Eighteen years of PD

Everybody with Parkinson’s remembers the anniversary of the diagnosis or ‘parkiversary’. I am no different except that I have had more than a few. I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s on 11 December at Pembury Hospital at Tunbridge Wells. In itself the diagnosis was unremarkable, being delivered in a brisk no-nonsense kind of way by a female German neurologist on secondment from Hamburg I believe.

“You have Parkinson’s disease, Mr Stamford” she said, instantly reducing my wife to tears. “Dr Stamford” I said “that’s Dr Stamford”. She looked bewildered for a moment before countering with “but you are not a medical doctor”. “No” I said “I am a neuroscientist” before giving her a brief summary of my prior research career. My wife, quietly sobbing into a handkerchief in the corner, brought this sparring to an abrupt halt. “But you started it” she said as we walked back to the car. “No I didn’t” I offered in a feeble attempt at humour “she invaded Poland”. My wife’s raised eyebrow indicated that the conversation was over. We briefly compared notes before setting off back to work.

All this was the work of a single lunchtime, exactly 18 years ago today. The neurologist, Dr Panzer*, did not invite questions. I just simply became a number, a new manila folder to be filled with shaky spirals, samples of handwriting, and all the usual scans. For that lunchtime, the folder had my name, address and GP. Dr Panzer referred me for an MRI scan and the pages began to fill up further folders (and this is a real folder, not a computer icon).

Before levodopa, life expectancy was poor. Six years from diagnosis to death. And if we are honest, six rather shitty years at that. To reach 18 years of Parkinson’s is, though I say so myself, something of an achievement, albeit a largely passive one, achieved through some 60,000 tablets, potions, salves, balms, and implanted electrodes to stimulate deep brain structures. Oh and exercise of course.

Eighteen years. If it was a lodger, and I sometimes think it is, albeit a largely unwelcome one, the notion of it occupying the spare bedroom in perpetuity would be decidedly unappealing. Even if it was one of one’s own children, 18 will usually be the point where it would be packed off to university with student loan and armfuls of books.

Okay Parkinson’s, it’s time to go. That’s you to go, not me. They have even demolished my local hospital and built a new one in the time you have been occupying my brain, bouncing around in my basal ganglia, lolling on the loungers of my limbic system. 18 years is too long to occupy anyone’s brain. You have wasted enough of my life. I would like to say it’s been lovely but it hasn’t. Take a hint. You are the worst kind of houseguest. If I could kick you out and change the lock, I would do so.

*You didn’t really think that was the neurologist’s full name?

The CD is dead? Don’t make me laugh!

I started collecting LPs when I was 15. I can remember the record in question (Hot August Night by Neil Diamond) and the first classical album I bought shortly thereafter (Peer Gynt by Grieg). At first I bought infrequently – I was only a schoolboy and my pocket money went only just so far. But I listened to a great deal of music and consequently bought discerningly.

By the 1980s, when I was in my early twenties, with four years of university behind me, I found myself drawing a salary as a research assistant. In terms of stacking up the vinyl I had money to burn. Almost literally. It was an opportunity to buy all those albums I had coveted. No more months of grim self-denial. It was time to splurge.

Almost every Saturday would find me skulking amongst the racks at the HMV Shop on Oxford Street, The Virgin Megastore at Tottenham Court Road or Tower Records at Piccadilly Circus. And for classical music, nothing could beat the Music Discount Centre (formerly Ron’s Music Shop) opposite Charing Cross station, sadly long since gone. Occasionally I would dive down into the back streets of Soho in search of rare jazz recordings. The shops got to know me and would keep me abreast of anticipated shipments of specialist live recordings as they euphemistically described what everyone else knew as bootlegs. And I walked everywhere, connecting the dots between the tube stations, piecing together a retail homunculus of London’s West End.

One might suppose this to be a young man’s indulgence, put aside or curtailed by each sequential life event – marriage, children and so on, with their associated dips in spending power. Wrong. Although I never quite ever topped the unfettered retail assault of my twenties, the habit continued unabated. I am now in my early 60s and the record (LP and CD) collection stands at a giddying 4000 discs. 4000 discs in 48 years is 83 albums per year. That’s a disc every 4 to 5 days. On average. I don’t know whether I should be ashamed or proud.

The truth of it is I love music. Almost every form or manifestation of music. From the Taiko drummers of Japan to the Fado singers of Portugal. From unaccompanied folk singers in Northumbria to the Symphony of a Thousand by Mahler. From the jingle jangle of Javanese gamelan to the woody resonance of a solo cello. A cornucopia of music.

And it had to be on LP or, latterly, CD. I was never a huge fan of cassettes. The quality was never adequate despite the weight of advertising trying to persuade us otherwise. Cassettes flattered to deceive. I started with LPs and postponed the decision to swap over to CD (or not) until the late 80s. I’m not sure why I was so reticent. The price differential between LP and CD was certainly offputting, with CDs essentially double the price of LPs. That wasn’t the sole cause of my caution.

