were able to see the show in real time. The only problem we discovered afterwards was that somehow the iPad doing the filming presented the whole show at a 90 degree angle. Emails about having a crick in the neck came wafting to us through cyberspace, and I was minded of the prophet Ezekiel. For those not so well up on Old Testament prophets he had to lie on his side for 390 days to function. Amy’s show only lasted a little over two hours, but the vision field was incongruous. Fortunately the whole gig was videoed so maybe bits of it will end up on YouTube or similar. Maybe.

The background to the album is covered in my liner notes. I will end with a reprint.

Personally I blame Radio Luxembourg.

In those dim and distant monochrome days of the late 1950s British radio was the BBC and establishment and both dull and condescending to the youth audience. But a commercial station based in Luxembourg (although recorded in London) broadcast sheer pop heaven on the 208 medium waveband. Lying in bed with my value portable radio the size of a brick clamped to my ear, I listened and absorbed.

One show was the Capitol show, paid for by the Capitol record company. A crucial ingredient of this show each week was the Kingston Trio.

I favoured folk music from a very early age and the Trio, with their harmonies and banjo and humour appealed. I bought singles. I looked for other similar fare in the record shops and came up with the Cumberland Three featuring a very young man named John Stewart. Then, when the Kingstons lost Dave Guard and John Stewart joined them, I was on a roll. I saw them at the Hammersmith Odeon on their one visit to the UK in 1962, and then saw Stewart sing Greenback Dollar and cut his finger playing it live at the London Palladium on black and white TV. I bought all the Trio discs – generally second hand because money was tight – and more and more, Stewart with his gravelly “wobbly” voice and song writing skills came to the fore. When the group disbanded and Stewart went solo it was a natural transfer for me.

Stewart’s music was eclectic. His albums went from country to rock to folk to singer-songwriter Americana and there were lots of them over the next forty years. His peak for me was probably in the early 80s when Chuck McDermott sang back-up and played 12 string alongside him. But that is a generalisation – I enjoyed (and still do) tracks from Signals Through the Glass to The Day the River Sang.

In the 80s and 90s I had a collection of bootleg tapes culled from the albums that I played in the car. Taking my daughter to and from school, and later to and from work, she was exposed – whether she liked it or not – to a John Stewart fest on many a day. Fortunately, she did like it, and ultimately this album is the result.

When Amy began writing and singing herself one of the first songs she wrote and taped was a tribute to John Stewart. It was pressed and presented to me with a couple of Stewart covers as an anniversary present. The tribute song incorporated all the various themes of John’s music, and told his story obliquely with lines from songs and particularly the final riff from Mother Country. Later when singing and recording professionally she had Buffy Ford Stewart’s permission and blessing on the song.

This brings us to this special tribute album. Amy has re-recorded her tribute song using musicians who have backed her in live performance. And she has chosen from a huge list of favourites the songs that make up the rest of the album. They range from the 1960s (Some Lonesome Picker), the 1970s (Hung on the Heart, Last Hurrah) to the 1980s (Dreamers on the Rise, Queen of Hollywood High). (Spanning the whole range of Stewart’s work she has previously recorded Jasmine from 2006 on an earlier album). She was especially pleased that Chuck McDermott who sang with John on some of his most iconic recordings kindly agreed to sing harmony with her on some tracks. More songs were worked on than could ever make this one album, but as a singer-songwriter with three albums already out, more of John’s work may well slip into some of her future projects.

I enjoyed this album. Of course, I have a certain prejudice. But I hope that anyone who loves folk music and the work of John Stewart will also enjoy.

As John sang in Irresistible Targets – Keep it Flying.

                  Chuck McDermott and John Stewart (with banjo) c. 1984. Taken from the John Stewart Facebook page.

Feet

(written in 2017 but never posted then)

A sort of life story (from the ankle down)

I never thought I would end up as a podiatrist (old title: chiropodist) and a sometime writer of podiatry textbooks. It’s funny how life turns out.

I had a career mapped out in my head from early on in life. Had it been a secular career I would probably have gone for an English degree and become an archivist or librarian. The idea of research never left me, but became an amateur hobby instead. It probably meant I never got disenchanted as sometimes happens when a hobby turns into work.

But I chose instead to spend my life working for nothing for a religious charity. As it happens, that still worked out, but when I suddenly found myself pushing a pram many years down the line, plans to work abroad and travel disappeared somewhat dramatically and it was necessarily to earn real money to pay real bills.

I could have chosen accountancy, and in fact started a course. My father started his career as an accountant, but then a chance encounter with someone in the same sort of boat sent me into the wonderful world of FEET.

My research skills, such as they were, came in handy, when it came to supplementing course work and practical work, and shortly after I was let loose on the unsuspecting feet of the Welsh nation I started writing.

