{"id":1517,"date":"2017-06-09T09:06:35","date_gmt":"2017-06-09T09:06:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/?p=1517"},"modified":"2017-06-09T09:06:35","modified_gmt":"2017-06-09T09:06:35","slug":"travelling-desperately-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2017\/06\/09\/travelling-desperately-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Travelling Desperately, again"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Shush, we’re in archive. It’s the Hull History Centre<\/a> and six years ago I was here researching my very first book. That was \u2013 take a breath, this is a long title \u2013 BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair<\/a>, from the British Film Institute. The Beiderbecke Affair is a 1980s television drama by the late Alan Plater and this place has his papers.<\/p>\n

It’s weird being in an archive that’s got a friend’s papers. I’d sit here reading something in the Beiderbecke collection and remember Alan or his wife Shirley Rubinstein telling me about it. But anyway, as much as I adore The Beiderbecke Affair and as important as my book was to me, there was also something else all those years ago.<\/p>\n

I worked like fury to collate and copy every pixel of detail about the Beiderbecke Affair and then also Alan’s dramatisation of Fortunes of War<\/a> because I had a canny eye to what the next book would be. That hasn’t happened yet, but give it time. Only, I did all that at extra-fast speed solely in order to leave the last two hours free.<\/p>\n

Because there is this other Alan Plater work that is especially dear to me: Misterioso.<\/p>\n

It’s a novel that’s out of print (but you can find it changing hands for a lot of money on eBay<\/a> and Amazon<\/a>) and a TV drama that has never been released commercially. It’s really just one small part of his work but I am shocked how deep it cuts into me. This is not a high-profile piece, not elaborate or overt, not famous or lauded, yet there are issues that I believe in and concerns that I share that I can easily trace back to the novel Misterioso in 1987 and the TV version in 1991. <\/p>\n

\"Title<\/p>\n

For a simple example, it’s why I’ve always loved the name Rachel. For a somewhat more complex one, it’s why I cherish the thought that, as the show describes, “it’s better to travel desperately than to arrive”. It’s why when I’ve done a lot I know that even as an atheist, I need time for my soul to catch up.<\/p>\n

So knowing from the Hull History Centre’s catalogue that they had one entire box of papers about Misterioso, I was having that. Nobody was paying me, I wasn’t writing a book about it, but I was going to read that box for myself.<\/p>\n

Only, the collection was still quite new then and things were still being sorted out. They told me they couldn’t find the Misterioso box.<\/p>\n

Deeply unhappy, I vowed to return.<\/p>\n

Yes. Six years later. I’m back and it’s still only for me, but this time I have a day and a half here entirely devoted to Misterioso. And that’s good because they’ve found the box. I call it a box, often these things are more like folders. But okay, I was ready to read one folder, then, and instead they’ve now got ten.<\/p>\n

One more thing. The title Misterioso comes from a jazz piece which features as prominently as you might expect in an Alan Plater drama. I like jazz when I hear it live, I adore jazz anecdotes, but I’ve not been a fan and I have not collected any albums.<\/p>\n

Only, the very last shot of Misterioso on television is of Rachel driving off down a motorway as the music plays. Yesterday as I drove down a motorway toward Hull, I lifted my Watch to my lips and said “Hey, Siri, play me Misterioso by Thelonius Monk<\/a>“. And my car and my head were filled with this tune that seems so simple yet somehow means so much to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shush, we’re in archive. It’s the Hull History Centre and six years ago I was here researching my very first … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[178],"tags":[1061,184,215,1065,196,652,1062,1064,453,1063,602,180],"class_list":["post-1517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-selfdistract","tag-alan","tag-bbc","tag-drama","tag-jazz","tag-misterioso","tag-novel","tag-plater","tag-rubinstein","tag-script","tag-shirley","tag-television","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4chyI-ot","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1517"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1521,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517\/revisions\/1521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}