My favorite Hitchcock

(from 2011)

I think I probably have all the surviving Hitchcock pictures on DVD, apart from two short films made during the last war. I even have the curiosity Elstree Calling – a musical featuring variety acts of 1930. Although I actually bought this for Lilly Morris singing Why Am I Always a Bridesmaid, not for the ‘humorous’ links Hitch filmed. And I saw Hitchcock in the flesh once; when he did a photo shoot for Frenzy in London in the 1970s.

So you could say that I count myself a Hitchcock fan. His best movie? It depends. For sheer old fashioned entertainment value, the re-working of the basic idea of 39 Steps in North by Northwest (chased by villains and police at same time) and Rear Window loom high.

But I am going to be perverse and choose my favourite sequence from a Hitchcock film – technically brilliant for its time, and something I can watch, and ultimately laugh at over again and again. The film is Young and Innocent, made in Britain in 1937 after 39 Steps but before The Lady Vanishes.

It is based loosely on the book A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey – an excellent writer and in her day, a serious historical playwright. Typically, Hitchcock omits the meaning of the novel’s title, and even chooses a totally different murderer to the book to round things off. Minor details really, and no doubt Miss Tey received her royalties and learned a lesson about the film industry. But it was another one of those films where an innocent man is accused of murder, but helped by girl, he flees from the police and they find the real culprit in time – and aaaah - fall in love along the way. I guess it is 39 Steps all over again (although Hitchcock drastically changed that from the novel too).

My sequence? The fugitive and helpful girl are looking for a murderer with eyes that twitch. The girl goes into the Grand Hotel and enters a very large room, dining at one end, and dancing at the other. The camera in a high crane shot travels from the hotel lobby over a wall into the hall, and then continues for some time over the diners and then over the heads of the dancers. There is a band playing at the far end, with a white conductor and vocalist, while the rest of the band are in black-face (a touch of the Al Jolson’s). The song is called The Drummer Man, which requires a small drum solo. Without a break and keeping in focus the crane shot travels past the vocalist and gets closer and closer to the drummer. It comes right up to his blacked-up face until all you seen on screen is a giant close up of his eyes – which suddenly twitch!

It is all done in one brilliant take lasting over a minute – a tour de force for the time.

So how can I laugh over it? Well, the villain suddenly sees his nemesis in the dance hall. Not only does he twitch some more, but his drumming goes all over the place – and when the police arrive you have this lovely sequence of the band playing and the bandleader and others looking confused over their shoulders, as the whole drummer’s performance goes completely down the drain and he gives himself away completely.

Naturally much of the film is dated. Some of the humor is somewhat forced by today’s standards. But I like it.

Of course, if you asked me to-morrow, I might select something else.

Woodstock - and beyond

(from 2011)

My daughter grew up on folk music. She didn’t have a lot of choice – I drove her to and from school for years, and then to work after that, and on the car stereo cassette player were all my folk albums. She got top grades in classical guitar, but then had to do all grades anew in rock guitar, because that’s what her students want to learn! But normally she plays acoustic folk, and her living room wall is covered with 4 string, 6 string, 8 string and 12 string instruments. Question – how many instruments does a folk singer want?  Answer – one more...

But she and her husband suddenly suggested – why not join them at a folk festival? A folk festival? Er – you mean like us, your elderly creaky parents, join you? You mean like Woodstock? Hippies? Mud? Drugs? National Guard? State of emergency? Pictures of respectable father being carried off by police in tabloid newspaper? A piece of doggerel came to mind – For I’m a happy hippie, with paint instead of clothes. Unless the weather’s nippy – I tried it once, and froze!

But I was assured that their kind of folk festivals were the most respectable events you could possible attend. And so it was. Although in one sense it was almost like a throwback to 40-50 years ago – with the same people now more much sedate. Now the men were of portly build (a lifetime of real ale causing slipped chest syndrome) with bald heads and pony tails as a kind of compensation, and the women were earth mothers wearing what appeared to be tents resembling Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. And kids – lots of kids – doing face painting, circus skills, and joining in on the choruses.

So after a couple of biggies watching stars from the folk firmament in relative comfort, a couple of weeks ago we settled for a weekend in a field at a place you would never have heard of even if I did give the name away – for a Folk and Ale festival. And we camped. The kids (my daughter and son in law are in their thirties, but they are still kids to us) had something resembling a tepee for them and the dog. We had the latest in frame tents with numerous rooms, proper camp beds, cookers, kitchen sink – and mod cons like eReaders. All that was missing was the chandelier.

