another blog in the wall....THE SUNDAY ITEMS: #22 70 YEARS A DAVE: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME

Seventy years ago I emerged from the birth canal screaming ("Come On You Spurs!!!"). I'm not going to talk about age and infirmity, though it is tempting to reminisce a little. For example, I've noticed a pattern in my relationships with the Other Gender. I'm quite good with the young ones and the very old ones seem to like me, it's just that awkward 8-80 group in between that I have trouble with.

This post was described in FESS (discarded before publication, when the book was thought to be too long) as 'self-indulgent'. Moi? Surely not. It is a bit, but if you can't do that on your 70th birthday.....

My legacy to the teaching profession, after 35 years’ hard labour at the chalkface, is a trick, a survival strategy for everyone who is confronted with a group of students for the first time, in a seminar, who through inhibition or ignorance simply won’t talk (but this applies to some other social situations not just education). Apparently they would rather sit there mute, looking at the desk or their shoes, in a rising tide of collective embarrassment, than venture a single comment or word out loud. You have almost exhausted your list of questions or prompts to stimulate discussion for an hour and there is still 53 minutes to go. Nightmare. And all you’re asking is for them to introduce themselves to the group: “Getting to know you, getting to know all about you” as Julie Andrews sang. Not. It’s a cultural thing, we don’t traditionally teach ‘public speaking’ in schools and British people are reserved and famous for it. What threw it into fine focus for me was teaching some visiting American students in the hour before I had a standard seminar group of final year British students. The Americans never stopped talking: their attitude was ‘What I have to say is good, so I’m going to say it, even if you’re speaking at the same time’. Occasionally I could get a word in, just to conduct and orchestrate the discussion. It was a delight. Then I would walk down two flights of stairs to the British seminar. The atmosphere that greeted me was a little like Swindon Railway Station platform on a particularly grey, damp morning in February. My heart would sink: another hour’s purgatory.

So I determined to start with the First Years and try to establish good habits from the off. If they didn’t/couldn’t have that much to say about social psychology, what could they talk about? I know, everybody’s favourite subject, themselves. But you can’t just say ‘talk about yourself, you’d get one stumbling sentence about where they lived, the family members, and the dog. There had to be a vehicle that would open them up. A flash of insight: this is exactly what castaways found themselves doing on Desert Island Discs, where they have to choose 8 records for an involuntary stay on a deserted island. A pedagogic miracle was born, the DID Task. I asked them to choose 5 records and make them relevant to major events or periods in their lives; ten minutes preparation and then showtime.

It starts hesitantly, then starts to take off as the other students warm to the speaker, identify with them, find things in common, love or loathe their choice of records, learn about their lives and begin to discover the people they will they will spend a lot of their next 3 years, and in some cases become their friends for life. Brilliant. Except when a young woman said “I’ll go first, I want to get it over with. Last week my twin brother died of cancer. Bridge Over Troubled Water was his favourite song, so I’d take that to remember him by” and then was overcome with emotion and cried with an intensity you seldom hear. The group froze, horrified; I wanted to give her a cuddle but was inhibited by the unwritten rules about physical contact with students, and my decision to ignore that was pre-empted by the woman next to her next to her doing so, who later became an inseparable friend for the rest of their time in college.

Not withstanding this, and the fact that I found the task almost impossible to do myself, on my landmark birthday I have chosen the self-indulgence of being interviewed by Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs. I've skipped the biography at the beginning, you can always read FESS.

KY: Now David, your first record:

DM: I’ve chosen ‘Apache’ by the Shadows: it was the first song my boyhood band (neé ‘group’) ever performed in public. We were great. A kid called Eric Clapton asked to join the group but we told him to come back when he could play more than three chords…never heard of him again.

KY: Sure you did...

DM :If you slow it down you can make it quite soulful, like ‘When my guitar gently weeps’. I played lead with such deep feeling that you could see the tears rolling down the audience’s cheeks – or maybe that was tears of mirth when I messed up the solo on the next number.

It can be quite stirring. It would get you up in the morning, to throw off your palm leaves, and go chase some little hogs along the shore with a sharpened stick in one hand and a bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup in the other (sorry to my veggie friends, I’m trying to add a little local colour here). I’m assuming that there were crates of ketchup on the ship and I paddled one to the shore. For me, the record is a quick way to feel 14 again instantly, though why would you want to? Horrible time. But it all turned out alright

KY: I’ll let it go, but I noticed you sneaking in extras: yellow card next time. Choose your second disc, please

DM: My next one is a complete contrast. I have many connections with Wales. My father was born in Wales (Land of my Father's) in Port Talbot, like Richard Burton (whose father taught my Dad maths) through to Michael Sheen and Rob Brydon. Three of the best years of my life were spent at university in Cardiff, and North Wales draws me back and back to walk in Snowdonia and climb Tryfan, my favourite mountain. Here Richard Burton reads the opening of Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas's work of genius.

