Monthly Archives: November 2020

A Cat, Several Pigeons, and I/Me (Delete as necessary)

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I don’t know about your dentist, but mine has the habit of settling you in the chair, tilting you back to a virtually horizontal position, clamping your top jaw and packing your bottom jaw with cotton wool, and then starting a conversation, which is, perforce, rather one-sided. It so happens that I was at the dentist last week, about four hours after publishing my last blog post.

“My wife,” began the dentist (who is also a co-congregant and friend), “is pretty upset by what you wrote”. I knew immediately what he was referring to. I realized I was going to have to live with my earlier hasty decision, and that I knew what my topic for this week would be. I’ll explain all presently (if this week’s title hasn’t already made it obvious).

But first, to continue my story. After the dentist had worked his alchemy on a recalcitrant tooth, I returned home to discover, in my inbox, a shocked email from a friend of over 30 years’ standing, a Classical scholar, who took issue with my English both in itself and as reflecting Danish grammar, which (if I understood him correctly) he claimed is the real arbiter of how English grammar should be. (My friend is Danish; his English is, like that of all the Danes I know, excellent – as I always say, if it weren’t, there would be precious few people he could talk to.)

So, what evoked these shocked and outraged responses? It was that, once again, I had used a nominative noun as part of an accusative compound noun phrase. Don’t panic! To be specific, I had written:

My father z”l was a keen all-round sportsman, and introduced my brother – Martin – and I to tennis at a fairly young age.

My two erudite friends argued that I should have written:

My father z”l was a keen all-round sportsman, and introduced my brother – Martin – and me to tennis at a fairly young age.

Their reasoning was that, since it would be incorrect to write:

My father…introduced I to tennis

it is similarly incorrect to write

My father…introduced my brother and I to tennis

Now, I don’t want to suggest that their position is eccentric. My blog is read by at least two others who take the same position strongly enough to have written to me on the first occasion I used this construction (and probably many others who didn’t feel strongly enough about it to actually write to me).

I want to first consider the underlying premise behind the argument that what I wrote was incorrect. This is a premise that was originally implicit, but that one of my correspondents made explicit later, writing:

I know that language evolves, and it certainly needs to. But I suspect there’s a vast difference between changes of growth and changes of … neglect (?), where a society – its speakers and its teachers/students–can’t be bothered to care about or learn their language.

That is exactly the fundamental point where I differ from my critics. Their view of English is the one I, and they, grew up with:

I was educated in a school system that taught and practised parsing – breaking down a sentence into its parts and describing the syntactic role of each part in the sentence. Parsing was presented and treated as an exact science, and, for each exercise, there was a single right answer. English grammar, I was raised to believe, was a closed, complete, perfect and unchanging system.

Not coincidentally, this ‘English grammar’ that I was taught was modelled very closely on Latin grammar. Where it didn’t fit, grammarians took a mallet to hammer various round pegs of English into square holes of Latin. The two facts they failed to take sufficient account of were that English is not Latin and that all native Latin speakers are dead! As a result, Latin is a dead language and, therefore, does not develop. On the other hand, a surprisingly large number of English speakers are alive. Trying to impose a closed, complete, perfect and unchanging system of grammar on a living language is a little like trying to fit a jellyfish into a small box: bits will forever be spilling over the edges.

Living languages are changing languages, and the changes are made not by grammarians but by users of the language. There may be some who wish this was not so, but they are not free to decree that it shall not be so. King Cnut (or Canute, as know him) of Denmark (there’s that pesky Denmark again), Norway and England demonstrated that eloquently when he sat enthroned on the beach and commanded the tide not to come in (knowing full well that it would not obey).

To illustrate this process of change, I have cunningly sprinkled through the first 150 words of this post a number of examples of ways in which English has changed in the last 30 years (or, in one case, 400 years). How many of them did you spot as being ‘wrong’, and how many slipped under your radar?

I knew immediately what he was referring to.

