The other night we had a real taste of a cold, windy, wet winter’s night. The rain pelted against the windows. The glass shook under the strain of huge gusts. Possums appeared to stay in their trees, roofs or boxes, fearful of being carried away like old umbrellas. Above all, we were all aware of the highway and the train line, whose sounds were hugely magnified by the fierce southerly. At one point in the middle of the night, a coal train appeared to be coming through our garden, such was the cacophony. Really, it sounded only meters away!

So today when I was spending a little time with an old uni literary primer, which is a brick of a thing to hold, I came across a poem about a coal train, far better then the one I wrote a few days ago. It wasn’t until I had read the poem through that I noticed the title and smiled. I had been diddled.

“In Memoriam John Coltrane”

 Listen to the coal

rolling, rolling through the cold

steady rain, wheel on 

  wheel, listen to the

turning of the wheels this night

black as coal dust, steel

  on steel, listen to

these cars carry coal, 

listen to the coal train roll.

Michael Stillman

Yes, a tribute to one of the great modern jazz saxophonists. The whole poem is a splendid metaphor for the magic that Coltrane brought to performance. Have a listen to him if you don’t believe me. The poem has a highly musical quality, one amplified by being read aloud.

And yet, I like to think that this is also a poem about a coal train riding through a cold wet night. I guess that it can be both. Maybe.

The passing of veteran Stones drummer Charlie Watts at 80 surely disproves the adage that rock and roll is exclusively a young persons game. There are now a number of artists who are well past middle-age and are still doing live shows and making new music. Groups who disbanded decades ago have reformed and are trotting out their back-catalogue, with the occasional new album thrown in.

But even if we accept that the elderly can still flounce and pout with the best of them ( incongruous as it often looks), there can be little doubt that most pop or rock musicians create their best music when they are younger. It is no mystery as to why. New musicians are hungrier for success, more willing to take risks, tend to be more creative and have boundless energy. If you want something badly enough and you have the talent, then you are in with a chance if luck shines upon you.

I can’t think of single example of the reverse - that is - an artist who creates better music later in life. Some have longevity and do buck the trend - Bowie had a few very good albums in the 1980’s. The Rolling Stones too, though little of their work reached the  heights of their late 60’s and early 70’s output. Compare Start Me Up, which was very successful in 1981, with songs like Angie, Gimme Shelter or Ruby Tuesday. The former is a good song, the latter are simply great.

As usual, I am always happy to be proven wrong, though this one is a tough ask.

The weight of blame for the flouting of the current Covid restrictions seems to be falling on the broad shoulders of young men. Eager interviewees are keen to present them as being totally devoid of personal responsibility and unwilling to submit to impositions on their freedom.

Young men are an easy target of course and they do feature to a higher degree in the stats concerning car accidents, crime, drug use and other forms of mischief. They are also at a time in their lives when they have been released from the strictures of childhood, free from the harassment of teacher's (and their elders in general) and thrust into a world of responsibility, one which they have not been prepared for.

And yet if a war were to occur, they would bear the brunt of recruitment for the armed forces in those areas that are most dangerous. They would die in disproportionate numbers to other cohorts but they would be celebrated every Anzac Day for their sacrifice. You can see the problem. They lack the sufficient maturity for proper risk assessment and yet they will be thrown into the heat of the fray.

It can only be a matter of time before someone on the TV opines that what young men need "is a good war." And then the repetition of the "old lie", dulce et decorum est pro patria mori will play again to packed houses.

 "For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
      the more knowledge, the more grief."    Eccles. 1.18

It is almost axiomatic that increased knowledge through learning leads to doubt. Certainty is the hand-maiden of those who study little, know little, think less but seem supremely confident in their views. The present time is perfectly suited to the latter, who, having spent 10 minutes on the internet, are experts in whichever field they choose. There is no arguing with ignorance - it is its own self-contained bubble.

