My fifth most popular blog

In what we now all seem to call 'the run-up' to Christmas (one thinks of 'Typhoon' Tyson thundering along the pitch at Old Trafford) I've decided, for the next five days, to re-publlsh my top five most popular blogs (or at least the ones that have attracted the largest readership). To get this festive count-down under way here's my fifth most popular blog. It appeared a few weeks before the publication of Harry Parker's superb debut novel, published early in 2016 by Faber. It's followed by  brief postscript.

I note with a jolt that this blog originally appeared a year ago this week. It was good to see the rapturous critical reaction to the book's appearance but for some reason Anatomy of a Soldier hasn't appeared on any 'Novels of 2016' list (apart from mine).

Monday, 21 December 2015

Anatomy of a Soldier

I first became aware of the author Harry Parker when he featured in an evening of readings by Faber authors earlier this year. The star turn that night was Edna O'Brien (the only human being I've ever seen who is literally dazzling), supported by Eimear McBride (reading from her forthcoming second novel The Lesser Bohemians, clearly delighted to be sharing the stage with her literary mentor). The line-up  also included Viv Albertine (late of The Slits and reading from her iPad) and a chap (whose name escaped me), a nephew of the critic I. A. Richards who had written a book about mountaineering. Harry Parker, first up, read from his unpublished novel Anatomy of a Soldier.

The Critics' Samurai Code is  unambiguous: books should never be reviewed before they are published, and reviews never circulated before they appear in print or online. Our leading literary organs generally abide by that and so do I, so what follows is not a review but a sort of drum-beating pre-view, and certainly not the first to appear. (I cleared permission with the author's agent before writing this blog). There's been a discernible buzz surrounding this book for some months now and for once the hyperbole is entirely justified because Anatomy of a Soldier is one of the most brilliant debut novels you're ever likely to read.

It's an unapologetically experimental work and a far cry from the Andy McNab school. The first-person narration (although the term itself is hardly the right description of what the author has achieved) comes from a series of inanimate objects: a rifle, some medical gauze, an army boot, a bag of fertilzer, a prosthetic limb and so on. Each object is imbued with a degree of consciousness and insight (although never quite amounting to self-consciousness) and each object delivers an eloquent, necessarily partial (in both senses) account of its role in an emerging catastrophe. I can't begin to tell you how incredibly impressive this is - the cumulative effect is harrowing, convincing and profoundly satisfying. Parker served in Iraq in 2007 and Afghanistan in 2009 and clearly knows what he's talking about and he understands the vital importance of a soldier's kit and of bantering camaraderie. He doesn't aestheticise the experience of war but renders it directly and with complete conviction in an arrestingly original way. It's hardly a just comparison but the last time I read an avant-garde account of conflict this powerful and persuasive it was Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

The central character, Captain Tom Barnes, is horribly injured by an explosive device in an unspecified country and Parker's novel explores in penetrating, clear-eyed detail this traumatic event and Barnes's subsequent treatment and rehabilitation. The fragments build up a lucid and coherent account while the narrative perspective shifts between Barnes, his fellow soldiers and the local insurgents. This is gripping and rewarding. It extends the range of the novel.

When I heard the author read a few pages that evening my immediate reaction (since amended) was that such ingenuity, however well executed, would be unlikely to sustain the reader's interest at novel length. The danger, I thought, was that the approach would sooner or later degenerate into a simple guessing game in which the reader, having identified (as it were) 'the mystery object', would be tempted to skip to the next section, and that while that might offer some ludic satisfaction it would not amount to a coherent fiction. I'm happy to admit I was quite wrong.

I received an advance copy a week later and having read it in (as they say) a single mesmerised sitting realised that what I'd heard at the Faber reading was representative but not typical (if you see what I mean). Anatomy of a Soldier is  potent, compassionate, visceral and necessary. It knocked the stuffing out of this reader and will certainly be one of the great works of fiction published in 2016. 

Anatomy of a Soldier will be published in the UK by Faber and Faber in 2016.

