It’s about time we recognized the value of other subjects. Yes, of course anyone with any sense knows that Music is the only actually important area of study in life, but hear me out: other subjects do have value.

Mathematics, for instance, can be very beneficial to musicians in working out musical structure, how to combine rhythmic patterns and subdivide beats, and when analysing Lutosławski, Messaien and several other mathematically-aware composers. Maths is also excellent at a higher level for developing the kind of abstract thinking skills which many gifted musicians find comes naturally to them.

Languages can also be a very beneficial area of study. In the sense of being able to translate song lyrics written in other languages, or in reading tempo and expression markings in Italian, French, German etc, of course their usefulness is clear. However, learning languages properly also prepares the brain to order thought differently: each language reflects a mindset, a prioritizing of concepts and values, and this is useful when applying to interpreting music. Getting inside the syntax of music is a similar skill, and linguistic skills may well equip musicians to tune their ears and hearts to deeper elements of what a composer is saying.

History is another potentially-useful field of study since an awareness of historical context can inform musical interpretation. Similarly, social sciences such as anthropology may provide insights into a composer’s world and enable performers to better understand their musical world, reflecting as it surely does, its times and cultural contexts.

The list goes on: Science provides key thinking skills and ways of analyzing the world which are useful to the thinking musician; a good command of English is invaluable for musical criticism; Philosophy attempts to put into words many of the truths which music manages to convey without them; Physical Education tones the muscles required for performance… indeed it is hard to think of any subject which cannot be justified for inclusion in a school curriculum for its knock-on benefits to musical education.

So I urge Academy Trusts, Education Authorities, Headteachers, School Governors and the Secretary of State for Education not to restrict the curriculum by pushing non-arts subjects out. They are useful in developing students’ intelligence, nurturing skills which are of immeasurable use to musicians, and are quite likely to improve the performance of musicians of all levels.

***

I’m fed up of reading articles which try to justify the study of music only in terms of how it benefits intelligence and performance in other subjects. Music is worth studying in its own right, as part of growing as a human being, just as surely as other subjects are beneficial to human flourishing.

Only, obviously, less so than music…

i. Shadow

Michael Wilson stared through the large plate glass window and pondered Kirk Lane, gleaming in unaccustomed sunlight. Like his father, uncle and grandfather before him, Michael kept the shop open for Friday lunchtime all through the summer months at exactly the hours he’d inherited, even though few customers nowadays were after fish and chips for lunch on days like these. Had Kirk Lane been located at the seaside or in a touristy town, popular with day-trippers, his continuation of these opening hours would be more understandable, but on a hot, summer’s day in the backstreets of a Pennine town whose mills had long-since closed, and whose subsequent service industry businesses had also, for the most part, folded as austerity had bitten, very few of the remaining residents had enough income from their zero-hours contract jobs to spend on fish and chips for lunch on a Friday. But Michael was planning on retiring soon and he hadn’t the heart to abandon the family chippy just yet.

And yet, his was now a lonely life, especially with so few customers, even in the evenings. Occasionally his oldest friend, Luke, would pop in for a chat – Luke, whose corner shop had served the community for several decades before his retirement a few years ago. Their conversations would eventually and invariably turn to a familiar theme: neither of them had anyone to pass their family business on to.

In Luke’s case, his son, Mark, had gone off to university some twenty years ago and had never returned, but ended up as an engineering manager for a plastic extrusion mouldings company based in southern Spain. Michael, though, had no children. He and Louise had talked about starting a family, but decided to wait until Michael’s uncle retired and they were running the business themselves. They had suspected that if they’d had little ‘uns, Uncle John would use their young family as an excuse to linger on in charge into his seventies. And then the car crash which killed both Louise and Uncle John came along and Michael was left to run things on his own.

***

Michael was struck by how stark and strong the shadows were outside. The midday sun caught Kirk Lane straight down the middle, pretty much, since it ran north-south, causing the doorways to be largely shaded by the door frames and the shadows of the guttering to fall across the top half of the upper windows opposite. But there was nowhere to escape the sun’s glare.

