Elvis Presley: Lost in a dream

I was listening to the car radio when Elvis Presley came on singing a fairly nondescript song – GI Blues. 

It came as a shock – as it always does – how good a voice he had. That night I delved into my DVD collection. It’s a perennial complaint in my family that every year I ask for a DVD, which they claim I put on a shelf and promptly forget. This is a canard. It’s a case of waiting for just the right moment – and one had come now.

I played Elvis’ 1968 comeback concert and was bowled over by two competing emotions. The first, and let’s get this out of the way, was how phenomenally beautiful he was. After such a long time, seeing him come alive on a large screen TV was like seeing a demigod, and at the same time an animated Tussaud’s mannequin. It was a Rorschach thing. 

In palmistry the lines on the left hand show your inborn potential. The lines on the right palm show what you have/are doing with it. They tend to coincide but not always and never exactly. It was a bit like that with Elvis’ face.

Disc One showed him performing with his band surrounded by a very strange audience. It was so prim and proper, well behaved children with their parents sitting behind, most of them corporative insiders, I’m sure. There are two kinds of audiences, the kind Hitler, the Beatles and the Stones enjoyed where the performer feeds from the energy of the crowd, and this kind of audience – respectful and all of them feeding from him. Elvis was singing to the un-dead all coiffured and well-dressed.

 Back to the face. In every disc the camera panned lovingly over Presley’s hair and face but in that first disc the camera occasionally zooms into his right profile, which is – the only word for it is – weird. His eyes, nose, lips and chin look as if they’re sinking into enveloping cheek.

 

 It’s a spine-tingling portent. You sigh with relief when the camera returns to the full face or left profile where an equally unnatural beauty prevails. 

This first Disc also reveals a degree of self consciousness and unease, to be expected from an icon threatened by change and perhaps the need to prove himself. It’s a strange mix of self deprecating arrogance. He comes to life when he’s on his feet, singing without the comfort blanket of buddies surrounding him. And, interestingly the camera largely avoids close ups of his right profile. We see only the demigod running through his greatest hits. Most of them are the necessary nods to his hey-day – just to remind you of why he was once unchallenged as ‘King’. Each song is professionally delivered, occasionally electric, but his last song – If I CanDream has pathos and power.  

The Aztecs had a god, Tezcatlipoca, and each year his priests chose the most beautiful man in the empire to represent him. For a year this man had everything a god incarnate could desire. At the end of that year he was sacrificed. Presley had more than a year but the story is much the same.

In 1968 he was 32 and, incredibly, a mere 9 years later he was dead, a bloated man aware of the unfulfilled parody he had become. And yes, I like the Vegas shows, but it is a different Elvis, still the consummate showman but more Liberace than Rock God, a sacrifice waiting to happen.

These lines, for me, sum up the tragedy of Elvis. He knew there was more.

There must be lights burning brighter somewhere
Got to be birds flying higher in a sky more blue

We're lost in a cloud with too much rain
We're trapped in a world that's troubled with pain

But as long as a man has the strength to dream
He can redeem his soul and fly

Deep in my heart there's a trembling question
Still I am sure that the answer, answer's gonna come somehow
Out there in the dark, there's a beckoning candle, yeah
And while I can think, while I can talk
While I can stand, while I can walk
While I can dream, please let my dream come true, oh
Right now, let it come true right now
Oh yeah

The meaning of Gay

I was doing some light dusting, the radio on in the background. They were discussing Will Young, who had approached the Education Secretary over the relatively new, derogatory use of the word ‘Gay’ in schools i.e. ‘That is so gay’ or ‘those shoes are gay’.

He has statistics ‘show 23% of young gay people attempt suicide and 56% will self harm.’ These are worrying statistics but I find it hard to reconcile them with a linguistic eddy over another layer of meaning in the word ‘Gay’. I would imagine there is much more direct verbal abuse, as unacceptable as even more serious on-line bullying. His suggestion that teachers should be ‘trained’ to stamp it out in the playground will have as much success as Canute ordering the tide to go back.

Language changes and officialdom – even French officialdom – has little success in stopping it. I’m old enough to remember when ‘Gay’ gained its new meaning. I remember the varying reactions, ranging from the ‘intrigued’ to the ‘irritated’ that a fine old English word could never be used again without this new connotation. To dance with ‘gay abandon’ took on an entirely new meaning. 

But then ‘Gay’ had been such a piffly little word, old but underused. Now it became turbo-charged culturally and politically. The language had changed. 

