10 Pieces of my Life

Rarely do I see something programmed on the BBC that mirrors closely the working environment that I occupied until I stopped working around 2003.

Up until this point, I had worked in a number of ways that introduced people to unfamiliar art-forms.

Principally, I worked closely within large arts organisations receiving considerable sums from the Arts Council of England.

Perhaps it is quite natural that the investment of significant sums of public money in such ways should be accompanied by the proviso that these organisations should offer an education opportunity so that the widest possible audience should have the opportunity to appreciate the activity offered.

Thus at the age of around 25 I began working within the education department of Opera North based in Leeds, one of only a handful of professional opera companies in the United Kingdom.

Opera North was established as an independent offshoot of English National Opera, to enable Opera of the highest professional quality to tour principally the North of England, occasionally reaching further afield such as to Scotland and even overseas.

For example, in the time that I was working for the company a production of Attila by Giuseppe Verdi was taken to Rotterdam, helping to establish the international reputation of the company which had already achieved a significant National reputation for both its reach across the North of England, as well as a reputation for high quality education opportunities that enabled people unfamiliar with this art-form to attend performances and explore in more detail exactly what Opera is all about.

When I began working for the organisation, I had very limited experience myself of opera, but my work gave me the opportunity to see numerous opera performances as part of the company’s output.

With its base in Leeds at the Grand Theatre, where rehearsals and opening performances took place, the company travelled regularly to Manchester, Hull, Nottingham, and other occasional venues and festivals across England.

Whilst I am not musically trained, not even with an aptitude for music, I found myself working in the creative environment of the education department of an opera company, thanks I suppose to an interest I have always held concerning the empowerment of people.

Whilst this may sound rather strange, I can look back at my entire working life and see that this strand of empowerment has been critical in every aspect of every employment I have undertaken.

For the first 10 years of my working life, I became involved first with housing co-operatives, and then perhaps as a natural progression, with workers co-operatives.

In other words, I have often worked in ways that treat people as equals, and in some respects, the same can be said of creativity.

It is something that people of all ages and backgrounds and indeed capacity can participate in, and in many respects, the fact that I first worked in a department associated with an opera company is simply representative of the fact that I lived in a small northern town that was lucky enough to possess a large opera company.

When this was established in the late 1980s, originally as a linked and strategic component of English National Opera, somebody somewhere must have made the assumption that developing such a large creative organisation would have a transformation and regeneration impact on this city.

Opera North’s orchestra also has its own identity as a symphony orchestra, providing a regular season of concerts at the local town hall.

You cannot have 60 or 70 professional musicians and all of the ancillary staff associated with an opera company and not have an impact on its local economy.

Opera North also had a regular full-time chorus of over 50 people, occasionally swelling to larger numbers when particular repertoire was performed.

Although I began as a novice in my own right, I quickly benefited from the opportunity to be able to see as much opera as the company produced.

Opera is typically produced in small seasons consisting of between three and four different operas, for the sensible reason that professional opera singers are not able to sing every night of the week, and therefore different operas are performed each night of a season so that the principal singers can arrest their voices in between performances.

So in the course of a year it is likely that a company will produce and tour about a dozen different operas.

In each season, there will be a couple of fairly popular operas, which may have two performances each, and one less common opera, which may only be performed one night each week.

Touring Opera is a logistical exercise, often involving two or three enormous juggernauts, which contain all of the sets and costumes for each opera, as well as all of the technical equipment required to light each work, as well as any ancillary equipment such as for enabling performances to have surtitles or subtitles on stage.

Something that I quickly discovered as part of my initial involvement in the work of the company was that I cannot hear classical music of the kind that is performed by the professional orchestras involved with professional opera without appreciating it in perhaps a rather unique way.

Opera is of course made up from an extraordinary combination of story, music, and staging.

It thus involves every imaginable art form from the written word, through the visual arts concerned with staging and costumes, as well as music.

My experience of the kind of music played by a professional orchestra is where I have drawn my parallel with the recent BBC programme entitled 10 pieces.