Mixed messages seemed to emerge from the CD lobby. “Perfect sound forever” was the courageous claim of the CD manufacturers. Forever is a long time. And this kind of perfection was difficult to reconcile with those bizarre adverts showing CDs daubed with butter, strawberry jam and whatever. There are surely better ways of demonstrating the durability of this then new vehicle. In any case, it was hardly a fair comparison. I have always taken my LPs neat – no butter or jam.

CDs were easy – put them in the tray, press play. That was it. All of it. What could be easier? I guess that was another attraction for many listeners. They didn’t need to worry about any rigmarole.

Okay so the the sound seemed better on unbuttered CDs – brighter, clearer and more detailed. You really could hear one of the trombonists quietly break wind in the seventh bar of Mahler 5. On LP, his blushes were spared by the background rumble, snap, crackle and pop of the LP’s groove. For classical music, the pleasure of hearing the music emerge from silence, apart from the occasional flatulent brass player (why is it always the brass?) was worth the premium. For rock, the claimed advantages of CD were less obvious. And certainly you would have been hard pressed to detect any trouser coughing against the backdrop of John Bonham’s drumming.

I think my reticence in changing over completely to CD was twofold. Firstly and most obviously perhaps, I liked the physical presence of LPs much more than CDs. In the early days of CDs, often the cover design was little more than a scaling down of the equivalent LP and, whilst the writing on an LP sleeve was readable, the same could not be said for the minuscule text on the CD booklet. Call me picky but I quite like being able to read those background notes. Especially on jazz albums where documentation is everything – “Jellyroll Morton played this with a sprained thumb causing him to miss the entry in the second bar of Cold Ravioli Blues”. That sort of thing.

But the real root of my reticence is what I called the rigmarole. Secretly I think I quite enjoyed it. Putting the record on the turntable, carefully wiping it down with a carbon fibre brush to clear the surface dust, brushing the stylus with isopropyl alcohol before slowly lowering the arm down onto the disc. It was my way of showing my respect for the music and for the record itself. If I looked after it then it would look after me. So many of my friends paid little attention to such preparatory ritual and paid the price with records that showed their age in the ingrained surface debris and compromised sound.

And what of my LPs, mostly 40 or more years old and largely unplayed for most of those 4 decades? How do they sound? well, pretty good if I’m honest. With a decent if not state-of-the-art turntable, they have aged well. Protective sleeves have helped. The sound is bright and musical and whilst the flatulent trombonist is inaudible, the rest of the brass section rings out clearly.

I haven’t failed to notice the recent resurgence of LPs. And whilst I was reticent 40 years ago to change from LP to CD, I’m in no hurry to change back again. Sonically I think CDs hold the edge unless competing with the kind of turntables that need a mortgage. Pound for pound, CDs remain superior (in my humble opinion). No end-of-side distortion, more limited dynamic range and ever so slightly muddier sound quality. Plus, most remarkably, they often cost more than the equivalent CDs. That seems to me particularly paradoxical.

But what of Spotify and Amazon and the streaming services I hear you ask. To be honest I’ve never really been persuaded of their merits. A friend of mine once said of Spotify that it was music for people who didn’t really like music. I can sort of see what he meant. In some ways it is a step further removed from the circumstances of its recording. LPs have always offered abundant documentation whether pop, jazz or classical. CDs suffered from the compact format by either reproducing the LP documentation in an infinitesimally small font or by abbreviating the content. Spotify offers next to no information and, should you wish that, it will be found on your computer.

Once you invoke the computer as a source of musical pleasure, you are inviting trouble in my view. If you have to listen to a piece of music with a laptop on your knee, you are not concentrating on the music. And by doing so you are devaluing, whether consciously or otherwise, that music. At the end of the day a laptop is not a hi-fi component.

Renting virtual music (and with the streaming services, that is exactly what you are doing) is akin to leasehold versus freehold. If a streaming service becomes bankrupt, why do you think all your music will be? Let’s not delude ourselves that handing over our music to 3rd parties is a good idea. Remember Napster?

In the end it comes down to the fact that I like to have something in my hands – documentation, programme notes, librettos with which to enhance my connection to the music. Balancing quality of sound and convenience in a robust format remains my preferred approach to the music. I’m happy that doomsayers are predicting the demise of CD. I don’t see a format in decline. The CDs I bought in the 80s sounds just as good today – better in fact as I have upgraded the hi-fi over the years.

My friends are ditching their CDs, persuaded by these modern music delivery systems. I am unconvinced and gladly taking those unwanted CDs. Happy to help.

Long live the CD.

Jon’s last ride

Jt wasn’t supposed to end like this. In the cinema of my mind, I saw it very differently – a mighty V8 Jaguar comes to a halt. Rugged, good looking man (myself obviously), removes Ray Bans, eyes screwed against the low sun, one last check in the rearview mirror, a blip on the loud pedal, one last snarl from that mighty V8 then silence. Pan across the valley to the familiar shape of Neuschwanstein castle as the music swells – “The Entry of the Gods into Valhalla” by Richard Wagner. Closing credits roll as the music thunders to conclusion. Screen fades to black.

That sort of thing.

