It's still a pleasure even if you just think you're enjoying it

‘What is all this swimming business?’ a friend asks me, after reading my latest dirge on how ghastly the whole experience is.

Well, I should perhaps set the record straight. It isn’t, in reality, anything like as bad as the impression I may have given of it. In fact, there are occasions when I derive great enjoyment from ploughing up and down the pool. Even at one of those horrifying times of day when the only kind of water that seems remotely attractive is the kind that fills a steaming bath, and even that prospect barely tempts one away from a sheet and a toast-warm duvet.

Just the other day, the pleasure practically tipped into triumph. I was racing up and down the pool, eating away the lengths as though there was no tomorrow, far more quickly than on any yesterday. I was achieving a staggering increase in pace. OK, I knew that the kind of speed I was managing was probably little better than what you might call sedate, but that was a huge step up from my usual performance, best described as downright laggardly.

In fact, the improvement was so colossal that it did occur to me to wonder whether it could be real. But I drove that unworthy thought away and enjoyed the pleasure of the moment. Isn’t that what the best philosophers always recommend?

Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday, why fret about them if today be sweet?

So I rose from the pool, shoulders squared, chest puffed out, full of my sense of accomplishment. Only then did I notice that the partition, which usually splits our 50 metre pool at the 32 metre mark, had been placed bang on the centre point.

I stood stupidly staring at this chastening evidence of my own vainglory.

The pool had been super-short. I’d been racking up the lengths, but they were just over two-thirds of my normal ones. Even a swimming-atrophied brain at a mind-numbing time could work out that far from achieving anything out of the ordinary, my performance had been right down there in the bargain basement I generally inhabit. There’d been no improvement at all.

No, it wasn't me.
However much I'd have liked to believe it was

So it turned out that the one time my swimming gave me tangible pleasure, it turned out to be entirely illusory.

But, hold on, that’s not really right, is it? It was the perception on which my enjoyment was based that was illusory. The pleasure itself was genuine. Now that’s got to be worth celebrating.

After all, how many of the pleasures we enjoy have any stronger basis?

The salesman's 'yeah': businesspeak scales new heights

Far too little attention has been paid to businesspeak, a language second to none in subtlety and indirection, leaving it with enough levels of meaning to make it the lasagne of international linguistics.

No doubt you all know, ‘this is urgent. We need action immediately’ which translates as ‘I’m calling a meeting for the middle of next week. No, damn it. The week after when George gets back from leave.’

You may be less familiar with ‘that’s not a suggestion we can take up at once, but don’t let’s lose sight of it, it’s a really good idea,’ which means ‘I can’t believe you came up with anything that dumb, but HR has told me I have to be encouraging towards the little people, so I’m letting you down gently.’

One of my personal favourite is, ‘I’ve glanced at the document but I haven’t had time to read it in detail,’ which means ‘I know you’ve sent me something but I suspect it’s more than two paragraphs long, so I can’t be bothered to plough through it. Why don’t you take up the first half of the meeting telling me what it contains, while I interrupt with irrelevant questions?’

However, as you’re certainly aware, it isn’t always the most complex creations of humanity that are the most striking. Sometimes it’s pure simplicity that wins the prize. That’s why I’m particularly pleased to be able to present to the world my most recent study of businesspeak, and one of its most phenomenal of structures. I’m sure you’ll agree it’s powerful precisely for its brevity.

I’ve come to call it ‘the salesman’s yeah’. Yes. A single word. And it’s definitely ‘yeah’, not ‘yes’. Here’s how it’s deployed.

‘Did you set up the meeting with Mr Howard?’ asks the worried executive.

‘Yeah,’ replies the salesman, and pauses just long enough to ensure that everyone has fully absorbed the fact that he’s given a positive response.

‘I spoke to his assistant last week,’ he goes on, ‘and she says she’ll make sure he gets my message just as soon as he’s back from his conference in Singapore.’

The master businessspeaker
Masterly. Confidence-inspiring.  Charming

Or then again we have:

‘Have they signed the agreement?’

‘Yeah.’ Pause. The pause is key. ‘Galactica from Legal thought a distributor agreement would be more suitable, so she’s drafting one.’

And a final example.

‘So will we get the order this month?’

