Ashes To Ashes - Barbara Nadel

I read this story almost entirely because it's set in St Paul's Cathedral and surrounds (it also takes in Wilmington Square and Holborn, albeit briefly) on the night of 29th December 1940. That was the Sunday night of mass bombing when the City burned in a firestorm and the iconic photo of the cathedral framed by smoke comes from that night.

It was only because of the setting, which is certainly evoked accurately, that I read through to the end. The plotting is creaky and the characterisation is confusing. In the first hundred pages you struggle to differentiate Mr Phillips, Mr Andrews, Mr Smith etc etc and her protagonist, a middle-aged half-Indian East End funeral director suffering post-traumatic stress from the Somme, is surprisingly and effectively persistent given his seemingly-debilitating condition.

As the story plays out over one night, it takes in the struggle of the watchmen to save the cathedral as a symbol of London - at one point the dome was in serious peril from an incendiary - along with child prostitution, city rookeries, freemasonry and Aleister Crowley. Plus parts of the cathedral, such as the triforium and the library, remain to this day more seriously bizarre than is indicated here. So the feeling remains that there could have been a much larger book here, especially as the author has indicated an interest in Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd.

Banksy at Bristol Museum

Monday morning I went to see the Banksy exhibit at the Bristol Museum. To be truthful I still remain unconvinced by the supposed artistic merit of the fellow and his ilk. I seem to remember Spike Milligan and unnumbered Punch cartoonists playing much the same game forty years and more ago. And then there was Terry Gilliam...

But that said the whole effect of the Bristol experience is impressive, particularly if you’re familiar with that museum. That, I think, was why I wanted to see it and why I was prepared to sit outside on the pavement for an hour and half to ensure I got in as soon as the place opened. I’ve been going to that museum regularly since 1972. It’s hardly the most exciting museum but it’s comforting, it’s welcoming, and it has a small collection of excellent pictures. It also has Alfred – the stuffed gorilla – who we used to go and talk to when we were tripping, the gypsy caravan, and the box plane hanging from the ceiling in the entrance hall.



That those items had been there so long, and basically unchanged, made this initiative so radical. As not only was it brilliant to see this prankster’s (admittedly slight) subversion of the collection, but to see so many people there; I’ve certainly never had to queue to get through the door before. And because you had to look carefully to see that you’d spotted all the jokes, and at times you really couldn’t be sure, it meant everyone was looking at everything very carefully. And that was what I found most heartening, along with the hope that some of them will think to go back again after this exhibit has gone.

And Alfred, as ‘a Bristol icon’ remained untouched, though the caravan had been clamped, and the plane had gained a pilot and the title ‘Escape From Guantanamo’.

Lament For The Public Library 1

I’ve worked, on and off, in public libraries in London for the last three decades. I’ve worked for the same library service since 1999, and ironically I’m now working in the same building where I started off in 1980. It’s been a long trip and taken in a fair range of the capital, and in truth – and with certain provisos – it’s been a disheartening experience. I’m pretty sure I’m now coming to the end of my library career and I can’t say that I’m that unhappy. The demise of public libraries over my lifetime has been a shameful episode, in which many parties can share the blame, but there’s little doubt to my mind that’s what’s done for them is their connection to local government.

From when I was a child I knew clearly what a library was. The St. Albans Library stood on Victoria Street. There were two rooms downstairs – adult and children’s libraries - and a reference library above. It’s currency was books, and secondarily, information. The one time I remember going upstairs was to find names of African tribes; I recall being given, or finding, a book with a page full of them which I assiduously transcribed. Later I used the Bristol Library on College Green; mainly to borrow records (jazz and folk, no pop, no rock) which we painstakingly examined through magnifying glasses and noted down all visible scratches.

The point was we understood what these places were for; reading and information. We went to school and school was where we were taught and where we learned. The library, and there was a good one at school too, supported and supplemented that learning. The librarians, and we called them all librarians, helped us to find what we required, but they weren’t our teachers. In a way they were helping us to cheat by giving us more, extra, information.

Public libraries were funded by local government, but local government stayed at arms length. It let the appointed Chief Librarian, Borough Librarian, whatever the title, get on with it. He (usually he, despite the predominance of women in the workforce) was a professional and he could be trusted. So long as the books balanced, and there were no obvious complaints, and often even if there were. Libraries, as providers of books and information, were understood to be a good thing. And so they were, these repositories with collections that grew and grew, that held on to the important titles from past in their special collections. That devised a country-wide co-operative system that meant that if a book were needed in St. Albans and it were in Aberdeen it could be obtained.

