Year-End Renewal; or, Logging Off

I’ve turned into one of those: an absentee blogger. Here’s the deal.

The last quarter of the year was a total turnaround, and 2012 looks set to be on an upward curve. For two years I extolled, in these pages, the virtues of work. For a good portion of that time I considered this space as my workspace, and I gave it my full attention. Now somebody is paying me not just to do what I want to do for a living, but to be who I want to be. My first line of business was always the historian’s craft, and that’s where I’ve been the last few months. The next couple of years will require some serious writing on my part and I’m determined that it will be good.

The end of year involved the usual escape to Montreal. It is still home, regardless of where I happen to be living. It’s even better to be home when you’re feeling good about who you are and where you’re going. The holiday has been packed with the kind of manly activities typical of the repertoire you’ve been used to reading about here: Handel’s Messiah at the new symphony hall – a carpenter’s wet dream if ever there was one; proper steaks at The Keg; being a good guest, and a good host; the new wing of the Musée des beaux-arts; and a number of visits to the best tailor in town.

Montreal symphony hall. Pic from Audiophilia.com

On the latter score, I must give an extra nod in the direction of H. Padar on St. Catherine W. downtown. Mrs. VB is the proud owner of a new bespoke suit, readied from consultation to final delivery in one week. One week! Three pieces, navy blue super 120s merino. Truly remarkable. When you live in Berlin and your tailor is in Montreal, you either have to be extremely organised and plan months ahead, or you have to rely on great service. H. Padar gives you the latter, in addition to an excellent cut. He doesn’t hit you too hard in the pocket either. While he was at it, he completely transformed a Simon Horsley tweed suit, given to me by my dear brother, which unfortunately hung from my slight bones like a marquee on a corpse. To cut and shut a fine suit is no easy thing, but I am delighted with the re-modelling. A good tailor knows another good tailor when he sees one, and I’m sure Mr. Horsley would be happy to hear one of his creations has been given a new twenty-year lease on life.

It’s wonderful to feel well fitted. That my friends, is how I feel, in my suits as in my life. BeingManly is, therefore, to rest easy, not to die. Occasionally it may stir, when inspiration compels, but I think on the whole it will slumber happily. It’s been a joy making so many acquaintances and not a few friends along the way. Long may our associations continue.

I leave you with this: be manly if you can, and if you can’t, at least be polite. Happy new year!

The World, if not the Worm, doth turn

My presence here has been patchy of late, but I want to let you know that the ride didn’t stop. It simply ran on other rails for a while.

I can’t recall a busier summer of travel and work, which both fly for me right now under the banner of ‘application’. In any case, the summer’s work is bearing fruit, as you might expect, and harvesting it is a labour. Yours truly is back in gainful employment, at least for the time being, and committing his energies to his professional calling. Callings are the best and worst of life, for they demand to be done whether they come with joy or otherwise. For many a moon, my calling came with a kind of grief, where the rewards were always tainted by the overarching feeling of being misapprehended and under-valued, and by the stink of failure. One puts it all down to paying one’s dues. Get your head down; grin and bear it; soldier on.

Since I can’t guarantee that the upturn will endure, I’m making the most of it. If you spend a winter rationing last summer’s meagre bounty, then it is no time to be lazy and nonchalant when it’s time to gather this summer’s plentiful crop. A measure of success is not a sign to sit back and enjoy the ride. A measure of success is a sign to put your foot down and bloody drive. You’ll understand, perhaps, that this has kept me from these pages of late. Once I figure out how to make everything balance again, you’ll hear from me more often. There is no shortage of things to say, after all.

A quick shout out to Lily Lemontree, who will be posting my guide to elegant places to visit in Berlin later today, so she tells me. Do enjoy it.

Fleet Street; or, Pipes, Facial Hair, and Suits

I love everything about this, and I think many of you will as well. If only newspaper men still looked like this, what? Click on the picture to be taken to the video. Be prepared for smart men in wide-lapel suits, pipes in conference rooms, and moustaches at which one could not shake a stick.

FLEET STREET

On Waiting; On Persevering

You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

I apologise for my patchy presence of late. Work rolls in unpredictable tides, and I can hardly complain about being up to my neck in the rising waters. At some point I expect to stop floundering and start floating. After that I’ll start thinking about navigation, but one mustn’t get ahead of oneself. In any case, professional obligations are impinging on the limited writing space my head will allow, and that accounts for the recent dearth. Normal service will, I am sure, be resumed anon.

Of course, in asking for your patience, I am mindful of my own waiting and persevering game. The world of the writer/scholar is not the jet-setting and exotic existence one might be forgiven for thinking it is. Travel is a blessing, yes, but when one is constantly in search of bread it is easy to forget the joyousness of it all. Being left to the contrivances of one’s own mind is a liberation, but often also a frustrating constraint. Nobody ever tells me what to do at work. Sometimes – and I immediately chide myself for so thinking – I wish somebody would tell me what to do. Working independently forces a man to confront the thing upon which he is never fully sure he can depend: himself. It is a constant battle of organisation, self-imposed dead lines, motivation, and crises of self-assurance and confidence. The structure provided by a regular job has to be provided entirely by the self. In short, it takes a good deal of will continually to make it work. Knowing that the intended goal is worthwhile is important. Persevering into the biting gale of procrastination is at least equally significant.

