Death Is Without Scruples

I was reminded this morning of the early death of Anthony Minghella.

That he died so young, at the age of just 54, is one of many tragic early deaths.

The reminder this morning was my receipt of the latest brochure advertising the forthcoming season at English National Opera.

Just a few weeks before his sudden death, I saw his production of Madame Butterfly when it was first staged at English National Opera, which must have been in 2006.

This was not the last opera I was to see at ENO, last year (2012) I saw a matinee performance of The Magic Flute.

The journey has become quite difficult for me as I have become increasingly disabled, although perhaps I should be grateful that death has not become a shadow on my horizon.

It is a fortunate fact that multiple sclerosis does not necessarily mean a shortening of lifespan, although it certainly does mean a change to what is possible.

Anthony Minghella first came to my attention when I heard an early radio play, entitled Cigarettes And Chocolate.

I still remember this, many years after I first heard it, and although I believe it has been repeated on the radio (Radio 3) I cannot remember when I first heard it, nor when it was repeated.

Like his films and indeed his opera, his work has been memorable in so many ways.

Films such as Truly Madly Deeply, and The English Patient.

I believe he was also responsible for the screenplay adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley, and for directing the television film version of the No1 one Ladies Detective Agency, broadcast by the BBC shortly after his untimely death.

I am always moved to remember people whose lives I feel have in some small way been entwined in my own, although in truth with Anthony Minghella the connection is slight and vague.

My friend Richard is on the music staff at ENO, and he was the pianist for rehearsals that led to casting for the original production.

Also, the writer of the original No1 Ladies Detective Agency story, Alexander McCall Smith, is someone with whom I have worked when I worked in Edinburgh for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

As the orchestras’ Development Director, I arranged for players from the orchestra to work alongside the music ensemble that the author was then involved with, as a parent who had begun to play an instrument many years after first having been taught when at school.

The ensemble was called the Really Terrible Orchestra, the RTO, and gave much fun to the children and their friends of those adults that played in it.

It was long before Alexander McCall Smith became a successful writer, and was able to give up his day job as the Prof of Medical Ethics at Edinburgh University.

I felt very privileged to have been involved with such highly skilled musicians whom I could provide opportunities for community engagement with, and I understand that after I had left the orchestra, Alexander McCall Smith has been invited to be the narrator of Peter And The Wolf.

It is a selfish pursuit, to observe the lives and deaths of those that when I was physically active I had some cause to cross paths with.

But it is one of the ways in which I console myself that I have lived a life beyond the world in which I now live.

My life is by no means over, and for that I am grateful.

Indeed, the limitations to my present life have perhaps sharpened my appetite for experiences that remind me of the sweetness of life, as opposed to the bitterness that could so easily be the choice of what tastes I still have.

What An Extraordinary Imagination

I have a collection of over 500 films, recorded using a digital hard drive recorder.

I used to keep my collection of films on DVD, but more recently, I have discovered that I can copy films recorded from broadcast onto a large external hard drive on my computer, thus saving me the space that so many DVDs take up. And indeed the cost of so many recordable DVDs.

Just recently, I have recorded a broadcast version of Minority Report.

This is an interesting vision of the future, and perhaps what is most interesting about it is that it was based on a short story by the American writer, Philip K Dick.

Other film fans may well recognise the name, for this writer has been behind some of the most iconic films of the last 20 years.

Although long dead,  Philip K Dick was also the writer behind Blade Runner, which many people may recognize this  as one of the most important films about the future, and a fairly  early film for Harrison Ford.

In Minority Report, the future imagined is one in which murder can be predicted by a number of extraordinary individuals, called Pre-Cognitives.

Blade Runner is of course about a future in which powerful humans are cloned for the kind of dangerous work that it would not be possible for straightforward humans to undertake, and a Blade Runner is somebody whose job is to ensure that these extraordinary human creatures do not ever come to Earth.

Their elimination is described as “Retirement”, and Harrison Ford is one such policeman.

It is quite amazing that so many incredible stories came from the imagination of one American writer, but they did.

I suspect there may be other stories that I have yet to discover have their origins in this man’s imagination, and it is truly astonishing that one person. Being able to have such insight into the possible future.

Of course, Philip K Dick is not alone in possessing this skill of imagining an extraordinary future.

I suppose what is interesting is that his work should have become translated as it has to the world of modern cinema, in which so much more is achievable by virtue of computer generated images.

