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One of the very first Italian words I learned in Rome in the summer of 1965 was “Frocci”, an insulting term applied to me and my fellow band members on account of our long hair. We were told that it meant “Queers”. The word recently used by Il Papa, “Frociaggine”, Google Translate renders as “smoothness”, clearly a word related to “Frocci” betraying its etymology.
It really isn’t a great advertisement for Pope Francis to use such language, particularly since his native tongue is Spanish. Furthermore, to use the word when addressing a collection of Catholic bishops, and in camera, betrays an astonishing level of hypocrisy. I’m surprised and yet not surprised at this, since it just confirms my own views about The Church. Any attempt to portray recent popes as having dragged Catholicism out of the Dark Ages is shown to be entirely spurious. I wonder how many people hung up their rosary beads as a result.
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For the best part of sixty years I have been fascinated by philosophy. My bookshelves groan under the weight of publications on the subject, from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, to Cathcart and Klein’s Plato and a Platypus go into a Bar. Of the former I got lost on page 6—and pages 1-5 were the preface... Plato and a Platypus is quite hilarious, and is an exposition of philosophy through mainly Jewish-American humour. I have read many other similar books, but to date the only knowledge on the subject that I have firmly committed to memory, is Monty Python’s Philosopher’s Song.
I’m now trying—for the umpteenth time—to read Bertrand Russell’s surprisingly accessible History of Western Philosophy. I have reached the point where he is expounding the theory that Plato might well have ‘invented’ Socrates. The argument is that what he (Plato) says about Socrates conflicts with Xenophon’s version of the man. Xenophon, like Plato a pupil of Socrates, was ‘not very liberally endowed with brains’ and ‘conventional in his outlook.’ Russell’s thesis is that the Platonic Socrates—the Socrates described by Plato—was a fascinating and most interesting character, substantially embellished, Russell suspects, by Plato’s considerably literary and intellectual talents and possibly even expressing Plato’s own ideas. It is fascinating stuff but by tomorrow I shall have forgotten it. I am reminded of an incident during my graduate student days. I was most fortunate to have Professor Alan Gibson, FRS, as my supervisor. He was an astonishing man; not only a gifted scientist and educator but also a very able administrator. I struggled during my research project which did not start well when I made it very clear to him that I did not understand Ohms Law... We were at an Opto-Electronic conference in Manchester. Alan was due to present a keynote paper first thing in the morning that followed an evening spent by me carousing in the bar. On going to bed I wondered why my travelling clockwork alarm clock was showing the completely incorrect time. I reset it, adjusting the alarm to wake me up in good time for Alan’s lecture. It did wake me up, but it was only that evening on coming back to the room that I realised that the reason the clock appeared to be wrong was that I had placed it upside down... There must be a wonderful metaphor there, but for the life of me I cannot find it. Anyway, I attended Alan’s talk and it was one of those rare Damascene events. As I listened to him explaining with complete clarity a most abstruse and subtle point, the scales were lifted from my eyes and for a few precious moments I was able to understand something that until then had completely eluded me. I never forgot the incident, that is to say the magical feeling of comprehension; the point itself was lost to me by lunchtime that day. I shall soldier on with Russell. At the very least having forgotten it all from the previous reading, every new idea comes as an exciting revelation. In our Time, the regular discussion programme chaired by Melvyn Bragg, is the very best of BBC Radio. Each week three working academics are assembled to discuss a topic chosen from an enormously diverse range of subjects in the arts and sciences. Some weeks are better than others. Sometimes an interesting subject is spoiled by poor communicators; likewise, an apparently dull topic can be made fascinating by gifted and informed academics. Occasionally, and last Thursday (29 February) was an occasionally, a set of great and knowledgeable communicators discuss a really fascinating subject and the programme positively catches fire.
The subject in question was Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The academics: Fay Dowker from Imperial, Harry Cliff from Cambridge, and Frank Close from Oxford, were at the absolute top of their game. Apart from the thoroughly lucid way each one of them dealt with the subject, they were relaxed, there were a few jokes and some light-hearted banter, and some superb analogies: atomic and molecular spectra were likened to a bar code. Quite brilliant! The Uncertainty Principle states that if you know the position of a particle fairly well, it’s momentum is uncertain. Likewise if you know its position in time accurately, you don’t know its energy. The consequences of this for many aspects of science are huge. I think it was Harry Cliff who cracked the joke: Heisenberg gets stopped for speeding. “Do you know how fast you were going?” Says the officer. “No”, he says, “But I know exactly where I was...” I have listened to the programme twice now—including the extra minutes on iPlayer—and I can say with some confidence that for anyone who is interested in science, cosmology, or even philosophy and religion, this programme is a must. I think it is probably the best In our Time ever. As a ‘Sixties Science Fiction nerd I have been vegging out on classic Isaac Asimov on Audible. They have the original Foundation series, the I Robot stories—so much better than that cretinous Hollywood film abortion—and the Robots and Empire books. They're dated but by jingo Asimov could spin a great tale!