Bear with me, dear friends. I’ll be with you soon.

Fighting with Two Chairs

Friends, I am beaten up. Today, as I was bleeding everywhere rather alarmingly, I did have the remarkably sober thought that it was all rather ironic (in the American sense), and probably fitting to actually wear some battle scars from the week.

I walked into a chair. ‘How do you walk into a chair?’ you ask. I do not rightly know, but there it is nonetheless. One thing I can be sure of is that I didn’t see the chair, and its way of announcing its presence was to knock loudly on my skull, with all its wooden might, just adjacent to my right eye. Quite a clout sent me reeling around the kitchen, wondering what the hell, and it wasn’t until I got to a mirror for a butchers that it started spurting, B-movie horror style, all over the place. ‘How do you cut yourself on a chair, even if you manage to walk into one?’ you justifiably ask. Well, I do not know that either, but the half-inch gash in the appointed spot suggests it is possible. There is a pleasant purpling developing all around, and by this time tomorrow yours truly will shine like a black hole.

Yesterday’s fight – well, more of a tussle really – was with a Chair of the academic variety, as I tried once again to find myself some gainful employment (much as I’d rather spend my time chatting with all of you, you’re not sending me too much by way of bread). I came away from that contest unscathed physically, but knocked around a bit all the same. I’m thinking of today’s head-banging as a sort of delayed, but inevitable, reaction. Anyway, fingers crossed that all this rough and tumble ends up with VB’s arm aloft. Nobody ever got where they intended without a knock or two en route, right?

Manfully forwards, ho!

City (E)scape

I’m catching up with myself. I’ve ditched Berlin for the month of June, and come to you from Montreal. New York next week. Montreal is the city I call home – a place I adopted five or six years ago – and, as with all homecomings, one begins by exhaling. The psychological comfort zone is welcome. I’m steeling myself for a busy time, as I attempt to reconcile my purpose to my future. July is likely going to be a mare, but I’ve broken worse.

A couple of points of order:

I must cordially acknowledge Lily Lemontree for giving me a hearing on her elegant blog. It’s a strange experience to answer direct questions about oneself, but the result I think is pleasing, and possibly an insightful backdrop to the pages before you. In the coming weeks I shall appear there again, detailing five elegant places not to miss in Berlin. I’ll let you know when it appears.

On arrival here I was pleased finally to take possession of my Timothy Everest signature tie, which I consider myself very lucky to have received. Tim’s Spring into Summer ready-to-wear is out, and as per usual it’s right on point. I hasten you there. Here are his images, stolen in the nicest possible way:

Winning Ways: Observations on Football Management

Times have changed, but the route to the top is the same as it has ever been. Hard work, determination, indefatigability, and self-belief. Repeat 10,000 times.

I’ve been looking over the managerial record of Sir Matt Busby, legendary manager of Manchester United. What a man he was. His single-mindedness was already evident before the Munich disaster, but his resoluteness in creating a team from the ruins of his Babes is still one of the most extraordinary turnarounds in the history of sport. I saw Busby once, just before he died. Children who had heard his name breathed with reverence by fathers and grandfathers lined up to hang onto his coat and beg him for his signature. Sometimes, greatness just is, and everyone implicitly understands it. But Busby was no conjurer. He simply had a vision, put into effect through hard work and discipline, repeated over 25 years.

Busby’s mantel is now worn by another. I’ve never been much of an admirer of Sir Alex Ferguson’s public persona, but Alex Ferguson the manager has my infinite respect. There is only one level at which a player plays for Alex Ferguson. Anything less than 100% will surely result in packed bags and a summer transfer. No player’s reputation is bigger than the club, and no media event is more important than what happens on the pitch. These are principles carried, no doubt, by just about every manager in the league. So it must be something about the man that allows them to be put into effect. He must be a man of immense character to pull it off.

There are several other things that endear me to the nature of his successes. He has consistently believed in youth, in nurturing talent as well as buying it. He absolutely understands that there are traditions and rituals to do with Manchester United that are far more important than his tenure with the team. Indeed, his tenure has been about preserving those things. He is unfailingly loyal – a self-styled servant of the club. In these things he represents what has otherwise been lost from the modern game.

What Busby and Ferguson also have in common, beyond their winning ways, is the faith shown in them by their employers. These days, football seems to be all about winning, or else the manager loses his job. There’s no faith shown in a manager’s ability; no adherence to the development of players, systems, strategies; no long-term planning. Ancelotti won the double at Chelsea, but nothing this year, and now he’s on his bike. What nonsense. Ferguson was appointed in 1986, first winning the league in 1992-3. Busby was appointed in 1945, not winning the league until 1952. Winning did not come by the touch of a magic wand, but through perseverance, experience and practice. It is bewildering to me that, regardless of the continuing presence and example of the finest ever football manager, in the shape of Alex Ferguson, the rest of Football Inc. attempts to emulate his success by following a diametrically opposite strategy. The way to win, despite the times we live in, is the same as it has ever been. 