Postscript After writing this blog I started reading up on Thing Theory., a branch of critical theory that focuses on human-object interactions in literature and culture. (Adopts Village Explainer pose)

It borrows from Heidegger's distinction between objects and things, which posits that an object becomes a thing when it can no longer function according to the use to which it is commonly put. When an object breaks down or is misused, it sheds its socially encoded value and becomes present to us in new ways through the suspension of habit. The theory was largely created by Bill Brown, who edited a special issue of Critical Inquiry on it in 2001 and published a monograph on the subject entitled A Sense of Things.

As Brown writes in another essay, Thing Theory: 

We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the window gets filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relationship to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.

Harry Parker may or may not be aware of Thing Theory, but his wonderful novel seems to me to articulate many of its concerns. As William Carlos Williams said: "No ideas but in things".

Jacko, Prince and me

Michael Jackson and Prince were both black men and internationally-renowned performers. I am a white man, and a vanishingly obscure literary hack. But we have a lot more more in common than you might think

Michael Jackson was raised as a Jehovah's Witness. He died in 2009.

Prince (or the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince) became a Jehovah's Witness in middle age. He died in 2016. 

I don't like pop music, much. Or any music, much. But Michael Jackson and Prince are, or were, my brothers. Or rather I should say my Brothers, because like them I was a Jehovah's Witness. I had no choice in this as my parents joined what is known by its members simply as 'The Organisation' or (tellingly) 'The Truth' when I was 8 years old. 

The Jehovah's Witnesses (correctly known as The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, the world's most prolific publishing outfit) are an evangelical fundamentalist religious cult within which everything that is not forbidden is compulsory. It's hard to communicate how very strange the convictions held by its followers are to anyone outside the organisation, so I shan't begin to try. Most Witnesses are not bad people (although there are some very nasty types within the organisation who are occasionally brought to justice, usually for some form of extreme child abuse). But they are dupes.

Michael Jackson and me were raised to believe (although that's a weak word for the kind of zealot conviction we were expected to embrace) that the world would come to an end at some point late in 1975, when we would both be 16. Prince, who signed up later, may never have known this. (The Witnesses regularly give precise dates for the Apocalypse, based on measurements derived from the Great Pyramid, or something, and these pass quietly and without discussion or comment.)

I can't lift an image from the Walt Disney film Peter Pan for copyright reasons, but if you know the movie you may recall the moment when Peter arrives for the first time at the Darling family's house in Bloomsbury, and the uncanny moment when he crouches on the roof and is briefly lit from below, his expression momentarily diabolical.

My theory is that this particular image made such an impact on Michael Jackson that he would spend much of the rest of his life carving his features into a simulacrum of it - the huge eyes and grotesquely retroussé nose, the abundant floppy hair, the weirdly asexual or presexual look that became the Jackson trademark.

Why?

Because, I'd further theorise, he wanted to arrest his own development and, in so doing, stall the Witnesses' ghastly eschatological chronology. He wanted, in his simple way, not so much to turn back time but to stop it in its tracks. His paedophiliac tastes (and there can be no question that Jackson was a paedophile) were, it seems to me, an aspect of a more general rejection of maturity, and of the passage of time itself.

Witnesses are not interested in life, only in eternal life. Eternal life in a paradise on earth that will follow Armageddon, a point at which all worldly things will be swept away and only practising Witnesses will survive (or be resurrected). According to their magazine The Watchtower, the earthly paradise will look like this:

This may look to you like a kebab shop mural, or a North Korean calendar (the aesthetic priorities of any tyranny, religious or secular, can be remarkably similar). There are no buildings and there's no infrastructure, although there's plenty of fresh fruit, and wild animals are friendly and approachable. The lion shall lay down with the lamb (it says so in the Bible). Everyone is neatly dressed. Will there be ironing boards in this early paradise? Washing machines? How does the fruit get distributed? And who built that yacht? Is there a currency? On what system does the economy operate? Will money be magic? Where are the old people?