KY: Surprise us with something different again.

DM: Easy. Bob Marley, ‘No woman, no cry’. It’s such a perfect song, so rounded, so compact and yet open-ended, so you could go on singing the chorus till your baby went to sleep (of whatever age). Marley was a genius and a man of his people who brought so much pleasure and did a lot of good. Saw him live once at Hammersmith and the energy he gave out was like a warm bath. Love the sentiments of the song, too, I’ve been there and I kind of feel the ‘no cry’ bit is wishful thinking.

KY: OK , what’s number 4?

DM: The only woman that’s made the cut, as it happens. Tracey Chapman: 'Baby Can I Hold You'. Wonderful voice, phrasing, great songs, no hype or showybizness, just the shy smile and the feeling, the commitment and the integrity of her performances. Saw her live at Dylan’s 30^th anniversary concert in Madison Square Garden, where all the stars sang him one of his songs: she chose ‘Times are a changing’.

KY: I love that, too, I always compare the choices with my own. Number 5?

DM: Another song which mixes the emotions in performance: George Harrison’s song ‘Something’ sung by Paul and Eric Clapton (plus George’s son, Dhani) at George’s Memorial concert at the Albert Hall. It’s a beautiful song, sung with huge affection for one of the nicest people you could hope to meet, and it is very hard to keep back the tears, but so what? The ukulele accompaniment is a master-stroke and helps to flip the song into optimism. There's another song first, but I'm not counting that.

KY: I wish I had been there, The Beatles were such an important part of all our lives it felt like losing family, almost. We're up to 6 now:

DM: Sure. Moving on, into sad territory again. Paul Simon and many African musicians got into trouble when they produced the album ‘Gracelands’ because of the apartheid boycott. But I’ve long believed it to be one of the most important albums in the history of popular music. It kicked off the appreciation of World Music. Melodically, rhythmically and creatively it is outstanding, quite apart from its huge intercultural significance. It’s simply a masterpiece. I could have chosen almost any track, there is not a dud one to be found on the album. But I’ve chosen the title track because it contains some Paul Simon lyrics which I find melancholic and piercing, but so very good that they are almost a source of pleasure:

“Losing love is like a window in your heart

Everybody sees you fall apart,

Everybody feels the wind blow…”

Ouch.

KY: The end is in sight: number 7 please

DM What became one of the best-known pieces of classical music in the world at Italia90, the World Cup Finals in Italy in 1990: Nessun Dorma. Soaring, triumphal, thunderous, agonising like some huge wave gathering up the people and, in the end, depositing them gently on the beach. The over exposure, I suppose, took something away from it, but 25 years on, it has recovered. You can hear it without mentally preparing for England to lose on penalties to the Germans again. Just. And the fact is that it is luminously beautiful – and probably introduced more people to opera than anything else, ever.

I envisage standing in the shallows at sunset, looking out to sea, and singing this at the top of my lungs, and when I finish, beautiful succulent fish start to swim out of the deeps, and waving white flags, throw themselves onto the beach in surrender. Enough, enough.

KY: I thought you had a good voice as you were humming along to the records.

DM: Pas du tout. If my singing voice was a footballer it would have a wooden leg.

KY: The last one – often the Big One that people single out if they could only take one. What’s yours?

DM: Simple. ‘Idiot Wind’. Bob Dylan’s tour de force on the ‘Blood on the Tracks’ album. Possibly on any of his albums. It will be played at my funeral, and the congregation – both of them – will be astonished at how inappropriate my choice has been. But later they may understand that its chaos, its desperate love and its rage and fury are a better slice of my inner life – and many people’s lives – than if I’d picked ‘My Way’ as so many do. The song drives forward, time after time, slides back then renews the assault. There is humour, blood, frustration and truth in abundance and when he talks to his lover “in all her raging glory” you can see her, deep auburn haired, beautiful and just beyond his reach, and probably always will be. I was a massive fan of Dylan from 1963 – 78, and then sometime after that he lost me. I still treasure the early work, still believe that he was the most important singer-songwriter of the 20th century, I just couldn’t follow him on his particular path; interestingly he recently confided in an interview that that was when he started to lose his way. But his catalogue before that was matchless, and Idiot Wind one of the very best songs, and there would be endless fascination unpicking the imagery, the references, and peering into the darkness behind them.

