The end of an era

And so it seems, Bobby Manc is no more.

No more the insouciant flick of the sliver-ash-blond locks with the manicured hands.

No more the great question of the fruit pastilles: were Brian and David allowed the black ones, Roberto, or not?

Mass before big matches and elegies to departed popes at press conferences …

The scarf: traditional but worn with Italian flair to go with those immaculate suits.

Oh dear.

As if Saturday’s Cup Final wasn’t bad enough, now Manchester City have gone and sacked coach Roberto Mancini in what could best be described as a ‘tactless’ manner.

Just so we get this clear – I’m gutted. I love Bobby Manc.

I love him, quite simply, because he has been the one who has been the coach when my beloved Blues (supported for nearly 40 years – eek!) have finally remembered how to win.

I will love him for ever for last year’s title win alone: the sheer drama of it, agony to ecstasy in three minutes flat, will never leave me.

For goodness sake – there’s a Mancini bobblehead on a shelf in the study (where all my kitschest things live).

Look, I admit it: City is the one major area in my life where I can get a bit irrational. By the very nature of our fandom, we are emotional and generally predisposed to irrationality.

But what I want to do here is to try to change that and to be more rational.

It’s not easy: we don’t know the full facts – and probably never will – and there’s an element of piecing together a jigsaw from a box that is only partly full and has no picture of what the finished puzzle should look like.

But let’s give it a whirl.

The media talk has, for some months, concentrated on the poor showing in this season’s Champions’ League.

In the later stages of the season, that has been compounded by the inability to defend the Premier League title, and then by Saturday’s defeat.

Some of this has been over the top.

There have been problems this season that we were fortunate enough not to have last term: injuries, for one.

The defence has remained sound and we’ve continued to dominate games – the key issue has been an inability to convert chances into goals this time around.

It wasn’t helped when, 10 minutes into the season, Sergio Aguero was injured and subsequently played no part for a month, then struggled to find form.

Mario Balotelli was out at the same time with eye problems. He never found form on his return and, as everyone knows, left in January. Edin Džeko is another who has found consistency hard to come by.

Under those circumstances, a second-place finish is hardly a disaster – although we fans probably have slightly different expectations and agendas than the owners.

But the club’s own statement on the sacking of Mancini included a very interesting word: “holistic”.

It seems that his relationships with the players have been poor – we know that there have been rows. Last season there was, of course, the entire debacle over Carlos Tevez.

This season, with Joe Hart, with Samir Nasri, with Balotelli (of course) and even – and perhaps this was the most shocking – with Vincent Kompany.

And those are the ones we know about.

Now the ‘hairdryer’ approach, as it might be called, can pay dividends – it has for a certain Scot – but if you never balance that with something rather less aggressive, it’s easy to see that there could be problems.

Indeed, I’d also suggest that, while we as fans might find some of this incredibly entertaining, it’s probably not particularly fun if you’re a player or a member of staff who is on the receiving end of such things.

There is an argument, indeed, that it amounts to workplace bullying, for which there should be no place – and it doesn’t suddenly become acceptable or easy to live with or something you should simply ‘put up with’ if you’re earning over X amount or simply because you’re a footballer and not a hospital cleaner.

For clarity, I don’t think City have an issue with ‘player power’ in the sense that it’s generally understood, although I continue to maintain that background issues may have been, in part, what was behind Saturday’s poor performance.

But let’s explore further.

Given Mancini’s rants about Brian Marwood and last summer’s transfer business, and then the weekend’s lambasting of the club for not dealing with the rumours of his own departure, it’s possible to conclude that that combustible approach to man management might also have been carried over into his relationships with club executives, if not the owners themselves.

Next up, is the issue of the club’s academy. If our long-term future is not totally dependent on developing our own players, it will certainly be very important – not least because of rules on spending.

The suggestion is that Mancini has not been interested in this part of the club’s development.