Michael knew that Luke resented Mark’s success, “Dumb luck of that boy to work in an industry that isn’t being undercut by bloody India or China!” as Luke bluntly put it. But Michael also knew there was more to their rift than paternal jealousy and resentment. Mark had started in a very junior role in a plastics company based in Sheffield and had been promoted (though without a pay rise) after a whole swathe of more senior staff had been laid off due to financial problems at the company. He ended up managing a significant part of the operation which involved many different aspects of the industry and got to know how the market worked pretty well, so when, a few years later, a Spanish competitor was looking to employ someone experienced, inexpensive, young and with a decent understanding of the European market, Mark was just the man for the job. Now, in Spain for ten years and living with a local girlfriend with whom he had an eight year old daughter whom Luke had never met, Mark’s life seemed settled, happy, and probably as secure as anybody’s these days. He kept in touch with his dad now and again, but Mark’s success still left Luke under a cloud of regret: regret that this was not the happy ending for his son which he had hoped for and worked hard to achieve. Plan A was for Mark to inherit a thriving family business: a corner shop as merely the starting point for a chain of retail outlets, including things which Luke knew he could not fathom, but which he saw others of Mark’s generation doing well at – e-cigarette shops, mobile phone accessories – and that was his family’s way. Find a niche, employ family where possible to keep the money in the family and sell what people want. Luke would often tell Michael that he needed to diversify from the traditional fish and chip shop menu, to look at wider society for trends to follow, niches to exploit. But Michael had no interest.

There was something solid about Michael’s menu, something that grounded him. Perhaps it was simply that to change it on his own would seem disrespectful to Louise who’d always maintained that “Folk will always want fish and chips and the standard menu. There’s no need for fancy stuff: stick with the usual.” And so it was that the jar of pickled eggs, the jar of gherkins and the bottles of non-brewed condiment sat on the shelf behind the counter as they had since the 1950s. Cod, haddock, battered sausage, pies, fish cakes, spam fritters… the usual fare, together with gravy, curry sauce, baked beans or mushy peas were on offer. No need to innovate in this business, not at my time of life, had been Michael’s unwavering approach. Yet there was something in the air today, something about his sudden mindfulness of the sunlight and the shadows which made Michael rather thoughtful.

***

“You can batter and deep fry anything. Anything!” Luke had told Michael on more than one occasion. “Up in Glasgow, they deep fry black pudding, white pudding, pizza, Mars bars – anything.”. Whereas Luke had sounded impressed and even excited by this, Michael had merely shrugged, but now, as the shadows lengthened into the early afternoon, Luke’s words came back to him.

The sunshine and the shadows… sunshine like golden batter gave an aura to the run-down road outside. The deep shadows only highlighted the rosy glow further, so that Kirk Lane, depressed, unloved, largely abandoned Kirk Lane, was transformed. There was some kind of life, some kind of hope here still, mused Michael, something in and among the light and shade of the day. A curious sense of playfulness had entered Michael’s mind. He popped upstairs to his flat over the shop, returning a few minutes later carrying a couple of things from his kitchen. You can batter anything, eh? Hmm…

First, Michael battered a KitKat. The art was in the timing and the thickness of the batter, he reckoned: he had to ensure the batter was spread fairly evenly over the whole of the KitKat, then plunge it into the bubbling oil just long enough for the batter to get crispy. Of course, there was no need to actually cook the KitKat, so it was quite a different kettle of fish than frying… er… fish.

Next, Michael battered some butter. This had been an unopened packet in his freezer and Michael did wonder whether this would actually work at all, even though one of his regular customers, Florence Mitchell, had confidently told him that this was something which had already been done at a county fair somewhere in America. She’d seen it on the telly. Mind you, Florence was far from reliable as a source of information and had once told him that a man in Bolton had taught his ferret to answer the phone and swear at cold callers, and much as Michael wanted to believe this tale, he was quietly confident that it was not true. However, in this case he decided to play along with Florrie’s received wisdom, but he thickened his family recipe batter so it would be less runny than usual, but decided that the only course of action was to simply go for it and see what happened. The theory was that the batter should absorb most of the heat energy and have chance to cook before the frozen butter had time to completely melt. There was only one way to find out…

The result was a squishy battered brick, not the complete mess Michael’d feared. He tried a bit of battered KitKat which was satisfyingly crunchy (and the chocolate layer was really tasty in combination with the batter). For the battered butter, Michael decided that a plate was in order. And a fork. The battered butter brick yielded to the fork and broke off a golden, yellow, gently-oozing chunk, with crisp batter encasing the edge. Michael tasted it. And it was good. Exquisitely rich in flavour, outrageously laden with calories and combining salty sweetness with a clash of contrasting textures – this was a delight, thought Michael. You can indeed batter anything. Batter makes everything taste different. Perhaps batter makes everything better?

