What I learned on Nightrider

Nightrider is exactly what it sounds like: a night-time round trip cycle ride of 100km, either starting at Alexandra Palace or Crystal Palace late on Saturday night and finishing on Sunday morning. I rode it this weekend to raise sponsorship money for the outstanding development charity Practical Action.

Without going into too much detail (which will be meaningless if you don’t know London), from Ally Pally it went to Hampstead Heath, down to central London, wiggled around a bit, headed south through Brixton and Herne Hill to Crystal Palace, then through Sydenham Hill to Lewisham, Blackheath, Greenwich and back to Tower Bridge, a bit more wiggling, then Wapping, Canary Wharf, Mile End and Stratford on the way back to Ally Pally. Or there’s a map here.

And this is what I learnt:

The anticipation is worse than the ride. This is me, milling around at the start at Alexandra Palace, circa 10.40 p.m.  

Reflectolite and flash photography don’t mix. Given that most cyclists’ clothing these days is reflective, it’s not surprising. It’s just a surprise when you forget to turn the flash off then look at the picture. The person in the dazzle on the right is my cycling companion Luke Crawley, of whom more later.

There’s a lot of cars in the middle of London on Saturday night.
And I mean, lots. I didn’t take any pictures because I was navigating the traffic, but Baker Street was full of traffic, Piccadilly was teeming (we were there just before midnight). There also seemed to be a disproportionate number of people crawling through the jams in over-powered sports cars, but maybe I just noticed them because they were driving around saying “Look at me”. Even at 3 a.m. the number of cars heading east was surprising.

It’s hard to take a picture of Big Ben with smartphone. 00:26 a.m. File under: atmospheric.

Tower Bridge looks stunning at night. 03:00 a.m.

Management consultants work late. 03:00 a.m. I’m pretty sure this is the offices of PWC in More London, but it could be one of the expensive City lawyers who’re based there. But anyway, the only reason for all the lights being on must be that they’re still hard at work. On a deal. Or something.

It’s not all glamour. 04:25 a.m. The last refreshment stop outside a leisure centre in Mile End, just after dawn.

There are a lot of cobbles in Wapping High Street. A lot. The super-domestique Sean Yates was once interviewed about the best way to ride on cobbles. I think the interviewer was expecting one of those secrets of the peleton. His advice: “You ride as quickly as possible to get it over with as fast as you can”.

Memory works in mysterious ways. Here’s the thing. You’re following the Nightrider route, looking for the next directional arrow, so you don’t have much of the route in your own head. And then you’ll come across a road or a location which throws up a fragment of something from the past – a wine bar where (you remember a bit later) a boss organised a celebration in Blackheath, the start of a sponsored ride 25 years ago you’d forgottn you’d ever done. And maybe this slightly dreamlike quality is enhanced because it’s the middle of the night.

Eat and drink properly. I cramped briefly at around 70km, and cursed myself. On the training rides I’d been really diligent about eating and hydrating properly (do it on a schedule, because if you wait until you’re thirsty or hungry it’s too late). But on the actual ride I lost track of the schedule and had to drink half my bidon to get the cramp to go away. There’s a bigger point here, about treating the distance with a little bit of respect. As I was coming home (at 6.30 in the morning) I overtook a couple of young women on heavy mountain bikes at Crouch End, with another 35km to go back to their start point at Crystal Palace, and touch and go as to whether they’d make the cut-off. 

Go with a friend. Better still, make sure that the friend is Luke Crawley, seen in the picture at the Crystal Palace stop. Luke used to do Audax rides – 200km in a day, more on a full weekend – and has also (massive respect) completed Paris-Brest-Paris. There were times towards the three-quarter mark, when I was flagging, when I was grateful for Luke’s ability to set a steady pace. And (maybe this is also from his Audax days) he invariably saw the not-so-easy-to-spot direction arrows before I did.

Next time, wear merino. The combination of the sweat from the steep climb to Crystal Palace and the north-easterly wind meant that as we headed back to south-east London I was a bit chilly. It’s all about the wicking, and the base layer cycling shirt I had on wasn’t wicking very well. I’d planned to wear a merino base layer and changed my mind. Won’t make that mistake again.

A bit of ritual goes a long way. 05:23 a.m. When we finished we were steered towards a tent where we were given a medal and had our photographs taken. Trivial, but it made you feel like you’d achieved something. I tried to get the woman who was handing out medals into the picture but she kept stepping out of the way. I don’t know the cyclist in the photo, who’s just collected his medal: he was just in the wrong place at the right time, or the right place at the wrong time.

