The Middlesteins: FOOD Is The Food Of Love

Disclaimer: the food in ‘The Middlesteins’ is often better than this.

And much else besides.

So, we have two siblings, Benny and Robin, who grew up in the Chicago suburbs. Benny is married to Rachelle, who is the sort of daughter-in-law many Jewish families would love to have. They have twins, Josh and Emily, preparing for their b’nai mitzvah. Benny tries to be a good husband and father, a still point in a turning world – though he needs a joint after work to help him. His sister Robin has a galactico-sized talent for anger and unhappiness and she likes a glass of wine, or several. In the past, Benny has worried about Robin. But not any more. He has bigger worries now: his father Richard, and in particular, his mother, Edie.

Edie was a lawyer for thirty-five years. Now, she’s a big woman with a big personality and not enough to do. And the trouble is, she’s getting bigger. She weighs in at near on 350 pounds. She’s about to have a stent put in one leg to match the stent put in the other leg six months ago. She has diabetes. There are dark murmurings at the hospital about bypass surgery.

Edie, it seems, is eating herself to death. And after nearly forty years of marriage, Richard has walked out on her.

Who are these guys? They are The Middlesteins, now published in the UK and coming to BBC Radio 4 next week (click here for the programme link). I won’t say much more so as to keep the surprise – this astute review from The Independent gives more background, if you want it – but it’s not giving away too much to say that this wonderful novel is built around food. Food is everywhere, from Edie’s reckless and continual pit-stops in burger bars to the Chinese restaurant where she finds friendship, love and a limitless menu. The fate of the family is discussed over meals at home or in restaurants. Robin attends a seder at her boyfriend’s parents house and leaves with an (unwanted) tupperware container of leftover brisket. The b’nai mitzvah features that ultimate status symbol, a chocolate fountain. As Edie’s parents conclude in the opening chapter: “Food was made of love, and love was made of food.” Edie’s tragedy is that she takes refuge in this thought and runs with it way, way too far.

Jami Attenberg, by Michael Sharkey

This is Jami Attenberg‘s fourth book and her first to be published in the UK, following two previous novels - The Kept Man and The Melting Season – and a collection of stories, Instant Love. Until now, she was little-known over here, but I suspect this has changed forever.

In a previous post (Reader’s Block), I said I was lucky enough so far to have only worked on books that I loved. This applies with additional sweet’n'sour to The Middlesteins. It’s a sad and bitter book in some ways, but underscored with heart, and it’s very, very funny. While some might describe them as dysfunctional, for me the Middlesteins are just flawed, messy and sometimes confused like the rest of us. And even though my job is finished, I find myself still worrying about them.

For the adaptation we had to lose, unfortunately, most of the chapters that deal with Edie’s back story. And one of the challenges in paring down the text was the number of long sentences with parenthetical ‘asides’. These can be an abridger’s friend – often they can be cut without losing too much that’s important in an episode. But not in this case. We’d have lost too much of the book’s flavour, those moments of ’more-thoughts-than-I can-get-out-of-my-head-at-once’ that spit and crackle like a steak dropped into hot oil. But having decided to keep them, this posed a fresh challenge in the studio. If you read them too slowly the listener will lose track of the thread. They have to taken quickly, so that it sounds as if they burst out of your head that very moment. But reader Tracy-Ann Oberman and producer Karen Rose were more than up for it. And not only do they keep the narrative pulsing, Tracy-Ann’s characterisations (and there are a lot of them) are a delight.

I hope you enjoy our ‘low-calorie’ radio version (told in 20,000 of the book’s 67,000 words) but equally I hope you will go on to read The Middlesteins in it’s full, unexpurgated, sodium-and-sauce-drenched glory.

Until next time, eat and feed each other with love, but please do so (more or less) responsibly …

Annika Stranded – postscript

And if you listened, I hope you fell in love with Annika too. Should you like to hear an earlier Nick & Nicola Walker collaboration, here’s the link to the radio play Lifecoach, as promised: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00s2w24.

Enjoy!

Annika Stranded

She doesn’t – as far as we know – have a sartorial trademark like leather trousers or a Faroe jumper. But she’s a fisherman’s daughter, with a passion for driving motor boats at high speed, so maybe state-of-the-art Scandinavian waterproofs figure somewhere. And in moments of high stress, when Sarah Lund might jump into her car without explanation, when Saga Norén might make a factually correct and emotionally clueless remark, Annika Strandhed of the Oslo murder squad is more likely to crack a joke. Trouble is, her colleagues seldom think she’s funny …

But instead of me telling the whole thing, badly, far better to listen to Annika Stranded (click here for BBC link) on Radio 4, 7.45 pm for the next three Sundays.