Again, this is something we have to take partly on trust, although the dearth of young players coming into the first team over the last three years (beyond his initial enthusiasm for Dedryck Boyata) may indicate a truth to this point – particularly as we have many potentially good young players at the club.

But finally, I want to dispel the idea that the way in which this sacking has taken place is somehow worse than any other in the game or in our own history.

It’s not. It may not have been good, but it’s not incredibly worse than any other.

And as but one brief illustration, I offer the case of Peter Reid, who was dumped, at the start of a season, for having the temerity to hold out on his own new contract in order to secure a pledge of funds for new players.

He’d done remarkably well in the seasons previously and wanted to take the club forward.

For the then owner, Peter Swales, that wasn’t on. He was sacked and Brian Horton appointed.

City fans themselves were so outraged that they launched the campaign that eventually saw Swales leave, to be replaced as chairman by Francis Lee.

So please let’s not be too rosy-tinted about the past. Or imagine that any problems are simply because the owners are not local.

A sacking is never easy – and Mancini might do well to remember that he himself was appointed on the back of one – and when they take place in the full glare of publicity, they’re even less likely to be handled in some sort of perfect way.

For City, the last few years have seen us rise from general laughing stock to a club that the media is hungry for daily stories about, even if it has to make them up.

As a club, we need to learn to deal rather better with rumours, but generally I think that we’re on the right track.

I know some fans are worried that things might now implode. But personally, I doubt that will happen. To start with, if it’s true that relations between coach and players were strained, then it’s unlikely anyone will be wanting away.

Any incoming coach will inherit the core of a very good team – albeit one that does need changes in order to develop and grow – together with everything that the planned Etihad Campus and emphasis on youth development will bring.

To conclude: Roberto – thank you for the last three years. And all the very best for the future. There is absolutely no chance that we will ever forget you.

Addio signore.

For my fellow fans – a new era awaits us. And CTWD.*

* City Til We Die.

A weekend of two halves

The jester

To borrow from a rather famous sporting cliché – it was a weekend of two halves.

First up, Saturday (although obviously you knew that anyway).

But Saturday just gone was FA Cup Final day – and I had a ticket for the match, with Manchester City set for their second final in three seasons, this time, against Wigan.

Now by this time you’ll all know that we lost.

And let it be said that the best team on the day won: Wigan coach Roberto Martinez got his tactics spot on, using very limited resources to cram midfield and stifle our attack, but without ever resorting to niggly or dirty play.

For City, Yaya Touré was quite clearly unfit; Sergio Aguero and Carlos Tevoz had little or no service, and … well, given all the stuff going on in the background was certainly not helping, that was essentially that.

So congratulations to Wigan – you deserved it. And that is the romance of the cup – and long may it continue.

What made the day rather more bearable from a personal perspective was that I was with good company and that, as a result, the craic was good.

We started at in a pub at King’s Cross at 1pm with lunch – and not just the liquid variety, although the Skinner’s Arms does do decent ale as well as cooking lager.

The pasta

I opted for pasta – which reassuringly lines the stomach – with capers and garlic and chili, and it was not bad at all.

And then we headed for Wembley itself, taking a train that allowed us to walk down Wembley Way – the iconic route.

And yes – I admit it now – I bought a jester hat. Hey – it had to be done. After all, it now entertains the cats.

The atmosphere before the match was wonderful – no need to separate all the fans – and the atmosphere after was fine too.

Let’s pass over the game itself any more than noted above.

Hey ho hum – this is all part and parcel of the experience of being a real fan.

It’s impossible to get on a train straight away after a Wembley match, and hardly easy to get into a local pub. But one of our number knew of a local Catholic social club that opens its doors on match days.

We headed there for the wake, joined by something like 150 other City fans, and with community singing to accompany the cooking lager. This is what, in the darkest times – and they have been far worse than this weekend – have still made it special and worthwhile.

It was around about 11pm when I made it home – surprisingly still largely in a decent state.

