Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

I had two linked concerns when I agreed to host John Baker’s Winged With Death blog tour. I have been linked to John’s blog for several years now, admiring and enjoying greatly its breadth of topics and depth of insight. But although I am a voracious reader with eclectic tastes, I have a blind spot when it comes to crime fiction, which is, of course, John’s stock in trade. So I picked up Winged With Death with some trepidation and entered via the first page much in the manner of someone negotiating their way into a cold bath. 

By page 4 I was fully immersed and 287 pages later I stepped out wishing that I could stay in a bit longer. First off, it’s not a crime novel so I was saved the need for some sort of in transit epiphany. Secondly, it’s a damn good read that manages that most necessary but elusive (and paradoxical) combination of elements, fast action and pause for thought.

I’m not going to present a thumbnail account of what goes on in the novel. There are synopses aplenty, both in the preceding blog tour stop-offs and in the publicity material available via John’s blog. But what both drives the book along with such momentum and provokes the meditations on time, passion, the personal and the political and, ultimately, loss and denial is the harmony and counterpoint maintained between the narrative sequences in ‘70s Montevideo and in present day York.

Linking the two situations is a claustrophobic sense of the fragility of our existence within any context and the fervent energy whereby we try to establish and maintain a sense of self and identity. And underpinning both theme and narrative in both sections is the primal force of dance in the form of the tango. Enclosed in the tight embrace of the milonguero tango (and caught up in the desperate resistance of the Tupameros guerrillas), young Frederick Boyle absorbs the new identity of Ramon Bolio and grows towards manhood. 

Disparate influences are evident in the text – Hemingway in sequences of terse, economical action description; Lawrence in passages of intense, lyrical depiction of sexual and terpsichorean passion; Greene and Le Carré in the fierce moral undertones that inform the political contextualisation of Boyle’s/Bolio’s life in Montevideo. I would add, tentatively, another – Albert Camus. There are moments when, like Meursault in Camus’ L’Étranger, Ramon’s involvement in events seems to have little to do with any operation of personal will or inclination. And there is a potent sense in the dramatic concluding passages of one motivated principally by physical sensation, as if, after his searing experiences in Montevideo, only the power of tango and sex can provide meaning in a chaotic world. 

But John Baker’s voice is a clear and distinctive one and Winged With Death is a novel of great power and originality. I shall now confront my prejudices concerning the genre of crime fiction and make my acquaintance with Sam Turner, protagonist of a series of earlier novels. But it’s John Baker’s next novel that I’m anticipating with greatest pleasure.

QUESTIONS TO JOHN BAKER

AS STATED ABOVE, IT IS INEVITABLE THAT, EVEN IN A NOVEL WITH AS DISTINCTIVE A VOICE AS WWD, INFLUENCES WILL BE EVIDENT. HEMINGWAY HAS HIS MOMENTS, AS DO LAWRENCE, GRAHAM GREENE, JOHN LE CARRE, MAYBE EVEN CAMUS. BUT THE SOUTH AMERICAN SETTING AND CERTAIN PASSAGES, NOTABLY THOSE CONCERNED WITH THE TRANSCENDENT POWER OF DANCE, SUGGEST AN ELEMENT OF MAGIC REALISM. WOULD YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THIS GENRE, OR INDEED ANY OTHER NOT MENTIONED, AS BEING PRESENT IN THE WRITING?

One Hundred Years of Solitude has been a constant companion for many years. It is still one of the most memorable novels I have read. If some of that has rubbed off on me I am a happy man. But if you are referring to the scene at the milonga in chapter 22, I think that owes more to the expressionism of Hammett than to Marquez, not that the two are separated by a long distance.

NOT FAR INTO THE NOVEL SOMETHING ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE PASSIONATE INTERDEPENDENCE OF THE PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS IN THE FACE OF ADVERSITY PUT ME STRONGLY IN MIND OF E.M. FORSTER’S FAMOUS INVOCATION, ‘ONLY CONNECT’. MIGHT THIS BE SEEN AS A MAJOR THEME WITHIN THE STORY?

I don’t know about a ‘major theme’. I am, of course, familiar with Howard’s End and all of my novels have been concerned with interdependence. I also feel, along with Forster, that ‘only connect’ is a mantra applied equally to class and social divisions as well as to the idea of friendship, with which Forster replaced his loss of belief in a divinity.

