Author: JSadmin

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.

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.

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.