Things to do in Kingston when you're dead

I am an anomaly.  I am the last of a line, and I exist purely because of a strange series of happenstances.

Where to start ...... OK, I am a Deeds Clerk.  That title in itself surely alerts you to the fact that we are not talking leading-edge technology.  Listen, you wouldn't believe the half of it.  Our firm is the result of amalgamations (most law firms are) and we have acquired responsibility for the wills, deeds and files entrusted to all our predecessors, going back fifty years in some cases.  I have four lock-up garages, a huge attic, several massive safes, and filing cabinets stuffed with deeds and other documents.  I am currently down to my last six inches of shelf space for deeds, and eight months of attic space for files, maybe.  After that, I'm going to resign.  Depends how they react to the situation.  (It's a long story.)

[Note:  if anyone from my company gets to read this ..... I am going to protect client confidentiality at all times, and our reputation.  Not for my benefit, but for theirs and yours.]

I am employed by lawyers in Kingston, Surrey, and they are all hard-working, well-intentioned professionals who do their very best for clients.  Sometimes the clients make that hard.  Some of the partners are so conscientious that I can see the signs of stress in them, on a daily basis.  I try to be supportive and minimise their burden, but the work makes that difficult sometimes.

Our main source of stress is the regulatory requirements of this industry.  Believe me, if bankers had had to comply with the stuff we do, the world would not be in financial ruin;  I can understand it to an extent - solicitors are present on occasions when large and sometimes vast sums of money pass between people, for one reason or another (death, divorce, sale, treaty, negotiation) and they have to be restrained from dipping their finger in the honey jar.  But when we have to apologise to clients for the length of the first letter we send out to them, and when we have to bank every cheque within 24 hours, and submit to routine scrutinies that make the Spanish Inquisition look like ten minutes in a bouncey castle ... something is wrong.  

I didn't intend to go in this direction.  I wanted to talk about documents.

In my few years with this company, I have had to destroy vast amounts of documents.  They go for 'secure shredding', because of the personal information they contain.  Most of the time, the documents are routine.  Sometimes, they are not.

I do my very best not to destroy anything worth preserving, despite the fact I have limited time.  For example, I came across a cache of stuff relating to an early pioneer in Eastern Australia - we are talking 1860s - which was mostly dull as ditchwater conveyances relating to property he owned in Surbiton before emigrating but had great lists of names and properties that proved to be gold dust to the museum in Port Macquarie.  In those days, everything had to be written out, in exhaustive detail, signed by multiple witnesses, and highly specific.  Copies of birth and marriage certificates were required.  Even copies of documents attesting to which church people attended.  I learned that this guy had many children, one of whom was consigned to an asylum, hired convicts who had been transported out there as virtual slaves, imported Hereford cattle to that continent for the first time, and much, much more ..... incredible stuff.  If I ever visit Port Macquarie (it is to laugh!), I'm sure of a few free frosties.

And sometimes it's poignant.  Lord knows why, but one probate file I was directed to destroy contained the 'Soldier's Penny' owned by the late client.  You don't know what a 'Soldier's Penny' is?

Here's an image, followed by a link - the image is not of the actual 'Dead Man's Penny' (the popular name) kept by this particular client.  I assume his father had died in the First World War.

Wikipedia entry

I couldn't believe it when the Penny dropped out of this file.  They are solid chunks of bronze, five inches in diameter.  I didn't know what to do with it.  Obviously, this guy had passed away with no living relatives, or at least with none who wanted any of his memorabilia.  In the end, I sold it on eBay and used their facility to donate all the profits to ... I think ... the Star and Garter Home for wounded soldiers, in Richmond.  I hate eBay, but at least they do offer that option.

Other documents I have destroyed have been wills.  Yes, if you make a will and leave it with your solicitor, after fifty years or so they will assume that you're either dead and no-one cared, or you have made a later will with another firm, you ingrate.  You would not credit some of the things people put in their wills, or what accompanying documents can tell you about their lives.  99% of the time, of course, wills are dry as dust and so they should be.  Occasionally, like mining for opals, something starts to gleam out of the wall you're hacking at.

