Blighty vs Krautland, plus the ‘OxCam Arc’

Knowing that I speak German, enjoy holidaying in German-speaking countries, my best friend lives in Germany, and I have a line of Zimmermans in my family tree, a mate sent me a link to an article in The New Statesman. Yeah. The New Statesman. To me. It was always going to end in tears.

The article (From Germany, the UK appears ever more dysfunctional and absurd) was penned by one Martin Fletcher. The name rang a bell. Even before I read the article, I found his website and recognised several of his previous articles in various publications.

Fletcher thinks anyone who voted for Brexit and then for BoJo, to get it done, is a fanatical right-wing ideologue, a jingoistic xenophobe, or was too exhausted to think straight, was easily seduced by lies and vacuous gimmicks. His vocab, not my interpretation. There’s no room in his closed, liberal-elite (probably metropolitan) mindset for the possibility of an intelligent, thoughtful, conscientious, responsible Brexit supporter.

Don’t blame Brexit or Covid.

Well we are in a dreadful pickle aren’t we. Christmas is going to be the worst ever. No cheap, plastic, Chinese here-today-gone-tomorrow toys under a non-existent Christmas tree. No factory-farmed turkey. No smashed avocado for breakfast. THE HORRORRRRRRRRRRR!

Oh, strap on a pair. What’s wrong with a jar of homemade marmalade from the mother-in-law (best in the world – the marmalade, not the in-law), paper chains made from discarded colour-magazines, a whole poached wild salmon, and my home-made, home-grown plum compote. Compared to Afghan women, Chinese Uyghurs, and white working-class northerners applying to university, what’s to complain about?

Einstein, Jesus, Irving and Beethoven

While writing my previous blog (“Inspired choices of music”), I had a feeling that I’d written something very similar before. I checked previous blogs – no nothing there. I searched all my documents saved on my laptop – including archives – and found an essay I had drafted in 1998 while living in the US. It was almost published in a prestigious magazine, nay TWO prestigious magazines, but the first rejected it after a monumental tussle between two editors, and I rejected the second when the editor said he liked the essay’s first half but not the second so could I re-write it. No one tells me what or how to write, so it remained unpublished and I forgot about it …

 … until I wrote ‘Inspired Choices’, the following bit in particular:

“You can analyse the pants off it in the most scholarly, imaginative way, but at the end of the day it boils down to your instinct. Your soul. A religious experience. A certain piece of music just does ‘it’. What’s ‘it’? Ask your soul,”…

Inspired choices of music

No I’m not thinking of Classic FM’s Top 100 or Desert Island Discs, but the most perfect, irreplaceable, hand-in-glove musical pieces ‘inserted’ in films, which re-imagine the former and elevate the latter. I’m not referring to music written specifically for a film, but classics lifted out of their original contexts and snuggled perfectly into an alien genre.

This occurred to me while attempting to play the piano the other day after six weeks in a sling. I shoulda stuck to “Chopsticks”, not tried something too ambitious, but Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” is what caught my eye while rummaging through my music stool. I tried to play it and failed.