Mister Duffy Changes Trains

Age and Perfection

1. Age

I have just received in the post a form to apply to renew my driving license, in view of my approaching 70^th birthday. I know I’m getting old. There’s no need to rub it in. I also received my invitation for lung cancer screening. They are determined to find something wrong with me.

I think I have mortality on my mind, as the other night I dreamed that my dad was still alive. He went to what the thriller writer Janet Evanovitch calls the Big Bacon Barbecue in Godland in 1989. While it was nice to see him again, it does suggest that my subconscious is a bit nervous.

Not quite an age thing, a few weeks ago I was offered the opportunity to have a spring COVID vaccination. You don’t usually get this until after you hit the biblical use-by date, but because I had radical radiotherapy last year, I’m deemed to have potentially impaired immunity, so I get the jab at age 69. Yet another prize in the lottery of life.

When I went online to book the COVID jab, I found that I could get it at a pharmacy only a couple of blocks away, so I booked it there. I won’t tell you which pharmacy as I am going to be slightly uncomplimentary. Everything seemed to be running late, and despite the booking having been made online, all mod cons, after a while, a bloke came from behind the pharmacy counter and asked me and my fellow-Methuselahs our names and what time our appointments were. He wrote these down on what looked like the back of a cigarette packet.

After a while I was called. As usually happens when you get a vaccination at a local pharmacy, they have partitioned off a tiny room just big enough for a desk, two chairs and a washbasin. The pharmacist who was going to administer the vaccine had a rather arrogant and supercilious manner. However, once he had ascertained that I was eligible and had no allergies, he asked me to roll up my sleeve. He then started rummaging in the drawers of the desk. Evidently, he didn’t locate what he was looking for, so he returned to the main shop and started opening and closing cupboards and drawers in there.

Still no joy. He returned to our little cubby-hole and had another look in the desk, this time taking out all the contents and putting them in the washbasin. Meanwhile, a substantial queue of decrepit old dafties like myself, awaiting their COVID vaccinations, was building up out in the shop. Eventually, the pharmacist announced that they didn’t have the correct size of needles, so I would have to come back another time. To his credit, by this time the arrogant and supercilious manner had evaporated.

I went home and rebooked in a different pharmacy, who had me, in, jabbed and out again in seconds. But it did occur to me that knowing that you have a clinicfull of customers expecting their vaccinations on a certain morning, you might make sure the day before that you had the appropriately sized needles in stock. Just a suggestion.

2. Perfection

Perfection is a concept of which I thoroughly disapproved while I was still working. In my caper, medical research, it is typical for research programmes to undergo review every five years. This is absolutely reasonable, but the trouble is that appraisal inflation means that if the referees’ reports aren’t laden with superlatives, saying that your programme is the best in the world, you are in grave danger of losing the funding. This means that the quinquennial review process can be very stressful and livelihood-threatening.

My position was that only one programme can be the best in the world, so stop expecting it of them all. Also, I have seen so many great ideas for research never being carried out because of the desire to do them perfectly. Striving for perfection in research terms generally means holding out for something that is never going to happen. You always have to compromise somewhere. There is no such thing as the perfect study.

OK, rant over. This got me thinking about what one might call the perfect example of some particular artistic genre. By this I mean an example of the genre which may not be the best ever, but which I find it difficult to imagine being surpassed. We all have about own opinions but here are a few of mine.

The perfect film: Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, 1938. This movie has danger, excitement, intrigue, romance, humour, the lot.

The perfect historical novel: The Singapore Grip, by JG Farrell (or possibly another in his empire trilogy, The Siege of Krishnapur or Troubles).

The perfect humorous novel: The Harpole Report, by JL Carr, the last Englishman (see previous blogs).

In terms of music genres, again, everyone will have their own opinions, but here are a few of mine:

The perfect march: The Washington Post, by JP Souza.

The perfect guitar-based rock number: Get Rhythm, by Ry Cooder (although there is tough competition from a couple of Quicksilver Messenger Service pieces, notably Maiden of the Cancer Moon).

The perfect folk-rock recording: Matty Groves, by Fairport Convention.

The perfect trad jazz number: Washington Square, by The Village Stompers.

The perfect punk folk number: New York Girls, by the Oyster Band.

3. June poem

That’ll do for now. Rather than wax lyrical about those musical pieces, I’ve put the Youtube links at the bottom of this blog. Here is the poem for June, about the Pre-Raphaelite painting Flaming June, by Frederic Lord Leighton.