It was midnight UK time when the Sox surrendered the last out and an Opening Day defeat to the Rays.
 
It had all started so well. The Sox arrived in St Petersburg after a short bus ride from Fenway South, with a 22-9 record in the pre-season. They were looking good. And they continued to do so for seven and half innings. Sale was awesome, nine strike-outs, six shut-out innings. The hitting was fine. A Laurel and Hardy moment in the Rays’ outfield gave Nunez an inside-the-park home run. Barnes pitched a 1-2-3.
 
To be honest, it was all pretty routine. A good day at the office. What could possibly go wrong?
 
Pretty much everything. This is why we watch sport, because you couldn’t predict what happened. No-one could expect the implosion that followed, not even the Red Sox Nation, and we’ve seen it all over the years.
 
Kelly couldn’t throw a strike. He walked three. Carson Smith was no better, unable to get what he’s paid for, ground ball double plays rather than the triple that he did manage. Suddenly, we had conceded six runs. All the walks came home to roost. Why was the outfield so shallow?
 
Should Cora have called up young Bobby Poyner, a lefty but someone who has never pitched outside of Double A? Should he have brought in Kimbrel, the best closer in the MLB who he had talked about using in non-save situations?
 
By the time he had Poynter warming up, it was too late. We’d lost the game. Kimbrel never got up from the bench.
 
So far, so Red Sox. Defeat from the jaws of victory. Criticism of the coach for in-game decisions. Relief pitchers blowing a lead. It’s happened before, back on Opening Day 2003, against the same club. The same 4-0 lead from Pedro. The same final score. I remember it well, as I will remember this Opening Day.
 
But there are 161 games to go. And I like the look of the Town Nine this year. I’ve watched a fair number of the Spring Training games, and although I have to keep telling myself that it is only Spring Training, the record was good and the way we won those 22 games was even better.
 
I know that I will have issues with some of Cora’s decisions. It’s all pretty obvious from where I’m sitting, on my sofa, with a glass of wine at hand. It’s a great deal harder from the dugout.
 
Kelly has never walked more than two in his whole career. Smith will get his command back. Cora had every right to expect better than they gave him.
 
So do we.
 
And we’ll get it. We have a powerful line-up. We have a great defense. When they’re all fit, we have a great rotation. And we have JD.
 
What could possibly go wrong?


Today from the everysmith vaults: The Dead on their first 'trip' to the UK and a crazy weekend at the Hollywood Festival outside Newcastle under Lyme. I've had a couple of AUDs for a while, but this is primarily SBD and it seems that the sound guys managed to keep their heads while all around them (including me) were losing theirs!

​A curious by-product of the Brexit negotiations is the return of existentialism, or, more accurately, the language of existentialism.
 
Every debate, every vote, every meeting is now an ‘existentialist crisis’. Every pundit peppers their arguments with words such as ‘freedom’, ‘responsibility’, ‘choice’, ‘essence’ and ‘identity’. I have even read of one columnist’s ‘existential angst’ at the prospect of a possible result.
 
And, then, a couple of days ago, David Davis accused the European Commission of ‘bad faith’.
 
‘Mauvais foi’ is, of course, a key concept in Sartre’s thinking, and in the context of the Brexit negotiations, it is damning. It refers to self-deception, the way in which we think that we do not have the freedom to make a choice because we are afraid of the consequences of making this choice. (It’s more complex than that of course but it is early on Monday morning after a late night- see below!)
 
Sitting in Deux Magots or Café Flore, comme d’habitude, the example which springs immediately and inevitably to Sartre’s mind is that of the waiter, who is striving to be everything which he thinks a waiter should be. In other words, he is play-acting a rôle, the role of a waiter whose essence is to be a waiter.
 
But in order to play the role, he must know, by definition, that he is not actually a waiter at all. He is a conscious human being who is deceiving himself into thinking that he is a waiter.
 
