Stiff Upper Lip

“The King’s Speech”. Pip-pip, toodle-oo. Jolly good show, a showcase of British stiff upper lip idiosyncrasy it isn’t. Thrust reluctantly on to a world stage by the forced abdication of his urbane, sophisticated brother, poor Bertie is ill-equipped for the age of wireless. Attempting as the then Prince Albert to speak at the British Empire Exhibition in 1925 into a black hole of wretched, pitiful, agonising stammering and sweaty verbal indecision, the silences would have filled a football stadium. A monstrous microphone, a heat-seeking metaphor for the sum of all the Prince's fears, hovers menacingly.  His wife - a spectacularly understated, subtle and emotionally-rich Helena Bonham-Carter, remarkable mother to the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, engages the services of an eccentric Australian, Lionel Logue, (Geoffrey Rush) a speech therapist operating out of a Harley Street basement. “My house, my rules. You come to me, I don’t come to you. First rule. My name is Lionel and that’s what you call me. I’ll call you Bertie”. Colin Firth as the future King George VI, looked as if he has been slapped in the face with a wet fish.
Logue realises that the underlying causes of Bertie’s affliction reside in his family’s history. Michael Gambon’s overbearing, impatient George V shows a complete lack of understanding as he imagines that all Bertie has to do is persist and he’ll somehow by dint of sheer effort of will overcome his affliction. Older brother David (Guy Pearce)– the future King Edward VIII - knows exactly how to reduce his verbally impoverished brother to ineffectual, frustrated, silent misery.
Bertie and Lionel fence and clash, agonise, sing and swear, creating together a landscape both epic and intimate.
Lionel is untrained and formally unqualified; his experience was gained in the emotional wreckage in the aftermath of the First World War. He is a failed actor, rejected for the part of Richard III by an amateur dramatics company in Putney, is given to grand gesture but is unintimidated by the blue-blood from the Palace whose entire training has been in ways to hold everything together. Logue guides his patient through the minefield of Coronation responses, ticking off a somewhat ovine Archbishop of Canterbury (Derek Jacobi) during the rehearsals. Cometh the hour, cometh the man; the film’s culminating scene is the triumphal King’s Speech of 1939, a rallying cry to an Empire to rise up, stand, and fight the menace of Nazi Germany.
The battlefields of emotional silence generated by the film are nothing short of stunning. An absolutely stellar cast includes a totally believable Churchill (Timothy Spall), who, casting off the unctuous obsequiousness of Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter series, is just beginning to develop the bulldog voice so beloved of a nation at war.
An avalanche of BAFTA’s must surely follow. Visually authentic and dramatically almost perfect, this one's the best by far, for a long time.

Stellar Drivel

There has, it would appear, been debate in the astrology community as to whether or not Sedna, a spherical spit of rock an awfully long way away is the tenth planet in our solar system. Arnapkapfaaluk is an Inuit word meaning Big Bad Woman and also a word for Sedna, the Inuit Goddess of the Deep Sea who dwells in the depths of the Arctic and protects the sea-creatures. According to Inuit legend, Sedna was so huge and hungry that she ate everything in her parents’ house, then gnawed off one of her father’s arms while he was asleep. Big bad woman indeed, not the sort of chick you want to meet on a blind date when Mercury is in retrograde, but anything involving big, bad women gets my attention. Sedna is presented to many men but finding none of them to her liking, she marries a dog. Not unreasonably, her father becomes upset, takes her out to sea in his kayak and tosses her over the side, quite an achievement with only one arm. Sedna clings to the side of the kayak whereupon her father chops off her fingers until she sinks like Leonardo di Caprio into the underworld and becomes immortal, her huge fingers becoming seals and walrus to be hunted by the Inuit. Sedna is linked to the sign of Cancer, seemingly confirmed by its zodiacal location of early Cancer at “perihelion” or ‘home sign’. To astrologers, Sedna’s influence is ancient and primordial. It is currently in the zodiac sign of Taurus.

As today happens to be my birthday, a distinction shared with the population of Cairo, or about seventeen million anonymous others, I find myself in retrospective mood. In common with the multitudes worldwide who place their trust in astrologers and other persons with the time and inclination to seek meaning from celestial bodies, I  thought I should review my life and progress in the context of my star sign, also whether those born near the periphery of a zodiacal sign share characteristics of both.  I am, it seems, firmly rooted as a Capricorn, or sea-goat. According to that well-known oracle of celestial wisdom, "I Love India", we sea-goats might, to a casual and superficial observer, be a tad curmudgeonly from time to time.

“It is very difficult to get close to a Capricorn man. He is always enclosed within a strong wall, which is not too easy to breach. He is not too gregarious & outgoing, but his personality traits include determination and patience. He has fierce ambitions, which he pursues with a strong resolve. If you look at him casually, it may seem as if he prefers solitude to company. Now, look deeper, inside his heart. Though he doesn't show it, he wants admiration as much as other people. It's just that a Capricorn male is too shy to express his feeling (sic) openly.”