© Nick Walker

For some in the UK the Scandinavian crime ‘bubble’ has already burst – ‘it isn’t great and actually it’s just boring’ – but this isn’t a view I share. For one thing, I don’t think it’s a bubble. Granted, fewer lucky journalists are likely to be dispatched to Copenhagen to have coffee with the likes of Sofie Gråbøl in future, but that’s because Scandinavian crime drama has settled down to take its murky place in our everyday viewing culture, just as American crime has for decades. And for another thing, I’m a fan, a junkie even. No, I haven’t read much (although I did enjoy Henning Mankell’s The Dogs Of Riga years ago) but telly’s another matter. Dysfunctional detectives? Beautiful but bleak coastal landscapes? Murky warehouses? Wood-panelled interiors? Subtitles? Bring them on …

So when Annika-writer Nick Walker suggested his singular take on the genre, he was pushing at an open door.

The Two Walkers

They’re not related, they’re not one and the same person, but I suspect they are symbiotic in some way. The first thing to know about Nick Walker is that more people should know about Nick Walker. He has written two novels - Blackbox and Helloland – but most of his energy is directed towards radio and theatre work. Because of this, I can’t point you towards his back-catalogue in the same way as with a novelist, and can only hope you’ve caught up with some of his wonderful works on BBC Radio in recent years. To name but a few: the recent play Stormchasers  (broadcast over Christmas), the poignant and inventive Messages To A Submariner, and the First King Of Mars stories (voiced first by Peter Capaldi and later, by Dave Lamb.)

Fans of Spooks, and lately, Last Tango In Halifax, will need no introduction to Nicola Walker. TV casting has tended to put her in victim or generally-put-upon roles – and since Nicola is good in all she does it’s a safe bet – but radio has so far provided more scope to show how warm, versatile and funny she is. In Annika Stranded she is all these things, and inhabits the character so completely that it would be easy to believe she’d written the stories herself.

As luck would have it, a previous ‘Nick-ola Walker’ production, Lifecoach, is repeating on Radio 4 on 7 February. I’ll post the link when it becomes available.

Noises On

The classic approach to a radio story is ‘less-is-more’: a reader, a story and at most a little ‘top and tail’ music, putting as little as possible between story and listener. And this still works best with most stories. But Annika Stranded is effectively a series of mini-dramas – performed as such – so it needed something more. Nicola was recorded in studio – neither time nor budget permitted going to Norway – but Nick collected some very good wild-track when he went to Oslo for research. So most of what you hear in the background is authentic Oslo noise. And there’s music from Swedish duo First Aid Kit and some haunting cello from Icelandic musician Hildur Guðnadóttir, too.

This is an unashamedly biased piece. I hope that if you listen to Annika Stranded you enjoy it as much as I do. And as always, thanks for reading.

I Overheard It On The Grapevine

Well OK, Marvin Gaye wasn’t there of course, but it was good fun all the same.

Last night, I went to the launch of OVERHEARD: stories to read aloud at The Betsey Trotwood in Clerkenwell. It’s an impressive collection, edited by Jonathan Taylor – also our MC for the evening – with 38 contributors (if I’ve counted right) ranging from the likes of Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie to expert ‘flashistas’ like Tania Hershman to the oral storyteller Katherine Rogers, and with any number of good and different voices in between. OVERHEARD is available and on general sale courtesy of those resurgent, independent and wonderfully human publishers Salt.

About half the authors were there in person to read extracts from their stories (or the whole thing, if they were very short.) It would be unfair to single out anyone as such, but I would like to mention two names I’d not heard of until last night: Alexandros Plasatis – whose hilarious, 18-certificate tale Confessions of a Great Lover brought the house down – and Emma J Lannie’s quieter but no less arresting ‘short short’ One Two.

On the tube home I read Jonathan’s introduction. Better for you to buy the book and read it than for me to paraphrase here, but it raised some thoughtful and interesting points about the traditions of oral storytelling and distinctions between public ‘performance’ and stories read aloud intimately at home. This picked up on something I’d been thinking about during the evening. In the first half, I sat at the front, close to the reader and the mic, and was aware of concentrating on the performance. But in the second I was at the back – oddly it seemed more as if I was listening ‘one on one’.

