11-3-12 Earlie Musickelele

We were delighted to entertain Prof. Reed last week, the ukuluthier responsible for the better ukuleles in our collection. We’ve always brought them home from his Suffolk workshop with the promise that he has open-ended visiting rights to his creations and finally we’ve made good on the deal.
One advantage of the arrangement is that you get a chance to hear the instruments played well and how different they sound from the audience-side. It’s surprising how much you can’t hear from the playing-side.
Prof. Reed’s repertoire of jaunty vintage risqué songs, saucy in the seaside postcard sense, is dotted with tricky triple-strums and melody runs for added comic value. It’s difficult to convey how this works but these music hall bon-bons gain comic momentum from a clockwork train-on-the track tempo and these carefully placed flourishes to highlight the lyrical double-entendres (given their vintage, these are often discreet entendre-et-demis) and give you a moment to appreciate them.
I haven’t so far discovered any research papers on the neuro-psychological precursors of comic effect (possibly more correctly ‘affects’) engendered by torrents of rhyming syllables – is it possible to compose comic blank verse? There definitely seems to be a metronomic correlate to the optimum humorous effect. Taking time to insert musical punctuation is less intrusive than the snare-drum and cymbal ‘trrrr- tash!’, maybe closer to a subliminal flash of the Variety comic’s ‘no, give over, missus, what are you like?’.
Naturally I went in search of early examples and discovered that one of the very earliest, played at Court upon the lutekinelle, or in the Courtlie Parlance of the time the ‘bien-jolie’, uccurs in Chaucer’s The Pane-Fettler’s Tale. Sadly the tablature no longer survives, though we may surmise from the preface to the troubadour’s baudie-lay that the inclusion of a customary benison was an early convention  – ‘with many a gladsome beck and nod he pluck’d his plaisantrie/ and saith to all the companye/ ‘Lo, Providence hath cast her fairest face upon us once again.’
Though this fragmentary example appears inconsistent with the Pane-Fettler’s canon text, there is evidence to suggest that it may originally have occurred as a lullay in The Miller’s Tale.

Nellie ye Oliphaunt packéd her traunche
Bade th’circus adieu to thee
Thence did she sallie with triumph of trumphs
Trumph, ‘non a trumph: trumphets three

The Thane of all Oliphaunts fanfarana’d
Manie a good league away
Then made they a tryst neath the Moones glist
En pilgrimage to Mandalay

Nellie, she-Oliphaunt, curtsied ful well
And to Hindoostan traundléd she
Thence did she sallie with triumph of trumphs
Trumph, ‘non a trumph: trumphets three.

———————————————————————————

For a more complete version of this family of traditional tales concerning the Elephant’s reputation for superior intelligence, see:-

http://www.kristinhall.org/songbook/ClassicKids/NellieTheElephant.html

How many times have I set up an empty page, thinking it’s about time I wrote something, looked at said blank page, paused over the keys and thought better of it, collapsed it and wandered off to play an instrument or hoover the East Wing? The question isn’t really why I don’t write but why I do. In the gaps there’s no clamour for more and rightly so.

25-2-12. That short paragraph was written on November 2nd last year. Nothing much changes. I hear that I’m surrounded by lives so crowded by incident that Facebook statuses demand to be updated daily; the airwaves are filled with a crossfire of tweets – what observation can be so pressing that it must be shared from a cinema seat mid-movie?; speakers appear on radio programmes on the strength of their blogging activity. How I envy these lives of daily significance.

We spent a couple of days at the end of the half-term break in Suffolk with The Reeds, two well-stocked minds under one roof, whose hospitality amounts to a form of therapy. They are in the original sense restaurateurs (my pedant-pinger dings when I hear the added ‘n’, albeit on the not unreasonable ground that the term is applied to proprietors of restaurants); our spirits are restored and the wonky wheels of the daily round are rebalanced and the tyre-pressure adjusted to recommended levels. We head off towards the A14 at the end of our visits with a mixture of cheeriness and regret, with the feeling that left to choice a kind of tranquil inertia would set in.  I think even their house-cats became better-educated than the average felid by osmosis.
We came home with a new Reed hand-built ukulele and the chords for a long-term favourite song, ‘T’aint No Sin’ (Walter Donaldson), which I first heard in my teens, on a Saturday afternoon Radio One programme of new recordings, a must-listen slot whose name now eludes me. I do remember that it was a track on an EP (for younger readers: ‘Extended Play’ – a 7” vinyl disc with three or four tracks) by The Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra, “The Great White Dap”.
Wikipedia doesn’t list this in the discography but the wonders of YouTube preserve the PHLO version amongst many others. I hadn’t realised how durable this lyric was until it occurred to me to suggest that it might fit Prof Reed’s repertoire of slightly saucy novelty numbers.
As so often, the original I recalled has undergone decades of remixing in my memory-bank, so it came as a surprise to me to hear it afresh, minus the Hot Club Of France gipsy-jazz guitar ‘pompe’ I’d obviously added for myself.
As a public service, here are Prof Reed’s chords. Typically, while I’ve never worked them out satisfactorily, it took him about 20 mins from first listen to emailing the arrangement for me to practise at home.

