Daylight Robbery

Saturday

We put the clocks on an hour, well before bedtime. We’re getting to that sort of age, and we wouldn’t want to miss it, or do it twice. Hence the cautious approach, although since we remember to do it at all we conclude that we must still be enjoying moderate mental health. 

Sunday

Evidence of moderate mental health is immediately confounded in my case by the onset of vernal affective disorder, which is the technical name for the sagging sensation one gets when realising that soon it will be time to mow the lawn, to do the watering, to eat lettuce, to not eat soup for six months, to have to go for long walks, to unplug things in case it thunders, to not be able to wear one’s favourite pullover, to eat more lettuce, and to say “the evenings are starting to pull out” - thus sounding worryingly like one’s parents.

Monday

A fine morning. If the weather forecast is to be believed (sad that meteorology is still a faith-based system rather than an exact science), this will be the best day of the week. So, a walk in the park. Alas, no daffodils, no blossom, just the scraggy remnants of flattened crocuses and women gabbing into their phones while their offspring squeal delightedly at the sight of alfresco free range dog emptying. Later on I start to degroove the patio. Yes, since you asked, with a de-groover, though not all night long, baby. Daylight de-grooving only, not the late lamented Dud and Pete bag-based technique. A proper wooden de-groover. Made in England. The best.

Tuesday

Microsoft Word is having a good day. I copy some text into a new document and - having spent half an hour chasing two thirds of a page of blank space that’s appeared out of nowhere but keeps popping up somewhere else every time I move it - I realise eventually (silly me) that Word wants to start the document at page 49. Like most new documents do, obviously. Once I fix this, things are much better. Google are having a good day too. I use the world’s most popular search engine to look for Nepalese restaurants in Staines, in what used to be Middlesex. Google finds me approximately 63,000 of them, in just 0.51 seconds. I notice that the second one listed is actually in Hounslow, and that according to the census the population of Staines was in 2011 a mere 18,484, but no matter, it’s a technologically impressive feat. Not just “about half a second” but 0.51 seconds. Wow, that is precise.

Wednesday

Microsoft Word is having an even better day. I run the spellchecker across the aforementioned document and it stumbles over the adjective “Hitlerian”, highlights it in red as a possible misspelling, and suggests an alternative. Hitler Ian. Of course, that’s what I meant. Ian Hitler, yes, I can believe he’s a Microsoft employee, best buddy with Hiram H. Himmler, Gary Goering and Wayne Doughballs. Though probably not Adolf Zuckerberg.

Thursday

I attempt to book a hotel – one of a well-known American-owned chain – near Liverpool. Before I can submit my requirements, up pops a screen suggesting that I might be interested in staying at a hotel in Hicksville, Missouri. I switch to another website. Oh, the power of advertising.

Good Friday

I continue de-grooving, with my lo-tech de-groover that does what I alone want it to do, as I push it purposefully along the moss-tinged grooves of my groovy patio. I’m so glad that my de-groover is so technologically advanced, indeed so smart, so intelligent, that it doesn’t ask me if I’d like to de-groove a patio in Zanesville, Ohio, instead. Or check on my serum potassium levels, or order me a pizza, or tell me that “de-groover” isn’t in its dictionary, or address me chummily by my first name and request some feedback on the quality of my experience today. 

Saturday

Well, here we are. It’s raining again. My faith in weather forecasting is restored – although since it’s a bank holiday weekend it’s not exactly difficult to get that one right, is it. I run the spellchecker across this blog piece, before posting it, and am once again reminded of the continued existence of Ian Hitler.

Hallo Spacebo

The only time I’ve been into the house of a Russian family I was fed repeatedly with enormous quantities of homemade cake. Massive amounts, which I felt unable to decline for fear of giving offence. While some may construe this as an ingenious technique of attempted assassination, a lethal spike of hyperglycemia undetectable at autopsy, I prefer to see it as a mark of generosity and desire for friendship.

I speak as I find; I don’t have a problem with Russia or with Russians in general. Like us, they are proud and clever, with much to boast of in the arts and the sciences; they are a rightfully stroppy people who down the ages have regularly been screwed by their leaders – and to an unimaginably greater extent than we have. During the twentieth century they suffered immensely, and their role in defeating Nazism was crucial. They were, and should be, our ally. Like all groups of people they include a few who are unattractive in various ways. I do hope this spat we’re having with them can soon be resolved, that the bogus accusations of Russophobia can be demonstrated to be false, and that Russia can be readmitted to the great family of European civilisation where it belongs. As part of The West. We don’t need Russia as The Enemy.

