No More Parades

As the summer goes into overdrive just as peoples' thoughts start to turn to going back to work, and the Olympics retreat into what already feels like distant memory, so the TV channels unveil their autumn line-ups.

The most eye-catching of what has been announced so far is undoubtedly the BBC's adaptation of the Parade's End tetralogy, which starts on BBC 2 on Friday.  The Sunday papers have pushed this heaily today, as the BBC's answer to the Downton Abbey behemoth, but I do hope that people aren't going to get too excited, as, unless Tom Stoppard has ripped tha heart out of it, Parade's End is a much more difficult and involving proposition than its ITV rival.  You can almost feel the slight anxiety that this adaptation has caused amongst the litterati in their pre-screening articles.  "Waugh we're ok with, we know where we are with Waugh - 500 words by tomorrow morning?" "Ah yes, Greene again - Catholicism, tortured soul, affairs" "Ford Madox Ford- ???"

Poor old Ford Madox Ford is little read these days, although he really deserves to be more mainstream.  In part, I think it's a question of style.  I've never really gone overboard on modernist writing, but his prose has a far greater clarity than Virginia Woolf, say, and his dialogue is better than Henry Green's (whom I think he probably most resembles). Persevere with the first 50 or so of the well over 800 pages of Parade's End, and once you "get" the narrative voice it's really absorbing stuff.

It would be unfair of me to blow the lid on the plot so I'll restrain myself, but I hope the cast are up to their roles.  Benedict Cumberbatch has a tricky job to pull of as the lead, Tietjens is quite a difficult hero for the early 21st century.  Even in the social milieu of pre Great War England his 18th century Tory attitudes mark him out from the crowd, and there are several occasions when you want to do nothing so much as give him a damn good shake.  The problem of course is that he tends to just roll with whatever punches life throws at him; which, given the scheming of his ludicrous wife, and his (chaste) love for the young suffragette Valentine Wannop, are legion.

Where Ford succeeds is in exposing the destructive effects of the war on the class system and the rigid certainties of the Edwardian age.  By offering Christopher Tietjens up as a saintly every man, we can observe the conflict as it deconstructs his personality and very sense of self, before rebuilding him anew.

I'll withold judgment for now (and the previews of the adaptation have been uniformly positive), but if they get Parade's End right, we could be looking at landmark television that can stand alongside Brideshead Revisited or The Jewel in the Crown.  If they miss the mark, then perhaps the book is truly, as I suspect it might be, unfilmable.

Watch this space.

Fun in the Sun - Or Cropredy for those who couldn't quite make it this year

Being the fine upstanding folk rock obsessive that I am, I thought I'd take myself off to the Cropredy Festival so that none of you had to go...

Blessed with astonishingly good weather this year, the scene was set for what I hoped was going to be 3 days of top quality folk. Was it? We'll come to Fairport in a bit. Read on....

The Highs:

Bellowhead - I've always been a bit ambivalent about them, but this was the weekend where I finally got the point. An absolutely storming set, and looked like they were enjoying themselves more than anyone else on the bill. Several albums purchased.

Calan - really good Welsh folk; sort of sound like 9/Jewel era Fairport (unsurprising maybe given the involvement of Maart), they even managed to work in a bit of clog dancing. Would have purchased the album, but it had sold out by the time I got to the tent.

Tarras - nice to see them back, after so nearly making it big round the turn of the last decade. Line-up's a bit different, but they make a good big sound!

Richard Thompson - he was a bit naughty really. It was billed as a solo set, second headlining on Friday, but then he brought on Mattacks, Pegg, Nicol, and blew the site away. We had some Bright Lights, a bit of Sandy, and the whole thing was a bit emotional.

The Middling:

Larkin Poe - just about got what they did, but they were probably a bit too "mainstream" for Cropredy.

Ellen and the Escapades - bland, inoffensive, nothing further to say...

Dead Flamingoes - I really wanted to like them, what with Kami Thompson being the singer (and sounding an awful lot like her mother), but even by the standards of folk the lyrics were bleak. If they cheer up a bit, they might be rather wonderful, but they're not there yet.

Big Country - sort of got it, but not my scene, and the new vocalist is a bit too different.

Legend - fun reggae covers band with some impressive session pedigree.

The Lows:

Joan Armatrading - I like her, I really do, but I'm not sure what she was doing at Cropredy. There was a hard core in front of the stage who were obviously enjoying themselves, but also a steady stream for the exits (she was the Friday headline), and lost me after about 20 minutes. In some ways I think it was through poor choice of material, but admittedly she wasn't helped by having to follow Richard Thompson.

Squeeze - why? Just why?

And so to Fairport, who came on at 2030 on Saturday night and played until midnight. Before we go any further, let me just list the personnel involved over the 3.5 hours so you get some idea of why this was one of the strongest Cropredy sets for a while:

Ashley Hutchings, Dave Swarbrick, Dave Mattacks, Dave Pegg, Simon Nicol, Richard Thompson, Judy Dyble, Maartin Allcock, Gerry Conway, Jerry Donahue, Chris Leslie, Ric Sanders, Blair Dunlop, Kami Thompson, the excellent Kristina Donahue, and the two singers from Larkin Poe.

Given the above wouldn't it have been nice if they'd cobbled together the "Full House" era lineup and gone heavy on that? It would? Lucky they did then.

Set list (copied from Andy at talkawhile's post with due attribution as my own notes were illegible thanks to a combination of darkness, alcohol and emotion):

1. Mercy Bay  2. Albert & Ted 3. Fotheringay 4. I'll Keep It With Mine 5. Percy's Song 6. Lark In The Morning 7. Come All Ye 8. The Deserter 9. Walk Awhile 10. Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman 11. Sloth 12. Bring 'Em Down 13. White Dress 14. Night Time Girl 15. One More Chance 16. The Gas Almost Works, Cat On The Mixer, Three Left Feet (instr.) 17. Red Tide (by Rob Beattie) 18. Jewel In The Crown 19. Honor And Praise 20. Dangerous 21. Portmeirion 22. The Hiring Fair 23. The Brilliancy Method & The Cherokee Shuffle (instrumental) 24. The Hexamshire Lass 25. My Love Is In America 26. John Gaudie 27. Danny Jack's Reward 28. Farewell, Farewell 29. Matty Groves

Encore:
30. Meet On The Ledge

Well, where do you start? Swarb was excellent, stood up for most of it, and looked a lot better than he had at the Barbican during the Sandy tour earlier this year. Jerry D has always been one of my favourite guitarists and did little to disappoint here. Kami Thompson did a bit of a Sandy impression, Richard Thompson picked up where he'd left off the night before, and the whole field was singing bethankit (to horribly mangle PG Wodehouse).

Interesting use of the younger generation, which might point the future direction for the Fairport slot (at this rate, they'll have perfected the creation of a perpetual band!) Must stop rambling now, but Fairport alone made the festival one not to have missed - certainly the best set they've done for a decade I'd have said.

Oh, also enjoyed (and bought) the excellent 45th anniversary t-shirt they've produced which helpfully shows a lego character of each of the 25 people who have so far been member of the band!

Hopefully, if I can link the two for a moment, it's the start of an upswing for both Fairport and this blog.....

Like An Old Fashioned Waltzer

The other day the estimable Jonathan Calder over at Liberal England drew attention to the Homage to Sandy Denny that’s currently touring the UK, and posed the question as to whether she really was Britain’s greatest singer songwriter.  Last night, I took myself off to the Barbican to find out…

Sandy has certainly always been difficult to pigeonhole, not that that has ever stopped people.  Her early work with Strawbs and Fairport put her quite neatly into the folk category, but I think that to see her as a purveyor of folk whimsy would be to do her a great disservice.  Nowadays, she is frighteningly forgotten.  I don’t mean by the trad folk denizens of the Whitby or Sidmouth folk festivals, who still recognise her even though she had arguably outgrown them even before she joined Fairport Convention, or even by the attendees of the latter’s annual Cropredy Festival.  Mr Calder is absolutely right when he contrasts Sandy with Nick Drake – once united in their relative obscurity and unacknowledged genius, he has gone on to TV background music ubiquity, while poor old Sandy, outside the cognoscenti, continues to languish.

