Forcing a Rethink

For years my mother has been trying to persuade me that I should sell my little house in High Wycombe and transfer my property portfolio to Dorset. There isn't much connecting me to Wycombe anymore, certainly, nothing more than a couple of friends and a residual affection for the Museum where I used to work, but so long as my house continued to be let there was no compelling reason to sell it, either. It isn't the house I used to live in: I sold that in favour of a slightly nicer one a mile or so away while I was at St Stephen's House. The agents I've always used are a small independent local company from whom I rented before I bought my own place, and over the years I've watched the couple who ran it and with whom I used to deal gradually take a seat further and further back in the firm. I told myself for a long while that my signal to sell would be when they finally retired.

What with one thing and another, though, I decided to move in advance of that and at least think about selling the house. This is not least because (forgive the middle-class topic) property is declining in value in Wycombe and rising in West Dorset where I would like to live one day. Curiously I kept overhearing conversations in which people discussed moving that way themselves, and eventually decided I would act - at least when my current tenants move out. I wrote to the agents to tell them, even if no sale was imminent.

And then, strangely enough, yesterday I had a letter from Mr & Mrs Bennett to say they were, in fact, retiring and had sold their interest in the agency to another local firm: their connection with the company would cease completely in a couple of months once everything was tidied up. The staff are staying on, but the atmosphere had already changed and the new owners are themselves a smaller brand within the gigantic LSL Property Services. How peculiar that my decision and the Bennetts' should coincide. I've written to them to say thank you for their service over the years. 

I have a streak of deep sentimentality in my makeup which I know makes me want to hold on to things, people, and organisations, after the conditions which made them genuinely important in my life have moved on. That shapes even what is basically just a commercial relationship between a landlord and a property agent. It's a silly thing, perhaps, but not entirely a bad one.

All About Eve: soundtrack by PJ Harvey (2019)

We were quite surprised when PJ Harvey’s soundtrack for the West End production of All About Eve emerged so quickly, less than two months after the show opened and not much longer after the reverential documentary about the composition of the soundtrack broadcast by Radio 4 – so reverential, in fact, that had its subject not been the humble person we know her to be it would almost have been unbearable. As it is, she plonks at her piano in her London flat apparently unaware of the adulation swirling around her. In contrast to PJH’s previous three studio albums, which took years to put together, the gestation of All About Eve has been a mere handful of months if you accept her statement that she began talking to play director Ivo van Hove about it late in 2018. The play, in fact, is still being performed, and I suppose having the music out at the same time makes sense in marketing terms.

PJH’s involvement in scoring theatre goes back to 2009 when she provided two items for Ian Rickson’s production of Hedda Gabler in New York, a show which flopped badly although nobody blamed the composer; Harvey worked with Mr Rickson again on his version of Hamlet at the Young Vic in 2011, on Electra in 2015, The Nest in 2016 and The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? in 2017. All of her output for these plays was incidental music or themes with one exception: a song – or maybe songs - written for Vinette Robinson to perform as the maddened Ophelia in Hamlet, accompanying herself on a lute. It’s a shame that only theatre attenders have ever heard any of this material; someone from thegardenforum.org who went to see Electra described Polly’s themes as ‘sounding like a Morricone-ish Western placed in Ancient Greece’ and although you can hear snippets on Youtube it would be well worth experiencing the whole thing. So this is the first extended score she has produced, and the first time she’s felt it worth putting out to the public.

PJH describes the score as opening out of the inclusion in the 1950 film of All About Eve of Franz Liszt’s 'Liebestraume', though typically from that one source she spins a variety of quite different pieces of music. There are also two complete songs written for the main actors, Gillian Anderson and Lily James, to sing, attempting to capture the characters’ emotions at particular points.

'Traume' is slightly reminiscent of Ryuichi Sakamoto, but the bigger influence lurking behind All About Eve is Mica Levi whose acclaimed scores for Under The Skin and Jackie PJH has expressed admiration for in the past. It would be hard to describe even the 10 instrumental pieces as ‘incidental’ music: like Levi’s work, despite being often abstract and arrhythmic (although, I would argue, less monotonous than hers), they are strongly flavoured and I can understand why some critics felt the score was a little overwhelming.

