Tuesday 19 May 2015

Rilke and Robert Peston

The last month has been very exercising. My innermost psyche is developing some impressive muscles.

The Wisteria is out at IFORD MANOR and Sarah Toa is sending me pornographic literature in a plain, brown envelope, all the way from Australia where she is out of harm's way. I didn't know she had it in her (not that she has yet). My sap almost rose, so it must be Springtime, but I know it's Winter there.

If I had been paid for all the work I have done on this little 5 minute video, I would be able to take the next three months off. Everybody who is directly involved with it is running off to the first of the Summer festivals, so they will never see it live. Many of them even make an appearance in the video, but their egos are not so bloated that they will run back to Bath to catch them.

Will the sponsors benefit from the brief appearance of their logos after the main show? Who knows, but advertising agencies are still in business. Anyway, as I keep telling them, it's the community project which counts, and you can't even get a decent pair of shoes for £250 these days.

Today I am making a surprise visit to an engineer, who waited until the last minute to tell me that aluminium forms an instant skin on its cut surface, and the skin melts at 3000 degrees Centigrade, whereas the metal beneath it melts at 1200. This is why it is so difficult to weld and why a thick wall is essential at the point of welding. He was supposed to have called me last week to talk of his progress but didn't, hence the surprise visit.

I have to stop myself in the over-use of commas. I tend to put slight pauses in where I would take a breath when talking. Some people (you know who you are) write very breathlessly, which is not very relaxing. I tend to be too relaxed.

There is a financial expert on British radio who talks in an extremely erratic way, stretching-out single syllables almost indefinitely, then racing through the next paragraph at break-neck speed. His name is Robert Peston and his mother is/was a speech therapist.

Everyone took the piss out of him in the beginning (he rose to fame at the start of the financial crisis), but now everyone is copying him.

Rilke once described how he became fascinated with an obvious Tourette's Syndrome sufferer as he followed him down a street in Paris. The man's symptoms were that he would walk normally for a while, then start to stagger forward - almost breaking into a run - before regaining control of himself again, only to repeat the process a little further along.

Rilke fell into the trap of extreme identification/empathy with the man to the extent that he found himself involuntarily imitating him a few steps behind, and everyone else thought that he was making fun of him.

The same thing is happening to all the BBC presenters who are desperately trying to understand what makes Robert Peston talk the way he does.

11 comments:

  1. It'll cost you, Tom. Otherwise I'll be the one living in a brown paper bag soon.

    We used to have a postman with fairly severe Tourettes. We would hear the shouting and curses escalate until he disappeared for a few weeks, to return in good health and start the process all over again.

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  2. I end up horizontal when I read your posts, talk about too relaxed, that's an understatement. I have to write quickly so i dont waste good drnking time, and of course you would expect nothing else of me. Robert Peston I am not, give me Nick Robinson any day.

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    1. Then don't read my posts. Horizontal is still not a safe position for you.

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  3. I think Robert a Peston has been trying to moderate his idiosyncratic positioning of his pauses as it does not seemed so pronounced recently. Have you noticed he is letting his hair grow longer?

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    1. Michael Foot was well known for his pauses of course. It made him quite effective in his Parliamentary speeches.

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    2. I remember Foot's hair, nut I don't keep up to date with Peston's.

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    3. I meant 'but', not 'nut' - I've never met you.

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  4. Did you see Peston on 'Have I Got News for You'? He was quite relaxed and funny -- and speech idiosyncrasies not nearly so pronounced...

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