The current tour is a restaging of a one-off show put together for the 30^th anniversary of her death in 2008, and features a host of Sandy’s contemporaries, along with the best of a new generation of folkies.  Well, I say folkies, but it is still as you would expect drawn largely from the compromised electro-folk end of the scale, rather than the new-trad exponents like say the Young ‘Uns.  A quite extraordinary line-up has been assembled including Joan Wasser (Joan As Policewoman), Lavinia Blackwall from Trembling Bells, Thea Gilmore, and Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, coupled to PP Arnold, most of Bellowhead and three people who actually knew Sandy well – Maddy Prior, Jerry Donahue and the legend that is Dave Swarbrick. 

Before we get on to the meat of the show, a quick word about Swarb.  He’s announced his retirement in the near future, and to see him now is rather akin to seeing say Barry Cryer performing with I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue – worth going a very great distance to be in on it.

The material spans the whole of Sandy’s career from the earliest days, through Fairport to the tragically short-lived Fotheringay, out the other side with the North Star Grassman and the Ravens album which was salvaged from the ruins of that band’s projected second album, and then onto the solo work which saw her increasingly spread her wings and move beyond folk through the course of the seventies.

Inevitably, some of the performances were stronger than others – Lavinia Blackwall stands out as perhaps the most Sandy-like of the cast, and her interpretation of A Sailor’s Life (accompanied by Swarb) was a great intro.  She then moved on to a perfect rendition of the eerily bleak Late November, a song whose lyrics sound traumatic enough before you know what the subject being obliquely treated is….  I did feel though that the evening was weirdly stop-start, and a lot of the enjoyment depended on sympathy or otherwise with the person who happened to be singing at the time.  I thought Green Gartside’s highly distinctive voice just about got through The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, but he murdered Nothing More.  I don’t think there’s anything he could have done differently, and it’s a shame because between songs he came across as possibly the most genuine fan, but it just wasn’t for me.

Thea Gilmore ran through a few numbers from last year’s Don’t Stop Singing, which confirmed Sandy’s status as a lyricist of the first rank I think, but the night seemed on surer ground when it was going through the back issues of the sandy songbook.  Maddy Prior got going with a slightly halting version of Fotheringay which had me fearing she had some sort of throat infection, but as her vocal chords warmed up over the evening she was on her usual transcendent form with a storming rendition of John the Gun – a track crying out for its own horror film.

My personal highlight of the evening was when Maddy, Thea and Lavinia combined with Swarb for a rendition of The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood so perfect that any record label with half a brain will get it released sooner rather than later – it really was joyous.

The male side of things was less satisfactory, I think because you just don’t associate Sandy’s songs with anything much below an alto.  Having said that, the Dennis Hopper Choppers’Ben Nicholls  pulled off a wonderful interpretation of Matty Groves (although I suppose, strictly speaking, that’s “trad. Arr.” In any case).  Blair Dunlop got through a competent take on It’ll Be A Long Time, but other than that, nothing else really stuck in my mind.

Joan Wasser, on the other hand, was a revelation.  She;s another one that really ought to get something from the night released because that woman was born to sing The Lady.  PP Arnold was extremely nervous, and had to start I’m A Dreamer three times before getting beyond the first verse, once she’d got over the hump though she was as good as you would expect.  Incidentally, for all Arnold’s fans namecheck her work with Nick Drake, Roger Waters and Ike and Tina Turner, I bet I was the only one there last night who first saw her onstage with Ocean Colour Scene at the NEC in 1998….

Last night in many ways was an opportunity to sit down and really put Sandy in context across the output of her career.  Consequently, it was possible to see how much she progressed as a writer, and experimented with different genres, whilst all the time managing to pull off the difficult trick of being life affirming whilst being very red wine at three am ( at trait she shares with early Barclay James Harvest in that respect).

I suspect globe spanning fame will continue to elude her for a while yet, although if enough of us keep the flame it can only be a matter of time.  Personally I think it went a long way towards answering the question posed on Liberal England at the beginning of the week:

“Up to a point, Lord Bonkers”

the head pokes up above the parapet

Blogging has somehow slipped back into hiatus - one thing after another seems to be conspiring to keep me away from the keyboard.  Actually, it keeps me at the keyboard, but on the revenue earning stuff rather than the pleasure writing.  Even the short stories have taken a bit of a back seat recently.

However, there is starting to be a light at the end of the tunnel again, and there's quite a bit to get through, so hopefully soon you'll be treated to my views on Sandy Denny, 10k road races, Loch Ness, and, if you believe the MOD rumour mill, catastrophic procurement U-turns that will render our new carriers what could euphemistically be termed "interesting"....

Who's escorting the escorts?

One of the knock ons of the great aircraft carrier saga, has been the decimation of the RN's surface fleet to pay for them.  A succession of First Sea Lords have been forced down the gruel today for jam tomorrow route, justifying ever greater cuts to capability on the basis that it will free up the funds to ensure that in the future we will have enormous great toys with nice planes to fly from them.

In the words of Blackadder, there was one small flaw with this plan.....

Let's consider the fleet as it was when I joined a decade ago:

3 x Invincible Class CVS

9 x T42 destroyers

4 x T22 frigates

and the finishing touches being put to 16 T23 frigates.  I'm pretty sure that there were actually a couple more T22s knocking around, although of the earlier Batch 2 so gunless (my guess would be SHEFFIELD and COVENTRY).  Regardless, this in itself was a massive drawdown from the fleet of 1992, and even more so from that of 1982 - and we should all be aware of what happened in 1982....

Now, it's more like:

1 x Invincible CVS in an LPH role

2 (as of Yesterday with the paying off of LIVERPOOL) Type 42 destroyers

2 (ish) Type 45 destroyers, with another 4 in various stages of completion

13 Type 23 frigates

The surface fleet has been pared to the bone.  Of course, there are bright spots amidst the gloom - for example, the arrival of Type 45.  However, even here, what was supposed to be an order for 12 ships has been reduced to 6.  The staff argument is of course that these new ships are so much more "capable" thn their predecessors that you don't need so many of them.  This is fine (and true, up to a point), but doesn't do much to challenge the fact that, unless DE&S has got some sort of multi-dimensional transporter in development, each one can only be in one place at a time....

However, whatever the shortcomings in terms of hull numbers, and weaponry (the hydra of fitted-for-but-not-with raises one of its many heads again - or rather it doesn't), the Type 45 does represent a quantum leap forward over the kit it replaces.

A certain hard core within the fleet will tell you that there is nothing to beat a batch 1 Type 42 to serve in, and in many ways I'd be minded to go along with that.  My first ship out of Dartmouth was a "stumpy," and frankly we had a whale of a time.  I'd happily go back tomorrow.  The advantage of the Type 42s were that they were pretty "agricultural," in that you could see a lot of what made them tick, and a lot of essential equipment could be maintained with the judicious application of a spanner.  However, there was no denying that by the first half of the last decade they were well and truly obsolescent.  It was just that they were forced to soldier on because MOD procurement was making its usual ham fisted job of getting their successor into service - notice a theme developing here?

Lewis Page would have us believe that there is no rationale for the RN's escorts.  They are expensive ways of showing the flag, and giving aspirant admirals nice shiny toys to play with.  In as much as fast attack craft seem to work well for the Germans and Swedes, I'd go along with us buying some; and there's something to be said for the sort of cheap and cheerful corvettes the French have forward based to protect their overseas territories; but the fact remains that places like the Falklands are a long way away from the home base.  I know the defensive posture down there is based on preventing an attack in the first place, rather than trying to retake them once an invasion has occured, but to properly defend them we do need organic air cover, so we need aircraft carriers.  If we're going to have carriers then they need to be escorted, so we need a good balanced force of frigates and destroyers that will allow us to do that while also maintaining our responsibilities elsewhere in the globe.

What we don't need, but what we could well be about to get, is the world's largest and most expensive LPH (QE), accompanied by a botched CVF (POW) with an airgroup of about 12, and enough escorts to be sure of nothing nasty happening to them while they're all in the Solent.  Which is certainly an interesting definition of "balanced and capable."

