SCREEN SHOT - All of Us Strangers

At the beginning you meet Adam ( Andrew Scott ) he's living in a penthouse flat in a high, but largely empty new tower block. He's a script writer. The fire alarm goes off, its always going off. He goes down to the ground floor to see if its real or yet another false alarm. He notices there is a light from another flat and the shadow of a figure staring down. Later that evening Harry ( Paul Mescal ) the occupier of that flat, turns up at his door drunk, wants to come in, charmingly and casually propositions Adam. Adam, a bit taken aback, says no, which he later regrets saying. 

From these mundane unpromising incidents eventually blossoms, not only a romance, but a film that explores in purging emotional depth themes of childhood loss, death, grief and loneliness. Whilst on the surface this might appear, with its central gay romance, to be another queer relationship drama from writer and director Andrew Haigh, similar to his equally wonderful film Weekend from 2011. But All of Us Strangers themes are largely universal one's and will cut to the core of everyone's human experience. At one point Adam says that he's reconciled himself to living a lonely life and later on that he's done nothing of any significance with it either. Who hasn't thought either of those things at some time in their life? 

Its hard to write about the movie's story line without giving too much away. But let's just say there are more than a couple of surprise twists in it. I watched it first on my own and a day later with my husband. During the first viewing I was more emotionally distracted by trying to work out what was really going on here. During the second viewing, because you now know the lay of the narrative, you pick up on all the foreshadowing, premonitions and musical clues that are scattered across the movie. Speaking personally I found it packed even more of an emotional punch, because the second time you understood the reasons for certain aspects of it. They resonated more in a way that was gut wrenching. And whilst it has its universal themes, if you are gay, then this film has tons of things you will find deeply resonate with your specific experience. Also, as someone who had a heart attack this year, it has a lot to say about having a good life and a good death, with as few lingering regrets as possible.

Haigh makes great use of eighties music and sometimes puts the words of songs into the mouths of his characters, the song lyrics allowing them to speak what they really want to say. He also has assembled a fantastic ensemble cast. Aside from Scott and Mescal, he also has Jamie Bell and Claire Foy in career best form. I've not seen Paul Mescal's acting before, and he is quite a revelation. I want to see more.  A solid northern accent and eyes that speak of what is going on inside with such yearning and fleeting delicacy. And here he's paired with Andrew Scott so renown for being an actor of huge ability, playing this chronically damaged man with such affecting tenderness and gritty realness. He must have been so inspiring to act opposite.

Inspired by a novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, Andrew Haigh has woven lots of his own personal experience into the script which brings it this telling ring of authenticity to the painful truths being revealed. This is my favourite movie of the year, its just far too good on so many levels it could not fail to be anything else.

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8

READING ALOUD - Kae Tempest - Europe Is Lost

If any artist caught the zeitgeist of the UK in the time of 2016 - post financial crash, post Brexit, at the dawn of First Term Trump, the pandemic not even dreamed of yet, it was this poem by Kae Tempest. As ever, they write accessibly and yet at the same time surprise you with the sophistication of the imagery they use. It's both ancient and modern, both of the street and of a tradition. Tempest never forgets where the poetic form originated and where they want to take it now. Its political, personal and punchy.

This live recording on KEXP captures the ongoing rolling syllabic momentum of Tempest at their performing best. There is a central character, there is Tempest there too observing, there is the world outside barren, hostile and alienated from the humanity it houses. And then there is us watching, caught up in the listening of it too.

FAVE RAVE - Ben Maton - The Salisbury Organist.

I started watching the videos by Ben Maton earlier in the year. He travels around churches in the Salisbury diocese, the more out of the way or redundant the better. Playing whatever organ he finds. You get to see the long walks across hills and fields to these often very isolated village churches, little bits of chit chat about their history, interesting aspects of organ playing techniques, as well as at the end of them some really lovely organ playing.

