When I excused myself briefly from a meeting last night, I confess that it was not – as many may have surmised – the old prostate playing up. I was actually checking on the score in the spring training game between the Sox and the Nationals and thus heard in real time the breaking news that Bryce Harper had signed for the Phillies. €330 million and 10 years was quoted by OB, though it turns out to be 13 years. With no opt-outs!
 
Returning to the meeting room, I found it difficult to focus on preparations for the local elections in my part of Leamington, which is in any case pretty much LibDem Central. I spent the rest of the time working out how this affects the Phillies luxury tax threshold and speculating about the future of Sox closer Kimbrel.
 
The deal with Harper is the biggest single guaranteed contract in baseball.
 
And not merely in baseball. It is the biggest deal in American sports history. In technical terms, it is a shedload of dosh. More even than the previous records – cash and duration - held (briefly) by Stanton at the Yankees and Machado at the Padres.
 
Is Harper worth it?
 
Nah. No-one is. Not even a generational talent like Harper.
 
But that won’t matter to Phillies fans if they win the title. It will, however, matter to Phillies fans if Harper doesn’t do the business. There are one or two Sox players who can tell you what happens to you reputation when a huge contract coincides with diminishing stats. (Where are you now, Carl Crawford?)
 
It’s going to be tough. Can one guy make all the difference to a team that was under .500 last year?
 
He’s got 19 games against the club he has grown up with. He’s got the Mets 19 times. And in August, he’s got a couple of games against the Sox. (We get Machado and the Padres immediately after!)
 
But he knows the National League East well and he’s walking into a hitter’s park (though for lefties not so much) - and they are already talking about Trout next year.
 
It’s all talk, of course, with about as much substance as the rumours that he had turned down Philly and was heading for LA. Only the Dodgers fans believed that.
 
And it doesn’t make a huge amount of difference one way or the other to the Red Sox Nation. Philly won’t go for Kimbrel now unless he drops his demands to a year, in which case he might as well stay with us. If we still want him and maybe we don’t.
 
My response to the whole saga is, I’m afraid, dismissive:

​“Hey, it's no big deal!”

                 RIP Nick Cafardo
              and thanks for the lift.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I was alerted by the excellent Roy Kelly to an article in the New York Times about the Dead and Dark Star, which included a 12 Greatest Dark Stars listing. My need for displacement activity prompted the compilation of my own list, which features (to date) the 20 Greatest. Currently playing is 1970-02-14 at Fillmore East, which eases into St Stephen and The Eleven. So maybe 21 Greatest. 110 to go.

Anyone who has penned a single word about sport will be in awe of Hugh McIlvanney, who died last week. We will miss his insights into and understanding of his subject; but most of all, we will miss his prose. Few writers have managed to articulate so beautifully the cathartic power of, in particular, football and boxing. Fewer still have been able to communicate the exhilaration and despair of those spots of time – memorable moments of triumph or despair which occur in almost every sporting contest.
 
The author Rick Gekoski, no mean sportswriter himself, once wrote that “Sport makes you write, and think, and feel, in exclamation marks”. Which is true for even the most seasoned of us. In 2004, the Boston Globe headlined the Sox World Series victory, their first since 1918, in this way: YES!!! Nothing nuanced: just one word, one syllable, in capitals, with no less than three exclamation marks (or screamers as they are known).
 
I doubt whether McIlvanney would have done this. However tight the deadline, his judgements were as measured as his prose. The emotional sub-text was implicit rather than overt.
 
It is because I lean towards Rick and the Globe in my response to great sporting events that I admired McIlvanney so much. Although he insisted on being known as a ‘reporter’, he was not. One did not turn to his piece to find a blow by blow account of a bout or a goal by goal record of a football match. We valued his writing because it concerned itself with what it meant: to the players, to the coaches, to those who were present as spectators. It is significant that he numbered amongst his closest friends those who were involved totally in the sports about which he wrote. They – Jock Stein, Bill Shankly, Alex Ferguson, Angelo Dundee – knew that he knew and understood as much about their game as they did.
 