Back to the subject of spatial strategy (do try and stay awake...), or the coming sacrifice of Meriden on the altar of new city building

Interesting article in the MoS today (which must nearly be an oxymoron) about government plans to put 100,000 houses in the increasingly narrow gap between Birmingham and Coventry.  Is there any common sense left in the world.  The same article, in what we must hope is just typical Mail outrage/spin, suggests the rebranding of Birmingham International Airport to, wait for it, Birmingham London Airport....  You know those occasions when you truly think you are living in the end of days?

Actually there is some method in the airport madness, in as much as assuming HS2 gets built then it will be quicker to get into London from Birmingham airport than it is from Stanstead.  That having been said, it doesn't do much for the sense of Birmingham as a city in its own right, rather than some form of extremely northern dormitory suburb of the great metropolis - rather like a super-sized version of Acton...

The problem is that this answers part of the demand for expansion of the national housing stock, without really addressing what it is that all these new Brummies are going to do when they get there (other than commute to London).  The idea of a forty mile continuous urban sprawl from the rust belt of the Black Country through to Coventry is something that really ought to make people stop and think about what it is that they want from where they live.  I know the relaxation of the planning laws is going to create a presumption in favour of new development, but at what cost to the domestic environment, and the sanity of the inhabitants?

I'm going to write something in the next couple of days about the coming referendum on whether Birmingham should have an elected mayor, but it would be interesting to see where the putative contenders stand on the idea of annexing Coventry as a flagship policy....  Not quite local democracy all this, is it?

Aircraft Carriers - The Madness Continues

A month or two ago, I suggested here that the MOD might like to take another look at what aircraft it chooses to put on the new carriers.  If you believe the rumours currently swirling around in the national press, then they're not only doing just that, but the conclusion arrived at is not quite what I hoped for....

As someone in the comments thread pointed out, we're pretty much getting the F35 whether we want it or not, despite the compelling case that can be made for buying greater quantities of something a good bit cheaper.  However, one of the few gleams of common sense in the SDSR was the abandonment of the STOVL version in favour of the cat and trap version.  The conventional variant at least offers a greater payload, and enhanced interoperability with potential coalition partners.

What now seems to be mooted, thanks to cost overruns with the catapult technology, is a switch back to the JSF model the MOD had originally planned for, the short take-off variant.  So, it's back to the ghetto of ski-ramps, and very heavy aircraft that can't carry much in the way of weapons load. All this at a time when the international situation everywhere from Libya to the South Atlantic has been underlining for our unfortunately sea-blind government and public the importance of aircraft carriers and why they're a useful thing to have in the back pocket.

I'm not sure any government of recent years has got defence right, particularly, but this one certainly seems to have a special talent for getting it wrong.  I await the official announcement with bated breath.

The hiatus stumbles to a conclusion

What we see here is actual words in an actual blogpost - the shock!  The general craziness of life has subsided, but it's been a good time to take stock, reassess, and all the rest of it (to say nothing of note just how many ways the Chancellor has developed to extract my assets....).

When I first started this blog, last year, there was a manifesto of sorts to go poking around in the sort of places that people overlook - to say that actually there are wonderful places right here under our nose, and that to pass them up for a safari holiday, for example, is nothing so much as an abject failure of imagination.  However, it quickly developed into much more of a meditation on Englishness, rather than England per se, and I wonder if that doesn't need to take more of a back seat in the future - I'm pretty sure that my just about three figures readership has worked out where I stand and it doesn't do to become a one trick pony.  I think it's going to be a more rich seam to mine for the growing short story output to be honest - watch this space; there's a novel coming in the next year or so too!  It's only taken me seven years - now just got to find a publisher....

However, in the hope that the audience haven't quietly drifted away, seduced by shinier things in the slightly-longer-than-expected pause; coming in the next week:

What we need from the next Archbishop of Canterbury

Carrier Aircraft U-Turn?

and

The Biggest Bang you've never heard of (or heard)......

Matt

other people write things too...

Just while I'm vaguely on the subject of literary ventures, let me point you in the direction of a friend of mine who's currently preparing his first novel for publication.  It's always difficult to engage in log rolling when you are part of the struggle yourself, but in the spirit of doing something unusual/out of character on February 29th, I do urge you to go and have a read of what it's like to be a struggling author (albeit one with a multibook deal immediately on graduation.....):

http://henryvr.wordpress.com/

Oh, and happy leap year!  I'm always rather glad to see the back of Februaries - they're never very happy times (or, at least, they haven't been for the last couple of years....)

In which I get a short story published...

One of my resolutions at the back end of last year was to really try and push forward with my writing, and to that end I'm forcing myself to enter at least one short story competition a month.  Five Stop Stories is a new app for smartphones/tablets, which aims to introduce new writers to a wider readership through its monthly competitions.  The stories are, as the name would suggest, designed to be read in the time it would take to travel five stops on the Tube.  Anyway, I got an honorary mention in the December entry for for a bit of sub-Wilbur Smith nonsense, with a nod to early Nadine Gordimer (across a wide gulf of competence...)

Anyway, it has now been published and you can, should the mood take you, read it here:

http://www.fivestopstory.com/read/story.php?storyId=1293

Feel free to like it if you do!

The Wooden World

I suppose I was always going to join the navy, or do something equally silly in that vein at the very least.  Having been brought up on a diet of Rider Haggard and GA Henty it seemed the most natural thing in the world to go and take the shilling when the time came.  The taste for adventure stories has never really left me, but I keep returning to the sea in fiction, even though I no longer spend my life on it.

I still think that Arthur Ransome has a lot to answer for - how else does one explain this desire to go to sea when being brought up about as far from it as you can be in the UK?  Peter Duck was good, but I was always a big fan of Missee Lee personally.  Hornblower has always left me cold - the battles are good but the whole thing is a little too one-dimensional; Hornblower himself just a little too perfect.  As a child you can identify with his courage and devotion, but at the same time the action never really rises above what the BBFC would no doubt these days classsify as "mild peril.."

Captain Marryatt made a big impression on me when I was ten or so - I could never quite get to grips with The Children of the New Forest, but Mr Midshipman Easy was another story entirely.  Here at last was Hornblower action with character development, and I remember being heartily sorry that it is a standalone book, and that I wasn't going to discover the further adventures of Mr Easy in due course.

Which, of course, leads naturally enough to Patrick O'Brian.  I came to him incredibly late, just a couple of years ago via the second hand bookshop in Burnham Market, but managed to read the whole canon in 2 years.  O'Brian tends to split people down the middle a little bit like Marmite; between those who can't see past the first bit of nautical slang and those for whom he represents near perfection in a writer.  Personally, I think there is a strong case to be made that he is the finest British writer of the 20th century - if the terribly snobbish end of the critical spectrum hadn't ghettoised him for the heinous crime of writing "historical fiction," then he probably would have been recognised as such in his own lifetime.

Indeed, even if we take the literary world's estimation of historical fiction at its face value, then O'Brian is clearly the leader of the field.  One someimes pulls up short when buried deep in the early nineteenth century with the realisation that O'Brian is a contemporary of the 20th century world, not Jane Austen, such is the perfect pitch he reaches in recreating/creating his vanished world.  Anachronisms are conspicuous by their absence, and the whole strata of the eighteenth and nineteen century Royal Navy, and the social round ashore, is perfectly delineated.

Quite apart from anything else, the sequence is a study of a friendship, in some ways an unlikely one, between a seafaring man and a government agent with a sideline in botany.  Over the course of the the novels we see what are initially lightly drawn characters become fully realised, until a point is reached at which it is genuinely difficult to believe that all of this is the product of one man's mind, and we have to remind ourselves that O'Brian is a novelist and not a particularly lucky Boswell who has stumbled upon the cached letters of two real gentlemen.

Aside from achieving a fully realised picture of the Georgian navy, O'Brian frequently employs certain narrative devices which set him apart from his genre near rivals.  Action is described sparingly, and frequently not at all - and is rendered all the more powerful for it.  My favourite novel, Treason's Harbour, describes perfectly the claustrophobic enclosed world of the senior officers waiting in Malta for news, rather than great fleet actions.  Similarly, O'Brian spends a good portion of Desolation Island setting up a pursuit between HMS Leopard and the Dutch Waakzaamheid, only for the incident to be over in a sentence - real blink and you'll miss it stuff which is all the more devastating for it.

