Olfactory performance is also not an absolute, I am told. Research reveals that, on entering a changing room of bulging supports after a ding-dong on the rugby field, the senses record accurately a near-overflow of stale sweat. After thirty seconds of adding one’s own to the soup, the smell is no longer experienced. All the chemical inputs are still there, but the brain has recorded their existence, evaluated their threat and finally dismissed them. And that’s what I think should happen to most of the players currently in the Bromaton Quartet team!
But it was T452, a higher level technology course, Safety, Safety, Safety, Health And Safety, in which I first realised that above certain known trace concentrations, some very poisonous and very smelly substances are completely odourless. It’s as if, when they are capable of killing you, they deliberately overload your ability to react in order to protect you from suffering. A whiff of bad eggs causes a grimace, reaction and “Pooh, who did that?” to be mouthed alongside accusatory glances at the weediest person present. Meanwhile it’s a fact that a nose of the pure stuff kills you before you can even say “I can’t smell anything.” But a confusion of smells produces merely confusion. How many cooks can ever taste what they concoct?
Touch? How many of us touch things to sense them? It’s not British, is it? A touch up on the bus at the thigh resting next to you would probably produce a bunch of fives thrust into your face. And blindfolded, how many of us can identify what we hold? A woman shopping, I have noticed, looks and then feels, always taking care to roll a fabric between fingers and thumb before pausing to think or move on. But it remains a secondary activity, subordinate to the looking, carried out as a second order test of suitability, an assessment of whether to try on, or bring close enough to risk association. And when it is tried on, she looks, but not at the item, only herself to question whether her psyche might accommodate the purchase option as permanence. Touch is a confusion. We recognise more by shape than by feel, so it becomes primarily an extension of sight, despite the fact that touch is the only sense whose receptors are distributed all over our bodies. Our brain perceives it only as a binary on or off, a there or absent aspect of existence.
And so to sound. Our hearing is more sophisticated than we think. At least it was before we went to the Adenoid Crossover concert in our youth and had our auditory sense pummelled into meek submission by the hundred and twenty decibel sound blast. “Hey we’re gonna change the world! Power to the people!” they all chanted while the audience replied with a collectively articulate “Yeah”. They would answer “Yeah” to everything because they were all deaf. That was just before the group got their exclusive contract with corporate capitalism, bought mansions in the countryside and retired, collectively deaf, to the polo field, and well before they all realised that the lead singer had screwed an extra twenty percent out of their own diminishing earnings and well before they all spent the rest on legal fees trying to sue their dues out of him. Idealism is such a durable skin. I make no excuse for using the male gender throughout, Dorothy. They were in the pop business. They were all men, all, that is, except for the token female singers that especially you, Dorothy, would label as purely sexual object stereotypes.
But what A279 taught me was a revelation. We can and often do hear different things at the same time and, as long as the organ is not physically overwhelmed by the power of something stuffed into it such as an intruding organ on full pump, our brains can both interpret and respond to different stimuli at the same time, even simultaneously, notwithstanding the advice of L253. We can’t do it with spoken language, incidentally, only with music. The first time I managed to hear two contradictory musical elements being played at the same time was a real eye opener. You can’t write that way, or touch, or see, or taste, or smell. You can. Or perhaps you can’t, but not at the same time, whereas with sound you can, or can’t, or both.
What is strangest of all is how this blends in with P101 and the concept of hegemony. It took some years of reflection upon these ideas before I could summarise them in an essay for P555, A High Level Investigation Into The Social Construction Of Popular Consumption.
What struck me, suddenly, an hour and a half into a karaoke evening in a Benidorm club in the late 1980s was that the so-called popular appreciation of music is neither popular nor musical. If sight dominates touch enough to nullify it, then words destroy music, at least when their presence becomes mere chant. There we were, Suzie and I, in a darkened room, mouthing Rolling Stones, followed by Neil Diamond, followed by The Eagles... Memory fails me here. No pop audience can remember the song before the last one and we were no exception.
My new awareness began in the middle of Hotel California. It came home by the end of Take me home to West Virginia. I was dutifully singing my affection for places I had never seen, experienced or - dare I say it - even imagined. I wouldn’t know West Virginia from West Punslet. And so I thought, suddenly, why it was that words such as I’m at home in Hotel Yogyakarta or Take me home to Kunyit Belapan would never figure in pop songs? And why were there no Turkish rock bands in the charts? Let alone ones with female musicians in them? There aren’t any women heavy metal guitarists, I thought. Why? It was only then that I truly understood false consciousness. It was in P927, A Neo-Marxist Reinterpretation Of Interpretative Marxism In Neon Signs that I was introduced to the concept.