Like the guy who left a fiver to his doctor; 'to drink my health, which neither he nor the medical profession as a whole could restore to me'.  Sorry to strike a sad note, but enclosed with that will was the death certificate, dated just two weeks later, which stated; ' ...... did take his own life by inhalation of household gas.'  Stuck his head in the oven.

With another will was a whole series of correspondence, telegrams and other ephemera which I have worked up into a binder, chronologically - basically a spinster sister ran away with a music hall entertainer, and his outraged wife and the spinster's outraged family (who were frightfully well to do) tried to combine to find them and confront them with their outrageous behaviour.  I do hope the couple had a happy ending ... sadly the ending is not available to me.

People also leave vitriolic letters to their relatives, explaining why they haven't been left anything in The Will.  Usually because of what they said about Our Brenda at Kev's wedding, or something equally trivial.  They go into shredding straight away.

The reason I'm writing this piece today instead of earlier is that I am processing the very last such batch of old documents.  It is a pile of draft wills from the 1930's, which popped up when we cleared some ancient deeds boxes from the attic.  Here's an example of how ancient these are:

"To our professional charges in connection with attendances on you and correspondence in the drawing and completing of your will ....... £1/11/6"

Oooh, and I love this one .... reminds us how things were once done, and what the Royal Mail used to be:

"In accordance with the instructions which you gave to Mr Ingillson last night, we have prepared and herewith enclose engrossment of your Will.

You will notice that we have added the legacy of £3/-/- to your nephew [X] in accordance with the note which you sent to Mr. Ingillson's house this mid-day.

We think that you will find the engrossment carries out your instructions.  Mr. Ingillson will call at your house at say 9.15, tomorrow Friday morning to confirm that it is quite in order and he will then call again at 2.15 as arranged when the Will will be executed by you in his presence along with Mrs [Z]."

Good Lord and butter.  That kind of service would today cost you upwards of half a grand.

I regret saying goodbye to these documents.  Every one of them (even those which don't have eight wax seals and signatures or are - like the boring conveyance from the early 1800s that I have on my shelf at work - attached by a ribbon to a three inch wax disc seal stored inside a lead canister, all of which are now so fragile after the centuries have trodden on them) meant a great deal to someone, and they are portals to lives that are by and large wholly forgotten.

It could make a man sad.  Thank god for gallows humour.

[Attendance Note:  An hour and a half.  No client, no-one to bill.  File copy in my General File, please, Doreen.]

"A good smoke in any weather."

I hope you recognise that as a Terry Pratchett quote, from his Tiffany Aching cycle.  This isn't excatly how I envisaged the sailor, from the pack of 'Jolly Sailor' tobacco that Pratchett invents for these books, but it'll do, it'll do.

What I mean in this instance is that I want to blow off smoke here, safe in the knowledge that no-one is going to read it.  In particular, I don't want to upset my son, whose music has been subject to much remixing.

I -ing (that's another Pratchett quote, from 'The Truth') hate remixes.  I -ing hate them with a vengeance.  Because a) they are never the original (self-evident) and b) they are always -ing awful.

Except, except .... Bob and Catherine did remixes of a Nirvana tune and a Carly Simon tune and a Creep tune and others - and they were just as interesting as the original.  Contradiction City?  No, I don't think so;  I think their versions are more reinterpretations, than remixes.  While I try to clarify that thought, I may post up a link to the Alpines' rejiggeries.

And then there's this:

OK, I think these are more 'covers' than 'remixes'.  I must explore this further.

Right, here's an original Alpines tune.  It's called 'Chances'.

And now here's a remix, which has had more YouTube plays than the original.  You'll forgive me if I don't listen to it again.  God, it's horrible.

And that's my point.  These people need to go out and make their own music, and be judged by that.  Bob and Catherine spent days and days of time and years of their experience writing and recording these songs, and these people come along and shove it through some software and add some 'farts and squeaks' (I think that's how John Peel described synthesisers, he was not what you would call a big fan) ... running on empty here, into the early hours.  Just woke up wanting to make a statement.

Kurt Vonnegut: an apology

The apology is not to Kurt Vonnegut.  It is to you, dear reader.

I have been shamefully neglecting this blog.  I fell into easy ways, just posting up my stuff on Facebook when I felt like it, not including photos or links or anything ..... but now people on Facebook are starting to complain that I am clogging up their news feeds.  So I thought I'd better try and reinstate the blog habit.