The Aubrey-Maturin saga is one of the greatest achievements of British fiction, and deserves a little more respect than that grudgingly granted to other tellers of superior sea tales.  Many have tried to emulate O'Brian since, but Sharpe didn't really work at sea.  The only one to have come really close is Alan Mallinson, whose Hervey novels are perhaps best viewed as sub-Aubrey on land, but who did send him to sea in Man of War, with pretty decent results.  Ultimately though, I don't think that we need another O'Brian - there are more than enough books in the sequence to repay re-reading over a long period, and Jack Aubrey does make a fine shipmate.

The clock struck 15 hours ago....

If you'll forgive the extremely obscure Ocean Colour Scene reference (B side to the single of The Day We Caught the Train), things at work have been ludicrious lately, and there hasn't really been time for sleep, let alone blogging.  However, astonishingly, there is a readership of sorts for this blog, and I haven't abandoned it.  When the fog lifts, as we said in the Fleet, normal service will be resumed...

Edited to add - thanks to whoever read the blog in Egypt the other day - I've got no idea which post they read, or what brought them here, but for some reason they're the first person in the entire African continent to drop by.  I've had good readership from both north and south America, Asia, the far east, Europe, and the Pacific, but no Africa until now....

Small is Beautiful

One of the great last hurrahs of the British film industry can be seen in retrospect to have been the run of exquisite little comedies turned out by Ealing Studios in the late 1940s and 1950s.  Although there is a wide variation of setting between, say, Kind Hearts and Coronets and Passport to Pimlico, the theme remains the same: the virtue of the small local community standing up to bureaucracy.

Although it is not one of the better known ones, my favourite, The Titfield Thunderbolt, has this central thesis in spades.  Partially inspired by the real-life events at the Talyllyn Railway in Wales, TTT is at first glance a routine farce centering on a group of villagers trying to preserve their branch line railway service in the face of government indifference and the antics of a predatory local bus company.

However, Titfield is a joy - beautifully shot in colour (the first Ealing comedy not to be black and white) it has a fine central performance from John Gregson, and able support from Stanley Holloway and Naunton Wayne (to say nothing of Sid James before his Carry on descent into a parody of himself). The line's supporters are a cross-section of the local great and good - squire, vicar, bank manager, bishop, millionaire alcoholic - all united in the love of their village and a shared aim to keep it the same.  

Whilst the main message is that people should be able to make their own decisions about how to run their community - in this case coming up against the exasperated officials of the Ministry of Transport; the message of localism is bound tightly up with a yearning for the old ways of doing things and the challenges of technological progress.

 One of the turning points of the flim is where John Gregson makes an impassioned plea to a public meeting, railing against the idea that buses are a better form of transport than trains and represent the thin end of the wedge.  For Gregson's squire road transport means nemesis "don't you realise you're condeming our village to death....our houses will have numbers instead of names - there'll be traffic lights and zebra crossings..."  For the squire, only the preservation of the past can guarantee the future - and that sort of decision is best taken by the people that are going to be directly affected.

Of course, the time for Britain's branch lines passed, as they were decimated throughout the 1960s in favour of an incredibly short sighted trunk route focused strategy.  But the spirit of Titfield found an echo up and down the country in the numerous societies which sprang up to reopen their lost lines as museum pieces.  It's not quite the same as riding from Titfield to Mallingford, but in no small part due to this little film one can still buy a ticket from Kidderminster to Bridgnorth, or Towyn to Nant Gwernol.  Sometimes even the byways of British cinema can have an effect far beyond the foyer of the local Roxy, Gaumont or ABC

Happiness

There's always one book I never go anywhere without - it's not that it's a talisman as such, more that I don't know of a time when I haven't felt better for having it to hand.  It's rather unlikely, being, as it's own author describes it, nothing more than the "annals of an ancient actor."

I first read David Niven's "The Moon's a Balloon" when in the sixth form.  One of the advantages of spending half your life on a train to or from school, as well as being able to read reasonably quickly, was that you certainly got through a lot of lengthy books.  The Crowthers of Bankdam, which would now probably be regarded, if it is remembered at all, as a deeply unfashionable sub-Galsworthy saga, is one that has stayed wih me particularly clearly: the politics of a nineteenth century mill-owning dynasty in northern England is not perhaps obvious reading matter for your average seventeen year old public school boy, but I was never one for convention....

Anyway, back to Mr Niven.  I remember being struck at the time by how much he managed to pack into his life - representing Britain in yachting; war hero; oscar winner; womaniser; Errol Flynn's flatmate.  If you're at an impressionable age, a chap can dream about his future as all of those (except the last one, obviously).  I think I read it in about half a day, and was left slightly bereft at the end of it.  I think the key thing is that Niv was such a good story teller.  I wasn't in the least upset when reading Graham Lord's later biography to discover that some of the anecdotes were "embroidered," there was always enough of the truth in them to mean that you could forgive the exaggerations as just helping to make the smile on your face that bit broader.

I'm not going to give you a great stream of examples, except to say that the story of how he eventually broke into Hollywood, aboard a replica of HMS Bounty into which he had been decanted off the coast of California after a particularly boozy night aboard HMS Norfolk, sets the tone for the whole book - imbued as it is with an utterly infectious joie de vivre.

Since that first reading 13 years ago my battered copy of this great little book has made it's way through my training at Dartmouth; been on deployment to the Red Sea, the Falklands, Antarctica, and, admittedly without me, travelled to the Gambia from Oxford in the back of an ambulance.....  Quite simply, it's a wonderful thing to have around, and there's not much excuse for not reading it as soon as you get a minute.

It will make your life a little bit better.

Happy Birthday Mr Dickens

Blogging is a bit light at the moment, as a result of the twin pressures of work and short story writing  - at the moment if it's not one, it's the other.  Anyway, I thought I ought to acknowledge his 200th birthday  - and look forward to that of Mr Trollope (who was much better) in 2015.  Sadly I missed Surtees' in 2005, as he knocks them both into a cocked hat.... 

There was an interesting discussion on the radio this evening about whether all these anniversaries are simply an excuse for creative laziness - hacks and marketing types simply looking for the next hook to the past, rather than genuinely progressing.  I think there's probably something in that, although it all depends how you do it, and what your take on the continuining relevance of the anniversary being commemorated is.

Dickens of course was the preeminent hack of his time - writing to order and publishing magazines as outlets for his own work.  Unlike Trollope, he never made the mistake of putting down his writing routine in an autobiography (which was the kiss of death for Mr T's reputation amongst those who maintained that the muse doesn't appear to fill a quota).  It's trite to say that the work of either is the nineteenth century equivalent of a soap opera, but it's also true.  The recent BBC adaptations of Bleak House, and more particularly Little Dorrit, show only too well how Dickens was the master of suspense, melodrama, and good plot driven character development.  He deserves his place on the shelves of the 21st century booksellers, even if the educational establishment worries that he's no longer suitable for the A level curriculum.

But, he still didn't write The Way We Live Now....

Coming soon, my Grandfather's journey from Cape Town to Kariba, by tractor, in the 1950s.  I might even get a short story out of that as well - two birds with one stone and all that!

What If?

Over Christmas, I saw a couple of episodes of 'Allo 'Allo, for the first time in a while.  Although it is obviously bawdy farce, there is a thread running through of making light of a pretty awful situation, the Nazi occupation of France.  One can make a case that half of Britain's issues with Europe at a political level are because we weren't invaded in the twentieth century; there is no folk memory of the tanks rolling across the border, of the mass displacements or refugee crises as the blitzkreig swept through, or of the enemy living amongst us, drinking in our pubs, and consorting with our women.

