Jim Granter

I am really tired tonight but in a placid mood conducive to a bit of casual blogging without too much thought. It’s so much milder now after some severe frosts and the coal fire has created an almost sweltering temperature in this front room.

Gill from down the road came with me today to first session this year of our ‘America in the 30s’ adult education group.

It was my turn to make a contribution. I had been sort of ‘volunteered ‘ for it as John Toft thought I was an expert on William Faulkner. Anyway, I did my best with a long lead in to a consideration of As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary and Light in August, the latter being my favourite book of all time, if I was forced to choose one for a desert island.

I played Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech from a recording he made reading it, rather than the actual speech which was never recorded successfully for the public. I also played Rednecks by Randy Newman, which caused some consternation with his regular use of ‘nigger’ – the ‘n’ word as it was referred to!

Nobody seemed to have read the books except for the wonderful John Toft, which detracted somewhat from what I had hoped would be quite a lively discussion period. If nothing else, I think my enthusiasm for Faulkner’s writing got across and I hope it may have encouraged at least someone to give him a go, armed with some of the insights I offered, perhaps.

Had a visit from Ian, home for three weeks from his work in New Zealand. Much good conversation, news and gossip was exchanged which cheered B up a bit from her unwell miseries. Several cups of tea also featured, obviously.

Have received the annual gift of the Oxford American magazine from Liz in Pennsylvania.

Wonderful surprise from the backlog of deliveries by Royal Mail. Two Christmas cards accompanied it. Today is 13th January. Never mind, quite pleasant really to have surprise deliveries. I had become rather anxious a few days ago that some new USB-powered speakers would not make it here in time for my above-mentioned presentation, but they did and are an excellent £9’s worth. That apostrophe looks a bit odd but I think it’s right.

In my head and body mostly, so not usually very aware of my immediate surroundings, but when I do look around it’s pretty good too. In two days recently I had visited the Health Centre, the dentist, the barber’s, the Post Office, the newsagents, the ATM, the Building Society, the library, the Coop supermarket, the tyre and battery fitters, the health food shop, the pet shop for bird food and the bird feeders at the top of the garden all on Shanks’s pony within minutes of each other and all with successful mission completions. Which makes it very difficult to contemplate a move to live anywhere else until it becomes someone else’s job to visit these places for us, when it won’t matter where we ‘live’ or are cared for anyway!

Have found Paul Phoenix and the boys of St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir so listening on Spotify. Magic. Looking forward to the arrival of the complete series of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (£4.99 for 350 minutes!) not only for the Nunc Dimittis theme by aforementioned Paul et al.

“Glad it’s all over and we can get back to normal!” was the cheery response twice when I asked two people in town how they had enjoyed Christmas! Whatever their normal is I hope they are enjoying it. Here one of us has had a lot of illness and is just showing some signs of a slow recovery.

The snow of several weeks has all gone and it’s quite mild again – about 6 degrees Celsius after reaching all-time lows recently of minus 11.

Naturally, the car which has started and run well during all the severe frosts refused to start today but attempted to unlock all the doors on turning the ignition key. New battery ordered, since current one is over 6 years old and is obviously becoming unreliable.

Overheard a conversation this morning about the comparative costs now between car ownership and using taxis, with the inexorable rise of fuel costs and insurance. Giving up the car is now quite an attractive proposition for many people, except for the major wrench from all that having it standing in the drive has meant. Independence? Flexible travel planning? Spontaneous trips? No local transport so walking to bus stops and standing in the rain for what might not arrive anyway to take you away and home again?

Work on next door’s orangery has started with skips full of earth disappearing at a fair rate. Mobile temporary builder’s toilet in the front garden is quite a feature of the landscape!

My mother would have been 100 years old this month.

A wide variety of activities have concentrated the mind wonderfully over recent days. Walking on snow and ice for a start – all thawed away now.

Barbara has had her bone density measured this week and we were disconcerted to say the least that the result shows a 40% loss of density in the last 12 months, attributed by the nurse to the now totally sedentary state of Barbara’s mobility. Apparently astronauts undergo similarly drastic losses when weightless in space, as their albeit limited movements don’t exactly count as exercise.

Then there was the meal on Tuesday at the Dun Cow in Dunchurch with brother Bob, sister-in-law Jane and nephew Ben, to celebrate Bob’s 70th birthday on 2nd December. Very enjoyable. The trip down the M6 to Rugby and then Dunchurch was remarkable for its views of the frosted-over landscapes of Staffordshire and Warwickshire / West Midlands. Such Christmas Card scenes we (Barbara and I) have only seen once before, in the film Doctor Zhivago which was our first date in 1967!