MANY WRITERS HAVE BEEN DRAWN IN VARIOUS WAYS TO THE THEME OF TIME – H.G. WELLS, J.B. PRIESTLEY, BECKETT, PINTER.  IT’S A DOMINATING ELEMENT IN WINGED WITH DEATH. WHAT ASPECTS OF THE THEME WERE YOU AIMING TO INCORPORATE?

It has always been a very broad canvas for me. Basically I wanted to undermine our current concepts and reliance on the notion of time. It is not something that exists in any real sense. It is nothing. But this comes to mind also, from JB Priestley:
Even as a child I could never understand why certain things that were important to me appeared to older people to be nothing. My dreams were nothing. What I ‘made up’ to delight or terrify myself was nothing. Certain queer feelings, coming out of the blue, were nothing. I can remember, though it must be all of 65 years ago, sitting in the sun on a tiny hillock at the back of our house, and feeling, not lightly but to the very depths of my being, that I was close to some secret about a wonderful treasure, which had no size, no shape, no substance, but all the same was somewhere just behind the sunlight and the buttercups and daisies and the grass and the warm earth. And this too, it seemed, was nothing. I was surrounded and often enchanted, it appeared, by nothings.

A LITTLE FLIPPANTLY, I POSED THE FOLLOWING QUESTION TO FIONA ROBYN DURING HER BLOG TOUR FOR THE LETTERS. SOMERSET MAUGHAM SAID: ‘THERE ARE THREE RULES FOR WRITING A NOVEL. UNFORTUNATELY NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THEY ARE.’ IF HE’S RIGHT ABOUT THE RULES, DO YOU KNOW WHAT THEY MIGHT BE?

He’s wrong about the three rules. But there are certain requirements for a novel to come into existence. The writer has to have read other novels. He/she should have spent some time writing in order to learn what happens when you place one word after another. The writer should find some comfort in spending an inordinate amount of time concentrating on the same thing without resorting to drink or drugs.

LARKS ASCENDING

I was 13 and staying with family friends in a damp, dilapidated but beautiful manor house called The Old Hall just outside the village of Reedham in Norfolk.  John and Joyce Jacobs were running it as a combination guest house and small livestock farm, motivated more, I realise now, by a romantic notion of rural idyll than the desire to make fat profits.

And in those days ‘romantic notion’ could get you quite far before the bank foreclosed or you flitted away in the night with your belongings in a couple of suitcases.  And at that time ‘rural idyll’ still had a little currency.  There remained the residue of a working countryside; independent farms with relatively little acreage could just about make a living and the pace of life was still largely dictated by the seasonal tides.  So the delightfully raffish Jacobs family sat around the Raeburn cooker in the unreconstructed authenticity of a manor house kitchen of a morning planning the day’s events

For me the glory of it all was the freedom. I was left entirely up to my own devices and I roamed for entire days across the endless flat fields, following the lines of the dykes – the deep, carefully maintained drainage streams, that bisected them.   For the first time in my life I was entirely on my own.  I could clamber up onto the railway embankment and trudge along the shingle in between the sleepers for miles in a dead straight line.  I could select a windmill, seen as tiny scribbled letter ‘X’ against the endless horizon, and make my way towards it across a multitude of five-bar gates and styles to stand beneath its clinker-built bulk, mighty sails locked into position, or, rarely, turning majestically in the breeze that always shifted across the constant plateau.  Or I could simply lie on my back in the dust and chaff of a recently harvested field, staring up at the bubbling summer clouds, watching and listening to the skylarks that wheeled and climbed in such abundance at that time.  And, of that genuinely idyllic six weeks, I remember with most clarity the prickle of the stubble, the throaty dryness of the dust and those soaring skylarks, alone amongst the clouds.

A few years ago, in mid-July, I revisited Reedham. I stood at the edge of the first field, the one that bordered the rambling gardens of the Old Hall and across which I used to stride at the beginning of my explorations. Initially it looked much the same, but a closer inspection revealed the changes: the windbreak hedgerows had gone; the crop had been harvested already; not a single skylark spiralled high into the clear air.

I learned recently that since 1970 the skylark population has declined by 52%.  Major changes in cultivation and harvesting procedures are thought to be responsible for this, notably the switch from spring to autumn-sown cereals, the disappearance of the hedgerows and the vulnerability of birds to the massively increased use of insecticides and weedkillers. 