From the example of this waiter, Sartre develops the notion that while we may pretend that we do not have freedom of choice, we cannot pretend that we are not ourselves; that we are not conscious human beings disconnected from our pragmatically-lived lives. (His conclusion, famously, is that we are ‘condemned to be free’.)
 
Many of the ‘players’ in the Brexit melodrama are clearly playing roles. I am thinking here in particular of Johnson and Rees-Mogg.
 
The former is the jester, the fool, the buffoon. The latter is the “MP for the eighteenth century”, the toff from the kids’ comics of my generation.
 
Sartre points out that his waiter is too “waiteresque”: “his movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid”.
 
Johnson and Rees-Mogg – and Davis and Barnier also in different ways – are deceiving themselves into thinking that they are authentic politicians. Their over-exaggerated histrionics, their method acting, betrays them.
 
They are acting inauthentically.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: My late night was the result of attending a gig by Live Dead 69. Tom Constanten of the Dead, Slick Aguilar of the Starship and Mark Karan of Ratdog gave forty or fifty ageing groovers a great show last night, close - on occasion - to authentic performances of some of the songs that defined us.

This is the set list. Not just any set list either. This is Slick Aguilar's set list!

​The show is firmly and clearly in my head, but as part of a continuing winding down from last night's high, I'm playing a show from Asbury Park a couple of years ago: Live Dead 69 with the Jefferson family.

An interview on Radio 4 this morning, with Antony Gormley, reminds me that Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge is about to re-open after being closed for ‘refurbishment’.
 
I confess I am always a little apprehensive about these programmes of refurbishment in general and this exercise has caused me not a little concern, because the Kettle’s Yard I remember was not an art gallery. It was a home with some great art.
 
For a time, back in the late sixties, I would walk past Kettle’s Yard a couple of times a day, on a journey between my rooms in college and the digs of a girlfriend in Castle Street. In those days, there was no signage to invite one inside. It was all word of mouth. And it was from a friend that I heard that Jim Ede and his wife Helen would hold open house most afternoons, offering tea and guided tours to those who were lucky enough to knock on the door at the appropriate time.
 
On a couple of occasions, I was one of those.
 
I wasn’t totally visually illiterate then, but the art I liked was almost exclusively figurative. Paintings that told a story. Narrative art if you like.
 
The work that I saw on my first visit was revelatory, despite - or more probably because of - the fact that I was stoned. Very stoned. I doubt that I would have ventured to knock had I not been.
 
Helen Ede – it was just Helen on that day - must have realized this, but I was treated with courtesy and respect, given tea and shown round the collection. I was told stories of Ben Nicholson, David Jones, Miro. I saw sculptures by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
 
But I also saw odd stones and pebbles and bits of coloured glass and weathered wood.
 
In my normal, unintoxicated, hard-line rationalist state, I would have paid little heed to these found objects. But on that day, they were wonderful. Not for what they were, but for how they appeared. How they balanced and complemented the art, how the domesticity of the rooms seemed to be the ideal environment for their display.
 
There was no shop, no café. There were no little typewritten notes telling us what to think. Just a couple welcoming you to their house and sharing their love of art.
 
I felt completely at home.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Yesterday was Shostakovich String Quartets, all of them, from the first to the fifteenth. Today, it’s studio outtakes from Dylan’s Desire sessions. As ever, I am unable to understand Bob's decisions to take one cut and abandon others. 

There ought to be a word for it. There probably is a word for it in German. But the loss of one’s most precious sense, the sense that plays a central role in one’s life and work, appears not to have a specific medical or psychological term in the English language.
 
For Beethoven, whose extraordinary String Quartet in A minor, the Opus 132, I heard played superbly by the Brodsky Quartet on Friday evening, it was loss of hearing.

For Bruce Chatwin, it was loss of his sight. “People would compliment me on my ‘eye’” he wrote, “and my eyes, in rebellion, gave out.

​“After a strenuous bout of New York, I woke one morning half-blind. The eye specialist said there was nothing wrong organically. Perhaps I'd been looking too closely at pictures? Perhaps I should try some long horizons?”
 