Taint No Sin

G              Em7      Am7       D7
Dancing may do this and that,
G              Em7       Am7     D7
And help you take off lots of fat
G          Em7       Am7       D7           G      Em7     Am7     D7
But I’m no friend of dancing when it’s hot!
G         Em7 Am7      D7
So if you are a dancing fool,
G              Em7         Am7          D7
Who loves to dance but can’t keep cool
G           Em7         Am7     D7       G               G7
Bear in mind the idea that I’ve got.

Chorus:
Am                       B7                          E7                       A7
When it gets too hot for comfort, And you can’t get ice cream cones,
D7                                                                   Dm7     G7               C
‘Tain’t No Sin, to take off your skin, and dance around in your bones.
Am              B7                   E7                  A7
When the lazy syncopation of the music softly moans,
D7                                                                   Dm7     G7           C
‘Tain’t No Sin, to take off your skin, and dance around in your bones.
Em                                       C7                 Em                 C7
The Polar Bears aren’t green up in Greenland, They’ve got the right idea.
G             D7                G     D7             G                 Eb7    G7
They think it’s great to refrigerate while we all cremate down here.
Am                                  B7                      E7                  A7
Just be like those Bamboo Babies, In the South Sea tropic zones,
D7                                                                   Dm7     G7          C
‘Tain’t No Sin, to take off your skin, and dance around in your bones.

The road trip to Suffolk included a reacquaintance with another – gasp! – 40-year-old vinyl LP transferred to MP3 with a turntable thoughtfully bought for me as a Christmas present by Herself in recognition of the miles of nostalgia preserved in the worn grooves of a crate of vinyl in the garage.
Curiously, I must have etched Buzzy Linhart’s ‘Music’ LP into my neural pathways so effectively that it’s become embedded, to the extent that as the digital transfer played through my inner ear anticipated the vocal gymnastics, guitar solos and stereo trickery. With a little more time on the transfer I can separate the tracks so they’d pop up un a random shuffle, but a strong element of the Proustian trip is in the brief analogue crackle in a time-honoured tracking-order.
I don’t know what impression it made on Herself, as a walking Wiki on 80’s Indie. She didn’t actually groan or rock with derision; her indulgence is extensive but not boundless.
I pause with a little trepidation even for myself at the prospect of revisiting early Strawbs LP’s and the late 60’s Notting Hill Asian-jazz hip-mysticism of Quintessence’ ‘In Blissful Company’ but Buzzy didn’t let me down.

One late night in my teens, when John Peel’s Top Gear radio programme featured, amongst the Captain Beefheart, Third Ear Band and Principal Edwards’ Magic Theatre, readings by poets, I have a tissuey memory of Roger McGough reading one of his about some future in which England would have little to trade on but our history and pantomime tradition and so would become a living heritage centre with Brits playing themselves for the entertainment of tourists.
As I wrote that paragraph it occurred to me that ‘the late 60’s of the 20th Century’ is already a distant bygone era. The Swinging 60’s – mod dandyism, Motown, Op-art, miniskirts and cute Courreges boots – was giving way to hippy boho-style, psychedelia, mystical knick-knacks, tuning in turning on and dropping out.
In theory.
Schoolchildren researching the social history of that decade of radical politics and social revolution will find it surprisingly staid. The Late 60’s Underground culture had its own nostalgia drawing from fin de siecle Art Nouveau and Victorian Imperial formality, which in turn had replaced a previous vogue for the 1920’s  – ‘Thouroughly Modern Millie’ and  ‘The Boyfriend’ at the movies; The New Vaudeville Band in the charts. By the time I’d arrived in Birmingham as a student, the 1930’s had become the reference point. By the time I graduated it was all Country Diary Of An Edwardian Lady and William Morris filtered through Laura Ashley, The Albion Band and Steeleye Span.
Nostalgia for this – our – decade will include an unaccountable – the more forgiving will prefer ‘ironic’ – regard for the pre-punk glitterball Disco 70’s. In the current collapse of faith in the belief-system of Global Economics, my money’s on a replay of the 80’s fling with Weimar fashion, filme noir and kohl-eyed German Expressionist Cinema; decadent chic. As a place-bet I’ll put a fiver on make-do-and-mend Blitz spirit and Ration Book austerity. The Keep Calm And Carry On brand has clearly struck some awf’ly English chord of stiff-upper-lip stoicism.
So… no surprise to discover some of the Keep Calm merchandise in the Black Country Museum Gift Shop on a reconnaissance visit for a school trip.
The Museum is a small cluster of buildings from around the area meticulously relocated and rebuilt, staffed by guides in Victorian costume, though not Victorian clothing, which for most was a durable one-set-of-everything, laundered once a week in the more fastidious households.
Try to banish even the aspiration to have a choice of clothes to suit the day and the weather. Try to unimagine our own distaste for the undeodorised body and its maturing residue in clothing. What if a daily squirt of gently-fragranced 24-Hour Dry Protection Mist wasn’t pretty much the unofficial law?
For £20 you can climb into clip-on costume to have your own sepia-tint portrait as if… as if what,exactly..? (I’ve paused there for several minutes trying to think of a snappy answer. What Derridalical ley-lines of disauthored intertextual dialectic converge in a digital photograph fed through a Photoshop filter and a laser printer that resurrects the souls of our ancestors: pipl dem b’long faraway time.)
A very good son-et-lumiere presentation of the workings of a Black Country drift-mine, with crouching figures given voice by recorded actors, can’t erase the visitor’s knowledge of a working world reshaped by the intervening century, nor replace it with the experience of an unrelieved conveyor-belt of days confined between home and coal-seam, with its fatalist resignation to sudden mortality, disabling injury and meagre diet.
What always strikes me about preserved historic sites is the many ways they remind you that you can’t imagine life as it was lived, even decades ago. Equally, as you return to the Black Country Living Museum car-park via the Gift Shop the airy glass-walled entrance it’s hard to imagine how of-its-time this ascetic turn-of-the century vogue for plate-glass and exposed structural components will look in even another 50 years and who will be looking.