The wake

The Other Half had retired, but on receipt of a text had put the oven on before so doing.

I slipped a Pieminster fish pie into the oven, half-heartedly teased the cats with my jangly hat, and waited until my supper was ready.

After that, the only possible place to go was my pit.

And there I stayed until yesterday morning, which dawned bright and sunny.

It was a morning that demanded time in the garden. First of all, though, a trip to Hackney Road was required to pick up a couple of framed pictures – not least, my Günter Grass lithograph.

Then, serious gardening time.

The runner beans had been going so completely mad that they couldn’t have stayed in the grow house a day longer without bending below the lid.

All three went outside. As did the three broad bean plants and one pea plant. For the beans, both varieties had new bamboo pyramids constructed – the runners are already up to the first level of string.

I raked away vast amounts of pink blossom from the tree above the potager: having finally come into bloom so late, the weather had then battered it into early submission with heavy winds over a number of days, leaving the delicate petals lying, like pink, drifted snow, across the carpark and flower beds.

The weather, which had stayed clear to this point, started to change. Clouds gathered to chunter among themselves. The merest hint of rain dropped.

I battled on.

New sowings of carrots and turnips went in, as the older ones finally show real development.

Then a new cloche, with spring onions, radishes, lettuce and chard underneath, sown generously in the hope that such largesse will eventually mean at least something to harvest.

And in the meantime, the blackcurrant bush looks serene as grows in splendid health.

Perhaps most astonishing of all, one of the peas – just a small one, really – is producing the first pea flowers of the season; a delicate white and pale green.

The brave little cat

So finally, the potager looks to be producing the first hints of harvests to come.

Much is still to be done – but these are the sort of things that revive the spirits after depleting times.

And if that wasn't enough, a half leg of hogget, roasted with Jersey Royals, baby leek and asparagus, was more than enough to do it.

Indeed, it wasn't enough, because then there was mad little Otto deciding that she was absolutely not putting up with local semi-ferel cat Reggie, who is SO much bigger than her, being in her carpark. And backing him into a corner and then sending him off in a flurry of claw-tipped paws.

Remarkable.

Sunlight and geekiness

Belis

If not quite the uninterrupted sun that, until the early hours of the morning, the BBC had been consistently forecasting for several days, but nonetheless, Monday turned out to be the best bank holiday in ... well, for quite some time.

And one nurses a hope that the weather itself realises just how much we need a proper, sustained period of good weather.

Windows were pushed open even before people had seriously decanted themselves from slumber; wood creaking and spraying around the accumulated dust and grime of some eight months of being closed against the gloom and damp and cold.

Sunday had seen a bout of serious tidying in the garden, with bedding plants packed in around the lemon tree, whose surrounding soil, naked against the forgotten heat, was drying out too quickly.

Ever-reliable violas, purple with a yellow face; sweet William, yet to flower, and belis, in delicate strawberry and cream garb.

The tidying produced a number of small snails, all instantly crushed and disposed of. The campaign starts early this year and with some knowledge to begin this struggle.

Dying tulip.

Frankly, much of the rest of the weekend has been spent in sitting outside, writing. Which is partly what a garden should be for.

And yesterday, The Other Half cooked springbok steaks and boervors over a fire, to be served simply with a bread roll and good mustard.

The first braai of the year was consumed with relish. Otto rushed back through the gate the moment it was ready: she may have a smaller appetite than the other cats, but her ears are perfectly attuned to the sound of food being served and what she lacks in appetite, she more than makes up for in the gourmand stakes.

All three of the cats relished a day when they could potter around, in and out of the flat as they pleased, for the best part of eight hours.

Belis.

If you get your hands on any springbok, then like deer, it’s very lean and needs handling with a little care.

The Other Half rubbed olive oil into these and left them between plates, at room temperature, for some time before cooking.

And then, as always, you don’t cook over actual flames, thus reducing the chances of the Great British Uncooked Sausage Syndrome.

