“The battle where men perish shuddered now with the long
man-tearing spears they held in their hands, their eyes were blinded
in the dazzle of the bronze light from the glittering helmets,
From the burnished corselets and the shining shields as men came on
in confusion. That man would have to be very bold-hearted
who could be cheerful and not stricken looking on that struggle.
Two powerful sons of Kronos, hearts divided against each other,
were wreaking bitter agonies on the fighting warriors,
since Zeus willed the victory for the Trojans and Hektor,
glorifying the swift-footed Achilleus, yet not utterly
did he wish the Achaian people to be destroyed before Illion
but only was giving glory to Thetis and her strong-spirited
son, while Poseidon emerging unseen from the grey-salt water
went among the Argives and stirred them since he was angered
that they were beated by the Trojans and blamed Zeus for it bitterly.”

(The Illiad Book 13 Lines 349-353 translation Lattimore)

Then Terry of the fearless valour came forward into the throng in the box
where battle was thick and clamour great for it was a set piece.
And Mourino had clad him in valour for he had license to get his head on a cross,
for quality was coming in from Hazard. Nor did Drogba hold back,
in the penalty area, he of the bronze strength who had proved his worth
in campaigns many and renowed including the Champions League final
where he had scored that header in the last minute against Bayern.
And Wenger saw that Terry had come up for the cross and he stepped out of his
designated area, to intervene in the action, pulling an extra man back,
who was much vaunted Giroud. And Mourino now stirred as he was much incensed
by Wenger straying out of the designated area, and he too ventured forth,
and vaunting cried out: “You who have not won the Premiership in ten campaigns
nor the Champions League either while I have tasted sweet triumph.
Poor fool, who thought you could slay my team and their parked bus,
stricken as you are in the wake of swift-footed Hazard.” So saying
the hordes gave forth great tumult for the cross came over and struggle
was in earnest with claims for holding and much wrestling of mighty forwards,
though the ref gave a goal kick and the hordes relented their clamour,
and with just a minute left on the clock before half-time,
went to get meat pies.”

(The Illiad. A reworking for modern sensibilities)