This took an unusual approach in its attempt at making classical music more accessible to young people in particular, by showing the music of several well-known works performed both live by the orchestra in a studio context, but with specially commissioned film material designed to encourage those unfamiliar with classical music to see it as a form of storytelling.

We will all be familiar with this as a technique, whether we consciously realise it or not.

The classic example of this kind of ways to familiarise people with classical music was used by Walt Disney in his Fantasia.

What I find fascinating is my own particular experience of classical music, and the way in which it seems to speak to me as if I am unable to hear the music without seeing some kind of story.

Synaesthesia, the way in which our brains can experience sensory stimulus that results in additional perceptions, is not as unusual as you might think.

My best friend, for example, associates various words in the form of colours, so that for each of the days of the week, she associates a different colour.

Perhaps other people may have their own experience of synaesthesia, in my own case, one of my strongest interests lies with creative writing, and so it is perhaps not unusual that I should experience the kind of narrative that I have suggested when listening to classical music.

This has served me particularly well in the context of for example introducing the instruments of the orchestra to primary school children, as it is a very familiar exercise to simply play a piece of music to a small audience and discuss the feelings generated from it. This is a good starting point for looking at the way in which something like opera tells a story with many different emotional colours that have been portrayed by the composer in their use of the instruments available to them.

I have been very fortunate to have met and worked with some extraordinarily creative people and I have been privileged to be able to introduce their abilities to a wide variety of people, young and old, as diverse as inmates in prison to people with learning disabilities, all in the name of the art form education that has been the focus of my work.

It is perhaps no surprise that I have been inspired by the people that I have worked with to explore my own creativity later in life, especially now that I have so much more time than most, as a consequence of my disability with multiple sclerosis.

But it was nevertheless remarkable to see such a specific exploration of what I have spent my life exploring in that BBC programme, 10 pieces.

Rarely Seen or Praised

It is so easy to forget how fortunate I am. I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis over 10 years ago now, and although I am severely disabled and limited physically in what I can still undertake, there are so many things that I have the time to appreciate.

Time is that most valuable of commodities, which few of us can appreciate unless we have the opportunity to pause in the muddle of our modern lives.

Of course I would not have wished to have my life prevented from achieving its full flowering, but I have had to remind myself that there are worse things.

At least the condition that I live with is no more fatal than everything else that we live with.

And since I live in the United Kingdom I am able to benefit from the fact of a system that protects and preserves those that cannot undertake those things that most of us take for granted.

The apartment in which I live has been made more extensible for my use as a wheelchair user thanks to alterations undertaken under the terms of a special grant, converting my bathroom to a shower room, and giving me a ramped access from the rear entrance.

A superior kind of ceiling hoist enables me to be transferred to and from my electric wheelchair, and I have a team of carers that ensure that I am well looked after.

The bed which I spend considerable time, but not so much that I consider myself to be bedridden, has been installed and is serviced by a special department operated by my local county council.

Recently, the handset that controls the movements of the bed had to be replaced, and the replacement handset has the additional buttons that enables the full function of this extraordinary item to be fully used.

My previous handset only had four pairs of buttons to raise the head, the bed itself, and what is called the leg break.

But the new controls enable the top and the bottom of this electric bed to be raised and lowered independently, a function that glorious in the unusual name of the Trendellenberg  effect, something that will be unfamiliar to most people.

Quite simply, it enables the bed to be raised or lowered so that the person in the bed slips in either direction.

More information about this can be discovered online.

With such an important piece of equipment, it is essential that it is properly maintained, and recently I had cause to discover that an engineer is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in the event of problems occurring that disable search an essential piece of equipment.

I had cause to request that the engineer assist as part of the power supply had become disconnected, and although a backup battery ensures that the equipment will operate on an emergency basis for a fuel hours, the engineer arrived within a few hours to reconnect and have the bed working once again.

Few people have reason to know that such a service operates, and it is one of those hidden benefits of the system that of course we pay for through our taxes. And it is only when we need such services that we fully appreciate their existence.

