I saw a familiar face in Marks and Spencers yesterday. None other than Professor Chris Whittey, the Chief Medical Officer and perhaps the most famous face of the UK pandemic. From behind he is surprisingly thick-set. It is only when he turns round to reveal his Elfin features and particularly hirsute eyebrows that you see that it is indeed he. He could very easily be an Elf prince from The Lord of the Rings. His basket was laden with salmon. That figures. I’m sure he eats a lot of fish. All that data tracking requires good brain power. The fish will keep him alert. I looked sheepishly at my own basket with its set of crumpets. They would keep me less alert. Seeing Chris Whittey doing his evening shopping like that made me feel properly connected with the times. More so than when on Wednesday in Mayfair I saw Steven Fry.

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Looking through YouTube yesterday I came across a phenomenon I had not registered before: Reaction culture. This is when a young person, mostly of colour, reacts to a piece of music from a classic white band or artiste from the 70s or 80s. So, we see the face of a twenty-year-old hip-hop aficianado as she listens to a track from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon for the first time, her eyes exploding as the weird sound explorations evolve or tears flowing as she listens to Wish you were here. What is happening? Are they sponsored by record companies wanting to introduce modern youth to classic rock to shift more units? There is something pleasant about communing with another person in listening to a loved piece of music. It flatters a baby-boomer to commune with another generation and another ethnicity maybe. It’s also part of pattern. The mediation of reception through others. We see it in X-factor and co. We are shown how to react by the judges. The programme Gogglebox where we focus on viewers watching telly and their reactions is another example that comes to mind. I suppose we have always had critics pointing us in the right direction; few zero-degree confrontations ever take place in aesthetic judgements. This seems different, however. It’s empathy culture in action. I am a believer that empathy is a more efficient pedagogical system than the magisterial system. A student responds better to a teacher reacting to material spontaneously than to his usage of prepared material. If the teacher sees, say, a text for the first time and reacts to it spontaneously in front of the students you see their process. The teaching is not dead meat; it is dynamic and questing. We like to see a spontaneous reaction, and as with the hip-hop fan reacting to Pink Floyd, we re-experience our first audition of the song through our empathy with the other’s reaction.

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There was an incident in my street yesterday. As we were coming back home, a crowd had gathered in the street and was looking up to the block on the other side of the road. On the second floor we could see a man’s arm hammering at a window. There was blood on the wall inside. The window swung open and the man in his thirties on the inside was naked. He started throwing things out of the window and shouting at the people on the street below. He sat out on the ledge as if he was about to throw himself down. Police arrived, an ambulance and a fire-engine. I said he must have a mental health issue. This is the first time I have used this expression. A woman behind me said he was a banker. A gas-man who was working on our building said it wasn’t surprising, him being a banker. Another man said his son played with the banker’s son. I wanted to go home. I said we shouldn’t be gawping. We went back home. From the living room window the banker’s window was just out of sight. I strained my neck but I couldn’t quite see. A couple of hours later the crowd had dispersed.

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Montaigne ascribes the quote about philosophy being the act of learning how to die to Cicero; it may well have been Socrates or someone else. It doesn’t matter because it doesn’t tell you much about how you are supposed to think about it. Webster, roughly contemporary with Shakespeare and according to Eliot was much concerned with death. Shakespeare too, if we can interpret him through his characters. Consider Hamlet, constantly musing on it; what happens after death is his issue, ‘the undiscovered land from whose bourne no traveller returns’. Claudio, in Measure for Measure, runs a similar vein (‘Ay, but to die and go we know not where/To lie in cold obstruction and to rot’), written maybe in the year after Hamlet, 1602. Ten years before in Richard III Clarence’s dream of his own death is equally lurid, a mysterious journey inflected by guilt, where he is taunted by the ghosts of his past. At this time we were taught by religion to think on our death, to ponder it in all its gory detail. Shakespeare takes this on board though the religious get-out clause rarely fires his imagination.

The turning point comes with Montaigne after a riding accent. Before that he did what he was told and fretted about death, its torments and particularities. After his brush with death when he was thrown from his horse perhaps by another insouciant rider or perhaps by careless gunfire, where he felt he had drifted unknowingly into death’s ambit, he reviewed this approach. Death was just a few blurry moments at the end of life. Best not worry about it too much. And so to Goethe in the 1820s in his poem on the contemplation of Schiller’s skull. When you compare it with Hamlet contemplating the skull of Yoric it is uplifting. We might be tempted to see the skull and, like Hamlet with Yoiric’s skull, lament the terror of bones where once there was flesh. But no, the skull is a cause for refreshing thoughts because of what the man was and what he did in life. Goethe, unsurprisingly, had little truck with religion; he shook his head at the image of the crucified Christ. For him death was, as for Montaigne, just a nice blur at the end of life.

Cheering you up this post-Easter week.