Marvellous. How frightfully apt.

And yet, a dark cloud overshadows me. The horoscope is in disarray due to the gravitational pull of the Moon, and all the signs are now a month out of synch, necessitating the introduction of a new sign, Ophiuchus, wedged between Scorpio and Sagittarius. Were I to abandon the sign under which I was born, I now find  myself to be a Sagittarian, ruled, it would seem, by the planet Jupiter. From the same unimpeachable source I now discover myself to be...

“cheerful and optimistic by nature…sees just the brighter side of life, ignoring the darker aspect.” It appears that I am “ lucky in both, professional and personal fronts…very straightforward, sometimes to the point of being rude.” Surely not. "Sagittarian man believes that the nature of the person matters more than the appearance. …believes that looks can go weary (sic), but nature always remains the same. Innocent at heart and straightforward in talk, he is not at all deceitful.”

Hum.

Being Happy

It's become a social imperative to be happy, or, at least, not to ever admit to being unhappy, except to psychologists who are paid to trawl through acres of human misery. My favourite Winnie-the-Pooh character is Eeyore, the lugubrious donkey, who made a career out of being unhappy, or, at least, pretending to be.  I'd like to share a rain-cloud with him. He once remarked:  "This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated, if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it."

The late British philosopher, Alan Watts once remarked "If I draw a circle then ask people what I have drawn, most will say 'a circle'. Very few will say 'a hole'. But, the circle and the hole, the inner and the outer, together make up the whole, if you'll pardon the pun. Who we are is the inside, where we are is the outside. Both conflated, determines whether or not we might describe ourselves as 'happy'. Vagabonds spend a lot of time rearranging their geography or, if you will, reconfiguring their circles in different places. For a brief, standstill moment in church yesterday, the geography sharpened to pinpoint accuracy, the mountains held their breath and outer and inner resonated with a pure, perfect tone.
As an inveterate voyeur, I have learned that I derive pleasure from watching other people engage in pleasurable acts. Neglecting pornography, I think this is an entirely normal state of mind, which is why I spend a lot of time in cafes and coffee shops. There's a rather enterprising cafe in Tel Aviv which has completely dispensed with the notion of serving food and coffee altogether - it serves its patrons empty plates and charges real money. People still come to watch and listen, cocooned in an intimate, manageable microcosm of the world; every detail clearly focused. Men peck each other on the cheek here and it's interesting to speculate about them, since the enthusiasm with which they do so is in some way unknown to me concerned with the relationship they have with each other. I was once in a hotel in St Petersburg and was fascinated by the behaviour of men towards a lone woman at the bar. She was clearly waiting for someone, but it didn't stop at least half a dozen hopefuls from trying their luck.
I'm writing this sitting in a luxurious shopping mall. Ralph Lauren is a few metres away, a breathtaking selection of sunglasses, shoes, a cinema, good food. What more could a professional hedonist desire? In other words, this environment provides everything material outside the circle. Except a relationship with the inside. I think, like Dostoyevsky, that a visit to the coffee shop is if no use unless one is with friends to argue with.

Sea Nymphs and Caffeine

Living here makes one an expert on coffee. I so miss my Nespresso machine but having one here is a luxury which I can't quite run to - rather like jet skiing. Starbucks is ever-present, however, which is some small crumb of comfort, not least because if you're in Starbucks, by definition you have absolutely nothing better to do. I read yesterday that they are changing their logo, stripping away the outer green layer with the company name on. Perhaps a slight improvement on the original brown, splay-finned mermaid.

CEO Howard Schultz talked about the decision to update its emblematic logo on the 40th anniversary of the company in March.

"This new evolution of the logo does two things that are very important," Schultz said. "It embraces and respects our heritage and at the same time evolves us to a point where we feel it's more suitable to the future."

Put another way, it’ll also sell more coffee in China.

I think the new version looks more like a logo for a hair conditioning product and emphasises the sea nymph as apparently naked with a sultry look in her eyes. What this has to do with Starbuck, first mate on the ‘Pequod’, the doomed Captain Ahab’s vessel in Moby Dick escapes me at the moment.

Why am I bothering to blog about this? What a trivial, vapid, irreflective life I lead…

Oh, yes. I'm in Starbucks.

In Beaune

Medieval French aristocrats were a duplicitous lot. Pausing in Beaune revealed the extent of their papish depravity. Beaune is a quite beautiful unspoiled part of Burgundy, with the exception of the A6 thundering northwards a few kilometres away, and the old town has a delightful charm which I'm getting quite used to appreciating.. 

It's a hub of the wine trade, auctions still take place by burning candle, festering, mildewed bottles sell for vast sums at the local Christie's auction house and you can buy a bottle of 1991 Montrachet for 950 euros in local restaurants.

