The Curious Adventures of A J Chadwin

A Traitor to the Written Word

2012-02-10T17:01:00.003Z

I recently acquired a kindle and have therefore, in the eyes of many, renounced any rights I may have had to call myself any kind of a reader. One acquaintance, when I told him, said mournfully that this was one more nail in the coffin of the book, which rather exaggerates my book-buying levels. A friend announced her disappointment in me and gazed upon me with sadness as if I had been denouncing the evils of the objectification of women and then asked her to wait outside while I nipped in to buy the latest copy of Playboy. And then there was this article in The Guardian which was so snobbish that I at first thought it was some kind of satire. It wasn’t.

In one article somewhere, I read that there has been a big rise in sales of ‘trashy’ (for want of a better word) fiction. This is, apparently, because no-one can tell what you’re reading when you’re using an e-reader. I have to say, I rather like that. I’m rather hoping that this might be the beginning of a resurgence of popular fiction á la the great days of the pulp magazines, a market so eclectic that it could support at least two editions of a magazine given over solely to stories about pole-vaulting. Honest. And if you look down on pulp fiction mags, remember they did give us Raymond Chandler.

So what’s it like? Well, I can say that reading a kindle is painless, certainly better than reading from a computer screen, and I do appreciate the volume of free material there is available, and the number of gloriously cheap classics. There is also the access of books that are out of print. One of my acquisitions, for a small sum, has been all five of the Dr Nikola novels by Guy Boothby. Written in the late 19^th century, they are mad novels about an evil villain (the eponymous doctor) who was stroking a cat while being polite to his victims about seventy years before the James Bond films joined us. The first two books were in print fairly recently, but only those two and I’m not sure if they’re still available new. They are.

As promised earlier, I have not destroyed my existing books and in some cases I read the book at home and the kindle edition while travelling. Kindles are good, but they’re not a replacement for books, yet, and books still hold several advantages over them, the key one being that you do not require a battery to read them. Will they replace books? I honestly doubt it but as so far the effect of them seems to have freed up people to read what they want rather than what they should, increased access to classic literature and given new access to almost forgotten books. And they irritate literary snobs. In my electronic book, that’s always a winner.

Happy Burns' Night!

2012-01-25T16:53:00.003Z

Another January, another Burns’ Night. I make no secret of my liking for this particular poet even though I have a distaste for the patina of professional Scottishness that has grown up around him. But perhaps that’s just me being a killjoy.

Until recently I had believed that Robert Burns had made the worst deal in publishing history when he sold the copyright to his Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect for an outright fee rather than take a commission. But then, I heard about the unfortunate Mervyn Peake, artist and Gormenghast author, who apparently designed the logo for Pan Books. He was offered an one-off fee or a commission every time a Pan book was sold. Acting according to advice from Graham Greene who turned out to be better at overweening Catholic guilt than financial forethought, he accepted the former and so lost a fortune. Ah me, but as the bard of Alloway himself allowed: ‘The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley’

So, to kick off our Burns’ Night festivities, here’s a clerihew by GK Chesterton (I think):

When reading Robert Burns

What a lot one learns.

He said a king can make a belted knight.

And he was right!

And now here’s Eva Cassidy giving us My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose:

And finally, a famous one from the man himself. Enjoy:

To A Mouse

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,

O, what a panic's in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

Wi' bickering brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee

Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry man's dominion,

Has broken nature's social union,

An' justifies that ill opinion,

What makes thee startle

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,

An' fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;

What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!

A daimen icker in a thrave

'S a sma' request;

I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,

An' never miss't!

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!

It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!

An' naething, now, to big a new ane,

O' foggage green!

An' bleak December's winds ensuin,

Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,

An' weary winter comin fast,

An' cozie here, beneath the blast,

Thou thought to dwell -

Till crash! the cruel coulter past

Out thro' thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,

Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!

Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,

But house or hald,

To thole the winter's sleety dribble,

An' cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,

In proving foresight may be vain;

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men

Gang aft agley,

An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,

For promis'd joy!

Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me;

The present only toucheth thee:

But och! I backward cast my e'e,

On prospects dreaer!

An' forward, tho' I canna see,

I guess an' fear!

Robert Burns

You'll Never Get Rich...

2012-01-19T17:41:00.006Z

Came across an odd little piece on-line earlier today* which states with some firmness that in order to become a writer it is first necessary to join the USA military.

*http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/01/why-every-writer-should-join-the-us-military-part-i#more

I feel I have to differ.

While I have any amount of respect for the US military (except when it’s urinating on corpses, raping their comrades, massacring villagers and blowing up sections of the British army that is) I doubt that service is a necessary adjunct to the literary life. After all, Claire Tomalin’s recent Dickens biography makes no mention of his stint in Fort Baxter and history does not recall any incident of Geoffrey Chaucer being screamed at by a crew-cut training sergeant who wishes him to give him twenty. Maybe that’s the real story behind Shakespeare? Forget the Earl of Oxford, the reason the historical record is so scant is that he was involved in Navy SEAL ops in curiously unspecified middle eastern countries.

It’s a sign of changing times. When I was of an age to serve we were told to join the army and see the world. I suppose I should be pleased that it’s now join the US army and write a book but my heart isn’t really in it.

And while I wish Mr Cole every success in his writing career, I do think he overstates the importance of marching on a writer’s development. I also think he massively overestimates the importance of being unhappy. He reminds me of the story about the fin de siècle author George Gissing who did not have the best of luck in his career. On one occasion HG Wells (I think it was) was extolling the virtues of a young writer he had discovered when Gissing growled ‘Has he starved?’ as if this was a necessary, if regrettable, prerequisite to being an author.

Well call me a cynic, I think they’re both wrong. I don’t know an easy way to become a writer save actually writing things and getting them published, but what do I know? I never served.

Save the Book!

2012-01-13T12:31:00.003Z

You may well have come across this fun film as it’s popping up all over the internet at the moment:

I think it’s great, but I do regret the little dig at e-books at the end. For the record, I do not own a kindle or whatever, but am planning to get one fairly soon. This, however, does not mean that I am going to place all my books into a great pile and burn them to ashes while dancing about the flames in manic glee pausing only to worship in the sodium gleam of a dozen laptops. Nor does it mean that I will never buy a book again, spurning the printed page with the arrogant sneer of the technowhore. No, some books I will obtain for the reader, others I will continue to buy the analog (as it were) versions of.

In 1970’s film and TV science fiction, the two items that were invariably assumed to have been abandoned by those of the future were the necktie and the book. The necktie is with us still and shows no sign of leaving. I suspect the same of the printed book.

Oh it may change. I believe and hope that it will get better. Already publishers are re-discovering how to print attractive hardback novels, an art I had believed long lost and am joyful to see return, and hopefully similar trends will arise.

Part of the problem is that some people have taken to fetishising the book as icon. There are collectors out there who buy many books but would never dream of opening, let alone reading, them. It is the object not the content that becomes important. Coupled with this is the cultural shell shock caused by the mass book burnings indulged in by the Nazis though it has to be said that the crime there was the choice of books burned, not the destruction of wood pulp.

Of course I could be wrong, in which case apologies and my next post will be hand written on vellum and available to view at your nearest monastery. Enjoy.

A Tale for the Season and the Dying Year

2011-12-23T23:00:00.007Z

The BBC letting us down for ghost stories this yuletide, here's a sorry substitute in the form of another meretricious solstice tale:

Saturnalia

A Fable

Once upon a time, well, Christmas Eve to be precise, but many centuries ago, a knight and his servant were preparing their nightly camp at the fringes of a great wood. Of course, strictly speaking, the servant was preparing the camp while the knight looked on in a vaguely supervisory capacity. He did not offer to help, it would not have occurred to him to do so and even if he could, there would have little he could have done to help save find some wood though that would have been help enough. He had few skills outside of fighting and courtesy.

The knights had been the guardians of the kingdom for many years. It was their job to dispense justice, swiftly and coldly if necessary, for the common weal. It was for them to set the example that others could follow, the example of chivalry and courtesy and gentleness.

But that was long before and now the knights had mostly forgotten their purpose and instead saw themselves as not guardians of the kingdom and its people, but rather guardians of their fellow knights and they had grown jealous of their privileges. And courtesy they defined as being deferential to those richer than themselves.

Sir Peregrin (for that was his name) was a typical knight of that time and he watched his servant with a kind of detached contempt. After all, the man could only be a servant because his blood was thinner and of a lesser vintage than Sir Peregrin’s. His mental acuity was doubtless equally lacking otherwise he would not be servant. For Sir Peregrin success was a lifestyle option and he held little sympathy for those who, for reasons he could not fathom, chose to be failures.

At last a fire was blazing, the horse groomed, the armour polished and a hare that the servant had caught earlier was stewing in a small pot. Sir Peregrin had not been able to kill any meat as no meat worthy of his blade or spear had been apparent for the last few days so he had been dining off what the servant could catch or snare. Peasant food, but surprisingly pleasant in some ways. Sir Peregrin debated with himself about serving some at his next banquet. It might be amusing. He lay back in an attempt to relax, but…

‘Cobb,’ he cried in irritation, ‘fetch something to soften this ground. Every pebble and stone inEngland seems to be digging into me. Find some moss or brush will you.’

‘Very well my lord,’ said Cobb and slipped away out of the circle of light given by the fire.

Now as it happens Sir Peregrin was not entitled to the honorific of ‘my lord’ but it pleased him mightily to pretend to it and as it also happens the servant was not called Cobb but Sir Peregrin had had many servants and he really could not be expected to remember their names. He found that Cobb answered nicely to all of them and as long as they answered nicely to him, well that was sufficient.

Cobb returned with an armful of brush and moss for Sir Peregrin’s bed with pine cones balanced on top.

‘What are those for Cobb?’ asked Sir Peregrin, ‘not my mattress I trust for they will not make a comfy bed.’

Sir Peregrin prided himself on his wit.

‘For the fire, my lord,’ replied the servant who wasn’t called Cobb. ‘They make a good crackle and shout when they burst and it is the solstice. We have the dark so we must have the noise.’

