First thoughts on sunshine and memory

As I can scarcely remember what sunshine looks and feels like I thought I would hold forth on the subject of memory itself, as a realm richly resonant of sunshine. Sunshine is often both agent and subject of the remembered past. As I put it in the book (in my favourite chapter, as it happens), the mind recollects what it collects and has a magpie's eye for the shiny stuff.

I'm off on this theme because, as it's getting close to back-to-school time, I was struck at how spectacularly cheated the little darlings have been of the stuff that traditionally preserves pleasant childhood memories and nurtures some widely-held delusions. The summer gave out just at the very moment school did, and the sun has scarcely shown its face for the whole time they have been off. As I walk past an empty school yard each morning, and see the overflowing drains clogged with damp leaves and crisp packets (not to mention discarded knives, syringes, and AK-47s - I live in the East End), I share their outrage, and wonder if this, added to the complete washout of last year, will prevent this generation subscribing to the popular delusion that the sun shone more when we were young.

Those with young 'uns might get them to sign testimonies that this summer and the last were decidedly pants, and, if they ever feel inclined to subscribe to the popular delusion in later life, these statements can be used as evidence to the contrary. According to Bill Bryson, the belief that “British summers used to be longer and sunnier” is one of the “idiosyncratic notions you come to accept when you live for a long time in Britain”.I've talked to Americans (from the South), Australians and Italians about this, and they have no idea what I'm talking about. And it's easy to see why, there is no need for nostalgia if you have a reliable and abundant supply. A bit like talking about the weather at all. 'Nice day' is a rather pointless observation if all or most days are nice, and this counts retrospectively too. But nearly all Brits share a belief that the official records refute. According to Met Office records (the past they can do quite reliably, it's the future and even the present that they find tricky), the last 2 decades have actually seen more sunshine (hard though it is to believe at the moment), than the decades of our youth. That's why I'm entertaining the notion of signed testimonies during what is clearly a setback in the blissful picture the experts derisively dangle before us.

For I believe the simple fact of greater exposure is one reason why we of a certain age believe the sun shone more when we were young. (I actually don't. Obsessed with sunshine from an early age, I've always had more exacting demands from the heavens, and can recall being indignant at summers not unlike this one even as a nipper). But for most people it's probably down to a simple aggregate of sunlit exposure. Most of us now spend the majority of our time in doors during the day, entombed in corporate prisons. That leaves weekends to see the sun, and sod's law says it won't be there when we are. When we were young, we finished school at 3.30, probably walked home (paedophiles hadn't been invented then); had morning and afternoon playtimes, and didn't spend our lunch 'hours' munching a sarnie chained to our desks, but frisking happily outside. And of course we had six whole weeks in the summer to at least up our quota. We simply increased the odds that some of those days might be sunny. The sun wasn't out more in the past, we were. (This is perhaps the most prosaic reason for this link between sunshine and memory. There is more to say, certainly, and I will recall what I have to say when I can recall what sunshine is. Does anyone remember? Does anyone remember waking up and seeing a sky of blue? Answers on a postcard, UK residents only.)

Il Penseroso 2

I'm resolved to pursue this rather morose line of reasoning at least until the weather improves. To lose one summer is unfortunate, to lose two starts to look like carelessness. I'd gladly swap some of Britain's golden Olympic medals for a few record-beating golden days. Just a few. But I'm supposed to be ruminating from my dark mossy cell on our dreary weather, our predilection for melancholy and the belief that there is some kind of creative intercourse between them. I use the term precisely.

Anthony Woodward and Robert Penn rather like our weather. They both live in Wales, so they've had plenty of practice. I saw them give a very amusing talk on their book The Wrong Kind of Snow a few weeks back, where they reiterated the point made in their introduction that rain has been very good for Britain. So much rain means green green grass. The green green grass fed nice fat sheep to make jolly nice wool, and jolly nice wool made Britain, as they put it, 'a great trading nation. The wealth from wool - damp weather converted for export - gave us the most advanced economy in the world, bankrolling the Industrial Revolution, and helping create the largest empire of modern times'. They also point out that the invention of most ball games from lawn tennis to football occurred in these green isles because the grass was so good we had to invent amusing things to do on it. None of this particularly stirs me into any kind of patriotic fervour or allows me to embrace the persistent showers as so many pennies from heaven. We may have invented or excelled at these things once, but even I (who have zero interest in sport) know the pantomime pony of our glory days of sporting triumph has well and truly bolted. But we still have the rain, o yes, raining every day on the lush green sward without an industrial revolution or a sporting one to convert it into anything but misery and despair. I'm not managing this idea very well, am I?

Ok, the industrial revolution created wealth; but it also created great plumes of smoke and smog, blotting out the sun to the extent that in the City of Westminster in December 1890 there were recorded zero hours of sunlight. A vicious circle. Rain fuels industrial innovation, industry creates more beastly stuff to blot out the sun. Joyous. And what of now? Whatever happened to the idea that global warming might be coming our way in the form of a 'Mediterranean climate?'. The latest is what we will get as our Nemisis for industrial pre-eminence is 'climate change', ie. much much more of the same. More disgraceful summers like the last two. Well I hope the bleeding sheep are happy.