Salt don’t do barmaids, but if they did … (With apologies and love to Alison MacLeod (left) and Jen Hamilton-Emery)

Stories on the radio – or good ones, anyway – have a bit of both experiences. Actors read them, so even with the lightest directorial touch performance is built in to some extent, but there’s the one-on-one intimacy too, since what we’re aiming for is a story for about 400,000 single listeners.

Readings aside, the craic was good, too. It’s always nice to catch up with the likes of Jen Hamilton-Emery (Salt), Tania H and Vanessa Gebbie but great also to meet some ‘onliners’ in the flesh for the first time like Alison MacLeod, Elizabeth Baines and Katy Darby. And the barman downstairs gave me a brief, knowledgeable and passionate tutorial on single malts …

Next week’s post will have a Scandinavian flavour – big time. But until then, thanks for reading.

Angels and Acrophobia (Part Two)

ACROPHOBIA

When the angels in Wings of Desire aren’t dispensing comfort, or acquiring mortal shape to take up with trapeze artists or kicking their heels off-duty in the Berlin State Library, they spend a lot of time soaring up to or swooping down from considerable heights. A favourite vantage point is on top of the Siegessäule (Victory Column). Although I have a passable ‘angel-overcoat’ there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest I’m not of their number, such as lack of pig-tail, no wings and less-than-beautiful soul. But let’s put that to one side. Conclusive proof that I’m not an angel, should it be needed, can be found in the details of a trip to the Siegessäule over Christmas in 2002.

The Siegessäule was originally designed to commemorate the Prussian army’s victories over the Danes in 1864. By the time it was completed in 1873, Austria and France had been similarly defeated and the princes of the German states had convened in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles to proclaim Wilhelm I as their Emperor. So the Siegessäule became a monument to the military and economic power of the new German Empire. The winged Victory herself - Goldelse as Berliners call her – still watches over the city from a height of about 67 metres. And a narrow viewing platform, a mere 51 metres high, gives good views of the city should you wish to climb the 285 spiral steps to get there.

Unfortunately, in 2002, our assembled party of two families did wish to climb the 285 spiral steps to get there. My daughter wasn’t even two back then so I carried her, as a father should, and for a while this was OK. But as we went round and round and higher and higher my fears about height took control. Worse, I started projecting them onto my little girl, who seemed way too restless and reckless in my arms. (She wasn’t – it was just me.) Eventually, her godmother took her so I could concentrate entirely on getting my jelly-legs to the top. As for the good views of Berlin, I was too busy pressing myself against the wall to notice them. I was left alone to manage a slow and grateful descent: legs trembling, mouth dry, palms sweating.

Vertigo?

It felt like vertigo. And like a lot of people I use the word freely to describe my problem with heights. It’s a proper medical condition, and it’s the title of my favourite Hitchcock film, so it has to sound better than saying: ‘heights scare the crap out of me.’ But this isn’t accurate. Dizziness and a spinning sensation are the key symptoms of vertigo, and they can be triggered by any number of situations, of which extreme height is only one. Early in Vertigo, James Stewart uses the correct term – for my problem, anyway: acrophobia. Which put simply means ‘heights scare the crap out of me.’

“I’m not afraid of heights. I’m afraid of falling.”

It’s a great line, of course, from Harry Dean Stanton in another Wenders film, Paris, Texas. But I wonder if it’s right. In my case, I think ‘drop’ is the key word. I stood in the Alps one summer and looked down on glaciers, clouds and small planes and found it exhilarating. But winding mountain paths to get there, with what to me looked like sheer drop on one side caused only anxiety. Worse, watching my kids skip quickly and fearlessly up those paths ahead of me left me panic-stricken. Cable cars are OK, provided I don’t look down when going past a pylon, which points like a giant arrow to earth and reminds me how high up I am. I’ve learned to be Zen-like about flying. But places like the Siegessäule, where you appear to be standing above well, nothing, are, I think, best avoided. And you’d never catch me up the Eiffel Tower or the Shard.

I can’t find a cause in any height-related childhood traumas. There’s a dim, small-child memory of cliff-tops, presumably from a family holiday, but it’s unthreatening. And to the best of my knowledge no-one dangled me from the top window of the house when I was a baby. So I guess it must be to do with an over-developed sense of self-preservation. Unless I’m subconsciously afraid that if I get too close to the edge gravity will whisper malevolently at my back, like an invisible Mrs Danvers of the universe, and coax me into letting myself go …

Before anyone starts calling the helplines on my behalf, I think it’s just self-preservation.

