Getting old

A while back the Davemeister asked on facebook for a list of the 50 best gigs of your life. You were only allowed to list the headliners and no festivals were allowed. I stuggled I have to say. The last gig that I went to was months ago - The late and very much lamented Broken Family Band at the Junction which is itself 20 years old this year. I'd have loved to go and see James at the Corn Exchange in April but its a sell-out. I was hoping to get to Latitude for the first time this year as opposed to the Cambridge Folk Festival which has for the last few years been a chance to meet up with old friends but what with one thing and another that doesnt look like its going to happen. I guess its money as much as anything - most gigs now go for £20 even at a shed like the Junction and for a name band youre quite likely to be paying big money. For the price of a Glastonbury ticket you could buy a budget airline flight pretty much anywhere in Europe. Added to that is the propensity to repeatedly see the same artist - a quick glance at the pinboard in the kitchen - a pinboard surrounded by the papery memories of gigs gone by shows an awful lot of Billy Bragg and Orbital tickets - and thats not counting the times that Ive seen them at Glasto or the Cambridge Folk Festival. And again I think theres the slow process of osification of the aural canal when new music becomes harder and harder to hear, or rather slips further and further down the list of priorities. Lets face it if its a choice between paying your council tax or another CD we know where thats going to end up... And so I end up trying to defend myself against a charge levied by myself - of getting old.

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852 - 1924)

It wasn't the best of Saturdays. I was still suffering from a stomach bug, we ended up missing both the Pub Quiz and also Question Time as we had an early night. We took the car into town to get a few bits and pieces and left it in the staff car park returning later encumbered by comic boxes and also the reborrowed Lived in London book only to find that the electronic gate was locked. Next to the staff car park was the blue plaque for Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, who was Professor of Music from 1887 to 1924 and was renowned for his choral works. Must admit I'd never heard of the guy which I suspect could also be said for most others. We stumped up for a taxi and then strolled back in the missle to find that we'd gone to the wrong college so ended up missing the start of the Fairhaven Singers performance of St. John's Passion which we both enjoyed in the lovely surrounds of St. John's. That's St. John's NOT Jesus college chapel. Fortunately we managed to sneak in (not to our previously set seats provided by the lovely Cullen which were right down the front though). I was going to say that Ive never been all that interested in choral music but thinking about it I do - just not classical choral music. From the harmony singing of the Beach Boys through the Motown Era to strange Bulgarian choral singing which I have to admit I'm rather partial to. Actually I'd love to maybe catch a performance on our visit. I did go and see a choir at the Cambridge Corn Exchange a few years back. Their version of Somewhere over the rainbow is certainly something that I'll never forget.

Rudyard Kipling reprise

I realised a couple of days ago that theres another Kipling link - Beautiful Bundi. I visited for a few magical days between the traveller hellhole of Pushkar - full of arseholes attempting to outtraveller each other while sitting around navel gazing and the earthy charms of Kota and Chittorgarh. I suspect that Bundi would by now have been firmly established on the traveller trail so I don't think I'll be revisiting - but rather enjoying my memories of this quiet little rest stop, its castle perched precipitately on the side of a mountain and the blue town spread below that Kipling described as "such a palace as men build for themselves in uneasy dreams, the work of goblins rather than of men" of a cycle ride out in blistering heat to the Jait Sagar lake where Kipling stayed and of the Krishna tea shop after being accosted by a stentorian "Attention!" It takes something to excel in the chai department on the sub-continent but that particular establishment certainly did. I remember the hordes of minkeys being chased of by a caretaker and the astonishing engineering of the towns step wells. Reading back through my journal it seems that I was going through the worse of Yaz withdrawl - lying awake in the beautiful Haveli I was staying in, tears running down my face. And here we are 4 years later and barely in touch. How times change...hopefully in the right direction, I think in my case very much so although Yaz is still closeted. I also rememebr the lovely home cooking a coule of houses down which was a bit of a traveller hang-out chowing down with a tableful of new friends. Hopefully M and Iare in good shape and thinking of our next grip which will hopefully take in a taste of Bulgaria before revisiting Istanbul - this time in hopefully rather more seasonable weather. I think that the idea of staying inland from Malaga is prettyy much stymied. I have to say that its not a destination that really fills me with excitement. Ma and Pa also raised the possibility of a trip to Libya which is high on my list of dream destinations...but with Maries probable career change and also the prospect of moving in together we'll have to see...