I grew up ‘knowing’ that a preposition was a word you must not end a sentence with. You probably know the (possibly apocryphal) chestnut attributed to Churchill. He received either a ‘corrected’ draft of a speech of his, or a very stuffy letter, with an awkward sentence including a preposition moved from its natural position at the end. He scrawled on the manuscript: ‘This is the kind of language up with which I will not put.’ There is no logical reason for this ‘rule’; it serves no purpose, and usually results in a sentence that is harder to understand, since we have to ‘remember’ the preposition until the end of the sentence, when we can reunite it with the verb that it naturally follows. Compare these two examples:

Where is the hat from which he pulled the rabbit?
Where is the hat he pulled the rabbit from?

Of course, you could argue that in the second sentence, from is separated from the hat’, which also makes the sentence harder to understand. In this case, a more drastic rewrite might be best: perhaps something like:

He pulled the rabbit from a hat: where is the hat?

I’ll explain all presently.

Originally, and unsurprisingly, presently meant at the present time, immediately. For example: I’ll do it presently meant I’ll do it now.

From the 17the Century, this gradually weakened, until today it probably means something more like at some indeterminate time in the not-too-distant future.

I bring this example to demonstrate that the meaning of words is fluid, and the changes in meaning are determined not by some official body (What an absurdity the Académie Francaise is, banning words: clearly, Cnut was not king of France.) The meaning of words is shaped by the way they are used. Some people think that the compilers of dictionaries invent what words mean; in fact, they discover the meanings that are already current. A dictionary is a snapshot of a language’s vocabulary as it is used at one moment in time in the real world.

The same, incidentally, is true for spelling. In the mid-1300s, there were heated discussions, and ladies having fainting fits, over the ‘incorrect’ writing of cupboard, when everyone knew it was two words: cup board. Changes like this are a process, and if you happen to be living in the period when this process takes place, you may find yourself arguing about which form is correct, instead of asking (of the journey from two words to one) Are we there yet?

But first, to continue my story.

I’m particularly pleased with this example, since it ‘breaks’ two ‘rules’: Never begin a sentence with a conjunction, and: Every sentence must have a finite verb. Thirty years ago, I would have ‘corrected’ this sentence to something like:

However, first let me continue my story

and ended up with a sentence that seems to me a weaker piece of communication.

So, language is constantly changing, and we should recognise that sometimes we are upset by changes in language in the same way as we are upset by changes in musical styles. Just because I happen to think Western music reached its peak with Bach, and it’s been steadily downhill since 1750, doesn’t mean that Beethoven’s musical style is incorrect. I can rue the change, without condemning it as wrong.

Let’s return now to my correspondent’s suspicion that there’s a vast difference between changes of growth and changes of … neglect (?), where a society….can’t be bothered to care about or learn their language.

I am reminded of two rather different characters: M. Jourdain and Bubba Watson. Jourdain is the foolish bourgeois who aspires to be a gentleman in Molière’s comedy. At one point, he is amazed to discover that: ‘For more than forty years I have been speaking prose while knowing nothing of it!’ We don’t need to study our own language in the abstract; it is sufficient to experience it in our daily lives. It is also unreasonable to expect the majority of language users to undertake serious academic study of their native language; just because I find this stuff exciting, I don’t need to inflict it on others (so feel free to leave).

Bubba Watson is an American golfer who rose to World No 2 in his prime, and who has earned at least $30 million from golf. What brings him here is that he has never had a single golf lesson in his life. He is a purely instinctual player. It’s not that he can’t be bothered to care about or learn golf; it is, rather, that he has a natural gift. Native speakers, I would argue, also have a natural gift.

Language is a functioning democracy. If a sufficiently large number of people decide to adopt a new word, meaning, spelling, grammatical or syntactical structure, it will be adopted generally. Once it is adopted, it is part of English. We might personally think it less elegant or useful than what it replaced (although that is often merely subjective), but we cannot argue that it is wrong.

The point at which a language finds itself at any given moment is a set of conventions, not immutable laws. These conventions have no moral value, and they can be changed with impunity. That’s how living languages function.

Let’s return now to the example that sparked this blog.

My father…introduced my brother and I to tennis.

The fact is, if I’m being completely honest, that this doesn’t sound right to me. Unfortunately, neither does:

My father…introduced my brother and me to tennis.

On this particular journey, from the grammatically conventional ‘me’ to the colloquially increasingly popular ‘I’, I feel more or less equidistant from the starting point and the finishing post, and I can’t really see either. I am confident that, when I write my blog in another 30 years, I will be completely comfortable with ‘I’….and so will you.

