On the eve: my local MP writes

 
Andy Slaughter is one in a thousand: a politician tirelessly serving his constituency in every sphere and well beyond the call of duty. He responds to e-mails; he's out there with people every week, and reporting back in an always informative and well expressed newsletter. He's wisely concentrated on photo-opportunities in the borough with our splendid Mayor Sadiq Khan. He resigned from the Labour front bench over issues with Corbyn, and was one of the MPs who voted against the triggering of Article 50.

His latest dispatch says it all - well, about everything except the Brexit process, which sadly and reprehensibly this short campaign has not addressed, and which I know Andy thinks is as pointless as and ruinous as I do, whatever the eventual terms. I reproduce his words here and urge anyone who cares for the NHS and human rights to vote wisely tomorrow. It's no longer about left and right, it's about fair versus unjust (maybe it always was). If Corbyn were only able to carry out a fraction of what he's promised, the country would still be the better for it.

Democracy unites us - in robust debate

This has been an extraordinary election campaign.  Called by a Prime Minister who promised she would govern until 2020.  Supposed to be only about Brexit but actually about everything from the NHS to the Dementia Tax.  And disrupted by two heinous acts of terror targeted at young children in Manchester and Londoners enjoying a Saturday night out.

This was going to be a non-event election. The cynicism of calling a vote just to help your Party increase its hold on power was turning people even further away from politics.

Now I hope everyone will vote - even if it is not for me! -  to demonstrate we decide things by voicing our views not by violence.  And that terrorism cannot disrupt the way we choose who governs.

Our city and the nation have come together to reject extremism and intolerance. Mayor Sadiq Khan summed up the strength of British values in a way Donald Trump will never understand [Slaughter campaigning with Khan before the Mayor's election pictured below]

But there is no contradiction in saying that all Parties can unite in upholding democratic values while conducting a robust debate.

Indeed this is what democracy is all about - calling out your opponents on the issues that matter.

I want Charing Cross to remain a major acute hospital, providing some of the best clinical care in the country, not be demolished and replaced by a primary care and treatment centre.

I want at least a third, preferably a half, of the thousands of new homes being built in Hammersmith & Fulham to be genuinely affordable to first-time buyers and long-term renters.

I want the UK to trade freely with the EU for the good of our economy and our social and cultural mix, not to shut ourselves off, looking for trade deals with dictatorships and unstable regimes.

I want our local schools to be fairly funded and for students to leave university without unmanageable debts.

I want pensioners to be warm and well provided for, not to be fleeced by a Dementia Tax.

And I believe our police and intelligence services, properly resourced, will keep us safe, and that scrapping our human rights laws will not.

That sounds to me like a reasonable programme for government.  A generation ago it would have just been thought of as common sense.

These are the policies Labour is putting forward.  But whether we get the chance to implement them or not, they represent the values that I will fight for if re-elected as MP for Hammersmith.

I hope I have your support on 8 June.

Andy

And maybe Mrs Mayhem should have her say, too, in the immortal re-ordering of genius Cassetteboy.

UPDATE on the day: well done, Andy - you increased your majority. And as for the general, assuming it was the students wot done it:

UPDATE (30/6) I confess I didn't even know that Andy was back on the front bench, albeit in a different role (housing), and I only do now because he's been sacked by Corbyn for supporting Chuka Umunna's proposed amendment to the Queen's Speech calling for Britain to remain within the customs union and single market. Of course he did. Top Mensch.

Freud Museum memories on Radio 3

Coming up on New Year's Day at 18.45, Breaking Free: Freud versus Music, Stephen Johnson's examination of the great man's singular relationship to music. The programme is available here, I assume for more than the usual 28 days as that proviso isn't given. Delightful producer Elizabeth Arno, pictured with Stephen above by me in the famous Maresfield Gardens study (yes, in case you didn't know, that's yer actual couch behind - Berggasse 19 has a copy), asked the folk at the Freud Museum who might represent their side of the argument, and Ivan Ward, who arrived as part of the new batch of 'Museum Educators' towards the end of my group's stint, recommended me.

It was a trip down memory lane in more ways than one. I first met Stephen, now my best pal in the music fraternity, during my year at the Freud, which means both the work and the friendship date back 30 years (ouch). Though the blurb says it was my first job, that's not right; I'd spent a year as Assistant Editor on the beleaguered, shoestring-run Music and Musicians and had just gone freelance, with a book on Richard Strauss to finish. The three days a week at the Freud, sponsored by the Manpower Services Commission - I found the job at Golders Green Job Centre - was just right (pictured below: bin in Maresfield Gardens covered with Freud Anniversary stickers).

Not only that, but it will always be my most meaningful time in some kind of 'office'.I even got to put on a concert of Freud-related works, a sandwich of analogous works - Mahler's Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen in the Schoenberg arrangement, with J as soloist, and Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony - flanked by the only music Freud seemed to care for, Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, in excerpts arranged for wind. My friend Andrew Constantine brought his Bardi Ensemble from Leicester and I reckon it was a pretty good concert in Belsize Park Town Hall.

I'd completely forgotten that I'd even given a talk on Freud and Music in the museum, and only when Ivan printed out select quotations was my memory jogged this time to realise that Freud actually references Walter's Morgentraumdeutungweise via Sachs.  Now that there's a catalogue of the 3000 plus books in the library we were also able to find two short psychoanalytic studies of Wagner operas, both of them gifts so hard to tell if Freud read them or not.

More of the issues you can hear in the complete programme, where I'm proud to stand alongside some fine figures in the psychoanalytic world as the more gossipy lifestyle commenter. We'll see what's there, but the main point is that we spent a very jolly couple of hours in the Museum and as always I sensed that extraordinary centredness and serenity that comes from standing in the downstairs rooms, left as they were at Freud's death by keeper of the flame his daughter Anna.

Stephen and Elizabeth needed to get down to editing business afterwards, so I took myself to Louis up in Hampstead, the Austro-Hungarian cafe, which never changes, for a coffee and cake and then wandered down ever-idyllic Flask Walk in peak Autumntime (as pictured above, looking up towards the local school) to Burgh House for a bowl of appropriately autumnal pumpkin soup

via an affectionate cat, appropriate since Stephen and his wife Kate were recently bereaved of the most characterful feline in the world, Agatha (I always called her A-GAA-the a la Freischütz) and we'd been talking about their new pair. Freud's favourite animals were chows, and he recalled that while stroking one of them, Jo-Fi, he found himself humming, 'unmusical as I am,' 'Dalla sua pace' from Don Giovanni - 'on her peace of mind mine also depends'. The words of the melody unconsciously summoned, he would argue in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, usually had a significance.

Anyway, it's nice, after a rather thin year for me on Radio 3, to be featured in something on New Year's Day. May 2017 be a good one for all, as 2016 has been for me on the personal and work levels albeit a horror on the world front - Brexit, Trump and Aleppo offset in tiny ways by victories for Sadiq Khan as London Mayor and LibDem Sarah Olney overturning the wretched Zac Goldsmith's 23,000 majority in Richmond Park. The fight against Fascism is going to be a hard one, but we've got to get tougher.