........ the food of love

Peter Bunn hit Harold Mockett. More of these later.

I occasionally put the radio to Classic fm. It’s generally chocolate box music. That’s not to put it down, just merely to put it in its place. Like a chocolate box, the contents are varied but with a limited set of ingredients, you know what you will get. Often soft and sweet, occasionally harder to chew and you will sometimes have some choices you would prefer someone else to enjoy.

But boxes of chocolates are only one confection from a whole array.

I like to imagine the world of music as a supermarket, with the music of Classic fm filling a small but accessible shelf in the confectionary aisle. And also like chocolate, it’s not healthy to have too much. The confectionary aisle is full of familiar soothing sweet and satisfying confections of other genres. And do not restrict choice to the confectionary aisle. There is a wide wide choice of music from all times and places, with new varieties every day. I like to think I end up with a varied trolley full, having visited many aisles to make sure I have made sure of everything that is on offer.

There are some aisles that I never wish to go down and some I will visit more often. But what determined my shopping habits? It’s quite easy for me to answer.

Once when the rooms downstairs were being redecorated, I had the hi-fi assembled in my bedroom. It was a temporary arrangement but at weekends I would be able to lie there in bed and listen to Radio 3, which, again, was a temporary fixation.

I remember Richard, my younger son who was 5 or 6 at the time, would snuggle into bed and I would amaze him by guessing the composer or the period of composition of some but certainly not all the music being played

He was more fascinated how I knew, with modest success, so many composers and could fix the music in time. It was simple. I had listened to my teacher. I had a limited knowledge of many things at ten years of age. My last primary school teacher introduced a reluctant but able reader to humorous writing, but it was a year later that my music education took off.

Two things happened at that time. I discovered, by tuning the radiogram, that there was a station called American Forces Network. And I went to secondary school.

The former brought the exciting and very alien sounding Big Bill Broonzy into the living room. The second brought Joe Brooke into my life. Both events opened up a window into my experience of what is music.

Joe Brooke was the teacher of music at my secondary school, Sir William Turner’s School, and he created the line at the top of the page and added a further list something along the lines of buying shoes on a shopping list.

In addition to these weird phrases, he played extracts of music and showed this eager pupil the instruments of the orchestra. What bound all this together was he clearly linked the signature music of Purcell, Bach, Handel, Hayden, Mozart, (Peter Bunn hit Harold Mockett), Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin and Liszt (buying shoes on a shopping list ) with the sequential development of the European orchestra as musical and instrumental changes took place. A marvellous education which has served me well.

He followed up this magic with the development of black music, jazz and swing in the USA. Thus a final piece was placed in the jig saw. I now saw how Big Bill Broonzy’s music, which had drifted almost accidentally into my parents’ living room, was part too of the global western music picture.

I am quite happy to shop around under the one roof for my music, but I know there are some very specialist shops which I can indulge my tastes to a higher level. I do not know if I will get around to going to one.

Whoop it up

There is a programme available on television called Extreme Makeover Home Edition. It’s fantastic. The ingredients are quite simple but the execution is of the grandest style.

Each week, so it would appear – it’s easy to forget that the programmes are edited to a weekly format, they take a family who have applied and been selected to undergo a transformation in their domestic arrangements, hence the title.

The programme selects those families that have a great AW factor. A tragic death in the family from a disease or unfortunate accident or act of violence works well as well as other wholly sympathetic domestic reasons. The chosen family are then whisked away while teams of every available skill necessary to build a super home that is literally jaw-dropping in terms of scale, or amount of bad taste or kitsch, are called on to re-home the family. But not until the previous hovel, shack or shanty is blown to pieces in a splendidly Hollywood action movie style.

What all this activity brings about is a general feeling of massive sympathy, concern, care and ultimately tear jerking, hugging and back slapping congratulations from all to all concerned.

In the UK we have makeover programmes too. But there the similarity ends. A most recent one in the UK is Ground Force, where a team of professional gardeners and a builder transform a shabby patch of garden into a kind of themed space. In terms of a makeover, it’s as if they had simply rearranged the items on a coffee table when compared to the changes in Extreme Makeover. It serves to state the differences between the way we are as British and the way the Americans are as Americans.

