Piano Concerto No. 2 (Rachmaninoff)

Going out with the tide.....

This morning I rose early.  Yesterday it rained, miserably, soaking my hopes of a useful BioBlitz at Wild Ken Hill, but today dawned well, despite the wind.

So I determined to walk to RSPB Snettisham to see and photograph the Whirling Waders before walking on to see (my wife) Amanda in her Home at Heacham.  

I was underdressed and the northerly wind was brisk and chilly, but eventually 32,000 Knot rose from the rising tide on the Wash, together with a large number of Oystercatchers, and whirred overhead to the shingle bars in the safety of the tideless lagoons behind.

Every day is different, but when the conditions are favourable, the human observer on the shore may see shoals of birds flinging themselves up and overhead.  The RSPB promote these as "Snettisham Spectaculars," or "Whirling Waders."  Many visitors confuse them with "Murmurations" as in the great flocks of starlings that fall to roost in many places.  Locals may refer to them as "Tangles of Knots".....

It doesn't matter.

Bird watchers, twitchers, photographers and others (including me) gather early in the mornings to see these wonders.  Over the winter thousands more Knot will join here from their breeding grounds in the far north, so they can feed from the rich mud of the Wash.

Behind the Sea Wall there are lagoons of safety, protected from the rising tides, and it is to these that these canny waders retire when the waters become too difficult.

Spooked perhaps by the turbulent winds they take their time to settle, but in their thousands they do eventually find a tiny space of sanctuary until the tide begins to fall and they can return to the muddy spaces where they can sift and forage.

But I have to make tracks.  I have miles to walk, to visit Amanda in her Care Home, where the tide of her life is going out.  I walk nine miles overall and my knees and feet are tired and bruised.  Nothing really.  The upside is that as I enter the Home I think that perhaps she recognises me and brightens.....  There is no way of telling, as she is non-verbal now, but it heartens me to imagine that perhaps she knows who I am.

She would love the clouds of birds.  She would be delighted to walk the shingle paths and see the watchers by the water.  But, we have to genuflect to the ghastly truths of life.....

Then, in the evening, alone in my capacious home, I tune the radio to a Promenade Concert and a young man (Alim Beisembayev - born in Kazakhstan in 1998) plays Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto Number 2.  How does he do this?  His fingers dance across the keyboard, his mind controls the pressures applied, but he has memorised the work and doesn't leave the orchestra behind.....  Not only dazzling, but beautiful.

Romanticism is not (yet) dead.  Tears come to my eyes as I wish Amanda could enjoy this too....

Although this is not connected to the flowing music of Rachmaninoff, Chapter 30 of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield rises in my mind:

The probability of his ever doing so, appeared to me, when I saw him, to be very small. He was lying with his head and shoulders out of bed, in an uncomfortable attitude, half resting on the box which had cost him so much pain and trouble. I learned, that, when he was past creeping out of bed to open it, and past assuring himself of its safety by means of the divining rod I had seen him use, he had required to have it placed on the chair at the bed–side, where he had ever since embraced it, night and day. His arm lay on it now. Time and the world were slipping from beneath him, but the box was there; and the last words he had uttered were (in an explanatory tone) 'Old clothes!'

'Barkis, my dear!' said Peggotty, almost cheerfully: bending over him, while her brother and I stood at the bed's foot. 'Here's my dear boy—my dear boy, Master Davy, who brought us together, Barkis! That you sent messages by, you know! Won't you speak to Master Davy?'

He was as mute and senseless as the box, from which his form derived the only expression it had.

'He's a going out with the tide,' said Mr. Peggotty to me, behind his hand.

My eyes were dim and so were Mr. Peggotty's; but I repeated in a whisper, 'With the tide?'

'People can't die, along the coast,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'except when the tide's pretty nigh out. They can't be born, unless it's pretty nigh in—not properly born, till flood. He's a going out with the tide. It's ebb at half–arter three, slack water half an hour. If he lives till it turns, he'll hold his own till past the flood, and go out with the next tide.

With love from North-West Norfolk

London 8 - Bright Lights, Big City

A night on the "Town"

Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

So said the great Samuel Johnson in conversation with his biographer, James Boswell, on September 20th, 1777.

A few years later, William Wordsworth stood on Westminster Bridge and wrote that:

Earth has not anything to show more fair.....

Of course the fires that plumed up through the myriad chimneys of houses and workshops, factories and trains, no longer cloud the skies with thick sooty smoke, but the air is not fresh, and the exhaust fumes of traffic, especially diesels, blur the potential pleasure of the views.

However, the sense that Wordsworth conveyed that the city has a mighty heart, and that anthropomorphically it may sleep, is not difficult to understand.  London's greatness, as ascertained by Johnson, transcends the ages, and is constantly renewed, now with the towers and domes that rise unimaginably high with extraordinary engineering techniques, and with lighting that creates another world once the sun has fallen beyond the M25.  And it was with this in mind that I recently took a stroll into the night......

