News from Nowhere

- and still saving lives at sea. Happy birthday to the RNLI, 200 years old today!

I always thought that Christmas ended on Twelfth Night: January 6th, also known as Epiphany, the day the three kings finally arrived at the stable. That's when decorations must be taken down, right? Then valydiarosada pointed out that if you count twelve days from Christmas Day, the twelfth day, the one with all the inconvenient gifts from your true love, is January 5th. There's no arguing with this: once you count it out, it's obvious. Christmas ends on January 5th, and the following day, Christians celebrate the coming of the Magi. Two related festivals on successive days suggest that something has gone wrong, and that Occam's Razor should be applied, but that's how it is. So today is not Twefth Night. I expect everybody except me already knew that.

Thursday wasn't Twelfth Night either, but it was that date of Phantoms, a now-traditional event which has come to mark the end of our Christmas. Originally 'Phantoms at the Phil', from its location in Newcastle's magnificent private library, it consists of a trio of spine-chilling tales newly written and read by their authors to a delighted audience. This year the Phantoms had exorcised themselves from the Lit & Phil only to settle a short distance along the road in Prohibition. Downstairs this is a bar haunted by its past existence as a jazz café, but upstairs -



- well, I think durham_rambler's photo does a good job of conveying the combination of old-fashioned comfort and ghostly unreality. Gail-Nina Anderson (left, shielding her eyes against the light) said it resembled a well-heeled bordello, but while there was certainly an abundance of drapery, there was also something of the gentlemen's club, or the sort of library on whose floor the master of the house will be discovered, horribly murdered. Sean O'Brien, right, looked entirely at home there. Out of shot, keeping a safe distance from these two sinister apparitions, was guest speaker David Almond.

We habitually refer to Phantoms as 'an evening of ghost stories', but actual ghosts are in a minority: some years there are none at all. This year Gail-Nina's story was a characteristic blend of disturbing iconography and parish gossip: something nasty in the chapel of Saint Anthony Abbot; Sean's trademark horror crept up despite the daylight and open windows of an artist's workroom (am I inventing the Mediterranean sunshine?). It was David who gave us an actual ghost dispatched back whence it came, and left us - well, left me, at any rate, wondering whether this was a good thing.

There's a widespread assumption that things are more interesting if they can be attatched to an anniversary of some sort - as if things that aren't interesting one day become magically interesting the next. This is just marketing, and my automatic reaction is to resist.

What, then, should I make of the declaration that 2022 is the 1900th anniversary of the construction of Hadrian's Wall? (What, all in one year? Mo, of course not.) Even sillier, the year of celebrations starts today, which is Hadrian's birthday: how obliging of him to be born so near the beginning of the year!

Well, any excuse for a party, and some of the events sound fun: I'm sorry to miss the Emperor taking a bubble bath in the bath house at Ravenglass. (Why have I never been to Ravenglass? It's not actually on the Wall, of course, but the Roman defensive frontier extends down the west coast, and could be worth exploring...).

If poliphilo had not posted that his mother, born in 1921, was celebrating her 100th birthday, I might not have realised that wait a minute, my mother was born in 1921, or indeed that 1921 was 100 years ago. But she was, and it is, so today, although she is not around to celebrate it, is my mother's hundredth birthday.

I don't know what to say about this, but it feels necessary to say something. She loved a party. Here she is, having fun, making mischief, and all in a good cause. (She wasn't Mayoress of Islington, she was Mayor - among many other things she was, but that's the Press for you!)

Today is a day durham_rambler and I observe as a significant anniversary.

For a short sentence, that one carries a number of footnotes. For one thing, it's not a wedding anniversary, since we never did the wedding, so we aren't limited to a single day in each year, but yeah, an anniversary of significance to us (also in the sense that it's - actually, I couldn't quite believe this when I first worked it out, but it is a 50th anniversary. Good grief!) For another, when I say we observe it, we are not punctilious about having celebrations on the actual date, and in fact durham_rambler has gone into Newcastle for the evening, to attend a meeting about (I think) WordPress plug-ins - which is why I am here and posting. But we did go out to lunch, at the Garden House: pub food with pretensions, but very pleasant (top tip: it is worth paying 50p extra for the triple-cooked chips).

Yesterday we went to see A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, curious to see how see how something as essentially undramatic as a profile of Mr Rogers could support a feature film, anf encouraged by the Guardian's glowing review. We both emerged saying, well, that was interesting, but what I'd really like is to read the article it's based on. Thanks to Eaquire magazine, it's right here: and while I enjoyed the visual charm of the film, particularly in the use of the miniature town- (and city-) scapes, the article wins in its richness and nuance as a portrait. The film is handicapped by its rather saccharine plot (there is both hugging and learning) in which the fictionalised journalist is healed by Mr Rogers' intervention.