It’s actually difficult to get your head around just how quickly the weather has changed.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the nights were still dipping close to or below freezing, and bed was a place to snuggle down into.

Now, as if somehow we’ve had the whole of a conventional spring wedged into that intervening two or three weeks, the temperatures are well up and, at night, it’s almost a question of throwing back the covers to keep from getting over hot.

Violas.

Has there really ever been a winter-spring like it?

And almost as suddenly, everything is in – or coming into – flower and leaf.

One week out of the country and the silver birches in the carpark were suddenly green – and even the planes, always late to turn green, are now close to it.

And even the dying flowers have their own beauty – something that I tried to capture in a brief photographic safari around the garden.

In such conditions, surely spring cleaning is inevitable?

Purple.

I did some – well, sort of: assuming you can call attempting to tidy my iPod and iTunes ‘tidying’ and don't expect something more akin to Mole's efforts in Wind in the Willows.

It was mostly a question of trying to impose some order onto the rather grotty new version, which seems determined to create chaos, particularly in my large (and growing) classical music section.

This, geeky as it sounds, also brought about my ranting moment of the weekend, as I tried to change details and import cover art, which the present system seems remarkably reluctant to do all by itself.

And when you’re scrolling through an iPod, having cover art is a nice, helpful way of identifying what you have and what you want.

And, oh goodness – more of it this evening.

Okay, it's not just the software developers' problem – it is quite astonishing just how many albums appear to have a choice of four or more lots of data when you're importing them.

Then, of course, there is no consistency in the basic labels are arranged: for instance, some stuff comes in as R Strauss, while others come in as Strauss (R). But this rather screws with any hopes of an ordered list.

The solution, then, is to change the data, but the new version of iTines seems intent on making it more difficult to find and then fully highlight the required album. And this is a long-term project to digitise and organise the whole of a rather large collection.

Technology – wonderful when it works, and a complete pain in the proverbial when you find yourself struggling with it!

Perspectives on Buddenbrooks

The (white) house on Mengstraße, from the Marienkirche.

Time flies. And it's already nearly four weeks since my departure for Lübeck. But the end of that trip was not the end of the story.

Quite apart from anything else, there was still my reread of Buddenbrooks to complete. And completed it has been, with the benefits of insights gained from a variety of sources.

I was about to say that my first reading of it, back in 2001, was flawed. But that's not the case. It was a face-value reading and I loved it as such.

But whereas my subsequent readings of Thomas Mann fed a view that it was a straightforward novel, a reappraisal leaves me thinking quite differently.

Long regarded as being close to an historic record of life in 19th century Lübeck, it's far more than that. I touched, in an earlier blog, on some of the themes, and particularly that of coming modernity. But as my background reading widens, it's possible to see much, much more in it.

It is a novel of layers. There's nothing wrong with reading and enjoying it as a straightforward family saga, but it has a lot more going for it. And a great deal of that is related to philosophical ideas of the time.

The title - or more accurately, the subtitle – is crucial. It charts the "decline" of a family. And it certainly does do just that: the business, the political influence and the reputation and status, built up over generations, are whittled away.

But the interesting question is why the decline occurs and whether, indeed, Mann meant it simply to represent something negative, which is how we tend to automatically interpret that word.

The Buddenbrook family does not simply decline: what happens is a metamorphosis.

The change, simply, is that over three generations, introspection and philosophical and cultural awareness develop.

We open with old Johann presiding over a housewarming party on Mengstraße. A merchant with little thought for intellectual matters, he has brought his house to its highest point.

Yet even as he himself nears death, he is starting to look around and question.

For his son, also Johann, such questioning takes the form of religious piety - something that the father lacked.

 But in his the younger Johann's sons, that changes again. First, the younger of the two, Christian, sufferers from childhood fears and panics and doubts that turn, as he grows, into self-indulgent and ill-disciplined self obsession.