Can I discern any silver linings from these historico-climatic speculations? Well, I suppose fog and smog do at least have a rather romantic and nostalgic tinge to them, and did actually, to be fair, inspire wondrous art. Would Dickens's Bleak House be quite such a powerful novel without that extraordinary description of foggy London in the opening chapter? Or would Stevenson's Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (the Penguin Classics edition of which I can heartily recommend), have gripped our imaginations so tightly had the the 'chocolate coloured pall' of fog not cloaked his tale in sepulchral eeriness? Or Whistler and Monet have painted such melting masterpieces of atmospheric effect had we not made smog one of our most important aesthetic hallmarks? TBC...

http://www.wrongkindofsnow.com/index.phtml

Il Penseroso

I have to accept that summer is officially cancelled, and winter has queue-jumped autumn, and must put a brave face on it. Actually, no, that is simply beyond me. But instead of unloading a torrent of righteous indignation as the heavens deliver theirs of cold, wet, windy despair, or instead of muttering a plaintive elegy over this stillborn summer, I will attempt a more philosophical perspective on these circumstances. No easy task, but here goes...

I was led to pursue this line by a response to my last blog from anonymous (whom I darkly suspect of hailing from sunnier climes), that fine weather doesn't produce the best poems. The implication is that grey skies and creativity might be more conducive bedfellows, and that this is somehow a silver lining to the brooding bleakness enveloping us (me) at present. Might there be something in this? Sidestepping poetry for the moment, pop music does lend some support to this notion. Jeremy Paxman suggests something of the kind in his book, The English - when he proposes the “reasonable supposition that cold wet weather, which forced teenagers to stay indoors in winter instead of going to the beach or skiing, probably has something to do with the country’s capacity for inventive rock music”. But we can go even further, not just pop music per se, but miserable pop music. The British didn't invent pop music, and didn't really invent many strains of it. We are particularly good at adapting it, giving it a particularly edgy feel and sound, and adding lyrical genius. And if you look at what is characteristic about what we contribute to the pop canon, and, more significantly, what is most successful as an export, a discernible and distinctive trait sums this up - misery. We are maestros of musical melancholy, and frankly, who can wonder in this climate?

I'm serious. If you think about it, there's an awful lot of misery in British pop, and especially the most successful exports. The obvious one is Goth. One of the few truly home-grown British pop product lines, it is a highly successful global export of long-standing, and Alien Sex Fiend ought to be given the Queen's Award For Industry for what they spawned 25 years ago. And then there is Morrissey. I don't know of a single male Italian of a certain age, who does not worship Morrissey and the Smiths. There's one who lives down below me, who will spend warm sunny days (when we had them) in doors, listening to tales of rainy Salford, and finding this exotic and beguiling. The rain falls hard on a humdrum town, and a good part of the globe (and generally the sunnier parts of it), lap that rain up by the bucketload. It is particularly ironic that Morrissey moved to LA and then latterly Rome, but it doesn't stop him singing about the 'slate grey Victorian skies' he left behind, and which those in his adopted home find strangely enticing. Radiohead don't sing about the weather (I'm not sure what they sing about, to be honest), but they look and sound like they've spent their whole lives starring out the window at rain, and they are, I'm told, the most successful band to break America since the Beatles. Hmm. I suppose the Beatles weren't miserablists at first, not in their mop-top, happy, jangly days; but it's interesting to see what America produced to meet the threat of the British invasion. What could they do to meet the challenge of muddy Mersey merriment? Hit back with sunshine. The Beach Boys, the Byrds, and then the whole San Fran scene, until sunshine won the battle, and the Beatles themselves joined the hippie trail to the sun. Depeche Mode - started off as electrobubblegum popsters, and delighted few outside these shores - got darker, darker still, so dark the lead singer tastes death momentarily - and they're an international sensation, while they can scarcely get arrested at home.

So, what does this suggest? Simply, that our climate cultivates mouldy misery, that more fortunate cultures enjoy like rich truffles, damp with our despair. This is a silver lining of a kind, I suppose. But I ain't seeing any of the royalties.

O for a beaker of the warm south...

I swear I had the very best intentions to vary my repertoire and give my more lyrical side an airing. All was well until the very last minute when a thorough soaking by the delights of the English 'summer' drowned all other thoughts from my mind. And so all I can muster is a good old fashioned rant at the insult that passes for that season in this unpleasantly green and sodden land. And by 'old-fashioned' rant I mean it, and can spout off knowing I do so among the very best company. Our finest poets head up a venerable tradition of meteorological moaners.

I'll let Shakespeare explain. His 34th sonnet asks:

Why did thou promise such a beauteous day,
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy brav’ry in their rotten smoke?

Yep, you and me both Bill. And not just rotten 'smoke', but pissing, incessant rain too. It matters not that the point of his sonnet is to decry the fickleness of his beloved, whose mind and affections change like the weather. For he evidently speaks eloquently from experience. For as he declares in the sonnet before that one:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace...

