RANDOM SNIPPETS - No 4 - Battles With Oneself

In films today, when they show us a medieval battle scene, you see vast phalanxes of archers launching arrows into the air. Hundreds and hundreds of them fall upon the enemy lines in a lethal thunderstorm. This bares a similarity with how our mind operates. Hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second, assaulting ourselves with damaging self limiting thoughts, created by our mind. Constantly besieged by self generated attacks upon who or what we think we are. 

This is how the story we tell ourselves about ourselves can become such a debilitating thing. It swamps us, assaults us, unrelentingly all the time. Raining down at times, so intensely, we have to find some way of seeking shelter or relief from it. That's why we crave pleasure and distraction so much, to bring us some temporary relief from all the penetrating arrows of self-criticism, self-justifications, self-lacerating, self-imprisoning thoughts. 

There is an internal war going on, one which we tell ourselves we are constantly losing. We can end up feeling so embattled, so involved with just dealing with it, we never have the time to question what exactly is going on here, why can't we ever find any peace? Why is it we feel so hemmed in all the time? However, it is you who is perpetuating this phoney war, you who ends up fighting with yourself,  all the time. So it is you who can call a ceasefire, and you who can bring about that state of peace. You can bring to an end the whole 'battle scenario' anytime you like. 

It is, however, a characteristic of these internalised 'stories' about our self identity, that written into the story itself is one fundamental lie, a deception that tells you that 'You' cannot do that. That 'You' are uniquely incapable of stopping it.  Defeating the pernicious nature of that one untruth, is the first step anyone can take towards liberating themselves.  *

An edited and further adapted extract from my Morning Journal
Originally written 17th November 2025

* Though I've used this metaphor of arrows and being embattled to make a specific point, the idea of seeing one self through the lens of an armed conflict is ultimately not an ideal one. Something less defensive, more open hearted and kinder in tone is what I'd be looking for. 

FAVE RAVE - Leonard & Hungry Paul

 
Every now and then you find a programme comes along that somewhat defies catagorisation. Is it a drama, is it a light comedy or a light comedy drama or light dramatic comedy? The BBC appears to believe Leonard and Hungry Paul is primarily a light drama. Whereas other programmes which exuded a similar tone as Leonard & Hungry Paul, such as The Detectorists, were defined as comedy. Where ever we eventually decide to place it, it sits there somewhat winsomely smiling back at you looking mildly embarrassed and lightly shrugs its shoulders, putting its hands in its pockets and walks away.

The novel this series is based on, was written by Irish writer and blues-folk musician Ronan Hession and became a word of mouth bestseller. Its subjects are quite ordinary people, with relatively uneventful lives. Two men in their thirties Leonard and Hungry Paul are friends who meet regularly to play chess. Leonard lives alone in his Mothers house who died recently, and works as an underappreciated and underutilised editor for a children's encyclopedia publisher. He is attracted to Shelley who works in the same office, and wants to ask her out. Hungry Paul, has very low ambitions for himself, living at home with his parents, and his sister Grace, whose about to get married. He can't quite work out how to launch himself on the world, and whether indeed he should do so at all. He spends his time making hospital visits to hold patients hands and the occasional day postal delivering. 

Though that is pretty much the basic set up of the series, this cannot capture the subtle underplaying of its wit and perceptiveness of its dialogue, and how the voice over narrator ( voiced by Julie Roberts ) is an essential part of how the humour is delivered. Leonard, is played by Alex Lawther, who is having a bit of a career moment this year. having already had central parts in Andor and Alien Earth, all exploiting his geeky nervous style of acting. To which he can now add, the socially inadequate Leonard. Ably supported by Laurie Kynaston as Hungry Paul and Jamie-Lee O'Donnell as Shelley.

This series manages to create and hold its very pleasurable tone steady. Its not an easy thing to write about ordinary lives without that becoming at some point trite,tedious or vaguely patronising. And Leonard and Hungry Paul avoids falling into any such pitfalls. It is quite the most simple hearted and kind little light comedy drama. One that emits oodles of warmth for its characters, their foibles as well as their charms, as it takes you for a modest gently meandering walk through its world. I wasn't entirely sure about its tone for the first quarter of its running time, but by the end of twenty nine minutes I was won over by it, completely hooked. I am currently trying to resist guzzling down all its six episodes far far too rapidly.

