SWITCHED ON BUT TURNED OFF

Earlier in the year, hosting a debate on climate change, I was put up in a brand-new designer hotel in Barcelona which, according to its website, attracts “clients who [will] have chosen this hotel for the novelty of the latest thing”. At night the lobby turned into a fashionable bar-cum-night-club, full of beautiful people sipping cava; but at night, after busy days and convivial suppers, I just wanted to go to bed.

The bed itself was relatively conventional, but with everything else in the room close study of the hotel guide was required to understand how it worked. Design, you could say, ruled over function, and the design style in question was a minimalism so strict that anything disturbing the clean lines designed in Tokyo, or Stockholm, or some bastard child of those two places, such as an obvious switch or knob, had been banished.

There was no such thing as a window you could open, of course; as in most modern hotels air conditioning was de rigueur. It took me over an hour to work how to close and open the two sets of electronically operated blinds which protected the room from the bright southern light and the view of people on the roof of Gaudi’s La Pedrera, right opposite. There was no television set, but a laser device (again requiring about an hour to work out) projected TV programmes onto the wall opposite the bed. More usefully, there was a CD player, but how would anyone guess that you had to pull on a little toggle, like a miniature lavatory chain, to get it to work? I pressed every button I could find, activating the TV, light displays and blinds in a sort of mad dance of technology, before I hit on the right solution.
Call me a Luddite, or just a grumpy middle aged man out of touch with the Zeitgeist. And perhaps I should say that the Hotel Omm was quite fun, in its way. But a more serious point lurks behind this, which could hardly be lost on someone drawing attention to the perils of climate change while living in a room which seemed designed both to maximise the use of energy and to cut its occupier off from contact with the natural world.

The trouble with my hotel room, I decided, was that its default mode was to be switched on. The first thing you had to do was to insert the keycard in the master socket, at which point all sorts of lights, heating and cooling systems and entertainment devices sprang into action. It was much easier to have everything on than to have it off, if you see what I mean.

The hotel was just a microcosm of a switched-on world: machines on stand-by, whole cities lit up at night. One of my gripes with computers and mobile phones is that they are horribly, uncannily, hard to switch off. We all know the problem of unswitched-off mobiles at concerts and theatres; it still gets my goat to see people fiddling around with their Nokias seconds before the lights go down; what desperate need is there to transmit or receive a message at such a time, or how did such people survive just a few years ago before the little pests had infiltrated our lives?

As for computers, one of the telling signs of viral infection is when the wretched thing disobeys instructions to switch itself off. There is something peculiarly awful about this refusal to give up the ghost, recalling the repeated efforts to bump off Rasputin or the warriors generated from dragon’s teeth in the Greek myth of Jason. The underlying fear is that we have created a monster more powerful than ourselves.

The switched-on world is the artificial, human-enclosed world – what the French Christian anarchist philosopher Jacques Ellul called “the technological society”. No doubt it gives, or appears to give, comfort, security, entertainment. Ensconced within it, we shall not feel cold or out of contact with others. But the danger is that by being permanently switched on, we have lost contact with the vastly greater world that lies beyond the technosphere: with the universe. Or as Ellul put it: “Enclosed within his artificial creation man finds that there is “no exit”; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years.”

At its most extreme, the fear of switching off is tantamount to the fear of death; the implication is that we are all on a kind of life-support machine. But if you follow that through you must conclude that we are more or less dead already.

In these last couple of weeks of unprecedented uncertainty (in my lifetime, in my cosy corner of the world, at least), something else has been on offer. Nature has delivered a sequence of breathtaking autumn days, each stiller and bluer and more golden than the last. In the supermarket car-park the other morning, getting out of the car, heading for the trolleys, I was stopped in my tracks by the delicious crispness of the air: it felt like champagne, and was totally free.

Published in the Financial Times 18 October 2008

FEET ON THE GROUND

Now might be a good time to think of feet. Feet are at home on the ground; they are naturally grounded. No point in bringing a foot down to earth; that is where it is anyway. There is nothing elevated or arrogant about feet. Humble foot-soldiers are those who do the donkey-work, unglamorous but essential.

Some people have an aversion to feet, thinking them ugly or smelly. The sight of a naked sole is considered offensive in Islam. I feel rather the opposite: if not a foot fetishist, then I am an admirer of feet – not just of all the work they do, silently and without complaining, carrying us hither and thither, but also of their unsung sensitivity. Feet are full of nerve endings as well as small bones and muscles. They need to be that way, as in our earlier days we had to feel our way with them, almost as much as see our way with eyes. The soles of feet, though they have the thickest skin on the body, are in fact exquisitely sensitive, a fact known to children and torturers.

A few years ago, I went on one of those self-improving holidays on a Greek island where you don’t just lie in the sun and drink retsina but learn to write children’s stories and paint in watercolour. In my case, having done enough creative writing courses and therapy to make up for several generations of my family starved of such things, the courses I chose on Skyros were foot reflexology and Commedia dell’Arte acting.

This might seem a peculiar combination but both were inspired choices. In particular, the reflexology course, which took place on a series of mornings in an outdoor clearing, surrounded by pine trees, high above the bay of Atsitsa, was something I would not have missed for anything.

As some of you may know, foot reflexology uses the foot as a map of the body, positing correspondences between zones of the foot and organs and parts of the body. The soft area between the ball of the foot and the heel, I remember, was said to correspond with the stomach, and the big toe with the head.

Those of a relentlessly scientific bent will already be reaching for their revolvers, or drafting complaints to the Financial Times for giving space to New Age twaddle. I myself was never entirely convinced by the theory of correspondences, at least at a purely physiological level; in practice, though, it seemed to work. As thumbs and forefingers worked their way slowly round the soft underbelly of the foot, stomachs rumbled. I won’t say cancers were cured and heart attacks averted by any of this, but people seemed to feel better for it.

I remember finding there to be something both touching and heartening about the sight of a group of rather complicated middle-class people (think Bridget Jones and her boyfriends and you will not be far off the mark) attending to one another’s feet. Those who refuse to accept that we are descended from apes would have had to avert their eyes. The fact was, we resembled nothing more than a family or group of baboons engaged in mutual grooming. But then, as David Attenborough once whispered while his hair was being being gently sifted by an enormous female gorrilla, it is not they who are the most dangerous and destructive species of primate.

One of the most affecting scenes in St John’s Gospel occurs the week before Jesus’ death, when he visits his friends the sisters Martha and Mary in Bethany; after supper Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with a costly ointment, and wipes his feet with her hair. Judas Iscariot remonstrates with her, saying the ointment should be sold and the proceeds given to the poor. This elicits one of Jesus’ most gnomic remarks, “The poor always ye have with ye, but me ye have not always.” Later Jesus washes his disciples’ feet, in a practical demonstration of humility. It seems both significant and cruelly ironic that Jesus pays so much attention to feet just before his crucifixion.

Feet have strength, sensitivity and humility (forgive me if this is beginning to sound like an advertisment for a bathroom product); we ignore and undervalue them at our peril. Only three poets that I know of have written odes to feet: Robert Herrick’s and Pablo Neruda’s are not to their own but to, respectively, a mistress’s and a wife’s; Neruda undoes much of his good work by saying at the end of ‘Tus Pies’ that he only loves Matilde’s feet because they have brought her to him.

Christopher Twigg’s ‘To My Feet’ is fairly and squarely about his own feet, which makes it to my mind the best of these poems. “When I lost my faith/ my feet never doubted;/ they kept up a groundswell/ of firm belief.” Let us all learn something of the wisdom of feet: “Oh let me not ignore their happiness/ their life of present moments, felt and lived!”

Published in the Financial Times 11 October 2008

CULTURE MUST BE BREWED LONG

As banks collapse and economies totter, the public mood is angry and confused. Scapegoats are sought. Short selling has been singled out, but you might say the heart of the problem was a chronic short-termism, an obsession with short-term profit (or, in the case of the media, short-term disasters and excitements, or in the case of politicians, short-term electoral cycles), at the expense of long-term sustainability.

What is the antidote to this? I offer up not a new template for financial regulation (you might not trust it), but two examples of long-term political and artistic vision. My first unlikely hero is a conservative Austrian politician, who by his own admission has only ever finished a single book in his life, a cowboy novel called The Treasure of the Silver Lake.

But Erwin Pröll, the governor (Landeshauptmann) of Lower Austria, is a believer in culture, with the long-term vision, and the imperviousness to short-term electoral considerations, necessary to make it flourish. In charge of a region always in the shadow of Vienna, unable to forge much of an identity or reputation of its own, Pröll has been able to turn things around. He established the Kunstmeile, or Art Mile, in the Danubian city of Krems – more like an Art Two Hundred Metres, with a Contemporary Art Museum and a Museum of Caricatures, but impressive for a middle-sized town nonetheless. Now the government of Lower Austria has invested millions of euros in both infrastructure and running costs for a new summer music festival at Schloss Grafenegg, not far from the charming wine town of Langenlois.

I dropped in on the festival last month while revisiting some of my favourite wine estates, in the ravishing wine country just north of the Danube. Everything conspired for a happy experience: the weather was balmy, verging on torrid – perfect for outdoor concerts in the so-called Wolkenturm, a cross between a Greek theatre and a piece of avant-garde sculpture, but with excellent acoustics; and in a recital at Grafenegg’s fine indoor hall the festival’s artistic director, the doyen of Austrian pianists Rudolf Buchbinder, brought his dazzling technique and seriousness of purpose to bear on three big beasts of the pianistic repertoire. Beethoven’s Pathetique and Appassionata sonatas and Chopin’s B minor sonata were followed by three encores including Liszt’s Rigoletto paraphrase, which Buchbinder threw off with a panache I had not quite expected.

The Grafenegg summer music festival is an attempt to introduce a more laid-back and democratic spirit to Austria’s rather formal music culture (though this message did not seem quite to have percolated to the 90% or so of men wearing ties). The grounds of the eccentric, Strawberry-Hill-Gothic-style castle owned by a descendant of Prince Metternich offer lots of possibilities for picnicking and sampling of Grüner Veltliner, though Austrians still prefer to picnic with a fold-up table and chairs. Most important of all, ticket prices are extremely reasonable.

Buchbinder’s artistic policy is simply to attract the best musicians, and not to strait-jacket them into a theme. This might not work everywhere – as it might not work everywhere to play a programme of the Pathetique, Appassionata and Chopin B minor – but it seems to work in the generally rural, conservative culture and society of Lower Austria. The Festival has connected with its audience and also with musicians, including at this year’s festival Nicolaj Znaider, Colin Davis, Charles Dutoit and Jean-Yves Thibaudet, who like the atmosphere and the acoustics of the two halls.

The whole thing depends on long-term political vision. Pröll has been governor of Lower Austria since 1992, a remarkable tenure, but the principles and funding of the Grafenegg festival have been agreed by all the main parties. This means the festival’s executive and artistic directors can plan for the future – not just next week, but the next five years. Everyone benefits.

In Britain it is impossible to imagine a politician with the long-term cultural clout of Erwin Pröll. But out of our entrepreneurial, commercial culture has emerged my second hero, the property developer turned cultural impresario Peter Millican.

Millican’s Kings Place development just north of Kings Cross railway station in London is a more improbable achievement than the Schloss Grafenegg festival. Two concert halls, exhibition spaces, offices and headquarters for two leading orchestras: all have been built, and are expected to run, without any recourse to the public purse. Millican’s property company Parabola Land has invested £100 million in the site, and is heavily subsidising the rents of the venues and rehearsal spaces on behalf of Kings Place Music Foundation, the charity established to run the whole shebang.

