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March 2002 |
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Wednesday 6 March Amazing!! A mere five years or so after the rest of the developed world, Britain (or my part of it, at any rate) is finally getting affordable broadband internet connection. I discovered this a few days ago, when idly surfing through the digital TV channels. (I seem to be doing too much of that while Mary is away. It's just as well that she comes home next week to reclaim the cable TV for herself, otherwise I would rapidly become a complete TV junkie.) Anyway, there was this channel dedicated to pushing the new cable modem service that ntl (the cable company) has at long last started to provide. The delay in getting broadband to Britain is almost entirely due to the obstructive tactics of British Telecom. BT used to have a monopoly over all telecom services in Britain, and even though this was abolished years ago, BT have been able to use their entrenched position to prevent other companies from introducing new technologies. BT themselves made some bad decisions on which technologies to go for (don't ask me for details, I don't take an intelligent interest in these things), and then embarked on a campaign to persuade people that there was no demand for broadband access anyway. They seem to have been remarkably successful in this. Just this week there was an article in The Guardian claiming that few people would be willing to pay "installation costs of £140 to £210 and a typical subscription fee of £30 per month", when "the fact remains that trying to find compelling broadband-specific content on the web remains a frustrating experience". Well I have news for the Guardian reporter. For a start, I'm not looking for "broadband-specific content". I just want to access the same content as before, but without having to wait endlessly for the dial-up modem to connect, then waiting again and again when it disconnects me for no reason, to say nothing of the painfully slow wait for every page to download. Then there's the matter of cost. The ntl broadband subscription is £15 per month (for a 128kbps connection; £25 if you want 512kbps). That's less than I currently pay in telephone charges for the modem. As for installation costs, it turns out that the digital TV decoder box contains a cable modem. So we already had that in the house without knowing it. ntl send you a free installer CD, and all I needed to pay was £20 for 15 metres of ethernet cable to connect the TV decoder box in the family room to the computer in the study. At present, the cable is lying on the floor, but at the weekend I'll route it under the floorboards. As you'll have gathered, I quickly signed up for the new service. The trouble started when I tried to use the installer CD. The instruction booklet didn't seem to correspond to what was happening on the screen, and I eventually admitted defeat and phoned the ntl customer service line. ntl has a terrible reputation in this country, and people seem to have no end of complaints about them. I must have been lucky, because I have never had any trouble with them. But I started to get fed up when it took over 15 minutes to get past the recorded announcements ("All our lines are busy at present. Please continue to hold, and your call will be answered in rotation", followed by the same few bars of Mozart over and over again). Eventually I got through to a very helpful young man, who talked me through the installation process without having to use the CD, which he admitted had been causing problems. It took him nearly half an hour to get me through the whole process, which involved me constantly running between the family room and the study, tripping over the cats every time. But it worked! Now I have a permanent high-speed internet connection. Thank you, ntl! It seems that ntl has been overwhelmed by the demand for this new service, so the poor old Guardian reporter was wrong on that score too. There really is a huge demand for broadband internet connection here in Britain, whatever BT may try to tell people.
I have not been feeling well for the past week. I thought it was going to be a dose of flu at first, but I haven't had a fever and it seems that it was just a bad cold. It has left me feeling tired and bronchitic, and I have had a quiet weekend at home. I did go to the Plastic Ivy sauna in Dewsbury yesterday evening (my last opportunity to visit it before Mary comes home on Thursday). It was busier than I have seen it before, but with a mostly younger crowd who, understandably, weren't much interested in me. I think it's just as well that this final visit was so uneventful. It has left me feeling that I have seen enough of this place for a while, and I won't be fretting to go back there any time soon. Other than that, I have done very little this weekend apart from installing the ethernet cable for the broadband computer access. This was easier than I thought it was going to be. Our house, like nearly all houses in Britain, does not have a cellar, but there is a crawl space under the ground floor. This is about three feet deep under the dining room (where there are a couple of removable floor boards to give access to the space below), but the ground is on a slight slope, and the space decreases to about 18 inches under the family room. I drilled a couple of holes through the floorboards in the family room and the study, fed the cable through the hole at the family room end, then dropped down into the crawl space and wriggled across under the hallway to the edge of the family room, where I could get hold of the cable and pull it through to the study, where it feeds in unobtrusively to the ethernet connection at the back of the Apple Mac. I still can't get over how great it is to have this cable modem internet connection. At a speed of 128k, it is notionally only about twice as fast as the 56k modem that I had before, but in practice it seems to be many times as fast.