Meanwhile, here’s someone who started not just speaking, but also reading, his own language, faultlessly, 9 months ago.

Anyone for Tennis?

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Spoiler alert: The title says it all. This started out as a post about sport in general, but I quickly realised that I will need more than one post to do justice to the subject, so this may well be the first of an occasional series. If the mere mention of the word sport induces in you a coma, I apologise. Feel free to leave. I look forward to seeing you next week.

For as long as I can remember, tennis was always one of my family’s favourite sports. My father z”l was a keen all-round sportsman, and introduced my brother Martin and I to tennis at a fairly young age. I knew almost immediately that this was my sport. The activity comes in short, intense bursts, with ample recovery time. Nobody comes crashing into you, barging you out of the way or hacking your legs out from under you. Tennis marries power and finesse, instinct and guile. It uses a ball that, when someone is firing it at you at speed, has the (for you) distinct advantage of not being made of solid cork covered in hard, stitched leather, like a cricket ball. Recreational tennis depends on you, and the player on the other side of the net, trusting each other to play fair, since each of you will usually be better placed to call the other’s shots in or out. The sport requires some equipment, which means that it comes with a body of specialized knowledge, and allows satisfyingly nerdy discussion of the relative merits of different makes of racquet and ball. At the same time, it is surprising how little you can make do with – see below.

By the age of eight or nine, I was hooked. This meant playing once or twice a week, for an hour, or two, or three, at a time, on the municipal courts in our local park. The park boasted about ten hardcourts, so there was usually at least one available. However, the quality of the different courts’ playing surfaces varied: from the recently refurbished (smooth, with crisp, white line markings) to the ridged and pock-marked. The word ‘fault’ is often heard on a tennis court, but seldom referring to something that resembles San Andreas. If I ever played a visitor on one of the worse courts, I enjoyed the advantage of knowing where to attempt to place the ball to maximise the chance of an uneven bounce, much like a slow bowler taking advantage of the fast bowlers’ footmarks.

Another feature of the more unkempt courts was that they had the odd tuft of weed sprouting in the cracks, which helped us imagine that we were playing on the hallowed lawns of our beloved Wimbledon.

Not that our imagination needed much help. In addition to the tennis described above, my friends and I also played hand-tennis every day after school. Using the existing markings (for netball, possibly?), we played with an old tennis ball, which we hit with our open palm. We had to imagine the net; we gave no quarter; but I remember no arguments, no John McEnroe You cannot be serious outbursts. There we would be, rain or shine, until we could no longer see the ball, playing in shirtsleeves, or jumpers (sweaters not having been adopted yet in England) or duffle coats (not many blogs can legitimately introduce duffle coats two weeks running, I bet).

In our minds, my best friend Peter and I were Pietrangeli and Sirola, the Italian doubles pair who won the French Championships in 1959, all grace and elegance. If you can stand in drizzle, wearing a duffle coat that, sodden, weighs twice what it did when it was dry, palming a half-bald tennis ball across a primary school playground, and feel as though you are gliding across the sun-baked clay of Roland Garros in the brightest of whites, then your imagination is at the peak of health.

I did actually get to play once on sun-baked clay. On a family holiday in Italy, Martin and I were woken ridiculously early (on reflection, it was probably 6:30) to play for an hour before breakfast, and before the sun was too high in the sky. Given the very long hours he worked, my father was not able to spend much time with us throughout the year, so this was a wonderful holiday, and that halcyon hour on the clay court was, in itself, enough to fuel another decade of fantasies.

Our tennis year naturally revolved around the Wimbledon fortnight – last week in June, first week in July. There was good BBC television coverage of the tournament as I was growing up. At first, although I enjoyed watching, I far preferred playing. At some point, and I wonder whether this is one measure of my move from childhood to adolescence, I preferred to stay home and watch an absorbing match, however inviting the weather was outside the window.

In our family, watching Wimbledon also meant, with very fortunate frequency, going to Wimbledon and watching live. Wimbledon tickets are allocated by a draw. The public are invited to apply to be included in the draw, and lucky winners are allocated at random a specific court and a specific day. My parents applied every year, and were, as I say, often lucky enough to be drawn. On one memorable occasion, when they had tickets for Centre Court on Finals Day, they generously gave the tickets to Martin and I.