Even more than Pröll’s achievement with Grafenegg, this is a very personal labour of love. Millican himself, a classical music enthusiast, is chief executive of Kings Place Music Foundation, and he has designed the programming in a thoroughly innovative and eclectic way, with Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays devoted, respectively, to chamber music, spoken word and contemporary music. He obviously wants this to last decades: let’s hope he can ride the markets with the necessary skill. I should add that he is a Haydn fan, which means that in my book he can do no wrong.

Published in the Financial Times 4 October 2008

AUTUMN AND ESSENCES

Autumn is the time of essences. To try to explain, let me revisit the quintessential autumnal poem, Keats’ Ode to Autumn. Some have said that this poem isn’t really about autumn at all. Keats wrote it during a period of beautiful, calm weather in Winchester, around September 19 1819: “How fine the air is,” he wrote to his friend Reynolds. “A temperate sharpness about it.” At times the poem seems to be more about late summer than about autumn: what are poppies doing in autumn? Shouldn’t the harvest be done?

Surely the poem is really about the process of ripening, the way autumn fills “all fruit with ripeness to the core.” The ode is an extended commentary on Edgar’s words to his father Gloucester in King Lear, “Ripeness is all”: like Shakespeare, Keats is talking not not just about the ripening of fruit, but the maturing of human beings.

Autumn concentrates the ultimate goodness in things. What happens in autumn is not
the superficial and visible forming of fruit, but a subtle, invisible process which fills fruit, and nuts, with sweetness; not so much a biological process as a chemical one – or even an alchemical one.

One of autumn’s everyday alchemies is the transformation of apples and grapes into cider and wine, and beyond that, into the spirits of those ferments, calvados and brandy. Keats’ personification of Autumn, who I visualise as a ripe woman d’un certain age, is pictured “by a cider-press”, where she watches “the last oozings hour by hour.”
I was thinking of those oozings recently in Austria, walking on the great vineyard hill of Zöbinger Heiligenstein with the refreshingly original vinegrower and winemaker Willi Bründlmayer. Every now and then – this was early September – Willi would stop and pick a grape. “Quite sweet but no real character.” This grape-sampling was no caprice: “You know my real job is grape-tasting,” he commented. “Wine-tasting is just a hobby.” Willi was waiting until the moment when the grapes were not just ripe, or sweet-tasting, but expressed the unique, essential character of the terroir.

Later on we drank a glass of his Riesling Beerenauslese 2005 from the Heiligenstein.
Beerenauslese, like Sauternes, is made from specially selected bunches of nobly rotten grapes. The benign fungus called pourriture noble, or Edelfäule, shrivels up the already ripe grapes, concentrating their sweetness, making their essence still more essential. Not far across what used to be the Iron Curtain border from Willi Bründlmayer’s estates in the Kamptal is made the most famous of all vinous essences, Hungary’s Tokay.

So what is an essence? In culinary and pharmacological terms it is a concentrate, so full of aroma and flavour that only a few drops are needed to permeate an entire dish, or room. But etymologically essence comes not from concentrating but from being (Latin esse, to be). The essence of something is what it really is.

Why should autumn have more to do with essence than other seasons? You might well argue that spring is just as much itself as autumn is. John Keats was aware of that. “Where are the songs of spring?” he asks, in what seems the only regretful or melancholy outburst in the whole of the Ode to Autumn. But the answer he gives, in keeping with the tenor of the whole poem, is one of calm acceptance: “Aye, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.”

The music, and the vision, of the Ode to Autumn are not anguished and impassioned, like those of the Ode to a Nightingale, its late spring or early summer pendant. The poet himself, with all his almost unbearable capacities for joy and suffering, has either disappeared from the scene or dissoved into it. There is no “I” in the Ode to Autumn.

With the shrinking of ego comes an almost dispassionate clarity of vision. Things are seen in their own light, as they really are, not dramatically back-lit by the poet’s despair. You could say that autumn is a quality and clarity of light. For Keats the autumn light gave warmth to the landscape, touching “the stubble-plains with rosy hue.” He wrote to Reynolds: “Somehow a stubble-plain looks warm…better than the chilly green of spring.”

For all this, autumn is also called fall. As well as a time of ripening, it is a time of diminishing – shortening light, falling leaves, departing song birds. Spring may be just as transient as autumn, but its messages are not about passing but about burgeoning; spring music speaks of arrival rather than departure.

As the Ode to Autumn proceeds towards its ending, the music of departure sounds more loudly. The day may have been warm, but it is ending, dying. Even the gnats, perhaps fancifully, are heard to “mourn”. Loudest of all is the sound of the swallows, which twitter in the skies as they gather for departure. But there seems nothing melancholy about this twittering; more a hint of excitement.

Published in the Financial Times 27 September 2008

FELLOWSHIP IS A HEAVENLY CLUB

A fellow from a free-market think-tank wrote in to the paper recently saying the last thing he wanted, in these times of economic and meteorological gloom, was to be told by a humourless and hypocritical nature-lover to go walking along the damp lanes of southern England. When times were hard, a chap needed to go on a bender on Barcelona, not be woken at dawn by those maddening song-birds, which should have the sensitivity to keep quiet during recessions. While deploring the egocentricity which made him resent the innocent joy of the dawn chorus, I thought he might have a point, and decided to conduct an internal Slow Lane humbug audit.

This summer has been a pretty miserable one weatherwise up here on the 51st parallel. I must confess that for all my urging of local pursuits I have only plunged about half a dozen times into the Hampstead ponds – though the last time, when I swam along with stripey great crested grebe chicks and came within spitting distance of a pair of Arctic terns resting on a life buoy, was as wonderful as any swim I’ve had.

But all the cool, overcast afternoons have had one great advantage: when not actually raining, it has been ideal weather for tennis. At the tennis club, where I spend an embarrassing amount of time, we have had a pretty good summer. The grass courts may not have been in the greatest of nick, but every time I have cycled down Ladbroke Grove (never leaving the bike unattended at Tesco’s) I have been rewarded by an enjoyable game. My club is the sort of place where you don’t need to book to arrange a game: a doubles seems to materialise at almost any time of day.

But then I realise it is not just the tennis I enjoy. The club, as a perceptive friend pointed out, has become a sort of community for me. What on earth do we mean by community? It is one of the most abused words in the dictionary, and especially in the political lexicon. Politicians are drawn to it like bees to flowers, but instead of producing honey, they come out with gibberish. First of all there is something entirely nebulous called “the community,” which is invoked in policies such as “care in the community”: this means “we would like there to be something called community to look after these people we can no longer look after”. In other words it is pure wishful thinking.

Then there are special interest communities, which designate a particular kind of belonging, to a religion, a race, a sexual orientation: the Anglican community, the gay community, the Bangladeshi community. Community could also mean a professional group: the legal community, the social work community. I have nothing against these kinds of belonging (well, I can’t help remembering George Bernard Shaw’s definition of professions as “conspiracies against the laity”), but surely in some sense, by operating from the exclusion of all those who not belong, they are the opposite of communities.

I used to be prejudiced against clubs for exactly this reason, thinking they were everything a community should not be: exclusive, snooty and private rather than all-embracing and public. Certainly my club is a kind of elective community; it brings together people who love playing tennis and excludes people who cannot play the game up to a certain, not very elevated standard. There is also the matter of a subscription, quite reasonable but clearly beyond the reach of some. But otherwise I don’t think the club is exclusive: quite the reverse.

We are a congregation of all ages, from young children to men and women well advanced in years, who will not let small matters like dodgy joints or heart murmurs keep them off the court. Hips can be replaced and pacemakers and stents fitted: the game must go on. We are also pretty international: I play regularly with tennis nuts from Iran, Colombia, Sri Lanka, China, as well as America, France, Italy and Britain. I haven’t noticed any racial prejudice in the club. There is no such thing as a Chinese serve or a Sri Lankan drop shot.

All this may sound standard in a big cosmopolitan city like London, but I believe it is rather special. Or rather what makes it special is the feeling that this particular melting pot is a genuinely warm one, which encourages fellow-feeling rather than competitive jostling for position (we are competitive on the court, not off it). A quite severely handicapped boy spends many weekend afternoons at the club; his parents are members. One of our senior players is a brilliant at entertaining this boy; they just seem to get on, and it liberates the parents. Again nothing special, but a kind of spontaneous, human fellowship.

Here is the nub; our yearning for community, our hope of restoring the warmer bonds we think once existed between people, is a yearning for fellowship. “Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell,” as William Morris put it. I find a kind of heaven at my club; the challenge, without doubt, is to extend the heavenly feeling of fellowship beyond our little enclave of grass and astroturf.

Pubished in the Financial Times 20 September 2008

LAST OF THE SUMMER’S WINE

I spent the end-of-summer weekend quietly, with my parents at home in the Chilterns. The weather was uncertain, and my father not particularly well (he is eighty-two). But we enjoyed walking and talking, and at two successive meals our mood was lifted by a pair of wines about half his age; that is wines over forty years old, which is a pretty good age for a wine.

The wines were both 1966 Bordeaux: Chateau Pape-Clement [nb. first e should have acute accent] from the Graves, the oldest documented vineyard in Bordeaux, planted in 1330, and Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, perhaps the most famous of all Bordeaux wines, though not nowadays the most expensive. On the subject of expense, or the cost or value of these wines, we were following a hedonic principle established a while ago by my father: when drinking certain wines the rule is to think not about how much they might be worth, but how much they cost when originally purchased (in this case no more than £5 each).

Opening such mature bottles is always a delicate business. You have to be prepared for disappointment; a sudden fading; or a fine wine turned to elderly vinegar. In this case the omens were good; the bottles had lain undisturbed for decades in a cellar with proven keeping qualities and the levels were up to the bottom of the neck.

The Pape-Clement was a revelation. It was vigorous, rich and full of fruit; with something of the suave, silky texture of its neighbour Chateau Haut-Brion. Next day’s Lafite seemed at first a relative disappointment; much lighter in colour and body and less vigorous, though beautifully scented. Then something odd happened; instead of fading, the 42-year-old wine suddenly perked up. As we drained the last drops, it was still gaining strength; who knows, it might have moved into yet another gear if we had allowed it.

To me, wines which might be considered on the far side of optimal maturity have a peculiar grace denied to youthful vigour. They bring up the intimate, physical relationship between wines and human beings. Aestheticians have long debated whether wines can be considered works of art; you could hardly say wines had philosophical depth, though they can focus our faculties and elicit aesthetic responses in a similar way to paintings or poems; but they have one quality which is denied to other artworks: they age very like us.

Wine perishes. All things perish eventually, no doubt; when I look at the Rokeby Venus or Titian’s Diana and Actaeon I am aware of the fragility and vulnerability of this canvas, those encrusted pigments, but I am not experiencing what Heidegger called their “Being-towards-death”. But when you buy a bottle of wine, even the finest, you know you are purchasing something with a limited life-span. When you drink a bottle of wine you are participating in, indeed hastening, its Being-towards-death, in a way that cannot help reminding you of your own. Every opening of a bottle can be seen as a libation, or a sacrifice. The colour of red wine is the colour of blood; the wine in the sacrament of the Eucharist becomes blood, the blood of the ultimate sacrifice.

Being-towards-death, for Heidegger, is not an accidental quality of human beings, and presumably the same goes for wines: it is our – their – essence. This sounds sombre, but it needn’t be. The great thing about the way wines (and some human beings) age is that they mellow; they lose tannic armour and hard edges, become more rounded and more complete. Instead of a decline, they can offer an ascension: a rising from the earthy ground into the ether. Becoming more spiritual, they might summon spirits: as Yeats said in ‘All Souls’ Night’, “it is a ghost’s right…/ To drink from the wine-breath,/ While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.”

