ARTICLES WRITTEN BY STEVE OSBORN (OZ) IN 2016

 

JANUARY

MITCH on DOCTOR! DOCTOR! – It was an ordinary doctor’s surgery - chairs round the walls, an alcove for the pretty receptionist (all long dark hair and the excitement of youth) and steps up to the doctor’s door. The door into the street was glass and there was a story being played out there... This is downtown Mumbai I should say, where you pay to see the doctor. They also visit - a tall reserved Parsi doctor had arrived two nights ago - a bad case of Delhi Belly. Now I needed her help again ahead of the long flight home. Need I say more! The pills each a different bright colour had to be collected before midnight from the cubbyhole dispensary on the edge of a highway. We crossed streets lined with sleeping homeless - you had to tread carefully... A woman opposite with her parents - eighties? Nineties? the daughter positive, bright, the parents weighted with age... But now it was the scene outside that took over - a tiny boy bright and beautiful held by Dad and a bite clear to see on his arm. Was it dangerous? poisonous? Mum and Dad animated, nearly arguing - could they, couldn't they afford the 100 rupees doctor’s fee clutched in Mum’s hand? Obviously poor, there were a hundred other needs and wants for that note. I could have afforded it but stayed silent. Did nothing. Afraid it would look condescending? Legacy of post- Raj guilt?  who knows. Whatever it was I regret that passive moment. And hope fervently that that little boy – he’d be about ten now - is healthy and cheeky and naughty - and alive! Jane Mitchell

FEBRUARY

OZ on PANTO – After Christmas we went with our two families to the Greenwich Theatre to see and hear this year’s pantomime, Red Riding Hood. It was a hilarious romp, on the tenth anniversary of the revival of pantomime by Greenwich Theatre, and demonstrated why many describe Greenwich’s as ‘the best panto in the country.’ Pantomime has a long history in Europe, the word itself coming from Greek ‘pantomimos’ and Latin ‘pantomimus’, both deriving from ‘panto-‘ (all) and ‘mimos’ (actor), originally a group that “imitates all”, often in dancing accompanied by vocal and instrumental music. Later, Latin poets, such as Lucian, wrote about, and for, pantomime. In medieval Europe, pantomime grew alongside, and was reinforced by, other influences such as the Mystery Plays, the Mummers’ Plays, and later, in 16th century Italy, the ‘commedia dell’arte’, a form of street comedy that also led to the Punch and Judy show. Early in the 18th century the first English pantomimes appeared, but struggled as “dumb shows” under the heavy theatre censorship of that time. It wasn’t until the Theatres Act (1843) that control of spoken drama was relaxed, allowing talents such as Joseph Grimaldi and Dan Leno the freedom to push the modern pantomime, or ‘panto’, to where it is today; traditional, bawdy, but essentially live, with much audience participation. In a recent article Jon Bradfield quoted Chris Goode’s “cat test” of whether a performance was truly live, which asks “If a cat wandered into the midst of the event, could that event accommodate the cat without breaking down?” He concluded that “Panto would not only accommodate a cat, it would tickle its belly and carry it around for the audience to stroke.” For interested readers, tickets are already on sale for the next Greenwich panto, Peter Pan, which opens on 18 November.

MARCH

OZ on APRIL RISE  –  Since Christmas I’ve been dipping repeatedly into two books: Tolstoy’s War and Peace, to help me follow the story on the BBC’s exciting new TV version; and, for pure enjoyment, Laurie Lee’s Village Christmas and Other Notes on the English Year. The latter, a Christmas gift from my daughter, is a collection of previously unpublished essays, and is a welcome addition to Lee’s modest but powerful oeuvre. I’ve admired Lee’s work for nearly 60 years, ever since a young and enthusiastic English teacher introduced us, a class of unromantic Lower VIth Science boys, in a General Studies lesson, to Lee’s poem April Rise. With its vivid imagery, lyricism, and alliteration, it speaks for itself and explains the affection that is still held for Lee nowadays. Here it is: Steve Osborn

If ever I saw blessing in the air/I see it now in this still early day /Where lemon-green the vaporous morning drips /Wet sunlight on the powder of my eye. 

Blown bubble-film of blue, the sky wraps round/Weeds of warm light whose every root and rod/Splutters with soapy green, and all the world/Sweats with the bead of summer in its bud. 

If ever I heard blessing it is there/Where birds in trees that shoals and shadows are/Splash with their hidden wings and drops of sound/Break on my ears their crests of throbbing air.

Pure in the haze the emerald sun dilates, The lips of sparrows milk the mossy stones,/While white as water by the lake a girl/Swims her green hand among the gathered swans. 

