The pits and the epiphany

Went to bed in a foul, self-critical mood, grinding out a mantra: no more about ageing, no more about bloody ageing. Until Younger Daughter and I flipped through some of my recent posts, courtesy of her Iphone, I hadn’t realised how the subject had tainted the latter part of the WW year. Ageing isn’t fun, but it’s even less fun to read about. Too late Plutarch came up with the following from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book of aphorisms, The Bed of Procrustes: “Here's another, which I personally find rather close to the knuckle, and therefore all the more true as far as I am concerned: The only objective definition of ageing is when a person starts to talk about ageing."

So from now on imagine me as I was in 1975, forty years old, full of professional arrogance, just awarded my first editorship – which is how I still see myself when times are good. Not likeable but likely to say something unexpected. A constantly spiky terror to those who were in charge of me.

But I must be honest. Knowing I could purge this discovery, as I am doing now, I relaxed to a newly remembered experience. At midnight we crowded round the French window to watch the New Year fireworks. There were fewer this year but we were compensated - sky lanterns, released in dozens, elegant domes of flame floating determinedly north towards the Malverns. At first I was struck by a sense of community (the kids released one of their own) but the word is too passive. What we were seeing was a dynamic community, one on the move. An affirmative display. And on they flowed.

Change and decay - not all bad

The one form of headgear I can accept: Breton marine cap (or its sibling worn by Rhine barge captains). Gift from Mrs BB.Great source of quaint lapel pins once awarded to pliant proletariat, now keenly priced for tourists

AGEING Evidence may be sudden and poignant. As when I heard trebles singing a descant to Adeste Fideles, a skill I lost sixty-five years ago. But it is, in the end, a balancing act.

Indent left: Former German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt

CAN’T: ● Regularly swim a mile in the pool. ● Ski. ● Go rock-climbing. ● Drink to excess. ● Eat to excess. ● Interest myself in most UK TV sitcoms. ● Sleep more than five hours a night. ● Pick up conversation in noisy environments. ● Endure the middle-classes en masse. ● Remain calm during conversation about soccer, pop music. ● Behave civilly to suspected Tories. ● Restrain myself from asking questions. ● Show enthusiasm for the Iberian peninsula. ● Fly long distance. ● Tolerate evangelists. ● Willingly regard the faces of Huw Edwards, Kevin Geary, Alex Ferguson, Sue Barker, George Osborne, Arianna Huffington, John Pilger ● Empathise plausibly with youth.

CAN: ● Feel untouched by many of the above. ● Compensate for not drinking to excess by buying expensive wine. ● Revel in shabby clothing. ● Take pleasure in academic accounts of history. ● Luxuriate in near silence. ● Respond to the appearance and songs of birds. ● Spend more without caring. ● Consider death unselfconsciously. ● Find myself becoming more generous (with cash). ● Imagine I understand maths and physics - and the structure of music. ● Write better. ● Ignore changes in the weather. ● Benefit from advanced car technology. ● Exercise curiosity about the nature of womanhood without being thought a menace.

A matter of some delicacy

Yesterday, those with fast reaction times may have noticed a Works Well post with a blog life of ten minutes. I was reflecting on my personal guidelines for blogging and on the unexpected late-life benefits blogging has brought me. Sentimentality got the better of my prose, hence the deletion. Here’s its replacement.

On the Fünffingerplatz blog the subject of beer is omnipresent, recently extended to traditional English pint glasses. I commented there were two types (the jug with a handle and the straight-sider), each representing the two sides of the class divide. This was disputed - in the nicest possible way. I offer this historical adumbration.

Once, nearly all pint glasses were straight siders, widening very slightly towards the top. Their obvious benefit was the thinness of the glass. In the fifties keg beer was introduced in the UK and was welcomed; its flavour was anodyne but its quality was consistent, unlike conventional pump beer then sold, wretchedly maintained, by many careless landlords.