If I were to give a value to the items I had got the best use out of over the year the results would in no way correspond to the monetary value of those items. I have a little sharp knife that I use for all peeling and cutting of vegetables, fruit, meat and fish. I think I bought this knife from a supermarket for about £3 about twenty years ago. I do not use this knife for buttering, for cutting bread or for eating, but I use it for the rest. Over the years it has given me more pleasure and utility than any other object in my possession, I suppose. Items in my possession on which I have spent a (relatively) large amount of money rarely give me much pleasure. For one reason, I rarely use them. But more than this, the care with which I use them takes away from the ease that I might feel with them, how comfortable I am in their presence. When my best knife breaks (if ever it does) it will be a sadder moment than when I drop my Ming vase (have no fear, I don’t have one) or when I accidentally tear my Gucci trainers (likewise). The value of my best knife resides in how it fits into my palm, how it knows my thoughts. Its value is that it is close to you. The distance between you and it has disolved. With luxury items their value are that they are distant from you. Best possessions are familiar creatures, not creatures that you admire from afar.
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Borges is famous for his baroque tales and parables that rehearse strange coincidences and weird symmetries. Time and reality may turn back upon themselves or twist through a an Escherian spiral into some paradoxical void. You do not expect to find Borges in the classroom.
A student had an exercise to accomplish for his Spanish oral. For the exam, whcih was to describe a photograph, he told his teacher he had a photograph at home of him and his family having a Christmas meal. The picture showed mother, father, brothers and sisters, dog, festive champagne and general merriment. Over the next two or three weeks the boy with his teacher prepared his description of the photo in Spanish, whcih he would then learn and polish for the imminent oral exam. Two days before the exam the teacher asked to see the actual photo which would have to be sent away with a recording of the speech to the examination board for marking. At this juncture the student (let us call him Arnold) admitted that the photo did not exist. It didn’t matter, he said, because his friend was very good at photoshop and using a number of separate photographs of father, mother, brothers and sisters, dog and champagne, could recreate the image that Arnold would be describing in his oral. The next day when the teacher and Arnold met up for final preparation Arnold admitted that the photoshop boy was unable to help him reproduce such a complexly described reality, but what Arnold could do was go home and search through the family photo albums and try and find a photograph that matched the reality he had so lovingly created for his oral exam. For Arnold it was too late to begin composition of another real picture. He would have to stick with the original text that he had so brilliantly constructed (the Spanish in his speech was exquisite) and try and find a picture of a reality that corresponded to that.
Borges never wrote this story, but he should have.
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My friend Emma was telling me about someone she used to know who told her this story: that when he was a student he was annoyed about the waste of paper, so he went to some committee or other and suggested some solution or other and lo and behold a few weeks later he saw that his suggestions had been implemented. This taught him that by going through the right channels you could get things done. The person in question is now making his way in politics. Emma told me that on three seperate occasions she heard this guy tell this story to different people. It was, she said, his identifying story.
Which made me think. Perhaps we all have an identifying story. It would be the one we churn out on a first date. The story that best defines us, or, at least, the one that, in our own mind, set us on a certain trajectory. Boring people tend to have a very clear idea about what their identifying story is because their knowledge of themselves is dead knowledge. And then, of course, people who are forever defining themselves are the dullest people. They say things like ‘I’m not the kind of person who stands for that kind of thing…’ and ‘I have my own way of doing things…’ Borish stuff.
We can all remember trying not to betray to an interlocutor that we have already heard a story they are recounting and us having to self-consciously post up an interested mien, and, worryingly, also when telling a story that moment when we suddenly realise we’ve already told that story before, and to the same person who is staring at us looking for all the world as if they are interested.
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Before getting on the plane in Baden-Baden there were a couple of hours to kill, so I went with my friend Remy to the modern art gallery of that town. Of the exhibition there are certainly things to say but I won’t do so here. What struck me more than anything else was the hyper-pristine state of the gallery. We were the first in at ten o’clock. I happened to be wearing a suit because there was no room for it in my hand luggage but even I was a huge disappointment to the gallery. In fact, all visitors and staff are massively out of place in the sparkling white, dustless environment of polished chrome and immaculate surface. At one stage I needed to go to the toilets. The coffee had got to me. I disappeared into the pod of the cubicle and to my eternal shame produced a rather messy number two. We are not worthy.
A word on the exhibition. The work of the artists was probably closer to my number two than to the white light of the gallery. By which I do not mean that the art was shit. Rather, its preoccupation was the animal and the primitive, rather than the controlled and the sanitised.
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The young man sitting in the airport in Baden-Baden was wearing his baseball cap with the peak towards the front, but before getting up to go across and get a bottle of water he turned it round to set the peak behind. On returning to his seat he reset the baseball cap peak to the front. A few minutes later when he got up to join the queue to get onto the plane to Stansted he turned the peak back round to face behind.
Here is my theory. The front-facing baseball cap is for interiority, focus, dialogue with intimates, the bubble of social media. The back-facing baseball cap is for interface with the public. It denotes disdain and nonchalance. It rejects intensity and engagement. That is because we reserve our best for the private and the distant interlocutor and our worst for the public, the sweaty alien.
In my investigations into the semiology of the baseball cap (a reader-friendly book along with gift cap will come out just in time for Christmas) I thought I could discount the side-worn baseball cap, surely now obsolete or at least only sported by the pre-teen. And then today I saw a side-wearer: a man in his forties with big stomach and in his long shorts stocky hocks. My semiotics abandon me! I am at a loss! Stop the press on that stocking filler.
