There is a light...

I have an apology to make. Emerging on the other side of 50 in a whirl of social celebration, I see that I have not been myself. Two dirges on something as banal as politics tell me that I have rushed to the surface too quickly, some time before I had intended to take the air. It was a case of the bends. Too many people, too much activity, too little time for contemplation. So, I’m sorry. I shall henceforth return to the depths to resume a colourful relationship with the denizens of my imagination, my true world. There you will again recognise me. Then, what I have to offer the world - through words and branding and general advice about how to get to the heart of things and communicate this essence – will once more make sense. For this reminder to return to a state of grace, I have the following to thank: Alain De Botton for The Architecture of Happiness; a painting by Marc Brown that I wish I’d bought on a visit to Southwold; Sean Lock for making me laugh in his narration for The Great British Sunday, on BBC 4 last night; and a brilliant photograph I took of light fading over the 21st Century Museum of Modern Art in Kanazawa a couple of months ago. I write this as a constant reflection on identity. And to keep a record of what matters to me. For, in these blogs, and only in these blogs, even after millions of words written over decades of life, have I found it possible to say what I need to say, from the place that I need to say it. And, sometimes, this is only possible in the middle of the night.

Mark Griffiths www.idealconsulting.co.uk

The Re word

Resurrection. No, that’s not the word. Reconstruction. No, not that either. I was only half-listening when the Dean of Coventry Cathedral mentioned the ‘re’ word while introducing the Robert Fripp/Theo Travis concert, an unlikely part of the Coventry Jazz Festival the other Saturday afternoon. Restoration. No, not that. Resolution. Again, no. Not even when the Frippertron himself interrupted his own performance, to introduce his concert himself and mentioned the same ‘re’ word, did I consider retaining it in the anteroom of my memory. Restitution. Resonance. Reconnection. No. No. No. At half-time, I wandered into this modern cathedral’s colourful corners, which reminded me less of church than the atrium of a giant theatre. Rejuvenation. Reformation. Not even close. In an annexe to the left of the entrance, my eye was caught by what appeared to be a kaleidoscopic sculpture made entirely of coloured strips of paper. Something drew me closer. Parts of my mind rushed me towards recognition. When and where had I seen this before? Nearer, I made out the shapes of paper birds. Then, it hit me. It was a smaller version of the paper crane exhibit created by the Japanese schoolgirl, Sadako Sasasi, who died from leukaemia in 1955, having been exposed to the atom bomb in Hiroshima at the age of 2. Knowing she was terminally ill, Sadako was trying to complete the folding of 1,000 paper cranes, following the belief that this goal would see her granted a wish. The story says she reached 644. I’d visited the real exhibit only a month before at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. I don’t really remember making my way back to my chair for the second half of the concert. All I know is that I enjoyed the music as if hearing Robert Fripp play for the first time. He finished the set with the beautiful and rarely played Threnody For Souls In Torment. But I found myself unable to recall the ‘re’ word. I just knew that it was a combination of all. Resurrection. Reconstruction. Restoration. Resolution. Restitution. Resonance. Reconnection. Rejuvenation. Reformation. Reggie Perrin. Later, much later, I turned to the world wide wonder and found Robert Fripp’s diary with his photo-journalistic review of the day, cathedrals old and new (www.dgmlive.com/diaries.htm?member=3). Before I went in, I’d walked the same steps, absorbed the same views. I wondered if I’d thought the same thoughts as Fripp. You see, there’s a collective view of Coventry that’s apt here. The city gets such a bad press. Concrete monstrosity. Well, people too easily forget the awful price the city and its people had to pay one night in November 1940, when Winston Churchill sacrificed it for the price of retaining the secret of breaking the cipher of the Enigma machine. Many UK cities suffered during the war, but none quite as unexpectedly as Coventry that night. Rather than the opprobrium it receives from the ignorant today, it somehow deserves a special place in our considerations. Those who know me well will also understand the significance of Coventry in my life from a personal point of view. How difficult it is for me to return or spend any significant amount of time there. I’d thought the Fripp gig would be an appropriate opportunity for some kind of catharsis. I was thinking about this when the Dean introduced the event, when Fripp re-introduced himself and his music. Now, reading his own review of the day, it was clearly a special gig, the end of his world tour, the end of something. “The new Coventry Cathedral is a remarkable space. The sound from the guitar stool was astonishing. At one point, high notes and harmonics flew upwards and kept going, as if angels in the roofspace had picked them up and were singing.” I did not find it hard to connect the man playing guitar before me with the man whose wizardry lay behind King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man back in the early 70s. A man whose diary notes continued: “The first set was introduced by the Dean, who referred to the Cathedral’s mission of reconciliation.” And there it was, my ‘re’ word. As I left the concert, still unable to recall this word, I remember thinking how it was the most magical of days. That morning, I’d woken to a blinding headache and felt too weak to complete my lawnmowing. Yet, I’d sensed this was an important day. After Fripp, I drove back along empty roads under a startling blue late afternoon sky to see Julius Caesar at Stratford – the first time I’d seen this performance, having studied it for O Level English Literature 35 years earlier. Greg Hicks was a better Caesar than he had been Leontes, King of Sicilia, in A Winter’s Tale. But it didn’t stop him dying with all the others. Something came to an end. I may spend some time yet wondering why I had to go to Hiroshima to settle my own personal conscience with what went on in Coventry, collectively before I was born, and personally, during my youth. Reconciliation surely implies some kind of acceptance. After reconciliation comes the time to get on with life. And that seems a suitably transcendent place to surrender my forty-something self, after eighteen thousand two hundred and sixty three days on this planet, and take up the mantle of quinquagenarianism. Something has ended. Something is beginning.

Mark Griffiths http://www.idealconsulting.co.uk/

Charming

Half way through a massage from my reflexologist, Kate, the other evening, I stopped her nimble fingers in their tracks just by mentioning that Clint Eastwood was 79 this weekend. Fifty-something Kate found this hard to digest. How could someone as young as Clint be so old? I said he is about the same age as my father. She said he is about the same age as the father of Greg Hicks, the favourite Shakespearean actor currently headlining in A Winter’s Tale and Julius Caesar at Stratford. For some, Clint will always be Dirty Harry, or the bloke with the chimp in Every Which Way But Loose. For me, he’ll always be the man with no name in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Then, I was at pains to explain to Kate that, althouth I abhor violence in films, I adore Clint’s spaghetti westerns. Yet, I cannot stand the modern, gangster-loving trash of Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction, and certainly not the latest two James Bond films starring Daniel Craig. And then it hit me. I knew why the Clint Eastwood brand was better than the Daniel Craig brand. I’d answered the question that had been hanging over me these last two years about why I didn’t like these new Bond films, when everyone else did. Clint’s movies have something important in common with most of the Bond movies before Craig. Charm. Whereas the two Craig films have been dark, graceless essays in violence and abuse, no better and no worse than anything else of their ilk, the staple Hollywood fare. Quite clearly, in any brand, that much pursued and hard-to-define charm is worth its weight in gold.

Mark Griffiths www.idealconsulting.co.uk