I’d worked a majority of a working life contracting to the Coal Board - later British Coal, complete with its newly exploited tailings. I’d voted Tory in 1970 and 1979, and certainly again in post-Falklands 1984. I’d spent my hard-earned - hard-come, easy-go - earnings on the pastel-coloured, inoffensive trappings of consumer capitalism only to chuck them out two years later in favour of new ones in a different colour, but still I had never understood the idea of false consciousness.
And then it hit me. While the working classes are fed aural stimulation apparently wholly local in language, in fact they are persuaded to reject anything other than the equally apparently global. But what is on offer is only an insulation from the wider world, a detail of its experience. It prompted me to rewrite a classic to incorporate some local flavour. I sang it, but the rest of the pub switched off, saying, “He doesn’t even know the words, the stupid arietta.”
On a dim Yorkshire A-road, cold breeze on my pate
Warm smell of chip fat rising up through the grate
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a fluttering light.
My head grew lighter and my sight grew dimmer
I had to stop for the night.
There she stood in the doorway;
I heard the “time gents” bell.
And I was thinking to myself :
“This could be Heaven or this could be Hell”
Then she pulled me a half pint, and she showed me the way.
There were voices down the corridor
I thought I heard them say:
Welcome to the Hotel Kiddingtonia.
Such a lovely place, such a lovely place, such a lovely face.
Plenty of room in the Hotel Kiddingtonia.
Any time of year, you can find it here.
Her mind is gin-lemon-twisted she’s got a Mercedes Benz.
She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys that she calls friends.
How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat,
Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.
So I called up the Landlord:
“Please bring me my wine.”
He said, “We haven’t had that spirit here since nineteen sixty nine.”
And still those voices are calling from far away,
Wake you up in the middle of the night
Just to hear them say.............
Welcome to the Hotel Kiddingtonia.
Such a lovely place, such a lovely place, such a lovely face.
They livin’ it up
at the Hotel Kiddingtonia.
What a nice surprise, bring your alibis.
Mirrors on the bog walls
The pink champagne on ice.
And she said: “We are all just tenants here
so ignore the mice
And in the landlord’s chambers
They gathered for the feast.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can’t cut the beast.
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door.
I had to find the passage back
To the gents for swift relief.
“Relax,” said the night man,
“I’ll watch your half, mate” go pee.
You can check out any time you like,
The best bitter around.”
What suddenly hit me were several ideas all at the same time. They arrived simultaneously like javelins from different parts of the room. Why should I be waxing lyrical about a place I have never been, a place I will never visit? Why is there no commercial song extolling the virtues of Kiddington, with a title like Raise me up to the muck stacks of Kiddington pit, sung to the refrain from Haydn’s string quartet opus 76 number four? All right, I accept that the words don’t fit the tune, but whenever did a minor musical detail like that ever get between an audience and a pop song?
And why is it that my karaoke experience never requires me to learn Turkish? Why are all the songs in my own language? Is it that the Birdies Song doesn’t translate? And why are there no instrumentals any more, like Telstar? False consciousness, I concluded.
Nobs, on the other hand, they that control the machinations of global capitalism, regularly listen to music that has no words. And if it has words, more often than not they are in a language that’s not even understood by the participants, thus rendering the message minimal, and karaoke nearly impossible. You wouldn’t get far trying to sell a karaoke disc of Beethoven’s fifth! In this world there’s no intellectual connotation or identification with content like in a pop song. There’s only the emotional, the completely selfish, internalised response to what the recipient might simultaneously perceive and define as an aesthetic.
The analysis becomes a template through which other politico-cultural phenomena could be interpreted. Why was it that the working classes had to be continually fed identity and situation via popular culture when the nobs could pick and choose from a variety of expression that seemed to transcend nationality, language and religion?
I’d started to question. I continued with my analysis, and what I found was that an essential class difference stuck out most forcefully in the area of music. While the nobs dealt exclusively with the exclusive, multi-lingual, words-ignored, message-internal instrumental music with multiple aspects and complications, the proles, the hoi polloi, dealt only with the simplified, the vocal, the mass-market marketable product that was designed primarily to keep them in their place, both socially through identification with the message and geographically via language. It was not until that great night that I decided to take up a serious study of music to further refine my theory of false consciousness. Little did I know that my decision would one day save my life.
Twenty Four
I always wanted to see my name in lights... - Suzie describes her pride at achieving one of her goals in life. She then relates how she has used her business skills to create a success at The Ribthwaite Castle. She describes various acts she has employed.
I always wanted to see my name in lights, and now it’s happened. Oh... sorry ... I should have apologised. Sorry, readers, for not having written anything for a few weeks. I’ve been busy, preoccupied, even. The last time I wrote something I had just taken over at The Castle, and I was sure I was going to make a go of it. Rome wasn’t built in a day. It was always going to take time. Well, it’s now several weeks since my last blog, and I have even surprised myself at how well I’ve done. Usually when I blow my own trumpet, I run out of puff, but I’ll do my best. Let the proof of the pudding be in the eating.
