Alistair Darling

Darling was always going to be Chancellor in a Brown government and so it has proved. I've had my eye on him since Labour first came to power - I clearly remember a programme (I can't remember which channel it was on) in the summer of 1997 which consisted of a cinema-verite -style look at the Treasury as it began establishing itself. Darling was a junior Treasury minister - someone said 'We can't do that', and Darling replied 'We're the government - we can do whatever we want.' It may have been a rush of blood to his head caused by the excitement of coming to power, but it stayed with me.
There was a piece in The Times yesterday on Darling - what a nice, unassuming person he was, how unlike Blair, humble and modest etc.etc. We shall see....power does things to people. Another politician to watch, along with Miliband, though Gordon will hold on to the reins very tightly.

David Miliband (3)

It's time to turn my attention to young Mr Miliband again on the occasion of his appointment as Foreign Secretary. I knew it wouldn't be long before he'd get something really important, and Brown gave him his reward for not standing against him. And it appears that Miliband made absolutely the right decision not to stand - he would have been dead in the water by now if he had as he would undoubtedly have lost. Now he's got a chance to shine - Foreign Secretary isn't the graveyard for ambition that Home Secretary almost invariably turns out to be. He won't have an easy ride - Iraq, the ever-expanding EU, the thorny question of our relationship with the US, all are potential banana-skins, but he's made all the right noises so far. Distancing himself from the previous regime for a start, and sounding humble and non-belligerent. Anyway we shall see. His blog's been suspended for the moment and I wonder if it'll come back to life - I would think it'll be difficult for him to muse in public in the same way when he's having to deal with matters of dealing with international security, it's not the same as recycling and climate change. I shall continue to watch his progress with interest - he hasn't disappointed me yet. He displays a wide-eyed innocence in public but underneath I believe there's calculation and steely intelligence. But I'm prepared to be proved wrong.

Blair's farewell

So Blair has gone - I've seen snippets of his last day, Prime Minister's Questions, then his departure from Downing Street with Cherie to see the Queen. Now Gordon Brown is on the radio giving his first speech. Somehow it feels momentous, more than I'd expected. Things really are radically different now from 1997. I remember how optimistic we all were, the euphoria. It really did seem as if a dark cloud had lifted. For those of us who brought up children during the Thatcher years it had been a punishing time.
Whatever one thinks of Blair, and I have to say my feelings are very, very mixed, he is an extraordinary performer, and that's the key - performer. He knew how to do that more than anything, and Brown will be completely different. I'm deeply conflicted in my opinions of Brown - I don't trust him an inch, but appreciate what he's done, for pensioners for example. My mother is vastly better off than she was under the Tories, when she received a pittance. Tax credits have helped people enormously, but the way it's been developed and administered has been a fiasco. It seems that Brown just gave the orders and left it to a bunch of management consultants to devise the structure. It works well for people with steady jobs, whose income doesn't fluctuate, or for people who live on benefit, but for people with chaotic lives, or the self-employed, or for those who major changes in their circumstances, it works very badly.
Anyway, we shall see. He isn't going to be able to predict events to the same extent, so it'll be interesting to see how he responds to things he can't control. This government has been the first one that's been run by people of my generation and I can't say they've made an especially good job of it. Not better than previous generations anyway. Spin and soundbites, while they existed under the previous government, really took off under this one. The enormously enjoyable BBC-4 comedy, The Thick of It had it nailed.
I'm wondering how different things are going to be; Brown has rising interest rates, what is now becoming a crisis in housing, Iraq, and climate change to contend with. I can't say I'm going to miss Blair - it's definitely time for him to go, but I have a funny feeling the Brown era may not turn out to be straightforward. And of course htere's always the unpredictable; I always keep in mind Harold Macmillan's reply when asked which factors had the greatest impact on his political life; 'events, dear boy, events'.

