Most of us, if we are fortunate, had a teacher. A real teacher, who inspired as well as taught, who mentored as well as educated, who selflessly and tirelessly shared both passions and erudition.

In my case, it was Christopher John Dixon. If you were at Oakham School in the mid-60s, when he taught English, or at Victoria College at the University of Toronto where he was subsequently Assistant Professor of English Literature, you will know him as Chris. If you were a reader of obscure novels in the mid-70s, you will know him as Matthew Vaughan, the author of Chalky, which won the first David Higham Prize for Fiction, Major Stepton's War, and The Discretion of  Dominic Ayers. All were excellent. All were unsuccessful. All appear to be out of print but not unavailable. (I commend them to you.)

Chris committed suicide. I don't know precisely why, and I didn't find out about his death until many months after it happened. But I think about him a great deal, whenever I open a volume of poetry, or pick up a literary novel or hear a learned and passionate talk on the radio or in the lecture hall.

I have been thinking about him especially in the last few days because my friend Parn has sent me a link to recordings of Sylvia Plath reading the poems from Her final volume, Ariel.

It was Chris who introduced Sylvia Plath to me and my English literature classmates. And although we shared the usual rivalries of schoolboys at that time - Dylan v Donovan, Beatles v Stones, Truman v Statham, association v rugby football and so on - the major rivalry in our small group was Plath versus Hughes.

Chris had been at Selwyn College, Cambridge, at the same time as Plath was at the adjacent Newnham. It was rumoured at school that they had briefly dated, which might account for Chris's overt dislike for Hughes, though he was always remarkably complimentary about the poetry itself, and I still have the copies of both Ariel and Crow which he personally gave to me. But he was convinced, and convinced me, that it was Hughes who had driven Plath to suicide, and that the imminence of this suicide was evident in the poems of Ariel and could have been predicted (prevented?) by a close reading, a very practical criticism, of the text.

These days, I understand the situation to be more complex. I know that the poem Daddy was, at least in part, really about her relationship with her father as well as her relationship with her husband. And I know that Hughes was genuinely distraught and destroyed when she eventually succeeded in her suicide. “That's the end of my life” he wrote to a friend (of plath's). “The rest is posthumous.”

Maybe it was. Hughes was an axis around which suicides and potential suicides revolved. Not just Sylvia Plath, but his lover Assia Wevill (who also killed their daughter) and his son Nicholas. I once argued forcibly to a friend who knew the Hughes family that the deaths of both Plath and Wevill could not be unconnected to Hughes; must, indeed, be post hoc ergo propter hoc. My friend suggested politely and reasonably that Hughes may have been a man who attracted those with a predisposition to suicide.

There may be some truth in this.

Where there is truth is in the poems that Sylvia Plath wrote and which became owned by Hughes with the rest of her literary legacy. We are not privy to all of it: some was destroyed, some suppressed, some ’edited’.

But the link sent to me by Parn Taimsalu is to a series of readings which she made in 1962.

I was unaware of these recordings and they are extraordinary. The accent will be familiar to any Bostonian, the poems familiar to all of us. But what is revelatory is that this is her own voice. Pure. Unadulterated. No self-serving gloss by friends or family, enemies or editors. Here you will hear the real, authentic Plath, for whom:

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.

The English preoccupation with the weather has had a serious point recently, as the Jetstream changed course and produced the appalling flooding which dominated our news broadcasts for weeks. The climate change which is almost certainly responsible for these meteorological events is too big and too complex a subject for both me and this blog. But there are economic and political issues on which we can all take a view.

We chose to follow the advice of Elizabeth David: an omelette and a glass of wine. I was in the French bistro Angelus, with Rick Gekoski, having an all-too-infrequent and, on this occasion, all-too-brief lunch. We were talking books, because Rick is a Booker Prize judge, rare-book dealer and writer, and I would like to be any or all of those.

At some point, Rick mentioned that he had enjoyed a particular blog of mine, which concerned a restaurant which we had both frequented many years ago. And digging it up from the archives on the train home, I noted that I had announced my plan to blog about Rick's last book, Lost, Stolen or Shredded, as soon as I had given it due consideration. By which I meant as soon as I had read it again, because one reads Rick firstly for entertainment and secondly for education and elucidation. Or I do.