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I was at an airport the other day. The airport was Stansted. I don’t like airports. It seems to me that airports display those aspects of society best designed to most exacerbate me. When you get through security they sit you in the centre of a carrousel of all the outlets you might spend your life trying to avoid, a ampitheatre of crap shops. Modern Man, including Modern Child, needs his accessories. He needs for his lightweight hand luggage to be on wheels, which extends his length three or fourfold, like some prehistoric reptile with an enormous tail. If he does not have wheeled luggage he has a back pack liable at any moment to clatter you on the side of the head. Modern Man is also bulkier than he once was. Modern child is bulkier too. Modern child can get very bulky. And both need more stuff. Phones; laptops; tablets; various forms of listening device; big headphones. Without them he is unable to function. In fact, with the headphones on the ears and the eyes on the smartphone Modern Man is mostly working in a state of sensory deprivation and with the reduced mobility of some lower life form. God only knows the mincemeat Primitive Man would make of Modern Man in a battle for survival. Planes aren’t much better than airports. The flourish required by Modern Man to sit down in his seat on entering the aircraft can only be compared with the flourish he requires when exiting a cimema. This I have noticed is an exceptionally unwieldy performance. He comes out to a fanfare of trumpets as if to say I have seen this film and you in the queue to see it have not. Give me space to exhibit the peacock feathers of my temporal priority. This, by the way is just one of the reasons I rarely go to the pictures nowadays. Add to that the unwieldiness of popcorn buckets and you will understand my position.
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Psychologists sometimes ask you questions about whether you are happy or not. They know it’s a daft question but they think that even though they don’t define happy and everybody has a different version of what it is to be happy and different expectations about how happy you need to be to be happy abound, if you think you are happy, then that tells them something useful. Of course, everyone is selling happiness. Macdonalds; One Direction; Red Nose Day. What might be happening, of course, is that we smuggle other stuff through with it, as in the case of Macdonalds, which smuggles through exploitation, commercial values, the triumph of the big corporation, obesity, hypocrisy. Sometimes what also comes through along with the happiness is other stuff too. The feeling you get when your shoulders sink. And it might be that over time your shoulders start to sink whenever you hear that word.
Spirituality is another one of those words where my shoulders sink. What does it tell you when a person tells you they are interested in spirituality? It means they think they’re better than you because you aren’t saying you’re spiritual. It means perhaps they have a pretty dim view of human activity that doesn’t label itself as spiritual. Somebody told me they were interested in the spiritual quest today. Spiritual people use the word quest a lot. I think I just look for stuff. Anyway, I just nodded and went off to another corner of the room where there was less spirituality going on. I hope my shoulders didn’t sink too much.
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Today is the day for burying Richard III or Richard Crookback as Shakespeare called him in Henry VI part 3 which (little piece of useful information) is where a lot of the good Richard III quotes come from. Of course, nowadays he’s not crookback but a-minor-spinal-deformation-which-may-not-have-been-visible-when-he-had-his-armour-on-back. I vowed not to follow it but you turn the radio on and it’s there. Two women from Northern Ireland in full medieval garb who are quote big Richard fans unquote. The reporter didn’t ask whether they preferred his early work or his late stuff. The second album can often be a disappointment. Maybe they liked his back catalogue. It also turns out that Peter Snow from Richard III Part one is related to Richard III. No wonder he was so excited.
The big news today is that Benedict Cumberbatch (or is it Dominic) is coming to the funeral. You can’t keep him away from anything these days. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got Clare Balding too. And Sir Hoy to keep the Scots interested. And Stephen Fry. He could hand out the Richard III gongs. And the prize for the best sneaky aside goes to… And then Jeremy Clarkson might try and muscle in with the Henry Bolingbroke heavies.
By the way, turns out Benedict Cumberbatch is also related to Richard III. He would be. And in any case he’s going to play Richard III on stage soon, so he’s going there for research purposes. I bet he puts the trip to Leicester down as tax deductible and all. These celebrities. Wouldn’t have happened in Richard’s day. He’d have had you in the Tower for so much as a dodgy business lunch recipt. Or would he? The debate about Richard continues to rage. This is Peter Snow live from Leicester Cathedral.
PS: I wonder if I’m related to Richard III.
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They are putting Richard III to rest this week. It’s been a long time for him to wait since 1485 and the Battle of Bosworth. I just switched on the telly as it was going dark this afternoon and here on Channel 4 is a four hour programme given over to the preparations (preparations, mind) for the funeral on Thursday. As I switch on there is a man in full War of the Roses armour on the comfy sofa with Peter Snow of Channel 4. The man in the armour has an American accent when he speaks. We see pictures of the coffin of Richard III driving through Leicester. People are throwing flowers onto it as it passes and weeping as if it were Lady Di. There is a young reporter interviewing people in the market square. A couple have come all the way from Brazil. The man’s wife has a ring with a line from Shakespeare’s Richard III engraved on it. That’s incredible, says the young reporter. I mean, Brazil wasn’t even discovered when Richard III was around. Oops! That’s a gaffe. You can’t talk about discovering countries anymore, darling. Where do they get these reporters from? Next there are other people on the sofa. Thee is a man from Canada who is a direct descendant of Richard III and a woman from Australia who is also direct descendant of Richard III. Thet’s incredible, says Peter Snow. You’re from Canada and you’re from Australia. The man and the woman don’t look too astounded by the news. Peter Snow tries to explain. I mean, he says, what does that tell us about how we live today? This is surely an interesting philosophical question, but no-one seems to want to run with it. Next we are interviewing the head of the Catholic church in England. He is doing the ceremony today, which concerns the arrival of the body in Leicester Cathedral but the big funeral gig is being given to the Archbishop of Canterbury (Anglican) on Thursday. The Catholic head points out that Richard III had been a Catholic, necessarily, as there were no Anglicans in those days. This is a good point and one up for the Catholics. There is more stuff. Family trees. Was Richard a goodie or a baddie? And so on and on. I think I’ve had enough. I’ll have a cup of tea. What does that tell you about how I live today, Peter Snow?

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