Hello and welcome to The Magazine’s first issue,
A new place I’ve made up for some new, slow, thinking and writing. Which might well look like a collection of blogposts passing itself off as a magazine but is actually me having a go at something more thoughtful. Which will aim at covering all the subjects in the panel below, though definitely never all in the same issue. Because some subjects will always need slower thinking than others.
I’m a slow thinker anyway, at the best of times. Because all my thinking involves walking. Sometimes over a considerable distance, and often more than once. So I can get everything gathered up then edited down to what feels like its essence, before I publish. Like a good magazine can create the space for. Always leaving me time between issues for slow thinking and writing to happen. I intend to enjoy myself.
And I hope you’ll enjoy it too.
Ronnie,
Liverpool,
February 2024.
The Magazine: Issued whenever the next one’s ready. All contents ©Ronnie Hughes
This Issue: Politics; Music; Books; Poetry; Photography; Walks; Opinions.
Last time round for the Graspers and the Triers?
“The Graspers, and the Triers” to explain, is how I caricatured Britain's two main political parties a while back. Coming down broadly on the side of the Triers then, the Labour Party as they’re better known. As at least they usually try. But now, as the pair of them line up for another of the five-yearly first past the post General Elections that have kept one or other of them in power for the last hundred years, I’ve been wondering. Wondering if this is any way to run a country? Especially one so proud of calling itself a democracy.
Because it doesn't feel very democratic does it, when the views and votes of so many of us don't count for much at all? As we lumber over to the little voting booths and see if we can bring ourselves to vote for the least bad of the Graspers or the Triers one more time. Because no one other than them has the slightest chance of winning in a first past the post system.
For me, the least bad (and occasionally quite good) in all the General Elections of my voting life have always been the Triers. And apparently they're on for what will no doubt get called a landslide this time round. Meaning?
Meaning they'll be in what I'm going to call a Moment of Democratic Truth and Decency. The once in every generation or two when one or the other of the main parties has enough of a majority to change how our democracy works. And so make more of all of our votes count by voting us into a system of proportional representation. A possibility that's been talked up before, plenty of times. Except that once either the Graspers or the Triers get in with their whacking first past the post majority, then neither of them ever see the point or have the decency to do the democratic thing and sort out a fair and proportional voting system for next time.
But maybe this time it could be different? Because maybe it needs to be. As I've got a feeling that voter turnout this time round is going to be too low for either of the place-holder parties to call any result a landslide. Or at least not a landslide for anyone other than the real majority of everyone who couldn't be bothered turning out to vote at all, or did but not for the Graspers or Triers.
Which kind of a landslide would, of course, be a very bad result for democracy itself. Don’t you think?
Music To Live With
Inside Songs, does everyone have them?
Until now I've never mentioned what I’ll call my “Inside Songs” condition in public, but here goes. They’re just a few songs that feel like they’ve become a part of me. And will at times run through my brain and out through my mouth when there’s nothing else going on for me to be thinking about.
A bit like one of the body’s motor motions then. If I’ve got a pulse, my heart’s beating and my lungs are working, then it’s likely an inside song will be in operation too. So I've been wondering if they happen to everyone?
The way, say "Blackwater Side" by Bert Jansch happens to me? As if it's hardwired into my neural pathways ready to turn up in my brain while I'm walking along the street. Most often only as a song inside my head, I think, though I'm not absolutely sure. Meaning if you've ever walked past me and been puzzled to hear something like:
"Twas in gazing off all around me
The Irish lad I spied"
Then that would be because I’ve just begun another involuntary but this time public rendition of the oldest and best established of my Inside Songs. There are others, and it might help me to write about some of them too in future issues, but this one's my default setting.
Its appearances over the years have sometimes come as comforting reassurances, like “Don’t worry about everything going so badly, you’ve still got ‘Blackwater Side’ in here.” But more often, to be fair to the song, appearances are linked to happiness. Like when I'm walking along feeling generally contented with how life and the day are going, my system will start playing its song. And often as not the day will then get even better. Despite the fact I'm walking along singing a typically brutal old folk song where terrible things happen and the loved one is sent off to:
"Think on your own misfortune
That you’ve wrought with your wanton will"
Despite that, “Blackwater Side” is mostly the sound of me in benign contentment. And has been since I found it on one of the first LPs I ever bought. Meaning it’s always sung and played to me by Bert Jansch. Not by Anne Briggs who taught it to him, or by Sandy Denny who's a better singer really. But only by Bert. Suggesting his performance of the song has been part of my internal operating system since 1969, when I bought the LP. So a very long time ago.
Since when the song’s been putting itself on repeat internal play without my ever once growing tired it. So long inside me now I could imagine some future Coroner, should a post-mortem ever be necessary, being able to examine my remains and say "I see he liked "Blackwater Side" by Bert Jansch."
