Shortest hour

Subjective time is a familiar phenomenon. “Time flies when you’re having fun”, and all that. How the wait in the airport departure lounge drags on and on, while the holiday that follows whizzes by, accelerating as the last day approaches. When we’re stuck with things we dislike doing, those which are boring, painful, or anxiety-inducing, we find that time slows right down. We may even check to make sure that our watch hasn’t stopped. When we’re happy and involved, time speeds up again. A twenty minute dental appointment may feel interminable; an evening spent in pleasant company and we can’t believe it’s already time to be putting our coats on. 

It’s a respectable topic, both in literature and in real life. A couple of examples may suffice. (1) The subjective nature of the experience of time is a phenomenon discussed in a fictional context by the character Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain". That’s one you may want to pursue. (2) Albert Einstein employed it in an attempt to explain the concept of relativity, using as an analogy the scenario of time spent with a pretty girl versus time spent sitting on a hot stove. I’m not sure how much of either he actually did, but since it’s Einstein, we must respect the theory (although we don’t have to pretend that we understand relativity).

It can get complicated, and there are anomalies, of course. There always are. For instance, elapsed time as experienced going forward may not pass at the same perceived speed as when viewed retrospectively. A boring week in the office, roll on Friday, and when Friday evening eventually arrives, and we look back over the week, we may query where the time went. Never mind, Monday morning will soon be here and we can try again. Another example. In the early hours, as one day is biochemically ticking round into the next, time may pass unexpectedly quickly. I’ve often found that, if I need to be up ridiculously early, if I’m setting off on my travels somewhere, the few minutes I’ve allowed myself to get up, to have breakfast, and to get myself ready, pass with alarming rapidity. The subjective speed of time somehow – certainly not linearly – reflects the amount of activity that needs to go into it.

Then there’s cinematic time. A couple of weeks ago I watched a morning showing of  the superb “Darkest Hour”, for which Gary Oldman has deservedly received an award for his portrayal of Winston Churchill during some of the most perilous days of 1940. I found every minute of the film enjoyable and enthralling, and only wished it hadn’t ended when it did.  

 
I never looked at my watch once during it, my only potential zeitgeber being my moronically metronomic reflex reaching for another Malteser to munch. At the end of the film it felt like about an hour had passed, and I was extremely surprised – disbelieving in fact - that it was so much later than I expected it to be. The Maltesers had kept giveaway time-for-lunch pangs at bay, had successfully suppressed the most basic of biorhythms, but the film had gripped my attention moment by moment. Intense pleasure and mental involvement. I’ve checked since, and the running time for “Darkest Hour”  is two hours and five minutes. This must be one of the most subjectively distorted stretches of perceived time I’ve experienced – in a long time.

Streets of Ealing

This time nothing as groanworthy as the Four Sturges, you’ll be pleased to know, but we’re still pretty much in the same territory, the same mangled and disreputable suburbs of language.

One of my Christmas presents this year was a CD called “Pressure Drop”, the best of Toots and the Maytals. I don’t know much about this Jamaican band, although I rather like them, and not long ago I watched a documentary about them. It’s my habit when listening to a record for the first time not to look at the titles, sleeve notes or anything extra-musically informative. I prefer to concentrate on the music; I like to be surprised and intrigued solely by what I hear. “Monkey Man” and “54-46 was my number” presented no surprises, and no intrigue, just pleasant and familiar songs. “Streets of Ealing” was more puzzling, however, so having listened to the whole CD, I checked the cover. Mm. No track called “Streets of Ealing”. Very strange, although in precisely that part of the disc where I thought I might find it, the tenth track, was a song titled “Spiritual Healing”. Ah ha ! The rare and fortuitous stumbling-upon of a so-called mondegreen, a creative mishearing. Well, that really made my day.

Songs are well known as potentially rich sources for mondegreens, a special type of wordplay, a subset of the pun, I suppose. The Japanese, who tend not to do things by halves, have raised the mishearing of song lyrics, and their substitution by ludicrous ones, into a whole art form called soramini. I have a lot of time for contemporary Japanese subcultures, but we don’t need to travel that far to indulge the habit, nor do we need to be so deliberate.

Accidental mondegreens are best, the unpredictable ones, although painfully contrived ones also have an appeal of sorts. Perhaps the most agonising specimen of the latter was that magnificently irritating song, originally recorded in the 1940s - which works best with an American accent and was still on the radio during my childhood - “Mairzy doats and dozy doats”. As in “and liddle lamzy divey”. I’m sure you know the one. For a long time I didn’t appreciate that it was a deliberate exploitation of the idea of the mondegreen because (a) I didn’t know that was the word for it (b) I didn’t realise that the song actually was such a thing. I simply heard it as a phonetic string of meaningless sounds. Fine, so it’s a song about mairzy doats, not sure what they are, but no matter, and not much more mysterious than “re turnasenda” or anything else that was bouncing over the Atlantic airwaves in those happy days when America was great and didn’t have to worry about being great again. In any case, pedantically, “Mairzy doats” isn’t a proper mondegreen, because the lyrics don’t make any alternative sense; they’re merely inappropriately chopped up and re-glued word fragments.