It’s all interspersed with Jeeves and Wooster as narrated by Stephen Fry. All highly amusing and escapist stuff, but these days can anyone suggest anything better? Answers on a postcard please ... Despite the depressing and relentless litany of obituaries of my contemporaries—this week Ian Lavender (‘Private Pike’), younger than me—I am still here, moderately invigorated by seven days in a nice hotel in Lanzarote. Sunshine, daytime temperatures between 22°C and 24°C, and far too much to eat and drink... What’s not to like?
I note while updating this website that I published nothing in 2023. I have not, however, been inactive. For several years now I have been working on and off on my memoirs, very brief snippets from which have appeared from time to time in this blog. Short biographies of my mother and father are also being worked on. What has occupied my fairly constant attention for the last six months has been an in-depth investigation into the ‘Iron Bridge’ at Hanwell in West London. This austere structure, which carries the Great Western Railway across the Uxbridge Road, is a landmark I grew up with. The current steel girder bridge is in the form of a ‘Pratt Truss’ (yes really—“Pop Con” movement, please note...), but it started life as one of I K Brunel’s most curious, imaginative, and troubled creations. I will reveal some of my findings in the coming posts. The left-leaning fifth-columnist in the Sunday Telegraph puzzles editorial team struck again today with a highly timely and apposite quotation from Coretta Scott King:
If you use weapons of war to bring about peace, you’re going to have more war and destruction. A friend of mine, I shall not name him, he knows who he is, suggested that the film Barbie was rather good and definitely worth going to see. I decided to do so, and in a fit of patriarchal largesse (I was on holiday with the family) offered to drive my wife, daughter, and daughter-in-law several tens of miles at night to the cinema. I think my reaction afterwards was something like: ‘Well that was two hours of my life I shall never, ever get back...’
What is particularly ironic (?) about the film is that it was released on the same day as Oppenheimer to the ‘amusement’ of many. I cannot think of two films more completely different. The one, a farrago of fluffy, candyfloss nonsense written by a giggling, Californian air-head (judging from her performance on Desert Island Discs), allegedly with a ‘serious’ message. The other, a brilliantly compelling, carefully detailed biopic of the man responsible for the development of the most terrible weapon of all time, who was then vilified and persecuted for his socialist outlook. Why am I so exercised about this now when the films came out in the summer? Two things. Firstly, the rhetoric and actions of the megalomaniac in the Kremlin are sounding more and more like Hitler in the late 1930s, with the difference that the former has the ability, on a whim, to use Oppenheimer’s invention to destroy the world. Secondly, I just heard the writer of Barbie, Greta Gerwig, speaking on the radio... Perhaps I am overreacting, but it seems to me that a viewing public who spend 50% more on candyfloss nonsense than learning about the method by which they might be annihilated (figures from Wikipedia), are quite likely to drift towards Armageddon, while hardly noticing that it is happening. I rather like the latest/last Beatles record. It has the character and feeling of their early music.
In January 1966 the band were marooned in northern Italy. It was damnably cold and our income from gigs was not matching our outgoings. It couldn’t last and we regretfully called it a day, returning to England through a European winter. Arriving home with £1 in my pocket, having sold my guitar amplifier for petrol money, I had to face the fact that the music business was not for me. I was invited to a party and Rubber Soul was being played endlessly. It was a total and complete catharsis. We had listened to and greatly enjoyed the Help LP in Rome in the late summer of 1965, and later saw the film, appallingly dubbed into Italian. But coming home as a musical failure at the age of twenty and wondering what on earth I could do next, Rubber Soul was a tremendous balm to a severely wounded ego; Now and Then has a very similar feeling to the tracks on that LP. This latest ‘record’ is a true child of the modern age, having used ‘Artificial Intelligence’ to extract John’s voice from a very poor quality cassette tape. And it really appeals to a mouldering old rock and roll fellow like me. All balls really, since I’m listening to Wagner’s Parsifal as I write this. Still it is an interesting demonstration of the extraordinary ability of music to affect one’s mood and transport one to a place whose existence had been all but forgotten. An extract from my memoirs at convent school, 1950 - 1952:
I was a Catholic, which is to say that my parents were Catholics; my mother from birth, my father having converted at some point from the Congregational Church. Consequently I spent my early years languishing in that particular combination of sickly, glutinous, sin-obsessed, guilt-ridden, death-worship that was the Catholic Church. I was ignorant of the fact that Henry VIII had burned Catholics while his daughter, Mary, burned Protestants. I didn’t know that the Sovereign of Great Britain cannot marry a Catholic. I didn’t know that Guy Fawkes, effigies of whom we cheerfully burned every 5 November, had been a Catholic. I was unaware that my birthday, 12 July, was a legendary date in the Protestant calendar, the day that celebrated the annihilation of the Catholic army of James II by the Protestant William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. William’s victory ensured that Protestantism rather than Catholicism ruled in Britain thereafter. Catholics generally name their children after the saints, virtually