Putting up the tent was – interesting. I won’t try and describe the process, but there is a scene in Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat which give the flavor. But the biggest challenge was our latest acquisition – the toilet tent. The girls had drawn the line at tramping through a muddy field in the dead of night to the delights of the communal Portaloos, so our very own toilet tent was the height of luxury.

But getting the thing up in the wind, and stopping it blowing away over the fields when we had got it up, required all hands. And it looked so easy in the diagram.

Once installed and pegged down against the gale, two things came to mind. First, there was that scene in Jurassic Park...

And then, many years ago I had the responsibility of accommodating many thousands who came to an international event. It included a tent and trailer park, with several thousand on it. In the days before health and safety legislation killed off most things, we installed a series of toilet tents on the ridge of the hill complete with state of the art chemical loos, and rigged up a lighting system with power from the local farm. All was fine until night fell, and the power was switched on. And there, silhouetted against the sky line... but I digress...

The sleeping arrangements for us were actually very comfortable. The only problem after the first night ended way past our usual bed time, was the following morning’s dawn chorus. One little girl of about 10, who sang sweetly with her father the night before, decided to get up early – and our tent was just by the swings in the park ground. She had obviously seen the musical Oliver in very recent memory and was enamored with it. From about six in the morning she swung back and forth and trilled her way solo through the whole score. Well, at least she was happy.

It was a good weekend, and for us, the highlight was the sing around – where everyone had the opportunity to have a go.

What is it like to sing? As a teenager back in the Cretaceous age I used to sing a bit. Back in the 1960s, a dear friend had a serious accident and was hospitalized for about six months – so my working partner and I put together a tape with all sorts of double tracking effects to “cheer her up”. I have recently been warned that a tape of my impersonating Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps singing Baby Blue (as featured in the film Hot Rod Gang) is still out there, and what is it worth...?

But after several decades of quasi-musical silence, we attended a folk club with daughter and son in law and were gently encouraged to try. The first time was absolutely terrifying. In one life I was used to speaking to large crowds – as an Australian would say, no sweat! – but to face 30 folkies with my other half and try and croak our way through an old Welsh ballad – please can the floor open up and please can we disappear... But then I heard some of the others. And that gave me hope.

So it got better. My voice may still sound like bathwater escaping, but who cares! A certain recklessness comes with time. And our recent sing around at the Folk and Ale festival was a most enjoyable evening.

I was going to do my party piece – a song called Coyote written by a Native American Peter La Farge – but it is not exactly something you can sing along to. (My daughter keeps threatening to put me on YouTube as the yodelling pensioner). But that night, everyone wanted to sing, to join in, for it to be a truly communal event.

So I switched to the old Merle Travis’ number Dark as a Dungeon (one of the first records I ever bought was the Folkways recording of Bob de Cormier and Peter Seeger doing it) and it went down a storm – even if I say so myself. And then, second time around the old standard that is so well known no-one ever seems to sing it – We Shall Overcome. A nineteenth century hymn slowed down and turned into a twentieth century union song, and finally with a very slight tweak into a civil rights anthem – with Martin Luther King picking out the words, if not singing it. I could manage the chords – and the audience drowned out my inadequacies.

My other half wowed them with Delia Murphy’s Spinning Wheel (fresh from our 78 rpm collection), and got everyone going with the Mingulay Boat Song.

So – the times - are they a changin’? Can music change the world? Religious and patriotic music can certainly have a big effect on people and move them – for better and sometimes for worse. And some music just makes you stop and think. Perhaps Tom Lehrer summed it up in his parody, Folk Song Army. Great last verse:

So join in the folk song army,

Guitars are the weapons we bring

To the fight against poverty, war, and injustice

Ready!  Aim!  ....Sing...?

Whatever – it does make you feel good.

Even if a little bit hoarse!

I never got on too well with Wodehouse

(from 2011)

I never got on too well with Wodehouse as author, apart from the Mr. Mulliner short stories, but he did have a nice line in one-liners.

Here are a few:

On romance

As a child of eight he had once kissed a girl of six under the mistletoe at a Christmas party, but there his sex life had come to an abrupt halt.

