Occasional Thoughts

Business, politics and the rest

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gigglemusic 1.6

It’s been longer than I imagined, perhaps longer than I re-imagined as the deadlines came and went, but we’ve finally released a new version of gigglemusic. It’s nicer, it’s prettier, it’s easier to use and it does more than it ever did before. Of course, I should know about software – I’ve been managing software development projects for more than thirty years – and I know it takes longer than…

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Falsificationism - 2

Falsificationism – 2

For a fascinating and illuminating summary and debate on the competing suppressor and ripper arguments, consider the articles below from The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal but now known only by the acronym). The articles and responses to them are somewhat technical, but bear in mind that the BMJ website cautions us that it’s ‘intended for healthcare professionals.

This one…

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Falsificationism

I’m not sleepless with anxiety but the more I hear the more I’m dismayed and confused by the two big competing theories about what we’re to do about the virus.

There are those who say, ‘Suppress, suppress’ whilst others say ‘Let it rip, but protect the vulnerable’.

Both sides tout evidence to support their views.

The suppressors say, amongst other things:

If we let the virus rip…

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gigglemusic - Telemann in maschera

gigglemusic – Telemann in maschera

To celebrate Version 1.4 of gigglemusic – now available on the App Store and Google Play – my teacher, Jan Thuri, and I recorded a Covid-19 compliant performance of a short duet by Telemann.

It’s a hard time for musicians, but play we must. If this is the only way we can do it, then so be it.

You may notice that we’re…

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Lettre d'amour

Lettre d’amour

Antal Dorati (1906 to 1988) is generally known as a conductor, but he was also a fine composer. Born in Budapest to musical parents, he studied at the Franz Liszt Academy with Kodaly and Bartok.

His Five Pieces for Solo Oboe, written for Heinz Holliger, are amongst the most imaginative (and difficult) solo works for the instrument. The least difficult is this one, which I recorded this morning…

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Two Great Musicians

Today is the birthday of two great musicians – my nephew, Frederic Bager and the composer, Richard Wagner.

Wagner was born in Leipzig in 1813, Frederic in London in 1991, where he studied at the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music.

Time will in due course adjudicate between them, but in the meantime judge for yourself whether execution outdoes composition in this tribute…

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Pandemic Prizes

When I was a seven-year-old at prep school, maps of the world were predominantly red – British colonies, dependencies and, of course, the motherland herself. But I suspect our geography teacher was a die-hard, nostalgic imperialist. This was 1965, and India remained red, nearly twenty years after independence. It must have been an old map, a reminder of those more glorious times when the British…

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Three Tenors

Tired of Netflix, I took refuge, the other night, in YouTube and found myself binge-watching and listening to three of my favourite Wagnerian tenors of yesteryear – Jon Vickers (1926-2015), Siegfried Jerusalem (1940-) and Alberto Remedios (1935-2016), all of whom I saw performing in London in the ’70s and ’80s. I was a huge enthusiast for Vickers and Jerusalem even then, but have only more…

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Chuggers and Shamers

I spent much of my first summer in London in 1980 standing in the queue at the back of the Albert Hall for the BBC Proms (I had much more patience and energy when I was 22). If you wanted a good vantage point you had to be there by 4pm, though for the more popular programmes it had to be the night before. All in all, you’d be standing for six hours at least, if you count the concert itself,…

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Robert Laurence Bager (1919- 2003).

Grace Evelyn Tizard (1921-2019).

My parents fought in the Second World War, my father in the Royal Artillery with the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkerque, and the Eighth Army under ‘Monty‘ in North Africa and Italy, my mother in the ATS (the Auxiliary Territorial Service) in England and Wales, calibrating guns and helping to test radar technology.  For both of them it was a socially liberating experience, my father being promoted to the ‘officer class’ at Alamein, my mother, along with millions of other women, finally allowed to do something useful in a man’s world.

I am proud of them both.

  I don’t doubt that my brother and I brought our parents joy and satisfaction in their post-war years. We were always their highest priority. But nothing, I think, could compare in intensity and influence to the years between 1939 and 1945.