Uncertainty; or, Paddle Your Own Canoe!

Faithful followers, forgive my absence. England made me ill, as usual, and the last few days back in Berlin have been consumed with filling in blanks. Every year around this time the plans for the next year emerge all at once. Until this week, I knew not where I would be come September. It transpires that I shall remain in Berlin another year, which is really not such a bad thing. Memories of winter bleakness are fading quickly among the blossoms.

I’m not sure there is anything more difficult for a man than uncertainty. One tries to stride forth manfully, but one risks looking a fool, at best, when one marches headlong into a crevasse. Knowing where one is going is key, even if one only has a rough bearing, but sometimes it seems as if one must wait for outside forces to determine the direction. Here I usually turn to Baden-Powell.

‘Paddle your own canoe!’, sayeth Sir Robert, and we heartily concur. The river flows this way and that, and will take us where it will if we let it. Should we sit back and wait for fate, the river will crash us over falls and dash us against rocks, drown us in maelstroms, and strand us on unfriendly shores. We cannot help the river’s current, but we can negotiate it with tenacity, strength and skill. Paddle the bloody craft, and set course. When faced with uncertainty, one must take control of what one can. Specifics may remain hazy – geography, job, and so forth – but this haziness does not prevent one from keeping a firm grip on one’s oar, one’s purpose.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be on the Spree, paddling my own canoe.

Freedom to Think in England

Being in England, and being in England amongst English academics, one cannot escape thinking about thinking, even though there is no time here to think about anything. What’s happening here in the academic arena will do truly appalling damage to the intellectual life of the country in both the short and long terms, and with consequences that threaten to go far beyond academic life.

Of course, one man’s appalling damage is another man’s political expediency, and one might argue about policy until cows are extinct. But, and here is the rub, one might only engage in this endless argument – and argument is in itself worthwhile – if one has the space, time, money and freedom to stage it. Argument comes, or should come at any rate, after thought. Critical debate is contingent upon critical thinking. Leaping takes place after looking, etc. What seems to be happening to scholarly life here is the rapid removal of all the prior conditions. Work is demanded without the necessary time to think about what work ought to be done. The solution to that problem is the provision of all the thought in pre-packaged governmental notions of what constitutes importance in the realm of ideas, projects and outcomes. Party policy is supplanting liberal thinking; rhetorical big ideas are being deployed to prevent the emergence of real ideas; research agendas are being set a priori, instead of being formed through research itself. And just in case anybody has other ideas about how to proceed, the money required to fund research is now being directed at only those scholars who are prepared to toe the line. Want funding? Do what the government wants (or think how the government wants you to think).

Tell any American professor in the humanities that you’re an English academic and they will roll their eyes, sucking air sharply over their teeth as if they were builders and you’d just asked them for a quote. This is not to say that American academia is by any means a perfect model, but England is the laughing stock of the academic world because its academics are increasingly becoming powerless in determining how they work and what they think about. They are increasingly subject to government – and hence party – policy to such a degree that even beginning to think without first attaining government approval (in the form of funding) is unlikely. They are forced to publish at a rate non-conducive to the production of high-quality research, and they are compelled to teach more and more students of ever-decreasing intellectual capabilities. Each time I return to England the situation is worse, and the forecast is for yet worse to come. And protest as loudly as the lowly scholars do, not a shred of difference is made.

The universities ought to be the cornerstones of civilised life. They ought to be our guarantors of freedom, for within their walls the vigilance required to maintain freedom is fed by intellectual inquiry. The ivory tower’s doors open onto society in such a way as to make sure that society knows when it is being held-back, its freedoms curtailed, its opportunities limited. Freedom itself depends upon the freedom to think about what it means to be free. If you limit that thought space by demanding that thought go only in this direction or that, then the risks to us all are nightmarish to consider. 

Marathon Memoir, Part II

Back in November I pledged to you that I would take on a couple of new challenges, after my maiden marathon run in Montreal last September. I also promised not to bore you with the details of the process, but to let you know when successes could be chalked up. Yesterday I ran the Berlin Half Marathon, on an unexpectedly hot day, in 1:40:08. This was within 8 seconds of my target time, which I can live with given how crowded the run was (25,500 registered), and about four minutes faster than I’ve covered that distance previously. Given the difficulties of winter training, and an ill-timed ear infection at the peak of the training schedule, I’m really rather pleased with it. I’m inclined to say that I still don’t much like running, but I do respond well to concrete, if self-set, challenges. If one is stubborn minded enough, hating running seems to be more help than hindrance: one wants it to end as quickly as possible. If giving up isn’t an option, running fast is all you’ve got. The next part of the challenge is to run a five-minute mile by November. I have no idea if this is possible, but the endeavour should be interesting.