I would not have known that tonight is Rosh Hashanah if it weren't for sovay, who has been cooking honey cakes: my calendar and my diary both tell me that daylight saving starts today in New Zealand, but don't mention the New Year. This can't be right.

But who am I to complain? We dined this evening on pork and mushrooms with sour cream, and that isn't right (well, it isn't appropraiate) either...

Despite which, here's wishing us all a sweeter year than the last one!

Over breakfast durham_rambler read me the highlights from Today's Birthdays in the Guardian. He always checks these, but it seems that February 15th is a particularly good day for cartoonists: Art Spiegelman is 71, Matt Groening is 65 and the Guardian's very own Martin Rowson is 60.

I couldn't find the Guardian listing online to link to, but On this Day confirms the first two, and since, unlike the Guardian, it doesn't restrict itself to the birthdays of the living, adds that it is also the birthday of Galileo, Michael Praetorius, Susan B. Anthony and Ernest Shackleton. And if that's not grounds for a party, I don't know what is.

Meanwhile, I was reading in yesterday's paper about micrococktails, but this is entirely unrelated, as nothing in the article would be welcome at any of my parties. For a start, the sugar-content is immense: the sweetness has been dialled down, says the article, over the last decade, but recommended mixes include Pernod absinthe, watermelon syrup and lemon juice; hot sake with gingerbread syrup; and a cocktail of mushroom vodka, maple syrup and chipotle – "Our interpretation of port," says the manager of the establishment where a small measure of this is served with the cheese course. I read this out loud to durham_rambler, and his response came out in unison with my comment: if you want port with your cheese course, why not serve port with your cheese course? (white port, in my case).

But we are old fogeys, and there are people on my f-list who are more cocktail-savvy than I am. So tell me, internets, are these drinks - err - drinkable? If a bartender offers you a shot from his bottle of Ferrari (half Fernet Branca, half Campari), do you feel like an insider, or do you suspect a wind-up? (I carry a little bottle of alicumpane...)

Here we are at last, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the hundredth year, and I am pretty much poppied out. I have been genuinely touched by many moments of commemoration and reflection during the past four years, and some of them have involved the imagery of the poppy (I wish I had seen the Weeping Window in one of its manifestations...). But as the hour approached, and the crocheted poppies have spread across the country, and FB group for the local paper's camera club has become more and more speckled with red and the declaration "We will remember them..." is appended to every photoshopped image... I'm sure it's all very sincere (even the 'poppy run' which I initially thought was an ultimate piece of cashing in, turns out to be a British Legion fundraiser, so I guess they are entitled) but I think more and more bitterly of that 'war to end all wars', and how it didn't.

I must already have been starting to feel this way last month, at the Lakes Comics Festival launch for the Traces of the Great War anthology, because I was particular attracted by the invitation not just to "remember" but to consider what came after, what marks the war has left on us today. It opens with a challenge from Robbie Morrison and Charlie Adlard. They have written before about White Death, the use of avalanches in mountain warfare, which continues to release the bodies of its dead: how would today's teenagers react to this very material trace of war? Mary and Bryan Talbot examine the demand for Germany to make reparation for the past war, and how this helped cause the next one (reflected in Mikiko's depiction of the German side of remembrance: there are no winners in war... only hunger, suffering, death, grief...). Other contributions point out that in Russia the war is eclipsed by the revolution it surely helped to trigger; Orijit Sen, meanwhile, chooses to remind us of the pressures that sent a 'Ship of Liberty' from India to Canada, and back.

Perversely, among all this internationalism, the two pages which most move me are the double page spread in which Simon Armitage and Dave McKean consider that most parochial residue of the war, the village memorial, with its list of names:

...what better way
to monumentalise
the dead and lost

within the clockwork
of the mind

than honour them
with stone and time

As a counter to this intensely local meditation of the act of memory, and again perversely, contradicting anything I may have said about welcoming the book's emphasis of traces, residue, looking back, I am particularly grateful for the contribution of Riff Reb's, which introduced me to the haikus of Julien Vocance. I know that it's too much to ask that a book published simultaneously in English and French should also produce a bilingual edition, just for me: but here, more than with any other contribution, I wished that was possible. Three cheers for the internet: here are the original haikus, one hundred visions of war, written on the moment in the trenches, panoramas of ruined countryside and tiny close-ups, moments of horror and moments of rest. (This essay on haiku in the Great War gives some examples with English translations.)

There's only one way to conclude this incoherent collection of thoughts and emotions: