Here is a very fine song from a talented young American musician named Peter Broderick (b.1987).
The writing's strong, as his is performance; I think one of the most affecting elements of it is that you're introduced early on to that beautiful, melancholic, fragile chorus -- then, finally, you get to hear it on top of the piano.
I'm not going to write any more. But have a listen -- I'm sure it will grab you.
I get email.
Suzie writes with a fine story to tell of a weekend visit to her Mum's place where, in a bout of attic-box-raking, she got her paws on a very old book with a long note in it from the author to her great great grandfather. The book -- how about this for a title? -- is called Famous Frosts and Frost Fairs in Great Britain, Chronicled from the Earliest to the Present Time; the author was Mr William Andrews.
Here is the truly wonderful tale from the page which Suzie screen-grabbed for me. Enjoy it...
I should point out, before I make my negative comments about this wine, that I spend a lot of my time acting as an unpaid trade envoy of The Wine Society, boldly coercing my friends, family and clients to become members. I have opened many hundreds of bottles from the Society, and have been truly delighted with every single bloody one of them.
2011 proved an excellent year for the Society, thanks to you, its members, who continue to give strong support. Good trading allows us, as a non-profit-maximising co-operative, to thank you in the most practical way with price reductions on more than 300 wines in this New Year List. These are not short-term headline-grabbing discounts but modest, sensible price reductions for the benefit of as many members as possible.
"Is a very great red wine. It has color red ruby with purplish reflexes. The perfume and ethereal and persistent, the taste, justly tannico warm and harmonic with notes of leather and of spice." (I swear I've transcribed that exactly as it appeared.)
"Gotten by the grape of Troia and Merlot, it has color red ruby, perfume yielded with signs of forest fruits, soft and harmonic taste with a good fullness gustativa."
"The taste is dry, with an acido/tanico equilibrium."
• Les Cavailles Blanc 2009 £17.30. Made from the tediously familiar blend of 70% Mauzac, 20% L’en de Lel, and 10% Oundenc and fermented in cement.Sign up here, people.
• La Combe d’Aves Rouge 2007 £19.60. Again, just your everyday blend of 50% Braucol and 50% Duras. Very elegant in style – that lifted, natural nose and a red fruited and refreshing palate.
• La Grande Tertre 2010 £28.20. Sticking with the international varieties again, this is 90% Prunelard and 10% Braucol.
It's good to hear someone big-brained with a love of language speak beautifully, isn't it?
The most striking example of this I've ever heard, in the flesh at least, was from Steven Pinker at the LSE in 2010.
Near the end of the fifteen-minute Q&A session which followed his talk he was falteringly posed a long question which could be better expressed as: "You're an atheist. Aren't you, in calling for religion to be eradicated, just as bad as the religious zealots who want to force their religion on unbelievers?"
"As a thorough-going atheist I would not have a desire to eradicate religion. I think it's important to come to the best collective understanding that we can about the nature of the world and the nature of morality and justice -- and that will often require overturning long held religious beliefs. But religions themselves, as social institutions, have obviously evolved, thank goodness: the way all of the major religions are practised now is very different from the way they were practised a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago: thanks to the enlightenment, thanks to the pressure from secular reason. There's no reason why that couldn't occur and all of the things that are valuable about religion -- that they are places for people to meet, they're forums for ethical discussion -- can continue to exist; but as long as it doesn't entail that we indulge propositions about the world that our best reason indicates are incorrect, or moral arguments that our best moral reasoning indicate are indefensible."- - -
The main - only? - question to be asked of competitive eating is, of course: WHY?
To grasp some of the horrors of the pursuit (past time? hobby?) check out the records page on the Major League Eating site. One stand out for me is:
Mayonnaise
4 32-ounce bowls mayonnaise
8 minutes
Oleg Zhornitskiy
"I don't need to make a pouring of the fish into the barrel -- and then shoot those.""Fish in a bag I think better than fish in a barrel that you have just made shoot of".