On children

Like so many infants of tender years, he presented to the eye the aspect of a mass murderer suffering from an ingrowing toenail.

On sound

She was giving the impression of a hyena which had just heard a good one from another hyena.

Somewhere in the woods beyond the river a nightingale had begun to sing with all the full-throated zest of a bird conscious of having had a rave notice from the poet Keats.

On writing

I dedicate this book to my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement it would have been finished in half the time.

On appearance

Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.

My dear, you look like Helen of Troy after a good facial.

The French invented the only known cure for dandruff. It is called the guillotine.

Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of his salad.

She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say “when”.

And finally on Life...

A melancholy looking man, he had the appearance of one who had searched for the leak in life’s gas pipe with a lighted candle.

The joy of second hand book collecting

(from 2011)

It was Virginia Wolfe who said "Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack."

Partly down to budget, but also with a nod to Wolfe’s philosophy, second hand book collecting has been a major part of my life. Since the advent of the internet I’ve obtained so many items that I never thought would have been possible. And yet there is something lost from the experience of scrabbling amongst dusty shelves and precarious stacks, and secret back rooms where real treasures might be found. More and more shops in Britain have gone to the wall. Even a place like the “town of books” Hay on Wye (everything you could never possibly want) seemed sparser last time I visited. The comforting jumble of the periodicals department in one huge building (where once I picked up originals of Overland Monthly) now replaced by a modern cafe.

So here are a two highlights and one lowlight of one person’s book collecting over the years.

First there was Newcome’s Improved New Testament, the first edition of 1808. Newcome was the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland who produced his own NT translation in the late 18^th century. Copyright wasn’t too hot at the time, and in 1808 the Unitarians got hold of it and “improved” it. Their version used the Anglicised Jehovah for the name of God in a number of OT quotations, and also had an untraditional rendering for John 1:1 where the last clause became “the Word was a god”. (It started a trend. The Universalist Abner Kneeland ran with this for his own translation in 1822, and the baton was picked up by the interlinear rendering in Benjamin Wilson’s Emphatic Diaglott in the mid-1860s – which strays into the historical area of this blog). Leaving aside linguistic and theological arguments – one can’t imagine the Archbish being too pleased with what happened to his baby.

At the time – and this was a good number of years ago - a pristine first edition could go for about 200 GBP. But there I was – in the one shop that always looked down on the rabble who bought “second hand” as opposed to pricey “antiquarian”. And there was gold – languishing on the shelf. They should have known better. I feigned as much bored indifference to match that of the person behind the counter, paid just a couple of GBP and left. Back in the car - “Yes!” That volume is still mine, although currently out on loan for an exhibition.

Then there was the bound volume of a Victorian periodical called “The Idler”. Edited by Jerome K Jerome, it was in beautiful condition in publisher’s cloth - the one volume I was missing. A perfect match, and going for a song. My daughter still remembers the occasion when I picked out the volume – made a fist and, according to her, danced around the second hand bookshop in Penzance. At the age of 12 she was used to her father doing strange things, but I am sure I didn’t actually dance. To this day, she insists I did! I blame the bad memory on her advancing years.

Of course there have been less successful experiences along the way. I used to advertise regularly in trade journals for publications of a certain religious group – a key one was called The Watchtower that started in 1879. A dealer contacted me to offer an original volume for 1901-1903. It was very expensive, and I was doing religious work away from home with a companion of similar age at the time. And we were broke. Really, really broke. But I had to have it. Money from necessities was diverted to obtain the prize. Then each day I waited impatiently for the parcel to come.

Finally it did. I ripped open the paper, and there it was – the Watchtower on the spine. Not quite the size I expected, but hey – how much did I know at that time about the shape and size of its past years? I opened the book wide, and there on a full page spread were the immortal words:

BILE BEANS FOR BILIOUSNESS

Those who may know the journal in question will understand how incongruous that was. I flipped through the pages and – aaagh - this wasn’t MY Watchtower, this was ANOTHER Watchtower – a literary journal published by the Broughton Baptist Church - full of life enhancing anecdotes, and advertisements for patent remedies for the ailing Baptist community of Greater Manchester.

My working partner behaved with true Christian charity.

How much did you pay for it?

HOW MUCH??

HAWHAWHAWHAWHAW!!!

Well over forty years have gone by since then, but I can still remember as he curled up and pounded the floor in hysterics, as I looked aghast at my prize and thought what I could have spent the money on.