But I wanted to write about Kurt.  I am reading again this book:

It's just great.

If you know Mr. Vonnegut at all, it is probably from 'Slaughterhouse Five', which gained a lot of popularity in the seventies and was made into a film.  It is fiction, but it includes his real world memories of being involved (he was a soldier, and taken prisoner by the Germans) in the aftermath of the firebombing of Dresden in Germany, one of the worst single Second World War atrocities against mostly civilians, after that of Hiroshima.  We did it.  Not the Nazis, not the Soviet hordes.  We took the decision to bomb and burn a mainly unprotected mediaeval city back to the bedrock.  And yet the book is full of humour and fantasy and science fiction themes, and he is not judgemental.  'So it goes', is his verdict.  'And so on', is another damning indictment.  'Poo-tee-weet' - you'll have to look that up.

Every single book I've read of Vonnegut's is a new departure.  'Cat's cradle', 'Mother Night', 'Sirens of Titan', 'Bluebeard' ..... And yet, contrariwise, there are common elements.  He often introduces himself into the narrative - 'Look at me', he says. 'This is a book I'm writing, of the nature of books, and here I am commenting on it.  Don't be fooled, it's all fiction!'  Apart, of course from the items he includes from his own life.  His mother's suicide, his relationship with his sister ...... they don't intrude, but they sidle on from the wings.

'Breakfast of Champions' is perhaps his best work in this vein.  The protagonist is Dwayne Hoover, who is going insane, but don't let that put you off.  The book charts the course of Dwayne on his way, all unknown, to meet Kilgore Trout at an arts festival;  Trout is a science fiction writer invented by Vonnegut - and he describes many of the novels that this fictional writer has written.  Fictional fiction, if you will.  (I like in particular the one about the alien race that communicates by tapdancing and farting.)  There are unsettling passages but much that is humorous and complete flight of fantasy .... not least when Vonnegut himself enters the narrative and interacts with his own characters.  With hilarious consequences.

Did I tell you that a recurring theme of Vonnegut's is that, at our centre, we each have an unwavering band of light?  No?  Good.

[ncidentally, the character of Kilgore Trout was so persuasive that another scifi writer (Philip Jose Farmer) wrote a novella called 'Venus on the half shell' under the Trout pseudonym that is so rare that fans now pay hundreds of dollars for an early copy.  That's a lie.  About the money, I mean - the rest is true.]

Oh dear, I am out of practice at ending blog pieces.  Well ... shall I say that his writing is easy to read, and you won't realise that he has smuggled some wonderfully original idea past you until you turn the page and then say; "Hang on ....... !"

Oh, and the pages of this book are splattered with bold line drawings that he did.  He went through a phase.  Don't we all.

Gwen Stefani. An excellent video. A rocking track. Much analysis.

I'm sorry, I have neglected this blog.  It's just ... I have too much going on.  I'm all over Facebook, Twitter, I do email, I have the occasional real world contact ... and I also have to leap from tree to tree, as they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia.  It all eats into my spare time, of which I admit I have much.  But any road up ....

I have viewed many fine music videos over the past few years.  'Go with the flow', by Queens of the Stone Age, is a standout.

But I really like this one.  Would you like me to deconstruct it before, or after, you view it?

The added video content in this extended version is knowing.  There are many subtle little touches ... look for the bunny in the automat machine ..... listen to the musak in the waiting room .... try and spot the questions on the clipboard ....

And the track itself is kickass!

I finally caved in and watched 'Game of Thrones'.

I watched the first episode of Game of Thrones. Throws you in at the deep end, doesn't it? What the **** is going on, mainly? And quite racey. I don't think our dear Queen, for example, would have felt comfortable at a Dothraki wedding. Which seemed to be held on Californian beaches ... anyone got any info on that? Ends on a little bit of a cliffhanger, but in reverse, so to speak. (GoT fans will get that.)

OK, I've now mulled it over for a few hours.

Without seeing any other episodes (except for a YouTube of the Red Wedding, and I don't recall the characters who appear in that, because I was just aghast at the wanton bloodletting), or reading any of the books, I make the following extrapolations. The audience will note that at no time during the performance do my fingers leave my hands.