We started early for the long tube journey from East to South London. I was armed with my binoculars, and I suspect Martin had his camera with him. We emerged from the depths of Southfields station to discover a dull and drizzly day. A short cab ride brought us to the ground. We settled in our seats nice and early, and spent the next four hours waiting for the weather to improve. I was able to watch the rain splashing on the covers in close-up, thanks to the binoculars and Martin was, presumably, able to photograph the pools of standing water. Eventually, we heard the dreaded announcement that play was abandoned for the day, and started our long trek back home. The icing on this particular poisoned cake was that the finals were postponed to the following Monday, and we both knew that there was no chance that our parents would agree to us taking a day off school.

However, I do have several happier memories of going to Wimbledon, and actually watching some tennis. The Championships operated a scheme (I’ve just checked, and they still do) whereby any ticketholders leaving the ground early were invited to leave their tickets in special postboxes placed around the grounds. (There were many suburban housewives who came to Wimbledon, but left early enough to be in time to have dinner on the table when their husbands arrived home from work.) These tickets were then collected, and, from mid-late afternoon, resold for a modest fee. All proceeds went, I believe, to the Lawn Tennis Association and were earmarked for affiliated charities. I have a memory of tickets being resold for half-a-crown; I see that the current price is 120 times that amount.

Several times, when the forecast promised good weather, Martin and I travelled to the championships straight from school, arriving around 5PM. On one memorable occasion, we were lucky enough to get Centre Court tickets, sitting high up in one corner of the court, It was men’s doubles semi-finals day, July, 1967.

In the previous round, an unseeded English pair, Peter Curtis and Graham Stiwell, had beaten the Number 1 seeds, John Newcombe and Tony Roche, 8-6 in the fifth set. They were now facing the Number 4 seeds, Roy Emerson and Ken Fletcher, for a place in the final. This was a match that had us on the edge of our seats from start to finish. You need to remember that this was in an era when the best players played all three events, so that the doubles events offered tennis every bit as high quality as the singles, and often at a more spectacular pace.

In the afternoon light, with shadows lengthening across the court, the match unfolded. The Australians won the first two sets 6-4, 8-6. The English then rallied to take two equally tight sets 6-4, 7-5. Would they be able to take the fifth to win a place in the final? Equally nervewracking was the question: Would the light remain good enough to complete the match that day. The prospect of our having to leave after the fourth and miss seeing the conclusion was awful. Of course, the prospect for the players of having to resume the following day must have also been very unattractive for them.

Fortunately, July in England provides some long, lingering evenings, and this was one of them. The fifth set was fought to a darkening but thrilling conclusion at 9-7. The only fly in the ointment was that it was 9-7 to the Australians (doubtless to the delight of at least two of my readers). At least we had the satisfaction of knowing later that they were beaten in the final by the South Africans Bob Hewitt and Frew McMillan.

Of course, tennis was a very different game then. 1967 was the last year before Wimbledon became open to professionals. Racquets were wooden, and, to prevent warping, we kept them in presses. The old-fashioned square press had a wingnut and bolt at each corner, each of which you had to loosen each time to remove the racquet. When this mechanism was replaced by a single metal bar which you pulled up to loosen the press instantly, we were stunned by the cutting-edge technology. The balls were white, not yellow. The racquets did not have the big heads they have now…and nor did the players. It was a gentler, less intense game, with no grunting and generally refined conduct, although, even before John McEnroe’s tantrums, Bob Hewitt was known to take offence at some umpiring decisions, and to plonk himself down, sit cross-legged on the court and refuse to move for a few minutes.

I have spent the last 50 years measuring each rising star – Newcombe, Borg, McEnroe, Connors (I always say that the difference between those two is that McEnroe hated losing and Connors loved winning), Sampras, Agassi, Federer, Nadal, Djokovic – against my gold standard – Rod Laver. Comparisons are, of course, in some sense meaningless. Each player is necessarily a product of his time, and shaped by specific equipment, playing surface, timetable and training parameters. I think each fan is to some extent similarly a product of his formative years.

