Books, glorious books

I have been having a lovely Christmas binge. I re-read What Katy Did, What Katy Did at School, and What Katy Did Next - the last of these a hilarious account of her European tour with a widowed friend and her daughter, all of them rather disliking foreigners. England is so soggy that they don't stay long - but then of course they don't like the French much either, and as for Italians.... Great stuff. I've always wondered whether the word game that the SSUC attempt is playable: it seems unlikely that many people can produce poetry to order.

Also William Mayne's A Swarm in May, which is a very odd book, and a lot of it about choir-school politics, very much from the boys' point of view. Oh, and I also read Eleanor Farjeon's story '...And a Pearl in the Myddes', which I doubt anyone has heard of unless they're an Antonia Forest fan (Patrick asks Nicola if she's read it when they visit Wade Minster). It was a perfect Christmas story, wonderfully atmospheric and incomprehensible.

Last night I grabbed a random Iris Murdoch: The Flight From The Enchanter. I like Murdoch more as I get older, and suspect I read a lot of it when I was far too young to know what was happening, though I do think the ones where really posh people fall in and out of love with each other in endless combinations are rather silly. (A Severed Head is my favourite of these, with all its delicious kerfuffle over who gets which of the d'Aubusson prints - or is that the name of the carpet? (Of course as soon as I started typing it the word left my head.) And I do like The Italian Girl, which has similar shenanigans. Nobody ever seems to have to earn a living.) My overall favourite, though, is still her first novel, Under the Net (come to think of it, I've never worked out what the title means), which is about a lovely group of bohemians. The politics are more overt and the relationships simpler, and it has huge youthful joie de vivre and some vividly memorable set-pieces: I love the part where the narrator trails someone through a French park but loses her when he stops to pick up the shoes she's hidden in a tree.

Tonight I read Claire Tomalin's biography of Hardy. Another fine work: I really appreciate how non-judgemental Tomalin is, and how carefully she draws her conclusions. I also had no idea of how many bad novels Hardy had written in between his barnstormers: I think I'd vaguely assumed that titles like The Trumpet Major were early works rather than mid-stream duds. I'm not a huge fan of his, since I like to get immersed in books and don't like to be reminded that the heavy hand of the author is dropping misfortunes on his characters from a great height. I found Jude the Obscure disgusting. But I think I'd like to read more of his poetry.

Oh yes we have

To the pantomime on Saturday: a family outing thanks to Grandma Pam (thank you, Grandma Pam!). We were surprised to see the place not at all packed (it was Jack and the Beanstalk at the Arts Theatre): it was a bit lame in places, but really not bad at all. Their only mistake, I thought, was always to aim for comedy and forget that a story needs drama. The scene in the ogre's castle went for nothing, because it just wasn't scary.

Anyway, we had ice-creams in the interval and everything. When we were packing up to leave, Sasha started crawling around, collecting the empty tubs together and picking up the spoons. When I picked up the child to go, there was a bit of scene that ended with a huge wail of "But Mummy, I want to TIDY UP!"

Truly, we have created a monster.

A paean

Over at La Maison Verte in September, I had a slightly silly dinner conversation with Robert Hollingworth. I'd been listening to Emma Kirkby on an old tape of Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen and got talking to Berty (ooh, do go and have another look at his site - I've made all the improvements that were suggested, and would love to know what you think) about her, and what it is about her voice that makes it so distinctive. She is one of the only classical singers I can reliably identify, and I love the clarity of her tone, and the way you can always hear the sweetness of her personality coming through. I saw her give a masterclass at Clare College once, and she was, I thought, terribly nice. Not in a soppy way: an essential sweetness of nature. Just as you'd expect from her voice.

Anyway, I got at cross purposes with Robert while trying to ask him the same question (which Berty, unless I've forgotten his answer because I was pissed, didn't have a very definite answer to), because he thought I was talking about Clare Wilkinson. Which was pretty logical, because he knows that A and I (do I need to carry on calling him A? I'm not going to get internationally syndicated at this stage, am I?) are huge fans.

So. Hands up if you don't know who Clare Wilkinson is. Okay. She is a mezzo-soprano. We first encountered her in I Fagiolini - I think I saw her first in The Birds, and then the first time we saw The Full Monteverdi we were sat, thrillingly, next to her. She also sings with the Dunedin Consort, and with Alamire, and probably with other groups I'm too slow to know about yet.

There is something really arresting about her stage presence, and there is something truly fabulous about her singing. I think the essence is that she has wonderful technique coupled with cast-iron musicianship (a funny word, that: do we use it simply to mean good taste?).

Anyway. She's got a huge range, and all of it sounds gorgeous, and you can't hear the joins. She's got amazing breath control, but she never sings through lines in that very Cambridge way that shouts 'Listen to me not taking a breath!'. She doesn't over-enunciate, but somehow her diction is crystal clear. Her tone is beautiful, but she never seems to wallow in it - and it's not bland; it has texture, and it's totally distinctive: she's always identifiable. Which is what made me realise that actually I love her voice for many of the same reasons that I love Kirkby's: I can always identify it, and I feel that it conveys what she's like.

I guess it's partly that all the stuff I've said tells you that her ego is always sublimated to the music. But there's also something really tangible about the sweetness of her tone. Is there a better word? Sweetness sounds cloying, and she isn't a bit.

