A short break for New Year...

We managed to get home briefly for New Year. Home - as distinct from where our house is - is on the Worcestershire-Staffordshire border just West of Stourbridge. It is stunningly beautiful and very good walking or horse-riding country; but almost unknown by outsiders (who, after all, ever thinks of going on holiday to the fringes of the West Midland conurbation?) My daughter and I - with Guthlac asleep in the back and Mrs Byard having a rare moment to herself - went to the local park to walk around on the frosty grass, watch the ducks coping with a frozen pond and give Guthlac his first experience of a playground swing. Of such simple shared pleasures are truly golden memories forged.

The park pond offers up, however, a deeply depressing sight - bunches of wilted flowers and mawkish messages scribbled in marker pen, attached to the fence where a depressed teenager jumped over and drowned himself. Sometimes I find the sentimentality around these events more grating and nauseating than the everyday tragedy itself; part of what Alan Bennett aptly called 'the Liverpudlianisation of Britain'. There is much to be said for keeping the upper lip stiff and the private grief private.

The occasion on which I felt least comprehension for the country of my birth was the aftermath of Diana the Princess of Wales's death in 1997. I watched the media coverage from afar (Java, in fact) and was asked by many locals to explain what was happening. I couldn't, since I totally failed to understand it myself. The nearest I can get to it is a feeling that it was a kind of emotional anarchy; the media - in a desperate attempt to hide their own culpability in paying top whack to the pursuing papparazzi - had told everyone that a self-indulgent outpouring of public grief for someone they never knew was now permissible.

Anyway, after being made miserable at the park, we drove out into the country, via Ismere, Caunsall and Kinver before returning to the parental/grandparental homestead. From Ismere we could see the tops of the Clee Hills, their lower slopes hidden by mist so that the summit appeared as an apparition-like blue-grey line in the sky. (Oddly enough, the oldest administrative document dealing with the Anglo-Saxons in this part of the country mentions the local tribe as the 'Usmere'; in the reign of Aethalbald in the early 8th century land at Ismere is granted to one of the king's followers.)

I sometimes daydream about finding a job in that area and being able to move out of the Thames Valley. The Thames Valley is a very congenial place to live in many ways, to be sure, but most of the people we know are economic migrants like we are rather than people rooted in an ancient community. Even though it may seem strange for someone with a family tree like mine to be going on in a way that is perilously close to the 'blood and soil' rhetoric of the far right, I can't help feeling more at home in North Worcestershire than I do in Reading. Though come to think of it, many of my ancestors were the economic migrants of a few generations back. Maybe my great-grandchildren, if they live around Reading, will feel about it the way I do about the place I grew up.

It is a curious fact...

... that in Cantonese, there is no way of saying "my backing singers are in tune":

Marriage, perception and memory

Surely I cannot be alone in my uneasy feeling that my lawfully wedded spouse and I inhabit parallel universes. This could explain the commercial success of books like "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Newcastle" or whatever the overhyped tomfoolery was called.

The rift in human perception on which it drew was recently brought to mind by a discussion of 'the incident at Heathrow' some years ago during which a caster became disengaged from the bottom of the oversized piece of luggage upon the bottom of which it had started the day.

My recollection is that it was a poorly made piece of luggage, dangerously overloaded by its female owner and unwisely trusted to the vagaries of airport floors and killer baggage carousels rather than the adoption of the sounder policy of keeping your luggage within the limit you can carry and lifting it clear of the floor. While getting out of the lift between the car park and the concourse, a wheel slipped into the gap between lift and floor and broke off, a fact that cannot be in any way blamed on the helpful, chivalrous gentleman attempting to drag it (and three other bags) at the time.

My wife's recollection is that rather than lift the thing clear of the sill 'like someone with common sense', I first got it jammed out of sheer malevolence and then spent fully 20 minutes pulling fruitlessly at it as queues built up around me, until overwhelmed by a combination of my Herculean strength the extent of which I apparently don't realise and the violence of my language - which allegedly attained a command of demotic Anglo-Saxon so advanced that students of linguistics within 200 metres got out pads and pencils and started feverishly making notes as their eyebrows ascended high into the stratosphere - the poor abused suitcase gave up and shed its wheel into the liftshaft where it subsequently 'must have' caused mechanical failure and congestion on a Biblical scale, too vast ever to have been noticed by anyone.

