(If you’re having trouble posting in this comment thread, email me! marksink3r at g00glemail d0t c0m)

1993 in Britain was the apex of scene-a-week genremaking by the UK music press: history focuses now on the proto-Britpop stuff (because it ‘won’ and because it was pretty good) but at the time that wasn’t such a sure thing at all and there was a forest of other stuff going on.* Such as!

New wave of new wave – reputationally poor punkiness, aggressive and political (SMASH, These Animal Men) – all the bands involved released second records which were apparently a lot better than their first ones but by that time Britpop had come along and their fate was oblivion.

Collision pop – sample-heavy ravey rock, hip-hop influences, aggressive and political though also danceable – Senser, Back To The Planet, Chumbawamba, Credit To The Nation, Hustlers HC

Any excuse for a Back To The Planet picture.

Riot Grrrl (UK edition) – ziney, DIY, political (esp. sexual politics) but also with a bit of dayglo POP rhetoric which survived through Britpop and ended up at Bis I guess.

A sort of vaguely “world pop” thing which was basically an attempt to categorise Transglobal Underground: Dance genres were their own hive of activity but definitely there was indie crossover going on via TGU, the weed-heavy spliff-end of ambient (The Orb were still big with students), Leftfield (“Open Up” was enormous), and so on.

“Lost Generation”: Butterfly Child, Disco Inferno, Papa Sprain, Seefeel, Laika, Pram – this is a Simon Reynolds coining for the arty wing of UK indie. Because of the support of Simon R and to a lesser extent of Pitchfork it “survives” in reputation better than most of this stuff

Proto-Britpop: Suede were a bona fide Big Thing but there was no great sense the ideas Blur were kicking around would work; Pulp hadn’t made their breakthrough; Denim and Cud, the Auteurs… all that lot.

Boho sceneless mavericks: Like PJ Harvey, Tindersticks, Bjork – serious acts who got quite big quite quickly and were definite presences on the indie scene but nothing really coalesced around them. There were attempts with Tindersticks – throughout Britpop there was a little wing of groups like Jack in London doing similar nicotine-stained atmospherica.

Random guitar bands we remember because of what they did later: Post-shoegaze noiseniks like Verve; one-hit local wonders like Radiohead. None of any significance at this point, or so it felt. You might as well have bet on Adorable or Thousand Yard Stare.

Adding to the confusion loads of these micro-scenes would happily cross over with one another – it was a time of genuine flux, a vacuum because the big bands of the previous few years had either imploded (Happy Mondays), vanished (Stone Roses), or were deep in the studio changing their sound (Primal Scream). A lot of fun to be part of.

*and of course the best music from then isn’t mentioned here at all – jungle, American indie rock, hip-hop… – this is just trying to dissect the fractured British indie scene of the time…

But nothing lasts forever – in today’s disruptive environment you must ADAPT OR DIE, and this even goes for blog posts making vague comparisons between technology and music. If comparing social media to punk rock has run its course as a “meme” – to use a bit of socal media jargon – then something else must take its place.

Social media is all about sharing, a bit like hippies – NO WAIT that can’t be right, a bit like living in a squat and listening to Crass. So here are some social media and music articles you could go away and write yourselves: I’ve even included example sentences to get you started.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS THE NEW NEW ROMANTICS: “Like the Blitz Kids of the 80s, today’s youth construct fleeting but highly visual images of themselves. Gary Kemp wore a curtain: his 21st century descendant simply ‘pins’ it on Pinterest.”

SOCIAL MEDIA IS THE NEW SHOEGAZE: “Kevin Shields took 30 years to update his status, today’s “scene that celebrates itself” do it every 30 minutes. Like shoegazers, they’re in love with otherworldly effects – but from Instagram filters, not guitar pedals.”

SOCIAL MEDIA IS THE NEW HIP-HOP: “Gen Y grew up with the idea of ‘sampling’ and now they apply it to every part of their rich media lives as they curate and ‘remix’ media. But instead of turning snippets of tracks into a beat today’s young people take a tiny loop of video and make an ‘animated gif’.”

SOCIAL MEDIA IS THE NEW DANCE MUSIC: “Today’s millennials are DJs, cutting and mixing seamlessly between platforms and screens as they try to ‘move the crowd’. But instead of hands in the air it’s “likes” and “Retweets” these social DJs crave.”

SOCIAL MEDIA IS THE NEW MOD: “Today’s mobile generation seek authentic social experiences, but instead of scooters they have iPhones, and rather than gathering in cafes or clubs they mark their territory with Foursquare check-ins”

SOCIAL MEDIA IS THE NEW INDIEPOP: “Today’s young creatives may have Tumblrs instead of fanzines but both rely on a ‘culture of making’ whose heartfelt honesty is a challenge to the old business models.”

SOCIAL MEDIA IS THE NEW CRUSTY: “These days it isn’t soap young people fear, it’s privacy. The layers of encrusted data their elders want to strip away are what defines their identity.”

Next: How Dubstep, Chillwave, Witch House, Vampire Weekend and Black Metal Are A Bit Like Facebook If You Think About It

“[There are] three tribes of Mu-Ma Turks [who] have the custom of riding wooden horses to gallop over the [snow and] ice. Resting their feet on boards and supporting their armpits with crooked sticks, with one stride they travel a hundred paces.” Xin Tang Shu (New Tang History), c.AD600-900. [2]

“Polar exploration has two naturally defined necessities: skis and dogs… to achieve the best results, we must learn from the two primitive peoples who, through centuries of experience, have understood how to exploit these necessities: Lapps and Eskimos… I am inclined to believe that an adaptation of the Lapp kind of ski is the most useful type of polar ski, and the Eskimo dog an ideal companion on a polar expedition.”
Otto Sverdrup, Nyt Land, 1903, p.19 [3]

TO SET THE SCENE: It’s a hundred years and ten weeks now since Petty Officer Edgar Evans, 35, collapsed and died close to the lower end of the Beardmore Glacier, on the return march from the South Pole. Which was appalling blow to his four companions, but also a relief: his condition had deteriorated alarmingly, mentally and physically, in the month since the team found themselves forestalled at the South Pole. They well knew they could not drag a sick man 700-odd miles back to safety on the sledge; margins of safety were always slim, with food, fuel, warmer weather and time all set to run out soon. They sensed they were badly behind schedule, and beginning to fail: for Scott, writing in his journal the following day, Evans’s death was at once a terrible boon to his companions, and a stay of judgment. [4]

Nevertheless, when this same judgment fell on the survivors, some time in the final week of March, 1912, Evans’s “astonishing failure” — the “man whom we had least expected to fail” — was become one of the six or seven key reasons Scott gave for the disaster, in his famous Message to the Public: as was the “sickening of a second companion, Captain Oates”. Can we really excuse Scott responsibility for the condition of his own men, or accept it was an exogenous event impacting entirely unexpectedly on his decisions? But he had a way with words in a desperate situation, and was somehow this way able to disperse blame far out beyond himself, onto everyone and thus somehow no one.[5]

Four of the five in the polar party left journals, or fragments of same: though only Scott updated though to the very end.[6] But Evans wrote nothing that we know of, and we see him only though the eyes of others, not always kindly. We also see him in the photographs the British polar party took at the Pole, half a dozen carefully posed images we can’t not view through the lens of what we know is coming, that they still only fear: so poigant with hindsight, five men defeated and dejected, hungry, cold, exhausted, humiliated, anxious, doubtless angry too. And doomed.

Perhaps we tell ourselves we can see Evans (standing, right) has only a month left to him, in face and body language, both masked and unreadable; or indeed that Oates (standing, left, visibly favouring one leg[7]) has just two. Perhaps we tell ourselves that we can well see exactly what both most meant to mask, from those far away, who would only see photos, as much as from one another.

But our visceral connection to the known aftermath certainly massively shapes our sense of what’s shown and what’s not; especially when blanks so litter the telling of this tale. “Things going down-hill,” wrote Scott on 10 March, just days before the crippled Oates walked out of the tent in miserable agony. The Polar Party, wrote Apsley Cherry Garrard in his 1922 memoir The Worst Journey in the World were “going down-hill” (this not long after the Second Support Party left them and turned for home): ACG means it geographically — the polar plateau does indeed slope down from the Transantarctic Mountains to the Poles — but the echo is insecapably there for us, reading afterwards. Close-reading his companions’ journals for missed clues, ACG quilted a measured, complex, beautifully written record of the expedition, a portrait of fallen comrades that’s part apologia and nevertheless full, in its quiet-spoken way, of the grief and guilt and occluded rage of the survivor, accepting the collective blame of Scott’s Message — and yet not quite accepting it either. Before the PP even reached the pole, sometime between 4-10 January, “something happened” as ACG puts it: and the implication is that this something must be present in the journals he’s reading and quoting, a something barely grasped by their writers, a something resisted or denied. [8]

The journal-keepers were no longer alive to speak for themselves, and ACG himself made no accusations; laid no blame. What he does, piece by delicate piece, is set out the relevant material, to allow latterday readers to think through what went wrong and why. Clues there are, but rarely emphasised as such. And though anger flashes now and then, it’s easy to miss: “On the one hand [he writes in his summary chapter, 'Never Again'], Amundsen going straight there, getting there first, and returning without the loss of a single man, and without having put any greater strain on himself and his men than was all in the day’s work of polar exploration…. On the other hand, our expedition, running appalling risks, achieving immortal renown, commemorated in august cathedral sermons and by public statues, yet reaching the Pole only to find our terrible journey superfluous, and leaving our best men dead on the ice.” [9]

At which point the anger somehow slides sideways — as ACG ruefully but unrelatedly admits how angry the Brits were at the time at Amundsen’s impertinent intrusion. Anger is something he’s ashamed of, or so he seems to feel and to be saying: Amundsen (of all people) of course bore no responsibility for Scott’s men’s death, and if it’s wrong to be angry with Amundsen, it’s wrong to be angry at all.

But it’s at this moment of comparison and contrast that full impassioned clarity emerges, just for a sentence or so, from ACG’s writing. And it would be a further 50-plus years before the implicit challenge was taken up: to tell the history of the two expeditions as a matter of contrast and comparison. Hence, in 1979, RH — to startled acclaim and undimmed controversy — turning orthodoxy on its complacent head, and retelling a tale of endurance, hardihood, sacrifice and what Scott called “unaccountable” bad luck as a miasma of inadequate knowledge, inadequate preparation and inadequate competence; an acid portrait of a moody leader unpopular with many of his team, improvising capriciously, out of his depth in a terrain that remained a whirling mystery to him to his last hour. RH, who speaks good Norwegian, has also scoured the surviving journals, for clues spoken and unspoken, noted and missed, to reveal two expeditions: one professionally tight with itself despite personal differences, intelligent and focused; and one in perpetual disarray, demoralised if not frightened, shadowed from the start by profound doubt and considerable mutual dislike.

Three important elements Huntford brings to LPoE and (30-odd years on) RSP: an aggressive forensic willingness to dig down beneath publicly declared team loyalty, to worry out elements diplomatically elided and fill in blanks; a sour shrewdness about what he repeatedly terms the “cross-currents” of conflicted human behaviour in groups; and (for a British writer) a likeably unusual Norwegophile admiration for Scott’s triumphant rival Roald Amundsen, who RH considers outrageously unpersoned in the routine British version before his intervention. RSP in particular is an unexpurgated edition of the journals of the rival leaders, organised so that day by day and date by date, the accounts of the journeys proper interlace and thus pass mutual comment. And importantly (though the book’s title obscures this) RSP weaves in a third account, in the form of a second Norwegian diary, that of cross-country ski champion Olav Bjaaland. Amundsen’s journal is plainer and far less discursive than Scott’s; Bjaaland’s, translated into English for the first time, provides an amused and often unimpressed sportsman’s counterpoint to his leader, just as Amundsen’s curts professionalism cuts across Scott’s writerly misdirections. These three take up the greater part of RSP, interrupted by occasional elucidatory harrumphs from editor RH, almost always at Scott’s expense: this all forms the central section, which is bracketed by focused contextualisation fore and aft, RH scornful restating his 1979 position, doubling down on very nearly all claims and anathemas; unapologetic and unimpressed by the various counter-arguments offered in the years since 1979. Amundsen he plainly still hugely admires, though by no means uncritically; and he still harbours a very lively anger at Scott, in person and as representative of a type and a mindset and of the cocooned society that so eagerly elected to canonise this dead explorer.

Anyway, the publication of RSP was what gave me the initial impulse to write all this, and — clear disclaimer here, as the RH line is sometimes contentious — my retelling is very much shaped by his, except where I explicitly say different. RH invariably fills blanks in to suit his anti-Scott agenda, when (by definition: blanks) the solid evidence isn’t there — but his instinct for where blanks actually are is a different, rather more interesting matter.

And as regards taking ACG’s challenge, and setting out the stories side-by-side, stage-by-stage and interwoven, purely as a formal structure, it really does do a surprising amount of Huntford’s work for him. Certainly it establishes key elements: that Amundsen was something of a genius, in the painstaking and imaginative depth of his preparation, and that Scott by contrast was always floundering, not only lacking in technical knowhow, but lacking too in the foresight or insight to recognise this; also that the story we imagined we knew depends all too crucially on omission if not suppression.

Less successful is the attempt by RH to establish that his burning contempt for Scott is morally justified, rather than mere accident of chemistry or tribal prejudice. The favoured RH structure gives him a handy rhetorical platform for the attempt, but the need for it is more symptom than reason — which is where my own obsession begins to play, I suspect.

TO ESTABLISH THE LARGER CONTRAST: the two leaders, who never met, headed very different types of projects. Agency, a wise man said, is far less important in any success than either luck or structure. Scott’s project was sprawling and confusedly ambitious, with portentous and often hubristic official and academic backing; Amundsen’s was focused and secretive, an embarrassment to his countrymen and supporters: he didn’t even tell his shipmates they were going South rather than North until they were halfway there.[10]

We have the luxury of hindsight; we know which team lost, and how catastrophically. To us, it’s quite plain whose the better mode of transport was: Amundsen’s (with Bjaaland at its head) a cross-country ski race with dogs, the Norwegian technique pioneered by the great explorer Nansen [11]; Scott’s an intricate plan combining experimental motorsleds, ponies (Shackleton’s unpromising innovation), dogs [12] and an immensely long slog of punishing man-power all across the polar plateau and back, down the Beardmore, and all the way home across the Barrier.[13] Since ponies can’t stand low temperatures that dogs can, Scott’s party started some time later than Amundsen’s, and the numbers alone show it falling further and further behind — and all too soon battling exhaustedly not to win a race but just to survive.

Hindsight Scott did not have, of course. He distrusted dogs — which he’d never seen run by those who knew how — and shipped in far too few to use as his primary sledge-power. We know — because ACG tells us — that Scott went into panic-mode for several days when he first learned of Amundsen’s presence (basecamp one degree further south, a party of expert skiers including Nansen’s former second-in-command, and fully 100 dogs). We know — because RH has astutely winkled this out — that no part of Scott’s plan shifted more confusingly and confusedly than the part relating to the dogs. The dogs themselves were taken farther than existing supplies really allowed — they didn’t reach the polar plateau but had a tough run back, their driver having to raid rations intended for others — and their orders for the following year changed so often (limping back from the South with their weary human messengers) that in the end literally no one knew what these orders actually were any more. By the time it mattered, the dying marchers were praying for their arrival with supplies and transport, the dogs were being rested back for projects the following year. No adequate supplementary dog rations had been laid in; the best dog driver had quit and gone home; and no one at base grasped that their beleaguered friends so desperately needed someone to come and rescue them. [15]

To win the pole — if the motors that Amundsen so feared didn’t deliver (and they didn’t) — the best British could hope for was that an accident in a crevasse or the like stopped the Norwegians; that Amundwen would discover no way up onto the plateau; or that his dogs couldn’t climb glaciers (it didn’t; he did; they could.)

Meanwhile: tents, clothes, goggles, ski-shoes, sledges and runners, containers, depots, cairns, way-markers — after a while the contrasts turn into a list[16], neatly effective solutions in one column, belated slap-dash improvisations in the other. Things small in themselves aggregated over days and months to give the Norwegians an enormous safety margin.

Secretive as he was, once Amundsen had let his team in on the secret of their own mission, he was also careful to place all his plans before them fully, tactics, strategy and route, for frank discussion and criticism. He needed them to trust in his leadership: he did this by trusting his team-mates to take their own safety and well being seriously.

Scott’s plan — unformed as it was until the depots were laid and half the ponies lost — remained opaque to his companions until it far too late. As intimations of disaster began to emerge, no one had a clue what steps to take. All knew, of course, that Norwegians were experts with ski and dogs, Nansen having pioneered the speedy effectiveness of this combo; faced with this, at least some of the British retreated to the stance that a technology aimed at speed and safety was to all intents and purposes cheating. [14: note to self and reader, footnotes now out of order -- sort later]

Scott, however — in a journal passage posthumously excised by his publishers — calls it a “miserable jumble”: as if to say mistakes were made, the passive-voice exculpation that all too often emerges after disasters. As even the inexperienced ACG recognised, Scott’s project was from the outset a sequence of hair-raising risks. As he cut corners with oil and food, he was spendthrift with his luck. Time and again, before the Polar journey even began, his men had had incredible (and undeservedly fortunate) escapes from serious harm or worse.[17]

Leaving no detail to chance, Amundsen was the opposite. He seemed to be stockpiling his fortune; narrowing the bounds of uncertainty to leave room for just two informed gambles: the location of his basecamp on the dangerously friable ice of the Barrier, and his certainty he would find a glacier to climb up through the Trans-Antarctic Mountains to the Polar Plateau. (All of which care offered Amundsen a certain grace when responding to his one lunatic improvisation, a near-disastrous error of judgment that turned out better than it ought, at least in the near-term.) [18]

In fact we’re using the word ‘luck’ in two distinct senses: Amundsen’s gambles, taken within a structured understanding of his environment; and the unexpected events that constantly assailed Scott, arising from his lack of a structured grasp of understanding of his situation. Which is a good point to start to switch the focus away from (so-called) agency, which merely compares of individuals (far-sighted intelligence versus fecklessness), and look closer at rival systems of thinking, attitude, knowledge. My belief is that the social border territory between competing systems is where anger like Huntford’s always lurks.