That volume is still on my shelves today. (As is another volume called Awake - a bound volume from the Church Missionary Society from 1902 – and that date really should have been a give-away).

I keep them there as a lesson.

I’m just not sure of what.

Tidying the Attic

(from 2011)

One of the delights of a public holiday is the incentive – with a bit of prodding from family – to “sort out” the attic.

Our family are inveterate hoarders, each individually denying it, but collectively having to fess up. The manuals on clutter advise that if something has been in storage for longer than a year, you no longer need it. Dispose. Promptly. Be Firm. Now. Humph.

So this last holiday we ventured into the attic. The first thing we managed to clear were the ancient cardboard boxes for electrical appliances that had long since gone to that great scrap heap in the sky. Even then, there was a lot of stuff.

Books. Not books we regularly use – they fill the actual rooms in the house below the attic, but ones kept “just in case” or for nostalgia reasons. Plus tons of my daughter’s stuff. She got married well over eleven years ago, and lives in a house that is larger than ours, but somehow we still seem to be the repository.

So what books did we unearth, and what nostalgic memories came flooding back? My first taped box unearthed books on conjuring. As a teenager I was well into magic tricks. My very first paid job (part-time) involved demonstrating conjuring tricks and other “toys” in a department store leading up to Christmas. I veered into magic tricks involving “thought transference” which didn’t sit all that well with my religious convictions – although I KNEW that what I did was trickery, because I KNEW how it was done. Outlets for demonstrating my “powers” were sort of limited in my circle, and the hobby took a back seat and soon disappeared off the radar. But yes – a couple of books as a distant memory – there they were, unopened for – well, quite a long time.

Then there were the textbooks on Gregg’s shorthand. Ah yes – Gregg’s shorthand. Because I planned to work for nothing for a religious charity, I needed lucrative part-time work. Secretarial – a well-meaning relative had this idea – shorthand-typing – that was it! Actually, it never was – but I went to classes and got my 100 wpm shorthand and 50-60 wpm typing. It was not exactly a macho teenage boy thing – I ended up as the only male in a class full of girls. Ten years before I had been the only male in a tap dancing troupe in a pantomime in which my father appeared – that was absolute purgatory – but now this was rather nice. As it happened, copy typing was already pushing shorthand into the cold, and anyway – I soon graduated to composing letters for others typists to produce – and at 50-60 wpm it was generally easier to knock them out myself and save on staff. But yes – Gregg’s – all those lovely short forms and perfected arguments to put down all those deluded people in the UK who still struggled with Pitman’s.

My wife’s hoard included the Montessori nursery nurse course. She started work in nursery nursing, before going to Spain to work for the same religious group as I had, when it were still illegal in the dying days of Franco. After detours in life – a major one was marrying me – she became a college lecturer in Spanish, French and Portuguese. Now “retired” she is conquering Welsh. (In-joke – Doctor to Patient – Don’t worry Mr Jones – we’ve found the problem – you’re not dyslexic – you’re Welsh!)

And the fiction books! Now we are both on eReaders, all sort of fiction gets stored in the attic – just in case. The detective fiction – ranging from the strict puzzle based on conjuring principles, with cardboardity of character to match, to modern authors where the turn of phrase is everything, and the plot incidental. Two whole boxes of Simon Brett. A TV producer and sitcom writer, who knocks out numerous tongue-in-cheek pastiches of the “golden age”. Phrases that stick in the mind – a description of the hero’s estranged wife driving a yellow mini – “She roared into the school car park like an avenging slab of butter” – a  dodgy receptionist – “a simpering teenager of 45, with hair from a color chart not supplied by God”. Those boxes got opened – a lot of tidying up time lost – before they were ultimately lugged downstairs.

Cartoons books by Styx. No-one today has heard of him – but he was very prolific in his day, and on occasion originals turn up on eBay. The jokes were thin even at the time, but the drawings were brilliant. I modelled my own style on his when illustrating a couple of books – for him it came effortlessly, for me it was hard work.

Notes and visual aids for long ago courses I taught. Actually, one of them did turn up as useful. A few years ago an anxious phone call asked if I could drop everything when illness knocked out someone taking a modern version of the same course – it was all set up and no-one wanted it cancelled. A frantic scrabble in the attic unearthed from nearly twenty years before all my notes and drawings and jokes – (very important to keep people awake) – and being self employed, I was able to make up the lost money in the days ahead. So they all went back into storage with new material thought up for the occasion. Who knows – I might get asked again in another twenty years time...