I realised that I have never honoured that promise. So I will do so now, because it is almost a year since publication and Rick is already well-advanced on his next book. And because I realised this weekend that a couple of works were missing from my shelves. And yes, I did read the book a second time.

The sub-title of Lost, Stolen or Shredded is Stories of Missing Works of Art and Literature. This is not, I suspect, merely to attract the attention of internet search engines, but because each chapter is, in fact, a great story told by a great story-teller, with a wonderful turn of phrase.

Consider the opening sentences of the foreword: “He collected absences. For him they were more intense, vibrant and real than the presences that they shadowed.” I remember reading this to Jill on the train back from the launch party, and remarking that it was worthy of the subject, who is, of course, Franz Kafka, and the  story concerns his visit to the Louvre to gaze not upon the Mona Lisa, but at the space that the painting had occupied before being stolen.

“He collected absences.” There is no way one is not going to read on after that. And so one does, learning about the stolen Mona Lisa, the destroyed Churchill portrait by Sutherland, the burned manuscripts of Byron and Larkin's diaries and Joyce's juvenilia, Et Tu, Healey, and the bejewelled copy of the Rubaiyat which went down on the Titanic. All are written as he talks - with eloquence and fluency and wry humour. 

I doubt whether the transformation from Radio 4 talks to book required too much editing. In both forms, he tells stories, each of which addresses the general (the art or literature and its place in the world) and the particular (Rick's individual relationship with it).

Absence, caused by loss, theft, shredding or sinking, is the theme. Does the absence of a poem, a diary, a painting leave the world a worse place? Rick mentions his inability to look at the work of Eric Gill without "a shudder of remembrance" of Gill's activities with children. I share that revulsion. I also care little about the destruction of Larkin's diaries, for example, and think that everything else the man wrote is diminished by the fact that those diaries were once written and did exist, that they were part of the 'complete works' of Larkin and that one's response to a Larkin poem now is informed by the knowledge of those diaries and their contents.

Today of course those diaries could probably have been erased not by the ceremony of ritual burning, but by the simple click of the delete button. And Rick's current preoccupations include the life and death of the book itself. Like me, he reads primarily on the Kindle, buying the real thing only for writers and volumes of particular importance. (I bought an actual copy of the reissue of Keywords by Raymond Williams this morning, the first such purchase for some months, probably since Lost, Stolen or Shredded, come to think of it.)

But for Rick, as a publisher of beautiful books and a dealer in rare ones, the convenience of the Kindle medium must be also a source of regret. We do not own an iBook or a Kindle book; we merely have the right to read it. (Nor do we own an iTune: Bruce Willis is currently engaged in a law suit to enable him to leave his iTunes music to his children.)

This is what we have lost, or had stolen from us. Our sense of direct, proprietary involvement with our books and our music. Our ownership, on a personal level, with both the artefact and the intellectual content.

I know this is not on the same scale as the loss of the library in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, another of Rick's stories.

But is for me. As well as my missing first edition of Keywords, inscribed to me by Raymond Williams, I discovered yesterday that my cassettes of Dylan and the Dead rehearsing in San Rafael in 1987 are also gone, baby, gone.

To paraphrase Stalin, which I do seldom, the loss of thousands of scrolls in Herculaneum is a statistic. The loss of that book, and those tapes, is a tragedy.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Miles Davis, opening for the Dead at Fillmore West in April 1970. Here's Phil Lesh in his autobiography, Searching for the Sound, “As I listened, leaning over the amps with my jaw hanging agape, trying to comprehend the forces that Miles was unleashing on stage, I was thinking, 'What's the use. How can we possibly play after this? We should just go home and try to digest this unbelievable shit.”

The Patriots didn't make it to the Super Bowl this year, and the Seattle defence is so invincible, that I decided to give the whole thing a miss.

I even missed the ads, which are a traditional highlight, especially for someone who has worked in the advertising field for years and even scripted a commercial (for the Volvo VN truck) which featured in the Super Bowl back in the mid-90s. So I've been catching up via YouTube.

