The most curious use, to me, of this word comes from Britain. In this case, “bitch” refers to human females, but not necessarily those of ill repute, and extends from them to something associated with them. This usage, in fact, refers to the more socially popular ladies who gather together to chat at a tea party, or bitch party as it was called circa 1880. This bitch party was composed of females of the species (wives) who would spend their afternoons discussing topics of importance to them. To the husbands, this was a gathering of bitches who spent their time together bitching while drinking a typical drink of bitches, tea. Perhaps through guilt by association, Cambridge University slang from 1820 to about 1914 called this drink – tea – “bitch” (Partridge 1966:57). Furthermore, to pour out tea was to “bitch the pot” (Partridge 1950:210), and one who poured the tea was said to “stand bitch”. “Stand bitch” in the late 18th and 19th centuries actually meant not only to preside at tea but also to perform any other typically female duty (Partridge 1966:57) or, in short, to behave like the female of the species. Metaphors accounting for these tea-time terms are not apparent to me and I do not think metaphors are responsible for these meanings. Instead, I think that the terms came about through their associations with the social function of tea and ladies at tea parties and shifted to the other meanings.

from Collins, C.A. (1984). ‘Bitch: An example of semantic development and change’

The story I am about to tell is one which I have kept locked in the inmost recess of my secret heart, until persuaded otherwise by friends, therapists, and one particularly lenient magistrate.

So opens For One Horrible Moment, Peter Bradshaw’s grim and gothic coming-of-age story set in 1970s Fenland. It was first broadcast on Radio 4 14 years ago; nothing as funny has been broadcast since (though I give honourable mentions to The Sunday Format and Cabin Pressure).

It continues:

My father, I remember, was an eccentric man, whose idiosyncrasies alienated many people. He suffered from what psychologists now refer to as a narcissistic schizophrenic guilt complex. He would spend many tortured hours pointing at his reflection in the mirror and shouting, ‘That’s the man, officer.’

I hope you are now on the way to being hooked. The glorious bathetic silliness of the thing, allied to Bradshaw’s stilted, deadpan delivery, create a singularly amusing comedy. There’s nothing like it.

BBC Radio 7 has just begun repeating it. Give it a try.

I’ve been doing my bit to repay the debt I owe Britten by spending a lot of my adult life getting to know his music. My acquaintance of Britten in childhood was fleeting but vivid. When I was about five my father, a teacher by profession, conducted a performance of Noye’s Fludde in a local church, which I attended. I don’t recall it particularly vividly, but I know that the music of Sem, Ham and Jaffett’s song, ‘Father, I am all readye bowne’, stayed in my head long afterwards.

A year or two later, at school, my teacher Miss Loveridge used the first Sea Interlude from Peter Grimes in a Music and Movement class. (Either that or as music played to welcome children filing into morning assembly, which I believe was on weekly rotation; but that seems unlikely given the norm was Semprini playing popular classics.) I fell utterly in love with the music, to the extent that I badgered my mother to ask Miss Loveridge what it was (that I had the nerve to ask her myself seems unlikely). I bought or was given a tape of the Sea Interludes and Passacaglia from Grimes and the Sinfonia da Requiem played by the RLPO and Libor Pešek, though I only got to know the Interludes.

When I did A-level Music myself, we used the marvellous London Anthology (now sadly no more; it was revised the following year to enable pupils to study Carl Perkins and the music from E.T.), and the set of extracts allocated to us included part of the mad scene from Act 3 of Peter Grimes, opening at ‘To hell with all your mercy!’ and ending with the spoken dialogue where Balstrode tells Grimes to sail out and sink his boat. By some way it was the most emotionally gutting piece we studied. Jessie Taylor and I sat side by side in G12 while Mrs Shaw put on the Britten/Pears recording of the extract, and we listened along with the score. At the end there was a stunned silence. A piece of music had never made me feel quite like that before.

‘I hear those voices that will not be drowned’

Later that year, I went on a residential course for A-level Music students at Villiers Park in Middleton Stoney, just outside Bicester. It was exciting to meet people with passions similar to mine. I had a great time doing two-piano improvisations with a boy called John. We stayed in touch, writing each other occasional letters (this sounds improbable, but I suspect we were both old-fashioned; I didn’t get email until 2001), and eventually reunited at university. A trip to an Oxford Bach Choir concert at the Sheldonian Theatre was organised as part of the course. Among other items the choir sang Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb, a magical discovery for me. We all studied the piece closely beforehand, and afterwards wrote reviews of the concert. Mine was voted worthy of submission for publication in a local news sheet (and still exists online, though modesty and shame forbid my linking to it here).