As John Berger taught us, there are different ways of seeing. And different ways of hearing.
 
Beethoven’s late quartets were written in silence. He was profoundly deaf. But he was recovered from a life-threatening gastric illness and was ready to address in his music his sense of mortality. Nowhere is this contemplation on life and death more emotionally charged and exquisitely expressed than in the third – slow – movement of the A minor, a Song of Thanksgiving for his recovery.

I have never heard it played so beautifully or so slowly, and listening with my eyes closed – a procedure on my eyes 48 hours previously had left me with headaches and blurred vision – I thought of that scene in Huxley’s Point Counterpoint, when the nihilist Spandrell introduces Rampion to this piece, claiming that it proves everything – God and goodness amongst other things – and that only Beethoven could achieve this “counterpoint of serenities”.
 
And one reason why it could only be Beethoven is precisely because his most precious sense was gone. His deafness forced him into introspection. The sounds he heard in his head are the sounds of his hopes and his anguish, uncontaminated by the outside world. And he heard them in the purest manner. He did not sit at the piano to compose. He did not make the compromises of traditional composition. He poured it directly to the paper in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
 
All this went through my own head during that third movement as the Brodsky dispensed a salve on my self-pity and paranoia at the possible prognosis for my precious sight.
 
It was a genuine catharsis, a much-needed purgation of pity and fear. I feel better now.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Unaccountably, this is the first time I have seen the Brodsky perform live and I resolve that it shall not be the last. But meantime, delving into the digital vaults, I discovered this morning The Juliet Letters, a joint enterprise with Elvis Costello. I can’t remember acquiring it or playing it before, but it is strangely affecting. 

It took me a while to get Rothko.
 
I have never seen his early, mythic, figurative work outside the pages of catalogues and art coffee table books. The Rothko I and thousands of others ‘know’ are those extraordinarily massive slabs of darkness, through which float almost untraceable hues of tone, texture and colour, the Late Series.
 
As he intended, I was overwhelmed, in awe, when I walked into the Tate a decade ago. And I thought of Dylan ten years earlier acknowledging that “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there”.
 
It was clear that, for Rothko, it had already got there. He was re-working over and over again this sense of imminent tragedy, which we may infer or deduce, was to end in his future suicide.
 
I have known three suicides: a writer, a painter, a scientist. Each was, in their own way, brilliant: clever, intelligent, funny even. I cannot know, no-one can know, what despair drove them to believe that they were better off dead.

I have also known many more people left behind by the suicide of someone close to them; left behind with the guilt that they should have seen it coming, that they somehow failed their lover or friend. Suicide is not painless.
 
Rothko spoke often of suicide apparently, particularly that of Jackson Pollock – suicide by alcohol and a car crash. He told his assistant that “if I choose to commit suicide, everyone will be sure of it. There will be no doubts …”.
 
There wasn’t. He over-dosed on anti-depressants. And slashed his wrists with a razor blade.
 
This was no cry for help. This was no psychosis. This was not even a philosophical desire to die and take control over a life which was failing physically and intellectually.

​I don't get it.
 
Half an hour ago, I had no intention of writing this or anything like it. But first thing this morning, I found myself staring at a Rothko print on our kitchen wall as I waited for the coffee machine to fire up. It is not one of the final pieces. In this one, it is not dark yet, but it’s getting there. I have looked at this many, many times but today, as I sipped my coffee, I was reminded of one of those quotes which I collect in my commonplace book.
 
It’s from Rothko. And it is this:
 
“There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red.’

​Now that I understand.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: A family illness has caused the cancellation of the Atrium String Quartet’s appearance in Leamington a week tonight. Their place is being taken by the Brodsky who will perform the Shostakovich #12 which was to be the centrepiece of the Atrium gig. I was looking forward immensely to seeing the Atrium again, but listening now to #7 is more than fine.

