Cousins reunited

At the Edinburgh Eye Pavilion  the other day, I met  a cousin  I did not know existed. Aged ninety, she was, like me, being treated for macular degeneration, an irksome malady which, for me, interferes with writing and reading but is held at bay with eye injections.

In the waiting room, along with her daughter, she had heard my name being called, and recognised it. My wife, who was with me, heard the words “music critic ” being murmured by someone  nearby. Not until later, when I was  about to leave, did we come face to face, and I realised that I was more than a music critic to her.

Spry and alert, she came straight to the point with the information that  she was related to me, on my mother’s side of the family. Her grandmother had been my grandmother’s sister.

This was news to me, since I did not even know that my granny had had a sister, although, married twice, she had made me aware that she had had two husbands, both of whom (the first,  my grandfather,  an army bandsman, the  second a prosperous traveller who collected antiques in Japan) were  dead before I was born.

My newfound cousin, I learned, had holidayed with me and my parents in Comely Bank, where I spent my early childhood, though I have no recollection of this, since I was scarcely out of my pushchair at the time.

Yet she had always remembered my unusual name which, she said, was that of the gynaecologist who had delivered me at a nursing home in Walker Street -  though my own understanding has always been that I was called after the German actor Conrad Veidt and the Polish writer Joseph Conrad. Still,  the gynaecologist struck me as a perfectly plausible addition to the list, especially as I knew that mine had been a difficult birth.  Nevertheless, had we had time, I would have liked to hear more from her about this.

But she correctly recalled that my Aunt Maymie, my mother’s sister (who, as I now realised, my cousin looked quite like) had lived in West Maitland Street at Haymarket;  and  she  confirmed that she belonged to the Paton side of the family, my granny’s name having been Joanna Keith Paton and my mother’s Joanna Paton Hunter,  with me myself following up the rear as Conrad Keith Wilson - the Paton link seeming by then to have been discarded.

Yet who knows? There are still things to discover  and I can see why  ancestry research has become a flourishing industry on the internet. Today, I should add, happens to mark what would have been my mother’s 110th birthday.
27 September 2015

A chance meeting at The Edinburgh Eye Pavilion

I'm writing a message to a lady called Joanna who's grandmother was my grandmother's sister. We met this morning at The Eye Pavilion. We parted without exchanging contact info but I mentioned my blog and hope you find it. I would love to invite you and your daughter for coffee. My email address is wilson.conrad@ymail.com

It would be lovely to hear from you.

Conrad
24.09.2015

This week's wine: Pinot Gris

Pinot Gris is one of the great white grapes of Alsace, which has recently been adopted by New Zealand.  In both guises it yields excellent, strongly recommended wine.

True, its most prevalent source of supply - the hinterland of Venice, where it is Italianised as Pinot Grigio - lies elsewhere, and  produces something not only quite different but by no means always a satisfying buy.


So take care.  Pinot Grigio wine, in its numerous Italian  forms, can be found everywhere, both cheaply and surprisingly dearly, though the dearer wines are not always superior to the cheap.

Produced by a  single vineyard, however, they can be very good and not to be sneered at.  Mass produced, on the other hand,  they are usually very basic, and not worth buying, except as a companion for fish suppers or the most routine pasta dishes.

But an Alsace Pinot Gris, if you can find one, is another matter. This week, unexpectedly, I came upon an admirable one in my local branch of Morrison’s, with a £7.99 price tag well below  what I would have been prepared to pay for it.

Alsace  wines are generally regarded as sweet with an interesting  undertone of dryness, or else dry with an overtone of sweetness, but this one got the balance right. Served as an aperitif and then with trout it was a success.


A New Zealand Pinot is similar, though with predictably more pronounced Kiwi notes. Waitrose currently stocks a nice one costing £9.59, with one of those rollicking  Kiwi names,  that you should not let yourself be deterred by. But if you can bear to ask for a bottle of Marlborough  Hunky Dory The Tangle, mixing Pinot Gris, Gewurztraminer, and Riesling, you are not likely to be disappointed. Again, as  an aperitif it is delicious.

