Riding the Waves to Eternity: Hangin’ with the Cosmic Surfer

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I Believe in Progress

Oct 19, 2024 | Goggle-eyes, Music, Writing

Lindsay and I were at Barrowland this week to see Public Service Broadcasting on the opening night of their latest tour. This was the third time I’ve seen them at Barrowland (the sixth time I’ve seen them overall since 2017) and, in a sign of changing times, this show was sold out, and tickets went fast. It goes without saying that it was a great gig – I don’t recall ever seeing a bad one from them. The first time I saw them, playing The Race For Space in it’s entirety at the Usher Hall as part of the Edinburgh Science Festival, was excellent and they manage to get better with every tour. They spent an hour and forty-five minutes on a selection from across their history, all played with skill, confidence and energy, and bolstered by a ‘lively’ crowd.

The inestimable Peter Ross, author of the excellent Steeple Chasing and A Tomb with a View amongst many other things (and a fellow devotee of Half Man Half Biscuit) was there too: his Guardian review is here:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/oct/17/public-service-broadcasting-review-amelia-earhart-barrowland-ballroom-glasgow

I’ve embedded the video for Night Mail, which Peter mentions, at the foot of this post. It’s one of PSB’s earliest recordings and remains a setlist staple. I’ve also embedded ‘Progress’, by turns ironic and optimistic (the voice over is from a film about progress in the UK mining industry.)

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I watched David Olusoga’s new A House Through Time: Two Cities At War, rapt. I saw the first episode on telly (for which I often need my hearing aids these days) and the other three episodes on iPlayer with noise-cancelling headphones. The hyperlink is to iPlayer which you might not be able to access outside of the UK. This series was narrowly focused on two apartment blocks, one in London the other in Berlin, and deftly used the central conceit of researching the lives of the residents to follow a broader social history, in this case roughly 1930 to 1945. In the best traditions of public service broadcasting, it informed, educated and entertained, and packed a powerful emotional punch, especially episode three. Highly recommended.

I’m still watching the latest from Marvel, Agatha All Along, and I’m still really not sure what to make of it. As I wrote last time, it has a distinctly American sensibility for, I now realise, American values of pantomime: the acting is not – and is not supposed to be – naturalistic. It also sits in a line of witchcraft narratives that owe a lot to the Brothers Grimm as filtered through Disney, and the Wicked Witch of the West of The Wizard of Oz – and not in an ironic or critical way. I think I’m enjoying it, but I’m not as enthusiastic as the mass of fans on social media.

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I’ve been spending time reading The Scotsman from 1933 and 1939 as background preparation for the next novel(s) and it has been fascinating. My initial aim was to get background colour and detail for the stories and I’m getting that, but I’m also struck by the differences between then and now. By that I do not just mean a world where the listings are for Radio not TV and international travel is by sea not air, I also mean the way in which the paper is written and edited. Grammar and syntax are spot on even if the vocabulary is now dated, but, more than that, there are no bylines and no opinion columnists: the focus is on the verities of who, what, when, where and how. The reporting of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in late January of 1933 is exemplary: concise, sharp, analytical and objective.

There is also that thing of watching events play out in real time when I know the outcome and it doesn’t end well (something that is strong in A House Through Time as well.)

Working through the papers (and I plan to read through 1936 too) is quite time consuming but worth it. As I mentioned last time, I intend also to work through the Edinburgh Evening News and Edinburgh Evening Dispatch for the same years for a different tone and a different assumed audience. It has since occurred to me that for many people of the time the primary news source would not have been the papers but Pathé newsreels in the cinema. happily, these have been digitised and are freely available online.

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Over the Hill

Oct 6, 2024 | Dead Water, Goggle-eyes, Retirement, Writing

I crossed the great divide last week and now view the world from the other side of my 65th birthday.  It was a nice, low-key day with friends and family, and I’m happy with that. I feel exactly the same as I did this time last week, yet also have a vague sense of difference that I can’t really put my finger on, as though I’ve entered another room. It’s not that long ago I would have got my State Pension as well, but that won’t now come until next October. I did get offered free Flu and Covid boosters, though, which I’ve had.

In all other respects life goes on as it always does. I enjoyed Kaos on Netflix, featuring Jeff Goldblum as Zeus, and I think I’m enjoying Agatha All Along on Disney, though the latter is very American in its sensibilities and I haven’t quite made up my mind. As for reading, I enjoyed Irmgard Keun’s The Artificial Silk Girl (1932),  though the modern translation hit one or two off notes, and I’m enjoying Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper (1936). Philip Kerr’s final novel, Metropolis (2019, posthumous) was decent but read in parts like a near-final draft rather than the finished article, though that’s hardly his fault.

Meantime, I’m going through notes for the next novels and expanding my research – soon to involve several days in the newspaper archives once one or two things in the garden are sorted. My targets are the Scotsman, the Edinburgh Evening News and the Edinburgh Evening Despatch, primarily for 1933, 1936 and 1939.