All this seems far from the contemporary language of wine-writing – and particularly far from the language used by the influential American wine writer Robert Parker. Parker doesn’t tend to like very old wines; he marked down Pape-Clement 1961 (which I tasted last year and thought superb) for lack of vigour and strength. He doesn’t always particularly like older vintages of Lafite, the most ethereal and intangible of all the great Bordeaux. In his great tome Bordeaux he awards the 1966 Lafite 84 points (which is the equivalent of a bare pass at GCSE), calling it “weedy… washed-out…with little body or length.”

The 1966 Lafite couldn’t help making me feel nostalgic. This was not just because it was the last bottle of that wine in the cellar, one of a sequence of “last bottles” we have been drinking over the last couple of years. It felt like the end of an era – an era when a great wine could be splendidly, insouciantly, unself-conscious.
The only information on the label was the name of the chateau, the vintage and the appellation (Pauillac). Nothing else, no tasting note, nothing about alcoholic strength, grape varieties or oak ageing; no health warning. “I am no more or less than a bottle of wine, even if I am Lafite”, the bottle seemed to say: “drink me in the spirit in which I was made”.

Published in the Financial Times 13 September 2008

ARE WE ALL STAR-CROSSED?

Last week Slow Lane sat at the high table. I was summoned to the annual Salzburg Trilogue to discuss matters of grave import – the challenges facing a globalised world, under the title “Global Visions – Are We Speaking a Common Language?” – with movers and shakers in the three spheres of the arts, business and politics.

Had there been a mistake, similar to the one which in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop sends the wrong William Boot, naive country naturalist instead of seasoned war reporter, to cover a conflict in Africa? No matter: here was a chance to leaven earnest policy proposals with the yeast of poetry, birdwatching and pond-swimming. And, I reminded myself, in Waugh’s book the wrong Boot ends up with the scoop: here too the boot could be on the other foot.

The first impression was of the formidable articulateness and confidence of the participants. David Cameron, the British Conservative leader, received much praise for making a speech without notes at his party conference; I thought it was a decent but not outstanding effort. Here people such as Peter Sutherland, Chairman of BP, Kim Campbell, the former Canadian Premier (why on earth did they throw her out, I wondered?) and Hanan Ashrawi, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, spoke not just fluently off the cuff, but brilliantly, passionately, spiritedly.

The second impression was of truly global diversity. Bertelsmann Stiftung and the Austrian Ministry of European and International Affairs had gathered people from the four corners of the earth, from China, Africa, India, the Middle East as well as Europe and North America (none from South America, though). There is something different about the way views are aired and heard in a global forum. They gain dimensionality by being tested by so many divergent perspectives. Khady Fall Tall of the West African Women’s Association from Senegal reminded us that the world appears in a rather sharper light to those who do not know whether they will eat tomorrow.

The third impression was of impotence. For all the brilliance and brainpower on display, there was a sense of powerlessness. The world does not suffer a shortage of institutions, resolutions, policies, laws. There is no lack of awareness of the problems facing humanity: we can all recite a list including global warming, persisting poverty and conflict, rising population putting pressure on resources and habitats. Ideas and analyses are produced in such quantities that it would take a single human being millions of years to read the output from the world’s universities and thinktanks.

We have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We have the European Union, a unique institution of peaceful co-operation which involves the pooling of sovereignty to aid development and solve common problems. Observers from outside Europe are awed by the existence of such a paragon. But it has become impossible for a British politician to say anything constructive about the EU. Ireland, which has done spectacularly well out of Europe, has just rejected the Lisbon Treaty in what seems like a fit of pique.

Of course the EU is not perfect. Khady Fall Tall showed remarkable restraint in not telling us about the devastating effects of the EU’s fishing fleets on the fish stocks of Senegal. The UN and the WTO are, in different ways, far from perfect either. All these institutions need to be reformed, not disbanded. But will institutional reform, or the foundation of new institutions such as a World Environment Organisation, as suggested by Peter Sutherland, solve the problem: how can we translate all the well-pondered weight of deliberation into the action which will make a difference?

The artists spoke more quietly, on the whole, than the politicians and businessmen, and more about personal experiences than global visions. But the tenor Michael Shade pointed out the power of the arts in promoting a virtuous globalisation. We Triloguers had attended a performance of Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette on the Friday night: at the Saturday morning session our Juliette, the Georgian soprano Nino Michaidze, joined the Colloquium. Michaidze, a glowing young star, spoke of her friendship with the Russian bass Mikhail Petrenko, and the artistic solidarity which bridges political difference.

It takes the death of the lovers, in Shakespeare’s tragedy, to bring home to the warring Montagues and Capulets that their internecine strife will end up destroying both families, and everything of value in the world. What is occurring on earth is perhaps a tragedy, or series of tragedies, on such a vast scale that we cannot fully comprehend it. That is, we may understand it intellectually, but we will not let it enter the space of our hearts, for fear of being utterly overwhelmed.

Here the arts and especially poetry do show us a way. Poetry, as the American poet and environmentalist Muriel Rukeyser wrote, both demands and offer a “total response” – intellectual, emotional, musical, imaginative, fully human. We have still not taken into our hearts the poetic and prophetic words of the Romantic poets, starting with Holderlin and Wordsworth. “Dead is our earth”, wrote Holderlin, as a half-ironic young man, in his epigram “To the Sanctimonious Poets”. What is our response to that?

Published in the Financial Times 6 September 2008

YES, RECESSION HAS ITS BLESSINGS

How do you write a piece looking at the upside of economic downturn without sounding smug or heartless, or just out of touch with reality? Of course recessions produce casualties; no-one aware of the increase in suicides among the unemployed in Japan in the late 1990s, or the pathetic tales of men pretending to go out to jobs they no longer had, let alone the more distant horrors of the 1930s, could propose an unmixed toast of welcome to the gathering clouds of economic gloom.

Your columnist does not praise slow-down out of self-interest; writers’ rates do not tend to rise nor commissions to multiply when belts are being tightened. On the other hand this territory has an obvious affinity with the Slow Lane: here is an opportunity to test out the philosophy outlined in these columns, proposing a pause for recollection and enjoyment of the often uncosted and uncostable values which make life worth living, and to see if it works. Could lightening your carbon footprint make your life more enjoyable?

The word recession implies drawing back, rather than proceeding ever onwards and upwards. Now we have a chance not just to stay put, but to enjoy and appreciate being where we are. The other day Ching Ling and I went walking in woods not far from where I was born, in the Chiltern Hills. Between showers we walked, along lanes I have known since earliest childhood, smelling fresh after the rain, with vetch and convolvulus in the hedgerows. The silence was broken by high-pitched mewing, somewhere between a cat and a child: two red kites, one very noisy. Then a few hundred yards away a buzzard – another raptor which, against the backdrop of drastic declines in farmland bird populations, is thriving, and has extended its range into the south-east of England.

But we saw no other walker. We had to stop quite often to let cars pass, nearly all driving inappropriately fast for country lanes: the drivers tended to glare disapprovingly, as though we had no right to be there, or, above all, to force them to slow down. After a while we followed a footpath, in the shade of tall beeches. Looking at the damp path it seemed no-one had passed for days. Here is another big change from thirty or forty years ago: now everyone has a car capable of going 110 mph, but hardly anyone thinks a Sunday afternoon might be better spent walking than bombing along too fast to take in any smell or sound or detailed sight.

Walking (for those lucky enough to be able-bodied) is a key part of being human, and costs nothing. Perhaps for that reason it has been more or less banned in the world’s most advanced economy (though advancing where, we might now wonder). I shall never forget staying in San Diego, and deciding to walk the half mile or so from my friends’ house to a local park. All the car-drivers that passed regarded me with horror, as some kind of deviant. But how, if you don’t walk, can you get the feel of a neighbourhood, its nooks and crannies, individual buildings and trees and gardens, or the still more subtle scents and sights of the countryside?

You don’t even need to walk to enjoy staying put. The other afternoon, one of the few truly summery ones we have had in this unsettled summer, I just spent an hour sitting in a chair in our little garden, basking in warmth, listening to the peaceful sounds of washing up, a child babbling, the wind rustling the leaves of the viburnum. One of the positive outcomes of an economic slow-down may be that people can once again think of and experience their homes as homes, not appreciating assets. Try cooking more at home (forgive me if I am preaching to a beleaguered housewife): it will certainly save you money, and bring untold satisfaction.

Berlin is one city which has not experienced a property boom in the last decade. From my rather distant perspective (I rely on reports from a wine writer friend and his food writer partner), this seems an entirely good thing. Writers and artists are able to live in the centre of town, and conversation does not revolve around the ins and outs of the real estate market (as opposed to what Yeats called “all lovely intricacies of a house”).

Whether recession, or standstill, is good for art is debatable (Athens and Florence were booming during their greatest periods of artistic flourishing); but I reckon it might be good for community. Ching Ling tells me that when she was growing up in Taiwan in the 1960s, there was only one television in the village. Was that a lamentable sign of underdevelopment? One image of village children gathering round a flickering screen connects with another, from one of Slow Lane’s favourite movies, Spirit of the Beehive, in which the young Ana is entranced, perturbed, shaken to her roots by James Whale’s film of Frankenstein.

Published in the Financial Times 23 August 2008

LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE PROMS

Amid much stern diagnosis on this page by my colleague Tyler Brule of the ills afflicting Britain, and recommendations for radical surgery, can I point out something that seems right, and doesn’t need changing, but could do with a little more trumpet-blowing? Actually there has been quite a lot of literal trumpet-blowing already at the 2008 Proms, and it was the trumpets blaring out their thrilling fanfare at the end of Brahms’s Second Symphony the other afternoon which had me singing along and applauding in rather absurd fashion at my desk, and decided me to write this piece.

I was listening again (a brilliant new technology which has quietly transformed the radio experience) to the kind of Prom some cultural pundits might think entirely pointless; Mendelssohn (Italian Symphony) and Brahms (Second Piano Concerto and Second Symphony), a trio of 19th century warhorses long since put out to grass. This was the kind of thing the UK culture minister Margaret Hodge had in mind, I imagine, when earlier this year she accused the Proms of not doing enough to attract audiences of diverse backgrounds, and scheduling too much music by dead white males (I made that last bit up). Certainly you could say that here was a thoroughly old-fashioned celebration of the kind of classical music which would have had Queen Victoria and Prince Albert dancing in their graves. It turned out this was a replica of a Prom given in 1958.

But what a magnificent concert it was. Jiri Belohlavek may have an unpronounceable name but he is bringing out the best playing I have ever heard from the Proms’ proud but sometimes moody house orchestra, the BBC Symphony. Unlike some high-profile superstars of the podium, Belohlavek is a musician’s musician, whose strengths are subtle blending and balancing of textures, long-term shaping and knowing when to hold back, in order to deliver the ultimate nobility of effect.

The Mendelssohn sounded lithe, fresh-minted and possessing a Byronic dash I have seldom heard in this familiar music. Lars Vogt’s performance of the gigantic concerto was everything you could wish for, epic sweep, ferocious defiance in the scherzo, tenderness in the slow movement and the unique combination you need of grandeur and delicacy in the finale. But it was the symphony which clinched it: a vindication of Brahms’s intention to write a summer idyll of a symphony, not without deep shadow, but ending in an exultant blaze of glory that brought the house down.