He's a young chap in his twenties, who has got a youthful and enthusiastic charm to him. He has visibly grown in confidence in what he is doing in recent months. This hour long video he made for advent covers three church he visited. In it he plays music by Bach and Franck, advent hymns, as well as a rather lovely Christmas Lullaby composed by Maton himself. 

The highlight is the last church, where he plays The Coventry Carol on a Victorian harmonium in a 19th century Gothic revival chapel. Its in the village of Wooland and was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott. The harmonium is so moodily dark in tone, a feeling of ancient melancholy suffuses it. Surrounded by its evocative gothic architecture. It provoked bit of a musical buzz in me, I was strangely mesmerised. 

I recommend you watch the whole video, but if you want to just watch the Wooland Church section its about 42 minutes in. Its well worth watching either way..

WORDS WRITTEN AT THE POINT OF GRATITUDE - No 1

I've recently begun writing a gratitude journal. I'll post from time to time edited selections. Here's a few from recent weeks.

• I have to be aware of not turning gratefulness into a task list, that I must find a dozen things to be grateful for in one day, or I am failing. I am trying to be more open, as I write, to the gratitude journal being whatever it turns out to be on any one day. Imbued with an aura of gratefulness, where it moves in and out of states, of being more or less explicit. Gratefulness can be a demeanour, where gratitude is one quality implicit within it.

• Writing here forces you to be more aware of what is going on around you. At the moment I oscillate between looking for things to be grateful for and examining the process of gratefulness emerging. Awareness seems primary, which appreciation follows, and though it is part of what gratefulness is, it is not gratefulness, but a close cousin. Appreciation is more like an observation, done from a distance, not fully emotionally engaged with what it is seeing. Gratefulness appreciates and goes out to the thing observed to express gratitude, in a sense directly to it.

• Gratitude, at its purest, is given freely to the object or person. If the latter, it also has to be received. Any form of gratefulness is welcome, but it seems that there are differing degrees of it, depending upon how publicly it is being expressed. In this sense any gratefulness is an incomplete thing the more abstract it is. It is always a work in practice, one that is never finished like a task list. 
  
  
• To be fully grateful you have to be content. The rolling stones of discontent tending to drown out our more appreciative thoughts. Our society is at present going through a huge roistering amount of discontent with itself. So its hard to resist getting caught up in its whirlpools.

WATCHED - What Miracle Are You? - A Reflection on Life Video

I always find it inspiring when I find someone who is plainly just being themselves beyond all limitations. The woman in this video is one such person, and is consequently a real joy to listen to. But, as ever, at the core of who she now is, is a tragic incident and a decade or two of pain. As someone who has struggled pretty much all my life to be themselves in all its fullness, and that it's still a work in progress, she challenges me to go further than I currently can conceive of. 

Absolutely bleedin marvellous.

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RECORD REVIEW - Endless Rain by One True Pairing

Tom Fleming, was once a co-vocalist with Wild Beasts for several years. This is his second solo album under the moniker of One True Pairing. On this he has reconnected with the sonic adventurousness  and subject matter that made his former band such a captivating joy.

Post the demise of the Wild Beasts, Fleming has had to face a few personal demons. His very fine first album garnered a few critical plaudits, but didn't get much airplay nor wider attention. The crisis of confidence in himself as a musician that followed threatened to end his solo career before it had even begun. Thankfully he's stuck it out.

This experience has fed into songs on this album, which have a strong confessional edge to them. It was a good move on his record companies part to team him up with John 'Spud' Murphy. The music production auteur of the moment. Standout tracks of this album have a distinctive fizz in their soundscape as a result.  

As Fast As I Can Go, is hard to beat as an album opener. The kinetic movement powering this song along, is somewhere between a horse drawn carriage and a motorway. It's quickly turned into my favourite track of the year. Along with Doubt, Tunnelling, Endless Rain and Prince of Darkness it possess an expansive, cinematic quality of painting a mood or picture. Into which Fleming's rich resonant vocals flicker. On the other hand tracks like Landlords Death, Be Strong, Mid Life Crisis can somehow feel too heavily weighted down by the lumpen earnestness of their subject matter. Whilst Frozen Food Centre stands alone as one beaut of a song, about a mother trapped in straightened circumstances. The stronger semi-autobiographical nature of it making this all the more deeply affecting.