‘Really?’ said Sir Peregrin, slightly petulantly. ‘Must we?’

‘Yes,’ said Cobb. ‘It’s the turning of the year and the longest night. Many things walk abroad that should not.’

‘As long as they stay abroad,’ said Sir Peregrin with a chuckle, pleased with the opportunity to show off his wit once more.

And so they settled. Sir Peregrin in his robe and blankets, Cobb in his blanket, stew and stale bread before the knight which he doled out to the servant when he remembered to and the fire crackling. Every now and then Cobb would throw on another cone which snapped out sparks that arced through the dark to die on the frosty ground.

Sir Peregrin was just about to doze off when he noticed the final cone in Cobb’s hand. It looked strangely green and unripe.

‘Wouldn’t put that one on the fire Cobb,’ he said sleepily, ‘too green to burn. It will just smoulder and do nothing.’

‘Oh I don’t know about that sir knight,’ said Cobb quietly and threw the unripe pine cone into the heart of the dying fire.

And smoke it did not. Instead it crackled, it hissed, what smoke there was were sudden violent ventings of greenish steam that hissed before suddenly collapsing to be replaced with a constant crickling.

Then at last a sudden spark that arced from the flames to land spitting before the two men, a spark that turned curiously and inevitably into a something.

At first Sir Peregrin thought it was some animal as it scuttled, then he thought it was some child as it walked, then he thought it some devil as it stood showing horns silhouetted against the soft light and then he saw that it was a smallish furry figure with long hair and whiskers and pointy ears that stood proud of its head and eyes that gleamed like a cat’s.

‘Merry meet good hobgoblin,’ said Cobb with a calmness that Sir Peregrin vaguely guessed came from having frequent conversations with hobgoblins. He decided that this was one of things that peasants often did. Or was possibly some kind of elaborate joke.

‘Merry met mortal man,’ said the figure. ‘Why bring me here on the solstice night. I would be dancing with my fair Titania for this is our winter time.’

‘I thought you might find something for your humour here,’ said Cobb.

‘You surprise me,’ replied what Sir Peregrin had reluctantly decided was a actual hobgoblin even though only peasants believed in them.

The hobgoblin stepped forwards towards the knight and servant and bowed.

‘Good,’ it continued. ‘You may call me Puck, or Robin Goodfellow or Jack in the Green so long as you call me for breakfast. What brings you to the edge of the wildwood?’

‘We travel to Earl Ranulf,’ explained Cobb. ‘My lord Peregrin would aid him in his war against his people.’

‘My lord Peregrin?’ the hobgoblin seemed puzzled. ‘Sir knight, you wear a cloth not woven for you.’

Sir Peregrin was totally mystified by that so ignored it.

The hobgoblin continued with an air of academic interest.

‘Earl Ranulf makes war upon his people? I would not thought it possible to make war upon yourself for the earl is of his people and the people make the earl so why bring warfare into it? Odd.’

Sir Peregrin was not going to let that one go.

‘Here we go,’ he said with the theatrical sigh of one who has had to explain this so often and the arrogance of one for whom coherence is for little people: ‘This is the real world young Goodfellow or Green and in that world a man has one name and sticks with it. And it is dangerously naïve to pretend that an earl who works damn hard I would have you remember and it is he who provides for the serfs who choose not to be free but prefer to laze about working on the land and we need people like the earl and if you had read of what they did, the violence and the uproar and the damage to property – oh and the loss of life – well the sheriffs had no choice in the face of anarchy and those who say the earl should stand for his actions, well we’ll lose him to France where they don’t have such idiotic ideas and appreciate the hard work that men like him do and I am proud to be going to aid him against those ungrateful peasants who dare try to stand against him and it’s not even as if I’m not feeling the pinch as well, I mean have you seen the price of myrrh these days.’

Puck and Cobb looked at Sir Peregrin with a degree of admiration and Sir Peregrin looked back in the firm belief that he had baffled all their arguments.

‘I see,’ grinned the hobgoblin. ‘A very, parfit gentil knight. Here is sport indeed. Lord, what fools these mortals be.’

‘Fools and ungrateful inefficient scroungers,’ stated Sir Peregrin, ‘furthermore, I think you’ll find it’s pronounced gentle,’ his voice ringing with the certainty of one who has completely misread his audience. ‘And what does parfit mean anyway?’ he added to himself, uncertainly

‘So my sir knight goes for on a quest to aid his fellows against those of the land?’ asked Robin Goodfellow in the tones of one who is interested in your problems but wants to make sure he’s got all the details absolutely correct.

‘He does,’ replied the servant not called Cobb. ‘And so I brought him here on Christmas Eve and made a fire in this glade and burned a green fir cone. I couldn’t think what else to do.’

‘And Sir Peregrin and Earl Ranulf are old friends?’ Jack in the Green enquired in the same tones.

‘No. They have corresponded but never actually met,’ said Cobb, meaningfully.

‘Our course seems clear then,’ said the hobgoblin cheerfully, ‘and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief.’

At that Sir Peregrin fell into a deep sleep wearing nothing but an old shift and Cobb found himself all in his master’s armour.

Cobb smiled.

‘My thanks good Sir Peregrin,’ he said, ‘but that was not my thinking. I do not wish to go to Earl Ranulf’s and ape my one-time master and dance and eat and drink and be merry in his halls. But I have served Sir Peregrin for many years and been his butt and practice man and I know now the way of weaponry, fighting and strategy. No, by your will, good Robin, I would to those people who stand against the Earl. I think I might be able to teach them something.’

‘And will you resume your true name?’ asked Jack in the Green.

The man considered. ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘Cobb has served well enough and will serve longer. I’ll save my true christening for another time.

‘As you wish,’ said Puck cheerfully and with a wave of his paw he deposited Cobb into a meeting of those who had decided to stand against the Earl and had slowly realised that they had no idea how to do so. Sir Peregrin he placed in Earl Ranulf’s courtyard where he was immediately taken up as a spy for the peasants on account of his poor clothing and confused manner.

And a merry Christmas Day was had by all, except Sir Peregrin, who was in the dungeon.

And Earl Ranulf was in his castle.

But the next day, the poor men were at his gate and this time they were being advised by someone with a good working knowledge of siege warfare.

But maybe Earl Ranulf remembered poor Sir Peregrin languishing in his dungeon and ordered clean clothing and good food for him. He must have. After all, it was Christmas.

And a happy new year to us all.

You Don't Get Me

2011-12-14T14:46:00.003Z

What might The Strawbs’ Part of the Union,

Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA

and Show of Hands’ Roots

have in common?

Well, curiously enough, they’ve all been used as propaganda for causes directly opposite to the beliefs of the writers/performers.

Part of the Union became the unofficial anthem of the TUC despite it being intended as an anti-union satire. Bruce Springsteen had to ask Ronald Reagan to stop playing Born in the USA at Republican party events and the BNP put Roots onto a CD it issued of British music. That last led to the creation of Folk Against Fascism.

With Part of the Union you can see how the mistake has arisen and with Born in the USA it was obvious that no-one in the Republican party had actually listened to the lyrics with any real attention. I have a touch more sympathy with Roots (and that is the most sympathy by a spectacular margin I will ever have with the those racist prats) as it contains the lines ‘we lost St George in the union jack/It’s my flag too and I want it back’ though that does refer to the Act of Union, not nationalism. But to those of us who have wandered through the folk clubs of this land, the idea that folk music is sympathetic to the right wing is truly startling. For it is a great truth that where four or more unreconstructed lefties are together, one of them will be singing an 18^th century ballad about sheep stealing. To be certain, Ewan MacColl, one of the godfathers of the folk music scene, went through a phase when he insisted that you could only sing songs from your own country but that’s a far cry from forced repatriation.

The Guardian ran a column at the time written by some metropolitan exquisite who reacted to folk music much as Ronald Firbank may have reacted to a ferret with artistic pretensions and who made the patronising assumption that because folk music is associated with the countryside and the past it was therefore right wing and insular.

Roots was inspired by the actions of the last Government who wanted to change the licensing laws concerning live music performances which would have effectively ended all live music in pubs. When it was put to one of their ministers the disastrous effect this would have on the folk music scene, he sneered in reply that his idea of hell was two folk singers in a pub in Bristol. Roots is Show of Hands’ response to this.

Oh, and if you think it is an angry song, then try this which really lets us now what they’re thinking:

A Tale for Hallowe'en

2011-10-29T20:05:00.004+01:00

Hallowe'en approaches and so here to dismay you is a hopefully appropriate story:

EFFECTIVE TREATMENT

THE brief was simple and I was a special effects man, working in theatre rather than films or TV which would be why Dr Thorne approached me. I’m good too, which will be why he offered me enough of a fee that I quickly agreed despite it being the oddest job I’d ever been offered.

Basically, it was one of Thorne’s patients. Thorne was a Harley Street man so this patient, Mr Marlowe, was not short of the readies. I hadn’t heard of him myself, but Thorne reckoned he was one of the richest men in Britain, in Europe maybe, even richer than those Russians who buy football clubs. Mr Marlowe had two.

So what was the problem and why did the richest man in London want the help of a special effects wizard. Well, not for his daughter’s wedding which was what I had assumed. In fact, he didn’t want me at all. He didn’t know I existed. No, it was Thorne that wanted me.

What it was see, was that this Marlowe had had some kind of breakdown and was convinced that his success was down to his selling his soul to the devil and the problem was the devil was due to collect the next week. Nothing Thorne could do would persuade him otherwise and he had brought in other doctors, scientists and priests even. Nothing would persuade Marlowe that he was not going to Hell at midnight the next Wednesday.

So what was the problem? I asked. Just wait until then and when nothing happens, result. Thorne wasn’t having it. No, Marlowe so much believed this idea that Thorne was scared that he would actually hallucinate seeing the devil and would believe that his soul was gone. At worse he might give himself a heart attack, at best he would be completely mad.

So this was Thorne’s bright idea. Marlowe was off flying round the world for a last look round and so his family would let me into his house, I would put up my gizmos and bits and bobs (no, you’re not getting any of my trade secrets) so that come Wednesday I would make an image of the devil appear and tell him that the deal was off and he could keep his soul. Then Mr Marlowe could relax and Thorne could get on with charging, I mean, curing him.