Crossing the gorge

Time was when I wouldn’t have even tried. But I did manage this in Switzerland, getting across a distinctly swingy bridge. And it was embarrassing, knowing the family were watching their useless wreck of a husband and father teetering across with rigid-neck (so as not to look down), but not without some small sense of achievement. More recently, I visited my son in Bristol and we made a return walk across the Clifton Suspension Bridge. I’d love to recount how I marvelled at the magnificent engineering and the sheer grandeur of the landscape, but of course I did neither, and kept my eyes fixed firmly on the other side.

Sadly, even though it’s well fortified with anti-climb barriers and high railings, there are large plaques with the Samaritans number at either end of the bridge. Which tells its own story, and brings me back to the angels.

It’s corny, but I find the image of crossing a gorge helpful in keeping going despite occasional depression and the paralysis that comes with it. Keep your eyes fixed on the other side, don’t stop, don’t look down and don’t look back. I’d love to think that an angel was helping us across the gorge, but I assume not, so we have to look out for each other instead.

And I hope one day to stop on the bridge above the middle of the gorge – not from fright, but simply to admire the view.

Angels And Acrophobia (Part One)

ANGELS

“Als ein Kind Kind war …”

Recently, I watched Wings of Desire again. Some of its images I’ve carried with me half my life, but I hadn’t seen it in decades. When I first saw it – in a West End cinema in 1987 – I wasn’t a child, but a young man who hadn’t entirely put away childish things. Back then, the first hour or so was the most wonderful thing I’d seen on screen, as the angels Cassiel (Otto Sander) and Damiel (Bruno Ganz) hovered over West Berlin, compassionate and watchful. Thereafter, I thought the wanderings of the old man, Homer, as he tried to make sense of his own and his country’s past in his quest for an ‘epic of peace’, dragged on. And – while the story demands that Damiel becomes mortal to pursue his love for Marion the trapeze artist – for me, the spell was diminished the moment he fell to earth. But what a beautiful film, all the same.

So what did I make of it this time, months away from an unwelcome and ‘significant’ birthday? When you revisit something you loved way back, there’s always the risk it will no longer enchant you as it once did, leaving only anti-climax and a sense of loss.

But it was even better this time. That first hour or so is still one of the most wonderful things I’ve seen on screen. These angels – with pig-tails and heavy overcoats, visible only to children – don’t shine with the blinding light of an implacable God. They are ‘lived-in’ and all too human as they listen to the troubled thoughts of Berliners on the U-Bahn or in the State Library and give out their unseen, unheard solace. (And who couldn’t use a ‘cosmic hug’ in their darkest moments?) The idea of Peter Falk as an angel who sold his celestial armour for 500$ in New York after falling to earth still makes me smile. The ‘Homer’ scenes are more essay than story but now I had more time for them. Homer goes to Potsdamer Platz, the hub of the Berlin in his youth but now a wasteland destroyed first by war and then the Wall, which cuts across the old tramlines. It was like this the first time I went to the city. But now it’s a hub again, bling, all chrome and plate glass and neon. If nothing else – although it’s so much more - Wings of Desire is a document of a weird city when it was at its weirdest.

Marion (the sadly late Solveig Donmartin) seems more sympathetic and much more beautiful than she did when I was twenty-four. And for anyone who can’t hear the name of Bruno Ganz without visualising Hitler foaming at the mouth in Downfall (or in any of the Hitler-memes on YouTube), this film is the perfect cure.

Wings of Desire is part of the European cinema canon. But Wim Wenders’ sequel, Faraway, So Close! (1993) passed me by – partly because I was distracted by impending and actual fatherhood – and it appears to have passed others by too, or disappointed them. So I watched it for the first time and found it better than I’d been led to believe. There’s a new angel – the sad, beautiful Raphaella (Natassia Kinski) – and a well-dodgy character called Emit Flesti (Willem Dafoe, naturally) who flits effortlessly between the worlds of angels and men before revealing himself, in the last reel, as ‘Time’. Peter Falk is here again, along with cameos by Lou Reed and, oddly, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Since Damiel fell to earth at the end of Wings of Desire, Cassiel has watched over him and seen him marry Marion, have a child and start a pizza restaurant. Angels are not allowed to interfere physically in the world of men, so when Cassiel rescues a child falling from a balcony he too becomes mortal. And for a while he is reunited with Damiel. But whereas Damiel has made a very decent fist of being a man, Cassiel is probably better suited to being an angel …

Once again, we have a permanent record of a city in flux. This time it’s the strange days after reunification, when the Wall has crumbled and the cranes have moved in to start building the Berlin of today. There’s more storyline and more humour in Faraway, So Close!, but somehow it’s messier. And however good or bad, no sequel could ever recapture the magic, the wonder, above all the surprise of that first ‘hour or so’ of Wings of Desire.