And here’s the proof. 07:00 a.m. I ended up cycling 103km on the ride (we missed a sign and ended up going on a bit of detour to get back on the route), and after I’d finished and had breakfast I realised the easiest way to get home was to ride there. 121km? I was quite impressed. But then, you can do anything with photoshop these days.

Thanks to all of my generous sponsors, who have nudged up my total to almost £600 £650. If you haven’t sponsored me, and would like to, I’d love to get my total past that £600 £650 mark. And my Justgiving page will stay open (I think) until the end of July.

And if you’re thinking of doing Nightrider, do it. It’s a very different cycling experience, and a memorable one.

The photographs in this post (but not the Nightrider logo) are by Andrew Curry and are published here under a Creative Commons Licence: some rights reserved.

Bryan, William, and Nanette

Bryan Forbes, the film director, has died – a British director who managed to have a fairly successful career on both sides of the Atlantic. He directed interesting British films such as Whistle Down The Wind, but for me The Stepford Wives is the one that has stuck in the fabric of the culture.

If you haven’t seen it (I’m pretty sure that this isn’t a spoiler) it is set in a small town in Connecticut in which the men become disatisfied with their wives and set out to turn them into clones of what the “good wife” should be. It was made in 1975 and you don’t exactly need critical theory to locate it as a story sparked by the feminist wave of the ’60s and early ’70s.

Anyway, the screenplay was written by William Goldman, from the book by Ira Levin, and it’s one of the films Goldman writes about in his memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade.

In fact he opens the chapter with an epigraph, a couple of lines of dialogue between him and Forbes:

FORBES: I think Nanette might be rather good for the part of Carol, don’t you?

GOLDMAN: She’s a wonderful actress; I think she’d be fine.

“Nanette” was Nanette Newman, Forbes’ wife, then in her early ’40s. A good actress, as Goldman describes her, “but not a sex-bomb”. And casting her has a big consequence for the film. In Levin’s story, as well as being willing and supportive providers, the women are male sex fantasies as well, all shorts, thighs and cleavage. That wasn’t Nanette Newman, however:

“By having Nanette Newman in the part, the whole look of the film had to alter. Forget the tennis costumes. Forget the parade of Bunnies walking through the A&P in shorts on their perfect tanned legs. She can’t wear the clothes.”

And so the Stepford Wives in the film end up in long pastel dresses. Goldman, looking back at the film, clearly thinks this is a problem.

But you never know how things will turn out. That other version of Stepford Wives, without Nanette Newman, would be unwatchable now, the sexism right there “on the nose” rather than embedded in the psyche, a period piece that screamed the mid-70s at us. As it is, long dresses and big broad-brimmed hats and all, it still stands up as a story – and one worth re-making 30 years later – about men who’re so threatened by intelligent, independent women that they’ll …. Now, that would be a spoiler.

Frink’s men

The works I know of by the British sculptor and printmaker Elisabeth Frink were her birds and animals, which always seems tough and scrawny, like the battered animal that eventually triumphs in Edwin Muir’s poem The Combat. Her horses, as well. But Woking’s Lightbox Gallery has a retrospective of her work (it runs through to Sunday 21st April) that marks the 20th anniversary of her death, and I realised that I’d pretty much missed the second half of her career. The most striking sculptures in the exhibition are her large male figures (the ones pictures are in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park); one of the rooms has four of them walking abreast across the gallery floor, which certainly catches the eye. a fifth figure is seated at the side, looking on. Why so striking? Partly just their scale, for they are larger than humans, perhaps seven-and-a-half feet tall rather than six, and also their mass; they are recognisably human but somehow more than human as well. Frink said she preferred sculpting the bodies of men to women because she found women’s bodies to be somehow formless – although she used this lack of form to her advantage in her commission for Salisbury Cathedral (Click on the image to enlarge).

Frink was a supporter of the charity Amnesty International, which works on behalf of prisoners of conscience, and her head and shoulders bust Goggle Head (below) uses mass in a more sinister way, concealing the face of a man behind goggles in a way that reminds me why aviator glasses are often used by people who wish to intimidate. The contrast with the quizzical and slightly vulnerable faces of the Walking sculptures at the top of this post is striking.

And the Lightbox - also the home to the Ingram Collection of modern British art – is free to enter, a welcome feature in these austere times. 

images from top to bottom: Top, from Martin Goodman’s blog So You Want To Be.A Writer; the Walking Madonna is from the blog Healing This Wounded Earth; Goggle Head is from the Tate. All are used with thanks.