However, a couple of weeks ago we learned a new word: novichok. The Russian news agency had the insolent but amusing insight to suggest that this was our invention because it sounds Russian. As indeed it does. The Russian language, like all languages, has an aura, a flavour, an accent that tinges the items it names. It smears them with a patina, or even a putina, of Russianness. The American cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter has discussed this idea at length, and used as an example the word “squaw” - which simply means wife or woman - but which has an indelible association with what for most of my life  were known in this country, without harming anyone, as Red Indians (folk who presumably now inspire the politically correct game of Cattlepersons and Native North Americans  - no guns, please, not even toy ones). Etymology has subtler consequences than the dictionary would imply.

Growing up through the 1960s, for me the idea of Russia was intimately connected with science and technology, especially with nuclear physics and space exploration. I was never worried by the Cold War, oblivious to the Cuban missile crisis, unaware of the gulag, unfazed by that little man banging his shoe on the table (why is it always little men?); I noticed only the good bits. The first Sputnik, in 1957, was as much a premature opener for the Swinging Sixties as was Elvis or ‘Look Back in Anger’; Yuri Gagarin was the first space superstar, whose boyish visage outlasted them all, right up until Tim Peake. This was the future, this was modernism at its most dentally whiter than white.

I think it was the ‘Sunday Express’ that did a two-page spread on the Russian language, and at an impressionable age I was captivated by its appearance. It was a long while before I heard it spoken. When you don’t understand it properly, spoken Russian sounds sexy, hence John Cleese (him again) and his seductive use of it in “A Fish Called Wanda”, and Anthony Burgess’s adoption of Russian vocabulary into Nadsat, a street patois suitable for the horrorshow cheenas, malinki malchiks and other assorted chelovyeks of Thamesmead, S.E.28.

Also, as befits our Soviet-era-and-beyond suspicions, it’s a sneaky language full of false Cyrillic friends, letters like B, C, H and P which are not what they seem; R and N exotically reversed; the numbers 3, 6 and 61 as letters; Os leaning phonetically into As; characters with curly bits strangely reminiscent of Uncle Joe’s moustache; others resembling pairs of letters krushchsched together; miscellaneous twiddly bits. And all those liquid consonants and dark Ls and glo’al stops. A language for the Sixties - let me hear your balalaikas ringing out, all you need is lyubrication. A language impersonal and objective, economic on verbs and articles both definite and indefinite; everything so matter of fact. They even had cities that sounded scientific and futuristic and surreally radioisotopic – Akademgorodok, carved out of the frozen tundra near Novosibirsk; Magnitogorsk and Elektrostal; Chelyabinsk-60, a putative droogie for strontium-90 and uranium-235. Much to admire.

Though not polonium-210. While not in any way wishing to condone or belittle recent tragedies, we can perhaps remind ourselves of a central component of fictional popular culture over the last half century or so – the crazy dictator bent on world domination, the psychopathic doctor with an unhealthy interest in pain mechanisms, the unstoppable invention that will inflict megadeath, the antidote-less toxin effective in sub-microscopic doses and injectable via a fiendishly adapted fountain pen, the whole humour of espionage and counter-espionage, terror and counter-terror, paranoia and counter-paranoia. Because at one level – though not for the victims – it can be hilarious. Where would James Bond and half the film industry be without it? Even the dalek is named after the Russian word meaning ‘far away’. Is there anything more homely than a dalek? Since the mid twentieth century we’ve laughed with vicarious terror at SPECTRE and SMERSH as dastardly foes; and I expect KGB and FSB employees have done likewise, perhaps as research for role models.

Fact and fiction sometimes crossed over, it was as though one inspired the other. In real life we enjoyed the Krogers and their microdots in a stunningly ordinary little bungalow, Georgi Markov and his brolly wielding assailant, Eugene Ivanov and his lady friend, countless deceits and defections.  It was simply what went on, it became a sort of expectation, toxicology and betrayal as tropes of international behaviour. Perhaps in some quarters it still is, which doesn’t mean that it’s right.

The coolest fictional agent ever was one of ours but had a Russian name – or should I say a Russian sounding name – Ilya Kuryakin. I offer this as idiotic proof-lite that our cultures were never that far apart. The actor concerned was born in Glasgow. “Mr Kuryakin, please go and find THRUSH and sprinkle some deadly clotrimazole on it”.

 
OK, let’s be quite candid about this. Silly is silly, sinister is sinister, and we need to remain cautious and to complain and condemn when we have to, while not getting carried away. We should open Channel D (for diplomacy). We ought to be – we need to be - friends. Thank you and dasvidanya.