‘Yeah.’ Pause. ‘There’s every chance they’ll give us the nod in the next fortnight, ready for the final meeting to authorise the order in six weeks.’

See how it works? If you or I had to communicate the message in the long sentence following the ‘yeah’, we’d probably be inclined to start with a ‘no’. But that’s because we’re naive speakers of that tediously transparent language, everyday English. The really proficient businesspeaker who has mastered the ‘salesman’s yeah’, knows how to give bad news a positive spin. Far better, his ‘yeah’ makes you feel good, and you cling on to that feeling while he gives you the less satisfactory information that follows. So it's outstandingly effective: he manages to communicate a misleading message without telling a lie.

Brilliant.

How can one avoid admiring such talented and ingenious use of words? It takes them out of the realm of the banal, ordinary communication of information in which most of us indulge. It takes us to new heights of communication and miscommunication, rarely seen outside the world of conservative politics.

When things are going swimmingly and only the coin is terrifying

I may not be crazy about swimming, but persisting in going at awful o’clock in the morning does seem to be revealing a surprising streak of craziness in me. 

One of the delights of early morning swimming, and there are so few I make the most of any I find, is trying to decide exactly what’s grimmest about the experience. And, funnily enough, it turns out not to be getting up at 6:00 a.m.

Nor is it that terrible moment when you’re half into the water but haven’t quite let yourself slip beyond the point of no recovery, so you could still, in principle, change your mind and climb back up the ladder. That’s pretty ghastly, because it’s the instant when every nerve at last realises that it’s true, that your wayward mind is really going to do that terrible thing, again, and immerse the whole of your protesting body in that frightful wet stuff.

But it isn’t that. It isn’t even the moment when I realise that I’ve left something crucial – towel, goggles, shampoo – in the locker and have to reopen it with the consequent loss of the 20 pence coin I dropped in the slot to lock it.

No, it’s that 20p coin itself. This has become the terrible, obsessive object of all my fears as I prepare for early morning swims.The 20p bit haunts my thoughts.

The humble 20p bit. The stuff of obsessional nightmare

Not, you understand, for any inherent value of its own. Why, it wouldn’t buy much more than 10% of a large latte. In fact, if you take your coffee in more fashionable establishments than I frequent, it wouldn’t cover even that. 

What concerns me is not the value it represents, but its value as an object in itself. 

Our swimming pool has lockers that will only accept those coins. Two tens? Out of luck, pal. Four fives? You must be joking. Ten twos? A suggestion not even worth dignifying by a refusal.

It’s odd, though. I’ve forgotten lots of things when going swimming but never, as it happens, a 20p bit. But the fear of doing so never leaves me.

Come to think of it, that may be the reason I always remember to bring one.

In any case, even if I didn’t, the fee for Danielle and me leaves us with a 20p coin in the change. And, as often as not, the receptionist asks us if we need one anyway.

On one occasion, I did turn up without my coin purse. I know, I know, coin purses are deeply unfashionable, please don’t think I haven't been told, but they are convenient when you’re sick of clinking coins around in your pocket.

My apprehension was intense when I forgot mine. How was I going to be able to overcome the terrible obstacle I’d created for myself?

‘Your change and your tickets,’ said the receptionist.

And there lying in my hand, small, shiny and apparently winking at me in good cheer, was one of those funny little seven-sided not-quite-silver coins. The relief was overwhelming. Which just made me feel stupid.

Especially as, when I came to put my possessions into my rucksack, preliminary to dumping them in the locker, I found several more 20p pieces in its front pocket. Where I’d put them as a reserve, just in any case I ever did what I’d done that morning and left without my change.

It made me wonder just how crazy swimming was making me. Until I remembered that I’d put the coins in my bag one morning at about 8:00, when I’m tolerably rational. And I’d worked myself into a panic over their absence before 7:00, when I’m certainly anything but. Perhaps I can put the whole embarrassingly dumb behaviour pattern down to time of day.

After all, we don’t call it stupid o’clock for nothing.

Hell is other people. Or how one woman's music became another's noise pollution.

Spare a thought for Laia Martín, a promising young pianist from Catalonia, now facing charges that could land not just her but her parents in gaol for seven and a half years. 

Why? Because she practises the piano.