Let’s establish one key rivalry clearly and provocatively: here are two distinct species of science. Scott’s camp contained a physicist, three geologists, a meteorologist, two zoologists, and a parasitologist; three of these were also qualified doctors. The expedition was widely, well and deservedly praised for its published scientific studies and results: the scientists selected to accompany Scott were high-quality field researchers. This was Big Science; Imperial Science if you like: science that leads to and from Royal Societies, official, prestigious, charismatic, within its sternly policed disciplinary matrices both effective and fruitful. There was an official photographer also, and two motor engineers — all three pioneers of the technics of machinery in severe cold — plus the folks brought along to look after the horses and dogs. And lastly — at the worried Nansen’s urgent behest — a skiing instructor: Tryggve Gran. In this world of snow and ice, and anticipating a punishingly difficult 1,700 mile journey across it, the only practically knowledgeable person regarding ski was the camp’s youngster, just 22, a rich Norwegian playboy paying his way and (as some felt) not really pulling his weight. Certainly no Britons were adequately trained at his hand: as the Norwegians technicians sped ahead across the various surfaces, fast and slow, the British more than once despaired of their skis and depoted them, only to regret it when improved surfaces changed their minds, and go back and fetch them.

Amundsen’s expedition made no claim to be science-led. He planned to get to the Pole first, fast and safely, taking only such magnetic readings as aided his quest and proved his claims. The closest to a qualified doctor was Amundsen himself, who’d dropped out of medical school in his first year. Nonetheless, this too is science: the focused science of swift and safe polar travel in the age before the motor was adapted to the climate; the gathered science — from folk wisdom and practical fact in half a dozen northern cultures, from the Finns to the Inuit — of the many states of snow itself, when these could be expected, how they behaved and how you coped. [19]

This is a deliberately contrary definition of “science”, of course: and the flash of irritation the contrariness maybe sparks marks exactly the borderwar I’m most interested in. On one side: the narrow and local and specialist knowledge and technique, perhaps transmitted by word of mouth and folk nostrums and experience in the field (snowfield; icefield). On the other: academic papers and peer review, official qualifications and credentials and graded centralised exams, with codified beginner courses that can be absorbed in a class-room. Little of what Scott needed to know to survive was yet woven tidily into any established or institutionalised Big Science discipline. Nor was a sense of this lack part of the ordinary knowledge of the imperial metropole he came from. Gran aside, the closest the British had to an expert in the science of polar travel was Scott himself, whose furthest south with Discovery in 1901–04 had been a riskily chaotic scurvy-ridden scramble. The notion that cultures adapted to the cold might have knowledge worth examining doesn’t appear to have occurred to Scott: thus the purblind complacency of Imperial Science in a nutshell — the natives within or beyond imperial boundaries were to be studied and exploited as resources, never consulted or respected as equals.[20]

Amundsen didn’t think like this at all. He had made thorough and intelligent study of every single relevant aspect of life, travel and survival in the snows. He’d read everything available, and thought hard about it: clothing and food, means of transport, modes of equipment, facts, rumours and myths about the region and its equivalents in the north. He’d pored over accounts of European and American expeditions, successful or otherwise, and (crucially) made intelligent study of the expertise of the peoples who lived in or hard by the polar regions, the Lapps and the tribes in Siberia, whose minds and skills he trusted; he’d already been on two invaluable expeditions — as first mate on the chaotic Antarctic expedition in the Belgica in 1897-99, and as captain of the Gjøa when it traversed the Northwest Passage in 1903-06. On the former he saw scurvy and madness; on the latter he spent two invaluable years living with the Netsilik Inuit studying dog-sledging and polar clothing, gleaning his wisdom from the people whose everyday lives depended on getting such matters right, every time they left shelter.

Amundsen wasn’t right about everything: Big Science already knew a scatter of relevant things he didn’t. But centralised institutions of knowledge inevitably carry with them complex hierarchies of authority and irrelevant slabs of self-interested preconception — and like all theory, Big Science is slow-moving and conservative. In the crucial adaptive space — how to keep himself and his men alive in the urgent moment — Amundsen’s very precise “uncredentialed” expertise, combined with the shape of the group he fashioned round this type of thinking and acting, was as superior as was his transport.

EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SAID: In November 1912 the search party found Scott’s tent buried in drift just 11 miles south of One Ton Camp. The first terrible astonishment: how could they perish so close to safety? The second: just three bodies lay within, not five. Scott lay in the centre, Bowers (“Birdie”) to his right, Wilson (“Bill”) to his left, head to the door. “Bill especially had died very quietly with his hands folded over his chest,” wrote ACG in his own journal, the same day the bodies were discovered: “Birdie also quietly.” Bowers and Wilson lay as if asleep in their bags, while Scott had thrown open the flaps of his and opened his coat, his hand outstretched across Wilson — but beyond this he would not “try and put down what there was in that tent.” Scott had died last, of this he insisted he was certain; left in the air is the suggestion that Scott had not died quietly. (Gran, in the same rescue party, was more forthcoming in his journal and memoirs: noting the glassy yellowness of their frostbitten faces, he says that Scott “seemed to have fought hard at the moment of death…”)[21]

Time was pressing; the search party itself was in no position to dally. No post mortem, just the swiftest examination of scene and bodies by expedition surgeon Atkinson (never officially written up), then tent let down over the three, and all evidence but diaries and letters buried with them.

“I feel sure that he had died the last”: in 1922, this is ACG’s fond grieving recognition of a colleague’s stamina. A half-century later, and this generous gracenote of subjectivity had apparently become a partyline. RH was researching at the Scott Polar Research Institute in the mid-70s, as he told a Guardian interviewer a few years ago: “They were reframing Wilson’s last letter and we found some instructions in pencil from Bowers on the back… The implication of this was clear: it was Bowers, not Scott, who was the last to die. The academic’s response to this was to say ‘This is the sort of thing that should be locked away in a bank vault and not revealed for 50 years.’ Facts should not be allowed to injure a national hero. After that, I learnt to be discreet about what I was doing.” [22]

There’s no way we’ll ever now know the answer to this quite minor question — in LPoE, RH actually places this same pencil note on the reverse of one of Scott’s last letters, not Wilson’s and makes no open mention of the unnamed academic and his fatwa — but it is a curious loose end right in the middle of the official legend. It’s no great surprise that an unexamined incident-scene throws up contradictory explanations — but why are the loose ends being kept tidied away? As I say, however he glosses them, RH has a nose for the blanks that beg explanation.

Scott’s family read the drafts of LPoE and exploded with shocked hurt and fury, and unsuccessfully went to court to stop publication. Doubtless they came to see this as a mistake: they made a foe of a diligent and intelligent scholar with an unparalleled grasp of the relevant material, who they will certainly have concluded was also a grudge-harbouring monomaniac. It’s pretty hard not to admire how waspishly well RH works the gaps and gulfs between Scott’s unpublished journals and their final public form. In both LPoE and RSP, all posthumous edits are restored; not to say, laboriously emphasised.[23]

What was considered decently printable in the Edwardian era, a reticent and an anxious decade, is very different from what we routinely today expect to be allowed to read, of course. Expedition survivors were physically shattered and emotionally traumatised — and the world they all knew was about to explode into a war beyond anyone’s imagination. The pain and grief of surviving family or friends were very much not things to be trifled with, and the pruning of Scott’s disappointed impatience with this or that expedition member was as much a diplomatic kindness as a distorting untruth — at least in the immediate aftermath.

But not everyone needed their feelings protecting. Scott’s crewman from the Discovery days, Shackleton, now a bitter rival, was alive and healthy and only too well aware that Scott had not loved him. In several passages referring to Shackleton’s 1907 polar bid, RH uncovers a crankishly dismissive scorn on Scott’s part — were these excised because they leave the latter looking petty, or worse?

Intriguing as such excisions are — and thrilling to any historian — all are minor: their reinstatement re-calibrates our sense of a complex man not universally loved, in an age era when plaster saints impress no one. But one omission is very different. And here was certainly a closing of ranks, a cover-up on a dead man’s behalf, as well as the wreck of the expedition’s claim to honour — if, that is, it was genuinely a project dedicated above all to science.

THE DOG THAT DIDN’T BARK IN THE BLIZZARD: the missing word is “scurvy”, and (to be fair) and ACG uses it several times in The Worst Journey in the World. He just doesn’t use it when it most needs using. He describes Dr Atkinson’s winter lecture on it. He quotes Lashly’s journal entries, when Lt Edward Evans nearly died of it on the SSP.[24] He notes (twice) that — when they knew the Polar party would not return — Lashly was certain scurvy was to blame; and that Atkinson disagreed (though not why he disagreed). Both had helped save Lt Evans’s life [25] — and Atkinson, the senior officer in charge after Scott’s failure to return and Lt Evans’s collapse, would insist in November that the search party took with them raw onions — he would not have done this if scurvy wasn’t a concern.

But then WJitW arrives among the bodies, and the urgent question vanishes. Nor is it to be found in ACG’s analysis of the reasons of the disaster. What’s going on here?

Scurvy is a deficiency disease, caused by lack of vitamin C, which the human body cannot synthesise. If vitamin C is absent from the diet for much more than three months, the following progession of symptoms appear: lethargy, spots, paleness, depression, spongy gums, bleeding from mucous membranes, partial paralysis, suppurating wounds, loss of teeth, jaundice, fever, neuropathy and finally death.

However, vitamins were unknown to official science when the Scott and Amundsen expeditions embarked: the experiments that isolated and identified them were little known and still underway in 1910. And by a quirk of fashion, orthodox scientific thinking in the Edwardian era was hostile to the notion of deficiency disease. Atkinson’s winter lecture had declared scurvy a product of tainted food, a toxicity avoidable via careful food preparation, and this was the mainstream view. Nansen himself, scientist and explorer, was venomously opposed to the very notion of deficiency disease.

The symptoms of scurvy were well enough known to sailors like Lashly — as were the classic preventatives, fresh fruit (especially lemons or limes), fresh vegetables, fresh meat. Nomadic Arctic peoples knew better too: seal meat and cloudberries not only kept scurvy at bay on long journeys, and quickly cured it when it appeared. Amundsen had seen just this on the Belgica; and had certainly discussed it with the Netsilik Inuit too. Neither expedition ate a balanced scientific diet in the modern sense: but Amundsen’s was informed by Inuit knowledge and his own experience. (And making his luck and reducing his risk as always, he anyway planned to be out in the field for no more than 10 weeks; Scott’s journey could never have been completed in much less than twice this.)

At the time of their respective expeditions, neither Amundsen nor Scott could know the first thing about Vitamin C — it wasn’t even isolated yet, let alone named. But ACG was writing in 1922; vitamin C’s role in scurvy was accepted, and the concept of deficiency disease back in good standing. Big nutritional science had swung right back in behind despised folk wisdom. And we know ACG knows this: because he discusses it, in a late footnote. We also know Atkinson had been thinking about it: first, the raw onions for the search party, and second, ACG mentions that he had had the size and contents of the rations quietly re-examined in the years since the disaster.

More to the point, both had seen the bodies in the tent, which were in (wrote ACG) a “terrible state”; he is not a man given to lazy hyperbole; the word “terrible” has a considered force here.

Scott has justification here: official science was very wrong about scurvy, and he was in no strong position to revolt against officialdom. But Scott’s chroniclers don’t have this excuse. This was a scientific expedition; if the condition was present in the bodies as found, science required it be recorded; and if it was not present — somewhat miraculously, given the circumstances — science requires this be noted too. Atkinson, ACG and were honour-bound to discuss its presence OR absence; and if unable to explain what they found, then honour-bound to say what needed explanation and outlay questions arising.

I said that the word doesn’t appear when ACG analyses the disaster. This is true, but it’s not quite the whole truth, perhaps. Another blank to fill in: in his closing pages, ACG explores three contributory reasons. Unlike Scott, he doesn’t blame anyone’s physical condition, citing instead a lack of oil, unexpectedly bad weather, and (at length) the rations.

Oil and weather we’ll leave to the footnotes [26]: the food is the matter of the tale. We know how things turned out; we know that folk-scientific Amundsen guessed right, and Scott badly. Summing up, ACG first moves doggedly through quantity and make-up of rations, on the barrier and on the summit: he knows, because he was eating it, and man-hauling on it, that just in terms of protein, carbohydrate and fat, it was wrongly adjusted. Everyone lost weight, strength and underlying fitness; everyone felt cold and hungry; lessons that should have been learned from the Winter Journey were in fact not learned [27]. He notes that Atkinson had independently been puzzling at the same issue.

And then ACG does quite a curious thing: rather than summing up, he throws the discussion wide open, with a last-minute typographical intervention of his own devising, as it were. He inserts a long footnote about vitamins (in my crumbly dawn-of-time Penguin edition still spelled “vitamines”), and this footnote — by virtue of page layout alone — draws our attention. No way to prove this is a strong unspoken hint, of course, about where historians-to-come ought to look. He still doesn’t mention scurvy — but I can’t see how a 1922 reader versed in the relevant science can’t be thinking scurvy. [28]

DISLIKE IS MUNDANE; HATRED IS INTERESTING: your own everyday reaction against the tiresome flaws of others is easily justified, and rarely all that important. Unexamined loathing, however apparently justified the catalyst, is your own weaknesses mastering you: it’s a giveaway, a tell. It’s natural enough for biographers to find themselves trapped in intimate and unveiled association with someone whose choices and mannerisms, beliefs and failings, they find over time they can’t really stand. And there’s no reciprocity with the dead: they will never adapt to the scholar’s sensibilities, can’t turn on the charm and soothe jangled nerves.

Probably the RH aversion to Scott is undisguised enough that it works a kind of self-innoculation: nothing is being snuck in, that’s for sure, and readers can easily push back against it, readdressing the evidence more sympathetically.

But Huntford is intensely sensitised to bad group chemistry, so perhaps there’s an aspect of his own allergy which bothers him a little. Does he feel he needs to justify his animus? Does it seem a bit much even to him? Certainly in both LPoE and RSP he nudges now and then towards speculations so extreme that even his most convinced readers likely recoil a bit. Somewhat different speculations in each book, and small moments both times — but telling; some might say damaging.

In LPoE, three men arrive arrive at their last camp: “Scott’s right foot had been frostbitten, and he was almost unable to walk. Now he was the drag on the party, and in the predicament of Oates. Wilson and Bowers, in marginally better shape, prepared to set off for the depot and fetch food and fuel. Something stopped them; it is not clear what.” [29]

This highlights a genuine mystery, a blank that needs filling: the two-man depot-march is indeed announced in Scott’s journal, but we never discover why it didn’t happen. RH chooses to imply that Scott had some strange hold over in his men, shutting off their natural survival instinct. He’s also implicitly sharpening a contrast: Oates had stumbled off into a blizzard, to free up rations and remove his companions’ responsibility to stick with him to the end. Only a few days later, Scott’s companions are persuaded to remain at his side, and all three starve.

But why would they not stay? Even starving and exhausted, they had deep affection for Scott; deepened, in fact, by shared adversity, even if they also held him entirely responsible for this adversity. RH himself seems to consider Scott so intensely dislikeable that any loyalty can only be a deluded hivemind etiquette at most, evolving into a species of group-protective corruption. But we all of us have affection for difficult and ambiguous people, which stressed situations often heightens… [30]

In RSP, 30 years later, this line of speculation — prominent in LPoE by virtue of its placing at the climactic moment — has vanished. What replaces it requires a link be intuited between two comments many pages apart. On page 30, when Scott first discovers Amundsen is in the Antarctic, and likely to beat him, the RH gloss on the inadequate British preparation that followed is this: “Scott continued with his declared pretence that Amundsen did not exist. Anyway, he knew that if he did not succeed, he might still be forgiven a ‘glorious failure’.” [31]

Some 280 pages later, with Amundsen feted globally and Scott’s whereabouts unknown, RH writes as follows: “Until then, Amundsen was regarded as the natural victor, while Scott was in the process of being dismissed as the loser. Scott’s ruin now reversed the roles, which poses the question of whether it had been premeditated.” [32]

The idea on p.30 is standard-issue sourness at the Brit love of a goofy loser: Eddie the Eagle-ism, a trait RH has no patience with. But where do we go when we conjoin it with the word “premeditated”? Coming second is one (unavoidable but spinnable) thing; when was ruin premeditated? At what point could Scott have intuited — and what an intuition! — that “ruin” might reverse the roles, and when could such a realisation meaningfully have been acted on? The key depots — most significantly One Ton — were already established. Various belated and risky improvisations notwithstanding [26], Scott’s overall plan was always both intricate and inflexible, with next to no give built in: by the time the British discovered Amundsen had poled first, and barring deliberate dawdling, the character of the home journey was entirely determined. [26a]. It was also a pitiless race for survival: is RH really arguing that Scott intended it to be such, and that Bowers signed off on the entire pre-trip prep not seeing this (or not minding)?

Or just that Scott was confident that gamely struggling losers would always have a place in John Bull’s big fat heart? That he knew he was well beaten before he even began — hence the mental crisis ACG describes — and thus set things up to ensure a suitably glamorous and romantic struggle for second place, against seemingly insuperable odds? Odds that turned out genuinely insuperable.

What about a subconscious death-wish? A friend jumped at this notion: “Of course! a death-wish is part of anyone’s make-up that repeatedly places themselves in high-risk situations!” And to her, this was very likely also a source of Huntford’s rage: as she knows from personal experience, there’s a self-absorbed arrogance to risktakers, especially when their stunts blithely endanger others. (Certainly it matters a lot to RH that Shackleton, no one’s idea of a cautious fellow, always showed scrupulous care towards his men, and lost none that he directly oversaw in two very high-risk enterprises.)

