The Virtual Rambler

Number thirty: 14^th November 2012

On Rambling

An elderly man sits at a table in the downstairs room of his terraced cottage , right hand poised above an empty page. He is surrounded by several open books and other scraps of paper containing rough notes. Is this a caricature of the indigent modernist in poet’s corner , wrenching stanzas from the shadows ? Its the midnight Rambler ‘at work’ on his latest effusion. To what end are his nocturnal scribblings devoted ? As his ex-wife is fond of pointing out , never in the field of written endeavour was so much waffle read by so few. Why should he worry if he writes for an audience of one ? The books on the cluttered table are the four Modern Penguin volumes of George Orwell’s journalism , letters and essays.

Orwell was a privately unprepossessing man , Orwell was an astrigent political writer who told the tale of my parents’ world , in which Socialism represented for ordinary people the best means of bettering their lives. A world in which the lawyer was always a swindler , the vegetarian a fanatic and the scotsman always drunk and indecipherable. Where youth and adventure ended with marriage , as individual lives gave way to those glamourless figures , Mum and Dad.His gaunt features are those of a generation we encounter in underground shelters during the Blitz , during the evacuation from Dunkirk. His voice was often raised against the folly and stupidity of the ruling orders of his day (Communist and Capitalist alike) , at other times he quietly rambles over aspects of life that amused him , like boy’s comics and seaside postcards. Beset by ill-health and voluntary poverty until the post-war success of Animal Farm , he rambled from Burma to Paris , from civil war-torn Barcelona to Jura⁽¹⁾ and the hospital outside London where his rambling came to a premature end.

When men of my generation (with their childhood exposure to War comics) hear the German language being spoken , we mentally tune in for an “Alles in Ordnung ?” or a “Gott in Himmel !” My mother never left these shores herself and saw no reason why anyone else should ever want to. Hers was a generation whose mode of life was an allocated given , whose unchanging attitudes were moulded by the times they had lived through - but how those times started changing ! A multitude of life-styles to be adopted or discarded , as attitudes too became subject to all the restless whims of fashion. That generation had helped the Russians to win the war. In the month of my birth , May 1945 , Hitler shot himself and Germans in their tens of thousands killed themselves as the Red Army moved towards Berlin. How could they have known that in a few decades’ time , anything involving swastikas and the SS would flourish in documentaries produced on an industrial scale , while Soviet Russia would fade like Ancient Egypt into the history books ? Newsreels showed the statuesque Politburo on a balcony , square-jawed below their trilbies and fur hats as they reviewed another May day parade of missiles through Red Square below. They soon came to resemble those abandoned stone figures of Easter Island gazing out over the Pacific.

There are some identifiable motives for any sort of writing. The foremost of these is sheer egoism. All writers are vain and selfish , with something petulant and aimless about them , possessed as they are of the instinct that makes babies squall for attention. As it matures , this develops into a desire to appear before others as clever and well-read. Another means of getting your own back on an indifferent world , we might call it an aesthetic imperative to rise above the level of what Jonathan Meades calls our “cretinocracy” - a land of text and twitter , fit only for toddlers in adult’s clothing. Any self-respecting author’s prose should aim to be as free of clichés as demotic speech is full of them. Metaphorically speaking , there are those for whom rambling implies setting out in full dress uniform – anorak , boots , spare clothing , map and compass in the rucksack – for a targeted march from A to a distant B. Others pop out on whim , with no definite aim in mind , for what may turn out to be a short stroll or something more prolonged. Depending on how the mood takes them , a snooze in the lowland bracken is as likely as striding across some distant mountain ridge.


Wig

⁽¹⁾ On our last holiday in Scotland I persuaded my ex-wife to the Hebridean island of Jura , where Orwell elected to live out his last years writing 1984 and slowly dying from T.B. in his remote cottage. After our experience of camping on its deserted Atlantic beaches and trudging back across uninhabited moorland in driving rain , from which we emerged with deer-ticks camping in our groins , the Mediterranean became a subsequent destination for every annual holiday.

Archive

Virtual rambler #1 – Posturing, 9^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #2 – Managerialism, 17^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #3 – Nostalgia, 27^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #4 – The Alpha Male, 13^th April 2010
Virtual rambler #5 – General Elections, 3^rd May 2010
Virtual rambler #6 – The Leisure Industry, 15^th May 2010
Virtual rambler #7 – Guide to The World Cup, 15^th June 2010
Virtual rambler #8 – Human Nature, 12^th July 2010
Virtual rambler #9 – Communities, 13^th August 2010
Virtual rambler #10 – Worlds Apart, 6^th October 2010
Virtual rambler #11 – Dawdling, 22^nd November 2010
Virtual rambler #12 – ELVIS, 24^th December 2010
Virtual rambler #13 – Transience, 4^th February 2011
Virtual rambler #14 – Regional Accents, 15^th April 2011
Virtual rambler #15 – The Afterlife, 21^st July 2011
Virtual rambler #16 – Bizspeak, 27^th August 2011
Virtual rambler #17 – Night Walks, 3^rd October 2011
Virtual rambler #18 – Bob Dylan & Charles Dickens, 8^th November 2011
Virtual rambler #19 – Another Nutty Professor, 16^th December 2011
Virtual rambler #20 – Customer Choice, 17^th January 2012
Virtual rambler #21 – Wearing Shorts, 18^th February 2012
Virtual rambler #22 – A Brief History of Progress, 17^th March 2012
Virtual rambler #23 – The Myth of Sisyphus, 16^th April 2012
Virtual rambler #24 – Natural History, 20^th May 2012
Virtual rambler #25 – European Self-Importance, 26^th June 2012
Virtual rambler #26 – Sweet Dreams, 25^th July 2012
Virtual rambler #27 – Excess, 20^th August 2012
Virtual rambler #28 – In Denial, 20^th Setember 2012
Virtual rambler #29 – The Way, 21^st October 2012