In a few weeks, I will be taking part in a round table at the History Department of Warwick University which concerns itself with sportswriting. My fellow panellists – Dave Sternburg, Simon Hart – are stars in the firmament. I am not.
 
Although I am on record with my views about Coventry City Football Club and Warwickshire County Cricket Club, my prime focus is on my beloved Boston Red Sox and the life of a fan based in the baseball desert which is the United Kingdom. (Although judging by the demand for tickets for the Yankees games at the London Stadium this summer, there are more of us in this country than we imagine.)
 
I tend not to engage in a recitation of baseball stats – when I did I was mildly chastised for doing so. Rather, my subject is my very personal and particular experiences of being a fan of a team which plays 3,000 miles away from my home.
 
In many ways, and certainly in the great order of things, it is a trivial pursuit. But almost every night, as I tune in to mlb.tv, I know that I will almost certainly witness something that only sport can provide:
 
In the words of Hugh McIlvanney, “a magnificent triviality”.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: After the fine performance of the Shostakovich String Quartet #2 in A major (actually mostly in A minor) by the Carducci Quartet on Friday evening, I am working my way through their Shostakovich cycle, including an advance copy of their new recordings of #1, #2 and #7. Magnificent and not trivial.

​

​“Is life worth living? It depends on the liver.”
 
More than sixty years ago, my unmarried, reclusive, elderly, dour English teacher gave me this as an example of a pun. Looking back, I’m guessing that he was speaking from personal experience, although I did not understand the full implications until some years later.
 
In many respects, I am an early adopter. Technology, for example - Betamax, 8-track, mini disc, that Sony precursor of the Kindle, anyone? In others, I am late to the party.
 
I didn’t drink until I was 25. Didn’t like beer and Scotch didn't like me. Only when I was introduced to white Burgundy and red Bordeaux wines did I appreciate the joys of drinking.
 
Which is why I am coming very late indeed to the idea of a Dry January. Forty or more Januaries have come and gone without so much as a missed glass of lunch.
 
I do get it. At least in principle. It’s just the practice I am struggling with.
 
So I have checked my diary for scheduled dinners at the homes of those who keep a good cellar. I am not missing out on some of those vintages for the sake of a principle.
 
I have looked hard at forthcoming sporting fixtures and concerts which will invariably involve a glass before, at the interval, and afterwards.
 
I have anticipated business issues and stress points which may provoke the need for a drink.
 
And I have reluctantly concluded that the only available window is this week.
 
Like, er, now.
 
As I write, I am on day 2 and I don’t know what the fuss is about. 

True, January is a pretty miserable month anyway. True, sweet fizzy drinks are not really my thing. Not sure they are even a thing at all. True, alcohol-free beer invariably tastes awful.

Most of all, it is true that our politicians have upped the Brexit ante to compound the issue and if there is a reason for self-medication, it is surely the prospect of leaving Europe on WTF terms.
 
But I’m only doing a week and a week in politics may be a long time, but a week off the booze should whizz past in no time at all.

​I am pretty sure that the withdrawal symptoms from Brexit will be infinitely more painful than a few days of temperance.

To ease the pain, however, I have put aside a bottle of Chateau Talbot 2005 for next week.
 
That should make life worth living.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I have a ticket for the Carducci String Quartet playing Philip Glass and Shostakovich on Friday evening. I don’t know the Glass (his fifth quartet) at all, so I’m listening to other recordings as preparation.  The performance of the Royal, who come to Leamington in March, is excellent; but the Kronos is superb.

Christmas itself was pretty much Brexit-free. The children and especially the machatunim and I have an unspoken agreement that we do not discuss politics - even having drink taken. So Christmas dinner passed happily in a mist of fine claret and praise for our shared grandchildren, the contributions each of us had made to the festivities and the shocking grammar of the questions in Trivial Pursuits. It was all going so well.
 
Until Boxing Day.
 
Early in the afternoon, at a drinks party in the depths of south London, I was introduced to a Frenchman, resident in this country and married to an English woman. The initial small talk exhausted, we moved - inexorably you may think – to the situation in which an EU citizen finds himself, living and working in a country which is veering vers une catastrophe.
 