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For reasons too tedious to explain I have found myself sitting through cooking programmes over various lockdown seasons. I watch The Great British Bake off and Masterchef out of the corner of one eye from a lateral position on the settee. If I want to watch the television head-on I will have to lie on the floor like a dog (the armchair is taken). So when I have only a passing interest in the fayre I go lateral. I have found that from this obtuse eye-beam angle you are more receptive to the incidental musical score of the programme: pizzicato for Bake off (pizzicato as wry comic accompaniment was I think invented by the series Desperate Housewives and has since been omnipresent as an ironic narrative voice; and what Adorno in his study of Mahler calls course of life music for Masterchef, as in these contestants are dealing with one challenge after another and taking them all in their stride, they’re dealing with whatever life or Greg Wallace throws at them. Fair play to the producers on this. But what is most offensive to an adult viewer is the simpering puerile masochism of the contestants when a food critic makes a guest appearance, often arriving in slow motion and to the hyperbolic commentary of the voice-off whipping up the guest judge in the high-astounding terms of some World Series All-in Wrestler. Cut, then, to the adoring faces of the contestants, sometimes weeping with joy as some guy from the Waitrose magazine who only got the job because his dad was big in journalism comes in for another free meal. And then there are the interviews after they are kicked off the show (what a privilege it was… I’ve learnt so much... let me coat mud all over myself so much I am not worthy yada yada) or get voted into the next round (I can’t believe it… it’s a dream come true to be standing in this weird industrial kitchen zone for five/tent in the middle of nowhere). The television cooking world is, of course, a complex Escher world of surreal interlocked realities. Best typified by quote unquote Chef Ramsey, now working as a quiz show host on prime time BBC. Television wants to just load him with options. His commitment to cooking is such that he would now rather not touch it and is skipping through formats looking for the best vehicle for his remarkable hybrid talent-basket of bully, foul-mouthed charmer and business-type, reminding me of GCSE students who can’t wait to study Business Studies at A level because they will be doing a no-bullshit subject in which they do not yet have a history of failure. I suppose Chef Ramsey is now taking on the mantle of Donald Trump and like the ex-President, will inevitably soon toxify himself to a frazzle.

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Did you ever play hunt the thimble? Probably not. It is not oneof the games we offer to today’s youth. You would probably have trouble finding a thimble in the first place. It was a game I used to have to play when I stayed with my grandmother in Gorton, East Manchester. It was how she thought she’d keep a hyper-active six or seven year old happy. Fortunately, she had a thimble to hand. I would close my eyes and she would place it somewhere on the mantlepiece. It could be anywhere: behind the carriage clock; at the back off the letter rack; behind the postcard from Uncle Jack. Anywhere. Then I had to hunt it, knowing that the mantlepiece was the only place where it could be concealed. Two seconds later I had found it . Yes, it was a short-lived game. We would repeat this three or four times. The fun was soon over. Ah, the kids of today don’t know how to have fun nowadays. Ipads and computer games are no replacement for the humble thimble.

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In Totem and Taboo Freud has a notion later termed priority magic to designate the sense of permission that a powerful person can give you when he or she does something that maybe is not normally permissable. The initial powerful actor takes all the guilt onto themselves and makes that act available for others. Once the unspeakable is spoken it is no longer unspeakable. In general, we do not allow ourselves this role. We wait for another and then we follow. I suppose you would call the initial adumbrator of the act a creative person; he goes into the unknown. People are loathe to go there. They and society prefer trends. In other words, well worn paths. There are commercial reasons for this, of course. The actor of priority magic is not necessarily engaged in a moral act. Indeed, most of the charismatic evil leaders of recent history have sprinkled priority magic and made acceptable to their followers fascism, brutality, racism. You would not want to follow someone because of charisma.

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The omnipresence of covid 19 finds us all modifying our habitual fields of reference for metaphorical language. Teaching French to GCSE students I find myself referring to the so-called etre verbs as a spikey variant strain of the past tense. We have always adapted our discoiurse to suit the times. ‘A plague on both your houses’ in Romeo and Juliet echoed the more virulent issue of the late sixteenth century. Until recently the most common use of the word virus was as a metaphor for computer problems. Now it seems disrespectful to the many victims of Covid 19 to have this term still maintaining its currency in computer world. At least with plague you had the properly horrendous plague of locusts as its extrapolated image.

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I came across two photographs of me taken this last summer the other day. In these photos I am in one of them fat, in the other grizzled. This irritated me all day and then puzzled me. I’m not fat am I? Maybe when I breathe out or after a holiday great British breakfast. As for grizzled. The word is right. I am gritting my teeth in such a way so that the the veins and gristle in my neck stand out. I am looking strained and harrassed, not at ease. What are the lessons to bring away from being caught out as fat and grizzled? Don’t breathe out after a Bumper British Brexit Holiday Breakfast one, and relax to keep the grizzle at bay two.

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I am throwing things out. I am not, by nature, a hoarder, but things can build up. Today I loaded into the big bins in the courtyard a massive double armfull of mostly teeshirts with some trousers. I am also throwing out trainers, about eight pairs. There was also a hoover and a cd player. As I said on the note I left on the street, functioning perfectly. It’s just I have no more use for them. I remember buying that cd player in Darty in Paris when I had bought a little flat there. In the queue a woman pushed in. I told her she had pushed in and she was scandalised and told me she was handicapped. I said she didn’t look it. She was scandalised again. Blatant pushing in of queues is something you get in Paris. You have to answer back. It is immoral to turn the other cheek. A lot of the clothes have memories attached to them too. The trainers document a period in my life where I bought Gola trainers. The first pair was also in Paris. I oo-ed and ah-ed about buying them. They were green and brown and about 60 euros. I’ve not thrown them away, but I think all the other pairs of Golas I bought were a ripple from that first pair of green and browns. Only now that I throw the others away do I see that as a part of life now over. Posters are also on the way out. You buy posters and never hang them. I have about twenty: from art galleries or museums mostly. I thought I’d hang them but never did, or sometimes I did and took them down after a couple of years service. Sometimes they had to go to make way for shelves. As it were, through no fault of their own. Actually, none of these things are to blame: shirts; trainers; posters; cd players, hoovers. They are just making way. They’ve served their time.

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