***

The afternoon light had changed. Usually, Michael would have shut up shop by now but with his adventure in experimental battering and deep frying, the time had flown by. The sun was now shining directly into the shop through its large, plate glass window. Michael was hotter than he could remember ever being. Sunlight shone directly onto the batter tray behind the counter. Does batter make everything better?

Michael took the batter tray and carried it over to the customers’ side of the counter and placed it on the floor, resting it against the counter in full sunlight. He turned the sign on the door round so it no longer said “Open” but rather said “Closed – even for Mickley’s Pies”.
Michael stood by the window so his shadow fell across the batter mix. He had no idea why he thought that what he was planning to attempt was a reasonable thing to do. Perhaps it was heatstroke, he thought. Let’s see if you can indeed batter anything, my friend, he said in his head to Luke…
Then Michael moved so that every part of his shadow moved across the batter tray.

And somehow, and he really did not know how, Michael managed in that sunlit, golden, suspended moment which seemed to sit both in and outside time, to entirely batter his own shadow, then throw it into the oil and deep fry it so that his shadow, and indeed everything which had cast shade on his life, his hopes and his future, was mysteriously encased in golden batter. And everything somehow now tasted better.

∞

ii. Transfiguration

Luke opened his front door, curious to know who was ringing his doorbell so late in the afternoon. He hadn’t made any online purchases lately so a courier seemed unlikely, and nobody else seemed to actually call round these days, not the Prudential, not even the Rington’s Tea man, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And Luke was astonished by what greeted him on the doorstep on several counts. Firstly, this was the first time in the course of a friendship which had lasted more than thirty years that Michael had ever come round to Luke’s home during daytime, uninvited. Years ago, Michael and Louise had been there as guests of Luke and his wife Pauline on a couple of occasions, but simply dropping by on the off chance was something which Luke did to Michael round at the chip shop, but Michael never reciprocated. The second cause of Luke’s surprise was Michael’s appearance, but Luke was hard pushed to say exactly what was odd about his friend. But odd was what he definitely was.

“Er, come in, Michael.” said Luke, who was feeling decidedly wrong-footed by the situation. Michael stepped inside and followed Luke through to the living room. “Something has happened to me, and I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense.” said Michael. There was an awkward pause. “I seem to no longer have a shadow.”

Michael had first noticed this as he’d walked along Kirk Lane – he cast no shadow on the road, on cars, or on the pavement. A strange sense of purpose had propelled him out of the shop and along Kirk Lane and then round the corner into Gordon Terrace to seek Luke, and somehow this seemed to have some kind of connection with what had happened to him earlier. Even when Michael had gone right into the full sunshine of the middle of the road, not only did he have no shadow, but when he turned his back to the sun, when he looked down at himself he could see that his front was unshaded, as if still lit by full sunshine. Indeed, it was this very effect which had so discombobulated Luke when Michael had first presented himself on his doorstep.