I mugged up on the wonderful world of fringe podiatry. For instance, there was (and still is) homeopathic podiatry. There was an excitable man whose descendants still promote the concept of using tincture of calendula in treatments (that’s heavily watered-down juice squeezed from marigold plants to you). The theory is that different genus of marigold can, on the one hand, promote healthy granulation and on the other can chemically enucleate helomas (in normal-speak, that’s burn out corns to you). If you are unsure of the concepts, they are diametrically opposite. There was an article in a now defunct journal that I sometimes wrote for, where hilariously he got the captions transposed on the grainy photographs. The worst case scenario from this was that - assuming the treatment had any validity - someone’s corns and callosities would grow to enormous size in one case, or you’d burn a nasty hole in your foot in the other. To the great amusement of skeptics, there was a frantic addenda sent out at considerable cost to subscribers.

Anyhow, I mugged up for another publication and did an article on homeopathic chiropody, even though I didn’t really believe in it. The result was that the person who unwittingly directed me into podiatry became a homeopathic doctor later in life. Yes, it’s strange how things turn out.

Then there was reflexology, a spin on an American pseudo-science called Zone Therapy. It was a bit too Ying and Yang for my liking, but if you left out the patter it made people feel good and feel relaxed and in some conditions with the elderly and terminally ill, that could ONLY BE GOOD THING. I mugged up and did an article on that too. I learned how to write “neutrally” at such times.

Then I wrote a history of the profession - warts and all. It started life as a podiatry seminar lecture. That sold extremely well, although it would need a considerable update for a modern audience, since in the UK chiropody has finally followed the American pattern and become podiatry, and protection of title has finally been achieved through legislation. Believe it or not, in the UK horses hoofs were protected by the Farriers Act of 1974, lower orders like humans had to wait until 2004.

But it probably sold because it tried to be humorous and sarcastic and was filled with cartoons - not what you normally found in traditional po-faced podiatry literature. Quite recently I got hold of a mammoth doctorial thesis on podiatric history and was gratified to find my humble work frequently referenced. How on earth could something like treating feet be humorous? Well, people like to feel elevated, and podiatry in Britain is no exception. Since 2004 new entrants to the profession need a first class BSc Honors degree to have the title, so they spend several years at Uni, get a mountain of debt for the next few decades, only to find that most of their working life is just cutting old ladies’ toenails. That’s assuming anyone will employ them. So they are forced into private practice and often fail because they lack people skills or business skills, while the older breed continues to make a killing. There was a lot of mileage in that story.

So the book covered attempts in the past to reach this elevated position, and all the shysters and chancers who sold trash courses when the titles were not protected. And how the profession started, with a London inn-keeper who coined the term “chiropodist” when he cut corns as a sideline to selling beer.

And then how the first corn cutters worked with the barbers - hair at one end and feet at the other. Actually, a hobby horse of mine, chiropody/podiatry in its British incarnation should have been a craft like hairdressing. A manual skill, supplemented by a knowledge of science - I mean if you put the wrong things on someone’s hair it can turn green or fall out - but a craft. But oh no - the powers that be decided that really they were “doctors” - well, from the ankle down. The American model moved into proper surgery and took over what in the UK would normally be handled by orthopaedic surgeons, so this isn’t a swipe at them; they have is a different story. But UK chiropody history has been a battlefield. Even today, with legislation and the like, it is still represented by four different associations who basically all hate each other, and will stick the scalpel in at a moment’s notice.

I also wrote a book on how to run a domiciliary practice. The plusses are very few overheads. The minuses are the limitations on what you can do outside a surgery and the need for special aseptic procedures for sterilization (sterilization of instruments that is). But it covered all sorts of things, like how to take case histories. People can be very vague about their medication - either because they just don’t know and don’t want to know, or because they are desperate for a treatment that might be denied in a particular environment. I remember one patient who insisted they were not diabetic or on anti-coagulants, but after I had done the deed I noticed a green card on the shelf - a hit-panic-button emergency card for someone with von Willebrand disease. That’s akin to haemophilia to you. I remember contacting the relatives and as we say in the UK wiping the floor with them.

It covered safety for female practitioners. (Tabloid newspaper headline - “but I stabbed him with a STERILE blade says chiropodist...”) And the business side of accounting without employing an overrated and expensive accountant - as long as you coped with basic numeracy to start with.

The books are long out of print, and impossibly dated, but I earned encouraging four figure sums from both of them in their time. 

And I have happily cut old ladies’ toenails, plus a few more advanced procedures on occasion, for the whole of my career. It has allowed me to still pursue my other vocation, while putting a roof over the family’s head. And I have seen off the competition time and again because I probably mastered certain people skills in another environment that helped me keep people sort of happy.

Just as long as they are not limping after I have gone...

But no, I never imagined things would have worked out like this when I first left school.

As I started off this ramble - it’s funny how life turns out.

Real Books

I grew up with books. Paper and print. For years I would scour the second hand and antiquarian bookshops of Britain and later the charity (thrift) shops until my home was groaning under the weight of overflowing bookcases.

But then in my later years it all changed. My special collecting area resulted in rooms full of material that was deteriorating without proper storage and the thought that if I popped my clogs what would happen to it all? I donated the rarest items to the parent religious group, sold off the bulk for gratifyingly huge sums on eBay  - so storage became someone else’s problem – and now I rely on scanned copies on either the computer or my eReader.