Of course, one piece of British soil was occupied by the Germans.  Any visitor to the channel islands can see the great concrete fortifications thrown up by the wehrmacht, or the site on Alderney which was home to the only concentration camp in Britain.  The Channel Islands experience ought to give the lie that there is any genuine British particularity; that the experience of being occupied would have been any different for the British subject than it was for the millions of Dutch, Belgians and French that actually had to live with the reality of foreign subjugation.  Yet the idea of what Britain would have been like if the Nazis had been successful in mounting an invasion is a subject that has provided fertile territory for film makers over the years, for a variety of reasons.

1) Film as propaganda.

At the height of the second world war, Alberto Cavalcanti made a film of a specially commissioned Graham Greene script - Went the Day Well?  WTDW is a shocking little film, which is quite nasty in many ways.  It tells the story of a German army unit disguised as Royal Engineers, on a mission to disrupt the British radar network on the South Downs, and their interactions with the villagers of Bramley End from arrival, through detection, to the final battle with the regular army.  Of course, being propaganda, I don't think I'm giving away to much of a spoiler to say that the German invaders are defeated, but WTDW does not make it easy, or say that there is anything inevitable about such an outcome.

The film deals with all the obvious points that you would expect the British authorities to want to hammer home to their population: careless talk, reporting anything that looks suspicious, etc, but then goes beyond that.  It raises the existence of fifth columnists in unlikely places, and throughout the film is perfectly clear about the sort of sacrifices which the ordinary citizen may be required to make - from the postmistress killing a German in her kitchen before being killed by another soldier in her turn, to the scene at the manor house where the village's very own version of Linda Snell saves the evacuees by calmly picking up the handgrenade which has landed in their bedroom and walking out onto the landing with it, no one has an easy time.  There's even an eight year old boy who manages to get shot while trying to escape.  WTDW does not pull its punches, and is in many ways a remarkable film - even if some of the acting is a bit dodgy (but full marks to Elizabeth Allen and the young Thora Hird!)

2) Film as escapist fantasy.

By the 1970s, most of the key events of WW2 had been filmed, with varying degrees of success, but the budgets and demand existed for a succession of thrillers, which began to deviate further and further from actual events.  Fitting into this canon are films like The Eye of the Needle, starring Donald Sutherland, and of course The Eagle Has Landed.

Based on the novel by Jack Higgins, TEHL uses the story of a Luftwaffe paratroop unit trying to assassinate Churchill during a visit to Norfolk as the backdrop for what is basically sunday afternoon popcorn fodder.  However, it does, consciously or otherwise, hark back to WTDW in many ways, including the difficulty of villagers trying to communicate their plight with the outside world, and the varying levels of competence displayed by their putative rescuers.  Like the earlier film, TEHL relies for its plot development on the existence of traitors within the local community (In this case Donald Sutherland and Jean Marsh), who are clearly outnumbered by "decent"British types who eventually see them off.  As with the wartime propaganda films, there is never any real doubt about the final outcome.

3. Film as historical counter-factual.

This is what we might call the Virtual History approach, and the exemplar is the most difficult of all the films in the German Invasion genre, Brownlow and Mollo's It Happened Here.  IHH sets out to provide a documentary style investigation of what it would have been like if a German invasion of the UK had been successful, and followed up with prolonged German occupation.  In the 40 odd years since its release IHH has never been very far from controversy; from its use of actual British fascists as extras, through to a clinical style which is totally non-judgmental about what it is portraying.  The result is a deeply unsettling, uncompromising thesis that turns the British national folk myth of WW2 on its head.

For Brownlow and Mollo, the British would have capitulated before the Germans every bit as readily as was the case anywhere else.  Of course, there would have been partisans and resistance, but the great majority would have settled down quietly under some form of crypto-Vichy regime (in this case under the aegis of the paramilitary Immediate Action organisation, which apparently works in support of a British puppet government, headed by Oswald Mosley).  IHH raises important questions about the role of free will and individual choice, as well as the capacity for realistic resistance in the face of totalitarianism.  Indeed, it asks (and answers in exactly the same way) the core question from Powell and Pressburger's Life and Death of Colonel Blimp - how far should people be prepared to go to fight fascism, given that the alternative to winning is no alternative at all? 

The problem for IHH is that it doesn't supply any easy answers, or offer much in the way of hope. Yes, the film ends with news coming over the wireless of a series of landings by the United States Army in the West Country (a sort of alter-D-Day), but this doesn't kick off delirious national celebrations so much as an orgy of score-settling on the part of the partisans, machine gunning British SS members and anyone that can be loosely defined as a collaborator in woodland clearings and generally setting the scene for a new dictatorship of the left, qua eastern Europe.

All of the films use the national myth of British exceptionalism for their own purposes - whether to stiffen national resolve in the face of external threat, or to provide a cheerful way of spending 2 hours in a cinema in the case of TEHL.  What makes IHH so unsettling is that it attempts to question the veracity of the stories that we tell about ourselves as a nation, and show that we are simply just another part of a wider humanity. 

In this analysis, there is nothing special about Britain or the British, except the luck of having 30 miles of water between us and a succession of European tyrants.

A Post for Folk

I've just staggered to the end of Rob Young's excellent "Electric Eden," which documents the evolution of "Britain's visionary music" over the twentieth century.  To a greater or lesser extent, this means the folk scene. 

Of course, folk has never really gone away, but it does swin in and out of the popular consciousness.  In the past couple of years no one has been able to escape the legions of fey north London types who have leapt aboard the folk bandwagon - think Mumford & Sons, Noah and the Whale, or Laura Marling.  However, away from the headlines and top ten there is a raft of good acts who are doing much more interesting things than what amounts in the most part to the new wave of British bluegrass....

For a window into the bleakness of the North East, The Unthanks stand unchallenged.  Their hauntingly beautiful ballads of lost love and broken hearts have captured hearts far beyond Northumberland.  They're also great live, and probably coming to a venue near you soon.  From a similar part of the world are the excellent Young'uns - who manage to make Hartlepool sound both appealing and poetic:  it's not often you get to say that. I saw them last summer at the Whitby Folk Festival and they deserve to have great things ahead of them (certainly they've just picked up a record deal).  It would be far too obvious to compare them to the Flying Pickets, so I will, but only in so far as they're very talented a capella singers.  They're not as overtly political, and they write some damn good tunes.

Away from the more trad end of the spectrum, I've always been particularly enchanted by the late sixties folk rock explosion, which Electric Eden covers very well. For a few years, if you knew where to look, you could soundtrack your life with Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span's first two albums, and the criminally short lived Fotheringay.  Folk rock is less overt in the modern scene, but one lot who do it very well are Trembling Bells.  If you do nothing else this year, beg borrow or steal whatever you need to get to see them.  They've got a short tour coming up in May with Bonnie Prince Billy, but tickets are already pretty hard to come by.  In Lavinia Blackwall they've got the archetypal late sixties folk rock frontwoman reborn.  I'm not going to fall into the trap of comparing her to anyone in particular, but this does lead me on to Sandy Denny.

For a generation of music fans Sandy, if she's known at all, is the girl who sings on Led Zep's Battle of Evermore.  However, in her short life (she died aged 31) she produced enough material to stake a claim as one of the finest singer songwriters the UK has ever produced.  From her early work with Strawbs, she progressed to Fairport (who famously remarked that it felt like they were auditioning for her, rather than the other way round), and her astonishing, bell clear voice was a key part of the seminal Liege and Lief; which set the template for a generation of folk rock and is regularly voted as one of the greatest albums of all time in any genre.

Her solo work is interesting; the first album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, has the atmosphere in places of someone lying dead in the next room, but is utterly compelling. Like an Old Fahioned Waltz is uniformly lovely.  Weirdly though, it's her last album, Rendezvous, which is the most upbeat, even though she was in a complete mess at the time and died shortly afterwards.

Interest in her work has picked up lately, with the release of an early demo album, the beatiful 19 Rupert Street, and last year's interpretation of her urecorded lyrics by Thea Gilmour.  I'm going to come bacck to Sandy when I've got time to do her proper justice, as she is one of those artists that gets inside your head and insists on being thrust to the foreground of your mind at all hours of the day and night.  I've just got tickets to see an homage that is being put on in the Baribcan in May, revisiting works from across her career and featuring Dave Swarbrick, Bellowhead, PP Arnold, Maddy Prior, and the aforementioned Lavinia.  I honestly can't remember the last time I was quite so excited....