But she had also homed cleverly in on something I’d overlooked; that Scott’s a better writer than Huntford. Or perhaps better say better stylist — where RH has something of an ex-journalist’s bad instinct for the first laziest phrasing, Scott had a superb sense of evocative pacing and what people need to read to begin to find amusement in the explorer’s technical gaffes and carelessness, his parochial conceit, his all-too entitled sense of a world that needs to organise itself for his convenience. It’s possible that Scott’s facility with words really rankles with Huntford, the gentleman amateur besting the meticulous professional; and when this is combined even with the suggestion that Scott had (unconsciously?) engineering a better drama by skimping supplies and cutting corners, and that he had fashioned himself an admiring and uncritical audience by the means of best-quality storytelling, well, we’ve maybe arrived at the irrational and all-consuming heart of a wounded amour propre. In the uneasy borderlands between competing disciplines, rival ethics chafe one another as feverishly as the most threatened modes of partisan politics, or indeed stand-in quasi-politics. My friend knows me pretty well: when irrational passions emerge in disputed cultural or disciplinary neighborhoods, when attitudes rational in themselves deliver themselves embattled, this is when my ears prick up.

SO IS THERE AN ACTUAL REAL POLITICS IN ALL THIS?: ever since LPoE appeared, Scott’s defenders have tried to impugn Huntford’s credentials by accusing him of mere fashionable political bias.[34] Here’s an aggressively anti-establishment Empire-mocking Norwegian-speaking enthusiast for the Lappish or Inuit world-view: the man has to be some kind of lefty, his attack merely typical of the pinko tendency in the 70s to decry all things British, no?

They could hardly be more wrong (or sillier): RH has never been slow to announce his admiration for Margaret Thatcher and his revulsion at all things socialist, his disgusted contempt for the thuggish collective as it smothers individual enterprise and vision, the state as it curdles into self-interested self-expansion.[35]

All the same, he’s no parochial conservative; as a Briton he’s unusually fond of Norway. His (very engaging) history of skis, Two Planks and a Passion, is obliquely also a history of Norway’s struggle for throw off Swedish overlordship (as is much of his biography of the explorer Nansen), as a sympathetic chronicler of the road to independence, he’s often highly critical of the emerging nation’s backwoods timidity, and sees the flaws and limitations within the liberating energies (he’s an Ibsen fan). What little time he has for Empire is a more a boyish fondness for its long-vanished buccaneering days — he compares Amundsen to Drake at one point — and he’s actively and relentlessly angry at that element in the imperial mindset that patronises and ignores local knowledge and native skills. Nor does he admire tradition simply because it’s tradition — 2P&P is a complex study of the materialist dialectics of innovation, to put it in a way that would annoy him greatly.[36]

He is no uncomplicated admirer of capitalism. Early in RSP, for example, he contrasts Amunden’s mindset with Scott’s. Scott he thinks a thoroughly conventional British naval officer, embedded in and dependent on imperial-military class rigidities; Amundsen was the “antithesis of Scott’s hierarchical discipline and today’s corporate mentality” [37, my italics]. He seems greatly to distrust the idea of “theory” — the word operates in his prose as the diktat-from-the-centre that blinds and blocks the lesser agent in the field. And he perhaps distrusts idealism even more; politically successful idealists he largely dismisses as power-hungry hypocrites.

So what to call him? Tory anarchist? But he’s really not an anarchist, and (as a self-declared Thatcherite) I slightly suspect he’d argue Thatcher‘s more pathbreaker than Tory. Radical individualist? Certainly there’s a tinge of the Nietzschean here (with more than a dash of Nietzsche’s sourly delicate sensitivity towards the psychological tangles of seemingly respectable social intercourse). He detests what he calls “sterile uniformity”, whether imposed by the state or by mass manufacture — or indeed by what I’ve been calling Big Science. He’s drawn to people whose path takes them away from the ordinary; and fascinated by how groups interract internally. To quarantine Amundsen’s success from the taint of crime of “collectivism”, he introduces the notion of the Virtuoso Team, and systematically contrasts such a formation with the ill-informed Polar amateurism he sees dominating Scott’s outlook and projects.

What spurs Huntford’s animus is his investment in certain convictions about expertise and its refinement, how best to combine variant strands, to process and scale up, to exploit without destroying.[39: footnotes out of order] This is a politics of the betterment of knowledge: he aligns himself with Thatcher because he’s convinced this betterment is best favoured by her reforms; or rather, most threatened by her opponents and enemies and the interests they represent.

Which will seem utterly contradictory to many. And requires (since it’s the tangle at the root of what draws me to this story, and to Huntford’s extreme take on it) a digression, into my own semi-formulated theory about the conflicting dynamics of rival systems of knowledge within a modern market economy.

Because I don’t actually think class politics (as we ordinarily understand the word politics) well explains Huntford’s anger. And to explain why, I need to propose a type of social category that cuts down through the horizontal layers of economic class: my term for this being tranche (because tranche is French for “slice”, and everyone knows intellectual jargon must be in French, clerical Latin or fake Greek: and slice because economic class is kind of like a layer cake, and I need categories that slice vertically down through the recognised class layers).

What I want to explore — and I’m aware this is the heavily contested territory of politicised experts, with me setting out onto a high and airless ice plateau with nothing but amateur equipment of my own devising — is the politics of partial information; and more explicitly the generalised paranoias of rival modes of partial information. [new footnote here: re cake and class and rival theories]

Now as noted, the British Empire in the Edwardian era repels Huntford, not least for for the conformist and class-bound stickiness of its institutes of knowledge; but also (and seemingly at odds with this) for the “British cult of the gentleman amateur”, a ideology of comfortable know-nothing complacency that makes a virtue of its own belated improvisations and lack of planning; a “common sense” empiricism that tends to manifest as insouciant amusement towards any technical matrix of disciplinary knowledge. [38: footnotes out of order] And to sterotype and generalise the RH bete noir: it’s the bad dynamics of large institutions, and how they fail to scale up the close observation and subtlety of understanding he associates with individualism (or anyway Virtuoso Teams).

A tranche is a social structure organised to develop and nurture and protect values, perspectives and skills that seem overlooked or under threat in society at large. Formal examples of tranches would be professional associations and institutions (legal or medical or military), guilds and unions and the like; less formally perhaps, there’d be art movements and magazines readerships and hobbygroups and fanclubs, from modernists to metalheads, from trainspotters to Beliebers, plus — not so different, rhetoric notwithstanding — the many identity-pol quasi-nations (the “Black Nation”, the “Queer Nation”), and of course all the many conflicted factions of actual official political and-or religious parties and groupings and movements and sects. A tranche (in my definition) is really ANY structure dedicated to the defence of values those self-selecting to gather in its defence (and within its community) consider essential, and vulnerable. Tranches — by this definition — come in many rival forms and internal sutrctures, the rivalry itself often the generator of this variation of form and structure.

In economic class warfare, the direction of battle is primarily up or down (the haves against the have-nots). In tranche warfare, as often as not, the conflicts are lateral. Whatever else it is, a tranche is a temple to partial information: a social space in which the specific local expertise will often seem to function as the dominant ideology.

Twentieth-century politics was dominated by variations of the Bismarckian technocratic state: for all their war-causing differences, one thing was common to the decaying and embattled 19th-century imperialisms, as well as the USSR, the USA, and the many smaller social-democratic regimes. This was a commitment to managerialist systems of planning. Until the 60s, these otherwise very different models of societies shared one assumption — that a better world could be created by a well educated, well intentioned centralised ruling class running everything in the interests of those not so fortunate. Vast political conflict arose over the machineries by which this class was selected and arrived at this role, by which it recognised and realised itself. Significant conflict too over what constituted the interests of all not within this class: and how (and whether) these interests merited concern. Yet beneath the implacable conflict there was a sinister measure of agreement.

By the 60s, challenge to this model was massing everywhere; in anti-colonial peasant nationalisms, in a surge of anti-Moscow marxisms, in a youth revolt across Europe and the Anglophone world (a revolt that aonxiously combined America’s stubborn don’t-step-on-me culture of individualism with a mushrooming of incompatible varieties of identity politics).

And another challenge too, from an unexpected, very anti-liberal quarter: a very opaque, ambiguous, very strong and ambitious mode of resistance to the notion of social transformation imposed and administered from above. It was formulated by the conservative pro-market economist Friedrich von Hayek and his followers (including Margaret Thatcher, of course); Hayek arguing, with sly vigour, that the localised knowledge essential for the understanding of (and thus efficient practical use of) this or that concrete phenomenon or social activity was by definition ungraspable in its full necessary detail by any centralised state elite, any inflexible Bismarckian bureaucracy whatever its political complexion. And thus that the judgments and decisions made at the centre — to whatever political end — would always tend to smother the skills needed to value a practice or a produce, and the quick-shifting facts necessary for informed and rational. The vast dispersed detail of this knowledge — available to no single agent in the nexus — was all too easily smothered, even in the best-intentioned overarching statistical generalisation of a centralised decision process. The interplay of detailed partial local intelligence (and desire), the interplay that fosters innovation and delivers focused satisfaction to those looking for it, will always be distorted and effaced.

Free markets, by contrast, allow the “dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess” to be aggregated in a readable and a useable way: the market’s ordinary pricing mechanism captures, codes and communicates all the types of information that mutually distant participants in the overall exchange need to know. What the free market allows is an speedread shared index of value that reflects and passes on, with immense and efficient swiftness, the corollary of the local judgment and knowledge of the factory-manager or merchant on the spot, without having to slather it in all the semi-relevant and irrelevant information-as-noise these judges have had to engage with.

A rational central evaluator will always still have to process such information (all the information there is, relevant or otherwise); the market (in this model) is essentially a vast interlocking system of shortcuts that allow everyone entering it to operate effectively, within a vast miasma of unavoidably partial information (against the swirling background of the imagined ideal of total information).

Thus Hayek: who I cite not because I agree with him politically (at all), but because he raises a question that surely needs answering whatever your politics. Partial knowledge is a conundrum that every conceivable society and any economy will have to confront: to transmit information by other means (be these statistical or descriptive) than by face-to-face encounter, or trade, is to risk the obliteration of local (especially tacit) knowledge and small-focus expertise, and to render value itself hugely vulnerable. Radical alternatives to the system-as-is are proposed all the time: but most (not all) arrive pre-infested with the same old modernist-managerial pseudo-rationalism of the central-committee-to-come. In tranche-warfare terms, the fundamentalist insistence that if only all society were reorganised exactly to the precepts this or that little dissident sect proposes, the problem of resource distribution in the face of unknowable information will simply vanish, the mechanism of such vanishment to emerge at a later date (and only reactionaries doubt or fear our motives or vision or capabilities…)

But having outlined a genuine (and a universal) conundrum, Hayek must now demonstrate that his favoured system, this unconstrained and undistorted ideal of the free-market pricing system, is not only perfect for the conveyance of the types of aggregated partial value he outlines (which are those that can be uncontroversially monetised), but is in no way an an active harm to the the transmission and protection of every other kind of value.

And actually his essay — famous as it is — really doesn’t even begin to attempt this. All we get are dodges: a speculative elision, a risibly sketchy survey of all rival wings of economic analysis, and in conclusion a mildly trivial nitpick aimed at fellow economist Joseph Schumpeter: that the partial knowledge imparted by price does not and cannot mean that consumers have magically imparted to them (as what Schumpeter apparently calls a “datum”) all the information of content and provenance that has, in the ordinary course of the market process, been sheared away. [39a]

The irony being that Schumpeter’s alleged silly error actually mirrors Hayek’s: not only does most of the complex of shifting information compressed and simplified into cost-price remain invisible at the price-paying end of the extended exchange; any information and evaluation that can’t be well signalled by the assignment of price is also rendered invisible.[39b]

And — to return to Amundsen versus Scott — such unmonetisable modes of information and evaluation are far from unusual (in fact they’re extremely common). In his 2001 introduction to Herbert Ponting’s The Great White South, Huntford says that it’s a “paradox” that the Norwegian victory produced a single book; where Scott’s failure no less than seven (to which can be added Ponting’s silent film documentary The Great White Silence). Huntford seethes at the obliteration of Amundsen’s achievement, as the two expeditions competed for mass mediation. But such obliteration — and such resentment — are surely exactly what tranche-warfare would teach us to expect, as lateral struggles within the information market play out. The occlusion of Amundsen’s story and the rise to heroic myth of Scott’s catastrophe is, very precisely, a example of the destruction by the market of certain modes of value and tacit knowledge. The value of Amundsen’s triumph — if by this we mean the compacted geometry of site-specific virtuoso expertise and the solutions his victory represented — was never going to be a value that the market, in 1912 or after, could recognise, scale up or exploit.

And while piratical self-motivation is undoubtedly an element in Amundsen’s story — the explorer as Viking raider — a merely uncritical Thatcherite admiration for entrepreneurship seems rather to miss the point. Amundsen was hopeless with money. He needed it badly but never made any: when he found sponsors to bail him out, they had to be satisfied not with profit (ever), but with the faraway mountains and glaciers that today bear their names [39c]. At the centre of a vast inhospitable frozen desert, the pole is a horrible place. The plain fact of the Polar Victory is that, in itself and as it is, it couldn’t directly be monetised: the commodification of the romance of unspoiled isolation can only ever mean the despoliation of both, via high-number tourism and/or mineral extraction. [39c2]

Stories, though: these can be sold (and might even somewhat protect the beauty of the landscape). But from a historian’s perspective, the better historical story is rarely the more saleable story: and (in the angry RH gloss), Scott’s account is a well written muck of sentimentality, mendacity, indifference or worse towards professional expertise, amused anit-historical indifference towards those foreigners (modern and ancient) who best understood the terrain, and a baffled contempt for any who declined to conform to complacent Edwardian convention. In other words, Scott gave his Empire readership exactly what RH believes they anyway craved: vicarious adventure, an enduring image of gutsily indomitable Brits at their best in a pinch, the affirmation of everything they already believed in. Any pointed questions could be smothered in shroud-waving, or a flurry of busy salutes to the flag of higher scientific purpose.

Amundsen — as his journals show — was a guardedly plain writer who refuses to gin up adventure where none was to be had. The tragedy of his occlusion can probably be summarised like this: you rarely get great copy out of a job well done. No “arc” and no “journey”, as the script-doctors would say — and not much “learning” either. By long planning and precise focus, Amundsen had made himself the master scientist of comfortable life and travel on the ice in the pre-petrol-engine age. His polar victory was a straightforward practical task very tidily executed (the very tidiness had a genius to it, but by its nature a tidiness of genius is always going to be self-effacing). And the difficulties he overcame will only prickle the nape of fellow scientists ( in the faintly contrarian sense I’m using the word here) — and this species of fellow scientist had been doomed by the arrival in the Antarctic of motor travel. Air travel and ship-to-ship radio were both on the historical horizon. The moment of Amundsen’s victory was the vanishment of the technique he perfected; an entire school rendered irrelevant overnight by its own triumph.

“Rendered irrelevant” is not an unsaleable story — but surely not one Amundsen had the mind to deliver. And manoeuvring in secret to steal the prize from under the nose of the foolish posh kids for the big stupid Empire, Amundsen had also stripped out the angle of the sporting upset: with the best will in the world, a single unrepeatable event is only a good pitch if you can present it as a public contest, and Amundsen left this too late. As a writer, he was no dramatist: the genuine achievement of reaching the pole first, its techniques, its lessons, its meaning — its value — did not find its storyteller for decades; and even this storyteller had to construct the drama within a larger juxtaposition, complete with overdrawn cartoon villain. Needing a hit to establish his career, RH (at least from my perspective) denies himself the more subtle, far more interesting moral-political drama, about the information that can’t survive the market’s cull, and how this impacts on Scott’s story, and Amundsen’s, and his own.

Which are more popular? Stories that conform to established conventions — of the doughty pluck and selfless heroism of “our boys” for example — or tales of skilled technicians taking unruffled care of business. The term ‘story-teller’ is hardly one of unalloyed approval — isn’t that fish you caught getting bigger and more of a fighter every time we hear of it? — but a story’s usefulness is only related in the most complex way to its truthfulness. Fiction vastly outsells fact, and we can tidy this unsettling statistic away into moralism in any smug direction we like — it’s our anxiety at being fooled by art that draws us to artists who die for their art. We read for struggle and conflict, for vicarious experience of extremes, for inspiration, to imagine ourselves more marvellous than we know we are, to confront ourselves in places we’d never dare go. Huntford thinks the victory-defeat switch is a paradox; but isn’t it really just a cliche? Albeit a very deep and strange cliche.

And science is as vulnerable as anything else once you move beyond its grand generalised narrative of progress. To turn it into popular stories, don’t you have to glamourise and distort? To favour conflict and daring breakthrough over patient routine and detailed exploratory uncertainty? Isn’t there a sharp tension between readers feel they want in the fields of information, education and science, and what they may actually need? Who gets to decide here, and how? [39d] Just as the free-market pricing system can hide ugly social facts about the production deep in the sheared-off “partial knowledge”, the mass dissemination of complex ideas can occlude or elide unpopular and unsaleable information essential to the evaluation of superfically popular or saleable claims. Good scientists in their role as scientists will know to hunt this hidden material out; but scientists rarely fund most of their own research, and the phenomenon of funders choosing to be ill-informed is hardly rare. Is there any evidence whatever that the free market encourages or supports scholarly research for its own sake, let alone the painstaking and scrupulous winkling out of disliked facts? Can RH argue the zigs and zags into and out of fashionability of his own conclusions about Scott — not to mention the disinclination of his critics to engage with the rich contradictory complexity of his material — are somehow not also artefacts of the information market as it actually exists? (This may come across as a rhetorical gotcha: actually I genuinely don’t know what RH believes is going on here, though he adverts to it darkly a couple of times…)

THE COMMODIFICATION OF A WIN AS THE REDEFINITION OF VICTORY: monetisable value is hugely privileged over any other species of value in a modern market economy. Other values are downgraded, sidelined, silenced, ignored: whenever you encounter the word “commodification” used in a negative or critical sense, you’re reading something that assumes some such argument (often, it’s true, extremely vaguely and confusedly). The effect of commodification — which so simplifies exchange in certain helpfully ways — is to shut whole layers of value out of any possible discussion.

To expand this a little: commodification is not simply the process of assigning an exchange price, to speed and improve transfer of materials or services, from source to use-point, in a particular trade. Or rather, the assigning of price is a far from simple process; certainly not a process with simple agency. Commodification is the insertion of any individual act of exchange into an all-emcompassing network of the deployment and interpretation of all the many many chunks of partial information, inheriting and accepting (as it were) values and prices assigned elswehere, far away, over the horizon of vendor’s and vendee’s immediate experience, knowledge or comprehension.

