Flow, sweet river, flow

The view from the 72nd floor

From Shadwell dock to Nine Elms Reach
We cheek to cheek were dancing
Her necklace made of London Bridge
Her beauty was enhancing
Kissed her once again at Wapping,
Flow, sweet river,  flow
After that there was no stopping,
Sweet Thames, flow softly…

Or, if you must (and you should), the original by its originator:

Though, even that has a progenitor:

From those high towers this noble lord issúing
Like radiant Hesper, when his golden hair
In th’ ocean billows he hath bathèd fair,
Descended to the river’s open viewing…
     Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.

Getting there, railroad song wise

If that previous post was all over the place, literally, this one ought to be far more straightforward. If only because that’s how steel rails work.

First up, there ought to be a definitive Johnny Cash railroad song (and there probably is — keep reading☟). Meanwhile, once watched, never forgotten: Ridin’ the Rails: The Great American Train Story.

Or, of course, there’s this:

The images are fine (Southern Pacific’s Daylight, Wow!) — though at least three seem to be UK specific. But ultimately, it’s The Voice.

The essence here is Malcolm rooting for rail journey songs: specifically, travel from place-to-place. Cash seemed to be reaching a named destination in the 1975 special-promotion album, reworking other rail-theme songs, Destination Victoria Station. Somehow the song, and the album would never feature in Malcolm’s Cash Top Ten.

Probably Cash’s best “journey song” was his 1959/1961 (depends on your source) Forty Shades of Green — but that’s not a railroad journey: the direction from Cork to Larne is fair enough (and can be done by rail, changing at Dublin and Belfast), but beyond that it’s just a listing of disconnected places — and the Man himself came to dismiss it (while others, the worst offender being Daniel O’Donnell, rendered it down into total schmaltz).

There’s a bit of irony here: Cash’s greatest railroad song is about the guys not going anywhere☝, Stuck in Folsom Prison.

Before we pass on, or out, Malcolm would insist on acknowledging Gladys Knight, leaving L.A. and following her man on The Midnight Train to Georgia. Very different from what’s above here, but stoo-pen-dus! Eyeballs and ear-drums should be set to minimum:

When trains were really trains, and Penn Station wasn’t a bunker (but the shoe-shine was still “boy”), we’re talking 1941 and the Andrews Sisters:

Yeah; let’s not pass over that one too lightly. We might even consider the sociology behind it.

The one that Malcolm would wish to have at the top of the heap hardly qualifies itself: it may not be a “train” song, so much as a railroad-construction one. More of an epic than just a song or a lyric— it is, simply, magnificent:

Cash (as so many others) covered City of New Orleans.  That has to be Malcolm’s prime contender here. Willie Nelson did a good job on it (serially). Arlo Guthrie walked off with the pop-success. Ad extremis Malcolm goes for the original Steve Goodman version:

Getting there, song wise

Friday, so slow views-day.

Sooner or later every long-term blog-artist is reduced to this one: songs with a common meme or — if you’re really unlucky and can’t click elsewhere quick enough — a common theme.

So:

• Dolly empathetically came Down from Dover —

• The Bangles were Going Down to Liverpool (with, in this case, a justifiably-unconvinced Mr Nimoy);
• The Drive-By Truckers, all coked up, were bound Greenville to Baton Rouge;
• Lee Ann Womack, having made it A Little Past Little Rock,  was in her two-bed waterfront flat reflecting on the million-miles and half-a-day trip from Montgomery to Memphis. We can pass over that one (though anything by and with Womack is worth the earing), to recall it was a more political distance for Martin Luther King.

There are many, many more.

Malcolm is not looking for the standard songs-with-placenames shtick here: it the A to B (and preferably via C, D, E …) that’s keeping him checking. And, of course, someone tried to get there before him and spoils the fun.

Yet, there’s a bit more to be said about these “distance songs”.