After Faraway, So Close! I moved on to City of Angels, the American remake of  Wings of Desire. But I reacted so violently against it I switched off after half an hour. Too on-the-nose for my liking, and whereas the closeness of angels to people is compassionate and beautiful in the Wenders films, here it just seemed creepy. Perhaps if I’d persevered it would have turned out good in its own terms: but it wasn’t doing it for me.

On my first trip to Berlin, in 1989, we flew in at night. As we closed in on the city’s landmarks, and the sinister (as I thought it then) Fernsehturm flickered in the dark, I had the strings and voices and synths of the soundtrack in my head. And though some strange things happened over the next few days – like the Wall falling – I was still disappointed not to see Bruno Ganz standing on the ‘broken tooth’ of the Gedächtniskirche. But waiting to go home, in the departure lounge at Tegel, I saw Otto Sander, lacking pig-tail or wings but nevertheless looking like Cassiel, waiting unobtrusively for his flight to be called. And this was childishly pleasing.

So what has any of this to do with acrophobia? As it says at the end of Wings of Desire: To be continued.

Reader’s Block

As New Year resolutions go, it seemed simple enough. And – unlike doomed plans past to be smoke free, more efficient, less vain – one I thought I could keep. All I had to do was read a few books the way I used to: chosen on whim and without a radio agenda. I wouldn’t cast readers in my head. I’d enjoy twists of plot and sub-plot without wondering which ones to cut and I wouldn’t try to break the story into episodes. And never once ask the question Will This Work?

And so, books were gifted and books were bought. And early in 2012 I put them in a neat pile by the bed. You know the punchline already: they’re still untouched, ten months on.

I’d love to put hand to brow and sigh like a consumptive poet and plead overwork – but I can’t. Yes, I do get sent a lot of books for the day job (I do read these) not to mention short stories (most of which are commissioned and loved, so no complaints there either). Equally, I’m a) lazy b) correctly distracted by family life c) incorrectly distracted by Test cricket and the Champions’ League. But I do think that when it comes to ‘extra-curricular’ reading I’ve developed a mental block.

Still, like the first guys to take pickaxes to the Berlin Wall, I’ve made a few small chips in the concrete in recent weeks. The Silent History continues to engage and I’ve started to read Pedro Páramo. Granted, someone I’m working with put me on to it, and when finished it will be a useful point of reference between us. But Pedro Páramo probably won’t be on Book At Bedtime. And sadly, Juan Rulfo died in 1986, so I can’t commission some bespoke stories from him. So as I see it, this is ‘reading without agenda.’ For those who don’t know (and I didn’t) Rulfo was a major influence on the likes of Gabriel García Márquez and, while no one has been born with a pig’s tail yet, I can see why. More on this another time.

To be clear: I like what I do. It’s a privilege to read good books by good writers, often before publication, and call it work. But sometimes it would be nice to be Joe Reader again, too, and it would help keep my judgment fresh.

The Abridger Has Been Drinking?

The next abridgment beckons. So far I’ve been fortunate to work only on novels I love and have chosen myself. Because of this, ‘going native’ in the world of the book has been all too easy.

Mostly this is harmless, perhaps no more than compiling an appropriate soundtrack to listen to while getting into the zone each day. It can be inspired by music alluded to in the book or by something that just feels right. The playlist for Olga Grushin‘s The Dream Life Of Sukhanov was a champagne and truffles affair of Russian opera and heart-rending piano music: great for the work, not always so good for my emotional well-being. Patti Smith provided the background for … Patti Smith (Just Kids), which because I played loud during screen-breaks tested the patience of my kids. No And Me (Delphine de Vigan) prompted listening to French pop, which prompted only derision from my kids.

But sometimes it goes beyond music. I was so engrossed in The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (music – solo piano by Janáček) that I cleaned (!) the big windows near my desk to enhance the sense of glass and light. But while I like our house, the Villa Tugendhat it ain’t, so no amount of imagination could turn the view of a Tooting backyard into a Moravian landscape. Even so, the characters became so vivid that their plight – rather than technical issues – began to keep me awake at night.