However, Laver’s performance on the professional circuit in the six years between when he turned professional and when the grand slam tournaments became open to professionals, is sufficiently impressive to suggest that, had he not ‘lost’ those six years of opportunity, he would have won more major titles than any other player so far has. In addition, he changed the way the game was played, turning defensive shots into attacking ones. Before Laver, if you chased down a lob on your backhand, you threw up a lob in return. Laver’s wrist strength allowed him to play a topspin backhand drive cross-court or down the line, while running back. If I had to choose one player who gave me most pleasure to watch, it would definitely be either Laver or Federer, and I’m glad I don’t have to choose between them, but have been privileged to enjoy them both, and so many others.

Sadly, Tao hasn’t started playing tennis yet…but he was, coincidentally, involved in a sporting contest in failing light last week.

Year One and Counting

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Those of you who know me really well are probably as astonished as I am to realise that today’s post is my 52nd, and that, according to the Hebrew calendar, I reached my first blog birthday on 20 Marcheshvan, 2 days before the day I am writing this. Both when I started, and this week, we read in synagogue Pareshat (the weekly Torah portion) Chayei Sarah.  I tell you all this to justify this week’s topic, even though the Gregorian anniversary of my first post will actually only be on 12 November, in a couple of days.

Either way, my thoughts have been turning to the, for me, astounding fact that I have stuck at this blog for an entire year. I’m not sure I’ve ever stuck at anything voluntarily for that long, and certainly not anything that required effort (so my marriage doesn’t count…all the effort there has been on Bernice’s part).

In my childhood, I took up trainspotting, which, before it was the title of a novel and film, was a schoolboy hobby. My friend Peter and I would regularly meet up, each armed with a Bic ballpoint pen, a 6-inch wooden ruler and our copy of Ian Allen’s ABC Guide, which provided a list, arranged numerically by serial number, of all railway engines in service in the Eastern Region. We would buy a platform ticket at Ilford station, or, if we could afford it, take the train to Stratford, and sometimes even Liverpool Street, to spend hours on the platform, usually in a light but persistent drizzle.

If I close my eyes, I can still smell the unique cocktail made up of the heady and exotic scent of a steam train engine, all coal dust and steam, mingled with the dank odour of a soggy duffle coat.

We would check every engine we saw against our copies of the ABC Guide, and rule a neat (or, in my case, blotchy and slightly skewed) ballpoint line through the number of each engine that we had never spotted before.

I only bring up the whole topic in order to tell you that, despite the considerable up-front expense of buying the ABC Guide, I only stuck at it for a short while, until the task of filling pages and pages like this seemed just too daunting.

And that pattern seems to have repeated itself many times. The phrase nine-day wonder seems not entirely inappropriate.

And yet, here I am, coming to the end of an entire year, without having missed a week, and feeling that I can maybe contemplate another year. The fact is that, a couple of weeks ago, when I wrestled for two days over a post, I confided to Bernice that I was considering cutting down to a fortnightly post (that’s every two weeks for any Americans who don’t know the word – and it would be invidious of me to point out that we Brits have one word to do the job of 3 of yours). However, reaching this milestone has pumped oxygen back into my muscles, and I’m not ready to compromise just yet.

Seeking inspiration, I turned to a book that I bought second hand for 40p (so it can’t have been more than 49 years ago). My mother z”l, despite being a very intelligent woman, had no intellectual or high-cultural pretensions. She read the Daily Mirror without fail, every morning (the Sunday Mirror once a week). The daily press in Britain at the time was firmly divided into highbrow broadsheet papers and lowbrow tabloid papers, and the Mirror was definitely in the second category. Mum always maintained that, if you only had half an hour to read a paper, you would be better informed reading the Mirror than any other paper.

In the era when she read it, I think she was right. Since then, of course, much of the ‘quality’ press in Britain has been Murdoched down and the old tabloid papers now have little if anything to do with genuine news stories. In the 1950s and 60s, however, the Mirror was vigorous and succinct in its exploration and presentation of the news, and in its comment columns.

The most famous Mirror columnist was William Neil Connor, who contributed 500 words, two or three times a week, every week for over 30 years, from 1935 until shortly before his early death in 1967. I am, frankly, in awe. I know he was being paid for doing this, but even so, I greatly admire his ability to maintain so consistently high a level of writing over all this time, and not to run out of subjects, particularly since he didn’t have a second home in Portugal.