CGI is in itself a quite spectacular means of making tangible what can only be imagined, and films can be made today that it would have been impossible to contemplate making at any other time in the history of cinema.

Perhaps as a consequence of this blog article, I shall research the work of Philip K Dick a little more carefully, just to see if there are other stories of his that I ought to know about.

Life Planning

I have been plagued recently by unsolicited telephone calls.

Mostly sales calls, trying to sell me something that I do not need, particularly as I am severely disabled.

In some respects, this is one of those infringements of personal space that are so much a reflection of the freedom that we are so proud of.

But on the other, they are simply an example of companies trying to make sales in difficult circumstances.

I feel for the poor salesman that no doubt often work on commission, that are given "leads" to follow, and their monthly pay cheque will be a reflection of their capacity to obtain sales, or to at least gain the opportunity for a sales person specially trained to obtain access for a face-to-face meeting.

Which no doubt will result in the unsuspecting householder buying something they do not need, perhaps because of the way in which the salesperson has been so thoroughly trained.

I almost fell prey to this myself recently, when somebody was trying to arrange for somebody to call concerning life planning.

On the surface, this seems to make perfect sense. In effect, to pay for one's funeral at today's prices, through an insurance policy that will preserve whatever estate one has for the benefit of one's family.

The carrot in this case, was assistance in completing one's will.

It just so happens that I am considering updating my will, and I almost fell prey to the notion of having someone visit to explain the benefits of this to me.

Having read the leaflet I subsequently obtained, I realised quite quickly that although it was difficult to find logical Fault with what was proposed, this was not something that I need worry myself with especially given my limited income.

It is a simple truth that when I am dead, the last thing that I should be concerned with is the cost of my funeral.

And so I have cancelled this potential meeting, but nevertheless, I have been made to think about this notion of life planning. Meaning, what after my death.

Now the only significant aspect of positive thinking that can be derived from considering this issue is that notion of the bucket list. What do I wish to achieve before I kick the bucket.

Quite simply, all of us could profit enormously from a greater focus on making good use of the time we have.

We have a saying in English, and possibly it will translate to most other languages, that they are only two certainties. Death and taxes.

My days of considering those things that I might wish to achieve that involve travel or spending money are long gone, and in some respects I do not - I cannot - afford to regret this fact.

But I can and I am acting on my deep held ambitions to leave something of my self to those that outlive me.

For anyone that has my blog over the last year or so, she will be aware that I have published two volumes of poetry, and though I still write, using voice activated software, I have recently decided that it is prose and not poetry for which I wish to be remembered.

I wrote my first novel when I was around 30, and I have never sent it to anyone for appraisal in any way.

But recently, at the age of 52, I have dusted it off, and read it over, and decided that it is after all not that bad. For a first try.

And so I have shown it to one of my carers, who is an avid reader, and she has agreed with me. That with careful editing, it will make something worthwhile.

And since the world of publishing has changed so much in the last 10 years, there is not the same stigma associated with self publishing.

And so for the last three months or so I have been working doggedly on my second novel, sacred places. The first four chapters of which I published in my collection of short stories a couple of years ago.

And I have already written a detailed synopsis of a third novel, which I will not look at again until I have completed the second.

And so, every day I write 500 words, which using voice-activated software does not take too long.

And as I have become accustomed to using this assistive technology, I can claim that it allows my prose to follow the natural rhythms of speech, which is no bad thing.

And so, I am working hard to complete this challenge to myself. Can I write these other two novels, in such a way as to be readable and of interest to the general public?

The simple truth is, no one will know unless I complete my task.

It is perhaps unusual for a writer to turn to prose after poetry, perhaps the example I immediately think of is of the novelist that wrote far from the madding crowd, Thomas Hardy. Who in his later life, wrote beautiful poetry which is often sought more highly of that his novels.

But for me, the choice is made. I wish to be remembered as a novelist, not as a poet.

Only history will speak for truth.

The Woman I Would Save

It is always an interesting question, what object would you save if you had to exit your home quickly because it was burning down.

For me, this is particularly interesting, as I am severely disabled, and getting myself out would be an interesting challenge.

If I were in bed, I would be able to contact the emergency services through the panic button that I have attached to my wrist.

This would enable me to call either emergency services, or my first named contact, which is a carer that lives just a few minutes from where I live.

