An education

As I promised - or threatened - in my previous blog, not having much in the way of new material, I’m forced back upon personal recollection for subject matter. And so it is today, a few days after my birthday. I’ve been looking through some old photographs, and came across one of the statue of Sir John Betjeman. Here it is, the poet laureate who saved St Pancras from the vandals, commemorated in situ, very rightly so, beneath the vast arched roof, although looking uncannily like a little lost bear who survived the journey from darkest Peru - only to be discovered in the wrong railway station. 

 “I wonder if the Browns have been able to find any marmalade anywhere”

Hilariously, very late in life, interviewed somewhere in Cornwall, the good Sir John was asked if he had any regrets. He replied that he hadn’t had enough sex. Somehow one felt that wasn’t the expected answer, splendid though it was. Enough sex? He should have been so lucky, going to Marlborough College and all that; he should have tried going to my school. But perhaps he was thinking about his life in general, rather than early concerns of a curricular nature.

Anyway, it got me reminiscing about one particular afternoon that I may have (only) slightly misremembered. One of the dubious benefits of attending a boys-only school was an adolescence spared the unpleasantries associated with the slightest awareness of the opposite, er, you know, er, the opposite. Until, that is, one dark afternoon in the depths of the Swinging Sixties, one dark enough to hide most of the embarrassment for all concerned, when the powers that be decreed we should be shown a couple of films of an, er, educational nature. In a very dark room. 

As I say, maybe there are some errors in my memory, but what I recall is as follows. The first film was American (so it was really a movie, wow, with the potential for moving parts), and concerned an American teenage boy. At the risk of cheap accusations of rhyming slang we’ll call him Hank, a young lad who had a major problem concerning, well, you know.  His girl friend, called Cindy Lou, shall we say, lived on the next block. As far as we could tell the two of them had never actually met, but that’s obviously not the point, is it. First thing in the morning Hank would phone Cindy Lou and say “Hi honey, my acne is no better”, and she would reply “oh you poor honey, you really must take more showers”. He would then do so, and around midday he would call Cindy Lou again to report that his facial blemishes still showed no sign of improvement. “Oh you poor honey” she would purr, while her mother hovered in the background,  all gingham, cupcakes and ‘I Love Lucy’. In the evening, following several more showers, the cutaneous manifestations of teenage hormone storm would be worse than ever. “You must take another shower, honey”. 

As the narrator implied, growing up and facing problems of, er, you know, can be, as it were, you know, hard. There’s nothing worse than acne – except perhaps being called Hank and living in Zanesville, Ohio.

Luckily, my friends and I all lived in sensible places, and none of us had names like Hank, or girl friends, or acne, or showers, or phones.  Phones? You must be joking. Next to the local shops there was the phone, a disgusting red kiosk housing a contraption into which one could insert pennies when instructed to “press button B”. However, such facilities were only to be used for reporting the deaths of close relatives and were certainly not intended for frivolous purposes like giving status reports on facial dermatitis. And they could only be used if one was wearing a tie and standing up straight. We were, after all, British. Nobody had showers. We had a bath once a week - assuming we’d remembered to buy some paraffin, Esso Blue or Aladdin Pink, naturally - to help unfreeze the bathroom. Thus we were spared one of the major problems of, er, you know, although we did start to form an unhappy idea of what it must be like to be American, an idea that, in retrospect, was perhaps not entirely accurate. Mind you, look at the mess they’re in now. What a shower.

Be that as it may, the second film was British, had been produced by James Watt, directed by Joseph Bazalgette, and sponsored by I. K. Brunel to the considerable tune of thirteen shillings and sixpence.  Its title was “A Reliable Guide for the Growing Boy”, and it presented the anatomy and physiology of the male urogenital system as an elaborate construction of tubes, pumps, conveyor belts, condensers, trunnions, valves, boilers, the roof of the aforementioned poet-containing St Pancras Station, cantilevers, Archimedes screws (does he?  what does that mean?), pistons, pulleys, and locomotive turntables. Everything highly efficient, obeying the laws of conservation of matter and of energy, Boyle’s Law too, nothing wasted, not one drop, and all Made in England and very clean. No bad language or unnecessary filth.

At the end of the film the master in charge vanished through a hole in the floor and the lights came on.

Phew, that was a relief, we blinked. So now we knew. More than a relief, it was an education.

The threshold of the age of autophagy

The day before my twenty-first birthday, after morning lectures, I took a train into Paddington, accompanied by Juan, my Venezuelan neighbour who was going to Hammersmith Hospital for a consultation about the painful rheumatism affecting his hands. On arrival in London, he bought me a coffee and went on his way. I crossed to Fenchurch Street, and bought a day return to Shoeburyness (80 pence). While on the journey I read some of Solzhenitsyn’s “One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich”. The Thames estuary came into sight, one of my favourite bits of coastline, so I put the book away and before long arrived at the end of the line. 