In fairness, this spell was broken by his war service from 1940 to 1945. To give you a tiny taste of his style: he began his first column after returning in 1945:

As I was saying when I was interrupted, it is a powerful hard thing to please all of the people all of the time….

Connor wrote under the pseudonym Cassandra. His columns were a mix of political comment, personal reminiscence, musings and comic entertainments. I remembered reading and enjoying Cassandra’s column very much, in the paper and in book form. When I revisited the book as today’s post was starting to take shape in my mind, I was surprised to discover how fresh his pieces still are. His no-nonsense, down-to-earth style has aged very gracefully.

As he became a well-known and well-respected columnist, Cassandra took on more serious assignments. He attended, and wrote about: the trials of Eichmann, and Jack Ruby (who shot J. F. Kennedy’s assassin); the enthronement of Pope John; Churchill’s funeral; the Korean War. He interviewed, among many others, President Kennedy, Senator McCarthy, Billy Graham, Charlie Chaplin, Adlai Stevenson, David Ben Gurion, Archbishop Makarios, and Marilyn Monroe.

All of these more serious pieces were interspersed with short columns telling appalling jokes based on wordplay. As he himself put it:

Forward into the abyss of unspeakable puns.

For example: there was the miserly theatrical agent who caught his assistant making an expensive international phone call in an attempt to book a pair of Persian acrobats, rather than sending a much cheaper letter. Challenged to explain his action, the assistant explained:

I was only trying to bill two Kurds with one phone.

It is at about this point that I realized this column was heading towards a second newspaper columnist. Once the penny dropped, writing the rest of it was easy.

Exhibit B is a columnist (and television personality) who I always thought I used to look like (when I had hair), and who I certainly would have loved to emulate: Bernard Levin.

He first came to prominence while working a theatre critic. He had a regular slot conducting a serious interview, or leading a discussion, on the ground-breaking satirical BBC TV show That Was The Week That Was. He showed no mercy when savaging the interviewees, and often launched into lengthy diatribes, leaving little time for the ‘victim’ to respond.

When he turned to being a newspaper columnist, he matched or bettered Cassandra’s 32-year run (with a 5-year interruption). Levin wrote five columns a week for the Daily Mail, from 1965 to 1970. Then the paper’s owner attempted to censor Levin’s support for the Labour Party, in breach of Levin’s contract, which guaranteed him political freedom in his column. He almost immediately joined The Times, where he wrote two or three columns a week for the next 27 years.

His topics were as diverse as the death watch beetle, Field Marshal Montgomery, Wagner, homophobia, censorship, Eldridge Cleaver, arachnophobia, theatrical nudity, and the North Thames Gas Board. His editor on The Times commented that ‘he made being opinionated, which he always was, accessible to people’, which seems to me a fine working definition of what an opinion column should be.

In his first published collection of his columns from The Times, Levin acknowledged his readers with a modesty and goodwill that somehow lived with his intellectual arrogance, air of moral superiority, and ruthless destruction of those he saw as evil, whether Peter Rachman the slum landlord or Charles Forte the hotelier and restauranteur. Levin wrote: [My readers’] letters in response to what they read under my name have always astonished me by their quantity and astounded me by their generosity”.

I couldn’t have put it better myself. I’m not sure what I envisaged when I started this blog a year ago. What I certainly didn’t expect was that, wherever my seat-of-the-pants flight of fancy took me, there would always (and I do mean always) be one or two readers out there who enjoyed the trip enough to write and tell me so.

I am immensely grateful to my groupie, who unfailingly thanks me and comments privately on each post; I can never quite decide whether it is genuine gratitude or old-world manners, but I’ll gladly take it, whatever it is, and every week I hold my breath after going live until I receive that email. Because every week I launch my little paper aeroplane, with no real idea whether it will plummet to the ground, land in a puddle, and be revealed as a soggy mess, or catch a fortuitous air current and soar triumphantly. (The truth, as is usual, appears to be more or less equidistant from those two extremes.)

It’s particularly rewarding when my memories chime with those of others, or spark in some of you memories of your own, which you then share with us. We’ve even had one or two rolling discussions in the comments, which is very exciting.