The Oxbridge Brain Belt

Last night, Nick Boles gave the Macmillan lecture to the Tory Reform Group.  You can read a potted summary of it here, but I wanted to pick up on one part of his text, because it's relevant to my post on HS2 a couple of months ago.  Essentially the issue of the Oxbridge Brain Belt has raised its head again, after first being proposed by Lord Wolfson last April.

This government likes large infrastructure projects - "Boris Island" and HS2 are ample proof of that, and I can see some logic in the Brain Belt proposal to link up the Oxford-Cambridge-Milton Keynes troika with a new motorway, paid for by the development of a new garden city en route. But, to return to a thought from last week, isn't this just another case where the best is the enemy of the good?

First, consider the very real problems of the northern cities - do we really want to be building an entirely new city in the south-east, when regeneration is so urgently required in large conurbations elsewhere.  Of course, some will argue that it should be both/and, not either/or, but it does indicate some "interesting" priorities, to say the least.

Then there's the purely political consderation, and this is really amusing.  If you're going to build a new city on this route, then where do you put it?  Logic would dictate the point where the motorway intersects with HS2 (for a potential new station), and the M40: so, North Buckinghamshire, just to the east of Bicester then; we could call it, oh, I don't know, Stratton Audley.  The best of luck with getting that one past an electorate that is already up in arms about HS2 - "by the way Bucks, as well as the high speed rail line, you're also getting a motorway and a city........"

And yet, there is something in this, and maybe it doesn't need a motorway. 

The first thing to say is that east west transport in this country is abysmal.  I regularly travel from Bicester to Milton Keynes for work, and what should be a 20 minute journey can take over an hour. Cambridge can take two.  Public transport is abject; the X5 bus weaves its merry way from Oxford to Cambridge via Milton Keynes and Bedford in a catatonia-inducing three and a half hours.

The Centre for Cities, in it's Cities Outlook 2012 notes that Cambridge and Oxford are first and third for number of patents granted in the UK, they've both got world class universities, and they don't directly capitalise on this.  The same report notes that Milton Keynes was the fastest growing city in the UK between 2000 and 2010, as well as being 3rd in the UK for business start-ups per 10,000 population.  Clearly there is potential here for an M4 corridor style belt of prosperity.

Of course, there used to be a rather well placed railway line.

The Varsity Line from Oxford to Cambridge was closed at either end in 1967, leaving only the section between Bletchley and Bedford, and the spur from Oxford to Bicester Town open to passenger traffic.  The rails are still in place between Oxford and Bletchley.  One of the infrastructure projects announced by the Chancellor in the run up to Christmas was the re-opening of the line to passenger traffic between Oxford and Bedford, with a new connection to Milton Keynes Central.  But why stop there?

The obvious answer is that the old trackbed east of Bedford has become obstructed.  Housing crosses the line at Sandy and Potton, the Mullard Radio Astronomy Laboratory has appropriated 3 miles of trackbed outside Cambridge, and there's a "guided busway" on the formation between Trumpington and Cambridge city centre.

But, if we're seriously debating building an entire city and new motorway surely we can look at whether it mightn't just be cheaper to allow Milton Keynes and Bedford to expand, and use the money from developers to fund either a deviation around the obstructions (surely not beyond the wit of man), or compulsory purchase/relocation of anything in the way.  This last might seem rather hardline, but actually I wonder if the authorities at the time authorising any of the above developments bothered to revoke the Act of Parliament for the railway line - which would lead to a potentially interesting legal position (feel free to step in here and correct me, it's certainly cost people their gardens elsewhere when the rails have unexpectedly been put back....).

Reinstatement of the railway line between Oxford and Cambridge would join up the Oxbridge Brain Belt, get freight off the roads, and provide a genuine east-west rail link in a country now largely short of them.  Indeed, if the government also reinstated the spur off to Banbury from Verney Junction then you've got a new fast link between Cambridge and Birmingham, opening up the West Midlands conurbation.  It's certainly worth looking at as an alternative: at a time when grand projects come with a grand price tag, maybe we should lower our sights ever so slightly and just have good, affordable projects?

Thanks, Aggers

Growing up in England in the 1980s and 90s it was still just about impossible to escape cricket, although the numbers that tried were growing.  My grandfather had played for a decent club side in the 1950s, and once managed to take all ten wickets in the match, after which he was presented with the ball.  I suppose I knew about cricket balls before I knew what cricket was, as he had it mounted on a plinth on top of his television, with a small bronze shield attached recording his feat.  Over the years, it had been polished regularly to a very deep patina, which I vividly remember staring at for hours as a young boy of four or five.  In retrospect, this was probably good training for the long periods at New Road, or Chester Road in Kidderminster, watching Worcestershire grind out fourth day draws...

Cricket has always played a part in England's sense of self, or at least, it has been used as a form of shorthand for whatever point the writer wishes to make: for John Major it was part of his appeal for a return to decency and fair play; for, say, AG Macdonell in "England Their England," it is an archetype of the English capacity for eccentric time-wasting.

Last week, the ECB announced that a deal has been signed to keep Test Match Special on air at least until 2019 - to general cheers and sighs of relief all round.  TMS is an integral part of national life, it's measured commentary perfectly suiting the ebb and flow of a five day match.  Over the years its commmentators and summarisers have become household names (well, in certain households), and judicious recruitment has seen gaps gaps filled by a succession of characters, from a seemingly never exhausted pool of talent.

Of course, the doyenne of TMS voices was Brian Johnston, who for so many years simply was cricket.  The three ring circus that is TMS had Johnners as its ringmaster, struggling masterfully to keep control over such diverse personalities as Don Mosey and Fred Trueman.

In his 2010 book, "Thanks, Johnners," what Jonathan Agnew has done is essentially bring him back to life in a small way. Part biography, part memoir of his own early years in the TMS commentary box, Aggers provides a window into the workings of a small part of English culture.  Derek Birley set cricket firmly into its position in English life, but Aggers goes a little way towards illuminating its place in the national soul.

At a time when the England side are experiencing a bit of a wobble at the pinnacle of world cricket, and it's still too early to think about sitting on the boundary at the Parks, huddling for warmth as Oxford University struggles to give some second string county side a competitive game, it makes sense to revisit past glories.  It's a good time to close the curtains against the January dark, throw another log on the fire, and drift away to a time when Johnners made cricket commentary seem effortless, even as Chris Tavare, say, made playing the game itself seem infinitely harder...

Indeed, to shamelessly plagiarise PG Wodehouse on "Love on a Branch Line" - itself home to one of the finer literary cricket matches;

"Reading it is like drinking champagne in the open air on a sunny morning"

Johnners has been very lucky in his memorialist, as we've all been in his successor at the centre of the TMS circus.

How We See Ourselves

I was going to write about Hampton Gay today, but the Oxfordshire mists have descended and made photography impossible - and it really needs photographs.  So, instead, it's film matinee time.

I wrote last year about Powell and Pressburger's lyrical hymn to England, A Canterbury Tale.  Although I think overall ACT edges it as a film, Englishness was a theme they returned to in colour in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

Starring P&P regular Roger Livesey in the title role, the film conducts a microscopic dissection of what it means to be English in the age of total war; by following the life of Clive Candy from dashing war hero just back from South Africa, through the Kaiser's Berlin and the Western Front to the period after Dunkirk when, as a general, his carefully planned military exercise is finished before it has properly begun by the actions of a young army officer who refuses to play by his rules.

Candy is everything that the British capacity for self-mythmaking would have the ideal army officer be - chivalrous, brave, kind to defenceless women, honourable.  P&P's point in the film is that ultimately this is not enought to beat forces driven by evil ideology - a theme returned to slightly less successfully in Brownlow and Mollo's "It Happened Here" ("the terrible thing about fascism is that you have to use fascist methods to defeat it.")