First they should be something better than a list of names, which rules out, for this purpose anyway, I’ve Been Everywhere, Man — originally Australian, more widely recognised in the Hank Snow US-specific effort. It also takes off the list stuff like Dave Loggins’s excellent (especially the Joan Baez rendering) Please Come to Boston — although it states a westward migration (Boston, Denver, L.A.), that isn’t entirely explained. Aw, shucks: let’s have it anyway:

Into the drossy zone

One that always has Malcolm a bit leery is C.W.McCall’s Convoy. Yes, yes: he knows he should scorn it (especially the “PG-variant” variant, which makes no geographical sense whatsoever), but Sam Peckinpah made a decent fist of it:

Bobbie Troup’s seminal Route 66 qualifies as a prime example of what Malcolm has in mind, because it does take us logically from place-to-place.

What intrigues is the YouTube vid is from 1964. So, who is following whom? Did Troup learn to swing it from the Matt King Cole classic? Or did Cole get it from an earlier Troup (who was, after all, no mean practioner)?

Number One?

Well, Malcolm is opting out on that — because he reckons there should be a separate posting on railways journeys, and the all-out Number One is on steel wheels. More, anon. And he’s not sure whether Highway 61 Revisited qualifies. At which point despair sets in: how to do proper justice to Highway 61, Roosevelt Sykes, Mississippi Fred McDowell and all. The problem is that US61 is not the entirety of “Highway 61″: that is more metaphorical than cartographical for the whole migration from the Deep South.

But for a walking journey (although she got on this airplane just to fly)  Emmylou is the pace-maker, with the elegy to Gram Parsons, going Boulder to Birmingham:

Every day a new distraction

Today’s was William Bloat.

That has divided those who venture these ways into an immediate switch off (the usual “dwell time” on a blog page is reckoned in micro-seconds) or a more positive, Oh, yes! I know that one!

Well, here’s the best-known rendition (from the Clancy’s reunion concert):

Once the final verse gets into one’s neurones, it’s ever-lurking, ready to pop out:

But the strangest turn of the whole concern
Is only just beginnin’:
He went to Hell, but his wife got well,
And she’s still alive and sinnin’
For the razor blade was British-made
But the rope was Belfast linen!

There is considerable debate about that “British-made”. That’s the version Tommy Makem gave us, and he was the first (as far as Malcolm knows) to marry the verse to The Dawning of the Day. Well, even that’s arguable. There’s a delicious, earlier, Makem concert (also on YouTube) when the blade is “Japanese-made”. That’s worth a visit if only to see Tommy trying to break through the rigidity and hyper-politeness of the RTÉ audience (don’t miss the lady with the hat).

We have, then, another opportunity to deploy the pencilled variae lectiones. But this is folk-music, for heaven’s sake! The whole point is modification, adaptation, re-working, interpretation. It’s what kept Cecil Sharp (and others) in tea and biscuits.

What we may grasp at is that the verse was by Raymond Calvert of East Belfast. And that’s Orange country. It seems the original blade was “German-made”.

Confuse a Mudcat

In any case of doubt or difficulty over folkery matters, a ready resort is the Mudcat Café. Sure enough, there’s a couple of threads on William Bloat. What is evident there is the lack of understanding of what goes on in Ulster (even in Irish) humour. Above all, it is wry. It is self-referential. And it crosses all the divides of religion and culture. The same jokes crop up each side of the Great Divide: all that happens is the protagonist is ‘ours’ and the stooge or ‘antagonist’ is one of them uns.

So, depending on where one is — north or south — the razor-blade may be be Free State-made or English-made. Belfast linen, though, is a matter of pride both ways. It’s the same as the Titanic gybe: it took 10,000 Ulstermen/Belfast men/ Irishmen (that bit depends on locality and allegiance) to build it, but only one Englishman to sink it (that bit is common to all parties).

While we in these parts …

The other — perhaps far greater — song that is set to The Dawning of the Day is Paddy Kavanagh’s love-lorn appeal to Hilda Moriarty:

There’s a useful RTÉ archive on the song, including Benedict Kiely asserting that Kavanagh had the tune in mind, and intended it to be a song rather than just a verse. There also is Hilda Moriarty briefly commenting on the inspiration.

