#17 A CAREER IN BROADCASTING

…the good seed on the land. Following the parable, I have been scattering the (grass) seed on stony ground,  and it turns out that just walking up and down, scattering seed by hand in a wide arc is very satisfying. When the careers master said that I might have a future in broadcasting he probably meant this, rather than the BBC. However, these pebbles are encased in the most dense, adhesive, cohesive, clinging, quicksand-like clay I’ve ever seen. And it seems to go to unfathomable depths. A local amateur historian told me why. Beyond the bottom of the garden is a Victorian railway cutting which scythed through the northern part of Willesden, then open country, yet to be blighted by the unimaginable horrors of Neasden. Being Victorians they were a bit short of JCBs, and skip-lorries to carry the displaced clay away, so they dumped it in my garden (to be). In 1911, along came the builders (as did, my father, and the Titanic, briefly) to build my house. By then the clay was lightly dusted with a layer of topsoil from all the surrounding vegetation, so they probably just chucked down a few handfuls of grass seed and went off for a pint of porter. Wind the tape on, to three weeks ago, and I have decided to give the ‘lawn’ its first mow of the year. Except that over the winter it has been colonised by an army of daisies and dandelions. A sprinkling of daisies on a lawn can look very nice, but three quarters of the surface area is a sprinkling too far. I don’t object to dandelions either: in their place, but that place is in the hooch-like dandelion and burdock wine my distant rural relatives used to brew in Wiltshire. Legend has it that they used to pour it over their corn flakes, too.

I digress. The invasion was so sudden and complete that it seemed entirely possible that they would spread indoors and strangle us in our beds, so I was determined to expel this expeditionary force and dig up every single plant, condemning myself to four days of digging, bending, lifting, sifting, and filling up heavy duty plastic rubble sacks: five of them, full to the brim and immovable because of the earth which had come along for the ride. It was this digging which exposed the clay, and the reason for the garden having been so unproductive over the 10 years I’ve been there. Not that I’ve been the most assiduous or ambitious Gardener. We tried to cultivate a vegetable patch one year, planting 5 or 6 different kinds in a decent-sized plot. The net yield was twenty potatoes. Everything else died, likely of malnutrition.

At one point I hit a very hard layer of stone seemingly set in some kind of rough concrete. I attacked it with an SDS drill to try and break it up, but was disturbed to find that the drill bit broke through something into 'fresh air.' What could it be? A chamber underground? Treasure trove that would finally buy me the Aston Martin? More likely the roof of an air-raid shelter? Quite plausible. Then the possibility that it might contain people occurred to me. This put a bit of a damper on my curiosity, because they were unlikely to be alive, 70 years on, and it would be gruesome. Maybe there was someone who’d kept themselves alive on grubs and stuff, and who didn’t know the War was over, like that Japanese soldier they found in the jungle? Or maybe – and here I could really hear the tabloid cash registers ringing – maybe I had stumbled on the last resting place of Lord Lucan, who had ridden there on Shergar?

I did have a proper gardening period: for 25 years we rented a cottage in Shropshire (see FESS, p. 147) which had an enclosed garden (dry stone walled) and the most extraordinary soil I’ve ever seen: rich, dark, moist, crumbly soil, in which you could grow anything. Digging was a pleasure, not a pain. I learnt quite a bit about gardening, and really got into it, something which I never would have anticipated as a younger person. Later I had a flat in Finsbury Park with a big terrace. I bought a lemon tree for it, and it looked quite nice but the real pleasure it gave me was that every time someone asked me what it was, I could  say "a lemon tree, my dear Watson". It's pathetic really, but I'm sure it comes as no surprise. I even picked up some Garden Latin, so that now I can tell you that despite the clay of rural Willesden, the azalea and ceanothus are showing off as usual (see below) the hebe has survived my chainsaw massacre (I get confused between pruning and felling) and thankfully, the chlamydia seems to be dying back. But thanks to Willesden’s near-tropical biosphere, the Clementine tree has produced its usual spectacular crop...

I’ve lived in NW London for 17 years and yet, I’m ashamed to admit, I’ve never visited the Temple until this week. It’s the same old problem: London is so overstocked with things to do, that the permanent attractions are taken for granted and not prioritised, set aside for when this or that transient experience is no longer available (which is never), and so postponed indefinitely.

I expected something rather beautiful, but what I found was something exquisite. Mere superlatives do not get close to describing this experience and they devalue through repetition. The hand-carved wood and sculpted marble bespeak almost unimaginable levels of virtuosity, devotion, perseverance and commitment through literally millions of man-hours of dedicated work. Standing looking at a marble ceiling, so intricate that it was hard to imagine it being conceived at the level of a plan, let alone executed in three dimension, by chipping it out of marble. The very finest art and craft and the sheer enormity of the surface area carved or chiselled with intricate design is breath-taking, literally. I felt overwhelmed, almost as though I needed to vent emotion through tears. I think perhaps it takes the experience of working with wood, however crudely, to fully appreciate the sheer complicated brilliance of the carving skills, to have the pronounced reaction that I did.