WordPress, the software I use to create my blog, also provides me with some statistical data. For example, I can see how many people view a new post, and how long they spend reading it. (Some of you must have taken that speed-reading course, I think…I hope.) I can also see in which countries my site is being viewed. For the most part, this is as expected: I know that my core readership is largely in Israel, UK, US and Canada. I also know who my readership in Portugal is, and who my one reader in Australia is, and I have a good idea about the one reader in each of France, Spain and Sweden.

However, every so often I get a surprise. I was being read in United Arab Emirates before the Abraham Accords were signed: once only, but nevertheless. I have also been surprised, and intrigued, to see readers in Finland, China and, most perplexingly, Uganda. If any of you reading this can throw light on any of these locations, I would be most grateful. (Of course, I suspect they may simply represent the locations of VPNs.)

I reached an all-time early high of just over 100 distinct readers. This was obviously because I sent out invitations to everyone I thought might conceivably be interested, and most people gave it a try. My readership has now settled down to around 65 or 70. A friend suggested to me that I might want to explore locating the blog on a more high-profile platform. To be honest, I very much like the idea that I am among friends. This way, I avoid unpleasant surprises when moderating the comments, or at least hope to!

One last observation. I regard myself as a pretty private person. I don’t ordinarily feel comfortable baring my soul, or even discussing my shortcomings, with anyone who is not a close blood relative. Curiously, the distance that the blog constructs beween me and you, dear reader, has made it easier for me to open up. Have no fear: I’m not going to go all touchy-feely on you. I have, however, surprised myself more than once in what I am prepared to put out there in the ether.

And that is quite enough navel-gazing for this week. Let’s cut to what is, for some of you, and for me, the chase: Tao. This week we find him chasing off to the shops. Rest assured: off-camera, he is being accompanied by a responsible adult, although by the looks of it that may only be necessary for the next week or two.

Momentous Moments

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My Uncle Bobby, z”l, was a jazz enthusiast, and always contended, in discussions with lovers of classical music, that anyone who claimed to enjoy listening to a 40-minute symphony was deluding himself: what he actually enjoyed were a few key moments, and he was prepared to wait through the other passages for the pleasure of these ‘highs’. Jazz recordings, Uncle Bobby believed, were a distillation of the ‘highs’, without any of the boring in-between bits.

I didn’t subscribe to his theory then, still less now…and yet there are some works that contain, for me, undeniable ‘high’ moments. I would, nevertheless, argue that the impact of those moments owes much to the surrounding music within which they sit.

For instance (I recall that my father z”l once told me that he was 14 years old before he realised that for instance was two words; until then, he visualised it as frinstance). Anyway, for instance, one such moment for me is the last three notes of the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4. If you can spare 5’ 35”, please listen to the whole movement, as interpreted by Christian Zimmerman and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Leonard Bernstein. (The movement runs from 19’25” to 25”00.) Of course, if you have a full 35 minutes to spare, I recommend listening to the whole thing.

I am no musicologist, but, for me, what is going on here is one long build towards resolution. At the beginning of the movement, the orchestra speaks in short, abrupt, hesitant, stuttering, broken phrases, in a minor key; the music is indecisive and troubled. The piano part, in contrast, is serene, measured, in long, sweeping passages. As the movement progresses, the piano passages became shorter, as if influenced by the orchestra. At the same time, the piano ‘calms’ the orchestra. By the end, soloist and orchestra are as one.

The movement closes with the orchestra playing a sustained chord, quietly, while the soloist plays a sequence of single notes moving up the scale, that start by echoing notes of the chord being played by the orchestra, in perfect harmony, but then turn back from the top of the scale, with the two final notes making us suspect that this is not the resolution of the piece, but a transition to what is to be a joyous final movement. As the piano crests that run, my heart always skips a beat. (Hope yours does, too.) Of course, I suffer from atrial fibrillation, so my heart often skips a beat. (Hope yours doesn’t!)

This happens, for me, not just in music, but also in theatre.

London’s Barbican Centre boasts a vary large apron stage; the distance from downstage right to upstage left, when the apron is in place, is about 16 metres.