I like reading Ecclesiastes because it is full of reasonable doubt about the world. Sometimes the author goes a little overboard - he does a good line in 'woe is me'- but for the most part, he is centred on the difficulties of being in the real world. Wisdom does surely lead to sorrow, for to become wise means to come to a fuller understanding of the human condition and our place in the scheme of things.

This is a time of limbo for many people, a stuck place between their old lives and the current stasis. For people in my state of NSW, we face lockdown into the foreseeable future. I am not complaining about it, but this might be a good time to become acquainted with writers like the one in Ecclesiastes, if for no other reason, than to get perspective.

Coal Train

The coal train stalls,
It stops,
And pockmarked trucks,
Stretched beyond sight,
Blackened all,
Bang and squeal and bang,
A vast complaint of coal,
Eastbound to feed
Insistent appetites,
Furnaces that gobble whole-
Reeling out steel,
Jolting impulses and
Fabricated need.
East, towards the moon,
That limping, leaves us.
Now the engine roars,
And gaining speed,
Begins a trembling conga
Down the line,
The hidden seam,
Hacked from the earth,
Dull in the sunlight,

Mortuary silent,
Is bound for the sky.

I used to frequent a lot of coffee shops once. Back when I was a kid they were far less common than today, the milk bar being a preferred site for a social non-alcoholic drink. I recall my mum taking us to cafe-style shops in the 1960's, and she pointed out to me recently that we often dropped into one or the other when in Chatswood or in Sydney.

For me the whole thing really took off at university, when coffee shops blossomed pretty much everywhere, though the ones on campus were fairly basic. Esme's Room in the Morven Brown Building had plastic tables and chairs, fluorescent lights, a coffee machine, Esme, and a tray of ghastly cakes. The latter included a truly awful oversized pineapple donut.

Later when I went to church, a group of us often went off to a cafe afterwards, though we had to drive a little to find one that was open. I recall fondly The Great Little Coffee Shop at Willoughby - filtered coffee, smoky Arcoroc cups and plates,  French cakes and a kind of cool ambience. One of our group brought his guitar and sang though the evening. 

Then it was on into the Eighties and a full immersion in cafe society, well before it even existed. I fear that I may have had hipster pretensions even then, though the term would not percolate through for another thirty years. No matter where I was living, there was always a cafe of some sort to indulge my whim of a cappuccino and a slice of carrot cake while I thumbed through a copy of The Guardian Weekly. 

These days I only occasionally step into one, though they are many and varied and often very good. I make my cuppa at home. The truth about this change is fairly prosaic - I was spending too much money. But in gaining something, I lost something else.

Maybe I will take it up again, post-covid. Who knows?

There is confusingly little light at the end of the tunnel for the good denizens of NSW. An extended lockdown is being mooted in some circles until November, which still seems like a world away, this being the last month of Winter and that being the last of Spring. That is a whole season. I don't mind the masks, the jabs or the digital check-ins, though it would be nice to go back to my work at 2RPH and hang out in those city haunts that I so love. Still, it's small price to pay in the scheme of things.

I can understand that this might drive some people a little bonkers - those with busy working and social lives - but I cannot fathom what drives others to become completely irrational. There is one fellow, recently arrested, who drove from Sydney to a popular town on the north coast and has set off a lockdown. He said he didn't believe in the virus even though he was infected by it. What could that possibly mean - that he can't see it and therefore I doesn't exist? Would he care to apply the same muddled thinking to toothache, or leukaemia, or the many other thing hidden ailments? How about oxygen?

"In a dark time, the eye begins to see" wrote Theodore Roethke, in a poem that dealt with his own demons. If only, I hope, that we all might.

I bought a cheap pair of headphones recently that were, strangely enough, highly recommended. I tried them out today in the garden, setting up a test of classical, pop, jazz and rock as benchmarks. Indeed, they did outperform their price by a huge measure. Will they outlast their plastic construction - who knows?