Fleming is not your typical singer songwriter, which must make his record label unsure how best to promote him. There are the soul bearing songs, but there's also the desire to musically push beyond the starkness of just his beautiful voice and a guitar standing alone. There are a broad range of production approaches on show here, of the many ways to embellish a song. Perhaps too many. If I were to have any criticism of the album, it's that it falls short of creating a completely cohesive overall soundscape. Instead it eclectically and energetically dashes all over the territory available, which does give it its own enervating, if slightly uneven, quality. As it stands three quarters of this album remains an absolute corker.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

200 WORDS ON - Atheism

The word atheism originally meant 'another theism', another form of religious belief. For once upon a time not believing in God was inconceivable. And indeed, Atheism can present itself with a declamatory aloofness similar to that of a Pentecostal Preacher. The urge to brow beat you into submission can feel unrelenting.

Modern atheism’s raison d'etre depends on the eradication of a belief in God. Theism and Atheism facing off against each other, like two bookends back to back in an unedifying duel for supremacy. Atheism finds itself unable to stand alone, unsupported by what it is in opposition to. That it cannot offer us a broader more compelling vision for humanity than that, is fundamentally the problem with it. It’s like being on a stringent diet, without being able to envisage what we’re hoping to achieve through it, we’re unlikely to stick with it.

That we might be much better off without a God, overlooks what an unbridled human nature is capable of without guide rails. Nietsche's declaration that ‘God is dead’ preceded a century of brutal atrocities. The worst of which entirely political in causation. If you turn off the light, it's alarming how quickly the dark sets in.

FINISHED READING - A History of Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Diarmaid Mac Cullough is a historian not unfamiliar with the magisterial all encompassing epic. Winning prizes for his previous substantial biographies of Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, and his history of the Reformation. So this history of Christianity rattles along at a pace through all three thousand years of the colourful diversity of its offspring. It has a lot of ground to cover.

It begins in the immediate aftermath of the death of its founder and ends in the mixed message of a post world war religious disillusionment on the one hand, against the extravagant, if not histrionic populism of fundamentalism in both East and West. Revealing how science and rationalism has both undermined and revived Christianity's fortunes.

Early Christianity,  though undoubtedly thriving, was a real ragbag of counter cultural movements with differing interpretations of their source materials. Of which The Bible and New Testament were only two. Things were unquestionably much wilder and on occasions uncontrollable. Paul's letters portray for us his attempts to keep control and direct his sometimes willfully errant followers.

Constantine's adoption of Christianity was the exemplar for what a potent force political and religious power being brought together could provide Christianity. Prior to this it's followers, who would never shut up bragging about their newfound faith, were continually hounded and persecuted. Progress to becoming a world wide universal religion, has been achieved on the back of a history of such adoptions and alliances with various emperors, kings, dukes and autocratic potentates. But also there's the misjudged and notable silences where moral clarity might have been expected.

Though establishment has provided an undoubted constitutional stability it has provoked upheavals galore - reformations, revolts and internal schisms, each attempting to meet the need for a specific theological adjunct or moral renewal. Establishment, though it provided access to power and influence in high places, it has frequently been one that would ultimately corrupt the actions of its practitioners and sew the seeds for further reformation.

McCullough expertly recounts theological disputes such as who the person of Jesus was a manifestation of - God, man or a synthesis of both. The meaning of The Bible is flexible, and can indeed be made to support many contradictory, inhumane and morally dubious things, should you wish it to.  It's clear whenever MacCulloch reaches a period which is one of his own specialisms. The text begins to fizz with a more vividly colouring and feeling for the detail.