- The white haired pretender over the water and his brutish Dothraki army come to a bad end, very enjoyable (for us). 

- His sister raises dragons (those fossils are just dormant eggs), gets tattooed, has a lot of fun cuckolding Muscle Boy with anything in sight, (including the guy who gave her the books, a sure sign), and then goes to the bad, revenging herself on any males but finally finding peace nursing sick dire wolves in a cottage in Dorset. (Not sure about that last bit.)

- Sean Bean loyally serves his buddy, until the king is treacherously murdered and Sean has to step up to the plate. He emotes a lot. But after a brief halcyon period something horrible happens, and Sean's youngest son (who has somehow survived what happened at the end of Episode One) comes into the kingdom. Hmmmm.

- The Bastard is everyone's expected king-in-waiting, but he is taken out by a meteorite. (This needs work.)

- The Dwarf roisters his way through (almost) the entire series, developing a nice line in sarky banter and depravity, before succumbing to either a stroke when he is denied a ride at Dragonland because he doesn't meet the height criterion, or something involving an edged weapon. Bets are on the latter.

- Those wolf cubs develop telepathic links with the brothers and the sister, and do a lot of meaningful growling.

- The sister proves to be more of a warrior than any of the brothers. She takes to leather.

- Something nasty comes through The Wall and lays the country to waste, combining 'Village of the Damned' with 'Blair Witch'. No-one thinks to just stop up the tunnel and forget about the whole thing. 

- Many characters can't decide their motivation, but throw themselves into it anyway and look forward to bacon butties at the commissary truck. Ooops, don't spoil the screen magic .....

- A lot more flesh is revealed, but it's all in the best possible taste and essential to the plot. My dear. (My other half remarks that the amount of tasteful male flesh has been disappointing so far.)

- A drinking game develops centred on matching drinks to the country in which the filming is taking place (chianti for Italy, porter for Ireland, schnapps for the Black Forest, weak lager for Arizona etc. etc.). Many carpets and soft furnishings thoughout the land are ruined by colourful stains.

- At no point is anyone shown raising crops, herding livestock, or otherwise generating food for all the feasts. Some cooking goes on (but only to provide a kitchen which can be overturned by brawls), but everyone has a diet of wild game which gives opportunities for hunts in which a lot of male bonding goes on. Oh yes, there will be a seer or sage trying to direct the course of the civilisation, but he will die senselessly and his books and alchemical equipment will be trashed by barbarians who sneer and pose the while. 

- Winter comes, and isn't as bad as the winters when I were a lad.

God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut

Our house has just acquired Netflix, and tonight we watched 'Slaughterhouse Five', which I first watched in a cinema in London back in 1972.  I think I went with Jennie Brousson, a young lady of Huegenot descent ... but memory plays tricks.  (That's so funny, if you're ahead of me.)

The book which preceded the film was written by the late Kurt Vonnegut.  I knew him as a science fiction writer, but at this distance I can't recall which books I had read;  maybe his early short stories, which were hard science fiction or sometimes just fiction .... but then he went far, far out.  He can be compared to Philip K. Dick (yes, yes ... the author of 'Blade Runner' blah blah blah), but unlike the great Dick, he wasn't actually insane.

Which is quite surprising, really.  OK, so he drank a great deal and smoked after it became unfashionable.

If you read his books and the broad brush strokes of his life (look them up, I'm not spending the whole evening posting links), they overlap.  He creates characters that reoccur, and details of life that do the same.  Vonnegut had a sister who died young, and a mother who committed suicide;  his book people have suicidal mommas, and one story features siblings who are scandalously linked.

But don't run away with the idea that he's using his work as self-analysis.  He just uses material.  You don't have to know anything about him to enjoy reading his books.  He worked in a power plant - he writes stories about it.  He lived near a volunteer fire station and helped out - he uses it, several times. His brother was a weather scientist - he uses it ('Cat's Cradle', and that's the only other title I'm mentioning).  He gets interested in art - he illustrates his books with powerful line drawings.

[A total aside:  Kurt's older brother Bernard invented the process of seeding clouds with silver iodide to promote rain.  I am obsessed with Kate Bush, and the song 'Cloudbusting' is about another maverick who believed he could create rain.]

