Monthly Archives: March 2009

How do you turn a bird into a soul singer?

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You microwave it until its bill withers, arf. I thought of labelling this post “Not your average white band” but the Bill Withers joke beat it by a margin.

The magic of photography manages to make this look like a smoke filled jazz lair rather than the eminently respectable and entirely smoke-free Charles Maude Room of Abingdon School. Though the rows of politely attentive audience might also be a clue. This represents, though I say it myself, a really quite good recovery job via Photoshop on a picture taken in a dim room by my phone on Saturday night.


Young Michael S, second band member from the left and playing bass, is a pupil at said school and has a close relative suffering from Addison’s Disease. And so, completely off his own bat, he arranged an evening of jazz and funk at the school to raise money for the relevant charity. He was ably assisted by a friend from church on keyboard, a friend of the friend from church on drums, and teachers on trumpet, sax and guitar. The sax teacher has apparently played with Manfred Mann, though whether that is the original group, the Earth Band or the individual I do not know.

And flipping good it was too: two hours of tunes by people I know or know of (Hoagy Carmichael, Gershwin, the Average White Band, Mr Withers) and people I don’t. A great time had by all and, I hope, lots of money raised. If Mike can keep going like that non-stop for a two hour gig, despite being the youngest in the band by a good 10 years, then great things lie in store for him. He was at primary school with Bonusbarn. I’m posting this now to register the fact, when he’s famous, that we knew him first …

A tale of fire and water

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Recently finished, and hugely enjoyed, Pompeii by Robert Harris.

In a book set in Roman times, about Pompeii, you think you have a shrewd idea what’s going to happen. So it came as a pleasant surprise to find most of the novel is in fact about water. Marcus Attilius is engineer in charge of the aqueduct that feeds water to most of the Bay of Naples region. The water supply unaccountably fails one hot day in August 79AD and he has to find out why.

The reader already has a pretty shrewd idea why, and it’s no great surprise that, yes, the aqueduct has been blocked by earthquake activity near the base of Vesuvius. It’s easily dealt with. But in the process of his enquiries Attilius stumbles across intrigue, fraud and skullduggery that would make quite a decent novel on its own.

Yes, the reader is thinking, all very good but sooner or later that volcano’s gonna blow and press the reset button. Which it does, but in a way that still manages to continue the story so far quite logically. Each chapter starts with a paragraph or two from a modern text on volcanology, so we the readers understand what’s happening even if the Romans don’t, and it’s all quite seamless. One of Attilius’s niggles is what happened to his predecessor, who looms over the novel without ever actually appearing alive. Turns out the guy was a native of Siciliy, from near Etna, and was about the only person in the whole of Campania with an idea of what was about to happen.

And when the volcano does blow, it’s terrifying. You see how the Romans must have felt. First, they had no idea Vesuvius was a volcano at all (the Greek historian Strabo, who had obviously been up there, described the top as a flat plain – no crater like today. You could stand up there with no idea the mountain was hollow). When it blew, around midday, the clouds of ash blotted out the sun and brought a premature night to the land. When the final pyroclastic flows came, burying Herculaneum and Pompeii completely, that really was at night so it would have been twice as dark as before, with visibility through the ash just a few feet. All they would have seen were the faint glows of light tumbling down the sides of the mountain. The first couple of these, from the point of view of the Pompeiians, go from right to left, east to west, and take out Herculaneum. The next just seem to get bigger and bigger, coming right at the town …

You’re on the edge of your seat, I tell you. And what makes this vision of volcanic hell doubly powerful is that Harris has been so good at describing the contrasts. The pre-eruption paradise of hot sun, vineyards, crystal clear water from the aqueduct, and the well-ordered civilisation of the empire that collapses into local chaos.

Another point that struck me – and amused me – was that Attilius reports direct to a guy in Rome who reports direct to the Emperor. A couple of times he is able to play on this fact and bypass all local politics, vested interests etc. The aqueduct itself, the mighty Aqua Augusta, was built by direct order of Augustus. That well known bunch of commies the ancient Romans had absolutely no problem with the idea that a vital resource like water operates under centralised state control. Privatise it? Don’t be ridiculous! They would have laughed.

Okay, we don’t have slaves or gladiators and we know a thing or two about volcanoes now. But it’s just possible we may have lost something too …

Lost soles

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They look like something on the seabed picked out by the lights of a submersible, but these shoes have a story. I suppose any shoes you’ve owned for at least six years would accumulate experience but I like to think these ones are special.

I forget if I acquired them specifically for my first ever trip to the USA in 2002 but I know I was wearing them at the time. So, these shoes have traversed the North American continent. They have felt the waves of the Pacific slap the boards beneath them as they stood on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. They have trod the baking hot dirt of the Cahokia Mounds in Illinois. They have been up the Empire State Building and the Washington Monument, they have walked the length of the National Mall and they have stood in reverent silence before the giant statue of Abraham Lincoln in his Memorial.

They only survived this long by taking a cunning sideways step a few years ago into being my indoor shoes. They have a strange fleecy lining that stops them getting too warm in hot weather but keeps them nicely warm when it’s cold. Even so they really were getting past it and made the fundamental mistake of becoming uncomfortable to wear, due to the split soles on either side. Overconfidence, perhaps? So they have, with all due respect and ceremony, been consigned to the kitchen bin. I will probably never see them again. If I do, I’ll know something has gone badly wrong, probably in the kitchen.

I don’t know if it’s meaningful to tell a new pair of shoes that they must fill a big pair of, um, shoes, but that’s what I’d tell their replacements if I could and it was.