#56: WAS MY FACE RED......OR GREEN

Back in the day there was a maxim: 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me'; it was supposed to be a retort when someone did precisely that. The expression conjures up a wonderful image of childhood courage and resolve in the heroic Boys' Own Paper/ Biggles era, that was 95% inspirational fiction for the average child - or adult, for that matter.

In FESS I described a scenario which is as fresh in recall as when it happened: as the youngest and smallest child in nursery school, aged 4, I was prevented by two larger, older bullies from using the toilet when I desperately needed to: they simply stood in front of the door and would not budge, despite my entreaties. Eventually I could no longer contain myself. It was humiliating in the extreme, not just in front of the boys, but also in confessing my 'accident' to the teachers, the headteacher and my mother when she came to pick me up. I remember every detail, more than 60 years later.

In secondary school, when Mr Booth, my physics master and form-master, declared that I was "too thick to go to University", to the assembled Upper Sixth Form, I burned with embarrassment. In those days, such a red mist of humiliation and anger did not generally lead to an assault charge, and he selfishly died before I could shove my PhD certificate in his abusive gob.When I join him in Hell I will delight in taunting him with his own lack-of-foresight saga,  and give him a good prodding with a red-hot tricorn: he'll burn with more than embarrassment. I'll add injury to insult. However, you may suspect in this instance that psychological child-abuse can also power motivation to transcend the insult and prove the offender wrong: 28 years later, on the way to the rostrum to deliver my professorial inaugural lecture I remember thinking (along with concentrating on not tripping over) 'how I wish Booth was here now'. You see, it stays with you, all that emotion burning as brightly as the original.

That's my point: we are said to view the past with rose-tinted spectacles, remembering the good things and luxuriating in the warm bath of nostalgia. In the same way, at the other end of experience, Freud had us believe that we repress our memories of the bad things. However, in reality, the recollection of earlier embarrassment and humiliation can be so painfully lucid that we actually physically experience the emotion all over again, in action replay. It can be almost HD in the clarity of image. So much for The Good Old Days.

The same applies equally to the most corrosive of emotions, jealousy. I have only experienced serious jealousy twice, very briefly. Both involved threat to a relationship, by the appearance of a rival or the reappearance of a former boyfriend. The former came from a girl-friend proving to be more generous with herself than I had been led to believe, though it was a sin of omission rather than lying: she was already involved with another man when she got involved with me. In the other case I was climbing the walls for a weekend while my 'betrothed' enjoyed some kind of reunion with a visiting former lover. Not even Tottenham Hotspur could distract me from this obsession for the duration of that very long weekend. Speculation was rife...... It was also, ultimately, a kind of immunisation process: it was so unpleasant that I vowed never to let anyone do this to me ever again, an ambition which largely succeeded.

What do humiliation and jealousy have in common, which could explain the potency of recall? Maybe it is that they constitute lethal threats to the self-esteem, self-concept, self-image, whatever you want to call it? That not only do they do actual violence to the person and their standing, in other people's eyes, or ruin a relationship, they strike at their core beliefs and feelings about themselves, so obsessive and potent and total are they. They play directly to our worst insecurities  and tweak them to the point that we doubt our ability to defend them from this onslaught. Time to re-write the maxim:  'sticks and stones may break my bones, but they can get fixed in A&E: the embers of humiliation and jealousy can glow for a lifetime, and fan to flame on demand'.

SUPERMARKET STATUS-SEEKING & SNOBBERY

There is a pecking-order in the supermarkets, a hierarchy of social class image. I freely admit I am an inverted snob. I do not like it when people display real snobbery and status-striving when they disparage my choice of supermarket. "Oh, I never shop there, they don't have the kinds of things I like, or the range, and I don't think their food's so fresh as Sainsbury's"  Cojones!

Rough translation:

'I've only been there once, couldn't find what I wanted, thought it all looked a bit cheap and basic, and found myself queueing with some men who'd come straight off a building site, and some black people who got a bit cross with me when I took a long time at the checkout". 

Sainsbury's customers are apt to say things like this, as though their store is vastly superior, inclusive,  a security blanket of middle-class culture, where 'people like us' do their shopping, and enjoy good taste in all things, not just food. It's a badge, a kite-mark of quality, a branding exercise which the hapless customer seems unable to recognise as such, and happily wears the badge as though it were an index of their own good taste. How infuriating it must have been when Waitrose edged into the market with a similar but superior 'quality with class' strategy. What a dilemma? Can one afford to transcend the Sainsbury smugness syndrome, and trade up? Probably.  After all, we could get some spare, different number plates for the 4x4, go to the new super cheap upstarts, Aldi and Lidl for the basic branded goods, and spend the money saved in Waitrose on little luxuries like Auvergne truffles or decent wine. Plus we'd get some Waitrose carrier bags to use for other things - you know, the ordinary plastic ones - no 'bags for life' unless they've got a bloody big logo on them!