Later, the older son, Tom, who has taken over the business, also finds himself grappling with questions about the very meaning of his existence. Indeed, at the end of Tom's life, we have an episode that is little other than existential angst.

And then finally there is Hanno, Tom's son, whose own, juvenile philosophical internal discussion leaves him, at 15, with a death wish as he views what he believes to be the utter pointlessness of life.

Only his own music - and hearing the likes of Wagner's Lohengrin - gives him a feeling of any meaning.

There are a number of things going on here, and many of them are reflections of the influences, philosophical and artistic, on Mann at the time, and more widely, of 19th century German philosophy and art.

We have moved by stages from an essentially simple internal life to a complex one in those three generations. This is the root of the decline from 'vitality' - a Nietzschian idea - to one of philosophical and artistic contemplation and action, which itself is in keeping with Wagner's post-religious belief in the centrality of art to human life.

At its most simple (as I understand it, in other words) Nietzsche's idea of vitality is about being energised and lively - without introspection. The conflict occurs when you have that internal growth, which is desirable, but which diminishes the vitality.

In Nietzchean terms, vitality was represented by the blonde, blue-eyed archetype: it's was not created by or unique to Nietzsche, and while we know where it went, he did not use it to represent some idea of racial perfection.

But this explains to us what Mann means, in the late stages of Buddenbrooks, when he represents the fellow pupils that Hanno and his equally intellectually inclined friend Kai are isolated from as being blonde and blue-eyed.

It's so easy to think now that this is so much bunk, but it makes great sense. From a personal perspective, I see how my own immediate family has 'declined' as each new generation has explored the same issues more and more.

My father came from rural, working-class stock, but moved beyond that - including simple, rural religious belief - into the clergy. It's probably fair to say I've gone further still in terms of the 'philosophical life', and certainly the artistic one.

It's a pattern that is partly reflected in the declining size of families.

We know that, when women have educational and career opportunities (internal growth), the birth rate declines - in Karela in India, ensuring this is the case for women has resulted in precisely such a decline in population growth to some 40% below the national average, with concomitant declines in infant and maternal mortality, and rises in life expectancy.

So while it's easy to view the idea of decline in Buddenbrooks as negative, it has a concomitant benefit - personal growth.

It ties in too, with the German idea of bildung, which I'm not going to claim I understand in detail, but seems, in essence, to be the personal quest for knowledge and understanding: growth in the internal life, in effect.

So hence the German Bildungsroman is 'a novel of ideas' - and Mann was arguably the last true exponent of that, taking it right into the post-war era.

All this in turn offers a clearer picture of what the Nazis misappropriated from Nietzsche (and others) and why Buddenbrooks specifically was burnt as a 'degenerate' work of art, on that night in Berlin, exactly 80 years ago this month.

Bildung - central to the German renaissance - was the antithesis of Nazi ideology, while unthinking 'vitality' was its lifeblood.

And it is one of the tragic ironies of history that it was not a disaffected older generation that organised the book burnings in 1933, but students.

But back to the book.

Another aspect is the increasing passivity of the Buddenbrooks by generation, which also corresponds to intellectual/artistic questing.

Old Johann plays the flute - but it is not Mozart that he plays, and there is no indication that he plays with particular fretting for any deeper emotional meaning or as 'art' - the same can be said of the poet, Hoffstede, who delivers a poem at the housewarming.

Rathaus, chancellery & Marienkirche

Yet within two generations, Gerda, Hanno's mother, is playing her violin in exactly that manner: music has become a vital part of her own internal life - and Hanno follows in her footsteps, taking it further.

But while old Johann's son continues the businesses, with moderate success, his increased religiosity reduces his vitality and it doesn't go forward with the same vigour.

Christian is redundant where the family business is concerned, as his introspection has already consumed him. To begin with, Tom makes progress with the family firm, but he reaches a point where it ceases to give his life meaning, and his own existential angst starts to hamper him and the business.

It eventually leads to him reading some philosophy (presumed to be Schopenhauer), shortly before he dies.

