Cheerful lockdown reading
Even I, who has been avoiding the news, couldn’t fail to notice that it was the 75th anniversary of VE day today, not least because a couple of RAF jets did a fly past this morning. I didn’t see them, but was asked why there’d been a flypast.
You wouldn’t really know there was some kind of national thing happening around here. Our street has one solitary house with a union flag draped across its garden fence, one house with a single strand of bunting, and one house with a tiny blink-and-you’ll-miss-it piece of bunting. On my walk this evening I saw precisely two houses with anything out: one with a union flag and a saltire, one with a couple of mis-matched flags in its windows.
By contrast I saw loads of houses with something in the window to support the NHS. This strikes me as being appropriate. The first thing the British electorate did at the end of WW2 was to elect Attlee’s Labour government that, despite immediate post-war austerity and the harsh winter of 1946, brought into being the NHS, NHS (Scotland) and the Welfare State as we knew it until it got royally screwed from Thatcher onwards, with consequences we can see all around us.
I suppose the events today were because it is 75 years, and some anniversaries seem to have more significance than others for numerological reasons that are beyond me. I don’t recall VE day as previously being something for general commemoration in all of my 60 years. I am not objecting to the principle–it is hard to say never again or never forget and then murmur about acts of remembrance, but I weary of the tone of a lot of this stuff. The direction of travel for me was to feel myself increasingly European, and I’m not in the slightest interested by the fantasies of the populist right.
Pynchon In Private
In fact, May 8th is usually something I mark in a good-humoured way as the birthday of Thomas Pynchon, who is 83 today. This usually takes the form of a tip of the hat to Pynchon In Public except, this year, its Pynchon In Private. There is only one of his novels I haven’t finished, Against The Day, and this might be a good time to dig it out of storage and have another try. My favourite of his is Mason and Dixon, which I bought when it was released and read in the shade on a cheap holiday on a campsite in Provence, though I haven’t read it again since.
Pynchon’s classic Gravity’s Rainbow got a mention in Rian Johnson’s excellent Knives Out. ‘I haven’t read it,’ says a character. ‘Nobody has,’ shoots back Daniel Craig. As it happens, I have. It was complex and dense and I probably will never read it again, and yet one of the core elements of its plot, an apparent chronological reversal of causality, is something I come back to often.
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Music: two songs tonight. Al Bowlly was killed in London in 1941 by a bomb that exploded outside his flat. His last recording was two weeks before his death, with his duet partner Jimmy Messene (billed as Radio Stars with Two Guitars): Irving Berlin’s When That Man Is Dead And Gone, ‘That Man’ being Hitler. He also inspired one of my favourites of Richard Thompson’s many songs.
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