Now, as the almond burns its smoking wick,/Dropping small flames to light the candled grass;/Now, as my low blood scales its second chance,/If ever world were blessed, now it is.     

APRIL 

OZ on MINSKY  –  On 24 January, Marvin Minsky, a leading but lesser-known founder of the computer revolution, died aged 88 in Boston, USA, of a cerebral haemorrhage. I’ve long been interested in his work, which I discovered in 1973, when, approaching middle-age, I was midway through a mathematics degree. One of that year’s set books was Minsky’s “Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines”, which followed and extended the work of British mathematician Alan Turing and his WWII Enigma machine. I was, and remain, captivated by it. Minsky was born in New York in 1927, the son of eye surgeon Henry and his wife Fannie. After serving in the US Navy from 1944 to 1945, Minsky graduated in mathematics from Harvard in 1950, married paediatrician Dr. Gloria Rudisch in 1952, and gained his doctorate from Princeton in 1954. From 1958 to his recent death, he worked at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), mostly in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory that he and John McCarthy founded in 1959. Over the next half century, Minsky invented various electronic components, collaborated with Seymour Sapert on the first Logo Turtle, published books and papers on artificial intelligence, and received many awards, including appropriately, the Turing Award in 1969. Minsky’s other great passion was music. He was an accomplished pianist, and one of the few in the world who could spontaneously improvise fugues as complex as those of Bach and Handel. In the preface to Minsky’s book “Music, Mind and Meaning”, his daughter Margaret describes how the Boston family home had three pianos which Minsky played incessantly, even when visitors were talking and children were kicking balls around under the piano. However, for Minsky, music was not simply an amusing hobby; it was central to his self-imposed and lifelong task of “thinking about thinking.”

MAY

HILDIE’S HORSES - It was a cold morning – white frost across the fields – but it would be hot by midday with lizards and crickets galore. She was there ahead of me, Hildegard, as I predicted, caressing the horses, murmuring to each of them under the single big oak. For today was to be a day of days for the two mothers and two daughters – and Hildie too of course – all their lives changed by sunset. The two daughters wild since birth were to be sent away to school. They would not return. The schoolmaster would train them to take saddle and rider and then they would be sold. For the two mothers life would return in a way to how it had been before. Day after day the same. Hildie had won the first in a tombola. Decided she needed a friend. So then there were two black mares under the oak. But then a boy came riding into town (or at least from the top of the village) and two became four. All girls, all black, all wild! But today the horse box for two. The mums were taken away down the lane out of sight, then the horseman and his girl started wheedling and cajoling, then getting tough. They had never been contained in outhouse stable or shed so the narrow dark box was entirely alien. They fought and kicked and ran down the field. The fear palpable. We watched in silence hardly breathing, not to disturb the high concentration. Two hours it took. Man’s will battling beast’s will. And then they were away. The mums’ mourning could be heard all day. “Come on,” said Hildie, “let’s get your photos up on my computer.” So glad I'd taken camera not carrots. And now the sun was hot and the frost melted away... Jane Mitchell

JUNE

OZ on PERCY – One of my lifelong enthusiasms is for tracking down obscure literary quotations, and that has led in part to the acquisition of a very eclectic personal library. Some years ago, in an antiquarian book-dealer’s closing-down sale, I bought cheaply a promising-looking Victorian volume entitled “The Percy Anecdotes”, consisting of several hundred tales, varying in length from just a few lines to a page or more, and covering every imaginable subject. The authors were named as “Reuben and Sholto Percy, brothers of the Benedictine monastery of Mount Benger.” Over the years, labouring through the anecdotes, I became much more interested in the true identity of the Percy brothers, which I eventually discovered with the aid of the internet. “Reuben Percy” was in fact Thomas Byerley, a London journalist, and “Sholto Percy” was Joseph Clinton Robertson, a patent agent and writer. Their massive work was published in forty-four monthly instalments between 1820 and 1823. The pen-name ‘Percy’ referred to the Percy coffee-house, Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia, London, where the ‘brothers’ used to meet. It is thought that the purpose of these anecdotes was to satisfy the need among the wealthy leisured class for subjects for small talk and table talk in order to appear well-read. This aim was certainly satisfied by the huge selection of anecdotes, ranging from The 42nd Highlanders to How to Deal with Sorcerers, complete with index. Leslie Stephen, in the Dictionary of National Biography, notes Lord Byron’s remark that ‘no man who has any pretensions to figure in good society can fail to make himself familiar with The Percy Anecdotes’. However, Stephen adds the dismissive comment ‘but the work is now acknowledged to be of no real value’, so perhaps I ‘figure in good society’ when finding the anecdotes a little tedious at times.