And once our particular exchange places us within the larger system of commodification — invaluable as it seems for the transmission of certain kinds of value — all these focused skills, this knowledge, expertise, wisdom, this entire dimension of human endeavour, become hugely vulnerable. The danger is — the fact is — that the ease with which the extant system processes value type A, in contrast to the evident difficulties it has with value type B, ensures that the “unfettering” of this system, the better to serve value type A, has (as unintended consequence, or not so unintended) the inevitable degradation of value type B; its rendering inoperable in public (which is to say political) discussion.

A tranche will form as easily round value type A as type value B: in both cases (in the society we actually live in) to beef up the degree to which the market (recognised as the primary vector of value across the entire culture) acknowledges either type as it adherents believe it should be. If the market is deemed incapable of properly recognising or valuing or respecting a value, a tranche will form: round any product or practice or idea or way of life that the market isn’t trusted to deliver or to leave unspoiled.

And the nervous system of any given tranche is thus a paranoid system: paranoia being the founding assumption of information asymmetry (whether or not such asymmetry exists); paranoia being the vast anxiety that the partiality of the information available to your tranche is damagingly less than it needs to be, for your specific expertise to receive what’s (as you see it) due. To commit yourself to a given mastery is to rob rival avenues of the time they’d demand: what mortal doesn’t worry that a different selection of time-investment might have delivered different advantages and counter-privileges. Because look at THEM over THERE — how did they know to get to know who they know…

Hence (inevitably) there’s endless fightback; there’s never not been been a fightback against the alleged atomised perfection of the Hayekian model, a fightback primarily from within the mass of its own fiercely uncritical adherents. A market is never merely a chaos: yes, it’s a highly turbulent system, and yes, highly opaque to itself — but its movements (of resources, of wealth, of information) follow patterns that can be explained and determined, even when any given explanation/determination remains controversial, limited and inadequate, with no overall explanation/determination able to date to transcend the background politics. Within this opaque turbulence, and the strong concomitant awareness of the fact of the partial information discussed above, those who depend on any given local knowledge for their livelihood — and those who are committed to the wider values embedded in the knowledge in question — will certainly band together: and will try and form structures to protect and promote the values they value, the skills, techniques, insights, the embedded or tacit knowledge that fashion their professional or their cultural or their informal ethos; to establish and protect and advance the continued presence of same within a market system they suspect (and are encouraged to suspect) may be functionally hostile or destructive to same.

All of us exist in an aggregate of larger and smaller overlapping groups, complete with obligations and contradictory loyalties; and the rational commercial agents in Hayek’s story are no exception, their reasons are as skewed as anyone’s by communal loyalties, the affective tribalisms of habit, the convenience of path dependency, the brittle defensiveness toward pre-invested time and attention; the binding and bonding facts of a region’s or a an institution’s history. Even if we assume away malice and fraud within the market (meaning the deliberate and conscious dissemination of false information for gain), management is driven by performance targets — which is to say, imaginary goals — that combine with an anxiety for their own positions, and a constant need to make decisions that affirm these positions (and to describe them and argue for them in termof the justifications of the market, whatever the actual rationale). And so management is ceaselessly placed in the position of destroying the accreted institutional knowledge that it doesn’t itself have, because its (imaginary) market indicators don’t recognise and can’t measure this knowledge. The much-vaunted rationalism of decision within the model becomes a kind of disconnected psychosis in non-model life, incapable of processing anything right there, but undescribed, by model or theory or ideological habit.

Tranches are inevitable, embattled crypto-tribal gatherings and clusterings and opacities within the social. The ‘ideal’ free market — the perfect circulation of goods and information to the benefit of all — has embedded within it a dynamic that cannot but generate the paranoia that fuels entranchement: the fact of the non-resolution of partial knowledge. Right there alongside the relief at not having to educate yourself in the entire science and language and practice of (say) fruit-farming in North Africa — the relative price of the apricot tells you the relative value, and you make your judgment — is the fear that, given someone somewhere knows something you certainly don’t, this someone or another is able to cheat you or fool you (only HIPSTERS pretend to like apricots). Just as the free market unavoidably coalesces into special-interest tranches, the clotting cannot but breed paranoia. Conspiracy theory is the nervous system of capitalism in a liberal polity: wherever you’ve found yourself there’s always a “they” over there, well versed in the exact secret knowledge that’s beggaring you. You know what we all know — that it’s impossible to know everything. So how come, if this is a democracy, is it that the asymmetries of insight always seem to favour this “other”? How did they know to know the things they chose to know?

And over and above this, modern democracy is in its ideal by definition in tension with the perspectives (and thus the interests) of the specialist; of all the many projects of the multi-form tranche. As knowledge structures itself into interest groups (corporate or professional) — and what else can it do? — politics right left and centre will be (is being; has been) shaped by conflicts between types and schools of expertise. Of course some take it as read that such intra-class squabbling is only ever a mask for deeper, more fundamental conflicts. But is it? Or better ask, can the fundamental conflict be “unmasked”, absent recourse to intellectual competition between all the relevant schools of political explanation and transformation (and their attendant systems of interested expertise)? Ask: when finally stripped of the distortions of economic or landed (or “cultural”?) status and hierarchy, will democracy also escape all the various rival lateral claims of established expertise? What will resolve or soothe this over-informed, over-invested, over-educated form of the war of all against all?

Certainly the structures of authority within the various professions have appeared in the past to survive conquests and revolution, even as details of practice and doctrine get shuffled. In any case, to return to the present, the politics of expertise is hard. Not only do you have to know what you’re doing and be able convince others who know what they’re doing; you must also at some point persuade everyone else. And humans — especially those with the vanity and drive to battle their way to the top of their field — are stubborn, egoistic, self-interested items. Threatened old-guarders will defend their turf; mere wily opportunists will always be circling. Change can be exciting, provided you feel you’re in the loop and in the know, not having something foisted on you; losing control of your already precarious lives can be terrifying. We mostly don’t think or act well when we feel threatened; on the contrary, we often react furiously badly.

Anyway, I hope I’ve given a sense of the extent to which lateral tranche warfare exists all across this story, a hundred years ago and today too, perhaps obscured and often recruited into all the (better recognised) “up-down” class conflicts. In one sense, the Polar race could hardly have been more cut-and-dried. Pioneering a new-and-untried route, Amundsen got there first; got back safe; his men were plumper and fitter when they arrived back at base than when thy’d left. The Norwegians treated it as a ski-race, a sporting event they’d invented; a sport they still in 1911-12 easily dominated. Their triumph was cheeky and deft: they won.

And then everything else kicked in. The RH view: Scott’s followers and supporters, united in grief, guilt and humiliated embarrassment, began gaming the refs: to fashion a win for their man by redefining the meaning of victory. A “moral” victory over the Antarctic; a victory — as the more religious were able to claim — over death itself. [39e]

Huntford, you could reductively argue, is simply angry on on behalf of the slighted art, craft and science of skiing: this is his tranche and he’s sticking with it. Every revenant claim excusing the British explorer’s bungling is for RH a renewed contemptuous assault on Lapp, Inuit and Norwegian craft mastery. These distant simple peoples with their funny unmetropolitan customs — how could they possibly anything unadjusted for in the hallowed halls of grand metropolitan assumption? Nothing will flame us more explosively than the airily ignorant dismissal of something we know in our bones to be true.

But there’s unbridled fury here too behalf of the slighted art of history. To fashion a history of his chosen tranche — to view one discipline through the lens of another, from prehistoric roots to modern sport and leisure activity, 2P&P must weave a tale out of every contradictory pressure and tendency shaping the evolution of a multi-purpose technology — must reintroduce all empirical details at any given stage, including the forces brought to bear by rival nationalisms, military requirement, the egos of sportsfolk, the entracements and curiosities of science, the contradictory advances and fashions of craft and industrial manufacture, the many divergent landscapes, snowscapes, climates and practical traditions of different skiing peoples at different times, the stubbornness, snobbishness, pretensions, vigour, greed, health and waywardness of an insanely large cast of characters in no sense mutually aware, less still in social and political sync. In other words, RH must reintroduce to his story vast background amounts of the various partial systems of information and value that the market economy would have had to shear off to function at the level of undistorted price-assignment. Commodification, I find myself arguing, absolutely specifically counters and disables the ethos of the historian in particular, and all rival disciplines committed to the re-examination of resolved and unresolved alternative complexities. (And once again, I hear my own obscure interests catcalling softly through this story…)

“Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my comanions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman”
Robert Falcon Scott, Message to the Public, 21-29 March 1912

“Adventures are a mark of incompetence”
Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Arctic explorer and ethnologist

AGENCY, LUCK AND STRUCTURE: BUT THE GREATEST OF THESE IS STRUCTURE. The longstanding Norwegian culture of snow-science aside, Amundsen — a driven, somewhat secretive loner — created much of his support network from scratch: he kept even his idol Nansen in the dark. And he threw his mind into reducing the play of luck wherever he could imagine it intervening. Scott was a spendthrift with luck. The entire voyage is a litany of narrow scrapes: the overladen Terra Nova nearly foundered a few days out of New Zealand; the near-criminal lunacy of the escapades with the ponies in the sound when the ice went out, and the entire Winter Journey project; the SPP’s impossibly squeaky escape and Tom Crean’s lone 18-hour march. An affair dogged by misfortune this really wasn’t, by any serious accounting: any luck banked was casually thrown away long before it was needed. Unlike his rival, Scott seems both uncomprehending and toothless before the structures shaping his destiny, until after death — through death — a way was found to refashion the way the world understood the issue.

Which returns us to the death of Seaman Evans, long weeks before bad weather or low rations and fuel were fully a factor. The five Norwegians were a team of equals, each a high-end niche technician under a leader they’d (more or less) democratically agreed to follow; a leader with a deep grasp of the respective technical ability at his command; the collective cemented by mutual recognition and trust. In an otherwise upper-middle-class and officer-class tent, Evans was there as handyman and porter. Large as it was, Scott’s expedition inevitably reflected Edwardian class structure, and within this the rigid hierarchies of the Edwardian Royal Navy, as well the intellectual rankings of the sanctioned official science of the day. To be free to apply themselves to science, scientists would not be asked to mend sleeping bags or design snowshoes or pack and unpack sledges. In fact, science was one of the few realms Scott himself seemed comfortable in: he enjoyed the company of professional scientists, and they returned the compliment, enjoying the pertinent questions this intelligent amateur would ask.

Interested amateurism was perhaps one escape-route from the collision of incompatible rigidities Scott face as leader of this expedition. Another was — paradoxically? — to throw himself into matter of the march itself. The party at the pole was a gesture towards Edwardian identity politics — naval officer Scott and his faithful sidekick Bowers, Wilson the doctor and published amateur zoologist, Oates representing the army, Evans representing the men. Isn’t there a sense in which Scott — who had immense physical stamina — really was escaping from the cares of leadership into the back-breaking labour of unskilled manhauling, for thousands of miles, as if to say, we’re in this together, simple packponies now one and all?

But Evans, also caught in this unforgiving, unbending cross-ply of obligations and inherited class and professional structures, has no such escape-route into play-acting, as he discovers that the quite specific qualities he’d been selected for are all now failing him, horribly: his physical strength, his deft craftsmanly handiwork, his role as a symbol (the right man from below decks). His hands were useless, his strength was failing, his steadiness was evaporating into querulous panic…

One recent biographer, David Crane, belatedly attempts in Scott of the Antarctic to shield poor Evans from the worst of this: “Weight loss, dehydration, possible head injury, vitamin deficiency, hypothermia, mental collapse, the effects of scurvy in its early, undetectable stages — whatever the reason or the combination of reasons that lie behind Evans’s death, the two myths that can be thrown out are the notion of the ‘isolation’ of a lower-deck man in a tent full of officers, and the egregious error of Scott in taking Evans in the first place.” [40]

Crane never quite says outright that he’s arguing with RH here, but assuming he is (and he is), Crane entirely misses the import of Huntford’s argument. It’s true that RH has little sympathy for Evans, portraying him as out of condition, a rollicking drinker and blowhard unfit to task, mentally or physically. Yet what Crane calls “myths” are not RH’s inventions, after all: Gran it was that judged Evans mentally unfit [41]; as for the suggestion that being trapped in a tiny tent with four men not of his own kind would have been a lonely and emotionally daunting burden, this came from Evans’s fellow seaman and acquaintance of many year Seaman Lashly, giving evidence in the mid-teens before the unofficial court of Oates’s furiously angry and grieving mother [41a]. Gran and Lashly may both be quite wrong, but they were highly intelligent fellow expeditioners and their judgments can’t simply be handwaved away.

So no one to vent to; no one in that final crowded tent that Evans could ever drop his class mask with. The strongman too weak to play his part. The worker whose manual dexterity was his livelihood, his future and (no doubt) his pride: and whose hands were in fact now ruined (from frostbite and a bad gash sustain when rebuilding the sledge high on the ice plateau, which refused to heal). Huntford doesn’t empathise with Evans, but his antenna for the crosscurrents of tension are witchily sensitive: five men huddled together night on night, in a tent made for four, in a situation without respite or hope of pause. Even granting Scott’s insistence that he never saw the journey to the Pole as a race, the journey back was nothing but, and undertaken by tired and defeated men without alternative was now a race against death itself.

“[H]e shows signs of losing heart over it,” wrote Scott on 30 January, of Evans’s physical state, “which makes me much disappointed in him”: the final clause suppressed, in the official published version of the journal. And yes, of course such unsympathetic exasperation is driven by Scott’s own gathering exhaustion and anxieties. And yes, Scott’s journal was now both public record and the one place he could go to vent. And no, we simply can’t know the true dynamics in the tent, what kindness (or roughness) Evans’s tentmates showed him at the last, as they attempted frantically to halt his psychological decline. But Scott’s state of mind was a consequence of his own command and his own decisions — and when Crane claims that Scott had taken Evans for old friendship’s sake, his argument must accommodate Scott’s actual private words, when we know them. Seemingly judicious in tone, a likeable relief from Huntford’s relentless contempt, Crane’s book nevertheless quietly and routinely dodges the issue of the passages edited out of Scott’s journals. [42]

As so often, Crane’s is a bioography of Scott that keeps discussion of Amundsen — and the dissenting Norwegian perspective — to a minimum. Absent this primary conflict, the many overlooked sources Huntford has brought into the public domain — often by translation from the Norwegian — are all too easily folded back into a less demanding form. Perhaps Huntford does select and interpret to Scott’s disbenefit: but challengers must confront the whole, or explain why they needn’t. [43]

And what we don’t have, and will never have, is Evans’s own evidence. Perhaps the most tragic figure in an awful story, we only ever glimpse him, blurred and obscured, through the eyes of others. Scott found a way to tell his own tale his own way, and to recruit almost everyone into a co-dependency with it. Evans is shuffled away into an awkward bit-part role: evidence unseen, unheard, unrediscovered, unrecoverable. “What killed Evans?” asks ACG softly and bluntly angry on p.573 of WJiW; but on p.524 he’d already hinted what: “Things began to go not quite right: they felt the cold, especially Oates and Evans: Evans’s hands were also wrong — ever since the seamen made that new sledge. The making of that sledge must have been fiercely cold work: one of the hardest jobs they did. I am not sure that enough notice has been taken of that.” [44]

Another digression: notes excavated from a counter-tranche to the Hayekian view of value. In the mid-19th century, when economists were attempting to define and explain value, they rooted it in labour-time: David Ricardo argued that the value of an item derived from the amount of labour expended to produce it, the Labour Theory of Value (LTV), and Karl Marx — seeking to undermine orthodox political economy by turning its own grounding against it — wrote a very long book exploring the consequences, distortions and social injustices to be discovered if you take this orthodox definition as a premise. Not long after, mainstream economics found a way to diminish the role of LTV in its theories of value. Which perhaps sidesteps Marx’s claim that a contradiction wells up from within the market-as-system, but nevertheless in the process casually reduces all our own personal valuations of our own personal lived time working to an externality; to uncostable irrelevance and merely subjective ghosts. [44a2]

Money mattered to both expeditions, of course — or rather, the lack of it mattered; funding was always scarce, and needed scaring up, with all the distorting promises this can entail. But wealth had never been Amundsen’s driving passion: all he’d ever wanted was to bag the pole (actually the North Pole) [44a]. Scott’s ultimate goal is less clear, obscured in the competing tangle of professional commitments his diffuse project entailed. If, per Huntford, we can also discern self-immolation as the purpose, at least after Amundsen’s arrival, then the shift of faith back to exploration as pitiless pack-animal slog makes a certain strange sense. Man-hauling was as self-destructively primitive as slaves forced to build pyramids till they dropped. With demands and obligations so intractably conflicting, why not just drop out of the entire ghastly mess of tranche-warfare into the dignity, so-called, of undiluted sledge-hauling labour. [44a3]

I’m often baffled by the politics people declare — when I was on ilx there were probably half a dozen aggressively regular posters who considered themselves lefties who really really weren’t of the left, and it seems to me there’s a distinct fissure here too, running through the allegiances RH declares, a man ostensibly of the right battling only half-aware against his own declared choices — perhaps through the fog of the myth of radical individualism — not just to honour the non-professional fallen as fully as their credentialed companions; but to restore unofficial or unapproved routes to best knowledge to their rightful and earned level of respect.