Epic, heroic and melodramatic all in one. Pete and l had discussed the idea a year or so back when it looked as though I was going to lose my driving licence. A series of narrative conversations about Parkinson’s, linked together by a journey through the various Wagnerian castles. Thoughts by Pete and Jon, music by Wagner. What’s not to like.

But somehow events rarely unfold so tidily. Like a friend who was looking for spiritual enlightenment at the top of Kilimanjaro at dawn only to find her moment of quiet reflection brought to an abrupt halt by four Dutch teenagers intent on mooning her until she left the mountaintop. Fatuous trumps heroic every time.

In my case, there was no Jaguar. No Wagner. No sunset. Just a momentary lapse of concentration approaching a sharp right-left corner in an this ageing Nissan Micra. A screech of tyres, and an abrupt admonishing yelp from my passenger as we left the road, crashed through brush and bushes, coming eventually to rest with that familiar sound of headlamp meeting tree trunk. A cause for celebration with hindsight although it did not seem so at the time (to the right of the tree trunk was a steep ravine, sliding into which would almost certainly have rolled the car).

No Wagner. No Jaguar. No roaring V8. No music at all.

So this is how it ends, I thought.

I know of no male who would ever volunteer the opinion that they were anything less than a god behind the wheel. It’s a machismo sort of thing I think, some DNA relic from our Neanderthal background. Let me break with tradition then and vouch the opinion, endorsed by my friends and anyone who has ever been driven by me, that my own driving is perhaps not the very zenith of automotive control. Put another way, and I have the Parkinson’s at least partly to blame, I am probably not a very good driver. I am the counterfoil.

As my passenger and I collected our thoughts and dusted ourselves down, we counted ourselves lucky. He could have shouted. He would have been within his rights to be angry. Or worried or fearful. He has known me for more than fifty years. He did not need to say anything. We both knew what this meant.

Given time I could have persuaded myself that it was just a one-off, an accident that would not be repeated. But I have a strong imagination and can easily deconstruct any event into a series of what-ifs. What if I had hit a person rather than a tree. What if the car had caught fire after the collision? What if? What if? What if?

It doesn’t matter how long you delude yourself that it will be okay, eventually it won’t. I picked my driving licence from the bureau, placed it in a Manila envelope with a brief covering letter and sent it to the DVLA.

It was not to a soundtrack of Wagner. It was not heroic. Nor noble. Just prosaic. The only thing I could have done. At least it didn’t end in Valhalla.

Espresso in the tumbleweeds

What once flowed onto the page in reckless abandon, words tumbling over each other in the need to be heard, is now barely a trickle. Where once I felt the need to express myself on virtually any given subject I no longer have that drive or compulsion. My fire is almost gone, flickering embers rather than crackling flame. It is a terrible moment for any writer – and I will just this once accord myself the luxury of that conceit, when they realise that the flame is gone, the fire cold.

The harder one tries the more the target recedes. Like an asthmatic dragon I have made effort upon fumbling effort to rekindle that fire. My desk is a shrieking bedlam of projects enthusiastically initiated then apathetically abandoned. An installation of empty espresso cups and Jaffa cake wrappers. Short stories, that novel I promised myself, plays, critiques, reviews and so on, a cacophony of incompletion, cheek by jowl with biscuit crumbs and coffee stains.

For months I have told others about my forthcoming screenplay, hoping against hope that, by talking about it, it might somehow become real. And it did briefly flicker into life, only to be too soon abandoned like some Wild West homestead shaped by the wind and tumbleweed. If I describe things often enough eventually I start to believe what I have said rather than what I have done. This is self delusion on an epic scale, the very grandeur of the deceit almost worthy of a certain ex-US President.

Parkinson’s lent me a voice, both figuratively and literally. The last five years particularly, when progress has been swiftest, discovery upon discovery in the perpetual flux of new and resurrected drugs, provided me with ample material to enlighten and explain for any readers so interested. Parkinson’s was my mojo. When you have written about little else for a decade, it’s hard to execute a credible volte face and speak with authority on other material.

I would like to believe, even in the face of such persuasive arguments to the contrary, that I will one day write a significant work of fiction – a screenplay, novel, or collection of short stories. Apart from occasional sputterings (https://jonstamford.com/writing/) the short story has largely eluded me as a genre. The novel too. And the less said about my moribund screenplay, the better.

Perhaps I should focus on maudlin self-pity. If the previous half dozen paragraphs are anything to go by, I’ve pretty much got that one nailed.

Class dismissed.

Signing off

For the last seventeen years I have had Parkinson’s (PD). Yes, I know I probably had it before diagnosis. It’s not a competition. There are no yardsticks to compare each other’s suffering. Simple fact – some get it worse than others. I consider myself one of the luckier ones. But it has been one of the enduring agonies of this condition that I have watched friends fall by the wayside. The journey is littered with the lost, comrades in arms who drew a weaker hand than I. Few things are more heartbreaking than to see close friends tortured beyond repair, their voices fading into the long silence.

Some shade into darkness quicker than others. Some are tortured by the private agonies of dystonia, others dance to that ridiculous self-parody of walking that we call dyskinesia, forced to endure the cruel laughter and humiliation, ultimately too weary to explain to the disinterested. Even for those untouched by such vicissitudes, there are still further miseries in store.