Inside Songs, I think they’re a thing. But do they happen to you?
More Music
I've been listening to...
For most of the last seven years, I can pretty much date it, I’ve been listening to classical music. All my life until then I’d been saying I was leaving what BBC Radio 3 plays “until later in my life.” So seven years ago is when I decided “later” had arrived. Since when I’ve been having a long and mostly happy adventure in new to me sounds that I’ll be writing a lot more about in The Magazine. Along with individual monthly recommendations.
This month’s being the new album “End Of My Days” by one of my favourite classical singers, Ruby Hughes performing with the Manchester Collective. Even after I’d begun listening to a lot of classical music I wouldn’t have thought I’d ever be listening to and recommending a record like this. I might have liked the tracks where the Manchester Collective string quartet play on their own, but the singing would definitely have been a problem.
“Using her voice like it’s an extra instrument and anyway where are the choruses?” I might have said.
Until one day at Literally Books in New Brighton I picked up an early twentieth century pamphlet about music like this that called it “Art Songs.” Which I sort of got, enough to begin listening differently. To songs intended as atmosphere pieces, pieces of art then. Short emotional performances, often shaped like conversations between the string players and the singer. In the case of this record, a collection of conversations about life and death, arranged by the performers, from songs written by such as the long ago John Dowland and modern day Errollyn Wallen, who wrote the title track, and Deborah Pritchard.
Of its kind this is especially atmospheric, very well done and recommended.
Tracks to try out “Go Crystal Tears” by John Dowland. And “Peace” by Deborah Pritchard.1
Also recommended and listened to a lot this past month have been the definitely not classical “Hurray For The Riff Raff,” great band name that, led by Alynda Segarra.
The first of her songs that got me listening to them was “Wolves” if you want to go and find it, from their “Life On Earth” album. Or “Colossus of Roads” on their new album “The Past is Still Alive.”
And Why Writers Need To Be Good Readers
Ian Rankin has been a favourite author of mine for many years. I’ve read all his Rebus books and will read anything else he writes. Like this, found in an introduction to a book by someone else.2
Here’s what he says:
“I am often asked for advice by aspiring writers. Most of what I say is changeable, depending on my mood, but there is one constant: it’s hard to be a good writer without also being a good reader. When I get together with other writers we always seem to spend the majority of the conversation passing on hot tips for new books we’ve enjoyed, or reminiscing about great books from the past. There will be anecdotes about bookshops and libraries, and we will vividly remember favourite books from childhood. It is through reading that we became writers, because we found it impossible to conceive of any finer vocation in the world than storytelling.”
Isn’t that great? And I’ve found what he says about reading to be true even as I’ve been putting the articles together for here. While I’ve got a good novel on the go my ideas and writing seem to happen easily. Then between books, or if I’ve started one I’m not getting on with, the writing stops and waits. Until a better book is started.
More Books
I've been reading...
I’ll start here with two recently read Patrick Gale books:
Take Nothing With You
The Facts Of Life
It had been years since I’d read anything by him. The last being one where the story featured a music festival in Cornwall. So, remembering he writes well about music, I picked up “Take Nothing With You” in a charity shop because someone on the cover is carrying a cello. Starting the story it soon turned out to be full of cello players, as well as the author’s informed descriptions of the ensemble pieces they were playing. All so beautifully described that my courage to write the Ruby Hughes recommendation, from well outside of my usual vocabulary, soon followed.
Having so enjoyed the cello-based Patrick Gale I’ve moved straight on to his “The Facts Of Life” where this time one of the lead characters is a composer. Three hundred pages in, it’s going well.
Other books enjoyed and recommended from the last month are:
John Boyne: A History of Loneliness
John Boyne: Water
Ann Napolitano: Dear Edward
Barney Norris: Undercurrent
Elizabeth Buchan: Two Women in Rome
Felix Gilbert and David Clay Large: The End of the European Era
Of these a “pick one” recommendation for you to try would be the Ann Napolitano. It’s a story based on a young boy’s life after he’s survived an aircraft disaster that’s killed everybody else on the plane. And not the sort of thing I’d usually want to read at all. But I gave it a go because of novelist Emma Donoghue’s recommendation on the cover. And found it completely wonderful. Kept me sat up in bed, late into the night, not wanting to put it down. That good.
From An Allotment in Winter
In the sacred quiet of an open sky cathedral
I sit
Waiting and watching for signs of spring
Not in impatience though
None of that here
With coffee boiled
Book brought
And bits to be got on with around the garden
While nothing much is growing yet
Here I sit
So loving the now and present winter
The sacred quiet of it
All to myself
In this place
At this time
Where winter trees are my cathedral walls
And the sky goes on forever
Late Winter Days
Around Liverpool, in Chester, on the Wirral and having a birthday.
