RECALL OF TIME PAST


We live in age of constant change. This cliche is particularly true in the world of electronics, where today's must-have is tomorrow's old hat. Most of the exciting add-ons seem to me to be largely the result of nerds amusing themselves by seeing what new trick the box can be induced to perform, rather than arising from any deficiency they can supply.

And there is the tendency to confuse smooth technology with the need to have anything worthwhile to say. My experience of video games - very limited, gained from looking over younger shoulders - is that the images have become closer and closer to real time photography. This seems to me to have nothing to do with the value of what is being shown, which has no relation to any human sympathy, understanding, wit, articulateness, or any awareness of a world other than the non-existent virtual world in which so many young appear largely to live.


What is this extended approach march leading up to?


Only to this. As you know, I have an interest in the Victorian toy stage, which is a repository of a great deal of fascinating history which I shall be glad to expound to you any time you have an hour or two to spare. To the great majority this will seem the last asylum of the aging mind. Yet simply as an example of what was, and still may be, arrived at by the simplest of tools - in this case cardboard and paint - it is worth consideration. The greatest achievements of dramatic art are achieved by movements of men and material on a dusty stage, not by glossy video effects.


So here is a snatch of the world of the richly decorated theatres of the past, and the splendid effects that skilled technicians displayed in them, as recaptured in the cardboard world of 'penny plain and tuppence coloured'.

A QUESTION OF COLOUR

When you're choosing colours to distinguish three teams or three players you will automatically go for three primaries - red, yellow,blue. They are the most easily distinguished. But suppose you're designing for four teams - what's your fourth colour? Green, of course.

But why? Green is only one of three available secondaries. Why not orange, why not violet? But we all feel that green is the most distinctive. Orange might be a sort of weak red. Violet might be a kind of cool red. But green is no sort of yellow.

Why does green have this dominance over the other secondaries? Is it a matter of optics, something to do with how our eyes work? Or how our brains distinguish the messages that the retina sends? Is it a matter of familiarity - green being the most common colour to appear to us in large areas?

Or is it just tradition? Are children brought up to regard these as the inevitable four colours? Are school house sports teams distinguished by coloured motifs any more? I doubt if any infant minds are now greatly impressed by long winter evenings playing halma - if, indeed, they ever were.

Odd, this business of coloured playing pieces. Chess has only two uniforms, Black and White. Even if the exquisitely turned oriental pieces on the board are dyed crimson, officially they are Black. Strangely for a mathematician, Dodgson got it wrong. His Red Queen is the Black Queen of chess notation. But I suppose he wrote from the child's point of view, where the pieces are described as they appear on the board. Tenniel's illustration, being monochrome, would serve for either.

And while we're thinking about colour - what is happening to traffic lights? Clever lads were always keen to point out to their grandparents that the green lights were in fact blue-green to compensate for the yellowing effect of the foggy English climate. But now they seem to have gone turquoise. Are the authorities aware of some impending change in the colour of the atmosphere?

I have my doubts.

INTERIOR DECORATION

I have mentioned already a set of masks I have made for my own pleasure, based on an imaginary ballet of The Elements. In order to let us look at these occasionally I hang them, one at a time, in our hall, and rotate them with the seasons. A harmless eccentricity, I thought, until I remembered the picture of Mr. Pooter decorating his hall. Do I resemble him, I wondered, in such a pompous charade?

A disturbing idea - until I remembered that he, of course, was hanging a mass-produced plaster stag's head. This,he thought, gave his house 'style' (which in a sense it did). This seems to represent a level of absurdity all of its own, above which I feel a certain separation.

Still, it's odd, isn't it, what people display on their walls? I mean, of course, other people. One's own home merely shows a variety of interesting or amusing objects, all displaying the operation of a discerning mind. What, after all, could be a more rational ornament than the piggy-bank, an accurate representation of a Gloucester Old Spot, and affectionately known as Simpkin, which decorates our hearth?

And I can't feel that a frock-coat was ever a really suitable dress for doing anything - least of all amateur carpentry.