I suspect I can guess which demographic groups will instinctively believe each version.

On the subject of Slavic music videos...

Before I get over this music video-posting craze and get back to serious blogging - Noted cultural commentator Gadjo Dilo has recently posted some interesting Ukrainian music videos. In a spirit of serious musicology, I would like to share the following video - Russian band ANJ's tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev, dealing with some seriously heavy political and economic issues within the music video form - with the three people in the world who haven't seen it yet:



But for other serious Southeast Asia specialists, I present an interesting art rock US/Cambodian fusion band ("Oh God, not another one" I hear you cry):

Gyppo's video jukebox...

In a feeble attempt to match the technological nous of others, I hereby present an attempt to get a video to play on here. This is the 'Song of Peace' from Tony Gatlif's 2002 film 'Swing'. I particularly recommend the bit at 3' when Gypsies gatecrash an earnest peacenik 'everyone sing together' exercise with some kick-arse swing. Sharing Tony Gatlif's biases, I thoroughly approve:

Smartening up rap music

As my colleague and time-wasting companion No Good Boyo has recently explained, he and I have come up with a plot to render rap, hip - and furthermore hop - music socially acceptable by asking the conceptual question "If this was being recited tunelessly over a repetitive rhythm by a decent chap with a sound public-school classical education under his correctly positioned and properly-tightened belt rather than a mumbling ghetto indigene with his trousers slipping down around his unwashed ankles, what words would be used?"

This train of thought led to the previous post, which - arriving unannounced and unexplained like a Burmese baby in a cardboard box on a Tory MP's doorstep as it did - seems to have confused more than it amused.

While Boyo applied his misshapen head to the improvement of Mr Schoolly D's lyrical outpourings (though he was unable to answer my query as to whether the School in question was Charterhouse or Winchester), I turned instead to Mr 50 Cent, duly relabelled 'Mr Ten Shillings'; whose 'In da club' I have thus reworked for a more upmarket-audience, to be sung to an appropriately uplifting tune:

At One's Club
Proceed, young lady chap, it's your birthday
We shall celebrate as if it's your birthday,
We shall sip Chateau Lafitte (the 92) as if it's your birthday,
And you know we're not unduly concerned that it isn't actually your birthday!

You can find one at one's club,
A magnum full of champagne
Look Mater I have a bag of ether,
If you fancy the idea of illegal substances I would not be averse to intimacy
So come give me a hug if you need the application of embrocation
When I park, you see the Bentley badge
Decent chaps heard I put one over on Dre*,
Now their appreciation has appreciated appreciably
When you sell like M&Ms, and the garden tools they wish to use
If you watch how I move you'll mistake me for a professional cricketer...

It continues, but is anyone going to read even this far?

*Presumably Reginald 'Tooler' Dre, leg spinner for Northants 1953-60

Jeevz N da Hood

It was one of those mornings when, as Jeeves once put it, God's in his heaven and all's right in the world, if that's the phrase I'm after. Jeeves would doubtless know.
When he shimmered in with the morning tea I did detect a certain frostiness about his manner, doubtless the result of his sulking over my purchases of a gold tracksuit, Air Jordans, a Malcolm X baseball cap and copious amounts of bling.
"Dashitall Jeeves - one must move with the times, don't you know. This gear is all the rage at the Drones Club."
"Indeed, sir."
"I mean, Tupac Fotherington-Thomas has promised to teach some of the chaps to break-dance. It's this frightfully jolly dance where you spin round on your head, apparently."
"I fear that Mr Fortherington-Thomas may be unable to impart his skill in that particular exercise of terpsichorean agility today, sir."
"What on earth are you blabbering about, Jeeves?" I retorted. Brainy as the chap may be, he sometimes fails to make sense at all.
"One heard from Mr 'Biggy' Little's manservant Beddoes that Fotherington-Thomas showed disrespect to Mr Little, upon which Mr Little's homies took him for a ride in Mr Little's stretch limo and popped a cap in his mother****ing ass, sir."
I reeled. "Oh I say Jeeves! Hardly the act of a preux chevalier, what?"
"Indeed not, sir."
As I sipped the refreshing brew my head seemed to clear somewhat.
"Jeeves?"
"Yes sir?"
"Do you really think the bling gear is a frost?"
"Yes, sir."
"You'd probably better get rid of it."
"Thank you sir. I already have"