'This thin uncomprehended song...'

Yesterday I heard a report on the radio about the spectacular mass hatching of Periodical Cicadas in the eastern seaboard states of the US. It put me in mind of Richard Wilbur's poem, Cicadas:

'You know those windless summer evenings, swollen to stasis
by too-substantial melodies, rich as a
running-down record, ground round
to full quiet. Even the leaves
have thick tongues.

And if the first crickets quicken then,

other inhabitants, at window or door
or rising from table, feel in the lungs
a slim false-freshness, by this
trick of the ear.

Chanters of miracles took for a simple sign

the Latin cicada, because of his long waiting
and sweet change in daylight, and his singing
all his life, pinched on the ash leaf,
heedless of ants.

Others made morals; all were puzzled and joyed

by this gratuitous song. Such a plain thing
morals could not surround, nor listening:
not `chirr’ nor `cri-cri.’ There is no straight
way of approaching it.

This thin uncomprehended song it is

springs healing questions into binding air.
Fabre, by firing all the municipal cannon
under a piping tree, found out
cicadas cannot hear.'


The last lines refer to an experiment by the great naturalist and nature writer Jean-Henri Fabre - a man distrustful of theories and systems, whom Darwin called 'an inimitable observer'. Here is his own account of the cicada experiment:

'For fifteen years the Common Cicada has thrust his society upon me. Every summer for two months I have these insects before my eyes, and their song in my ears. I see them ranged in rows on the smooth bark of the plane trees, the maker of music and his mate sitting side-by-side …. Whether drinking or moving they never cease singing.
It seems unlikely therefore that they are calling their mates. You do not spend months on end calling to someone who is at your elbow. Indeed I am inclined to think that the Cicada himself cannot even hear the song he sings with so much apparent delight ….
On one occasion I borrowed the local artillery, that is to say the guns that are fired on feast days in the village. There were two of them, and they were crammed with powder as though for the most important rejoicings. They were placed at the foot of the plane trees in front of my door. We were careful to leave the windows open, to prevent the panes from breaking. The Cicadas in the branches overhead could not see what was happening.
Six of us waited below, eager to hear what would be the effect on the orchestra above.
Bang! The gun went off with a noise like a thunderclap.
Quite unconcerned, the Cicada continued to sing. Not one appeared in the least disturbed …
I think, after this experiment, we must admit that the Cicada is hard of hearing, and like a very deaf man, is quite unconscious that he is making a noise.'

Perhaps not the most scrupulously scientific experiment - but fun, and beautifully narrated.

Heroes Of Prog Rock: Charlie Drake

Born on this day in 1925 was the diminutive comic Charlie Drake, who was, incredibly, a considerable star in the Fifties and Sixties. Even in an era that abounded in deeply unfunny comedians, he stood out as quite singularly tiresome - though he was very popular with children, including, I blush to recall, my boyhood self. I'm pretty sure I even watched (and presumably enjoyed) at least one of his feature films - Sands of the Desert? Drake's catchphrase 'Hello my darlings!' was originally addressed to the breasts of any of the tall, big-busted starlets with whose poitrine he found himself eye to eye, as it were, in the course of duty. Later, he adapted it to all situations, to unfailingly irksome effect.
  Apart from the catchphrase, Drake's stock in trade was slapstick - and it was nearly the end of him when a live TV sketch went wrong in 1961. The little chap was to be hauled through a bookcase that had been specially set up to fall apart as he emerged - but an over-diligent workman (or friend of British comedy) had mended it, with the result that it put up a considerable resistance. Unaware of what had happened, Drake's fellow actors proceeded with the rest of the sketch, which involved picking him up and throwing him through a window. Drake was unconscious for three days, with a fractured skull, and didn't return to the screen for two years.
  Like many a comedian in those days, Drake made several records (mostly produced by George Martin, who has had to live with the shame ever since) - but his most startling contribution to music history was a 1975 single titled You Never Know, the first post-Genesis solo project of prog rock / world music legend Peter Gabriel (who had himself recorded the song as a demo). The performing line-up for Drake's recording of You Never Know is surely one of the most bizarre ever: lead vocal Charlie Drake, backing vocal Sandy Denny, Robert Fripp on guitar, Percy Jones on bass, Keith Tippett on keyboards and Phil Collins on drums.You can, if you must, listen to it here - though  I must warn you, it's pretty terrifying...
 Drake - whose last stage role was as Baron Hardon in Jim Davidson's 'adult' pantomime Sinderella - was a notorious womaniser. However, there is no truth in the rumour that flame-haired Simply Red frontman Mick Hucknall was his love child.
  To his credit, Drake did put in a fine performance as Smallweed in the BBC's 1985 Bleak House. This too was pretty terrifying, but in a better way.

Beau Dabbler

I pay tribute to Beau Brummell on The Dabbler today...