So it is a difficult question without a straightforward answer, however, for the sake of answering the intended nature of the question, I would reach for a photograph that hangs in my kitchen.

I do not know the person in the photograph, but I have in some strange way adopted her, as a kind of honorary family member.

It is not that I do not care to keep photographs of my closest family, far from it.

Although I do not have that many photographs, as my sister is rather camera shy, and my elderly mother is equally camera shy these days, far too concerned that she cannot appear as glamorous as once she did.

She is after all in her 90s, and I remember how embarrassed she was when she once confessed to me that she could remember as a young child of about 13 queueing to see the first ever talking film.

As she lived most of her young life in the east end of London, this may well have been in the early Thirties, rather than when the film was first released in 1927.

My mother was born in 1919, and this was very much a confession, of which she was rather embarrassed because it revealed her age.

I on the other hand felt quite privileged to have had this fact shared with me, and it is one of those extraordinary reminders that elderly relatives can provide an almost direct link across vast stretches of time.

The photograph that I would save was purchased by me some years ago, when I lived in Glasgow. My then partner and I lived close to a regular auction house, and every fortnight and auction would take place which always included many small items that had probably simply been cleared from the homes of the recently deceased.

This particular photograph has always intrigued me, and I have often referred to her as my enigmatic woman.

It is a studio photograph from perhaps the 1920s, and it is of a relatively young woman, perhaps in her 20s. She is wearing a fur stole, glasses, and is clearly well to do and perhaps unafraid for a studio photograph to show that she wears glasses.

Perhaps hinting that she is proclaiming that she is an intelligent woman, unafraid to be seen with something that hides her face to a limited extent.

Although the spectacles are those kind of glasses that do not have solid frames, and are therefore obscuring less of her face than might otherwise be the case.

So why the importance of this photograph to me?

This is difficult to give a direct answer to, quite simply she is someone that I have felt an interest in over the years, and there are questions that I would love to have answered as to whom she may be.

The only clue has been the frame within which the photograph is mounted.

I had hoped that their would be a name of some kind pencilled into the cardboard frame, but there is not.

However, there is a clue to her identity from the name of the photographic studio that took this studio portrait.

It was taken at the Lafayette Studio, and a small amount of Internet research enabled me to identify quite quickly a little about this company.

And this has only served to increase the enigmatic nature of the person captured in the photograph.

The studio had branches in Dublin, London, and Glasgow. It was founded in the 1860s, and finally closed in the 1960s.

It seems that the great majority of the glass plate negatives from the studio in London were saved by the fact that some rock musician in the late 60s observed that they were simply about to be trashed, when the Studio closed and everything was being cleared away.

He had the connections and foresight to ensure that the glass plate negatives were temporarily stored at the Pinewood Studios, which presumably had the space for such a speculative set of objects to be stored. They must after all have taken up quite a lot of space.

It seems that the Victoria and Albert Museum quickly became very interested in what the pictures in the collection represented, because it seems that the studio were well known for having photographed the wealthiest people of just about every year between the studios opening in the 1860s through to the 1960s.

And thus the overall collection represents a fascinating insight into fashion for this entire period, specifically for the fashions of the well heeled, and indeed many of the photographs proved to be of the crowned heads of not just European royal houses, but also Royal families or their equivalent from every corner of the British Empire.

And one of the very interesting collections within the collection is of a fancy dress weekend held at the seat of the Duke of Devonshire, Chatsworth, one of the most magnificent country houses in England, and the guest list represents an extraordinary social selection of the great and good. All photographed by the Studio, who had clearly been required to send a photographer to catalogue this extraordinary event that took place in about 1910.

My curiosity about whom this woman might have been, was of course raised enormously by this discovery. And many of the photographs in this extraordinary collection can in fact be seen online on the website of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

This meant that I have been able to send a copy of my photograph to the specialist curator at the museum, and in fact we exchanged a couple of e-mails.  He had not seen this particular photographs at all before, and had no idea of whom it might be.

But he agreed with me about my suggestion that it was from the 1920s.

And no doubt as an expert in fashion and costume across this span of time, he must be right.

So, I was no closer to identifying my enigmatic woman, but her enigmatic qualities have only been enhanced.

I don’t think I can have paid more than about £16 for the photograph, but it is one of those found objects whose value to me is irrelevant to its financial value, it is simply something worth keeping.