A few years later, in reaction to keg beer (symbolised by Watney’s Red Barrel), the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) began. Drinkers were offered a much wider choice of pump beers served by landlords who understood the need to care for their pipes, etc. CAMRA was a middle-class initiative and its supporters, many of them Hooray Henries, insisted on straight-sided glasses. Keg beer lingered in pubs where drinkers seemed not to care about these newer beers and, in my mind, is associated with much thicker handled jugs with a discouraging mould line round the rim.

It is no longer PC to pretend to be objective about the UK class system and so I will leave it at that.

Suffering - the tie that binds

The Salvation Army has set up (paid****SEE STARRED COMMENT BELOW) hot drinks and snacks to ease the agonies of those lost in the Heathrow Time Warp. At first glance this hardly seemed to fit in with social welfare provision, the SA’s raison d’etre. Do those hopping off to sunny beaches and expensively smoothed pistes deserve our charitable instincts? Then, fatally, my thoughts turned from the general to the particular.

Four or five years ago Mrs BB and I contrived a Christmas ski-ing holiday in Cervinia with the whole immediate family, a party of eight. A very rare event, unlikely to be repeated, and something we can look back on fondly. But suppose it had all ground to a halt in that modern-day Slough of Despond – the airport departure lounge? We were lucky. And the SA is probably right. The middle classes are not immune to despair.

ALL GOD's CHILLUN When I saw a rat insouciantly climbing the central support of the bird table we stopped putting out bird food. But today a blackbird, fluffed up like a ball of knitting wool, poked sadly round the snow on that empty shelf. The service has been resumed. If the rat returns, so be it.

INNER PULSE Lucy recently posted a list of 49 exhortations, observations, indulgences, what- have-you, that I suppose help define her passage through time. The first was: Don’t forget music. I was reminded of my mother who abhorred the idea of playing music while she read, but embraced it while working – notably as she ironed. Today Radio 3 droned out a Kodaly cello sonata as we belatedly decorated our living room, hardly Christmassy but a little warp to add to the woof. (Note: MSWord’s style guide hated that last bit).

Sing along with Old Bach

In the West Riding of Yorkshire where if tha does owt for nowt, do it for thisen (If you ever do anything without cash reward, only do it for yourself) Messiah was big around Christmas. Yet Handel devotes only six airs, choruses and recitatives out of 50-plus to this festival. There is nothing Christmassy about “All they that see him, laugh him to scorn.” and “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?”

For wall-to-wall Christmas we need ace professional, master recycler J. S. Bach and his Christmas Oratorio, cobbled together from six cantatas intended for separate days – New Year’s Day and the Sunday after, among others. It’s amazing it works and yet, in another sense, it isn’t. Bach fed the public demand for new music and though capable of standalone masterpieces (the Goldberg, the Brandenburgs) he didn’t bust his ass every weekend.

To spare his inventive powers he craftily eased his second-hand secular music into sacred works. Christmas Oratorio contains bits from Hercules at the Crossroads, and Strike the Drums, Sound the Trumpets, both non-religious cantatas.

My Bach has a dream cast (Elly Ameling, Janet Baker, Robert Tear, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, King’s College Choir) and they make a fine racket. But it’s the Colin Davies Messiah that is the greater musical event. For one thing the soloists (Heather Harper, Helen Watts, John Wakefield and John Shirley-Quirk) are required to improvise curlicues; for another the choir is far smaller and better throated than was usual at the time of the recording (1966).

BIG QUESTION So, why does an atheist (presently considering a switch to rationalism or humanism, given a declining capacity for intellectual rigour) listen to this God stuff? Well, it’s simply not true the Devil has all the best tunes.

The mower as a time machine

The sixth age shifts into a lean and slippered pantaloon…
… a world too wide for his shrunk shank.

Ageing isn’t just a withering of the body but a contraction of hope. Mundane detail also tells the story.