Summarising in RSP in 2010 how background fashions in politics mirror reactions to his various polar biographies, RH perhaps sweepingly associates Thatcher with Scott’s rival Shackleton [44e], that self-taught amateur and social outsider who was adored by his men and explored by the skin of his teeth, that roguish and charming entrepreneur who got himself into scrapes but always out of them too. Shackleton is a hard figure not to have a soft spot for, but few of Huntford’s readers today will see much evidence of Shackleton’s amiable ilk anywhere round us. Let management manage was the Thatcherite mantra. Actually existing society post-Thatcher could hardly be less Shackletonian in the lee of this precept: cadres and combines of the powerful refusing ever to be held accountable, management whingeing bitterly when accountability is even mooted. Wielding ghastly instruments of asymmetric knowledge and jargonised obscurantism, predatory corporate raiders like Lord Hansen — hostile stakeovers and asset-stripping are nothing if not the destruction of patiently accrued local specialist knowledge — have laid waste to swathes of experience and expertise for ruthlessly market-justified reasons. And of course press-barons like Rupert Murdoch have shown not the slightest tenderness toward the subtleties of the complexity of scholarly understanding, or the tacit artisanal wisdom of the skilled worker in any given industry-under-threat. It is really very hard indeed to look around the world that Hayek remade, and argue that knowledge is better nurtured and nowhere threatened; that truth and value are somehow today better able to counter the machineries of moneyspinning fiction and power-gathering.

The hierarchy of the British Edwardian gentleman was deeply ambivalent about professionalism — doctors and lawyers could be accepted into it, as could scientists, but RH is basically correct: to best access this degree of technical ability a gentleman hired someone he trusted. To be the best at what you did because you hard to make a living was faintly absurd to the denizens of this upper-class layer: only its eccentrics and dissidents ever seriously embarked on a vocation or a skilled trade themselves. This is an attitude easy to dislike; Huntford detests it. He see, too, how patronising was the affection sometimes paid by the upper classes to the artisanal layers below the officially professional, and to those “honest working men” who embraced their symbolic as well as their economic role. But — however deludedly — there’s a kind of topsyturvy envy here also: a vaguely grasped sense that to escape from the purblind labyrinth of privileged perspective and partial understanding, you had to see everything from below, from the perspective of an absence of any inherited or learned advantage. [44a4]

Hayek’s model of the market, his defence of commodification as a effective machinery of exchange which usefully and accurately simplifies an impossible mass of information, is a model that entirely rejects the relevance of LTV to any grown-up discussion of value. In this world Evans’s sense of himself is simplified and exiled, overwritten into invisibility. As is any labourer’s valuation of his own time, his own skills and purpose, his own plans for his own future. Commentators since have sometimes projected dreams into him — he would quit the navy, set up a little pub in Wales, doubtless called “The South Pole” and live out his days telling tall and amusing tales as its landlord — but how he actually felt is forever elided from the conversation. He had no one — except perhaps Lashly in one instance — to battle on his behalf. [44b]

As the expedition’s second-in-command Lt Evans could presumably have asked pertinent questions early, about risks and flaws and corners cut. Instead he exhausted himself, out of misplaced ambition, in the scramble for polar priority — and his life was only saved by Lashly’s and Crean’s generous and courageous solicitude. Possibly somewhat scurvied themselves, the two seamen stuck with their senior officer and saved his life. This too is worth dwelling on, when so much in the story — not just the Scott/Amundsen race, but within the Scott camp and even within the much smaller Amundsen camp — is a tale of intensely divided loyalties and obligations: of professionals caught between their commitment to the ethics of their professional, and their commitment to the reputation of the expedition; of friends with a duty of honorable care to fallen companions; of the various contrasting acts of sacrifice which established this nexus of duty. While Scott was still imagined alive and defeated, the expedition remained a grab-bag of resentments, disappointments and buck-passing: his death — his self-sacrifice — allowed expedition and immediate family to fashion a “cultural movement” that conjured ethos-trumping loyalty to the expedition which was enormously politically potent (especially in the context of the Great War); and also — once it emerged into the wider media world — quite information-destructive. The three doctors, the entire contingent of scientists, working to obscure the issue of scurvy: science as an ethos subtly betrayed in the name of a distorted image of itself. [44c] Figures like Ponting or Cherry-Garrard gritting their teeth to help sacralise and purify an affair they had deeply ambiguous feelings towards. The uncolonised or refusenik layers or margins – from the Inuit, via the voiceless working men like Evans and his bereaved family, to obsessive focused micro-expert loners like Amundsen — without well-established platforms within the validated structures of the imperium on which to combine their perspectives, against the establishment of even quite bad science. Highest of high likelihoods is that they’ll fall out before they even begin to find common ground. Against all this, or with it but somewhat lost in it — they won decorations for valour and Lt Evans’s undying gratitude — the patient unselfish cross-class care of Lashly and Crean…

The Hayekian model of the market is where all professional confrontations must be mediated — confrontations between clubs and corporations, associations, institutes and movements, parties and nations and every other aggressive-defensive electively affine gathering. Here genuine potential conflict can indeed sometimes be diverted into the “marketplace of ideas” (or the lawcourts). This adjudicates between embattled modes of expertise and rival structures of passion — but it’s also the medium that cultures and generates this rivalry, this passion, off out from under the rational into the world of endless maddened petty bourgeois flamewar. [44d]

The social battles of specific expertise — the inevitable resentments and fury of an equally inevitable partial knowledge — point in all directions at once, of course. Laterally it points most of all, at rival tranches and temples of understanding. Downward it points, at the uninitiated masses as viewed from in-tranche perspective — sometimes as scurrying apprentice wannabes, not yet in on the marvels of understanding to be had; sometimes as unbudgeably torpid and unconvinceable know-nothings; sometimes as the seething unsalveageably threatening counter-mass. But also — in the end — it always also points up, at management with its generalisations and its targets and its theories and its fashions, all the many uniforms (as everyone in the middle agrees) of overpaid incompetence. (Management types are even more prone than academics to the self-interested adoption of those trends and systems they can best wield for professional advantage in intra-departmental warfare…)

There’s a politics here, but it’s intricate and tricky. In my own work, the critics I mainly lose patience with are those who skate past detail they can’t see or hear — or (worse) treat the techniques needed to analyse the detail as mere absurd scams. (Problematic, yes, often enough, no doubt; scams they almost never are). Push such critics a little — draw attention to the blanks that exist, that require explanation or exploration, and suddenly the anger and the defensive contempt are there. It’s unsettling to discover we require knowledge we didn’t expect to need to do our job properly — and some turn this about to declare the lack a value, and haughtily polish the turds of their ignorance, as badge of achievement. And so it goes round, and so it goes round: it’s almost always a two-way inflagration: because partial knowledge is everywhere a feature.

History as a discipline is ill-served by the market; by what I’ve sketched as the process of Hayekian commodification corrodes the deep ethos of the scholar. The pop breakthrough of Huntford’s first book, LPoE — it sold well; it made highly entertaining useful noise — derived, I suspect, from its brute slayage of sacred (if dated) cultural cows; RH found minor celebrity as a sourpuss maverick and troll… and most of those who’ve engaged him since respond to this and skip much too quickly past all the much more subtle, interesting and extensive lacunae and conundra within this ineluctably tangled field of tranche-warfare. Which is not to say that an aggressive defensiveness towards your own specialism — inevitable as it is in any context of contested values — isn’t largely also a good thing. You really probably do see or hear or know things other people. A hermeneutics of pure suspicion is a lazy thing as much as a brave thing; certainly a widespread and an established thing, all too quickly a boring and a, well, square thing. What drives an implacability as stubborn Huntford’s? More than simple dislike; more than ordinary disciplinary tribalism; more than merely bigoted judgmentalism; and more too than mere party-political kneejerkiness (especially within a partisanship as hard-to-parse and contradictory as Huntford’s).

There a commitment to the deep ethos of the social-professional-aesthetic tranche you identify with, which is suddenly all emotional triggers when menaced with disrespect or dismissive indifference. In the end, Huntford’s deep sympathies do lie with the slighted science of skiing and — not quite so easily conjoined — with the hard-won (and easily re-obscured) intricacies of popular history; in the end, it’s in defence of a perceived threat to this species of life-long investment and self-validation — of passion and expertise — that the uncontrolled crackle of quasi-political temper is most often heard. Heard here as Huntford’s own half-understood self-disgusted need to heighten the contradictions and accelerate the conflicts, to get the blanks on his map attended to at all.

GLOSSARY of ACRONYMS
RH = Roland Huntford
LPoE = “The Last Place on Earth” aka “Scott & Amundsen” (Huntford’s first book on this specific topic)
RSP = “Race for the South Pole: The Expedition Diaries of Scottand Amundsen” (Huntford’s most recent book on this specific topic)
2P&P = “Two Planks and a Passion: The Dramatic History of Skiing” (Huntford delivers what it says on the tin)
ACG = Apsley Cherry Garrard
WJitW = The Worst Journey in the World, Cherry Garrard’s 1922 memoir of the Scott expedition
PP = the Polar Party (Scott, Wilson, Oates, Bowers, PO Evans)
FSP = the First Supporting Party (Lt Evans, Lashly, Crean)
SSP = the Second Supporting Party (Atkinson, Cherry Garrard, Wright, Keohane)
LTV = Labour Theory of Value

Well, the truth is it was trying something out for my day job. I wanted to try out DIY split-testing tool Optimizely and see how easy it was to run basic experiments.

In this case there were actually two different polls – the one you saw should have been random.* One of them asked the question as follows:

“This is a list of the best-selling acts of 2011. Please tick any acts that you enjoy.”

And the other asked it this way:

“This is a list of the best-selling musicians of 2011. Please tick any artists that you enjoy.”

So the idea** was to see if phrasing the question using more loaded words – “musicians” and “artists” would have any aggregate impact on the results, perhaps making people more careful in their judgement*** or favouring particular acts.

And did it? Well, maybe. As a researcher, I’d only report a result as significant at the 95% confidence level, and none of the differences hit that.**** But two acts showed different voting patterns at the 90% confidence level (which roughly means, if we ran this again, there’d be a 9 in 10 chance of getting the same result, and to be ‘significant’ you need a 19 in 20 chance.)*****

These were Adele and Amy Winehouse. Amy beat Adele in both polls, but in the ‘acts’ poll Adele got 46% and Amy got 54%. Change the terms of reference to ‘artists’ and the gap between them widened enormously: Adele ended up with 35% (11 points lower) and Amy got 64% (12 points higher).

This is interesting enough that I wouldn’t mind running the test again on a wider population with a better designed survey.

Of course the trouble with A/B tests is that it can give you a result but it doesn’t tell you why. I was expecting Amy to do better once you started talking about ‘artists’ – she’s a recently canonised dead musician – but I’m really surprised Adele’s vote dropped (whereas Gaga and Rihanna held up fine – so it’s not a ‘triggering yr latent rockism’ thing). Maybe enjoying ‘acts’ implies less of a commitment, so Adele picked up more ‘she’s OK’ ticks on that poll. I don’t know!

Even 90% confidence intervals were stronger than I expected, though, and the “is this tool usable” element of the test worked fine, so if you voted, thankyou very much for doing so!

The final combined rankings, incidentally:

Lady Gaga – 60%
Rihanna – 60%
Amy – 57%
Adele – 42%
Coldplay – 22%
Bruno Mars – 9%
Jessie J – 8%
Ed Sheeran – 4%
Michael Buble – 2%
Olly Murs – 2%

*It may be that there were browser issues in some cases, or that some of you have plug-ins which avoid javascript nonsense like the Optimizely code. For whatever reason, a lot more people ended up filling in the “acts” poll than the “artists” one, but I don’t think this was a ‘result’.

**Beyond just trying out Optimizely.

***This is why I REALLY should have put a “none of the above” in!

****Except poor old Ed Sheeran, who got 10 votes in the “acts” poll and NONE AT ALL in the “artists” one – apparently this is significant, but since even his 10 votes only got him a 7% share I don’t think it is really.

*****The whole poll ought to be very bad research anyway, since the sample is opt-in and very skewed (people who follow me on Twitter don’t have the same music tastes as the general population, it’s fair to say.) BUT the great thing about split tests is that this doesn’t matter in terms of examining the split, since the sample is identically dodgy on both tests!

As the hedgerows are decimated, another important ecosystem is dying. An unsavoury and slightly scary one and one I would not want to put my face near (then again I’m not that keen on having my nose bitten off by a badger, either) but one that is necessary for certain aspects of modern life: the pub carpet.

I salute you, festering menace

Many things have counted towards the pub carpet’s demise; the smoking ban meant that the rank perfume of a Carling-soaked rag on Sunday morning took on the role of an aggressive olifactory vomit-hammer rather than merely being the undertone to an ashtray. Realising the grossness of the thing that had been living on their floor for years, landlords ejected this malodorous punter rather than face the horror of cleaning it. It seemed the kindest thing to do, perhaps.

Wrong! The pub needed that rug. The same for the tobacco-stained, tar-encrusted flock wallpaper. The smell and feel of them may have grated against the unfogging of the 21st Century boozer but they weren’t just there for nostalgia’s sake.

The thing which pubs don’t seem to have appreciated, regarding all these soft, absorbent surfaces was not just that drunkards are far more likely to slip on varnished floortiles than a proper paisley print flock and underlay* is that it was essential if you didn’t want your pub to be totally filled with braying wankers.

No no, not just a style thing- braying wankers are everywhere, especially in London but if you rip out the soft furnishings in a place and leave tables unpartitioned then an acoustic transformation takes place. The current fashion for minimalism has led to a decimation of sound-absorbing surfaces, freestanding chairs and tables scraping past punters standing up to drink their £4.30 pints. This creates an enormous echo-chamber, with nothing to dampen the noise and so if you have more than 10 people in the room, everyone begins to bellow to compensate.

Add to this music at any volume and the ricochet of noise becomes almost unbearable. A good, noisy, bustly pub is one thing- the Newton Arms, Holborn, for instance, can get rammed and be very pleasantly shouty but the crescendo of noise in a pub stripped bare leaves you barely able to understand people more than two feet away. I am slightly hard of hearing in any case but the enormous roar of a room full of drunkards, a percentage of which somewhere between 5 and 75% will be braying idiots at any time, is an unearthly din over which to try to have a Proper Old Man Pint.

Perhaps I should move with the times but it seems unfair to accompany a hangover with tinnitus if I haven’t added Rock Neck for the holy trinity. Thus: landlords and ladies, I beseech you, BRING BACK THE CARPET before we all go deaf and the only pub customers left are hollering rugby fans.

*I am one of the Freakytrigger writers most likely to be found wearing HEELS in a pub and can tell you that the chance of me sloshing my pint everywhere is greatly reduced by the surface being non-reflective. I’m not saying everyone has to cater for my footwear needs but the evidence of yr correspondent’s last venture into the New Look shoe section suggested that the more wimmin you get in the Brew Dog concrete pen the more you’re likely to need a mop and crutches handy.
[Image from http://mushypeasontoast.blogspot.com]

1. You enter the club and head to the floor, roll a 3 or higher to light a fire and make it hot (proceed to 3 or if roll too low, 2)

2. The club can’t even handle you. You see them watching you, roll a 6 to go all out and proceed to 7.

3. Decide whether to take pictures or shots by rolling two dice; if the total adds up to 7 then it’s shots and straight to 5. If it doesn’t add up to 7 then console yourself at 4.

4. Apologise for party rocking. Rate your sincerity by rolling one die- if 4 or higher then you head to the bar at 5, if 3 or lower proceed to 7.

5. Determine how many shots you need to take by rolling the die. If number is 5 or higher then proceed to 6, if 4 or lower proceed to 2.

6. Dirty Bit.

7. You encounter David Guetta. Decide if he will turn you into a nubile robot by rolling two dice; 6 or higher and you will be asking Where Them Girls At as the optical processing systems are not yet advanced enough to give you clear vision, a total score of 5 or lower means an accident during the splicing process leaves you wondering Who’s That Chick.

From Brian Joseph Davis’s The Composites: “Images created using law enforcement composite sketch software and descriptions of literary characters”

(<– He’s not on this one, I don’t think: but I spent long hours as a kid poring over the cover as I listened to my parents’ copy, so I can’t help the association.)

The 2012 broadcast proved that time travel exists. Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins accepted the Brit for best international group via videotape, clutching the strange little statuette, and at one point even kissing it. But the show was live?! How could Mr Hawkins possibly have taped his acceptance speech before the outcome was known? The only explanation is that there were two timelines for the show. In the first, Taylor – or indeed, any or all of the other Foo Fighters – are actually at the ceremony and accept their award. However, while the band is in England, bassist Nate Mendel’s girlfriend and Sub Pop marketing honcho Kate Jackson becomes bored and elopes with former Melvins bassist Matt Lukin. Realising his tragic error, Mendel persuades the band to build a time machine so that they can go back in time and stay on the West Coast, taping an acceptance speech in advance. This buys Mendel time to spend all weekend with Jackson and even do a bit of landscaping. Ver Fighters have the foresight to bring the Brit statuette into the time machine with them so that it can be present in the acceptance video. Well played, Foo Fighters, well played. It’ll be a Nobel next time.

Lana del Rey was there, acting as bizarrely damaged and emotionally fragile in her acceptance speech as you’d expect, to the point where it’s almost impossible not to believe that her entire existence is a massive piece of assiduously rehearsed performance art.

Adele was there and sang “Rolling in the Deep”. You may be sick of it, but the Martin Scorceses of the future are going to be putting it into their movies as a signifier of the early 2010s and you’ll hear it and go “Hey, that’s pretty good.”

Part of Adele’s appeal is that she seems like a throwback to an era when everybody could agree on a singer, an exception to our current mode of demographic microsliver niches. But the Brits reminded us that the concept of a lukewarm, unconfrontational “mainstream” still has legs by serving up a big warm helping of James Blake, Kasabian, Ed Sheeran, Noel Gallagher, Anna Calvi, Chase & Status, Coldplay xvsdbi\bn … I’m sorry, I just fell asleep typing that.

And just when the Grammys had you thinking that maybe the high-end showbiz tier of the music industry isn’t all that bad, the Brits were a salutary reminder that actually most of the time, it really is. It is helpful to have this laid bare. Without the sudden jolt of grief that Whitney Houston’s death provided on the eve of the Grammys, it’s doubtful such a touching tribute would have materialized for her in LA. It would have looked a lot more like the Amy Winehouse tribute at the Brits: a black and white photo montage played over an interview clip, and a hasty segueway.

Cesc Fabregas presented an award. Cesc Fabregas!!