And it changes again. In a new world ‘wicked’ and ‘bad’ have an extra layer of meaning. ‘That’s wicked’ or ‘that’s bad’ means exactly the reverse, depending on context. The word ‘Gay’ has taken on the same fate.

I don’t know. It may have begun as consciously homophobic – some gay-baiting master-mind injecting it like a virus into the playground. Somehow I doubt it, but then again language is hard to pin down. 

Whatever the origin of the changed use of ‘Gay’ I doubt that its casual use in today’s playground is consciously homophobic, but I accept it has tainted a ‘brand’. The word ‘Gay’ was bravely appropriated to mean something proud. This extra layer of meaning is unfortunate, but what is appropriated can sometimes be re-appropriated in unexpected ways. In ten or twenty years ‘gay’ may have an entirely new layer of meaning with or without teachers being re-trained. 

Will Young has every right to express his concern, and use his minor celebrity status to approach the Secretary of State for Education, but he should also be aware of its dangers. Writing as a teacher with some experience of playground politics I fear such pleadings to officialdom for special treatment reinforces the concept of ‘victim,’ – a far more tainted brand and something Gay Pride resisted from its inception.

Tea bags and death

Last night I dreamt of tea bags and Chancellors of the Exchequer present and past. Head on pillow but somewhere else it seemed eminently logical that you could assess the strengths of their respective economic policies by examining their drained teabags, and I had amassed a fine collection going as far back as Gladstone – three for each chancellor to preclude mistakes, and each carefully arranged about the study. My fingers were poised on the keyboard when my wife came in and the dream ended.

In a peculiar way the dream made as much sense as the random leaflets inserted in   magazines. These two leaflets dropped from a recently purchased Private Eye, and I make no comment about the merits of each – not now at least – I’m still trying to get my head around a connection I sense but can’t quite tease out.

 

 

The soldiers of the Great War were heroes even if most didn’t want to be, and heroism on the battlefield has been shown before and since. And there is no doubt that those fighting in the campaign for ‘Dignity in Dying’ are sincere and believe it is wrong that they are not allowed to die. God forbid the dilemma ever faces me or those close. 

Perhaps it was the random contrast between the horrendous death toll of the First World War and the infinitesimal casualties of those wanting to die. I keep feeling it is something else as well, a shadow hard to define but there.

My feeling is that once such a right is enshrined in law what begins as permissive will end up as noblesse oblige  and the eventual casualties will dwarf those of World War I. The ‘LiverpoolPathway’ began as a humane approach to death in the hospice movement. Adopted larger scale and institutionalized it became something horrendous.  It may be that the law should remain uncertain. The alternative might be  a neat symmetry between abortion and euthanasia – the carnage of the inconvenient.

The man that hated Britain: ideological ping-pong

The man that hated Britain: the headline is arresting as tabloid headlines should be. It encapsulates an aspect of truth, which, in a free press will be ideologically one-sided. For those who don’t live in Britain the article refers to the late Ralph Miliband, the Marxist ideologue  and father of Ed Miliband, a possible future Prime Minister. 

It might have been a more accurate headline if it had declared ‘The man who hated the Britain that was’. And he did hate, or if you will, dislike, the Anglican Church, the Monarchy, the armed forces, Parliamentary Democracy and the ‘rabid nationalism’ of the people at large. As a Marxist and internationalist he’d have been a rum cove if he didn’t preach that ‘the workers have no country.’ Ralph Miliband probably did hate what ‘was’. He also loved an abstract alternative.  

He wanted to replace ‘the Britain that was’ with ‘a country that could be’. And there’s nothing wrong with that you might say. Who would want to live in the Middle Ages? Social structures come and go, each carrying the seeds of their own destruction. Contradictions become unbearable and change when it comes is invariably violent.

And therein lies a problem. 

Change is effected by intellectuals who profess to know what the people want – or at least what is good for them if only they knew it. There’s no getting away from this, Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin, Mao, they knew ‘what was what’ and imposed their vision on societies in turmoil.  It’s how things work, and at least such men (maybe not Mao) accepted the moral consequences of their actions.

So what about British Marxists – even - Fabians in the interwar years?

Between 1928 and 1932 seven million people died in Stalin’s Russia as the result of an engineered famine designed to drive peasants into the new collective farms. Beatrice and Sidney Webb (founders of the London School of Economics) concluded:  ‘Strong must have been the faith and resolute the will of the men who, in the interest of what seemed to them the public good, could take so momentous a decision.’ So that’s all right then. It was for their own good.