Armed with OS map Number 162, “Southend-on-Sea”,  one inch to the mile, published 1957, price seven shillings and sixpence, cloth-backed, total imperial luxury, I headed north from Shoeburyness station. I took the road towards Foulness, for I had spotted on the map a waterway called New England Creek, and had formed the idea that beyond it was a small area that might – or should - be called New England Island. For my milestone birthday, into adulthood, I thought that would be somewhere suitably symbolic to visit, even if it was only a patch of Essex mud. A New England, a fresh start. I walked out of Shoeburyness and through places with odd corners and malign-looking inhabitants. Through Great Wakering and Samuel’s Corner. Off to the right, the North Sea and the fabled Maplin Sands, already being considered for London’s third airport and, under the soubriquet of Boris Island, wittered about - still runway-less - to this day.

I reached a barrier across the road; a military checkpoint. “And where are we going today, laddie?” “Er, towards Foulness”. At that precise moment, some distance ahead, came the loud crump of munitions. Perfect timing. “I don’t think so, squire. We’re in the middle of training”.

Welcome to adult life. I smartly about-turned and headed back, past the malignant corners and the odd inhabitants, and caught the next train out.

Later, in the evening sunshine on Primrose Hill, which I’d never visited before, I sat near the summit admiring the view towards the recently constructed Snowdon Aviary, Centre Point and the Post Office Tower, symbols of the decade just passed, and composed a sort of manifesto about coming of age – what I had done, where I had got to, where I wanted to go. Then I walked down across the park and returned to base. Mercifully, the manifesto soon disappeared.

Now it’s the eve of another milestone birthday. No more manifestos, but something more like an article of surrender. Now isn’t the time to be having a midlife crisis, so I shan’t be investing in a Harley-Davidson or a red Ferrari, parachuting onto the summit of the Matterhorn or walking to the South Pole, starting a new family with a Polynesian pole-dancer or having the operation so I can enter a convent. Now is not the time to be jumping out of my comfort zone, although I might gingerly explore its blurred edges. I might, for instance, consider a new pair of slippers, try to remember a few more words of Welsh like you see on bilingual roadsigns, become a more pro-active gardener, or listen to more Elgar than is strictly necessary. At The New Thirty (see blog posting for 1st June), while one should not rule out new activities - absolutely not - I feel that one should start to behave largely within the perimeters and parameters of expectation, not out of consideration for others, but for oneself, because one has accepted what one is. Circumstances of birth, parentage, location, education, time in history, the accidents and coincidences of life and opportunity, have made one what one is essentially always going to be. Now is the time to get on with it.

There are boundaries, limitations, preferred territories which it is absurd to try and deny or disrespect, and it is largely within these constraints that henceforward one will operate. This, basically, is it, this is all there is, all there is ever going to be. 

Input will surely affect output. One will begin to ransack the past for things to say in order to try and communicate, in an ongoing act of autophagy, of eating oneself, of draining the swamps of fickle memory. A meaty forearm here, a juicy earlobe there, a tasty buttock somewhere else; when you get to my age you have to bite what you can reach. This tendency for devouring oneself is no doubt augmented by the current viral pandemic, by the restraints imposed by lockdown, and in my own case by this entirely unnecessary habit of blogging. Perhaps I should keep stumm.

As one grows older, if one is fortunate to age in reasonable health, one can expect that the tendency towards self-consumption will become more pronounced, until most of the substance has been used up and one has reduced to a skeleton of core fixations, into an etiolated being boring others to death with the same old pointless and increasingly disjointed, mangled, predictable anecdotes and derailed trains of thought. Ultimately, a time will come when even these cannot be accessed, even via the most tortuous routes of mental association and by the well-rehearsed promptings of one’s kind and patient relatives. And then what happens? What is left? Is what is left what one truly is, what one has been all along, no longer worried by detail or meaningfulness or relevance, no longer clothed in the flatteries of language and productive life? What then?

I wonder if I’ll get some new slippers for my birthday.

A memorial to suffering

A few days ago in our local cemetery I tried, and failed, to find the grave of a teacher at my old junior school. Despite my failure at identifying the exact plot I’m pretty confident, however, and very happy, that he’s six feet under, somewhere in the vicinity. It’s just that I couldn’t definitively locate him.

We’ll call him Old L. He wasn’t particularly old, mid-forties I should guess, at the time I had to endure him, nor is the descriptor ‘Old’ a mark of cosy familiarity. Few people in my life have I loathed or feared more. A “face like thunder” was his norm (on good days he had a slight facial resemblance to Tony Hancock at his most lugubrious), with an habitual expression of contempt for his pupils, a bitingly sarcastic Welsh accent, and a well developed appetite for doling out punishment. I’ve never heard anyone else say “well done” so sarcastically, even if he occasionally meant it. He was an ogre and, as my dad would have said, a thoroughly nasty piece of work.