London

I've just had a great day in London - once again, I've felt totally energised, by the traffic, noise and helter-skelter hurly-burly. I'm sure I could never live there, but it's like a fix, a rush of blood and I never fail to come back feeling regenerated.
I went up on the train, the 10.00 from platform 15 at Bristol's Temple Meads. Platform 15 is at the far end and there's little trace of Brunellian grandeur. It has a few 21st century features, but also some signs which look definitely 1950s. It's a cramped, narrow platform; today it was raining and water poured on to it from a broken piece of guttering. The view from the platform is of derelict 1960s office blocks with every window broken. Not only was it wet, but also cold. The mood was lightened by several skimpily and extravagently dressed girls on their way to Ladies' Day at Royal Ascot who were cheerily oblivious to the weather. It's midsummer, and Glastonbury weekend is coming up, always a cue for rough weather in these parts.
The black clouds thinned out as we approached the South-East and there were shafts of sunlight breaking through as we approached London - and I had a trip on the Tube to look forward to! It was an unusual trip - it was only two stops on the Circle Line, the line closest to the surface, so plenty of daylight, and I counted four lively conversations taking place around me. Maybe it was because it was late morning, and summer, so the passengers weren't typical - visitors to London (like me), unused to normal Tube introversion.
I took a taxi back to Victoria coach station which was interesting - the taxi driver took me through various short cuts around Mayfair and Grosvenor Square. It's unbelievably rich round there - there are the Embassies, of course, but plenty of very rich people obviously live round there as well. The wealth in that part of London is extraordinary, yet it's only in recent years that it's become so rich. Thirty or forty years ago you could buy a flat or house in a run-down part of London, Notting Hill, say, for very little. If you've hung on to your property you'll be enormously wealthy while staying a pretty humble person.
Yet around the corner from these impossibly wealthy properties are blocks of council flats - very unlike French cities where blocks of flats circle the urban conurbations far away from the centre - here the poor live cheek by jowl with the rich.
Victoria was, as usual, hectic. So many people use the coach now as trains are so expensive. The coach was packed as it always is these days, but for £6 all the way to Bristol, who's complaining?
So, a fascinating and enlivening day out - it did me good.

Burt Lancaster

I've just watched The Birdman of Alcatraz which was on BBC-4 this evening. I'd never seen it before though I'd heard of it, and knew a little about the story. I visited Alcatraz 8 years ago on while spending a couple of weeks in San Francisco with my brother-in-law and his family and found it an extraordinarily atmospheric place, impregnated with the almost tangible presence of the long-departed inmates, and suffused with an overwhelming melancholy.

Actually, Alcatraz is an almost incidental presence in the film and only appears about two-thirds of the way through, when Stroud (the prisoner and Birdman) is sent there after having spent over 20 years in another penitentiary which was where he began and developed his relationship with birds. Burt Lancaster's performance dominates the film and I was reminded what an wonderful actor he was, one of the greatest. There's always a feeling of danger when he's on screen - you're never quite sure what he's going to say or do next, and in this film he's in nearly every scene so it's impossible to take your eyes off the screen for a moment. I don't know much about Stroud's life and have no idea how accurate Lancaster's portrayal was, but he plays him as a man who found a way to live within the constraints of prison life and learned to make the most of his circumstances. So it's very much a life-affirming film, typical of the old Hollywood studio style and none the worse for that. It's about two and a half hours long and, although I was feeling a bit tired I found I didn't lose concentration for a moment. Lancaster's enthralling presence held it all together and I can't think at the moment of a present day actor who is capable of the same magnetism. I'll see if I can come up with a name - there must be someone. There have certainly been some great individual performances in recent years but actors like Lancaster, and Kirk Douglas, did it over and over again.

music

Music's always played a big part in my life and my earliest memory is listening to the radio. 2-Way Family Favourites and Housewives' Choice, which my mother listened to every week provided part of the soundtrack of my childhood, introducing me to, among much else, Nellie the Elephant, The Laughing Policeman and Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, always played as the grand finale. Then, in 1962, I can't remember what prompted me to turn the radio on at 4.00 one Sunday afternoon, but I know that I heard Pick of the Pops with Alan Freeman for the first time around then. I'd been aware of Saturday Club in the background of busy Saturday mornings, but not really listened to it; on Sunday afternoons, though, my parents tended to fall asleep over the papers after Sunday lunch, so I had the radio to myself.
I looked at a list of the top twenty number one singles for 1962 the other day and was overwhelmed with memories; I could remember almost every line of every song. I know that memories of things experienced when young go very deep and stay there, certainly these songs, the only pop music I listened to then are virtually imprinted into my DNA. The first Number One I remember ever hearing was Frank Ifield's I Remember You and I can recall every note, every yodel. Other singers I remember well from that time were Roy Orbison, Del Shannon and Neil Sedaka and their songs were always in the charts.
Anyway, that was it; I discovered Radio Luxembourg soon after, and then of course, the tidal wave of the Beatles crashed on to the scene, drowning everything. Nothing would ever be the same again. We had fierce debates at school over who was the best Beatle, and then, when the Rolling Stones appeared, the class was divided into camps, Stones versus Beatles, and we spent our breaktimes arguing passionately. When With the Beatles was released, I remember going round to a friend's house on a dark December afternoon to hear it for the first time as her older sister had just bought it, and we sat round the dansette record player on the floor, listening to it in silence, over and over again. I still know every line, every note, of every song, by heart and I suppose most people of my generation do.
The next major development was pirate radio which opened up our musical horizons further and we used to spend our breaktimes talking endlesslyabout the songs and DJ's we'd heard on Radion London. I don't think our teachers had the faintest idea that our minds, our whole beings, were being gradually colonised by music. I can only speak for myself, but I was totally obsessed with music, with clothes and boys coming second (although they were important - I was a teenager after all). I'd started going out to a club where Motown and soul held centre stage - my schoolfriends and I were mods, or thought we were, and danced around our handbags to Sam and Dave and the Temptations, among many others.
Bob Dylan, though, was always there, and, although the only music of his I knew were his hits, Tambourine Man and Blowing in the Wind, I knew that he was special. I bought a book of his songs complete with music, and, as I was learning the piano at the time, I doggedly laboured over Chimes of Freedom and many other early songs - I hadn't got a clue how they should sound as I'd never heard them, but they moved me deeply and I played them (very badly) over and over again. Then gradually his songs could be heard on the radio more often, and Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde became part of the soundtrack of my life.
My horizons opened up further as I discovered bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Doors. America music of the hippy era was what me and my friends were listening to now and soul became deeply unfashionable and a bit of a joke. West Coast music was now of central importance and we began to think that music had the potential to change society. Almost nothing else mattered. But when punk and new-wave hit the country in the mid-Seventies I found that it was more to my liking; the Clash, Talking Heads, Television etc. and I've realised that this is the music I enjoy the most. I've always retained a love of the short, snappy pop songs that I grew up with in the early Sixties and have returned to them.
I'm pretty eclectic in my musical taste, all the same, and I'm listening to Patti Smith and Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers a lot at the moment, but am also enjoying Rufus Wainwright and Richard Hawley, about as different as it's possible to be. There's classical music as well, of course, but that's another story......