The late Eric Hobsbawm, another Marxist academic, refused to condemn Stalinism’s 30 million dead, or the Soviet invasion of Hungary. When asked whether if:  ‘the radiant tomorrow’ had actually been created in the Soviet Union, the deaths of 15 or 20 million people would have been justified, he replied: ‘Yes.’  I think it was Stalin who said, ‘you don’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.’

Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband were close friends though the latter never went as far as to support the excesses of Stalinism. My point is that the Webbs were opinionated fools, whilst Eric Hobsbawm was at least morally consistent. He believed the ends justified the means and accepted the moral consequences of his ideological beliefs.

And that’s my point. Once you adhere to a belief system you shouldn’t attempt to shrug off the moral consequences. A Nazi however far removed from the death camps bears a degree of responsibility. Similarly a Marxist accepts that revolution is violent, whether you’re talking about Trotsky’s suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, or the later Gulags. Revolution involves killing, and Marxist academics who lead comfortable lives are either open about it like Hobsbawm – or attempt to look the other way and refine the abstraction. In both cases these are men who hate their country if by country you mean the status quo.

I’ve touched upon relative giants. Now on to pigmies.

 No doubt the children of Maggie Thatcher felt similar grief when confronted with this puerile petit bourgeois nonsense. But they took it on the chin and remained silent

 The same Ed Miliband declares…The Daily Mail sometimes claims it stands for the best of British values of decency. But something has really gone wrong when it attacks the family of a politician — any politician — in this way

In fact the brunt of the ‘attack’ was on the father’s belief system, and yes, it was a deliberate, smear in what will be a very dirty battle between now and the next election. Now it is Ed Miliband bringing his ‘dad’ into the fray. There is anger and hurt, no doubt. There is also calculation in how to win the sympathy card. In foot-balling terms Milliband is taking a calculated dive – calculating, too, in how to destroy a dangerous opponent. First News International, now the Daily Mail. Press regulation is gathering steam.

And where do I stand in all this? I prefer a free press with all its faults. I would rather newspapers make mistakes than not be allowed to make them.  My nightmare would be a monopoly BBC or a monopoly Daily Mail. Regulate boxing, yes but blogs and newspapers should be opinionated and ‘bare knuckled’ - the bloodier the better. A Marxist will tell you that the primary aim of a legal system and police force is to protect property and in consequence the ruling class because they have most to lose. In a similar way Press Regulation is meant to protect the Establishment, cynically using victims of the press as pawns.

So here's to the summer that went!

My New Year’s resolution was to visit old friends. So far I have managed only one, Richard, living now in Hassleholm. Within weeks of my return I began experiencing breathing difficulties, with the outcome already described. But now I have a backlog of friends presently spared the Keyton visitation, and only three months left before the start of a new year. As John Lennon said ‘Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.’

I enjoy travelling, I love holidays but sometimes I wonder. Why go through the hassle of airport security, recycled air and dodgy cabin air pressure, delayed trains and traffic jams when you can just step out your back door with a bottle of plum wine or a glass of cold beer and listen to birdsong?

 

 Damson trees above and below.

 Trees and sky beyond. It's easy to forget there are neighbours

 And home when the beer is finished, the birds have stopped singing.

It’s been a good summer. The plum harvest was magnificent – largely shared with neighbours and friends while I was otherwise engaged. And my daughter was magnificent, picking, stoning and freezing 12lb of damsons for the damson wine I’ll make when I can. 

So here’s to the Summer that went. And here's to good friends.

What you can learn in a short space of time

 

Top pic kindly donated by David Ross

Bottom pic donated by my daughter

The Well of St Non (the saintly mother of St David) is easily accessible. Its water is quite pleasant to drink, but it offers no cure for a collapsed lung. 

Nurses are a saintly breed but they can talk about the most inappropriate topics. The one who trolleyed me out to the operating theatre talked about food. As he conveyed me through corridors and elevators, he told me how his son was a gifted Chef. He told me some of his favourite recipes, and how to cook the perfect curry and an even more perfect Onion Bhaji.

 This was to someone who had just fasted twenty four hours. The anaestheticist  told me afterwards, he’d had some trouble inserting an oxygen tube from oesophagus to lung. I’m not surprised. It would have been struggling against a ravenous tide of expectant saliva.

Illness is a great leveler and nursing is a vocation. There have been horror stories in the press about malfunctioning hospitals, and I’m sure all of them are true. But when you see a good hospital in action it is an eye-opener. The patience and just pure human kindness is something you never forget. Over a short period of time I shared a ward with, amongst others,  a drug addict, a simple-minded man with a beautiful soul, and another severely incontinent who had to be cleaned every few hours – all of them treated with humour and grace.

