Not everything is going to the dogs: a cheerful Christmas post

It's nearly Christmas and therefore time for a bit of goodwill.

Like everyone who is broadly sane, I've noticed that some things are going pretty badly in this country. But that makes it all the more important to identify the things that are going well. In my own, Eeyore-ish way, I try to do that from time to time, whether it's good writing for children or goodish writing for adults (but not, I think, writing for people who fall in the middle). So here's another one - and it's seasonal: choral music.

I went to Temple Church a couple of weeks ago for the last concert in their Winter Festival. It was the choir of Merton College, Oxford, together with François Cloete on the organ. Here's the programme.

A couple of things to note. 

First, it was lovely - simply a very pleasant auditory experience. The performance of the Panufnik Sleep, little Jesus, sleep was the best I've heard: I find that recordings tend to emphasise the soloist's voice too much and that can jar against the sound of the choir, whereas the Merton choir did it with better balance. Chacun a son goût, of course, but I'm not alone in thinking that the choir is pretty good. The most challenging piece at Temple Church was probably the Dupré one, on the organ, which to English ears sounded like virtuoso variations on a slightly wrong version of "Now the Green Blade Riseth", but even that was really quite fun.

Second, did you notice how many of those composers are modern and British? Have another look at the list and perhaps Google a name if you don't recognise it. Sir James Macmillan, Dame Judith Weir and Roxana Panufnik are all still with us, while Jonathan Harvey died not that long ago (2012) and John Joubert even more recently (2019). And yet, it was all very lovely music. 

That in itself is very encouraging. But there's more! Cheryl Frances-Hoad (with whom Merton College Choir has also been associated) is also with us and if you don't take to her music then perhaps you will enjoy that of Rebecca Dale. You might well recall that there was plenty of new music composed for the Coronation too, for example Paul Mealor's Coronation Kyrie sung by Sir Bryn Terfel (in Welsh). And those are just the examples that come to my mind - there are bound to be even more.

In short, the modern age has produced a good list of composers - within the UK - who can write very appealing music. That is really very good news.  

It's also instructive to look at the history of Merton College Choir. The college itself is a notably ancient one, but its choir is not and was founded only in 2008. It's also distinctive in another way: girl choristers. As their website puts it, "In 2016 Merton College became the first College in Oxford University to admit girls into its Choral Foundation ... 24 girl choristers ... specialist musical training from the College’s professional musicians, they sing Choral Vespers ... and Choral Evensong .... In addition, the choristers undertake a number of concerts and other activities each year, including performing in the Passiontide at Merton festival and touring over the summer." In my view, that's a rather charming way of expanding and building on the wonderful choral traditions of the country as a whole and of our oldest universities in particular: rather than stopping anyone training boy choristers or altering the sound of established choirs, Merton decided to do its own thing. No woke nonsense - no virtue signalling - just a serious expansion of the options open to girls and women to participate in one of this country's best features.

So there you are. You may think that this is the bleak midwinter, but remember that there are always reasons for hope. Which neatly brings us back to Christmas. Best wishes of the season to all my hopeful readers!

Observations on Conversations with Friends - more on Sally Rooney

I wrote previously about Sally Rooney's Normal People (NP). It's fair to say that I was not especially impressed. But I have now read Conversations with Friends (CWF) and doing so has changed my thinking about NP. It's not that I am any more impressed with NP than I was, but I have a better understanding of what NP was trying to do and why it was so well-received.

Below the break I set out, first, what is good about CWF (especially compared to NP), then a couple of caveats and, finally, why I think NP got much higher praise than it deserved.

Japan (part III): the stuff that Twitter loves - babies, YIMBYism and religion

Enough of musing about holidays! It's time for Issues with a capital I. Let's take it away with the big 3 favourites of Twitter (by which I mean X and all its imitators): babies, YIMBYism and religion. 

I repeat that I don't pretend to understand Japan: all I intend to do below is to set out some relevant observations on these topics. I leave both the explanations and the lessons to be learned for more qualified people. 