Like I said. Odd.

But the money was more than good and it would a story to tell the kids so I agreed.

And it all went to plan. I put in my bits and bods in the library, which was where the devil was going to appear apparently, and with a hidden CCTV link I was in the kitchen able to watch and operate what needed to be operated.

WELL you probably remember what happened, it was all over the news for long enough. Thorne got struck off, tried to make out that it was practical joke gone wrong, then when that didn’t work, started hinting that it was a murder plot put together by the family. So they sued and with the help of the recordings I had made of our conversations when he had been briefing me (I’m not so green…) they pretty much took him for every penny.

And what about me? Not as bad as you’d think. Legit theatre wouldn’t touch me, Cameron McIntosh didn’t want to know. Can’t say I’m surprised. Who’d want to employ an FX man who’d scared someone to death? Turns out those ‘death metal’ bands do. Looks great on the posters for their gigs. Pays well enough and the perks are brilliant. So I’m all right.

EXCEPT, well, except that sometimes I can’t sleep and all I can see is Mr Marlowe on his knees, horror struck, and all I can hear is his last scream. And sometimes it sounds like what he’s screaming could be:

‘Dear God, there are two of them!’

And for those who seem to think that disneyfy is a synonym for sweeten, from Fantasia:

And once again, if you are abroad on Monday e'en, beware for there are things that will be walking that night that should not.

A Good Read?

2011-10-20T16:00:00.006+01:00

Well, congratulations to Julian Barnes for winning the Booker this year though commiserations for winning it in a year when the literati have deemed the contenders as very poor. The last time I can remember there being such a kerfuffle was when Martin Amis wasn’t nominated for London Fields. If you missed it, the starting point was the alleged poor quality of the shortlist, though we tend to get that every year, but what set the whole thing ablaze was the judges’ statement that their main criteria for making an award would be ‘readability’. Well, with all the fuss this caused they might have well said ‘font used’ or ‘number of chapters’ or whether there’s character called Elspeth or not or how many paragraphs had ‘Ineffably’ as the first word. Not since Caesar burned the library at Alexandria has a cultural elite been so put about.

And the curious thing, of course, is that apparently ‘readable’ has become synonymous with ‘shallow’ or, according to a piece in today’s Guardian, ‘marketable’. We have been here before. One of the reason why Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads made such a stir was that they aimed for readability and accessibility against the high stylisation of 18^th century poetry*. George Herbert went to some difficulty to ensure that his poetry would be comprehensible to all of his congregation and Jonathon Swift read out bits of Gulliver’s Travels to passing workmen to ensure that his writing was not too high-falutin’.

*discuss with diagrams, all workings must be shown and the examiners’ articles cited

I blame the Bloomsbury set*. Or maybe the Modernists. Perhaps James Joyce. But it’s become very common to assume that acknowledged classic novels are hard to read and it very often isn’t the case. I shot through Joyce’s Dubliners and found what I’ve read so far of Ulysses easy enough, the fact I didn’t finish it had nothing to do with its alleged difficultness. War & Peace, the ‘hard to read’ poster child of fiction is perfectly easy to read once you get past the first chapter which introduces about every character in a couple of pages and just about all said characters have, of course, Russian names. Meanwhile, my friend and fellow blogger, o**, is currently shooting through Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. For those who are waiting for the film to come out, Clarissa is a breathtakingly long book (1, 500 pages in the current penguin edition) which has the reputation of being unreadable. When the BBC commissioned a couple of Oxbridge academics to do the television adaptation, the joke went round that they were the only people in the country who had actually read it. Well, o is loving it and would find it impossible to put down if only it were possible to lift it in the first place.

*but then I blame the Bloomsbury set for most things up to and including the fact that the 306 bus is almost invariably late on a Sunday. I also blame Brideshead Revisited for most of what’s wrong in early 21^st century England. But I digress.

**there’s a story there, I’m sure of it

Alas and alack, I perceive an odour of snobbery here, an assumption that great writing can only be appreciated by a select and if a novel becomes too popular then it cannot logically be much good. Sometimes that may be the case, but I think it is sad that a major criterion on which we designate ‘good writing’ is its failure to readable.

Never mind, Terry Pratchett’s got a new one out, so I’m happy.

Is It About A Bicycle?

2011-10-06T16:35:00.007+01:00

This week (yesterday to be fearsomely precise) saw the centenary of the birth of Brian O’Nolan, Irish civil servant. Here’s a photograph of him:

He is better known, and has appeared as such in this very blog, as Flann O’Brien under which name he wrote novels. Specifically he wrote At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman. It is sometimes said that Evelyn Waugh’s Decline & Fall is the novel most undergraduates would wish to write which is true if said undergraduates were self-loathing misanthropes who could only live with themselves by insisting on their unproven superiority to the working class. For the rest, it has to be At Swim-Two-Birds. After all, it is a novel about a student who is writing a novel about a man who is writing a novel. It is also about a demon; Finn MacCool, legendary hero of old Ireland; the various effects of drinking porter; a poem about beer and according to a brother who knows about such things, an excellent translation of the Madness of Sweeney.

I actually prefer The Third Policeman. Not read it? Do so. Now. Find a copy by any means at your disposal. I care not if you lose your job and/or your family and/or loved ones. Published in 1967 but completed in 1940 it is a brilliantly funny work which will delight you and for a brief but gloriously happy period, you will be unable to look at a bicycle without giggling.

Under the name of Myles na nCopaleen he wrote regularly for the Irish Times and here as a taster is his Catechism of Cliché:

Catechism of Cliché

What is a bad thing worse than?
Useless.

What can one do with fierce resistance?
Offer it.

But if one puts fierce resistance, in what direction does one put it?
Up.

In which hood is a person who expects money to fall out of the sky?
Second child.

If a thing is fraught, with what is it fraught?
The gravest consequences.

What does one sometimes have it on?
The most unimpeachable authority.

What is the only thing one can wax?
Eloquent.

Yes, More of It

What happens to blows at a council meeting?
It looks as if they might be exchanged.

What does pandemonium do?
It breaks loose.

Describe its subsequent dominion.
It reigns.

How are allegations dealt with?
They are denied.

Yes, but then you are weakening, Sir. Come now, how are they denied?
Hotly.

What is the behaviour of a heated altercation?
It follows.

What happens to order?
It is restored.

Alternatively, in what does the meeting break up?
Disorder.

What does the meeting do in disorder?
Breaks up.

In what direction does the meeting break in disorder?
Up.

In what direction should I shut?
Up.

Dead English

When things are few, what also are they?
Far between.

What are stocks of fuel doing when they are low?
Running.

How low are they running?
Dangerously.

What does one do with a suggestion?
One throws it out.

For what does one throw a suggestion out?
For what it may be worth.

What else can be thrown out?
A hint.

In addition to hurling a hint on such lateral trajectory, what other not unviolent action can be taken with it?
It can be dropped.

What else is sometimes dropped?
The subject.

A pint of plain is your only man.

I'll Tell Thee Everything I Can...

2011-09-14T18:39:00.010+01:00

Watched Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland film the other night and it confirmed for me once again what odd books Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass are. The film, as you probably know, is actually a sort of sequel with a teenaged Alice being bullied into marriage and escaping down the rabbit hole. According to imdb.com Burton disliked the original stories as they had no plot. It was just Alice meeting various odd people/animals/chess pieces and then waking up*. This, apparently, was not acceptable to young Burton so he provides us with a story involving the Red Queen ruling Wonderland as a capricious tyrant and Alice has to find the vorpal sword in order to slay the jabberwocky and so free the Mad Hatter, the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat et al.

*http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1014759/trivia

All this goes to confirm to me once again what deeply odd books these two Lewis Carroll classics are. Tim Burton is meant to be one of the most imaginative and ‘off-the-wall’ film directors operating at the moment yet when faced with adapting these books to film, he had to impose a, let’s face it, rather standard to the point of clichéd storyline involving a quest, a wicked queen and a good queen (the White Queen in this case) and heroic helpers to aid in said quest (the Mad Hatter, the Dormouse and so on). He also gives everyone names apparently unhappy that all of Carroll’s characters are known only by their title with the only exceptions of Alice herself, Dinah (her cat), Humpty Dumpty and Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I don’t think anyone else is named in either book but feel free to correct me, preferably without too much smug superiority, thanks. My point however stands. Tim Burton seemed to have thought that these were books that needed to be tamed. Certainly they are deeply subversive, more so than is initially apparent. After all, Looking Glass must be one of the few children’s classics to have a joke about child murder in it.Honest, it’s in the ‘Humpty Dumpty’ chapter after he’s asked Alice’s age:

‘Seven years and six months!’ Humpty Dumpty repeated thoughtfully. ‘An uncomfortable sort of age. Now if you’d asked my advice I’d have said “Leave off at seven” – but it’s too late now.’

‘I never ask advice about growing,’ Alice said indignantly.

‘Too proud?’ the other inquired.

Alice felt even more indignant at this suggestion. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that one can’t help growing older.’

‘One can’t, perhaps,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘but two can. With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven.’

As I said. Odd.

The last word though, goes to Charles Lamb who made this helpful observation in a letter he wrote in 1808:

Why do cats grin in Cheshire? Because it was once a county palatine and the cats cannot help laughing whenever they think of it, though I see no great joke in it.

Most Haunted

2011-08-25T17:07:00.003+01:00

Just what is the difference between a ghost story and a horror story? This is a question that has vexed me, if no one else, for over twenty-five years. It was raised when, while an eager undergraduate reading English Literature,* I asked if I could do a dissertation on the ghost stories of M R James. Having established, with some difficulty, that I did not mean Henry James, doubts were raised over the academic value of studying horror stories to which I retorted that, no, these were ghost stories. And what, pray, was the difference? I was asked over a light sherry.** To this day I still cannot provide an answer to my, or anyone else’s satisfaction. The best I have ever been able to manage is that horror stories strive to gain their effect by describing something physically horrific while ghost stories strive to gain their effect by not doing so, I suppose, I don’t know. All I do know is that ghost stories do have to have a supernatural element. Lacking that means that they are stories only. Good ones, maybe, even touched by transcendent genius perhaps, but not ghost stories by definition. No, ghost stories need, not necessarily ghosts, but the supernatural. Beyond that, I am stymied.