I ventured a mildly critical remark about Government policy and the shambles that is the Tory party. Common ground, surely.
 
“Non! It is that anti-semitic moron Corbyn who is to blame. He is a moron. A moron!”
 
I was taken aback by his vehemence and temporarily speechless. I remembered the promises I had made – to Jill and myself – about discussing politics with total strangers and resolved to remain calm, reasoned, civilized; to eschew ad hominem attacks; to demonstrate those qualities which I find attractive in Corbyn himself; to set an example to this angry young Frenchman.
 
I took a large gulp of the cru bourgeois Médoc which our host had provided for us, and inhaled deeply on my vaper. I was ready to respond and, I hoped, to maintain a form of entente cordiale.
 
“Au contraire” I said. “Monsieur Corbyn est un homme intelligent qui a horreur des attaques personnelles, préférant se concentrer sur les politiques. Certainement pas un crétin. Et certainement pas le politicien responsable du fiasco actuel."
 
"Phouf. Il est raciste, il est trotskiste, il est stupide."
 
What can one say? My Gallic shrug was not sufficient response, but it was all I had short of physical violence. So I shrugged as best I could and seized my empty glass.
 
"Vous avez tort" I told him, "mais maintenant j'ai un besoin urgent d'un autre verre." I walked towards the bar with as much dignity as I could muster, shaking my head with what I hoped he would interpret as more sorrow than anger.
 
In retrospect, I am sorry. Sorry that I was not minded to argue for longer with him, sorry that his view of Corbyn was moulded exclusively by the right wing press, sorry that someone who should be a natural ally was so clearly opposed to us.

Sorry too for the sorry state this country has come to.
 
He was still holding forth about Corbyn as we left to drive back to our pro-Remain, pro-Corbyn bubble in Leamington. I tapped him on the shoulder.
 
"Bonne année" I said. 

Today from the everysmith vaults: The Bob gurus have been telling me each Christmas that Christmas in the Heart is a fine album. I am not convinced, but it plays once a year in this household. And the time is now.

In a House of Lies is Ian Rankin’s 22nd Rebus. He (Rebus) is retired now, has quit smoking and barely drinks. But this is a ‘cold case’, with which Rebus was involved years back, an excuse he uses to infiltrate himself into the investigation. In so doing, he is back with the usual cast of characters: Big Ger Cafferty from the dark side and, representing the forces of ‘good’, DIs Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox. But of course, this being Rankin and Rebus, the distinction between good and evil are rather more nuanced than this simple characterization. Everyone has something to hide, even – especially – Rebus himself. As the story unfolds, we learn what they are hiding and how well it is hidden, with each loose end neatly tied up in knots (and crosses). Masterly.

​Another cold case. Michael Connelly’s Dark Sacred Night brings together Harry Bosch with the more recently created Detective Renée Ballard to look into the brutal murder of 15 year old Daisy Clayton. As a mystery, it’s not really satisfactory: the attention paid early on to character one would expect to be peripheral gives it away. But as a procedural and a study of two characters interlocking and intertwining, it’s excellent. And, at the end, surprise surprise, the two – having both solved cases on the side – agree that they might well work together again. If they do, I’ll be there.

And yet another cold case, the 23rd Reacher novel from Lee Child. In Past Tense, the case in question is the absence of records of the Reacher dynasty in Laconia NH, contrary to family lore. But the paper trail opens up nefarious activities in both past and present. With his own version of Renée Ballard to assist, Reacher continues the more cerebral and caring approach of last year’s The Midnight Line. Which is not to say that fans of old-fashioned Reacher will be disappointed. The closing chapters, set in a New Hampshire killing ground, are as violent, suspenseful and gripping as anything Child has written.

​Finally to Tombland. Who would have thought a novel set in Norwich could be so fascinating?
 