There was much that was smug and middle class about libraries but then there was much of that about all of UK society in those times. But the cultural changes of the 60s and 70s did, albeit slowly and unevenly, work their way into the public library system. So that when I first worked in them they were approaching, at least for the user, the aspect of a free zone where all ideas stood equal and could be accessed. You could find a comprehensive range of politics of every hue. You could find avant garde literature. You could find masses of foreign language material. You wanted something odd and you could find it. And the music section had started buying rock, pop, and punk. And still local government; the councillors and the chief executive; didn’t impose a view, and kept the funds flowing. But things were changing – and to that I will return.

When The Rain Stops Falling

I made my first visit of the year to the theatre. That's as many times as last year - when we went to see The Revenger's Tragedy, and that was it.

Last night Jane and I went to the Almeida to see an Australian play When The Rain Stops Falling by a fellow called Andrew Bovell; he had something to do with a film called Lantana, which I haven't seen.

Not knowing what to expect but as ever thrilled and chastened to be back in a theatre once again I was taken aback by a fantastic piece of work. It was a story about generations of a family that played itself out over a period of eighty years, beginning in the late 1950s and running through till thirty years hence.

It roamed back and forward through time, gradually exposing the family secrets and enlightening the audience as to the various relationships and connections. It was a poetic work, almost operatic, with its repetition of phrases and situations, and in its entirety it was deeply moving.

As other critics have stated it is a play you have to stick with as it takes time to see the pattern emerging. At the end we were craving to see the beginning again. Of course that's just like poetry or novels, or most works of literature for that matter.

The clip is not from the production we saw. It's from the Sydney Theatre production which is also running now. But it hints equally well at the power of this piece of work.

In My End Is My Beginning

You will know that those lines end East Coker, the second of the Four Quartets. This week they encapsulate my emotional revivalism after a period of preoccupation and concern.

You will have noticed a six-month has elapsed since the last, and opening entry. I haven't been hidden away. I've been to a number of good shows, and to Malmo and Copenhagen in March. But I have had, since May last year, a continued concern about my mother whose health has seriously deteriorated in that period. This culminated in her entering a residential home just before Easter, and last week we emptied her flat and gave up possession.

As I was carrying that through I realised that now I finally had no family home to return to. I had run away to London a long time ago but it always had been there. Now no longer. That was suddenly a little traumatic, and by the end of the week I was overwhelmed by a weariness of the soul.

In consequence I didn't, as I'd initially planned, head down to Hastings and see my friend Wes. Instead I spent a little of Sunday in Spitalfields at the Pride and then we walked down to the Radcliffe Highway and the Hawksmoor church there before it got cold to continue to Wapping as we'd intended.

What I did do is realise I'd reached an ending, and a sense of closure enveloped me. From thence it was but a step to a sense of a new beginning. It's coming up to ten years in my current billet, starting and ending up in Holborn; to what purpose? I realised it's time to wipe that malign dust from my feet.

Here we go...

Now and in Kings Cross

So what is this about then?

It's about now and in England, but where is now and what is England? On one level, of course, it's undeniably a cold Tuesday afternoon in January 2009. And I'm sitting in a flat in Kings Cross. But lots of things are bouncing through me; my memories, my hopes, and those experiences that I've picked up second hand. Those latter coming from family, from reading, from listening, and from imagining.

This locale, this city, this country, is chock full of traces, of ghosts, of leavings. A small island of many souls. Within a few minutes walk of here is where Arthur Rimbaud stayed with his mother and sister, where Kenneth Williams spent his childhood, where Bob Dylan played his first London gig. Every street you walk you step in the footsteps of someone memorable.

Of late I've started to become intrigued by London's experience of the last war. In November I stood on the Stone Gallery of St Paul's, and looked out over the surrounding area, but simultaneously I was thinking about those nights of bombing and how the city all around the cathedral burned. I've seen the graphic footage a few times and it stays with me.

I also find myself thinking, in places like Borough Market, at the Market Porter on dark afternoons, how it must have been scurrying home by the river, across the bridges, down the platform, before the raids began. I used to think how lucky I was to have avoided the war. Now I wonder if I mightn't have missed something astonishing.

Now And In England is a line from the Four Quartets of T.S.Eliot, from Little Gidding to be precise. It's a group of poems written during the war that take a mystic, transcendent viewpoint of England, that open hidden pathways and forgotten byways, touching lost causes and unremembered sacrifices.

In 1979 I wrote a dissertation on the Four Quartets. I went deep into Eliot and many of his lines remain with me to this day. They often come into my head unbidden, like old friends. So they probably shape my experience of London and England, even now.

That's Eliot reading the conclusion of the last poem.