For a couple of years in the early ’60s, undergraduate Malcolm used to stagger home, alone, bereft and unloved,  to his cold-water basement flat in Elgin Road, Ballsbridge, after a night at O’Neill’s in Suffolk Street. If it wasn’t Wellington Road, it would be Raglan Road he passed down. He never met or was inspired by a Hilda.

Dublin is a small place, and Hilda — having discreetly repulsed the inept gropes of Kavanagh — went on to marry Donogh O’Malley, the later Minister of Education. Which, finally, brings us to another personage worthy of respect and admiration.

Malcolm wonders …

… about lots of things:

• Does he feel up to giving the Redfellow Hovel lawn a touch of the mower?
• What is that strange low ache in his left side? Is it terminal or just a strained musclette?
• Who is the arse who drives a lorry, sans le pot d’échappement, past at 3 a.m. each morning, during the second sleep? If it’s News International, can it be legitimately bombed?
• Is there really an estate agency with a balanced number of complaints and plaudits?
• Is Eric Pickles really necessary? Or — the nightmare alternative — is he Jabba the Hut in drag?

… and so on.

This Monday morning two particular considerations perplexed Malcolm:

• Is it a given that David Tennant gets all the juicy parts?
• Did Lola get about a bit?

Let him deliberate further on that last one.

That’s one reading of the seminal text, including the glitch which wikipedia explains as:

The original song recorded in stereo had the word “Coca-Cola” in the lyrics, but because of BBC Radio’s policy against product placement, Ray was forced to make a six thousand mile round-trip flight from New York to London—interrupting the band’s American tour—to change those words to the generic “cherry cola” for the single release.

Referring to the iTunes library on the Big Bastard back-up hard drive, Malcolm reckons there there may be three, at least, very different versions. At TCD the undergraduate Malcolm would now pencil a note in the margin of the Homer, Horace or Herodotus text: variae lectiones (“variant readings”, i.e. the editors still haven’t sussed what the original could have been, but some medieval monken copyist clearly got it wrong).

The three locations for the club seem to be Muswell Hill, Notting Hill and — of course — Old Soho.

Why this matters

Lola is the anthem for Muswell Hill and its Hill-billy population. No New Years Eve party (or similar booze-up) really takes off until, suitably slaked, the gathering can reclaim its own inner Davies and join raggedly in the chorus.

Gallus gallus domesticus … raptus

That, as Julian and Sandy would insist, is your actual Latin.

It translates to a Trinity News review (from around 1963) of a Cilla Black concert. She was, to the reviewer, like a chicken in mid-rape.

Self-evidently, Dusty Springfield, currently being featured by BBC4, hadn’t come into the comparisons.

Now, let’s be honest (ear-plugs optional) …

The pointless grump of a downtrodden man

There is, none too far from Redfellow Hovel, a parked car. It is big, long, black, sporty, Mercedes and a recent model. To Malcolm’s untutored, and definitely non-petrolheaded eye, it looks distinctly expensive — the kind of hardware that costs as much as a three-bed home in many parts of this fragmenting kingdom.

The Merc-monster has been there, unattended, a couple of days now.

Quite a bit transpired, yesterday, when an anonymous white van also arrived. The van contained the the heavy mob from the collections agency. They had come to chain up said Merc-monster because a string of parking tickets were outstanding.

Seeing Malcolm hard a-blog, the more elephantine of the heavy mob rang the door-bell of Redfellow Hovel. Did Malcolm know anything about Merc-monster?This Malcolm decoded as, “Is it yours? We have a tidy account for you to settle. Then we can head off to the pub.”

Most definitely no, never seen the thing before. Shouldn’t be there. etc.

While his mate was dealing with the chain on the Denver Boot, Mr Pachyderm explained why this was under way (hence the information three paragraphs previously) and then fished out one of those telephones that contain major computing power. He was then able to display in Malcolm’s face a name and address. Again Malcolm decoded, “Does this name and address chime with you?”

Well, actually, in a dim recess of the less-visited parts of Malcolm’s cortex, it did, but the synapse didn’t instantly connect.