Sansom has taken half a decade to research the latest Shardlake, and it shows. In a good way. His mission from the Lady Elizabeth is to investigate the circumstances of the murder of the wife of one of her distant kinsmen, a Boleyn, and the whodunnit element unfolds in a more than satisfactory manner. But Shardlake being Shardlake, he finds himself at the centre of Kett’s Rebellion, and this and its causes is the real subject of the book. I confess I was unaware of the rebellion which defeated a couple of royal armies and controlled much of Norfolk for a few brief weeks in 1549. But I know a hell of a lot now, thanks to both the novel itself and the historical afterword. It’s a great read, as educational as it is entertaining.
 
Also palliative. Because as I turned the last page of the last book, I realized that my cold had gone.
 
I was cured.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Since 2010, the Dead has been releasing a highlight track on each day of November. These are not just great in themselves, but serve to remind one of hidden gems and forgotten shows. The 2018 is currently two-thirds of the way through, and I am relishing each morning as I download the latest carefully chosen track.

I’m writing this at 4pm on Sunday afternoon, and it’s almost dark. The clocks went back last weekend, ensuring that the first pitch of the final game of the World Series was at midnight our time. And as the euphoria of that victory fades, the prospect of months of short days – “It gets later earlier here” – is depressing. No baseball, no cricket, no Dylan visit to the UK. “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? / Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.”
 
Keats is never far from my thoughts, but appeared unprompted and powerfully on Friday evening. Because Autumn’s music in Leamington Spa was provided by the Fitzwilliam Quartet and, in the Mozart Quintet, Sophie Renshaw as second viola.
 
The programme was changed at the last minute, the death of first violin Lucy Russell’s father meaning that there was insufficient time for rehearsals of the Bruckner Quintet. So I still haven’t seen or heard this (apparently) complex piece.
 
But what a treat we had instead. The Fitzbillies dug into a half-century of repertoire to present us with one of the most startling quartets of our time.
 
Reader, we were given Shostakovich’s Opus 138, the Quartet #13 in B flat minor.
 
The Fitzbilly and Shostakovich have form. The European première of the Opus 138 was given by them. The second ever performance, a few days later, was also given by them, and this time with Shostakovich himself in the audience. It was the beginning of what Shostakovich called a “musical friendship”, and Benjamin Britten reported that Shostakovich had told him that the Fitzwilliam was his “preferred performers of my quartets”.
 
I am indebted to the excellent programme notes of Richard Phillips MBE for this stuff; I didn’t know before the Friday interval.
 
What I did know was that Shostakovich’s 13th quartet is a segue from the second movement of the 12th, a performance of which – by the Kodaly – was the last time I heard a Shostakovich played in the Regency grandeur of the Leamington Pump Rooms. In this sense, the experience was akin to hearing the Dead playing a single gig on several successive nights up the East Coast in the ‘70s. But even the Dead never got close to the ferocious atonal screaming of the central section of this dark and scary quartet. Nor did the Dead ever create anything so soulful as those final bars from the viola, climbing higher and higher into silence.
 
It’s less than 20 minutes long. But, played by this quartet, it’s better than any Dark Star > St. Stephen > The Eleven you ever heard.
 
Yes, yes, yes. It’s all part of my autumn almanac.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: This morning it was the Emerson and the Kodaly versions of #13. This afternoon, I’m returning to More Blood, More Tracks. One could argue that they are as one in their inspiration and theme. But I won't.
 

“New England can go back to bed” the Boston Globe told us on the morning after the Sox clinched the World Series, referring to the difference between the Eastern and Pacific time zones. Some of us in Old England would have appreciated a smidgeon of sympathy for the implications of the difference between Pacific Time and British Summer Time. But hey, it’s only eight hours – and we won!
 
I feel a lot better now, on Tuesday morning, after 18 innings worth of sleep last night, and the euphoria of my fourth World Series victory has eased. Don’t get me wrong: I’m still replaying highlights of the post-season in my head, but now the emotion is recollected in tranquility rather than embarrassing bouts of solo and solitary fist-pumping exhilaration.
 
The more I think about it – and I’m thinking about little else – the more I think we have witnessed something quite extraordinary in sports in general and baseball in particular.
 
Look at the stats. Spring training 17-2. Regular season 108-54. Post-season 11-3.
 