Okay I have had some of these in moderation – by which I mean sufficient to recognise the symptoms but too little to gauge their current path or project a future trajectory. I fall into that category – I have the full range of symptoms, but expressed at a relatively low level such that, beyond a general low-level malaise, none of the symptoms of PD have taken top billing, nor even a starring role. Like I said, I feel lucky. I feel empathy, sympathy or whatever for those in the majority who suffer more than myself.

The last seventeen years of PD have yielded some eight books, loosely based around life with the condition, but often veering into less focused tracts on politics (sorry, I can’t apologise enough), music, philosophy and so on. Some of you bought my books and I thank you for that. Writing is, both at its best and worst, a lonely way to occupy yourself. Short of book signings, press releases, chat show interviews and so on it amounts to solitary aeons at the keyboard. Those sequinned soirees among the glitterati are the province of the JK Rowlings of this world, not hacks like myself. Anyone who was ever going to read my books has done so by now. They will also probably have noticed the same features of my writing, appearing like leitmotifs throughout. And there’s the rub. I have said everything I wanted to say, offered every crumb of advice I could conjure, and cracked every joke I know.

I could carry on, re-treading and re-purposing old ground for what may be a new audience. Not a bad way to spend my time. And, with a little effort, I could easily delude myself that this still represented a service to our PD community. Truth is it doesn’t.

For me, PD is a journey but not in the way you might think. It is no mere progression and intensification of symptoms, though those are a parallel path. No, the journey as such is the transformation of blind optimism into realism. The journey essentially of acceptance.

For many within the PD community, acceptance is a dirty word. I know plenty who might argue that acceptance amounts to an admission of defeat. I don’t see it that way. To my mind, acceptance is the realisation that I cannot change everything. Some things will be beyond my ability to alter, whether by healthy eating, medication, exercise and so on. Acceptance for me represents the acknowledgement that energy spent railing against the injustice of PD is not energy well spent. Fighting PD is sapping. In my book, acceptance is a redeployment of one’s resources where one can reasonably expect benefit. In the same way Russia burnt its cities ahead of the Wehrmacht’s approach, prepared to concede ground and better use the resources they had to preserve the country. So it is with PD. Don’t fight the battles you can’t win.

It has taken me some seventeen years to grasp this fundamental truth, to reach this personal nirvana. Acceptance is the path to survival not to defeat. I don’t want to ‘fight’, kicking and screaming against this unseen enemy. There are better ways of spending that energy.

I have written books, given lectures, been part of panels, workgroups and advisory boards. I’ve advocated till I’m blue in the face. I have been a neuroscientist, a researcher, writer and adviser. Sure, others have done more. But I have done all I can. And at the end of the day I’ve put in my shift. I’ve given all I had. And now I want to turn away from writing about PD. It’s time for younger men and women to spell out their agenda, to raise their banners and and to lead their armies.

This, such as it is, is my baton to pass on to you. Run. Run like the wind. There is a whole world out there. Life is the ultimate journey and we never pass the same way twice. Thank you for reading. My watch is ended.

Siegfried’s desk

It was a long tradition of my school, and probably elsewhere besides, to carve your initials into your desk. The especially brave would write their entire name. Obviously this is easier if you are James Bond rather than say Aristotle Fotheringay. Many of the desks were extremely old, with some of the set-up-and-beg examples dating from the turn-of-the-century. That’s the turn of the 18th into the 19th century. With comic good humour, these ancient specimens were largely bequeathed to New Block. Constructed of cast iron and British dark oak, they were the very model of Victorian inflexibility. Whereas modern desks amount to little more than a space to put your laptop, these Victorian behemoths, with grooved rest for quill and ink well, were designed to last as long as the Empire. And largely they did.

Many of the desks were so old that new inscriptions were made over existing handiwork. Some seemed to speak angrily, vicious carvings deep into the surface. Others barely ghosted the years at Marlborough, with timid diaphanous markings, delicate and effete scripture. When I was an inmate, sorry I mean pupil, there was a clear gender divide. I don’t recall Persephone or Camilla ever feeling the need to mark their presence. Nor can one imagine Kate Middleton, our future queen and Old Marlburienne, taking the compass point or dividers, the favoured means of inscription, to virgin oak. Inscribing ones desk was a male province alone. Some even dated their handiwork. Since the punishment for such inscriptions was often beating, this was ill considered.

Maybe it says something about our need to mark our passing. And many of those desks in New Block, inscribed by the future young officers of The Great War, were to be exactly that. Leaving school, 18 years old, freshfaced and innocent to Sandhurst and then on to the Somme, Passchendaele and Cambrai, as young lieutenants, to die a thousand different anonymous deaths on foreign soil in that most dehumanising conflict. Marlborough produced more than its fair share of war poets – Brooke and Sorley to name two – but none more famous and impactful than Siegfried Sassoon, author of, inter alia, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.