Here is Air -

LIVING ON CREDIT

Some months ago Tiresias took the opportunity to suggest that credit card companies had some responsibility for the approaching credit crisis, and that it was time that they took action to restrict the use of credit to sustainable levels.

Such is the influence of this blog that response was almost immediate. Egg took a stern line with customers who evidently had no intention of clearing their accounts, by blocking any further transactions. A harsh move, but one in the right direction.

Less commendable was their apparent attempted dropping of customers who regularly cleared their accounts by direct debit, presumably because they never paid exorbitant interest charges.

Is this the sort of action that Tiresias was recommending?

Er - well, no. But then, that's the way of fairy wishes. Readers of the brothers Grimm will know that they generally carry a nasty sting in the tail. Perhaps Tiresias would do better not to dabble in financial matters in future.

HELTER SKELTER

Shuffling the rim of the endless shore,

The holiday fun already a bore,

What are we going to do today

To fritter our empty lives away?

Here is a thrill you might enjoy,

A petulant giant's twisted toy.

They clamp you tightly on a rack

To see how soon your joints will crack;

And swing you up against the sky,

A most traditional way to die.

Horizons tilt, the clouds drop down,

And overhead is the seething town.

(But in the iron filigree something grates -

Or is it a shift of tectonic plates?)

Far off in the alien world below

Oblivious mannikins come and go:

On damp flat sands the children score

Trenches of a forgotten war;

A naked girl on a cockle shell

Drifts to the beach with the onshore swell;

And a soaring boy who had no care

Falls through the unsupportive air.

(A rivet shifts in a rusting girder.

Manslaughter is it - or is it murder?)

Over the top in the scything wind -

Oh, tell me, brother, have you sinned?

Then who is that hoodie by your side

Rapt in his bone-white-knuckle ride?

Hold on to your hat, your hair, your head.

Have fun. Have fun.

You're a long time dead.

Frederick

UNPOPULAR WARS

Reports come through of British service personnel in this country being required to travel to duties in civilian clothes and change into uniform when at their unit. Apparently men in uniform have been attacked and insulted by those who wish to protest against the apparent failure of operations in Afghanistan and the detriorating situation in the shambles of Iraq.

Typically, these protestors choose the wrong target; but the fact that such things can happen in our society is disturbing. There are wide-spread doubts as to the advisability of our policy in Afghanistan, and the futility of the so-called 'war against terror' in Iraq was clear from the start, and has only become more obvious as time has dragged on.

During the Second World War the necessity of fighting made it possible to raise a conscript army with, in general, the support of the nation as a whole. During those years the fate of the services was identified with fate of the community. By contrast, neither of the current operations could have got off the ground if it had depended on general mobilisation. Not only does your average civilian very reasonably wish to stay well clear of any personal involvement, but it seems to me that a widening gap in sympathy is appearing between the civilian and service communities. The particularly nasty mock recruiting poster displayed may be an extreme example, but it does highlight a growing attitude.

The British army has been recklessly deployed in pursuit of aims that could not be achieved, and at the same time has been starved of reliable equipment. And no-one outside of the services seems to care very much. There appears to be a general sense that soldiers of all ranks chose to follow this peculiar career choice, and now things are going badly they should be left to sort out their problems as best they can.

Meanwhile, of course, the power-drunk politicians who pushed them into this chaos drift into comfortable and no doubt profitable retirement.

And now reports too well-authenticated to be ignored appear of British troops' uncontrolled and violent treatment of Iraqi civilians. In our comfortable peace-time world the army would find it difficult to recruit men with the required characteristics of disciplined aggressiveness at the best of times: embroiled as they are in meaningless wars is it any wonder that recruiting fails to find the numbers, let alone the quality, that it needs? And however much the red-top press bleats about 'our lads' the bitter fact remains that the man in the street cares little for them, and the parents and partners of the killed and maimed feel abandoned in their misery.