all of whom were martyrs, men and women who died—nearly always in agony—for their faith. Once in my early teens I recall walking through a Catholic seminary with time on my hands to peruse the many oil paintings that adorned the walls. These were exclusively representations of martyrs being executed in a variety of gruesome ways, illustrative of the boundless ingenuity of the torturers—and the artists. Catholics are, of course, used to seeing large and realistic crucifixes in their churches, showing the corpse of a man who has died in agony on a gibbet. This obsession with death can go to sickening extremes. Catholics revere Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. She received special permission to join a Carmelite monastery at the age of fifteen, and died there of consumption nine years later. This ‘Little Flower’ had written of her developing illness: … in the early hours of Good Friday, Jesus gave me to hope that I should soon join Him in His beautiful Home. How sweet is this memory … I felt a hot stream rise to my lips. I thought I was going to die, and my heart nearly broke with joy … when it was time to get up, I remembered at once that I had some good news to learn, and going to the window I found, as I had expected, that (my) handkerchief was soaked with blood. Dearest Mother, what hope was mine! I was firmly convinced that on this anniversary of His Death, my Beloved had allowed me to hear His first call, like a sweet, distant murmur, heralding His joyful approach … Such stomach-churning bliss at the prospect of imminent death surely borders on the pathological, not to mention sinful. Why is it that the Catholic Church is so mesmerized by death rather than celebrating the joys of life? Some relics of St Thérèse were recently brought to Britain. Her body, apparently, had been divided into at least three parts, and bones from her leg and foot were sent on tour around the UK like some medieval peep-show. I thought that in Western so-called Civilized Society (in which I include France), the sanctity of the dead and their right to rest in peace was a fundamental, if unwritten, human right. Who performed that division into three of St Thérèse? Did just her disarticulated bones remain when she was dug up or was a surgeon needed, and who authorized that grizzly affair? This obsession with death does not stop there. Martyrs were in a ’state of grace’, without sin, and went straight to Heaven. But, we were told by the nuns, anyone who died in a state of ‘mortal’ sin would go directly to Hell and burn there in non-consuming fire for ever and ever and ever. This was not the wicked torture inflicted on a person being burned to death; that may have lasted for a few agonizing minutes, the victim usually suffocating from the smoke and fumes. This Catholic Hell was the precision application of the most acute pain imaginable not for minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years, but for ever, and ever, and ever. The nuns at school reminded us five-year-olds of this time out of number, and reference to the Catechism of the Church on the Vatican website confirms that it remains the belief to this day. In order to make sure that we understood the risks, we were taught the prayer: Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. This verse absolutely terrified me. The prospect of dying in my sleep, with the possibility that I might go to Hell made me sick with fear. The age of criminal responsibility in England at the time was eight; we were five-year-olds, and the nuns threatened us with the worst possible eternal torture for our trivial transgressions. As we reflect on the apparent death of Yevgeny Prigozhin in the ‘unexplained’ crash of his private jet, we hear news that during a televised debate of Republican presidential hopefuls in America, six out of the eight candidates declared that they would support Trump as president even if he were to be convicted of criminal charges.
I recall some years ago visiting Sigmund Freud’s apartment in Vienna; among the fascinating artefacts, there were sickening details of how NAZI bully-boys barged in during the 1930s, breaking furniture and stealing what they fancied. The common law concepts of the right of property and the sanctity of home did not apply to Jews in Hitler’s Reich. Perhaps I am naïve, but I have always regarded democracy and the rule of law as what separates us from the animals and the jungle, ‘red in tooth and claw’. But now I find that on the one hand we have a regime that seems to operate like something out of The Godfather. Countries are invaded on the flimsiest of pretexts; non-combatants, women and children, are killed in arbitrary strikes on tenement blocks, difficult personalities are eliminated by 25 years in gaol, Novichock, ‘falling out of windows’, or the unexplained crash of aircraft with previously very good safety records. On the other hand, in America candidates for the highest executive position in the land, declare their willingness to support a person for that office who has apparently conspired to subvert the outcome of an election for his own personal gain, and has, by the way, at least three other criminal charges pending. Between them these two states control in excess of 10,000 nuclear warheads, each one capable of destroying a city; criminals and potential criminals are holding the world to ransom, and all we can do is watch and hope. I used to think that the early 1980s were the most dangerous of times, with Reagan on one side and a succession of aged Russian leaders trying to control a disintegrating Soviet Union on the other. But that was nothing compared to now, with China, North Korea, Israel, India, and Pakistan in the mix as well as the lunatics previously mentioned. It is a time for bucket lists to be ticked off. As they say, ‘be afraid; be very afraid...’ |
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