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Oliver Cross: Ukuleles and the word 'nice'
Woodhouse resident and YEP columnist Oliver Cross talks Ukuleles and the word 'nice'.
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Good news for fans of the ukulele
The good news for ukulele fans – which I realise may not be good news for everybody – is that The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain will play at this year's BBC Proms in August.
Some music enthusiasts predict that this will be even more fun than a Harrison Birtwistle concert.
The Ukulele Orchestra have quite a pedigree; they have collaborated with the Kaiser Chiefs, Madness and the Ministry of Sound and a few years ago walked into the Chemic Tavern in Woodhouse, Leeds, leaving us rather puzzled because they weren't carrying their ukuleles as a helpful clue to their identity.
It was like trying to spot the Red Devils without their parachutes and eventually we gave up and had to ask them, like we were rednecks in an outback Texas bar, to explain themselves, which they did very charmingly because it's my observation that musicians are, as a class, the cleverest and most well-balanced people you are likely to meet outside Sweden.
I'll never know how some of the neurotic, drugs-guzzling jazz greats of the last century managed to produce such sublime music, but I think they were an exception.
They were also very tough; one of them, whose name I can't find on Google, had a life fuelled nightly by huge quantities of whisky and drugs and said on his 100th birthday: "If I'd have known I was going to live this long, I would have looked after myself."
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Nice point on nonentities
I have the ability to incite some readers into such a frenzy that they feel compelled to send me abusive emails and letters.
Generally, I don't read them closely but a common complaint seems to be that I am some kind of lazy impostor because a proper columnist wouldn't fill his space by talking about his friends or his local pub.
He would address topics of General Importance, such as, presumably, the fuel tax or Jade Goody.
They also get intensely annoyed about my use of language; one, some time ago, sent a furious demand that the editor sack me immediately for using the word 'nice' three or four times in one column.
Perhaps he (I always assume these are men, even when they remain anonymous) was mistakenly taught by his English teacher, as I was, that 'nice' is a lazy word, when in fact it's a versatile word with so many shades of meaning that it's difficult to overuse.
For example it can be used, depending on its context, dismissively to mean 'nice but...', implying an absence of glamour or excitement; or neutrally, meaning 'just nice' and therefore dull; or 'thoroughly nice' – a great compliment because, as anybody with enough experience knows, it describes a very rare quality.
Another correspondent got extraordinarily angry over my frequent use of the word 'bossy' to describe the mildly totalitarian tendencies of our public authorities. But I said 'bossy' because it was exactly what I meant, and using an elaborate Latinate word which had passed its A-levels wouldn't have done at all.
Of course, I can't defend my fascination with, by columnist standards, insignificant people except to say that it may run in the family.
My grandfather, at least 70 years ago, as a reporter on the Natal Mercury in South Africa, used to walk along Durban beach with a quick-sketch artist and produce daily amusing profiles of random nonentities.
Apparently (although this is the family version and not necessarily true) it was the most popular feature in the whole newspaper. It was also, if you think about it in a creative way, a sort of forerunner to Facebook.
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Saturday 19 May 2012
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