Yes, that’s right. You’d expect a budding concert pianist to have to play rather a lot. And when her parents bought her a piano and encouraged (I suppose the prosecution would say ‘incited’) her to play it, they thought they were behaving as devoted parents should.

Sadly, they were living next door to a woman called Sonia Bosom, clearly someone with a lot to get off her chest.

She sued for noise pollution and physical impairment. She’s moved away, which strikes me as sensible, but in the meantime the matter had been picked up as one for criminal charges. It’s true that Martín practices for eight hours a day, but that’s pretty much what I’d expect from a professional musician (particularly a soloist). She also keeps it to daytime only. 

All of which makes me feel that in asking for a seven and a half year sentence, the prosecutor who’s taken up the case is being just a tad excessive.

Noise pollution.
Seriously? Noise pollution?

And, believe me, my wife and I have plenty of experience of noise pollution. Our neighbour goes in for it less often than she used to, but when she lets herself go, we certainly know about it. First she starts off apparently enjoying herself. She and her friends laugh a lot; then the music comes on; and next it’s Karaoke, an invention, it seems to me, with only one purpose: however awful you may feel professional singers are, you’ll go back to them with alacrity once you’ve heard the amateurs.

Hard though it is to believe, things actually deteriorate after the Karaoke. That’s when the mood turns rough. Voices are raised but no longer in joy. Epithets are exchanged, accompanied by encouragements to engage in procreative activity. Elsewhere. 

Doors are opened and doors are slammed as various people are included or excluded from groups. In the latter case, they usually protest at a length that belies their words, that they care very little about their fate, in speeches generously larded with further procreative allusions.

As a general rule, there are tears, occasionally blows, sometimes even the sound of crockery being broken.

We think of her as our neighbour from Hell.

I imagine, however, that Ms Bosom and the Martíns feel exactly the same way about each other. Ms Bosom must have regarded the hours of piano as hellish; Laia and her parents must feel the same about the prospect of being gaoled for their devotion to music.

Which I suppose only goes to prove the truth of Sartre’s idea that hell is other people. The Spanish case seems to confirm it. So does our neighbour.

Fortunately, however, in my experience other people also provide the means to get as about as close to heaven as we’re ever likely to be. The existence of friends consoles us for the persecutions of the hellish other people of Sartre’s vision.

Right now, I hope Laia Martín and her family can find some friends of their own, in high places if at all possible, because they really, really need them.

Dreading the half century

The date comes inexorably closer: in just over a week, on 22 November, we’ll be marking the half century since John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

It’s going to be agonisingly painful. The worst is going to be watching so many people mouthing platitudinous tributes, though we know that they wouldn’t vote for him in a month of Sundays, if they had the chance.

Not of course that they’d have that chance today. No one with Kennedy’s track record with women would even get a look in for a run for the White House, let alone winning. Kennedy’s behaviour in this respect would leave Bill Clinton looking like a shrinking teenager at a school dance but, with a complacent press, JFK sailed right on through all of that whereas poor old Bill got impeached for his pains (well, Hillary’s pains, not to mention Monica’s).

Of course, Bill wasn’t just paying the price for a quasi-JFK-ish inability to keep his flies zipped. He was also paying for Richard Nixon’s opponents who had the gall to impeach him. The guys on Nixon’s side of the aisle had never forgiven the way Tricky Dicky was treated, and were chomping at the bit for a chance to get their own back.

Jimmy Carter was far too decent to give them the pretext, so they had to wait for Bill. And did he give them the opportunity they wanted. In spades. You could almost see them mouthing the words ‘we’re going to get us a piece of Democrat President.’

None of them see the irony that the action against Nixon was for a major offence: abuse of power, betrayal of his oath to uphold the constitution, a breach of a 200-year old principle that no one, not even the highest office-holder in the land, is above the law.

Clinton’s offence was serious, but essentially domestic.

These characters clearly can’t see the implications of equating the actions of a man who subverted the very nature of US government with those of a philanderer. Sad. I wonder if anyone could explain to them what it says about their own side?

The heirs of those guys are in the Tea Party now, and I dread to hear them praising another, murdered Democrat. Perhaps they won’t. Perhaps they’ll have the decency to keep their traps shut.

On the other hand, they are the Tea Party, so they probably won’t.