Here's the thing though - back in the 1970s, when I was growing up (and Michael Jackson was for good reasons of his own deciding not to grow up) the kind of images found in publications from the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania were more like this:

And like this:

Or this:

Theologically speaking they were weird. And more than weird - mad. Mad and ridiculous and wrong - an assault against taste, intelligence and reason. And they were not something to be challenged because zealot evangelists do not have anything as fragile as beliefs, they have only convictions. These are not hard won, or open to negotiation. They are self-evident truths, and ungainsayable. Ultimately a longing for eternal life is nothing more than a profound timor mortis - the fear of  oblivion. 

It's surprising that Prince - not a dullard - should have been suckered into something so lifeless and wrong.  It's even more surprising that a hip rocker such as David Thomas of the cult avant-garde band Pere Ubu (they meant something in the late 1970s; check out their debut album The Modern Dance) should also have been washed in the blood of the lamb. There are others - other Sisters, other Brothers.

Images © The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania

Intellectual humility

Apologies for a two-day hiatus - normal service will now be restored.

Earlier this year the Times Literary Supplement carried the  following advertisement:

____________________________________________

Intellectual Humility in Public Discourse

Request for Proposals and Fellowship Applications

With the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, and subject to a final grant agreement, the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute announces a funding proposal competition of $2 million dollars to support interdisciplinary research projects on intellectual humility and its role in promoting meaningful public discourse. [...]

Topical areas of focus include both the barriers that prevent people from engaging in open-minded, intellectually humble dialogue over culturally divisive issues and scalable models or other interventions that may be effective or ineffective in promoting more reason-based, intellectually humble dialogue.

________________________________________________________

I'd never heard of the Templeton Foundation. The phrase that snagged my attention, and perhaps yours too, was 'intellectually humble dialogue'. What did this mean? I started to dig around and looked first at the  Foundation website, where I found what is, I suppose, a mission statement: Here it is:

The John Templeton Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality. We support research on subjects ranging from complexity, evolution, and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will. We encourage civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians and between such experts and the public at large, for the purposes of dwfinitenal clarity and new insights.

Our vision is derived from the late Sir John Templeton's optimism about the possibility of acquiring “new spiritual information” and from his commitment to rigorous scientific research and related scholarship. The Foundation's motto, "How little we know, how eager to learn," exemplifies our support for open-minded inquiry and our hope for advancing human progress through breakthrough discoveries.

What are 'the Big Questions'? There's clearly a religious slant  to the Foundation's preferred lines of research - 'forgiveness, love and free will' are all Good Things, and I'm all for definitenal clarity.

The Foundation is very rich indeed, and reportedly hands out around $70 million each year in research grants and programs. in five core funding areas:

• Science and the big questions
• Character development
• Freedom and free enterprise
• Exceptional cognitive talent and genius
• Genetics

This is all fascinating, and you might like to ake a look at their funding priorities here, 

The Foundation also provides grants for several independently administered awards.,including the $100,000 Epiphany Prizes for ‘inspiring movies and TV’, Past winners include The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

As to its billionaire founder - ';a penny life will give you all the facts' as Auden said. These days it's Wikipedia.  He held British citizenship, lived in the Bahamas and was quite fantastically generous. The Wiki entry says that he "attributed much of his success to his ability to maintain an elevated mood, avoid anxiety and stay disciplined."

An example to us all, then. I don't suppose I'd ever be a recipient of the Foundation's munificence, although perhaps my sense of personal inadequacy is evidence of intellectual hunility?  I can be pretty good at elevated moods. , if that adds to my case. But I shan't hold my breath.

Finnegans Wake - the dust wrapper

Published on May 4th 1939 (a Thursday), this is one of 425 copies in a limited edition signed by the author (and you can expect to shell out £15-20,000 for a copy in this state, which is as near Fine as it gets).