A friend described the 2018 Sox as a “juggernaut” which indicates a lack of finesse, the superiority of sheer power over nuanced skills. But it is true that the Sox were relentless throughout the season. Just look at the number of runs they scored with two outs. Just look at their ability to come back from the dead on so many occasions, notably in Game 4 of the Series itself.
 
Having finally succumbed in the bottom of the 18th to the Dodgers in the longest ever post-season game the night before, and then trailing 4-0 into the 7th in Game 4, the Sox came through 9-6.
 
What changed? Well, you can point to Steve Pearce’s four RBIs. But more important I think was the contribution from a man who was not playing at all. Chris Sale suddenly emerged as a version of Big Papi in Detroit, ranting, goading, exhorting, encouraging and insisting that his team-mates come through.
 
The TV did not pick up what he said. Cora later said that his English wasn’t good enough to understand, and Devers said that he couldn’t repeat it.
 
We can guess at the vocabulary. But we know for sure that it worked. The Sox scored nine runs from the seventh inning on to re-establish its dominance of the Dodgers.
 
The historic casting of the Sox as underdogs which some of us cling to is long gone. This was no David and Goliath scenario. The Dodgers had won 92 games in the regular season. The Yankees had 100 – they were beaten in their own house in the Divisional Series. And the Astros entered the Championship Series with 103 regular season wins. The Sox beat them in Houston.
 
In my naivety, I had predicted that each series would go to the wire. Oh ye of little faith!
 
In 2018, the Sox were simply the best. From beginning to end, from April to October. And my prediction is, it will get better.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: After the World Series, the Bootleg Series: A first listen to More Blood, More Tracks. If you thought having the New York version as well as Minnesota was enough, think again. The development of these songs, as evidenced by this series of complete recordings, is fascinating, illuminating and rewarding The pick for me, today, is an early take of Call Letter Blues.
 

“If I get home before daylight / I just might get some sleep tonight.”
 
Every game in the post-season is scheduled to start at 1am UK time, except for tonight in Houston. Which is great news for sleep-deprived Sox fans in the UK, and probably for kids in the States too. (It’s a school night and I know that 8pm ET is prime TV but I wish MLB would give young fans the chance to see whole games.)
 
The best of seven series is tied at one each after an implosion (and some iffy strikes and balls calls at home plate) in Game 1 and a scary end to Game 2. Sale has been in hospital and Price still hasn’t won a post-season game either. But tonight, Nathan Eovaldi takes the mound. And he’s been good.
 
So, too, has the bullpen, especially Matt Barnes and Ryan Brasier. I’m not forgetting Rick Porcello, but I always expect him to do the job. He’s a starter after all and should start in Game 4, which rules him out tonight. The exception of course was Kimbrel, who went through the whole regular season with an ERA of 3.3 something but is currently 10.80 in the post-season.
 
Three appearances. Three runs conceded. Where’s that breaking ball, Craig?
 
We need to win at least one of our three scheduled games in Houston to bring them back to Fenway, and I think tonight could be it. If Eovaldi pitches with anything like the control and variety he showed against the Yankees, and the bullpen continue to be consistent, then we shouldn’t need Kimbrel at all.
 
Assuming the bats continue to swing. They will. I’m looking to Mookie, JD and Rafael Devers to bring the runs home.
 
Mookie is, according to reports, smiling again. JD will want to show Minute Maid Park that he is a better player than they ever saw in an Astros uniform. And you just know that Rafael will relish the chance to make an impact when it matters. He did it in Boston. He can do it in Houston.
 
I think these two teams are the best in baseball right now. I fear that the series will go to the seventh game. I just hope my heart can withstand the tension.
 
But everything is in place. I have told our dinner hosts that I need to be away in good order by 10pm. My Red Sox shirt is laundered and ironed. There is Sam Adams in the fridge. And I confidently expect to be in bed by about 1am with Dirty Water playing in my head.
 
Go Sox!
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: The recent death of Marty Balin has prompted a fest of Airplane shows. Marty’s beautiful voice did not always meld well with the increasingly strident Airplane style towards the end, but he will always be remembered in this household with love and affection for songs such as Coming Back to Me. Listening to a Winterland show (1970-10-04), he shouts out, at the end of Volunteers, “I want a new band!” Sad.
 