Listening to this performance and several others, I think that despite being a signed-up fan I have underestimated the Proms. I am not the only one; this year the FT has decided not to review most of them, and the BBC is strangely reticent about one of its greatest glories. I believe we need the Proms to remind us what music really means. Take that Brahms second symphony: I have a CD of it and listen to it from time to time, but though it happens to be a recording of a live performance, the experience of listening to it in the study can’t really compare with the live communing you get in the concert hall, or even, for some reason I can’t quite explain, listening live on the radio.

The vast yet companionable Albert Hall contributes enormously to the sense of occasion and event. This is good fortune, born out of murderous terror. The Proms started off, in 1897, in the much smaller, though acoustically superior, Queen’s Hall. Robert Newman, who ran the hall, and the young conductor Henry Wood, had a dream of what now seems breathtaking cultural arrogance (could we have a bit more of it, please?): “I am going to run nightly concerts,” announced Newman, “to train the public in easy stages.” He charged 1 shilling (5 pence) per concert and 1 guinea for a season ticket.

During the First World War, when anti-German feeling ran so high that D.H. Lawrence and his German wife Frieda were kept under surveillance at their cottage in Cornwall, Newman and Wood kept alive a more magnanimous spirit which did not damn great art by association: “the greatest examples of Music and Art,” they announced, as they continued to programme Beethoven and Brahms at the Proms, “are world possessions and unassailable even by the prejudices of the hour.”

It was not the finest moment for German culture when the Luftwaffe reduced the Queen’s Hall to smoking ruins on the night of May 10th 1941. Henry Wood was undaunted. Even though the BBC, which took over the Proms in 1927, had pulled out on the outbreak of war, Wood continued to run them with private sponsorship, and moved the 1941 season to the Royal Albert Hall. He died three weeks after conducting the last concert of the 1944 season, one of those who kept culture alive in history’s darkest hour.

The Proms have gone from strength to strength since then, becoming ever more international, featuring new music, jazz and world music alongside Brahms and Beethoven, adding chamber music concerts in the Cadogan Hall. They are inspiring in their nightly celebration of art’s power to inspire and hearten and move us, against all the forces which would deafen and kill. More trumpets, please.

Published in the Financial Times 16 August 2008

THE RIGHTNESS OF SUMMER TIME

All the words for summer seem beautiful, but the most beautiful to me is the Greek word kalokairi. Not just beautiful but profound: kalokairi comes from two Greek words meaning fine or beautiful (kalos) and time or moment (kairos). Now “fine time” might not seem an especially insightful formulation for summer, but you need to remember that kairos is not just any old time. Kairos is the proper time, the unique unrepeatable propitious moment, as opposed to chronos, that other, deadly kind of time which grinds on relentlessly, linear, unstoppable, consuming all things. Being Greek words, they are also gods: Kairos a kind of trickster, and Chronos a wise old greybeard.

The Greek word kalokairi beautifully and profoundly reminds us of the paradox of time, especially in relation to summer. We know, especially as we get older, especially if we live in latitudes higher or lower than say the 45th parallel, that summer does not last long (or in Shakespeare’s image, “Summer’s lease has all too short a date”). But at the same time, summer can seem, especially to children, endless. Can anyone forget how they felt as a child of ten at the start of the summer holidays, golden lazy full-leafed days stretching on for eight or ten weeks, which to a child is an eternity?

Summer is short, chronologically speaking. But summer also opens up the possibility of kairological time, a time consisting of moments of eternity, which magically redeem time. Those lazy picnics in a meadow, in half-shade, close to a river or a lake; or the more challenging sea-side ones, with sandcastles (and sand in the sandwiches) and beach cricket where the outgoing tide has left the sand firm. The late swim, at evening, with the rock-fortress of Monemvasia casting its shadow far out into the Aegean; the even later one, at midnight, with phosphorescence, and no clothes, and cod quotations, and laughter…

Those swims happened twenty five years ago, the picnics thirty-five years ago, but in another sense they happened yesterday. Their kairological rightness effortlessly put to flight all those deadly intervening stretches of mechanical routine, boredom and anxiety, “the waste sad time/ Stretching before and after,” as Eliot described it at the conclusion of Burnt Norton, the first of the Four Quartets. The whole of the Four Quartets can be seen as an attempt to integrate chronology and kairology: to hold the redemptive moment when children’s excited laughter is heard in the shrubbery within the longer perspective of history.

The wished-for transition from chronology to kairology might happen at any time; it happens to the narrator of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu when he is eating a madeleine cake, and kairological time suddenly opens up its richness, beginning with memories of childhood in Combray, which will take seven volumes to encompass. All the same, it seems more likely to happen in summer.

There are, I think, physical resons for this. Summer warmth relaxes our muscles, and somehow also the muscles of our mind. Less guarded and constricted by what Reich called “character armour”, the muscular defence mechanisms which we think keep us safe but in fact slowly throttle us, we are more open to the infinite otherness of the world; we can breathe; we are inspired. Heat sends a subversive message; forget clock time, cancel the equation between minutes and money; just sit back and soak it up, like a lizard, or jump in, like an enthusiastic dog.

Summer holidays return us for a while to our animal nature, whether we are glitzing it on the Costa Smeralda or renting a beach-hut on Southwold’s staid Edwardian shore. We bring our bodies in contact with the earth and the sea, not to mention the suncream. For animals, of course, there is no chronology, or no understood chronology. Nothing more pitiful than the sight of a dog dutifully trudging along in the wake of a clock-time-obsessed master, not allowed to sniff that tempting tree or lamp-post for fear of putting out the schedule which the dog will never comprehend.

The problem with summer holidays, and summer generally, is that they have become a sort of programmed kairos: they involve an expectation that everything will be right, the sun will shine, the company will gel. The result is all too often a very un-kairological gridlock. It also explains the bitter disappointment some of us feel when summer fails to materialise. But the essence of kairological time is that it cannot be programmed; those moments of rightness come from nowhere.

Summer and summer holidays have a value in reminding us of the importance of “stopping the clock”, detaching ourselves from the drudgery of chronological time. But the “fine moment” crystallised in the Greek word for summer can strike at other seasons, or at no known season. The “midwinter spring” Eliot experiences at Little Gidding is more of a spiritual than physical phenomenon. “Where is the summer, the unimaginable/ Zero summer?” the poet asks, as if the essence of summer is to be not just unprogrammed, but beyond thought.

Published in the Financial Times 9 August 2008

RESTORING THE FULL RANGE

Two expeditions, from recent wanderings in the deep interior of Spain, completed days before the terrible plane crash at Madrid airport. I won’t tell you exactly where, to honour a promise made to the publicity-shy friends who entertained me, but let’s say it was somewhere between Salamanca and Soria, in sight of one of those 8,000 foot ranges which rise from the tawny tableland to guard the northern and western approaches to the capital.

The first sortie, in the last light of day, took us up a slope and then along an old track through groves of holm-oak and past fields of sunflowers. Westwards, towards the sunset, and northward, immense vistas opened out; to the south-east the barrier range loomed darkling. What were the sentinel birds perched on the holm-oaks? Shrikes, both woodchat and red-backed; members of that rather sinister family of birds fierce beyond their size (neither is much bigger than a greenfinch), which butcher other small birds then larder them on thorn-spikes.

Red-backed and woodchat shrikes used to be reasonably common summer visitors to parts of the English countryside but now are rarely seen. We counted around half a dozen of both species combined, by no means an exceptional haul in this bird-rich land. The beautiful gurgling calls of bee-eaters accompanied us; sand-martins and swallows wove their patterns around and above our heads. At the very end of the walk, I nearly stepped on a small adder – the very first snake one of my companions had ever seen.

The second outing took place in midday heat, leading us in the opposite direction, towards the foothills of the mountains through more varied terrain, including meadows and orchards and poplar plantations. I spotted one of my favourite Spanish birds, a great grey shrike, long-tailed and pale-breasted, but this was mainly a raptor-fest: griffon vultures plied the thermals high overhead, red kites wheeled lower down; I saw my first ever honey buzzard, then a Bonelli’s Eagle, flying strong and purposeful, and a peregrine falling fast towards a wooded gully. Finally one of the most exotic of Iberian raptors came to join the party, an Egyptian vulture, as elegantly black and white as Audrey Hepburn dressed by Givenchy.

The point of all this is not to tick species off a list or boast about bird-spotting rareties (none of these birds is particularly rare in north-central Spain). The point is to communicate how it all felt, how wonderfully exciting and restorative.

What was being restored? Why, nothing more or less than the full range. Most of us – city- and town-dwellers – make a modern version of the Faustian pact. In return for all our human excitements, for restaurants and cinemas and libraries and museums, we consent to live with a severely reduced gamut of species: few flowers, trees or birds.

We must make do with pigeons, and bluetits and blackbirds, the opportunistic crows, jays and magpies; with those admirable London plane-trees which eat the pollution, with long-suffering pollarded limes and increasingly blighted chestnuts. There in the park’s lakes and ponds we can find coot and mallard and mute swans and Canada geese, but these semi-tame waterfowl don’t give us the wild thrill, of meeting the utterly undomesticated, crossing paths with creatures whose trajectories have little to do with the human.

What happened on those Spanish walks was, for me, a joyful stretching, not just of limbs, but of the sense of being, of being alive. But with the exhilaration came a troubling thought. What if the restriction of range we have accepted, in terms of our birthright of biodiversity, also applies on other levels: if we are accepting, without being fully aware of it, a drastic restriction in our ranges of feeling, and thinking, and being?

We have all of us become, to a greater or lesser extent, addicts. Whether we pop pain-killers, or chocolate, drink ourselves into oblivion every Friday and Saturday night, watch the kind of TV which does not extend our intellectual or emotional range (in other words, about 99%), or films which do not allow time for thought, the same process of the topping and tailing of experience is at work. Far from extending our range, we are reducing it, perhaps saving ourselves from the catastrophic lows but also missing out on the ecstatic highs.

I may sound as if I am preaching, but I speak from experience. I have done all the things listed above. I have taken anti-depressants, and I think they can be life-savers, rescuing people from the lightless tunnel of deep depression; but I would not want to spend my whole life protected by their emotional filter. I once complained to a doctor that the pills were making me feel emotionally fuzzy: just a little cut off from reality. “I have quite a number of patients who are very happy to be cut off from reality,” was his grimly humorous rejoinder.

We seem to take it for granted that reality must be dire, but it is not so. We were born into a world of extraordinary beauty, as well as dreadful cruelty and injustice. The fully human thing is not to cut ourselves off, but to embrace the full range.

Published in the Financial Times 30 August 2008

A TOUCH OF ARTISTRY

In his underrated travel book Iberia, James A. Michener speaks of his feeling of nervousness at being invited to jump up and down on the vaults above Room XII at the Prado, the room which houses twenty-six masterpieces by Velazquez [nb a should have acute accent], including the canvas generally considered the greatest ever painted, Las Meninas, or The Maids of Honour. Michener, writing in 1968, calculates the worth of these paintings at $80 million. But surely they are beyond all price.

Las Meninas is Velazquez’s most complex and cerebral painting, but also in a way his most intimate one. Apparently the name given to this painting at the court of Felipe IV was simply ‘The Family’. Every time you look at Las Meninas you see something new. One of the less talked-about aspects of the endlessly analysed work, it struck me last time, is the way Velazquez depicts himself holding the long brush he is using to paint the King and Queen, whose shadowy faces appear in the mirror on the back wall. This is a painting about painting, as well as about the way we live in time.