ENGLISH LANGUAGE AS AN ENDANGERED SPECIES

The view has been darkly expressed that this blog spends far too much space rabbitting on about standards of English speech.

Now, as you can see, the seriousness of the situation is being emphasised by Sir Jonathan Miller, Brian Sewell, Sir Peter Hall, Tony Benn........

Tiresias is glad to welcome support from such distinguished company; but don't forget - you read it here first.

THE PATH NOT TAKEN




So - it's only a ballad. But the voice is limpid (she could belt it out too when needed), you can hear every word, and the feelings expressed seem to articulate sympathetically the thoughts of a girl in one of those minuscule catastrophes which afflict the young. In any case, listening to any of the current chart-toppers, if you can get close enough to distinguish the words you will find that they are often merely sloppy sentiment disguised by a lot of bashing and strumming.

Why has so much of society rejected all tender feeling in favour of arrogant violence? Is our world really so much of a jungle that only harsh loud mindless noise can express it? Or does the constant outpouring of thumping banality induce this terrible insensitivity in the hearers?

For once, my ancient wisdom fails to see any answer to all this.

GALILEO

With this frail hand I stopped the sun,

Which else had geocentric run

Illimitable years;

And flung a million miles in space

The spinning earth, the human race,

The singing and the tears:

And though you rack my body, all

Your piety can not recall

The music of the spheres.

Frederick

MORE ARTWORK



Frederick



This is a watercolour of Pont's Mill, across the river from Fowey. It is based on a photograph of my own, taken in late autumn. I couldn't work in this detail devant le motif.

WINTER JOY

The clocks have gone back, the shops are already full of twinkly treasures, and the winter season clothes catalogues arrive on the mat.

And what a feast of colour they offer us! I quote from but one edition -

'Slate, Anthracite, Shale, Navy, Dusk Black, Dark Spice, Ivy, Dark Charcoal, Dark Brown......'

Never mind, the girls will be wearing cheerful wintry colours!

These are the girls' colours. Men are offered an even wider range of glumness -

' Blackberry, Hickory, Mahogany, Midnight Purple, Dark Earth, Iron, Hematite, Deep Lake, Dark Indigo, Dark Forest.....'

'Gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.' Why do we allow ourselves to be cowed into accepting whatever the rag trade decide is 'in this season'?

I tried to buy a short mack for the winter. My favourite outfitter could produce just the thing - in a shade I can only describe as frozen spinach past its best. 'Another colour?' 'I'm afraid they're all like this at the moment, sir.' So look forward to grey streets filled with trudging figures wearing boggy garments this winter, just when we could do with a bit of cheering up.

Of course, when it gets really cold........

HOW TO LIVE WITHOUT SPENDING ANY MONEY

For some time now there has been growing concern that the British economy is becoming more and more dependent on vast amounts of credit card lending. For some people, resort to a credit card loan may be the only way to negotiate a really serious temporary financial problem, and even then it must be obvious that they are only postponing the day of reckoning.

But I suspect that putting more strain on an already stretched credit limit is too often a way to obtaining glittery 'must-haves' rather than to relief of any real necessity. The idea that if you can't afford it then don't buy it seems to have been relegated to the area of quaint old discarded things, like badger shaving brushes, hip baths, and pince-nez. So we have built up a vast filigree of interconnected debt, where it only needs a crack in one part to bring the whole over-strained edifice to the ground.

Few people read nowadays, and history is a bore; otherwise the phrase 'South Sea Bubble' might bring a chill of common-sense across the hearts of those who contemplate going down the path of easy credit. But the card companies are themselves largely to blame. Each month our credit account announces cheerfully 'You have £15000 to spend'. This is rubbish, and lying rubbish at that. We have got nothing. It merely means that they will lend us this much at an extortionate rate of interest. We know that we should be mad to spend in this way: the card company know this as well, but they are perfectly willing to encourage us to do so if it will increase their turnover, and have no sense of their reponsibility to offer sound advice to their customers.