CARROT REVIEW - 7/8

POEM - The Gardening Of Time

I am not finished yet
I declare as I wash down
the path in the garden
the old arthritic man in me
gently fiddles ineffectively
with weeds
trims errant bushes
clears mounds of leaves things
that need attending to
are added to the
purposeful small garden of tasks
seemingly so I cannot say
this job is done
yet

and through these
insufficient deeds
the hours into days well
they pass peacefully enough
with only this gaggle of
humble activities of note
though there are days 
where I can't be arsed with
even this,
that or the other
luxuriating in my age
and indolence
because I can
and will given the time
lounge around sheepishly

deaf to plaintive echoes of my Mother
incanting disparaging phrases
of any notion that I
could sit around all day
doing nothing
when nothing can be
so delightful a frisson of freedom
from care about any
inculcated remonstrance
too old yes too bloody old
for any of that
I puff up some cushions to
let body mind and purpose
find some shut eye

existing can that really
be redacted to an exercise
in the time
and productivity
of a neat garden in winter
or did I miss some salient point
or sagacity along the way in
the meaning of meaning
is it in the doing 
or the endgame that
life is at its best isn't life normally a job
left incomplete abandoned to
the accompaniment of some tune
filched from Thomas Tallis
to activate all the tear ducts
of mourners in the perfectly
manicured garden 
of remembrance

Written by Stephen Lumb
November 2025

FINISHED READING - On Friendship by Andrew O'Hagan

 

These essays were originally conceived to be broadcast on Radio Four. In them Andrew O'Hagan reflects upon the many different forms of friendship he has encountered in his life. Beginning with childhood friendships, the friends who you grow up and share enthusiasms with, the type of friends we make through our work, how animals form a type of unconditional friendship, the imaginary friends of childhood and those a novel writer invents, how the internet is adjusting the definition of what a friend can be. 

There are two stand out chapters. One on 'Losing Friends' where O'Hagan remembers his friend Keith Martin who was the inspirational catalyst for his very moving novel Mayflies, about the loss in later life of an old friend from his teenage years. The other is a chapter about how he met and became friends with Edna O'Brien. Who he touchingly celebrates their uniquely platonic form of friendship with an older, distinctly eccentric, fiercely independent minded woman. This was for me the real delight of this short volume. the obvious reciprocity of love and appreciation between O' Hagan and O'Brien leaps fondly off the page.

"I poured her another glass. She reminisced about the first time we had dinner and recalled me telling her my daughter's name.
'I remember where we sat at the Wolseley' she said.
'I've had lovely times with you. And we have....not identical sensibilities but a lot of resemblance, whether that's race or disposition. I know that you're a wounded man who handles it very impeccably and very plausibly.' 

'Who knows' I said, 'but there's friendship in the speculation."

Throughout all these essays, O'Hagan reflects cogently and with all his captivating linguistic flare, not just on the particularities of one friendship, but broadens this out to ponder on our need for and the benefits of friendship. What they provide us with, that the intimate closeness of our love partners cannot. 

" We each wander so much of the road alone that it's nice to have someone else, a friend who knows the weather and is minded to share their umbrella."

A lovely short book, that brings a melancholy to mind for friendships that have been lost and smiles of recognition at the life enhancing conspiratorial joys of camaraderie.