The brush is the key to everything. It is Velazquez’s ironic equivalent of the king’s sceptre, or the sword or the lance, but so slender and insubstantial-looking it could not hurt a fly. In one of his most daring coups, Velazquez paints the brush, and the hand which holds it, in the most flimsy and impressionistic of strokes. The fingers (you can only really make out three) are rendered in quite thick, smudgy marks, but what they suggest is not imprecision but the way the hand works faster than the eye can see. As for the brush, it is a white diagonal line painted so swiftly that the colour is broken.

Perhaps not the brush but the way Velazquez holds the brush is key to everything. He holds it, I reckon, about a third of the way down, and with such relaxed lightness that you feel it might slip from his grasp. I imagine it requires confidence to hold a brush like this – the supreme confidence which enables Velazquez to suggest the play of light on silk sleeve, the glint of belt buckle, with such apparently careless economy.

How far can what goes for the brush also be applied to the pen? Can the writer aspire to the swiftness and economy and lightness of touch shown by Velazquez, and what, if any, are the physical implications? Writers, Chinese calligraphers excepted, suffer from an inferiority complex in relation to painters. We simply can’t get as physical as they can (which may partly explain why painters seem to have more luck with the girls). We can’t express ourselves through a mere or unmediated physical gesture; everything we do has to go through the medium or filter of words.

For the poet Robert Graves, this constituted a tragic limitation: “There’s a cool web of language winds us in,/ Retreat from too much joy or too much fear.” Perhaps the filter of words saves us from excessive emotions which might be overwhelming, but at the same time writers have a tendency to become wrapped up in their own verbal netting; “We grow sea-green at last and coldly die/ In brininess and volubility.”

I don’t quite share Graves’s pessimism here about writing, and language. I do think there’s a way in which the writer can achieve something like Velazquez’s lightness and grace, though obviously in a less direct manner.

Writing entries in my journal, I’ve been experimenting with holding the pen less close to the nib, and with a lighter grip. The experiment is surprisingly powerful; I find the writing changes character – I write less but in some way more precisely. And this is the opposite of what you might expect; presumably you hold the pen tightly, and near the nib, in the hope of exercising the greatest control.

The recent history of the technical means of writing has seen a flight from the physical: the moves from the quill pen to the steel fountain pen to the ball-point, to the typewriter and then the computer represent a journey into disembodiedness. I’ve yet to see a romantic film about a writer which shows the hero tapping away at a lap-top; somehow the pounding of the typewriter, the clunking mechanism of the carriage return, the messy physicality of the ink ribbon, all provide far more evocative correlatives for spiritual struggle than the silent manipulation of bytes and pixels.

I propose, first of all to myself, a return to a more physical mode of writing, to recapture the sense that writing does indeed have something to do with touch – with the precise way the pen meets the paper. In some sense it will involve slowing down. Despite the extraordinary speed of his strokes Velazquez, it turns out, was both a fast and a slow painter. Some of the paintings, executed with what appears astonishing rapidity, actually took years to complete.

Published in the Financial Times 3 August 2008

 

COUNTY DURHAM: NOT THE PITS

When my friend Helen annouced she was holding a significant birthday party in County Durham, 260 miles north of London, there was a certain amount of groaning in the household. Why couldn’t she have the party in Camden Town? Admittedly, she is the MP for a Durham constituency, right next to Tony Blair’s old one as it happens – but would the Blairs hold a significant birthday party in County Durham, or in Connaught Square?

The groaning intensified when we looked into the National Express website and found that the best train they could offer on the day after the party from Darlington to London took eight hours, involved two changes and bus transfers and cost £180 one-way. Memo to Helen: can this government do something about the absurd railway pricing system which makes the National Lottery look like a fixed rate monthly savings scheme?

But we laid aside our groaning and climbed aboard the old faithful Vauxhall Cavalier. By the time we got back, very late on Sunday night, we were immeasurably grateful to Helen for having such an inspired idea. I had associated County Durham, apart from the magnificent cathedral, with mining and the scars of the industrial revolution. I wasn’t entirely wrong, as those who reported back from the Durham Miners’ Gala held on the morning of the party could confirm; but it turned out that there was far, far more to County Durham than slagheaps.

The party was held in the small market town of Barnard Castle, where the medieval fortress of Bernard Balliol beetles over the peat-coloured, fast-flowing River Tees. Barnard Castle, at the entrance to Teesdale, one of England’s loveliest valleys, is an entrancingly sleepy and quirky small town, full not just of art galleries and antique shops but hardware stores and alleyways with greengrocers and florists. The sleepiness is perhaps overdone, with the tourist office closing well before 5 on a July Saturday, but the charm is irresistable.

Barnard Castle should probably make more of itself touristically, because it is home to one of the finest and most improbable museums in the British Isles. You would not expect to find a large 19th century French chateau with a world-class collection of fine and decorative art anywhere in Britain, and especially not in a tiny Durham market town. The Bowes Museum has one of the most romantic stories of any museum, up there with the Victoria and Albert Museum and trumping the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection if not for the quality of the work then for the sheer imaginative largesse of the conception.

John Bowes was the natural son of the 10th Earl of Strathmore, who, deprived by lawyers of the earldom but in possession of his father’s Durham estates, set about multiplying his fortune. But he was a romantic as well as a shrewd businessman; he not only bought the Theatre [nb acute accent on first e, circumflex accent on a] des Varieties [nb acute accents on both es] in Paris but married one of its leading actresses. Then he and his wife Josephine [nb acute accent on e] Coffin-Chevallier, a talented amateur painter, had their brainchild; they would create a museum to make the finest arts of Europe, from Sienese renaissance altarpieces to French neo-Classical porcelain and furniture available to the people of the north-east of England. “I lay the bottom stone,” said Josephine in 1869, “ and you, Mr Bowes, will lay the top stone.” Josephine died in 1874, and John followed her in 1885; it would be another seven years before the museum opened, but the immense, generous effort which saw them purchase 15,000 items between 1862 and 1874 finally had its public consecration. 63,000 visitors came in the first year.

The Bowes Museum is big and grand but it is also wonderfully local. The people working there obviously love it (of how many great national galleries can that be said?). And there is no doubt which is their favourite exhibit. The life-sized solid silver swan, an automaton made in 1765, is a miracle of ingenuity – and as a cheeky note informs you, the world’s only fish-eating swan; it shares a room with half a dozen masterpieces of painting which the locals seem to care less about. There are two huge and splendid Canalettos, an El Greco of St Peter, and Antonio de Pereda’s wonderfully tender and graceful painting of Tobias Restoring His Father’s Sight.

But the work which stayed longest in my mind was Goya’s portrait of his friend Juan Melendez [nb acute accent on second e] Valdes [nb acute accent on e], one of the leading figures of the Spanish Enlightenment. In his pale refined face you see the tragedy of Spain’s flirtation with French ideals and their terrible consequence.

Melendez Valdes, the leading lyric poet of his age, joined the government of Joseph Bonaparte when the French invaded Spain in 1808. No doubt he was in a difficult position, as was Goya himself, a supporter of the French Revolution and of French Enlightenment ideas. But Goya recoiled when he saw the brutality of the invading troops, and left his searing records of the horrors of war. Melendez Valdes goes down in history as a turncoat who died in dishonour.

So much content in a single small picture, just one of the thousands of works of art which an enlightened and generous couple bequeathed to a particular corner of England.

Published in the Financial Times 26 July 2008

 

LIVE LIFE WITH A FLOURISH

Forty years ago, America’s Summer of Love had already turned sour, as the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy rewrote love as violence. Even in the heady early summer days of 1967 in San Francisco, that granddaddy of all underground newspapers the San Francisco Oracle was urging hippies to stay at home, as the city’s infrastructure (not to mention residents) simply couldn’t cope with more young people turning up, and on. Nowadays the hippies with their strange talk of undefined “energies” and “cosmic sandboxes”, and the French students who festooned the Parisian barricades with Situationist slogans (“FREE THE PASSIONS,” “LIVE WITHOUT DEAD TIME”) a year later, seem sweet but deluded.

Traipsing the steep clapperboard streets of San Francisco the other day, I saw more down-and-outs, hung with plastic bags, or pathetic billboards saying “Have AIDS, need money,” than flower children. But I want to put in a word for the young idealists of 1967 and 1968. For all that they were naive about economic realities, they were absolutely right about one thing. Their summer festivities forty years ago were concerned with human flourishing, not merely survival.

A grim kind of survivalism seems to have taken hold of the Zeitgeist. Faced with peak oil and rocketing food prices and mortgages, it may be no wonder that we set our sights low. But what if the narrow focus on survival is a fundamental perversion of the human spirit? People focussing on survival rather than flourishing end up doing self-defeating things, like eating their seedcorn and cutting down all the trees that bring water to the land.

The flower children wanted to flourish, as their name suggested. With the piercing and cruel insight of youth, they rejected the grinding joylessness they saw in so many of their homes, and took the Greyhound bus out West. They wanted to connect with nature, because they saw that for a flower, or a flamingo or a peregrine falcon or a dragonfly, to be is to flourish.

Flowers flourish naturally. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow;” says Jesus in the Gospel according to Matthew: “they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed like one of these.” Flowers have no work ethic, but they manifest a breathtaking beauty beyond the reach of all elaborate human artifice.

Human flourishing is more complex than the flourishing of flowers, birds or animals. It is a matter of culture, history, ethics, politics, as well as nature. Our current culture is dominated by technology, by an instrumental reason which sees everything as a means to an end, though the ultimate end has somehow got lost along the way. Perhaps it’s eternal life without meaning, the life of Tennyson's Tithonus. Ours is a quantitative culture which has lost touch with quality and therefore with flourishing. It speaks in a language denuded of poetry, which is the flowering and the flourishing of human speech.

Long ago in Greece Aristotle considered the end, not just the means, of human life.
In the Nicomachean Ethics he found that flourishing, or eudaimonia, “the end to which all our conscious acts are directed”, is “something final and self-sufficient.” But in what does human flourishing consist? It is not simply pleasure or wealth or social standing or even health, for all these can change – though the practical Aristotle averred that flourishing “seems to require a modicum of material prosperity”. Human flourishing is a conscious and consistent directing of the highest human powers towards goodness, “an activity of the soul in accordance with the best and most complete form of goodness”. Furthermore, it cannot be achieved in the short term: it is not momentary bliss, but the mature fruit of a fully lived life.

Lofty and admirable though Aristotle’s discussion of flourishing remains, it seems to us incomplete. There is not enough there about relationship – not just our human relationships with other humans (though Aristotle did make clear that “human beings are social animals”), but also our relationship with the natural world, with other species.

The hippies thought flourishing had mainly to do with love – not just sexual love, though they wanted to express that freely, and who can blame them, but a more general loving-kindness which they believed, with breathtaking naivety, would radiate out from the Haight-Ashbury to redeem the entire planet, from the boondocks of South Dakota to the killing fields of Vietnam. Of course the first problem they encountered was that the long-term residents of the Haight, who loved their quiet and orderly neighbourhood, felt no loving-kindness towards the chaotic crowd of young vagrants who had invaded their quarter.

In Paris the students were more critical and theoretical. Imbued with a Marxian analysis of the alienation of human creativity under capitalism, the Situationists called for “a concrete transcendence of the state and of every kind of alienating collectivity.” Pure air-dried waffle, you might say. But let’s hear it for Raoul Vaneigem, who asked “Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?”