Be that as it may. Fast forward a few years to our own take on the English language, an entirely different kind of Mairzy sound, and one encounters the Beatles’ "a girl with colitis goes by", from 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'. Or more conventionally “a girl with kaleidoscope eyes”. Well, it makes about as much sense, but the whole point of a successful mondegreen is that it does have another discernible meaning, however improbable or peculiar. Presumably, sadly, there are girls with colitis and occasionally, well, they pass by. So it’s the real thing, then, a proper mondegreen.

Beatle-related ambiguities, being Beatle-related, have been much discussed (artichokes/arty jokes, armchair/arms yeah), though they’re not as puzzling as K T Tunstall’s apparently estuarial “So to Leigh-on-Sea” (more prosaically “Suddenly I see”), Herman’s Hermits’ “she’s a muscular boy” (“she’s a must to avoid”), Bowie’s inspired “on a merry cast orchard brow” (“on America’s tortured brow” – whatever that means – from ‘Life on Mars?’), or many of the incomprehensible consequences of Elton John’s unique vocal blending of Pinner and the Deep South. Several websites explore this sort of thing (or thang, as Sir Elton would no doubt say), although many of the examples they quote are only slightly erroneous variants on the original and thus not particularly funny or inventive. Former Roxy Music frontman Bryan – “let’s stick together” - Ferry had a singing technique which, appropriately enough, tended to fuse the end of one word with the start of the next. This could be a fruitful technique for artificially generating mondegreens.

We live in less carefree times. Given our ability to google anything, and to find anything, there are implications for the validity of knowledge, per se. If you can find absolute nonsense online, which you most certainly can (present company excepted, of course), with nothing to indicate that it is nonsense, then it’s mildly unsettling, to say the least. Can one perhaps find on the web an entire Borgesian music library of utter falsehood, a parallel lyrical universe of fiendish mondegreens; and how does one know that it is false? How can one tell which is which? For instance, the alternative cheese-fixated lyrics to the Eurythmics’ hit “Sweet Dreams”:

Sweet dreams are made of cheese

Who am I to diss a Brie?

I’ve travelled the world and the Cheddar cheese

Everybody’s looking for Stilton

 
Well … To be honest, the original version is better, if you will halloumi my opinion. If one can so badly misunderstand songs with perfectly sensible and innocent lyrics, what chance for more sensitive texts - religious or political pronouncements, for instance? What should we believe, who should we trust? Even in our irreligious times there persists the London Transport (or TfL) version of the Lord’s Prayer, one of the oldest contrived multiple mondegreens, a myth more suburban than urban, the one that begins “Our Father, which art in Hendon, Harrow Road be thy name, thy Kingston come, thy Wimbledon, in Erith as it is in Hendon” and goes on to plead  “Give us four bus passes” and “lead us not into Brent Station”. But at least it doesn’t try to tempt us into Ealing. For that we need Toots.

Four Sturges

Well, we had the Three Esses the other week, and now it’s the turn of the Four Sturges. Just think Ronnie Barker.

As a child, I loved to draw. I still do. Drawing accompanied most of my passing fads and phases, all my visual obsessions, from shabby sheds to space rockets, from steelworks to stadia, from battleships to bridges – always bridges. Subject matter came in waves; I would have an idea about something, a temporary passion to pursue, to illustrate on paper. I’d get on with it for a while, and before long it would burn itself out.  A fallow period would ensue until the next enthusiasm took hold.

My problem was that my desire to draw was constant, it was an urge almost physiological in its intensity. But every now and then I would be stuck, sat at the dining table ready with paper and pencil, mind’s eye constipated; I’d turn to my parents and wail “I don’t know what to draw”. They would offer helpful and plausible suggestions – something we had noticed on a walk together, an episode in a story I’d read, a seaside pier we had strolled along. Well meant, often imaginative, and dovetailing with my known visual interests, but these suggestions were never any good. Never. Eventually I learned not to ask; I knew that the inspiration had to come from within, it could only come from my own mind. What I didn’t realise, for a long time, was that such patterns of up and down, peak and trough, boom and bust, are perfectly natural. To try and resist them is unwise.

At present I feel I’m emerging from a spell of “painter’s block”, having long ago switched my primary allegiance from pencil to oils. This follows a spell of activity at the end of last year, so it’s not unexpected. I’m in the fortunate position of not having to worry about it, being an artistic unknown. I’m due to exhibit locally at the end of this year, but that’s a long way off at present, and I feel no pressure. A few ideas are starting to gel, but for now I don’t have to do anything.

