R.I.P. Clive James

We've featured quite a bit of Clive James here over the years, so from the ITBB archive here's the great man in 2014:

Victorious in the Eurovision Song Contest (BBC One), the Austrian singer Conchita struck the most triumphant blow for bearded male transvestites since the heyday of Kenny Everett, or possibly even of King Edward II.

Nobody knows what Edward II sounded like when he sang, but now the whole world knows what Conchita sounds like. She, or he, sounds like incoming artillery. One hundred and eighty million people in 45 countries were blown sideways by the uproar emanating from a young woman pretending to be Russell Brand, or perhaps it was Russell Brand pretending to be a young woman.

No, it was neither: it was a bloke called Thomas Neuwirth. Back in Austria he had spent several years developing his identity as a bearded lady, or whatever it is he is. But in Copenhagen, the site of the world’s greatest song contest, his identity stood fully revealed: he was a bearded lady draped in a gold-embellished fishtail gown. He shimmered in the light-storm like an upright carp with a bad shave. Hosting the British TV transmission, Graham Norton explained that Mr Neuwirth’s achievement could be important to all those of us “struggling to come to terms with their sexuality”.

After struggling with my sexuality all my life, I’ve finally realised that I should have been Graham Norton all along. The guy is so at ease with himself. He doesn’t even bother to dream up a few lines in advance, as Terry Wogan used to do. He just reacts to what we can all see. “In a minute, lots of indoor fireworks. Ooh! There you go.”

On the other hand, he was quite Woganesque when he postluded the performance of some moaning Norwegian by saying, “I think he’s delighted that’s over. As are we.” Pretty good gag: we just need more of them.

But Graham has charm. He tactfully played down the inconvenient truth that the UK singer Molly Smitten-Downes came only 17th. I studied Molly carefully to see what she lacked. Alas, it was all too obvious: a beard. She might have done better had she been twins, like the two Russian women tied together by their hair: but to win she would have needed a transgender element. I couldn’t remember Lulu having anything like that, when she won the contest back in 1969: but then, those were different times.

Women have come a long way, if they can now conquer the world by growing a beard and being a man really. And it’s all happened in the lifetime of my generation. 

A smorgasbord for a Saturday evening

It's a while since we've had a proper 'smorgasbord' post.

A 'smorgasbord' post is all I can manage today, so please prepare for a whole load of utterly random stuff.

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Shaun of the (Dead) BBC

Today's Dateline London was one of those editions where a single right-winger is allowed onto an otherwise entirely left-liberal panel (which is always preferable to those editions that have an entirely left-liberal panel - and, unfortunately, Dateline now appears to be regressing in that respect). 

Today's lone right-wing Daniel was Alex Deane, and the left-liberal lions roaring around him were Abdul Bari Atwan, Eunice Goes and Michael Goldfarb. 

The result was both fun and thought-provoking, and well worth watching (and Daniel did good). 

They discussed Syria, Trump 'n' Farage, and the burkini ban.

Presenter Shaun Ley gave the following three introductions (one to the entire programme, the others to the final later topics):

Introduction:

President Erdogan of Turkey has certainly bounced back after the coup attempt. This week he appeared to have the United States eating out of his hand. After a Turkish excursion into Syria to deny the group that calls itself Islamic State its only border crossing the US obligingly instructed Kurds to get out of the way if they wanted to go on receiving American support. Mr Erdogan is not the only populist politician basking in American adulation. Nigel Farage - one of the prominent voices in the successful campaign to get Britain out of the European Union - appeared at a rally with Donald Trump, telling his supporters the Establishment can be beat. Even as in Syria some women were celebrating liberation from Islamic State by taking off their burqas those wearing burkinis on the beaches of France were being ordered to take them off,

Second topic:

Let's move on to another populist leader - like President Erdogan perhaps! Donald Trump received some international aid of his own this week. Nigel Farage, who was instrumental in the campaign to get Britain out of the European Union, joined Mr Trump in Mississippi, where he suggested they were soul-mates battling the Establishment. 