My other special collecting area was obscure Bible translations and I still write for specialist publications on these. But alas, they are not scanned, so those shelves still stare out at me. However, that’s a subject for another day.

I went away on vacation recently determined to research and complete several articles but there was no internet access in our trailer. The advertising blurb promised that the internet was available, what it did not say was that you had to travel to a noisy café on site full of other people’s children, to struggle with an intermittent service.

So the articles didn’t get written. The research didn’t get done. So I caught up with some paper and print reading that had been languishing around for some time. The last few vacations I took this material away with me, but my predilection for eBooks and computer screens meant that it always went on the back burner. Not this time.

I completed fours books. And when not tramping around nature reserves and gardens and shopping centers I read and read. And Mrs O did embroidery and stuff. It was a change of pace. Actually it quite a restful throwback to how things used to be before the internet.

So what did I actually read and complete?

“The Kingston Trio on Record.” Who? They had five LPs (albums) in the American top twenty all at the same time. No-one else, not even Elvis or the Beatles, achieved that. They introduced the American college kids to a smooth kind of folk music that paved the way for the gritty folk boom of Bob Dylan and others, leading to folk-rock and the whole concept that popular music could carry serious lyrics that made you think. It was a good book that could be quite critical when the authors thought it necessary, and which had a whole chapter on John Stewart. Stewart sang with them for six years before going solo with over forty albums. My daughter Amy has just issued a tribute album of his songs that has achieved considerable interest in the States.

“Below the Fairy City – The Life of Jerome K Jerome” by Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton. From a very young age when my former tutor tried to read Three Men in a Boat and burst into laughter in front of a class of bemused nine years olds, I have collected Jerome. And written on Jerome for magazines and anthologies. It was nice that this biography also quoted from me. Yup - footnoted fame at last. Where it scores is that it takes its historical subject IN CONTEXT. As I specialise in writing on historical subjects this to me is a crucial aspect of research. You cannot fairly always judge 19^th century writers on 21^st century attitudes. Context of the times must be taken into account. Oulton does this admirably.

“Laurel and Hardy” by Randy Skretvedt – all 630 pages. Again, this is a subject that is one of my lasting passions (much to the bemusement of Mrs O). As a child I used to be shipped off to an outfit called Junior Holidays (the British equivalent of summer camp) and my lasting memory is seeing Laurel and Hardy films on 16mm, and watching our “supervisors” (that’s actually what they were called) trying hard not to cuss in front of their young charges when the equipment invariably broke down. Ther are whole clubs devoted to the art of Laurel and Hardy where middle aged men dress up in costume and impersonate their screen mannerisms. And no – I don’t actually go THAT far. Yet. But here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into… I was a paid up member of the British Film Institute for many years and studied silent film and early comedy. There were the four greats – Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and Langdon. Of the four Keaton always stands out for me. But, and it is a big BUT – over a hundred years since their first encounter on the screen, Laurel and Hardy still MAKE ME LAUGH.

“Acta Comparanda.” This was a conference on a religious group to which I was invited in Belgium in 2016. I didn’t go but helped two contributors with their material and as a result was sent a copy of this extremely expensive paperback. I do like the fringe research, in some cases the lunatic fringe. Human nature and the extent of self-image coupled with self-deceit are fascinating issues for me.

So, I read more paper and print in one week than I had done for a considerable time before. But I am looking forward to picking up the pieces of research now I am back home in civilization and the internet. How did we ever manage without it?

Ich bin ein Berliner

(from June 2019)

This is being written at Tegel airport. When Berlin was divided into four sections by the allies at the Potsdam conference, they all needed their own airport. Tegel was originally the French one. We are here with time on our hands because we didn’t want to take any chances with the Berlin transport system getting there in time. This was daft really, because the Berlin transport system has been excellent all round. Four means of public transport (overhead railroads, buses and trams at ground level, and then the Tube/Underground/Metro/Subway – take your pick – all integrated, clean and on time.

We have been in Berlin for a religious convention and also as traditional tourists. I could write lots on the history of Berlin and also the history of the group who in the past were generally known as Ernste Bibelforscher, or Earnest Bible Students. The group fell foul of German militarists in World War 1, then Adolf Hitler and finally the GDR (the communist government in East Germany). However, these subjects have been covered extensively elsewhere, and far better than I could.

So this is a tourist snapshot of impressions. Of course, as tourists, we visited historic sites including ancient churches, remnants of the Berlin wall, and the Brandenburg Gate. Napoleon and his troops marked through it, Hitler and his troops marched through it, and in 2019 the Occasionals stumbled through it. That doesn’t have quite the same ring about it but it is one for the family photo album.

We stayed in the former eastern part of the city. The main memory of those times was the line of the Berlin Wall (1961-1989) with small sections still preserved, and also the trams and blocks of flats still overdue for demolition in the former eastern sector. Under the GDR most people had a flat and a job of sorts. When the wall disappeared and Germany reunited many from the eastern sector had difficulty adjusting to the cut and thrust of the capitalist system. West Germans paid an extra tax to help the East after reunification.