Attempting any such comprehensive and inclusive coverage of the development of Christianity over millennia, cannot help but feel occasionally like its quickly skipping over the bare facts of the matter. No one can be a specialist in a minor cult's manners of practice. That MacCulloch largely manages to keep you on track and engaged over its thousand pages, is a Testament, not just to his scholarship, but also his feeling for the texture of this history and his undoubted skill as a writer of it.

CARROT REVIEW  - 6/8

FEATURE - EARWORMS OF 2024

It's interesting how my perspective changed as the year progressed. I raved about Yard Act in the early months, but whilst still good I don't think it's worn as well in my heart. Whilst Playing Robots Into Heaven by James Blake has recently returned to being played an awful lot and my fondness for it has grown immensely over the months.

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So, as ever these favoured tracks of 2024 are really only of this moment, not forever. 

But here they are - Just click on the link to play

Kylie Minogue - Lights, Camera, Action,That's It.- Oh My Oh My

Kylie continues to have her very own little renaissance on the back of the success of Padam Padam. Here are two addictive little numbers from Tension 2, which prove just how much she has still got it.

Kylie Lights Camera Action

Kylie Oh My Oh My

James Blake - Loading

I simply love this track. its James Blake at his simplest melodically, with its uncertain churchy keyboard and mysterious lyrical obsession. Its the sort of thing I save the word ravishing for. Runs One True Pairing a pretty close second for favourite track of the year.

James Blake Loading

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Conversion

The album Wild God marked yet another career high point and shift in musical emphasis for Nick Cave. This is by far the best track on the whole album, channeling a bit of the agony and the ecstasy of a burgeoning faith.

Nick Cave Conversion

One True Pairing - As Fast As I Can Go

My favourite track of the year. Light percussive rhythms propel this track along as it builds in intensity. Whilst Tom Fleming sings warmly, extolling the excitement of driving home to see his lover.  Everything I love musically condensed into three minutes plus.

O T P As Fast As I Can Go

Godspeed You Black Emperor - Broken Spires At Dead Kapital

I chose this to represent the album, it is simply the shortest track. Its an album that is pretty impossible to define. Provoked by the war in Gaza, the band came up with probably their best album in ages. Unsparingly bleak landscapes painted in sound.

GSYBE - Broken Spires

Aurora - When The Dark Dresses Lightly

Such a talented songwriter, I was seriously spoilt for choice with her album Whatever Happened To The Heart, there are just so many great tracks. I chose this because it was the first track to hook me and I have played it to death.

Aurora When The Dark Dresses Lightly

Beth Gibbons - Burden of Life

Beth Gibbons doesn't release a solo album very often Loves Outgrown being only the second. How many tracks I could have picked ? Well, pretty near all of them. But this mournful little ditty captured something of our world weary zeitgeist.

Beth Gibbons Burden of Life

Aroof Aftab - Aey Nehin

The opening track of her latest album Night Reigns, this silky smooth song sung over a backing that is as light as air. This is wonderfully stripped to the bone and stylish. 

Aroof Aftab Aey Nehin

Laura Marling - Caroline

It's not just the rare tone and expressiveness of her voice but the songwriting quality. Here an older man struggles to remember the break up song he once wrote, prompted by the lover who was the cause of it re-emerging into his later life.

Laura Marling Caroline

Little Simz - Mood Swings

It appears there is never a year off for Little Simz, her EP from which Mood Swings is taken fizzes with ideas and fabulously complex grooves. Makes you anticipate the next full album all the more.

Little Simz Mood Swings

Low- Monkey

A track from several years ago, that caught the attention of my ear holes. My goodness we miss Mimi Parker's voice.

Low Monkey

St Vincent - Broken Man

This is one stonker of a song from her recent album All Born Screaming. This track hits you so hard you are literally physically stunned by it. Terrific stuff roared in your ear drum til it bursts.

St Vincent Broken Man

Arab Strap - Bliss

Very much a continuation of their return to form, great electronic backing whilst Aidan Moffat intones his characteristicly poetic misery and mischief over the top. 