On Thursday I went to Opera North's production of Albert Herring. We have season tickets for Opera North, and we have got to know several of the other people who have tickets for the same series that we subscribe to. So although Mary was not with me, I didn't mind being there on my own because I could talk to our usual group of friends in the interval. Albert Herring is an interesting opera by Benjamin Britten. At one level, it is a comedy about English social attitudes, set in the deeply conservative rural community of Loxford, where they are unable to find a suitable May Queen for the May Day ceremonies. Eventually they hit on the idea of choosing instead a May King, the greengrocer's assistant Albert Herring. Young Albert is a simple lad, completely dominated by his mother, but he has the essential qualification of being a virgin (unlike any of the local girls). Britten uses this scenario to explore issues of sexual identity and gender transgression. After the May King ceremony, Albert decides to break free from his overbearing mother and disappears for a night on the town before coming home to assert his new identity. But the opera ends ambiguously. As the programme note puts it: "Quite whether Albert's third-act confession of his adventure of drunkenness, dirt 'and worse' alludes to a night with a stable-boy or with one of Loxford's seemingly endless supply of willing and experienced young women is perhaps less important than identifying the system of social oppression against which Albert rebels." As you will know if you have ever looked at my music page, I love Britten's operas. Albert Herring is one of his lesser known works, and I had not come across it before. I very much enjoyed this performance of a work that is at the same time entertaining, amusing and thought-provoking.
When I buy a book, I don't usually read it straight away. I put it on the shelf of books waiting to be read, and it has to take its turn. But I don't read the books in strict rotation. If I'm really looking forward to reading a book then it will jump a few places in the queue. Other books keep getting put to the back of the line. The book that I have just finished reading has had to wait a uniquely long time. When I first visited America, in 1964, I bought a little paperback book at the University of Pennsylvania bookstore, a selection of the Journals of Lewis and Clark (published by Mentor, price $1.75). It has been sitting on the shelf ever since, until I finally got round to looking at it a few weeks ago. The pages are yellowed at the edges but the content is timeless, and fascinating. I have been reading it a few pages at a time, at bedtime. It makes ideal bedtime reading. You can read a couple of days' journal entries and then ponder on the way the world has changed since Lewis and Clark made their epic journey. They were commissioned by President Jefferson to find a land route across North America from St Louis to the Pacific, following the course of the Missouri and Columbia rivers. They took a party of about 30 men, and one Indian woman who acted as a guide and interpreter, and they were away for over two years, from May 1804 to September 1806. There is an interesting contrast of styles in the journals. William Clark was a brusque military man whose journal entries are mostly factual records of what the party did each day. But Meriwether Lewis had a deeper, darker side to him, and some of his more introspective entries seem more like those of a modern online journaller.
Considering that he had just become the first white man ever to see the great falls of the Missouri, in what is now Montana, and that the triumphant success of his expedition is still remembered nearly 200 years later, it seems that he was being a bit harsh on himself. Sadly, he was wrong about being halfway through his life at the age of 31, because he survived only four more years in this sublunary world before dying in a violent incident which may have been murder or possibly suicide. Reading the journals, you can't help being aware of the unimaginable changes that have occurred since those days. The members of the expedition had no tools except axes and guns. They had to build their own canoes, and saddles for their horses, shoot game for subsistence, and make their own clothes from animal hides. For the whole duration of their expedition, they were completely cut off from what were then the United States. By the time they returned they had been given up for lost. Yet scarcely two lifetimes later men were walking on the moon and half the world's population could see them live on television. I would love to be able to see another two lifetimes ahead. Doubtless the world (if it still exists) will have changed in equally unimaginable ways by then. The journals record a seemingly idyllic world where vast herds of buffalo roam the plains ("I could see over twenty thousand at a time," writes Clark more than once) and the native tribes are mostly friendly, though wary of these strange explorers. Lewis and Clark constantly tell the Indians they meet that they have come in peace and wish them no harm. Reading the journals, one can't help being aware that within 60 years or so, virtually all the buffalo and most of the native tribes would be exterminated in the brutal colonisation of the American West. Having left this book to gather dust for 37 years, I wish now that I had read it sooner. It brings a lost world to life in the words of the men who actually discovered it, in a more vivid way than a second-hand account could possibly do.