Come right back

One of the themes of psychogeography is that the historical past can linger into the present, co-existing with the physical surroundings, if only we could see. Supposedly, events from long ago hover in the air above the city streets, or adhere to buildings, sometimes lending a frisson of evil or an aura of sadness, pervading the surroundings with a permanent mood for those sensitive enough to detect it. Physical science demands that, if no molecular or conventionally energetic traces remain, this is a delusional belief, and that any such claims are “all in the mind”. I lean towards the scientific viewpoint. However …

The centre of Nottingham is conventionally held to be the Old Market Square, known to some older residents as Slab Square, and colloquially simply as The Square. It is, in fact, anything but square, more of an awkwardly warped irregular quadrilateral, but it is the largest central space of its kind in England, allegedly, originates in pre-Norman times, for centuries functioned as a market, was rebuilt in the 1920s in an attractive but bastardised art deco style, and then again in 2007 was expensively reconditioned - despite popular protest - in a style felt to be more appropriate to our times. Which, unwittingly perhaps, it is. Along the southern side, known as South Parade, is the NET tram stop. Here I quite frequently alight, do what I have to do in town, and head home. Town isn’t somewhere I want to linger these days. To the extent that I notice anything at all, I see and feel the Square as it is today. Why would it be otherwise?

Until, that is, 7.30 on a Sunday evening a few weeks ago, and the first episode of BBC1’s “Hold the Sunset”. This is a gentle enough sitcom set in the leafy avenues of Richmond. The only reason I watch the series is because, along with Alison Steadman, it stars John Cleese, and therefore it ought to be good. Oh dear. How I long for Cleese to say something outrageous and funny. He plays a congenial character, one with which it is easy to empathise (we share similar height and paunch). But wouldn’t it be wonderful if he could erupt with a torrent of that famously inventive invective, of surreal, over-the-top, Sydney Opera House and wildebeest sarcasm. It almost happened last week, almost, but no. I look at that face, a TV face I’ve known now for half a century, now chubbier and less angular, but the herald of literally hundreds of well-remembered priceless moments from ‘Python’ and ‘Fawlty’. I can almost feel the hilarity waiting to burst forth again, that curiously feline twitching at the corners of the mouth, an aged and updated version of that Anne Elk (Miss) look. Alas, no. No theories about the brontosaurus. Not this time. A couple of weeks ago I managed a smirk when Bournemouth, Weymouth and Ilfracombe were cited as “front runners” in research for a holiday destination. Conspicuously not Torquay or Weston-super-Mare, but in the same humorous direction. But that’s about it. Sorry, I digress.

The opening credits to “Hold the Sunset” are accompanied by the song “Have I the right?”, by the Honeycombs. The moment it starts, it is the summer of 1964, and I am in the Old Market Square as it was, no trams and pedestrianised nothingness, only buses and trolleybuses, chunky urbanity, boys and girls on their way home from school. Me, just turned fourteen, raging with testosterone and teenage angst, ogling a girl from the school across the road from ours, a girl whose name I will never know, who I will never dare speak to, a girl who will catch a different bus. But all the same, a girl with whom I imagine myself to be deeply in love. The Honeycombs are high in the charts and during the holidays they will reach Number One. I am waiting on South Parade for the No. 14 bus due at 4.35 at precisely the spot where – more than half a century later - I will step off the tram, with no recollection of the past and only the vaguest memory of what that girl looked like.

Now, back in the present, one unexpectedly re-encountered piece of music has succeeded in piercing decades of tired acceptance of a familiar scene and taken me back to somewhere that - so it seems - still exists, co-existent with the physical template of today’s Square. Instantly, it is all there, the total experience; in the (misappropriated) words of the song it has ‘come right back’.  A Proustian madeleine delivered via a record charged with adolescent hormones and produced by the brilliant but troubled Joe Meek and now used on a mildly disappointing comedy programme. Out of the blue.

A couple of other relevant points. One is that this experience seems to refer back to one of those moments when, slightly self-consciously, one thinks “I will remember this” – although often one doesn’t. I don‘t think this mental quirk has a technical name, at least, none of which I’m aware. The other point, more psychogeographic, is the old and very iffy business of thoughts and feelings attaching themselves to physical objects, so-called psychometry. As I implied at the beginning, I have my doubts, but this particular Honeycombs-triggered remembrance opens up for me two related episodes of musical thoughts “posted” at about the same time around the Square. On the north side, known formally as Long Row, is a large branch of Debenham’s, for many years Griffin and Spalding’s, somewhere I always thought of as an ‘old lady shop’. A Nottingham institution, after which we named our two goldfish when the kids were little. Now, once again, as it used to be until I forgot, attached firmly and at a slight angle to the columns in front of the main entrances to the store is an audio memory of “Concrete and Clay”, a catchy little number by an outfit called Unit 4 + 2, which reached the top of the charts in April 1965. A little way down, on the west side of the centre of the Square, where the 41 and 43 trolleybuses used to pause on their route down to Trent Bridge, is a sound trace of Tommy Roe’s 1966 hit “Sweet Pea”. I’m not sure whether this song title has any olfactory connection with the adjacent subterranean loos that were there then, so central and publicly convenient that they were “rationalised” at the last revamp, in favour of a less useful water feature.