Arab Strap Bliss

Fat Dog - All The Same.

They appeared on Jools Holland's Later performing this song and stole the show, with its energy and punch. Unfortunately the debut album its from doesn't quite live up to the promise of this track. 

Fat Dog All The Same

WATCHED - Freedom of Less - a Reflections on Life video

This guy has a lot to teach us all. Living without a permanent home and wandering from one casual job to the next. There is a lightness to him that's inspirational. Though I can't quite see someone of my age wanting to do it, I imagine you do need to be robustly healthy. but then maybe that limitation is all in my head.

READING ALOUD - David Whyte - Everything Is Waiting For You

 

Good poetry often misses its point with deliberate ease. Modern poets can tend to disguise their meaning behind an artifice of obscurity and erudition. It maybe clever, but its rarely wise. You often find, like the tombs of Muslim heroes of old, that there maybe an elaborately wrought coffin to view on the surface, but there is no body to be found within. It's symbolism is an empty one, an echo without a resonant chamber.

David Whyte's poetry, at its best, will never be found empty of meaning or potency. But neither is it weighed down in a clumsy, portentous or leaden way, nor by expressing itself within the easy understanding of a flowery sentiment. It is the embodiment of its depths that strikes you about Whyte's poetry. One that is never so obvious, that its understood in the moment, you grasp it and quickly move on. There is still an air of mystery in the elucidation to draw your return to it. Here poetry encapsulates, it strikes a vein of recognition like a vestigial bell.  

Gaston Bachlard once described poetry as being like throwing a pebble into a deep pond - that it touches the depths before the ripples of it break the surface.

MY OWN WALKING - Journal December 2024

Having passed the fifth month since the HA! I am still being very dutiful in taking my medications. But also notice that it is slipping my mind to take them at the allotted times more frequently. Also, those morning physical exercises, confession time - I hardly ever do them anymore, I've come to dislike them so much. I can sense my inner sub conscious world is in a mild mannered rebellion, not sweary or cussing, but it is seeping into the conscious world outside.

I've become so accustomed to the medications. I no longer have a lived sense of whether they are meeting my needs or not. However much I might want to beg to differ, all these chemical additives are still contributing to keeping me alive. I feel immensely grateful for what they are doing, however silently in the background. 

I ceased doing the physical exercises because I had no felt sense of them being of much benefit. I was not aware of feeling better, fitter or looser for doing them. But in the world of the HA! who am I to judge? After all, left to my own judgement about what to eat I ended up with a blocked heart artery.  So you know, life lessons.

Whilst on holiday in Derbyshire, I bought myself a notebook, with the intention of writing a daily gratitude journal. So far this is going well. I'm being deliberately loose around how or what I write about within it. If I am not careful, it can end up being all about clocking up an impressive list of things I claim to feel gratitude for. So I also write about gratitude, what it is and isn't. How appreciation is near to, but not quite it. Plus the odd poem by David Whyte, quotes from Brother David Steindl Rast the guru of gratefulness as a spiritual practice. The journal within my first week of using it, is  taking on its own life and direction, which I'm enjoying seeing unfold.

I'm realising I often need to do a bit more excavating. That underneath most things there is something to be grateful for, you just need to discover the strata on which it lies. That it cannot be just about being grateful for those virtuous, obviously nice things. It's worth noting the things you think are beyond the pale of feeling gratitude for. It's a bit like the Buddhist practice of Metta Bhavana, where you cultivate, loving kindness towards oneself, a good friend, a person you don't know, a person you dislike and then all four subjects combined spreading outwards in an interconnected net to hold the whole world and universe within it. Gratitude, ultimately at least, should aim to be as all encompassing as that.

But then I still allow myself to have my doubts and reservations, these keep me on my toes. I've become particularly aware of the different gradations that gratitude has. There is awareness of gratitude, the noticing that there is something you could be grateful for, there is writing down that you are grateful for something or someone, there is the direct expression of your gratitude to someone, there is the feeling of being grateful, and being grateful. 