“This is… true… or seems so,” said Luke, “Have you had some kind of religious experience?”
“No… well… I had a highly calorific one and then I did something weird, but it wasn’t some kind of holy-moly thing. I seem to have done this myself.” explained Michael in a way which, frankly, explained nothing. He filled his friend in on the events of that day’s extended lunchtime.
“You look like someone who’s had some kind of revelation – like… when Moses went to get the Ten Commandments off God… and when Jesus went to chat to God while a few of his friends watched… they ended up all shiny with holiness. That’s what you remind me of. I always wondered what that actually looked like and now I can more easily imagine.” mused Luke, a lapsed Catholic who’d evidently taken something in at Sunday school many years ago.
“But this was not a vision, I didn’t go to heaven, though I’d tasted something unexpectedly divine just before… but that was deep-fried butter” protested Michael, “so it wasn’t God… it was my family’s own secret recipe fish batter and heaps of saturated fat that did this.”
“And yet,” said Luke, “the fact remains that you have a holy glow about you. There’s no darkness around you at all. It’s some kind of miracle – a sign or… er… well, it must be a sign of something, that’s all.”
“A sign? A sign of nothing I can see,” said Michael, “and all I am left with is my shadow encased in batter back in the shop, and I don’t really know what to do with it.”
“What does it look like?” asked Luke, “Is it like a full sized replica of you in batter?”
“No,” said Michael, “it’s just a weird, globby, mis-shapen lump of batter. I reckon I should eat it, y’know – seems wrong to chuck it, and I daren’t just leave it around. It’s weird… but… but it’s almost as if everything that’s gone wrong with my life is in it. I want rid… but the right way. Whatever that is. I need to think about that.”
“If this is something you need to do,” said Luke, “then you should not be alone while you work this out. I’ll come with you.” And so the two friends walked in the late afternoon sunlight back down Gordon Terrace where Luke lived and along Kirk Lane towards Michael’s fish and chip shop.

∞

iii. Prophecy

By this time, the local primary school had just finished. It was almost the end of term and children with parents and grandparents were streaming along Kirk Lane in the opposite direction to Michael and Luke. “Hi, Michael!” shouted a young mum by the name of Deborah – a neighbour of his whose son, Diesel, often banged on the fish and chip shop window as he walked past.

“Hello, Deborah,” said Michael in reply, and he continued to walk past her, keen not to be waylaid. “Mummy, look – look!” yelped Diesel, pointing to Michael, “He’s got no shadow like he should of.”
“Should have,” corrected Deborah, “and everyone has a shadow, look…” And as she looked, she stopped. Her son was quite correct. “We did shadows at school ages ago,” explained Diesel, “and in sunshine it works best. You just need the light to come from somewhere and something for the shadow to land on. You can’t escape shadows, even if you run right fast. How is Mr Wilson doing that?”
Michael Wilson had no idea and neither did Deborah nor Luke.
How…?” asked Deborah.
“I don’t know,” said Michael, “but I do know that I tried to batter and fry my own shadow and somehow I managed it. Diesel, what you learned about shadows is quite right. I know for a fact that I couldn’t run from my shadow, and if I’d tried to shine a different light into it, the shadow would simply change direction or appear somewhere else, but encasing it in a traditional fish batter and deep frying it does seem to have done the trick. But I don’t know why or how.”

By this point, other mothers and small people had taken an interest and there was a small crowd gathering. They all had questions and Michael was feeling self-conscious and uneasy about all this attention. He just repeated a summary of what he’d told Deborah, “Look! Shadows are a fact of life. There’s light and shade in all of us. You can’t run from your shadows, or shine light onto them to get rid of them – at least, not forever. But you can trap them in tasty batter, apparently. I don’t know how, but you can. So there has to be hope, doesn’t there?” And with that, he strode off to the fish and chip shop with Luke. But the conversations continued and discussions started… could the Wilson family batter recipe somehow have magical properties, capable of destroying darkness in all its many forms, physical, metaphysical, spiritual?

∞

iv. Revival

Luke and Michael stood in the chip shop as the late afternoon sun beat through the window and they stared at the deep-fried shadow. “It’s not as big as I expected,” said Luke.
Michael shrugged, “But still a fair-sized bit of batter to eat, if that’s what I decide to do.”
“Fair enough.” Luke agreed. It was about the size of a football, which is much, much more batter than it is wise to eat in one sitting. The two of them stared at the batter some more. They pondered. There was much silence, punctuated by occasional sighs and deep breaths.
“So, are you going to eat it, hide it, put it on display? Any idea?” asked Luke eventually.
“Come back after the evening frying’s over,” said Michael, “I reckon I need to just get on with the Friday night fry to clear my head then work it out.”  So Luke left, promising to return later that evening as Michael began to get the shop ready for Friday teatime.