It is dusk, and time to unwind.  The city workers have begun their traipse home, or their social hours.  The geeks start to play in the wi-fi zones, and the nerds stay on for a while in front of their screens.  The count down to tomorrow begins......

As the sky thickens and starlings fall, the sometimes shabby bricks of old-style pubs breathe new life, and the younger set spill from offices to join forces in the joys of the Happy Hour.

Midweek it does not seem so busy, but the shifting sands of humanity fill every crevice in a surreptitious dust storm. Tables fill with anticipation of a rendezvous;  bar stools edge closer with the magnetism of opposites.

Haunts that may have once been familiar to the creeps and bawds of Dickens' time are now chic hangouts of the smart and the cool.  At this moment the revolution is in full tilt, with bar-room cracks giving way to gourmet blackboards.  

Night falls.  The bright lights awake.  The Big City begins to rock and roll, where during the working day a slow discharge of four-letter work slunk through the streets.  Now the spirit awakes, and, looking back, looking forward, looking up, the city calls out to the young at heart.  Awake!  The countdown continues.....

In my head, Jimmy Reed's (1961) words start to jump, in the Eric Burdon version:

Bright lights, big city,

Gone to my baby's head

Bright lights, big city

Gone to my baby's head

This simple refrain was recorded by both the Animals and the Rolling Stones (and Bob Dylan!) in the '60s and has since chugged repetitively around my brain pan when I think of city nights. Recently a different song, entitled Bright Lights Bigger City has been a hit in 2011 for CeeLo (it was number one in Israel....?) The songwriters, Thomas Callaway (aka Ceelo Green), Tony Reyes and Benjamin H Allen III, must have nodded toward the great Jimmy Reed when they wrote:

Bright lights and the big city, it belongs to us tonight

Tonight, tonight, alright

Guess I need it, everybody does

But whichever you choose, there's still a whiff of Wordsworth, or at least Wordsmith, in these sentiments. And underlying them also run the theme of the source of human inspiration created in such a matrix of enterprise.

For some it is now home time. In the glam flats overlooking the Grand Union Canal out the back of the new Guardian building, the corks are popping and the glasses over-fizz, while the aged barges and narrow homes on the still waters below rock to the ripples of waterclocks.

For others, the young at heart perhaps, it is party time,

and in the basement bar of King's Place, for instance, the hip and hip-replacement set are getting ready for the second half of their night.

Then, all too soon, it is over, and the darkness consumes. Lights sparkle and incessantly twitch through red and orange and green. Hurried steps take revellers to their hopes of the undiscovered country beyond the terminus platforms, and the night trains head off to the comfort, or relative quietus, of the bare-bodkin suburbs......

The nearby Filling Station stands closed, illuminated against invasion, an outpost of some strange development under the night sky, though paradoxically quite insignificant by day.

And I direct my steps to the city, to bask in the neon glows of incandescent wealth, though the first light I note is that of a moon, slightly belittled here by man's achievements, but none-the-less smart as a reflector of greater powers.

And then, eventually, I stand in awe of the great towers of silence that rise in some way celebrating the male domination of the business world.  The Lloyd's building rises, glowing blue, its tubes like vasa deferentia pulsing towards its peak.

And then the lights go out.  A nod toward nightly conservation.  The blue splash evaporates and the tubes go limp.

Close by, the so-called gherkin, 30 St Mary Axe, rises 180 metres on its launch pad, glowing in the dark even when the lights are off:

This giant lingam, standing on the site of the Baltic Exchange, devastated by a bomb in 1992, takes its proper name from the church of St Mary Axe, which was demolished in 1561.  The combination of the Virgin Mary and an Axe may have its roots in an inn of the sign of an axe, or it may be related to the Worshipful Company of Skinners, who wielded axes in their trade hard by.  

Or maybe, just maybe, the Axe reverbs into that so twentieth century symbol of Slash and Mark, as bankers and insurance clerks rise up to flay their air guitars against the stars.

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

Then to the river, to admire the presumption of the obelisk known as the Shard, Egyptian in its pose, and breathtaking in its daring.  Though despite its shiny promise, its hypodermic charge, it has yet to be filled, and could remain a deep veined dream. 

Just near here, in different times, one David Copperfield Landed in London on a wintry autumn evening, on his return from three years abroad. It was dark and raining, and I saw more fog and mud in a minute than I had seen in a year. I walked from the Custom House to the Monument before I found a coach; and although the very house-fronts, looking on the swollen gutters, were like old friends to me, I could not but admit that they were very dingy friends.

In his most pensive style, Dickens (for it is he, dear reader) continues.....