The attendees displayed magnificent good sense in completely ignoring James Corden whenever he spoke, chatting amongst themselves endlessly in the vasty caverns of the O2. And Adele had the good sense to flip him off. Sure, she was flipping off “the suits”, as she said afterwards, the ones who had given Corden the command from on high to cut her acceptance speech off after 15 seconds (I timed it), but were they the only targets? It was the last award of the night. Her name had been read out by another big natural voice, George Michael, who claimed that he’d been asked to appear at the Brits for each of the last 17 years, this being the year he finally agreed to present an award – the biggest one, Best Album, to Adele. World-conquering Adele, finally coming home after her triumph at the Grammys, the youngest ever winner of the “top three” Grammys (album, record, and song of the year), the first British musician to win six Grammys in one night since Eric Clapton, and performing there for the first time since vocal surgery had laid her low. After the applause over the Blackwall Tunnel Approach died down, she began expressing how grateful she felt to represent Britain at the Grammys, “waving our little flag”, when Corden scooted up to the podium and cut her off. To the extent that Corden obeyed the suits, to the extent that he carried out their wishes, that bird was meant for him. Did we learn nothing from Nuremberg?

What was so important as to humiliatingly cut the show’s climactic moment off at the knees? Why, Blur! You know, Blur? They were a boy band in the 1990s. They’d won some kind of lifetime achievement award earlier. And now they were about to play an entire SET at the other end of the arena. Somebody’s walkie talkie must have malfunctioned. Or else playing in the O2 is like flying in the space shuttle. Once that countdown begins, clear the fucking decks. Blur waits for no one. The mood soured from the outset by Adele’s rough handling, Damon Albarn proceeded to do the equivalent of a beery karaoke version of his first band’s most radio-friendly hits. Which is to say, bellowing, off-key, out of breath and entirely too pleased with himself. So chalk up another victory for last night’s Brit awards. A definitive result on the question of whether Blur still have it.

ET is crowd-sourcing responses to questions that relate to his thesis, which is about music-writing and the internet. Question #2 was “what is the role of the music critic?” — and he’s kicked off the debate with an answer I sent him some time last year. Which in turn links back to my review of Marcello’s book, which drew a distinction between the critic’s role and the reviewer’s. (Yesterday’s was on trolling…)

1) The music is SO BAD I think to myself ‘I can do way better than this’ (aka the ‘Free Trade Hall‘ rule).
2) The dudes on stage look like they’re having fun, which temporarily blots out the memories of driving a hire van 800 miles in three days and not being able to find .012 gauge strings ANYWHERE in Nottingham on a Sunday morning.
3) The musicians are making excellent music in an achievable (for me) fashion, e.g. pressing buttons on a laptop, playing rudimentary chords or basslines, saying words in a monotonous voice (aka the Elastica rule).

I don’t get the same trigger when seeing an elaborate guitar solo — I know I’m never going to be able to do that! I will never be able to do a backflip like Britney does at the end of the ‘Baby One More Time’ video and I will never be able to belt out a power anthem like Kelly Clarkson. It is highly unlikely I will learn to beatmatch as well as Magda or Jeff Mills as my key 10,000 hours were wasted learning Red Dwarf scripts off by heart.

There’s often a big jump between learning the rudiments of a subject and becoming an expert (see all X Factor series ever). Most dudes who enjoy listening to music know how to hum a tune or can play a few notes on an instrument. How do you go from that to producing a complex pop song like “Single Ladies”? Somewhere in the middle there’s a big box with “???” written on it before you can get to the “profit” stage. Perhaps it involves… mastering?

Analogy time! Most of you reading this will know the basics of a computer desktop, moving things from one window to another with a mouse, using software like Word or Firefox or whatever. You probably also know that all computery things are made up of zeroes and ones. How do you get from one to the other?

While studying Computer Science at A-level, I was genuinely excited to learn how those zeroes and ones were turned into an extremely basic programming language. Once you have that basic programming language, you can use it to create a complicated programming language and thus write a text adventure where the evil wizard has the same name as your Pure Maths teacher. Great! 10,000 hours and several ??? boxes later, I am writing my own web applications for a living, with little shopping basket buttons and everything. There’s still many parts of the process I don’t understand (such as why there are 5 different iexplore.exe processes in my Task Manager when I’m not even running Internet Explorer) but at last I have a good handle on what goes where, and thus I can make a professional end product.

Anyway my point here is that I thoroughly enjoy gigs by brilliant performers, but usually I am too fully aware of my own limitations to be immediately inspired to emulate them. Discovering the contents of the musical ??? box requires either unlearnable talent or immense amounts of hard work (and petrol). Now I’m content just to listen and dance and program instead.

…And then I saw Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards play the Scala in 2010. She was slightly older than me, and was wearing no makeup except for an Adam Ant stripe across her face. She carefully built up drum and vocal loops piece by piece: each part sounded off-beat or off-key on its own, but eventually they came together to make a full drum break or a burble of backing vocals.

It reminded me of Mum’s barbershop learning tapes, which would have the same song on both sides, the A side with just her baritone part (i.e. the harmony) and the B side with the other three parts turned up (with the baritone still high in the mix). The baritone part on its own never failed to sound like a dying cat, but mixed in with the bass, lead and tenor it made sense and gave it a distinctive sound.

Over the top of her loops, Merrill played an amped-up ukelele and sang very complex melody lines over a huge range, clicking the loop pedals on and off as desired. Her only other assistance was from a bassist and a couple of dudes alternating between horns and percussion, taking their cues from her nods and smiles. Tune-Yards obviously aren’t the first or last people to make music in this fashion, but prior to that Scala gig I had never seen it executed so well (in particular I have a dreadful memory of some dude looping improvised sitar riffs for half an hour – not my cup of tea).

The amount of organisation going on in Merrill’s head was a talent all on its own, clearly awesome and something I’d never be able to manage (I can’t even sing and play the guitar at the same time). But there was a key difference to this performance: each step was difficult, but seeing her demonstrate how they fitted together showed that at least it was possible without magic. The contents of the ??? box were revealed. PING! A little voice popped up at the back of my head saying “Why don’t you do this? She’s your age. Maybe you do still have a shot at being a rockstar?” I was just about to leave my job for a few months of ‘creative pursuits’ and this was excellent motivation, though as you can probably infer I did not subsequently become a rockstar or amazing bedroom producer (my fault, not Merrill’s).

When the W H O K I L L album came out in 2011 I felt rather underwhelmed. I remembered the songs I’d heard a few months before and enjoyed hearing them again, but it was too late: I had seen behind the curtain. I knew exactly how those loops and layers had been built up. Except now I couldn’t see it happening right in front of me! An unexpected downside to the demystification process.

Fast-forward to last Wednesday, when I was watching Tune-Yards at the Shepherds Bush Empire. Well, I say watching, the gig was a sell-out and I was crammed in to one side, behind all the people in the venue over 6ft tall. If I shifted my weight to one leg I could just about make out Merrill’s face, framed like a postage stamp between the hairstyles of hipsters in fake glasses. I couldn’t see her ukelele, let alone her drums or pedals. I was tired after a long day at work and my bag seemed very heavy.

From my admittedly poor viewpoint and unenthusiastic state of mind, it seemed Merrill was concentrating too hard to have fun (she later relaxed and allowed herself a few moments to breathe and dance while her saxophone backup took over). I couldn’t see the machinations behind the songs and once again, I felt disappointed. It wasn’t Merrill’s fault of course, but I was getting no more joy out of it than I was of the CD. My mind started wandering and I started to question whether I actually liked any of the songs unless I could see them being made in front of me! Just two days into my thirties, I felt like an old woman among all those cool kids. I certainly had no thoughts of creating my own indie/techno opus.

Thankfully things eased up after The Hit Single was played and a bunch of said cool kids buggered off home. Merrill held up her ukelele to the mic where I could see it, and started hitting it with her drumstick until it distorted like the Rank dude banging his gong. I started to think about how awesome it was during the last module of my degree in which I finally learned the theory behind creating a graphical user interface for a desktop. We’d already learned how to talk to hardware (like disk drives and keyboards), how write our own simple operating system to manage multiple programs at once, as well as writing software to write the programs themselves.

All this had been done through a black and white terminal screen – now came the final piece of the puzzle. Each pixel on a display screen continually refreshes, and I learned how to tell the computer which window should be on the top of the pile in each of those split seconds, or whether it didn’t actually need to refresh at all. It felt like I was finally getting to the true nuts and bolts of how a proper modern computer worked, and it was (almost) as simple as drawing a line with a blue felt tip pen for 400 pixels, then swapping to a white felt tip for another 100px before going back to blue again. AT NEARLY THE SPEED OF LIGHT HURRAH.

That kind of put things in perspective a little and I finally started to enjoy myself. Although I know the theory behind all (OK, most of) the parts of a computer system, it’s not practical to make all of those pieces by myself. Sometimes knowing how to use a piece of software properly is more useful and more enjoyable than being able to create it. Tune-yards need an audience just as much as they need Merrill’s operating system brain, but it’s more fun when you can see how everything fits together.

A scientist and teacher by profession, my father had been an excellent amateur calligrapher in his youth, and an artist in ink, as well as an occasional poet. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 1967, but a badly shaky writing hand was the earliest symptom, some time before that, and he had to switch to his other hand to teach himself how to write from scratch, giving up drawing for ever. The condition takes you through cycles of capability — from flail to freeze and back — that mean that you are all too often not to be able to get your limbs to do the most ordinary things, such as picking up the pills which will cycle you through blessed mid-way periods of balance for a while, but then out again into the opposite unbalanced state. The effect on anything more deftly ambitious will eventually be devastating, but for some the slow on-set of the disease will mean — as my father’s poem below suggests — that the passions and possibilities of your art have become intimately tangled with Parkinson’s itself, how you feel about it, how you work with it; what you want to do, what you can no longer do. And in fact he lived with it — as did we, his family — for 43 years, an unusually long time.

Barbara Thompson, the virtuoso jazz saxophonist and composer, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1997, and for five years Mike Dibb’s camera has recorded her, on-stage and off, as the moment approaches when she will have to retire from the public performance that she loves. To anyone with the condition, or in their close family, there will be many piercingly familiar elements in this documentary. Some of them are really quite small — a close-up on her fingers as she stiffly walks them among pills on a table’s edge, and the elegant little pillbox close by (living with dad, nothing was more necessary to remember than the baroque complexity, from the very start, of his regime of medication). Some things are deeper, and more subtle. Dibb’s film follows Thompson and her husband Jon Hiseman, the jazz-rock drummer, far into their domestic life together, at home, visiting doctors and on tour — and while Hiseman is not especially like my mother temperamentally, there’s something about the stubborn, almost dogged thoughtfulness that support for his life-partner has called from him, that I certainly recognise. Mum was dad’s primary carer for almost four decades, and solving practical obstacles together, large and small, requires great mutual trust and patient teamwork. If this occasionally came at a cost — being a carer will sometimes generate enormous exasperation, frustration, even angry resentment– it nevertheless created a deep bond between them that all the family drew on and worked with: something similar suffuses this film.

But there are differences too. My father was no musician, and Thompson is one of the leading players of her generation in her field. If you don’t know her name you will know some of her music: for example, she played the flute line in the famous themetune to the South Bank Show (Hiseman’s Colosseum II are the backing band), and the music — including the incidental wisps of heavily echoed saxophone — to the detective series A Touch of Frost are composed and played by her. But there’s as much mystery as recognition for me, when I watch recent footage of her on-stage, the fluid mastery of her instrument she still (astonishingly) retains as it combines with the characteristic Parkinsonian near-toppling jerkiness of gait. Is there something about the nature of music’s physical movements — technical virtuosities internalised over years of repetitive practice — that leaves them perhaps not untouched by the condition, but somehow sometimes given a kind of brief grace and remission… Or is it something about the abstracted state of mind when playing?

I’ve written about music long enough, and worked with enough artists and makers, to know that both are physical disciplines which flourish in the curious shadowland between willed movement and learned automatism — and this, of course, is the shadowland that Parkinson’s patrols and bedevils. It’s an affect that lurks between the imagined and willed consciousness. Think of yourself running downstairs — nimble and safe as long as you don’t think about where to put your feet. Now imagine this for every single movement you make, no matter how simple: every simple step you take; every time you pick something up; even smiling can be an effort. And for many sufferers, the medication brings hallucinations with it, distracting even when they’re benign — much of the time bedridden in his later years, my father now and then entirely failed to mark the difference between yesterday’s facts and events he’d that night dreamed.

Musicianship winds mind into exactly these learned traceries of agility and fantasia — all the patterns internalised, the scales, the arpeggios, the conventional turns and trills, figures and cadences, which an improvisor plays with, shifts and games and transformations passing across the face of familiarity faster (so it seems to outsiders) than thought can possibly consciously modify action. Somewhere in the pathways from brain to nerve and muscle, from imaginative concentration to the physical habits of its realisation, the signals the Parkinsonian is sending him or herself can curl back on themselves, and the body clogs or blocks or freezes, or else writhes into uncontrollable spasms. Which means — though he took early retirement and against all expectation lived for another three decades — my father wasn’t able to spend that time writing anything like as much as I believed he would have wanted, even while electric typing was still possible (with painstaking hunt-and-peck and clever ribbons that lifted any errors back off the page). The disease didn’t stop him composing poems in his head — but even the bouts of intense involvement sometimes overflowed into an over-stimulated jerkiness that made it impossible to keep the paper he was reading in his hands, or on his knees or the table. I don’t know if he’d have ended up a published poet if Parkinson’s hadn’t come for him when it did — or in fact if he even wanted this. His preferred style wasn’t exactly fashionable, certainly in avant-garde or middlebrow terms — though Thompson’s music isn’t, either, at least in the UK (some of her music you almost certainly know, but the musicians she tours very largely play only to audiences overseas, though quite large audiences). It wasn’t entirely a private pleasure for him — he liked when people read it and were interested or entertained — but it was perhaps never a driving, mono-focus passion either.

Not everyone will enjoy this poem about (and to) the condition, I imagine. “A Sonnet to PD” casts Parkinson’s Disease as something — or rather someone — external to him, a complex, witchy paramour, detailing the sinister, sensual physicality of this, its horrors and its allures. Which is a very particular way, and quite an unsettling way to see his situation, and the specifics of his relationship with this disease (he was intensely phobic about spiders), but this, I think, is what he’s exploring: the degree to which PD is a condition that can adapt itself to its target, as intimately and inimitably and wilfully as a problematic, unavoidable, unrefusable acquaintance. An acquaintance –– an entanglement, even a muse — who impacts on one’s ideas and sense of artistic self, and on the shape and direction of one’s creative ambitions.

There’s a fascinating moment in the documentary when Hiseman asks a specialist if there’s a link between obsessive, meticulous, vision-driven personalities — do they perhaps have an advantage, cope better as patients, he wonders? Well, replies the specialist, perhaps caught a little unawares, research suggests they may actually be more prone to the condition in the first place. Perhaps they do cope better — but the medication may also unmask the obsessive characteristics. The specialist is doing his job, of course, and this ultra-diplomatic mode of generalisation is unavoidable (why else use the word “unmask”?) Careful generalisation is what medical science is, and he’s probably anxious not to light too many fires of hope round essentially magic solutions — it’s a condition that attracts them — but nevertheless there’s an element of wily particularity to this condition. As you develop tactics to overcome problems, it’s learning them and somehow adapting: and this is magic thinking too, but of a rather different kind.

Our forebears certainly weren’t helping themselves when it came finding cures — or even just balms — but nor were they necessarily idiots when they thought about such conditions in terms of “possession”: the belief that sometimes there’s another being present, in the exact same body, knowing and feeling the exact same things, but with its own agenda; the belief in some being the patient is always in negotiation with; a being that you can on occasion negotiate a ceasefire with. Certainly this is not so far away from my own conceptualisation and practical-emotional coping mechanism, as a long-time secondary carer. My sister and I looked after my father — and after my mother too, when she became too stressed or unwell; our role became to untangle the conflicting requirements of their care, especially the emotional ones. And just as depressives personalise their condition as the “black dog” — a creature visiting and vanishing on its own timetable — Parkinsons was more easily lived with (for me) if I imagined it as a creature, sentient and even perversely clever, but not-quite human-sentient, which knew dad inside out, as he knew it. I too came to feel as if the condition had a personality, had agency, had its own individual relationships, with dad, with mum, with all of us, one by one: its own attachments and provisional allegiances and plots and wiles to divide us. Perhaps a little like some of the demons in Buffy the Vampire Slayer — they have their targeted passions and their allocated agendas, some of them are far from stupid, some of them can even be charming, but their comings and goings, their interventions and remissions are unbiddably theirs to confer or withold. Often and often, when my sister and I were strategising this emergency or that impasse, all this was whispering in the back of my mind.

Plainly it would be fanciful — and ridiculous — to argue that BT’s approach to her musicianship conjured the demon into being, that it’s somehow an artefact of her shaping herself into so focused and driven a master of her craft. But is there something about the act of playing that lulls and enchants it, at least for a while? She talks about music — composition as much as performance — as an “escape”; about it being a place where she isn’t constantly reminded of the realities of the condition. A lot of the daily fact of dealing with it is mundane and unglamorous, without even getting into the blandly anonymous not-quite-shabby feel of hospital waiting rooms and corridors. One of the things we came to recognise about dad was his ability to focus his energies for some upcoming non-mundane event he was looking forward to; the yearly village fete was one, family Christmas another. He could be “up” during the event for far longer than we all dared hope, but would crash the next day, totally exhausted. My heart goes out to Thompson, and the demands of sheer logistics, when it comes to bringing your best energy and mobility not just to touring — with all its timetabled rigidity and unplanned minor crises, and endless unglamorous lobbies and corridors — but to the pencilling in the necessary practice and rehearsal, all the concentrated unseen work that keeps your fingers and lips and responses in pitch-perfect trim for full unfettered creative flight. Especially when you also want to keep some of the best of yourself back, for private family time.

Mark Sinker, February 2012

1: the photo at the top was probably taken in 2001, by my mother perhaps 12 years ago, by my sister, Dr Becky Sinker, in North Wales: dad in his favourite jumper in one of his favourite places — and it captures his impishness, which wasn’t always there to see (Parkinsons leaves the face rigid and austerely expressionless a lot of the time).
2: the photo on the right is from June, 1960, the exact month of my birth, and some years before the condition had manifested: and he’s at the far right, a Vogue model teaching at Whixall Moss. (It may well not be Whixall Moss, but he often taught there, and this is how he looked wherever he taught in those days, the Field Studies Dandy.)