As indeed were the rest of the contents of the studio stock when it was simply destined to be thrown out as rubbish.

Shock And Awe At The Wonders Of Life

Professor Brian Cox is a particle physicist.

He has a tendency to emphasise the way in which everything adheres to the basic laws of physics.

In a new BBC documentary series that he has been hosting on BBC1, he has been leading viewers through an extraordinary perspective on the way in which life may have originated on this particular planet.

He is fascinated by chemistry, and the way it which chemicals work. And he has a facility to be able to explain complex chemical facts in a way that can be understood by the lay man.

You should try to see this series if you can, as it will be available on the BBC’s play again system for at least a couple of weeks. It is worth it.

Step by step, he explores the wondrous variety of life on Earth, and in the process he explains the circumstances required to enable chemical reactions to have taken place so that it happened almost spontaneously.

But this does not remove from the equation a sense of wonder at the circumstances in which so many things have conspired together to make life possible.

Constantly, he reaches the conclusion that this planet is quite possibly the only one that we will ever have knowledge of as having all of the factors necessary in which life became possible.

It is as if the crucible of the Earth were constructed uniquely to be a vehicle for life, in all of its variety and wonder.

He spends much time looking at the question of water, and exploring the nature of water as a compound. It seems to have been perhaps the single most important requirement for life to develop.

And in the context of this particular planet in this particular solar system, he talks about his theories as to how the circumstances in which life might have developed may have come about.

There is always a sense of awe involved, and quite a few shocks along the way.

Such as the idea that a most of the Earth’s water may have in fact arrived through a collision with a comet or an asteroid that was composed primarily of water.

So that at a time when the earth was sufficiently cool, water arrived in a sudden and extraordinary cosmic event.

It seems that planetary bodies have been observed that do emit the kind of tails that indicate the presence of water commonly enough for this theory to be a reality.

And he goes on to explain the detailed chemical properties of water that make it an ideal medium within which for certain long chain molecules to have been created.

It seems that all of the carbon required for such chemicals to be created must have come from stars, where carbon would have originated, in the fusion furnace of stars.

And so we have a vision of a chemistry set at a planetary scale, in which so many factors have to be present.

But once the complex double helix of DNA is created, it seems that there is no stopping life evolving into all of its diverse forms.

It is quite simply a self replicating chemical that can be affected by ultraviolet light so that it is vulnerable to change, or development, and of course because it is passed from generation to generation of whatever life it results in, then natural selection takes place, so that it is the successful alterations that survive.

What is extraordinary about the programme is that it encourages a sense of wonder at life in all of its diversity, whilst at the same time referring always back to the basic laws of physics to provide a reference from which everything must adhere.

It does not remove a sense of awe from the majesty of life, even though it makes it clear that in the right circumstances, which may indeed be unique on this one plant, it can come about almost spontaneously.

Given water and it few billion years of stability to process everything.

It makes it quite clear that sun has been a vital component in this mix, but also that it is a double edged sword.

Whilst it provides the essential energy for most of the chemical reactions needed, it is also capable of destruction through the dangerous ultraviolet emissions, particularly when it was young.

Strange concept that, that our Sun was once young, young and dangerous.

But then most of the concepts in this programme are complex and if not controversial, then certainly surprising.

Be Wary In The Information Age

I am embarrassed.

There is no other way of putting it, I have made an unfortunate blunder.

Hopefully, nobody has been hurt by my mistake, and I have certainly learned something from it.

Perhaps it is a common mistake when we are presented with so much information at our fingertips.

Put simply, we must learn to distinguish fact from that which we are seeking.

This phenomenon is not new. It has even been given, incorrectly I believe, a name in a recent Hollywood film.

The da Vinci Code, and it was used to describe the facility that we have to see what we wish to see. Or what we are looking for.

In that film it was called schotoma, which is more accurately defined as the capacity our eyes possess for seeing what we wish to see.

My understanding of it is that we have a blind spot at the back of each of our eyes, where the optic nerve goes from the eye to the brain.

But none of us has an obvious part of our vision that is simply blank, although it is possible to discover this blank spot by simply moving something visible across our eyes until it disappears briefly.

In other words, millions of years of evolution have made it helpful for the brain to be able to fill in this gap in our vision, so that we appear to be able to see continuously.