Desert rats

I’ve found myself watching not one but two different programmes about the Desert War, being shown to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of El Alamein. As a result, I realised that when I was young I was sold a complete pup about the military skills of the British commander at El Alamein, Bernard Montgomery. Watching Jonathan Dimbleby’s endless documentary, it was clear that after Churchill had removed both Wavell and Auchinleck from the command in Cairo, Montgomery just happened to be the general standing in the right place by the time the British had weakened sufficiently the supply lines of the Afrika Korps and had mustered enough men and tanks to attack the German desert army. Either of his predecessors would have won comfortably as well – and Auchinleck was probably a better general.

The programmes helped me understand a few other things as well. Hitler, obviously, was notorious for over-ruling his generals (so much so that at Bletchley Park they sometimes thought messages they’d cracked were wrong because they made no apparent strategic sense) but Churchill had form here as well, insisting that his generals attack when the attacks were doomed. Wavell departed because he reluctantly followed Churchill’s order and lost disastrously; Auchinleck because he declined to do so because he knew the consequences would not be good.

Rommel, on the other hand, won Hitler’s trust through some outrageous tank attacks; he was a gambler who usually had a shrewd grasp of the odds. His letters to his wife, Lu, which were included in the programme, seemed surprisingly candid. But he lost his last gamble when he was implicated in the 20th July Plot. Even then his military record saved him from the humiliation of a Nazi trial, since Hitler allowed him to commit suicide instead.

A world war

I’d believed before that Britain’s commitment in North Africa was a sop to Stalin, to pin down some German divisions a long way from the Eastern Front. I’ve also had it argued that it was a way into the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Axis, through Italy, at a time when Britain knew an invasion across the Channel was impossible. (Though as a German commander said later, and the Allies learnt the hard way, if you’re going to invade Italy, don’t start at the bottom). But both the programmes I watched suggested that the British understood that it was a world war before other countries, perhaps because of the Empire. Churchill was obsessed with Egypt and the North African desert because he could see the link between the war effort, the Suez Canal, the resources of India, and the oil resources that Britain controlled in the Middle East. The oil in particular, was critical: the German army never quite had enough of it, and it did for them in the end. But it took a while for Churchill to persuade Roosevelt of this. (Eventually the Americans had to insist that the Allies pressed ahead with invading France.)

As an aside, the Dimbleby documentary seemed to have blown the entire budget on travel – he popped up in more locations than were needed to tell the story – which left the graphics to be done in Photoshop, or so it seemed. It made me realise how much the Snows, Peter and Dan, have done to improve the quality of military graphics on television. There were frequent occasions when my understanding of events and tactics would have been improved by a bit of Peter Snow’s electronic tabletop.

Finally, even if Montgomery happened to be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, one can see how his name became so important. By the time of the second battle of El Alamein, Britain had been losing the war for two years. But El Alamein marked the turning of the tide, something more than “the end of the beginning”. Three months later the Germans were beaten at Stalingrad, and by then American equipment was pouring into Europe. The autumn of 1942 represented the point at which – largely thanks to the determination of the Soviet army – the Germans became overstretched. Although the Japanese had further successes, the Germans barely won again. But it’s a lot easier to say that in hindsight, now we know how things turned out. In late 1942 the relief of a victory well-won would have been overwhelming.

The image at the top of this post is from World War II Today, and is used with thanks.

Limestone country

I was following a guidebook on a short walk in the Brecons, and came across this description:

“The bustle of the valley is left behind. In front lies a a lunar terrain of limestone crags, pockmarked by quarries and loose rocks.”

It’s by Alastair Ross, whose walking guides in the Kittiwake series are ideal for a casual walker like me. The village still has a  (just about) working quarry, and the station building is still standing, even if the remaining quarrymen’s houses are now home to the South Wales Caving Club and the railway line is long gone.

 

There’s a hidden history here, of the 19th century opera singer Adelina Patti, who paid for much of the station. Patti, who commanded at the height of her career fees of £1,000 a night (then a colossal sum) was rumoured to have been a mistress of Edward VII, and was for a time the flamboyant owner of the nearby Craig-y-nos Castle, which she equipped with a private theatre and a billiards room, and invited musicians and billiards players alike to come and stay.

 

But I digress. The phrase in the guidebook, and the sudden change to the bleaker limestone landscape, reminded me of Auden’s early poems, strongly inflluenced by the former lead-mining area he would walk in in the Pennines. This is the first part of The Watershed, written in 1927, when Auden was 20, and the earliest poem to make the cut in the Selected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson:

Who stands, the crux left of the watershed

On the wet road between the chafing grass

Below him sees dismantled washing floors,

Snatches of tramline running to a wood.