There’s nothing new about all of this. Right and left of the US likes to speak highly of many other dead presidents. Jefferson, for instance, or Lincoln.

You think anyone in the Tea Party would vote for either of them if they came back and ran for office today? Free thinkers? Committed to Liberal principles? Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase, for Pete’s sake. Can you imagine the shutdown there’d have been if the Tea Party had been around when that particular bit of big government was going through?

I at least will be commemorating the anniversary on Friday week with sorrow. Losing JFK, above all to such a despicable act, left the world a sadder place. But I have to confess that he isn’t the Kennedy I miss most. That honour goes to the man I fear is the best president the US never had, his brother Bobby.

Three Kennedy brothers.
Was the greatest the smallest?

We’ll never know how he would have performed as president. But I still feel he deserves that accolade, if only for one event in his tragically short life. 

On the day Martin Luther King was murdered, Bobby Kennedy was campaigning for the Presidency in Indianapolis. He learned of the death as he was travelling to a rally deep in an African-American district; many of his aides felt it would be too dangerous to proceed with the plan, but he insisted.

He gave no campaign speech but informed his audience, many of whom hadn’t heard the news, of what had happened, to its howling dismay. He didn’t flinch but went on to make a brief call for peace which included the words:

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

There were riots that night in over a hundred US cities, but not in Indianapolis.

Now there’s a man whose absence we should still be regretting.

Diane Lockhart: a touch of fantasy for a magical evening

When majesty strikes life, and at the same time fantasy invades reality, surely we have all the ingredients for a magical evening?

I wrote on Saturday about heading to St Martin’s in the Fields church, for a performance of Mozart’s Requiem, partly in expiation of a broken promise to my son. It was an outstanding evening. 

We’d bought our tickets early and were at the front of the Church, barely out of arm’s reach of the soloists, so we had them singing more or less straight into our faces. That description may not sound particularly attractive, but the experience was inspiring, mesmerising.

And then in the interval, several of us popped down to the café for a drink. Well, you have to really: how many other places can you have a coffee under the pillared arches of a church crypt?

That’s when I practically walked into Diane Lockhart of the celebrated Chicago law firm, Lockhart Gardner.

Diane Lockhart, much as she looked in the crypt of
St Martin in the Fields on Saturday

Now let’s be absolutely clear. I’m fully aware that Lockhart Gardner is a fictional firm in The Good Wife which is, after all, merely a soap, however ingeniously constructed. However, I would maintain to all comers that the woman sitting on her own, looking perhaps even a little solitary, sipping her coffee at a table near the entrance, was not Christine Baranski, who plays Diane Lockhart in the series, but Lockhart herself.

Why, she had Lockhart’s clothes, Lockhart’s makeup, even Lockhart’s poise and elegance. She was Lockhart.

I had to check, of course.

‘Did you see?’ I asked Danielle when I caught up with her, ‘by the door? Diane Lockhart?’

‘I thought it must be her,’ she answered.

‘It definitely was,’ said the young woman at the next table, and when her companion asked, to my astonishment, ‘who?’ she explained ‘Tanya from Mamma Mia.’

Tanya? Mamma Mia? What a load of nonsense. Lockhart’s a lawyer, not an actor. What an earth would she be doing in some Mediterranean romp of a musical?

Naturally, because I’m terribly proud of my English aloofness and dignity, I didn’t approach Ms Lockhart and introduce myself. On the other hand, as I’m just as imbued with English curiosity, I did hang around the edges of the group who, accompanying the Mamma Mia woman, threw dignity to the winds and asked her for autographs. She confirmed the identification and looked pleased at the attention or, more likely, fed up to the back teeth with the attention but professional enough to pretend she was pleased.

For my part, I was delighted to see her there. Things have been a bit tough in the Good Wife recently. A lot of tension. Between some of my favourite characters. A nasty conflict, and since I’m fond of them all, I’m not sure who I really want to see coming out on top.

Lockhart’s earning quite enough (as I expect Baranski is) to be able to pop over to London from time to time for a little R&R. Must be doing her good, particularly since the Mozart Requiem was rather fine. Balm to her soul, I’d say.