 
I know people often claim that certain songs remind them of particular events or places, but I wonder if this example of induction of involuntary memory by music is unusual in the annals of psychogeography. Does it ‘take the biscuit’?  Without the promise of Cleese it would never have happened. I await to see what happens on “Hold the Sunset” tomorrow evening.

Beyond my Ken

The popularity of e-mail, text, and other asynchronous keypad-based messaging systems may mean that these days we engage in fewer phone conversations with people we don’t really know. I’m excluding, of course, the unwanted nuisance calls such as:

·        

          (1)  The tiresome old tosser who declares “this is a free message”. I suspect this is PPI-related, but he’s never got beyond this vacuous announcement, so I don’t know;

·       (2)  The caller, who after a delay of several seconds and a few electronic clunks, states: “I am Adam [sometimes it’s Adrian or John or another very English name]. Oh dear. You are having an accident the terribleness of which is mightily flabbergasting. I am having to ask you some questions. What is your name?”;

·       (3)  The chirpy young guy who always rings in the middle of tea, has an impenetrable Celtic accent and an unspellable name to match, but as far as I can tell is (a) on chummy terms with me and has known me for most of my life, (b) is concerned that I’m having a good day, (c) is not ever so concerned that I’m in the middle of tea, and (d) is very interested in offering me a uniquely special and evanescent deal on a complicated tariff for one of the less interesting utilities - all right, gas.

I’ve no idea what any of these people look like, yet instantly I hear them, with their time-wasting crass intrusions upon my privacy, a fully formed image fills my mind’s eye. It is, respectively:

·       
      (1) Someone who looks like Gene Hackman in “The French Connection”, wearing a moth-eaten blue overcoat, and for whom – given his apparent age and respectability - I feel pity. That anyone has to make a living in this dismal way, even though he’s only a recording;

·        (2) A crusty, lavishly white –whiskered old fakir (or words to that effect), but again someone for whom I feel a degree of sympathy. No sensible person would do this if they didn’t have to. I can almost hear the monsoon beating down on a corrugated iron roof;

·         (3) An extremely irritating one-hit Irish “rock star” with an aggressively  sanctimonious ego of galactic proportions. No, not that one, the other one. No sympathy.

I’d be quite happy never to hear from any of these unfortunates again, and since signing up a year or two ago to the Telephone Preference Service – touch wood – I haven’t.  But they do allow me to introduce a topic, namely, the sort of mental picture one forms of people one has spoken to several times on the phone, but never met in the flesh, nor seen a photograph of.

Back in the bad old four letter days of work I frequently – say, once a fortnight or so – had to phone a colleague called Ken, who was based a couple of miles away. Ken was always friendly and helpful and a pleasure to talk to, but I didn’t meet him face to face until several years had passed. From the outset I had formed a strong mental image of him, that he was aged about forty, not all that tall, had a moustache, and looked a lot like George Orwell, as per the classic photos. The image was unchanging and enduring. Then one day I had to meet him in real life, for an hour or so, in his office. A delightful man, as I expected, but looking nothing like how I imagined. Instead, he strongly resembled another Ken, a more famous one, comedian Kenneth Horne, he of “Beyond our Ken” and “Round the Horne”, those innocently smutty radio highlights of my childhood Sundays. Completely bald, very tall, not a hint of a moustache. A few greying wisps round the temples. In his early fifties. Not in the least Orwellian. I was astonished that my mental picture of him was so utterly wrong.

Over many years I continued to have pleasant phone conversations with Ken, and I continued to visualise him as before, as George Orwell, never as he actually was. The mind is a wonderfully inventive facility and in this instance was determined to overrule the evidence of my eyes. So much for the phone. I wonder if an ability to deduce erroneous and indelible facial features from the terse acronyms and emoticons of e-communications will ever become a topic for discussion, or whether another tiny opportunity for exercising the delusions of the imagination has been squeezed out of our lives by “progress”.