So where has it left us? All the dead cardboard boxes went into the dumpster. Bootloads of stuff went to our favorite charity shop – and we only bought a little in return – honest. But I don’t know what it is, the attic looks a bit tidier, but overall it still looks very much the same.

Possessions multiply to fill the space available for them – and for hoarders the process just keep on going. I just hope we don’t get totalled crossing the road together and someone else has to try and make sense of it all. They would have a job.

If music be the food of love...

(from 2011)

There is a certain period in most peoples’ lives when music becomes all important. You can often tell a person’s age by the tunes and lyrics they know inside out. These bring back memories of happy days – or at least different days. In my work I visit many retirement homes – the visiting sing-along entertainers still lead with songs of the last World War. In ten year’s time, they will all be Elvis impersonators!

Before I even hit my teens, my life revolved around Radio Luxembourg. It was realistically the only commercial station available to people in Britain. The BBC had the monopoly and its tastes in popular music reflected the age of those who ran it. It was also tied up in knots by musicians’ unions which meant that recordings were rationed and music was more often than not – “live”.  Or “dead” – depending on your point of view. But Radio Luxembourg was a commercial station – “208 on the dial” – that broadcast popular music to Britain – even though its programs were taped in Britain, flown out to Luxembourg, then beamed back to its hungry UK audience. It was before the era of transistor radios, but I had a valve portable wireless the size and weight of a large brick, that could be snuggled under the bedclothes with me.

The only time that music took a back seat was on Sundays when a variety of religious groups bought time for their individual messages. They included one of the splinter groups from the religious history I write about elsewhere.

Only now, looking back, do I see how my taste in popular music was shaped. A lifelong interest in folk music – people like Pete Seeger – started with a series of live programmes by the Weavers in the mid-50s. I heard Seeger and audience do Wimoweh and I was hooked. Still am. Different companies bought airtime on Luxembourg, so you heard stuff you just wouldn’t have heard anywhere else. There was a strange program called Scottish Requests – which started with a bowdlerized version of Scotland the Brave – “sit ye in your easy chair, for your program’s on the air”... Then the Capitol Show introduced me to Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee and (some contrast) Gene Vincent and the Bluecaps. As Vincent’s career nosedived in the States he came to Britain – first in 1959 – and I saw him perform on a number of occasions, and wrote articles about him for small circulation fanzines. In his prime, before drink got the better of him, he was one of the most exciting rock and roll performers of all time. And in my misspent youth I saw most of them.

Also on Capitol came the Kingston Trio. In their day they racked up gold disc on top of gold disc for album sales in the folk style. Later we realised that their harmonies were perhaps a little too slick and their patter too rehearsed. Nik Cohen gave the best put down when he said (quoting from memory) that they had the ability to get hold of an old blood and death ballad like Tom Dooley and make it sound like a song by Shirley Temple. Still – they introduced a huge swathe of the college crowd to folk music, who were then ready to lap up Dylan and Baez and the 60’s folk protest movement when it came along. I saw the Trio too on the only occasion they visited my country. I bought all their discs on vinyl, and courtesy of Bear Family Label of Germany have them all on CD and iPod today.

As a spin-off from the Trio, when they disbanded, John Stewart went solo and I followed his career through over forty albums down to his death in 2008. Some were straight folk, some were rock (he teamed up briefly with Fleetwood Mac), some were pop (he wrote Daydream Believer for the Monkeys) plus hundreds of quality singer-songwriter tracks – it became the soundtrack of my life. My poor daughter was subjected to Stewart tapes as we drove to and from school for years, but grew up to teach music and sing herself, and now does Stewart numbers in folk clubs and on YouTube. When visiting clubs – having heard how bad some of the others are – I have even plucked up sufficient courage to sing a Stewart number myself. Some of us will just not grow old gracefully.

But really it all started with a valve portable radio, snuggled under the bedclothes, and the delights of Radio Luxembourg - 208 on the dial. As did a lifelong interest in radio drama. But that’s another story.

FAME

(from 2011)

The hit film and subsequent TV series FAME spawned a huge disco hit in 1980 – unsurprisingly entitled “Fame”. The lyrics included the words: “I’m going to live forever, Baby remember my name”.