*as we used to say on University Challenge when it was proper with Bamber Gascoigne not that Paxman fellow, now there’s a chap who looks like he had to buy his furniture

**well, it would have been a light sherry had I gone to Oxbridge rather than the concrete slab university which suffered my presence for three years, cheap instant coffee if memory serves

And if you haven’t read M R James, you really should, or listen to Michael Hordern reading them as he was born to do. You won’t regret it, though you may never sleep quite so well.

An Obligatory Blog

2011-08-11T15:18:00.005+01:00

In this time of fear and uncertainty it is beholden on the blogging community to make some judgmental and ill-informed contributions. Never let it be said that I shirk my duty.

No, I am not going to share my pet, and indeed pat, theories, save only to note that riots happen for a reason or reasons and to attempt to discover those reasons is not to condone the rioters’ behavior as some commentators would have it.

But thankfully we have incisive political leadership at this hour. David Cameron returned with the illuminating announcement that the rioters were criminals which was helpful as I was under the misapprehension that they were mormons. And as today’s Guardian reminds us, certain prominent tories know of where they speak when it comes to the wanton destruction of small businesses:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/aug/10/uk-riots-boris-johnson

It is a sobering thought that if Angus Deayton had tied a knot in it, London wouldn’t have that clown as mayor.

At time of writing, the north east remains calm. I was in the city centre on Tuesday night and passed a group of about fifty young people, mainly in hoods on a warm sunny evening, and there was a mood of nervous anticipation but nothing seems to have come of it. There were not enough and the mood had not hit that twitchy tipping moment when a group become a mob. Why not? No idea. There were a couple of police officers but no more than that. The council was doing an open air showing of The King’s Speech just up the road and maybe Geordies don’t riot when superior and slightly smug British cinema is playing in the vicinity. Thank God it wasn’t Sex Lives of the Potato Men. The consequences could have been awful.

I Quite Liked It Actually...

2011-07-27T17:42:00.005+01:00

A friend and fellow blogger has had a somewhat severe reaction to Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory as you may read here: http://delaisse.blogspot.com/2011/07/wasp-factory.html (warning: spoilers).

While I was not greatly enamoured of Mr Banks’ gothic effort, I can’t say I disliked it that much but I do appreciate the concept of the polluting book, the novel whose very presence on your shelves can even corrupt your other books so that you become scared to read them again in case Mrs Gaskell has mutated into the Marchioness de Sade. I do not, and have never had, any such book with the possible exception of a self-published fantasy which chunters along for about forty pages until the author gets bored and then breaks off with a note informing the reader that what you have just read actually belongs in a later unwritten novel and now he’s going to start the story proper. As far as this reader was concerned, he was on his own there. While I agree with Flann O’Brien that ‘one beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with’ I felt this was taking things a touch too far. But I do not loathe nor yet fear that book.

No, the only novel that I’ve had such a major reaction to was Martin Amis’ Dead Babies which gave me an intense distaste for Amis fils both as a writer and a human that nothing he has written or said since has dispelled. A milder reaction was provoked by D H Lawrence’s Women In Love which I was required to attempt to read as a student. At the subsequent seminar, it was revealed that everyone in the room had hurled the book at the most convenient wall at the same point in the narrative, the famous nude wrestling scene, so I suppose that can be classed as an achievement. Also, an excellent performance of The Three Sisters that I saw as a depressed teenager upset me so much that I still cannot bear to watch another Chekov play. But that last was down to the skill of the then RSC ensemble and that of young Anton and the translator.

As to young Iain, the only other thing of his I’ve read is The Crow Road which I recommend to just about anyone. He also writes science fiction under the not very mysterious pseudonym of Iain M Banks. This is, I suppose, to ensure that no reader of serious contemporary fiction should find himself reading about spaceships portrayed non-ironically, which I think we all agree is a kind act on behalf of the author.

Having expunged the early Banks oeuvre from her life, my friend contacted me this morning to inform me of a startling thematic link she had discovered between Trainspotting and The Wind in the Willows. She's not wrong.

Poop! Poop!

Crime and Bureaucracy

2011-07-01T16:15:00.004+01:00

As part and parcel of the application process for a new job I was recently required to undergo a CRB or criminal records bureau check. This, for the uninitiated, is to confirm that you have no criminal convictions and certain jobs demand it as a condition of employment. Certain voluntary roles do also and I had to have one a couple of years back when I applied to help out at a children’s centre.

It is, with the best will in the world, a somewhat nerve-wracking procedure. The form is simple enough but the wait can be bloody. Now, I do not have a criminal record but I still find myself distinctly tense until a bureaucrat confirms this. Apart from the fact that mistakes and errors do occur even in the most perfect of systems, and this is not one of those, I still have the vague and worrying feeling that I have, at some point, been arrested, charged, prosecuted and convicted for something and then forgotten about it. Unlikely I know, but like Douglas Adams when posting an important letter, I fret that the post box might be, in some obscure way, ‘broken’.

Well, I passed, and even better, this time I passed an Enhanced Disclosure which, I think, is rather more impressive than passing a standard (or vanilla, as we enhanceds like to call them) one.

Of course, all this proves is simply that I have not been caught doing anything wrong and the whole apparatus exists, I suspect, for the protection not of vulnerable people but of the organizations that work with them. But the fact remains that I did pass and I am childishly proud of that.

So, if anyone wishes me to look after any money or valuables they may have, please contact me below. After all, I am as honest as the day is long and I have the paperwork to prove it.

Passing by the Other Side, a Beginner's Guide

2011-06-18T14:33:00.004+01:00

Summer's here and with summer comes the chugger (a portmanteau word derived from 'charity' and 'mugger' and one of the best neologisms of the last decade). It is possible your area is not effected by this modern phenomenon in which case you are blesséd indeed. For your information they are young people who approach you in the street on behalf of charity and are remarkably persistent. They're not volunteers and they're not employed by the charity in question. They work for agencies paid for by said charity and they are very irritating. They've spread to the telephone now. Just the other day I had a call from a well known national help and advice charity wanting a direct debit off me. So I am now in the position of being able to say that the Samaritans have called me wanting help.

The flesh and blood ones have calmed down a bit this year, or at least they have in this part of the world. Last summer it was impossible to make your way down Northumberland Street without being pursued by one or more of them. They would even approach you if you were sitting down and deep in conversation and you had to be distinctly rude to them to get them to go away which I dislike doing.

I did however find one foolproof method of getting shot of them. The theory was as follows. I was frequently approached while returning from a shop at the supermarket and at the top of my bag would be a loaf of their cheapest bread. On being approached I would invite the chugger to regard my somewhat scruffy attire, elderly shoes and finally the cheap dry bread and invite them to conclude that I do not have any disposable income to put to their convenience. Abashed and confused, I reckoned, they would fall away sadder but wiser chuggers.

That was the theory.

You see, I'd had a bad day and so when I was approached by an earnest young man my carefully worked out plan collapsed and instead of calmly taking him to task I whipped the loaf out of the bag and waved it at him while saying 'Cheap bread! Cheap bread!' in an urgent voice.

Well, it worked, I'll say that, but on the whole I'd rather not discuss the incident any more.

I Want to Know What the Words Are

2011-06-10T17:26:00.004+01:00

Here’s a thing, 47 years old and never seen stadium rock. This was not deliberate as such, it just never occurred to me to do so. In fact, going to see three ‘80s bands at Newcastle’s arena the other day turned out to be the first gig outside of a pub that I’d been to in something like fifteen years if not more. It was like realising how long it is since you last saw a dentist.

Anyway, thanks to the generosity of an old friend, I found myself at said arena to watch the rock stylings of the bands Styx, Foreigner and Journey in that order. It was all a bit odd as I could not bring to mind a single song any of them had done. I listened to bit of Styx and Foreigner on spotify but never got round to Journey so that was going to be a new discovery for me. People I mentioned this to would say ‘Journey? They’re the ones who did…’ and sing a few bars which, I’m sorry to say, was not as helpful as they intended but did leave me in a state of pleasurable uncertainty.

So what was it like? Well, Styx were on first and it quickly became apparent that either they had not seen This Is Spinal Tap, or – and this is my hope – they had but were damned if they were going to change their act as a result. We had the three guitarists lined up front stage phallicly sticking the necks of their guitars at us while they grimaced musically. We had a plethora of ‘Hullo Newcastle’ and ‘Whoo Newcastle’ shouted at random. The keyboardist had a habit of showing off by playing solos with one arm held up in the air behind him thereby demonstrating that there are at least two things he can do one-handedly. Every now and again a slightly shy bookish looking man with a bass guitar would come on and join in. Much was made of this and it turned out that he was the bassist from the original band which raised the question of how authentic were this lot? How many original members were left or were we getting some kind of homeopathic Styx? My companion noted that the difference between the original and the tribute bands is becoming increasingly blurred. But all in all, they were good fun, got the audience on their side and did what they had been paid to do. I thought they were rather sweet.

Next were Foreigner who endeared themselves to the audience after a couple of songs by stating bluntly that they didn’t have much time so from now on in they were going to be only doing their big hits. Which they did. And the crowd loved it, even if the lead singer did over-estimate the geordie audience's capacity for remembering the lyrics to the chorus of ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’ and ended up having to shout out the line in advance like a rock pantomime*. Again, highly professional and like Styx, pronounced Newcastle correctly with the short ‘a’ and the stress on the second syllable.

*A cheap and cheerful form of rock opera which I for one would pay good money to see

Finally we had Journey, the headline act and as such on for 90 minutes as opposed to the mere hour the other two had been granted each. Their arrival on stage was greeted with great enthusiasm by the audience which slowly dribbled away as the lead singer kept announcing those words nostalgia soaked concert goers of a certain age both loath and fear: ‘And here’s one from our new album.’ One of these appeared to be called 'Spunky Love' though I really hope it wasn't. We left before the end and so I never did get to hear their version of that song people sang at me. Never shall now I suppose.