On Their Necessity
There’s no walk article as such in this issue. Except they’re all walking articles. Some of the photographs above being obviously gathered while I’m walking around. Up my favourite hill at Everton, into town, round Chester, in and out of their gorgeous poetry filled StoryHouse Library, round Ness Gardens with Sarah, to the allotment and Sefton Park near home, and my day in day out ritual walks along Penny Lane and Rose Lane just because. Because that thing Ian Rankin says about the link between reading and writing also applies to walking for me. If I don’t walk I can’t write.
So every word written has been brought back home from a walk. Then later, all of them together have been taken out for an even longer walk and a sit down in the polytunnel at the allotment, for a read through and a think. Then brought back home again for a final edit, print out and proof-read. Before publishing them ready for you to read. Because if I don’t walk I can’t get any of that done.
And there will be articles about actually walking in future editions. The science and philosophy of it, as well as the one foot in front of the other kind. These might also include sketches from while I’m out walking, once I’ve worked up the skills and the nerve. Because I’ve just started having a go at them too. Now there’s this magazine where sketches might find their place.
Just The Back Page to go now.
The Back Page
On memoirs and things not mattering as much as they used to.
Even if it's only from between issues, this is the part of The Magazine where I'll be looking back and reflecting on things. Something magazines can be good at, what with not having to come up with opinions too quickly for their writers to have properly thought about them. An intrinsic problem with both daily newspapers and the even more impatient 24-hour news and social media cycle.
For this first of these columns I've been thinking about things that don't matter as much as they used to. Some thinking that's come about from my reading as well as writing of life stories over this past year. Lots of the stories in novels and a good few more in the approximations of life stories that are people's memoirs, including my own.
I've especially enjoyed some of the life story novels I've read where their authors have included a century or more of a family's history. Making observations on family patterns and the breaking of them as their stories have weaved in real life twentieth century pogroms, persecutions, wars, and some "never had it so good" sorts of times. A weaving technique I attempted in my own life story, though with less of a dramatic effect than in, say, the novels of Linda Grant3 and Kate Atkinson4. My life so far having been a blessedly quieter affair than those of their lead characters.
Nevertheless, writing my own memoir did show me some patterns. Tendencies to stay too long at jobs and in some relationships. To work too hard and for too long at fitting in and trying to be more sociable than comes naturally. Also on more than one occasion, back in the housing days and then with a recent second go at university, when I went for easy options. Of promotions and more money in the day-job. Then, with the funded PhD, going at least as much for the comfort and shelter of a regular income as I did for its pre-defined subject matter. Because I was tired out by then from half a lifetime’s self-generated gig-economy employment. In need of the quiet retreat I’ve since set up. All easier to see from the whole life perspective of writing a memoir. As was the fact that when my book got up to the most recent twenty years they felt too recent for inclusion at all. Then from the fifty years I had written about, there were some expectedly major elements, like jobs, family members and fallings out I’d decided to exclude or at least minimise. For the sake of the story, my story, as I was now deciding to tell it.
In fact I wrote two entirely separate and different versions of the memoir over the course of the year. The second one working much better for me because it felt more like I was writing a novel. About me, but not everything about me. Influenced by those writers I’ve mentioned and also by the best of all the memoirs. Where Donna Leon5 showed it was not only acceptable to leave whole sections of a life out, doing so could also create a better book people might be more likely to read. Certainly than one with all the stolid tellings of times I'd long grown tired of left in, like they had been in my own first attempt at a memoir.
So as soon as I finished the second version6 I threw the first one out. Like it had been merely a practice for the story I really wanted to tell.
All gone now, as is my time of reading and writing memoirs. Now I've moved my writing into this new place, which I'm so happy to have come up with, and which will always have space at the back of it like this for looking back on, well, things.
Next time:
The Magazine No.2 will arrive when it’s good and ready. Probably some time in the Spring.
Except for the Ruby Hughes album where I thought this most useful link might have been harder to find.
From Ian Rankin’s introduction to ”Death Sentences.” An anthology edited by Otto Penzler.
Linda Grant “The Story of the Forest”
Kate Atkinson “Life After Life” and “A God in Ruins”
Donna Leon “Wandering through Life”
Enjoyed reading through this - and I like the idea of slow thinking. I had to do too much fast thinking at University during my PhD and when I was teaching, and some slow thinking would have been very welcome. It takes time to listen to different voices and experiences, and get out of those silos and comfort zones and knee jerk reactions and personally and politically I think that's what we need.
Musically, thanks for sending me back to Bert Jansch, who my best friend adored, though glad you mentioned Anne Briggs as well (Nottingham's finest). Do I have a musical soundtrack playing in my head as I walk? I'm not sure. I often sing Kate Bush's Cloudbusting to myself: But every time it rains
You're here in my head
Like the sun coming out
Ooh, I just know that something good is gonna happen
...
I've been known to sing it to slightly threatening cows to show them I'm not scared. It seems to work. Look forward to reading more.