A brief addendum: Back in 2010, when this blog was conceived, I split the posts into Lettres d'Uzès (my hommage to Racine) for those written in France and, thus, Leamington Letters for those written in the UK. Lifestyle changes make this distinction inappropriate, so all posts will now come under the (highly appropriate) Not Dark Yet banner. Numbering of the posts henceforth is as if both were in fact one. The blog itself will now be titled MS for reasons which should be self-evident. The new profile picture was photo-shopped by my late great friend Bill Keningale for my 50th birthday. Er, that's it.

There are few sportsmen for whom my admiration extends beyond their skills and athletic ability. In fact, there are many whom I am sure I would positively dislike outside the football field, the baseball diamond, the cricket square. We would have nothing in common beyond the fact that they possess a talent I'm in awe of.
 
As fans, we seldom get the opportunity to put this proposition to the test. We don’t meet our sporting heroes, so they remain heroes. Even when we read of some particularly egregious behaviour or political opinion, they are still superstars. Our memories are of that superb goal, that home run or no hitter, that exquisite cover drive.
 
The exceptions prove the rule: Ali, David Ortiz, Garfield Sobers, Learie Constantine, Brian Clough, Romario.
 
To this off-the-top-of-my-head list, I wish to add the name of Cyrille Regis MBE.
 
Together with Laurie Cunningham and Brendan Batson, Cyrille was instrumental in achieving acceptance for black players in British football. When ‘the three degrees’ first played together, some season ticket holders at The Hawthorns sent back their tickets in protest. But the football that they played, and the way that they played it, appealed to the vast majority of fans, whatever their club allegiance and in so doing contributed immeasurably to defeating racism and bigotry on the terraces.

So I was over the moon, Brian, when Bobby Gould signed him for the Sky Blues in 1984. He played seven years and more than 200 games for Coventry and his strength and elegance and goals made him an instant favourite. But it was not solely that wondrous talent. He was, on and off the field, a perfect gentleman.
 
I heard Ian Wright quoted this morning: “My generation of black players were like Malcolm X. But Cyrille was Martin Luther King”.
 
I know this from personal experience. I met him socially only after he had moved on from the City. He would meet up from time to time with his City team-mates in Wilde’s, where he stood apart. Not literally – he would be as much part of any conversation as anyone else present; but his demeanour marked him out.
 
He was tall, slim, always well-dressed and very good-looking (when I introduced him to Jill, she looked up at him and said “No wonder my husband worships you!”).
 
He had that air of self-confidence and calmness which the rest of us  envy. He knew who he was and was content to be what he was.
 
He was a gentleman and a gentle man.
 
I am privileged to have seen him play the beautiful game so beautifully, and proud to have known him, if only a little.

​Well, that’s all done, then.
 
Christmas has been cleared from our house. The tree is down, the baubles packed away and the pretty lights carefully boxed up. The Christmas cards sit on the desk – I will go through them to make a note of a new address here, unexpected contact from a friend there and pangs of guilt at those forgotten everywhere. But I am already turning my back on 2017 and setting out on a new trip with my equivalents of Gunslinger, Claude Levi-Strauss and Everything Kool.
 
Ed Dorn’s Cautious Gunslinger has been my travelling companion for many years. Here’s why:
 
Very good. Then you must
never consort with the Perfect,
stick to the Absolute, it’s
pliable, and upon it
you seem to play any tune
you choose.
 
Absolutely. And the tune I have chosen to play in 2018 is writing. Which means, firstly, reading. Reading about writing. And in doing so, I chanced upon David Lodge’s Writer’s Luck.
 
Many years ago – Lodge must have been still at the University of Birmingham – the two of us approached the last remaining empty table on the Marylebone to Leamington train, seated ourselves reluctantly opposite each other and, like synchronized swimmers, reached into our satchels and took out the current issue of the London Review of Books.
 
Had either of us been more sociable, in my case more confident also, this might have provoked an hour of conversation about the state of the novel, the business of writing and any number of other burning issues. It didn’t. We half-smiled to acknowledge the coincidence, nodded and bowed our heads to the printed pages of LRB.
 