In 'Slaughterhouse Five', the main character Billy Pilgrim "comes unstuck in time", drifting between decades and a future in which he is abducted by aliens (before it was fashionable) to the planet Tralfamadore.  Small wonder, since he suffers trauma in a plane crash, which occurs some years after he served in WW2 and survived the firebombing of Dresden, in which over 100,000 civilians died. But Billy Pilgrim is a curiously bland character, never really reacting to anything or taking a positive direction.  He is like the hero of 'The Tin Drum', or maybe just another version of The Fool.

I think Vonnegut just felt too deeply about Dresden, and other acts of barbarity which crop up in his books, to express his emotions, even through his characters.  He simply describes.  No, that's not quite true ... he describes with innuendo.  He's saying; "You see?  You see what we do to each other?  Any idea why?  Me neither".

It is no surprise that the words many picked up on in the seventies from his books was the bathetic phrase "So it goes".  (Me, I preferred "Poo-tee-weet?"  Look it up, fer crissake.)

There are many flashes of true brilliance.  The American Nazi Howard W. Campbell, Jr. in 'S5' and 'Mother Night', who has designed his own uniform that makes him look like 'Captain America' (or maybe 'The Shoveller' from 'Mystery Men').  Ice-Nine (look it up).  Bokononism (ditto - what is the wampeter of YOUR karass?).

But for me, the greatest is Kilgore Trout.  Kilgore is the world's worst sci-fi writer.  He has never been published, although he has written hundreds of stories, and in one book attends a Sci-Fi convention ('with hilarious consequences').  Oh, that's not quite true.  Some of his MSS have been stolen by publishers and used to bulk out pornographic photomagazines, with their titles changed to crudities.  I think this is Vonnegut doing a little satire on the decades when Sci-Fi mags proliferated.  [And still existed, alas.  Where are they now?  I have a kindly rejection letter signed by the great Ben Bova. That's as near as I got.]

Kilgore Trout gives Vonnegut licence to invent stories that he never actually has to write himself - a writer's dream.  I'll never forget the one about the alien that tries to warn of a cosmic disaster, but is blasted because he looks like a sink plunger, and because his species' form of communication is tapdancing while farting.

And Kurt/Kilgore became the universe's only recursive author.  Kurt Vonnegut once made Kilgore Trout write a novel called 'Venus on the half-shell'.  I was amazed some years later to see that actual title listed in the end-papers of another SF novel, and spent years trying to find out what the hell was going on.  Come the Internet, all was revealed;  Philip Jose Farmer (another SF writer of note) posed as Vonnegut and wrote a fairly amusing parody novel, a copy of which I now have ... but it seems Kurt was not amused.  Follow up the story yourself.

I love science fiction.  No, not precise enough ... I love good writing, with imagination.  If it's science fiction, too - I'm in hog heaven.

I can't believe I've never blogged about QOTSA

This is not going to be a think piece.  And I think that's the point.

Look, I like a bit of Vaughan Williams. 'The lark ascending' and all that. But sometimes there's a need that even Led Zeppelin can't fill. Here's Queens of the Stone Age. Which basically means Josh Homme, who is a guy I wouldn't want to meet at noon in Death Valley, never mind in a dark alley. I do not see him going gentle into that goodnight.

Don't ask me why, but genre nazis have called this 'desert rock'.  I think I get some of that .... but I really don't think Los Angeles, out there on the Pacific coast and forever young, really looks into its interior and sees the desert that separates them from the great Midwest, heartland of dreams and bread basket of the entire world.  That breakfast cereal you're eating probably contains Kansas corn. 

The sonic landscape of this album is incredible.  Of course, for me the guitar is supreme, and here we have distortion within clarity and precision.  It's not just noise for noise's sake. 

This album has at least two classic tracks, but the whole thing is almost a concept album. There's 'First it giveth', and then there's 'Go with the flow' (it's at 27 minutes, it's amazing).  The official video for the latter has amazing graphics  ... but it's undoubtedly somewhat offensive. Be prepared:

Ok, after all that, I recommend you come down with some chilled music, or people are going to be looking at you weirdly all day.  I know I do.  Try some Labi Siffre or Joan Armatrading.