Published in the Financial Times 19 July 2008

 

LESSONS OF THE GREATEST FINAL

The last time I was so affected by a Wimbledon final was in 1972, before half of you were born. When the moustachioed, military efficiency of Stan Smith defeated the mercurial artistry and natural grace of Ilie Nastase in a five-set thriller, I paced up and down the high street of the little town where I went to school, for what seemed hours, too upset to speak. It wasn’t just that the wrong man had won, or the man I did not support, but that some exemplary drama, or tragedy, had been played out, with implications beyond the sport of tennis, or any sport. Implacable force had won over finesse and imagination, teaching a lesson I wanted with all my heart to resist. I have felt the same way after great performances in the theatre, but very seldom in connection with sport.

So it was last Sunday during and after the finest and most dramatic Wimbledon final, or perhaps sporting event, in living memory. We had invited friends round for our regular Sunday morning ritual (the nearest we have in our bit of London to a village get-together, or even religious service) of a visit to the farmers’ market followed by a light lunch of Cambridgeshire salad and Kent berries. Scudding clouds covered the sky; only the chilly, hunting winds kept the showers from joining up into uninterrupted rain. Tennis did not seem remotely on the cards.

The summery gazpacho I had made should have been turned into a hotpot, but our Spanish friend Barbara’s tortilla de patatas, with a bottle of 1978 Ducru-Beaucaillou, cellared for 27 years, wonderfully elegant, aromatic and lifted, like no wine made in the post-Parker era, was more appropriate for the wintry, weeping weather. Even better was the Christmas pudding which Ching Ling, with prophetic brilliance, had steamed the night before.

Then, improbably, the tennis began. We watched, and we went on watching, with the odd breaks for weather, for the opening of another bottle of wine (a £5 supermarket Chinon), then another (the naturally made Contadino of Frank Cornelissen from the north slope of Etna), for supper at the start of the fifth set, and when the tension became unbearable, until the last ball (Federer’s cross-court forehand into the net) was struck in the gloom at 9.16 p.m.

By that time the match had not just been through many phases, or acts of drama, but had transcended genres and dimensions. There were the first two sets when the champion seemed to reflect the weather: under a cloud, unable to lift into the light. The coming of the rain changed the mood. Federer would not crumble, as he had at the French Open a month before. In the third set tie-break, he exploded into brilliance, a Greek hero fighting not just for his life, but for immortality.

The fourth set tie-break brought the unimaginable: the young warrior and iron man, Nadal, choking when he had a 5-2 lead, double-faulting weakly. The climax of this breaker brought the two sublime shots which will be replayed for as long as tennis captures people’s minds and hearts – Nadal’s laser-like forehand down the line and Federer’s riposte at championship point down, the running backhand of sublime beauty and pinpoint accuracy.

By the stage of the fifth set, the match, for me at least, had already gone beyond the sphere of winning and losing. Both men had already both won and lost. Federer’s fight-back was a magnificent achievement. It came down, in the end, not so much to the particular niceties of tennis, as to sheer hunger and will power; even beyond that, to natural changes in the order of things. Perhaps the hunger and will of the young pretender will always, at a certain point, be stronger than that of the established champion. The grip of the strongest must at last be loosened.

All this happened, as the distinguished California tennis pro and writer Doug King put it in an email sent to me on Sunday night, “not without struggle and not without pathos.” The pathos for me, as it had been in 1972, was almost unbearable. The graciousness of both winner and loser was admirable, but nothing could disguise the sadness of the end of an era. That at least was the view of the weather gods, who delivered a Monday of unrelenting rain and thunder. I thought of the lines written by Miguel Hernandez [NB a has acute accent] after the murder of his friend Federico Garcia [NB i has acute accent] Lorca: “a poet dies and creation feels/ Wounded, sick to death in its entrails.”

But what had happened was no murder. Two equally valid, opposite principles, the hardness of muscle and steely will, and the elusive spirit of pure poetry, had been set against each other and had fought it out not to the extinction of either. Perhaps it was always likely that in such gusty, gloomy conditions the style of play which relies on the smallest margin of error, Federer’s, would not prevail against the relentless assault of heavy top-spin. The broadsword beats the rapier. But the rapier’s finest thrusts live longer in the memory.

Published in the Financial Times 12 July 2008

 

IT’S A WATERSHED TIME FOR RIVERS

Not long ago, the passing-bell tolled for the Yangtze River dolphin. In August last year scientists announced that the baiji or Goddess of the Yangtze, a species venerated for thousands of years in China until Mao’s Great Leap Forward turned it into bushmeat, was probably extinct, as a result of overfishing and pollution.

It will not be the last Yangtze species to go the way of the Great Auk and the Hawai’i O’o. The giant Chinese sturgeon, which migrates from the Pacific to the Yangtze to spawn, may not last out this decade. According to Wei Qiwei of the Yangtze River Fisheries Research Insitute in Jingzhou, “there may be only 1000 of the animals left in the river.” The valiant Mr Wei has not given up hope: “The Chinese sturgeon is very precious to us,” he says: “I don’t want it to disappear on my watch.”

The Yangtze is the fourth or fifth longest river in the world, perhaps the greatest in terms of its impact on civilisation. But now its reputation is clouded by another statistic: the Great River is reckoned to be the largest single source of pollution entering the Pacific Ocean. Since the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, environmental degradation has increased dramatically: there is a risk of “an environmental catastrophe”, according to a Chinese forum of scientists – the same forum, ironically, which recommended building the dam in the first place.

If all this makes me melancholic, that is partly because I have always had a thing about rivers. As quite a young child, I pored over encyclopedias and geography books, gobbling up statistics like jam doughnuts: was the Mississippi-Missouri really the longest river, or was it the Nile or the Amazon? Which was bigger, the Ob or the Yenisei, the Amur or the Lena? Since English rivers are little more than trickles, the first river which really impressed me was the broad and beautiful though shallow Loire. Three hundred yards across was an impressive breadth, a good drive and a pitch.

What had not yet occurred to me was that rivers might be de-rivered. Already in the 1952 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (the one I have on my shelves) there is an ominous sign: the article on rivers is entitled “River and River Engineering.” Here is an illustration of the point Heidegger makes in his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. “The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the power plant.” Heidegger is saying that the river, Father Rhine, central thread of German culture, hymned by the poet Hoelderlin, beginning and ending of Wagner’s Ring cycle, is no longer a river. Technology has supplanted nature.

Is that the end of the story? Must we sit back and watch while river after river loses its immemorial riverness and becomes merely a drain and a water supply, for irrigation or power generation? Or is there another, more hopeful scenario: can rivers be re-rivered?

London is the city which did in its rivers first. Not only was Edmund Spenser’s “sweet Thames” declared biologically dead in the 1950s, but nearly all the other London rivers were forgotten, built over or running underground like sewers. Now there is an ambitious scheme, proposed by one of the advisors to the Mayor of London, to revive several of London’s lost streams.

“When these rivers are opened up,” says Peter Bishop, director of Design for London, “I think Londoners will be absolutely amazed. [The rivers] have been there all the time but you never see them.” He is talking about such rivers as the Fleet (which runs under Fleet Street, of journalistic renown), the Bourne, part of which still forms the beautiful lake in Hyde Park called the Serpentine, which includes London’s first swimming Lido, the Wandle, which runs from Wandsworth to Croydon, and the splendidly named River Quaggy.

The scheme is intended not just to beautify the capital city, but to cool it: believe it or not, London, increasingly covered by tarmac and concrete, can get uncomfortably warm in heat waves. Perhaps these rivers will even be clean enough to swim in, as the Thames now is as far down stream as Walton-on-Thames.

Last month’s devastating Mississippi floods remind us that rivers have not lost their power. The St Louis-born poet T.S. Eliot’s lines in ‘The Dry Salvages’ remain relevant: “I think that the river/ Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable.” For all our attempts to control them, rivers have a habit of striking back. Entirely understandable are the Chinese authorities’ attempts to tame the Yangtze and the Yellow River, whose floods have cost millions of lives. But it seems we need a new way of living with and not denaturing our rivers, so we can say once again with the great Chinese poet Li Bai, “all I see is the long river flowing to the edge of the sky.”

Published in the Financial Times 5 July 2008

DANGERS OF BANALITY

Reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, the political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” Eichmann, responsible for the slaughter of millions of Jews, had the appearance and even the mentality of a petty bureaucrat or administrator, crunching numbers and logistics which could have concerned widgets but happened to involve the mass-murder of human beings. The former employee of the Vacuum Oil Company was examined by a team of psychologists who pronounced him perfectly “normal” – “more normal at any rate than I am,” as one of them said with black humour, “after having examined him.”

When Arendt wrote, humanity was still reeling from the first total war in history, from the revelations of the Holocaust, the pitiful starvation of inmates at Belsen, the aftermath of the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Evil loomed large and dramatic on the face of the planet, and it was something of a shock to find its incarnation in such commonplace, trite human beings as Eichmann and the thousands of others who were simply “obeying orders”.

Evil has not disappeared from the planet in the intervening years, but in most of Europe and in North America it has retreated from the limelight. If finding banality was surprising for Arendt, it is now what we expect and what everywhere surrounds us. We might feel grateful for small mercies and rejoice that today’s politicians do not stage Wagnerian rallies and line the streets with one-hundred-foot-high banners. We find it to reassuring to hear commonplaces uttered and we watch television programmes which are engineered precisely for that purpose (anyone caught saying anything difficult or original gets short shrift from Big Brother).

But I am beginning to wonder whether Arendt’s formulation might not be reversed, and whether we should not concern ourselves more with the evil of banality. One petty example is sports commentary. At this time of year I turn couch potato for an hour or two each afternoon to watch tennis or listen to the cricket (I used to watch that too until it was sold down the river to Sky). Cricket in particular has produced its fair share of poetic commentary, from the burred Hampshire lyricism of John Arlott to the bone-dry crispness of Richie Benaud. But poetry, whimsy and originality are every day less in evidence.

Tennis commentators (apart from the admirable Frew MacMillan and the ever more elusive John McEnroe) seem to be chosen for locker room bonhomie rather than any gift for language or analysis. Commenting on the tatooed quotation from Dostoevsky which the maverick Serbian Janko Tipsaverich sports on one arm, the ever-trite Andrew Castle joked to the equally uninspired John Lloyd, “oh, he’s intelligent too – that wasn’t what we used to read, was it Lloydy?” The idea it seems, whether you are a player or a commentator, is to be “one of the lads”.

Test Match Special, one of the truly great English eccentric creations, the one sports programme which comes into its own when play is suspended during breaks for rain, has been steadily losing its unique flavour, reminiscent of the genteel English surrealism of the Ealing comedies. “There’s really nothing to say,” opined the New Zealand commentator Jeremy Coney recently – not a sentiment which could ever have passed the lips of the great Brian Johnstone.

The most popular purveyor of classical music in the UK is Classic FM, the radio station which treats classical music as if it was chocolate – and not even good chocolate, but the kind of milky, sugary nothingness which should have been banned long ago by the EU. The early evening offering on Classic FM is called “Smooth Classics”, as if the music of Beethoven and Schubert should slip down the gullet like baby food.

So the effect of banal commentary, and banal thinking in general, is to turn everything into undifferentiated pap. What is banal is what has already been chewed over, a thousand times, by someone else, or thousands of others. What is wrong with that? In the 1950s, the Gestalt therapists Fritz Perls, Ralph Hefferline and Paul Goodman explored the connection between physical eating and spiritual nourishment: as adults, it turns out, just as we need to engage in an active process of selecting our food, biting, chewing and digesting, so “we need to able to ‘bite off’ and ‘chew’ experience so as to extract its healthy nourishment…To the extent that you have cluttered your personality with gulped-down morsels of this and that, you have impaired your ability to think and act on your own.”