It might be possible to deal with this by legislation. Insurance and investment firms are required to use specific phrases, point out possible problems, and offer let-out clauses. There seems to be no reason why similar disciplines should no be imposed on credit card offers. But few punters wish to read the small print, or are capable of understanding it when they do. Anyway, perhaps the false image of a booming econmy is too precious and fragile for any government to wish to send a ripple of common-sense through it. In the meantime more and more naive people are moving steadily into a financial situation hopeless both for themselves and for the economy as a whole. One can only watch with fascinated horror. The pleasure of saying 'I told you so' when the inevitable crash comes will be very meagre.

ENGLISH LANGUAGE - AN ENDANGERED SPECIES [2]

English has spread widely as an international language, partly because of American global dominance, but mainly, I think, because it has rid itself of a lot of fiddling details that still bedevil other languages. It is not cluttered by diacritical marks, umlauts, accents, cedillas, and the like. It is rarely bothered by gender, whereas in European travel your French feminine shirt is suddenly neutered as you pass into Germany. It is possible to speak faultless English while remaining blissfully ignorant of the subjunctive (though old people sometimes like to play with it as an intellectual exercise).

On the other hand it has a number of ineradicable disadvantages. One is its irregularity of spelling and pronunciation - the 'cough, bough, rough' syndrome is frequently held up to scorn by rivals. Another is its unwillingness to abide by any set of rules - the moment you have sorted out a clear mnemonic the exceptions come crowding in. All the more reason, then, to cling to whatever basic principles can be established.

Take the simple word 'cover' for example. (Pronounced 'kuvv-er', for those of you in the back row.) Characteristically for an English word it has an array of uses. When we put the lid on something we 'cover' it. What we put on it is a 'cover'. The item is then 'covered'. When we take the lid off we 'discover' what is underneath. We tell the world of our 'discovery'. On the other hand if we 'uncover' something we hint that we have found something a bit shady - under-cover. With luck we may 'recover' the stolen goods that have been hidden by the thief. (But notice the subtlety of the language - 're-cover', with the hyphen written or implied by intonation, is something you do only to books, armchairs, and the like.) All this is connected to the basic word 'cover'; and once a newcomer to the language has managed to grasp that we are in the same league as 'lover' (but not 'hover' or 'Dover') then all is plain sailing.

Why on earth then do some people suddenly introduce a different pronunciation? An alternative (older) version of the adjective is 'covert' - still meaning 'with a lid on', and pronounced 'kuvvert'; still intimately connected by pronunciation and meaning to our basic 'cover'. Secret operations are carried out under cover; they are therefore 'covert'. They are carried out 'covertly'. If you happen to be a small wild animal being pursued by red-jacketed men with dogs you may seek cover in a covert, a patch of dense foliage. The owner of the land, in the days when men still wore overcoats, might sport a covert coat, a short overcoat suitable for tramping through the undergrowth covering the covert. If he bred horses he would have his own technical use for the word.

All this richness of language is organised under the word 'cover', and we do language a disservice if we deck it out with fancy pronunciations which seem to indicate that 'covert' is just any odd word that happened to be lying about so we grabbed it. And we make the language just that bit more difficult for the newcomer.

None of this has anything to do with 'cove' [COEv] - a curved inlet in a coastline (or a rather disreputable figure in an Edwardian novel).

But just as you think that it's all very easy really, notice the Cornish village of Coverack - pronounced not 'kuvver-ak' but 'cov-rak'. Ah, well.

PAR POND




Par Pond is a small unassuming development by the council of a natural area between two villages. It seems to be practically free of vandalism, and to be appreciated by visitors, especially the wild life.

ARLINGTON COURT

Arlington Court is a National Trust property on the western edge of Exmoor. The house itself is lumpy externally, but rather splendidly domestic inside. The grounds range from a Victorian formal garden to tracks through the wilder bits of the estate, including a lake.

There is a very fine collection of horse-drawn carriages of all kinds, housed in a special block of the stables, and visitors can take horse-drawn rides at a sober clop round the grounds. However, I caught the equipage just after the last amble of the day, when the horses were travelling light on their way back to the stables.