However, as always, Harvey is her own woman. The main tone across the whole score is a combination of the gentle and the baleful, heard most clearly in the six pieces which are organised around simple piano chords: they exploit very carefully the contrasting qualities of those chords in a way which strongly recalls that eerie masterpiece from 2007 White Chalk, but with more muscular and conventional orchestration around the keyboard work. ‘Descending’ and ‘Ascending’ form a pair, though the second doesn’t have Kenrick Rowe’s dramatic drumming to power it along, like the first. And the songs are a separate matter again. Gillian Anderson’s ‘The Sandman’ is an appropriately dreamlike waltz, but not a very comforting one: you get the impression that the Sandman is not someone you really look forward to encountering: ‘the Moon appears/One thousand fears arise’. Meanwhile, Lily James’s song, ‘The Moth’, is a great Goth pop track, swirly, romantic and deliciously melancholy. It could almost have been written by – wait for it – All About Eve, and I wonder whether that’s deliberate Harveyan mischief. Harvey sings backing vocals on both songs and thereby manages to make them sound almost exactly like herself anyway.

‘I’ve always loved stories’, says the singer on her website about this album, but the non-specificity of the songs demonstrates that although she claims merely to be illustrating musically the text of the play, she’s actually using it as a point of departure to somewhere else – her customary approach to any source material, going right back to her Biblically-inspired works of nearly thirty years ago. All About Eve marks a breathing-space, an exercise, though in preparation for what I doubt Harvey herself knows yet.

Bible Broadcast

It was a bold decision by the BBC to broadcast the whole of the Book of Psalms over the Easter weekend. I wonder what led to it. I only heard one chunk, as the beautifully orotund voice of Jeremy Irons rolled its way around these ancient words, filtered through the vocabulary of King James I's committee of translators. 

The programme had taken the decision for Mr Irons to read the word selah every time it occurs, and although this put him in the company of Diamanda Galás who also does the same when she uses Psalmic texts it is nevertheless a bit weird as nobody really knows what selah means. It's probably a musical instruction ('pause for reflection', the Amplified Bible renders it) and could mean anything from 'rest here' to 'play a twiddly bit'. Solemnly reading it out is like all the musicians in an orchestra shouting DIMINUENDO when it appears in the score, and hearing Mr Irons trying to invest it with some emotional content is bizarre.

In fact the whole exercise was slightly bizarre. It is true that the Psalms contain 'some of the most beautiful poetry in the Bible' and 'a whole range of human emotion', but when they are recited in church they are smoothed by plainchant or Anglican chant, or just read at some distance from the feeling they are trying to embody, quite flatly. Reading them with the emotion put back in, acting them, sounds most odd, especially when what you're reading is the language of the Authorised Version, heightened and unfamiliar at this distance of four centuries. As Jeremy Irons all but gnashes his teeth and weeps his way through these ancient texts, they sound all too often like the ravings of someone not-quite-hinged.

Spotted Sacrifices

What a lot of church there has been this Easter Day. All the services had similar gates to last year, though there were fewer communicants at the main 10am mass, with lots of infrequent attenders (including one family making what I think is their first visit in about seven years) who received blessings at the altar rail instead. We sang the Regina Coeli, blessed two new icons, and Roy the verger rang the bell 93 times for the Supreme Governor's birthday. I'd thought he would do it as we were finishing the service, but to my surprise we all stood and listened. It took quite a long time.

Months ago we managed to dent the old Victorian silver flagon we use for communion. It was sent for repair to the jewellers, and though we received it back in great excitement we quickly discovered it leaked. The jewellers were most apologetic and had another go. The leaky joint is now repaired, but for a couple of weeks there have been mysterious spits and spots of wine appearing on corporals, and at the Dawn Mass this morning the linens looked as though they'd been used to staunch a wound: it seems there's something wrong higher up the flagon, so that when it's full an upper joint is now leaking. Jill our sacristan sadly bundled up the soiled altarcloth she'd only put on the altar the day before, and arranged for Gordon, the head server, to collect her tall glass ewer as a stopgap later on in the morning. 

It was the glass ewer I used to prepare the table at the 10am service. The last chalice was filled when a drop of wine, just one tiny drop, fell from its lip in what seemed to be slow-motion until it spattered onto the pristine linen of the nave altarcloth. Jill wasn't there. I waited until the church was empty and took it away to launder in penance.