I wonder how many readers of this blog can name the singer who had the original hit. If you are a child of the eighties you might manage it – Irene Cara actually. But if you didn’t give the answer before the buzzer went, the words “Baby remember my name” take on a certain irony.

The words of the song reflect a common human desire to want to be remembered – by someone – be it family or friends. And for others a bit more ambitious, the desire to even leave some kind of mark on “civilization”.

Looking back a century or more, the past masters at perpetuating their own memories had to be the Victorians in Britain. One only has to visit a 19^th century municipal cemetery to see some amazing memorials to “the great and the good” of Victorian society. It was put rather nicely by a newspaper columnist – if you can’t take it with you, at least you can show the rabble you once had it!

However, this yearning for terra firma immortality can be quite useful to others if their hobby is family history. Unless your ancestors were all serfs or ag labs (agricultural laborers), they often strived to leave their mark in some way. And even the ag labs left interesting records – if only parish payments for tribes of children born out of wedlock.

A branch of my wife’s family came from a small town we will call G. It is actually quite a famous place today, and it used to have a huge second-hand bookshop where I picked up stacks of material on the lunatic fringe of Adventism. But, I digress. Back in the early Victorian era, it was a small market town, and the key ancestor, JH, was mayor several times over. Looking at it objectively today, it was “big fish in small pond” syndrome, or as H G Wells would describe it, “in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is King”.

Trawling through the Town Hall archives we came into the era of photography, and there we found a picture of JH – a pompous gentleman, extremely stout, posing by a globe, and so very pleased with himself. When he died, the papers gave a suitable eulogy, and a team of black horses pulled the hearse down the main street. Although his grave – discovered while tramping around the cemetery in the rain - was not the grandest by far.  Perhaps his descendants had other uses for his money.

But while alive, JH did all he could to perpetuate his own memory. In his own honor, he donated to the town an ornamental drinking fountain. The ornate relief depicted a scene from the Gospel of John, chapter 4 – Jesus and the woman at the well at Sychar. Jesus talked of living water as a metaphor for everlasting life, and the woman – perhaps not the sharpest knife in the drawer – put the two together and came up with everlasting water...

The inscription below the image dwelt on JH’s beneficence and mayoral accomplishments.

Old newspapers showed that JH personally chose where his memorial should be installed –

directly in front of the gas works, as a fitting symbol of Victorian enterprise and progress.

Of course, as always, time moved on. The gas works ceased to be glamorous; they became the back end of town, and ultimately were abandoned and demolished. The frontage of JH’s fountain then languished as scrap metal in the corner of the council yard until an enterprising businesswoman with an eye to local history rescued it. By sheer chance we stayed in one of her properties for a vacation some years ago and an idle conversation rescued the subject. The big question had been what on earth were they going to do with it?

With a bit of lateral thinking, the council decided that it could go in the local bus station, fixed to the wall of the rather run down public toilets (or as US readers might prefer, rest rooms. However, in Britain, public toilets are not a place you would want to rest!)

So to this day, if you visit the town of G, JH’s proud monument to himself is firmly affixed to the wall of the local public conveniences. To our shame, we actually have a nice shiny photograph in our album of irreverent descendants pulling faces in front of it. (In the UK the technical term is “gurning”).

So what was that whirring sound we could hear? Probably JH spinning.

What was it that an ancient writer in Ecclesiastes wrote? – Fame? Ah – sorry Irene – Vanity of Vanities – all is Vanity.

Codes, Monuments and Considerable Fiveness

(from 2011)

A month or two back I had a little fun here in a post on the True Bible Code – “proving” that William Shakespeare’s name is hidden in the psalms. It sort of goes along with pyramidology and other mathematical gymnastics that people with too much time on their hands have extracted to enlighten mankind.

For the closet pyramidologists among us, I thought you might be interested in some extra information that “proves” how a Divine hand was obviously behind the Washington Monument.

If you look up the Washington Monument in the World Almanac, you will find considerable fiveness. Its height is 555 feet and 5 inches. The base is 55 feet square, mulitiplied by 60 (or five times the months of the year) it gives 3,300, which is the exact weight of the capstone in pounds. Also the word “Washington” has exactly ten letters – two times five. And if the weight of the capstone is multiplied by the base, the result is 181,500 – a fairly close approximation of the speed of lights in miles per second. And if the base is measured with a “monument foot” (Pyramidologists will understand the reference to their “pyramid inch”) which is slightly smaller than the standard foot, its side comes to 56 ½ feet. This times 33,000 yields a figure even closer to the speed of light.