One of the Flickr.com features I really enjoy is collecting Favourites, a scrapbook of other Flickrists’ posted images. Some really need no explanation; some give me quick links to on-line archives of artwork, printed ephemera and found photographs; a few are bookmarked because I’d paused to work out why they made me hesitate.
Like the fashion for Magic Eye 3D(ish) posters, there was a brief blossoming of those composite photographic images created with a patchwork of tiny photographs. The Favourites collection must form some kind of composite mind-map, including characteristic head-scratching moments.
I keep meaning to write occasional footnotes here, so while I’m on the subject of history that makes you go ‘wha…?’, here’s Eadweard Muybridge mechanically recording the kinetic procedure of slapstick.

Pea-Brains 12-10-11

Ah, the life of Supply Teaching. Here’s a thing. Quite an old thing, from last term, long enough for the simmering ‘Wha…? Wha…? Tuh!’ and worse – oh, pay no mind to my coarse mariner’s oaths, rough as a plug o’ Navy Shag me, lor luv yer, ma’am – to subside.
Left with a Literacy Learning Objective to experiment with story introductions other than ‘once upon a time…’ I remembered I had Andy Stanton’s “Mr. Gum And The Cherry Tree” in my briefcase, opening line: “Yes! No! Maybe? What! Hello.”
Mr. Stanton’s ouevre is jolly good fun to read aloud so long as you can more or less keep track of the voices in his jostling cast of cartoon characters.
To prime my Yr.3 class in adventurous writing and share my admiration for Mr. Stanton’s Puckoonish style, I read on and by the time I thought we’d all heard enough and had some serious writing to do there was clamour in the auditorium and demands for more. Firm but fair, I denied Year 3 further guffaws and told them to write their own, the kind of writing they’d like to read.
Job done, I thought; the primed class set to work and there was enough time to read out some of the results before the end of the lesson.
Next day – now here is The Thing in question, sorry to keep you waiting – I had a call on the class phone from the Deputy Head, telling me that she’d had a call from the mother of  ‘one of our more sensitive children’, complaining that I’d called the class ‘pea-brains’.
I suppose I should look up exactly what a flummox is but for a second or two I was definitively flummoxed. You don’t need etymology to know you’ve experienced the woozy felt-mallet concussion of a sudden flummox.
‘Pea-brain’ when I first heard it as a child was certainly one of my favourite funny phrases and as a sensitive child myself, far preferable to cretin, moron, numbskull and worse (yes there were worse insults to the intelligence which I won’t repeat here even as social history. Political Correctness is often only a particularly puritan relabelling of Common Decency).
However, colourful and pithy as ‘pea-brain’ may be, it hasn’t been in my vocabulary for decades.  ‘Pea-brain’ seems even to me as dated as ‘oh, capital!’ for approbation ; the yout’ today routinely use ‘sick!’ as a term of approval. I don’t, though even I know that when adults these days imagine that pronouncing their services, products or educational materials ‘cool!’ they may as well be saying ‘with-it’ or ‘all the rage’. Cool. Yeah, right.
Disentangling myself from the flummox (how does one unflummox, or is that deflummox? In short I was in recovery from a condition of flummoxedness. I’m sorely tempted to claim that I achieved aflummoxia ‘in a trice’ if only I was clear about the span of a trice, so it may have been two) I had two questions: first (note to self) was ‘pea-brain’ sufficient to unsettle even a sensitive child? And second (official report) when had that salty curse occurred?
I remembered our Mr. Gum exerpt. There wasn’t time to haul out the book and read it over the phone to the Deputy Head, but here’s Exhibit A – apologies to Mr. Stanton for the possible copyright infringement (it’s page 2, so you can check this in any book shop worth the name):-

“… And what a freshial, special morning it was in the town of Lamonic Bibber, my friends! The sun was shining, the birds were playing Quidditch in the treetops and the ground was sort of just lying there letting people walk all over it. It was a glorious, give-me-morious, start-of-the-storious sort of a Spring morning. And as you can imagine with your tiny little brains, everyone was looking forward to it like a rascal.”