An industry already comatose,

Yet sparsely living. A ramshackle engine 

At Cashwell raises water; for ten years

It lay in flooded workings until this,

Its latter office, grudgingly performed. [...]

 

The photos in this post were taken by Andrew Curry. They are posted here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

Mad with us

Madness, of course, are well on their way to becoming British National Treasures, ever since they sang ‘Our House’ from the roof of Buck House to mark the Queen’s Jubilee last summer. Their outdoor performance as part of the BBC’s ‘Goodbye to Television Centre‘ programming, outdoors in sleet and near-freezing temperatures, will only speed this process. (Television Centre, where I worked briefly in the ’80s, has been sold off as the BBC moves much of its programme production to Salford in the north of England).

I like Madness, without being a huge fan, but there is something quintessentially British about them - by which I mean modern British, with their social roots in inner-city multi-cultural London and their musical roots in ska. And outdoors, on Friday night, in the blustery wet cold, they worked their socks off, gave the well-wrapped audience a thoroughly good time, paid dues (to the dying Wilko Johnson, who joined them on stage), and made this member of the television audience wish I had been out there in the cold on the forecourt of Television Centre.

Fortunately, there is already a whole load of clips on YouTube, which the BBC, also a national treasure, is not rushing to block. Just saying.

The story of the blues

You’ve got to love Jack White. He’s going through with his plan – definitely file under “labour of love” – to release on vinyl through his Third Man label the records by Charley Patten, the Mississippi Sheiks, and Blind Willie McTell on the blues label Document Records. He expects to lose money on it, but he doesn’t care. In a long feature in the Guardian that might as well be a hymn of praise to the early bluesmen, he says:

“Some people might go out and buy a Ferrari or something, but I would rather spend my time and energy in releasing these records. If only a thousand people get something out of them, it’s still something that makes me and the people here feel excited, because they know the power of this music.”

In the article, he gives the journalist, Dave Simpson, his potted history of how these early recordings emerged from a clutch of different trends (and as a futurist, I like these kinds of trends stories too):

White is still in awe of the process by which events came together in America’s deep south to create the blues. There was the Great Depression, the technology of recording music and the fact that furniture makers had started making record players, and needed something people could play on them. So they started recording the poor black singer-guitarists that were emerging in the Mississippi Delta. “Something magical just occurred to create a moment in history that changed the world.”

White, though, is more interested in the cultural history – he argues that in that moment of recorded history, for the first time, the songs that individuals had written from their own experience were recorded and therefore available to people outside of their immediate world. It’s not quite right – for example the early recorded material of some of the English music hall performers was similarly personal and rooted – but it still represents an interesting tradition, and also a different perspective on the way in which blues and rock music, obviously deeply rooted in the idea that we share personal stories about the world, has changed our cultural ways of telling.

And I also liked his rationale for going back to these first recordings:

“It’s important to go back and cleanse your palate. If you like punk rock now, there were people who did this with way more things against them than a suburban kid who goes to a guitar shop or someone buys him one and he starts singing punk songs. There’s beauty in that, too, but to be black and Southern in 1920 and have no rights … that exemplifies struggle.”

Cleansing your palate. In our too-knowing post post-modern era, when (as Umberto Eco said) media has genealogy but no memory it’s important to strip away the layers of interpretation and irony and try to listen as if for the first time.

The picture at the top of this post is the cover of the first of Third Man’s Charley Patten releases, and is used with thanks.

 

Edited with BlogPad Pro

Concision

I’m indebted to my colleague Walker Smith for pointing me to this New Yorker article by Brad Leithauser article on concision. It’s actually quite long, given the subject matter, but I just wanted to pick out a couple of things here while recommending that you go and have a look at the whole thing.

The first is a haiku – concise by definition at 17 syllables – by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, from The Haw Lantern:

Dangerous pavements.
But this year I face the ice
With my father’s stick.

Leithauser’s commentary:

[T]he poem evokes a complex, compromised psychological condition. There’s comfort in the notion that Father is sheltering us with that stolid stick of his. And there’s anguish and vulnerability in the implication that the stick has been transferred because Father has died—recently, within the past year. As we set off from home into the freezing outer world, all sorts of emotional accommodations must be discharged.

One other thing I enjoyed was the way he elegantly sidestepped the notorious New Yorker fact-checking department (his brackets):

(Someone told me that Marilyn Monroe once remarked that she enjoyed reading poetry “because it saves time.” I like this quotation so much that I’ve never dared to confirm it; I’d feel disenchanted to learn it was bogus.)