In summer 2001 I played the piano duet (with my mother) in another production of Noye’s Fludde, conducted by my father in the inaugural Frome Festival. Everything seems to come back to Noye with me.

I’ll be singing the Choral Dances from Gloriana, the Five Flower Songs and the Te Deum and Jubilate in a concert in this year’s Frome Festival. I’m so pleased to be taking part in an event, however small, that is listed on the Britten 100 website. It’s a brilliant resource for finding performances of Britten’s works, among other things, and I hope it may continue in some fashion after the centenary year is up.

If it hadn’t been for the website I wouldn’t have happened upon a performance of The Little Sweep in Norwich last month, which it was a great pleasure to attend. I haven’t set myself a specific Britten-related mission this year, but I certainly intend to see some of the operas I don’t know that well. I’ve already seen a student production of The Rape of Lucretia that was quite superb, and will be seeing Gloriana later in the year, and The Burning Fiery Furnace, one of my favourite Britten works and one that is all too seldom performed. I’m also hopeful of my first Screw since June 2009 (and my third in total).

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently listening to unfamiliar Britten works and recordings, among which I have found many treasures, but they can wait for another post.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Who is this man?

I don’t know. The beard makes it look like he’s got something to hide, and the bunch of oddballs around him look like members of a cult. One of them is doing a passable impression of Abraham Lincoln and another appears to be Clive Dunn in a flat cap.

How does his death help us?

I suppose if he can be taken out before he enacts the inevitable mass suicide ritual, all of these people’s lives will be saved.

Why is it important that we remember him?

So we can make sure this never happens again.

I believe in God the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth:

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
Born of the Virgin Mary,
Suffered under Pontius Pilate,
Was crucified, dead, and buried:
He descended into hell;
The third day he rose again from the dead;
He ascended into heaven,
And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost;
The holy Catholick Church;
The Communion of Saints;
The Forgiveness of sins;
The Resurrection of the body,
And the Life everlasting.
Amen.

This is the Apostles’ Creed as it appears in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. A beautiful piece of writing, even if you happen not to agree with the sentiments.

A few years ago I was attending evensong at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the time came for saying the Creed. The congregation turned to face the East.

The Creed has natural pauses built into it, most notably before the catalogue beginning ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost’. On this occasion, the congregants paused for breath at the appropriate point, but failed to start again. Even the presiding priest stopped talking.

This sudden silence may be interpreted in any of several ways. The probability is that, having stopped and paused, no one person wanted to take the responsibility of starting up again lest he should be a lone voice, a pelican in the wilderness (as the Psalmist says), and so silence enveloped the chapel. At the time, I liked to think that the words about to be said — ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost’ etc. — had struck the entire congregation as so unlikely, so far-fetched, as to be unutterable.

The silence lasted five seconds, possibly slightly longer. It certainly felt longer. To our credit, most of us started to laugh as we launched into the final straight.

It’s a testament to the enduring qualities of the 1662 Creed that it inspires poetry to this day.

Top 3 books
My greatest joy has been in reading P.G. Wodehouse, with three Jeeves and Wooster books late in the year reminding me what an unutterably funny writer he is. Sadly I only have about 90 of his books left to read. But if I’m going to choose individual titles, I shall go for Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, the wit and imagination of which was an unexpected delight, Winifred Watson’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, a sparkling and cheeky variation on the Cinderella story, and Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens. Completed in 1848, it’s not Dickens’ greatest novel, but it shows the stirrings of a greater ambition that would be realised in the masterpieces he wrote in the following twenty years, and in the likes of Captain Cuttle, Solomon Gills, Walter Gay, Toots and Florence Dombey it contains some of his sweetest and most lovable characters.

Top 3 CDs (classical)
Late in 2011 I heard this Radio 4 documentary which contained some beautiful guitar arrangements of French piano music. I contacted the producer, who kindly informed me that the CD used was Rêverie by the Groningen Guitar Duo. I have enjoyed getting acquainted with it this year. An article in Gramophone alerted me to a 1999 disc of French Airs de Cour performed by Catherine King, Charles Daniels and Jacob Heringman, which is superb and contains much unfamiliar and charming repertoire. I haven’t bought a great many CDs released this year, but the disc of choral music by Howells sung by the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge under Stephen Layton is one that stands out. The programme is inspired, beginning with the Hymn for St Cecilia and ending with ‘All my hope on God is founded’. The recent discs of Howells from Hereford and St John’s, Cambridge have missed a trick in not including any of Howells’ hymn tunes. I could have done with one or two more on the Trinity CD.