JULY

MITCH on THAMES GREEN - We didn't go down that often - picnics on the water meadows on hot Summer days - and even rarer, swimming in the ‘Thames Green’ water. Gill my sis was always the better swimmer, but I expect our dips were rare because Mother didn't swim. A near-drowning as a girl had left her traumatised – until we took her in hand in her fifties and helped her lose the fear. What I remember is the breathless excitement of the cold water when you first dared plunge in, and the feel of oozy mud between the toes touching down again to clamber out. And Dad's favourite joke: Bowler hat floating gently down the river, raises to show man's head. Man in Thames to man on bank: Is this the way to London? Man on bank to man in Thames: Yes – but you can get a train from here. Man in Thames: It’s ok thanks. I've got me bike down here see...I love it! Our bedrooms faced north across the valley to the Chilterns beyond, and the thin silver ribbon widened in winter to cover miles of meadows – a shiny expanse by day, a watery glimmer by night. And the locks – each had a huge post sunk deep in the water painted black with bright white marks to show the worst years’ flood levels: 1947, 1962, and now 2013...... and the names of the locks conjure each of them too (all of course take the place name on the northern bank, not the southern) – hence Whitchurch not Pangbourne, Mapledurham not Purley, Goring not Streatley. A feeling of pride and ownership whenever ‘The Thames’ is mentioned (though I've lived away for years) - that's my river I think! Does everyone feel the same about theirs I wonder? Jane Mitchell

 AUGUST

OZ on THE LOST CHORD – My girl-friend Gillian has, at the age of 77, started to sing solos, the most recent being in June, at a concert in Brabourne Church, where she performed Arthur Sullivan’s masterpiece The Lost Chord. The words were written originally in 1858 as a poem called A Lost Chord, by Adelaide Anne Procter, an English poet and philanthropist. She was, in fact, Queen Victoria’s favourite poet and the second most popular with the public after Lord Tennyson. Sullivan, in addition to collaborating with W S Gilbert on their operas, composed serious orchestral and choral works, interspersed with hymns and parlour pieces. In 1871 Sullivan started trying to set Procter’s poem to music, with little success. He returned to the task in 1876, when his brother Fred, an actor who had appeared in many of the G&S operas, became ill. During many visits to the dying Fred’s bedside in King’s Road, Fulham, Sullivan worked on the music, and finally signed the manuscript on 13 January 1877. Fred died five days later. It is thought that, when not in Fulham with Fred, Arthur worked on The Lost Chord at the organ of the Manor House, Hothfield Place, where he often visited Lord and Lady Hothfield, and where he played publicly in 1877. In the late 1890s the organ was moved to St Margaret’s Church, Hothfield, where it remains to this day. Over the years, The Lost Chord has been recorded by many great singers, most notably the English contralto, Dame Clara Butt. Italian tenor Enrico Caruso sang it in 1912 at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in a benefit concert for families of Titanic victims. Sullivan was rightly proud of the song, once commenting: “I have composed much music since then, but have never written a second Lost Chord.”

SEPTEMBER

OZ on TRAHERNE – Recently, researching an obscure literary quotation, I took home the wrong book from the library and accidentally discovered the fascinating story of a little-known poet. Thomas Traherne was born c.1637, a “shoemaker’s son of Hereford”, according to Anthony à Wood. After being educated at Hereford Cathedral School and Brasenose College, Oxford, Traherne was appointed rector of St Mary’s, Credenhill, near Hereford, on 30 December 1657. Here he lived for most of the remainder of his short life as a humble country priest, producing a steady stream of intense religious poetry and prose, and only occasionally visiting Oxford and London for professional purposes. In February 1674 Traherne moved to Teddington, Middlesex, to be the domestic chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman. Sadly, Bridgeman died in June, followed by Traherne, still in Teddington, on 10 October 1674. Little of Traherne’s work was published during his lifetime, and his manuscripts passed to his brother Philip, and then, on Philip’s death, to the Skipp family of Herefordshire. Here they remained, undiscovered, until the winter of 1896-1897, when William T Brooke, a London book-collector, discovered “a barrow of books about to be trashed.” Brooke and Alexander Grosart, a literary expert, agreed that the manuscripts were unknown works by Henry Vaughan, a contemporary of Traherne. However, Grosart died before he could include the works in his next edition of Vaughan. The manuscripts were then examined by Bertram Dobell, who, after some amazing detective work, concluded that they were by Thomas Traherne. So here we have the strange situation of a great poet who lay silent for over 200 years, but has inspired so many in the last century. As for the quotation I was seeking, I can’t tell you that yet, as it’s part of a national competition which doesn’t close until 1st September. Steve Osborn

