PotCXXVIIpouri

 It's the summer and, relatively unusually in the UK, it has been summery. I have therefore been out and about, but, finding myself briefly back in the Casa Epictetus, here's a catch-up.

I have been in Glasgow for the second time this year. I still can't understand a word that the natives say, but they seem friendly enough. I went inside a tenement building for the first time and found it to be disconcertingly up-market. Also for the first time I tried a haggis pakora, these days just as traditionally Scottish as tenements. Probably more noteworthy was that I travelled up via the Settle to Carlisle railway, which I had never been on before. It is every bit as scenic as I had been led to believe it would be.

Two things about that photo. Firstly, you can't really see that view from the train itself; for that you're much better off walking the area, which I have done many times. Secondly, I didn't travel on a steam train. I did do so however when I went to see 'The Railway Children', part of the ongoing Bradford 2025 City of Culture programme. The film, the original with Jenny Agutter rather than the remake, which confusingly also featured Jenny Agutter albeit in a different role (*), was shot on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway (**) and so the day started with a trip from Keighley to Oxenhope on a train pulled by the very same engine saved from disaster by Jenny's red bloomers. Then, in what I assume is an engine shed with a few tiers of seats installed on either side, the performance took place. The action took place mostly on small platforms being pushed backwards and forwards along the track by stage hands. At the climactic moment a steam locomotive suddenly shot into the theatre. Most impressive.

You won't be able to see that because the entire run is sold out. You may however be able to catch 'The Ceremony', although I don't expect it to get a particularly wide release. In my previous post I observed that I had never been to a première; lo and behold, I now have and a Gala Première at that. The shine was slightly taken off things when we reached the end of the red carpet to be greeted by an officious lady with a clipboard who told us, quite accurately, that we weren't on the guest list and should have used the side entrance with all the other ordinary punters. However, by the time she had finished speaking my companion for the evening had already liberated a glass of fizz from a passing waiter and so it was all a bit moot. I very much enjoyed the film, most of which took place not very far from the Ribblehead viaduct pictured up above. It was extremely well acted, visually striking and quite tense. What is it about? Fair question; possibly the fact that there is good and bad in all of us. If you do go and see it then I'd be interested in your view of what all the quasi-mystical stuff with the goat (***) is about.

*      The sequel to the original was also shot on the KWVR and, inevitably starred Ms Agutter, who apparently thereby claimed the record for the longest gap between playing the same character in films.

**    Both Keighley and the Worth valley are part of Bradford

*** It might actually be a ram, reviewers are divided on the subject. 

So where does that leave us?

 I've been searching through reports of Johnson's statement, but can't find any specific mentions of playing with toy soldiers. We need to find a proxy. Do you think it's more like going to the gym, or more like going to the zoo?

A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy's Day

It is the Feast of Santa Lucia, a much bigger deal in Scandinavia (not to mention the eponymous Caribbean island, where it's the national day) than it is in the UK. As was explained to me by my Swedish colleagues over glögg and lussekatt when I worked in Gothenburg, that's because December 13th was the winter solstice under the Julian calendar and therefore a festival of light was just what they needed. 

Regular readers will know that nothing pleases me more than a debate about the Earth's orbit around the sun, but they are a non-confrontational race of people so I didn't bother to point out the obvious flaw in the Julian calendar theory. Still, it does explain why John Donne started his poem in the way that he did:

 'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,

Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;

         The sun is spent, and now his flasks

         Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;

                The world's whole sap is sunk;

The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,

Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,

Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,

Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be

At the next world, that is, at the next spring;

         For I am every dead thing,

         In whom Love wrought new alchemy.

                For his art did express

A quintessence even from nothingness,

From dull privations, and lean emptiness;

He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot

Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,

Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;

         I, by Love's limbec, am the grave

         Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood

                Have we two wept, and so

Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow

To be two chaoses, when we did show

Care to aught else; and often absences

Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)

Of the first nothing the elixir grown;

         Were I a man, that I were one

         I needs must know; I should prefer,

                If I were any beast,

Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,

And love; all, all some properties invest;

If I an ordinary nothing were,

As shadow, a light and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.

You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun

         At this time to the Goat is run

         To fetch new lust, and give it you,

                Enjoy your summer all;

Since she enjoys her long night's festival,

Let me prepare towards her, and let me call

This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this

Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

                                       - John Donne

Born to be wild

A few months ago I had cause to mention the goats of the Great Orme; as so often, where this blog leads, the rest of the media follow:

I was delighted to see that right at the top of the latest list of the internet search terms which have directed people here is 'Conny Kreitmeier'.

The stage name of the writer of that song was 'Mars Bonfire', which you have to admit is a belter. His brother was the drummer in Steppenwolf, and our thought for the day is taken from Hermann Hesse's book after which the band were named:

"As a body everyone is alone, as a soul never."