One has to put these things into perspective. How do these achievements fit into a life? What do they mean? Aside from the fringe benefits of being fit, being able to eat whatever I please, and being on the whole a bit more even tempered, why bother? Some would say, perhaps, that these things are enough, and indeed they might be for some. But it doesn’t quite cut it for me. The real importance has to do with the value one attaches to a life. We are too given to reduce achievement to possession, to salary, to sealing deals that nobody will remember. In short, we are defined by ‘work’ in the narrowest sense of that term. If we are not careful, life will pass us by in the pursuit of green, and when we collapse with heart disease just after our hard-earned retirements, people will gather and say ‘what a waste’. 

Making music, listening to music, reading with all my attention, these activities are part and parcel of my life; to call them hobbies would make a mockery of them… [T]here is no hard and fast opposition between my work itself and what I do apart from it. (Theodore Adorno, Free Time).

I am a firm advocate of work, but I prefer to interpret the term much more broadly. Victorian gentlemen understood that work was necessary, even if money was no object. A vocation is required of a citizen, for to be a drone is to be a drain. These men went about their work with a zeal rarely seen among today’s workforce. But they also went about their recreation with a similar zeal. In essence, there was no difference in spirit between ‘work’ and ‘play’, in the best traditions of the amateur. It was all done with serious intent. Whereas we are wont to have a ‘hobby’, a word that tends to connote frivolousness and idle pleasure, they held their pursuits to be an important reflection of their character and, writ large, of the state of society. Ultimately then, play is also a form of work, and our attitude towards it tells us, and the world around us, something about ourselves. 

#FF? Hang Twitter, It’s Formal Friday

There’s a large minority of people – probably the majority of intelligent people – who think that the casual turn is really what’s wrong with the world. There’s something about ‘looking the part’, a lesson I learnt when I was about four years old, that instils purpose. Uniforms serve a purpose, and not only in schools. I would expect a bank manager to look like a bank manager, for example, and would think twice about entrusting my money, or my conversation about a loan, to a man in khakis and open collar. When I have to deal with a call-centre monkey, pace call-centre monkeys everywhere, I really think I can tell whether s/he has turned up to work smartly dressed or not. It’s something in the tone of voice. You just can’t be confident and professional if you show up to work in a t-shirt. Television engineers, gas men, electricity meter readers, plumbers: under your overalls I should like to see a collar and tie. It shows you care. It shows you’re professional. If you come to install my Sky box or fix my boiler wearing jeans that would be illegal in certain Southern counties in the US I should be loathe to let you into my house.

Worst of all is the general trend in offices everywhere to observe ‘casual Fridays’. Whose idea was this? It can’t be good for business, and it can’t be good for people’s self-esteem. The Victorians believed in the maxim of ‘healthy body, healthy mind’, and bless them if they didn’t rule the bloody world. I can only think that the twenty-first century motto will be remembered as ‘casual attire, casual attitude’, or ‘slack pants, slack off’, while civilisation crumbles around our under-used ankles. What’s more, being casual at work actually takes more effort than professional wear. People worry lest they are judged for their ill taste, and compete for the best individual appearance. Work wear makes no such demand. It simply is what it is. The style-savvy professional might know how to make it his own, but nobody is going to mind if he doesn’t.

Some rather natty Americans have formally rejected the casual turn, and announced that Fridays be especially formal. I’ve long thought that dressing well sets an example, and that, whatever the policy, if a respected individual dresses like a professional then others will emulate him. I exhort you to join the ranks of these fine people and don your best for Fridays in an outward show of contempt for the broad societal acceptance of slovenliness.

On Purpose

Oh how easy to drift along allowing things external to ourselves to determine what we do. People will become agitated if you tell them they lack agency, for we all wish to be our own masters; and yet common-or-garden frustration is borne precisely from a feeling that matters are beyond our control. Whether it be work, geography, money, relationships, family, friends, dependencies, or just the bloody weather, a moment’s self-reflection often leads to feeling of smallness and futility, immediately followed by a kind of fatalism. We are but small boats on a big ocean, and we daily curse the moon.

I’m not about to turn around and tell you that all of this is not the case. But I do maintain that the feeling can be managed, and that what we identify as the fates can be defied, at least in spirit. Fundamentally, each individual needs a purpose: a reason to go through life. It might be a duty of care. It could be a pursuit intellectual or physical, or perhaps political. It is probably not reducible to the acquisition of money, for mere accumulation still begs the question ‘what for?’. Likewise, ambitions are not purposeful, for what happens if you realise them? The process itself must be the reward. For many men out there, the process of self-betterment is their purpose. Whatever comes their way, this resolve steers them straight. But whatever be your purpose, if you hold fast to it you will be able to endure and surmount the circumstantial obstacles that seem to block your way. The challenge is part of the actualisation of self. Capitulation, after all, is never partial. To give in is to abnegate the self.

Illustration by Bill Ross

My purpose is to write, for to write is to engage. It is an end and a means to other ends: discussion, education, learning, entertainment. The where, what and how of the writing process is up for negotiation, but the object is constant. Of late there have been many obstacles to pursuing my purpose – funding being not the least – but to hell with them. My wants are, after all, meagre. Consider this a re-statement of intent, albeit with many of the details omitted.