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8

FINISHED READING - Fractured by Jon Yates

 

We all sense that our society is currently not in a good place. We feel the divisive nature of our political discourses, the increasing racism and intolerance, and we bemoan the lack of community, as though  that were something that has been robbed from us without our say so. In Fractured, Jon Yates takes a cool look at why our society feels this way. Suggesting how this came about, what the primary causes are. Though at times sobering, the book actually has a strong vein of optimism running through it, that we can and must find a way to reverse this drift towards division and uncivil conflict 

These days it's quite common to blame it all on social media, but Jon Yates says that really is simply another symptom of a social move towards individual isolation, that we already had become people living within bubbles of the like minded. People Like Me syndrome has had a long presence within human society. Our liking to surround ourselves with folk we agree or are in sympathy with, are educated similar to us, have similar tastes, social status and aspirations to us, is not in principle a bad thing. But, if this is the only thing that binds us then it becomes a major social driver, where we are unable to talk with people from a different background, class or race, and may even find ourselves feeling instinctively hostile towards anyone who is remotely different from us. We all bare a measure of responsibility for how this situation has arisen. For what Yates encounters as he reviews our parlous state, is a society lacking in much sense of a shared common life. 

In past eras, when we lived in smaller villages and social contexts, we moved around less, so you really had to get on with the folk around you, even if you disagreed with them or they lived lives very different to oneself. This rubbing up and along with individual differences is actually good for us, and it's vital in cultivating a more cohesive sense of society. In the past they also shared the common religious context of a faith. In this country this was Christianity, this gave everyone a sense that despite our differences there was something else that asked us to work at getting over them, of even transcending them. Such rural communities were effectively torn apart during the population exodus caused by the Industrial Revolution. This produced a huge amount of social disruption and divisiveness. And there was a period when this newly urbanised society was in danger of falling apart and tipping into revolution. What in the end stopped that from happening, was an explosion of community based voluntary organisations,charities, clubs, societies, associations, social and political initiatives that brought together all types of individuals, and this slowly brought into being a more cohesive sense of urban society emerging.

Post World War 2, this network of social voluntary organisations has been in gradual decline. People don't join them in quite the same numbers anymore. Television means we just don't go out and socialise as much, if at all. Pubs are not the local focal point they were, we don't join voluntary associations, we live a more singular and socially isolated lifestyle, even from our neighbours. Before the internet arrived a shared communal life was already endangered. Social media has merely accelerated this pre-existing trend. But like the period of change and upheaval post the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, we are, in Yate's opinion, in an interregnum, where we painfully feel this lack of cohesion and don't know if it can be restored, or how. Any social movement towards correcting this lack of a shared common life has not yet formed itself. Human society, however, can not survive without closer communal relationships, so Yates is confident it will eventually emerge, but whether it will arrive in time is the question.   

As you look down your street at the people who are your neighbours, are they pretty much the same class, race and education, with similar aspirations to you. If so, this has not happened by accident. We might believe we live in a multi-cultural society, but the UK is quite effectively socially, economically and racially segregated. Analysis says its as segregated as some of the the worst cities in the US.. Racists may complain about immigrants not learning English and living amongst their own culture, but fail to notice that, regardless of race, everyone is separating themselves off from people that are not like them in cultural, social or economic ghettos of one sort or another. Yates says this is all an expression of People Like Me syndrome, and an ever increasing demand to have a choice where, how and with whom we live. Racial homogeneity in a culture is not really the solution to creating a sense of a common life that some people believe it to be. Humankind is generally too full of a radically wide range of different, potentially difficult people. We can all be a bit of a pain in the minds of other folks.

There are two drivers then, that are slowly destroying the shared sense of a common life, and a sense of connection with people not like us. First, a major social or economic upheaval or crisis, and second increasing choice about where we live, where we are educated, and who and how we socialise with other people. Left to choice, People Like Me rules everything we do. And collective communal contexts become habitually avoided, because we fear conflicts, of encountering differing viewpoints to our own. 

The knock on effects of this expands outwards. Innovation requires us to be open to working with other people and their ideas, productivity needs us to be able to work effectively in teams with all types of people, schools which are not substantially mixed in class and race, don't cultivate the sort of skills and abilities to network and work well together.. Instead we are hurtling towards further division, as the gap between richer and poorer widens, and equality of opportunity becomes stifled. If our economy is currently stalled, its because when wealthy people become wealthier they tend to bank their money and live off the interest, whilst working class spend money as and when they have it. The later is a major driver of our economy. Too much money is currently in too few very wealthy hands and our economy is stagnating as a result. It's no wonder the very poorest in our society are sick of the constant struggle to make ends meet, and are getting angrier and more disruptive with every passing year. So the lack of a shared common life is actually a much bigger deal than we give it credit for.  