Japan (part II): the sights

I started this series of posts by describing the experience of being in Japan. One reason I did so is because that experience is one of the highlights of visiting Japan. More fundamentally, in this post I will suggest that you need to consider the sights of Japan as a whole in experiential terms. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that "sights" - meaning, things that are to be seen - is the wrong word and "gestalt experiences" would be a better phrase, but this post is already sufficiently pretentious. Time for a break.

Japan (part I): Being in Japan

I have recently returned from a trip to Japan. Just as when I went to Korea, I have come back convinced that I am now the fount of all wisdom about the country. But rather than give you the full "Mysteries of the Land of the Rising Sun"-style thinkpiece, laden with gnomic quotations from Bashō, I will instead provide some helpful and accurate observations about Japan today, and I will do so over the course of a number of posts. (A full set of profound insights is of course available on request through the usual channels.)

I will start with this post, in which I try to give an explanation of what it is like to be in Japan. Subsequent posts will address other topics of interest to people thinking of travelling to Japan or simply interested in the normal topics of this blog.

TL;DR - you should visit Japan. You should visit it now.

On being frozen in time - and on looking forward

The end of a living thing has the effect of bringing equality to every moment in its life. Let me try to explain what I mean.

Think of one of those long prestige TV series. What is it? It is what it is right now: right at this point, series 7 episode 4 or whatever. But, when it ends, no moment within its life is privileged in this way. You might prefer this series or consider its peak to be that episode. But each one of these, for better or worse, is equally what it - the series itself - is.

Or, more seriously, think of a human life. You might have seen someone growing older, weaker, dying. Who are they? What is their condition? An old, weak, dying person, sadly. But after their death, their whole life is equally who they are (or were, if you prefer - it makes no difference to my point). Perhaps you have been to a funeral or memorial service with an order of service adorned by photographs of a much younger, healthier and happier person than the one you knew. And rightly so. That person - the one in their pomp and their prime - is the one you are remembering too.

More significant than even the most CGI'd American TV series, but much less important than a human life, we are, it seems, coming to the end of a government. (Yes, pedants, I know that Parliament has already been dissolved. You know what I mean.) When it has been finally dispatched, it will immediately acquire that quality of temporal indifference that both your great great aunt and Game of Thrones have: there is no "now" to take precedence over the other moments of its existence; it's up to you what you remember of it; and perhaps it's up to history to decide what part of it matters.

The government that is to come will one day have that quality too. It will one day be over and frozen in time. No life - no TV series, even - consists of nothing but high points, and I doubt that anyone claim that either this government is the exception or that the next one will be. But I think all people of goodwill can hope there will be some good episodes to replay, some joyful photos for the albums, for us to take from what is to come.

How to get better MPs; or Why things were better in the past

You have, I am sure, heard the plaintive cries: politicians nowadays - a bunch of pygmies! Useless, drab, uninspiring, hopeless! How we can get better MPs? 

The problem seems to be this: there are plenty of MP-adjacent people (spads, for example, and various public policy sorts) who are bright and able, and generally interested in the job, but the job itself looks so off-putting that they don't go for it. How can we change that? 

This old chestnut came up recently on an online platform (not Twitter, but let's say Twitter). There was some talk about pay, but a couple of intelligent people pointed out that the bigger issues are matters such as losing your job overnight or being less employable after doing it.

Now, we need to be clear that, in a functioning democracy, there must always be the possibility of going overnight from running the country to being essentially a nobody. That's a feature, not a bug. But it's a fair point that being removed from power should not mean personal disaster, and it's also true that if the job requires people to accept the risk of personal disaster then it will (a) attract some pretty odd people and (b) incentivise them to do some pretty odd things once they get power (for fear of that very disaster).

Were MPs better in the past? I don't know. But it seems to me that there were a variety of features of political life in place a generation or so ago (now, I'm afraid, routinely roundly despised) that mitigated these worries about personal disaster. If MPs were better, perhaps these are some of the reasons why. Let me take you through them (below the break).