Only later did Malcolm recognise the connection. The name waved electronically before him seemed to lack a title. Not “Mr” or “Dr”, but “Sir”. It is — perhaps by coincidence, the name of a prominent and publicly-honoured architect, of the modernist tendency, who has scattered the landscape with some exotic structures.

The gravy train

Well, Malcolm has no envy that such talent has earned so well to afford the Merc-monster, and to pay so promptly the inflated fines (by the evening, Mr Pachyderm and his mate had returned and doffed the chains).

On the contrary, such a show of wealth is part of modern Britain.

As is the lack of opportunity for others, and the failure for wealth to percolate downwards.

Consider the story by Patrick Wintour in today’s Guardian, Labour to use US research to shape election campaign. In the print edition that comes with a nice little line-graph. On-line we have to settle for:

Labour is drawing on research by the New Democrat Network (NDN) central to the Obama re-election campaign to shape its own election thinking.

The research was described by the Obama campaign as its North Star. It tracked three trends in the US economy between 1992 and 2009, showing how two – higher growth and higher productivity – had not been matched by a rise in living standards for the majority.

The Resolution Foundation thinktank, the leading voice on UK living standards, will next week produce its own State of the Nation report showing how long it will take to return to rising living standards in the UK even if growth returns. Labour will also launch its own exercise – “the condition of Britain” – next week, its policy review chief, Jon Cruddas, has revealed.

Padded out with some choice quotation, there’s also this:

It also indicates that the crisis of living standards predates the City-induced recession of 2008.

“The reason this is happening is because of rising global competition, the defining new economic challenge of our time,” Simon Rosenberg, the head of the New Democrat Network, said in a recent interview.

“In the actual experience of the American economy, there has become an enormous gap between the upper one-third and everyone else.”

The chart hung in the Obama campaign office, along with a caption derived from a focus group participant: “I’m working harder and falling behind.” That same line was repeated by the president in a campaign stump speech.

So some have Merc-monsters, and can ignore parking fines, on the assumption that it’s only money (and expenses can be set against taxes). The rest of us have to obey the rules and muddle along as best as we can afford.

There are two ways of looking at this.

On one refined level we can take the research and graphics of — say — the Financial Times, to show just how dismally the ConDem government have perpetuated the Great Depression of 2008-2018 (as in the graph — Malcolm likes simple graphs — right).

Along with that, we can take the wit-and-wisdom of the Office for National Statistics, who tell us the same, with numbers attached:

Incomes squeezed more than in previous recessions

Real national and household incomes have been falling due to a combination of the recession and high inflation. That is the analysis published today by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) as part of the Measuring National Well-being Programme.

The data describes an economy that has been stagnating:

• In the second quarter of 2012 net national income (NNI) per head in real terms was 13.2 per cent below its pre-recession level in the first quarter of 2008; a sharper fall in economic well-being than the 7.0 per cent fall that GDP per head data indicate.
• In the second quarter of 2012, real household actual income per head was 2.9 per cent below its peak in the third quarter of 2009.
• Household incomes have generally been eroded by price inflation, for example in September 2011 inflation peaked at 5.2 per cent whereas the annual rise in household actual income per head was 1.9 per cent in the third quarter of 2011.
• At the end of 2011 national debt was in excess of one trillion pounds, the first time on record, and equivalent to 65.7 per cent of GDP.

Or we can simply look, it is hoped with compassion, at the plight of millions of Britons, trapped in falling incomes, rising costs, lower wages, poorer expectations and increasing misery.

At the start of the ConDem government, David Cameron was buoyant that we could, and should measure “well-being”. And so, at a cost of £2 million and two years later, we were treated to guff like:

Responses by 165,000 people in the annual population survey reveal the average rating of “life satisfaction” in Britain is 7.4 out of 10 and 80% of people gave a rating of seven or more when asked whether the things they did in their lives were “worthwhile”.

Any bets we’ll not be hearing comparisons this year? Even that the ONS be told, quietly, to forget the whole thing?