Yates concludes his book by outlining a few options for a way forward, and their pros and cons. We could just sit this current phase out and wait for the backlash and a more communal focus to re-emerge. Or we could try to engineer more communal initiatives. A characteristic of the emergence of charities, societies, clubs and associations was they were entirely voluntary, which is both their strength and weakness. There are very few mandatory communal requirements placed upon us these days, jury service is probably the only one. But what if, at a pivotal moments in your life, in childhood, adulthood and retirement there was an obligation to explore ways you could serve your society in the company of a wide range of people. It maybe the time is not yet right for such ideas. So lacking such initiatives currently, Yates concludes his book by outlining - Thirty two things you can do right now.

Fractured is accessible and brilliantly written with an immensely convincing exposition for how we got here, but it's also clear what direction we need to start heading in to turn the situation around. I found this has already affected the way I view the turbulence of our era. It's an inspirational book, that has set me thinking about many things, a lot of the time it's what small step I could take, to break out of my little retirement bubble?

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8

WATCHED - Nine Perfect Strangers

 

Nine people arrive at the Tranquillum retreat centre. Each of them has chosen to come here not really knowing what to expect, but all have reached a moment of crisis in their life. They need some time away from all that. The retreat centre is directed by Masha (Nicole Kidman) a woman whose immoral high flying past came to an end with someone trying to murder her. There are elements in this previous life that are still unresolved, even though she has developed this therapeutic retreat on the basis of her own experience and route back to psychological wellness. 

All the retreatants were hand picked by Masha, some paid through the nose, others a discounted price. As the series progresses the turbulence in their personal lives comes into sharper focus, as well as Masha's reasons for choosing them. But her therapeutic methods are highly unconventional. if not illegal. And its clear that things on previous retreats did not always go well. Masha is receiving threatening texts and emails,someone from her past has it in for her.  

With Micheal Shannon, Melissa McCarthy, Samara Weaving, Luke Evans and Regina Hall amongst the cast, this is packed with star performers. The script is witty and often playfully irreverent. As the retreat progresses elements of backstories get pieced together. Relationships fracture and mend, people's motivations become mixed or morally dubious. As a whole Nine Perfect Strangers is quite effective, with a low key 'who done it' element to it. Kidman, Shannon and McCarthy in particular shine out here, primarily because a large part of the drama circles around them. Samara Weaving and Melvin Gregg's characters are woefully underwritten, and could easily have been written out at no loss to the dramatic narrative. Luke Evans does his best with an unappealing character, whose story arc never quite becomes fully rounded or his eventual turn around explored or explained.

Nicole Kidman is having one whale of a time playing the slightly spooky, maybe unhinged, Masha, her accent is light, its audiblity is slightly variable. But without her ability to dominate the screen, its clear this dramas creaking old tropes would have rattled a bit too noticeably. On the whole I enjoyed watching it as a drama, though it never quite became gripping essential viewing. They made a second series, I can't imagine at all why they thought that would be a good idea, but I wont be setting aside any time specially for it.

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8

READING ALOUD - W.S.Merwin Reads - The Love for October

 

When you read W.S.Merwin's biography, you see very little that tells you what sort of a man he was. Extremely productive and driven as a poet, the delicate thoughtful nature of his writing, is often like turning over and examining a tumbling stone. A common trope in his poetry is to see everything as if viewed through the framing of a particular window. There is a certain unknowable insularity to his character and writing, I can't imagine he was ever the life and soul of a party, did he ever get drunk and out of control? Married three times might indicate he could've either been difficult to live with, or was drawn towards women that he really was incapable of fully meeting. 

The Love of October, reflects on youthful perception. saying in its first line

'A child looking on ruins grows younger
but cold
and wants to wake to a new name
I have been younger in October
than all the months of spring'  

As indeed he once was. Born right at the end of September, October was indeed Merwin's first month alive in this world. So his choice of this poem as one to read aloud, has some strong personal links for him.