“Tiny Little Brains”, uprooted from its native text and relayed via child to parent to school and back to me loses something in translation. I only found out that there’d been a final stage in the relay when I asked the teaching agency if they’d  heard from the school at all recently, because I liked it there and had looked forward to visiting it again, only to be told that the folklore had taken root. I’d called a class ‘pea-brains’.
Supply teachers are an expendable resource, so it was probably easier to drop the teacher than explain to the parent that she or the child had probably not been using appropriate skill and judgement, or, perhaps even responded with the  cerebral finesse of a small legume.
I reserve the right to feel less than sanguine about losing paid work because of this whisper-down-the-alley (an acceptable neologism I’ve discovered recently as a culturally neutral substitute for ‘Chinese Whispers’ – a parlour-game, young’uns, from a bygone time when houses had parlours and we were driven to make our own entertainment). However, when educators stroke their chins and wonder why teaching fails to attract graduates, here’s a possibility. Working in a classroom is not made any easier when you have to watch out for concealed tripwires of etiquette while keeping an eye over your shoulder and an ear to the ground for the approaching grumble of disgruntled parents. Good heavens, this example is the very least sinister of the range of accusations that a teacher might have to account for.
(Are we allowed to say ‘sinister’ or am I being gauche? There may be activists in some cadre of the left-handed lobby who might take up ergonomically modified cudgels on my kack-handed behalf. I’m allowed to use The K Word, see? First elect yourself into an oppressed minority, then you’re allowed to identify with its marginalised constituency, patrol its borders for trepassers and ‘reclaim’ its insulting signifiers as your own, K?.)
To the concerned parent I’d wish that she could read this and take righteous satisfaction that as a result of her prompt action the offending teacher has been summarily dismissed from the premises and her sensitive child has been spared exposure to the perils of ambush by literature. I’m still a fan of Mr. Gum and – call me reckless – I look forward to using his disgraceful example again in Literacy.

Hollesley 2011
Years ago I had a call from an editor at DC comics in New York to say he’d be out of the office for a few days, visiting friends in Reno. I know nothing about Reno except it sounded like it belonged in a Western and I said as much; American place names very often have a ring of myth about them missing from Cleethorpes, Basingstoke or Runcorn.
He pointed out that when he was touring in the UK he’d find himself asking for directions to towns marked on the map as Little St. Mary’s Under Ditheridge which turned out to be pronounced Lambsditch. That was part of the romance of British geography for an American.
Months ago I was invited to experience the Hollesley Ukulele Jamboree 2011 in Suffolk. I only found after I’d parked the car on site that it’s pronounced Hoseley. I don’t know what my New York colleague would’ve made of nearby Ho’sly Be’ach.
I don’t know either how many have to be gathered together to constitute A Festival. I’m reminded of a Bill Tidy cartoon ‘Oh come on, Ghengis, we only need one more to make a horde’. A couple of hundred in all, enthusiasts plus friends and family?
The HUJ gathers in a holiday camping-site. You can walk easily around it in about five minutes. Step out of the car and you hear ukulele strums near and far like birdsong. Lay out a sheet of music to strum and sing and within minutes you’re likely to be surrounded by wandering uke-ists like sparrers drawn to a bird-table.
As at similar gatherings of scooter-clubs and hot-car modifiers, punctuating the buskathon there are intense show-and-tell discussions between ukuluthiers about the handbuilt variations they’ve assembled and displayed on builders’ online forums.
Clifford has found cunning ways to use laser-cutters and in one experiment has pressed a Citroen hub-cap into service as a resonator cone; Sven has travelled from Sweden with his family and acts as a consulting field-surgeon to a steady trickle of enthusiasts, refining their instruments with a kit including teeny-weeny luthiers’ planes you could use as Monopoly pieces; deals are made over sheets and short planks of Suitable Wood for necks and facias; arcane know-how is exchanged about how unlikely bric-a-brac and salvage can be assembled and coaxed to yield music. Cigar-boxes are pretty routine, oil-cans aren’t unknown.
Electric ukes are a bit marginal in these circles, as electric planks would be at guitar-builders’ conventions; electric instruments share characteristics of the acoustic versions but behave very differently. Their design is more to do with getting the circuitry and the action right than making the wood sing. You can buy off-the-shelf acoustic Flying-V’s and Les Paul cutaway novelty ukes but they’re not known for great sound. There’s a whole area of extravagant whimsy yet to be explored here; my left-handedness has preserved me from several thousand pounds I might have squandered on ooh-shiny boys’ toys flashing their fetching curves and luscious paint-jobs from music-shop racks.
My host for the weekend, Prof Chris, took one description of the banjolele, ‘a drum on a stick’ – George Formby’s instrument of choice curls the lip of hardcore ukistas – and built his Little Hooligan series from hand-drums bought off eBay. I own the second; the third was donated as a prize in the Saturday Raffle and the winner was being offered substantial three-figure sums for it within the hour. He’d advised that if my ticket won I should grab Sven’s svelte sopranino. Since uke-owners rarely stop at just the one, keen eyes are cast over covetable concubines; Rufus keeps a domestic harem of 40 on a wall at home, though he’s been obliged to fit a second picture-rail.
I’d missed the Friday Night open mic session in the marquee but Saturday evening was definitely worth perching on the hay-bale seating for. First up was Simon – it’s all first names here – with a soprano uke arrangement of The Velvet Underground’s ‘Sister Ray’. I first heard the original, a relentless churning 18-minute miasma of garage sleaze taking up most of one side of the White Light White Heat LP, about 40 years ago and revisit it every couple of years. Like vindaloo, it takes a while to forget how deeply unsettling it is and to foolishly imagine that this time you’ve got its measure.
This performance presents a different take on off-kilter, summoning up the spirit of John Otway.
The massed ukulele-power of SOUP – South Ockendon Ukulele Players, or is that Philharmonic? The tiny stage overflows with the pluckers – provided my high-spot of the night with their version of Chas’n’Dave’s ‘London Girls’, a number I’d never heard before but for my money, better than the original.
Top spot by a narrow margin, set beside Yan Yalego – my companion, a connoisseur, leans close to murmur ‘…a *serious* player…’ – and The Re-Entrants, two guys playing classic stadium rock and pop hits on two ukes, with that winning combination of profligate virtuosity and stand-up comedy. After their opening number, Take That’s “Let It Shine”, I thought oh yeah, a covers band. A couple of songs later I was smitten.
They announced from the stage that they’d just got a support-slot for Amy Winehouse. We cheered. I remembered someone’s line that her name was French for ‘Likes The Pub’. I thought they’d be a great counterpoint to her darkening repertoire.
We drove back to our hosts’ place in Woodbridge on Sunday afternoon to be greeted with the news that Amy Winehouse had been found dead. It was one of those rock RIPs that qualifies as a not-unexpected surprise. Some learn wisdom through excess; sometimes the excess gets them first.