By now we have another reflection of vitality - or a lack of it - represented by bad teeth. A fatal stroke directly follows a nasty visit to the dentist for Johann, while Hanno has problems with his teeth from birth.

It's an idea that crops up again in Mann's masterpiece of a novella, Death in Venice (1912), with Aschenbach observing that Tadzio's poor dental state probably indicates that he will die young.

And it works at quite a specific level to illustrate the contrast between vitality and inward growth, when Hanno is rewarded for a series of painful dental visits with a trip to the theatre to see Lohengrin.

But back to the passivity. It reaches its apotheosis in the book with Hanno, who does nothing to defend himself from the bullying of those blonde, blue-eyed types, but accepts in a the manner of a martyr.

Interestingly, Kai - who wants to be a novelist - does strike out to defend his friend on one occasion: an indication, perhaps, of the next stage of development, where the internal life can combine more with the vital one?

In his book, Aspects of Wagner, Bryan Magee points out the passivity of Wagner's characters. While he represents the internal life in a way that no other composer had come close to, he also leaves his characters as being recipients of actions rather than causing actions.

And this is reflected in Buddenbrooks, with Hanno as the ultimate realisation of it.

Mann's characters develop beyond this in his later works - to mention Death in Venice again, Aschenbach almost falls victim to the same attitude, but earns his ultimate 'salvation' by recognising his duty, wrenching himself out of this state and warning Tadzio's mother of the disease bringing havoc to the city.

Perhaps it should be argued that the very search for inward development is the antithesis of passivity?

However, to return to Buddenbrooks, though, from the perspective of my visit to Lübeck.

Such a visit gives a deeper sense of a novel, certainly, but it can also offer specific insights.

For me, the central benefit came from understanding the physical and political make up of the old city itself.

Where the Dom (cathedral) had been built some way away from the Rathaus (town hall), the Marienkirche was built right next to it - and built bigger and more splendidly - creating a corner of  the Altstadt that was the centre of mercantile power and achievement. The court for the whole of the Hanseatic League sat in the Rathaus.

The house on Mengstraße is simply across the street from the church. It could hardly be closer to those seats of power and authority and achievement.

By contrast, when Tom decides to build a new house for himself and his family, he moves away from Mengstraße to Fischergrube.

Eventually, the house on Mengstraße is sold too - to Tony Buudenbrook's enduring chagrin, to an upcoming family that she sees as rivals.

And ultimately, the remaining Buddenbrooks find themselves living beyond the Holstentor, outside the old city itself.

Travamünde operates as an interesting contrast to the city.

In general terms, it is somewhere that is closer to nature, yet it is far from immune to internal development.

While summering there to escape the attentions of Bendix Grünlich, Tony comes as close to internal development as possible, both directly in her relationship with Morten, a trainee doctor, and also less directly, in her spending time "on the rocks" in lonely contemplation.

But Tony's opportunities for such reflection are limited by conventional demands to marry well, and she never again comes close to such learning. Indeed, we can read the rest of her role in the novel not simply as comedic, but also as indicative of the restrictive role of the conventions of both Lübeck specifically and the period more generally on women.

Beyond this, food has an interesting, if minor, role to play.

The housewarming that opens the novel is a feast - and one that, straight away, gives the child Christian a serious attack of indigestion.

Family doctor Grabow advises a lighter diet for a while, musing at the same time that such a heavy one is what ultimately sees off most of his patients.

But the earliest sign of Christian's own growing and unhealthy introspection comes a short while later in his panic at imagining choking on a peach stone, and his trouble with swallowing that follows it.

It is not indigestion from good eating that will bring about the decline of the Buddenbrooks, but indigestion of a different, more cerebral variety.

Overall, it's important to stress that all of this is written in a dispassionate and ironic style: it is far from a depressing or po-faced book.

It's also too easy to say that Mann sympathised exclusively with the exchange of vitality for inward growth, with passivity as an outward.

