The greatest hits

Today, Saturday, The Guardian has a supplement for its second centenary:

Good to revisit the glories of yesteryear: the take-down of Jonathan Aitken (He lied and lied and lied), cash-for-questions (A liar and a cheat), Edward Snowden, Murdoch’s phone-hacking, the Panama papers …

Like most pop-music top-lists (compare the changing face of Rolling Stone‘s 500 Greatest Albums) , that coverage is tilted towards more recent history. Unlike such ephemera, a little anthology like today’s supplement rubs in the dystopias we have witnessed: Sarajevo, Haiti, the fall of Saigon, Rwanda, Eichmann. Interspersed are more uplifting moments: the end of the Berlin Wall, the election of Obama, seven pages (in the original, sadly not here) of San Seriffe.

At the foot of page 27, moment #65, is a classic Steve Bell cartoon from 1992:

There’s one in urgent need of an update.

For any who don’t recognise the Ur-source, that’s the Wobblies’ Pyramid of Capitalism:

I can be precise as to when and where I first encountered the Manchester Guardian. It was in the home of Alan Tuck, post-master at Wells, Norfolk. The Tucks lived at the bottom of Two Furlong Hill: Adrian Tuck was my contemporary at primary-school. For me, the son of a Daily Express reading house, that far-flung, exotic paper was something of a revelation. As soon as I was old enough, and certainly at TCD, The Guardian (Manchester being elided in 1959, but not from the trend of Neville Cardus’s cricket columns) was my arm-candy. Usually folded with Douglas Gageby‘s Irish Times.

£840 a roll? Cheap at the price!

Yesterday I was forced into a video call.

Now, I’m quite happy with FaceTime on my ageing Mac, but this one involved a commercial operation. So I had, at their request, to instal a sodding Microsoft application, Skype and some Cisco thing. Which reminds me: some urgent deletions needed from hard-drive.

Then, for an extended period I was looking at talking heads (nice guy, by the way) and myself with my book background.

I’m not posh enough to have a ‘library’, so this is my ‘book-room’. Such terminology makes me feel more egalitarian.

Oh, and this is a working operation: what you see is what I get down from the shelves on a regular basis. Which is why there is precious little ‘order’. For the record, the three bays are (approximately) English history (Scottish and Irish out on the left-hand wall), European history, and American stretching into other nationalities

Vaguely then, this was the back-drop (face edited to protect the guilty):

Now you should, quite literally, see the point I’m driving at. It’s an agglomeration of decades of reading and acquisition. The Oxford histories (top left) came on marriage. There’s stuff from my time at TCD (high up on the side-shelves are Latin texts from even earlier). Even an odd Mr Man books from the childhood of one or other (or all three) daughters.

When we were first married a neighbour (this is metropolitan Essex, just so we all appreciate the context) asked ‘Had I read them all?’ The answer, strictly, would have been, ‘Not exactly’, on the basis that many books are there for filleting and reference, rather than a consecutive ‘read’ — those would be the fiction, now corralled on a couple of unseen bays.

At that stage of our lives we were probably unique among the locals by not having a car. The neighbour in that previous paragraph obviously did. In the moment of that conversation, my mind noted that our bookish expenditure, in capital and continued acquisitions, was likely to be not dissimilar from that of others on personal transport. And we didn’t have to polish the brute every Sunday.

Just now, from those American strips, I saw this:

Which must be the predicament of every locked-down politician, on television ‘remotely’, trying to look cultured and ‘smart’.