It was while reliving Bowie's Station to Station, a much underrated album IMHO, that one of those flashbacks came that I followed through to a surprisingly satisfying endpoint. Suddenly, there I was, back at the Roundhouse Bar at UNSW, surrounded by my drama buddies, while someone behind the bar had the album on rotation. The niggling memory slid in at the track, Wild is the Wind, a majestic love ballad that Bowie sings with tender beauty. It echoed around that busy lunchtime bar like a thick cloud that threatened to envelop all with a kind of fantastic love.

Music can do those kinds of things to you. 

This morning I found yet another diary. It had slipped down the back of the bookcase and was just barely visible. Dated 1979, it contained short daily entries on my life, with occasional comments where space permitted.

One thing that astonished me was just how busy I was. This being my final year of my BA at UNSW, there were plenty of uni and class related jottings, but beyond that, were a plethora of entries about theatre, classes, meeting with friends for the cinema or lunch, parties, work commitments, adventures. In the first four months of the year, there wasn't a day when I was not doing something.

I really can't get my head around that. Sure, university was a great time for socializing and obviously I did, but this much? I guess my life has shrunk - so many of those friends rarely or never seen again as real life took charge, roads diverging irrevocably.

It makes me sad.

I was reading in the US version of The Conversation, an excellent online publication, that there are moves afoot amongst some academics and at some universities to 'cancel' Geoffrey Chaucer. By this I mean, the removal of Chaucer's fiction, most notably, The Canterbury Tales, from the modern curriculum.

His crimes apparently include sexism, racism, antisemitism, to name but a few. These offences take place within a fictional work and come from the mouths of fictional characters - those who are wending their way to Canterbury on pilgrimage. That in itself should be a sufficient rebuttal to such a ludicrous charge, but I suspect not. Those who come after Chaucer are probably intent on tearing down any author who is white, male and a part of the literary cannon. They strive for a decolonized curriculum, whatever that is. I suspect, though, that it is another misguided utopian project.

I have said before that overlaying modern ideas and moral standards on a different historical era is foolish. It is foolish and stupid and arrogant. Chaucer wrote in the 14th Century when attitudes and beliefs were entirely different to the present age. Human nature may not change much but what they believed then bears little relationship to what is believed now. This point should also be a sufficient rebuttal but it probably isn't.

When I studied Chaucer in Year 12 and later at university, there was no confusion about this. We could read and enjoy The Canterbury Tales, while at the same time knowing that many of the attitudes and social mores in the work would be completely unacceptable today. There was no problem because there isn't a problem. 

I am saddened that the current crop of undergraduates have to put up with this arse-hattery. What a joy just to read a book because it is a wonderful work of literature!

 I went to put pen to blog late this morning when a person from Porlock came a-calling and engaged me at the front door for a few minutes. Sad to say that upon sitting down again before my keyboard, I had forgotten what I was going to write about, entirely. I still can't remember anything some hours later.

Suffice it to say that I feel much as Coleridge might have when a similar visitor assailed him some two centuries ago. On that occasion, the fully-formed Kubla Khan was shattered, leaving us with the still-magnificent fragment we have today. Some have accused Coleridge of inventing the Porlockian to cover for writer's block, which I suppose is possible.

But the mysterious visitor narrative is far more interesting and leaves us with a sense of what might have been, had only that door not been rapped upon all those years ago.

The last month of winter has opened with a mild, sunny day. My morning ride saw me reducing the layers of clothing by a half and I could have gone further. Other cyclists were donning t-shirts! Cold weather will soon return and perhaps that is for the best, since the lockdown continues until Spring.

I think the current period, so lamented as a time of adversity in the human realm, might be seen differently in another part of the animal kingdom. I refer to dogs, for surely this time, like no other time, cannot be other than a golden age for our canine friends.

Everywhere I go, there are dogs on leads, dogs cocking legs, dogs with tails triumphant, dogs with snouts in the air. What must they think, after months or years on the slim rations dolled out by their masters, to be lorded as kings. Everyday the company of their friends from morning to night, everyday the long walk, everyday the much-sought-after attention!

A golden era, indeed.