Or, of course, the ConDems could scatter Merc-monsters across the land, warbling up-lifting ditties (and not the kind of uplifting that Mr Pachyderm & co involve themselves in):

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey-nonny-no,

These pretty country folks would lie

In springtime, the only pretty ring time,

When birds do sing, Hey ding a ding, ding.

Sweet lovers love the spring.

This carol they began that hour,

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey hey-nonny-no.

Is the future really bright?

The memory is clear from the revival of Close the Coalhouse Door. Malcolm was a bit rusty on the exact Alex Glasgow lyrics, but help was at hand:

“— When its ours, Geordie lad, when its ours:
There’ll changes bonny lad, when its ours!”

“— Are you sure we’ll be all right? Is the future really bright?”

” — (Oh, for God’s sake, man) We’ve won this bloody fight!
An its ours, all ours!”

So, on 1st January 1947, the miners of the North-East (and across Britain) sincerely believed nationalisation would change the nature of pit-work. For many it did: the very next year, Malcolm’s Uncle Ernest Copley was leading the stay-down strike to keep open the Waleswood Colliery. That campaign failed. Today the only mine in the South Yorkshire coalfield is Maltby.

The message, as always, remains: Be careful what you wish for, you may get it —

“— When its ours, Geordie lad, when its ours:
Man, the wife’ll be reet glad when its ours!”

“— Tell me Jackie, whats in store? What will she be grateful for?”

” — Why, I’ll stop in bed, wi’ her,
When its ours, all ours!”

Self-deception

You’d find a similar bubble cruelly popped by Malcolm d’Ancona in the Torygraph, as he suggests:

Westminster’s Tory tots must do some growing up

The mutineers are living in a Hogwarts fantasy world – where all it needs to achieve growth is a wave of the magic wand

“The Tory century”

He opens:

The Conservatives have a do-or-die decision to make before the next general election – and it is not about the identity of their leader. They must decide if, having dominated the 20th century, they are serious about being a party of government in the 21st. They must decide if they want to retain their reputation as the nation’s crisis managers. They must decide if they want to be seen as political grown-ups, or a bunch of overgrown kids using Westminster as a playground.

At this stage of the Parliament, Ed Miliband was expected to be the tribal chief facing a leadership crisis, and the Lib Dems the party answering hard questions about their commitment to office. Yet, in February 2013, it is David Cameron who is being undermined by talk of a leadership contest, and the Conservatives who – in some garrulous cases, anyway – are more deeply preoccupied by internal party intrigue than by the governance of the country.

Well, well: that must make Asquith, Lloyd George, Clem Attlee — not to mention Beveridge and Nye Bevan — all makers of 20th century Britain, equally all natural Tories.

As for being the nation’s crisis managers, there was that 1946 business when Hugh Dalton had to despatch J.M.Keynes to Washington.  Or the other one, 1974-9, when Denis Healey was coping with the economic ruins of the Heath administration. Odd how, in the parallel universe populated by the d’Anconas, “clearing up the mess left by the previous government” is persuasive only when it falls from Tory lips.

As for the c-word, we could have a good’un cooking right now, as even the Torygraph‘s James Quinn recognises:

Sterling caught in a quiet crisis

It’s only “quiet” until the screaming starts. That could come along very soon; and — as Quinn glosses George Soros (and even the IMF) — the fault is not longer “the previous government” but:

austerity was the “wrong policy at this time”

Have the Tories lost the plot?

Well, some most definitely have — which is d’Ancona’s beef,  following that excellent, if mischievous, Guardian editorial earlier this week

Meanwhile, Andrew Rawnsley takes the argument a step further into the shrubbery — and has something very nasty stirring in there. He emphasises the chasm between Tory myth and Tory reality:

There are few things so forlorn as a cliche that has turned into the opposite of the truth.