Naturalist and pioneering conservationist, Charles Sinker was director of the Field Studies Council from 1973-83, primary author of Ecological Flora of the Shropshire Region (1991), and editor of Hilda Murrell’s Nature Diaries (1987). He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 1967 and would live with it for 43 years, with curiosity and fortitude, until his death in January 2010.

We step up into a whole new realm of poitnlessness though when we consider Pirates Of The Caribbean IV: On Stranger Tides. Now I have a love but mainly hate relationship with the first three Pirates films. I am somewhat in awe of the sixth highest grossing film of all time being one which starts with a ten minute sequences culminating in an eight year old child being hung by the neck. There is a fever dream quality to the third film which as you marvel at its general awfulness you cannot help but admire. Luckily “On Stranger Tides” is much more conventional. It feels a little bit more like a big budget pilot for a TV series, now centred around Captain Jack Sparrow, his love/hate pirate gal pal and a mixture of old and new addtions to the Pirate canon.

Somewhere along the line, and I was never quite sure where, Geoffrey Rush’s undead Captain Barbossa went from big bad antagonist to slightly slippery best mates to Captain Jack. Somewhere along the line Blackbeard suddenly became the most dread pirate of all (despite not showing up at all for the pirate conflab where Keira Knightly became King Of The Pirates…) Somehow Ian McShane being Penelope Cruz’s father did not seem totally ridiculous. I am more au fait with murderous mermaids, and yet another hopelessly sappy love story with a chinless wonder, that is the way of the franchise. But when we get to the fountain of youth and pirates frankly refuse to act like pirates, well by then I would have walked out if I hadn’t seen it on DVD. I did fall asleep for about twenty minutes. Perhaps it was twenty minutes when some cheeky orphans all got tortured to death on the Spanish Main thus completely confounding my expectations for the fanchise again. However I think it probably had Depp either poking his own eyebrows out with a Kohl pencil or falling over.

You know who I feel a little bad for (ameliorated by the fact they must have got plenty of money): the writer of the book On Stranger Tides. I’ve not read it but the book was very well received in the eighties, and it just goes to show what happens when you sell all your rights on. A fun swashbuckler may turn into a grotesque pantomime…

… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community, and crossposted at FT.

aka the Sorrows of Young Adric, in which everyone’s favourite wooden doughy doe-eyed teen brainiac hatemonkey Adults Up and Takes One for Evolution, cleverly time-slipping an otherwise entirely unremarkable production-line Cyberman planet-bomb into the actual original Alvarez Impact… At this most traumatically significant transition-time for Likeable 5ive and his Famously Too-Numerous Pals, why not mark/muffle/muddle the Breaking of the Fellowship with the first starring role in kid’s pop culture for the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event? Anyway, EarthSoXoR was an ep I’ve heard a LOT, but never seen: SO NOW READ ON

i: These days the Silvery Juggheds are quite dead to me, which is a pity. I think there are three reasons I turned against them. First, they really did scare me when I was a wee meatspace tiny myself on Old Mars/Telos/Mondas/London Underground/I DON’T REMEMBER OK, as they stumbled spongily through dark b/w tunnels killing killing killing: and the residue of terror vanished is often contempt. Third and recent, the Nu-Who protocols of UTTERLOGICWAR are primarily feebly stampy gags across the clichés of easycopy post-digitial computer discourse (“Delete!” and ect and ect and zzzz) which are as soon-to-be-dated as they’re dreary. But second middle and most, there really was often something spookily poetic about the pre-hardbody ‘Bermen. They looked half-formed; they battled their confused mass-larval way out of shrink-wrap cocoons at the end of the first ep; there was something genuinely alien about them, somehow, their humanoid form more an organic pod-production than a factory-line metal macho. Or something (for more on this, see my comments on THE INVASION pt 2 at Helix 8b, at para iii. And of course maybe the middle reason find itself more part of reason three than not: hauntology, as we know, is the soft shift of today’s stupid technology-habit back towards yesterday’s anxious unspoken future-threat dreams blah blah beebaw bleugh. All of which is mainly just to set the scene for my not being v.blown away by this v.famous story…

ii: … Not that 5IVE seems terribly impressed either. In fact he’s distracted from the off: he seems fed up, world-weary and enough not his cheerful easygoing self that viewer unease breeds. The whole section of the first ep where he’s elaborately tormenting Young Adric by telling him nothing about anything — kind of a BadBaker Throwback Obnoxion Tic — is actually quite odd, even as a dramatic-irony set-up for later grief and guilt (if this is indeed what is later depicted). And then when the Juggheds turn up, his exasperated fed-upness doubles. Genuine WhoSchoolers will correct me here, but I believe they’d been absent from DW for quite a while, perhaps because writers had got written them off — absent since old HoboDays possibly, except didn’t BIG HEAD briefly skirmish with a forlorn handful late in the ‘Hed timeline (at which point they are declared scattered and diminished and laughable). None of the companions recognise them whn they first appear in EARTHSHOCK, and 5ive does nothing to clue them in to nature of danger: you’d think Who’s ancient war with the Juggheds (how they see each other; how they joust) is worth a bit more than this backstory insertion than this — if 5ive’s mug is a guide, this is just more boring pest control, just more unending admin, bottling up stupid not-really-robots, protecting stupid self-regardless humanity, shepherding and staving off stupid whiny LOGICBOY…

iii: … who (doctoral unkindness notwithstanding) is a good deal of any stumbling block, is he not? See, once there was Sherlock H, and today there is Sheldon C, and in-between — mightier far than either as a science-fictional archetype — is of course SPOCK: and Matthew Waterhouse was a very young unpracticed semi-non-actor required to realise all kinds of facets of the “reason vs emotion: which will win?” type storyline, NARRATIVE AND THE DIALECTICS OF hem hem PURE LOGIC if you will: facets he was simply not suited to (especially when poorly served by the script). (ps by no means a new topic for me to be picking at, in Helixterms: cf also THE INVASION Part 1 and Part 2 (feat.Cybermen), as well as FOUR TO DOOMSDAY (feat.Adric).) Indeed EARTHSHOCK actually skirts (tho doesn’t really resolving into) a kind of high-level Comi-tragic Logic-Off — Logicboy vs the Top Local Botman in Charge — with inadvertent solo self-sacrifice defeating trollingly psychotic mass exterminationism (hurrah). But (certainly compared with linked eps) not in a way you learn anything much from (unless you’re learning how not to write a moral fable). (Or how to write, period.) Primarily because this may be because JugHead-in-Chief is actually a terrifically pompous — and really NOT very rational — fellow, giving his speeches strangely over-emphatic readings and constantly re-improvising a poorly controlled plan to to destroy a planet to disrupt a conference so that he can humiliate and torment the fleshly (“That’s sadistic!” squeaks Tegan at one point. “No, it’s scientific!” declares the Jugghead serenely… ) (Adding: I’m advised by wikipedia that the actor, David Banks, recapped this performance several times and became cultishly beloved for the way he says “Excellent!”…)

[UPDATE INSERT (guide to cliffhanger-structure):
a: Danger in the cave! It's latex pervobots with a bomb
b: Bomb defused but NOES! It's invading cybermen offplanet, and the Doctor is being framed for one of their murders
c: he's now onside with the (good) crew members but the freighter is itself a massive flying bomb
d: adric will save the day but oh at what cost?
e: DINOGEDDON]

iv: Sadly, 90% of Real Actual Proper Good Drama is how deftly you get yr heroes and villains on and off-stage, and into the binds and conflicts youwant them in. <--- if this isn't a well-worn dramacraft apothegm it bloody ought to be, if only to underscore why eps like this -- with quite simple cliffhanger structures -- are so tiresomely underwhelming. The cast is both numerous and diversely teamed: all teams ceaselessly splitting up, often quite unnecessarily. The Juggheds we encounter are of course part of a vast army united in vast strategic purpose, but an intricate localised part of this army, with much to do, little of it on point (viz why have they been busy murdering crew members if they want the vast plan to remain secret until too late? Why leave scary homicidal android guarding a defusable bomb instead of ACTUALLY HIDING THE BOMB BETTER etc); the cave-exploring team of course split up, to make it easier for the homicidal kinkybots to pick them off; the freighter crew somewhat ditto but this does give a sense of the sheer SCALE of this ship (=15,000 containers-worth); and the Doctor-Companion dynamics entail their (apparently) not even wanting to move around as a gang, in despite of the demands of the circumstances. To the point where the TARDIS-team atmosphere seems downright haunted and peculiar -- especially when you recall this ep comes after BLACK ORCHID aka NYSSA’S DREAM, with its rich oneiric foreshadowing of doom. There’s a very little bit of me tempted to argue that the Doctor is so distracted and distanced with Adric because, in some intuitive pre-cog subconscious fashion, he *knows* that the puir wee prodigy is not long for this world, and already subconsciously blames himself (I don’t believe this really, I think it’s just muddle-headed scriptwriting)…

v: Anyway time for a direct and simple positive yip yip: Beryl Reid! As a bored and cynical but actually totally competent captain of avast merchant vessel of space, well aware of the dickishness of her crew and the general uselessness of regulations. This includes an excellent reveal-surprise at the first appearance (SPOILER: you’re totally not expecting the ship’s captain to be a woman, let alone this woman). Beryl have made a good quasi-companion actually, Lethbridge-Stewart-style (ie a constant character over a longer arc; not necessarily a TARDIS inhabitant).

vi: various unrelated observations. 1: It’s merely anomalous and quaint given that the ep’s set centuries in Earth’s future, but the various computer tracking technologies, in the cave and on the ship. are also all quite poetic in their blinky bleepy simplicity (= more Hauntology 101 of course). 2:
i liked the bogus time-science round the ship’s engine — that it’s anti-matter contained by a flickeringly reconfigured matter shell, rebuilt every micro-second by “computer controlled electronics”. 3: wai oh wai when we encounter a human traitor the Juggheds have suborned do we never see the anomalous charm and guile they must have put into the seduction? How on earth do traitors ever fall for it? (They’re not all dimwits — cf The Invasion — though this one is. 4: I am a bit fascinated by the sociocultural relationship the ‘Heds have to their blackly clad Latex pervodroids . And (related!) 5: why does the droid-killing technique leave such a slimy — and recognisable — mess?

vii: Writing this up has been of a sluggish slog — partly bcz I’m getting back into the rhythm after a too-long lay-off, but also because I find this quite a hard ep to get to grips with. It’s a BIG IMPORTANT STORY (in long arc terms) without being a particuarly good one: certainly not a well told one. Ideas-wise, it’s potentially really rich — actually probably TOO rich for one four-parter — but I *really* feel I’m projecting an awareness of this richness onto the writers (except it seems very unfair to withhold it: none of this is especially subtle stuff, and — see Helix-Eps already linked — it’s all over early Who, much better grasped). Just to bring focus back to DINOGEDDON to make the point: I genuinely can’t decide if I want them to have made more of this underlying idea, or kept it as a (ideally more deft) Amazing Reveal. The latter allows us to get maximum impact from the Cretaceous-Traumatic Adric Event; but the fact of all the mass-produced JuggHeds struggling out of their shrink-wraps as they power up — satirical metaphor ahoy! of human extinction by container-freighter carbon-footprint white-goods consumerism! — would have been very hard indeed for a NuDoc overseer to overlook.

Plus also:

(^^^this exciting aspect — Robot vs Dinosaurs! Fite!! — is a kind of buried conceptual easter egg, except to no apparent purpose)

Putting a lot more thought into this issue than I suspect they ever did — no there is nothing at all wrong with this imbalance, plz to bug-off — I think there’s two aspect to the Matthew Waterhouse problem. First is that logic vs emotion — whiskered as it is in DW terms — gains a lot of potential once a major character is a mathematically brilliant child, in terms of big-question SF and in terms of sit-com misunderstanding. (What Jim Parsons brings to Dr Sheldon Cooper is a layered awareness of different modes and speed and qualities of intelligence, types of thinking and awareness and knowledge that aren’t necessarily transferrable, sensibilities associated with distinct age-groups that not everyone is well attuned to. There’s a constant in-body comedy of incongruity, as if the adult has to catch with the small boy in him, or vice versa: types of “getting it” that pass across a face at different speeds, or pull a body all the different different clownish ways.)

Second is sadder, really: MW actually has a very sweet and engaging face. When he’s not speaking or acting, you quite often really really want to like him (sometimes to hug him). Which possibly powers the abreaction (though others are know get very protective… )

NEXT DAY UPDATE: I say above that the “latter allows us to get maximum impact from the Cretaceous-Traumatic Adric Event” but realised as I was bit-by-bit tweaking this entry that this over-compressed reference to the climax actually indicates why the story doesn’t work — which is that it has two Amazing Reveal climaxes combined into just one shock ending, except one is pure Daft Robo vs Dino Thrill Power WHHHEEEE!, and the other is an emotionally important milestone in the long-game unfolding of DW’s understanding of himself, his behaviour, his responsibilities, his failings, his contradictions… The two trample all over one another, in tone and resonance and usefulness.

SECOND UPDATE: I’ve been tweaking piecemeal for two days to clarify and amplify — apologies to anyone reading while this was happening, it’s very unprofessional! The untweaked version is hereat LJ if you want to check what I first wrote. Though it has a slightly different nose there. I feel like there’s more to say, but I’ve leave it for comments.

Anyone reading these stories in canonical order should by now have a good idea of how they tend to play out. An aged antiquary finds or hears of the existence of a peculiar ancient artefact and in the course of further investigation, prompted either by avarice or simple scholarly curiousity, unwittingly awakens some eldritch horror who torments him, often to the death, either as punishment for his greed or out of mere supernatural malice.

On first approach The Tractate Middoth seems like it’s going to follow this pattern nicely. The title obviously refers to the artefact which will cause all the trouble, and it’s nicely esoteric and sinister sounding. And on the very first line our antiquary is introduced, a Mr John Eldred, elderly and male of course and sporting a fine set of piccadilly weepers (a wonderful term whose meaning is surely apparent even if you’ve never come across it before) and indeed seeking after the titular Tractate. But he is unable to procure it for someone else has got there first, someone perhaps of sinister aspect. Has Mr Eldred already unwittingly set malevolent forces in motion? Is there a ghoul in waiting for him?  However, our expectations are quickly upset. The person who has a nasty encounter with whatever supernatural bogeyman the Tracate has perhaps empowered is not Eldred but an innocent library assistant. Eldred is forced to leave the library empty-handed, and to confirm the deviation from normal form he also leaves the story for a while, and the action turns to the assistant, William Garrett.

After his nasty fright – of which more in a moment – Garrett has to take a little sabbatical in which he stumbles, with a coincidence (or is it?) that may cause us to raise an eyebrow, upon the real mystery of this tale. The mother and daughter he fortuitously crosses paths with, a Mrs and Miss Simpson, are trying to find a will left by the mother’s evil uncle, Dr John Rant, that leaves his considerable estate to her. In the absence of the document the estate has passed over to her cousin, by her account a rather mean fellow. It seems the will has been hidden in a book – and here I offer no prizes for guessing Mr John Eldred’s relation to Mrs Simpson, or why he is trying to get his hands on the Tractate. It’s the little setup with Garrett and the Simpsons which is most intriguing though, and where the true form of this story becomes apparent. It resembles less your average Jamesian tale of eldritch horrors and more an Agatha Christie mystery, with its wronged third parties and a cosy fireside chat where they put their problems to the sleuth who will set everything to rights. And crucially, as with many a good detective story there is a Macguffin. Not the will, since the specific nature of that document is rather critical to the construction of this tale, but the Tractate Middoth itself. This mysterious and eerie sounding text is utterly irrelevant to the plot, Dr Rant could have hidden the will inside a copy of The Boy’s Big Book of Hebrew Stories and things would have played out exactly the same. And in fact that’s more or less what he did – the Tractate Middoth might sound sinister but it is no Necronomicon. Middoth or middot means measurements in Hebrew, and it’s just a tract of the Talmud that deals with the measurements and customs of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. A drier, less occult text could scarcely be conceived. Have a read, it starts off pretty racy with the temple officer beating and burning the clothes of any guard asleep at their post, but it soon settles down into dedicated cubit-counting action.

As to the detective story, of course it leaves a lot to be desired, but James wasn’t really trying to become the new Conan Doyle. The mystery is set and solved within a couple of pages, and all that remains for Mr Garrett is a rather frantic race against time, for an outcome he is not even sure of – he has to get the book off Mr Eldred, but how? Fortunately despite its detective trappings this is still a ghost story, and the ghost does his work for him.

So, what of this ghost? For me the key feature of James’ stories, more than the academic attention to detail, the fondly drawn characters or the authentic settings, lies in the brief but precise moments of terror. There are rarely more than one or two per story, and they are often described in merely a line or two, but they are usually exquisitely chilling or even horrific. The shocks in this tale are not quite top five material, but effective nonetheless. The first is the appearance of the figure that causes Mr Garrett to have his little turn. He doesn’t take in the lower part of the face but the upper is “perfectly dry”, and the deep-sunk eyes are covered with cobwebs. Those cobwebby eyes are the main image you come away with and it’s wonderfully ghastly but I wonder if the first part of the description is on reflection even creepier. Why describe a face as dry? I start to think what once-human creature, dead for over twenty years, might have a face completely devoid of perspiration or errr grease, or indeed any means of producing it. And why take care to point out that he didn’t see the lower part of the face? Well it would be quite difficult to see something that wasn’t there in the first place…

The second, deadly, visitation is described in an even more circumspect fashion than the first. “Two arms enclosing a mass of blackness” envelop and smother mean Mr Eldred. Perhaps this isn’t an image to make us shiver before turning out the bedside light, not as much as the first at least, but that mass of blackness bespeaks ineffable hadean horrors. And it means that despite our subverted expectations, the aged antiquary does get his comeuppance at the end. But why, exactly? Comeuppance for what? The usual ambiguities and vagaries of intention are at play here. Dr Rant was a bad man, and Mrs Simpson said she thought he preferred her cousin, a similar meanie, although Rant told her himself he wasn’t very fond of him. And he told her he wanted her and Mr Eldred to start on equal terms in this little puzzle, yet with his knowledge of and dealings in books surely Eldred had the upper hand. Perhaps Rant feels he made things too easy for Eldred, and came back to even things out. And Eldred seemed to know who was after him, although he was less discomfited with this knowledge than the protagonists in other stories. What had or hadn’t he seen? Who were the witnesses to the will and what (if anything) happened to them? Questions abound, as always, but they merely add to the mystery. (However I was pleased when, after thinking it slightly suspicious that a train leaving around two and taking two hours might arrive as evening was drawing in, I turned back to the beginning and found the story starts “Towards the end of an autumn afternoon…”. Trivial, but it shows that you can’t blame loose ends on any woolly thinking of James.)