How this blind spot has recently confused me is in the creation of my most recent blog entry, when I mistakenly believed that I had discovered from an online newspaper story that there had been a recent earthquake in Italy, frankly because I didn’t read the information on my computer screen correctly.

What I had done is found the article published in 1997 about the earthquake that badly affected Assisi and northern Italy more generally, but I had failed to appreciate that this was in fact an article written in 1997, mainly because at the top of the page, quite naturally, the online newspaper published yesterday’s date.

The date of the article, written in 1997, was in smaller type further down the page.

Because I had been undertaking research for my current writing project, sacred places, I had failed to appreciate this fact, and I believed briefly, that in fact there had been an earthquake in northern Italy on 7 February.

In some respects, this was entirely because if there had been such an event, it would have suited the purposes of my story perfectly.

It was a case of seeing what I wanted to see, because I had not checked carefully what precisely the article in fact reported.

Fortunately, I did that this morning, and so I can publish my sense of embarrassment, and talk about what I have learned from my failure to read fully and properly what I had taken for granted when my Internet search revealed something useful for me.

This is a useful lesson for anyone using the Internet regularly for research, and I am sure that everybody can give examples of where they have read something that they have interpreted as fact without questioning whether it is in fact fact at all.

There is no doubt that the Internet and the information age is a great boon to all of us that have access to it, but it is important to realise that it is easy to be misled, and not only by the actual content of an article, but by failing to appreciate its true context.

Hopefully I will not make the same mistake again. In terms of my characters about to visit the town of Assisi in Umbria, I may well use this experience creatively, perhaps making my central character experience a realistic dream that matches with what I briefly thought was the case.

Who knows. This is the nature of creative writing, it is up to the reader to be careful to always judge whether they are reading something that is truthful or indeed designed to mislead.

The only positive thing that I can rescue from my embarrassment he is what I have learned about how gullible I can be, and I will certainly be more alert to the genuine context of what I am reading in future.

Perhaps my last words in this article should be an apology to anyone that has read my previous blog article, and even for a moment, believed that it may have been true.

It wasn’t, it was my mistake. I was wrong. And I am embarrassed by it, even though it may well serve a useful creative purpose in the end.

Art Reflects Life......

It’s not my fault. Honest.

This morning is 7 February, and I have been awake since just after 4 AM, engaged in my latest writing project.

It’s just a couple of weeks since I decided I would complete my novel, Sacred Places, which I began a couple of years ago. Since more recently completing my first novel, Bela, which had lain 95% complete for almost 20 years, I had finally recently got down to the work of finishing it. It is just at this moment with one of my carers, an inveterate reader, for final corrections and proofing.

And so I have decided recently that I want to be a novelist.

Everybody, so they say, has a book in them. Few have the time needed to write it.

When I wrote my first novel, I was single and able to be sufficiently selfish so that I could get up at six every morning, write for a couple of hours, before going to work and then editing what I had written that morning in the evening.

I did this six days a week for the best part of a year.

For my second novel, I have set myself the task of writing 500 words a day six days a week, so that my average should be about 3000 words a week.

By my reckoning, this should mean about 150,000 words in the course of a year.

That is the kind of selfishness that novel writing requires.

Although of course you can do university writing courses and so forth, I don’t believe there is any magical formula for writing a novel. It just requires the kind of obsessiveness I have described above.

My opening denial stems from the fact that this morning, from about 4 AM, I have been writing about my character Tom visiting Assisi with his girlfriend Kitty, as part of a tour of Umbria, in a sideways connected section of my novel. Assisi, of course, is an important sacred place, and I had known about the earthquake of 1997, which had prompted me to take my characters there.

Imagine my chagrin when this morning, having completed my daily regimen of words, I thought to check on the earlier earthquake by a simple Google search.

Straightaway to discover that this morning’s Independent newspaper front page has the news of a more recent earthquake, from yesterday morning. Six on the Richter scale.

And the entire basilica of St Francis, with its important Giotto frescoes, has been destroyed.

Needless to say, I feel responsible. Who wouldn’t.

But of course it’s only a coincidence, I tell myself. But what a coincidence. I am beginning to wonder if I should be much more careful about the subjects for my future chapters, and I will certainly keep an eye on the press, just in case I seem suddenly to have become the cause of what I write about actually happening.

Now there is a story for a Hollywood movie, but one of course that nobody would believe.

Have sympathy for me, please, as I feel so responsible for the destruction of those magnificent frescoes.