Busy week ahead. Tomorrow afternoon I fly to Amsterdam, for some meetings on Wednesday. I get back home late on Wednesday evening, and then on Thursday I have to drive over to Manchester to pick Mary up at the airport. Finally, on Friday I'll be in London for the day. By the weekend I'll be very glad to veg out at home. With Mary about to return, it's time to reflect on how we have both managed without each other. The short answer is: alarmingly well. We both agree that the time has flown past, and that we have both been very content to be on our own. Don't get me wrong, though: I wouldn't want that to be a permanent situation, and I'm very much looking forward to having her back home again. But it seems to have done us both good to have a few weeks apart from each other, and I'm already beginning to hope that we'll want to repeat the experiment next year. No time for more now. I have to pack my overnight bag for the trip to the Netherlands, and make sure that I have my passport, tickets, euros and papers for the meetings. Liz just phoned, to wish me a good trip and to warn me not to have too many hash brownies while I'm there. But there won't be any opportunities for that sort of indulgence. This is strictly a business trip. I shall even wear a jacket and tie, that's how serious it is.
Mary is home again, and suffering from a bit of culture shock as she adjusts to the cool, grey, showery weather of northern England after two and a half months relaxing in the subtropical paradise of Gran Canaria. The climate there has definitely done her good, and she would really like to have stayed there for longer. But our friends Christine and Simon have been there on holiday for the past couple of weeks, and it seemed sensible for her to come back with them. She is not well enough to travel on her own, and the only alternative would have been for me to go out there to bring her back. Not that I would mind another visit there, but that would have been time consuming and expensive. As I drove over to Manchester airport on Thursday to meet them, I realised that I was singing to myself. This is not something that I normally do, so I guess it must show that I was pleased at the prospect of seeing Mary again. The seven weeks that we have been apart seem to have flown by, and I have really enjoyed living on my own for a while. But I wouldn't have wanted that to go on for much longer, and it's definitely good to have her back again. The flight arrived on time, and Mary was looking very cheerful and tanned as she came through the arrival area at Terminal 2, followed by Simon and Christine pushing the baggage trolleys. We somehow managed to squeeze them and all their luggage into the car for the journey back to Leeds. That evening, the cats were very cool towards Mary, and made a point of sitting on my knee to show their disapproval of her long absence. But they couldn't keep up that act for long, and they soon gravitated back to their usual place on her lap. Yesterday I was supposed to go to London for a meeting of the editorial board of one of the journals that we publish. I caught the early train at 7:20, but it only got as far as Doncaster. After a while, the conductor announced that the overhead power cables had come down at Retford, and that all the trains from the north were held up waiting for the power to be reconnected. Ninety minutes later, we still had not moved. We were told that single line working had been restored, and that the backlog was slowly being cleared. But they couldn't tell us how much longer the delay would last. At this point, there was an announcement that a train was about to leave Doncaster for Leeds. I decided to cut my losses and abort my journey. There didn't seem much point in arriving two hours (or more) late for a meeting at which my presence was not really essential; and I didn't like the thought that the return trains in the afternoon would probably still be badly disrupted and delayed. I phoned the office in London to tell them that I would not be at the meeting, and I found out that the colleague who should have been able to stand in for me was also unable to be there because of some domestic emergency. I felt a bit bad about that, because the editors of the journal had come from Copenhagen and Chicago to be at the meeting. However, a third colleague was able to take our place, so the meeting could go ahead. I was glad to be able to spend what was left of the day at my own desk, dealing with the work that had built up earlier in the week during my visit to Amsterdam (which was enjoyable but uneventful). I still haven't altogether shaken off the cold I had last week, and I have had a lazy day at home today, recuperating after the week's travels. I'll probably do the same tomorrow.