Ali Mohammed Abbas 1922 - 1979

I guess that Ali Mohammed Abbas is one of those guys that blue plaques are there for someone who worked behind the scenes of one of the most significant events of the twentieth century, the Partition of India. So, his name doesn't resonate like that of Gandhi or Nehru or Jinnah but he and others like him founded the Sub-continental states. He was empowered by his wealthy maternal grandfather whose money saw him educated, he became a student representative and joined the ALl India Muslim League. Like many Indian nationalists he came to Britain to pursue the dream of Indian independence and a career in the law. He was a groundbreaker, the first Asian barrister to appear in all the levels of court in England and set up nearly 30 schools across England to teach Pakistani immigrants english. In 1947 his house in Tavistock Square became the unofficial embassy of Pakistan.

His blue plaque is sited at 33 Tavistock Square, metres from the site of one of the terrorist atrocities that took place on 7th July 2005 when Hasib Hussein detonated an explosive device on a bus killing 13 innocent people. Hussein was a British-born Muslim of Pakistani descent.

I can't help but wonder what Abbas, an educated Muslim who lived by the law would have made of the modern Islamist movement with their utter disregard for life?

I've been fortunate to travel a little in the former British colonies in South Asia, both in India and Sri Lanka, both countries have problems; India has its own religious strife, particularly between Hindus and Muslims and the massive divide detween rich and poor has developed a bubbling Naxalite insurgency. Sri Lanka has its own horrors (hopefully now over) with the Tamil Tiger atrocities (who knew that the first suicide bombers werent Muslim?) and the governments heavy handed responses. But neither of those two states stand on the brink of failiure as Pakistan does. I don't pretend to be an expert in Pakistani politics but the tribalism inherent in the country seems to me to be a major factor.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

Spotted on our last trip to London tucked behind Charing Cross station just by Villiers Street which gets a visit from us fairly regularly as theres a South African foods store just round the corner featuring all the familiar names from M's time in South Africa. Kipling was born in Bombay and I think as an Anglo-Indian has the clarity of vision that only tends to come with the eyes of an outsider.He returned to England after a stint in America in 1889. He wrote "meantime, I had found me quarters in Villiers Street, Strand, which forty-six years ago was primitive and passionate in its habits and population. My rooms were small, not over-clean or well-kept, but from my desk I could look out of my window through the fanlight of Gatti's Music-Hall entrance, across the street, almost on to the stage. The Charing Cross trains rumbled through my dreams on one side, the boom of the Strand on the other, while, before my windows, Father Thames under the Shot Tower walked up and down with his traffic"

Coincidentally Kipling's name has come up a couple of times of late firstly because I'm reading Billy Bragg's The Progressive Patriot - Our Bill was brought up with Kipling and also because he recently got a whole issue of Mike Carey and Peter Gross' The Unwritten. He carries baggage does our Rudyard in this post-imperial age. He was a contentious figure even during his lifetime, Orwell called him "a phophet of British imperialism" whether he was that or rather as Billy believes him to be more of a chronicaller of the Raj is a guess a matter of opinion, he was a great writer, maybe not in the modern sense but as a tale-teller and I think that thats what both the Braggmeister and Mike Carey have picked up on. And he does have a way with words, that I think is beyond doubt. He also shifted position fairly radically especially after the death of his son, John at the battle of Loos in 1915. He wrote My So Jack afterwards containing the klines "If any question why we died / Tell them because our fathers lied" which I think speaks volumes about the guilt that he felt about his earlier unquestioning support for the war. To my mind he was quite simply a man of his times, the sentiments expressed in poems like The White Mans burden
Take up the white man's burden
Send forth the best ye breed
Go, bind your your sons to exile
To serve the captives need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild
Your new-caught sullen peoples
Half devil and half child
were utterly unremarkable for the time. Personally I'll go with "what knows he of England / who only England knows.

Strangely I don't think I've ever read any of his work. Dad raised me on tales of derring-do from the Likes of H.Rider Haggard, John Buchan and Captain W.E. Johns but not Kipling.