Or perhaps I should say ‘infamous’. It was Sassoon’s published ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’ of August 1917 that raised a voice of protest against the continuation of the mechanised slaughter of Passchendaele and beyond. Leaked to the press and even read out in Parliament, it was enough to have Sassoon ‘sectioned’ in modern parlance and sent to Craiglochart War Hospital, a treatment centre for psychiatric and neuropsychiatric cases where he met fellow dissident Wilfred Owen.

But Sassoon, despite the heavy-handed approach of the British Army’s top brass, was taken seriously. He was no angry, inexperienced neophyte, no desk pilot shirking front line action, but the recipient, on 27th of July 1916, of the Military Cross and later even recommended for the Victoria Cross. A courageous and well respected officer.

For much of my third year at Marlborough, I sat, for Tuesday double Geography in NB2, at Sassoon’s former desk. Angry inch high letters, deep chiselled capitals, and his name in its entirety. No coy initials. No time wasted on needless truncations. SIEGFRIED SASSOON, bold as brass. But Sassoon, as was to become apparent soon enough in Flanders, was not the kind to hide.

At the time, it meant little to me – another former pupil at what was, for that year, my desk. The depth of Sassoon’s inscription making writing neatly in my exercise book over that bumpy rutted trench surface nigh on impossible.

Did I inscribe my initials? No. And therein lies the mark of the man. Sassoon – bold, courageous and outspoken. Stamford – timid, anxious and reticent.

CD or not CD…

I’ve discovered charity shops. Once dismissive thereof, my piteous pension propels me ever more inexorably to their doors. Last week alone I picked up a beautiful autumnal tweed jacket (bespoke no less), a snip at barely more than a tenner. I could probably have knocked them down a little but that seems to be missing the point of the charity shops.
But the real secret of charity shops is not the clothes available, but that quiet little corner where they keep the CDs for £1 each. This is the place to pick up those unwanted Christmas presents – less popular Beethoven symphonies, one-hit wonders with their “meditation” or “fantasia on a theme by another composer who couldn’t come up with a decent tune either”. Not to mention modern composers with titles like “obelisk 23” and “para-fern-aye lee-uh” by the Giorgio Malvolio string quintet on prepared instruments. No, those are not real pieces so don’t go googling them.

The way we listen to music has changed this over the last several decades. And I think that has everything to do with the medium. Radio, LP, CD or streaming. I was first properly aware of music in my mid to late teens, it was predominantly LPs that formed my main musical diet.. Eschewing the single as little more than a musical amuse bouche, we embraced the LP. And I think it was partly the ritualistic nature of playing LPs.

As university students, typically we would gather in somebody’s room to listen to the new Peter Gabriel, Tangerine Dream or King Crimson album. We made coffee and hastily took our seats, on the bed, chair but mostly floor. One of us would take out the disc from its sleeve and pass it, like a sommelier offering the cork of a wine bottle, to another. The LP would be briefly examined for scratches or imperfections or before being placed on the turntable. A gentle wipe with a velvet cloth was sufficient to clear the dust from the grooves, at which point the tonearm was gently lowered if not damped. Conversation stopped for 20 minutes, the only extramusical sounds being the slurping of coffee. We read the track listing, notes and information on the sleeve. That was always one of the great joys of LPs – the wealth of supplementary material, graphics and information generally. Gatefold sleeves were particularly wonderful. Brief discussion of side 1 before the procedure was repeated for the other side. More coffee, animated discussion, comparison and analysis. A new record was an event and enjoyed as such. We were serious students and talked of tracks not songs played by bands not groups. It was important to get the words right.

Music is of course, the food of love and lust. My girlfriend at the time was a fan of The Who, with posters of Pete Townshend playing at the Marquee in ’75 I think. I remember summer evenings (nominal revision sessions) watching the sunset over Solsbury Hill to the soundtrack of Discrete Music by Brian Eno. That I can remember it more than 40 years later is testament to the awesome power of music and one very sweet brunette (occasional redhead when she wanted to be). I still have the record.

As the years went by, we replaced our LPs with CDs, marvelling at the robustness and sound quality of the discs. One by one we replaced the old, now battered LPs with their CD equivalent. For brief moments we were transported back in time to those summer evenings. That is the power of music.

CDs are dying I’m told. People either stream or buy vinyl. What once was seen as the greatest asset of the CD – the music emerging from silence not the sound of snap crackle and pop – is not considered by some as a deficiency. If your music does not sound as if it was recorded in a Weetabix factory, you are somehow spiritually ersatz. You have no soul. The record shops sell LPs at eye watering prices to people with unkempt beards and comb over haircuts, hoping to once again recapture their youth through exorbitantly priced bootlegs of Bob Dylan at Glastonbury – or wherever.

Streaming, on the other hand is mainly the province of the young, faces red and purulent, cratered by acne, under virtual house arrest in their bedrooms, curtains drawn against the purifying power of sunlight. Even MP3 players are no longer the acme of the acne-riddled generation. Who would want any device however small and powerful (iPods hold about a squillion songs) when they need not. Even Apple finally gave up on the first series of iPod, for many years its techie flagship. But this is a generation that travels light, in musical terms at least. DJs aside (I wonder how many of the younger generation actually know what DJ stands for), the suitcases are empty of music. Just as well probably – they will need the space for skin lotions, potions, balms and salves to counter the pockmarked rampages with which they battle.