MY OWN WALKING - November Journal 2025

Like most folk, I sometimes get far too caught up in the intricate tangle of my self justifications. The finely woven warp and weft of my own terribly tedious self story. So much so that it can be one devil of a job putting a stop to it. To cease the constancy of my weaving it. And then, comes the day when I can for some reason, after some directional wind change, I see through it just one tiny little chink. How the intensity of any perceived injury to ones selfhood, is firmly embroidered into it with sutures of my own making.   

I say this, full knowing one of the Buddha's wisest utterances, urged us to become closely familiar with the pain caused by 'the second arrow.' The first arrow being our experience of suffering, the second arrow our response to that suffering. That second arrow being by far the more dangerous to life, because it is entirely a self-inflicted wound, ever so easily embedding itself into 'that story of our self'. Usually with the help of a charitable variation of  'poor me' narrative. And, once ensconced, it sits there like an AIDS virus, waiting for future suffering to provide advantageous circumstances for yet another virulent outbreak of self pity.

With this years extended prolongation of Autumnal mildness, I'd became prematurely lulled into thinking that Winter's onset this year was hopefully delayed. So the arrival of damper, chiller winds and turbulent storms, arrived like an unwelcome salesman at my doorstep. After months and months from spring through to an indian summer, I'd got used to milder weather and the consequent low level of bodily discomfort. Then over the matter of seemingly a mere few days the weather changed, and that discomfort cranked up. Furiously aching joints and muscles, most tender particularly in the hips and lower back. Voltarol gels could do too little to pacify its inflamation and soreness.

One morning, post another fitful incomplete nights sleep, I arose in one cross patch of an internal bad mood. I did not feel well disposed towards my usual morning routine of practice, and this had been increasingly so for a couple of days. I'd sort of struck a deal with myself, to take the level of it all down by a peg or two. To maintain a morsel of connection with the continuity of practice. But by this particular day, the most I could persuade myself to do was to meditate, and that was after quite an extensive period of coercive encouragement. Once I did sit down to meditate, it was clear there was a job of work to do, cultivating a more loving and kinder relationship towards myself. Bring on the Metta bomb.

A Metta Bhavana meditation practice,is most usually a progression of five distinct stages. But this can be stripped down to the simpler mode of it radiating outwards, which given my current level of resistance, was probably advisable. So I began with as much gentle encouragement I could find, to cultivate loving kindness for myself, my body, my mental states, my overall state of being, and then gradually expanding that out to the people surrounding me, to the area, county and country, to the world, to the universe and the cosmos. Wishing all to be existentially well, to be happier, more content and less suffering beings. All its usual generic elements were there, where paradoxically, I was placed at the living centre of my own mettaful cosmos. But by the end, when I got up, the discomfort in my hips and back had quite dramatically diminished. 

All of which caused me to reflect more deeply on the role of the second arrow in suffering. Now I do have osteoarthritis present in some major joints, there is no getting away from that, nor the consequences thereof. And its certainly been my experience that changes in barometric pressure, the severity and depth of weather fronts, can sometimes put my whole body physically on edge. But what this meditation experience pointed out, was how much the depth and prolongation of my bodily aches and pains, can also be due to, in my very being, hating and loathing them on almost an existential level. The self antagonism, once I noticed it, seemed quite obvious.

So much of the intensity of any suffering is down to how you feel about the suffering, not the suffering itself. Now this infinitesimally small insight, does not in itself take away the original cause of the pain or discomfort, but just encourages me to turn off the bloody megaphone. Whenever I start writing about physical ailments and how this or that particular part of this body of mine is aching or aging, it makes me hyper aware of how frequently I use the word 'my' as I write, That I take my body, and my osteoarthritis, and my pain, and my suffering, and my advancing age, and turn them into the largest badge I can wear. One that declares a technicolour statement - 'look on the size of my suffering, you bitches, and despair' .