1982

The commemorations of the 25th anniversary of the Falklands invasion have sparked off some strong memories for me. My father died in the middle of the conflict - he'd been suffering poor health for several years but I've often wondered whether seeing ships full of sailors setting off, followed by the scenes of ships under fire and sinking might have been too much for him. He was a sailor during the war and was under fire many times. He was from a humble background yet travelled to places I can only dream about, Africa, the Far East, the Mediterranean, even Virginia in the US. He returned safely, but with his hearing permanently damaged by heavy gunfire. He was from a generation who never talked about their experiences - all they wanted to do after the war was try and return to normality as soon as possible, and as most of the servicemen and women were only in their twenties, what they wanted to do was get married, settle down, earn a living and start a family. As the economic situation improved, their whole focus was on the future. They had grown up in the Depression and as austerity began to fade and rationing eased, the war soon began to be something that belonged to the past. One of my most vivid memories of my father is Sunday lunch. We would sit round the table eating roast beef, or lamb, or pork, with all the trimmings, including vegetables he had grown himself on his allotment, and he'd say, with a sigh of deep pride and satisfaction, 'We're living off the fat of the land'. His own father had died in the 1920s, so he grew up in poverty, his mother struggling alone to bring up her children with no welfare benefits. He left school at 14 and was faced with a very uncertain future - life was very much hand to mouth, so sometimes he could hardly believe his good fortune. He returned from the war to full employment, managed to buy a house and saw his children go to grammar schools, so, for his generation, the war was a job well done, and who could disagree? They fought for a better life than the one they'd grown up with and achieved it. That was why the Labour government was voted in so resoundingly in 1945; memories of the 1930s were too vivid and the people felt they had fought hard, saved the country, and deserved better.
Memories of what they endured were, therefore, buried very deep. I don't know for sure, but I wonder whether the sight of young men setting off in ships to battle was too much for his health. I'll never know, but I see the Falklands commemorations as a memorial, not only to those who fought down there, but to my father and all the other WWII veterans who came home, scarred and ravaged, but full of hope for a better life.