All of these, whatever the attributed level, are better than not being grateful at all. It is, however, always worth noting to what depth these things go. Whilst also being wary of not giving yourself a hard time when inevitably you feel a bit shallow and skim the surface for a while. It's a cultivation thing, you are dragging gratitude into the fore ground of your attention, and this can all feel a bit too contrived. Until it's not anymore.

I imagine the more gratitude is actively outwardly expressed the more trans-formative it can potentially be. To not permit it to remain something entirely theoretical or abstracted from real life. If something is really touching you at great depth, then how could this not spill out into your everyday interactions and encounters?

FEATURE - David Whyte - The Conversational Nature of Reality

I found this You Tube conversation between David Whyte and Tim Feriss. It's over two hours long, but it does go deep and broad into Whyte's writing and philosophy. I found it it an invigorating and frequently inspiring listen. Give it some time, if you will.

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 121- Life Lessons For Infants

As we were travelling home from a recent visit to Norwich I spotted a van ahead of us. It was for a painting and decorating company based in North Walsham. Further investigation found, as I suspected, that it is owned and run by a female director.  The company is called - Hard As Males.

I've taken to frequently doing a circular walk around Sheringham Park. On this day it was freezing with a cold raw wind blowing across it down coast. Encouraging me to keep up my pace, more than the usual 'moderate pace', as the fitness app dubs it. Fortunately there is the reward halfway of coffee and tea cake in the park cafe. A place where one lone female blackbird can be seen working the tables. Hopping under them the moment  humans vacate the area to scavenge crumbs.

On the way back I encountered a walk organised by the park rangers for families with young infants. Where the kids had to find toy animals hidden in the bushes. The children screamed with delight as they spotted yet another fluffy being, placed conveniently at kid height. Stuffed rabbits, foxes, bats, giraffes were tossed with great enthusiasm into a collective wheelbarrow. Though no doubt a great way to get children to interact and observe nature closer. I couldn't help but ponder on how mortified they're going to be when they discover not every wood has a fluffy pink elephant in it. Ah, there's a life lesson in everything.

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Having reached emotional states of feeling more than a bit overwhelmed and stressed, we took ourselves off for a short break in Derbyshire. Just to get away from the familiar demands of the usual stuff and surroundings. It was a relatively relaxed holiday. The worst thing in modern life is to replace one hyper busy working lifestyle with a holiday planned down to the last minute of each waking day.

We stayed in a small farm cottage near Matlock. Taking in the delights of Matlock Bath, Buxton, Bakewell and one evening we went up to the Heights of Abraham to see the light illuminations. The illuminations were really good and we thoroughly enjoyed them. I took so many photos my hands became bitterly cold and this somewhat shocked my post HA! medicated body. 

You get to the Heights via cable cars, travelling upwards slowly for ten minutes. During the day the views from these are spectacular. At night all you can see are spots of lights from houses and the A6 snaking underneath, cloaked in a 360 degree all encompassing darkness. Your sensations being so limited, as the cable cars creep upwards you are palpable aware of how much they swing and lurch like a bell. Going up and coming down was quite the most unnerving experience of not feeling entirely safe. Something I'm unlikely to want to encounter again any time soon.

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Whilst on this six day break away, there is always the gift that keeps on giving of the overheard conversation. We were leaving a fine little cafe called Butterfingers. Two middle aged women were cackling uproariously at a table by the door. As we left one of them guffawed and said :- ' what I need is a handyman' after which another round of screeching laughter ensued, with more than a hint of innuendo to it.

As we were walking through the park in Matlock one frosty morning. A young woman probably in her thirties, dressed in a fake fur pink coat, in a terrible hurry. She was having a conversation on her matchy-matchy pink phone as she scurried along. It went something like this. ( Imagine a Derbyshire accent )

" well, it's not having a dog that I object too, it's the name. She has to change the name. I mean who wants to shout 'heel Mr Juicy' in the middle of the street?"