So some highlights? One was talking to someone who used to smuggle religious literature into the east for a banned group, who was betrayed and arrested. Years later after the fall of the communist sector he was able to look at his Stasi file (old secret police) and see who betrayed him – actually a friendly West German policeman who was a paid informant for the East.

The most moving experience was visiting Sachsenhausen concentration camp – around 900 Bible Students passed through its gates and many died there. The first conscientious objector to be executed in Nazi Germany in 1939, August Dickman, died there and you could see both a memorial stone and several information boards with his story and that of others of his faith. On the day we visited there were 20 coachloads of visitors. They arrived at different times but all 800 left together singing the song/hymn Forward You Witnesses, which had been written by Erich Frost, while an inmate in Sachsenhausen.

On the history front we travelled a couple of hours to visit Magdeburg. The Bible Students had their European headquarters there from the early 1920s, but the Nazis confiscated the property when they banned the group in 1933. The Jehovah’s Witnesses as they became known finally got it back in 1945, but then in 1950 the East German communists took it off them again.The group remained banned until the Berlin wall came down. Much of the property is rented out but we had a social event in part of it. We were all taught by rote a presentation to use on the bemused citizens of Magdeburg inviting them to the convention. There was much hilarity, but fortunately the locals’ English was a lot better than my German.

The most surreal experience of the trip was on rhe first day. Travelling in an East Berlin hotel elevator, a woman got it, looked at me and said “I know you…” It turned out she had heard me ‘sing’ at a gig back in Southern England.  There are background reasons why we were both there at same time, but it was still one of those weird coincidences in life. The words of Rick from Casablanca came wafting back: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine. Play it, Sam…”

So some overall impressions? The Germans seem really keen on recyling. I remember the howls of protest in parts of the UK (although not in Wales) when they started charging for plastic bags – it was Plasticbagageddon! But in Berlin, the bags we were given were paper and the disposable plates were either paper or very thin wood. Plastic water bottles are still in abundance, but they all carry a refundable charge of 25 cents. In the supermarkets there are special machines that accept the bottles, count them, and then spit out a coupon with a credit toward your next shopping experience. If you just leave them around or put them in the trash then the homeless will quickly retrieve them to get the money back. Everyone benefits and maybe there is a little less plastic in the sea as a result.

So we went to a convention with 38,000 in the Olympic Stadium, on the site where Jesse Owens infuriated the Nazis by winning so much in 1936. You can read about this elsewhere if you have a mind to. And we spent nearly two weeks in Berlin. A very clean city (in comparison with other places I won’t mention) with huge squares, wide roads, numerous parks and green spaces, and numerous waterways. We were very impressed and one day would like to go back and fill in more of the gaps.

Coda

On the airplane home the cabin crew as usual used a series of pre-recorded messages to tell us to fasten seatbelts, follow safety instructions and be prepared for the merchandising trolley that would soon block the aistle for anyone desperate to reach the rest room. Someone pressed the wrong button and mellifluous tones informed us that we could now disembark from the front and rear exits.

We were flying at 35,000 feet at the time…

I have never been on a plane full of strangers before who symultaneously all burst into nervous laughter.

A Day Out...

(from 2015)

Mrs O and I went to the theater in Cardiff this week and sat in the dress circle. I surveyed a sea of shiny bald heads before me. Was I the only old codger who still had his own hair? We were at the matinee performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore.

The average age of the audience was - well, shall we say a bit older than me. Struggling to get refreshments in the interval meant mixing it with assorted walking aids that may have served their owners well, but risked Occasional taking a header straight into the bosom of the girl selling ices on the stairs.

I have a soft spot for HMS Pinafore. The daft plot revolves around the old English attitude towards class, and double standards, and patriotism, and cronyism. The “ruler of the Queen’s Navy” (that is Queen Victoria) gets his position through never going to sea. And the plot device - babies switched at birth was sort of reused by W S Gilbert’s scripts rather a lot. If you liked old-fashioned British humor, irony and puns, and knew a bit about late 19^th century British society, you would be in your element. And if you didn’t, but just liked silly songs and silly dances - well, you could still enjoy it.

My grandfather used to produce G and S operas at the Alhambra Theater, Bradford, in the 1920s. My grandmother, who was always short and rotund, played most of the comic middle-aged women for him in these operas. Gilbert had a very cruel streak to him when it came to writing about women of “a certain age” - and “Little” Buttercup in Pinafore was one of my grandmother’s favorites. After some bad experiences with people ripping off their stuff - generally featuring America - G and S tied down their domestic productions to the letter of the dialog and stage directions. It was only when the copyright expired 50 years after Gilbert’s death that things could be relaxed. The first “unauthorised” production by Sir Tyrone Guthrie in London was of HMS Pinafore. My grandmother was still short and rotund, but a little old lady by then, and took me as a young lad to see it. She spent the whole performance noting how they’d changed a lyric here, and changed the stage around there, and that bit of “business” - THAT wasn’t in the original.

Now of course G and S can be done every which way. We used to go regularly each year to the festival held in the Spa Town of Buxton, and various companies rang changes with modern dress, modern references in patter songs, and even audience participation. But last year we did America instead. This year we did rather a lot of folk festivals, so this theater trip was our only G and S experience for a while. But we knew the theater company and had seen a number of the cast before. They had ‘done’ the regular festival in the summer and were now taking out three operas in three days on tour.

