40 years ago in South Africa I met a banned lawyer and his wife, a university lecturer. His name was Unterhalter. I asked what it meant. “Entertainer,” he said wrily.
I thought of him this morning when I looked up who wrote the song I’ve used in the title. Herman Hupfeld, supplied the search engine, American song writer. Indeed. No show business without Jews and gays. And if Casablanca can be shown several times recently, I can invoke the song memorably sung by Dooley Wilson. Because time is currently impactedly slow and whips past, all at the same time. It’s June and all I have to show for May is the payment of several bills, the advent of hypertension and reading a book I would never have tried if it hadn’t been given to me (The Magician, about Thomas Mann, by Colm Toibin – fine writing, highly apposite.)
When sleep won’t come,
I choose the road I was born in and begin to follow every road I can remember, every house and who lived there, every shop – till sleep comes. The other night I cast the memory net over my early days in London – where I stayed, where I went, what I saw. I have lived in London ever since except for two years out in New York and I like it less than I have ever liked it.
You may have noticed that I don’t spend a lot of time on negatives.
I acknowledge them and I try to work through them because I know that going round them, trying to avoid them, won’t answer. For me. You can’t avoid the numbers in London, the mess in the street, the shuttered properties mostly but not exclusively commercial. You can’t avoid the contrast between the privileged of which disposable income is a great part, and the rest of us. It is there, staring you in the face.
Yesterday I met a very pretty woman, becomingly dressed and as she came down the bus aisle, she asked if she was on the right bus for … and I said “Yes and you look wonderful, sit here “ indicating the seat beside me.
And she talked about living in rural Kent,
coming up to shop (“I want a Zara and a Uniglo”) but she also said how drowned she felt in the numbers in the street, how she couldn’t remember feeling so before, was it just age , did I think ? And children, she said, children everywhere … so I remarked that, listening to the recent report on child poverty, how I had waited to hear a comment on what we used call Family Planning – contraception – “More than our lives are worth to mention it” she said, a shadow of weariness across her face. “But we thought” I began – “That was then and this is now. Time goes by” she said.
Time has gone by for any love affair between the actor Rowan Atkinson and the electronic car. He loves cars, he has qualifications in electronics, and he has looked at the provision of the shortlived heavy batteries which use up all sorts of resources and are necessary to the electronic car. And he says of cars – barring diesel – what increasing numbers of people say of clothes – make them last longer.
It’s part of recycling and we can all do it. The woman to whom I lent a novel a year ago returned it with a nice note and the used edition of a book she thought I’d like (I did) writing “Used the new new.”
The train crash in India killed and injured the very poor, right out in the back country where trains are overcrowded and neither they nor the lines they run on are well maintained because that is not the face India wants the world to see. When you see numbers of the poor discarded like that – and it happens in every country in the world – it is an abstruse form of birth control – later on in life, an early death. If you have a belief system, it comforts you. But that child, that person never comes again. That time is gone.
Annalog 