The first night after the operation I had a nurse who checked me on the hour. Just as well. Wires have a life of their own - especially those attached to the body. Anaesthetics also have unexpected effects. When I stood to urinate two things happened and one thing didn’t. Wires entangled me like mischievous snakes, becoming more creatively entwined the more I struggled. And the machine went berserk, beeping and flashing in various shades of red. This was because my heart hadn’t been warned and it rose from 92 to 160 and I staggered. Everything was working then, except my bladder, which slept through it all and refused to cooperate. The nurse systematically untangled me and my heart rate returned to normal the moment I lay down.

She was an excellent nurse, with a small tattoo on her neck. The machine had no tattoo but was malevolent. It had but one purpose, to punish not just me but the entire ward if I didn’t breathe deeply enough. I spent the night taking deep breaths, eyes fixed on a numerical display that couldn’t be allowed to fall to 8 or below. 

 It was like being attached to a video game 16 – 14 – 10 – 8 BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! I appreciated the sense of it. Lungs have to work hard after a pleurectomy. But some sleep would have been nice. 

And the most perverse thing of all?

I learnt that when you’re told you can’t do something that you have never wanted to do – you suddenly wish that you could. I now wallow in melancholy because I will never be able to scuba dive or experience the joy of hard physical sport. This is weird and irrational. I blame it on the Tramadol.

And one thing to share: Pembrokeshire is a well kept secret - and I've just blown it.

St Nons is on the coastal path that will take you from one end of Wales to another.

 

Damn Magpies!

A distrust of magpies was instilled into me as a child: ‘One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy.’ The rhyme has a merry bounce and sounds innocuous, even innocent. Why then the frisson of fear on seeing a single magpie? Why the involuntary spitting on the pavement and greeting said bird with ‘Good day Mr. Magpie’? And perhaps most puzzling of all, how was a thoroughly urbanized Liverpool toddler infected with such rural twaddle?

Rural twaddle my foot.

Within five minutes of setting out for our holiday in Pembroke a single magpie zoomed across our windscreen and vanished. I avoided spitting. It can’t be done in a car without eliciting comment. I did, surreptitiously, wish it a good day. Then, blow me, ten minutes later another single magpie shot across my line of vision. A chill ran through me, my thumbs prickled. I knew something bad was about to happen – but what – and when?

We had barely arrived in Nolton Haven when I almost stopped breathing. Some kind of invisible elastic band encircled my chest stopping allowing only a trickle of air into my lungs. Walking from bedroom to kitchen brought me out in a sweat and a pant. It also brought into relief how precious air is. 

I’d experienced a similar revelation crawling out the Grand Canyon and, a few years after that, mazing my way through the ruins of Pompeii during a heat-wave. Water then was the ultimate treasure.

Water and air - finer than the finest champagne, finer than the finest malt – even Lagavulin. Such revelations invariably occur when it’s almost too late. Still, I was on holiday to enjoy myself and that involves swimming in a cold Atlantic. Take it easy, I thought. Go slowly. Just float. Big mistake. My lungs went on strike and twenty minutes in I juddered to a halt. Magpies danced and cavorted as I crawled on to land.

The doctor was sympathetic. She told me I had beautiful blood pressure but an infection in the right lung. Strike One to the Magpie. Just one more to go.

I didn’t have to wait long. The following night in fact. 

It was a strange cottage with low beams that caught the unwary head. But the magpie had more serious intent than a cracked head. It was night and I was on my way to the toilet, concerned not to wake my wife, so didn’t switch on a light. I felt my way through darkness half asleep, dreaming or perhaps imagining myself to be Dirk Deadly on a mission…Gestapo close on my heels. Unfortunately for me the stair-case was adjacent to the toilet and I stepped on air, tumbling head first down the stairs.

I mouthed a silent prayer to God that there hadn’t been a third magpie. Two had done their worst. Enough was enough.

Post script.

An X Ray showed a collapsed lung. Pneumothorax to be exact. And from X Ray to draining it was sorted out in a matter of hours. The NHS is both efficient and fast – when things go right. Just waiting for a final check up – fingers crossed and scanning the skies for magpies.

PPS

Damn magpies. There must have been one great windblown, flea-ridden specimen squatting on the car roof on the way home. Far from being alright I was called in again and attached to a wall by a tube sucking out excess fluid and air from my thorax. Two weeks later they said it wasn’t working.  Three days after that I had a pleurectomy – something I’d like to do to every damn magpie in creation. Shooting’s too good for them

PPPS
And thank you again here