The age of the audience probably reflected the time of day, as well as the age of the material. But at G and S festivals we have seen audiences full of teenagers laugh at fellow teenagers performing. And very good they were too. We have seen university drama clubs put on the operas - generally very badly. But probably the worst experience was a university production we saw - not at the festival, but at a theater linked to a university on the British South Coast. They put on The Yeoman of the Guard, which is a lot more serious than the rest of the canon. But there was one violin in the orchestra that was out of tune. Only slightly, but with a violin that is more than enough. Every time the orchestra struck up, there was this off-putting sound - off-putting to both the audience and increasingly to the players as they tried unsuccessfully to keep straight faces and stay in tune. A gentle murmur and titter sort of increased each time the offending instrument struck up and totally trashed the pathos of the piece. We thought that at half-time they would do something about it, but maybe the player was a professor’s wife or a director’s girl-friend or something. She stayed. We contemplated leaving. But there are some things in life you can still enjoy for all the wrong reasons.

Perhaps my worst G and S experience was a version of The Pirates of Penzance we saw at an open air theater at the Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagans. The players were good, the weather was good (always a plus for open air) and we were all set to enjoy the afternoon, when the two seats next to me were finally occupied - about ten minutes after the start of the performance. A gentleman who could probably have made the record books for obesity, came and plonked himself down next to me, and on top of me - so great was the overlap. A very strange grey-haired old lady who may have been his mother, sat on the other side of him. As the singers were getting into their stride with “We Sail the Ocean Blue”, he suddenly started eating his packed lunch. I remember it was a strange kind of salad that would normally feed four, which required a plastic fork, which he promptly lost down the back of the seat in front. His mother downed a bottle of coke - from the bottle - which was incongruous to say the least, and then decided that she needed to go to what Americans quaintly call “the rest room”. I may have remarked before in a long-forgotten piece, but in Britain these are not rooms where you would choose to rest or even linger longer than necessary - certainly not when attached to an open air museum celebrating the joys of the past. Back and forth she came several times. At the interval we thought they had gone and breathed a sigh of relief, but five minutes into the second half, they were back - for more.

What made the experience memorable for all the wrong reasons is that I knew about thirty in the audience. We had very recently visited a congregation for a week’s visit, and they had all seen us in smart suit, smart bag, encouraging smile, that sort of thing. I think they’d obviously organised a sort of group outing, and just seeing us there in casual clothes was a novelty. But when they saw our plight, you could see it made their day. Forget G and S - watching Occasional (although they didn’t know him as such) be swamped and crushed and battered throughout the performance, sort of gave them a spring in their step - even though they were seated. I can still see them all trying to keep straight faces and shove handkerchiefs into mouths, while making continual covert backward glances throughout the performance. I know from later contact that many of them also gleefully remembered that day - and it wasn’t opera that made it.

But what is it they say about humor? It’s nearly always based on someone else’s misfortune.

A Case of Proud Father Syndrome

(from 2019)

For a number of years Rachael was good enough to promote the work of Amy Goddard, a singer-songwriter from England. I say “good enough” because I was the one who introduced Rachael to Amy’s work – which up until now has totalled three CDs, live performances on YouTube, and now the prompt for this post – a brand new album out at the end of this month.

It was one of those in-jokes on several levels because Amy Goddard is my daughter. So I would write things like – “I was invited by the family to come and see Amy Goddard.” “I’m told Amy Goddard is a music teacher.”  And my personal favourite, “I’ve known Amy Goddard’s mother for some years…” Amy’s mother and I have our 45^th wedding anniversary later this year.

There were other in-jokes too. One of my favourite songwriters was named John Stewart. Amy was force-fed John Stewart material on the car cassette player each day going to and from school, and the result is her latest album, which is a tribute to his songs. There are around 700 of them that are known, and she had to whittle the list down to 17. But in Rachael’s extended family there was also a John Stewart; there was even a photograph of him in a kilt many years ago on this blog. So there were in-jokes about the John Stewart who sang. And the John Stewart who – well – didn’t.

So why didn’t I own up to who I was? I was concerned at the time to preserve my anonymity. If it were possible to trace who I was, then my pen-name for this blog could lead to other blogs where I used a different handle, but could at a stretch be traced. I didn’t want that. Now, I don’t really care. On the basis that a secret is something you tell everyone individually, most who know me, actually know ME. I can’t see anyone else being bothered, and anyhow, I’ve never written anything anywhere that I’m worried about being “found out.”  I might be a bit embarrassed perhaps, but that’s about all.

Amy’s latest CD has one tribute song to John Stewart that she has recorded before. This is a new arrangement but the rest are her selection of his songs.

Stewart wrote and wrote. He sang with the Kingston Trio, who were huge in America over 1958-1963, and wrote Daydream Believer for the Monkees (whose version changed one word and missed the whole point of the song but who listens to lyrics anyway?) and had one hit of his own with Fleetwood Mac, called Gold. By then he was in his early 40s, and finally having a hit, he sang it on national US TV. He was obviously ill at ease, miming away with a tribe of scantily clad girls cavorting behind him (they shook it to the east, they shook it to the west, and then they shook it down south). It was not his finest hour. He almost had a breakdown afterwards and went back to writing and the folk clubs, his real home.

