Come ON, you Spurs!

After 90 minutes plus at White Hart Lane on Saturday evening, neither Spurs nor their opponents, Aston Villa, had managed a goal. Mind you, Villa had hardly tried, keeping their wingers pulled back defensively into midfield, whereas Spurs had tried a lot, without having either the final expertise or the luck. Their best chance towards the end fell to Peter Crouch, a few yards off the goal line with the ball bouncing near his feet, but Crouch, as so often, came closer to falling over his own legs than making good contact with the ball. Watching Drogba for Chelsea against Arsenal on TV the following day made all too clear the difference between a world class striker and a stork in footballer’s clothing.

Meanwhile, I’m happy to report, my ‘other’ team put one over Grimsby, winning by the odd goal in what was apparently a bruising encounter, and moved back up to fourth.

Johnny Come Lately

Used to be simple. Trad jazz, it was either Chris Barber/Ken Colyer or Humph. Modern, either Johnny Dankworth or Ronnie Scott. In London anyway. I actually always found Dankworth’s tone a little too thin and his approach, though fluent, a little too academic. But the Johnny Dankworth Seven, now that was a band …

It used to have a regular radio show in the late 50s, I remember, and when I was teaching, unqualified, at Wesley Road Secondary School in Harlesden (the year before I went to Goldsmiths’ to learn how to do it properly) I took a bunch of kids along to the recording sessions on a couple of occasions. I enjoyed the band live quite a lot and I think they kind of liked it, too. Got them out of Harlesden for a few hours anyway.

Did a lot for the music, JD, thin tone or not …

At The Phil …

Two successive evenings at the Royal Festival Hall: Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia playing Stravinsky & Bartok; Osmo Vanska and the LPO playing Sibelius. Both nights sitting in the choir seats, immediately under the conductor’s eye: Salonen driving the Philharmonia through a strong reading of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra (after a flattish first half, with Viktoria Mullova – surprisingly – failing to excite in the Stravinsky Violin Concerto), then Vanska dancing edgily from foot to foot, marionette-like, in the 6th & 7th symphonies.

This was the last of Vanska/LPO Sibelius cycle, which has been drawing rave reviews, and in their performance of the 7th you could tell why – the composer’s last significant work, there’s a tremendous amount of energy and dark emotion contained here within its brief – 20 minute – single movement and waiting to be unleashed. Of itself it was almost enough to convince me I should try more Sibelius, who’s always been a bit off my radar – though the impressions of forests alive with birds and other wildlife in the more tranquil episodes of the 6th symphony did little to discourage my prejuidices.

What was interesting were the differences between the audiences on successive nights. Bartok/Stravinsky was less crowded – no more than 75% full, I’d guess – and with a higher proportion of younger people, especially in the choir seats, which with their brilliant pricing (a little over £7) provide a regular home for students and the genteel poor; Sibelius was packed out and not simply older but noticeably more blue rinse. Can it really be that after all this time, Bartok and Stravinsky are considered intimidating? Or is it the difference between a Thursday night and a Friday?

I was thinking about this, looking at a piece about audiences for classical music in Alex Ross’s New Yorker music blog, which suggests that whereas earlier generations have tended to show an increased interest in the music as they move towards middle age (an interest which fades again as they enter their 60s/70s) with the generation who became adult in the 80s & 90s (Generation X), which surge simply hasn’t happened.

And what seems incontravertible is that, despite all those students seated cheek by jowl in the choir, audiences for classical music are in what may prove to be terminal decline.

Up for the Cup

While I was happily hobnobbing on Tuesday evening with publishing folk in the vicinity of Soho Square – celebrating the publication of Jon McGregor’s excellent Even The Dogs – Notts County were excelling themselves by beating Wigan Athletic in their FA Cup replay. At Wigan. All the more astonishing, given how poorly they had played against Barnet just a few days before.

And then, last night, the Mighty Spurs withstood all that Leeds could throw at them in the last twenty minutes of the first half, conceding only a single goal (and that was almost certainly offside), before going on to dominate the second half and come out 3-0 winners. Class will tell. Well, sometimes. In this case, a Defoe  hat trick and, more suprisingly, far more surprisingly, a really good performance from David Bentley.

Oh, and McGregor’s book. Terrific.

If I may quote myself from the back cover :

McGregor brings the underclass we instinctively turn away from into razor-sharp and sympathetic focus. A stone-cold brilliant achievement.

Can’t say fairer than that.

At The Match

Taking my seat at Meadow Lane on Saturday I was reminded by several people that County, who have been enjoying a good season on the field if not off, rarely played well when I was in attendance. And so it proved. Only on this occasion the opposition (Barnet, Adomah excepted) were even worse  and County won two-nil.

The real sign of the times became apparent at half time: one of the bars beneath the stand shuttered up and the other so poorly stocked it might almost as well not have opened. Aside from the £250,000 or so the club owe Marstons, one of their main suppliers, they have 28 days in which to come up with around £360,000 for HM Revenue & Customs, without which they could well be forced into administration, the consequent loss of 10 points moving them from play-off position close to relegation.