29-6-11
I’ve neglected the graffiti-wall for almost a month, sidetracked, or maybe mainlining on a little surge in illustration projects and teaching work. [More than a month now - I began this almost a week ago - more diversions]
I’ve been waiting for a moment to collect my thoughts on the surprise of hearing a voice-over in a TV pizza ad. Could it be… and as it turned out, yes it could… the voice of John Cooper Clarke, listing all the heartwarming things ‘we do’ as a pizza-chain?
This is John Cooper Clarke, the rasping angle-grinder voice I first heard on a 10” translucent blue vinyl EP compilation of live acts from The Electric Circus. How much more punk could an artefact be? ‘Daily Express’ and ‘I Married A Monster From Outer Space’ rattled out between tracks by The Fall, Steel Pulse, The Buzzcocks… Johnny Clarke with his audible gobful of Wrigleys, doing poetry to the crowd.
JCC’s albums with The Invisible Girls’ smart eerie soundtrack were regulars on my record and tape-decks at the turn of the 80’s, prompting me to revisit John Betjeman’s albums with Jim Parker’s musical arrangements. Both poets seemed to have struck improbably lucky with collaborators who saw more in the words than an opportunity to play to the public image, both sets of arrangements struck the tone of the poetry like good illustrations, echoing the words in unexpectedly apt ways. Sir John had recorded readings in the 60’s for specialist audiences, as poets did, though the poetry belonged on the page; Johnny Clarke’s natural habitat was the stage of clubs, barking into a stand-mike. Parker enlivened the reading, Clarke’s backing band allowed him space to breathe.
A few weeks ago now I added a performance of JCC’s juggernaut dystopian panorama Beasley St. to my Favourites on YouTube. Until I get the necessary tech advice and more importantly, the nerve to upload anything of my own, I’ve discovered this facility to make a scrapbook of vids.
Beasley St. is one of those ‘total performance’ moments. Take away the shadowy band and it’d be an unusually slow reading; the music is no surprise, just as you’d hear it on the record; add the presence of JCC, a stretched-out scarecrow effigy of Bob Dylan circa 1967 – the slab-black shades and the back-combed back-lit bombstruck bouffant halo – expressionless, relentless, reciting the deadpan litany of squalor over a delicate piano line that wouldn’t have been out of place in a John Barry spy-movie and you have something queasier and more compelling than the page or the recorded track allows.
So there was that pizza-ad on TV, that is-it-is-or-is-it-ain’t Our Johnny moment. JCC, whose previous outing into Family Life was the ‘what do we look like?’ snapshot-album parade, A Distant Relation. Well blow me down and bravo!, Mr. Clarke.
Older readers may remember a previous TV outing for – gulp! – Sugar Puffs, featuring JCC in his stage uniform and shades, looking like a Sinister 5th Banana Split. It must’ve pre-dated the defensive dawn of preventive PC. I don’t know what the target audience made of it – remember, that’s Mrs. Mum, not the kids – but I rather like the idea of kids asking Mum ‘Who’s that?’. Oh he’s a poet, darling; he wrote Chickentown.
Now the commodity for hire is a trademark timbre and a laconic delivery. You made a bit of useful cash and you didn’t let them talk you into writing parody couplets in celebration of branded fast-foods. You didn’t let the costume dept. throw you into pantomime costume or allow the affable ad execs to persuade you that yeah, sure, you’d be in the ad but, you know, subverting it with your, like, individuality.
Like Some.
Naming no names.

