Month: February 2014

The Things We Did Not Know

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Just back from the WESC Foundation Pub Quiz which we did not win. Here is a list of things which we, 6 grown adults under the banner ‘University Challenged’ did not know:

  • Who’s only published work was ‘The Limelight’
  • What Tallin looks like
  • The name of Hermione’s cat
  • What Helsinki looks like
  • The year of the first Academy Awards
  • What Nadine Dorries looks like
  • Who married Eleanor of Aquitaine
  • What Valletta looks like
  • Which Dickens novel features a cricket match between Muggleton and Dingley Dell
  • The name of that woman who got caught smuggling drugs last year
  • The Scottish island with the largest populations of Gannets
  • What Stockholm looks like
  • Which black and white film featured Spats Colombo
  • The name of the captain of England’s Ashes winning women’s cricket team
  • What Budapest looks like.
  • Or Prague
  • Or Lisbon

Does it matter that between us, when we rubbed our brains together, we could not generate enough light to illuminate these facts? I don’t think so. I’m not bad at quizzes, and for a long time i’ve been storing essentially useless, or at least non-life-altering, information in my head to no great purpose. These last few years I’ve started to feel that there really is only so much room in there and for everything new that goes in, it does seem like at least one old fact has to make way. So I’m forgetting stuff and not sucking up so much new stuff. So what.

More importantly, I think the fun of these occasions comes not from knowing, but from not knowing or, ideally, nearly knowing.

When I play football, I get pleasure from doing good things and from seeing other people pull off impressive feats. But what I really love, what gives me an electric bolt of pure joy, is when someone, myself included, attempts something impressive and gets it so wrong in such a simple fashion, that they must immediately question what on earth they are doing there and by the way what is this game you’re playing – I’ve never seen it before. I get such a kick from seeing someone accidentally chip the ball over the high fence for no reason whatsoever that I can never contain my laughter. I think some of them think i’m a total arse.

So it is with quizzes. The real joy is in bumping up against that impenetrable barrier of what you do not know. The best are those you know you should know, that any reasonably intelligent person just must know. But you don’t. And you know you don’t. In those moments you come face to face with your limitations and you look into the eyes of people who share them. You realise you’re all the same, all limited, and you laugh.

I can’t remember much from the quiz which only finished an hour ago. I can’t say I’ll remember Charlie Chaplin’s only novella or what Nadine Dorries looks like, but the sight of team-mate Paul squaring up to what he thought the opening bars of Ellie Goulding’s version of ‘How Long Will I Love You?’ sounded like will live with me for some time, along with our suggestions for what the ship in ‘The Perfect Storm’ may have been called (“probably ‘Lucky’?”).

We laughed.

Hannah and Jack

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Seventy years ago today, Hannah and Jack were half way up a mountain in Scotland. They were married two days earlier, on 14 February. The date was chosen for practical reasons. Both were serving in the armed forces, Hannah with the Women’s Air Force reading radar signals and updating charts to predict the paths of fighter planes, Jack with the Royal Electrical and Mechanics converting his apprenticeship as an electrical engineer into connections between circuits which kept signals flowing from antennae to screens.

In two week’s time Jack would be in Europe, moving with the Allies up from Southern Italy and across to Trieste. Hannah would be back in her cabin with 5 other women, focussing through the noise of the North Sea winds to read and translate the signals she was picking up, only occasionally allowing herself to wonder whether any of the aircraft she was tracking had passed over Jack’s head.

So on Valentine’s Day 1944 they took leave, met 10 of their family and friends in St John’s Church, Edinburgh, and were married. Their courtship had been shorter than the time most couples spend just planning their wedding nowadays, weddings which cost more than Jack and Hannah’s first house would.

Their marriage was not a declaration of defiance in the face of existential threat, although this still applied. In January 1944 V1 ‘doodlebug’ flying bombs began buzzing over Southern England and Jack’s electronics helped to coordinate what still sound like extraordinarily advanced automated systems for tracking them and shooting them down. Their marriage was made from love, but created in tough times by people who had learned to be tough.

Today they told me the story again, on the seventieth anniversary of the day they climbed a mountain on the South side of Loch Lomond. They never reached the top, where they’d been hoping to catch a glimpse of the Clyde estuary but, in Hannah’s words, “we got as far as that one tree”.

The metaphors are easy to reach for, but I can’t help thinking about that tree. Long gone, I assume. I’ve been married for 7 years, and I couldn’t with confidence tell you a single thing I did on the second day of my honeymoon. Perhaps for Hannah and Jack those moments had to be held tight, those memories pressed away against an unknown future. And perhaps as a result they made themselves strong enough to fill the next seventy years with memories just as precious.

I Have Never – Novelists

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I used to feel strangely proud of the cultural monoliths I had bypassed. As a teenager I wrote an excruciating essay about never having read Hemingway (how pleased with myself I was for not knowing something) and every Christmas I felt a small but identifiable tweak when everyone moaned about schedules once again containing ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’, ’The Great Escape’ and ‘Laurence of Arabia’. I hadn’t seen any of them and still haven’t.

I felt as if the moment when I might have reached for most of these touchstones had passed. I was forging into the future, or so I thought, and had no time to reach back into the past. That’s not to say I read, watched or heard only new things. I exhausted Burroughs, Ballard and Vonnegut, hung out in the 70s and early 80s with Woody Allen and Steve Martin and tracked back to the reference points of post-punk. But to me these all felt like counter-points to some cultural orthodoxy I wanted away from, so I avoided some of the brightest guiding stars in the firmament.

Now I have less time and those decisions, made and never brought out for re-examination, seem completely stupid.

In conversation recently with Fiona from 940 Sundays and the foremost authority on Nabokov on the second floor of the building she works in, I suddenly felt faintly embarrassed for never having read him. I know things about him and I’ve read lots of writers who were profoundly influenced by him – almost all of Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie and Don DeLillo – but not Nabokov himself.that particular source.

Perhaps I’ve felt the same way about music in the past. If artist X is the freshest, most radical on the scene, why should I be interested in their influences, when they have presumably progressed from or built upon them? I only reached back to artists who seemed so iconoclastic that no-one had approached them since. Hence I love Dylan, Beefheart, Velvet Underground but care much less for the Beatles, Rolling Stones or Byrds.

I think it’s time to change this. To start doing things instead of not doing things. We’ve talked about this before.

I’m going to start with books. Here’s a list of 10 fiction writers, pulled from thin air, who i’m going to try to read within my next 20 or 30 books.

  • Doris Lessing
  • Saul Bellow
  • Primo Levi
  • Ernest Hemingway
  • Flannery O’Connor
  • Henry James
  • Vladimir Nabokov
  • Joyce Carol Oates
  • VS Naipaul
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky

To my knowledge I’ve read nothing by any of them (with the possible exception of Hemingway – I have a sneaky feeling I’ve read ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ – but he needs to stay in the list as a symbol of my arrogance and ignorance). I make no claims for this list, and there are hundreds more who could and, in time, should be included. But it’s something. Perhaps if and when I finish I’ll know whether and how badly I’ve been missing out on all this time.

If you have anything to say about any of these 10, including specific recommendations, then do please comment. And before you scoff and file me under ‘Philistine’ take a little look at your own gap-lists, maybe submit them as comments too if you’re bold enough, and take a long hard look at yourself and your glass house before throwing stones.