CDs on the other hand are terminally uncool I gather. Pulling out a CD from a purpose-built storage rack marks you out as the kind of person who can remember the Falklands. Not necessarily endorse, but certainly remember he says, quickly backtracking.

This is a straightforward four-way fight between LPs, CDs, radio and streaming. And the biggest fallacy lies in the notion that we (well, I) have anything to say in that process. Music always has been the province of the young. Whether we like it or not, music is marketed as a commodity, just like anything. And commodities dealers are young.

If however you are old, and I can’t escape the tale of the years, these are potentially bonanza years. The very same people who believe that CDs are dying, are emptying their racks of Mozart, Mahler, Mendelssohn and Messiaen. And as quickly as they are emptying their carrier bags at the counter of Oxfam, I am clearing those shelves.

The gaps in my music collection are being filled. In the last week I have bought Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Tchaikovsky’s Eugen Onegin, Villalobos complete piano concertos, Rachmaninov’s Vespers and a box set of Wagner preludes and overtures. For less than a tenner – that’s a tenner for all of them together. In my music collection, the CD is alive and kicking.

Long live the CD.

Second best

For more or less my whole life thus far I have wrestled with the notion of mediocrity. Now that would not have been quite so bad had it not been instilled in me from an early age that excellence was all that mattered. At my small local prep school, exams were a regular end-of-term ordeal. This wasn’t the kind of school which believed in competing against oneself or any such namby-pamby liberal nonsense. We competed against each other. Plain and simple. Our headmaster Hamilton H, reasoned that, in life itself, you competed against others not yourself. Life was a savage cockpit and you had better enter it prepared. Deeply unfashionable though these ideas became in the early 70s, he stuck to these principles resolutely.

We were examined in 10 subjects (English, maths, chemistry, biology, physics, Latin, French, geography, religious studies and history, as I recall) with scores of up to 100 in each subject, yielding an overall total out of 1000.

Looking back, this level of granularity beggars belief but, such as it was, it must also have been a colossal task for the teachers to produce such a penetrating yet different invigilation each term. In my class the spoils of victory, bragging rights or whatever were shared between three boys – Stephen H, Nigel A and myself. Other boys occasionally (and I mean occasionally) flickered into life on subjects close to their heart. I remember one boy whose father, unbeknownst to us worked in some kind of unspecified roving role for the foreign office in Africa. Predictably he excelled in geography. His classmates simply took this as an added step up in geography. None of us put two and two together to draw the obvious conclusion – that his dad was a spook. But, such rare anomalies aside, Stephen was by a clear margin the brightest, with a photographic memory to match. Nigel too was consistently knowledgeable across the board. And my flame had brief sputterings, enough to suggest strong potential. Almost invariably Stephen won the overall prize each year and it would be a battle for second between Nigel and myself. The gap between first and third could be as narrow as five marks (out of 1000!)

Each term, along with copies of my school report, I took home the exam results in a separate sealed envelope, to be handed directly to my father. He therefore knew the outcome before I did. Sometimes he would ask me to sit down with him, in silence, while he read the results before placing them back in the envelope, sometimes without comment. This of course, from my perspective, amounted to torture. But I think he was really doing little more than collect his thoughts for discussion at the dinner table. I mean, of course, nothing so grand as an actual dinner, merely the time point when my father finished the evening surgery and rejoined his family for food. If surgery dragged on late, buoyed by a procession of hypochondriacs, he would face the inevitable ‘burnt offering’, as he put it, with stoicism.

Nobody spoke until my father had pronounced on my exam results. Sometimes, and I came to realise that this had as much to do with the health status of his more cantankerous patients, he would be brief and usually encouraging. “Really coming along strongly in French” he would say. Or perhaps “maths is slipping back a bit don’t you think”. Never harsh and, if I’m honest, an accurate reflection of performance. Reading the above, It seems to me that I make my father out to be cold and detached. He was not. And his criticism of my performance in the exams was, accurate. He seemed to know those subjects in which I was treading water before I did. But of course, he was a man, who, when a boy, used to coming first.

At that time I was a keen supporter of the then mighty Leeds United. Although widely acknowledged to be the best team in the land at the time (around 1970 give or take a few), Leeds consistently finished second, somehow conjuring defeats from the jaws of victory. Famously knocked out of the FA cup in the 5th round by Colchester on 13th February 1971. Defeated by Sunderland and their goalkeeper’s heroics in the 1973 FA Cup final. That sort of thing. Actual titles were relatively few. Although doubtless unaware of my mirroring of Elland Road’s finest, it seemed to follow suit. Whilst Giles, Bremner and Hunter carried The Whites to the edge of the title, they seemed doomed always to be second best. And so it was for me. Term after term I improved, overtaking Nigel into consistent second place but somehow never scaling the heights of Stephen’s stellar performances. At the end of the year, prize-giving ended with Stephen weighed down by silverware. There were no trophies for second place. Nigel and I prayed there had been a counting error and that we would be declared victorious. I’m not sure really what life lessons we took from this – Stephen probably learnt that life was pretty cushy at the top. Nigel and I learned that there was no reward whatsoever for hard work if you didn’t translate that into being top of the form.