My companion, who was stopping off in the North East of England on her way to somewhere else, had obtained the tickets because a Foreigner tribute band are playing at her holiday destination. I must ask her which was better.

Give me Eeyore, or Give Me Proust

2011-06-04T17:21:00.007+01:00

Chatting to a friend the other day, I commented that I occasionally get into trouble for putting milk in espresso coffee. Apparently you’re not meant to do that. My friend fiercely defended my right to put milk, or indeed anything else that took my fancy, into anything I wished to drink. I was grateful for her support. As it happens I drink espresso not only because the espresso maker I have is one of those that you place directly on the hob and therefore guarantees piping hot coffee, something which cafetiéres and percolators cannot, but also that said espresso maker looks ever so slightly like a dalek.

I was reminded of all the above while perusing the Guardian on-line and yet again coming across someone getting remarkably tetchy about adults reading Harry Potter. This is a bit of a King Charles’ Head with CP Scott’s mob*. They have that curious irritation bordering on real anger about the Harry Potter books which I genuinely do not understand. Some of it seems to be down to snobbery, some of it down to jealousy and a lot down to the fact that adults read them too. And this seems to be the real irritant. But what, pray, is so appallingly wrong with adults reading children’s books? Especially that some extremely fun and interesting writing is currently coming from that corner.

*And with me as a quick glance shows I have written about three blogs on this subject over the last six months

The answer, at least for some people, seems to be a sense of propriety. Adults should not read books intended for some other group. It makes a mockery of the whole terribly serious business of being a reader. After all, how can you hold your head up at the Hay on Wye Literary Festival when your bibliophilic superiority is undermined by someone reading The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins (which scores doubly badly as it is not only a YA** book but science fiction as well but which remains one the very few literary responses to the banking crisis that I have come across).

Well the hell with them. I will continue to put milk in my espresso and read what I damn well want to read. It’s just such a terrible shame that I have to assert my right to do so.

**Young Adult as teenagers and children who dislike being called children are now referred to by the publishing industry. As I now have discovered, calling a teenager an old child does not go down well.

All I Ask Is A Comfort Break...

2011-04-30T15:40:00.003+01:00

I recently undertook an eight hour coach journey. Irritatingly, it was not one of those that people on Radio 4 or The Guardian witter on about, travelling in some far flung part of the globe in order to go and patronise some poor people and make their lives in a small, and yet significant, way ever so slightly worse. No, this was a journey from Newcastle to Birmingham (insert own joke here) via Leicester and Nottingham. I was obliged to go this longer way owing to the increasingly insane cost of rail travel in this fair and royalist land. £100 Richard Branson wanted from me and for that amount I expect luxury on a scale that would Louis XIV of France, the Sun King himself, mutter ‘Steady on old boy.’.

Actually, it was a rather pleasant journey. Certainly nicer than the overcrowded hell that is Virgin cross-country these days. Not only was there room for your luggage, there was even room to stretch out your legs and even turn a page of your book without nudging your neighbour, none of which is possible on Beardie’s trains.

It’s not the longest single journey I’ve undertaken in my time. That would be the thirty-two hour ferry crossing from Ireland to France I undertook in 1985 during which I tasted frogs’ legs for the only time, found out that members of the US Marine Corps are obliged to shave their legs* and saw the first Police Academy film.

Those were the golden days of travel.

Incidentally, I will not divulge the name of the coach company with which I travelled. This blog is not for hire. Meanwhile, here’s a song for you:

*’You want waxing? You can’t handle waxing!’

All Hail a Glover's Son

2011-04-23T16:18:00.004+01:00

Another 23^rd of April, another Shakespeare’s birth/deathday celebration. Another piece about whether Shakespeare did actually write the plays or whether someone else did and if so, does it actually matter(http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/23/care-wrote-william-shakespeare-plays).

It does, but only because of the argument put forward by those who cannot bear the idea that a glover’s son from Stratford could be England’s greatest writer. Once you strip away the glitter of their argument it comes down to simple snobbery and as such needs to be resisted rather than ignored. The idea that a provincial with a reasonable but not amazing education could achieve what Shakespeare achieved has to be celebrated, not furiously denied. Interestingly, so angry are the Shakespeare sceptics at the effrontery of the man’s persistent refusal to be well-born, they rarely even use his name, preferring to refer to him as ‘the glover’s son’ or ‘a Stratford actor’. They even call themselves anti-Stratfordians, which does rather reveal the wellspring of their denial. Refute and then ignore is my humble advice. You can find the facts you need in Bill Bryson’s excellent biography, Shakespeare, though doubtless the sceptics would refuse to accept his arguments because he’s American or too popular or whatever. As Macbeth says:

…it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

On a better note, once again here’s the reason why we should celebrate this day with, as it is also St George’s Day, John Gielgud as John of Gaunt in Richard II stating why he rather likes England but is a bit upset about recent events. He shouldn’t worry, it will all turn out for the best a couple of plays down the line, well, for England anyway, not so much for France:

Have fun.

Reading Maketh Something I've Read

2011-03-26T17:21:00.003Z

So, Michael Gove thinks children should read 50 books a year. Seems a lot to me, that’s one a week with a fortnight off at Christmas presumably, but what do I know? Reactions were as to be expected. Some people boasting that fifty was not nearly enough, one on-line commentator threatening violence if any of the fifty were Harry Potter or Twilight books, which seemed hard, and most agreeing that quality not quantity was the issue. I have to say, I’m not so sure.

Reading is many things. At its basis, it’s a way of sharing information with others. It’s a form of pleasure for some. For others it is a kind of moral duty and there are some for whom it is a way to parade their superiority to others. Each, save the last, seems valid. But it is the idea that there are books that should be read (and by serious and worrying implication, books that should not be read) that I find truly troublesome. I know I failed that test badly as a child by spending a year obsessively reading Enid Blyton (the Famous 5 and the Adventure stories to be precise) which confession casts me into the outer darkness as far as some are concerned. In the pre-video/i-player days I read novelisations of my favourite television series, Dr Who and Space: 1999 in particular. As a teenager, or Young Adult as they are now designated by the publishing industry, it was Alistair MacLean and science fiction. Then as an older Young Adult (if that makes sense) I discovered Penguin Modern Classics and dismayed my friends and family by always having one in my pocket, green spine to the fore so that it could be seen, identified and admired. And of all of them, I cannot think of a single book that I have ever regretted reading and that, surely is the important thing. The act of reading is neutral and to attempt to indoctrinate children into thinking otherwise is as dubious as not allowing them to read at all.

Anyway, must dash, got a DVD I want to watch.

Goodbye, Mr Bond

2011-03-12T14:38:00.004Z

I don’t like the James Bond novels anymore.

I’m a bit sad about that as for most of my life I did and it’s a bit like an old toy finally falling irrevocably apart. I also no longer enjoy the Flashman novels of George MacDonald Fraser, but I’m not sad about that. Tastes change over a life and it’s curious, to me anyway, which are mourned and which are not. Like Mr Banks, I feel a surge of great satisfaction, though for me it is the knowledge that I shall never again read The Lord of the Rings, that burden has been taken from me. On the other hand, I was upset to discover that I now find T H White’s The Once And Future King almost unreadable. That was the first book that I read after my university final exams and as I studied Eng Lit, was therefore the first book I had read out of choice for three years. I loved it. Tried it again just before Christmas, didn’t like it and felt a pang of loss. But the Bond novels are a special case. I partly defined myself as a reader of Bond books, defending them from criticisms that seemed to mainly arise from snobbery or ignorance. Furthermore, I am now nervous about the films. What if I no longer enjoy them? After all, the reason I write is because of the James Bond films. I adored them as a child and was horrified to discover that Ian Fleming was dead and so no longer writing which, I reasoned, meant that there would come a day when there would be no more Bond films, a horrifying prospect. Then I noticed that someone else had written a Bond novel, one Robert Markham (a pseudonym for Kingsley Amis, no honestly). The relief was overwhelming and with a prelapsarian ignorance of the laws of copyright, I wrote a Bond story myself. It was the first thing I ever wrote because I wanted to as opposed to being told to by school. It was called One By One, had a Russian villain called Ivan (after consultation with my brother had elicited the information that Ivan was what most Russians are called, and him a Man From U.N.C.L.E. fan) and featured a cunning plan to kidnap scientists. I then wrote a Bond screenplay, I forget the title, which was set on a cross-channel ferry and had 007 thwarting a hi-jack attempt. Sadly, both manuscripts are lost, but I’m sure if Barbara Broccoli calls, I could put something together.

And of course I may return to the written Bond, because, as every fan of the films knows as a certainty:

James Bond Will Return.

A Vote for Me is a Vote for Something Else

2011-03-05T16:47:00.003Z

Another by-election, another small turn out and doubtless soon to follow we will have the usual laments about voter apathy which always seem to have the sinister undercurrent that the whole system should be abolished and we should resign ourselves to autocratic rule by those who know best. There may well be laments about how more people vote in X Factor or whatever than vote in elections. But as Mark Steel has pointed out more than once, people don’t bother to vote because they can’t be bothered with democracy, they don’t vote because they can’t see the point. Their votes have no concrete effect. He may be right. On a local level, Tesco recently failed to get permission to build a new shop near where my mother lives, said permission turned down by the democratically voted local council. Tesco then trotted off to London to get that decision over-ruled by a government made up of two parties who failed to win the last election. David Cameron wants to privatise just about the entire state which I don’t remember being mentioned in the TV debates and Nick Clegg justifies breaking his university fees pledge on the grounds that not enough people voted for him which is not so much realpolitik as petulance. ‘Manifestos are poetry, policies are prose’ says a character in The West Wing. Maybe, but I reserve the right to get annoyed if I am sold a book which is advertised as being by Oscar Wilde but is in fact written by Jeffrey Archer.