And I would be able to play all his songs on my one luxury object, which is a red Fender Stratocaster, preferably before they went Japanese. It’s the ultimate rock guitar, and though there are others just as good, all my icons have chosen the Strat. There is a problem with electricity and amplification, I know, but I’m thinking solar power and maybe a 3-D printer that was being smuggled inside the tomato ketchup crate, so I can print myself an amplifier – and of course a boat.

KY: And your book?

DM: I’m assuming that this programme is contemporary enough to allow a Kindle or similar? So I’ll go for the collected works of Philip Roth (a mere 35 books or so). I’ve followed him since his first novel. No writer has given me more pleasure or deserved more admiration. He was recently described as the greatest living writer in the English language. No quarrel there, I have argued the same thing for more than 20 years. Sadly he won’t live very much longer but his legacy is one which would sustain me in my solitude for a very long time

KY: Thank you, David.

DM: More than a pleasure.

There are times when I get more talkative: the Gemini’s drive to communicate gets the upper hand. This is not just in ordinary conversation, I talk more generally, including to people I don’t know (aka strangers). I don’t mean that I walk along the street declaiming to the general public, laughing and joking out loud: that’s hebephrenic schizophrenia (but without being flippant, if you had to have schizophrenia, that is definitely the kind I would choose. Some enjoyment is definitely preferable to the anguish involved in most disorders). No, what I do is just strike up conversations, or have a little banter with people I encounter, whether at supermarket checkouts, on the Tube, or wherever, in a way that I wouldn’t normally. Of course, some people will shrink from this unexpected contact: but very few, most are agreeably surprised and the spontaneous conversation is the more enjoyable for breaking the British taboo on such things.

One of these conversations had an enduring effect on my life. Snappy Snaps opened a branch in Mortimer St near PCL’s Wells St building. Being the pre-digital age, I took my colour negative film in there for processing. I would enter the shop by the front door, not drive my car through the window as George Michael did to the Hampstead branch.

The manager in Mortimer Street was a guy called Noel Knower, an anglicised Sri Lankan, I believe. When he told me his name I just resisted the temptation to say “that’s a bit of a no-no," because no-one likes their name being a joke. He was a very personable man so I would stop and chat for a while, or later fetch coffees for us both in quiet periods.

Knower by name, knower by nature. One time he said to me: “David, if you could have one wish what would it be?” Well at the time I was getting very strapped for cash, and so I said rather flippantly “A million quid would be kind of useful right now”. He said “No, you know that’s not the right answer to anything, try again”. I was getting the general idea and I said, “Good health?” . He replied, “Closer but not the right answer, try again”. I thought hard and said, “Happiness?”. He smiled and said “Close but not it. I will tell you: you should wish for a positive attitude. Because if you have that, all the other things you’ve wished for will follow.”

It is true, pretty much. It begs some questions, like how do you get such a frame of mind, particularly when you most need it, feeling low or without energy and drive. It’s a prescription which is a goal not a ready-wrapped solution. A decision to highlight what is best about a situation or thing or person, to put on a positive spin, to see the advantages not the pitfalls in a plan. Taken to extremes, there will be some scrapes if you over-reach yourself, maybe some embarrassment at a plan failing, publicly. But it is essential to any project because it will stretch you to achieve, beyond what you have already achieved. William Blake said “Who shall say that a man’s reach shall not exceed his grasp”. The Four Tops (almost) said “Reach out and You’ll be There”.

Big birthdays tend to start a review process: not just what's happened to you in your life but what's happened in the world. For example my father was born in 1911, when cars were few and far between, the Titanic was about to sink, followed by 'The war to end all wars' and the Russian Revolution. He died in the early 90s as the Iron Curtain rusted and collapsed, computing was changing life for the masses, and the density of motor vehicles brought motorways to a standstill. It's almost impossible to comprehend the rate of change in human affairs. In my own lifetime, since 1946 the rate of change has accelerated further: for example, from food rationing, to the explosion of takeaways at one extreme to fine dining at the other - and back to food banks. Here are some of the changes during my span:

'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty!' Hamlet. Sadly, women had not yet been invented aT this time, apparently, but they've turned out to be bloody marvellous, too.

When the history books come to be written about this period, Brexit will be seen as a kind of madness in which too many members of the British public were influenced by the Sun/Mail/Express axis of the Press into following the most hated man in recent British politics, a Trumpalike showman so convinced of the Leave case that he was arguing for Remaining, in public, two weeks earlier and a saloon bar raconteur who thinks the World will rush to trade with us if we Leave (even though we cut ties when we went in, and much of our current trade is because we are in. Gove and Boris want No. 10 (Gove is losing already), and this was a vehicle to ride there. If you can't make up your mind, think of it this way: