January 2019 – Page 2 – For the fainthearted . . .

Revolutionary music

The BBC 4 programme surveyed legends of guitar music. Bo Diddley featured strongly. Of course, the name was familiar, although I would have been hard-pressed to have named any of his songs. Bo Diddley, it seemed, was causing ripples across the United States when Elvis Presley was a small provincial artist. Bo Diddley with elemental rhythms and profoundly sensuous performances was the face of rock and roll that was disturbing conservative America.

Bo Diddley was part of an international revolution that lasted a quarter of a century. From the mid-1950s …

Tarsus-Schmarsus

In a secular world, the old church feast days have been forgotten, but there was a nagging feeling that tomorrow is a significant date. A check revealed it is – it is the day when the church remembers the conversion of Saint Paul.

Paul was always a fascinating character, although I always felt he was a good anglican at heart. In much of Christian teaching, he is presented to us as having a fundamental disjunction in his life: there is Saul; then there is the conversion on the road to …

Keep on trucking

Pass the handful of lay-bys on the A39 in the darkness of a January morning and there will frequently be articulated lorries pulled in, the blinds across their windows showing they have been stopped for a driver’s statutory rest period. England is a small country and the stops along a Somerset road are probably not the quietness before a long journey.

Stops elsewhere can punctuate journeys of a different scale. A service station on a French autoroute can have ranks of lorries, their registration plates an alphabet of European nations. …

Stuck on the road

Roadworks have commenced in the M5 between Bridgwater and Burnham. Yellow signs warn of delays until July. With technology and machinery, it is a mystery how it can take six months to repair a short stretch of road. On one weekend in May 1892, one hundred and seventy one miles of track belonging to the Great Western Railway was converted from the broad gauge to which it had been built, to the standard gauge which is still used today. One hundred and seventy one miles of railway in one weekend …

Will people remember their first download?

Apparently, an artist gets paid US$0.006 for each track that gets played on Spotify and that more than 20,000 tracks are uploaded each day. It also seems that artists will record albums with thirty or forty tracks, each of two minutes or so, because they are paid once a listener has played a track for more than thirty seconds.

When people are used to downloading hundreds if not thousands of tracks, who will remember the first one they bought?

I remember the first single I bought. Forty-five years ago, in …

Looking for the boat to Avalon

In the dying light of the winter evening, the moorland to the north and south of the ridge that forms the Polden Hills was only greyness and shadow, were there to have been a barge carrying a mortally wounded king to his final rest at Avalon, it would have been difficult to discern among the unidentifiable shapes.

BBC Radio 3’s Words and Music programme accompanied the drive along the winding road that would have taken me to Glastonbury if I had not turned off the ridge and dropped down to …