Nevertheless, I can see how it can be a worry. An acquaintance of mine, modestly commercially successful in the art world, wrote to me before Christmas to say that he is due to contribute to an exhibition at the end of March. He said he was currently  several works short, and was evidently struggling and concerned. Clearly, he wasn’t enjoying his chosen activity, which had become a chore rather than a pleasure.

Success, achievement, can bring with it commitments which can be uncomfortable and unnatural to accommodate. Urges can’t be forced, and if they are, the outcome is likely to be unsatisfactory, wooden, stage-fraidy, self-conscious, boring. You see it with poet laureates, the moment they are crowned.

You also see it every summer at the Royal Academy. Every year I tell myself it will be the last time, but I’m always there again next year, groaning and wishing I hadn’t. Once more I see the well known names, the Academicians, hogging the prime wall space. Because I like landscapes, seascapes and townscapes, I know which artists’ work to seek out. It saddens me, how painters who - when they were more or less free to do what they wanted, weren’t famous, and had no commitment to actually do anything - were brilliant, but now that they are expected to perform, to contribute, and they churn out the same old same old every year, only with increasingly insultingly greedy asking prices. But far worse, they paint with no evident enthusiasm, only boredom and slapdash “this will have to do”, even hints of self-parody. Not all of them are like this, but those that are have become, in short, POFs, Precious Old Farts, the consequences of the forced urges hinted at in today’s blogpost title. Where is the satisfaction in that?

I detect a natural progression. A creative theme emerges for someone, develops, gets better, gets very good, gets recognised, gets desirable, gets wanted. It becomes a product, a proper artistic artefact. More is demanded. The theme or style or concept, whatever it is, peaks and plateaus. Sadly though, in due time, the urge starts to dry up, while still the product continues to emerge, ever more routine and lacklustre. Natural decline and death are resisted. Quality and interest level fall away simultaneously. The expectation remains, but the inspiration wanes, disappointment sets in. Is this a happy state of affairs for the artist or the viewer? I believe not.

 
In a way it’s a paradoxical situation, because many people are at their best if faced with a deadline, or if their process of production is constrained in some way. In general, though, it seems to me much better if one can be free to produce whatever, whenever, however one wants, or not at all. I’m in that lucky position; no one is interested, and if I don’t want to, I don’t have to. Four Sturges are surely worse than none at all.

The very best trainset you could possibly wish for

Nostalgia, though often derided as a not particularly useful psychological process, is real enough. Proper nostalgia that is, not the commercial, cultish, fake, retro-biz. Sometimes what isn’t clear, though, is what nostalgia is actually for, why we feel it, how the process works, and what its reasonable limits might be. Is it for the loss of something long ago, or the loss felt now? Is there any difference between the two? I can’t offer any reliable answers, but here, I’ll use St Pancras as an example of some of the odd trains of thought that may be encountered. Pun sort of intended.

The vast trainshed and adjoining hotel that make up St Pancras Station constitute a national treasure that not so long ago was in danger of being lost. Its miraculous survival constituted a subversion of the then dominant modernist zeitgeist accompanying the swinging heyday of post-blitz London. An unexpected victory it was, one that upset the progressive status quo, the attitude which Sir John Betjeman – hero of the hour – viciously dubbed “withitry”. In the early Sixties nearby Euston and its Doric arch were the sacrificial victims catalysing the moodswing sufficient for St Pancras to survive. It was a close shave. Even today I expect there are still people around who would happily demolish it for financial gain - if not out of aesthetic rage and stylistic revenge - given half the chance.

Well, here we are, half a century on. However, even with its imaginative rebirth – its grand reopening in 2007 with an “International” appendage - what that survival means can perhaps be re-examined, slightly critically, some might say with a modicum of jaundice. Doing so may illustrate a little of how nostalgic processes, feelings and motivations operate. I should emphasise, of course, that I’m very glad that physically St Pancras is still with us, and that it’s such a wondrous place to start a journey into Europe, as well as to Kent or to the East Midlands – and equally to return to.  

Now then, suppose you have an affection for St Pancras, what form does this take? Is it to do with architecture, or railways, or something - since we’re talking European  here - more outré? Is it some personal connection you have, a bit of a thing about  gothic, a love of  trains, a historical sensibility, a romance with the whole idea of travel? Do you like it as it is now? Do you prefer it as it was? Do you lust after both? Depending on your answer, it may or may not be the huge arched trainshed for which you are passionate or nostalgic (stained and sooty rather than revamped in a sunny shade of  Wedgwood), or the former Midland Grand Hotel at the front of the station (now splendidly renovated), but something else.