This year, of course, we had two which featured Columbia recording artist, Mr Bob Dylan. The first was merely an appalling misuse of his song I Want You for yoghurt or something; the second, for Chrysler, actually starred the man himself and incorporated an analysis of international manufacturing capabilities, culminating in an exhortation to buy cars from Detroit: “Well, it's sundown on the union/And what's made in the USA/Sure was a good idea/'Til greed got in the way” as he didn't say in the commercial.

However, the commercial which provoked the most attention (outside the Bobosphere, that is) was for Coke.

It was kept under wraps until the moment it showed on Fox, and you might think that it was pretty old-fashioned and innocuous, if truth be told. It featured a number of American people doing American things in American landscapes with a soundtrack of America, the Beautiful, sung in nine different languages.

And that is the issue. Nine different languages! English, Spanish, Tagalog, Mandarin, Hindi, Hebrew, Keres, French and Arabic. What's going on here?

As Michele Bachmann told Fox News, “if English was good enough for Jesus when he wrote the bible, it should be good enough for Coke”. Todd Starnes, another Murdoch mercenary, claimed that “Coke is the official soft drink of illegals crossing the border”. And others too numerous to mention and too obscure to dignify with a reference jumped in with equally absurd comments.

The problem with this is that it prompts people like me to want to defend Coca-Cola, which I have no wish to do. The Coke bottle is the iconic symbol of American imperialism. Through Coke, the cultures of scores of countries were - and are being - transformed. Whole generations are being Americanized at the expense of their own national cultures.

But what is wrong with that? We can see from this commercial that America is multi-lingual, multi-racial, multi-cultural. Everything for which one might wish. A beautiful country, home of the brave and land of the free.

Except that what is portrayed in this commercial is very different from that which Coke has represented over the years, when the real thing has been WASP-ish to say the least. And very different from what the increasingly desperate right wing of America wish it to be, which does not include the prefix “multi-”.

That Coke, the epitome of the imperialist right, is now a target of the imperialist right is vaguely encouraging. I think.

Not least because one thing I do know is that advertisers do not, in any way, wish to be cutting edge. A successful advertising campaign is a reflection of the zeitgeist. Its starting point is the existing cultural consensus of its target audience.

And it’s clear that Coke and its agency, Weiden+Kennedy, now believe that diversity is the essence of the American zeitgeist.

It is equally clear that there are still many who find this as unpalatable as I find the product.

But you’ve got to admit, if Coke is using multi-culturalism to shift soda, America might be moving in the right direction.

Which isn’t to the right.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Been listening to the Dylan and Dead shows from ’86 and ’87 to mark the 25th anniversary of the official, and dreadful, album. 1987-07-19 at Eugene is quite brilliant. Subsequently, moved on to a quality audience tape of my Royal Albert Hall show last year. It appears that it was better than I thought and wrote at the time, musically at least. Sorry Bob.

One of the occasional delights of the bleak mid-winter in the UK is a chance encounter with a fellow Sox fan and the opportunity to talk baseball when there is no baseball to talk about.

One such occasion was Tuesday evening last week in Wilde’s, when three guys strolled into the bar, and one ordered with an unmistakeable New England accent.

“Where are you guys from?” said I.

“Connecticut.”

Now we know that Connecticut is, in the words of Rick Hough, “a twilight state”. It is split pretty much 50-50 between the Red Sox Nation and the Evil Empire. So, with some trepidation, I asked: “Sox?”.

Not just Sox, it turns out, but someone who has actually played at Fenway. Who was coached by Johnny Pesky and Bill Lee.

Cue serious Sox talk, while his colleagues chatted amongst themselves.  Being Sox fans, we first of all discussed the disappointments and the failures of many, many years. We moved on to those greats who never won a ring (Peskey, Tiant, Williams). We spoke of Tim Wakefield and, through him, to those players who gave back so much to the community, especially those whose work was so often unheralded.

And Mark, because this is you Mark DeLuzio, told me a story about Hall-of-Famer Jim Rice, our own power-hitting left fielder, who hit for power and average, which I have his permission to write about here.

Mark comes from New Britain and is an alumnus of New Britain High School, where he was a year ahead of Tom Thibodeau, the Associate Head Coach of the Cs a few years ago and now Head Coach of some team called the Chicago Bulls.

Anyway, Mark told me a story about a young kid, maybe 12 years old,  from New Britain, who wrote to Jim Rice asking for advice on hitting, mentioning that he was scheduled to be in Florida during Spring Training. Now, you can be sure that almost every MLB player gets scores of such letters everyday, and the huge majority of them are ignored. If the kid is lucky, he gets an autographed photograph and a scribbled note about working hard, staying off the booze etc etc.

Not this one. Jim Rice called his home and told him to be at the Sox training ground at 5am on a given day. The kid turned up. So did Jim Rice. No-one else.

This was not a photo-op. This was not a publicity stunt.

With no-one else around, Jim Rice taught this kid everything he knew. And he was hard on him, too. He wasn’t going through the motions. He was taking it seriously. Because baseball is serious and Jim Rice took hitting seriously.

But, as anyone who saw that moment in 1982 when he left the dugout and rushed into the stands to help a 4 year old boy who was bleeding heavily after being hit by a line drive, he was so much more than a baseball player. Rice carried the boy onto the field, through the home dugout and into the clubhouse, so that he could be treated by the Sox medical staff.

Jim Rice was voted into the Hall of Fame at the 15th and final attempt. There are still those who argue that vote, citing a plethora of sabermetric stats. But in my view he should have been a shoo-in on the first ballot. 

And anyway, as Arthur Schopenhauer famously said, "The longer a man's fame is likely to last, the longer it will be in coming."

It took a long time coming. But Jim Rice's fame will last long. As a ball-player. And as a human being.

Almost time for Pitchers & Catchers. My tickets for the opening homestand in April are confirmed. Go Sox!

Today from the everysmith vault: Stumbled over a Jefferson Starship show, but have no details of date or venue. Set list sounds as if it's about 2008, but can't trace it. Wherever it was, the locals heard a great gig.

The Royal Pump Rooms in Leamington Spa has had a chequered history since it was opened in 1814, as the New Pump Rooms and Baths, with the pumps themselves manufactured by two great names of the Industrial Revolution, Boulton & Watts of Birmingham. As ‘taking the waters’ became less fashionable, and those that wished to do so travelling to Europe, business and revenues declined throughout the 1840s and ‘50s to the extent that, in 1860, the building was to be demolished and the land sold for re-development.

A group of local investors managed to save it in the short term, but – failing to make a profit – sold it to the local Board of Health, and it has remained publicly owned ever since, lately under the control of Warwick District Council. In the 1990s, the Council proposed that it should become a private operation, and it took a concerted campaign by local people, with the help of luminaries such as Earl Spencer, Lady Diana’s father and a really nice guy, to thwart these Thatcherite plans and, instead, transform these famous buildings into a cultural complex, which incorporates a library, a museum, an art gallery, a tourist information centre, and the refurbished original assembly rooms. This last has an ambience and an acoustic which are particularly well-suited to chamber music and, in my view at least, has contributed immeasurably to the continuing success of Leamington’s International String Quartet series.

This is where I was on Friday evening to hear the Atrium String Quartet play a concert which included the first of Haydn’s Russian Quartets, Opus 33 No1, the second Prokofiev, Opus 92, and – in the second set – Beethoven’s quartet in A minor, Opus 132, perhaps the finest of Beethoven’s great, late quartets.

I am a huge fan of these four young Russians from Leningrad (or St Petersburg as I fail to learn to call it). Having seen them in Leamington, I have travelled to London for a couple of performances of Shostakovich in the Wigmore Hall; so I was looking forward to seeing them again at the Pump Rooms and hearing, especially, the Beethoven, which was written just 11 years after the building opened its doors.

They were in a hurry. The presto of the Haydn was taken at breakneck speed. The Prokofiev came and went in no time at all. And the great slow movement of the Beethoven came in, I estimate, at well under 15 minutes.

Now, I was brought up on the Amadeus, who would usually extend this movement closer to 20 minutes. Which it should be – despite the faster moments of renewed health which punctuate it. So the Atrium’s version lacked that sublime gravitas to which I was accustomed.  And it occurred to me, walking home in the rain, that this is to do with the age and maturity of the four players.

The A minor is about mortality. It was written whilst recovering from a life-threatening illness. The slow movement is dedicated to a god who had spared him. I am not sure that the youthful precocity of the Atrium is ready for the profound emotions which I find when listening to the Amadeus renditions. 