I have often remarked—I suppose everybody has—that one’s going away from a familiar place, would seem to be the signal for change in it. As I looked out of the coach window, and observed that an old house on Fish Street Hill, which had stood untouched by painter, carpenter, or bricklayer, for a century, had been pulled down in my absence; and that a neighbouring street, of time-honoured insalubrity and inconvenience, was being drained and widened; I half expected to find St. Paul’s Cathedral looking older.

But if anything, this dome, which has stood here since 1708, looks better today than for a very long time, thanks to restoration and cunning lighting.  Although it is only a puny 111 metres high, it rises from the highest point in the city, and so, until 1962, was the tallest landmark in London, certainly the most impressive when David C was at large, though he would most like have been phased by the streaming lights of modern traffic.....

Time unwinds. The stars begin to fade and the countdown reverses to bring in the day.

As Wordsworth stretches, wanders to the bridge, and wonders at the industrial impact on this organic earth, I stumble to my city breakfast, with those who try to rest on the cold paving of the dawn.  Only to find my way barred; society (in the guise of the Carpenters' Arms) unwilling to embrace me in the grey morning light.

As Jimmy sang to Mary 'Mama' Reed, his wife:

Go ahead pretty baby

Oh, honey knock yourself out 

Go ahead pretty baby 

Oh honey knock yourself out

I still love you baby cause you don't know what it's all about

And I start my way back home, a little weary, with just a touch of the delta slide and only the blues to call my own. 

But not weary of life.

Yet!

The lights are going out.....

London 3 - Dickens's London

The London of Charles Dickens

The Charles Dickens Museum, 48/49 Doughty Street

I wonder how much of London in 2013 Charles Dickens would recognise? He first came to live in the city at the age of ten, in 1822, when it had a population of about one million. Ten years later it was approximately one and a half and by the time he was forty it was two and a half million. Yes, there are individual buildings, for example churches, the Tower of London, and certain palaces that, because of their importance and their strength, have been there for centuries, as well as a fair number of Georgian buildings and early pubs that have survived, but a great deal of the more vernacular examples of architecture have given way to “progress” or have changed beyond recognition. 

The age of steam, with its hungry need for rail cuttings and stations, swept away some of the old domestic dwellings. The shifting of the docks downstream and away completely rewrote the activity of the Thames. The Second World War did not help preserve the fabric of the city, and the enormous expansion in the twentieth century (Greater London now has a population of 8,173.000) and the advent of motorised vehicles, have certainly aided the obliteration of signs of the world of the horse and the rickety slum.

Murdstone and Grinby’s warehouse was at the waterside.  It was down in Blackfriars.  Modern improvements have altered the place; but it was the last house at the bottom of a narrow street, curving down hill to the river with some stairs at the end, where people took boat.   It was a crazy old house with a wharf of its own, abutting on the water when the tide was in, and on the mud when the tide was out, and literally overrun with rats.  Its panelled rooms, discoloured with the dirt and smoke of a hundred years, I dare say;  its decaying floors and staircase; the squeaking and scuffling of the old grey rats down in the cellars; and the dirt and rottenness of the place; are things, not of many years ago, in my mind, but of the present instant…..  (David Copperfield, Chapter 11)

In fact the blacking factory where the young Dickens worked was on Hungerford Stairs, now lost beneath the embankment at Charing Cross, but it was real to the young author and very much representative of the riverside in central London before the banks were built up and the water born traffic ebbed away downstream.

A mist hung over the river, deepening the red glare of the fires that burnt upon the small craft moored off the different wharfs, and rendering darker and more indistinct the murky buildings on the banks.  The old smoke-stained storehouses on either side, rose heavy and dull from the dense mass of roofs and gables, and frowned sternly upon waters too black to reflect even their lumbering shapes.  The tower of old Saint Saviour’s Church, and the spire of Saint Magnus, so long the giant warders of the ancient bridge, were visible in the gloom; but the forest of shipping below bridge, and the thickly scattered spires of churches above, were nearly all hidden from sight.  (Oliver Twist, Chapter 46)

The Church of St Magnus the Martyr, one of 51 designed by Sir Christopher Wren, still stands, though it is dwarfed by modern blocks.  St Saviour’s became Southwark Cathedral in 1905, or more correctly, the Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St Saviour and St Mary Overy (which derives from over-the-river), but the nave was rebuilt in 1840 and the modern additions and surrounds, not least the railways connecting London Bridge with Cannon Street and Charing Cross, have obscured some of its splendour.  The actual bridge on which Nancy arranged her fateful meeting, was opened in 1831, so was actually very new in this description (the 600 year old Old London Bridge having been demolished at the same time) but this in turn was dismantled and replaced by a box girder construction in 1973, with the stones being transported and reassembled in the Arizona Desert, having been bought by oil tycoon Robert P McCulloch.  The flavour of the Dickensian river has long since evaporated.

