MID WINTER BLUES
Eliot libelled April when he declared it to be the cruelest month, that dubious honour belongs to January, this really is the month of the bleak mid winter. With the Christmas tinsel all cleared away and in the cold and damp of a London winters morning I must now once again take up the struggle with hideous bureaucratic monstrosities that assail me on all sides.
I lump them all together as ‘the beast.’ The beast cannot be sated, its demands grow and evolve, and just as you sever one limb another grows in its place in the form of a little brown envelope labelled HMRC or some other hideous acronym. You can keep the beast at bay but can never destroy it.
So it is with just such dismal thoughts pounding like the Cossacks wedding dance in my head I lock the door, drawer the curtains and hold my shotgun at the ready. This is the mid winter blues.
I have stopped listening to radio 4* in the bath and now listen to radio 3. The change was organic, as I lay contemplating the fact of life being ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,’ Evan Harris announced, “Now for some more gloomy news on the economy.” I think not, was my response and promptly turned the dial to radio 3.
The shift is as dramatic as it is sudden, a shift in values, here is world untroubled and unmoved by the trials and tribulations of the vulgar material world, whilst markets crash and regimes crumble whole hours are devoted to Bartok, Liszt, Schubert. Whilst on Radio 3 you are soothed with ‘Through the Night,’ radio 5 live offers the crudely titled ‘Wake up to Money.’ There are many things I like to wake up to, birdsong, the sound of sea, the warm body of a beautiful woman lying beside me, even a warm cup of tea, but money! What a horrible idea. I think not.
The sounds I listened to in the bath originated with Sergei Rachmaninoff, probably my favourite composer, though he is often not treated as a serious front rank composer in the west and has been the subject of a good deal of snobbery. In Russia the story is different, here he is fully appreciated and of course he is a quintessentially Russian composer. I loved the TV documentary about him narrated by John Gielgud, if dark chocolate had a voice that is what it would sound like.
My other antidote for the winter blues is PG Wodehouse. Everyone in the western world I think must be familiar with the Jeeves/Wooster relationship, but the world created by Wodehouse embraces many more characters and settings. Not only does he create wonderfully comic stories, totally incredible of course, one does not only willingly suspend disbelief one goes and buries it out in the garden for the duration, but he weaves these together with the most wonderful command of the English language, not least in his use of slang. It is the slang of the upper class, though of an indeterminate period, stretching from the Naughty Nineties through the Roaring Twenties to the middle years of the 1930’s, of the first world war there is no mention. The stories too seem to relate to an indeterminate period, primarily the 1920’s with a running theme of nostalgia for the Belle Epoch, though it does enter the world of the 1930’s with Woodehouse’s masterly lampoon of Oswald Mosley with Roderick Spode leader of his ‘Black Shorts,’ declaiming the vibrancy of British knees, -he is incidentally forced to settle upon shorts as virtually all other items of clothing had already been spoken for.
Woodehouse’s world is however primarily innocent and apolitical, a world of impending domestic and social disaster, usually averted. The Wodehouse world is ultimately as timeless as it is magical, a whole array of exotic characters, from the wonderfully drawn spiv Ukridge to the hapless Lord Emsworth, to whom my heart constantly goes out, he just wants to be left alone to look after his pig, the Empress of Blandings. If I was truly pompous I would say a poignant metaphor here. Ultimately Wodehouse just wishes to make you laugh and succeeds amply. I recommend extremely heavy doses in mid winter.
I have definitely fallen out of love with the London Review of Books, the latest edition just dropped through my door with major contributions from two people I cannot stand, Tariq Ali and Slavoj Zizek, the latter a man who reminds me of George Orwell’s remark ‘something so stupid only an intellectual would believe it.’ Though it thankfully arrived in the post at the same time as Nick Cohen’s new book You Cannot Read This Book, which I was pleased to see is dedicated to Christopher Hitchens, with a wonderful Hitch quote at the front.
‘There is an all out confrontation between the ironic and the literal mind: between every kind of commissar and inquisitor and bureaucrat and those who know that, whatever the role of social and political forces, ideas and books have to be formulated by individuals”;
Cohen is doing battle for free speech on the same battleground as The Hitch and his arguments are as razor sharp. One way of emerging from the winter blues, don’t let the bastards get you down, fight back.