In Lost, Stolen or Shredded, published in 2013, my pal Rick Gekoski gave us fifteen stories of missing works of art and literature, ranging from a juvenile poem by James Joyce (lost) to the Mona Lisa (stolen) to Philip Larkin’s diaries (shredded).
 
I wonder if Banksy read it.
 
His Girl With Balloon, which self-destructed minutes after selling for a million quid (the Sotheby’s estimate was £200K to £300K) is now believed, in its shredded state, to be worth twice what the anonymous buyer paid. Or at least, what he or she bid because we await confirmation that the buyer has paid or will pay for the artwork.
 
I’m pretty sure that he has or will. After all, the result of this coup de théâtre is a new, unique artwork.
 
There is a parallel here. Back in the early 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg performed an equally audacious act. He ‘erased’ a drawing by Willem de Kooning and in so doing, over a period of two months, he created a new piece which he exhibited under the title “Erased De Kooning Drawing”.
 
He said that it was not destruction, nor negation, but celebration. And de Kooning colluded in this by providing “something I will miss”.
 
Rauschenberg had experimented with erasing his own work, but concluded that “If it was my own work being erased, then the erasing would only be half the process, and I wanted it to be the whole,” he said.
 
Judged by this criterion, Banksy has only achieved half the process. His next move, perhaps, will be to approach a de Kooning of today with a request for an artwork which can form the raw material for a total erasure.
 
I nominate Damian Hirst.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: To my eternal regret, I missed Luna’s couple of gigs in the UK last month, so grateful to nyctaper for a great show from Industry City in “deep Brooklyn”. Highlight (for me) a terrific version of the Velvets’ Lonesome Cowboy Bill. What NY lacks in baseball, it makes up for with a great music scene.

​Paweł Pawlikowski won an Oscar (Best Foreign Language Film) for Ida. And this year, he won Best Director for Cold War at the Cannes Film Festival. The latter award has greater resonance in this household and so we embarked on a Google search to find a showing within travelling distance and ended up, yesterday, in Oxford.
 
It is the first week of the Michaelmas term, and the streets and restaurants were crowded with freshers and their proud parents. But Screen 2 of the imposing new Curzon cinema was deserted apart two women of a certain age who whispered throughout the film in what we think was Polish, and probably was, because this film is set primarily in Poland during the Soviet era and it blends the personal and the political, the poetic and the prosaic in a quite mesmerizing manner.
 
Cold War is a musical, a love story and a political chronicle. It takes place over the course of a couple of decades, half a dozen ‘chapters’, and is punctuated throughout by music, which points to the cultural and political changes against which the doomed and destructive love affair takes place, moving inexorably to its conclusion through a series of scenes, spots of time, which illustrate the two hearts, four eyes of the affair and the film.
 
Paris is contrasted with Warsaw; Rock Around the Clock with the faux-folk of the Polish peasantry; the passion of the lovers with the ever-present politics - “I’m ratting on you” she tells him. “Is you or is you ain’t my baby?” asks the soundtrack.
 
The Best Director award is justified by any of so many delights. The ravishing, high contrast black and white. The square format. The meticulous framing.
 
But his greatest triumph is to draw out of his actors extraordinary performances. Tomasz Kot as the chain-smoking musician Wiktor and, particularly, Joanna Kulig as the ‘mountain girl’ Zula are superb in a New Wave kinda way, which is appropriate of course. And as each chapter addresses another spot of time, the suffering, the melancholy, of the intervening years are immediately and powerfully present.

The brevity of each scene, the short span of the movie as a whole (90 minutes), is not merely exquisite. The conciseness, succinctness, is perfection.
 
I doubt I shall see a more beautiful film this year. And certainly nothing more poignant than the dedication, at the end, in lower case out of black, bottom right of the screen: “to my parents”.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I’ve been re-syncing about 100GB of shows and the process has thrown up some fascinating stuff which I had forgotten I had and not played for some time. Currently, it’s the sound track from Zabriski Point – some of Jerry’s most inspired noodling.