Bracing

I have been to Llandudno, which turned out to be a very pleasant place, although it would have been even better if the temperature had been ten degrees higher. I had never been before and had no idea that it was a purpose built resort in the manner of Cancun or Pattaya, albeit on a more human scale than the former and less sleazy than the latter. The promenade is particularly impressive, kept free of tack and with all the low rise Victorian hotels painted in pastel colours. I saw a spectacular fireworks display from the promenade one evening. The reason it was held a few days earlier than in the rest of the country was that they set it up on the beach and the date is therefore determined by the times of the tide.

It was colder and gloomier than this when I was there

In an attempt to shoehorn in something vaguely wargaming related can I point out that the Great Orme, seen rising behind the town in the photo, is home to the flock of goats from the Royal Welch Fusiliers select their regimental mascot. More directly connected to military history is the magnificent Conwy castle:

The town of Conwy, which has virtually all its medieval walls intact, is very nice as well, with plenty of coffee shops to duck into when visitors lose feeling in their extremities. It also boasts Great Britain's smallest house:

As I was in full tourist mode I paid my quid and went in. I can confirm that it is indeed very small. I wanted to know whether the claim that it is GB's smallest house meant that there is a smaller one in Northern Ireland, but the otherwise charming Welsh lady in the picture affected to have no interest in one of the most contentious current constitutional issues and said that she didn't know.

I may in due course explain exactly what took me to North Wales, but for now let me relate one thing that happened last week which touches on this previous post about people dying in theatres.  I was in the Venue Cymru and as curtain up approached I was eyeing the vacant seat next to me with a view to putting my coat over it if no one arrived to claim it. The lady sitting on the other side of it leaned over to me and said "It's OK, she's not coming. I've just been to her funeral."

Henry Liddell, father of Alice, had a holiday home on the West Shore at Llandudno and was possibly, depending on whom you believe, visited there by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. In any event the town is littered with statues of characters from his books. In one of those coincidences that I like even if no one else does, on the day of my return I went to see June Tabor and the Oysterband at Leeds Town Hall and for their first encore they did a cover of Jefferson  Airplane's 'White Rabbit'. Astonishingly Grace Slick was 80 last Wednesday, so here's the original as performed at Woodstock:

Knitted garment that opens at the front

"A younger woman who hangs around older men" -  definition of 'cardigan' according to urbandictionary.com

I have been re-reading Flashman, mainly I must admit because it was available for 99p as one of Amazon's Kindle e-books of the day and I felt like some light reading. One character who plays a prominent role at the beginning of the book is James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan. Famous of course for leading the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854, at the time the book is set he was Commanding Officer of the 11th Light Dragoons, into which our anti-hero is commissioned. The Brudenell family owned a lot of land in what are now the Woodhouse Moor and Hyde Park areas of Leeds, to the north of the university, and local place names still reflect this. There is a Cardigan Road (indeed it's where the recent opera festival was held) and, more pertinently for today's post, there is the Brudenell Social Club, one of Leeds' most prominent music venues.

I have been there to see the Devon Allman Project. The project bit represents the fact that since I last saw Allman, his father died and he decided it would be appropriate to feature more Allman Brothers music in his act. To help with this he has recruited Duane Betts, son of Dickie and obviously named after Duane, as opening act/sideman. It certainly all hit the spot for me. You will have gathered from reading the blog that by and large my musical heart lies in the blues/rock of the early seventies, and from the second song in when Betts did a cover of 'Silver Train' from the Stones' 1973 album Goats Head Soup, I was up for it. So were the rest of the audience, especially a somewhat incongruous party of Norwegians down at the front. They stood out partly because a couple of them were around 6' 9" - for once I don't exaggerate - and partly because the availability of beer for less than £15 a pint had left them all rather exuberant. One of them called out, loudly and repeatedly, for 'Free Bird', which amused those watching quite a lot more than it did Allman himself.

A highlight was an extended version 'Blue Sky', written by Dickie Betts, so here's the original:

A thing of beauty is a joy forever

So opens Keat's poem 'Endymion'. I mention this not just because it is his 221st birthday today, but also because - in the joined up manner beloved of your bloggist - Endymion is a character in the latest opera that I have been to see: Cavalli's 'La Calisto'. This further slice of baroque brings together two mythological episodes: the 'seduction' of Calisto by Jupiter and the liaison between Diana and Endymion.

English Touring Opera play it for laughs in the first two acts with, for example, yet another man playing a part written for a woman sharing scenes with a woman playing a part written for a woman playing a goat-boy, followed on stage by a man dressed as a woman miming to the voice of a mezzo atop an upstage ladder. The setting was Victorian steampunk meets Peter Jackson style elves which gelled surprisingly well with both the seventeenth century music and the humour. Endymion as Professor Branestawm (or possibly Doc Brown) was especially effective and Mercurio gave good quiff.

In the third act they focussed more on the drama. Faustini, the librettist was obviously giving the Venetian public what they wanted and expected rather than going for anything deep and meaningful; he plays rather fast and loose with Ovid, Aeschylus and whoever else his sources were. However, there is something poignant about the mutual love of the moon and an astronomer, the two being inevitably and permanently separated by the natural order of things. Jupiter and Juno however clearly deserve each other. And if I was the title character I'd think I'd have preferred to stay as a bear - which was very effectively, if briefly, realised - than be raised to the heavens as a star, but perhaps that's just me.