Play nicely Martin

2011-02-12T16:15:00.003Z

There must, as they say, be something in the water. First we have two football bods being rude about female match officials, then Jeremy Clarkson and his droogs mocking Mexicans and now Martin ‘son of Kingsley’ Amis has had a go at children’s authors. You may have missed the last. It was in a TV interview with Sebastian ‘literary writer’ Faulks in the course of which Amis fils stated that he would require to be ‘brain-damaged’ before he could write a book for children.

What is it about children’s books that so irritate Britain’s intelligentsia? I assume it has something to do with Harry Potter being so successful but I don’t remember Roald Dahl getting it in the neck in this way. He would be criticised for being too dark or otherwise unsuitable, but I cannot recall anyone saying that he must have suffered some kind of mental collapse between writing all those ‘tales of the much as we expected’ (as Peter Cook called them) and James & The Giant Peach.

As always when one of these attacks on children’s books pops up, I am reminded of Philip Pullman, a writer who, as a friend once said about Derek Jarman’s films, I don’t really like but I’m very glad he’s there. His reply to someone’s query as to when he was going to start writing grown-up books was to comment that an equivalent was to ask a paediatrician when they were going to start doing grown-up medicine. He also once smugly noted that when the Dark Materials trilogy, which deals with the existence of God and the role of religion amongst other things, was top of the children’s best-selling charts, the best-selling adult’s novel was Does My Bum Look Big In This?.

Which is nice.

Make Room! Make Room!

2011-02-04T18:22:00.004Z

During the debates over healthcare in the United States recently, it was interesting to see the misconceptions that young nation has about the NHS. Remember all that talk about ‘death panels’ deciding who lives and who dies? It got to the point where one was required to point out that Dr Shipman was the exception, not the norm. But we in dear old Blighty should restrain from mocking too much. We too have our own fiercely held beliefs that must seem peculiar to those not blessed to dwell among us. This was borne out recently by a survey that Radio 4’s been burbling on about concerning immigration. Apparently we don’t want any more immigrants on the grounds that the country is, in some way that I for one have not noticed, ‘full’ and furthermore we don’t want the immigrants we have got to receive any care or attention from the aforementioned NHS. So far, so Daily Mail. Then it gets weird because it turns out that we do want immigrants after all, but only if they are doctors or carers for the elderly.

Is this really a good idea? Maybe I’m a wuss in these things, but I am leery of being treated by someone who is denied the very care and treatment that s/he is giving me. I can see there being ‘potential issues’, as a manager I once had used to call foreseeable consequences, arising.

And then there’s this business of the country being ‘full’. This one’s been doing the rounds for as long as I can remember but it seems to be peaking at the moment. A lot of this, I suspect, is a result of the disgraceful scaremongering during the last government by the party previously known as Labour, but it seems to be also driven by all those southern shandypants who can’t tell the difference between the United Kingdom and South East England who get into a tizzy every time they can’t get a seat on the tube. Fret not my little metropolitan friends, once the housing benefit caps come in there’ll be loads of room. Curiously Holland does not think it's full despite having a higher percentage of immigrants and being smaller than us and, indeed flatter. Must be the waffles.

Undead? Moi?

2011-01-29T20:59:00.003Z

At a book sale today, I commented to my companion that I was a bit bored with vampires. I had found a copy of the first book in the True Blood/Sookie Stackhousen(?) series by Charlaine Harris and had decided not to buy it. My companion disagreed and spent the next minute rhapsodising about vampires. ‘They bite,’ she crooned, a touch too loudly and sensuously for a church hall on a Saturday morning in my personal opinion. But that is by the by. Apart from my friend and assorted Ron Pattison groupies, I get the impression that we’re all a bit bored by vampires. There’s a lot of them about and I can’t help but feel that a moratorium is called for. So far, so uncontroversial.

However, if we are to move, slowly, to zombies, things are different. Zombies are great, zombies are cool, zombies are going to medical school.

Well, I’m sorry, but I just don’t get this whole zombies thing at all. They are the dullest and dreariest supernatural menace to stalk the cinema since I can’t think when. Yet they seem to be adored by many. I mean, all they do is moan, lurch and eat people alive and even that palls after a few times. The website www.tor.com ran an article which posited the theory that we like them so much because they are so pathetic. They are ‘schlupps’ the article suggested which I take to mean that we are meant to feel a certain sympathy for them. I don’t get it myself. I mean to say, with a vampire there’s a chance of some decent conversation, with a ghost you might be given a great revelation and some cool special effects but all you ever get from a zombie is a moan and some anthropophagy for your trouble. Where’s the pleasure in that?

I suppose that if ghosts represent our fear of personality annihilation after death and vampires our fear of predatory sexuality and STDs, then zombies channel our fear of pre and post mortem decay and loss of facilities. Oddly enough, that was what folkloric vampires seemed to have represented before Bram Stoker and then Bela Lugosi got their fangs into them. Perhaps a similar arc awaits the poor shambling zombie? Already they can run, which they never used to be able to so it’s not such a leap for them to become sophisticated, stylishly dressed and Hungarian as opposed to hungry.

‘I do not eat…snacks.’

Burns Notice

2011-01-21T17:26:00.006Z

It’s Burns Night soon, the 25^th to be precise, and this is a thing worthy of celebrating. Oh avoid the neeps and tatties by all means, especially the neeps in my humble opinion, and no one’s forcing you to eat haggis, although these days I think it’s rather good, especially the vegetarian version. Now I come to think of it, is there another poet who’s reputation has suffered from the vague belief that the reader has to eat certain foodstuffs before s/he can be appreciated? Not that I’m aware of, though it may be de riguer in certain circles to turn on the gas oven before reading Sylvia Plath for all I know.

No, forget all the toast to the haggis and piping the damn thing in nonsense, unless that’s the kind of thing you go in for in which case indulge yourself by all means, but instead consider the poetry itself.

All right, that can be a bit of a reach for those not up on lallands, aka the lowland Scots dialect, in which a number of the poems are written but it should not be too much of a problem for those used to picking their way through, say, T S Eliot’s The Wasteland. It’s really just a question of getting your ear in and not being shy to use a glossary if one is provided.

One of the more famous Burns’ poems is commonly known as Scots Wha Hae, which actually comes out in standard English as ‘Scots who have’ which is a compelling reason why it should not be Scotland’s national anthem. God Save the Queen may be a dreary anthem to have but at least it’s title doesn’t leave the listener hanging in suspense. Not that I’m a fan of God Save The Queen, it’s one of the duller anthems, especially when compared with The Marseillaise which is great fun. For the record, my vote’s with Jerusalem.

No, let us celebrate Burns because in the month that has seen Bob Diamond of Barclays tell Parliament that he believes that the banks no longer need to show remorse while the cabinet is made up almost exclusively of millionaires, this following poem is rather apposite:

A Man’s A Man For A’ That

Is there for honest Poverty
That hings his head, an' a' that;
The coward slave-we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a' that!
For a' that, an' a' that.
Our toils obscure an' a' that,
The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The Man's the gowd for a' that.

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an' a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man's a Man for a' that:
For a' that, and a' that,
Their tinsel show, an' a' that;
The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor,
Is king o' men for a' that.

Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,
Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that;
Tho' hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a coof for a' that:
For a' that, an' a' that,
His ribband, star, an' a' that:
The man o' independent mind
He looks an' laughs at a' that.

A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an' a' that;
But an honest man's abon his might,
Gude faith, he maunna fa' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,
Their dignities an' a' that;
The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth,
Are higher rank than a' that.

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that.

And here’s the Corries doing a rather fine version of it:

There Will Be Platelets

2011-01-15T14:09:00.002Z

It comes of having a Y chromosome I suppose, but I am inordinately pleased to discover that I have enough platelets in my blood stream to be a possible platelet donor. Not everyone has. And it’s better than that, not only do you have to have enough platelets to spare, you have to have the right blood type and furthermore have ‘rigid and raised’ veins. The latter sadly really does bring out the Jeremy Clarkson in me as a friend discovered when I boasted loudly of having them while she was browsing in Topshop. Mind you, she ought to be used to this. I once announced loudly in Fenwicks that I’m partial to Polish sausage. Well, in these hard times you have to carry on, don’t you.

Actually, I’m not there yet. While my veins are ready and willing and my platelets are so numerous they’re in danger of seceding from the red corpuscles, I still on the day have to have a high enough pulse and a low enough blood pressure. So I may yet have to endure the ignominy and blow to my self-esteem of not actually being able to give away any of the teeming platelets however much I may wish to.

Wish me luck.

Souls to the Devil, Did You Think I Was Dead?

2011-01-06T19:15:00.005Z

I have to admit being somewhat impressed when a friend mentioned en passant on facebook that finding James Joyce’s Ulysses heavy going, she had instead picked up Finnegans Wake. Now, as you doubtless all know, Finnegans Wake is the difficult book’s difficult book. Even people who read Thomas Mann or The Glass Bead Game for fun find it hardish. Based on the Irish song about a man in a coma who is awoken when whiskey is accidently thrown in his face during the wake held in the mistaken belief that he is dead, Finnegans Wake describes the dreams he has while unconscious. Or so I’m told. Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story based with a similar story but which does not end so happily though it is somewhat shorter.

I’ve not read Finnegans Wake and to be blunt, don’t really intend to. I’m having a go at Ulysses and quite enjoyed the first 49 pages (Wordsworth Classics Edition, £2:00), certainly beats all that ‘once upon a time there was a cow it was a moo cow’ stuff that blights the first sentence of A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, but I just cannot foresee a time when I will want to read the later work. Apart from anything else, I don’t have a copy and Wordsworth Classics don’t do one. Now I come to think of it, I’ve not actually even seen many copies of it. I worked for ten years in an Oxfam book shop and never once was a copy donated which might mean that it is such a loved book that it is never parted with or that there’s damn all copies in circulation.

Apparently either Pozzo or Lucky in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is based on Joyce, I wouldn’t know. Beckett of course was Joyce’s compatriot and fellow allegedly ‘difficult’ writer, the main difference being that the latter killed Germans and played cricket, one in his capacity as a member of the French Resistance and the other in his pursuit of a loved sport, though I can never remember which.

