I saw Sandi Toksvig performing live. Thoughtful, interesting, funny and an expert comedian in terms of structuring her act, engaging the crowd and shifting gear. I've got to admire someone who gets a full-Brexit crowd on their feet to conduct Beethoven's Ninth, while omitting to mention that it's also the EU anthem. The added benefit of ending your show like this is that you've also engineered your own standing ovation. Actually, it wasn't a full-Brexit crowd: all the demographics of her long career from kids' TV to Bake-Off via QI and The News Quiz were there - you could tell who was who from which jokes or points they responded to.
Later in the week I went to a a masterclass by my retired colleague Gaby on the wonderful Goth Girl and In-Jokes which was predictably magnificent, a real antidote to the baby talk about literature often doled out to school kids. That was followed by a lecture by Michael Rosen, organised by my colleague Josiane as part of the city's literature festival. Another triumph: Rosen is wise, witty, profound, hugely knowledgeable and intelligent and a supreme communicator. Within five minutes he had a crowd of schoolchildren laughing about and understanding fort/da and French narratology. If only I could do the same… He did a deconstruction of Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are (which he loves), eventually uncovering its hidden tale of parental absence and lovelessness. He used his astonishingly expressive face to extend – and sometimes subvert – what he was saying, and his bond with the children was really moving. If you ever get the chance to see him in action, do, if only for his explanation of why camping holidays in the rain with his parents were prescribed by Marx. I took some pictures - you can see them here.
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| Michael Rosen |
After that, despite battling a heavy cold, I went to several other literature festival events: a well-attended talk by Jefny Ashcroft and artist Joy Baines about a mysterious portrait of 'Miss Brown, a Jamaican Nurse', novelist Kerry Hadley-Pryce's discussion of psychogeography in the Black Country, Rob Francis's poetry-writing masterclass, Daisy Black's Mappa Mundi stories, and Alan McGee, the former boss of Creation Records. You can see some pictures here.
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| Jefny Ashcroft, Joy Baines, 'Miss Brown'. |
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| Kerry Hadley-Pryce |
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| Rob Francis |
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| Daisy Black |
The only exception to the general wonder and vitality was McGee. Clearly more comfortable talking about the 'units' he shifted (record sales and lines of coke), he was amazingly unreflective for a man who's written an autobiography. There was a smidgen of regret for the excess, but he made no connection between his own hedonism and his own son's long-term addictions. He had little insight into why the music his label promoted suddenly became so popular, and no interest in wondering why it was so laddish. Having got through 40 minutes without mentioning a single female musician I asked him. He pointed out that there were women in a couple of his bands, but eventually just said 'it was a different time'. So much for Riot Grrl, Lush, Stereolab, Melys and a host of other female-fronted bands that Creation didn't sign. I should say that I have a massive record collection with 90s indie at the core, so there's an awful lot of Creation's output on my shelves. Top Tips: Super Furry Animals, The Telescopes, Teenage Fanclub and Idha's underrated albums Melody Inn and Troublemaker. My other musical discovery this week has been Ann Southam, the Canadian minimalist. Hannah Peel played a marimba arrangement of her Glass Houses on Radio 3 and I was entranced.
I've managed to read a couple of books too. Pynchon's hippy-noir crime thriller Inherent Vice was fun and evoked 1970s California's strange melange of libertarian good vibes and heavy-handed authoritarianism but didn't feel like an essential addition to his oeuvre. The Manson background adds a little menace and there are a lot of good gags though. Angela Brazil's mid-40s Three Terms at Uplands was pretty bad. Coming at the end of the Queen of the School Stories career, the plot is so basic (girl is slightly misunderstood at boarding school; gets into very minor scrapes; is eventually accepted) that it was barely worth reading. It felt like someone going through the motions. Finally I read Irrepressible, an American biography of Jessica Mitford, the sister who ran away to the Spanish Civil War with Churchill's nephew, emigrated to the US, joined the CP, fought for equal rights, hosted the Black Panthers, infuriated the funeral trade and ended up drunkenly recording albums with Maya Angelou.
It's a good read - well-informed and more interested in Mitford's political activism than the legend of the Baron's Terrible Daughters that so captivates British biographers. Next up: the first two of Gilbert Adair's meta detective thriller pastiches, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style.
I'm off to Amsterdam for a meeting in a few minutes. Absolutely no time to look round one of the world's greatest cities, which is very sad, but at least I get to take the train all the way there, and experience the welcome now afforded to EU passport holders on the way back in to the UK. See you next week, if I'm not refused entry…
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