Let's be clear and suspend our prejudices which have little basis in fact: most supermarkets use the same or similar suppliers. Branded goods only vary in price, not quality. Most 'own-brand' goods are not made in Mr. Morrison's own kitchens, they are re-branded products of the same major suppliers. Range of goods is variable but will roughly correlate with size of store. Not to your taste  in terms of supermarket brand image or clientele? Here's a tip: buy a packet of long carpet tacks at B&Q; scatter liberally in the road outside your house. Call in an order to Fortnum and Mason, to be delivered. When it arrives, set off car alarm. All the neighbours will see where you shop while the AA comes to mend the punctures. Job done.

We must never confuse elegance with snobbery. Yves Saint Laurent

Laughter would be bereaved if snobbery died. Peter Ustinov

It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money. Albert Camus

Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging. Alexander Theroux

For me,  instrumental virtuosity, melody and harmony come before rhythm and beat. Here are some examples, the final one perhaps combining all of those things, the prime 'instruments' being the voices. Please swoon if you feel inclined to.





Now, looking back over many decades of guitar players, I don't think I'ever heard anyone play as fast or intricately as that. He's remarkable. Having said that, I think he over-elaborates to the point where we lose track of a wonderful melody. So 10 out of 10 for pure technique and finger fireworks, but....











And as an encore, a new feature:

In which some unusual one-off combinations are featured starting with 3 generations of musicians on one stage: Chet Atkins (one of the greatest guitarists of all time) Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits (whose composition, Why worry, they are performing, and who can play a bit, himself :-)) and the Everly Bros, who may have eaten a few doughnuts since the picture above, but can still harmonise anyone off the stage. Enjoy.

Introducing my cousin: Mark was a freelance journalist in Portugal
for a number of years, writing for the newspapers and magazines on the Algarve, often interviewing well-known people who lived or holidayed there.  Mark now DJs as a volunteer, for the patients in the world-famous Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge.  In his writing there is coverage of a remarkable variety of celebrities from Bjorn Borg to Clive Dunn (of Dad's Army) to Kinky Friedman ('New York's only Texan-Jewish Cowboy') and three England football Captains. Mark is a movie, music and football fan and has written about all three. We start with his piece on Wilko Johnson, one of that coterie of rock musicians who have not had a major superstar public profile but enjoy a cult status amongst those in the know, and the unqualified admiration of many fellow-musicians in the business. Wilko played with Dr. Feelgood, Ian Dury and The Blockheads, and more recently recorded a great album with Roger Daltrey; and you may also  recognise him from his acting role in Game of Thrones. But it's his health which has provided a remarkable story......

Dressed all in black, clutching his prized black and red Fender Telecaster guitar, Wilko Johnson strides across the forecourt of Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Earlier, in 2013, Canvey Island’s most famous musical son announced he been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and given just 10 months to live.

Stoically. Johnson embarked on a sold-out ‘farewell’ tour with trusted musical sidekicks Norman Watt Roy (bass) and Dylan Howe (drums) but it was whilst playing Oxfordshire’s Cornbury Festival that Wilko was approached by a fan, Dr Charlie Chan. Chan referred the seasoned musician to Addenbrooke’s Hospital and oncologist Dr. Emanuel Huguet, a specialist in pancreatic cancer. Dr Huguet informed Johnson that as the form of cancer he’d contracted was non-aggressive it was operable. This though came with a caveat: there was no more than a mere 15% chance of surviving the lengthy, involved surgery.

On April 30, 2014 Dr Huguet’s skilled team of surgeons performed an 11 hour operation, successfully removing an neuroendocrine tumour from Wilko Johnson’s pancreas. Also extracted were the pancreas itself, spleen and part of the stomach and intestines. Six months later, in October 2014, Wilko was given the all clear from cancer, about a year after he was originally supposed to have died.

‘What Addenbrookes did was an incredible thing’ writes Johnson. ‘I have very pleasant memories of a dedicated staff. I admire them so much, I mean they saved my life. Everyone working there is a hero to me: consultants, nurses, cleaners everyone’.

The 68 year-old looks back on the whole life-threatening, life-defining experience with humour, with literary reference and great powers of description (a particularly bookish rock’n’ roller Wilko gained a BA in English Language and Literature from Newcastle University during the 60s):' There’s nothing like being told you’re dying to make you feel alive. I felt a surge, an energy. I went outside and the grass took on an extra shade of green. I saw the colour, the real beauty of the trees and the nature around me'. 

Johnson jokes  that before the tumour (the size of a baby) was removed  he would rest his guitar on it. ‘On the day of the operation I can’t remember leaving my hotel' (having now walked back to the very theatre where it all took place); 'arriving in the operating theatre for the operation was like something out of Kafka novel’. Dr Huguet adds that 'Wilko was a brave stoical patient who didn’t have an easy time but handled all the experiences well. He listened to everything. He made it as easy as possible for us. He is a loveable character with an incisive sense of humour'. 

Today on a sunny afternoon in Cambridge Wilko Johnson pronounces himself as fit as a fiddle. He is a survivor in every sense. Let's leave him now, not as a current star in a TV hit, but talking to a small audience in a Hertfordshire bookshop, passing on his craft and  modestly attributing it to someone else entirely (Mick Green):