CAN YOU EXPLAIN BEES?

It is a warm day. We sit in the conservatory, with all windows and doors open. A bee blunders in. He decides he is in the wrong place, and hurls himself at the nearest window. He seems baffled by the fact that he cannot push through the glass. However, he determinedly chooses another window, with the same result. And another...and another...and...

What he never seems to do is to fly out through the wide-open door, even though he sometimes flies right past it. Eventually, when he is reduced to a quivering bundle on a window-ledge, I take pity, scoop him up, and release him into the outside world, where he seems to fly off with relief.

How is it that an animal that is bright enough to be able to build a honeycomb based on angles of 120 degrees (a task that would baffle a lot of our children) seems unable to understand that open doors work both ways?

ENGLISH LANGUAGE - AN ENDANGERED SPECIES [1]

I had the tremendous advantage of having been born into the golden age of broadcasting. It was technically primitive - we listened to an unamplified signal through headphones, and if anyone turned over the newspaper the message was momentarily drowned.

This side of things improved quite quickly, but it was still John Reith's BBC we heard. This had its absurdities; the most remembered I suppose being the rule that news readers had to wear dinner jackets. Sundays were drear, with a great bias towards propagating the faith; and commentaries on current events, always with a proper respect for the (usually Conservative) government, tended to be delivered in the kind of hearty condescending voice that was before long to be heard making encouraging noises about the British war effort on news films.

What we heard, however, was generally the King's English - a form of lingua franca among the educated. There were some things wrong with this concept, particularly because it seemed to perpetuate class distinctions which many of us wished to see toned down if not eradicated. But it did represent a way of thinking and expression which was distinguished by a sense of clarity, a width of reference, and a delight in the sheer pleasure of employing a skill which had produced, and could still produce, melodious trenchant utterance. I don't know that we ever consciously imitated this style, much less made any attempt to learn it, but it did echo in our ears, and we absorbed it through the pores. [Not all radio influence was good, though: I remember Miss Winnington Hill, Head of English, fighting a despairing battle against a popular song of the time with the refrain 'Any umberellas, any umberellas...'] Still, if we did not always know how to speak, it was a comfort to know that out there were people who did, and that for the first time in history such speech was easily available to anyone who cared to listen.

Not so now. Half the population does not know how to speak, and if anyone listens to radio or TV he will hear a rag-bag of usage which has neither rhyme nor reason, and is no help at all. The heir to the heir to the throne speaks in a kind of suburban mumble: small hope for the King's English there, then. But it might yet be possible to insert a little discipline into the use of our precious language by the application of some clear thinking. Otherwise we shall continue to hear university professors who are happy to contrast the situation in Grea' Bri'ain with that prevailing on the Con'inen'. So here goes - a still small voice.

People Who Do Things

English is good at making a word adopt all sorts of useful functions. So you can say 'I can't stand this heat', or 'Heat the milk first', or 'Gas heater', or 'Use low heat', or 'He became quite heated', or...... But you need to adapt the right word in the first place.

Take a company that conTRACTS (verb) to do a job. It is a conTRACTor (noun). The fact that in this case there is another noun for the CONtract it has signed does nothing to stop its being a conTRACTor.

People who join in a PROtest (noun) wish to proTEST (verb). They are proTESTors. You take your name from what you do, not from what you're interested in.

So, subSCRIBers, not SUBscribers. And reSEARCHers, not REsearchers, and.........

Generally, people or things that do things are stressed on the second syllable [ti-TUM-ti]. There are oddities. What you do to food is to PROcess it. So you whizz food in a PROcessor. Since it is possible to proCESS - to walk in a procession - you would expect a person taking part in it to be a proCESSor, but he isn't, he is a proCESSioner. Though a person who proFESSes a particular skill is a proFESSor.

But then, I never promised it would be easy, did I? Think of it as a kind of mental jogging. Anyway, if you will promise to stop talking about CONtracters, and SUBscribers, and PROtestors, and CONtributers, and........ we shall have between us scrubbed the English language clean of some obscuring fungus.