I have so far recorded 3 vinyl LPs onto this laptop using a new USB turntable, a new toy which was suitably and masochistically satisfyingly fiddly to install and get working properly. Have since screwed up the playback system on this machine, temporarily, by playing back a programme off BBCi Player, switching on Sound in the Control Panel to “a HDMIdevice” as detected when I started the playback and could only hear sound through the laptop’s speakers. Lost the speakers altogether but now recovered through helpful forum on the topic, involving .ini, .dll, .pnf and .sys files, whatever all those are. Still can’t see USB Audio Codec listed as a choice in Playback- it has disappeared; plan to seek it out in due course, but it doesn’t appear to be necessary just yet. Wonder what will happen when I engage the Audacity programme to record another LP.

I had an extraordinary evening of music last night with friend Dave at the Victoria Hall, Hanley where we had Smetna’s Overture from The Bartered Bride, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1 featuring the miraculous soloist Nobuyuki Tsujii and Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 From the New World. The orchestra was the BBC Philharmonic.

Received the annual missive from 4th cousin Don Granter and his wife Pam in Australia; their address now has an e-mail in it so I sent them a link to my photos from the Family gathering in Warrnambool in April 2001.

Received a “Have a nice day!” kiss on Facebook from Karen Barlow, another relative, this time a little nearer home in Worcester, England, where Dave lives as well.

A really bad headache over the last 24 hours can probably be put down to the over-strong cup of instant coffee yesterday morning. Feels now like I was kicked in the head about then by a particularly upset mule and the damage is only just subsiding. It didn’t spoil the orchestral concert though.

Out again tonight to see The Town, the latest Ben Affleck movie set in Boston, USA.

First long conversation in Chicago was on the El from O’Hare to Monroe in the Loop, as the passenger behind us turned out to be an education lecturer from Leeds, UK!

First meal was an excellent shared spinach pie in the Marquette Inn. (Not until the last day did I explore the exhibition in the Marquette Building itself, learning about the MacArthur Foundation and the restoration of the building).

Had fun in our excellent hotel room (Central Loop, 111a West Adams St.) figuring out how to convert the sofa into a bed.

Did not get lost on venturing out to buy provisions, given that we had a kitchenette.

Leaving the Art Institute to an anticipated grey or rainy day, Day One was to the Robie House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. On turning the corner to lay eyes on this iconic masterpiece, I was sorely stunned and disappointed at what seemed the moderate size of the edifice. In my mind picture, from images at a lecture I attended in the Spring, it was going to be much larger. Anyway, on a second visit to return a too-small gift sweatshirt, the house had come into its own as the fine piece of design that it is rather than anything scaled up and imagined.

The shirt is my birthday present from Beth and depicts Falling Water, a FLW design that I consider surpasses the others.

The Bean (or Cloud Gate) sculpture was a delight to both of us; like everyone else’s, our cameras clicked away in the brilliant Saturday morning sun.

Andersonville had been featured in the NYT as worth a visit some weeks before our trip and the article sent to me from our cousin Liz in State College, Pennsylvania; we were not disappointed to explore this neighbourhood as the main stretch reminded us a bit of Brighton back home.

The next neighbourhood we picked out from its description in The Little Black Book of Chicago was Bucktown / Wicker Park. I was pleased to happen upon Nelson Algren’s house and to have Beth snap me under the street sign for Division Street. Joined those waiting on the pavement (sidewalk) outside The Bongo Room and after an hour we were called in. Eggs Benedict and salad (Beth) and omelette with chives, tomato and bacon (me) was worth the wait. My omelette ingredients were all together in a pocket fashioned by the egg part of the omelette, which I thought was interesting but it probably isn’t. This visit was not dominated too much by bookshop browsing but we found our first here at Myopic Books where I found an analysis of Faulkner’s Sanctuary original galley proofs and the revisions he made; Beth also found a book worth toting all the way back home. As my style guru she advised me on a shirt purchase, which I like very much.

The Art Institute was obviously memorable. Beth liked the Armour and Arms section especially and I at last got to see Nighthawks and American Gothic and some Whistler.

We went on to another equally impressive-to-me building and institution , the Harold Washington Library, to sit for a while after an overdose of “Art” and write postcards.

At least, I did, while Beth updated her Facebook page and used it to arrange to meet up that evening with a complete stranger later at a gig – which I understand involved some music and food. After all, she is a social media consultant in real life.

Later that afternoon we walked through torrential rain to see the film 127 hours, which was worth the soaking. Taxi back to the hotel through the persistent downpour was driven by a recent immigrant from Nigeria who regaled us with his consternation at the Americans’ abuse of the English language, with their calling the car boot the “trunk” and so on.

Some impressions of our activities, with an undue emphasis on eating it seems to me, is given on my Flickr set and Beth’s. A favourite shot, taken in a split second before we boarded our train on Quincy Station is this one:

Arrived early enough at O’Hare for our return trip to be offered an earlier flight to Newark, where we then had time for some good Japanese food before the six and a half hour flight to Heathrow. Arriving back home in Alsager after a day in Beth’s flat in Brighton, the cold that hit my face on Alsager station platform was harsher than anything we had experienced in Chicago.