Although there are substantial autobiographical aspects in the novel - it's certainly easy to see Mann himself in both Tom and Hanno - his own dedication to his art, itself perhaps a continuation of the Protestant work ethic of northern Europe, illustrates how he himself always related that art to something other than an apparent lethargy.

There is humour here too. Near the end, as Hanno recalls the previous evening's performance of Lohengrin, is the following: "It was true that the music of the overture was too much for the cheap violins in the orchestra ..." which did make me laugh out loud.

And there are times too when Tony is, in her absolute lack of self awareness, hilarious, although Mann never overdoes the fun he pokes. At the end, she is a tragic figure.

There are issues with translation. HT Lowe-Porter did an immense job in providing the first translations of Mann's work for English-language readers, but it is far from flawless.

In his introduction to his own translation of Death in Venice, David Luke slams Lowe-Porter's work, not least because she also removed things she didn't like.

But some of the flaws are obvious even for someone with a very limited knowledge of the language themselves.

When a character is translated as presenting a meal with the words, "good appetite", even I know there are problems. That is a literal translation of 'guten Appetit'', but it doesn't mean that any more than 'bon appétit' means 'good appetite'. The nearest would be 'enjoy you meal' or even, simply, 'enjoy'.

She also had a tendency to use archaic words where they're not needed, which can give Buddenbrooks a rather older feel than it should have.

Mann acknowledged Lowe-Porter's work, but would never be drawn to criticise her: he said instead that his English was not good enough to allow that.

Hopefully, better translations will come about. And in the meantime, I shall return to my own German studies with greater vigour, determined that one day I might be able to read them in the original.

Buddenbrooks, then, can be read on a number of levels. But digging deeper is a fascinating and rewarding exercise, and helps to emphasise just what an extraordinarily precocious literary debut this was.


• The covers illustrated above are from, top, the Vintage 1999 edition. The second, is a German edition, with the original cover design, which I bought at Buddenbrookhaus.

Lübeck and Travamünde – reprocessed

Just for a change – well, it's supposed to be as good as a rest, isn't it? – here are a selection of pictures from Lübeck and Travamünde.

They've been reprocessed and all can be double clicked to reveal larger versions. They are, in effect, my 'postcard shots'.

In the Lübeck shots in particular, they are attempts to capture the classic vistas of the city.

Rites of spring

It has been a rite of spring for some years: the moment when the grapevine relates the news that – whisper it with reverence – the first Jersey Royals and the first English asparagus of the season are available.

The pilgrimage is then undertaken to Borough Market, which is guaranteed to be the first place where I’ll be able to find these reminders of the joys of seasonality.

Admittedly they won’t be cheap, these first specimens, but they go beyond simply being food and into something special: they are the first concrete statement that spring is with us and there is no turning back.

Last year, that pilgrimage came at the very end of March.

In 2011, it was in mid April. The year before? Within a few days of that. In 2009 – 10 April.

Last weekend – in the very dying embers of April – some asparagus was available on Broadway Market, but it was poor.

So when The Other Half took the day off yesterday, since he was contemplating a braai for this weekend, I gently hinted that he should make the journey to London Bridge, where he could obtain boerewors from the South African speciality shop underneath the station – and then head into Borough Market itself to track down these seasonal joys in these unseasonal days.

That’s more than a month later than the earliest occasion in the last five years, and a good three weeks later than the latest. Which tells you a great deal about just how bad this spring has been – or perhaps more accurately, how long winter was.

Last night’s meal, of simply grilled lamb chops, with homemade mint sauce (a bundle of mint, leaves picked and blitzed briefly, with a pinch of salt, a good pinch of sugar and red wine vinegar to bring together), boiled Jerseys, and fine beans with English asparagus, butter and good salt, was more of a real celebration than anything that Easter could offer.

It had, instead, real, serious pleasure in the seasonal meaning that came with it: tastes and textures and colours that are utterly those of the spring.