Let me rephrase that. I have even surprised myself at how well we have done, because it’s been a real team effort. I stress the word ‘team’. Ability can take you to the top, but it’s character that keeps you there. Better late than never.
Now I know I have entered the dizzy heights of management-speak. I’ve even read some of the books, some of those ‘How I turned a donkey into a racehorse’ management memoirs that over-populate airport bookstalls. They all go on about how you should prioritise, be creative, include rather than exclude, be top-down with responsibility but bottom-up with innovation, touch base, regularly think outside of the box. Now I only bring to the table items that are going great guns. My people jump through hoops when encouraged to be pro-active, focusing on what’s actionable. I’ve incentivised the bar work and impacted on the bottom line without over-leveraging. Mick identified that there was an issue around usage of the pub, that the business needed taking to the next level by thinking out-of-the-box and without merely ticking it. The Castle had been out of the loop for too long, and inclusion was what we needed. At least that’s what he said. For him it might have been a trouble shared and thus halved. He was trapped between a rock and a hard place. He had nowhere to go. Now I can see when a friend is in need. He needed a new broom and the shoe fit, so I put it on.
Now all of those management books empathise how you should build a team and then claim all success going forward on its collective behalf. Great oaks from little acorns grow and I’m not going to mend it if it ain’t broken. Everything has its time. Failure can be the stepping stone to success, and I’m sure that if all else fails then I should try the obvious. I told the staff that if they’re not part of the solution, they’re part of the problem and if they have to fall off a cliff, they may as well try to fly, because opportunity is just there, waiting for the door to open. Somebody, I told them, needs to stick their neck out and it may as well be me. There might be no point crossing bridges until you come to them, but I’m not going to spoil the ship for an ha’peth worth of tar.
In public, they say, single out individuals only for purposes of re-inclusion, which means the day after you’ve torn strips off them in private. But only declare your total public support for someone you have decided to sack. Otherwise, attribute all success to the team, the collective expression of individual achievement. The word ‘team’ also effectively and conveniently hides where the fruits of that success actually finish up, and so it keeps everyone but the real insiders completely in the dark. It thus also allows yours truly, the management, to treat them all like mushrooms. Neat, isn’t it? Honesty and openness, you see, always were the best ploy. I’ve nothing to say, so I’m not saying anything at all.
So what about those lights I started with? Well they’re a symbol of my leadership. Lead to success, follow to failure! With my name out there, up front, The Castle is going forward as my project and in my image. It’s not just my baby, and defiantly not Mick’s, and now the whole team knows that. Only bad drivers cut corners, and I needed this symbol to complete the picture, to let everyone know that the cat is now firmly amongst the pigeons.
My parents used to tell me that one day the Mullins of Mullins The Milliners would be Suzie Mullins, my Mullins, and that could happen sooner rather than later. They weren’t going to work themselves into early graves. Not on your nelly. They were going to step aside in their early fifties and let me have the reins. They were grooming me for the role, teaching me the business, the skills, the hatter’s words. This end was to be my beginning.
But we were retail, not manufacture, milliners rather than hatters, ever sane. We had little use for terms like belting, braiding, blocks and the rest. We were the sales end, the customer interface, my dad used to call it. My goodness he was ahead of his time! Mullins The Milliners was where smiles and politeness were the common curren
cy. Once you had transacted in those, he used to say, the rest would follow. It’s all about trust, you see. When she’s looking for that special topping, that je-ne-say-quoi to add a perfect piquant piece-de-resistance to an outfit, a woman needs to trust you before she will listen to a word you say. Once that trust is established, she’ll buy almost anything you try to sell her.
“Of course madam would not consider...”
“Certainly not!”
“Of course ... or perhaps this ...”
“...well perhaps ... let me see ...”
“... well perhaps it might just go...”
And thus the demic fruit-basket monstrosity that’s been on the top shelf for ten years gets sold. “She’ll wear it to the wedding,” my dad used to say, “and then it will sit in its box on top of her wardrobe for about five years before being regurgitated in a roll of crepe paper as an entry to an Easter Bonnet competition, which it will probably win, thus repaying the original investment.” You have to crawl before you can walk and I learned a lot both from him and from my mother, who was a lot more feet on the ground than he was. The bigger ideas were his, dreamt up while Mother busied herself with the bread and butter. They did so much for me. I was an only child. But I never got what I really wanted from them, which was my name up there on that sign. By the time I might have inherited, the sign and the shop had gone, done out as a coffee bar called The Acropolis, a name set in capital letters that were all angles and corners. It was a fashion at the time. I’d counted my chickens, taken an assumed future for granted, and the well ran dry before I got my water.
But now I have my prize. I don’t know why I never went into business before. The idea never cropped up, what with Donkey out to work every day with the boring regularity of self-winding clockwork, and the demands of home, Dulcie and aging parents clinging to either side of the front door. But I would have made a go of it, as I am doing now.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 24