This is not surprising, really. Would one wish to see Lear played by a 20 year old actor? One looks for the life experience and depths of pain and pleasure of a significantly older man.

So with Beethoven who, at this point, had less than two years to live.

There is no doubt that the performance was technically accomplished. It was played with spirit and power. But perhaps because I am now of a certain age, I look for more emotional resonance, more appreciation of the uncertainties and inconclusiveness of life.

So it's back to those distant memories of the Amadeus in the '60s and to those definitive recordings.

Back also to The Swaps at Wilde's tonight. Still an age gap but I'll hack it.

Today from the everysmith vault: in addition to the Amadeus recording, I have also listened to the Lindsays. Interestingly, Peter Cropper and the boys come in at more than 18 minutes for the slow movement. 

A recent graffito  from France reads “Hollande et toute la class politique dehors”:  Hollande and the whole political class get out!

The French unashamedly develop their political class, and have in place a structure which ensures progress to the Grand Corps of the state. As a rule, future leaders begin at the Institute d’études politiques de Paris and move seamlessly to the  École nationale d'administration, from which graduates, knowns as énarques, take up their positions of power. Presidents Giscard d’Estaing, Chirac and Hollande are énarques, as are half a dozen prime ministers and – on average – between a third and a half of every cabinet since the ‘60s. The majority are strangers to any occupation other than politics.

Aren’t we fortunate that we have no such institution in the UK, regurgitating 100 graduates a year onto the top of our political hierarchy?

Of course, we do have such a system. And it’s called Eton and Oxford. It could – at a pinch – be St Paul’s, or Harrow, or Winchester. And it’s possible that a Cambridge graduate might sneak in. But the principle is sound.

Eton and Oxford train those of a certain class in the same way as Ecole nationale d’administration. The difference is, the French is a meritocracy (established by de Gaulle to democratise access to the senior echelons of the state); the English version is about money and class.

Yep, we’re back to this recurring theme.

I have banged on about this a number of times, pointing out that not only is our cabinet from this background, but also many of the journalists and civil servants and lawyers whom one might expect to maintain checks and balances.

Back in 1968, Stephen Sedley (at that time not the Right Honourable Lord Justice Sedley) pointed out to me that only one High Court judge at the time was not educated at public school and Oxbridge, but the real issue was that one could not tell which one!

And this is the broader point. In the same way as capitalism re-invents itself constantly, so the ruling political class absorbs those from different class backgrounds and transforms them into upholders of the status quo, rewarding them for their change of allegiance.

A case in point is the former Labour leader of Sheffield city council, David Blunkett, who became Home Secretary under Blair, and was yesterday defending the political class, claiming that we should be grateful for this “volunteering” for public service. When Will Self pointed out that he had been forced to resign not once but twice and that he had managed to find a role within the Murdoch empire which paid him £45,000 for a few days work, he “would not deign to respond to such a slur”.

But it’s not a slur. It’s a statement of fact. And a particularly relevant and significant statement of fact.

This prominent player in the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire has become part of the establishment and is unable to recognise the contradictions in his position. Or perhaps he can but refuses to admit them.

Either way, we have a problem. It is the structure of the class system which makes it impossible to make the profound changes to a system which works to the benefit of a single class at the expense of others.

We are emphatically not in this together.

Today from the everysmith vault: Celebrated the 39th anniversary of BOTT on Monday by playing both versions, New York and Minnesota. But, subsequently, it's been Mahler, conducted by the late, great Claudio Abbado.

I listen to a great deal of music. 

I have music playing pretty much the whole working day and, often, not in the background. I have a specially constructed – by the estimable James Johnston – 240 gig iPod which I carry with me at all times in case I should suddenly get the urge to listen to some obscure set of noodling by Garcia and Cippolina, or a forgotten single by Mouse and the Traps, or that Dylan show in Avignon in 1981.  Last night I sat in Wilde’s and listened to a remarkable set of cool and clever jazz played by the Interplay Duo - Richard Baker (trombone) and Adrian Litvinoff (bass). I have moments ago booked my seat for the Atrium String Quartet, four young Russians who are as good as it gets in this genre, and will be playing Haydn, Prokofiev and the extraordinary Beethoven Opus 132 at the Pump Rooms in 10 days or so.

