David Le Winter and his Orchestra

“An Evening at the Pump Room”
Mercury #MG20280

From the Back Cover:

“Turn on the music and order anything you please from the solicitous waiter in gleaming knee breeches and tail coat of hunting pink; he’ll send over the emerald-clad Blackmoor Coffee Boy, his white satin turban adorned with white plume; the curry boy in deep gold; and a sommelier scarcely taller than his champagne cart. The sumptuous food comes to you on a flaming sword! And all the elegance in the world is yours tonight.”

The sumptuous food comes on a flaming sword!?! I'm there brother!

Pic and blurb via www.bizarrerecords.com

princess margaret opens cumbernauld town centre

Albert Finney (Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning)

Writer of seminal "angry young men" texts "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" and "The Loneliness Of the Long Distance Runner" Alan Sillitoe died last weekend at the age of 82. Along with Colin Wilson and (perhaps most famously) John Osbourne, Sillitoe seems to typify that breed of rebellious, disaffected writer who emerged from the misery of rationing in the wake of WW2 to challenge the cosy notions and petty predudices of British life

Sillitoe came from a background which nowadays would be characterised as deprived, making his story rather different from that of his mainly grammer school educated contemporaries

Sillietoe left school at 14 to work in the giant Raleigh Bicycles Factory in Nottingham - the setting for his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - in which anti-hero Arthur Seaton rails against authority and conformity in a very English version of Brando's "What are you rebeling against?" " What have you got?"

By the time of his first success Sillitoe was living in the South of France. The French saw in him a successor to Camus, an Outsider's Outsider. He remained abroad most of his life

His second published work, The Loneliness of The Long Distance Runner and Other Stories was an immediate commercial and critical success. It was filmed starring Michael Redgrave and Tom Courtney in 1961. The story of a disaffected Borstal Boy who deliberately loses a cross country race which he could easily win in order to spite the Borstal's Governor, chimed with the times and resonated with a generation of young men who had money in their pockets and were (for the first time in a generation) free to grow up without the spectre of national service hanging over them

Throughout the remainder of his working life, Sillitoe found it difficult to shake of these connections back to "Kitchen Sink Drama". He remained a respected and celebrated literary figure in France but became largely forgotten in the UK

The Raleigh factory in Nottingham closed in November 2002, in the same week that marked the death of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning's Director, Karl Reizs. The story sees Seaton’s initial rebelliousness diminished by several key events; including a relationship with a ‘well-to-do’ steady girlfriend, Doreen (Shirley Anne Field), an affair with a married woman which leads to a terrifying back-street abortion and the subsequent punishment beating doled out by the aggrieved husband and his heavy-handed associates

Ultimately, Seaton looks beyond the limited horizon of dark terraced streets and considers married life on a brand new council estate. The final scene appears to suggest that ‘the price of social mobility is submission and conformity’

Neither Alan Sillitoe nor Raleigh Industries will be seen by Nottingham again. The remaining bit of the Raleigh factory site has been redeveloped as city penthouses. It is possible then that a present day Arthur Seaton will one evening arrive home from his white-collar sweatshop to realise that the themes expressed in 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' are as true today as they’ve ever been

As I browse my days away on the various menswear or lifestyle centric Blogs on which I regularly lurk, I have come across this word “sprezzatura”. It seems to be used to describe a certain kind of Italian style, slightly flamboyant, conventional but highly personal and individualistic, a flower in the buttonhole, a splash of collar at the ankle or in the breastpocket.

I tried to translate it but it didn't help, ("sprezz" translates as contempt).
The word is coined by Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of The Courtier (written 1508-1528) where he says

I have found quite a universal rule which in this matter seems to me valid above all other, and in all human affairs whether in word or deed: and that is to avoid affectation in every way possible as though it were some rough and dangerous reef; and (to pronounce a new word perhaps) to practice in all thing a certain sprezzatura so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.

In this translation sprezzatura is read as "nonchalance". I’m not sure that’s how the word is now being used or even if that translation is accurate. I suspect that sprezzatura is one of those words like gestalt or zeitgeist that have no immediate equivalent in English, representing as they do a concept or idea as much as a single, knowable entity. Still, I’m striving to achieve it (as are we all, I suspect). When and if I get there, I'll let you know...