Domestic synaesthesia

For several years now, chilli con carne with a jacket potato has been a regular Thursday evening meal of ours. It’s within my extremely modest range of culinary capabilities, it’s tasty, and it permits me to experience – and thus to report on - a peculiar subjective phenomenon. At the stage in production where I shave a slice of butter from the butter dish and place it between the two halves of potato, I have an indefinable sense of Oxford. Not the city itself, or its colleges or even its name, but just a feeling of … Oxford. There’s nothing in our kitchen to cause such an association, apart from a jar of Frank Cooper’s Oxford marmalade, hidden away in a cupboard. And no, I’ve never attempted anything as disgusting as jacket potato with marmalade. I doubt that even Paddington Bear has ever been that gross. It’s nothing to do with that, but purely an odd and presumably inappropriate mental link between a specific buttery manoeuvre and the concept of Oxford.

As you probably fear, that isn’t the end of the matter. In a drawer close to where the butter dish resides is the key to our garden shed. This, in analogous fashion, causes me to think, not of Oxford, but of Hull. It’s a simple lever-type key, and I have wondered if its teeth spell out an art deco version of the word HULL, but I’ve checked and, no, they don’t. Another explanation is called for. Perhaps it’s because the shed is a bit out of the way and in the top right corner of the garden. Certainly there’s no way one could mistake our shed for a city of culture, or even an ex-one.  

Upstairs, in the bathroom, are my interdental toothbrushes, made by TePe of Malmö. I would like to say that they are specially made for me and flown in by courier every morning, but the truth is that my dentist keeps them in a big box in reception. They’re in two sizes, one yellow, one blue, representing – IKEA-like - the colours of the Swedish flag. The yellow brushes I think of as the Swedish brushes, which is odd though slightly sensible. The blue ones as … the Russian ones, with slight hints of “ruthenium”, the chemical element named after an old Latin word which coincidentally is also the root of the word “Russia”.

Thus I slide down a Pyeongchang-sized slippery slope towards madness. One comfort is that I’m not alone, and that someone who has always been very sane, and often very amusing, has been known to experience something similar, though more related to feelings of personality than to inappropriate intrusions of language. Playwright and national treasure Alan Bennett, on page 284 of his volume of diary entries called “Untold Stories”, recounts that on 8th January 2001 he noticed “how personalised and peopled the material world is at a level almost beneath scrutiny”. The “material world” in question was the contents of his cutlery drawer, which included some “friendly” wooden spoons, while others were “impersonal or without character”. There was “a friendly fork” and “a bad knife”. He acknowledged that setting down these observations in this way seemed close to insanity but that “it goes back to childhood when the entire household was populated with friends and not-friends and few objects were altogether inanimate, particularly knives and forks”. He concluded that, despite sixty years having passed and his kitchen having relocated from Leeds to Camden Town, “more traces of this animistic world persist” than he would like, “making a mockery of reason and sense”.

This is reassuring, because as well as the feelings about the butter, the shed key and the toothbrushes, I also have some peculiar feelings about items of cutlery, in particular half a dozen bone handled knives I inherited from my Welsh grandmother. Some of these have rectangular cross-sectioned handles, and others have handles with a curved profile. I avoid using the curved ones. I’m not sure what would happen if I did use them.

This isn’t madness - although just don’t get me started on spoons. It isn’t a phobia or a superstition as such, it isn’t even obsessive compulsive neurosis. It’s very slightly autistic, I suspect, with a large helping of our good friend the pathetic fallacy too, but mostly, I think, it’s a mild variety of synaesthesia. Neuroscientist Vilanayur Ramachandran, based at the University of California at San Diego, has commented that there is now virtually a synaesthesia industry. So be it, and  perhaps there should be. People who exhibit coloured hearing, “see” Tuesday as pink or the number 4 as blue, experience Tottenham Court Road station as sausage and eggs, or exhibit other explicit forms of sensory blending or crossover or mix-up, have become popular media fodder in recent years. I don’t enjoy anything as spectacular as that myself, although sometimes when listening to music I spontaneously generate geometric patterns or architectural fantasies in my mind’s eye. I do, however, believe that my ruminations around the house, and likewise those of Alan Bennett, as described above, are very much in the same territory as more blatant forms of synaesthesia.

 
Moreover, on the basis of absolutely no reliable evidence, I believe that, to a degree, we’re all synaesthetic, at least some of the time. While we use superficially synaesthetic metaphors constantly in everyday language – loud shirts, cool responses, heated arguments, pointed remarks, feeling down, sharp disagreements, real heavy man – and while in a small percentage of people synaesthesia takes its newsworthy forms, I suspect something more basic and pervasive, and that synaesthesia plays a fundamental role in the way we think.