● The first pusher is second-hand: the blades are blunt and one wheel jams randomly, tearing the grass.
● The cheap, new pusher sheds its grass-box.
● The hoverer runs over its own cable.
● Engines are harder and harder to start. Recite: Lord protect me from small capacity IC power units.
● And thus the ride-on.
BUT
● You pay next-door’s kid to do the riding.

Does anyone know anyone who has chosen and paid for their own burial plot? Surely the act of a Virgoan (I am a Virgoan) keen to tie off all the loose ends.

MORE, ALAS, ON CHARITY I can be tickled into spreading my bread on the waters. Years ago I handed over my credit card to my younger daughter as she watched the first Band Aid do, a gesture that cost me twice over as the pro-gay Terence Higgins Trust sought to get in touch with me later and rang off every time Mrs BB picked up the phone.

Today The Guardian had a much subtler temptation. Donate to their chosen appeal (to help disadvantaged youth) and the call would be answered by a member of their editorial staff. I got Katherine Viner, the deputy editor, and we had a brief but nostalgic chat (for me) as she helped pare down my Visa. These days I live more in the past than the present even though my pantaloons are merely corduroy.

Cakewalk to freedom

Freed in 1959 from weekly newspapers (and destined ecstatically for a magazine in London) I swore I would never again attend entertainment put on by amateurs. Call me elitist, an intellectual snob and I say phooie. But recently the threat loomed. I was asked to publicise a Christmas Concert on the website I run (Fine.) To ask “my lady wife” if she would bake a cake for the event (That quote brought powdered teeth to my mouth corners.) To attend in person (I sought the seppuku sword.)

Mrs BB dislikes the quote too and was minded to refuse. But the proceeds were for the local hospice and both us can be guided by self-interest. So the cake equipment was mobilised reluctantly (see pic) and suddenly I saw clear skies. I delivered the cake an hour ago and when asked about my evening plans I was no longer shackled, the price had been paid. I said, simply, no, without any awkwardness. As I drove away I reflected on an unexpected benefit of being married. To a cake-maker, for one thing.

ANYONE HOME? Once you brayed (a good Yorkshire word) on the door with your fist. Later there were knockers. Then bells which you wound up like clockwork toys. Followed by electric bells which depended on cumbersome batteries. And now the above. What you see is a radio-frequency push-button transmitter with its exposed circuitry and a tiny battery sufficient to release an equally tiny signal, insufficient in itself to activate the ding-dong. Power for the ding-dong is derived from the wall sockets into which receivers are plugged and which respond to that infinitesimally small pulse of electro-magnetism. You might well ask whether this is progress.

Painless delivery for corned beef

I’ll brook no argument (a silly verb I grant you). The best tin-opener in the world is the Brabantia Profile. No longer available in this form the model name is still retained and I can’t believe Brabantia has lowered its high – and frequently expensive – standards. It costs £9.32 and passes the ultimate test.

What test? The traditional corned-beef tin is a symmetrical trapezium in frontal elevation, thus one end is smaller in area than the other. OK if you have tag and twisty key; if not you need the Profile. To ensure the contents can be pushed out neatly in one piece, you need to remove both ends and it’s the short-radius corners on the smaller end that test cheapo openers. Easy with the Profile and no jagged edges. One caveat: even the Profile suffers wear, notably the cutting disc and the sprocket that “drives” the tin. Be prepared to replace the Profile in a dozen years or so. But then perhaps you don’t eat corned beef.

BEST WURST Mrs BB is back from her continental Christmas market visit: last year Prague, this year Munich. My prezzie is a Steirische Burgsalami in a dinky hessian sack resembling a bucolic Xmas cracker. Huge flavour, even a huge bouquet. But so, so hard. Denture wearers needn’t apply.

FANCY THAT I write a lot and take a physically active break now and then. Hence the piano keyboard. No big deal, often just hymns. Did you know the seventh and eighth lines and one note of the ninth of Ye Holy Angels Bright:

Or else the theme,
Too high doth seem
For…

are a C-major octave plus one? Makes things easy.