The portrayal of Blimp is sympathetic, but underscored with the thesis that his time has passed and that a new approach is required to secure Britain's safety.  This was not an opinion that went down well with Churchill, who tired to have the film banned as unpatriotic, but it is one that they advance very powerfully. The core argument is essentially that much of what Britain/England values about itself will have to be sacrificed to ensure that any of it survives at all.  In one of the most poignant scenes, when Candy realises that his frontline military career is over, it is explained to him by his friends that this is a new kind of war, it's not a rugby match, and there will be no peace with honour for the loser - just a descent into darkness.  Therefore, given that losing is not an option, you can't choose how you want to fight.

Although these days P&P are rightly lauded for their cinematography and direction, one of their bravest strokes in this film is the writing of a sympathetic German character as second lead, played brilliantly by Anton Walbrook.  That even in the depths of the Second World War they were able to put a German army officer centre stage says a great deal for both their readiness to take risks, and their absolute humanity. 

This is a film that will make your hair stand up on the back of your neck on several occasions, but never more so than when Walbrook's character, making his case for political asylum in a 1939 London police station, relates the story of how his children became Nazis, and howm therefore, with the death of his English wife, his life has essentially come to an end.

The female lead is Deborah Kerr, who plays no fewer than three parts spanning 45 years - Theo's wife, Candy's wife, and Candy's ATS driver.  She carries a lot of the weight of the film and makes it look effortless. 

Of course, being Powell and Pressburger, there has to be at least one scene of jawdropping technical achievement, but this one provides two.  The real film technicians get very excited about the duelling scene (again, typical of P&P, you never actually see the duel) where the camera pans down over a snowy Berlin and in through the gymnasium skylight in a single take, but that's not the high point.

For something utterly dislocating the film takes the viewer into a First World War POW camp.  But one in England, full of German officers.  Candy goes to visit his German friend and finds the officers sitting by the side of lake listening to a concert.  During the interval he picks his way through the prisoners and catches sight of his old friend just as the music starts up again.  Walbrook looks straight through him before turning away, kicking off a beautiful shot of groups of Germans turning in differenct directions to face the music to the opening bars of Fingal's Cave.  It's powerful, magical, heartbreaking, and utterly captivating.

The film was mauled by unsympathetic postwar editing, but is generally now shown essentially as Michael Powell intended.  It's long, but there are fewer more genuinely pleasurable ways to spend a Sunday afternoon than to watch it.  As a portrayal of friendship it's unmatched, as an examination of national values, and whether these should be set in stone, or adapted to changing realities, it stands alone.

Gratuitous Friday Photo

Sea Harrier in the hover over INVINCIBLE during 2003.  Would be quite handy to have a few of these in the back pocket.
Happy Friday

Aircraft Carriers - it's what's on the flightdeck that counts....

Just occasionally it's nice to get out of the shires, at least that's what I thought a few years ago when I ran away to sea.  To a navy with three whole aircraft carriers, all of its very own - I left before they did as it turns out....

The Royal Navy has been in and out of the news ever since the Strategic Defence Review of 2010, one of the main points of which was the aircraft carrier debacle, which suggests that of the two carriers currently in build, the first will be mothballed pretty much at launch, while only the second will ever embark a fixed wing air-group.  Cue Daily Mail self-writing headlines along the lines of "Aircraft Carriers Without Planes - Shock!!!"

The problem however is not with the carriers themselves; steel is cheap and air is free; so much as the planes.  Britain is supposed to be buying the Joint Strike Fighter, which it is developing in conjunction with the USA.  However, it is here that the procurement fun really starts.

Because the RN has been operating Harrier jump jets for 30 odd years we decided, against all logic, that that is what we should carry on doing, and committed to buying the jump jet variant of the JSF rather than the conventional variant (which would require catapult assistance for take-off, and arrestor wires on the deck for landing).  The SDR changed that decision and committed the UK to the conventional variant - meaning that the carriers need to be redesigned.  Then last week we learned that there have been problems with the design of the arrestor hook, meaning that the plane itself is going to have to be redesigned.

Defence procurement is a licence to print money in so many ways - you're dealing with cutting edge technology, long lead times, and defence manufacturers who know that they are the only people governments can go to, and thus have them over a barrel.  Maybe it's time for a pragmatic rethink?

UKIP were first out of the traps last week with the suggestion that now was the time to pull out of the JSF programme and, as far as it goes, I'd be minded to agree with them.  However, they then suggested that the answer to Britain's problem was to "navalise" the Eurofighter, citing a BAe feasibility study from early in the last decade.  Their argument essentially runs along the lines that this would be good for British manufacturing.  Fine, but the Eurofighter is just another in a long line of UK procurement disasters; late and over budget. 

The plane would have to be completely redesigned, and the UKIP plan does nothing to address the old truism that whilst it is easy to make a very good land based plane from a naval design, it's much harder to go the other way and turn a normal jet into something suitable for carrier operations (apart from anything else the sea is a particularly unforgiving operating environment which demands different materials to be used in construction, hence naval jets are typically heavier than their land based brethren and will handle differently and carry a different payload).

If we are going to have carriers at all, then we need to ask what we are going to realistically use them for, and cut our cloth accordingly.  If we're going to fight a major power, then we're probably going to do that as part of an alliance, and so do we really need the best planes in the world, when the sky is likely to be full of them?  Quite apart from this, things are likely to have got pretty serious geo-politically, and we're probably getting into wars-of-national-survival territory.

If we're going it alone against a second rank power, then surely all that matters is that our planes are better, rather than that they are the best in the world?  The best is after all the enemy of the good.  I think it might be time to start thinking about buying off the shelf  - especially if the rumours are true that we're unlikely to put a carrier to sea with more than 12 JSF on-board, when it has been built to hold more than 30.

For the price of JSF we can afford to buy something designed for the job, that's combat proven, in greater numbers, and better than anything we're likely to come up against from potential enemies - unless we're going to unlaterally declare war on a superpower.  Therefore, the UK realistically has a choice, we either buy Rafale off the French for the most modern carrier jets, or F18s off the USA.  Both would be fine for our realistic needs for a couple of decades until being superceded by UAVs, and either would be cheaper.

 JSF is a nice to have, not the be all and end all.  Given that we seem to lack a workable defence industrial strategy, I don't think a large number of defence jobs AND decent kit are achievable across the full spectrum of defence equipment needs.  Perhaps it's time to retreat from some of them and recognise that the needs of our forces ought to come first, and we should aim to give them something that is good enough, rather than world beating.

I'm not sure I'm totally right, and willing to be convinced of the merits of any aircraft type, but I think the option ought to be on the table that the solution to our carrier needs already exists, and is flying from a navy very nearby - whether it's to our east or west.

Finally, for the nostalgists, a picture I took back in the days when we could embark a fixed wing carrier air group.....

Happy Burns Night!

"Titfield.  One can't open the newspaper these days without reading about Titfield."

With these exasperated words the Minister of Transport in Ealing Studios' "The Titfield Thunderbolt" wearily resigns himself to the fact that Something Must Be Done.  It isn't just going to go away.  At the moment, the same can be said about Scotland - and the fact that it's everywhere in the papers at the moment as one side seeks to cut loose, whilst the other searches for elusive positive arguments for why we'd be better off sticking together....

So anyway, given that it's Burns Night, its time to sit down and consider the story of the struggle between a cheery streetwise ginger Scotsman, and his ancestrally Scottish putative overlord up from London with the English accent - yes, Ronald Neame's film of James Kennaway's "Tunes of Glory."

TOG fits perfectly in with the first rule of British cinema - that if it's set in Scotland and was made before about 1965 it's going to be good (the exception, naturally, being Jack Hawkins and David Niven in "Bonnie Prince Charlie").  It tells a complex story of power and identity, that is fairly ambivalent in its presentation of the two protagonists Jock Sinclair (Alec Guinness) and Basil Barrow (John Mills).  Indeed, by the end it's difficult to know who you're supposed to be rooting for.

The plot is straightforward enough: Jock, an officer commissioned from the ranks after Alamein, is acting colonel of his highland battalion, garrisoned in a peacetime barracks similar to Stirling Castle.  Basil is the 5th generation regimental officer sent up from instructing at Sandhurst to take command over Jock's head.