I lump them all together as ‘the beast.’ The beast cannot be sated, its demands grow and evolve, and just as you sever one limb another grows in its place in the form of a little brown envelope labelled HMRC or some other hideous acronym. You can keep the beast at bay but can never destroy it.
So it is with just such dismal thoughts pounding like the Cossacks wedding dance in my head I lock the door, drawer the curtains and hold my shotgun at the ready. This is the mid winter blues.
I have stopped listening to radio 4* in the bath and now listen to radio 3. The change was organic, as I lay contemplating the fact of life being ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,’ Evan Harris announced, “Now for some more gloomy news on the economy.” I think not, was my response and promptly turned the dial to radio 3.
The shift is as dramatic as it is sudden, a shift in values, here is world untroubled and unmoved by the trials and tribulations of the vulgar material world, whilst markets crash and regimes crumble whole hours are devoted to Bartok, Liszt, Schubert. Whilst on Radio 3 you are soothed with ‘Through the Night,’ radio 5 live offers the crudely titled ‘Wake up to Money.’ There are many things I like to wake up to, birdsong, the sound of sea, the warm body of a beautiful woman lying beside me, even a warm cup of tea, but money! What a horrible idea. I think not.
The sounds I listened to in the bath originated with Sergei Rachmaninoff, probably my favourite composer, though he is often not treated as a serious front rank composer in the west and has been the subject of a good deal of snobbery. In Russia the story is different, here he is fully appreciated and of course he is a quintessentially Russian composer. I loved the TV documentary about him narrated by John Gielgud, if dark chocolate had a voice that is what it would sound like.
My other antidote for the winter blues is PG Wodehouse. Everyone in the western world I think must be familiar with the Jeeves/Wooster relationship, but the world created by Wodehouse embraces many more characters and settings. Not only does he create wonderfully comic stories, totally incredible of course, one does not only willingly suspend disbelief one goes and buries it out in the garden for the duration, but he weaves these together with the most wonderful command of the English language, not least in his use of slang. It is the slang of the upper class, though of an indeterminate period, stretching from the Naughty Nineties through the Roaring Twenties to the middle years of the 1930’s, of the first world war there is no mention. The stories too seem to relate to an indeterminate period, primarily the 1920’s with a running theme of nostalgia for the Belle Epoch, though it does enter the world of the 1930’s with Woodehouse’s masterly lampoon of Oswald Mosley with Roderick Spode leader of his ‘Black Shorts,’ declaiming the vibrancy of British knees, -he is incidentally forced to settle upon shorts as virtually all other items of clothing had already been spoken for.
Woodehouse’s world is however primarily innocent and apolitical, a world of impending domestic and social disaster, usually averted. The Wodehouse world is ultimately as timeless as it is magical, a whole array of exotic characters, from the wonderfully drawn spiv Ukridge to the hapless Lord Emsworth, to whom my heart constantly goes out, he just wants to be left alone to look after his pig, the Empress of Blandings. If I was truly pompous I would say a poignant metaphor here. Ultimately Wodehouse just wishes to make you laugh and succeeds amply. I recommend extremely heavy doses in mid winter.
I have definitely fallen out of love with the London Review of Books, the latest edition just dropped through my door with major contributions from two people I cannot stand, Tariq Ali and Slavoj Zizek, the latter a man who reminds me of George Orwell’s remark ‘something so stupid only an intellectual would believe it.’ Though it thankfully arrived in the post at the same time as Nick Cohen’s new book You Cannot Read This Book, which I was pleased to see is dedicated to Christopher Hitchens, with a wonderful Hitch quote at the front.
‘There is an all out confrontation between the ironic and the literal mind: between every kind of commissar and inquisitor and bureaucrat and those who know that, whatever the role of social and political forces, ideas and books have to be formulated by individuals”;
Cohen is doing battle for free speech on the same battleground as The Hitch and his arguments are as razor sharp. One way of emerging from the winter blues, don’t let the bastards get you down, fight back.