This is a man who has clearly done as I have done today - thrown caution to the wind, and been hoodwinked by the absurd fiction denoted by the date on the calendar, and the fact that it was sunny when I set out in sandals. Serves me bloody well right, you might protest. We have scientific 'weather forecasts' now, when in Shakespeare's day they had merely quaint folk wisdom. My arse. I make it a principle never to consult weather forecasts. They will either (a) delude me with false promise of sunshine, or (b) depress me with their firm conviction of the opposite. And, besides, the other day I faltered, and did consult the BBC up-to-the-minute 'forecast' for the next day, but I couldn't get beyond the what-the-weather-is-doing-in-London-at-this-precise-moment window, which simply beggared belief. Whilst the whizzy flash display had black clouds and torrential rain, my wide survey of the skies for as far as the eye could see revealed the opposite. Whilst Shakespeare's weather prognosticators might not have had bleeding great computers and flashy displays to assist his decision on what dress might be suitable for his day's adventure, they probably had the sense to at least peep out of the window before hazarding an opinion on at least the current state of meteorological play.

Everywhere I turned today was confirmation of the dismal, depressing, and ancient scandal of our climate. I spent the day damply reading Keats's letters in the British Library, as the rain thrummed incessantly down. Keats, standing equidistant between Shakespeare's day and ours, had a similar time of it. In 'spring' 1818 he had joined his brother in Devon where he had travelled in the hope that the climate of the 'English Rivera' as it would later laughably be called, would improve his fragile health. Some hope. Keats wrote to a friend how he had wished to send him a picturesque description of the county, but he wasn't seeing much of it. Or anything - confined day after day, week after week inside, 'with a sense of being drown'd and rotted like a grain of Wheat'. He declared that is is 'Impossible to live in a country which is continually under hatches', and not unreasonably wondered who would live here 'when there is such a place as Italy? ... Rain! Rain! Rain!'. There was indeed, such a place as Italy, and there still is, and incidentally it was 34 degrees and sunny today in Rome, with much the same for the forecastable future. And in Rome it is the very height of summer, and they might very well dread (yes, dread), the prospect of another 2 months at least of this stuff. Sigh. Yet poor Keats didn't get to Rome until it was too late. Before this last desperate bid for health the furthest he travelled was Scotland. He went on a walking holiday of the north a few months after his rain-soaked sojourn in Devon. This was technically summer, but appears to have been no drier.

Where is this all going, you might wonder. It's not really going anywhere. Beyond the declaration that this is simply wrong. it was wrong for Shakespeare (a poet who couldn't bring himself to compare his love to a summer's day, because, frankly, in England, that wouldn't be a compliment, and he'd have got a clip round his ear for his troubles); it was wrong for poor old Keats, soaked and rotted into an early grave. And it's wrong now. To have your central heating on in early August is simply wrong. To spend what's supposed to be the most joyous season of one year (make that 2, as last year was even worse), of the short span of life allotted to us avoiding puddles of dirty water is wrong. I will continue to rant and rage against the dying of this light as our summer dies of a certain consumption before our very eyes. If anyone reading this comes from 'such a place as Italy', then rejoice in your good fortune, survey the blue dome above your head, breathe in a draught of that warm south, a draught of life - as it's meant to be lived....

A new project, a new leaf

My embarcation on my new project (a biog of Keats) has encouraged me to review my blogatorial activities, and assess my own performance. Has 'love sunshine' fulfilled its purpose to engage with a potential readership for my book? Is it a worthy ambassador for that enterprise? Put like that (albeit rhetorically), I can't help sinking into self-pitying self-recrimination, and suspect I have been found wanting.

The thing is, I've been nosing around, discovered a few proper blogs and I'm suffering from serious blog envy. It all started with meeting a writer, a real writer, called Tahir Shah, when we shared a cab, a train journey and a lot of literary banter, on the way back from Hay on Wye. Tahir writes beautiful books, makes (no doubt wonderful) films, and belts out beautifully-crafted blog postings as regular as clockwork before breakfast nearly every day. He claims they help him clear his mind. Take a look - Tahir's blog on my blog roll - and you'll see what I mean. If that's to clear his mind for his real writing, imagine what that's like.

For I have realised that my postings have only revealed one side of my book and one side of myself. They have become entramelled in the all-too-easy rut of flippant self-irony. Endemic with we English and often used as a carapace for our fear of being earnest. But that's selling my book short, and allowing only one part of me full ascendancy. What I'm trying to say is the book (and myself) is deeply, hopelessly romantic, and yet I have only presented the cynical face to the world. The class clown, the cheeky chappy whose antics have always masked a highly sentimental soul, constantly upstaged by his noisier twin. In the book I managed to keep them in stable equilibrium, but here the romantic has been compelled to take a back seat. And whilst old cheeky chops won't entirely leave the building, it's time the romantic had his time in the sun. The Keats biography is the perfect excuse to 'out' this side. It's worth a try. I'll see what I can do going forward...