Top 3 CDs (other)
I have been recommending Todd Rundgren’s 1972 double album Something/Anything? to all and sundry this year, and have given it to people as presents. It’s enormously sugary and 90% of it is seventh chords, but I love it. I have also been spending a lot of time with Para One’s soundtrack to Céline Sciamma’s film Naissance des Pieuvres. I saw the film two or three years ago. It’s a coming-of-age drama centred around a swimming pool, a fine piece of work, but I think the music stands on its own. It’s sumptuously atmospheric, and very watery. And I was lucky to find a cheap copy of this William Sheller anthology. It’s been lovely discovering songs of his I didn’t know before.

Top 3 films
I’ve already written about my favourite new films of last year, but what of those I came across on the TV? I watched quite a lot of them. Omitting those I’d seen before (though I would like to give an honourable mention to Basil Dearden’s Victim, which came across as a bold minor masterpiece that I hadn’t acknowledged before), I have narrowed the list down to three, two of which are very recent films anyway. Firstly The Arbor, Clio Barnard’s audacious drama-documentary about the life of Andrea Dunbar, which marries documentary footage with new interviews lip-synched by actors. At times it takes the breath away. Then Hirokazu Koreeda’s Still Walking (Aruitemo Aruitemo), a gentle, illuminating drama about a family convening to mark the anniversary of a son’s death. It has been compared by some to the films of Ozu, which is not unwarranted praise. And thirdly, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s remarkable religious melodrama Ordet, which packs an astonishing emotional punch at its climax.

Top 3 live music
I love instrumental and chamber music, but my favourite concerts in 2012 were on a larger scale. I don’t always like the Royal Albert Hall as a venue, but I find it’s better if a) there are a lot of performers to fill the space; and b) you’re not too far away from them. I was lucky to be in the side stalls for two excellent Proms – Les Troyens in July, and Bernstein’s Mass in August. Both were thrilling. Smaller but no less exhilarating was English Touring Opera’s production of Britten’s Albert Herring at West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge. I hadn’t realised how fun and how funny it is; I’d certainly never laughed at an opera before. I hope to see plenty more Britten on stage in his centenary year.

Top 3 theatre
I’m including musicals again. One of my choices last year was the Chichester production of Sweeney Todd, then about to transfer to London. I went to see it three more times after the transfer, and I’m choosing it again. I suppose this is about as close as I get to being a fanboy. I marvel at Sondheim’s genius, and vow to get to know more of his work this year. Company is on at the ADC in a month, so that can be the first step. Then, the revival of Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork’s London Road at the National Theatre, a haunting and upsetting musical based on verbatim transcripts of interviews with the residents of London Road in Ipswich, in the aftermath of the 2006 prostitute murders. It sounds unpleasantly sensationalist; in fact it’s just sensational, and grows in stature with the passage of time. And lastly, the all-male Shakespeare’s Globe production of Twelfth Night, which I went to twice, firstly at the Globe and then at the Apollo Theatre. The play’s a masterpiece, of course, but this production is a dream. The grace and sweep and composure of Mark Rylance’s performance as Olivia defy description. He is the finest actor I have ever had the privilege to watch, and I am going to see his Richard III soon. You still have time to catch them before they close next month.

On the subject of theatre, I feel bound also to credit Gatz, the unabridged theatrical adaptation of The Great Gatsby staged by Elevator Repair Service at the Noel Coward Theatre, Helen Edmundson and Neil Hannon’s captivating musical of Swallows and Amazons that I caught at Cambridge’s Arts Theatre, and a number of comedy gigs (Sheeps, Jonny Sweet, Tom Basden, Tim Key, the excellent Staple/face). There is one more event I would like to mention that doesn’t quite fit into any of the categories above: Alex Preston’s discussion with Richard Holloway at the Cambridge Union as part of Cambridge Wordfest in April. It felt a great privilege to see Holloway in person, a wry, humane, sympathetic and wise man. I’m sure I will read his acclaimed memoir, Leaving Alexandria, this year. Let’s all of us have a good one!

I did this a year ago and I’m doing it again. Enjoy (if you want).

How many books read in 2012?
73

Fiction/Non-Fiction?
57/16

Male/Female authors?
57/16 (more equal than last year, but still something that may require attending to)

Favourite book read?
Let’s say Gulliver’s Travels, for argument’s sake

Least favourite?
There have been a few duds but no absolute stinkers this year. In terms of effort expended and awards recouped, though, I’m afraid I must name Wolf Hall as my biggest struggle. Not the worst book I read this year, but just not for me. Perhaps I’m simply out of sympathy with the Booker judges, as The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson was also very much in the running. A disappointment, particularly given how much I’ve loved his other novels, but it had the mercy of being less long-winded than the Mantel.