And there, right there, I stop myself to further remark - my goodness me, how unkind you can be, just in the general castigating tone in which you converse with yourself.  Listen to how the purpose of words dance around from reactivity to insight, then back to reactivity again. It's also to recognise the heavy rainfall that the second arrow brings with it, and how that precipitation forms the precursor and resplendent rainbow of a third, maybe fourth or fifth bit of self injury - should you let it. 

PAINTING A THOUSAND WORDS - Autumn Leaves ( 1855-1856 )

 

John Everett Millais,at the precocious age of eleven won himself a place at the Royal Academy Art School. By the time he was twenty,in 1848, he was a founding member of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His painting Christ in the House of his Parents (1849-50) provoked accusations of blasphemy. This fueled his rise to fame, wealth, establishment respectability, a knighthood and eventual baronetcy. However, as is often the case, artistic child prodigies take their 'genius' far too much for granted

It has been frequently said of Millais's artistic career, that he squandered his talent for money and status. A view based upon subsequent work as an illustrator, the paintings executed for commercial advertising, the drained palate of his later painting used to such emotionless effect. All would indicate some truth to this opinion. The early colourful effervescence of his talent, didn't just fizzle out and die, it carried on afterwards as a deathless ghostly apparition of itself. But by the mid 1850's, when he was painting Autumn Leaves, Millais had become the leading light and acceptable face of the Pre-Raphaelites. A transgressively vivid painter of allegorical literary or biblical scenes,with often this sense for the transient,elements of mystery and complete mastery of the mournful mood. Autumn Leaves was the first in a sequence of paintings to explore that season as a metaphor for impermanence. Two other paintings in this occasional series The Vale of Rest(1858-62 ) and Chill October (1870) were to follow.

In some respects the progression of their subject matter exemplifies the slow malformation of Millais's artistic muse. The Vale of Rest appears, at first glance, to echo the sentiments of Autumn Leaves. Taking place at twilight, where two nuns are very hurriedly digging a grave before it gets too dark to see what they are doing. What was perhaps merely suggestive in Autumn Leaves, is made emphatically plain in Vale of Rest. The allegory is presented with a much heavier handed intent, earnestly reaching out to make itself known. It drives home its evidently mordant moral undertow. The seated nun on the right, looking pointedly straight out at the viewer, as if to say - remember this. As a painting this is not subtle.

By the time we reach Chill October fourteen years later, what we are presented with here is a rather bleakly plein-air painting of a Scottish loch, boggy and windy and cold hearted. No figures, allegorical or otherwise, are present, just a vague sense of an underlying mood from the earlier works resurfacing.The place is desolate, lost of any sense of direction for its soul, devoid of human context or frailty. Its not then unreasonable to question why this shift in focus happened ?

The original seven members of The Pre-Raphealite Brotherhood were an unwieldy mixture of like minded young painters and poets. For all their stated idealism, it is in the nature of such artistic movements to be internally fractious, loosely aligned and inherently fragile collectives. Holman Hunt and Millais, were the visual realists, whereas Rossetti and his artistic acolytes were the more seriously aligned medievalists. Both sides dedicated to restoring the spiritual to art. The religious controversy over Millais’s Christ in the House of his Parents in 1850 proved too much for the devout Stephen Collinson, who left the group.

This was the first, but not the final straw for the Brotherhood, but that too would be supplied by Millais. John Ruskin had been the sole vocal champion of The Brotherhood, keeping them financially and artistically directed. Millais went to paint a portrait of Ruskin at his Scottish home, over the Summer of 1853. Ruskin had married Effie Grey in 1848 when she was nineteen, and he was twenty eight. Yet five years later when the handsome dashing Pre-Raphaelite Millais turns up, Ruskin had yet to consummate that marriage. Millais and Effie fast fell deeply in love and literally ran off together. The marriage to Ruskin ended up being very publicly anuled, bringing a degree of shame and disapproval into Ruskin's revered orbit. Though he continued to financially support Hunt and Rosetti, The Brotherhood was summarily ripped apart by the ensuing public scandal.