For Amy this project has been a different ball game. If you are a singer-songwriter, generally the project stands or falls by the songs. A brilliant songwriter with a voice like bathwater escaping down the drain (think Bob Dylan) can get away with it. Also, the fledgling singer-songwriter provides songs that no-one else has sung, so there are no terms of reference for comparison. But if you sing someone else’s material, then you can either sing it, or you can’t.

Amy can. Yes, I know I’m prejudiced – both in favour of her singing and the choice of material. So why not click the link below and try it? You can hear a single Bringing Down the Moon and a preview of the tribute album. In the preview you can even hear Occasional in there somewhere, but only a correspondent like the recent Boyo would recognise it and make rude remarks.

https://www.amygoddardmusic.co.uk/music

The Occasionals in Spain

(from 2019)

When contemplating this essay I decided to take a leaf out of Mr Arrowsmith’s book. Who? James Arrowsmith was a publisher. In the late 1880s he received a manuscript on the history of the River Thames. It was a boring travelog incorporating the history of England’s most famous river. The writer had thrown in a few anecdotes among the serious bits, and Arrowsmith ruthlessly cut out the serious stuff and kept the anecdotes. The result was the British classic Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome. It helped Jerome pay his gas bill for nearly forty years.

I can’t rise to the heights of Jerome K Jerome, but I can avoid his original mistake. Because unless it is something historical (George Borrow’s Wild Wales comes to mind) no-one wants to read about places they can visit every day on their TV. Nothing turns a page quicker than a flowery description of ancient architecture. The Occasionals went to Spain and saw lots of it; but if you’ve seen one Moorish arch you’ve seen a thousand, and that’s about it.

For years we were not able to travel far because of family responsibilities. Mrs O lived some years in Spain in a previous life, working for a banned religious group in the days of General Franco. Yes, she is THAT old. Which means that Occasional is EVEN OLDER. But she had rarely ventured down to the south of Spain, so we did this special trip, six nights, three hotels, four cities, vino, paella, flamenco, more vino – to coin the title of a long forgotten film – if it’s Tuesday it must be Belgium…

Mrs O was able to use her Spanish again, and I amazed myself how much Spanish I could remember from those heady days when I would use cheap holiday flights to get to visit her when we were courting. I was able to order drinks in a bar, point at things in the supermarket and ask how much, and even ask directions. The ability to remember the words for left and right and a few numbers meant I could even understand the answers sometimes.

Of course, now I am in my dotage I am trying to learn Welsh. But there is only so much of my brain that can cope with “foreign language”- and I’d start off with Spanglish and Wenglish and end up some horrible hybrid that no-one could understand – Welshspan perhaps? Or was it Spanelsh?

Our first night I confidently walked Mrs O into the restaurant to be shown to a table. The Spanish for thank you is “gracias” (and the pronunciation will give away whether you are from Spain or America). The Welsh for thank you is “diolch” (pronounced dee-ock). Somehow my Welsh-wired brain came up with the perfect combination “Dee-ass” – which when bawled at the waiter came over as “Dios” – the title of the Deity, usually used as an expletive. It was not Occasional’s finest hour…

Spain has changed since I was last there. Mrs O had taken school parties over on cultural exchanges when working, which was mainly a case of trying to keep the sexes apart and stopping the students getting blotto. But I was last there over 40 years ago and went on a train journey from Valencia to Barcelona, which I still remember as the journey from hell. But Spain now has decent railroads, decent highways, and a cost of living to match.

So – the touristy bit – we saw the one surviving Moorish baths in southern Spain – the Christians re-conquered the country and flattened all the others, since apparently Christians didn’t wash. (One is mindful of the famous quotation about Queen Elizabeth I of Britain – she bathed once a month, whether she needed it or not…) Moslems and Jews had actually co-existed quite happily for centuries, but when the Christians got the land back they gave them three choices – leave, convert – or die. We saw the Alhambra Palace where a strange hybrid of Christian and Islamic art nudged each other along with ancient graffiti.

Of the places we visited, Ronda, Cordoba, Seville and Granada, probably Seville stand out best, and actually for something from the 20^th century. They had a huge world class exhibition planned for 1919 to try and generate trade with their former colonies in the Americas. World War 1 put paid to that, so they worked on it until 1929. The Wall Street crash torpedoed it again, but at least the site was created. Huge parkland, beautiful buildings in various styles – still used by government and education bodies today – and of course by film companies. One – the Plaza de España - has appeared in Laurence of Arabia, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones. Its curved frontage tells the story of Spain with all the key players sculptured. People like Ferdinand Magellan (who was Portuguese) and Christopher Columbus (who was Italian) but don’t say it too loud…

So the time went very quickly. When you work hard and are on call constantly you often don’t realise the stress levels – until you stop. But we stopped in Spain. We had no real internet connection to distract us. A glass or three of vino and we were zonked. We piled in the tours, and came home absolutely shattered.