At the same time, we are scheduling more Mondays Unplugged, an eclectic Mayday extravaganza featuring The Rosenberg Appeal and the Swaps, and choosing between a plethora of gigs at assorted bars, pubs and clubs in Leamington and Warwick.

Is it all too much? Is the surfeit of sound making it impossible to make any kind of judgement about the quality of what we are hearing? Does it all merge into a single soundtrack with fewer and fewer distinguishing elements?

One of the ways in which I avoid this danger is by focusing for long periods of intense concentration on a single band or a single album. (Recently, it’s been the Pixies but I think I’m over that for the moment.) And another way is to open one’s ears to new stuff which one absorbs from the children or from the staff at Wilde’s, where several of the part-time staff are musicians “between gigs”. And another way is to be responsive to the fear that one is missing or has missed something remarkable.

This last has been facilitated by Wolfgang’s Vault. I have been a subscriber to Bill Graham’s archive since it started, primarily because it offered some soundboards of the Dead in the great days when they were still raw, before they got so fucking good. Recently, members have been inundated with shows and fragments of shows from a remarkably diverse assemblage of bands.

Much of the stuff I want I already have. But I listen to each at some point, even U2. And occasionally, down from the ether comes something of which I have never heard.

This happened over the weekend just gone with a show from The Dream Syndicate. From the first song, which took me back to the first time I heard the Velvet’s Live at Max’s Kansas City, I was hooked. And when they launched into a version of Neil Young’s Mr Soul, I was riveted.

Who were these guys? It turns out they were part of what was known as the Paisley Underground, a phrase I had heard but never bothered to investigate. Something to do with Scotland maybe? According to one profile, they were “critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful”. Just my kind of band! How come I missed out on all this stuff in the 80s?

Of course, I was listening to old GD tapes and Dylan for most of the decade, wallowing in what had been and might have been. But boy, did I miss something vital and vibrant and alive.

And that is why, despite the fact that quantity is dominating quality, I will continue to play and listen to too much music. It’s for those moments – a sublime Jerry exploration, an unreleased Bob song, an exquisite Shostakovich riff played by the Atrium, a Flo melody under Pip’s hard rocking guitar at a Rosenbergs show, Tommo’s blues harmonica at a Swaps gig, or a thousand other spots of time in basement bars and on headphones.

Is there too much music? Yes. Is it a problem? If it is, I can live with it.

Today from the everysmith cellars: Marquis Anselme Mathieu 2010, a Chateauneuf du Pape which was a gift from my Red Sox Nation brother Myers. 90% Grenache but with all 13 allowed grape varieties. Exemplary. Thanks, bro.

One of the rituals of New Year that I look forward to is not the announcement of the award of assorted gongs to people one has never heard of or to people who have earned millions and donated some of it to whichever party is currently in government.

It is the release of those cabinet and government documents that have been kept secret under the 30 year rule; in this case, the assorted stuff from 1984.

1984 was the year of the miners’ strike, which split the country pretty much down the middle. Or rather, the government’s response split the country.

It was class warfare. Raw in tooth and claw. It lasted from March 1984 to March 1985 and although some miners had returned to work earlier, ministers later admitted that they had lied about the numbers involved in order to destroy the morale of those still striking.

Thirty years later, we now know that this was by no means the only lie told by the Thatcherite Tories of the time.

Now we know that their total dismissal of Scargill’s belief that there was a hidden agenda of pit closures was unjustified. Not only that but it had been discussed in a secret meeting, attended by only seven people, the minutes of which were not to be made public, but which agreed that 75 pits were to be closed with the loss of 64,000 jobs.

Whole communities were to be destroyed. Families were to be thrown into poverty.  Two-thirds of Welsh miners would become redundant. One third of those in Scotland would lose their jobs, together with half in the north-east, half in south Yorkshire and almost half in the south Midlands. In Kent, not a single job would remain.

You will not be surprised to learn that final paragraph of the document read: "It was agreed that no record of this meeting should be circulated."