I came across this in a magazine recently. It was actually part of a list of 20, but I'll spare you the rest of them.
Right, that's quite enough silliness (as they used to say on Monty Python). Let's turn to something altogether more edifying. When I was in Gay's The Word a few weeks ago, I found the most extraordinary little book, The Real Tadzio by Gilbert Adair (whose novel Love and Death on Long Island I mentioned in March last year). Tadzio, of course, is the Polish youth whose adolescent charms captivate the writer Gustave Aschenbach, in Thomas Mann's novel Death in Venice. I had never realised it, but Death in Venice is almost purely autobiographical. Thomas Mann really was infatuated by a beautiful Polish boy while staying at a hotel in Venice in 1911. The boy's name was Wladyslaw Moes, and Gilbert Adair has researched his life story and unearthed some historical photographs of the boy. Moes came from a wealthy Polish family which was financially ruined when the communists took power. He spent the Second World War as a prisoner of war in Germany, and later emigrated to England where he died in 1986. Adair also discusses the impact of Mann's novel, and its influence on other art works, notably Visconti's 1971 film of Death in Venice, in which Tadzio is played by the Swedish teenager Bjorn Andresen, described by Adair as "an adolescent so ravishing that for once spectators, including readers of Mann, had the impression of justice having been done to a reputedly matchless model". Andresen's subsequent career has been an anticlimax. He is quoted as saying "I can't wait to age. I was born with a face I did not ask for." He adds, plaintively, "One of the diseases of the world is that we associate beauty with youth. We are wrong. The eyes and the face are the windows of the soul and these become more beautiful with the age and pain that life brings." It would be nice to be able to believe that. There may be a small element of truth in it, but it seems more like wishful thinking to me. As for Wladyslaw Moes, the real Tadzio, the photographs fail to explain his appeal. One forthright critic wrote "The child in question can only be described as a lump." Adair discusses this at some length, and points out that the ideal of physical beauty, for boys as well as for women, changes with the times. "One day," he says, "difficult as it may be for the moment to credit, Andresen will seem just as frumpy as his turn-of-the-century model."
Adair's book has sent me back to re-read Death in Venice. This is another of those yellowing paperbacks on my bookshelf (price three shillings and sixpence, in the days before decimal currency). It must be 30 or 40 years since I read it, and I don't now remember much of it at all. I imagine that I skimmed through it pretty fast. This time I shall take it slowly and relish the writing, in the excellent translation by Helen Lowe-Porter. That should provide my bedtime reading for several weeks.
Steve called to wish us a happy Easter. He and Jo are very pleased with their new location, in a small town between Seville and the Portuguese border. They have been living there for a few months now, and Steve has recently gone into business with a couple they met there. They have opened a garden centre, and it seems to have made a good start. They have been open to the public for ten days now, and have already cleared enough profit to pay for the first month's rent of the shop. Tom also likes it there. It's much easier for him to meet other kids to play with than it was in their previous isolated location. Easter is a big festival in Spain. Today, Jo took Tom to see the Easter procession, where members of one of the local churches take various statues and icons from the church and parade them through the town. The procession passed by them, then paused at a street corner for some kind of traditional ritual. Tom quickly lost patience when he saw that the procession had stopped, and he shouted out "DON'T JUST STAND THERE, PROCESS!" Jo fell about laughing, and had to translate this into Spanish for the benefit of the other bystanders. Mary and I are going to visit them in a week's time. The last time we saw them was in September, and a lot has changed since then. It's going to great to see them in their new home, and I'm sure Tom will be a lot of fun to be with. We're really looking forward to this trip.
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