More to come.

DIANA - NOT MY PRINCESS

So we have had what many of us hope is the last of the Princess Di weep-ins. Of course one is saddened by the loss of a young and vibrant life in sordid circumstances, but it was a story she chose to live in, and the situation is by no means as clear-cut as her mourners seem to suggest.

Clearly Charles dithered over his relationship with Camilla until it was too late. Obviously, then, he had to be offered the solution usually adopted in such circumstances, of the Royal Personage being allowed to keep his true love as a discreet mistress, while being paired off with a suitably nubile partner for official breeding purposes in order to maintain the line. Nobody is going to object to that, unless one happens to be the kind of starry-eyed fantasist who believes that all members of the royal family are by nature noble, and that it is the function of the aristocracy to lead us lower orders in the paths of righteousness.

So, what went wrong? Can we really be expected to believe that a sweet young princess was decoyed into a sophisticated and cynical world totally beyond her comprehension? Certainly her father must have known what was going on, and even if his self-satisfaction did not allow him to give her sound advice before shuffling her up the aisle it has long been common knowledge that her mother, who had got out of the family situation much earlier, warned her strongly to re-consider. Besides, young as Diana was seen to be, she was no simple milkmaid from a fantasy country idyll. The manipulative ogling that was displayed as the marriage fell apart had not been learnt in a few months, nor the ease with which she consoled herself afterwards with glitzy company and fast cars.

The whole Spenser family made a risky investment offering rich returns, and, as many of us simpler souls are aware, if you do that the chances are that you will end up badly burned. That one of those involved was an attractive young butterfly who was eventually scorched to death is a cause for quiet sorrow, but not for sanctification.

And the royal family? They are by education and tradition case-hardened to events such as these, by no means unique in the rough island story. From the Queen down, they were prepared to ignore the whole sordid affair once it was over. The hysterical outburst of sentimental public opinion which followed forced them to engage in ritual gestures of sorrow. I doubt very much whether it has much endeared them to the great soft-centered British public, and will certainly not have endeared her subjects to the monarch.

MORE DESTRUCTIVE DIRECTORS

I complained on 22 March of the antics of foolish stage directors, perhaps with a half sense that this was yet another sign of the daftness of the contemporary world.

I am relieved in some ways to have come across a reference to Alec Guiness's production of Hamlet in the 1960s, in which Ken Tynan, playing the Player King, was required to wear a large false plastic ear for Lucianus to pour the poison into, for all the world, as Tynan put it, as if it were 'an advertisement for a proprietary brand of rum'. So arrant stupidity is not, after all, a characteristic of directors of the twenty-first century only.

There seemed to be more point, in a production in which I was involved, in putting the Players to act in half-masks, to detach them from the real world. The only snag from my point of view, in this and other productions, has been that actors always want to keep their masks as souvenirs, so that I have no reminders of all the work that went into designing and making them. In this case I put Lucianus into black and silver, corvine, with a laid-back plume, and Prologue into scarlet and gold, cocky, with a tuft on top, rather, in retrospect, like a cross between a cock and a hooded kestrel (a coistrel ?- see Twelfth Night)

The two lads playing the parts could not agree who should wear which, so they ended by changing parts each night. I can't remember who took home which, but certainly I never saw them again. So eventually I had to make a set of display masks for an imaginary ballet of the Four Elements to put up at home. The picture, in case you have been wondering what it had to do with directors, is such a mask, for Water, shown only in the hot dry months of summer. Perhaps it has been performing a rain dance.

WEATHER PANIC OVER

No, it's all right, the world is not going to drown after all. Since my gloom and doom of 06 July, with evocations of Noah, and similar predictions of disaster, the weather has swung round and we have had days of sunshine and warmth.

Not so sunny today, though, is it?

When you have been around a little longer you will realise that there is no guarantee attached to the weather. We are, after all, British. Just enjoy it while it is there. I assume that you are not surrounded by forest fires in your area.