But, returning to the Burgundian dukes. The auction house is in the Hôtel-Dieu with its beautifully crenellated roof which was founded on 4 August 1443, when Burgundy was ruled by Duke Philip the Good, who was, it seemed, a good mate of the Pope. The Hundred Years War had recently been brought to a close by the signing of the Treaty of Arras in 1435. Mahyem and massacres, however, continued with marauding bands ("écorcheurs") still roaming the countryside, pillaging and destroying, causing  misery, hardship and famine.  Life in those days could well be described  in the words of Thomas Hobbes two hundred years later as ‘nasty, brutish and short’. The majority of the people of Beaune were declared destitute. The building of the Hôtel-Dieu as a hospital and refuge for the poor served two purposes -  to ameliorate the appalling suffering the bastard English had inflicted during the war and, as a trifling incidental, buy the Duke’s way into heaven with indulgences.

The Hospices de Beaune received their first patient on 1 January 1452 and looked very much like this - the 'Room of the Poors'. Elderly, disabled and sick people, orphans, women about to give birth and the destitute have all been uninterruptedly welcomed for treatment and refuge, from the Middle Ages almost until the present day. The chapel is conveniently part of the building lest the ministrations of the carers proved insufficient and the patient expired, which judging by the surgical instruments on show in the museum, happened rather more frequently than not.
The Duke appears on the left with other luminaries in Rogier Weyden's majestic polytych on the Last Judgement.. The saved are escorted into paradise on the left, while the damned are hurled into the abyss on the right.

Skiing Like A Belgian

"You ski like a Belgian" is a cheerily raffish Swiss insult to those, unlike themselves who had the misfortune to be born somewhere else and for whom sliding down precipitous slopes comes as naturally as breathing.

Surprisingly, a lifetime and a half ago, I used to teach people to ski. Before the days of parabolic skis which allow even an ill-balanced troglodye to turn, we learned on sleek, long, wood-core skis, legs glued together and carved compression parallels were achieved only after much effort and practice. Modern skis have taken a leaf from the skateboarders book, have a spectacular parabolic curve and turn on a sixpence with legs hip-width apart. All of which meant that with legs glued together and determined pressure, I found myself over-rotating hopelessly with shoulders facing the wrong way, amid gales of laughter. In my defence, the borrowed skis were a bit short, but I nonetheless felt briefly Belgian.

Out and About

It's been quite a week. France is full of small, private interstices that the French, quite properly, keep to themselves. It's captivating to sit on the sidelines en famille  when the chatter involves family, black sheep, flimflam and gossip. It's sometimes convenient to catch only one word in three, most especially when accents are treacle-thick and tongues loosened with good wine. The Gipsy spent a week in the company of various friends and relatives dismembering a pig or two - an activity going back generations, I gather, and some of the fruits of her labours was evident at this and other dinner-tables.  Boar meat stiffens the sinews and puts fire in the blood, thus buying slivers of weed-thin, tasteless beef bacon from the Sultan Centre won't ever quite seem the same, I'm afraid. This photograph shows what a couple of million euros will buy you by way of a morning view.

Geneva is different. Swiss and proper, home from 1536 to Jean Calvin, who, having embraced Protestantism, had to leave France. He came to Geneva, where he expected to stay for only a short time since Geneva had just experienced the Reformation. The old church had been abolished and the rule of the bishop repudiated, but the new church had not been properly organised. Oh, dear me - what a  drearily familiar tale. The inhabitants of the city were quite a fun-loving crowd, given to what might be described as the passions of the flesh and much remained to be done, at least according to the fledgling Protestant burghers of the town, to repair public morals, in other words to make having fun illegal. The most active of the reformers of religion in Geneva was the fiery French preacher Guillaume Farel. Hearing of the arrival of Calvin, whom he knew by reputation, Farel came to him and urged him to remain and help in the reorganisation and 'reform of religion'. Calvin had no taste for this sort of work, and allegedly attempted to decline, but Farel called down the wrath of God upon him if he refused.  Calvin was so intimidated that he felt compelled to stay, although reluctantly. He began his work in Geneva as one of the ministers, and his genius for organisation soon manifested itself. He drew up a catechism and a confession of faith, which were accepted with some initial reluctance by the city government. On the matter of church discipline, Calvin ran into more serious trouble. It was his aim to make the church autonomous in disciplinary matters which  involved, first of all, the right of the Church to decide who was worthy to be admitted to partake of the Lord's Supper and who should be excluded, in other words, the right to excommunicate. H'm This rings a faint, clangorous bell - for the life of me I cannot quite bring it to mind. Calvin's legacy would not have been to his liking - he is remembered chiefly in Geneva by Calvinus a rather fine glass of beer, apparently. His theology, much misunderstood, might be reduced to the view that God reigns everywhere and over all things and this led him to develop the notion that man can serve God in every area of life—church, civil government, education, art, music, business, law, journalism, etc. Calvin’s teaching led directly to what has become known as the “Protestant work ethic” and created unprecedented economic prosperity around the world. Good stuff, but, hey, I only went for the skiing - perhaps more of that anon...