Old L’s pedagogic forté  was plastic work. Proper schools had woodwork or metalwork, but my school so very typically had plastic work. I suspect the headmaster, let’s call him Mr A - a man with eyes too close together and a personality that could pass as a psychopathic parody of Captain Mainwaring, always busily strutting about barking ridiculous commands - perceived plastics as the future, as leading edge technology. He would want to be trendy, even though the word hadn’t come into vogue; the Sixties having not quite got going in the manner we like to remember them. If you know where to look you can find Mr A on the internet, described as a “strict disciplinarian”  and “rather scary”– and we’re not talking specialised contact sites either, just the reminiscences of former pupils.

Plastic work with Old L took place on Monday and Wednesday afternoons. I used to dread these days, and during the lunchtimes beforehand I would be hardly able to eat, counting the minutes. For the best part of a year it became my personal nightmare.

The objective, ostensibly, was to produce supposedly useful articles out of perspex (aka Plexiglas or polymerised methyl methacrylate). My first production was a key ring, a small rectangular piece of sickly pale green opaque perspex, smoothed at the corners, and with a hole drilled through towards one end. Considered retrospectively and in the most positive light, it was all rather Festival of Britain in appearance, and  the exercise was, as far as it went, a success. I would happily have made another key ring, several key rings, in fact, but the annoying thing about teachers is that they always want to go on to something else, don’t they, something cleverer and more ambitious. They’re never satisfied, are they. Old L was no exception.

So it was that for the rest of the year my sole output was a single ashtray, made from translucent orange perspex. Approximately three inches square it was made in two sections, a bottom part which was simply a square of plastic chamfered at the corners, and a top part. The top part was far more ingenious, more hi tech. It consisted primarily of a hole, with two shallow grooves (readily made with the convex backside of a file), on  opposite corners, upon which to place smouldering cigarettes, and again with rounded corners to match those of the base. This large central hole in the top part was made by initially scoring its circumference on the surface, I forget how, drilling a few holes at random and then joining them together with cuts from a fretsaw - so that a central jagged part fell out - and then filing the rough edges until a smooth circle was obtained.

I soon learned that the smell of perspex powder, especially when hot from the friction of a file, is not pleasant. I’m also sure I inhaled plenty of perspex dust in those gung-ho pre-Health and Safety days, and I’ve a strong suspicion that the long term consequences of such inhalation are unknown to medical science. Perhaps one day someone will cut me open, find me full of bright orange micro-pellets, and deem me to be a danger to marine ecology.

The crucially worrying thing was that the two sections of the ashtray had to be perfect before Old L would grant permission for them to be glued together with some special acrylic glue. The last stage before inspection was therefore a meticulous polishing, and since I was too afraid to seek permission I spent a lot of time polishing. Eventually it got to the point where I couldn’t go and see Old L because I should have passed that stage ages before; other boys were now making really clever things like tea trays. If anyone asked, and Old L fortunately didn’t, I was already on my second ashtray or maybe my third. If anyone wanted to know, I really liked ashtrays and had lots of relatives who were exceptionally heavy smokers.

I did entirely unnecessary polishing for most of an entire term, and never has time passed more slowly and more fearfully. The speed of time approached asymptotically to zero; at this rate, I could live for ever. It was interminable; if only I could have obtained some kind of zen enlightenment from this experience, but all I felt was fear and loathing, while I polished away with the liquid Brasso or the Dura-Glit pads. The latter came in yellow and blue tins and should have been pleasantly addictive, sniffable and hallucinogenic, but the circumstances denied such escape routes. Fear spreads to associated artefacts.  

Eventually I seized the moment – carpe diem as they say in Latin, which translates accurately into English as a crappy day to beat all crappy days – and glued the two halves together without seeking permission. I then hid the wretched thing and, somehow, life moved on.

At the end of term I took the ashtray home, for my father to use, since around that time he was smoking cigarettes in modest quantities. He was given the honour of inaugurating my masterpiece, and performed a convincing pretence of being duly thrilled and ecstatic at the opportunity. My mother also looked on with eager anticipation. What actually happened next, was, it has to be said, a bit of a surprise to us all. At the first hint of hot cigarette – at the sort of distance we would now associate with contactless transactions – a few fiery particles of ash fell onto the ashtray, causing local bubbling and melting of the perspex. Immediately, it was all too apparent what was going to happen should the ceremony proceed further - my year’s torment would mutate into a molten orange blob.