I regret this lost opportunity. My silence was the result of not wishing to impinge on the time or solitude of a leading academic and author of one of the funniest books I have ever read, Changing Places. And his? At the time, I may have attributed it to aloofness, a kind of professorial hauteur. From Writer’s Luck, we discover that he is naturally shy, even timid; and he recounts an occasion at which he was snubbed throughout dinner by Germaine Greer, who turned her back on him, literally and figuratively, and conversed exclusively with her other neighbour.
 
The anecdote resonates with me because it brings to mind a similar episode. I have been a snubbee also, although not in such exalted company. I can confirm that being trapped by the cold shoulder in a social situation is not pleasant, even if one’s embarrassment is shared by one’s fellow diners.
 
The fact that both events occurred many years ago, and Lodge and I still remember – ah yes, we remember it well – is testament to that.
 
But I shall try to forget and forgive. And if I cannot forget, laugh about it:
 
Entrapment is this society’s
Sole activity, I whispered
and Only laughter
can blow it to rags.
 
That will be the resolution for the new year. Never consort with the Perfect. Stick to the Absolute. Play any tune you choose. And have a larf.
 
In 2018, “the sheer writing of the poem must be our shelter”.
 
Happy trails.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I would by now have ventured an opinion on the latest from Bob, which concerns itself with the Gospel years from 1979 to 1981. I have been listening, promise. And although I was less than enthused by his embracing of Jesus – think I only saw two or three shows during this period – I have to confess that there are some great songs and some brilliant shows. Nevertheless, my Christmas playlists have been heavily weighted in favour of Chris Forsyth, Dream Syndicate and the Dead. No, no regrets.

I have never had much time for the honours system in the UK, apart - obviously - from the medals awarded to my dad. But another exception must be the MBE conferred on Richard Phillips who, with his wife Veronica, is the driving force behind Leamington Music in general and the International String Quartet Series in particular.
 
Over the years, the couple have brought to Leamington and Warwick some of the great quartets, many of them (the Atrium, the Petersen) appearing long before they achieved national and international critical acclaim.
 
Last night, we saw the return to Leamington of the Kodály Quartet from Hungary. The Kodály are emphatically not up and coming – they celebrated fifty years of playing together in 2016 – but despite this, and despite their mittel-European tradition, they always surprise and delight.
 
They began with Haydn, proving that they can play this kind of thing standing on their heads. There is a pattern emerging throughout the chamber music world of giving us a example of Haydn’s extraordinarily prolific output. Like the Dead opening with Bertha or Bob with Crash on the Levee, Haydn serves as a warm-up for many quartets, a plate of nibbles before the main course.
 
And so it was last night. But the Kodály’s main course was remarkable. I had never heard of Erno Dohnanyi before I saw the programme and this is very much my loss. His String Quartet #2, composed in 1906, was a revelation – by turns haunting and menacing, passionate and angry, evil and innocent, intense and sensitive.
 
The violinists Attila and Ferenc, the latter looking like a young Lewis Litt for you fans of Suits, swapped roles for this piece. But for me the highlights were the drive of the cello in the second movement and, in the finale, the opportunity for the viola to take centre stage. From my seat, directly behind the viola player, János appeared as if a Soviet-era discus thrower, all massively broad shoulders and close-cropped hair. But the sound he produced was beautiful.
 
Richard’s programme notes quote a claim that this is “one of the greatest, if not the greatest, post-Brahms Romantic quartet”. I don’t know enough to make that kind of judgement but I do know that, not least in its emotional range, it is close to a masterpiece. And I also know that, in their performance last evening, the collective virtuosity of the Kodály did it justice.
 
I am grateful I was there. Grateful to the quartet for their performance. And grateful to Richard and Veronica who make this kind of experience possible time after time.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I have no Dohnanyi in the vaults (yet), but I do have the Kodály playing string quartets by Kodály. So that’s what I’m listening to as I type.

I am proud to say that I was an early adopter of Jack Reacher. Long before the literati cottoned on, I was acting, once a year, usually in the first week of November, like a teenager on the eve of the publication of a new Harry Potter, arriving at my local Waterstone’s at opening time to pick up the latest episode in the life of the loner ex-MP and then, having cleared the day, devouring it with relish.
 