Oh and there isn’t meant to an apostrophe in the title, I believe. The great Flann O’Brien maintained that it was assorted editors insistence in adding one that contributed to Joyce’s early death.

Lots of fun at Finnegan's wake.

Are You Sitting Quietly?

2010-11-17T19:12:00.003Z

Another Harry Potter film, another flurry of smug people complaining about adults reading children’s books. I am grateful to the anonymous poster on the Guardian website who provided this great quote from C S Lewis:

"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."

As it happens, I’m not a massive fan of Lewis. Enjoyed The Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe as a child but could never really get into the rest of the Narnia books. I preferred the Moomins as it happened. I still read children’s books as well as these new YA (Young Adult) novels that we never had when I was a teenager and which seem to be the sole refuge of serious political satire in fiction at the moment.

As I understand it, children’s literature was invented by, of all people, 17^th Century puritans, especially one James Janeway who published in 1671 a book that is a touch startling to our sensibilities as its title reveals:

A Token for Children, being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children

It gets worse. In the preface Janeway exhorts his now presumably already nervous young readers thus:

‘If you love your parents, if you love your souls, if you would escape hellfire, and if you would go to Heaven when you die, do you go and do as these good children.’

The book remained in print right up to the 19^thcentury.

Mind you, the paedocidal Janeway has to bow to Abraham Chear who in his 1670 book, A Looking-Glass for Children writes this verse in the voice of a young girl looking in a mirror:

What a pity such a pretty maid

As I should go to Hell!

Meanwhile, over in colonial America, the Tracey Beaker du jour was The New England Primer, a sort of children’s ABC and snuff book combined which gives us such cheerful rhymes as:

The Cat doth play

And after slay.

And

Xerxes the Great did die,

And so must you and I.

It does rather put Enid Blyton into context.

There's something out there...

2010-10-30T18:14:00.003+01:00

A tale for Hallowe’en:

‘HULLO? Hey! Anyone there? Where am I? Why is it so dark?’

‘I want it to be dark. I prefer it that way.’

‘What? Who are you? Where am I? You want money or something? I’m a rich man. Oh Christ, that’s it, isn’t it? I’ve been kidnapped, haven't I.'

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘Look, let me go and we’ll say nothing more about it. I’m powerful. I know where the bodies are buried.’

‘As it happens, so do I.’

‘You can’t keep me hidden for long. The police will be here soon enough.’

‘I have no doubt that most of them will arrive here when their time comes. But right now it is just you. You have been a bad man, have you not? You have been ruthless to those less fortunate than yourself. That is why you are here.’

‘What? Is this some kind of political thing? Look, that way of thinking went down with the Berlin Wall. You make your own opportunities out there. Dog eat dog. If you step on a few people, well they should learn to move out of the way.’

‘That is your philosophy?’

‘That’s being realistic.’

‘You do not repent?’

'Repent?'

‘With all your heart?’

‘Of what? Of course not.’

‘Then let there be light.’

‘Oh my God!’

‘Not quite.’

‘Oh bloody hell.’

‘Precisely.’

And then there this story that I read or heard many years ago and cannot remember who told or wrote it, but it went something like this:

IT was a dark and stormy night and the traveller was still some distance from the inn. The landscape was wild and harsh, with shadows made to dart by the scudding clouds obscuring the full moon. The traveller was a rational man but he could not stop the unease rising in him, could not avoid starting at the lightning flash or the crack of thunder, could not cease from glancing fearfully behind. After a time he spoke to himself aloud thus:

‘Why this is ridiculous. I am no child. I am a grown man. Furthermore I am a good man, kind to my wife and children, generous to those who have not shared my luck, gentle with my animals and thoughtful and accommodating with my neighbours. Why…’ Here he laughed aloud to himself, ‘why if I were to meet a spirit or demon tonight, it would mean that there is truly no justice in this universe!’

And a voice at his ear said:

‘There isn’t.’

Finally, here’s a short film from Tim Burton:

Safe Hallowe’en and if you must venture out, then watch out for that which should walk alone may not do so tonight.

Watch the Skies!

2010-10-06T15:42:00.004+01:00

Chatting to a neighbour the other day I noticed he had what looked like toothpaste smeared on the side of his neck. He noticed me noticing and explained that he had felt a sudden pain on that spot and on putting his hand up had found a brown moth there. What I had mistaken for toothpaste was actually savlon and he had removed a small bit of said moth from his neck. He was a tad disconcerted and my repeated references to vampire moths and that it was all doubtless something to do with global warming may not, with hindsight, have been helpful. He had not kept the rest of the moth and what with me not being an lepidopterist I have no idea what it was but I have to say, a moth seems unlikely. A horse fly maybe? I remember being bitten by them a few times many summers ago while camping on one of the Inner Hebrides and it is surprisingly painful. They are brown but not, to my memory, particularly moth-like, but maybe my neighbour has not been to as many moth farms as I have (three) or keeps his windows open on warm nights which brings them in. I hope it was not a moth because I like them and I would, on the whole, rather not spend the rest of my days in a constant and ultimately futile war with them or, even worse, an abusive relationship with one that sparkles. I probably wouldn't even get a truck out of it. The question is also raised of whether my neighbour, having been bitten, will now himself transform into one. Should I warn his girlfriend? How do you start a conversation like that? ‘So all well? Has T------ taken to circling the lamp while you’re trying to read? ... No, no particular reason. Are you fluttering more than you used to?’ I couldn’t say any of that. I’d be ASBOed.

And here's something else you might not know...

2010-09-28T15:27:00.003+01:00

There was a recent news report that some doctors are campaigning for the introduction of plastic glasses only in pubs. This is to reduce the number of injuries caused by glassing apparently. Now I have never glassed anyone and have no immediate plans to do so, but it so happens that I do know, in theory anyway, how to break the bottom off a beer bottle so that it can be used as an improvised weapon just as they used to do in films but no longer seem to. It seems that just smashing the thing against the nearest hard surface will cause the bottle to shatter completely in your hand and as you are clutching it tightly this causes nastiness to your palm. Now I’m not going to tell you how to it, I’m not Frederick Forsythe, but I merely use it as an example of the odd bits of information I’ve picked up over the years. I know the correct lights that a ship should show while sailing at night and used to be able to tie a bowline knot one-handedly. I know, thanks to a couple of medical students, the most painful thing you can do to a man and owing to my intense conviction that it would come up as a jackpot question in a pub quiz, the registration number of the car that Patrick McGoohan is driving in the opening credits of The Prisoner. On matters of pronunciation I know, thanks to one of my brothers, how to pronounce the name of the Norse god Odin correctly and thanks to George Bernard Shaw that the words ghoti and fish can be pronounced the same way. I know the fates of the six wives of Henry VIII and at a push I can remember the accomplishments that were required before you could join the men of Finn Mac Cool, legendary hero of Old Ireland. I freely admit that some of this knowledge may be of limited use.

For there is a hierarchy in knowledge. Knowing the names of all the actors who have played Dr Who is an accomplishment that is, on the whole, held in a degree of contempt. Knowing the names of all the players who scored winning goals in a football team’s championship wins is at worst seen as being a bit keen. Being able to name all the books in the Apocrypha makes you a theologian and understanding the ramifications of the salic law makes you a mediaevalist. My father knew how to manumit a slave which, along with a few other details, made him a barrister.

Well I think that knowledge should be equal. Let us put aside these old prejudices and admit to being proud that you know the names of everyone who performed at Woodstock or all the lyrics to Bony M’s Rasputin or the solution to every Sherlock Holmes mystery. Let's call an end to this apartheid style segregation of useless knowledge and three cheers for mnemonics.

Oh, and if you want to know which host of which tea-time quiz show also played James Bond, give me a shout.

Durham Cathedral, an apology

2010-09-15T16:21:00.005+01:00

Apparently you don't have to pay an entry fee to get into Durham Cathedral. Apologies if my stating that you do may have caused some readers to mistakenly assume that you do. I hope that clears that up.

Last time I believe a self-confessed tory.

As recompense, here's a out-of-focus photo of Tony Blair's autobiography in a satirical setting:

I am empiricist Anglophone, hear me roar

2010-09-15T16:10:00.004+01:00

In the current issue of the London Review of Books there is a crit of a book about the French cinema magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. It begins thus:

In an essay on Avatar in the March issue of the French film journal Cahiers du cinéma, Slavoj Zizek wrote that, despite its superficial espousal of revolutionary action (by blue-skinned aliens rising up against earthling exploitation), the film was in fact entirely reactionary. In an interview in the following issue of Cahiers, Zizek cheerfully admitted that he had written his piece without actually seeing Avatar. Empiricist Anglophone critics were horrified, no doubt, but Zizek’s article persuasively made its point nonetheless.

I was a tad taken aback. The writer of the crit, one Jonathan Romney, rather deftly seems to be saying that expecting important and busy critics to actually see the film they’re criticising is not only unreasonable but downright parochial. Well, in the spirit of those activist groups in the ‘70s I am going to reclaim the negative vernacular and say loud and proud that I am an empiricist Anglophone critic and proud of it.

To make it worse, the critic in question not only is commenting on a film he has not seen, he is challenging the whole basis of it. He cares not if the makers say that it is about such and such, he has not seen it and so knows that it is not. And critics wonder why they are disliked in some circles.

For the record I have not seen Avatar, nor do I intend to as I disliked the director’s previous film, Titanic, so much. This means that my contribution to any critical discussion on it is limited to why I won’t see it and that seems fair enough. But then I’m an empiricist Anglophone and that’s what we’re like. Get used to it.

This thinking is not, I’m sorry to say, restricted to psychic critics like young master Zizek. It’s very common in the Anglophone literarti as well. In my bookselling days, many were the times that I was informed in a lordly manner that the Harry Potter books were terribly written or that The Da Vinci Code was awful by people who had read none of them. Any attempts at discussion would be waved away with a dismissive laugh. The accuracy of their opinions was, of course, unimportant. The point here was to ensure that everyone knew that they had impeccable taste and so had no need to read such vulgar and, let us be honest, plebeian books and would no more dream of doing so than they would dream of holidaying in Ibiza.

