Down in the Dumps

I saw the long awaited Robert Plant tour on Saturday in Liverpool. Plant was, as ever, absolutely superb. Like a good wine he seems to improve with age and, as much as I enjoyed his latest album, it really doesn’t do justice to his astonishing vocal range. I just wish I could have said the same of the venue which he performed at.

Now I have seen Robert Plant perform four times now and all of the venues I have seen him play at could have charitably been described as “having seen better days”. I don’t necessarily regard that as a bad thing as it enables a major artist to play intimate venues at a reasonable cost rather than giant stadium tours with extortionate costs and giant screens to compensate for the fact that the artist cannot be seen due to the curvature of the Earth. I like the fact that Plant plays the sort of small venues that no other major artists will play. Maybe his next tour should be called the “Shitholes of Britain” tour.

The problem with the venue in Liverpool was much more down to the basic organisation. The Olympia is attached to an old ballroom called “The Grafton” and when explaining its location to local taxi drivers seems to be met with bemusement that it must have been demolished years ago. It’s still there and we made sure that we arrived in good time – particularly as there was a football match taking place just up the road. For some reason we were waiting for an hour outside in the cold before we managed to get in and, in the process, missed half of Seth Lakeman’s support act which I had been looking forward to as an added bonus. I had hoped that someone would show us to our seats but it was supposedly unreserved seating. At least it was until four songs into Plant’s set when we were asked to move as the seats we were in were reserved.

The problem with this is that we had bought seated tickets and looking around it quickly transpired that several of these seats were actually broken. After remonstrating with one of the staff we were moved to a table with seats whereby I could just see the stage but which my friend couldn’t. As he said, he may as well have gone home and put on an old Led Zeppelin album. The problem overall seems to be with the management of the venue – there were actually plenty of staff around and those that I spoke to were polite and as helpful as they could be but there is only so much that they can do to combat poor management.

What partially made up for the night is that the performance was truly breath-taking with a mix of songs from Plant’s last two albums with a smattering of others from recent years and a good dollop of the first four Led Zeppelin albums plus In The Light which I had never heard live before. It’s just a pity that the venue couldn’t live up to his high standards. Ironically, it was a toss-up between this venue or the Armadillo in Glasgow, the auditorium that vaguely resembles Sydney Opera House, which is a genuinely first class venue. Maybe I shouldn’t always go down to the dumps.

War Poets

Since it is Remembrance Sunday this weekend (and Armistice Day today) there are lots of Poppy sellers around. I spoke to my mother last night and she mentioned that whilst she has made a donation to the poppy fund she will not be wearing one. Of course, she is old enough to actually remember a World War so does not regard a Poppy as a simple fashion item which they appear to have become. However, she did find the joint remembrance of the English and German football teams (and military personnel) before last night’s football match to be quite touching and far more in line with what remembrance week should really be about.

One thing that I did pick up from my mother is an appreciation of War Poets. War poetry offers a first-hand glimpse at the reality of war and it is far from being rose-tinted solemnity. It is horrific, brutal, often angry and always honest. There seem to be one or two bits of war poetry that are often recited but as an act of remembrance it really should be delved into. If it doesn’t make you angry then you are missing the point. There is only really one thing that one should remember about war: never again.

One poet that I have picked up recently is the Welsh poet Hedd Wyn (the bardic name meaning “White Peace”) who posthumously won the poets award at the Birkenhead Eisteddfod of 1917 just weeks after he had died at Passchendaele. This is a translation of his Poem “War”:

Bitter to live in times like these.
While God declines beyond the seas;
Instead, man, king or peasantry,
Raises his gross authority.

When he thinks God has gone away
Man takes up his sword to slay
His brother; we can hear death's roar.
It shadows the hovels of the poor.

Like the old songs they left behind,
We hung our harps in the willows again.
Ballads of boys blow on the wind,
Their blood is mingled with the rain.

Gwae fi fy myw mewn oes mor ddreng,
A Duw ar drai ar orwel pell;
O'i ôl mae dyn, yn deyrn a gwreng,
Yn codi ei awdurdod hell.

Pan deimlodd fyned ymaith Dduw
Cyfododd gledd i ladd ei frawd;
Mae swn yr ymladd ar ein clyw,
A'i gysgod ar fythynnod tlawd.

Mae'r hen delynau genid gynt,
Ynghrog ar gangau'r helyg draw,
A gwaedd y bechgyn lond y gwynt,
A'u gwaed yn gymysg efo'r glaw

Hedd Wyn (1887 – 1917)

Things that go BANG in the night.

I quite enjoy fireworks, even if it does tend to involve standing outside in the cold and wet, cricking one’s neck backwards and making appreciative “Ooh” noises at the pyrotechnic display overhead. At least, it’s quite nice for half an hour although after that a combination of frost-bite and trench foot start to erode my enthusiasm for the whole thing.

It’s Guy Fawkes night tonight and I may take the kids down to the park to see the public fireworks display (if the weather holds out) but this commemoration of the gunpowder plot seems to have been going on for the best part of two weeks now and I expect we will still get the occasional explosion for another week or so. This is all well and good but it also means that I am compelled to walk the dog during the daytime and, given that I also have to work for a living, this isn’t always possible.

I think the problem comes down to two things – a lack of occasion and knobheads. The lack of occasion is something that Nina picked up on. Fireworks are freely available in Germany for New Year’s celebrations and typically go on sale for a few days prior to this after Christmas. They are set off, en masse, on the stroke of midnight and the sight and sound of this is quite spectacular. However, with Guy Fawkes night the fireworks are staggered, not only across the night but now, seemingly, for the fortnight surrounding it. Not only does it lose impact put the whole period is a nightmare for pet owners.

The other problem seems to be more of a UK based issue which is knobheads: morons who purchase fireworks for the sole purpose of public nuisance whether this is using them as weapons, idiotic pranks or idle nuisance. I came across this many years ago when a teenage knobhead threw a banger at our dog. Unfortunately, the dog ran away and hid under a car rather than doing the sensible thing of viciously mutilating the fecker’s face.

I think that there could be a reasonable solution to both problems which would be a simple licensing system for fireworks. This wouldn’t have to be anything too arduous but just a council-issued ticket that would allow fireworks to be bought after specifying the time and place that they are intended to be used. This would enable anyone in the near vicinity to be warned in advance and also provide a reasonable way of prosecuting and/or banning anyone who abuses the fireworks once purchased.

Of course, this still leaves the issue of what to do with anxious pets. I’d suggest the best thing is to leave them in a warm and comfortable place with some soothing music to listen to – just like I did with Sam:

Listening to soothing music can help anxious pets during fireworks displays.