It was a memorable vacation. We just need another one now to get over it.

An Occasional Tribute

(from 2019)

I will always retain fond memories of Rachael. We corresponded regularly for ten years, both on history matters and other matters too. We emailed, we shared blog comments, and tweeted too.

One of my correspondents who contacted me back-channel could not believe she was only 41. He thought, from her insights and comments, that she was much older. She was a tenacious researcher who argued her point of view passionately. I must confess that I didn’t always agree with her point of view, but that’s human life for you, and I couldn’t fault her conviction and turn of phrase to express it.

In fact my alter ego, Occasional Reader, came about through disagreement. It was friendly disagreement, but disagreement none the less. Many years ago on this blog, Rachael wrote a long piece about how she viewed certain members of a religious group. She’d had some bad personal experiences. I couldn’t argue about her experiences because I wasn’t there and I felt for her, because what happened just wasn’t right. However, I did feel that others were being “tarred with the same brush.” I broke one of my own rules and decided to respond online and on the defensive. I was an “occasional reader” of her blog, so to preserve my anonymity, that’s what I called myself. Back came a lengthy well-written response on the blog. I still didn’t agree with her I must confess, but almost immediately. I decided that an open forum was not the place to discuss such matters and the conversation went back-channel.

Not very long after I was invited to submit something for her blog, as far away from religious history as could be. So I started writing – sometimes occasionally, sometimes frequently. Rachael had soon worked out who I was, and that was OK, and actually – being fairly adept at sleuthing – I soon found out her real name too. But I never told her or anyone else for that matter. She had a right to her privacy.

So the years went by. I wrote and researched for Rachael and Bruce and also followed up the quirks of history that appealed to me. I’d written on this subject for many years in different contexts, and had a wide range of contacts, but this project provided me some regular focus and continuity. We shared resources and Bruce and Rachael entrusted me with rare materials that needed checking.

On the pixie blog I learned about Rachael’s family, and their nicknames. I learned about her book collecting and library – a passion I shared. I learned about her holding down several jobs while seriously ill, being determined not to give in to the adversity of her medical condition until it was absolutely forced upon her. I learned about the goats, the family history back in the old country, and all the artwork of pixies and children. I learned about her eclectic music tastes, from swing to hymns to country and western (come back Marty Robbins, all is forgiven). I received and enjoyed Pixie Warrior. In return I told slightly exaggerated tales of our family’s doings, with an occasional serious rant on something interspersed. So Rachael knew of Mrs O, my wife Lyn, and also had her own correspondence with my daughter, Amy, who sings and records. We sing too, after a fashion, but Amy REALLY sings.

So it is the end of an era. I am sorry never to have met her in person, but the global village of today means that most of our contacts are probably people we will never actually meet. I put that right with some when I visited historic sites in America in 2014, and who knows, one day maybe a book will come out of that. But Washington State was just too far away, and anyway, I think the distance and anonymity suited Rachael still. We will all miss her.

O.R's Trip

(from 2019)

So the Occasionals went away for the weekend. Within Wales. Since they actually live in Wales that may not seem too adventurous, but the weekend involved a day-long religious conference that we normally attend twice a year. It has been fraught with difficulty in the past. For the last event we had torrential rain and many had to turn back before reaching the venue. We had come up the day before and were staying in the hills above the place, unlike those who were swimming in the valleys below. The time before, a year ago, it snowed. That was in March. We were stranded in a hotel in a borders town called Welshpool, eating expensive food and drinking expensive drink, and the whole event was cancelled.

This time, in February, we have been in the midst of a highly unseasonal heat wave, which made a welcome change.  The event was highly successful and we were exposed to total Welsh all day. My favourite Welsh expression has been “Fy pen tost.” Translated it means “My head hurts.” Even Mrs O was flagging by the end of day and she is a retired language teacher. Although her specialities, Spanish, French and Portuguese bear no relation to Welsh.

The conference was all day Saturday, so Sunday we left our farm house accommodation and headed for Aberyswyth, an old Victorian era seaside town with a brilliant University library, which of course wasn’t open on Sunday. So instead it was Sunday lunch on the pier. Dodging the waves that crashed on the seafront and which have trashed the town in years gone by. Then a visit to a Red Kite Center. Red kites became extinct in England and Scotland in the last century, and were down to about five pairs in one known valley in Wales. A special feeding and breeding campaign has restored the breed and there are three Welsh feeding stations that come into their own in winter. We visited the one at Bwlch Nant yr Arian near Aberystwyth and watched over a hundred birds hover overhead – making one uneasily think of Alfred Hitchcock and The Birds – before swooping down in formation, grabbing food and making off with it.

It was nice to hear all the families with small children speaking Welsh at the Kite center. When kids whine and demand food and the potty and parents bawl them out – all in Welsh – I can actually understand every word. It probably stems from my first experience of Welsh – my future mother-in-law bawling out her dog. So “sit down” and “shut your mouth” are Welsh phrases ingrained in my psyche. I tend not to use them with Mrs O though.