What is your purpose? What keeps you going? And by what means do your steer your craft, in defiance of the tide?

The Writer's Work Week

Under the U-Bahn line the workmen are laying cobble stones. Berlin construction workers restore the old unevenness after having dug it up. The conveniences of cables and optical fibres are buried in charm. No tarmac and steam rollers here, but a wheelbarrow full of rocks and a team of men with hammers. These men of 2011 could be men of 1921 or 1871 were it not for their modern interpretation of work wear.

The view is from a café on the corner of Schönhauser Allee and Danziger Strasse, overlooking the historic site of Konnopke’s Imbiss where, since Weimar days, this street-food shack has purveyed currywurst, day and night, to Prenzlauer Berg patrons. It has survived wars, hot and Cold, and managed to function behind the Iron Curtain. Now it’s being renovated, the stones under it being replaced, that it might serve sausage another century.

The U-Bahn arches over the street in freshly painted green wrought iron, riveted but trembling under the weight of the yellow trains. It’s an essential industrial relic: a monument to muscle work for which we no longer have a taste, but upon which we rely everyday. Thousands ascend the limestone staircase to the platform daily, for the train is the artery that transports worker blood to the capital heart. At 6 a.m. the workforce is in overalls; at 8 a.m. it is in suits. They rattle off that the city may function, and underneath the men with hammers, on their knees, knock in stone after stone.

In the café, students are being industrious in their way, learning languages in tandem, reading papers and writing essays. Some sit in a studied picture of thought, which is to daydream in an intellectual posture. The baristas pull shots of espresso and plate croissants and watch life go by, wishing they were going by too. The industry here is decadent and delicious. Plate glass separates this world from the clickety-clack and blue collars of the street. As if lured to giant plasma screens the intellects look up at the riveting scene of industry and the pathways to work. Disengaged, they resume their posturing. They live in a world of screens and windows – of televisions and computers, telephones and tablets – and the café is just another way passively to pretend that their lives are active and engaged.

Amidst all this the writer observes, wondering about his place. It is Monday, but it doesn’t much matter. The writer has done his fair share of manual labour. He has also ridden the train in a suit, heading somewhere for somebody else. He has been a student, and studied the affectations of their kind. He has done the intellectual labour that they haven’t yet reached, and may not ever, and found in it a detachment – an unbridgeable distance from the day-to-day – that he tries to recapture through observation. He fails for himself, but finds meaning in the others. Writing what he sees, he orders more coffee.

Modern Times

The man visited the Neue Nationalgalerie near Potsdamer Platz  in order to look over the Moderne Zeiten exhibition. He could never quite reconcile himself to the abdication of morality among certain modernists. Art that gave itself to mere daubs and splatterings seemed to him an insult to painting. The pursuit of pure form, of messages surreal, abstract or non-existent, seemed to him pompous and puerile. But the man was drawn to new objectivity – to the confrontation of those parts of the human most joyous, most erotic, most grotesque in candid representation. He went expecting a heavy dose of the latter element.

He argued with his companion over the meaning of Lotte Laserstein’s Abend über Potsdam (1930): whether the men bored and ignored their women, or if they fought over them in that faux-relaxed intellectual manner that attempts to prevail without ever coming to violence. In either case, the feast is meagre, the mood depressively alcoholic, the outlook grey with pending gloom. If this was a last supper, it was not a prequel to an apotheosis, but a repast before a fall: sin and daggers cum panis. The man, shocked by this portrayal of masculine shortcomings, walked away trying to shake of his admiration of the portrayal of their clothes, to which he was compulsively drawn. There is more to civilisation than dressing, he considered.

In the next room, a crowd of people stood laughing. The man joined them and began to laugh too. They watched Charlie Chaplin, at his beautiful best, in Modern Times. Across languages and cultures people came together to laugh at the master who has never been approached in comedic cinema. His performance transcends time. And so does his critique. The man ceased to laugh and looked again. So many muscular men; so many hard workers. But the machine enslaves them, and makes men subject to unworthy men, who hold power in capital, but who occupy themselves in effete activities, engaging with reality through jigsaws that cannot be put together. The weakling is put on a par with the strapping chap; the function of biology put in rhythm with the machine. Woman is reconceived as mere nuts and bolts, to be tightened compulsively and without any notion of humanity. Modern Times was emasculation in extremis.




The man moved on, searching for an image of a man to which he could hold. He could not find one.

On Loyalty and Unassuming Pride, Part I

I watched a film today that I found posted by Will at A Suitable Wardrobe. It was made under the auspices of Esquire, and I only wish everything perpetrated by that particular rag paid such sober reverence to quality and tradition. If you have a spare hour, go and have a look. There are some very ordinary, salt of the earth, old-fashioned working people interviewed in this film; or at least, they seem ordinary, but they are not. In fact, they are stunningly exceptional.