Are We Really In Charge?

I had a soft spot for George Orwell when I was doing an A-level in English Literature.

I read many of his novels, his short stories, and his writings in general.

I admire much of his work, and there is no doubt that he has had much influence on our cultural ideas, if the measure of his influence might be judged by the number of words and phrases that he has introduced to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Perhaps his greatest and most influential novel has been 1984, and although we do not feel explicitly that we are as controlled as the social system described in this work, closer examination is worthwhile to assess the degree to which the State has become Big Brother.

I have been struck recently by the extent to which we are encouraged to experience emotion on a regular basis by the television schedule.

To this extent, clearly I am talking about the United Kingdom, although I am sure that someone with more local knowledge might be able to assess other cultures that share a similar set of control issues.

What has particularly struck me is for example the way in which Strictly Come Dancing has become as a ‘must watch’ programme within the BBC schedule.

Even from the perspective of its production values we are encouraged to perceive the success or failure of participants as an emotional journey, which we become excited about, and indeed feel as if we are participating directly in by way of public voting to determine the fate of our chosen favourites.

There is no doubting the quality of the professional dancers, and the skills of those that principally guide our thoughts about what we are seeing.

And the judges that guide our thinking also appear in many other televised contexts, often engaging additional emotional aspects of our lives, such as memories of holidays from times past, or as recently demonstrated, the way in which dance as an artform links to its expression in films from as far back as the 1930s.

There is a subtle link here with other aspects of our culture, and through such films as The Hunger Games, adapted from the book written by an author, Michael Morepogo, questioning the same territory that I am here touching upon.

The Poet, a Marchioness, and the Wardrobe

In the mid-1990s, I had reason to attend with my then wife the residence of the Earl of March and Wemyss, just south of Edinburgh.

It was not given to dropping in on members of the Scottish aristocracy, but my wife had good reason for this particular visit.

As a director of Opera, with her own company, she had been asked to put together a short tour of the Opera Venus and Adonis by John Blow, which would be performed by a small company in stately homes across Scotland.

The Earl was to be visited because of his role in being the founder of the National Trust for Scotland, and it was his wife, the Marchioness, that we were to meet on that day in order to look at the venue for one of the performances, his own house at Gosford, to which he intended to invite his own personal invitation list for what amounted to a private performance of the work.

The Marchioness was more than happy to show us the venue for the performance, and to help us to perhaps find an item of costume that we could use for one of the characters.

And  thus we found ourselves having tea with the Marchioness, and rummaging through a most extraordinary series of wardrobes in which the Earl kept several generations of clothing appropriate to his position as the most senior  noble in Scotland.

We had been looking for something specific form one of the cast members, and it had been the Earl himself that had suggested we may find something suitable in this storehouse.

As we soon discovered, the wardrobes at Gosford House  contained a vast quantity of historic items, much of which the National Museum of Scotland was anxious to become the curator of.

But the family resisted this, preferring to keep the items close at hand, although acquiescing to the need to keep much of the contents wrapped in archival quality tissue paper to ensure its protection.

After much searching through the contents of much by way of would be worn at the house of lords in London, we eventually found what we had been looking for, by way of a bright red cavalry officers uniform from the 19th century.

Though it was quite heavy in weight, thanks to solid silver epaulettes, it fitted perfectly with the costumes scheme for the performers, who would in effect dress themselves from a trunk that they would bring with them as they entered for the performance.

Which was to take place in the hallway of one wing of the house, which makes it sound like a small place.

But over 100 people were to attend this performance, as the hallway was like no other I had ever seen.

For a start, it  was white marble, with an open area at its summit that could hold about 100 people quite easily in an open space.

Gosford House is a substantial stately home in its own rigt  and one whole wing had been destroyed by fire during the second world war when it has been used as the barracks for soldiers, and they had accidentally literally set fire to one part of it, which had never been restored.

And so the hallway with its magnificent staircase was in a whole wing to itself, constituting one half of what remains of the original house.