Finally there is a little surprise at the end, a secret kernel to the tale we don’t discover till the very last line – well, assuming you didn’t see it coming beforehand, the clues are there. Wrapped in the detective story inside a ghost story is, it turns out, a romance! A most unusual subject for James, but tackled in his usual fashion by leaving more – far more – to the imagination than is spelled out in the text.

Together at last

This entry is sponsored by the letter ‘s’ and could possibly come under the catch-all of ‘stew;’ what I’m actually here to talk to you about, though, are SWEDE and SAUSAGES.

Oh sure, Sausages aren’t always cheap per se- at two 8 packs for a fiver in most supermarkets’ upper-end range they’re no tomato sauce for absolute value extraction but there are few foodstuffs that actually count as widely nutritious and which the very most expensive form of was a £20 pack made of fillet steak and champagne. In fact, there’s realistically no meat to rival them.

EVERY MONTH

Even if you want to go more upmarket, though, you’d still have to have a pretty substantial brood to not be able to feed an entire table with leftovers for about £3. No mince is that cheap, pork belly would be a mean offering and you’d struggle to get enough mackerel within budget.

The sausage is undoubtedly cheap and although probably not the single healthiest thing you’ve ever eaten, genuinely nutritious. You can make any meat into it, you can even make them involving no meat at all- the wonderful combination of breadcrumbs and some kind of fatty protein, herbs and pepper is consistently delicious. There’s not a lot you can say that for, that’s cheap; I’ve had some rank old chick peas in my time, some dodgy burgers (admitedly, mostly from ~gastronoms~ hanging the meat too long before mincing) and yet never, ever a sausage I didn’t like. Pork ones, beef ones, venison ones, vegan ones, Linda McCartney’s strangely fibrous vegetarian ones, saveloys, frankfurters, chorizo, Bernard Matthews, toulouse, cumberland whirls and those glorious little sweaty cocktail ones you can get as a delicious protein hit, ready-cooked in the cold meats section. Untraceable provenance, unusual colour, found down the back of the freezer, bought from Gregg’s in a moment of hungover bliss and always a mouth-burning, fatty explosion of joy.

Which brings me to the slight controversy of swedes. I don’t mean the desire of some to call them rutabaga, I mean that they perhaps do not have the taste consistency of sausages. The swede, for a basic root vegetable, is a difficult proposition and there’s no doubt that it’s if not an acquired taste, a required skill to make it taste good rather than agedly rooty.

It’s definitely cheap- the canonical offering in any teen narrative where home economics suggests food budgeting but it’s not necessarily all that lovable in many of its forms. For a start, there’s the need to hack into it, which requires specialist tools and a strong arm.

When I lived in a bedsit with few kitchen accoutrements I once managed to peel and slice a swede using a butterknife and sheer desperation that this had to somehow to be turned into dinner but I’m pretty confident the physical effects of this act will haunt me in later life. While I’m sure some industrial-strength peelers exist that can face the 3mm thick armour plating of the turnip. Like squashes, the delicate flesh inside is contained by something best addressed with a meat cleaver.

Unlike squashes, said delicate flesh is also a ball of fleshy, fibrous matter that has been packed so densely as to perplex physics. After you have smashed, hacked and grunted your way in the worst fact of it is that what you have is, undeniably, swede. Due to the aforementioned density, it needs boiling or roasting for longer than most root veg and realistically requires a parboil before frying. Then again, at least it doesn’t need soaking overnight, then boiling for forty minutes before you can do anything with it.

The best way to get your swede is of course to hang around by the pre-prepared vegetables waiting for bag of it to be reduced to 19p; if you’ve got no time for that though, it’s still worth the sweat and tears to prepare the damn thing to curry it. I think swede might be the only root vegetable that (I suspect) would cook well in a tandoori oven and if you haven’t parboiled some, drained it, thrown it back into the pan with a splosh of fat (oil/ghee/butter/whatever) with some fenugreek seeds, chilli and garlic then you are missing out.

Tangy and tough, it holds its own against even the most overwhelming spices; no point in going easy on it, hammer it into the roasting pan with mace and ginger and throw cayenne all over it. It works as an accomplice to buttery potato mash, which can dilute some of the woody flavour but why try and trick it into things rather than using it?

One of the best things about swede is it can take a lot of fat near it without becoming greasy, which may give you an idea of where this is going. The marriage of delicious sausages and delicious swede is the cheap equivalent of a steaming piece of aged venison; flavoursome and warming no matter how cheaply you’ve had to buy the constituent parts.

Alternatively, tis the season for a ruddy enormous stew you imagine you’ll have leftovers on:

Spoiler: there will not be leftovers

There are three big problems with Season Of The Witch, only one of which is that the Donovan track the film is named after does not turn up in the film. Nic Cage, in phoning it in mode, is a real problem in the film. As a world weary knight, who has seen it all, returning disillusioned from the crusades, there was a real chance for more crazy Nic to turn up. In particular, the trauma of killing no end of innocent people would leave any knight cynical, prone to a quip and also a fervent non-believer in all things biblical and supernatural. Ron Perlman, as his sidekick, gets the tone just right. Cage just plays it dour as he transports a suspected witch across country to try to solve a curse. Clare Foy plays the witch, locked in her little travelling cage, and plays the ambiguity well. Except…

The main problem with Season Of The Witch is the pre-credit sequence where a witch is tested, classic style, with a good dunking. The standard dead body is them examined later, at which point the corpse comes to life, beats up the clergyman and proves firmly that in the medieval world of the film, witchcraft is definitely real. Its a nice way to start the film, a good jolt to the system. But then removes what is the basic conceit of the film -is Clare Foy a witch or not? We know she is a witch because if the film has already established that witchcraft is real, why would she not be? It makes no sense to the film to establish the reality of witchcraft to not use it. Thus stripping the film of its central tension. Is this young girl being needlessly tortured? Well no, because she really is a witch.

Season Of The Witch should be a schlocky bit of fun, but a combination of Cage not getting in to it, and this stupid lack of suspense leaves it as one of the dullest films of last year. Cheapish CGI, and a real lack of any driving suspense don’t help. Nothing highlights how poor this film is than the twenty minute sequence where the party has to cross a shoddy rope bridge. Bernard LEvin present Now Get Out Of That did this king of thing in a much more exciting way. There is no suspense, no cinematic magic, it whole films ends up feeling considerably longer than a season.

Oh and Nic Cage fans – note that the other possibility for this list Drive Angry – survives due to an excellent bad guy, a nice turn from Amber Heard and proper use of exploitation 3D (stuff is thrown at the screen). Nic himself is pretty poor in it.

You can see what they’ve got on the bar at @OldFountainAles

The disgraced children’s author William Mayne died in 2010, some 57 years after the publication of Follow the Footprints, the first of his more than a hundred books, none of them for adults. A final book came out the year of his death, Every Dog (puissant title in the circumstances), and I haven’t read it yet, though I will. I’ll talk a little about his downfall at the close of this post, and doubtless more later, but what I actually propose to undertake is a gradual reading of these books, such as I can track down, starting with a rereading of the 20-odd that I own and know.

A Swarm in May (1955)

“Five shillings,” said Owen. “Well done, ye!” That was a choir-school phrase: no one knew who had invented it. It was a sign of joy and approval.

Swarm is Mayne’s third book: the first of an admired set of four set in a cathedral school (he went to Canterbury C.S. as a boy): since the cathedral holds services all year round, choristers have to stay in school for at least some of the holidays, or return early. So the setting is emptied: half-staffed, all-male, with Owen, the youngest choirboy — perhaps nine, helped some of the time by an older boy — uncovering curious and unsettling items very material to a bee-keeping ritual rendered vestigial back when Henry VIII abolished the monasteries.
So, buildings with hidden reaches you can creep down into, in which unexpected things are secreted, forgotten or never known by all the grown-ups round you: flashes here of Kipling’s Stalky: which continue in the depiction of teachers (as slightly absurd and eccentric adult cartoons, half-deliberate self-conscious parodies of themselves); in the well observed and witty delineation of trends and memes and traditions and catchphrases in the language the boys speak to one another; and of course Mayne shares Kipling’s fascination with the detailed arcana of specialist knowledge and technique (the jargoned world of choirs and organplayers; the physical feel of the practice of bee-keeping). But really this is a FAR far gentler world than Kipling’s; one in which loneliness very lightly touched on in an ebb and flow of communal affection, and agon (such as it is) uncomplicatedly (and sensibly) worked through.

The Twelve Dancers (1962)

It was no good taking Porky by the hand. The way to lead him was to walk in front. Porky would seem to look at everything else, but he would follow. He would follow anything in a wandering way. Once he had followed a kindly big dog down into the village, all the way from the house. The dog had taken him to its home and then gone to sleep. Ma had rescued Porky, and he had had to walk all the way home as well.

Dancers is set in a semi-isolated Welsh valley, somewhere at the head of the Severn, some not very specified time in the 50s — apparently no cars or radios, let alone TVs, but there is a Queen’s head on the coins: Marlene is new to the village, her mother a cleaner in various local households and a single parent (no backstory on this, or the reasons for their arrival). It’s Marlene’s first encounter with the yearly Traditional Dance, and she’s initiated into this intricate village affair involving girls at the school, curious ‘doors’ of various heights built into the church wall, and a semi-buried old dancefloor atop a nearby hill. The dance-steps (direction and number) decode into a sort of treasure map that will perhaps rediscover a lost or misplaced or deliberately concealed item — a cup — and resolve an ancient dispute over ownership of a tranche of land, known as Commons Wood. If the young-ish local landowner finds and claims it, he believes the land will revert to him: said land is probably not worth much, and he’s really more interested in the archeological riddle, but unsurprisingly there’s a certain crackle of class conflict as various schoolchildren side with or against him in this project (as — in the background — do their parents). Dance as enactment of tension, and as resolution: in the event, everything comes out nice (in fact the ritual indirectly enables a cross-class wedding), but it’s not hard to see this book as a forerunner of Alan Garner’s far more fraught The Owl Service (1967), where the children are rather older, and sexual tension and jealousy power the (explicit) magic that will be uncovered.

A Parcel of Trees (1963)

“I don’t how you’re going to make out at all,” said Mum. “Or I wouldn’t if we didn’t all feel the same. It’s the weather.”
“It’s the dreadful life we lead,” said Susan.
“What do you mean?” said Mum. “You’re the dreadful life, lying about like an old stump.”

Again rooted in a potential conflict about property: the “parcel of trees” of the title is a slice of disputed property cut off from the family garden by the intrusion of a railway line many decades before, and now only accessible through a culvert. Susan (14) discovers this secret near-garden and — when amiably challenged as a trespasser by railway officials — decides to prove that legal ownership has in fact reverted away from the railway company. With the help of a solicitor neighbour (working for free because it’s an unusual and interesting case) she uncovers a pertinent slice of recent very unofficial local history; villagers of very various ages semi-illicitly using the land for several quite unorthodox purposes. Woven into this is the portrait of Susan, her little sister, mum and dad, an odd-because-ordinary family who no more perfectly jigsaw than any non-fictional family (they live over dad’s bakery and must all do shopstuff when it’s busy). What Mayne catches so well is the affectionate combativeness and allusive abruptness of the speech within a loving close group like this, complete with subtle undercurrents of rivalry and rebellion routinised into play squabbles; and underpinning Susan’s need for the intimacy of solitude, probably Mayne’s deepest subject. (The illustrations, which contribute at least equally to the soft-spoken modern sensibility, are by Margery Gill.)

Sand (1964)

The kettle was boiling on a gasring behind the counter, where it had boiled for a century. It had boiled away every layer of paint on the wood nearby, and the steam had removed a deep hollow in the wood as well.

Sand is an amazing book, quite unlike any children’s novel before it, at least by any other author I can quickly bring to mind. At one (not unfamiliar) level, it’s a sketch of the fascination and antipathy between secondary modern boys and grammar school girls, in a small never-named northern coastal town — and as such fits into its time, the time of kitchen sink cinema and Coronation Street, the Beatles and, well, Ballard, actually. Because — in its deceptive, even diffident way — it’s a closer cousin to Ballard, Beckett and Camus than anything you’d surely expect to encounter in children’s books, at least those with Jill MacDonald’s cheery pop art Puffin on its cover. Of course, Mayne has a greater interest and thus a superior ear for family-based or school-directed banter than any of these better celebrated ‘grown-up’ modernist counterparts: whose flaw this is you can decide yourself, I guess. The town is situated huddled beside some great sand spar: it is being eaten, month by month, hour by hour, by its own dunes, and — behind the mildly prankish goings-on — it’s very much about the wearisome allure of entropy and erosion, the implacability of non-human forces. While it’s the fourth of four books reviewed here in which some aspect of the past is dug unexpectedly up, it’s the first so far in which the omipresent modern media eye on same plays a role.

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So can we extract anything yet, from this small and faintly random selection? Actually perhaps not so random: Swarm did much to establish his early reputation: there were four choir school books, and they tidy pretty safely into an already popular a form of middle-class children’s literature: the school story in which “school” very much DOESN’T mean the kind of school most British kids were going to (he would increasingly break from this pattern). The comfortable presence of C. Walter Hodges as illustrator surely helped his recognition. Meanwhile Dancers, Parcel and Sand appear to be be the first three he published with Puffin books, whose role in developing the kidlit canon in the 60s was enormous. This was when Mayne soared into his ‘imperial’ phase; this was when my mum, a passionate amateur expert in children’s book who bought me all three, was paying close and interested attention.

It’s easy — and not especially surprising — to begin to discern themes over a decade’s writing: local ritual and the everyday linked via amateur archeology, generally by children, for example, as well as the persistent idea that digging up and understanding the past can transform a deliberately unmelodramatic but never mundane present. A delicately and often wittily sensual sense of place, and of willed solitude in that place; well sketched location as a kind of flight from company (and vice versa).

And then there’s the fact of his disgrace, and how it fits into all this. In 2004, in his mid-70s, Mayne was convicted of 11 charges of sexual abuse with young girls, sentenced to two and a half years in prison, and placed on the sex offenders’ register for life. The obituary in the Independent contained further detail: “Accusations of indecent assault made in 1973 and 1999 finally came to a head in 2004, when he was taken to court by a farmer’s wife in her fifties whom he had befriended when she was eight. She described being entranced by Mayne, but there were times when her erstwhile friend, normally so kind, witty and affectionate, would force himself on her. This abuse lasted for six years; five other witnesses came forward with similar accounts. Evidence of his criminal behaviour for 15 years from 1960 onwards was overwhelming, leading to a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence.”

So there’s the question Tom Ewing discussed several years ago on FT (in a Popular piece on Gary Glitter): “Take William Mayne, for instance, a children’s book writer of immense imaginative and empathic skill, and also convicted of serially abusing fans of his books. Is the thing that makes Mayne an excellent writer for children – his ear and head for how they talk and think – also what made him an effective paedophile, able to win and exploit their trust?” Comments threads on reports of the conviction divide, understandably angrily: anonymous posters arrive to say that they knew Mayne personally (the real Mayne), and the trial was a travesty, in fact and as reported: because he was much worse even than the verdict revealed him, or exactly the opposite, that he was innocent, and maligned. I’m in no position to adjudicate, and don’t plan to: I won’t pretend I’m bringing much new as regards sexual psychology or criminology to this story, and I’m sure I won’t be unearthing relevant new facts in the case.

But I do know a little about books and writing, and indeed about books and reading. All fiction — all writing — is a matter, at some level, of control and manipulation: marks made on a page to nudge a reader from sentence to sentence and page to page, effects conjured in head and heart, to fuse or collide in patterns, some open and undecided, some tried and tested, many much harder to categorise so glibly. It’s not forcing a pun to link the word “author” with the word “authority”: with such easy-to-miss power comes the risk of easy-to-miss irresponsibility, and anecdotes are legion, as we all know, of the ugly behaviour of authors. Nor can it entirely be a shock to recognise that someone who diverts the greater part of their energies to the acts and inner lives of folk that are made up is not always paying intelligent mind to the lives and wounds of those that aren’t.

Mutual misunderstanding was not a new topic in fiction — or even in children’s fiction — but surely few explored it with Mayne’s insight, humour, gentle delicacy or subtlety: how children are not party to adult agendas, compromises, habits and assumptions; and of course vice versa, that in growing up adults have very often lost or set aside a valuable way of seeing the world. That there’s a thread of trust that marks the path everyone is treading, and that this thread is sometimes very fragile indeed. Can sympathetic intelligence and wisdom — wisdom precisely about such trust — sit alongside deep selfishness and a capacity to abuse? Well, yes, sometimes I think it can.

Whether or not it’s the relevant truth in this case — I’m not competent to adjudicate, as I say — it seems to me challengingly important, because so challengingly dreadful, to propose that a genuinely lovely writer, a writer deeply worth reading, by children and adults, can at the same time be an abusive man who betrayed trust and responsibility. We’re all contradictory, and writers are especially well used to firewalling the sensitive imagination off from the reaches of life that are experienced rather than imagined, for all kinds of reasons, good and bad. And all writers — and this certainly includes me — write as much for an imagined reader as the readers they happen to know and meet in life. Who were Mayne’s imagined readers? What do his books tell us?

I plan to go back to the books, in all respectful caution, and reread and talk about them. They meant a great deal to me as a child, partly because my mother took such joy in them; I’m a grown-up now: I see many things differently. What’s gained, and what’s gone lost?