If I close my eyes, I can still see Lady Percy, in a 1983 production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I, entering at the back of the stage, very agitated, having just learnt that Hotspur, her husband, is about to leave for war. She spots him at the very front of the stage, and runs the entire diagonal from back to front at full pelt. Hearing her approach, he turns; a few metres away from him, she leaps into his arms, and wraps her arms and legs around him.

From the dialogue between the couple in their few scenes together in the play, we can easily feel that they are uncomfortable with each other. Percy is a man of action, not talk, and he certainly does not feel any need to make a woman privy to his battle plans. Lady Percy seems unsure of Hotspur’s love, and feels shut out by him from the things that matter to him.

However, in this one moment on stage, we learn of a whole other side to their relationship that the words cannot convey. We see tremendous passion, impetuosity and physicality. We see that Lady Percy trusts Hotspur completely, and is absolutely confident that he will catch her.

When he does catch her, without staggering back, it is a thrilling moment for the audience: Hotspur is standing perilously close to the front edge of the apron, and Lady Percy, though slight, has launched herself at him like a bullet. We feel some of the relief we feel watching a successful acrobatic or trapeze performance, and we admire Hotspur’s strength and solidity. The leap, and the catch, are an expression of their love for each other, an expression that is missing from their dialogue. The texture of their relationship, and of the play, is enriched by this wonderful moment of theatre.

One more moment, this time of both theatre and music. Bernice and I were privileged to see Amadeus, in Bristol, in its pre-London 1982 run, with Frank Finlay playing Salieri. At the time, the round trip from Nantymoel, where we then lived, to Bristol was well over three hours; I can honestly say it would have been worth walking to Bristol to see this particular production. Although the play had premiered with Paul Scofield in London a year earlier, we knew very little about it before seeing it.

There is a scene, near the beginning of the play, when Salieri, in a single revelatory moment, realises Mozart’s genius. He hears, from a side-room, a wind serenade, which you can hear here. Instead of attempting to describe the music, I will give you the words the playwright Peter Schaeffer gave to Salieri:

The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse. Bassoons and basset horns, like a rusty squeezebox. And then suddenly, high above it, an oboe. A single note, hanging there, unwavering. Until a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I’d never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.

I can only add that, in Bristol, that evening, that music soared over the theatre and we all felt the same awe as Salieri, knowing that we were in the presence of a divine talent.

It is these moments that drive me to continue going to live theatre and live music concerts. At a certain level, this makes no sense. You pay a not insignificant sum of money for tickets, drive an inordinate distance, spend ages looking for a parking space, and then have to half-jog to reach the auditorium in time. No sooner do you sit down than you have to stand again so that even-later-comers can squeeze past, and now you’re settling yourself for an evening of trying to filter out the rustling, coughing and whispering of those around you.

Why do I do it? I wouldn’t bet on my ears being able to distinguish a live recital in the concert hall from the reproduction through my mid-priced CD player and speakers in the comfort of my own home. At home I can listen to Daniel Barenboim, Pinhas Zukerman and Jacqueline du Pre performing Beethoven’s Archduke Trio, in a recording from 1970 that has perhaps never been bettered for unabashed youthful enthusiasm.

We’ve already established that I’m not a musicologist; if I were, I could do even better, perhaps, and read the score, hearing the music in my head exactly as I feel it should sound. So why do we still go to concert halls…or, indeed, theatres, to see live plays, when we can download films and enjoy a more comfortable seat with unimpeded sightlines.

Not everyone does go, of course. Our son, Micha’el, himself a multi-talented amateur musician, hates going to live arts performances of any kind, because he finds himself on the edge of his seat, imagining all of the things that might go dreadfully wrong.

This is, paradoxically, almost exactly the same reason that drives me to go to live arts performances; I find myself on the edge of my seat, imagining all of the things that might go wonderfully right. The fact is that, every time I go to the theatre, as the lights go down, I have a strong feeling that this may just be the night when the cast, or the musicians, all give the performance of their lives. This, I guess, makes me an incurable optimist, but the moments I have described here, and more than a few others over the decades, give me good grounds for my optimism.

All I have to hope now is that, at some point in the future before we all become immobile or gaga, we. and you, will be able again to enjoy live arts performances (and grandchildren, of course).

Until that moment, Bernice and I will just have to make do with our video of A Man for All Seasonings.