Appropriately to the position of its owner, it was furnished with extraordinary things, and one such item we were able to use as the principal image in advertising the opera and its tour.

This was a 16th century painting of Venus and Adonis, a beautiful Renaissance oil painting, which we were able to have propped on an easel at the bottom of the stairs as people came to this particular performance.

Interestingly, a couple of years after the performance had taken place, this painting was sold at Christie’s in London for just under £20 million. Quite some set decoration.

It was a wonderfully informal performance at Gosford House, very much made up of people invited by the Earl and his wife the Marchioness.

People were encouraged to attend in fancy dress, and I remember that the Earl attended wearing nothing more than a simple toga, then I do not remember how the Marchioness dressed.

On The Interpretation of Dreams

I  rarely speak in my blog of my dreams. Quite simply, most people simply switch off if you were to relate to them the strange goings on in the world of your own dreams.

But this morning, I had the strangest of dreams, and I wanted to make a particular effort to remember this dream. And the only way of doing so is to make some notes about it immediately.

In this dream, the principal activity seemed to be some form of competition at the heart of which was to be the unlikely activity of moving meteorites around a physical course, meteorites of different shapes and weights, for no other reason than to see whom of the participants could do so most easily.

As an adjunct to this central component of the dream, an additional prize offered was something along the lines of entry into a competition that involved filming an activity also taking place on the same rural location.

In trying to identify what this might have been, the closest I have come is that activities were taking place which I have seen in the context of a program like Time Team. Something for participants in the principal activity won the opportunity to film or some ritual reenactment or some kind of ancient manufacturing process, but the most important aspect of this dream was that the choice of film material used was to be something fly blown, which I can only assume must meant timelapse photography.

But it is Interesting. here to think about other interpretations of this, so that the filming process involves watching something taking shape in the same way that for example you might watch the entire life-cycle of insects.

I can only think that having this dream may have been the result of having recently read the Dan Brown novel Deception Point, a principal part of which is concerned with the falsification of the origin of a meteorite discovered locked in Arctic ice.

This would account for an interest in passing with meteorites, although it says nothing about the other part of the dream.

Because I am severely disabled because of multiple sclerosis, I am always keen to appreciate that my brain is still functioning in some way, however strange. I am always reminded of the scene in the Matrix film, where near Neo is first told how the matrix works.

A battery is held up as an example of what the machine world is doing by exploiting the capacity of human development simply to produce electricity.

I take it for granted that the human nervous system is not fully understood, and that as long as I am still producing animal electricity, and because the brain has the capacity to find new ways of making connections in the body even if nerves of themselves cannot be repaired this plasticity of the overall system, giving me some hope that my brain might one day find those collections which are currently blocked by the sclerotic nature of the condition.

If nothing else, this is a demonstration of hope in the face of adversity. Never give up, never surrender.

Annonymity Even in The Information Age

We have become so accustomed to having information at our fingertips.

It is sobering sometimes to come across something elusive, and one such elusive thing has come to my attention recently.

We are of course that a critical point in remembering those that have fallen in conflicts across the 20th century.

There has been much moving coverage across the BBC capturing perhaps before lost in the mists of time first-hand accounts of those that have exhibited extraordinary bravery during the second world war, a conflict which is so nearly slipping into obscurity as those with personal experience begin to reach an age that prevents them from participation in person, Leaving only recollections for future generations.

It is important to remember, and although it is quite possible for the argument to be put forward that it is wrong to glamorise that sense of sacrifice. It is equally the case that we must never forget the importance of taking a stand against what is both brutal and at times offensive.

Although my father died many years ago, the fact that he served in the Armed Forces remains with me as a memory even though only second-hand. At one remove from personal experience.

I have on the wall of my bedroom, visible from my electric bed, the recruiting poster that remains perhaps one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.

I Cannot imagine that anyone the world over will not at some point have seen this image, that of Lord Kitchener facing straight to the onlooker and exclaiming that Your Country Needs You.

There are few images which can claim to have been so successful, if that is the term to use, in capturing the spirit of a time.

The poster that I have framed was given to me by one of my carers recently, having been a special giveaway with a Sunday newspaper at some point in the recent past.

It is a striking image, and I have it framed in front of me for several reasons.

One of them is simply as a reminder of so much of what is being remembered at the moment, but there is another very personal reason why it is important to me at the moment.

This is simply that Lord Kitchener possesses a stupendous moustache, very much a reminder of the kind of facial hair that was common at the time.

I have recently grown moustache of my own, which I use moustache wax for, and of which I am particularly proud.

Perhaps it is simply that when you have a red car, you see red cars everywhere.

I have begun to notice that there is an increasing fashion for extravagant facial hair such as was more common in the early part of the 20th century.

I was recently delighted to discover that thanks to the Internet, it was quite straightforward for me to find the source of moustache wax, a product which might be considered to be of interest only to a very small minority.

One interesting consequence of having this poster regularly in my vision is that I have noted the name of the artist that creates is the original poster image.

His name is Alfred Leete, and what I was surprised to discover was the fact that it seemed impossible to discover anything meaningful about this artists work.

Beyond the fact that the first appearance of the image came about in an obscure local newspaper, I have discovered nothing about the artist whatsoever.

This is something that I find so surprising given the times in which we live that I have felt it worthwhile to raise it.

It is strangely satisfying to discover something unknowable.

We are so used to being able to access information instantly, that it is quite remarkable that something so iconic should be so shrouded in anonymity.

The Warp and Weft of History

It’s not so much that I am obsessed with celebrity, and I have no illusions about my own sense of impact on history.

But I am fascinated at observing the way in which I can perceive the threads of connection between people and places.

There is great comfort to be had from a sense that I have been wrapped in these threads, and though it is clearly the case that we are all in some way connected to these threads and by these threads to everything, it is not necessarily the case that we are aware of those threads that bind us.

I suppose this particular blog is partly my reminiscing about the way in which I have been fortunate to have uncovered and become aware of some of these threads, and partly a means of finding some sense of meaning that I have gained from the whole process.

If I ever try to name drop about some of the people that I have met or worked with, more often than not other people do not know who I am talking about.

This only amuses me is, and perhaps underlines the fact that I have spent my life in a rarefied not to say mysterious world.

But it has been a world nevertheless connected to so many things.

This morning, as I was beginning to contemplate what I might write about, one of my starting points was to think of a title, such as why Les Miserables is such a favourite of mine.

Most recently, I am meaning the 25th anniversary film that Cameron Mackintosh commissioned to celebrate this important anniversary of his stage adaptation.

I did once see the staged adaptation, and it may have been in the 1980s, since I remember attending with my wife. Or at least the woman that was to become my wife.

I saw it at the Prince Edward Theatre on Drury Lane in theatre land.

When I was at university I lived only 30 minutes walk or so from Drury Lane, when I lived in Gower Street as a student. I was a student at University College London, the godless college in Gower Street.

Strangely enough, it was from an old-fashioned theatrical costumier close  to here that I first obtained moustache wax, when in my early 20s I first attempted to grow a relaxed moustache.

I have only one photograph from that time, the identity photograph from my London tube ticket.

I am currently attempting my second waxed moustache, and after much stress about whether or not I would be able to find another supplier for moustache wax, I searched on Amazon and was amazed at how many suppliers there were to be found.

This is an extraordinary reminder of how times have changed. It would have been unfixable in the early 1980s to use the Internet to shop for this kind of product, and yet today we can almost take it for granted.

I was even able to get some tips on how to wax my moustache from YouTube. Another unthinkable thing.

And of course having thought of Les Miserables, I made the connection with syndicalism.

Perhaps not everyone might have made this collection, but since my first working years were spent building a cooperative business, for me the link from those last scenes in the film where idealistic young men are talking about the blood of angry men and black, the colour of ages past.

Black and red are the colours of the anarchist flag.