Third topic:

Now, it was Churchill who promised to fight them on beaches - French beaches in the Second World War - but he certainly didn't have this in mind: The modern-day battle on the beaches (as Eunice was suggesting there) - and, yes, there has already been a punch-up in Corsica - is over the burkini ban - swimwear that covers almost all the entire body. Photographs of a woman being instructed to remove hers by four male police officers was deeply unsettling for some. Others insisted Islamic dress was provocative - a perhaps surprisingly statement when the French are unmoved by the sight of people sunbathing in the nude. On Friday the bans were thrown into doubt when the Council of State - France's highest administrative court - suspended the ban at Villeneuve-Loubet, pending a detailed judgement later in the year.

Were I some A-level student presented with those statements blind and asked to 'discuss' them, I'd say:

(1) that the speaker didn't approve of the US backing Turkey at the expense of the Kurds. 

(2) that the speaker called Turkey's president a "populist", and then called UKIP's Nigel Farage a "populist", and twice linked them together, and didn't sound complimentary about either. And then Trump.

(3) that the speaker really didn't approve of a 'burkini ban', given: 

(a) his pointed contrast of the liberated women of Syria with the burkini-wearing women being "ordered" about by the French

(b) his sardonic reference to Churchill's 'We will fight them on the beaches' speech to make the 'burkini ban' sound ridiculous, and...

(c) his mocking of those who argue that the burkini is provocative by sarcastically saying "a perhaps surprisingly statement when the French are unmoved by the sight of people sunbathing in the nude".

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A pretty mosque, Brexit Street, Thornaby-on-Tees

Over at Biased BBC David Vance posted a piece sent to him by a reader concerning the History section of the BBC's educational resource BBC Bitesize (a widely used tool in UK schools) - specifically the component in The Middle Ages section called The Islamic world in the Middle Ages. 

The B-BBC reader's complaint was that the BBC was projecting an extremely rose-tinted view of the medieval Islamic world whilst simultaneously mocking medieval Europe:

I would ask you (especially as it won't take you very long) to read the whole eight pages of the BBC Bitesize revision module and I think you'll agree that the B-BBC reader has a very real point. 

Take this, for example:

There's no mention of the term 'dhimmi', nor of those non-Muslims religious communities being 'second-class citizens'. And there were many times - as even Wikipedia admits - that non-Muslims were persecuted under Muslim rule. 

I would have hoped that the BBC would have encouraged nuance at the very least in their schools' history study guide instead of sounding oddly like proselytisers.  

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Oh, and the lefty BBC-haters are going mad for an LSE study that doesn't even mention the BBC. 

The LSE study found that the UK newspapers have posted lots and lots and lots of negative headlines about Jeremy Corbyn. 

Avoiding the possibility that some if not most of those negative headlines might have arisen because Mr Corbyn isn't really up to much, they say that the media is being soooo unfair to Jeremy.

The foreword to this LSE report comes from Nick Couldry, head of the LSE's Department of Media and Communications, and the report's lead author Bart Cammaerts. And if you're wondering who they are and where they're coming from, well,....:

Of course, the fact that a pair of Corbynistas have produced an LSE study proving massive media bias against their hero might be taken as automatically self-destroying their findings. But that's to succumb to the ad hom fallacy. Their findings, in fact, appear fair enough - except that, as I said above, they (fatally) choose to magic away the possibility that their magical leader might have deserved most of those headlines.

Academic studies of BBC bias are always to be questioned. Stick to blogs, folks! (h/t Michael Gove).

That said, they are probably right that the media is heavily biased against the Bearded One.

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RS Thomas, appearing on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In

Meanwhile, I  was sitting in my sunlit garden this afternoon looking at the sky, the trees, the flowers, the birds, the butterflies, the bees, and a very colourful green-and-red fly that looked in shape just like the kind of fly people itch to swat but was so green-and-red that no one would ever want to do it harm. 

All was well with the world and I was happily reading the Collected Poems 1945-1990 of that English-hating Welsh vicar and semi-fascist (well, at least as far as us English were concerned) RS Thomas. 

He was echoing my mood, talking about a view from his window, writing that "these colours/Are renewed daily with variations/Of light and distance that no painter/Achieves or suggests". I thought, yes, that's true. (Sorry, M. Monet).

And now I feel I ought to add an "I suppose"....

....which is just typical of me as a blogger (these days). 

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No need for a caption here. See above. (Not Camilla B)

I've not had the time to monitor much of the BBC's reporting of Theresa May's proposed audit on inequality, especially racial inequality, but I heard the coverage on this morning's Today and watched this evening's BBC One evening news bulletin and both followed a basically similar pattern. 

On Today, we got two main segments - at 7.16 at at 8.10. The first was an inter-BBC discussion between Simon Jack and Ellie Price. It gave Mrs May a favourable review. Ellie talked about "how important to her this obviously really is" for Mrs. May, and Simon said:

And she does have some form on this because, of course, when she was Home Secretary there was the racial profile of the stop-and-search and she made some progress there. So she's on quite firm...on quite familiar territory.

(Some might say Simon's use of the word "progress" there was telling).

The interviews after 8.10, with (a) Simon Woolley of the campaign group Operation Black Vote (and the Equality and Human Rights Commission) and (b) Danny Dorling, the left-wing geography professor, also welcomed the move, whilst stressing that there's a heck of a lot to be done. Prof. Dorling, however, also complained about the effects of Tory cuts on making the problem worse.

On BBC One tonight Elaine Dunkley's report followed a fairly similar trajectory. It started with Elaine at the Notting Hill Carnival, talking about how multiculturalism is being threatened by unfair treatment of ethnic minorities. Three 'vox pops' attending the Carnival said, yes, the problem is very real. Mrs May's Downing Street speech was recalled before Elaine said that Mrs May would "have her work cut out". Then a lady from a campaign group Black Activists Rising Against Cuts (picture above) denounced the effects of Tory cuts. 

I suppose you could call that balanced in that in both praises the (new) Tory government for doing what it's now about to do and damning the (previous) Tory government for partly causing the problem in the first place - except that both BBC programmes seemed to be acting in full support of Mrs May's new strategy. 

Critics of that strategy from people who aren't from the pro-multiculturalism/anti-cuts Left seemed conspicuous by their absence...

...well, at least in the little bit of the BBC's coverage that I saw and heard today.

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Ellie Price of the BBC. Impartiality personified

During her 7.16 chat with Simon Jack on Today, Ellie Price let slip a turn of phrase that hit me as being 'very BBC'. Talking of Mrs May, she said: 

And this is a prime minister, of course, who's going to be laden with the legacy of taking Britain out of the EU.

"Laden" is a rather loaded word (appropriately enough), and it's not a positive one:

She could have said something along the lines of "...who's going to be busy with" or "who's going to be strongly engaged with" the legacy of taking Britain out of the EU but she said "laden with" instead.

Am I reading too much into that?  

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Ayatollah Khamenei and his friend Jeremy (in their younger days)

In a questionable editorial decision, this morning's Today chose to invite in comedian Jake Yapp to mock ITV for switching off all their channels this morning in a Team GB-related stunt to encourage children to go out and do some exercise...

The BBC mocking ITV for doing something noble doesn't strike me as being very...er...noble on the part of the BBC.

The one upside is that Jake, as ever, was funny. I like Jake. He does all the voices:

You're watching ITV One, the home of Saturday morning children's entertainment, with Ant and Dec ready to go live...fifteen years ago. 

Today though the channel's a bit different on Saturday mornings. It's time for all you kids to go completely wild for...Murder She Wrote. 

Man: Hello Angela Lansbury.  

Angela Lansbury: Hello dear old male friend with who I have a romantically ambiguous history. Oh dear, it looks like you killed someone. Oh well, it never would have worked out between us. 

As Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (is he still alive?) would say, lol!!

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Naga O'Brien

Talking of being still alive, Clive James was on last night's Newsnight, still being alive. 

Last night's Newsnight marked the debut of Naga Munchetty. She was wearing James O'Brien-style intellectual glasses, but, thankfully, wasn't James O'Brien. 

Clive was talking to Steve Smith of the BBC. Clive was funny. Steve asked him about his affair, among other things. (A time and a place please, Steve!)

And Clive admitted that he'd outlived that famous maple tree - the subject of a beautiful, moving poem of his which I (among many others) quoted (in full) this time last year. 

The point of the poem was that that newly-planted maple tree would outlive the dying Clive and be a source of joy to his children. 

Unfortunately, the famous tree has now died while (not at all unfortunately) Clive is still going! 

He's planted a new maple tree.

Oh, I do like Clive James. I even bought his Collected Poems in my recent poetry-buying splurge on Amazon. Whether they are all as good as Japanese Maple I'm yet to find out.

Presumably all his widely-mocked royal stuff will be in there too. (I've got a thing for the poetry of William McGonagall too, by the way).  

Of course, Ted Hughes, while Poet Laureate, used to get mocked for his royal poems....

....which gives me the chance, finally, to post my own sub-Private Eye Ted Hughes parody from my early Twenties (long, long ago):

The Corgi 

Slipped, a stone god, from entrails
Bloodied like lizards' skulls.  

Scarred black, the moronic silence
Raises a gloved hand of guts and carcase
Waving like a holocaust.    

Caton Moor, black, black.
A beefeater's hat,
Pouring down blood. 

A wound on earth, slitty-eyed. 

Pass, Raven (of the Tower of London). 

Happy birthday, Your Majesty! 

Japanese Maple

There was a lovely edition of Radio 4's poetry programme The Echo Chamber today. Paul Farley talked to Clive James, who also read some of his latest poetry. 

One of those latest poems apparently went, as Paul put it, "as close to viral as a poem ever has in a medium even more inescapable than TV" - namely (and get the garlic out quick!) Twitter.

That poem was Japanese Maple. And as this is a social media platform, I think it's only right to help it go even more viral: 

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain: 

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls? 

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share. 

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same: 

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colours will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

Carpe diem

Radio 4's Broadcasting House, coming live from a tent at the Hay Festival (though sounding as if it were being broadcast from inside a tin drum), paused for thought for a moment today. 

We heard extracts from one of Clive James's latest poems, Sentenced to Life - read by the man himself. 

It was so good I thought I'd share it with you. (The full poem can be found here).

My daughter’s garden has a goldfish pool
With six fish, each a little finger long.
I stand and watch them following their rule
Of never touching, never going wrong:
Trajectories as perfect as plain song.

Once, I would not have noticed; nor have known
The name for Japanese anemones,
So pale, so frail. But now I catch the tone
Of leaves. No birds can touch down in the trees
Without my seeing them. I count the bees.

As if my first impressions were my last,
And time had only made them more defined,
Now I am weak. The sky is overcast
Here in the English autumn, but my mind
Basks in the light I never left behind.

It reminds me somewhat of Afterwards - a late poem by Thomas Hardy:

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
"He was a man who used to notice such things"? 

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
"To him this must have been a familiar sight." 

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone." 

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
"He was one who had an eye for such mysteries"? 

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
"He hears it not now, but used to notice such things"? 

Those were different times

Oh dear. Clive James is giving up his TV reviews in the Telegraph to concentrate on finishing two books.

Here's a taste of his latest review for those of us who love the familiar, surprising prose of Clive James:

Victorious in the Eurovision Song Contest (BBC One), the Austrian singer Conchita struck the most triumphant blow for bearded male transvestites since the heyday of Kenny Everett, or possibly even of King Edward II.

Nobody knows what Edward II sounded like when he sang, but now the whole world knows what Conchita sounds like. She, or he, sounds like incoming artillery. One hundred and eighty million people in 45 countries were blown sideways by the uproar emanating from a young woman pretending to be Russell Brand, or perhaps it was Russell Brand pretending to be a young woman.

No, it was neither: it was a bloke called Thomas Neuwirth. Back in Austria he had spent several years developing his identity as a bearded lady, or whatever it is he is. But in Copenhagen, the site of the world’s greatest song contest, his identity stood fully revealed: he was a bearded lady draped in a gold-embellished fishtail gown. He shimmered in the light-storm like an upright carp with a bad shave. Hosting the British TV transmission, Graham Norton explained that Mr Neuwirth’s achievement could be important to all those of us “struggling to come to terms with their sexuality”.

After struggling with my sexuality all my life, I’ve finally realised that I should have been Graham Norton all along. The guy is so at ease with himself. He doesn’t even bother to dream up a few lines in advance, as Terry Wogan used to do. He just reacts to what we can all see. “In a minute, lots of indoor fireworks. Ooh! There you go.”

On the other hand, he was quite Woganesque when he postluded the performance of some moaning Norwegian by saying, “I think he’s delighted that’s over. As are we.” Pretty good gag: we just need more of them.

But Graham has charm. He tactfully played down the inconvenient truth that the UK singer Molly Smitten-Downes came only 17th. I studied Molly carefully to see what she lacked. Alas, it was all too obvious: a beard. She might have done better had she been twins, like the two Russian women tied together by their hair: but to win she would have needed a transgender element. I couldn’t remember Lulu having anything like that, when she won the contest back in 1969: but then, those were different times.

Women have come a long way, if they can now conquer the world by growing a beard and being a man really. And it’s all happened in the lifetime of my generation. 

Glittering incarnations of a great poetic tradition

It's a peculiar thing, but whenever I read the inestimable Clive James I always hear his voice in my head as I'm reading. I don't consciously decide to hear his written pieces in my head in this way. It just seems to happen. 

See if the same happens to you too when you read his latest piece for the Daily Telegraph, from which this is a taster - and a very tasty taster at that: 

To my perhaps jaded eye, the Winter Olympics has been, since the opening ceremony, all downhill, especially when the skiers are not going downhill at all, but are slogging along the level snow for miles before lying down to fire a rifle. A lot of the winter sports are dead boring. But there are a few unmissable events, mainly on the ice-rink; and anyway there was the opening ceremony, which featured Vladimir Putin and, helping to carry the Olympic flag, a young lady rhythmic gymnast who might very well be, we were told, Putin’s unofficial inamorata.

We were told this by our normally strait-laced BBC commentary team, headed, for these Olympics, by the doughty Clare Balding, now thoroughly established as the Beeb’s go-to girl for flogging excitement into a dull sport. Clare can keep a straight face while referring enthusiastically to “legends of the luge”. According to my researches, there is nobody alive who can name even a single legend of the luge. There are people who own a luge who can’t name a legend of the luge.

Theoretically, to watch someone lying on their back as they ride a tea-tray into the pit of doom should be madly exciting, but it is not. Nor are the heavily publicised new acrobatic snow-board events all that gripping after you have seen the first competitor do all the tricks. The next competitor does all the same tricks and it is up to the raving commentator to provide the excitement. “There’s the double upside inside switchback triple twist!”

But hush, the skaters are on the rink, and once again the Russians have manufactured a 15-year-old miracle girl. Linking her jumps in a legato line, she is cooler than the ice. We have seen it all before, but it’s still pretty wonderful. There were a few real-life episodes missing from the dramatised Russian history spectacular in the opening ceremony, but they can be legitimately proud of some of their skaters, those glittering incarnations of a great poetic tradition.

The legendary megapod

Clive James is stilling writing beautiful TV reviews at the Daily Telegraph. Here's an extract from his latest piece:

Having painstakingly disguised an underwater camera as a tuna, BBC One was rewarded with an entrée into a so-called “megapod” of dolphins. We were assured that this was the first time ever that a megapod had been seen. And indeed Dolphins: Spy in the Pod featured some stunning footage, if stunning footage is what you go for. Personally, after the first thousand or so dolphins had surrounded the dummy tuna, I started to get a bit blasé. When so many dolphins meet up at once, their main object, apparently, is that they should all have it off with one another.

Good luck to them, but they were unlucky in the commentary, which was written by someone with an ear of tin. There were references to “the legendary megapod”. But how could it be legendary, if it has never previously been seen? Perhaps it was seen by ancient sailors, who said: “What we need is an underwater camera disguised as a tuna.”

For a more lowly kind of humour, how about this?: How does a group of dolphins make a decision? Flipper coin!

Making glee compulsory

Clive James's delightful TV reviews at the Telegraph are too little read, so here's an extract from his his latest essay - an essay which begins: 

The BBC spent a whole week celebrating the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. Programmes without number were devoted to his continuing fame.