The way the makeover is celebrated could not be any more different.

In the UK, the new garden is celebrated with champagne naturally, but with the family being grateful and selfless while being watched by a few neighbours who helped keep the secret and may have made scones for the celebrity design team during the transformation.

Extreme Makeover Home Edition does it slightly differently. The family arrive in a stretch limo and are hidden from the new home by a bus, whilst behind what appears to be the inhabitants of a small town are whooping it and thoroughly enjoying the anticipation. And when Ty Pennington invokes the crowd to shout his catch phrase requesting the bus driver to move his vehicle, then all hell breaks. The cameras catch faces with quivering lips, eyes that are filling and overflowing with tears and all the human reaction to story milked for every ounce of emotion.

This is no place for polite applause. There are whoops and cries of joy beyond measure.

There is a legend of restraint in Britain that for centuries is marked by not showing too much emotion if any at all. It is our way. My reaction to the American way is to see it as vulgar, insincere, over-the-top schmaltz – a typical Hollywood movie finale.

But that is changing. In the UK the growing generation is adopting the American way and it is sincere. We can on occasion whoop and cry with the best. We now see ourselves perhaps see it a safe thing to do without attracting ridicule and laughter.

The Americans naturally do celebrate and be thankful. There greatest day of the year is Thmksgiving day after all. I think the root is being a mongrel nation. People went there in very recent history to escape many forms of restriction and fear– financial, religious and political as examples. Or they were taken without any choice. Once there, they lived or fell by their own efforts, so success was something to celebrate. Not only was it there to celebrate, but it also served to show that anyone could have that success too. Extreme Makeover sums up the American way, because that’s what their early citizens had to do – undergo an extreme makeover of their individual and family lives. Here in Britain it’s been more a case of accept and adapt people with their cultures and ideas.

But the whooping and hugging and open emotion is seeping into British life, and perhaps it is no bad thing.

Sat late at night, I noticed the tulips

Warm with colour, lit as if by candlelight.

Further packaging

After reading Mark Price, managing director of the Waitrose supermarket chain, my vow to refuse plastic bags from as many shops as they are offered now seems Lilliputian step in the march to the green planet. But I will not be deterred. Eating Zimbabwean tilapia and buying Spanish roses will not yet make me feel I am making a difference. (Guardian article 10/3/2008). He states it is better to buy Spanish grown roses rather than English grown after you balance the footprint of the air miles from Spain with that of the heat and light needed in this country.

There are many, many factors when shopping that can impact upon the world and its dwindling resources and greenness. Packaging, air miles, refrigeration, supermarkets dominance and its effect on small business and their ability to sustain or destroy farmers and growers both at local and global level are players in the game of green shopping.

Consumers who wish to make a difference are faced with some difficult choices and the necessary information is not always available or very clear. If buying Kenyan food, for example, I recognise some jet aircraft has flown several thousand miles and the carbon footprint can be measured. But in buying the food I am sustaining families in employment and bringing money into an environment that may help to build schools and create health promotion schemes. How can I make a green decision amid this balance of loss and gain?

Unless someone comes with a definitive ethical purchasing index to apply to buying which converts factors for carbon footprint, farming sustainability, environmental and social impact, I will continue to run around in a green fug.

However the plastic bag challenge will remain. I feel it is a clear contribution to the world. The other day I collected some spectacle from a branch of Specsavers. I was asked if I was to wear them immediately. I said no and as I hadn’t a case with me they placed within a new one. Now for the killer question. I was asked if I wanted them in a bag. I almost screamed why. The logical extension is that I will need a bag whenever and wherever I carry them. I declined politely. Another anecdotal observation amused me in Asda. At the check out, a mother and daughter were bagging their shopping of which the last item was a large packet of bread buns.

Not only where they in a plastic bag, but they had a handle already as part of their packaging and yes, they were placed inside a plastic carrier bag without thought. My inward smile of disbelief was immeasurable.