Picking a Cause

"We should hand the world over to the teenagers", commented a friend sharing the latest speech by young Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg. I thought of the ones whose rubbish I'd picked up from around the church this sunny Good Friday afternoon, and reflected how little I'd relish the prospect of very much at all being handed over to them apart from litter-pickers.

Perhaps the solemnity of the day promotes melancholy reflections, but it wasn't just that liturgical influence. I have at least two friends who've joined Extinction Rebellion's protests in the capital, and wondered what, if anything, I should do about it myself. Hornington has an active XR group: I could lie in the main road in Swanvale Halt for a bit with a sign saying 'Down With This Sort of Thing', or picket the garage. I know them in there, anyway. Perhaps I should blockade the one I don't use.

The litter in the churchyard and the other bits I picked up on my journey home from the Liturgy of the Passion of the Christ brought home how hard it is to imagine thorough change. Quite a proportion of human beings show a strange psychological resistance even to picking up after themselves when a serviceable bin is three feet away, let alone engaging in the degree of radical sacrifice that the science suggests will be necessary to keep human society functioning at all. And here in Britain, where the public seems agitated but not really willing to give anything up for long-term climate security, we're doing comparatively well in cutting our carbon emissions, down nearly 50% since 1990 thanks mainly to destroying the coal industry and heavy manufacturing; yet, sixth-biggest economy in the world the UK may be, we contribute a tiny amount to global carbon emissions, and it's hard to envisage the US or China shifting much, whether by 2025, 2050, or 2100, by which it will long be too late. By the end of this century (and I am increasingly glad I won't see further than the middle of it) it will become very likely that there will be wars over migration and access to resources, and that those wars could be fatally destructive, quite apart from the heating of the Earth reaching self-perpetuation by then. It all looks strikingly similar to the picture painted in the Book of Revelation, funnily enough, so perhaps this is it: perhaps these are the conditions preparatory to the End. I suspect the chances of modern society surviving the next two centuries are small, and those of human beings making it through in any form no better than 50-50. I'm already starting to think differently about the babies I'm baptising, and what they may face over the course of their lives. 

Naturally the matter has arisen in discussions among people I know on LiberFaciorum, and though I am not normally easily shocked I have been perturbed by the ease with which extremely violent language comes to hand. People should be shot, hanged, maimed. These are not strangers using these terms: these are souls I have known for years, acquiring apparently a new rage, resentment, and scorn. It was this that persuaded me my role should not be campaigning on the climate, but promoting the standard, unexciting Christian virtues of love and sacrifice, and the will to understand the truth. Whatever happens to us, human beings will need those, and, the crucified and risen one shows us, they are at the heart of all things. 'One God-ground deed endures/When this ring of diamond-and-gold is dust.' Or when we all are.

Archiangelic

I am not at all sure my wildflower patch is going at all well. There is quite a bit of grass on it now, but I suspect with regret that this is not the 'nurse grasses' which will shelter the wildflowers that will emerge next year, but just the same coarse grasses that were there before.

This is why it is gratifying to welcome the occasional new plant that appears in the garden, quite without me doing anything at all. I can't tell whether the bugle will appear this year, but instead I have had an entirely unexpected patch of yellow archangel emerge. Lion's Snap was its name in Somerset once upon a time, Snuff Candle in Wiltshire, and Weasel's Nose in Dorset, a title apparently taken up into its scientific name of lamium galeobdolon, the second part of which means 'weasel stink'. A slander: it resembles the weasel in neither scent nor appearance, which my photograph does no justice.

Recent Catherines

On a day when one of the greatest churches of Christendom burns, posting a few images of my patron saint recently discovered on my travels is a distraction. The first two come from St Nicolas in Guildford.

On the west wall, behind the great Gothic font cover, there is a mural of an array of saints. Very oddly, as you can see, it's painted directly onto the brickwork. Catherine's wheel is picked out in gold and the whole thing has a very amateur look to it - as with the church as a whole, I've yet to discover its history. That's St Agnes you can glimpse to Catherine's right, holding her lamb.

I knew about the mural, but on my visit was surprised to find a second depiction of the saint further along the church. 1890-1910 is my guess for this.

A couple of weeks ago I also found my way to All Saints' Carshalton (of which more on another occasion). Among a variety of amazing fittings, there is a sumptuous organ loft decorated with a frieze of saints, and Catherine can be found among them, too.