Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

Dick Jones of Patteran Pages wrote an amusing piece on the music that moves him to tears. I'm a sucker for a list and enjoyed his choices. I'm having a go at a selection. It rather bears out Noel Coward's comment on cheap music being potent and it shows scant subtlety. The only criterion is that this music really did make me cry once - or many times, so it has little to do with musical taste.

- Top of the list is Richard Strauss' Im Abendrot (At Sunset), one of his Four Last Songs. The sheer beauty of it moves me terribly and I never tire of it. If I have to have one of those CD jobs from the back of the crem' chapel when I shuffle off, I'll probably hope for this, but sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf who gives it immense tenderness. 'We have willingly and joyfully walked hand in hand; now let us rest from our wanderings through the silent land.'

- At the Festival Hall in the 70's, Menuhin was due to play the Bruch Violin Concerto; as we settled in our seats they announced that he was indisposed and Alfredo Campoli was rushing to the hall in a taxi. People got up and left. He took the stage with no music, unrehearsed and gave a faultless performance full of passion and colour. The sweet pathos of his 2nd movement was unforgettable. He took a five minute ovation and the orchestra stood and applauded.

- One Piaf song that breaks me up is Les Amants d'un Jour, the little skivvy wiping glasses in a hotel bar envies two lovers who come to a room to make love - "Que ca me fait mal...". I can't find a recording online. I have it on an old crackly tape.

- Puccini can own your heart & pull it its strings at will. Non Piangere, Liu from Turandot is high tension manipulation. 'Don't cry, Liu......My poor Liu with you tiny heart....'

- Penelope's Song. Loreena McKennitt knows how to hold an emotional line and embellish it with good orchestration, I love her voice.

- This is a very personal one, an 'our song', Miles Davis - Concierto De Aranjuez (Adagio). One summer long we played a French vocal arrangement of the Adagio by Richard Anthony, over and over. I found Miles' version long after romance was over, it holds the melody at its heart but with such apt overtones of longing and poignancy. Apologies to Rodrigo.

- I have heard dozens of Messiahs, I've never got through one without choking up about halfway through with the sheer cumulative power and thrust of it. The supreme one was in St Paul's Cathedral where the magnificent sound blossomed and grew and filled the great space until tears fell uncontrolled. This is the nearest to it that I can find online.

- I actually avoid listening to this song because it pains me. Yentl: Papa Can You Hear Me? It makes me weep every time. Obvious why.

- And I half dislike this cover of Jacques Brel's great "Ne Me Quitte Pas", (English here) I wish his wonderful singing had the same effect but it doesn't. Nina Simone's accent is pretty ropey and her rendition is all over the place, but something in that voice punches me hard, it has tears in it. (Maya Angelou's speaking voice has the same quality, a significance). I'll bet you don't get halfway through it - which would be a pity as the end is the best bit.

- Booking very early brought me tickets to only the second London performance of Les Miserables, I don't think I had been so picked up and shaken in the theatre since the RSC's marathon Nicholas Nickleby. It's a tremendous show running on high octane emotion. You must overlook the vibrato in the number that allowed Colm Wilkinson to hold the theatre in the palm of his hand - Bring Him Home. "...the summers die one by one, how soon they fly on and on, and I am old and will be gone". Sob.

"I think you should start with the first one and work down," Sandra prodded the list, printed out from the Eire telephone directory, of seven people with my family name. Four of us sat round the table of the rented cottage in a small village in Tipperary on our first night in Ireland. The objective was to try to find my father's family by visiting the place where he was born. He died in 1948, when I was six and we gradually lost touch, mother married again and the Irish family were little mentioned.

Fifty-nine years later I made this first trip to my father's homeland, ashamed that I had waited so long and doubting that I would succeed. I picked up my mobile and dialled John M., first name on the list. "Sure, you are welcome to visit us tomorrow," said a man with a soft Irish accent, and we made a time.

As I stepped out of the car and walked with G & my two friends towards him the next day I saw something sympathetic in his face but nothing more. Sitting beside him, surrounded by his family, I chatted and drank a cup of tea before opening my folder. I put a photograph of my dad on his lap and heard him say "My God, it's Mick." "No, it's Tom, his brother," I said.

"There's a photo on my sister's wall that is the image of this face, our Uncle Mick," he said, "exactly the same, I know it as well as my own." I held his hand tight and passed him the birth certificate. There was a place name on it that I could find on no map. "It's the name of the family land," said John, "all gone now, but we had our own bog and woodlands as well as pasture, acres of it, I remember it as a boy. Grandfather Daniel drank it all away. The grandmother had 21 children, fourteen lived, they were all raised there. This is your family."

We wept, cousin John, his wife & children, G., Sandra and Jim, we all had tears running down our cheeks. Such an outcome, so quick, so irrefutable seemed an act of God, as if I had been granted a wish in full. To be immediately embraced by this family was beyond any hope that I had had.

In the hour following came a rush of history, a map of the land, some photographs, then a phone call to cousin Teresa ten miles away; could John bring a visitor to see her? On the way he pulled the car over to show me the little family house and the rolling fields around that had once belonged to it

Arriving at a tall lodge by the gates to a great house, we were led through a wide, dark hall to a comfortable room where an open fire crackled in the grate. A lady with a big smile rose from the sofa.

"This is Anna from England, Teresa, she has something to show you," said John; I passed her the photograph. "This is my father, Tom."

On a sharp intake of breath came "You are family? Come and look at this (picture right) on the wall here, it's our Uncle Michael, Tom's brother, they look so like each other it's no wonder John recognised the face. Tom's daughter? We never knew what happened to you at all. Oh my God, come here, come here and give me a hug"; And, taking to her at once, I held her tight and cried again.