I don’t know either, and I’m certainly not going to go and look. I’d be as disappointed as he would be if I discovered she didn’t say it. But the whole piece is a writerly pleasure.

The image at the top is from the blog Between Fashion and Death, and is used with thanks.

Just seventeen (you know what I mean)

If I were ever on one of those programmes where you have to choose a single Beatles song, mine would be I Saw Her Standing There, the first song on their first LP, Please Please Me, recorded fifty years ago this week. For me the song is both urgent and suggestive, the moment English rock ‘n’ roll stopped talking with an American accent and acquired its own voice. Lennon recalled having little to do with it, but McCartney’s version, later, was that he started it and he and Lennon finished writing it together one afternoon in the front parlour in McCartney’s house. A collaboration seems more likely. If the rule of thumb on Beatles’ songs is (I’m indebted to my brother for this) that McCartney songs go up and down and Lennon songs go along, I Saw Her Standing There definitely goes along.

The shift from American to English can be seen in a change Lennon made to McCartney’s original opening lines. McCartney’s version was, “She was just seventeen/Never been a beauty queen”. Lennon changed it to the more provocative, “She was just seventeen/You know what I mean.” The new line is at once both direct and indirect. Direct: English doesn’t get much more direct than five one-syllable words. Indirect: the listener is drawn complicitly into the world of the the singer. They have to know the code.

In his companion to the Beatles’s songs, Revolution in the Head, the late Ian MacDonald explains how the song’s lyric signalled a cultural shift in gear.

“[I]t called the bluff of the chintz-merchants of Denmark Street with their moody misunderstood ‘Johnnies’ and adoring ‘angels’ of sweet sixteen (the legal age of consent). By contrast The Beatles’ heroine was seventeen, a deliberate upping of the ante which, aided by Lennon’s innuendo in the second line, suggested something rather more exciting than merely holding hands. But the clincher for the teenage audience was the song’s straight-from-the-shoulder vernacular. Its hero’s heart didn’t ‘sing’ or ‘take wing’ when he beheld his lady love; this guy’s heart ‘went boom’ when he ‘crossed the room’ – a directness of metaphor and movement.”

The picture at the top is from the website Beatles Autographs, and is used with thanks.

The secret of Groundhog Day

It turns out that Groundhog Day is twenty years old this month (going by its US release) and The Guardian has an engaging article by Ryan Gilbey, who has just written one of those natty BFI guides to the film. I’m a fan (how can you not be) and I’ve written about Groundhog Day before, but Gilbey has an interesting take on why it has become a classic – and gone into the language.

1. The writer ruthlessly expunged all references to the 1990s.

[Scriptwriter Danny] Rubin urged [Director Harold] Ramis, with whom he shares a writing credit, to expunge any nods to the 1990s: “You’ve gotta take all this out,” he said, “because this movie is really going to go on for years and years.” Compare this with Judd Apatow’s films, which are peppered with gags about early-21st century celebrity culture. … our descendants in 2063 will have no trouble understanding Groundhog Day when they download it on to their frontal lobes.

2. The film refuses to explain how TV weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) got trapped in Groudhog Day:

There is no magical fairground machine (Big), no mantra (Shallow Hal), no curse (What Women Want). … Rubin was urged to write a Gypsy-curse scene explaining the loop, which Ramis wisely never shot. The mystery has only fortified the film’s magic.

3. Or any explanation of how long he is there:

It could be 10 years or a thousand, however long it takes him to memorise the personal histories of Punxsutawney’s townsfolk, and to become, among other things, a pianist, an ice-sculptor and a doctor (“It’s kind of an honorary title,” he shrugs).

4. The film has a classic redemptive story structure. I’ve written about redemption stories here before, and the article suggests that Groundhog Day borrows here from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

There’s more. It’s just plain clever in the way it disregards many of the Hollywood conventions. Terry Jones enthuses, for example, about the way it subverts structure.

“Normally when you’re writing a screenplay you try to avoid repetition. And that’s the whole thing here, it’s built on repetition. That’s so bold. The way they get through it is to short-circuit everything, so just when you think something is going to happen that you’ve seen before, the film gets to it before you and changes or abbreviates it in some way.

And the artist Gillian Wearing compares Groundhog Day to films such as L’Avventura and Last Year in Marienbad. She tells Gilbey:

All those films reinvent structure and create a new conceptual framework that makes you understand them. They share an almost surrealistic vision, and they pose philosophical questions.

In short, Groundhog Day succeeds because it is, says Gilbey, that rare creature: “an art film in mainstream clothing.”

The picture at the top of this post is from What The Movie, and is used with thanks.