Ah, yes, Andrew: the miners of ’47 had just that experience. But, sorry to interrupt, pray continue:

One such is the aphorism of Lord Kilmuir, the Tory grandee, who declared that “loyalty is the secret weapon of the Conservative party”. If you were to tell this to David Cameron, he’d surely laugh. So would all his recent predecessors as Tory leader. It was not even true in Kilmuir’s day as he discovered when he was summarily sacked from the cabinet by Harold Macmillan in the 1962 “Night of the Long Knives”.

The trademark of much Tory history is that the party frequently kills its leaders and its leaders often betray their friends. Ted Heath was toppled by Margaret Thatcher. She was defenestrated and replaced by John Major. That saved the 1992 election for the Conservatives, but the Thatcher regicide injected a virus into the party’s bloodstream that has made life hell for every leader since. His party so tortured Mr Major that he felt compelled to reapply for his job in the “put up or shut up” contest of 1995. They re-elected him and then promptly went back to torturing him. After their 1997 defeat, the Tories went through three leaders in eight years before they arrived at David Cameron. Just half way into his first (and possibly only) term as prime minister, they are at it again. His party swirls with talk of knives being sharpened, signatures on no-confidence letters being collected and assassination plots being hatched.

 Much as Malcolm likes and admires Rawnsley, a piece by Peter Franklin for ConHome, over five years ago, ran on remarkably similar lines. Franklin concluded:

I’ll leave you with another cliché, but one that’s as true as it’s ever been:

There’s no ‘I’ in team.

There’s no ‘I’ in loyalty either. Disloyalty, however, is another matter.

For once, Rawnsley isn’t taking us anywhere, and his perceptions are as mundane as Malcolm’s too often are. We can forgive him, however, for fingering the guilty (as the dissident Tories would see it): Cameron himself —

… his unforgivable crime for many of them: not winning a proper Tory victory at the last election, which fuels the growing fear in Conservative ranks that the same will happen next time. Mr Cameron’s enemies within are absolutely correct that this was a big failure, but they are quite wrong when they go on to say it was because he did not offer enough right wing meat to the voters. The party tried that in 2001 and 2005. In 2001, after four years of Labour government, the Tories made a net gain of just one seat. In 2005, after eight years of Labour and the Iraq war, the Tories made a net gain of less than 1% in the share of vote. There has been some fascinating analysis of voters who thought about voting Conservative in 2010 but in the end didn’t. The conclusion from these studies is that swing voters were unpersuaded by the Tories not because they were insufficiently right wing, but because they were not detoxified enough. Mr Cameron is now paying the price for that.

The “detoxification” cliché

 Rawnsley doesn’t need to spell it in full. The poison in the Tory blood will be evident again next week.

We learn — depending on your source — that 130 or even 180 Tories will vote against the gay marriage bill. That’s more than half the non-payroll vote, even half the parliamentary party.

To what end?

The bill will pass. Nobody outside a small group of the politically-committed will notice the passing. Tim Montgomerie gets that one:

There’s lots of nonsense emanating from certain pollsters, notably ComRes, about gay marriage having a disastrous impact on Tory fortunes. YouGov’s Joe Twyman has Tweeted an important link which shows that the effect might well be negative in the short-term but that – AT WORST – it will reduce the Tory vote from about its current 34% to 33%…

Joe’s numbers don’t account for the generational issue. Younger voters really cannot understand the opposition to same-sex rights. The Conservative Party rebels on gay marriage are putting themselves on the wrong side of history.

As of now, the ConHome comments on that article run to some two gross: far too many are defiantly, aggressively the wrong side of the generational issue and the wrong side of history. Yes, many of those can be dismissed as the usual rants from UKIPpers and (by the sniff of it) escapees from the local tin tabernacle.

Then the mainstream Tory press is reporting a new grassroots campaign, and here things may be a bit more serious. Despite protestations:

… along with many faithful, local Conservatives, we have become increasingly concerned at the policy direction of the Party and the apparent rejection of cherished Conservative principles.

This appears, for now, to be a single-issue campaign:

We are particularly disappointed at the manner in which the leadership is seeking to push through the redefinition of marriage, squeezing out the debate, scrutiny and accountability that Conservatives so value. Yet we fear that this experience is symptomatic of a wider problem – of a leadership that is out of touch with its grassroots.