I was sad to hear that Bert Jansch (he had the perfect name for his occupation, didn't he?) died today, aged 67 -- it would've been nice to think that he could still have continued to record and perform, as I'm sure would have been his wont, until into his ninth decade at least, just like the bold BB King.
It was Dave Boyle Sr, in the early 1990s, who first played me Jansch's music (Dave had already confirmed his impeccable taste in the matter of the 6-string by also introducing me to Leo Kottke's tunes).
I can still remember well my first hearing of Angie and the distinctiveness of that muscular, angular style of his: the fluent bass lines contrasting beautifully with so many nimble little hammer-ons and pull-offs.
I saw him play live twice: once in the mid-1990s (with some of Pentangle), once on his own at the Tron Theatre in 2000; the latter was probably the perfect size and setting for him.
He was a great player.
There are great pleasures to be found in Matthew Engel's book, Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain. It's deftly balanced stuff, combining stylish, wry levity with belt-and-braces history. I've not finished it yet, but I'll damn well recommend it.
Here he is, on the first of his major trips, from Penzance to Dundee non-stop:
At Bristol, we got a fresh crew, and I regarded them the way an old lag looks at a new screw. I'd been going for four hours now, a third of the way. Who did they think they were, coming in and taking charge? I'm a lifer, me. This is also the way railway staff regard each new franchisee. One guard I met in the north, who had been in the same job for twenty-five years, tried to list all the different companies that had ordered him around, and the different-coloured uniforms he had worn. He gave up in despair.
I love trains. I hate trains. This is a book about trains. This is not a book about trains. It is a little about me. It may be a lot about you. This is a book about the British.
In 1868 the Midland Railway, determined to compete with its rivals to the east and west, pushed through a new line south from Bedford into its awesome new cathedral at St Pancras. Then it marched north to conquer Scotland by building the Settle and Carlisle line through some of the bleakest landscape in the kingdom at a terrifying cost of men and treasure.
Do you enjoy a wee drop of wine from time to time? Whilst you're not given to the economically ruinous and frankly distasteful business of chucking £1000-a-bottle-claret down your thrapple, do you care enough about getting a decent bottle to sidestep the two-bottles-for-a-fiver options offered by your local 24-hour grocery shop? Well, if you enjoy wine, may I urge you to join The Wine Society forthwith?
Why should you join? The main reason is that the Society (full name: International Exhibition Co-operative Wine Society Ltd) is a mutual. As Will Lyons put it in the Wall Street Journal:
"...as a mutual, the Wine Society is owned by its members, so the primary concern of its management committee is, in the words of their buying director, Master of Wine Sebastian Payne, to offer good quality wine to members at minimum-added cost. The day-to-day concerns of other international wine retailers, such as growing profit margins and increasing market share, come second to finding and selling the wines its members want to drink."
"Please find attached confirmation of receipt of your order for wines from the 2010 Bordeaux In Bond offer. These details are being entered into our allocation system and you will receive notification of wines allocated to you by Monday 8th August 2011 at the latest."
"It feels rather like the period after the American civil war when the carpetbaggers hit the south, this strange global regiment of weird money men and imagineers and promoters of every kind of scheme."
This insightful little article on pragmatism by Tim Harford is worth a butcher's; he describes well the flakiness which besets ministerial decision-making..
Politicians and their advisors have repeatedly explained to me the problem: gathering evidence is all very well in theory, but in practice a minister will arrive at their post to discover her predecessor has done little to commission the kind of solid evidence that might be useful when, say, improving literacy standards in schools, or reducing re-offending rates of former prisoners.
When she asks how long it will take to produce her own evidence base, she'll be told three or four years, perhaps longer. Figuring that by then she'll be on to her next job, or perhaps even the job after that, they'll set about figuring out what to do immediately. And action without decent evidence is bound to be dogmatic, not pragmatic. Two years later, a new minister will arrive in seat, and the cycle of ignorance continues.