Oldest book read?
Twelfth Night beats Macbeth by a year or two.

Newest book read?
I read David Mitchell’s (comedian) memoir Back Story as soon as it came out. Lovely, it was.

Longest book title?
Martin Ashley’s How High Should Boys Sing? Gender, Authenticity and Credibility in the Young Male Voice beats Douglas Snauffer’s The Show Must Go On: How the Deaths of Lead Actors Have Affected Television Series by five letters.

Shortest book title?
Robin (Catherine Storr), Flute (Richard Adeney) and Spent (Joe Matt) are tied on five letters each. A disparate trio.

How many re-reads?
Last year, two; this year, nine: Macbeth and Twelfth Night, old favourites The Great Gatsby, Le Grand Meaulnes, Young Törless, Pride and Prejudice and Death in Venice, and school books revisited Golden Girls (Louise Page) and A Fox Under My Jacket (Harriet Graham).

Most books read by a single author?
5 (Armistead Maupin), 4 (Alexander McCall Smith), 3 (Muriel Spark, P.G. Wodehouse).

Any in translation?
3. Oh dear. And nothing I hadn’t read before, although one of them was a new translation. Alain-Fournier, Mann and Musil.

How many books were borrowed from the library?
25

Best blog recommendation?
I’m sure it was reading about the book on blogs that prompted me to try Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall, which I found beautiful.

I had no clue what was going on:
Take a bow, Wolf Hall.

Favourite character encountered this year:
Captain Cuttle! HOOROAR!!

This is a Brahms chorale prelude on ‘Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen’ that will be played before the service today. It’s one of my favourite pieces of Christmas music. I remember when I first heard it – it was on some enchanted evening, possibly across a crowded room. It’s meant for the organ, but you can play it on the piano, though you generally don’t, but in fact I generally do, not being an organist. Anyway, have a good one.

To fill the many hours I have spent not writing, I have gone to the cinema probably a little more often than in previous years. Most of the best films I’ve seen there, predictably, have been classics — La Grande Illusion, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, To Kill a Mockingbird, Psycho, Inherit the Wind. If an old film is on at the Arts Picturehouse, that’s generally because it’s worth watching. But among the many new films I’ve come across, the following are ten that have stood out as among the best. They’re a predictable melange of sentimentality and physical or psychological abuse.

10. A Cat in Paris [Une Vie de Chat] (Alain Gagnol, Jean-Loup Felicioli)

A beautifully drawn, charming and exciting adventure, in which a little girl joins forces with her cat and a local burglar to catch the gang of crooks responsible for the death of her father. It is animated with wit, humour and tenderness, and certain aspects of it recall things like The Snowman, though it’s a bit livelier than that, and Wallace and Gromit. The original soundtrack is recommended over the English dub.
IMDb | Trailer

9. Petit Nicolas [Le Petit Nicolas] (Laurent Tirard)

Created by René Goscinny of Asterix fame, the adventures of Petit Nicolas are popular in France but haven’t caught on overseas. That’s a shame, as otherwise this enormously likeable film might have had a larger audience in the UK. Nicolas leads an idyllic life, but when his bickering parents start to get along he fears it may mean a little brother or sister is on the way, and resolves to put a stop to it. By and large it stays on the right side of saccharine, though there are some near misses, but I can’t immediately recall a single British children’s film that has its knockabout good humour and joy.
IMDb | Trailer

8. Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin)

A gripping psychological drama dealing with the after-effects of a young woman’s escape from a cult. The most striking thing, I thought at the time, is how beautiful and natural it looks, but that is not to detract from the performances, which are superb, especially those of Elizabeth Olsen and Sarah Paulson as the two sisters. John Hawkes is his customary charismatic self.
IMDb | Trailer

7. Amour (Michael Haneke)

Michael Haneke’s study of dementia is an emotionally gutting film to watch, but full of life and alive to the tenderness and fragility of human existence. The performances of Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva are beautiful, and the conversation scenes between them superbly observed and entirely credible. Trintignant has a couple of spellbinding scenes involving a pigeon, and the pigeon gives one of the great performances in cinematic pigeon history. Music is central to the plot of the film, and it is used sparingly and to great effect.
IMDb | Trailer

6. Michael (Markus Schleinzer)

Not something one could bear to watch often, this Austrian film is a compelling and all too believable study of an outwardly unremarkable insurance broker who secretly keeps a boy locked up in a custom-built cellar in his house. It features two tremendous central performances and engages the mind constantly. Its sense of tension and nerviness reminded me of the Dardenne brothers’ Le Fils, one of my favourite films of recent years, and there is a great deal in it that merits high praise. It is telling that first-time director Schleinzer is a long-time collaborator of Michael Haneke, whose stamp is on the film. The banality of evil has rarely been so well realised in cinema. There are any number of telling little touches that took me aback – like the simple writing of a cross in a notebook.
IMDb | Trailer