This campaign is mighty mysterious: no address, a mobile ‘phone number and contact only via an anonymous web-site. But that’s how guerrilla warriors work. A cynic might wonder if this is another front of that dubious Coalition for Marriage, or, if not, why a parallel fifth column was required.

No, Mr Cameron, your future is none too bright. Is it?

A small puff

Ooops! here we go for a slight boost in Malcolm’s derisory stat-porn (© either Iain Dale or Guido Fawkes — who cares, anyway?).

For why?

There’s a BBC page on 20 of your songs that changed the world, of which perhaps half-a-dozen get the Malcolmian seal of approval.

Furthermore, Nena’s one-hit wonder, 99 Luftballons is in the list. Quite properly:

Europop doesn’t come much better. Not that there’s huge competition in that category.

Nearer home:

Malcolm worked that one into a rumination on a DARPA experiment and a trip to the Sloany Pony in Parsons Green. Quite which aspect there keeps pulling in the gongoozlers he doesn’t know: it remains, however, one of the 1678 (officially) posts on Malcolm Redfellow’s Home Service that still drags ‘em in.

Here’s another, older but perhaps better:

A week ago the Pert Young Piece dragged the Lady in Malcolm’s Life and the man himself to Berlin’s Warschauer Strasse S-Bahn station. From there down to Mühlenstrasse, to walk the mile long East End Gallery — the well-graffitied remaining stretch of the Wall. Damn cold; but not to be missed.

The Wall has been expunged for most of it length — though a keen eye tells the lingering architectural and other differences between the old East and West. On tatty, crappy Warschauer Strasse there can be no doubt.

Which brings us to another song that should have changed the world. Alas, back in 1962 (when Wayne Shaklin gave it to his wife Toni Fisher) we’d be waiting over half-a-century for the abomination to be ripped down:

Brushing up Cole Porter

Malcolm has been this way before, but on Wednesday the Lady in his Life, the Pert Young Piece and the man himself redeemed their tickets for Trevor Nunn’s Kiss Me Kate at the Old Vic.

Believe Malcolm: the production does everything it says on the posters. Hannah Waddington (Lilli, Katherine) and her facial acting (as below) are worth the entry alone. The voices, for once, meet all expectations (does Ms Waddington actually need amplification?). How, for heaven’s sake, can — is it really that number? — some sixteen very active dancers all fit on the Old Vic’s limited stage?

But, then, Malcolm always reckoned Porter did a better job than Will did for himself.

Sure enough …

The lady occupying the seat next to Malcolm spent as much time as possible reading her novel. At the final curtain, Malcolm had to nod to her, and mutter the usual pleasured inanities.

She, however, was not persuaded. She was far too feministically offended by Katherina’s concluding:

Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband’s foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready; may it do him ease.

Umm, yes. Difficult, that …

Except, Toby Frow’s production of the Shrew at the Globe got away with it, through a neat device. Which Malcolm passed over lightly last August.

When Katherina and Petruchio first meet (Act II, scene i), there is an electric moment, a double beat, as opponents recognise each other’s worth. Thenceforth they, and we the audience are involved in their knowing, convoluted and perverse gender-game. So, this final moment is sub-texted by the wager between Petruchio and Lucentio, which is the hat-peg for the final scene:

Petruchio: Twenty crowns!
I’ll venture so much of my hawk or hound,
But twenty times so much upon my wife.
Lucentio: A hundred then.
Petruchio: A match! ’tis done.

So Katherina’s final speech (in this version, — informed by Grumio? — she seems privy to the bet) is tailed by Petruchio collecting his dues:

‘Twas I won the wager, though you hit the white;
And, being a winner, God give you good night!

After all, Petruchio blew to Padua here from old Verona, to

thrust myself into this maze,
Haply to wive and thrive as best I may…

And Katherina, his equal, help-mate, and partner, is well-prepared to help him to wive and thrive. After all, she is an actress capable of the most titanic explosions of passion.