Then another miracle - I was led to a day-bed in the corner. On high pillows, frail, ill, lay an old man with fluttering eyelids and that same family smile. My father's youngest brother, Jack, now 84, serenely uncomprehending.
I took his hand and the touch of its flesh made, in some deep place, a direct human link to my father whose own touch I cannot remember. I thought of my mother, of me as a baby and of all the things that I would never know about Tom. I held on to that hand for a long time and they left me alone with him.

In the old kitchen later, kettles boiling for tea, Teresa handed out cakes and stories, I sat, on display, as more and more distant cousins piled in to have a look at me, summoned by phone. The rest of that day passed in a blur of chatter and discovery.

We saw each other through the week; I took flowers to the family grave, held a little dinner party in the local hotel and met all of John's four children. On our last meeting they gave me a package that the youngsters had put together - an album of photographs copied hurriedly so that I should have them at once. They had framed a photograph of my father as a young man just after joining the Guards, all wide grin and short back and sides. There were three crystal angels to watch over and bring me back again, with the instruction that, "You will never have to buy a bed again in Ireland, Anna, you stay with us, always."

Since I came home, both my first cousins have phoned often, we laugh a lot. I will keep the link alive until I go back again. It's not just the finding of them, it's liking them so much that is very wonderful.

My step-sister, Patricia - and I must label her as such to make sense here - though we are proper sisters at heart, also lost touch with her mother's Irish family. I hope sincerely that she may go looking for them and find her own roots there too.

Maeve McCarthy: Sash window

Dialogue - an awful piece of wood
Cacti - rubbish neckwear
Laburnum - French BBQ
Coitus interruptus - deck games on the Titanic
Memsahib - the same Swedish car
Goodie bag - Jade's mum
Artistry - the history of art
Measles - what artists use for self-portraits
Undeterred - skid mark
Goatherd - exclamation while flushing
Scar tissue - problem attaching a DVD to the TV.

More definitions here from this week's show (Cruise Control - Scientology). They're back with a new series, more scatological than ever, be warned, and probably largely unintelligible to non-Brits.

This is a bit of a nostalgic treat - the ageing Trenet, still full of comic charm in spite of what appears to be a ginger syrup. His enunciation is superb - one picks up the Southern "Perpignaang" in his accent - 'blongs moutongs'.

I've just had a happy hour trolling through lovely Piaf, Brassens and Aznavour songs on You Tube and I'm feeling very Ooh La La. Perhaps a Dubonnet as it's aperitif time ....?

In conversation with an interesting and articulate old gent the other day, we touched on the subject of the tussle we feel between the fear of loneliness and the wish for solitude. I have always had a need to be alone quite a lot, but feel very fragile about leading a life without the support of love. It's a selfish agenda.

The old man, an illustrator in his working life, has given up his home to live among a random and largely inappropriate (to him) group in sheltered housing; he went there because he was left without relatives and felt isolated. He copes with the situation by closing his door firmly, mixing with neighbours on a superficial level that gives him human warmth but not too much. He is reproached for it by the warden who wants him to 'join in' and mistakes his reticence for boorishness. It hurts him but he won't yield his wish for privacy. He said that 'he didn't want a whole ivory tower, just a little annexe'.

I so understand this. I will sit happily outside on the steps at a party and listen to the music and chatter at one remove. Lots of people around is great, but lovely it is when they are quiet with me sometimes. Once, I fled on the spur of the moment to a room in a seaside town taking two days' sanctuary, not because I was unhappy, but because I needed badly not to have to respond for a while. Formal retreats are heaven until thoughts build up an urgent head of steam that requires release by forbidden conversation. Most people feel something of this, but some to an uncomfortable degree.

The old man likes poetry and I said I'd drop a couple of pieces round to him that mean something to me; sorry that they are a bit depressing but they have, at their hearts, attitudes to the need that we were considering. He found both to be of real interest, enough to write note to say so.

The first I derived from Samuel Barber's "Hermit Songs", all of which are based on anonymous Irish texts:

The Desire for Hermitage

Ah! To be all alone in a little cell
with nobody near me;
beloved that pilgrimage before the last pilgrimage to death.
Singing the passing hours to cloudy Heaven;
Feeding upon dry bread and water from the cold spring.
That will be an end to evil when I am alone
in a lovely little corner among tombs
far from the houses of the great.
Ah! To be all alone in a little cell, to be alone, all alone:
Alone I came into the world
alone I shall go from it.


And then, from the master of ambivalence:

Best Society

When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not specially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.

Then, after twenty, it became
At once more difficult to get
And more desired - though all the same
More undesirable; for what
You are alone has, to achieve
The rank of fact, to be expressed
In terms of others, or it's just
A compensating make-believe.

Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on - in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It's clear you're not the virtuous sort.

Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

Philip Larkin

I apologise. I can't persuade myself up to start web writing and reading again. Self Winding? Oh, definitely not. Some sort of block. I'll start catching up with you all soon. I really have been doing loads of other things, being sociable mostly. Went up to see the Monet pastels & drawings last week before it closed, a satisfying mixture, with several big oils derived from the sketches stuck in between like plums. The one shown here - The Cliffs at Etretat simply lit up the room from its shady corner.

Quote:'Sir Terry Leahy, who runs Tesco, claims there are only six layers of hierarchy between him and the woman on the checkout. How many layers are there between Patricia Hewitt and a nurse?, I thought this was an excellent assessment of the state we're in - from The Times

I'm starting at a gym this week and have my induction on Thursday. Considering (and I hope they do) all my gammy bits, I guess they'll have to devise a fairly cotton wool programme. I've got to get a grip though. I plan to have a swim at the 7 a.m. oldies' hour in the pool once a week at least.

There, see, that didn't hurt, I actually wrote three paragraphs.