And – and is it not significant that the Monument is in the form of an obelisk – which reeks of ancient Egypt? Or that a pyramid appears on a dollar bill, on the other side to Washington’s portrait. And the decision to print the pyramid symbol was announced by the Secretary to the Treasury on June 15, 1935, both date and year being a multiple of five. And are there not twenty-five letters (five times five) in the title “The Secretary of the Treasury”?

Yes indeed my people – considerable fiveness.

My head hurts....

1611 and all that

(from 2011)

OK - so it’s the 400^th anniversary of the King James Version – which all code-breakers know was the original Bible written in the special language spoken by God. Oh, and also the language of William Shakespeare. In fact, by careful calculations, do you know what you can prove?

Well, Shakespeare was born in 1564.

That means that when the original Bible came out (and do concentrate now – we are talking about the KJV – delivered gift-wrapped from heaven) Shakespeare was 46 years old... at least for the first few months of the year.

So let’s go to the psalms in the KJV.

Try Psalm 46.

Now count 46 words from the beginning.

The 46^th word?  “Shake”.

Now count 46 words back from the end (ignoring the musical term Selah).

The 46^th word? “Spear”.

Shake-Spear. You see, Shakespeare!

And there’s more! If you add the numbers 4 and 6 together, you get 10. So go to verse 10 of Psalm 46 in the KJV – and reverse the 4 and 6 to become 6 and 4. The sixth word is “I” followed by “am” and then four words later is “will”. So “I-Am-Will” or “Will-I-Am” – William! William Shakespeare...

And there’s even more!! Did you know that the name William Shakespeare is an anagram of “Here was I, like a Psalm”?

You see - that proves it!!

Er – proves what?

Oh, and if you combine calculations from the Mayan calendar with the pyramid inch measurements for the diagonals in the Queens Chamber of the Great Pyramid (courtesy of the Great Pyramidiot, Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal for Scotland) – then you can work out the exact date when Obama will cure the budget deficit for America....

And another thing....

What’s that...? 

Pardon?

But of course I’ve taken my medication!

I Blame it All on Mr V.

(from 2011)

I blame it all on Mr V.

Mr V was our form tutor for three years in junior school. A florid faced man, he’d been a pilot during the Second World War, and was known to hurl blackboard rubbers across the class room with deadly accuracy. He probably would not have lasted long in teaching today.

But I liked Mr V, and I liked the fact that he read stories to us some afternoons. One such story he attempted, was Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.

Mr V did try. He would start one of Jerome’s anecdotes – Uncle Podger trying to put up a picture, or Hampton Court Maze, and would dissolve into laughter, with tears streaming down his face, watched by a mixed group of slightly puzzled nine year olds.

Later, when I was 12, my father took me out for the day and bought me the first Penguin edition of Three Men. I still have that battered volume today. A youthful hand has amended Jerome’s features with a bushy beard and a pair of Buddy Holly spectacles, and the misnomer “perfect binding” as used for paperbacks resulted in what is best described as a “loose leaf” publication – but there is no way I will part with it.

Jerome K Jerome was a product of history. The compulsory education of all children in late Victorian Britain resulted in a new class of author –less than middle class – with new themes for the masses who purchased books and journals at the Railway bookstall. Pompous critics of the day dubbed Jerome as ‘Arry K ‘Arry – because of his use of slang of the “lower classes”, but much of his style had echoes of Dickens and Austen. A clever use of language – the English understatement for serious matters and overstatement for trivialities – made his best books readable and re-readable.

Jerome had a mixed life. After disastrous family fortunes, grim poverty, then numerous jobs including being a less than successful actor - he later wrote several amusing volumes about “The Stage” – things started looking up. Three Men, written when he had recently returned from honeymoon, is his most consistent humorous book – a trip by three men (and a dog) up the River Thames in a skiff – with various anecdotal digressions. They get so far, the weather gets worse and they give up. That’s about it. If that bald description puts you off, try it. You will either laugh and love it, or as one friend to whom I heartily recommended it complained – “but it doesn’t have any story...”