Time was when the best working people spent years honing a skill, a craft, a vocation. The finest artisans did things that their brethren could not do, and they were rightly revered. They built the backbone of an empire, literally, with their bare hands. Forget machines. Forget steam. What drove British preëminence was a mind to quality. It was superiority in skill, in combination with the finest resources. As with so many ironies of history, the world these men built was to be inhabited by men who found no further use for them. The machine – the engine of mass production – was the death knell of empire. The zenith of imperial production was also the possibility for colonial competition. Any man, after all, can turn on a machine. Not everyman can make one.

How refreshing, therefore, to see a number of people who have spent years at their craft, loyally serving companies that had their origin in headier days. They are the last of their breed, but you can almost see the sense of pride running through their veins. Pride is not something I would typically advocate, save where it is magnanimous and absolutely justified. These people make the finest things of their type anywhere. They cannot themselves afford to own the things they make, but they are proud to see them being worn by others. Watch the tweed maker fill up when he sees his cloth transformed into a bespoke jacket, on the back of a Savile Row man. The social distance traversed in this extraordinary meeting is really something to behold. The pride is precious.

The loyalty of these people is bound up with their pride. They work for men who give them jobs for life, on the understanding that the standard set is high. Note how few young people you see in this film. We have lost hold of what it means, what it meant, to work for somebody, for something, that you believed to be important. Much greater than the pursuit of chasing pound notes was once the pursuit of position. Among working-class people, a skilled position within an esteemed manufactory was to be blessed with the best that could be hoped for: the respect of one’s peers, one’s employer, one’s family. To own a skill was a much greater asset than mere wealth. To ply that skill for the man who first employed you, and to do so for all your working days, was a matter of honour. One can read of it in books; it is a rarity to witness.

So, where do your loyalties lie, and does what you own mean anything? Without skills, and without allegiances, we run the risk of being frivolous, even to ourselves.

On Becoming Immortal

The writer put down his pen and made a fist, cracking the joints in his hand and feeling the dull ache chase up his arm to the shoulder. ‘To publish a book is to give birth to a child that never dies’, he mused. That wisdom is as old as the hills; perhaps older. In these days of ‘think it, publish it’ he wondered if it remained so.

He took up his pen once more and wrote:

Of course, the ethereal ephemera of our age is really only the pulp nonsense of yesteryear writ large. Of things published we remember less than a tithe. We should be wary of easy roads to living forever: even Aristotle’s works have been partially lost, and nobody is really sure who Shakespeare was. I used to think that writing a book was my chance to leave a timeless legacy of myself to the world. Having written one, I might be forgiven for concluding that I have merely added another unread block of bound paper to the dead weight of the world’s libraries. Writing in our age is the production of ever smaller needles for the stocking of an ever larger haystack. I am given to reflect: a writer needs a reader if he is to achieve immortality, and the reader must be so impressed as to ensure the dissemination of the work. He must not be a mere pleasure reader, for many millions have read J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown in this vein, and we can forecast quite credibly that these authors will not be remembered. The reader must be serious and thoughtful, and also influential in those two capacities. Note to self: find a patron.

Leaning back in his chair, feeling the burn in his neck and the cramp across his shoulders, he noticed that he could no longer feel his legs, and he struggled to his feet. He paced the room impatiently, awaiting the descent of his blood to his feet. As he gasped at the return of sensation, he lamented the bygone times of the Medici, the Court of Friedrich the Great, the English aristocracy, and the conspicuous nouveau riche of America’s gilded age. There were stupid people in abundance, with more wealth than they could ever spend, eager to add, vicariously at least, human importance to their social value. Under such a system the cream rose to the top. To be sure, they made compromises in their art for the sake of the paymaster, but then, the paymasters were often too simple to notice that their prescriptions only made the artists crafty.

The writer traced a finger across a dusty bookshelf and stopped at Milton’s Areopagitica. He thumbed through it until he found the page he wanted, and then folded himself back into his chair, found a blank page, and scribbled:

Milton says: ‘Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them’. I am morally compelled therefore to write, or I risk losing that which I am. But it must not be lost. It must not be mere memoranda, but live in the memory. Write the damn book. But DO find a patron.

The writer looked at his watch. It was 16:44. With renewed purpose, he continued to write out his soul.

In Defence of Breakfast; Or, Dunkin' Don't

Some men, under the illusion that the behaviour makes them seem tough, leave the house each morning on little more than a cigarette, and perhaps coffee. During my stay in the Boston vicinity, I observed that this was often augmented by doughnuts, on the way to wherever men went. I do not like to see unhealthy people. The grey, pallid skin, raccoon-ringed eyes, chapped lips, and mournful vacancy of the expression are all tell-tale signs of the malnourished. Men who look like this do not seem tough to me. They seem fragile.

Breakfast like a king! It is the first phrase of a three-part maxim, the other two being ‘lunch like a prince, and dine like a pauper’. I’ve never been entirely sure about the latter phrase, but in any case, I absolutely adhere to the primary exhortation. When one breaks one’s fast, let us say, at 8 a.m., it may be thirteen or fourteen hours since the body has been nourished. It craves food, and should have it supplied. One cannot possibly expect to make it through a morning’s work in any kind of fit shape unless one is sustained. To eat well in the morning is to take on the fuel necessary to be the best one can be. Let us hear no more of the coffee and cigarette regime.