The Kite Center was in a nature reserve that was originally a site for lead mining. North Wales has its slate and South Wales its coal, whereas mid-Wales added lead to the mix. (Celtic Cornwall to the south adds arsenic and tin). All long gone, and nature – with a bit of help from European money – has transformed them. Out the back of my home is a huge nature reserve where once three coal mines stood. I’ve lived through the transformation. But Wales deserves it. All those years when the British Empire grew rich on the back of Welsh resources – and the native Welsh had to make do with pneumoconiosis and silicosis as their share. And their language stamped on with kids punished in school for using their own native tongue. It wasn’t surprising that so many of them took off for Pennsylvania.

So it’s been a good weekend. Now it is a mellow evening with Endeavour on the TV, a glass of red in the hand and a leisurely drive home tomorrow.

If Music be the Food of Love (again)

(from 2018)

We are currently in the process of slimming down. Not our figures but our possessions. But it seems never ending and no matter how much disappears on eBay, what is left still seems to overfill available space. But in my attic this week I came across some sizeable remnants of my record collection.

What were the first discs I bought?

They were on 78 rpm. It was a format usually produced on shellac that replaced cylinders and lasted for around sixty years.

Showing my penchant for high art from a tender age, my very first purchase from a piggy bank full of pocket money was the 78 rpm recording of Mel Blanc singing (?) “I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat.” I read somewhere that he once mused that he wished he had done something worthwhile with his life, but being the voice of Sylvester and Bugs Bunny is not a bad epitaph.

Blanc was followed by such delights as “The Singing Dogs” and “The Runaway Train” – Vernon Dalhart’s version. When pop music started to intrude there was Buddy Holly burping and gargling his way through “Peggy Sue.”

But my real musical discovery with millions of other teenagers and pre-teens was the joys of skiffle.

In Britain skiffle sort of started with Ken Colyer. Colyer was a jazz musician who went to the States to play with the New Orleans greats, and promptly got arrested and then deported over visa problems. This gave him enormous street cred in the miserable monochrome Britain of the day. He started the trend for Jazz musicians to use a show’s interval for a brief foray into a very limited type of folk music which they called skiffle. It was usually borrowed from old American singers like Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) and optimistically it involved all of three chords, a washboard and thimbles for percussion and a one-stringed tea chest for bass. If I were writing a thesis on skiffle I would hark back to the American jug bands of the early 20^th century. But I’m not. So I won’t.

I bought Colyer’s “Streamline Train”, then Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line.” Donegan was an anachronism – he was old, nearly 30, and he wore a suit and a bow tie, but he did have a voice. Before he morphed into that most dreaded of performers (the-all-round-entertainer) he did some good stuff. Skiffle paved the way for the British pop invasion a few years later; the Beatles started out as the Quarrymen Skiffle Group. But coupled with hearing the Weavers on Radio Luxembourg during their McCarthy era blacklist, and then the Kingston Trio on the Capitol radio show – I was to be hooked forever on folk music in its various incarnations.

78s were phased out very quickly for vinyl 45s (although I seem to remember that Woolworth still briefly used shellac for the new speed) – so there was a very young Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” Buddy Holly again, “Learning the Game,” Gene Vincent with “My Heart…” I was now in the era of having more of my own money and that is where it went. O the joys of teenage love songs and punk pop.

And of course vinyl Long Playing Discs at 33 rpm.

I still have my very first vinyl LP. Four Rossini overtures played by the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam conducted by Eduard van Beinum. It was on a reissue cheapo label.

I liked Rossini. Most classical composers seemed to be so po-faced, so very serious, dying for their art and all that. Rossini was a hack. He pinched the best pieces from one opera and recycled them at the next place he went to. His overtures were regularly reused although they had no bearing on the new opera.

 I remember as a small child at school they showed us a short film of an orchestra playing the overture to “The Thieving Magpie.” It started sort of slow and ordinary, then built up a bit, and finally went ballistic at the end. I learned how Rossini wrote arias that certain singers couldn’t sing, just to annoy them. I almost added here that he was obviously a man after my own heart but actually I’m a pussy cat by comparison. Or as Mel would say – a puddy tat. When fashions started to change and he’d made his money he virtually retired and lived the sort of life for his last 40 years that you really wonder how on earth he managed to last that long.

So yes, my first LP, which is still there in the attic. I wouldn’t part with it. When I pop my clogs and they pore over my collection of junk this is going to be the Occasional version of Rosebud. If you have seen the film Citizen Kane that was Kane’s first prized possession, a wooden sled called Rosebud - the first word in the movie and also the final shot in the film as it goes up in flames.  (Orson Welles would later define this as an unkind joke at the expense of William Randolph Hurst but we will tiptoe away from that).

It all gets dead boring after that. Later were cassettes where you could make up your own playlists for the first time – I still have wall to wall radio drama preserved in this format – and then CDs. Our new car doesn’t even have a CD slot so that’s the start of a death knell for that format, so now it’s  a trusty iPod and streaming and downloads and all that.

But even now, nothing can replace the sound of bacon frying on a scratchy old 78 shellac record played with steel needles on a genuine wind-up phonograph.