12-5-11 Electric Hearts

It’s been too long since I’ve seen The Toy Hearts live. Last Sunday I finally made it to an ‘all electric’ date at The Actress And Bishop on Ludgate Hill, though only for the first set as the dread tinnitis began to ring in my ears. I should be more careful about carrying ear-plugs to higher-volume events; the persistent dweeeep! doesn’t subside overnight as it once did. Skeptics please note that although my little foam buddies are clearly uncool (so *prudent* my dears) you actually hear the music more clearly.
It was a revelation though to hear Sophia J’s Gibson 135 pushing out fat, fuzzy, jazzy melody lines instead of the usual gipsy jazz and bluegrass picking, another reminder that the electric guitar is a different country.
I always look forward to Howard Gregory’s solos: for my tuppence the best of the shifting rosta of fiddle-players to go out with the band. I try to push to the back of my mind that he considers it his second instrument, dammit.
I like The Hearts on principle. There’s nothing easy, no corners cut to get the sound they want, and it’s been a long trek to get their trad and alt.bluegrass music heard, though they’ve recently made it onto national radio. Apparently the editor concerned had liked the review cd he’d heard around the house but had previously laid it aside unheard because he wasn’t desperately keen on Brit bluegrass. Yeah well, they’re liked and respected in the States…
I have a tiny footnote in their history as the first to do a (gender-adjusted) cover version of a Hearts song, ‘Giving You Back Your Troubles’ from their second cd, When I Cut Loose, partly because it’s a great song and partly as a bit of folksy promo. Like the caveat they used to print on the flimsy flexi-disks you used to get taped to music papers, I’m quick to point out that ‘this version is not representative of the professional recording.’
There isn’t a vid of The Hearts’ electric set, but there’s a very slick vid for Femme Fatale off the third cd, one of their numbers whose gipsy-jazz accent conjures up a kind of Weimar Kabaret decadence, more ja,doch than yee-haw.

25-4-11

Nearly four months into the year we’re returning to our parked car and allowing a couple of minutes for the oven heat inside to disperse, driving around with the car windows open enough to make a draught.
Over the weekend, sorting out some of the folders of accumulated jpgs that have replaced the traditional shoe-box full of processed snaps as the repository of people, moments and places you can’t quite place, the monitor screen is the rear-view mirror reflecting the snowy gunmetal landscape only a couple of months behind us.
The imagination can conjure visions, leap and swerve and take you to the edge of the expressible but it can’t quite bridge the gap between the Winter morning when you try to grasp that in a few weeks you’ll be wilting in heat and remembering to take precautions against sunlight, or these days when we lounge on the lawn and try to recall the chill and snow-muffled silence mere weeks ago.

Last week in Aldeburgh, the Suffolk coastal village best known for its association with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, the Pet Shop Boys of English choral music, there was time and weather to lounge on the shingle beach; excuse enough to trawl the local bookshops for a holiday paperback.
I’m sorry I didn’t succumb to impulse and pick up “The Uses And Abuses Of Art History” from a £1-basket outside the second-hand shop. It was a familiar hover; the price made it almost sinful to pass over, balanced against the thought that I may not in fact find time to read it despite my good intentions and that I could easily come back to collect it if it was still on my mind in an hour or so.
It was temporarily pushed from my mind by a drop-in to the small but well-stocked Aldeburgh Bookshop where I found Charles Freeman’s ‘A New History Of Early Christianity’.
In the holiday season of choccy eggs and bunnies and miscellaneous retellings of the popular folk-narrative of The Crucifixion, it’s refreshing to be reminded of the historical, social, political, cultural and not least the physical landscape in which the recorded events took place and the factions which wrestled for authority to shape and tell the story over subsequent decades and centuries. Whatever the Gospels have to say about the Divine elements of the story, the written canon version is the editorial product of entirely human rivalry and schism, competing accounts and interpretations. The history is so well-researched that I shan’t even attempt a précis of the book when I’ve finished reading it but I’d recommend it as a dense historical whodunnit whatever your faith-affiliation.

Last week I was also presented with a new toy, a handmade Reed Little Hooligan banjolele, built around a tuneable hand-drum the ukuluthier chanced on in eBay. It has a moveable muting pad on the underside so that it can become a usefully strident busking instrument in the street or, as I now have it, barely audible in the next room while I try to get to grips with the triple-strum. For right-handers this is a thumb-and-index-finger down-down-up flick. Left-handers will strike the strings in reverse order on a standard-strung uke and it seems my best chance of recreating the strum is to use the index with the middle finger replacing the thumb-stroke.
I have to be reminded regularly that the rest of the world is largely populated with non-strummers for whom this kind of paragraph is indecipherable gratuitous geekery. My own skills remain so stubbornly at intermediate busker level that I assume real musicians will recognise and I hope sympathise with my attempts to achieve enough competence to join in without getting in the way.