Dickens, whose novel Oliver Twist was selling well, wrote this description upstairs in 48 Doughty Street to which he had moved at the beginning of April 1837.  He was 25 years old, married to Kate and father of a baby.  His sister in law, Mary Hogarth, and his brother, Fred, also moved in with them.  It was a broad, airy street, with gates at each end and a porter in a lodge, and he was to pay £80 per annum rent.  Doughty Street adjoins Mecklenburgh Square, with its gardens which themselves lie next to Coram’s Fields which is a children’s play area on the site of the original Foundling Hospital, still enclosed by the colonnade of the original building, erected by Thomas Coram in 1745.  In Brunswick Square, outside the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children, sits a statue of the philanthropist, and to his right is the Foundling Museum, which, although constructed in 1937, contains eighteenth century interiors and paintings from the original hospital.  The stories and memorabilia of the children supported by this organisation would be familiar to Dickens, as he was a supporter of it, and had his own chapel pew there when resident in Doughty Street.

The Foundling Museum, Brunswick Square

It is perhaps a coincidence that Foundling number 18,607 was baptized John Brownlow in the Hospital Chapel in 1800.  This gentleman was later to become Secretary of the society and a friend of Dickens.  Was he the model for Mr Brownlow, whose heart was, large enough for any six ordinary old gentlemen of humane disposition, who rescued Oliver from Mr Fang?

Gerrard Street, where Jaggers entertained Pip and friends

Anyway, though London careers into the twenty-first century and beyond, with the Shard now dwarfing St Saviour’s, and Seven Dials no longer being, a maze of streets, courts, lanes and alleys…. lost in the unwholesome vapour which hangs over the house-top; Jaggers’s home in Gerrard Street now being occupied by Chinese; Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road were not developed until after Dickens’s death; the houses that the family lived in after Doughty Street, in a Devonshire Terrace in Marylebone (not the current one in Bayswater) and in Tavistock Square have long since disappeared; but London is still London, quite distinct in style from Paris, New York, or Rome, and there is still something Dickensian for all to experience.

The Dining Room at 48 Doughty Street

The Dickens Museum, now at 48 and 49 Doughty Street, recently reopened following a £3m overhaul, recaptures something of the domestic scene of the early Victorian period.  It is not difficult to imagine the young novelist at work at his desk here, and the empty bed of his beloved sister-in-law is itself a moving reference to the transitory nature of life. 

The bed where Mary Hogarth died, May 7th 1837.
"I have lost the dearest friend I had....."

Not far away, close to the restyled Covent Garden, is the Lamb and Flag pub, its stained wood and rickety stairs little changed in over two centuries, and well-known to Dickens.  A step away from this, in Maiden Lane, is Rules restaurant, also said to be a Dickensian favourite, and also over two hundred years old.  The wanderer in London can follow Dickens trails, be guided on tours, and step into the past in many places, such as the George Inn in Southwark or his friend Thomas Carlyle’s house in Cheyne Row.

And, despite the change in the ethnic mix of London (three eighths of the current population of Greater London were not born in the United Kingdom) there are still the characters that fascinated Dickens and from whom he drew inspiration.  You don’t have to sit for long in the Lamb and Flag, or the Lamb in Lamb’s Conduit Street, or the French House in Soho, or downstairs in Gordon’s Wine Bar, to observe faces and types that step right out of the novels, whether it is Mr Micawber (a stoutish, middle-aged person…. with no more hair upon his head…. than there is upon an egg, and with a very extensive face…..  His clothes were shabby, but he had an imposing shirt-collar on,) or Steerforth (so self-possessed, and elegant,) Wemmick (I found him to be a dry man, rather short in stature, with a square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have been imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel,) or Lady Deadlock (bored to death.  Concert, assembly, opera, theatre, drive, nothing is new to my Lady, under the worn-out heavens;) they still perambulate the capital, with their individual foibles and blemishes.  

But when all is said and done, there are things perhaps we must not lament about the passing of time.  Search for a hot water tap in Dickens’s rooms in Doughty Street and you’ll search in vain; likewise a flush toilet.  And be thankful that Tom-All-Alone’s, the ruinous place to which Jo the Crossing-Sweeper crept at night, no longer exists:  It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people…..  these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gasps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever…..  (Bleak House Chapter 16)

Cholera first struck London in 1831 (6,536 deaths), returned in 1848-9 (14,137 deaths) and again in 1853-54 (10,738 deaths).  Much as the romantic may imagine the days of Charles Dickens at No 48 Doughty Street to have been colourful and cosy, not all progress is to be decried.

Goodwin's Court, off St Martin's Lane, dating from about 1690

http://www.dickensmuseum.com/about/

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/carlyles-house/

http://lambandflagcoventgarden.co.uk/

http://www.rules.co.uk/

Seven Dials