The danger of banality is an insidious one. Banality weakens our intellectual, spiritual and ethical muscles, rendering us flabby thinkers, unable or unwilling to chew over the difficult matter of experience and make it part of us. The connection between the banality of evil and the evil of banality is the danger of a surrender of our human powers of discrimination. We always need to be discriminating, and we always need to be working on refining our powers of discrimination, or one day we might find we can no longer distinguish between a human being and a widget.

Published in the Financial Times 28 June 2008

 

MEET THE ANCESTORS

Going to see Ibsen’s intense late drama Rosmersholm at London’s Almeida Theatre recently I was struck by two aspects of the play I hadn’t fully appreciated when studying it for A level English. The first was Ibsen’s boldness in tackling the subject of incestuous abuse when Freud was still a young neurologist – and implicitly going further than the father of psychoanalysis (himself a fan of Rosmersholm), who notoriously pulled back from his earlier position of accusing the bons bourgeois of Vienna of seducing their daughters. The second was the importance in the play of family tradition, represented by rows of family portraits which Ibsen’s stage directions insist should lower down on the modern-day inhabitants of Rosmersholm, the family home of the Rosmers.

The designer, Hildegard Bechtler, has played down the scale of these portraits, which works beautifully in creating a set which could have been painted by that Danish master of cool interiority, Vilhelm Hammershoi, but takes away from the weight of meaning which family tradition has in the play. Johannes Rosmer, the idealistic clergyman hero, believes he can break free from his ancestry, the generations of Rosmer dignitaries who were, according to your view of things, either pillars of the community or oppressors of the poor. But too late he realises that it is only his family name which gives him standing in the small-minded local society, as he is fought over by rival political factions, led by a reactionary schoolmaster and a left-wing tabloid journalist, each eager to give himself the Rosmer seal of approval.

The past catches up with the present in all sorts of ways in Rosmersholm, blighting possibilities of love and idealism, and the ending is a tragic Liebestod without any of the transcendent ecstasy of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. But I don’t think Ibsen’s intention was to vindicate the framed gallery of self-satisfied worthies on the walls of Rosmersholm. Any victory the family portraits achieve is Pyrrhic, since Johannes Rosmer dies childless.

More than a century has passed since Ibsen wrote Rosmersolm, and Freud came up with his shocking theories about the origins of malaise in the psyche. Victorian dignitaries no longer have the power to influence and inhibit us. Lytton Strachey debunked them long ago, in Eminent Victorians; revisionist reappraisal is no longer news. So if I put in a positive word for family portraits, I don’t mean to challenge the healthy iconoclasm of Ibsen and Freud, but am simply musing on my own family history.

All my life I have been coolly appraised by two family portraits, painted in the late 18th century by the English pastellist John Russell. George Bolton Eyres and his formidable wife have looked down from the walls, he dressed in his East India army uniform, with a palm tree over his shoulder, she rather snooty, with long gloves and an elegant country house in the background. I used to find them overbearing, full of social airs and self-importance.

Now I am much more intrigued by them. George Bolton Eyres, the only member of my family who ever made any money, was obviously a shrewd operator. The lavish encomium on his memorial stone in Bath Abbey (“Merely to enumerate the several virtues of this excellent man etc. etc.”) tells only part of the story. As a young man he was briefly dismissed from the Company for engaging in a spot of private copper trading; who knows what he got up to in India (he ended up as a Major-General in the East India Army)? Merely to survive there in the mid-18th century was quite an achievement.

Of course the kind of Jane Austen life they aspired to and set up was based on what we would now call exploitation; but boy, must it have taken energy and determination to accomplish.

George Bolton’s descendants tended to be more academic and less shrewd; his son, who bought quantities of wine from Berry Bros. in St James’s Street, lost his father’s fortune standing surety for a friend’s debt. His great-grandson (my great-grandfather) became British minister in Albania in the 1920s, furthering the cause of King Zog, and no doubt contributing inadvertently to the problems which have bedevilled the Balkans ever since.

But my purpose was not to dwell on my family history in particular, but to reflect on the way a family background influences an individual. Suddenly I am realising that I have a certain pride in my ancestors, that they served with some distinction and courage for two centuries in the armed forces, the diplomatic service, as Cambridge academics. And though this pride could become a ludicrous vanity, it might also have a beneficial effect: to make me want to live up to their achievement, not by working in the same fields, but by doing something with distinction.

I believe Johannes Rosmer was wrong to try to reject his ancestors so absolutely. No doubt they were a mixed bunch, but some of their determination and pride had passed down to him. Paradoxically, his admirable belief that he could lead the community in a fresh direction, away from the sins or accommodations associated with the old oppressive Rosmers, stemmed in part from them.

Published in the Financial Times 21 June 2008

REASONS WE NEED CHOPIN

The other weekend BBC Radio 3 decided to hold a Chopin jamboree – two days entirely devoted to Poland’s great poet of the piano. There was no particular reason, as far as I could see: no major anniversary, no topical peg; it just seemed a good idea. And so it was; in our household we listened entranced, to a succession of wonderful performances and illuminating live comments by musicians of the calibre of Vladimir Ashkenazy and Tamas Vasary. As Sunday evening approached the normal end-of-holiday blues were intensified: we wished Chopin Weekend would carry on for days.

Listening to a lot of Chopin felt different from being immersed in Bach or Beethoven or Bruckner. There was nothing over-reverent about this experience; Chopin strikes me as one of the least religious musicians, in the conventional sense, who has ever lived. There was much sheer delight and exuberance: the hyper-sensitive, consumptive composer, so unhappy in love, also wrote some of the most purely delicious music ever confected – the two early piano concertos, the more extravert waltzes, the Berceuse and the Impromptus.

But talk of confectionery doesn’t quite explain the appeal of Chopin. When asked what it was that drew him to the music of his fellow-Pole, the great Chopin pianist Arthur Rubinstein replied, “I don’t know, Chopin just spoke to me.” Presumably Chopin speaks to very many of us: his voice seems like an essence of humanity. For that reason his pieces continue to be the most played and programmed in the piano repertoire, all over the world, from Taiwan to Tennessee.

One objection to Chopin weekend could have been simply that Chopin is too well-known, one composer in no danger whatsoever of being neglected. But what was revealed, I felt, was just how little we really know about Chopin – how ultimately unknowable he, like all great artists, remains.

How well, for instance, do we know the Funeral March sonata (apart from the da-da-di-dum tune which opens the slow movement)? This was where Chopin Weekend began, with an fascinating comparison, in that cynosure of classical music programmes, Building a Library, of all the available recordings of Chopin’s opus 35 in B flat minor.

Here is an uncompromising, revolutionary piece if ever there was one. From the strange, violent, truncated introduction to the whispering, desolate, tuneless finale, this supposedly familiar work plunges us into the most uncomfortable extremes of emotion: a travel agent advertising this kind of emotional journey, from agony, though death, to desolation, would go out of business in hours.

Another revelation was that no-one has yet been able to play the piece entirely satisfactorily.
Some of the greatest pianists who have ever lived (Rachmaninov, Cortot, Rubinstein, Horowitz) failed to deliver technically flawless accounts, especially of the fiendish Scherzo, while the experience of listening to a Vorsprung durch Technik Wunderkind such as Evgeny Kissin was described by Harriet Smith as “no more enjoyable than facing a firing squad”. Play safe with this music and you may hit all the notes but you will miss the essence; much better to take risks, like Rachmaninov and Rubinstein.

The final movement still sounds modern and eerie and challenging, closer to late Beckett than Lord Byron: a chill blast from some region we would rather not visit, certainly not often. In fact I was left wondering when I would have the courage to face this music again.

Now we are getting closer to what makes Chopin great: a combination of that human vulnerability and those challenging extremes. He draws us in, by speaking in the most human of tones, then challenges us to extend the range of the human, or our range.

For many musicians, Chopin’s greatest work is the 24 Preludes opus 28. Here you find the coming together of extreme concision with grand scope. Some of the preludes last less than a minute; even the longest, the so-called Raindrop Prelude, lasts no longer than five. Each is a miniature world, and their juxtaposition creates a kaleidoscope which sets out a new philosophy of human emotion: we are not sensible smiling 18th century rationalists, but unstable successions of the most violently conflicting moods, from the playful delight of the twenty-third Prelude to the epic despair of the twenty-fourth. We contradict ourselves, as Whitman would later confirm; sometimes we may be incomprehensible to ourselves.

One of the shortest and apparently simplest of all the Preludes is number 7 in A major. A young pianist who has reached Grade 5 can master this one – master the notes, that is. But I have found it takes half a lifetime (I started playing this piece 37 year ago) to begin to understand what lies behind the notes. Wordsworth’s comment about “emotion recollected in tranquillity” provides a key. There is a certain distance between the emotion and the expression; if you like, a love idyll in the past, recalled not with bitterness, but with heart-breaking tenderness. Getting the shading of tone right here challenges not just your technique but every fibre of your imagination and humanity. This is why we need Chopin: to cleanse our emotional and existential filters of all the gunge and scale which keeps clogging up our lives.

Published in the Financial Times 14 June 2008

 

BOLD ETONIANS

When I left Eton College, aged 17 in 1975, the Head Master Michael McCrum, a remote figure who had had very little impact on our lives over the past five years, presented each of us with a signed copy of the poems of Thomas Gray.

At the time it seemed one of the most meaningless of the many arcane rituals and traditions which helped give the school its peculiar flavour (the wearing of Victorian undertakers’ dress, the playing of bizarre games involving walls and mud, the private language).

Gray, the author of ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ wasn’t even the best old Etonian poet. Unfortunately Percy Bysshe Shelley was a rebel and an atheist and a proto-socialist advocate of free love, and not the sort of man whose poems you hand out to teenagers.

But Gray did write ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’, the poem which distils nostalgia for a carefree adolescence spent rowing and playing cricket near those “distant spires” and “antique towers which crown the watery glade.” The ode ends with the famous lines, “Where ignorance is bliss/ ’Tis folly to be wise”, which seem an unlikely advertising slogan for an expensive and exclusive seat of learning.

Now Eton no longer needs the copywriting services of an obscure 18th century poet, Suddenly you can’t move for the alumni of our Thames-side alma mater. Wherever you look, whether at the new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, the leader of the Opposition, David Cameron, the TV celebrity chef who enjoys roasting trout on his car radiator (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall), the high-profile environmental activist (Zac Goldsmith) or the West End stage star (Damian Lewis), even the future King of England, you see an Etonian.

However hip Eton may have become, I never thought I would be infected by Gray’s nostalgia (the logic of which, as Edward Gibbon memorably argued, would lead to the wish to become an oyster); but nowadays, on the rare occasions when I drive through the commuter village of Datchet and past the immense playing fields (on which, as we know, the Battle of Waterloo is said to have been won) with names like Dutchmans and Upper Club, and catch sight of the pale stone pinnacles of College Chapel, I am ambushed by emotions which seem too strong for the circumstances.

Though considering I spent eight years of my life at Eton, five and half as a boy and two and a half as a teacher (or ‘beak’), it may not be surprising I harbour strong and complicated feelings about my old school.

Eton either makes you or breaks you, said a writer contemporary once with, I thought, a certain melodramatic cruelty. And also an unattractive complacency, because I assumed he meant he was one of the made ones (now I am not so sure). The trouble was, I could never be sure which it was in my case. Perhaps it was both.