In the end, in the penultimate year before boarding school, I was awarded the English prize. The school, probably as bored as I with Stephen’s routine ‘Grand Slam’ of trophies, had somehow engineered the results in such a way that Stephen was not allowed to collect more than six cups, shields or plates, and therefore the runner-up, myself, was awarded the English prize for second place in that subject. Nigel picked up physics I think. Stephen was magnanimous nonetheless, accidentally dropping and denting one of the cups whilst offering me a congratulatory handshake. He hadn’t had to do that before and it is a measure of his social skills and upbringing that he did not need to be told how to be gracious.

I remember going home and drinking a small bitter shandy from the trophy at teatime (I was 10) along with a larger slice than usual of my aunt Kath’s legendary lemon meringue pie. Ah, the spoils of victory! At the end of the day, I went to sleep aglow with my ‘victory’.

Over the course of that summer, I learnt that Stephen’s dad had moved jobs, to somewhere in the Peak District. I never saw him again. His place was taken by another boy, a dentist’s son as I recall, bright and cheerful and with teeth to match. A keen sportsman as well. The school loved him. As did I, until the years exam results were published. There it was in black-and-white. Effortlessly, he had taken first place. And once more, after briefly remembering the shandy and lemon meringue pie, I was back in my rightful spot. Yes, you guessed it – second.

A year later I went on to boarding school and learnt a great deal more there. There I would have settled for second. But the boys who came to Marlborough were all firsts’ big fishes in their respective prep school crammers. Much lower than that and you didn’t get into the school. I learnt the most valuable lesson of all there – that mediocrity was a relative commodity. I was now mediocre. My dad, bless his soul, had simply been preparing me for the realisation of the greater truth. For every second place there was a first-place and a third-place. And if I didn’t find them, they would find me.

The floating hotel

This is probably going to sound terribly snobbish but I want to talk (or substitute “rant” if that fits better with your take on things) about cruise ships and liners.

Many use the terms “liner” and “cruise ship” interchangeably but there is, in fact, a world of difference. Sad to say, the liners largely belong to history. Magnificent ships that they were, they were principally conceived to transport people across the great seaways, their raison d’être being created back when air transport across the Atlantic was still a little haphazard and, to some degree, a good opportunity to put your affairs in order.

Airliners of that post-war ilk were prone to the vagaries of the weather in the north Atlantic. Even the title – airliner – suggested an entirely erroneous kinship with the true liners. While the airliners lurched, creaked and yawed their way from cloud to cloud, they might be serving dinner at the Captain’s table twenty thousand feet below. No trays on laps, like TV dinners, with the true liners making their way majestically across from Southampton to New York. If you travelled first class, dinner jackets and ballgowns all the way, you felt like royalty. Indeed many travelling first class were actual royalty.

Of course travelling by liner was preposterously expensive. But then, airliners were also costly, seeking to make a virtue out of necessity, emphasising in their promotional material the value of shaving four days off the crossing (much as Concord, in its own day briefly offered the international traveller). Transport cost more in real terms then than now.
The reliability of long range jets polarised travellers into one of two groups – those for whom the destination was the key and those others for whom destinations were immaterial. The first group was well served by the Boeing 707 and its progeny, while the latter group and its less sophisticated needs spelt the gradual demise of the great transatlantic liners.

Even the names – Queen Elizabeth, Normandie, Titanic, Canberra, Olympic, Oriana – spoke of pride in their construction, hinting at aquatic nobility. While Cunard and the White Star Line largely dominated the transatlantic market sector, another market existed between Europe and the Far East, under the aegis of the Pacific and Orient Steam Navigation Company (P&O to you and I). Nevertheless, the ethos was the same – to get you from A to B, in style rather than at speed.

And of course the ships got bigger. The Olympic, built by Harland and Wolff of Belfast in 1910, for the White Star line, weighed 46,440 tons and carried 1447 passengers. Half a century later, at the very zenith of the industry, Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth II, built on the Clyde and launched in 1967,, tipped the scales at 70,327 tons and carried 1877 passengers. But by the late 60s, the transatlantic liner industry was going nowhere. Doubly ironic then that this decline should be paralleled by a huge expansion of the cruise lines – ships that more or less literally went nowhere or, at least, nowhere that mattered.

It’s no use lamenting the passing of the great transatlantic liners. Difficult though I find it, these new ships, floating hotels in reality, are a huge success. After all, why carry a thousand passengers for five days, when you can carry five times as many for twice as long. On mathematics alone it’s a no-brainer. To me these floating hotels (for that’s what they are) are a blot on the seaways. Gone are the beautiful sleek curves of the QE2, replaced by the vertical sides of a tower block, some 20 levels high.

Take the latest floating hotel, Wonder of the Seas, operated by Royal Caribbean line upon completion in 2022. Sister ship of Allure, Symphony, Harmony and Oasis (all of The Seas), this behemoth weighs in at 236,857 tons, and carries marginally under 7000 passengers. Oasis? Seriously? Do the operators know what an oasis is? Or should that be holidaymakers because the word passengers suggests destination and of course there is none.