Alternatively, also from New Zealand, there is Rod Easthope’s Pinot Gris, which goes up and down in price, but never rises too high.  Eashope is one of those new young producers whose wines are available through Naked Wines, and this is a particularly inviting one.
23 September 2025

Flourishing Bonds

The latest James Bond novel not to have Ian Fleming as its author is Anthony Horowitz’s flippantly entitled Trigger Mortis, published this week.

Horowitz is a master of pastiche whose predecessors as exponents of brilliantly faked Fleming include Kingsley Amis, Sebastian Faulks, and William Boyd. Reviewing Trigger Mortis in the Financial Times, the zealous Simon Schama - whose fascinating study of great British portraits, tied in with the National Portrait Gallery and a new BBC  television series is also out this week - has proved to be a bit of a Fleming himself.

His review - wonderfully witty,  observant, substantial, and to the point - is a glorious tease, suggesting that the next James Bond novel to be written may well come from whom else but Simon Schama.

Not that Horowitz’s book is in any way disappointing. Though not perhaps quite the equal of William Boyd’s Solo - which is surely the most seductive and persuasive  piece of neo-Fleming of them all, and the one which has the most disturbing ending - it is alive, fast-moving, and perfectly pitched,  with a grippingly oblique prologue, an artful reappearance of the hard-edged American, Pussy Galore, and, before the story  has gone very far, a vivid trip to 1950s Germany for a hair-raising  car-race in Burburgring, south of Cologne,  with Bond secretively at the wheel of (I speak as a non-driver) an alluring red Masarati.

Schama in his review conveys its freshness of  flavour,  scrupulously identifying one or two minor blemishes, just as Horowiitz himself works wonders of Bondian reincarnation and resourcefulness.  As his recent piece of mock Conan Doyle confirmed, he knows how to feel his way into the style of authors he clearly cares about,  and Trigger Mortis can be warmly recommended as a ripely convincing Bond experience.
15 September 2015

This Week's Wine: Try Lidl

Lidl, like Aldi, is finding better and better wine with which to tempt its customers. Though both firms are German in origin, neither of them seems to use German wine as a regular sales ploy. Personally I would not regret it if they did, such is the dearth of good German wine in British supermarkets.

Nor does the focus seem to rest particularly on the New World.  It is in France that both firms are finding their specialities and from French sources that they are assembling their most attractive offers.

True, Lidl’s  wine shelves are notoriously a shambles. You hardly notice the good bottles resting amid the much less good on their side walls.  The Cimarosa range which they do make some effort to display are mostly dull and drab.

Steer clear of these and trust that your eyes will catch sight of other things, whose price tags are often obscured, whose printed descriptions may seem to apply to different bottles altogether, whose layout is just a muddle - it almost as if supplies have been simply dumped on the shelves - but which happen to include some real riches.

The French offers, as I have said are the ones to go for, if you can find them  - and inevitably not all branches of Lidl carry the same stock. But every month there is something good available, including, at present, a pair of admirable white burgundies and the 2014 vintage of their established stand-by - a pale pink, nicely dry Cotes de Provence costing £5.99, which would seem a good buy at double that price.

There is also an excellent Fronsac claret, which does cost more than double the price of the Provencal pink, as well as a Margaux at nearly £17, showing that Lidl is not frightened to charge a bit more for something really special.

As Christmas approaches, Lidl also stocks up with lobster, pheasant, quail, and langoustines in Japanese batter, all attractive matches for the better wines.

I first came upon this supermarket some years ago when I praised in one of my musical reviews an ergonomic stool, visually very striking, on which a visiting cellist sat for his Edinburgh recital. A friend who read my review telephoned me and told me that his wife, also a cellist, had bought the same stool and that it was on sale very cheaply in the Leith branch of - guess where? - Lidl. Going to the shop to see for myself, I was too late. The stool was sold out.
11 September 2015

How Sweet the Caress?

William Boyd’s big new novel, rather uninvitingly entitled Sweet Caress, is not winning the best of reviews. Is it as poor as it is said to be? It was still on my reading list when I was warned off it by a close friend and Boyd enthusiast who told me he had passed the 30 per cent marker in his Kindle edition - Kindle still employing percentages rather than page numbers as gauges, perhaps because of the variety of font sizes they employ as aids for readers who, like me, have bad eyesight - and that his interest in it was dwindling. The book, he said, was deeply disappointing.