Being able to hear the person, and the personality, is definitely a personal preference of mine: it's why I generally prefer amateur voices to professional ones. I've always loathed that really 'trained' classical sound with the mouth full of plums. The archetype of this, for me, is a recording I've got of the Faure Requiem with Janet Baker singing the 'Pie Jesu'. The vowels are all so rounded and dark she sounds as though she's about to throw up. Horrible.

Another thing about Clare is that her face expresses the emotions of the music, not the difficulty of the singing. I don't think your face should tell the audience that singing is hard - those sopranos who sing with their eyebrows permanently raised make me feel tired.

Anyway, enough of me wurbling away: go and listen to Clare (go to her website and click on Listen), and come back and tell me whether what I've said makes any sense at all. Actually, I think most of the singers in I Fagiolini are pretty special, and the group itself is quite remarkable, but Clare really does stand out.

This posting has been sitting about for a long time: I made the mistake of writing it in my head but not getting it onto paper (you know what I mean) soon enough. Then A read it and didn't really like it. My theory is that this is because it's unusual to write unreserved praise for anything, especially a person. Being English, we are embarrassed by the very notion. But I also think that one tends to assume that anyone who's really good, and reasonably well known, knows that they are and gets told so frequently, and in fact that's not the case at all.

Life in pink

I went to see Piaf at the Vaudeville Theatre (transferred from the Donmar (btw did you know that the 'Mar' bit is from Margot Fonteyn, who started the place with someone whose name I can't remember (but they contributed the 'Don')?)) last night. Just as all the reviews had said, the play itself was a bit flaky but Elena Rogers was amazing - and in what seemed rather a Piaf-like way, too: that tiny, fragile frame, emitting a HUGE noise. But I wonder why writers find it so hard to tell Paif's story? Perhaps there's just too much to tell? The film - La Vie En Rose - was really incoherent: I do hate narratives that mess with the chronology purely for the sake of novelty.

I'm thinking a lot about story-telling as I've a third of the way through Russell T Davies' The Writer's Tale - a splendid book. I've been thinking about how gut-wrenching the end of series four was, with Donna Noble saving the world then having to have her memory wiped. I love the way Davies portrayed that as what it really was: a kind of death, real and tragic. One of the mailing lists I'm on had a discussion a while back about what a swizz the '... and it was all a dream' ending is, or even worse the 'and they forgot everything that had happened'. There's a John Masefield that does it, and I know it made my heart sink when I read it. We couldn't remember whether Dan and Una forget everything at the end of Rewards and Fairies. But what's the point of those two whole books, if they do? Oh, and the chap at the end of Silver on the Tree who asks someone else to decide whether he'll remember that his wife was on the dark side, and the supposedly wise old person decides to wipe his mind. Gah!

It made me think: is there anything in my past that's so awful that I'd want to erase it? (Now we've moved on to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - and wasn't that just absolutely the greatest movie title ever? And I love the sci-fi fan who commented that it could well have been called We can forget it for you retail (you'd have to be reasonably geeky to get the reference, I think - can I do a quick straw poll of all the, er, two or three people reading this (hello Mum!) and ask if you do?)) Anyway, I digress. I couldn't think of anything. The events that haunt me aren't the big emotional moments - I wouldn't lose a second of those, however much they hurt at the time - but the small snarly moments of acute social embarrassment, when I said something really tactless. Embarrassment is such a strong emotion, I think - you really feel it physically, in the pit of your stomach. The memories are so tangible: they take decades to fade. But even so, I'd keep them. I want to be reminded not to say something quite that stupid ever again.

(Anyone spot a running theme of nested parentheses in this posting? What's that all about? (Just my butterfly mind, I suppose))

Sublime and ridiculous

We spent the day working on Britten's Sacred and Profane. Boy, they were hard: after five or six hours' work, we'd got three out of the eight to the stage where we could risk singing them in public. What I find with Britten is that it just doesn't stick, and I don't know whether it's him or me. I think it's mostly that my taste is for a melodic line, and I'm not very harmonically sophisticated, so all that dissonance that you're supposed to understand and turn into consonance just doesn't quite work for me.

At least all five of us seemed to be in the same boat. But it was a frustrating day. If terribly character building.

Thank goodness for the Guardian

There's been some very intelligent writing in the Guardian (as always) about the death of Baby P. I'm not going to write about the details at all, since like many parents I've found that having a child yourself makes it physically painful to think about cases like this. The point the Guardian made was that villifying the social workers involved saves the media the real horror, which is thinking about parents and guardians who kill.

It's actually not that difficult to imagine how horribly difficult a social worker's task might be in terms of visiting these families, working out what's really happening, and knowing when to make a call on it. What is almost impossible to imagine is the mind of someone who is able to damage a child so tiny, or to watch while someone else does. And when it's their own child? My brain simply crashes into the barriers: I don't know how to contemplate the idea. At the deepest level, this is simply, bleakly, literally, inhuman. And this is why we look for the easier targets and the simpler explanations: what lies beneath is too obscene to contemplate.

Polka dots?

Cigarettes are blinking in the dark
and making polka dots around the baseball park...

Lovely, isn't it? It sounds like Joni Mitchell, but it's not at *all*. Any of you clever people recognise it? (I know it, but I was surprised it couldn't be googled.)