5. North Sea Texas [Noordzee, Texas] (Bavo Defurne)

The debut feature film of Belgian director Bavo Defurne, whose short films, generally on gay subjects, have caught my attention in the past. It’s a coming-of-age story set in the 1970s, and centres around Pim, a teenage boy with a passion for his older neighbour. Then the other boy gets a girlfriend and things become complicated. It’s the kind of thing that might easily be drearily formulaic, but it’s nothing of the kind. Defurne coaxes winning performances from his young cast and the result is a tender, moving and erotic film.
IMDb | Trailer

4. The Imposter (Bart Layton)

In 1994 a boy goes missing from San Antonio, Texas. In 1997 he is reported found in Spain. But the boy who is found isn’t the boy who went missing. Why do the missing boy’s family take the other one in when it is so obvious he isn’t who he claims to be, and why are they so desperate not to let him go as the truth dawns? The most unlikely thing is that it isn’t all made up. It actually happened. This documentary is sensational without being sensationalist. With the source material it would have been so easy to make something tacky and/or partisan, but the film avoids those traps. The viewer’s loyalties shift. The real boy’s mother, sister and brother-in-law are interviewed, as are the surrogate boy, an FBI investigator and a private detective, all of them giving engaging testimony. The use – the mere existence! – of documentary footage of the boy’s arrival ‘back’ in America is genuinely breathtaking. The film is a tour de force that had my brain doing gymnastics. The people around me laughed at some of the most shocking things, and that’s understandable. The most upsetting things the film relates are also laughable, and there is a very fine line between harrowing and ridiculous.
IMDb | Trailer

3. Skyfall (Sam Mendes)

Not a perfect Bond film, but damn good fun. The synthesis of the high-octane, post-Bourne revamp of the Bond franchise with the old gadgets and cars and sly humour is enormously pleasing. Daniel Craig doesn’t do enough jokes for my taste, but at least he’s not as po-faced as Lazenby and Dalton were. The addition of performers of the calibre and charisma of Javier Bardem, Ben Whishaw and Ralph Fiennes is an enormous boon, but at the heart of the film is Bond’s relationship with M. It’s a delight to see this aspect, which has taken a back seat since Judi Dench’s Bond debut in GoldenEye, in the foreground for a change, and it provides an emotional core that is too often absent from Bond films. It’s a thrilling ride.
IMDb | Trailer

2. The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius)

It’s bold to claim that this film has the visual sweep of something like Citizen Kane or The Magnificent Ambersons, and I’m not sure it’s a claim I could justify if pressed, but I certainly felt in the world of those old classics. The actors, from Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo to James Cromwell and Uggie the dog, have verve and charm in bucketloads, and the film is a delightful homage to silent cinema that I found irresistible and occasionally overwhelming. I was delighted to see it garlanded with awards earlier in the year.
IMDb | Trailer

1. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)

I’m not sure I have ever before had the experience of feeling a film might have been made specifically for me, but by gum I had it while I watched this. I’ve admired Wes Anderson in the past, but this is the first time I have fallen in love with one of his films. Set in 1965, it tells the story of a boy scout who absconds from camp with a girl he met at a production of Britten’s Noye’s Fludde the previous year, and is told with Anderson’s usual stylisation and quirkiness and the most beautiful colour palette imaginable. The performances are all excellent (I’d single out Ed Norton and Bruce Willis for particular praise, and Bob Balaban’s oddity of a narrator is a sublime touch), but what I really love is the innocence of the whole thing. Anderson’s treatment of Britten’s music is respectful and sensitive, and my heart wells up to think about the film. Exhilarating and transcendent.
IMDb | Trailer

It’s doubly sad to lose both Ledger and his frequent recital partner Robert Tear in the space of barely a year and a half. I have written before, I think, of my love for Tear and Ledger’s recordings of Harold Fraser-Simson’s settings of the hums of Winnie-the-Pooh. Our LP of Three Cheers for Pooh! got worn out in my childhood. Tear and Ledger are a delightful double-act in these songs, warm and witty. The recordings aren’t out on CD at the moment, I think, but you can sample them here, and there is even a link to a zip file of the whole album on that page, not of course that I condone bootlegs. You can more easily get hold of their performances of the songs of e.g. Benjamin Britten and Madeleine Dring, which are really quite as memorable.

Goodbye, and thank you.