OCTOBER

MITCH on FAMILY HOLS - Oldest daughter: would you like to join us in The Highlands for a week? And then maybe look after the girls in Edinburgh for a bit? Instinct says Yes to both, though it seems strange to enjoy the reward before the work doesn’t it? Ever the optimist that a) Scots weather will be uncharacteristically clear and warm, and that b) I can be calm and patient with small children if I try hard! So we set off in Edinburgh’s Friday night rush hour in this fashion: Dad Charlie in the driving seat, Gran beside him, Mum Sarah and two girls in the back, four bikes on the back rack, another on the roof with the roofbox - oh and kitten Joe in a basket on Mum’s knee. Luckily a car with a big heart, since the last bit of the drive is over a mountain pass - the highest in the UK. Not just highest also bendiest – hairpins galore. And by then it was dense mist and dark. And now and again a handsome stag loomed up in the mist! And now and again the kitten was just a little bit ill...But then we arrived and all was well – the sound of the sea lapping inches from the door and dark shadows of hills just visible across The Sound...It all reminded me of holidays in Wales or the West Country as a teenager – the car rather different, the speed too – it would take all day from Berkshire! and the route had to be carefully chosen to exclude all possible inclines either up or down. The old Austin Seven up Porlock Hill was not an option. And Mother, sister and me had to push uphill many a time while kid bro (younger) sat in state on the back seat...And I’ll save tell of our journeys to Orkney (with cat and kittens!) for another day...

(Jane Mitchell)

NOVEMBER

MITCH on FAMILY HOLS - Oldest daughter: would you like to join us in The Highlands for a week? And then maybe look after the girls in Edinburgh for a bit? Instinct says Yes to both, though it seems strange to enjoy the reward before the work doesn’t it? Ever the optimist that a) Scots weather will be uncharacteristically clear and warm, and that b) I can be calm and patient with small children if I try hard! So we set off in Edinburgh’s Friday night rush hour in this fashion: Dad Charlie in the driving seat, Gran beside him, Mum Sarah and two girls in the back, four bikes on the back rack, another on the roof with the roofbox - oh and kitten Joe in a basket on Mum’s knee. Luckily a car with a big heart, since the last bit of the drive is over a mountain pass - the highest in the UK. Not just highest also bendiest – hairpins galore. And by then it was dense mist and dark. And now and again a handsome stag loomed up in the mist! And now and again the kitten was just a little bit ill...But then we arrived and all was well – the sound of the sea lapping inches from the door and dark shadows of hills just visible across The Sound...It all reminded me of holidays in Wales or the West Country as a teenager – the car rather different, the speed too – it would take all day from Berkshire! and the route had to be carefully chosen to exclude all possible inclines either up or down. The old Austin Seven up Porlock Hill was not an option. And Mother, sister and me had to push uphill many a time while kid bro (younger) sat in state on the back seat...And I’ll save tell of our journeys to Orkney (with cat and kittens!) for another day... (Jane Mitchell)

 

DECEMBER

 

MITCH on FAMILY HOLS - Oldest daughter: would you like to join us in The Highlands for a week? And then maybe look after the girls in Edinburgh for a bit? Instinct says Yes to both, though it seems strange to enjoy the reward before the work doesn’t it? Ever the optimist that a) Scots weather will be uncharacteristically clear and warm, and that b) I can be calm and patient with small children if I try hard! So we set off in Edinburgh’s Friday night rush hour in this fashion: Dad Charlie in the driving seat, Gran beside him, Mum Sarah and two girls in the back, four bikes on the back rack, another on the roof with the roofbox - oh and kitten Joe in a basket on Mum’s knee. Luckily a car with a big heart, since the last bit of the drive is over a mountain pass - the highest in the UK. Not just highest also bendiest – hairpins galore. And by then it was dense mist and dark. And now and again a handsome stag loomed up in the mist! And now and again the kitten was just a little bit ill...But then we arrived and all was well – the sound of the sea lapping inches from the door and dark shadows of hills just visible across The Sound...It all reminded me of holidays in Wales or the West Country as a teenager – the car rather different, the speed too – it would take all day from Berkshire! and the route had to be carefully chosen to exclude all possible inclines either up or down. The old Austin Seven up Porlock Hill was not an option. And Mother, sister and me had to push uphill many a time while kid bro (younger) sat in state on the back seat...And I’ll save tell of our journeys to Orkney (with cat and kittens!) for another day... (Jane Mitchell)