It would seem, then, that the skylark – a bird whose rural associations transcend entirely the phoney bucolic Merrie England clichés - is another casualty of the late-20th century.  Apparently not.  Although a 52% decline in a little over 30 years is dramatic and alarming, a government-funded study has demonstrated that merely the provision of two small patches left untouched within a hectare of cultivated land can reverse local decline.  Experiments done over a two-year period resulted in an increase of nearly 50% in skylark breeding.  So to encourage the process, farmers are being offered £30.00 per hectare to join a scheme involving small, undrilled patches across their field systems.

A small resistance to an advancing tide. So shines a bright deed in a naughty world. If the farmers of East Norfolk are an enlightened crew, maybe I’ll be able to lie on my back in the great fields by The Old Hall, Reedham again in a year or two, watching and hearing the larks ascending.

…

The Lark in the Clear Air

Dear thoughts are in my mind
And my soul soars enchanted,
As I hear the sweet lark sing    
In the clear air of the day.

For a tender beaming smile
To my hope has been granted,    
And tomorrow she shall hear
All my fond heart would say.

I shall tell her all my love,
All my soul's adoration,
And I think she will hear
And will not say me nay.

It is this that gives my soul
All its joyous elation,
As I hear the sweet lark sing
In the clear air of the day.

(Samuel Ferguson)

…

The Lark Ascending

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.

For singing till his heaven fills,
‘Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup
And he the wine which overflows
to lift us with him as he goes.

Till lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.

(George Meredith)

...

The Lark In The Morning

The lark in the morning she arises from her nest
And she ascends all in the air with the dew upon her breast
And with the pretty ploughboy she'll whistle and she'll sing
And at night she'll return to her own nest again

When his day's work is over, oh what then will he do
Perhaps then into some country wake he'll go
And with his pretty sweetheart, he'll dance and he'll sing
And at night he'll return with his love back again

And as they returned from the wake unto the town
The meadows they are mowed and the grass it is cut down
The nightingale she whistles upon the hawthorn spray
And the moon it is a shining upon the new mown hay

 Good luck unto the ploughboys wherever they may be
They will take a winsome lass for to sit upon their knee
And with a jug of beer boys, they'll whistle and they'll sing
And the ploughboy is as happy as a prince or a king

(Traditional English - sung here by Steeleye Span)

Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.
ABBIE HOFFMAN

Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.
ALBERT CAMUS

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
MAHATMA GHANDI

Ordinary people dream extraordinary things.
BARACK OBAMA

The other morning on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was, once again, attempting to account for the slow motion car crash that is her career at this point within the inglorious Gordon Brown administration. Employing that familiar mixture of rapid, authoritative diction and the down-turned vocal inclination that anticipates that each successive utterance should by rights put the subject to bed, she blagged, shimmied, slithered, sidestepped and generally obfuscated her way through the barrage of allegations of personal and professional maladministration. Nothing she said was inspired by some larger moral sensibility; nothing she said arose from some deep core of informing ideology. Direct questions bounced off her like ping-pong balls as - arrogantly, patronisingly, shamelessly – she blathered her way all the way up to Humphrys’ sardonic thanks and farewell.

In other words, she behaved like a politician. In fact, so perfectly did she subscribe to stereotype, she might have been rushed in from central casting.  And how sad is that judgement; how damning that characterisation.   Three ‘p’s in a row: politician as professional pragmatist.

Sitting at my desk now, just before turning out the lights and going to bed, I find myself musing almost nostalgically about times gone by when the enemy was clearly delineated.  Once upon a time the mill owner, the mine owner, the factory owner did live in the big house on the hill.  He may well have smoked a big cigar; he may well have sported a top hat!  Once upon a time the fascist wore a black shirt and he called himself a fascist and he marched through the streets. Once upon a time the communist wore a red tie and argued over warm pints of beer about precisely how many proletarian heroes could dance on the head of a pin. There was a distinct demarcation between the interests of Capital and Labour, between worldviews divided between Right and Left, and the radicals and the reactionaries took their stands and made their play, knowing that they were ineradicably opposed, one to another.

An oversimplification, of course, and arguably, a sentimental one.  But my father’s eventual decision not to go to fight in Spain against Franco in 1936 wasn’t made out of any ideological confusion or equivocation.  He knew what he believed and why and he decided that he couldn’t take up arms because his pacifistic convictions outweighed his readiness to commit violently to his sense of massive social and political injustice.