Although I would not consider myself an anarchist, I would consider myself a syndicalist. And the two have a great deal in common.

Much of the Basque region in Spain has been the focus of significant industrial co-operatives, and I once owned a washing machine manufactured in one such business.

Working in eight co-operatives context has been an important part of my early experience, and indeed made me aware of some significant historical threads.

So for example the premises within which we operated a conference centre providing residential facilities for up to 40 people were provided to us at a peppercorn rent by a Christian socialist named Tom Lupton whose family had owned the Beechwood estate since Victorian times.

They had been manufacturers of fine woollen carriage cloth, and this substantial estate on the edge of Leeds was where they lived, in fairly grand style.

Examples of their cloth had been exhibited at the great exhibition in 1851.

Tom Lupton trained as an architect, and became a manufacturer of furniture. He eventually sold his furniture business to Terence Conran when that entrepreneur was building the Habitat empire, and since he lived in Oxfordshire he had no use for the Beechwood estate that he inherited from two spinster aunts in 1972.

As a Christian socialist, Tom Lupton was motivated to ensure that this resource was made available to pursue objectives that he had some belief in.

And so I became aware of the way in which Christian Socialists like him have had an important influence in the UK.

For example, the Scott Bader Commonwealth, located I believe somewhere close to Middlesbrough, is a chemical factory making injection moulding chemicals. The owner of the factory, Scott Bader, gave the entire factory to his workforce, in perpetuity, in the 1950s.

It is one of few examples of industrial cooperation in the UK, where co-operatives have tended to be consumer co-operatives.

Later, when I was working as the education officer for Opera North in Leeds, I became involved in a project to help the co-operative movement celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Rochdale Pioneers.

This took place at a national centre owned by the co-operative movement nationally, located in Staffordshire.

Strange how threads can link up on themselves, and I found myself in a unique position to appreciate what I was helping to celebrate by virtue of my own history.

It was whilst working at Opera North that I had the opportunity to meet and work with an extraordinary range of creative people, broadening my own horizons substantially.

Opera was not an art form that I had ever previously experienced, but for five years, I had the opportunity to see as many shows as I could, and never had to pay a thing.

I even had the opportunity to see work at other opera houses, including Glyndebourne and English National Opera, since the education officers at all of these institutions formed a small but unique network.

Thus I got to go to Glyndebourne twice, and though I did not possess a dinner suit, working for Opera North meant that I was able to be kitted out with a very fine dinner suit thanks to the wardrobe department.

And so it is that I have met many of the most important composers working in the 20th century, often only at those kind of drinks parties that take place when a production opens.

But nevertheless, to someone like myself interested in those threads of history, I have had a field day.

I met Sir Michael Tippett during the opera lost production of his last opera, New Year.

He was in his 90s and almost blind, but still composing.

As a conscientious objector, he was imprisoned for his beliefs during the Second World War.

Later, working as the development director for the Scottish chamber Orchestra, I would work closely with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, master of the Queens music, organising his international young composers course on his island home of Orkney.

And so in the course of my work, I have had dinner with the likes of Arnold Wesker, at the Cheltenham Festival, and gave Sophie Dahl her acting debut in Goldilocks and the three Bears.

When I tell people that I have had dinner with Sophie Dahl I usually omit to mention that another dozen people were at the table with us, including her mother.

But that is the nature of personal experience, you can choose what you wish to include in any anecdotes.

Where I now live in Worthing in West Sussex is just across the road from the Queen Alexandra Hospital home for soldiers, and every year this important place has an open day.

I have met Dame Vera Lynn at the open day twice now, and because I included a short story about meeting with her at the hospital, in a special edition of my first collection of poems, a copy of this collection has been included in the local history collection of West Sussex county council, where it is rubbing shoulders with works by Shelley, Balzac, and Kipling.

I must have no illusions about the reason for my poems being included in this prestigious selection, it is the importance of the hospital and of its connection with Dame Vera Lynn, but it is nice to be thus included.