To his astonishment, when the time came to open up, a large queue had formed outside. People who had never darkened his door before were there, along with customers he usually only saw occasionally and the queue was huge. In fact, even before serving the first customer, Michael phoned Amy, a local lass in her early twenties who had occasionally helped on Saturdays as a teenager, and asked her to come in to serve while he fried.

It seemed that word had spread and the tale of Michael Wilson’s curious transfiguration and his words of hope of life free of shadows had struck a chord. The whole community wanted to be free of their shadows, to lead lives full of light and void of darkness – free of all those kinds of shadow which can never be run away from or dispelled with vain attempts to shine a jolly light into them. The community was thirsty for enlightenment and Michael and Amy kept frying until they had entirely run out of batter, fish, chips and even mushy peas and were forced to close the shop, even though there were still people waiting to be served.

“Phew!” said Amy, “I’ve never known it like that before.”
“Me neither,” said Michael, “that was as busy as any night in the old days when my granddad ran the place, and back then nearly everyone had a fish supper on Friday.” He looked around the shop. Even the pickled egg jar was depleted… But he couldn’t see the deep-fried shadow where he’d left if over by the fridge.

“Amy,” he asked, “did you see a big ball of batter over by the fridge earlier?”
“Aye,” Amy replied, “I broke it up about twenty minutes into the shift – everyone was asking for bits on their chips, so I hacked that batter up and kept it in the warmer as there was such a run on it. Was that OK?”

Michael paused, then answered, “That’s fine, Amy.” knowing full well it was not, but what could he do? Actually, in food hygiene terms alone, Amy was in the wrong to take apparently discarded batter and serve it, but Michael knew it had been similarly remiss of him to leave the thing in a food preparation area in the first place. But somehow he had a sense of peace about the shadow now.

∞

v. Ascension

Michael walked down the middle of Kirk Lane as the sun was setting. Luke was walking from the opposite end of the road towards him, and as he approached noticed that Michael was not only free of shade and shadow, was not only strangely radiant and translucent, but seemed to be actually fading, with the texture of the road, potholes and all, clearly discernible through him. As the two met, Luke could see that his friend looked happy. No, not happy: something deeper – he looked to be at peace.

“Michael, you’re fading – I mean I can see through you. What’s going on?” asked Luke.
“I think that right now, everyone is eating the shadow batter in houses, in the park, the graveyard… all round here. Amy mixed it in with the orders tonight – she didn’t know what it was. Somehow my shadow being deep-fried and eaten is having some kind of effect on me. I really do think a great weight is being taken from me. And, you know what? I have realized there is something I need to tell you as I disappear, Luke, something I always intended to say, but somehow never have done, but I can say it now with complete sincerity before I disappear completely… you see…”
“No, you really don’t to say anything,” said Luke. “I know.”
“What?” said Michael.
“The crash,” said Luke, “I feel it. I know. It’s like you have somehow already told me. You’ve forgiven me, haven’t you? All these years of polite friendship, a shared sense of loss, but we both knew… There was one thing that could never be undone, one fact we never confronted, never spoke about. A shadow has hung between us. But it is gone, isn’t it? I… I know you have truly forgiven me.”

Michael simply smiled, nodded and… disappeared completely. Luke could see him no longer.

And as Luke walked back to Gordon Terrace, he sobbed, lifted of the burden of the deaths of Michael’s wife, Louise, of Michael’s Uncle John and of Luke’s own wife, Pauline who had been in the passenger seat right next to him as he’d taken the corner far too fast, crashed through the small wall and rolled the car down the hill. As soon as he got home, Luke picked up the phone and left a message on Mark’s voicemail before ringing the travel agent in Bradford he used to use for family holidays and arranging a flight to Barcelona on Sunday. He could face his son now.

Somehow, by whatever miracle the Fryer of Kirk Lane had performed, Luke was finally able to forgive himself and walk out of the shadows. As his friend had disappeared, Luke had miraculously forgiven himself, just as surely as Michael had forgiven him. Luke walked on in the light.

∞

Luke 11:2-4
He said to them, ‘When you pray, say:
Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.’

New Revised Standard Version

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