What a lovely object this is. It has a dignified and monumental presence, like a 1930s power station. But - and it's troubled me for years - why is 'BY' thus capitalised? Why in the same size font? Why is it there at all? Wouldn't that nobly austere cover be even more noble, even more austere, without that unnecessary 'BY'?

Faber did the same thing many years later with Pincher Martin by William Golding, but quite reasonably, because the average punter might not know whether this was a book by Pincher Martin called William Golding or by William Golding called Pincher Martin.

On the back of their  dust wrappers for volumes of poetry Faber invariably employed that 'by', again for no reason I can fathom. A whim of Eliot's?

Speaking of which, I love the Faber poetry back list (which inexplicably no longer appears on the back of their poetry books. What a cohort - and what a prompt to further reading! With very few exceptions Faber poetry collections - and Faber books generally - no longer have such striking covers as they did in the past. The rot set in when that spindly 'ff' colophon emerged from (was it?) the modish designers Pentagram, and we lost the distinctive and very beautiful  Berthold Wolpe covers  that made mid-century Faber publications so desirable and collectible.

First edition Wakes tend to be in very good nick because they are (predictably) unread. Many modern first editions lack dust wrappers because (as you may not know) they were intended only to keep the book in a reasonably pristine state while on the bookshop shelves and usually discarded at the point of sale by the assistant, who would bin said item. As the dust wrappers of many first edition novels are especially attractive they tend to increase the value of the book, often to an eye-watering amount. Collectors will be wary of less than pristine books with fine wrappers as they are likely to be (as book dealers winningly term it) 'married' - not the original pairing. There's a whole publishing industry based on the production of facsimile wrappers which are, in the case of much genre fiction, the best thing about the novel. Have a look at some  here.

The London Nobody Knows

The London Nobody Knows is a very odd and  compelling documentary - you can probably find it on YouTube somewhere, and I hope you will. Look it up on the International Movie Database and in the section devoted to 'plot keywords' you'll find the following:

River Thames, chains, whip, pub, dancing, lavatory, haggling, catacombs and 'reference to Christopher Wren'.

The director/producer was Norman Cohen. This is his filmography:

1977 Confessions from a Holiday Camp

1977 Stand Up Virgin Soldiers

1976 Confessions of a Driving Instructor

1975 Confessions of a Pop Performer

1974 The Importance of Being Dublin   Director

1974 Confessions of a Window Cleaner   Producer

1973 Adolf Hitler - My Part in His Downfall  Director

1971 Dad's Army Director

1969 Till Death Us Do Part Director

1967 The London Nobody Knows

1966 Brendan Behan's Dublin Director/Producer

1966 The Blue Max Assembly Cutter

Cohen worked as a humble cutter on a 1966 movie called The Blue Max and became friends with one of the stars, Yorkshire-born James Mason. When, soon after,, he was contracted to make a 15-minute documentary about London Mason signed up and the project became more ambitious.

The title comes from a book by Geoffrey Fletcher published in 1962. For nearly thirty years - until 1990 - Fletcher wrote and illustrated a regular column for the Daily Telegraph. The London Nobody Knows was followed by a string of similar publications (London After Dark, Pearly Kingdom, The London Dickens Knew and (perhaps the best) Down Among the Meths Men. I'll come back to that. Long before modern topographical writers such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, Geoffrey Fletcher developed an approach to telling human stories, of exploring communities that were fast disappearing thanks to massive re-development and gentrification of the 1960s and 70s. 

Fletcher was drawn to the undervalued, the ugly, the decrepit - he liked stuttering gas lamps, cast-iron lavatories and railway yards, the urban poetry of dereliction.  He was dismayed by the rise of office blocks and the gung-ho redevelopment which would stamp out, he correctly predicted, "the tawdry, extravagant and eccentric". The London he loved was disappearing fast - it was a Victorian city still, but one that had been blown to smithereens by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz. It was very much a post-war city, with bomb sites and widespread neglect and decay. It was shabby and beautiful and full of accumulated detail. The film picks up on this very sensitively.