13-4-11 Nettle Soup

Making use of the recent bright days, Spring-clearing the garden, Herself does a dogged job of weeding and clearing and those bits that require skill and judgement, buying in and planting out new shrubs and flowers, pruning or uprooting the old. Winter leaves are hoovered off the gravelled stretches, path-slabs swept.
My contributions are the broad-brush unskilled tasks: shifting barrowloads of undistributed gravel from the back of the house to the gravel-beds, cajoling the mower up and down the lawn through the damp and mossy turfy tufts, hoiking up deep-rooted defunct shrubs, tackling the burgeoning nettle-beds…
Herself and I stand in mutual puzzlement at our respective patience for her time in the garden and mine the kitchen, and about half a garden-refuse sack into nettle clearance I remembered my first encounter with Nettle Soup in my Foundation Year of art college, served by Mary Wandrausch, a ceramics tutor at Farnham who specialised in trad English slipware technique and who rented rooms in her Hardyesque farmhouse to students.
Mary lived like a back-to-the-land hippy – often barefoot, kaftan-clad and rattling with chunky handmade bead necklaces -  but she was clearly from an older honourable tradition of bohemianism. She’d been tutored in life-drawing by Mervyn Peake (‘We all lusted after Mervyn’) and reminisced cheerfully about days spent nude on remote Greek beaches, before the islands were on the standard tourist map.
At the meal table she would place a hand on your thigh as she turned to share some erudite factoid or salacious aside. She didn’t linger; it wasn’t creepy, though you did wonder whether at some point she might fall upon you like a big cat and haul you off to her boudoir. Though she was chronologically decades apart from us, she was an exotic earth-spirit and her appetite for the sensual gave the prospect of a pounce an element of intrigue. If you were to have your Older Woman experience, she would certainly have provided a memorable one, so there was probably a current of suppressed wishful-thinking in the air. In reality it remained a matter of conjecture whether the memory would be more terrifying or instructive on balance; both, probably, and awfully good fun, my dear.
So… my memory is of a twilight Summer evening warm enough for open doors to admit birdsong from the surrounding meadow and woodland, interior light dim enough to call for candles at the scrubbed wood farmhouse table and nettle soup with tear-apart homemade bread from slip-glaze patterned tableware.
I don’t really recall anything very much about the soup except that it seemed very Mary to harvest whatever was local and seasonal and to know a traditional recipe to make it edible. Another memory-snapshot has her receiving a puffball fungus the size of your head brought back by another friend as a trophy from a woodland walk, which she greeted with the delight and attention an extravagant bouquet might envy. It arrived at table soon after, sautéed in butter and dusted with nutmeg and fresh-cut herbs.
Given the company and the setting and the contrast with my home-life in commuter dormitory Woking, the fact that I found myself eating soup made from nettles was a mere contributory detail.
Slow-forward nearly four decades and I’m grubbing out and piling up a stack of stingers in the garden and – Old Gods Bless Thee, Mary Wandrausch – I’m again prompted to think about preparing the tetchy leaves for the table.
On the nutritional properties of the leaf, this from
Healing Wise, by the splendidly-named Susun Weed: “Very high calcium, magnesium; high iron, potassium, zinc, Vitamin B’s and A; niacin, protein, vitamin C, D and K. Excellent for the liver, low back, and anemia.”
However, although I can suggest how to prepare a soup, it’s a method rather than a recipe and don’t get too excited. You’d expect all that aggressive uric acid to bring a tart zing to the dish but what you get is spinachy colour and texture and a flavour you might expect from grass-cuttings (don’t try these as a substitute; cows’ complicated digestive tracts are made from sterner stuff than ours).
So, for a mineral and fibre-rich soup in which the headline ingredient’s main contribution is its novelty…
First, carefully uproot enough nettle stems to fill a plastic supermarket carrier bag and reflect that already you score recycling-points.
Like spinach, nettles reduce to a green slurry when boiled or steamed, so don’t stint yourself on quantity.
It’s a good idea to tip the whole stems into a sink of water and stir them around with a gloved hand. It gives them a rinse and softens the leaves a little, but don’t be fooled into thinking they’ve capitulated and that they aren’t still waiting for an opportunity to get you. Wear gloves while you pick the leaves off the stems – you can pinch off the top cluster – and drop them into a colander to drain.
Now the work begins to get as much flavour into the dish as you can. it’ll have to fight its way through the nettles later, so there are no fixed quantities; it’s all ‘to taste’.
My experiment began with finely-diced potato, onion and steamed carrot fried in oil in the bottom of the soup-pan; garlic, salt and black pepper added later and then a cup or two of water ready for a couple of veg stock cubes and some All Purpose Seasoning I found in an Asian supermarket.
By this stage I was still expecting the nettles to have some kind of distinctive flavour, but you can pile in as much intensity as you like at this stage. Chinese 5-spice, or Lebanese 7-spice, or Jerk seasoning – if you experiment with this soup you might try a madras curry paste at this stage and a quantity of chick-peas after the next to create a saag-chana dall variation.
Now add a quantity of water, enough to douse the nettle leaves. Empty them in carefully and tamp them down with a wooden spoon. When they’ve all wilted into the stock, the sting is gone and it’s time to apply the blending wand. I added some quark and milk to make cream of nettle soup and we discovered recently that leftover cooked basmati rice under the blender gives a good low-fat cream effect.
That’s pretty much it. Unlike wild garlic dishes, where the leaves have a distinctive, delicate flavour which repays the care taken to preserve it, nettle soup scores high on nutrition and worthiness but we didn’t rush out to the garden again for another crop of delicious weeds.