As sums in football go, the amount owing is paltry; nothing compared to the 3 million deficit that just did for Crystal Palace. It does make me think, though, why are smaller clubs like these penalised, when clubs such as Chelsea and Manchester United are allowed to continue, year after year, with truly massive deficits?

Wrong Model

I realise now that when I was looking around for writers to copy, career-wise, in choosing Arnold Bennett, who at the end of every year totted up the number of words he’d written, the amount he’d earned, and divided one into the other – in 1899, for instance, 335,349 words against earnings of £592 3s 1d – I’d made something of a cross for my own back. Better someone who got it all done comparatively early, didn’t write another word for 45 years and still got two whole pages in the obituaries when he died. Then, of course, I’d have had to have written Catcher in the Rye.

Auster Tells It Like It Is

I’m well into my fifties and things change for you as you get older. Time begins slipping away, and simple arithmetic tells you there are more years behind you that ahead of you – many more. Your body starts breaking down, you have aches and pains that weren’t there before, and little by little the people you love begin to die. By the age of fifty, most of us are haunted by ghosts.

Paul Auster, 2003

Good Bait: Progress Report 2

What’s that marvellous Springsteen song? One step up, two steps back?

As I realised last week, any further movement in my attempted novel [beyond the first chapter, that is] was dependent upon my putting in the hours, working out a more detailed back story than the one I already had. So I took myself off to my new favourite coffee house in town [and no, I'm not about to name it, too difficult to get a seat already] and, between lattés, set to work. That evening, the results typed up, I gave a copy to my partner and asked her if she thought there was enough detail, could she follow what was going on, had I papered, sufficiently, over the cracks?

Assured that I had – much of it it read like a treatise on people trafficking, aside from anything else – next day I set to work. Chapter two, a little of chapter three and once more I ground to a halt. “What’s the matter?” my daughter asked, when she came home from school. “You look grumpy.” Understatement. I knew in my heart the pages I’d written were dead. To me, at least. Discovery of murder victim at the start of chapter one, then the investigation begins. I guess what I’d written might have passed muster, but it wasn’t interesting at all. Alive. Not to me. Check the CCTV, the files on the computer, blood types, DNA; findings of the post mortem; officers down on their knees, finger-tip searching for clues … No, I simply don’t care. I’ve done it all too many times before. [But this IS a crime novel, you say. Isn't it?] Well, yes … but  I cannot bring myself to write about it in any detail, the police investigation, I simply cannot.

So – forget the back story for a moment, go back to what you imagined you did want to write about. A man, somewhat disengaged from the world, a policeman, though not operating as one – Cordon, from the previous book, Far Cry – goes in search of a woman who has gone missing and may be in danger, a woman for whom he feels, in some unclear way, responsible. For reasons of plot [yes, there is a plot] his search crosses over with the investigation into the murder which occurs in chapter one [and which has, again for reasons of plot] to happen first. Clear so far?

What I thought I’d have to do, what I’d begun doing, was set the police investigation into the murder in motion and follow it through several chapters, then introduce Cordon and his quest, keep cutting between the two until they coincide. For reasons stated above, I realised that was a bad idea.

What I should be able to do, I realised, was to briefly announce the murder and the detective who will lead that investigation [Karen Shields, from Ash & Bone and Cold in Hand], then cut straight to Cordon, don’t show any of the nuts and bolts of that investigation at all; let the reader assume they’re going on out of plain sight, behind the lines. Follow Cordon primarily, Cordon and the girl. That’s what you’re interested in. When their story comes into contact with the murder investigation, let it be seen from their point of view, how it affects them.

That’s what I’ve been doing, yesterday and today, writing, rewriting the first five or six thousand words. By the end of next week, the week after possibly, I should know if this is going to work. And if it’s not, abandon it. Step away, start something different, something else.

Watch this space – let you know.

Nottinghamshire Constabulary

The Police Force in Nottinghamshire is to have the dubious distinction of being the first in the country to have a team of experts parachuted in by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary to sort out what it calls “consistent under-performance.” A bit like a failing school being put in special measures, I suppose.

The team is headed by the chief constables of Warwickshire and Northumbria and Tony Wilkinson, previously chairman of the locally-based Wilkinson’s discount hardware stores, and the areas they will be looking at include leadership, strategy and the delivery of services.

Chief Constable Julia Hodson claimed it was “good management practice to recognise there are areas to imporove. I don’t see it as failure at all,” she said.

Well, she would, wouldn’t she?

Wonder what Charlie Resnick would have said?

Obits: Jean Simmons

One of the most disappointing moments in my early to mid-adolescent life occurred when first watching the 1946 film adaptation of Great Expectations, when Jean Simmons, who had been playing the haughty but beautiful young Estella, changed abruptly into the adult Valerie Hobson.

Estella apart, for me her best role was in Angel Face, where she lures a wary but smitten Robert Mitchum to his death. It’s a film that I leaned on heavily in Gone to Ground, when writing the script sections for the fictitious Stella Leonard movie, Shattered Glass.

And I’m interested to see that her north London birthplace is given variously as Crouch End or Lower Holloway – not just Holloway, but Lower!  Either way, give or take a few years, we might even have caught the same bus or tram to school.