Ian Nairn’s London and Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody Knows are the two best books written about the capital in the past half century - both were published in the first half of the 1960s and, in their different ways, have never been bettered. Having said which Fletcher's writing hasn't dated especially well and somebody suggested that a better title for his book would be “The London Nobody who reads the Daily Telegraph Knows.” 

From the introduction to The London Nobody Knows:

There are parts of London never penetrated, except by those who like myself, are driven on by the mania for exploration: Hoxton, Shoreditch, Stepney for instance, all of which are full of interest for the perceptive eye, the eye of the connoisseur of well-proportioned though seedy terraces, of enamel advertisements and cast-iron lavatories.

While Fletcher was billed as the film’s writer and his book informs the whole project, most of what we hear was scripted by Brian Comport, who was given a credit for “additional material”. He was later the screenwriter for the cult horror films Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1970), The Fiend (1972) and The Asphyx (1973). It was Brian's idea to have James Mason walk and talk directly to the camera, making the film a personal journey - an innovative format at that time, and an idea that really pays off. Mason's voice - Yorkshire via Cambridge, Dublin, Hollywood - is languid, sad, aristocratic even.

We first encounter Mason in the derelict Bedford Theatre in Camden Town, now long demolished (the site is a job centre). It fixes the tone for what follows, dilapidation and neglect. From there he wanders around the overgrown railway yards north of Euston and we're on our way. The first half is full of fascinating footage and is entertaining if unremarkable - there's some heavy-handed slapstick comedy and the film is speeded up a few times in a chortling Benny Hill style. But - and this is the reason for watching it again and again - almost exactly at the half way mark something happens.

We see a tap dancing busker (Norman Norris, who died aged 96 in 2007), then an escapologist, then the trendies of the King's Road, then - but I want to stay with the tap dancer for now. 

Norman Norris aka Lord Mustard - still tap-dancing until a few years ago in a red frock coat and top hat. In later years he became a well-known street entertainer in Oxford, often going by the names Captain Tap or Colonel Mustard. Born in Glasgow in 1911 as George Pirie, he took the name of Alastair MacDonald as his stage name and traveled  the country as an entertainer. He claimed to have worked with Norman Wisdom, and to have won the Bognor Regis Opportunity Knocks contest in 1981. He said in a newspaper interview I taught myself to tap dance as a boy and also do gurning [making strange faces]. Mostly I entertain to raise money for charity -- I was once a living legend in London."

Back to our film, and a montage of Londoners young and old wolfing down eel pie, mash and liquor in Manzi's, of Chapel Street, Islington, an old man's chomping jaws rhyme, visually, with the gnashing rear end of a council dust cart. Then we cut to an undertakers and Mason delivers with relish some bizarre lines:

When the eating is over and done with there's always the undertaker, at your service. At least we get a decent send-off. We get silk and satin, not the spoon and fork. We're embalmed in cherished memories, not jelly and vinegar.

The camera roams around the dilapidated Kensal Green Cemetery accompanied by the wonderful 1930s song by Leslie Saroney  Ain't it Grand to be Bloomin' Well Dead. The camera enters a derelict sarcophagus. Darkness. The end? No. Then the camera emerges from a Salvation Army band cornet and we're back in the deepest East End. What follows is a kind of hellish afterlife - breathtaking, harrowing and unforgettable.  We're in what Fletcher calls 'the suburbs of hell', a place of bomb sites, wet rags, old mattresses, waste paper and vegetable refuse that - Fletcher said - make the quarter so attractive.

Here we reach the lower depths - the homeless, the meths drinkers on the steps of the synagogue in Brick Lane, old men scavenging  in the gutter for  cabbages at the Market. 

When I got to the Synagogue, I found them on the steps, eight men and a woman.[…] a few young prostitutes, on the job, hung about in Brick Lane. Brick Lane is marvellous, a melting pot of all the nationalities that grew from the loins of Adam, greasy, feverish Brick Lane, the Bond St for the people of the abyss. 