This early in the season, you pay a premium, but by Odin, it’s worth it.

Today, on Broadway Market, the asparagus was much improved and Mark had organic Jerseys. The young lad serving me took my rather full bag and pointed out, slightly nervously, that it was not cheap.

Oh, I knew that. But sometimes you just have to do such things – and my soul has been crying out for this for weeks.

This is my rite of spring, no less. And such things have importance.

Not that it’s the only rite of spring I’ve been paying attention to recently.

For the last week I’ve been doing a job that requires concentration and patience, yet does not occupy the mind fully.

There are times when sticking headphones on and listening to music aids concentration anyway, but with this, it’s done that – and yet there has still been enough brain space left over to actually appreciate the music.

Since I’ve also been reading Bryan Magee’s excellent short book, Aspects of Wagner, old Dickie has featured rather heavily: various bits and orchestral pieces, a disc of tenor Jonas Kaufmann singing various arias – and the whole of Das Rheingold (Solti and the Vienna Phil).

But this also made me want to go back and revisit other composers – first, Berlioz, because I recalled a similar gut reaction to part of his Symphone Fantastique as I get with Wagner; and second, Stravinsky, because I wanted to see whether The Rite of Spring in particular produced a similar, primal response.

Well, I was essentially correct in what I remembered of the Berlioz (who was obviously influenced by Wagner). At least it was the certainly the case in the fifth and final movement, Dreams of a Witches' Sabbath.

In the case of Stravinsky, Magee says that he was one of the very few post-Wagner composers who was not influenced by him (although he notes that Stravinsky’s teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, had a picture of Wagner in his study).

But if one key aspect of Wagner’s music – and one of the things that disquiets some people – is that it gets you in the gut, as well as being cerebral, then the same can most certainly be argued of Stravinsky’s ballet.

A century old this year, its Paris premiere caused a riot. We Brits, of course, merely got a bit noisy, but it still upset the first London audience a few weeks later.

Now it’s entirely feasible that the prime cause of outrage was the choreography of Ballets Russe director, Sergei Diaghilev.

It is an idea of spring that is far from a European pastoral one: indeed, its subtitle, Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts, leaves no doubt that this is far from any Christianised vision.

Let’s face it – a young woman is chosen as a sacrifice and dances herself to death.

But the score itself must have been equally as startling for the first audiences – and even today it has a power that goes beyond concert hall politeness. It too aims for the gut; for the primal, for instinct within us.

In that sense, Stravinsky was following in Wagner’s footsteps, taking music yet further away from the church and from established religious conventions – and shocking audiences in the process.

I’ve been listening to two versions, trying to compare and hear the differences: first up is Kent Nagano and the London Symphony Orchestra, and then Simon Rattle’s centenary recording with the Berlin Philharmoniker.

So much of the piece suggests the angular and sharp that it’s easy to forget that there are passages of lushness that suggest a debt to Debussy, even though this is a long step beyond the sensuality of the French composer's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune.

I can hear differences between the two recordings, right from the greater vibrato on the opening bassoon passage in the Rattle. And there are other moments where this new version seems to have layers to the sound.

It’s a good listening exercise.

And after that, it’s back to my own little culinary rite – which is probably every bit as pagan in its adoration of seasonality: more Jersey Royals, scraped gently to leave them in all their ivory glory.

Tonight, they accompanied some fillets of brill, which had been dredged in plain flour and paprika, before being pan fried in butter.

Keep them warm and deglaze with sherry vinegar or dry sherry, before adding orange juice and boiling quickly to reduce.

Serve with chopped chives and, optionally, toasted slivered almonds.

You can easily do much the same with any whole fish, including cod or pollock, simply adjusting the cooking time.

These are the tastes we’ve been hankering for for what feels like an eternity.

And on a day that has encompassed sun, wind, rain and even hail – as though this were March and April rammed into a single 24-hour timeframe – they are tastes that remind you that spring really has arrived and that there is no turning back.