The school certainly had an enormous impact on me and most of my contemporaries, much more of an impact, I realised later, than their schools have on most people. Eton is huge (hard not to be overwhelmed by such a place, when you arrive as a very small boy), the biggest boarding school in the UK with 1300 boys in 25 houses spread over the town of Eton, more like a small university than a school; it is grand and in parts very beautiful; very old, full of tradition: eighteen British prime ministers were educated here.

Because I won a scholarship (my parents paid only £300 per year, as opposed to the £1700 full fees, which have now risen to £26,000), I spent my time as a Colleger in the school’s oldest and original part, close to the Perpendicular Gothic chapel with its marvellous wall paintings, eating all my meals in a fifteenth century hall, practising the piano in a fifteenth-century schoolroom with wood-pannelled walls on which boys had carved their names for three hundred years. I may not have been happy much of the time, but I was proud: not just proud to be an Etonian, but proud to be an Eton King’s Scholar; descendant of the seventy poor scholars for whom the school was founded in 1440 by the saintly King Henry VI, and more recently of intellectual mavericks such as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Cyril Connolly.

My pride and that of my contemporaries was tempered by other considerations. In our day, the 1970s, when the cultural icons were pop stars such as Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Bob Marley, it was not exactly cool to be an Etonian. When asked where we went to school, we were apt to mumble something along the lines of having gone toa comprehensive near Slough.

No doubt the Establishment was always crawling with them, but they tended to keep a low profile. Now David Cameron can say (at the Conservative Party Conference last October) he is “not embarrassed” that he “went to a fantastic school…because I had a great education and I know what a great education means”. It wasn’t long ago that we thought the days of Etonian prime ministers were past, as clever grammar school products such as Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher took over from the last Etonian prime minster, the intellectually low-voltage aristocrat Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

Are there any particular reasons for this Etonian renaissance or at least renewed high visibility, I am wondering as I come to interview the current headmaster, Tony Little. He just happens to be himself an old Etonian of roughly my vintage, though you would never guess it from his classless vowels and Lech Walesa moustache. He could be a clever civil servant, or the manager of a football club or a hedge fund. One of the less talked-about characteristics of Etonians is how hard they are to stereotype. The friends I have kept up with from school include a potter, an opera singer, an actor, a careers advisor and an English teacher in Australia.

“First of all I think you have to distinguish Eton College the actual school, which few people know much about, from the general term Eton, which is journalistic shorthand for all sorts of things,” says the thoughtful, intellectually nimble Little, as we sit in his bright and tidy office, whose great windows look past an expanse of garden to the Thames. “Eton College happens to be a rather good institution which acts as a great standard-bearer for British liberal education, and – this sounds like an oxymoron – is at its best when it’s conservative in doing so. We’ve always recognised two principles in education, which are first that young people teach each other more than adults think they teach them, and secondly that at least as much learning goes on outside the classroom as within it.”

I can’t disagree when I think back to my most intense experiences at school: playing Gloucester in a production of King Lear which involved procuring fresh pig’s eyes – “out, vile jelly!” – every morning from the Slough abattoir, and endless conversations with fellow Collegers about everything under the sun, or at least our sun, from Shostakovitch string quartets to the films of Don Siegel and the music of Cat Stevens – and whether dogs were superior to cats (that one ended in tears).

What if anything is special about Eton, I ask the Head Master, who is dressed in the standard beak’s uniform of barrister’s trousers and stick-up collar, no gown or mortar-board? Little again has a double answer: “I think boys in a very unarticulated way are aware of the tradition of the place, though no-one ever talks about eighteen prime ministers and so on. More important is that if all these people have done things, then why not you? It builds a kind of expectation of the possible. There is an expectation, from each other, of excellence, in all kinds of areas.” Here again I think Little is right, though that expectation of excellence has crushed more than one decent and highly intelligent contemporary I can think of.

“Secondly Eton encourages independent-mindedness. You have your own room from the beginning, so there isn’t the herd-like instinct of the dormitory – not a great group hiding one behind the other. Above all Eton produces people who have the confidence to go out and do something, not witter about it from the sidelines. Of course that can tip over into a kind of arrogance.”

Ah yes, confidence. As someone who has spent most of his life wittering from the sidelines (not a bad title for an autobiography by a minor poet), and pondering this apparently all-important question of confidence, I feel somewhat uncomfortable at Little’s own lack of doubt on the matter. I’ve often wondered whether this famous Eton confidence could be skin-deep: certainly people such as Boris Johnson and David Cameron do not lack chutzpah, but the confidence to believe you deserve the high position does not necessarily mean you possess the other talents, humility, for instance, and the ability to listen to others, needed to honour it.

Perhaps Eton boys are getting nicer. I certainly found when I went back to teach for a couple of years in the English department (a bastion of creativity, critical thinking and dramatic achievement set against some less enlightened elements in the school) that the majority of boys were charming and kinder and more emotionally intelligent than I remembered. Some of those I taught have gone on to do creative and literary things, like the critic James Wood and the actors Dominic West and Nick Marcq. And the ones I liked most, and enjoyed working with when I directed plays, were all from outside College, a sobering finding for the proud former King’s Scholar.

I walk back from Tony Little’s office in thoughtful mood along the famous blue corridor with its paintings and drawings of old boys, and then through the shady cloisters and School Yard, the cobbled heart of the school, with the Chapel on one side and Lupton’s Tudor tower on another. There is hardly a boy to be seen; the Etonians seem to have reverted to their old mode of invisibility.

Once back from my day out in Eton I conduct a straw poll of Eton contemporaries. Not surprisingly they offer a more mixed picture than the glowing one presented so skilfully by the Head Master. My friend Nick Goulder, International Casualty Director at Willis Re, says he came out of the school “incredibly naïve politically, with a complete lack of awareness of the outside world.” On the other hand, he found Eton immensely enriching intellectually and artistically: “it gave me a lifetime’s interest in culture, in painting, Greek theatre, music. A classics teacher, John Roberts, happened to show me a book of paintings by Mondrian and I began to understand about the evolution of artistic possibility.” Socially, “we lived intensely together. The sharpness of repartee could be painful. But there was great camaraderie, a sense of esprit de corps. On the other hand I had no idea how to speak to a woman.”

Matthew Fox, now Chief Executive of Servite, one of Britain’s largest housing associations, says “Eton was the most intellectually competitive environment I have ever operated in – far more so than Oxford or business”. As for confidence, he says “in some ways Eton made me very confident – it ensured that I would have no fawning respect for the old aristocracy of the country. By a process of osmosis rather than formal teaching, Etonians learn very effectively how to get on in the world using an odd mixture of humour, worldliness and good tailorng.”

Something nags at me. A clue to it is found in that neglected source, Gray’s Ode on a Distant Prospect. The poem is prefaced by a line from the Greek dramatist Menander, given in Greek and probably ignored by most readers. It translates as follows: “I am a man: sufficient excuse for being unhappy.” Unlike Gray, who saw the school as an idyllic, pre-lapsarian contrast to the woes which would follow, I experienced some quite intense unhappiness at Eton, though perhaps not as much as certain contemporaries who appeared to have chronic dental problems. It turned out that their visits to the dentist were actually being made to the school psychologist. More seriously, no less than five of the boys I overlapped with in the scholars’ house, College, (that is five out of about 130) committed suicide by the age of twenty-five.

For a long time I blamed the school, rather in the manner of the critic Cyril Connolly in his memoir Enemies of Promise, both for my own misery and for this terrible loss of young life – though when Connolly wrote “of many of the boys whom I knew at Eton, I can say that their lives are over,” he was not speaking quite literally. Eton, or at least College, seemed full of people who might have been swimming intellectually or socially, but were drowning emotionally. Ferdinand Mount’s beautifully written memoir Cold Cream, which includes Mount’s time at Eton in the 1950s, also paints a picture of emotional deprivation, against a background of casual cruelty.

Talking to the Head Master and to some old Etonians of more recent vintage, I do get the impression things have improved in this area. “We’re better pastorally than we were,” insists Tony Little. “The maverick nature of house-mastering is much more refined. The houses are still semi-autonomous units but there’s much more collaboration. Boys have an embracing structure comprising not just the housemaster but also the dame [Eton parlance for matron], and the tutor.

“A mother recently came up with an excellent soundbite: ‘My son can be on his own, but not alone.’” More prosaically, boys also have mobile phones. Boys who are unhappy will probably be unburdening themselves to parents in the twinkling of a satellite signal.

It is a privilege to go to Eton, one is constantly reminded, both by those hostile to the place and those defending it. But it is not a privilege which is chosen by the small boys who arrive to be fitted up for their tail-coats and striped trousers at Tom Brown’s Tailors in the High Street. Various members of my family have attended the place over the last two centuries: my father was there during World War Two, and doesn’t seem to have been especially enamoured of the place, though he says he loved listening to jazz and rowing, on his own, to the island in the Thames called Queen’s Eyot, to drink cider. Now my nephew is there and relishing the freedoms and possibilities he finds, from soccer to the extraordinary range of outside speakers who address the various Eton societies. If I had a son, I would be more likely to send him, for his happiness’ sake, to an alternative school such as King Alfred’s or Brockwood Park – but that may just be the law of equal and opposite reaction.

And perhaps Gray was right after all, and most Eton boys are not unhappy. Trainee solicitor Ivo Stourton, son of broadcaster Edward Stourton, who was at Eton from 1996 to 2001, says, “Eton left me as an optimist. I tend to think things will be fine. Eton gives you a sense of entitlement, in the good sense that you leave convinced that you have the right to say and do things, not that you what you say or do is more important than what anyone else says or does.” Eton helped him develop as a writer: one of the plays he wrote there was put on at the Edinburgh Festival, and he has now had a novel, The Night Climbers, published by Random House.

Leaving once again in the direction of Datchet and the M4, I do feel most of the problems in British education lie outside the amazingly peaceful and beautiful “expanse of grove, of lawn, of mead” between the industrial estates of Slough and the towers of Windsor Castle. The gifts that Eton bestows, of social ease, mastery of difficulty and confidence, are signally lacking in the wider population, especially the male part. I am glad that once again Eton has a Head Master of wide vision and social conscience, following the great Robert Birley, the Head Master from 1949 to 1963 who caused an uproar by involving Etonians in projects to alleviate social problems in Slough. Back in London, I hear news that Eton has joined up with six local state schools, in one of the government sponsored Independent State School Partnerships. Eton boys will help tutor the less academically able from the partner schools. Perhaps there are other battles that can be won on those famous playing fields.

Published in the Financial Times 24 May 2008

IN THE DAYS BEFORE THE FLOOD

Now that the credit crunch and high food and commodity prices have come along and seem here to stay, David Cameron’s Conservatives, according to the British historian and commentator Max Hastings, would be wise to drop all their high-minded guff about the environment. In belt-tightening times there are other priorities. The signs are that Labour’s very modest increase in fuel tax and proposals to raise excise duty for the most polluting cars may fall victim to protests against tax rises which, presumably, no-one ever imagined would be popular.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in the most dramatic Presidential nomination campaign in living memory, the environment has barely figured at all. Hillary Clinton’s image as a tough pragmatist does not accord with any sort of greenery, and in Barack Obama’s glowing vision of a new politics and peace on earth, the environment is strangely absent. It is left to the elderly war veteran Republican candidate, John McCain, to be an unlikely upholder of ecological values. Meanwhile in Brazil, the Environment Minister Marina Silva has resigned, saying in her resignation letter to her friend President Lula that her efforts to protect the environment and in particular the Amazon rainforest had faced “growing resistance… from important sectors of government and society.” Apparently she and Lula have not spoken since.

This, it seems to me, is in every sense antediluvian thinking and antediluvian politics. It is antediluvian in