Perhaps something more ambient, shall we say, an ache for the whole atmosphere of the area as, for very many decades, it used to be. Is it contents or contexts, or both, that you crave but cannot have? Midland Road, fog and coal dust? Perhaps a sneaking admiration for the cluster of gasholders (Doric again), the mysterious and possibly dodgy businesses operating from the murky arches beneath the platforms, the seedy tenement blocks and alleys off Pancras Road (alluded to in Orwell’s “1984”), or any number of features which helped to generate such an intensely noir atmosphere for this part of the city.

For noir is the word, in any language. Appositely, that great early psychogeographer Ian Nairn (1930-1983) commented that the only true colour for the station was jet black. He was right, of course, perverse though it is to insist after the thorough and brilliant makeover by Alastair Lansley et al. And not only the station. Noir all around; surround-noir. In the immediate environs, until redevelopment, well … you might score something unusual, get solicited, mugged, murdered, you might jot down a rare engine number …  

Unfortunately, sadly, no longer. Today you can only imagine, and sigh. Despite the efforts of local action groups, little remains. A few gasholders have been cleaned up and reassembled in a new and spectacularly irrelevant context, that of luxury apartment living. As in (Q) “where do you live?” (A) “Inside a gasholder”. Gasholder N1. Mm. Terrific. Close by, novel opportunities are springing up for Retail and Refreshment, right next to the Regent’s Canal with its pleasure and leisure barges. This part of London was always good at R and R. Somers Town coalyards are now a depot for knowledge – the British Library and the Sir Francis Crick Biomedical Centre. On the other side of the tracks, colleges of art and galleries of illustration, a local HQ for Google, a German restaurant. Who would want to argue with that?

The station has been saved, but what if it’s the whole lot that you want to preserve, the way of life it represented, the people who passed through, in 1868, or 1890, or 1939, or 1955, or 1987, or 2005 ... ? Are you satisfied with just the station or do you need to pickle the entire past? Do you need pickled people too? Pickled Mum and Dad? Pickled grandparents? Do you want to sling out the books and the students and the researchers and bring back the smoke and the lowlifes? Does the pickling extend across Euston Road, up into Islington, across to Camden Town? Where does it end? Pickled London, pickled England? A pickled planet?

This is the proper nostalgia, isn’t it. It hurts too much. The past has gone for ever, and there’s no adequate way of holding onto it or bringing it back.

Sensitive conservation tries not just to preserve individual buildings but the character of their setting too, the entire neighbourhood and way of life. Laudable though this is as a theoretical objective – even if unsubtly themed, heritaged and quartered - to anyone with feelings and imagination it is unlikely to succeed in any meaningful way, and it certainly hasn’t happened at St Pancras. Anyway, it’s too late now. The crucial life saving operation has been successful, survival will continue, but although the patient is recognisable and functions well, he’s no longer quite the person he once was. Never mind. Be grateful for what you see around you. It’s better than most.

The blunt-nosed whining Eurostars unload their passengers, load up, and whine off again towards their long tunnel. A whole new range of human associations has been created or encouraged – and the process continues. The station itself has (like many prime transportation nodes) become a significant retail outlet, complete with farmers’ market, champagne and sushi bars, high end confectionery, a pub named after Sir John Betjeman with an ambience and a clientele he would hate, free pianos (one donated by Sir Elton John) on which to show off one’s tonkering abilities before boarding. Outside, the dubious auto repair shops, the pushers and the streetwalkers have had to move somewhere else. No one was going to slap a preservation order on them. Observe the Betjeman statue, which is convincing (although he does look more than slightly like a lost Paddington Bear newly emerged from darkest Peru, only at the wrong terminus). Less good (subjective judgement) is the rucksack-bearing double sculpture by Paul Day officially known as “The Meeting Place” but sometimes unkindly dubbed “The St Pancras Bomber”. However, enjoy.

But it’s not the same.

The urban context of St Pancras has been transformed to the extent that – from a nostalgic agenda – it is effectively destroyed. We have the physical context, the roof and the platforms, the brickwork vigorously scrubbed, the concourse and the hotel and all the rest of it bustling, thriving, humming. Everything else is irretrievable. Even how it looked inside is hard to recall since the dramatic internal rearrangement (the heroic atrial surgery) of the station’s facilities – the dark and dingy ticket hall, the gents’ loos with their strongly odoured disinfectant crystals and urinals clustered geometrically around supporting columns, W. H. Smith’s in the corner, the ancient smell of mailbags, the two flights of narrow, pokey steps twisting down towards the Underground, the incomprehensible echoing announcements … “will be calling at Market Harboroughboroughboroughough …”

In a sensible frame of mind we know that we can’t formaldehyde an entire neighbourhood, and we can’t halt time, especially in such a valuable location location location as St Pancras. To wish otherwise isn’t merely perverse, isn’t merely wanting to play at model railways, to play at trains. It’s akin to playing God. Perhaps that’s exactly what we want to do. Sometimes it’s good not to be sensible.