Out of the mouths

It fell to me to do the Karate run the other day. (I occasionally tend to three children. Dull story.) The boys do the karate, and I keep the girl amused. No sweat. We happened to be watching the lesson, and she remarked on one of the boys (for the class was composed entirely of the little beasts) saying that it was the chap in the white shirt. Of which there being many, I asked for further classification. Look, she said, the one with the blue belt, doing the kick. I saw exactly the fellow she meant.

She was pointing out the only boy black boy in a sea of white.

It clearly didn't occur to her that this was a valid distinction, or if she even saw it, it was not worthy of notice. This cheered me up NO END.

Is it just them, or is it all of them?

There's this bloke in the village - pleasant fellow, tall, fair, nice looking. Pung, his name is.* He and his wife are independent barristers, they have two kids, a bunch of grandmas and a lodger. He is quintessentially English - courteous, unassuming, a self-deprecating sense of humour and - this is where it goes off the rails a tiny bit - he is an armchair Liberal Democrat.

Or was. He, it transpires, had been dallying with the idea of actually getting up out of his armchair, and actually standing (for parliament - this metaphor could run and run). What with election fever gripping the nation, for a few days anyway, our man hurtled into action, dishing out questionnaires and buttonholes and glad hands like a man possessed. And at every turn, well some turns anyway, he was asked if he was working with Tonk**.

'Tonk??' Pung would cry. 'Who he?'

'Dontcherno?' would come the startled reply. 'He's Ming's*** right hand man, his policy adviser, the speechwriter who inserts all the jokes that Ming takes out. He lives just round the corner.'

How about that then. A local bloke wanting to stand for Lib Dem MP didn't know that Menzies Campbell's chief policy adviser was living in the same village, and the chief policy adviser didn't know that a local bloke was wanting to stand for Lib Dem MP.

Is this just the Lib Dems, or the Labs and Cons too? It doesn't inspire confidence, it has to be said.

* No of course it isn't.
** Not his real name either.
***Nope, not his real name, but his real nickname.

Condolences

How on earth do you write a letter of condolence when you are pretty sure that the bereaved person is actually giddy with glee?

My cousin in South Africa had a marriage which had been going sour for a long time. She's 49, has two children in their early twenties, and a husband who was a model of unreconstructed afrikaner boer. Not interested in his growing children, he required a tidy house, a beer, a relax and hot food at the end of his working day, and sex every other day, regardless of how she felt. And as many affairs as he felt like. (Any male readers out there? NO. THIS IS NOT A CIVILIZED ATTITUDE.) She has been trying to get out for the last five years or so, but he has been - well, unhelpful. For the last couple of years she has been living in friends' houses, sleeping on sofas.

He died two days ago. His son found him in the morning, still in his tracksuit from the previous night's jog. He was 53. (And his name was Frikkie. South Africans have an outlandish idea of what is acceptable in a name for a male.)

Knowing that her e-mail address is a work one and not secure, and even though I bet she is probably doing cartwheels of joy, I had to go with the 'I'm so very sorry' schtick, when what she wants is an airline attendant called Sebastian in extremely tight leather trousers singing 'Ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead!'

Bleak House

The best thing about having a rattle-trap of a car (in them thar days. I drive a sensible car now.) was the sound effects. Or rather, what the engine noise did to the music.

I'm not much of a one for pop music. Late baroque / classical gets my vote, with the occasional nod to Late Classical / Romantic types like Verdi. So I'm talking about music with a lot of layers. Complexities. Dimensions. Stuff it actually pays to listen to -I mean it doesn't really do as aural wallpaper.

So, cruisin' an' playin' my radio, it became apparent that the engine noise was masking certain musical frequencies, usually the highest ones, the ones that played the recognisable tune. And what I was left with were the lower lines. Not helpful if I was listening to a sonata of any sort, or, say, one of Bach's cello suites, but a symphony? Wow. My head could fill in the missing parts but all of a sudden I could hear the music from a totally unfamiliar angle - the bass lines, the harmonies, the musical sub-plots - and my admiration and reverence for Beethoven and Haydn and Mozart and Verdi exploded.

Same sort of thing is happening now. I finally started watching the recent BBC take on Bleak House. I put it off for ages because the novel is one of my favourite Dickenses and I didn't want a disappointment (and I have fond memories of the last one they did). But Wow again - the adaptation is excellent, it looks gorgeous, the acting is top notch AND it's doing that thing that my car engine did. It's changed my focus on the book, and made me see structures and characterisations that I hadn't seen before. I never expected to feel a flash of sympathetic understanding for Tulkinghorn, or to despise Richard Carstone quite so heartily, or to see the malice seeping from Skimpole so clearly.

And best of all, it makes me want to re-read the book NOW. Can't say fairer than that.