The antagonism between the two characters provides a window on the eternal questions of Scottish identity, and what is proper behaviour.  Jock has his officers dancing reels with gay abandon, hollering and raising their hands above their heads; Basil is convinced that his officers should be dancing "correctly," and orders them to attend remedial dancing classes at dawn with the pipe major.  As an aside, as someone who has been given some very stern looks at the Northern Meeting I can confirm these attitudes persist on the 21st century Scottish dancefloor.

Some of it is more subtle - can Basil really be considered Scottish with his English accent, even though he is undoubtedly from north of the border and from an old Scots family?  Are the attitudes of his officers to him mirrored in the scorn of the pipe major for the clearly English Regimental Sergeant Major, Riddick? And can any self respecting Scotsman take seriously as his commanding officer a man who will turn down whisky in favour of lemonade?

The officers are an odd bunch.  Gordon Jackson is ever-reliable as the adjutant, but then there are characters like Alec Rattray, clearly a bruiser after Jock's heart, and a marvellously malevolent turn from Dennis Price as Major Scott - a man who manages to alienate everyone around him by the end of the film, stealing Jock's lover  and completely undermining Basil whilst giving every outward impression of being on his side.

Shot in technicolor, the film is these days a distinctly period piece, but it has some marvellous scenes - particularly of the reeling - and Guinness was never better than in this film: indeed, he saw it as the performance he was most proud of in his career.

Ultimately, it's a study of leadership, and the shifting currents of loyalty within a tightly sealed world.  It gets under the skin of the immediate postwar army in a way that perhaps only George Macdonald Fraser's McAuslan stories (interestingly also dealing with a Highland battalion) have matched.  It deserves a new audience.

Self Determination

Lots of people died on both sides, shouldn't we let the people who live there decide?

Getting to the point.....

The big racing news of the weekend was trackside, rather than having anything to do with horseflesh - Ascot's spot of bother with its new dress regulations.  However, just up the M40 a few thousand people were having much more fun - and all dressed impeccably.

The Heythrop point to point was held at Dunthrop for the last time on Sunday, with the organisers citing the inability to water as the key reason.  This essentially means they have no choice but to meet early in the season, and hence restrict the number of races on the card because of the limited amount of daylight. Next year, they're moving to a new site in Aldsworth, so it was a last chance to experience the extreme silliness that a point to point 600 feet above sea level in January has always been....

A general lack of rain recently meant that the going was at least firm, and the car parking didn't resemble quite the Passchendaele of some past years.  There were a variety of decent stalls, some of which will be familiar from elsewhere on the circuit, offering the chance to stock up on everything from hunting prints to the works of Dick Francis.  I made a beeline straight for the cider stall, where £3 purchased an incredibly dry scrumpy at around 8%.  Once the initial shock had burned off a few tastebuds, the flavour settled down to a very crisp note; even so, it took nearly an hour to drink...

As ever, a good crowd had been drawn from the surrounding area.  Obviously a large number had come across from Chipping Norton, two miles to the west, but there were a fair few of the usual suspects from the hunting world.  The Heythrop were  out in force, but there were also contingents from the Christ Church & Farley Hill Beagles and Four Shires Basset Hounds as well.

So to the racing.  Prices were pretty keen along the run of bookmakers, but what reputation I may have had as a judge of horses was in tatters by the end of the afternoon following a steady procession of three legged horses, fallers, and non-stayers. Nevertheless, I'm sure someone somewhere had some success (probably the chap with the chalkboard).

Point to pointing has been undergoing something of a renaissance lately, as people seek out less costly ways of entertaining themselves than the corporatised experiences at the big racecources.  It's part of a wider trend that has seen attendances up at agricultural shows throughout the country - if only the Royal had held on for a couple more years it might still be with us!

As ever, there's a lot going on out here in the countryside if you scratch the surface.  An awful lot of the point to point was only possible because land owners and hunt supporters had donated their time, assets and experiences.  It wouldn't be possible without this sense of community, and of place.

Dunthrop was always a cold experience, and some years I certainly wondered what on earth I was doing there, but it will be sad not to be there next year.  Aldsworth is going to have a lot to measure up to, but I'm sure in 20 years time it will be every bit a part of the local calendar as its draughty but wonderful predecessor.

Next up, the Bicester with Whaddon Chase at Whitfield on 18th March (HS2 permitting...) - well, strictly the Bullingdon at Kingston Blount's before then, but who in their right mind wants to go to a point to point on the last Saturday of the hunting season?

Sleeping your way to a Meeting

Recently, the sleeper service between London and points Scottish has come under the threat of having its funding withdrawn.  Whilst this lunacy seems to be diminishing after a rare outbreak of common sense, perhaps now’s a good time to consider why these services are so vital to the wellbeing of their users.

The first thing to say is that I’m not rampantly anti-aviation. I think it would be a good thing if we all took fewer, and shorter flights, but there are times when obviously only the plane will do.  In the UK we have the real advantage that nowhere is really all that far from anywhere else.  Admittedly, if you live in Truro and get asked to a forty minute business meeting in Inverness then you should probably think twice about whether a conference call might not be a better idea; but there is generally no need to be leaping on the plane for an internal flight every couple of days. 

A couple of years ago I was travelling regularly from London to Edinburgh on business, and you got to recognise the same faces standing in the queue for security at 0630 on a Monday morning.  I just couldn’t understand how people could keep up this existence for any length of time.  Of course, I realise that some people make calculations based on needing to do it – in order to see more of their children and have a workable home life - but it did seem to me that this sort of extreme commuting meant serious compromises in other areas of life, and high levels of stress and exhaustion.

After a while I investigated the possibility of taking the sleeper instead of the plane – I’m generally pretty positive about rail travel anyway, and it seemed to have been the right solution for Richard Hanney….

Quite simply, it was a revelation.  Yes it takes longer – London to Scotland and back in 30 odd hours instead of say 14, but it opens up time for much better use than standing in queues or waiting for the transfer bus to a far distant airport car park.

Given my general antipathy to London, the sleeper at least gives me the opportunity to go and have dinner with those of my friends who haven’t yet managed to escape!  From the restaurant or bar a quick tube to Euston sees me on the train and in bed by midnight, before being lulled to sleep by the motion of the train as it makes its way out through the northern suburbs and onto the West Coast mainline.

The berths are spartan but comfortable, and if you know the dates you want to travel a decent time in advance then you can usually get a cabin to yourself for about the same price as a business internal flight.  When you wake up it’s to the sight of the Pentland Hills rolling past the window, and you’re into Edinburgh in time for a shower, breakfast, and a read of the paper before your nine am meeting.  You’re less stressed, better rested, and arguably better able to perform.  That night, simply repeat the process with your Edinburgh based friends….

Of course, this sort of thing is made a lot easier if you’re single, and don’t have a partner or family who may be less enthusiastic about you spending more time away than you technically have to, but, if you can get away with it, then it really is the only way to travel.

 If the sleeper service was withdrawn tomorrow then the world would still keep turning, and most people would carry on without batting an eyelid, but something that makes Britain ever so slightly more civilised would have vanished; in the long run that would make us all the poorer.

Where do we go from here?

One of the most striking features of the current "Age of Austerity" is the growing need for authenticity in consumer habits.  As household and discretionary spending undergoes a squeeze, people have been forced to confront their consumption and make real choices about what is important in terms of quality and quantity.

One of the more pleasing bi-products of this has been the gradual trend away from consuming for its own sake, in favour of buying fewer better quality items (something that has been genuinely the case in Switzerland for many years, and that a Frenchman would at least tell you was the case in France, even if it is more honoured in the breach...).

However, it's not enough just the recession that has brought this about.  Even before 2007, the UK public were becoming increasingly concerned about issues such as food miles, seasonal/local produce, and ethical consumption.  This catalysed the growth in regional food fairs, and initiatives like Cittaslow, making it increasingly possible for people to take a real interest in what they wear, what food they put on the table, and how they live their lives.

I'm currently rereading Carl Honore's In Praise of Slow, which more and more seems to make sense as a blueprint of how we can all live better, slower and more ethical lives.  As the world staggers slowly towards what we can only hope are the broad sunlit uplands Mr Churchill was so enthusiastic about, maybe we do need to start thinking about what sort of society and structures we want to build to ensure that we don't fall into the same consumerist trap as before.