And then there was bullfighting. The most dangerous way to finish off a bull in the ring is the recibiendo, in which the matador stands still and encourages the bull to come and have a go if he thinks he’s hard enough, whereupon the unfortunate beast charges onto the point of the bullfighter’s sword. Quite often the bull is indeed hard enough, which is what makes this method so risky. Wena Poon evokes the choreography of the corrida beautifully in Alex y Robert, so much so that I tried to mime some of the matador’s best moves. I had just mastered what I thought was a pretty good recibiendo (complete with air-cape and air-sword) when my then12-year-old son walked in, said nothing and fixed me with a look of extreme pity.

These are a few examples. I’m not sure whether it’s good (shows empathy with the text), bad (lack of editorial detachment) or simply confirms the need for continued medication. But I get there in the end.

So this is the trade off. Less breadth, for now, but a few books each year that I experience more fully than I would if reading in a conventional way.

And thank you for reading – all thoughts on overcoming a ‘recreational reading’ block welcome. It’s time to put a playlist together for the next book. I’m not sure, but I think Tom Waits might be in there somewhere …

Sounds Of Silence

A few months ago I bought a new toy, a pocket-sized audio recorder which takes up about the same amount of room as a glasses-case. In the right hands it captures broadcast-quality sound but to develop those hands demands both trial and error. My new and growing sounds library is a diary of both. “Gallery Café, British Museum” was a minor success but “Upper Tooting Road, Olympic Torch” was a failure, partly because I was way too discreet – the sounds were flattened by too many bodies in front of the mike. But at least I came home with something to listen to, which puts it ahead of “Daughter singing solo in end of Year 6 show”, a recording that cut out before she’d even filled her lungs because unwittingly I hit the pause button.

But I’m making progress. Last week, for the first time, I went out with the recorder with serious programme-making intent. I captured the silence of a parish church, by which I mean the ‘hiss’ of the building and the low rumble of the wind outside in the trees and against the brickwork. It worked well enough, but effects like ‘footsteps’ need more practice. I imagine my ‘walker’ now with a shorter, quicker step than my own and need to work out what type of soles and heels she would have worn.

So, while the recorder sat on a tripod atop a grand piano, capturing the silence, I sat in the front pew – conductor and audience for my own private recital of 4’33″. I’m not likely to put this or any of his noisier pieces on my iPod, but I think John Cage was hard done by the knee-jerk “he’s on drugs/having a laugh/what’s the point of that then?” reactions to this ‘piece’. If you want to – and you know it won’t take long – have a look at these performances from 1952 and especially a ‘full orchestral’ version from 2004. Yeah, I know, a conductor directing three ‘silent’ movements looks silly, but try to get past this and remember that the piece was framed by ‘actual’ music in the concert programme. My guess is that the audience probably listened more intensely to 4’33″ than to anything else they heard that night.

One of the first things you learn when you edit for radio is that any pauses you want to add must be found somewhere in your recording session. The ‘silence’ in even the best studios is quantifiably different to a couple of seconds of ‘nothing’ from the software menu. It’s not that there’s no such thing as silence, more that silence is relative,  and that the total absence of noise isn’t silence at all, it’s the void.

The Silent History

The first of October saw the launch of an unusual ‘App novel’ (for iPhone and iPad only, at present.) The Silent History is the work of Eli Horowitz, Matt Derby, Kevin Moffett and Russell Quinn: a futuristic narrative covering the years 2011 to 2043 in which increasing numbers of children are diagnosed as ‘silent’, unable to ‘generate or comprehend language of any kind.’ As a concerned citizen in 2021 puts it: ‘… the thing that no one wants to say is, they aren’t like other kids. They lack some basics. They’re not just different, they’re … uncharted.’

For more detail, and it’s worth having, go to the project’s classy website above and also read my friend Melissa Lee-Houghton‘s blog on the subject. In brief: the main ‘novel’ is released via daily instalments to your device, but you can also chart the spread and development of ‘the silents’ via a system of location-specific ‘field reports’, written by other contributors. When your present location matches a field report, you can read it. Not surprisingly, most of the field reports so far are to be found in the U.S., but the fictional silent condition is spreading across the UK and Europe. As no one so far has covered the spread of the silence to Tooting, I’ve not yet read any field reports ‘live’. But I have privately, and found that not only did they work in their own terms but that the spreading of the tale into more familiar idioms and geography was both moving and unsettling. As I understand it, more field reports from more places are still coming in.