Three years later Millais married Effie, she has since been unfairly made to take the lion share of the blame for Millais’s declining artistry. Yet here he is in that very same year of his marriage painting Autumn Leaves. The two central young girls,dressed in the modest dark blue clothing of the middlingly wealthy, are Effie’s sisters, Alice and Sophie. The younger children are meant to be peasants, as they are wearing poorer styles of dress. They’re making a bonfire. All look upon the smoldering pyre of autumn leaves the girls have been gathering, collectively transfixed. The background sky has sickly sulphuric slashes of yellow and bruised purpley blue. It is twilight, the landscape shadowy, all we see are the barest of outlines.

This painting has a Chekovian air, of trapped lives with limited future prospects. The faces of the elder girls bare concerned strained faces. For some reason this bonfire building is not eliciting any childish playfulness, or sense of this being a fun thing to do. The girls look on instead rather sombre, with bowed depressed demeanours. It is as though something has died, and no one here feels willing to openly enjoy even a simple task. Whilst lost childhood innocence is a recurrent Millais theme, I’m not sure that is precisely what is being conveyed here. Its meaning feels more multi-layered than that. It is as though they’re mourning a loss, ritually burying someone or something underneath this huge pile of bronzed leaves. The tone is sorrowful, emotions just about staying contained. The littlest girl with the red bow is holding an apple, frequently interpreted as a reference to Eve and the temptation of the snake. What is the simmering symbolism of a smouldering pile of leaves? This is portraying life requiring death, as a cycle within life itself, of recurring moments of cremation. Millais understood all too clearly, what he had lost, destroyed and sacrificed to secure his love.

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - More Songs About Buildings And Food by Talking Heads - 1978

And so we come to the concluding album of this current seasons My Most Loved Albums, and we near the end of the 1970's, certainly a seminal era in my musical explorations. Every subsequent musical enthusiasm I have ever had, you will find has its roots in this decade.

Talking Heads are another interesting example of the idiosyncratic US punk band who smoothly morph into post-punk. After the edgy angular psychopathy of their self titled debut, Talking Heads brought in Brian Eno to produce the ''difficult' second album. Second albums become troublesome, because the freshness of their debut is now gone. All their best early songs, which they've performed endlessly and finely honed through live performance are now mostly used up. The compressed time to write fresh material, plus the added pressure to produce another winner, often means a band plays safe and reproduces more of the same. And on many levels this invariably disappoints. Bringing in Brian Eno was an astute move. if anyone was likely to encourage a band to shake itself up, to playfully stretch and subvert its existing paradigms, it would be him. It both was and wasn't going to be, just more songs about buildings and food, as the album title announces with its tongue firmly in its ironic cheek 

More Songs About Buildings And Food, is the album where Talking Heads began to move away from being a punk band who cut their teeth in the New York underground scene, and venture into more experimentally artful territory. Playing with mashing up their frenetic choppy guitar style with funk stylings, and open up further that more plaintive reflective tone to David Byrne's lyricism. Byrne's song writing style tends to start with the recognisably everyday and work outwards towards the universal. No album begins with so much committed attack, than this stirring opening track, a mass assault of guitar rhythm launches Thank You For Sending Me An Angel, which comes charging towards you like this galloping brigade of pounding horses. Into which Byrne enters whelping like a cowboy high on speed.

Eno's role on this album appears to have been to direct already existing temperaments, and where needs be to sprinkle a bit of standard Eno magic over a track. The latter arrives in its most recognisable form on Found A Job, probably my favourite track off the whole album. It starts as a simple hearted typical David Byrne song about a couple in the middle of a domestic argument, both searching for a vocation in life. The song motors along, and then two thirds of the way through Byrne shouts 'hit it', which kicks off an infectiously off beat stepping counterpoint rhythm that instantly elevates this into a wholly new musical level of joyful brilliance. It takes Talking Heads rhythmic drive, and forces it to take a sideways step out into unknown peripheral vision territory. Its utterly fabulous.