But about what stark and simple world conflicts might Westerners have to agonise similarly today?  Where once class background, or race, or culture, or straightforward moral articles of faith placed one in alignment with a cause whose supporters were untainted by the issues they opposed, now we are wound tightly into a web of complicity and guilt.  We wear clothing that is produced in Third World sweatshops.  We eat food and drink beverages that are produced by countries that see none of the profits flowing – or even leaking – back into their own economies.  We enjoy standards of living that depend significantly on the suppression of Third World economies at best and, at worst, on the open and rapacious pillaging of their resources. Where ideologies prevail, they are bleak, reductive and prescriptive, demanding of their followers only blind obedience unto death.  We are governed by mendacious, cynical, exploitative administrations whose rhetoric, sophistry, cant and downright lying cannot conceal their ideological and moral bankruptcy.  And we know it with certainty, but, it would seem, we are too jaded and disillusioned and, in the final analysis, too cynical to care.

But I do believe (or, in darker moments, hope defiantly in the face of experience) in the principle that, as in physics so in human affairs, the pendulum must perforce swing back the other way. Are there faint signs evident within this shopping-and-fucking culture entering the first febrile months of a cataclysmic recession of the slowing down of the one-way momentum? The obdurate refusal on the part of millions of ordinary men and women to believe either that there ever were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or that their government went to war in order to destroy them for our safety may indicate the beginnings of principled dissent, however inchoate and unstructured in these post-ideological times.   It was six years ago and in times of complacent plenty, but over a million of us filled the streets of London, every tinker, tailor and manufacturer of candlesticks knowing then with grim certainty what Bush and Blair had no choice but to acknowledge at the time of their passing (even if only in the wee-wee hours) – that an invasion of Iraq would create a continuum of violence that would tear the country apart and deliver the prerogative for faith, belief and action into the hands of the ideologues.  Supplement this with such manifestations as the mass presences that gather noisily, sometimes violently, wherever international convocations of the purse holders are held – as at the recent G20 conference in London - and the tireless proselytising of the deep green activists who refuse to yield the initiative to those who would assimilate, re-package and market the stark truths of environmental collapse. 

Lapping at the edges of the long-term quietism that has resulted from post-ideological complacency and despair is a rising tide of anger.  In the international corridors of power where compromise, the crafted u-turn, the morally unimpeded machinations of realpolitik prevail, the urgings of the heart have no place.  But as a precursor to measured, calculated popular dissent, the righteous indignation that defies smooth argument and demands accountability is a crucial detonation point.  Our ability to scrutinise and monitor has never been greater; our capacity to interpret and analyse has never been more acute.  Significantly, even the right-wing media are weighing in with the phraseology of dissent in the face of the ethical acrobatics of purblind bankers and omnivorous investment managers.

So maybe from some nexus of green radicalism, opposition to the global conglomerates, gathering exasperation with the grotesqueries of gluttonous wealth in times of financial collapse, and informed and active disillusionment with the traditional highways and byways of political process, a new ideology might begin to emerge. At which point the Great and The Good to whose will we currently bend would do well to remember that nothing has more power than a pendulum at the full extent of its swing.

I’m slipping in this second draft of a poem from 2006 as Easter subsides. It’s a time of great resonance for many and I don’t wish to appear to be merely raining on the parade. Any season that causes us to reflect on intolerance, persecution, sacrifice, suffering and, ultimately, forgiveness and reconciliation is of value.

...

AN HOUR IN CHAPEL ANNEXE

What are we to believe? That Christ
welcomed the thorns, Sebastian the arrows,
Catherine the wheel? Yes, they tell us.
Pain is the passport to Jerusalem.

Only when the body’s shriven, mortified,
made carcass and dispatched
can the soul emerge immaculate
and rise like gas, invisible yet palpable.

Christ hangs on above my head, his face
cast down, his arms stripped wings
spread wide, his ankles crossed. This
is more dance than agony, a frozen

entrechat – Christ  terpsichore, reeling
down the ages to a timeless tune,
treading out the double loop, the bee’s
infinity, until the measure’s known by all.

And what’s a dance? A means by which
we occupy the air, divert, persuade,
seduce. Passionate engagement, yet
powerless to lift the curse of Sisyphus,

or block the juggernaut, or move the stone.
This God omnipotent, who claims our praise
and swallows our prayers like a hungry bird,
is out of dreams. He draws on the oxygen

of our need. We might as well worship
falling water, metamorphic clouds, or those
janus faces gnarled into the bark of trees
that whisper wisdom to us in the dark.