The story of a woman photographer born in 1908, it toys with reproductions of her pictures (in reality anonymous odds and ends Boyd had evidently acquired in car-boot sales), with walk-on roles for twentieth-century celebrities (a device which, like some other novelists, he has sometimes irksomely employed in previous travels into the past) and, aptly enough, with a sort of snapshot literary technique which gives the book an extremely fragmented structure.

Was I going to like it, I wondered, as I picked up my Kindle at page 0 per cent? Since I generally enjoy the innovatory aspects of Boyd’s literary style, I did not feel automatically opposed to those that are incorporated in Sweet Caress. I began by liking it quite a lot, but by the time I reached the 30 per cent point, my enthusiasm for it, like my friend’s, had begun to wane.

The fragmentation, especially in its Scottish sections, set on an island near Mull in 1977, failed to grip. But I persevered, and never wholly lost faith in it. It is really quite a good read, if sometimes uneven and sometimes, by Boyd’s high standards, somewhat slack.

I would like to read a review of it by Geoff Dyer, a good writer and novelist who shares Boyd’s affection for cameras and photography, but who has not yet pronounced upon it. How accurate it is in terms of photographic information, of which there is an abundance  (always in my view quite interesting), I cannot say.

But my friend, a fellow music critic, has pointed out to me that it contains, as so many modern novels do, at least one musical howler, a reference to Bartok which is wrongly dated.  Read Ian McEwan’s novels to find some similar mishaps.

The next book of its kind, employing the twentieth century as its backdrop, will be from Sebastian Faulks.  Let us hope for the best.
7 September 2015

Why critics?

In a recent posting on the subject of  critics (see my blog “ Days of Yore”) my friend John Duffus asks if reviews really matter.

To be dismissed as a parasite - not that John goes that far - is something quite familiar to me, and I have my answers to such accusations. One of them is Kenneth Tynan’s definition of a critic as “someone who knows the way but cannot drive the car” - which has always struck me as a sharp, succinct observation. Once, quoting it to the conductor Sir Charles Groves in the course of an interview, I was interrupted by his wife, who was present and remarked proudly that “Sir Charles not only knows the way but can also drive the car.” Coming from a conductor’s wife, It was a neat riposte.

In fact, there are plenty of conductors  well qualified to drive the car - think of Herbert von Karajan - but who cannot be said to know the way, if their opinions and style are to be taken seriously (just consider  what Karajan had to say about the abilities of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, his Viennese rival).

But whether or not critics matter can perhaps seem a moot point. Do bad reviews stop people going to a show if they want to do so?  Does a good review prompt them to go to an  event they do not desire to attend?  Sometimes yes and sometimes no, it seems to me.

“Beyond the Fringe” may initially have received no more than moderately appreciative reviews but there was something about it which rightly caught public attention and its four protagonists went on to win world fame.

Some critics, such as Bernard Levin, gained readers because they were witty and vicious, but I do not think people were greatly deterred by him from going to what he despised. Edward Greenfield of The Guardian, on the other hand, was the kindest - and one of the most popular - of critics,  who never wrote a bad word against anyone, yet never lost his following.

Reviewing events - such as concerts - which are already in the past by the time the review is printed has understandably perturbed John Duffus, though I myself  see it  as a vital part of newspaper criticism. The critic as chronicler is invaluable to the art of reviewing, if he or she is a good enough writer, and the fact that an event is already over seems to me of no consequence.

Every review of a work, even  the most familiar of works, is an incident, however small, in the ongoing life of that work.  Andrew Porter, who died recently, was the supreme exponent of that sort of review, and wrote in a way which showed why his large-scale reviews were worth collecting, as they were in the five volumes of reviews he wrote for the New Yorker magazine.

In this respect Bernard Shaw, whose reviews are still deservedly in print, was Andrew’s forerunner, a lesson to us all. William Mann’s reviews for The Times were, alas, never collected, though he did produce two fine big operatic books, on Mozart and Strauss, filled with a musical journalist’s spirited knowledge.
3 September 2015