Once established, Jerome edited two journals and wrote numerous other books and plays. Nearly all have been forgotten, although when they all conveniently went out of copyright in Britain in the 1970s, about a dozen were republished. Some still have parts that are very funny – my favourite are the essays that bulked out Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891).

Like many others, Jerome was not happy to be a humorist. Like the clown who yearns to play Hamlet, he yearned for what he viewed as more worthy achievements. He wrote serious books – some quite good, and a couple after sad experiences in the First World War, quite dreadful – all of which have sunk without trace, apart from aficionados and completists and Project Gutenberg. He wrote a quasi religious play, The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1908), which ran and ran and is still occasionally revived by amateur societies today. Alma Reville (Mrs Alfred Hitchcock) wrote the screenplay for a 1935 film version, starring Conrad Viedt, which not surprisingly added a bit of death and destruction that Jerome would not have recognized.

From my first acquisition as a 12 year old I went on to collect Jerome seriously. There was a second-hand bookshop in Ealing that put volumes away for me for when I returned to London. I would turn up after perhaps six months away and they would always remember me – which was nice. They also saved books of a certain religious group for me as well. One rare Jerome volume came from a friend in the film industry – a lady preserved forever in a bit part in Calvalcanti’s Nicholas Nickleby (1947). I joined the Jerome K Jerome Society and wrote for their journal.

So this is my ramble on Jerome K Jerome. He rambled too – that was his style. No one could call it great art, but something that makes you laugh, or even just smile a bit, can’t be too bad a thing.

As I said, I blame it all on Mr V.

At the Movies

(from 2010)

Home cinema is all very well, and it is wonderful to collect the films you really love to watch again and again. But nothing can replace the collective experience of being in a movie theater – particularly a large and full one – as emotions like laughter and fear are transmitted throughout the whole audience. As an ardent film buff I have one memorable moment from 1962.

There was a double bill in a local run-down movie house that we called the “flea pit”. The main attraction for the audience must have been some horror picture because that night the viewers at the front of the auditorium were virtually all male in their late teens and early twenties. Perhaps the girls were with their boyfriends further back – I don’t remember – but where I was sitting that night was male. It was likely a double X bill. In the UK, certificate X meant that you had to be sixteen to get into the cinema. The picture that caught us all out was “The Miracle Worker” – also certificate X. Why the authorities decided that those under sixteen should be protected from this movie I still cannot fathom.

It was always a very noisy experience at this cinema – what was sometimes wryly called “audience participation” – often an entertainment in itself. The film started with the usual shouted witticisms and occasional missiles of empty ice cream tubs thrown about. (I think the limited staff used to melt away unless something really serious happened).  But soon things quietened down dramatically as everyone found themselves unexpectedly engrossed in the story of Helen Keller, blind and deaf from nineteen months – and the efforts of partially sighted Annie Sullivan to reach her and help her. Anne Bankcroft played Annie and Patty Duke played Helen. They had already played the roles for a couple of years on Broadway I discovered much later. When the battle to get Helen to fold a napkin was played out – for slapstick laughs to begin with – there came a dawning realization that this movie was a bit out of the ordinary. A few nervous laughs, and then the audience were silent. You could say absorbed.

But the real killer was the last few minutes of the film. A house-trained Helen plays up when presented to her family who have always misguidedly spoiled her. An attempt by Annie to exercise control results in a major tantrum and Helen is dragged unceremoniously to the pump to wash. Suddenly, there at the pump as the water splashes over her hands, the penny drops. Helen remembers the word she knew before illness robbed her of sight and hearing – and repeats in baby talk the word “water”. The connection is made – the hand signs she has mimicked throughout are words and things – the bridge to true communication is made.

I can remember it vividly today – row upon row of macho young men sniffling away into their popcorn – then making sure the evidence was wiped away before they left the cinema.

The decades have gone by – I bought the film on VHS and then DVD – now sensibly reclassified as PG (parental guidance only). It still packs a punch. One can see the staginess in some scenes nowadays, but seeing that end I am transported back to the 60s and an emotional wallop I hadn’t been expecting and really wasn’t prepared to deal with the first time around.

There are other films that stay with one that also have that special effect – “Twelve Angry Men” “To Kill a Mockingbird” – every so often (perhaps when ill and in need of a comforter) one goes back to them. But for me – it has to be the Miracle Worker. It was the best film Anne Bancroft ever made – and she made several good ones.