Here, however, is the essay's closing section - dealing with the celebration's closing extravaganza. Enjoy!:

To rub the triumph in, there was a follow-up show on BBC Three called Doctor Who: The Afterparty. There is a long history of fizzling disaster to suggest that parties held in a TV studio never work, but the BBC, rather than learning from a mistake, always prefers to repeat it. So here everybody was, all the surviving veterans of Doctor Who since the beginning, ready to be quizzed and jollied along by Rick Edwards and Zoë Ball. Rick’s main task for this event was to be keen, but to be outshone by Zoë. He accomplished this with ease. When fronting It Takes Two, the satellite show for Strictly Come Dancing, Zoë’s role is to shower the Strictly contestants with sparkling encouragement at the very time when they are suffering agonies in the boot-camp phase of their training. There is no one like her for effervescence, but here, at the Afterparty, she excelled herself. Her default phrase was “Very exciting”. She would say it even in the middle of saying something else. You could imagine her saying it even if the building had caught fire. “Would everyone proceed calmly to the very exciting exit area.”

The assembled veterans looked a bit subdued but Zoë wasn’t about to let them get away with that. “Are you happy? Did you enjoy that episode? Is everybody happy?” Rick essayed a general statement about how the atmosphere “couldn’t get any more exciting” but Zoë was ahead of him. She marched into a bunch of veteran girl companions and asked one of them, “Did you enjoy it?” The veteran girl companion said, “I’m exhausted.”

This response, if it meant anything, meant “No”, but Zoë and Rick weren’t really after answers. They were after injecting an air of conviviality into a funeral. Most of the veterans generously played along but you couldn’t miss the air of regret: having once been in a show about the conquest of time, here they were in a show which reminded them all over again that time does the conquering. Doctor Who gets regenerated as a character but the rest of us will fade out. Still, there were a few laughs; and there was always Zoë, making glee compulsory even in the face of the intractable fact that the super-episode had been strictly for the fans.

Backbone of the BBC

Here's the ever-inspired Clive James on the BBC's best-known silverback:

So successful are the vertebrates that one of them is making huge television programmes at the age of 87. David Attenborough was back yet again with Rise of Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates (BBC Two). Every vertebrate has a backbone: the device which best expresses “how you and I came to be what we are”.

That statement might apply to Attenborough but I’m bound to say that the spectacle of his undying energy left me with no backbone at all. Dissolved by envy, I just lay there like a puddle of plankton while he climbed rocky hills in China, current scene of all the most interesting new fossils. One of these was the fossil of the very first vertebrate, dating from 525 million years ago, when Bruce Forsyth’s career had barely begun.

Genuinely caring for nature, Attenborough has always been consistent with his message that our beloved Earth is producing too many people, but it should be noted that the message is getting a bit shrill in his old age. He is against food aid for Africa, for example: an opinion that sounds perilously like “let them starve”. Luckily he confines most of these notions to press interviews, and leaves them out of his TV programmes. But when they occasionally creep in, they can sound a bit chilling. He still has a nice smile, though.

Clive James on Nigel Kennedy

Ah, the master is still at it, penning beautifully-written reviews of TV, junk or otherwise.

Here's Clive James, blessing the Telegraph with his presence, on Nigel Kennedy at the Last Night of the Proms:

In The Last Night of the Proms (BBC One) Nigel Kennedy might not have looked like a violinist specifically, but he sure as hell didn’t look normal either.

You could say that his clothes were just an assembly of random cloth that hit him after a mattress factory exploded nearby, but his hairstyle was the dazzling proof that his get-up was all his own idea. Spiked and shining with fixative, his coiffure rose vertically as if it were being sucked into an overhead air duct.

Meanwhile he was playing The Lark Ascending, by Vaughan Williams; and very beautiful it was. Well, if that’s what it takes for an instrumentalist to relax, why not? Although I can’t remember that Vladimir Horowitz ever wore a clown’s costume to play the piano. But then he really was mad, crazy etc. (You can always tell them: they work flat out to prove themselves normal, whereas people who carry on like nitwits crave attention, not solace.)