For me, this is what’s most exciting about this project: it’s not just an interesting and beautifully-designed e-novel, but an evolving ‘fiction organism’. The Silent History is genuinely pioneering and the writing, which remains the most important thing, has been top notch so far.

Hello darkness, my old friend

It’s been nearly a year since the previous geezer post which, on re-reading, I see prefigured a descent into a long and unhelpful winter gloom with a silence of its own. Don’t want to go there again. So did I make good everything I identified then as wrong? Did I heck. The fags and booze still need to be faced down. But on the plus side, I pay a bit more attention to diet now and although it’s been stop and start I’m into week 5 of Couch to 5K.

And in the end I bought not one but two new hats:

 

 

 

 

 

On the left, a fedora for winter and rain purchased in Spitalfields just before Christmas, and on the right a summer titfer from a market stall in Verona. There’s no denying that the straw hat has a certain ‘Englishman abroad’ quality to it but definitely a step up from a handkerchief with the four corners knotted.

Unfortunately, it’ll be a while before I need it again. The fedora it is.

Saving Daylight

I woke up this morning, winter blues ringin’ in my head.

I’m not sure if you can be diagnosed formally with Seasonal Affective Disorder, but for years now the pattern of my moods has been textbook. The lethargy and gloom kick in early in November, after which there’s a brief remission in the New Year (connected with a holiday rest and residual false optimism about fresh starts), before they return with renewed menace in February.

According to the NHS website, SAD is most common in young people. This surprised me. I’d always assumed this was something that got worse with age, to do with the ultimate darkness, with mortality … but “that’s all I have to say about that.”

We’ve just had a gloriously sunny and warm October – even though the Diwali lights were already up we were still walking about in summer clothes – and perhaps this is why the turning of the year and clocks has hit me so suddenly and hard. The sense that everything might be futile jingles away in the head, like that crap song on the radio that you hate but can’t stop humming. Though I’ve started wearing it because I like to be dry but hate umbrellas, I’ve become self-conscious about my hat and can no longer wear it with my former insouciance. Psoriasis – which I used to put up with cheerfully until my daughter told me she’d been shunned by one of her schoolfriends because I had patches on my arms – is getting me down. And I’m overweight. Given I’ve mostly been skinny (even emaciated, at times) this has been a massive shock to my sense of self. No wonder I’ve been in denial for so long.

Put it all together and it’s as if I’ve been dragged into the trees on Tooting Common by Mid-Life and his psycho-mate Crisis, and been given such a kicking that although the bruises are real I have no memory of the incident.

So what to do?

Either slide into further decline (tempting) or (better) TAKE STEPS to tackle each problem individually. The first act involved referring to the NHS Direct website, not in the hope of salvation, but as an attempt to focus the mind.

1. Winter Blues

I’ve just bought a jar of Vitamin D to supplement my existing meds. Since exposure to daylight is key, perhaps I should wrap up in duvets and fingerless gloves and work outside on dry days. Some people swear by light therapy, but light boxes are expensive and apparently risk a number of unwelcome side-effects, so I’ll pass on that. The NHS recommends a) more exercise, b) careful attention to diet, c) less alcohol and d) no smoking. It has no published views on listening to music but it might be an idea to remove all traces of Mahler, Richard Strauss, Black Sabbath and Nick Drake (not sure I can do that) from the iPod for a while.

2. Hat Crisis

The NHS has no known views on this. Since my hat is uncool and mis-shapen from the rough-and-tumble of family life and one rain-soaking too many, a possible remedy would be to buy a new one. Hugh Bonneville, I noticed, was sporting a highly covetable titfer on Downton Abbey last week (guilty pleasure). But on balance, I think this is something I just have to ride out.

3. Psoriasis

There is no cure though – as with winter blues – sunlight would help, as can certain emollients and UV light therapy (which apparently risks a number of unwelcome side-effects). Other things that help include a) more exercise, b) careful attention to diet, c) less or no alcohol and d) no smoking.

4. Weight Gain

The NHS Direct website recommends a) more exercise, b) careful attention to diet, c) less or no alcohol and d) no smoking.

5. Mid-Life Crisis

At present, there are no plans for Harleys or hair-transplants. It’s such a vague term there are no obvious cures except dealing with it, but I have it on good authority that a) more exercise, b) careful attention to diet, c) less or no alcohol and d) no smoking would probably help.