A while back I mentioned a poem I’ve been working on since January. I’d had the first few stanzas lying dormant for several years. As happens, they emerged in response to a brief sequence of memory and then ran aground when introductory description needed to yield to narrative and no further words were forthcoming.

Then in January, after a lengthy period during which no new work had been even started, much less completed, I had a rummage around amongst the various false starts, fragmented sections of old abandoned poems and disjointed images that inhabit a dedicated document in my poetry folder.  I had nothing in particular in mind beyond a vague notion that I might jump start one of them into some kind of automotive life.

I copied and pasted the opening three-and-a-half stanzas of a piece under the working title of Binners onto a new page. I had got no further than that uncompleted sequence, but I quite liked the graphic description they carried of a Victorian municipal building – a mental hospital in which I’d been employed for a few months shortly after leaving college. The intention had been to provide an account of an incident that occurred when I was working in the laundry. It had made a profound impression on me at the time, but I had found no means at the time to make sense of what I had witnessed. Nor, it seemed, was I to find interpretation and expression all these years later.

However, placing the words on the virgin page away from the distracting presence of the other flotsam appeared to wind up the spell immediately. I found that the story for which I had located no language previously now needed to be told and the poem found a voice. I have been unable to dictate the speed of its unfolding, but a long, intense, difficult but deeply engaging process of composition has been going on ever since. And throughout the process there has been a powerful element both of decoding and therapy, which, whatever the objective virtues of the poem in the perception of its readers, must bring some satisfaction to the writer after so long.

The poem is nearly finished, albeit in a form much mutilated on the page and to be subject to much revision before I produce a first draft.  But the notebook goes everywhere with me and the final words will drop out in twos and threes and tens and twenties whenever and wherever.

...

Away for Easter. Back on Monday. Enjoy the break, one and all.

Another new poem in its first draft.

STORM FRONT

“Look, look!” she cries.” The moon!”
And, yes, through bundled cloud
careering west out of nowhere,
this blank medallion passes for

her sister’s silver. But in what
new universe turned upside down
can the moon displace the sun?
Right here at the storm front

with the small birds running
from one great room of the air
to another and the trees blundering
like the newly blind below.

pic: http://brooklynartproject.ning.com/

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN...

I am delighted to be able to share with you another one of those letters to officialdom from the Pissed Off and Articulate.  I want to believe so very much that this is an authentic document and that a functionary with some claims to literacy in a bank somewhere might have been duly outraged by it, but I fear this not to be the case.  I suspect that these letters are generated by that same perverse human capacity that has us constructing the ultimate killer piece of repartee half an hour after the spat so comprehensively dominated by the other guy.

However, on the basis that this one might, just might, be written by someone taking heed of that most wise of counsels that tells us that revenge is a dish best supped cold, I present it to you now. It may not have quite the piquancy of the declaration by Chris Knight, anthropology professor and G20 conference protestor, that there were to be bankers hanging from the lampposts on April 1st, but it’ll do pro tem.

To whom it may concern,

I am writing to thank you for bouncing my cheque with which I endeavoured to pay my plumber last month. By my calculations, three nanoseconds must have elapsed between his depositing the check and the arrival in my account of the funds needed to honour it. I refer, of course, to the automatic monthly transfer of funds from my modest savings account, an arrangement which, I admit, has been in place for only thirty-one years. You are to be commended for seizing that brief window of opportunity, and also for debiting my account £30.00 by way of penalty for the inconvenience caused to your bank.

My gratitude springs from the manner in which this incident has caused me to rethink my errant financial ways. I noticed that whereas I attend to your telephone calls and letters personally, when I try to contact you, I have to deal with the impersonal, overcharging, pre-recorded, faceless entity into which your bank has evolved during the past ten years.

From now on, I, like you, choose only to deal with a flesh-and-blood person. My mortgage and loan repayments will therefore and hereafter no longer be automatic, but will arrive at your bank, by cheque, addressed personally and confidentially to an employee at your bank whom you must nominate. Please note that it is an offence under the Privacy of Information Act for any other person to open such an envelope.