the Tube

I've been thinking quite a lot about the Tube (the London Underground) recently, sparked off by BBC-4's recent 'Tube Night', a whole evening of programmes devoted to it. Although I've never lived in London, it's always been a part of my life. My parents took me there regularly for day trips from when I was quite small, as we didn't live too far away from London. There were school trips as well; I remeber visiting the Tower of London and the Victory. I can't remember when I first went on my own, but I think it was probably in my early teens (it was the 1960s, and you could do that kind of thing then), and I can definitely remember staying in London with a school friend for a few days with some friends of my parents, just after finishing O-Levels, and buying a copy of Sergeant Pepper in Harrods - it had just been released.
Anyway, the Tube's something with which I've always been familiar and I've never felt intimidated or threatened by it; on the contrary, I've always felt a sense of exhilaration every time I get on the escalator and find myself being propelled down into the bowels of the earth. A lady on the BBC programme was taken down to a Tube station for the first time since she was a child. She had been part of the army of Tube-dwellers escaping from German air-raids during the last war so the Tube held very strong memories for her. She gazed around her in wonder, talking about the sense of utter safety and reassurance that overwhelmed her. Her feelings as a child had been so powerful that they had remained with her; they'd been submerged but reactivated after many years by going underground. Her face was a picture, suffused with happiness. I understood - I think it was the fact that I had visited the Tube several times as a child means that the experience is very deeply rooted and intense, as was obviously the case with this lady. Of course, it's also the fact that many people feel a sense of warmth going down there, something about being underground, although I'm sure that many feel the opposite - overcome by claustrophobia.
There's a great blog (it's listed as one of my links) called Going Underground, which chronicles everyday life on the Tube in words and pictures - it's great and I look at it regularly. Truly all human life is there - that's another reason why I love it.
I can't deny there's a thrill in being so far underground - it's another world and people do behave in a particular way. The BBC programme focused on this - the way everyone behaves as if they're in a bubble even while they're in close contact with multitudes. It's fascinating - conversation and interaction simply does not happen.
Another programme on Tube Night was a documentary first broadcast in the 1980s, The Heart of the Angel, a day in the life of the Angel tube station, admittedly one of the worst stations and now unrecognisable as it's been smartly refurbished. The pre-Livingstone Tube was a very different place. The Angel had no escalators and its lifts regularly broke down. The film showed elderly people coming off the tube forced to stagger up the Angel's steep stairs. The staff's sense of grim gallows humour kept them going, but the level of their desperation, cynicism, resignation and endurance was remarkable. I wondered where they are now - most of them probably dead or retired, there's certainly no-one resembling them on tube stations now and I'm sure ticket machines have replaced most of them anyway.

Anyway, I'm off to London next week and shall enjoy my brief trip on the Tube - Paddington to Baker Street, Jubilee Line.

Snow Falling on Cedars

I finished Snow Falling on Cedars last night, staying up until midnight to read the last few pages. It's a remarkable book that will stay with me for a long time. I found it very hard to get into it at first and had to make a real effort to stick with it, but was rewarded as it found its way under my skin as all the best books do.
Its subject is something I knew nothing about, the Japanese communities who arrived in America at the beginning of the 20th century, and their fate when war broke out. I had no idea that many Japanese fought in the US army during World War Two. So there was much to learn about in the book, something I always enjoy.
I made a list as I went along of the issues on which the narrative touched: love, loss, the passage of time, parenthood, belief, unbelief, grief, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, different cultures colliding, immigration, war and peace. The weather and its impact on our thoughts and actions is a constant thread running through the book, used throughout a a metaphor. As a snowstorm engulfs the community, it freezes, not only the pipes and road, but the souls of the three central characters, Ishmael, Kabuo and Hatsoe. Ishmael and Hatsuo had an secret relationship as children and teenagers, and it is the memory of this that haunts Ishmael after he returns from the war, in which he lost an arm. Memory, and the tricks it plays on us, is a major theme.
Their lives have been blighted by war, and it's as if their souls have been frozen over. At the end the reader becomes immersed in Ishmael's thought processes, almost becoming him as he ponders the choices he has to make. We will him to make the right one, but the possibility of him making the wrong one is left open right up to the end.
I did think the end was a little rushed and the book hurtled towards its conclusion in the last few pages. But, a fine book nevertheless, one that will live in the memory.

This is England

I went to see This is England last night - very good indeed. Very much a British film; set in the mid-1980s it began with lots of footage of the Royal Wedding, Roland Rat, the miners' strike and the Falklands War, setting the scene. It was set in an unspecified town, but seemed to be somewhere in the Midlands. It had the ultra-lucid hyper-reality of memory, and was indeed based on director Shane Meadows' own experiences as a skinhead. This personal touch gives the film an intensity and immediacy missing from other social-realist films
There were some excellent performances and Combo, who has come out of prison a bigoted neo-Nazi, is truly terrifying. Thomas Turgoose, the boy who plays Shaun is a real find, and never appears to be putting on a performance. I've never had any contact with skinhead culture so I've no idea how authentic the film was, but that doesn't matter. It's whether a film works dramatically or not that's important, and on the whole, this did. The end was nicely open-ended, as you have no idea what Shaun's next step is going to be after he leaves Combo's gang - has the violence he's witnessed and then rejected had a lasting impact? Will he turn into a film director like Meadows, or end up in jail - the film leaves it open by finishing on Shaun's blank gaze into the camera.
The music was fantastic, with tracks from Toots and the Maytals and the Upsetters which I'd never heard. The whole film, although a little rough around the edges, was evidence of a major talent in the making, and I'm glad I saw it on the big screen