The building is a feast of visual delights, to be enjoyed in the quiet, peaceful and contemplative atmosphere that the builders and the community have created in this unlikely, grubby location. Please treat yourself to this experience, it is almost unique. Ironically, a few hundred metres away from the Mandir is another temple, the IKEA shrine to bargain consumerism. What could be more of a contrast, the spiritual and the material divided only by the North Circular road. By their temples shall ye know them.

                                                    JAMIE VARDY        OLD MAN STEPTOE

                                                    

#16 SWEET LITTLE SIXTEEN

NINETEEN SIXTY-TWO

Sweet little sixteen: not tall, not through the spotty period, not in possession of a girl-friend but aching to have one, and not happy. Not least because I had just started A-level sciences, in order to be a doctor, help humanity and have a nice car, only to find myself bored out of my skull. The prospect of trying to get grades in these subjects good enough to get to university and change direction was deeply depressing.

Then came October, bringing two seismic game-changers. On the 5^th of October 1962 the Beatles released “Love me do”. It only went to number 17 in the charts but everybody sensed that something special had happened. There was no Beatlemania at first, just a sense of the new, an excitement, a rumbling which foretold an explosion, like the lightning anticipating a thunderclap. One afternoon, after school, I was ironing some shirts in the morning room while my mother was cooking close by. “Love me do” came on the radio, and I stepped back from the ironing board to try a quick burst of The Twist, which I’d just mastered in my bedroom. My mother laughed, with an edge of alarm and incomprehension: “Don’t be so silly, you look ridiculous!” Suddenly I realised that I didn’t mind her scorn, in fact relished it: it was the first glimmer of light from an opening door: independence and the rejection of parental authority.

When you see the first shots of The Beatles it’s striking how shorttheir hair was. But it was still shocking to the older generation, let alone their later incarnation. Very soon they became the four mop-tops, the loveable, cheeky, Scouse rascals who ran rings round the traditional TV presenters and music journalists, and captured my cohort as fans – all around the world. The music was totally original, yet of the moment, passed the old grey whistle test, melodic, rocking, and, remarkably, struck a chord that resonated across all the barriers of age, race and nationality, everywhere. Beatlemania simply became the most immense show-business                                                               phenomenon ever.

They might easily have had a very short career: 23 days precisely. Because from October 16 to 28 the US and the USSR were engaged in a terrifying bout of arms-wrestling, a flirtation with all-out nuclear war, which seemed a very real possibility, during the Cuba Crisis. The Cuban government had allowed the Soviet Union to build missile-launching sites on their territory 90 miles from the US mainland. Every sizeable city in America could be destroyed, at will. Ships carrying the missiles from Russia were steaming for Cuba. The US imposed a blockade. There was stalemate and 

paralysis, and the world held its breath, looking on in horror and

disbelief as this first nose-to-nose confrontation between Kennedy and Khruschev, representing the super powers, played out in slo-mo. People bought tinned food; some constructed ludicrously inadequate shelters; the Government’s Civil Defence advice (e.g.’stick brown paper on all your windows’) was exposed for the sham that it was: there is no defence against nuclear weapons. At the Eleventh Hour Khruschev had the courage to pull the ships back and a compromise was reached. Phew. Bit of a close thing, but no-one who lived it will forget how it felt: the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki that we had truly apprehended the holocaust of nuclear war – because we had to.

Not long afterwards I joined CND and met FA there: it was my first BOGOF, a political identity and a girlfriend. We lived happily ever after, though not together. Bob Dylan was the first chronicler of the nuclear age at this time. He wrote Talkin’ World War III Blues, a wry, surrealist skit, a dream about being a survivor in the post-nuclear desert: “you can be in my dream if I can be in yours” was the line that stuck in my mind.

BRUVVAFROMANNUVAMUVVA

You know that feeling when you are looking at someone, and there is a bell ringing: they look like someone or something else, but you can’t quite put your finger on it? I get that when I look at Donald Trump. The improbable hair, the eyes, the contorted mouth, the pink/orange skin that is somehow over-inflated – that’s it, he looks like a blow-up sex-doll...

 Inflatable sex doll                                                                                                              Donald Trump

SIXTEEN: licence to wed

I think people can still get married at sixteen, if they have parental consent. Given that the costs of marriage and divorce are phenomenally high in both financial and emotional terms, this seems like a potential car-crash for everyone concerned. It would be interesting to know what the average longevity for these marriages is, compared to 'adult' marriages, over 40% of which now end in divorce.  My money is on a shorter span and higher proportion. How can youths of 16 conceivably have had enough experience of relationships to make an informed choice of partner, or even know their own needs and temperament? The limit was made law in the days before living together had become widely accepted. A rational policy would be to require potential partners to live together for a 2 year period, until 18, in rented accommodation and without starting a family, after which they would be fee to do whatever they wish, but without the complications of property ownership and children, saving a lot of grief if they split up.

       DONALD TRUMP:   DEMOCRAT DOUBLE AGENT?

QUOTE/UNQUOTE

Nikita Khruschev on the Cuban Missile Crisis:

They talk about who won and who lost. Human reason won. Mankind won.

On the possibility of the Soviet Union rejecting communism (1955):

Those who wait for that must wait until a shrimp learns to whistle.

John F. Kennedy:

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.


Too often we... enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.