But if ‘going nowhere’ is your thing, if 14 days of still blue ocean and white beach floats your boat, then listen to this. Wonder of the Seas, soon to be replaced by an even bigger ship, boasts (and that is very definitely the word) four swimming pools a basketball court, children’s waterpark, out door aquatic theatre, a children’s playground, a surf simulator, a 10 storey zip line and two rock climbing walls. Along with the usual themed restaurants, cinemas, and theatres. It doesn’t say so but I imagine there is a golf course in some form. A putting green at least. And bars – did I mention bars? Themed after popular television series perhaps? Casinos? There is even a ‘Central Park’ with more than 10,000 plants. Presumably there you can recreate an authentic New York style mugging experience at knifepoint?

And then there is all the ruckus over these giant ships making their way down the grand Canal in Venice, leaving a trail of ecological destruction behind and dwarfing from the 20th storey structures meant to be seen from the ground. These Tyrannosauri of the oceans somehow manage to skip over the Venice of Canaletto, Bellini or Titian. No wonder the locals are so embittered.

Joking aside, you do have to ask yourself the obvious question – is this what people want? And the answer to that is very much so. I may be the last man sat at the Captain’s polished mahogany table in my dinner jacket, sipping a Negroni, while the captain regales us with genial anecdotes from a lifetime at sea. Fast forward 50 years – I am sat in what appears to be a burger restaurant, tucking in to my McAwful or whatever it is. I am dripping with chlorinated water all over the bright orange plastic chairs and table with designs of cartoon fish. Nobody cares. The ship’s crew love it. Nearly all from the hotel and catering industries rather than maritime types, they can hose down the area at the end of the day. Waiters and housekeepers are fine until you run into difficulties. Since the ship’s crew speaks as many languages as the tower of Babel, let’s hope the lifeboat drill doesn’t prove necessary.

To me, this kind of populist holiday making and alcohol-fuelled bonhomie is a Dantean vision of Hell, no more no less. But numbers talk. The aged liners are now largely rusting hulks or long since scrapped. Ecological timebombs also, riddled with blue asbestos over their corroding skeletons. These new ships are mostly full of hedonistic ‘fun’ seekers. It’s all too much – I shall have an attack of the vapours…

I have been thinking about the next ship in the line. ‘Sick of the Seas’anyone?

Hungry Heart

With artists who have recorded many singles or albums, I often like to think of say a dozen of their songs that, if I was ever asked, would happily form a ‘best of’compilation album. Many artists would fit that category, perhaps none more so than Bruce Springsteen, the legendary ‘Boss’ of rock, ever since Jon Landau proclaimed him ‘the future of rock ‘n’ roll’ in 1974.

Rock ‘n’ roll is about relevance. It’s about recognising characteristics in your audience and playing appropriate music. But it goes beyond there. That will grant you success perhaps but it makes no promises about longevity. This year’ bright tie-dye T-shirt is soon enough faded and torn,, wiping down garden furniture on the patio.

Songs about Emmy Lou’s bronze skin in the sunset, fumblings in the back seat of a ’63 Chevy’s give way to families, employment and unemployment. Then the internal diatribes about enlistment and foreign wars, unemployment and disillusionment. Laments about friends lost literally or metaphorically in the jungles of Southeast Asia. And before you know it, the city skyline and bustling noise has given way to tumbleweed, dust storms and crystal meth. A life outside the American dream.

Somehow Bruce manages , nearly 5 decades after Landau’s review, to still be relevant. After all who else could start a song with the words “you do the drying, I’ll do the dishes”and get away with it? In anybody else’s hands it would be trite. In Bruce’s hands it becomes a sorry vignette of a failing marriage and the desperate need to believe that all is well. Bruce lays bare the American dream. There is no deerhunter Thanksgiving dinner. Bruce consistently eschews the fairytale endings, leaving the gritty perseverance of the working man.

It’s hard to see how this man with personal wealth of some $650 million can, in any way, be relevant to a steelworker in New Jersey or a border drug runner in New Mexico, or any one of the disenfranchised to whom his songs have spoken. And yet it is. And he speaks in a way that makes every song seem to have been written specially for each listener. There is perhaps nobody who could not find his own song among the many.

Bruce found the pulse some 40 years ago, stripping away many of the more complex instrumentations of the first three albums in favour of the leaner and darker psychosocial simplicities from Darkness on the Edge of Town onward. And he got it right.

Bruce’s longevity is somewhere beyond astonishing. Not only does he appeal strongly to my generation (sixty somethings) but also my children, who grew up to the sound of Bruce on the car stereo on the way to school. When a new generation finds continued relevance and meaning in his songs, you know that he has hit the mother lode.

Here are my favourite songs – my compilation album if you will. I’m sure you have others.

Tenth Avenue Freeze Out, Philadelphia, Living Proof, Ties That Bind, Downbound Train, Born In The USA, Adam Raised A Cain, Promised Land, Independence Day, Brothers Under The Bridge, Nebraska, The River.