9-4-11 H&S cross’d buns

It’s a Health and Safety issue. In the old days we might have called it a concern or a topic, a question or a matter. Now we have issues, which we address. Oh issue, what shall be our resolution?

You might be forgiven for thinking that H&S is shorthand for Health And Safety Gone Mad; the phrases are pretty much interchangeable. I’ve been asked, for instance, to furnish a Health And Safety Risk Assessment for a library drawing session. I acknowledged that a sharpened pencil could present a risk of accidental impalement or indeed be converted by the malicious into an offensive weapon, though I noted that in my experience this had never occurred. The erasers supplied by the library could present a choking-risk. A sufficiently motivated child might unscrew the blade in a pencil-sharpener, presenting a whole range of possible unfortunate consequences. Paper-cuts could not be ruled out, though again this has never happened… so far.

Rather like the sin-assessment required in preparation for confession, a thorough survey of possible risk reveals another terra nova in Health And Safety: the minefield. It’s a Health And Safety Minefield, quite unsettling enough to provoke the disorder known in the field as the Health And Safety Nightmare.

The nightmare is that an accident might happen. In the enquiry that must happen in that event, there are two possible outcomes: (a) the risk has been overlooked (‘with cavalier disregard’) or (b) it has been noted, and is thus ‘an accident waiting to happen’, another way of saying that it didn’t happen until it did, in which case those responsible must claim that they will learn from the incident, while injured parties and their advocates are given the opportunity to observe that this is ‘too little, too late.’ Lessons must be learned, steps taken, measures put in place.

This week I discovered that there are are issues around hot-cross buns. Not issues around the strict accuracy of the trade description ‘hot’; I will assume that a good lawyer would defend the nomenclature as a simple generic classification observed by the baked confectionary industry and allied trades. No, no, this is a Health And Safety issue.

In the week before the Easter holidays, R.E. naturally turns to The Easter Story and associated customs and traditions. I’d thought that it might be worth bringing cross-buns in as a ‘multi-sensory resource’ [tick relevant box] in a brief history of the seasonal bakeware.

There was a worksheet based on a related comprehension-text, outlining linked superstitions: buns baked on Good Friday will not ‘go off’ during the subsequent year (I thought this made it sound like a suspect device); buns baked on this day are said to help people recover from illness ‘if they eat them’; if taken on a ship, they’re thought to prevent shipwreck; buns hung in the kitchen ensure that all bread baked will turn out perfectly; anyone sharing a bun will have friendship for the following year (End Of Ecclesiastical Year Notice: Failure to supply and share buns on the date specified may result in a Billy No-Mates Order).

The name ‘hot-cross buns’ was first recorded in 1773 – though sliced bread supplanted buns as the measure of excellence against which all human ingenuity is measured around 1928.

It’s thought that buns with a cross on them were eaten in Saxon times, when the cross represented the quarters of the moon and honoured the goddess Eostre, from which we get the name Easter, an early example of theological imperialism, though one I might not have raised with Year 5.

So I mentioned this to another teacher, who looked suddenly guarded when I had the foresight to ask to ask whether there were any children with notified allergies. Procedure advises that the staff member with responsibility for keeping the special dietary needs register must be consulted, but she was not in school. I asked at the office, who directed me to the Deputy Head. She welcomed the Incoming Bun warning, told me to hold fire and said that parents would be texted as a precaution; a useful exercise since the database may need to be updated.

Thursday’s R.E. was displaced by an extended games session, making use of a fine day. By the time the children were back in class and changed out of games kit there was time to show a couple of short vids outlining the Easter Story. Friday, there was no official R.E. window, and since the timetable was filled with end-of-term activities there was no time to introduce and divide the buns I’d kept in my briefcase overnight. In retrospect, had any child keeled over as a result of reckless unauthorised distribution of the contentious bakeware, an expired sell-by date would be clear evidence of culpable negligence.

I learn lessons from this and will put measures in place to prevent this simple error in future. Classes will not be exposed to the risk of buns, crossed or otherwise, not on my watch.

The community can sleep that much more soundly, safe in the knowledge that we are taking steps to eradicate the possibility of all accidents in compliance with initiatives to raise awareness of the dangerous environment we monitor on a day-to-day basis.