Please find attached an Application Contact Status form, which I require your chosen employee to complete. I am sorry it runs to eight pages, but in order that I know as much about your nominee as s/he knows about me, there is, of course, no alternative. Please note that all copies of his or her medical history must be countersigned by a solicitor, barrister or judge, and the mandatory details of his/her financial situation (income, debts, assets and liabilities) must be accompanied by documented proof. In due course, I will issue your employee with a PIN number, which s/he must quote in dealings with me. I regret that it cannot be shorter than 28 digits but, again, I have modelled it on the number of button presses required of me to access my account balance on your phone bank service. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

I shall, I regret to say, have to level the playing field even further. When you call me, you will now have a menu of options on my new voice mail system to choose from. Please press the buttons as follows:

 1. To make an appointment to see me.

2. To query a missing payment.

3. To transfer the call to my living room in case I am there.

4. To transfer the call to my bedroom in case I am sleeping.

5. To transfer the call to my toilet in case I am attending to nature.

6. To transfer the call to my mobile phone if I am not at home.

7. To leave a message on my computer, a password to access my computer is required. Password will be communicated to you at a later date – this to depend on the vicissitudes of the postal service - to the Authorised Contact.

8. To return to the main menu and to listen to options 1 - 7.

9. To make a general complaint or inquiry. The contact will then be put on hold, pending the attention of my automated answering service. While this may, on occasion, involve a lengthy wait, uplifting music from the 1980s will play for the duration of the call.

Regrettably, but again following your example, I must also levy an establishment fee of £50.00 to cover the setting up of this new arrangement. Please credit my account after each occasion.

May I wish you a happy, if ever so slightly less prosperous, New Year.

Your Humble Client...

This is an expanded version of the second draft of a poem from 2004.

POPPIES

Waiting for the poppies
at the field’s edge,
blood-red amongst
the charlock and
the chamomile.

Nothing comes
unburdened. Within
the seed the silent germ
works towards
its own oblivion.

This is also a time
of turned flints
and hidden thorns. 
And a fire that will bind
the days like shocked corn.

pic: http://tangledwing.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/storm-over-red-poppies-wallpaper-meat-and-ethanol-straining-resources/

...

I’m busy with two new poems at present. Primavera on the verse front too, it seems.

...

Three more female voices for your delight or distress.

1. Joanna Newsom singing Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie.

2. Jolie Holland singing Mexico City.

3. Nico singing I’ll Be Your Mirror (with The Velvet Underground.)

BACK OFF THE BENCH

A bit of a scare. For four years now I have taken an annual blood test to check lipids, liver, kidneys and prostate – standard late middle-age precautions that I take to ensure that nothing has crept up on me as I head into that euphemistic territory known as ‘the third age’.  Early on Monday morning I joined the crowd in the Pathology waiting room at the local hospital and, after 50 minutes, duly shed blood and went about my business with no more than some slight concern about the kidneys, which I knew from an earlier blood test were – as Dr. H. put it – “a little unhappy”.

The doctor rang me on Tuesday to give me the green light on the lipids and liver, an amber-ish light on the kidneys and a red light on the prostate. It seemed that the protein/blood balance in the latter test had climbed the scale considerably since my last test and was now only .3 below the top of the tolerance scale.

An anxious 24 hours elapsed. The raised protein levels were alarming and there is a history of prostate cancer in my family. I made the earliest appointment available and presented myself to Dr. H.

There is a reliable test that can be performed – undignified but mercifully brief - that bypasses the need for the dreaded scan. For your reading comfort, the nurse will draw the screens around the next 60 seconds and I shall hasten to the verdict. Which was that all was as it should be and that the test results may have been aberrant. There are certain circumstances unrelated to things carcinomic within which proteins can be released (and again, for mutual peace of mind, English reserve will prevail) and a couple of these circumstances may have coincided with the taking of the blood test. However, Dr. H. said that, with the family history in mind, I would be wise to test regularly so this time next year the blood-letting will take place again.

Temporarily reprieved (and it’s all temporary, isn’t it?), I walked into the warm sunshine, a free man.

...

Now, let confusion reign. I believe that these three singers have created some of the most exciting and innovative music of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Many will disagree. Don’t hold back. Speak your minds.

1. Kate Bush singing Mná na hÉireann on a Donal Lunny album.

2. Elisabeth Fraser with The Cocteau Twins, singing Carolyn’s Fingers.

3. Bjork singing A Generous Palmstroke at the Royal Opera House.