There's that Telegraph perspective again. The same woman. I'm pretty sure, appears in this film, and is named Beth (from her native quarter of Bethnal Green). 

Beth showed signs of recognition, lifted up her weary red eye-lids and stretched out a hand for a fag. I distributed Woodbines. Meths women are heavy drinkers, and can get through three or four wine bottles full in a morning, but they tend to begin slowly and build up as the day wears on. Next to her was Liverpool Jack, an ex-merchant seaman whose nerves had gone West on the convoys, and a man called Pee. He had no other name, nor could any other have done him credit. He was the most abject of the meths men. He had made two or three attempts at suicide, and his last one nearly rang the bell. I thought, sometimes I overdo my relish for offbeat experiences.

The faces that we see are the faces of people who lived through the Blitz. Over eight months of bombing, mostly at night, more than one million London houses were destroyed or damaged and more than 40,000 civilians were killed, almost half of them in London. Much of what we see, I'd suggest, is what we would now describe as post-traumatic stress disorder. 

But life goes on, and vibrantly, elsewhere. We cut to Mason outside a former Yiddish theatre, now a bingo hall: "The enormous modern blocks are on the march, and already threatening each last little shop on the corner. Cut to the Marx family's bustling deli on Petticoat Lane, then to the bleak empty streets around Spitalfields, a vagrant scavenging among the cabbage stalks. Then Fournier Street (at around the time, I think, that the artists Gilbert and George moved in) and, inevitably, Jack the Ripper.

The end is heartbreaking. A cantor sings the Kaddish, a lament, not only for a community now dispersing, but for the very fabric of that community now being wiped out. by the wrecker's ball.

Mason is refreshingly unsentimental - most of Victorian London was squalid, he says, and the modern eyesores taking its place will in time come to be demolished. That's happening now, of course. But Cohen wants us to go out on a laugh and . well, watch it and see for yourself.

On St Trinian's

In the current TLS Libby Purves, reviews Terms and Conditions - Life in girls' boarding schools 1939--1979 by Ysenda Maxtone Graham. It's a terrific review of what sounds like a wonderful book. Contributions from many ex-boarders are rich and strange . . .

The louche prize, however, goes to Caroline (Lady) Cranbrook’s 1940s memories of a place called Wings: a grand house, and a drunken headmistress with a fag and crème de menthe ever at hand, encouraging the school sport of rugby (“Jump on me, girls, jump on me!”). She made them dance with her armless, First World War veteran father, whose stumps without prostheses they had to cling to. Biology in the old kitchen involved dissecting an aborted foal. So many teachers left that Cranbrook at fifteen taught two subjects herself and put the five-year-old boarders to bed. When inspectors came she was given make-up so that they would think she was a teacher. Eventually, with difficulty, she smuggled out a letter “betraying” the school. After Wings closed, rumours spread – one had the headmistress knocking out a girl’s tooth in assembly “because she didn’t like the way she was looking at her”.

Are the St Trinian's films much watched these days? These blissfully funny, endlessly re-watchable comic masterpieces catch something of the social upheavals of Britain in the 1950s as we negotiated the momentous social changes that came with peace time and the post-war Labour settlement. Before you read on, listen to Malcolm Arnold's  magnificent theme song (and credits with illustrations by Ronald Searle, who invented the whole St Trinian's myth in 1941). It will add to the experience.

Part of the appeal - to a section of the audience at least - was the dramatic and unnerving transformation that took place between the Fourth Form and the Sixth form, when the girls mutated
from pint-sized matt-haired gap-toothed she-devils (faithfully reproducing  Ronald Searle's original cartoons) into svelte glamorous debutantes, capricious and sexually potent incarnations of male desire,  and fear. Their essential moral depravity remained intact, but they acquired a veneer of class (and a veneer got you a long way in post-war Britain - vide Lady Docker).