The War marked them in different ways. My father saw terrible things on the front line but rarely spoke of it, even though, by character and bearing, he remained a military man to the end of his life. My mother, by contrast, spoke of the War nostalgically, especially in the company of my godmother Anne, with whom she served. ‘Comrades in arms’, cantankerous friends for seventy years, for Anne and Tizzy (my mother’s abbreviated maiden name), the War was a time of levity and joy, as well as seriousness and sadness (my mother occasionally spoke of a Polish airman lost over continental Europe).

Jonathan and I were conscious of the War from our earliest years. It was the background to everything. The schoolmasters who taught us at our prep schools were often former military men, uncomfortable, like my father, in civvy street. Diminished by demobilisation, they seemed to have been robbed of purpose. Commander Varley’s history lessons would conclude with a noisy re-enactment of the Japanese fighter planes that divebombed his convoy in the South China seas. His grasp of the more distant past was slender. In the playground we played at Spitfires and Messerschmitts. The films we watched, including my favourite, The Sound of Music, took the War as their starting points, and television was saturated with series such as Tenko, ‘Allo ‘Allo, Colditz, and Dad’s Army (my mother’s favourite), all harking back to that finest hour.

My generation is rooted in our parents’ experience of the War. It formed them, and, by extension, it formed us too. Our lives were made safer and more comfortable by the sacrifices they and their generation made. We have never known real danger or want (even at boarding school in the 1960s). Political misjudgement in the 1930s made the inevitable worse, but it was a war that had to be fought. We must be grateful to them.

Warriors Robert Laurence Bager (1919- 2003). Grace Evelyn Tizard (1921-2019). My parents fought in the Second World War, my father in the Royal Artillery with the…

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Guided by Science

Deaths from Covid19 in the UK are (or are about to be) more numerous than anywhere else in Europe. They’re exceeded only in the USA.

We must be wary of international comparisons. It’s far from certain that we’re comparing like with like. Every country records and counts deaths diferently, but, even so, this is an appalling eventuality given that the UK had time to witness the overwhelming of…

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COVID-19, R*(1-I) and the difficulty of making policy

Policy is a matter of values and the calculation of cost and benefit.

Take speed limits, for example. Increase the limit, and the severity and number of casualties will rise. Decrease the limit, and freedoms are curtailed and economic damage done (an economy can’t function at walking pace). Assuming today’s technology, the limit is unlikely to rise beyond 200 mph, or decline below 10 mph. Debate…

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Boris Johnson’s vision of Albion reminds me of Cair Paravel, the turreted castle and court at the heart of C S Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis’s nod to a chivalrous past that never, of course, existed. Boris, naturally, is High King Peter, ‘head of the world’ at last, rousing his subjects to a frenzy of patriotism with talk of a new era, a new dawn, a new beginning (an old cliché).

Cair Paravel is lovely. Primary colour standards flutter in the breeze. Boys can be Kings, and girls can be Queens. Whether boys can be Queens, or girls can be Kings, is never quite clear, but C S Lewis I suspect might have given short shrift to Diversity and Inclusion Policy, even if not to gender equality. Queen Susan, after all, is a dab hand with a long bow, even if Queen Lucy has to rush about the battlefield with a tiny bottle of Chanel No. 7 that cures even mortal wounds.

Everything in Narnia is noble and nice, and everyone is gracious. The Royals speak with the clarity of a BBC English of the 1950s, with a sprinkling of ‘prithees’, ‘nays’ and ‘verilies’ to make things even nicer. No one squabbles. For spiritual and ethical guidance there’s a talking lion.

Everything is good and wholesome at Cair Paravel, even if just a tiny bit priggish and smug. There are battles to fight, of course, against oiks who want what Narnia has, but don your cuirass, your sallet, your fauld and your spauldron, parry and thrust awhile, and the oiks, natural cowards that they are, will retreat in shame.

Puberty is as yet a distant threat at Cair Paravel. Indeed, nothing sullies the loveliness. No one counts the debits and credits, there are no interfering bureaucrats, no constraining regulations, no spending reviews, no deficits, no cancer, no garlic, no cocaine, no coronavirus. And whilst not everyone is equal (after all, you can only be royal if you went to a good school) everyone seems happy enough, banqueting and quaffing mead together in the great hall of the castle – though only enough, mind you, to make them merrie. No one is drunk and boorish at Cair Paravel.