The knock-on advantages are many. One snacks less. One binges less. One feels fit and able. For those of you who are overweight, I would suggest that eating well – eating best – at breakfast will help you lose weight, for you will be satisfied at the beginning of the day. You will have more energy to exercise, and more will to do it. But what to eat?

The possibilities are endless: porridge, boiled eggs or scrambled, kedgeree or poached haddock, kippers, fruit, pastries and breads, cereals, cheeses and cold cuts. Mix it up, but be sure to feed yourself well. Once, or maybe twice a week, go all out with a Full English. It need not be overly greasy, if done properly, and will sustain you like nothing else. The ingredients, lest anyone should be in any doubt:

Bacon (streaky or back, preferably grilled, according to the English definition of that word).

Sausage (none of your cheap and nasty processed stuff, but something your butcher made. Grilled, for twenty minutes).

Eggs (however you like them. Poached is the healthiest way).

Mushrooms (fried).

Kidneys (from whichever animal you prefer, and lightly fried).

Black pudding, if you can find it.

Fresh tomato (sliced in two and grilled).

Hot toast with butter and jam.

Some people like Heinz baked beans for good measure. Can’t say I disapprove. Wash it all down with a pot of English Breakfast tea, or, for the more refined approach, some Earl Grey.

Nary a weekend in the Beātum household goes by without one. I wish you the same comfort.

What Is Old?

Now I am rampant with memory. I don’t often indulge in this, or not so very often, anyway. Some people will tell you that the old live in the past – that’s nonsense. Each day, so worthless really, has a rarity for me lately. I could put it in a vase and admire it, like the first dandelions, and we would forget their weediness and marvel that they were there at all (Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel, 1964).

My ‘Old Man’ had a birthday this week. I won’t divulge his age, although I’m sure he is still yet young. He occasionally protests that he is an old man, but I won’t hear of it. Age, in this age, is a state of mind, and will only become more so. We have it within our grasp, each of us, to live to a biblical age. Once a man reaches sixty he has a very high statistical chance of reaching eighty, and many, of course, will go way beyond that. By the time I am sixty I will fully expect to reach my century, and I have secret (well, not any more) designs on attaining the ripe number of 120. How dreadfully tiresome, dull and pathetic it would be, therefore, if we declared ourselves old at sixty, as did men of not-so-long ago. That might very well only be half way! Think of the possibilities!

We shall have to re-evaluate what it means to do a life’s work over such a long innings. When the Old Age Pension was introduced in Britain in the good old Edwardian era, the clever politicians put on it a qualifying age of seventy. At that time, the age of seventy, the mythical three-score years and ten, was significantly higher than the average life expectancy. It was, from a governmental point of view, a pretty safe bet. Over the years that age threshold came down, even as life expectancy went up. Generations grew up on the promise of increased leisure, and interpreted is as a license to be idle in one’s dotage, which was projected to last for a good long stint, while the government paid a pile to keep everyone going. It was a sweet thought, but utterly unsustainable. Now the British and the French have undergone revisions to the pensionable age (the British with rather more stoic fatalism than the French), and those revisions are set to continue. When I went to school the retirement age was set at sixty-five for men, sixty for women. What will it be when I actually reach sixty-five? Seventy? Seventy-five? Eighty? Chances are there will be no such thing as a State pension by then, but it’s worth stopping for a minute to consider our futures in a way that we perhaps do not typically. We may be around for longer than we think.

All the more important then to carefully think about what work is to us. Vocations these days are rare. Jobs for life? Seems unlikely. In the West, few people learn a trade, a skill, a craft anymore. Yet now more than ever we have the time. In the days when fifty might have been considered an unlikely milestone, apprenticeships lasted perhaps seven years. In our breakneck desire to make as much money as possible for the least possible effort, we eschew such patience and diligence. I’ve said before that it seems to me that most people hate what they do. Well, do something else. There’ll be time to see it through. We have the opportunity to give vent to the courage of our convictions. Seek fulfillment. Lord knows we may have a long time to endure life’s resentment if we do not.

Self-Help; Or, Getting by on Smiles

happiness and well-being as individuals… must necessarily depend mainly upon [one’s] own diligent self-culture, self-discipline, and self-control – and, above all, on that honest and upright performance of individual duty, which is the glory of manly character (Samuel Smiles, Self-help, 1860).

I don’t know why I haven’t mentioned Smiles before. Seems to me that his most famous tome, now firmly out of fashion and looked upon in some ways as a quaint relic, ought really to have a force of relevance for today. Smiles lived by what he preached in many ways, transcending and uniting social class through an adherence to hard work and application. Smiles’ figure of the gentleman acquired his status not through birth or through wealth, but through character. We live in a time when certain forces might deny that to us, but Smiles would have exhorted us to persist. I shall return to Smiles in the near future, but for now I shall let his words stand by themselves. They require little immediate commentary from this humble historian.