A Cork with a Twist

As I've mentioned before, here and elsewhere, I do like wine bottles to have proper corks, made with cork oak. The plastic 'cork' or 'Stelvin' - a devil to extract, impossible to replace and smelling only of itself - is an abomination. The screw cap I can live with, and I can see why it now seems to be conquering the wine world; it's easy and it works, in its reductionist way. But now all that might be about to change, with the advent of the helical cork - a cork that twists out of the bottle and twists back in for an airtight seal. Why did nobody think of that before? You can read about the new style of cork in this typically exhaustive account on the BBC News website. We've all been there. You're on a picnic, you've got a bottle of wine - but no corkscrew. Enter the helical cork...

Quiet Times

Here's a thought. It's 2013, I'm a 63-year-old man (GSOH, own teeth). I look back 50 years and I find myself in 1963 - in Larkin's chronology, the year of the Beatles' first LP and the beginning of sexual intercourse. It's a recognisable world: the music of the Beatles has never gone away, sexual intercourse still thrives, there have been no major wars or wholesale upheavals in the life of the nation. Of course there have been big changes and epoch-making events in the past 50 years - 9/11, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the life-changing impact of digital technology and globalisation, etc - but really 1963 doesn't seem all that long ago or far away.
What if I were a 63-year-old man then - in 1963 - looking back over the previous 50 years? I would have been a teenager (had the term been invented) in the First World War - and probably served in it towards the end - would have seen the rise of Communism and Fascism, the impact of the Great Depression, then the Second World War, followed by the Cold War. And the lost world of 50 years ago would have been one of empires and peace and (apparent) golden prospects - the world of 1913, wholly, unrecognisably different.
Perhaps the world will change more dramatically in the next 50 years than it has done in the past 50 - for one thing, Europe will probably be majority-Muslim in half a century. Meanwhile, I count myself blessed to have lived in quiet times.

'Get down, get groovy...'

Funny the things that pop into your head (well, mine anyway). There I was, blamelessly brushing my teeth last night, when out of nowhere - or out of the dim recesses of my boyhood telly-viewing - came the jingle 'John Collier, John Collier, the Window to Watch!' I don't think that even in those entertainment-starved days we were often reduced to hanging around outside a tailor's shop watching the window, but I may be wrong. Anyway the jingle proved a mightily persistent earworm, long outlasting John Collier's chain of shops. Formerly the Fifty Shilling Tailor and long since subsumed into the Burton's empire, John Collier in its day fancied itself a pretty groovy kind of tailor, the go-to gentleman's outfitter for that all-important Saturday Night Suit. Indeed, John Collier even went to the lengths of sponsoring a 7" single called Saturday Night Suit by the Johnny Johnson Orchestra. You can hear it here - a bouncy little number. A shame this is the instrumental version - the lyrics, apparently, were full of strange music: 'It's Saturday night, you look sharp in that John Collier suit from only £10.19.6. Get down, get groovy, because you are one suave guy...' (And don't miss the liner notes by Brian Mathew, who is still with us, or with Radio 2 anyway.)
Here are a few more to which my poor head is, alas, no stranger even now:
'This is luxury you can afford - by Cyril Lord' (whose carpets were, you might recall, made of long-lasting Enkalon).
'A Thousand and One cleans a big big carpet for less than half a crown.'
'Opal Fruits - made to make your mouth water,
Fresh with the tang of citrus -
Orange, lemon, strawberry [citrus?], lime...
Opal Fruits - made to make your mouth water.'
'Murray Mints, Murray Mints, the too good to hurry mints.'
'You do the Shake 'n' Vac and put the freshness back.'
'Um-Bongo, Um-Bongo, they drink it in the Congo.'
'Whitbread big head Trophy Bitter -
The pint that thinks it's a quart!'
and, from a sojourn in Scotland,
'McEwan's is the  best best, the best beer, the best beer.
McEwan's is the best beer - so drink some today!'
I could go on, but you'll be relieved to hear I'm not going to...



 

Bald and Fat

By one of history's quirky little coincidences, both Charles the Bald and Charles the Fat were born on this day, respectively in 823 and 839. Charles the Fat had the distinction of being the last ruler of a united Carolingian Empire. He was widely regarded as a spineless and inept fellow, a waste of (a considerable amount of) skin - though historians are, of course, divided over this verdict. Charles the Fat was inept even in the matter of fathering an heir, though he did manage one illegitimate son.
Charles the Bald, on the other hand, was more successful, alike in ruling an empire and in fathering offspring - among their number Louis the Stammerer and Lothar the Lame. Historians are again divided over the question of whether he was bald; he might even have been exceptionally hairy. But there seems to be no disputing that Charles the Fat was on the large side, and no doubt Lothar the Lame and Louis the Stammerer gamely lived up to their names. It might be fun to revive this habit of labelling royals with descriptive cognomens. We could begin with our own Prince Charles - but no, that would be too cruel (and possibly treasonous)...