Luckily my father valued artistry over practicality, and longevity over spectacle. He sharply withdrew the smouldering ciggie. Having saved the day, or at least the ashtray, it seemed only right that the unusable item should be preserved – not as a reminder of the sadistic idiocy of Old L – but as a memorial to pointless suffering, and it was given a proud position on the window sill in our front room. For many years it existed quietly thus. You’ll be happy, I’m sure, to know that it has survived the intervening  six decades, and can finally enjoy its moment of glory. Here it is:

Taking – and getting - the hump

On the subject of my Spotify playlist, again, I’ve been revisiting my enthusiasm that peaked earlier this year for the works of Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno. Fortunately, Spotify uses predictive text. One Eno track I believe is particularly relevant during these diseased times, “Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy)”. Though, as regards the coronavirus, we don’t have a mountain as such to take, but we do have a hump, and it’s certainly one ideally taken by strategy.

Actually a series of humps, but any strategy we may have once glimpsed has by now fallen by the wayside. I do realise, of course, that humps have become something of a personal fixation (it’s probably an age thing) in these postings.

While we don’t know the truth about the precise timing and causation of the start of the coronavirus pandemic, we do know that from early March reasonably accurate figures have been kept in the UK for proven incidence of the disease and, sadly, for fatalities linked directly to it. At the outset we were told that the figures would rise, plateau, and then decline, in a recognisable hump, with deaths likely to reach 20,000. The picture as it has developed across time indeed represents a fairly well drawn hump; the projected trajectory was accurate in outline. If asked to draw a hump, yes, I think it could plausibly be titled “Covid-19 2020, side view”. Happily, at the moment, we are descending the right hand side of the hump at some speed. Whether we will whizz straight to the bottom or have further humps or humplets to negotiate remains to be seen. Outrageously, the final death toll will be far higher than at first estimated.

As for strategy, early on it was proposed that there would be a sequence of five stages leading us out of the crisis and ultimately to the resumption of normal life. So that was another type of hump for us to be confronted with, but one that once “taken”, would see us through. While – perhaps unadvisedly – suggested dates were attached to these five phases, it was emphasised that progress could only realistically be governed by the infection figures. If they worsened again, restrictions could be re-imposed and progress to the next stage delayed. As a strategic approach this seemed to me perfectly logical. Lockdown would be relaxed in stages only when it was safe to do so. The ideal was that the hump in restrictive measures would mirror the hump of disease incidence; the latter hump would decline in response to the decline in the former. The two would proceed in parallel. I quite liked the hump model of the disease; it was tangible, achievable, finite, end-in-sightable, and all in all, adequately humpy.

Meanwhile, other humps were forming – enlarging, peaking and plateauing, declining. Humps of anxiety, fear, anger, sorrow, and so forth aroused directly in response to personal tragedy or family circumstances, and to news reports of what was happening to patients, to the economy, and to the way the crisis was being handled or mishandled. Whatever they thought privately, most people behaved well, showed their Thursday evening appreciation for the NHS and other care workers, and probably for a while overlooked some of the catastrophes that might one day be laid at the door of the government - like the delay in banning immigration, the situation in care homes, the acquisition of protective equipment, and the apparently headless chicken style of management – particularly after Boris was hospitalised. All those promises about “ramping up” “world beating” track and trace, antibody tests, vaccine research, equipment magicked together by the manufacturers of vacuum cleaners and aircraft engines, rapidly built hospitals with not enough staff and, surprisingly, not enough patients; one thing after another with seemingly no follow-up - left one feeling bemused. I still want to know if I had coronavirus in January. By and large though, in this phase of the outbreak the growth of the disease and public behaviour were in tandem. Perhaps, retrospectively, we will now have a hump of nostalgia, when we look back at these “good old days” of the crisis, when the situation was, despite all its ghastliness, seemingly more under control and everyone was polite.

But then came some destabilising factors – warm weekends, VE+75 Day, the irresponsible behaviour of certain prominent individuals – followed by some new humps encouraged by the media, humps of expectation, of indignation, of over-eager anticipation of relaxation measures, of doubt about the advice we had been given, of financial distress in the travel and hospitality sectors. Humps of impatience; the ‘end of the beginning’ mentality, gate fever. Finally, a considerable section of the population, though surely only a minority, decided that they had had enough of being told what to do and – to use a favourite expression of my late grandmother who originated in one of the most deprived parts of the East End – we learned that these individuals had “got the hump”, were having none of it. Without consideration for others or for the environment they had – entirely predictably - gone off to parks, seaside resorts, beauty spots and elsewhere, behaving irresponsibly, leaving behind physical evidence of their unlovely little lives.

So, starting off with a very real hump of reality, namely a potentially deadly disease, plus a sensible hump of proposals for getting through it, all the humps have now become misaligned, desynchronised from one another, spread about chaotically, laughing at each other, threatening to negate the sacrifices made along the way by so many. In an ideal world the two basic humps would have mapped neatly onto each other; the disease would be in its final days and we would be looking forward to normal life any day now. Unfortunately we don’t live in an ideal world; we live in twenty-first century Britain with the sort of people who live here.