The crown and glory of life is character. It is the noblest possession of a man, constituting a rank in itself, and an estate in the general good-will; dignifying every station, and exalting every position in society. It exercises a greater power than wealth, and secures all the honour without the jealousies of fame. It carries with it an influence which always tells; for it is the result of proved honour, rectitude, and consistency – qualities which, perhaps more than any other, command the general confidence and respect of mankind.

Character is human nature in its best form. It is moral order embodied in the individual. Men of character are not only the conscience of society, but in every well-governed State they are its best motive power; for it is moral qualities in the main which rule the world… The strength, the industry, and the civilisation of nations – all depend upon individual character; and the very foundations of civil security rest upon it. Laws and institutions are but its outgrowth…

Though a man have comparatively little culture, slender abilities, and but small wealth, yet, if his character be of sterling worth, he will always command an influence, whether it be in the workshop, the counting-house, the mart, or the senate… You may admire men of intellect; but something more is necessary before you will trust them… Character creates confidence in men in high station as well as in humble life…

Truthfulness, integrity, and goodness – qualities that hang not on any man’s breath – form the essence of manly character, or, as one of our old writers has it, ‘that inbred loyalty unto Virtue which can serve her without a livery.’ He who possesses these qualities, united with strength of purpose, carries with him a power which is irresistible. He is strong to do good, strong to resist evil, and strong to bear up under difficulty and misfortune.

…Every man is bound to aim at the possession of a good character, as one of the highest objects of life. The very effort to secure it by worthy means will furnish him with a motive for exertion; and his idea of manhood, in proportion as it is elevated, will steady and animate his motives. It is well to have a high standard of life, even though we may not be able altogether to realize it.

The Butcher

One of my earliest memories is of the local butcher’s shop. I’d press my nose on the refrigerated glass and look at what to me was a smorgasbord of delight. Black pudding, lambs' kidneys, fresh sausages, streaky bacon and back, pigs’ trotters and sows’ ears, and so on and so on. I never was much of a one for sweets or toy soldiers. These cuts were my heart’s desire but, much like the child who never owns the toy of his dreams, it was the visit to the shop that I cherished more than the things themselves. On the back wall, which was covered in shiny blue and white tiles, was a row of meat hooks upon which hung a variety of larger carcases. In those days things weren’t pre-cut and packaged; the butcher waited for you to order your joint before hauling down the whole hunk on his shoulder and pouring it out onto the block. He sharpened a gloriously large knife with a long steel that was kept in a leather belt, moving with such speed but miraculously never cutting off his hand. The joint was cut to size, but still attached by the bone. Out came the clever: the moment I always anticipated most. My local butcher was a wiry, tall man with glasses. He’d raise the cleaver right above his head – a good seven feet above my gaze – and bring it down with clinical accuracy upon the bone, making the most delicious crack, immediately followed by the dull thud of blade in block. For many years as a child I really wanted to own a cleaver. All of this took place in a uniquely cool atmosphere – like walking into the fridge to choose your dinner – but with a warmth of conversation that taught me to recognise that butchers are (sadly, were) pillars of the community.

The butcher used to know everyone and, in all probability, everyone’s business too. The single-most important quality for a butcher was discretion, and that made him a great listener. Yet history has been unkind to them. By precedent they did not serve on juries because their work was thought to harden their hearts. I never could work out how a butcher was any more likely to be callous than a surgeon, a veterinarian, or a funeral director – those pillars of middle-class life who might have been thought ideal candidates for duty at court. But butchers were working class, and concomitantly thought to be unrefined, unpredictable, and already somewhat hardened by life. Their singular quality of being able to listen without prejudice was overlooked because of other doubts.

Gillray, The British Butcher supplying John Bull with a Substitute for Bread, 1795

Still, not everyone maligned these men. Representations of John Bull, the stalwart freeborn Englishman, had a forerunner in the caricatured form of the butcher, and William Hogarth left no doubt about the importance of beef (and implicitly, those who provided it) in his idealization of a content and fulfilled society. He was the pivot point around which local life gathered, for everyone had to visit him, and most probably would meet each other at his shambles. In wartime the butcher became a man of great power, able to do unto his neighbours that which they had done unto him. It became a matter of great importance to respect the butcher if one was to feed a family in times of ration. Mr. Jones the butcher of Dad’s Army fame is the archetype: friendly, eager, courageous, and with a heightened sense of justice.

Hogarth, Beer Street, 1750 (hunk of beef to the left)

There aren’t many left. My mother still has a good one – actually a husband and wife team – but they are knocking on, and soon the supermarket will have won. My Hungarian butcher in Montreal is the salt of the earth, but he too is getting long in the tooth. In Berlin things are a little brighter, but I don’t quite yet have the hang of the experience yet. I’m working on it. In any case, I thought I’d share a thought or two on these rare men, for they are not long for this world, and we may not yet realise just how much we shall miss them.

 Rembrandt, Carcass of Beef, 1655