Unfortunately, it’s all pointing one way: I have to clean up my act.

One of my favourite songs is Roadrunner by Jonathan Richman. Last week, someone gave me a recording of a rare, live version, Roadrunner (Thrice). It’s twice as long as the other versions and allows time for a soliloquy on loneliness and for the journey along Route 128 to become truly epic. I ought to listen to it now to cheer myself up. I can’t dream that I’m young, fit and carefree anymore, but it might convince me that winter can still be a source of magic.

It isn’t September 11th yet, but …

Already the re-living and revision and reflection has begun. There was a sad report on Newsnight about ‘long-term’ casualties in New York, those left chronically debilitated or worse by working in the toxic dust around Ground Zero in the months following the attack. Pankaj Mishra’s authoritative overview in the Guardian – Our own, low, dishonest decade - provides among other things a real sense of the appalling human cost world-wide. As the 10th anniversary draws ever closer, the world media and the blogosphere will be filled by those with significant experiences of that day.

So I’ll get mine – which are humdrum, thankfully – out of the way now.

We were blissfully unaware of events until our younger son came home from his first day at nursery. He switched on the TV and instead of Bob the Builder got live, silent coverage of a smoke-cloud. It took a while to work out what was going on, until the BBC went ‘back to the studio’ and then replayed the last spiteful turn of the second plane over and over again.

Thereafter we kept the TV and Radio 5 Live on for the rest of the day. I don’t know how many times we stared at replays of the towers collapsing into themselves.

Next morning I stood in the back garden and wondered at the silence and – though I was probably imagining this – a clearer sky. We lived in Battersea then and the planes passed overhead towards or away from Heathrow. But not that morning. The children’s routines carried on as normal, but I kept the radio on all day. At times 5 Live simply relayed live broadcasts from one the New York stations. In between speculation about further attacks, the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden (or Dubya, for that matter) and the first of Rudy Giuliani’s briefings, we heard the Coldstreams play ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at the Changing of the Guard, by order of the Queen.

My eldest brought a friend home with him from school. They built towers with wooden bricks and knocked them down with toy aeroplanes. This palled quickly because of the amount of time it took to rebuild the towers before crashing into them again. Next time I looked into the bedroom they’d built the Pentagon instead, which could be put together again easily and posed the additional challenge of finding the precise angle at which to skim the small metal planes across the carpet. Like everyone else, they were trying to make sense of things.

At the weekend they changed the programme for The Last Night of the Proms. Instead of the usual musical Britfest of the second half, Leonard Slatkin conducted Samuel Barber’s Adagio. Fair enough. The evening finished with the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth (Ode to Joy and all that), envisaged as an act of universal solidarity and Western cultural defiance. Looking back, this strikes me as melodramatic, but it didn’t then. These were very strange times.

Anthrax and radio days

The planes returned to the skies. Buckingham Palace, Canary Wharf, Centrepoint and the Nat West tower remained intact. Attention turned to other potential forms of terrorist attack: suitcase ‘dirty-bombs’ (survival chances 1 in 3 for Londoners); Sarin gas and anthrax. I’m an anxious soul and I’m not proud to confess that for a while I bought into every type of fear and paranoia going, to the extent that I wondered quietly if we should pack off our children (7, 3 and 6 months old) to live with their granny in Northern Ireland for a while. But even I couldn’t sustain that level of panic forever. I stopped watching the news on TV after a grim-faced Michael Buerk read the evening bulletin with a giant, tabloid ANTHRAX behind him and started listening to The World Tonight instead, which assessed a still frightening and volatile world in a more measured, intelligent and rational way. And I started listening to Radio 3 in the mornings, reasoning that we weren’t under immediate threat – so long as the music played.

KEEP BUGGERING ON

This is my wife’s favourite phrase in times of stress, and was much loved by Churchill. The summer holidays are almost over: at this end best described as ‘low-key’. This brings with it a profound sense of paternal failure and paralysing moments of pre-autumn gloom. But this is a luxury. ‘Back to school’ is in the air and the kids have all got challenges this year (my daughter starts Year 6, middle son is working towards an early GCSE and my eldest is in A-Level and UCAS year.) My wife is filming at the moment. And, complete with ‘new-term’ haircut, I’m back to school too. I’ve found my ‘new voices’ stories and I’m getting ready to record them. And there are future projects to plan for too – which until recently didn’t seem likely.

Nothing for it.

KBO.