Dando Shaft - a critical appraisal

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I have sunk to the level of the rest of the interweb and posted a picture of a cat. Mea culpa. It has even provoked the leaving of a couple of comments, plus the non-leaving of one by our newly acquired female reader, who cannot deal with the technology of Google usernames and therefore resorted to a text message to tell me that she preferred the naked hippies. Suffice it to say that I wasn't surprised in the slightest.

A second was by Cave Adsum. Now I have come in for some flak in the past about untranslated foreign language phrases and I therefore no longer use them. For those who don't have the Latin I believe we must interpret his Google username as a tribute to the well known soul act Sam and Dave.

Now Sam (or possibly Dave) seems to suggest that cats have very little to do with wargaming, and that the blog is better - or perhaps worse; it's a bit ambiguous - for wandering off topic into other areas. In reply I simply say that playing with toy soldiers and dressing cats as goats are all meat from the same bone. I call in support the distinguished Marxist historian C.L.R. James who, had he been born in Ilkley - epicentre of wargaming in the lower Wharfe valley - instead of Trinidad, would surely have written 'What do they know of wargaming that only wargaming know?'.

Tony Kitchen however is more on the money. No such false dichotomy for him. Indeed if you read his blog then you inevitably come away with the feeling that 'The Great Patio War' involved a race of giant cats without whose approval no engagement could ever take place. [As an aside this conflict is one of the few examples where my normal distaste for imaginations is completely suspended.] The same feline involvement can be seen in the blogs of many giants of the wargaming world, for example, Conrad Kinch. Indeed even the legendary wargames room of James 'Olicanalad' Roach has not been immune, to the extent that Mrs Olicanalad forbade the use of cotton wool balls to mark units that had fired, so fed up was she with the cat carrying them all over the house. James decreed that instead we would use barrels, a solution that may even have worked had we not already been using barrels to mark which units had acted on a card. Much confusion ensued and we have returned to 'smoking'. I have no idea whether Mrs O or the cat are in the loop on this one.

Another rhetorical question

Have you ever found a kitten where there used to be a goat?

A very pleasant complaint for a man in London

"Never go on trips with anyone you do not love." - Ernest Hemingway

I have been to London again (it rained) and have to report that Virgin East Coast managed to maintain their 100% record of delayed or cancelled trains when I travel with them. The excuse yesterday seemed to vary between an 'incident on the line' (a sad euphemism for such a tragic human story I always think) to Kings Cross having been evacuated due to the arrest of a man with a gun. Now I was actually on the concourse at the time of this supposed police action and I saw nothing; which on reflection possibly says more about my powers of observation than anything else.

I made the trip to meet with a group of bankers. It seems that they had advanced a large sum of money to someone. let's call him Jack, for the purpose of buying some magic beans and had taken as security a charge over the beanstalk that Jack intended to grow. They now find that there is no money, no beanstalk and, for all intents and purposes, no Jack. Another triumph for the banking system. 

Speaking of London, I have recently got to know someone living in West Yorkshire who, at the age of 42, has astonishingly never been there. It may be for the best though; my friend - a non-drinking vegetarian whose main hobbies are knitting and growing vegetables - is very innocent and has led a sheltered life. Some people are just not ready to be exposed to the sort of goings on that one finds in the big smoke.

The Goat's Revenge

James has come up with what seems to be another excellent Seven Years War scenario. Details and photographs are as usual on his blog (although you'll search in vain for a report on the conclusion to the previous Crusades game) so I'll just highlight a couple of points. I'm in charge of the Russians and my first failure was in drawing for morale. My draw was so low that I thought James was joking when he told me the minimum below which I could declare a Mulligan; some serious fiddling had to take place to ensure that we could make a game of it. My second problem has been an inability to get any reinforcements on. My force is split into a higher number of commands and this is therefore a bigger problem to me than it would be to the Prussians if they had it, which they don't.

On the plus side, I got lots of initiative, with runs of 20, 19 and 18 (in that order funnily enough) although looking at the current position you'd never know it as the Prussians have done most of the attacking. And whilst James rubbishes the Cossacks as 'fairly useless' they've actually done rather well. They have destroyed a handily placed Prussian artillery battery and provided a screen that has delayed the Prussian cavalry sufficiently to enable an infantry command to move in force onto the hill on my right flank. 'Fairly useful' I would say.

Anyway, in case there should be any visitors to the blog who are not interested in wargaming, I offer the following cautionary illustration. One shouldn't mess with goats.

Goat's Head Soup

I was listening to this in the car yesterday as I drove across the moors near Skipton and it occurred to me with a certain amount of shock that it was released forty years ago.

I can vividly remember that summer - well bits of it anyway. And all those that I was knocking around with then - ooh, what happened to you, whatever happened to me, what became of the people, we used to be? Actually, an awful lot of them are washed-up has-beens rather like me.

When I think back to that summer I also always think firstly about the future mayor of Harpenden - for obvious reasons - and then about the lime in the coconut. Vicious, you hit me with a flower.

Wargaming relevance - zippo.