I loved the Chronicles of Narnia until I was about sixteen (far too long, you might say). The muscular Christianity, the moral certainty, the nobility of it all – the clothes, too, and the talking animals. But in reality it has the verisimilitude of Katharine Hepburn as Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter, all make-believe nonsense that does a disservice to the multi-faceted, complex, competitive world we live in.

The oiks, after all, have their own point of view, their own moral certainties, their own talking animals, their own good schools. Is there anything as dangerous as righteousness, certainty or nationalism masquerading as patriotism? Better to compromise and cooperate. Let’s hope that the flag of the EU will once again flutter above the parapets of Cair Paravel.

Cair Paravel Boris Johnson’s vision of Albion reminds me of Cair Paravel, the turreted castle and court at the heart of…

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Love is all there is

Love is all there is

At the end of it all, after fifteen hours of rollercoaster music, words and drama, Brunnhilde gives thrilling voice to:

Siegfried! Siegfried! See! Brünnhild’ greets thee in bliss

And then she spurs her horse, Grane, onto Siegfried’s funeral pyre, to burn in the arms of her hero.

Know’st thou now to whom and whither I lead thee? In fire radiant, lies there thy lord, Siegfried, my hero blest. T…

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If I were to come across Siegfried on a dating site (Tinder, I think, not Grindr), I’d swipe him left without a moment’s hesitation.

His profile might look like this:

  Name: Siegfried von Walsung

Gender: Teutonic

Languages: German, Woodbird

Occupation: Swordsmith, dragon-slayer

Sexuality: There was a moment on the mountain top when I thought Brunnhilde was a man, but on the whole I think I’m straight…

Body type: Athletic (though can look paunchy and middle-aged)

Fetishes: Armour’s nice

About me: Uneducated, ungrateful and unfeeling. Also cruel and violent if crossed. Courageous (I feel no fear – does that make me brave?). Like older women, especially if they’re family (I never met a woman before I met Brunnhilde, and it was kind of exciting to discover she’s my aunt).

  Nonsense aside, what’s there to like about Siegfried? He’s an oafish idiot, too stupid for fear (courage is surely the mastery of fear, not its absence). He’s only attractive if he can sing well, as last night’s Siegfried (Stefan Vinke) did (though not quite as well as Brunnhilde (Daniela Kohler)). The idea of Siegfried as the epitome of German manhood appals me, so let’s be grateful that the modern German adolescent venerates Conchita Wurst.

What did Wagner, and his devotees, see in Siegfried? The strong, free man, unburdened by expertise? The man of destiny?

Freedom lies in knowledge, in education and compassion, in the rejection of the seductive lies that underpin nationality. A proper fear of what can go wrong with the world is part of freedom too. Fear is good.

As it happens, Siegfried’s incinerated remains are buried beneath a monument on the outskirts of Leipzig. It’s a shrine to the marvels and mysteries of masculinity (vats of testosterone were mixed with the concrete used for its construction). The vast granite structure has lasted a thousand years. Some say Siegfried merely slumbers (members of the ADF on the whole) but they’ve waited in vain, so far, for his return. What’s more, his reassembly would be quite a task, far harder than Siegfried’s re-forging of his father’s shattered sword. There’s no more than an egg-cup full of cinders. Wrest Nothung from the granite block in which it’s rested since the curtain came down on Gotterdammerung and you might acquire the mantle of heroism yourself.

On the other hand, better don’t try. We’ve had enough of heroes.

    Hard to love If I were to come across Siegfried on a dating site (Tinder, I think, not Grindr), I'd swipe him left without a moment's hesitation.

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You need more than love

You need more than love

Dexter Dalwood’s You need more than love hangs in the hallway of my flat in Prague. It’s a realist’s take on the Beatles’ All You Need is Love. Party over, drumkit and flowers abandoned, the Summer of Love has given way to an Autumn of emptiness.

Wagner’s Die Walkureis another (though lengthier) demonstration of love’s insufficiency. We want to believe that love can conquer all. Fricka will…

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You don't need love

You don’t need love

If you’re hairy, stubbly, shabby and malodorous, Wagner seems to say, choose lucre over love. It’s the right choice for Alberich. Rejected by a trio of shallow, promiscuous Rhinemaidens who are too lazy to find his inner beauty, and humiliated by their emasculating mockery, Alberich does the right thing, IMHO, foreswearing the complications and disappointments of love in favour of money and…

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