The album concludes with The Big Country. Byrne is in an airplane looking down on the quintessentially American landscapes of urban and rural life. He observes other people living simple conventional lifestyles, but finds he wants none of it - 'I wouldn't live there if you paid me, no siree' But nonetheless he still wants to live and belong somewhere, just not there. Encapsulating the ennui of Byrne's tired alienated persona, whilst also being a curious elegy to the very thing he most reviles. Its an emotionally conflicted, yet reflective song. Where we want, but don't want, what modern society has to offer us. The universality of Talking Heads songs are founded on quite plain and simple human yearnings for love and belonging. I've felt many of their songs spoke directly to my own past aspirations and struggles, which imbues them still with an enduring fondness, etched as they are with personal meaning.

So, that concludes this first series of My Most Loved Albums. In the end ten became twelve, and ended up at sixteen albums. These are in no way definitive, but they represent this moment in time and are a reflection of my enduring tastes, both then and now. At some point I may do one on the 1980's, but I need a break from a commitment to completing lists for a while. So when the spirit moves me, then maybe you'll hear some more.

LISTENING TO - Iconoclasts by Anna Von Hausswolff

 

'I came to take you back. To where you came from. But that's not what you want.'*

On 2018's album Dead Magic, Anna Von Hausswolff took one approach towards unhinging her vocal expression to quite an extreme degree, one where there was perhaps no point in pushing further at that particular doorway. Her response two years later, on All Thoughts Fly was to return to the simplicity of her own organ playing. Denuded of any need to vocalise, it was a series of dynamic instrumental pieces that conjured a sonically rich range of imaginative atmospheres. And so, after a five year hiatus, we now have, without much trumpeting fanfare, this new album Iconoclasts. Where has her music progressed to arrive at, in the meantime?

Well this sixth album is certainly bold as brass with confidence. Most of all this is truly BIG music. Its not lacking in extraordinary ambition. Iconoclasts is over an hour and a quarter in length, which might sound daunting or that someone's ego needed its feathers trimmed. But once you start listening time accommodates you and you become part of what feels like one huge musical piece with different intervals and tones touched upon. And it is full on right from the start. Once you are launched on Iconoclasts, its hard to put down and walk away, or cherry pick your way through your favourite tracks. Its just not that sort of album. sit down and listen to the whole thing in one sitting, and if you can't do that then go do something else for a while. This warrants your whole attention. This is not remotely suitable to be played in the background.

Whilst her earlier work was stuffed with sombre drone work and was certainly dramatically gothic in tone, it was never really conventionally goth. And Von Hausswolff never courts that association, nor presents herself as such. She has quite a quietly understated outward appearance, like a primary school supply teacher. Iconoclasts begins as it means to carry on. The Beast contains a distinctive motif from avant garde saxophonist Otis Sandsjo that resurfaces fully fleshed out later on, in Struggle with the Beast. Sandsjo's playing is splashed judiciously all over this album, providing all sorts of unusual colourations and angular tones. His free flowing style reminding me of the late Evan Parker. 

This album has been loosely framed as her 'pop' album, which I would say is only so in spirit. There are  magnificently ravishing tunes and pounding drumwork galore, but there is also an experimental edge, a willingness to go completely musically off piste if necessary.  And what pop album has twelve tracks, an hour and a quarter running time, only two tracks which are under three minutes fifty and they are instrumentals, five tracks are over seven minutes long, and the title track Iconoclasts luxuriating in its eleven minutes fifteen seconds? It possesses a pop sensibility for sure, with an accessibility most notably on the duet with Ethel Cain -Aging Young Woman. If one were looking for something evidently mainstream and radio friendly.

However, if you are looking for massive slabs of sound, and emotions to match, here it all is. It's interesting that Florence & the Machine has a new album out the same day as this. In many ways they share a similar trajectory and liking for the grand emotional statement. Whilst Florence tends towards shrill bombast when she over reaches, Anna can have a greater impact as a result of taking it down a peg or two. Its hard to pick out favourite tracks from Iconoclasts, so I've made a selection that I thought best represented its range. This album is a huge achievement, and it has assumed the top of my best of 2025 already. Nothing else is going to quite match this, because this is magnificent.

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8