A subsequent document, penned by a senior civil servant, argued the same small group should meet regularly in future, but that there should be "nothing in writing which clarifies the understandings about strategy which exist between Mr MacGregor (Ian MacGregor, the chairman of the Coal Board) and the secretary of state for energy".

Today, I doubt whether any of this surprises us. And it wouldn’t have surprised me at the time – most of us were convinced that this strategy was in place and that the objective was to destroy the organised working class.

But we are thirty years on, and the proof that we were right then is irrelevant. 

“History to the defeated
May say alas but cannot help or pardon”.

It will come as no consolation to those families throughout the mining community of Britain that they were right. They, and the movement, was destroyed. And it was destroyed in no small measure by working class people, the police constables who surrendered their principles in order to gain unprecedented overtime and who relished the legalised punch-ups.

I know this because my brother-in-law at the time was a traffic policeman. One day, in the middle of the dispute, he brought round to see us a brother officer, who regaled us with stories of beatings up and how much he had earned and what he was going to spend it on: video players and Majorca, as I recall.

He was confused. My accent, my home and the wine I was serving made him assume that I was on his, and Thatcher’s, side. I was not. And the defeat of the NUM, and the recent disclosures that the union was right all along, confirms my instinctive loathing for Thatcher’s strategy and those who supported it.

They are still denying that meeting, and what was discussed and agreed, despite the fact that the minutes are, finally, in the public domain.

Their guilt is manifest. And we cannot help or pardon; we can only say alas.


Today from the everysmith vault: EP2 from the Pixies, four great new songs, released today.I commend it to you.

I posted a blog last Friday evening, and deleted it early on Saturday morning. The stats show that a only couple of hundred people read it in the short time it was up there, and it received only a single comment, in complete agreement with my point. 

The theme was the accusation that Nigella Lawson had been treated in court as if she were “a druggie on a council estate”, and the overt class bias of the statement annoyed me so much that I dashed off 500 words about the nature of master and servant, laws which “forbid rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges”, and the ways in which the ruling class bond in such circumstances, noting that, amongst others, David Cameron had claimed to be part of “Team Nigella” during the trial.

I did not delete the post because of any second thoughts about the points I made, but rather because of the tone of the piece. It was angry and bitter and mean-spirited. The argument deserved better.

Subsequently, today, with the year end in sight, I have been musing on the nature of these weekly rants, now in their fourth year, and the responses they provoke. I do not moderate the comments on the blog, and I have on occasion been the subject of some inaccurate and unpleasant observations, but not that many. In fact, scrolling through the fifty or so blogs in 2013, it would appear that I and my readers and commentators share very similar prejudices and bigotries as well as what I hope is a reasonable and reasoned manner of expression.

It is fascinating to identify the subjects which interest you. Dylan is on the decline; baseball is booming (which pretty much reflects my own priorities). Descriptions of la vie Française in the Lettres d’Uzès have their own niche market, and my concerns about the changing face of Leamington and the machinations of Warwick District Council attracted more response, though not more readers, than any other topic. My occasional forays into the worlds of art criticism and book reviewing were welcomed, which is gratifying, as were my political and philosophical rants. Even my personal and family stuff was ok.

But I'm guessing that the guys at Google would not wish to allocate significant advertising to this blog, whatever it happens to discuss. To please Google Analytics, a blog must be focused. It should concentrate on a single subject with a specific audience in mind.

Not Dark Yet is too diverse, too eclectic, too random.

Regulars will never know what the next one will be about. I don’t either. When I started this one ten minutes ago, I had no idea it was going to take this direction. Its germ was to explain to one of my regular commentators why Friday’s blog and his comment had disappeared. It has now morphed into the nature of blogging itself, which is perhaps a tad self-indulgent and risks parallels with “a painting about the nature of painting itself”, “a novel about writing a novel”, concepts I dislike.

So I will continue to post during 2014, addressing … whatever I’m thinking at the moment I find a half hour to spare.

Which will probably mean more of the same: going weakly through the year.

So my very best wishes for a peaceful, prosperous and happy new year. I will be here in 2014 and hope you will be too.

Today from the everysmith vault: In preparation for tonight’s New Year celebrations in Wilde's,the theme of which is Cabaret, I’m listening to Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht and assorted chanteuses.