The only worry was that I couldn’t see her husband anywhere. I’m sure hardly anyone needs telling, but he’s Kurt McVeigh (ably represented by Gary Cole), a ballistics expert, NRA supporter and general firearm nut. The liberal Lockhart (friend of Hillary Clinton) has nothing in common with him politically, but the warmth of their feelings made a marriage between them ultimately inevitable. Given the stress she’s facing, she must need his support more than ever.

Still, I saw her again outside the Church, after the Concert, clearly waiting for someone. McVeigh strikes me as not the kind of man who would be particularly drawn to Mozart, so he may have spent a couple of hours in more congenial company, perhaps with some fine representatives of the British huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ set. It seemed likely that he would turn up shortly to whisk her off somewhere they could wrap up the night in style.

I hope so, anyway.

At any rate, I was delighted she was there. The majesty of the music had injected magic into the evening. Her presence had provided fantasy.

For that, I owe her my heartfelt thanks.

A promise made is a debt unpaid

Debts, it’s frequently asserted, are there to be paid.

The French say that ‘good accounts make good friends.’ Polonius, in Hamlet, warns his son ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’, which isn’t quite the same thing: while Shakespeare clearly feels debts are not to be carried, he only suggests not incurring them in the first place, which isn’t a lot of use if you already have.

No one sums it up better than Robert Service, who has little claim to be taken seriously as a poet in spite, or perhaps because, of having written one of the world’s finest comic poems, The Cremation of Sam McGee. It includes the sonorous sentiment:

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code

I know what he means.

Fifteen years ago I suggested to my son Michael, then in his mid teens, to take him to a performance of Mozart’s Requiem. The third person due to join us was a German friend of ours, Alenka. She would, I suspect, herself be the first to admit that her life isn’t unduly marked by anything one might call order or structure. She tends rather to create an atmosphere around her that is redolent of the sixties, wherever she goes.

In one respect, however, Germany has influenced her far more than hippiedom. She has, in spades, the German respect for punctuality. I remember a boss telling me with some annoyance, long before I’d learned the lesson, that the only way to turn up to appointments on time, is to set out to be early. That was our friend Alenka through and through.

So she was at our place to collect me for the concert at a ridiculously early hour, or so it seemed to me, accustomed as I was to turn up for such events just a minute or two before applauding the musicians as they trooped in. Alenka was more the ‘sit quietly in your place and make small talk for twenty minutes’ kind of person.

Michael wasn’t home when she showed up. Since he hadn’t expressed any particular enthusiasm for joining us, I decided to set out with Alenka alone at the moment when waiting had tried her impatience to breaking point – still, in my view, far earlier than necessary.

Alas, on my return after a fine performance of what remains one of my favourite pieces, I found Michael more than a little put out at having been left behind.

‘You went off without me. You knew I was coming.’

Well, I hadn’t been sure, and I’d felt pressurised by Alenka... but in reality, no excuses helped me feel any better. I’d gone without him, though he’d wanted to come, and he was disappointed. All the guilt a parent can feel towards a child he’s let down invaded me. I wonder if there are any parents out there who haven’t suffered the same gnawing feeling?

And from that date, it’s never left me. But this year, back in September, I went to a concert in London at St Martin in the Fields (remember the nursery rhyme? You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St Martin's?). It was a glorious baroque setting in which to listen to glorious baroque music. My heart particularly leaped when I saw that a performance of Mozart’s Requiem was planned for 9 November. 

St Martin's: just the place for Baroque music.
And not bad even for classical

The ensemble may not have been the best I’d ever heard, but surely no one can completely cock up the Requiem, can they? I mean, the music’s just majestic enough to carry the performers with it, however limited their talents. This lot weren’t untalented, it was just that they left me unconvinced they were entirely outstanding. In any case, this was an opportunity not to be missed.

So the very next day I was on the line to Michael in Madrid, where he now lives.

‘Book a ticket for that weekend,’ I suggested.

‘Out on the Thursday, back on the Monday? Will that do?’ he promptly responded.

The day has now come. We have the tickets. Michael’s in the house. Alenka’s not around to disrupt proceedings with her chronological puritanism.

I don’t know whether the performance is going to be brilliant or just passable. Either way, the setting will be breathtaking. And several friends are joining us, so the ingredients for a good evening will all be there. And, above all, I’ll keep a promise made, discharge a debt unpaid. 

A great weight will be lifted from my heart 15 years after it first settled there.