I couldn’t have done it everyday. It works that there is merely one such event per year. As Michelle Chang says in the note she leaves for Reacher at the start of The Midnight Line, comparing him to New York: “I love to visit, but I could never live there.”
 
Me too.
 
But this year was different. For one reason or another, I was a few days late opening the book. By which time I had heard and read a few reviews. A “gentler” Jack Reacher awaits I was told.
 
Oh, shit. I don’t read Reacher for gentleness, at least not in the modern sense of the word, although he is of course “a veray parfait gentil knight’ in the old sense. But no worries. In less than 20 pages, he had already dispatched seven bikers outside a bar – “six fat guys and a runt” he says. “That’s a walk in the park.”
 
And that’s pretty much it as far as traditional Reacher is concerned. Oh, there is that minor contretemps with three cowboys, two thirds of the way in, but he only kills one of them. And for the remainder of the novel, he becomes increasingly emotionally involved in his quest.
 
I won’t spoil it by giving you too much of the plot, except to say that this is a traditional romance narrative in which our hero undergoes his various tests and trials to achieve his goal. And in case we don’t get it, that transcendent goal is a ring. Yes, a ring. Belonging to a woman. And the location is the sparsely populated, wide open spaces of the American mid-west, with long blacktops running endlessly, where your nearest neighbour is twenty or more miles away and probably up to no good.
 
Like living on opioids. Or dealing them. Or both.
 
What distinguishes this Reacher, though, and this Lee Child novel, is the emotional engagement with the characters. These are not the usual stereotypes. The baddies are not all bad. The addicts are real people, with reasons. And the issue which Reacher finds himself dealing with is a real issue.
 
One can sense the anger of Lee Child and his protagonist on every page in the last third of the book, his 22nd and certainly best for some time.
 
“We fought for freedom” Reacher says. “And this is what freedom looks like.”
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Dylan in Osaka, Japan from February 1978. This is what “Live at Budokan”, recorded a week later, should have been.

Three songs and quarter of an hour or so into the gig, at Warwick Arts Centre last night, Richard Thompson tells us that, as we will have realised by now, he has really only one style of song: miserable. But within that, he says, “there is variety: slow miserable, medium-paced miserable and fast miserable”.
 
“How” he wondered, “can I sustain this for an hour and a half?”
 
The answer, at least for me, was not very well at all. I say this with regret because he is a legend in this household and has been since I first saw him with the Fairports nearly fifty years ago. But last night, this solo acoustic show was all too furious and frenetic, as he bellowed out those emotionally-charged lyrics over too-loud rock riffs and fast picking that was, well, just too fast.
 
The variety he promised us did not materialize. It was full-on from beginning to end, without light or shade, without nuance, subtlety or elegance.
 
The pace never faltered. When Who Knows Where The Time Goes? is almost indistinguishable from Valerie, I was considering whether to take an early bus and an even earlier glass of red.
 
That I didn’t yield to these twin temptations is down to the fact that it would be disrespectful to do so and I owe this man a great deal.
 
But it does raise the question of why we, or I, attend these kind of shows.

Jill absented herself from the gig on the basis that she had been there and done that. But I suppose I wanted to show my allegiance, pay homage, cast my mind back to the Fairports in 1968 and the stuff with Linda in the ‘70s, to revisit the first time I heard him play 1952 Vincent Black Lightning live twenty years or so ago.
 
I did all that. And now I will try to put this particular show out of my mind.
 
With the exception of the support.
 
I had not realized when I booked my seat that Josienne Clarke & Ben Walker were opening the show, and what a pleasure it was to hear them live for the first time. Josie’s songs are haunting and her voice beautiful; Ben’s guitar playing is exquisite.
 
Not a wasted night at all.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: something of a Fairport-fest inevitably, but at the end of Unhalfbricking, iTunes bizarrely skipped to the Incredible String Band and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.