The first three St Trinian's films are perfectly cast: Alastair Sim in drag as the trilling, cooing, unflappable headmistress Millicent Fritton; George Cole (in real life Sim's adopted son) as the cockney wide boy 'Flash' Harry (who appears to live in a shrubbery and sports the most hilarious coat in movie history - a shoulder-padded ankle-skimming camel hair creation, flapping unreliably in all directions, the ensemble topped with a dodgy pork pie hat); the sublime and very sexy Joyce Grenfell as the lovelorn policewoman Sgt Ruby Gates ('But I've had a bath specially!' she wails to her betrothed, shrewdly underplayed by Lloyd Lamble).

Cameos are by reliable stalwarts of mid-century British cinema: Richard Wattis, Eric Barker, Dennis Price and John le Mesurier all play Whitehall mandarins from the "Ministry of Schools". Then there's Raymond Huntley, Cecil Parker, Sid James, all turning in their best performances. Look out for Beryl Reid as the monocled lesbian chemistry teacher and - well, I could go on, and on. The St Trinian's staff room is populated with Britain's equivalent of The Addams Family. There's an illicit gin distillery on the premises, and a hotline to the the local bookmakers. It's heaven.

Best of all, for my money, is Terry-Thomas, the absolute non pareil of caddishness and a superb comic actor. In Blue Murder at St Trinian's (my favourite, I tend to think) he plays Captain Romney Carlton-Ricketts, sole owner and proprietor of the Dreadnought Motor Transport Co. He is employed by Miss Fritton to take the girls on a UNESCO-sponsored tour to the Continent (or 'Continong') with (as they say) hilarious results. He's the bounder's bounder, an unscrupulous and opportunist ladies' man out for all he can get. I've always loved the visual rhyme of the gap in his front teeth and the baffling hyphen in his name.

There are four films in the original series, and they should be watched in order:

The Belles of St Trinian's (1954)
Blue Murder at St Trinian's (1957)
The Pure Hell of St Trinian's (1960)
The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery (1966, the last and the least of them. Shot in colour, which doesn't help, and with Frankie Howerd drafted in, unhappily.)

There followed a succession of horribly crude and witless updates culminating in a 2009 travesty directed by Oliver Parker. Avoid this charmless horror and its lurid sequel at all costs.

In her TLS review Libby Purves adds an irresistible note (and this is what prompted my thoughts of St Trinian's).. In 1971 a sociologist collected nicknames used in girls. boarding schools and among theme were: Baggy, Bambam, Bouncy, Bubbles, Doodles, Farto, Flea, Kipper, Moo, Pawpaw, Pussy, Tick, Turnip and Wopsy. 

Lost worlds!

Otherwise mint

I don't write much poetry because I'm no good at it. But here's a little something I perpetrated which, I believe, offers to the world a minor innovation. Has anybody else used highlighter in a poem before?

Otherwise Mint 

Eliot's Selected for two quid
Picked up in Oxfam, Muswell Hill

With biro marginalia  

(Pages 3 to 11)

Crammed in tiny caps, some sideways

That took me back to school,

Wondering then, and now, how Faber miss the trick

Of making space enough for annotation

By learners on the brink of English Lit.

HE DIGRESSES HERE BECAUSE OF SMELL 

ADMITION OF NIGHTS IN CHEAPHOTELS

HISSTRUGGLE IS INSIGNIFICANT

'And should I then presume?'

'And how should I begin?'        

QUESTIONING HERE!!!

'A thing with claws'  [circled, with an arrow]

POSS. CRABS??? NOT EVEN IDETIFYING THE CREATURE

ARGUABLE CLIMAX OF POEM!

HISSTRUGGLE IS INSIGNIFICANT - NEVER A STRENGTH OF HOPE

         
          LAZARUS COME FROM DED BY JESUS

BUT IRONIC AS HE HAS NONE [Hope, that is]

EVEN IF HE HAD HIS YOUTH WD IT MAKE A DIF?

      HE COULD OF RISKED EVERTHING!!!

HEROSTATUS?

Then last of all there's one word:underlined

BLEAK.

Prufrock formulated, sprawling on a pen.

The other pages all unmarked,

Though not without some interest.