As it happens, I have read the Harry Potter books and The Da Vinci Code and, in my empiricist Anglophonic way, I believe the former to be flatly written, rather than badly written, and the later volumes scream out for heavy editing, while the latter is like a late-night kebab after a night clubbing in a number of surprising ways.

The Curious Incident of the Cat in the Bin

2010-08-25T22:47:00.004+01:00

Another day, another case of cruelty to an animal, another round of on-line commentators making snide and smug remarks about how the British love animals and loathe humans. After all, don’t we as a nation give more to donkeys than we do to children?

This argument is, of course, based on a rather weird mistake. We are animals too. I’m sorry if this news startles you but human beings are in the same biological grouping as felines, it’s just that we have access to wheelie bins, CCTV cameras and computers in a way that domestic cats do not. I’m always surprised when a cruelty to animals story does the rounds and various commentators start wittering on about how we care more about them than we do about humans, especially children. But we are them, and so are our children. This may be a blow to some people’s self-image but we are members of the animal kingdom, the mammal county to be precise, and resisting the urge to put our fellow subjects into wheelie bins strikes me as good practice as well as good manners.

Meanwhile, on a purely pragmatic note, it is known in circles where such knowledge is necessary, that cruelty to animals is a sign of a serious capacity to be cruel to humans and is a major danger signal. And to all those who think the cat in the wheelie bin is terribly funny, no it isn’t because it’s real and caused real distress to a living thing. It would have been funny in a Tom & Jerry cartoon and I think it’s terribly important to remember that distinction.

So why did she do it? I suspect we’ll never really know. My personal feeling is that she did it because she could. She had the power to do so and for some reason there and then she used that power. Am I sympathetic? Am I buggery. Cats do what cats do because they are cats. We do what we do out of choice and that is why while we may be closer to angels, we often choose to embrace demons.

Brush Up Your Shakespeare

2010-08-18T17:01:00.002+01:00

With all the discussion of Tony Blair’s donation of his book advance to the British Legion, here’s a Shakespeare character in Henry V with a short speech that seemed appropriate:

Williams:

But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath
a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and
arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join
together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at
such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a
surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind
them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their
children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die
well that die in a battle; for how can they
charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their
argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it
will be a black matter for the king that led them to
it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of
subjection.

Let us pay...

2010-06-29T13:16:00.002+01:00

In Durham the other day for reasons that need not worry you I found myself next to the cathedral, world heritage site that it is. So I thought I might pop in until my companion informed me that there’s a £5.00 entrance fee.

Chester Cathedral does the same, and the entranceway there, which takes you past a souvenir shop before you arrive at the cathedral proper, is appropriately situated next to a branch of Barclays Bank which is actually part of the fabric of the cathedral structure. Talk about God and Mammon.

I mean, all right. It’s very expensive to maintain a cathedral and visitors can cause inadvertent damage. I once read that the moisture from the breath of the millions who visit Notre Dame annually is the single biggest threat to its interior. All this is taken on board, but I don't remember Jesus saying 'Where two or three are gathered in my name there shall be a small charge because of inevitable overheads'.

Everyone I’ve mentioned this too asks the same question. What happens during a service? I assume they don’t charge so how is it policed? You inevitably start thinking: bouncers! Or at least I do. This of course leads to the possibility of being turned away from evensong because you’re not wearing a tie, or a mitre or whatever.

Now I’m not a churchgoer, I’ve never been baptised or entered into any faith and I’m with the Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman character who avoided going to church and the church he avoided going to was the good old CofE. I therefore accept that it is arguably none of my business whether Durham, Chester or my parish church decide to charge entry. If I’m using them as museums then I should pay accordingly.

But that feels wrong. A place of worship surely must be open to all or open to none. And the Church of England is the established church of this country and so has a duty towards every British subject regardless of their beliefs. So I think it would be good if they cut the admission fee and make up the shortfall by, oh I don’t know, selling a couple of bishops.

Oh and my companion assured me that we would see Bill Bryson and we didn’t so I’m sulking.

I was walking in the park one day...

2010-06-24T20:10:00.007+01:00

Odd experience in a city greenspace yesterday. I was sitting in the sun with a lady of my acquaintance when we were approached by a man who commented on the rabbits he had seen. We agreed that there were a good few around. He then informed us that he had lent his belt to a friend and as a result his trousers were very loose. He continued to comment on this fact for a half minute or so while fiddling with his waistband before being called away by someone else. At this point the lady enquired if I agreed that for a moment there it looked as though we were going to be flashed at and I was obliged to agree that it had looked that way.

Now I am of the male persuasion and therefore enjoy many of the perks of living in a patriarchy. One of these perks, quite frankly, is not being flashed at in parks. I hasten to add that I do not think that women should have to put up with it either. When it comes to the indecent exposure debate, I am firmly in the ‘no’ camp. It’s just that a man does not expect it to happen to him in the same way that he does not expect ever to have to have a bra fitted or have to respond to an unexpected proposal of marriage. Actually, that last has happened to me twice so bad example. And another story.

Anyway, it turned out, and an excellent thing too, that my companion had never been flashed at either. Therefore, neither of us had the slightest idea what we would do in the circumstances. I said something solemn about how I would have told him to put it away or I would call the police which made me sound as if I was channelling Joyce Grenfell, but I really don’t know.

The odd thing is that as a society we are a touch confused about male nudity. I imagine that the majority of people would agree that this man’s behaviour was not acceptable. Yet there was a huge amount of support for the naked rambler. Remember him? He kept being sent to prison for breaking court orders not to walk around the countryside naked and a fair number of commentators stated that that this was ridiculous and how they do these things differently in the continent (and indeed in the barking mad TV series Spartacus: Blood & Sand, about which more later) and how uptight we all are. Maybe so. My attitude to public nudity is a matter of record* and I think that what is really sad is that it is necessary to say that a person, either female or male, should be able to sit in the sun without being flashed at.

Oh, and if you don't know Joyce Grenfell, enjoy:

*see Oh Matron No post, October 2009

A total fallacy

2010-06-15T14:28:00.004+01:00

A few weekends back I found myself looking around the Vindolanda site. I was last there about fifteen years ago when it was basically just a lumpy field with a few information boards saying that there was probably some great stuff underneath. I preferred Housesteads.

Well, things have changed. The Vindolanda site is incredible. We spent about three hours there and I could easily have spent at least another, if not more. The museum contains the only surviving legionary’s crest, which I found strangely touching, along with a mildly startling display of phallic good luck charms. Not so much phallic, actually, as phalluses. There was one small discreet one that was worn round the neck but sadly the gift shop were not selling replicas. A missed opportunity there I feel. But also, in the site itself, an information board told us that a keen observer might discern a phallic good luck charm scratched into the stonework of one of the drains. Sure enough one of my companions found it with suspicious ease:

There’s one at Housesteads as well apparently. The scholars tell us that Roman soldiers scratched them into stones as good luck symbols. Well, the past is a foreign country and all that, but I can’t help but feel that whenever a large number of men are gathered together in one spot for any period of time it is inevitable that one of them will draw a phallus on a nearby surface for a laugh. It’s one of those laws of nature that David Attenborough keeps using as an excuse to show us antelopes being eaten alive by alligators or whatever.

In York these graffiti are called wooglies, or so I’ve been told by a native of that city. Now it may be the company I keep and the circles I move in, but I have rarely discovered a new word that I have found so useful.

And I bet you will too.

Lampshading the idiot ball

2010-06-08T15:03:00.003+01:00

Now this is a fun site, though I warn you it’s easy to lose an afternoon exploring it:

http://tvtropes.org /pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage

Hit the random item button for best results.

Some of these tropes are well known, Jumping The Shark is in fairly common usage these days. If you’re mystified it refers to the moment in a long-running TV series when the makers try to liven it up with a ridiculous stunt/event. This is a sign that the series has lost its way and will never be as good again. So a show that has jumped the shark is in terminal decline. It refers to the startlingly popular ‘70s US sitcom Happy Days and an episode when the main character (the Fonz) did actually jump over a shark while water-skiing. While the show continued to run for at least two more series, it was generally agreed that it had lost its way. There have been recent attempts to replace the phrase with nuking the fridge, a reference to the most recent Indiana Jones film, but I think the shark is here to stay. Meanwhile, the trope Chekov’s Gun (if a gun is mentioned in Act 1 it must be fired by Act 5) is well known in theatre.

Other tropes I found on this site and liked included The Queen’s Latin which references the fact that historical characters nearly always speak with an English accent, and holding the idiot ball which is when an established and normally intelligent character suddenly becomes very stupid for no other reason than to keep the plot going. The Archers seems to be currently going for a complete, never before attempted, 100% of characters holding the idiot ball. One assumes they’re being sponsored. A-Team Shooting refers to the situation where, presumably for ratings reasons, a vast number of shots are fired but no one is ever hit. It refers of course to The A-Team where our heroes were particularly adept at this. Aesops are characters who turn up once solely to make a moral point (the old college roommate who’s now a raging alcoholic for example) and genre blindness is when characters do something the viewers know they should not because of the conventions of the genre they are in. This is not so common now since the Scream films highlighted it. Meanwhile, lamp shading is when the writers get over a major cliché or coincidence in the script by drawing attention to it, sometimes in an ironic post-modern way (‘Well constable, you wouldn’t get away with it in a book, but coincidences do happen in real life you know’).

Watch your favourite programmes with a fresh eye and start collecting them now.

What Lies Beneath

2010-05-11T17:30:00.003+01:00

The Ouseburn Valley separates East Newcastle from the rest of the city and acts as a natural barrier between the cheap(ish) and cheerful Heaton and the expensive and dour Jesmond, which skulks fearfully behind the ranks of the Residents’ Association. Four great bridges span the valley but at one point no bridge is necessary. It’s been filled in.

For years I wasn’t aware of it. I knew, of course, that the valley was not continuous but I had assumed that the blockage was natural and geographical. The adjective igneous doubtless came into it somewhere I thought. Then I found out that no, it had actually been filled in and again I vaguely assumed that this would be with rubble from the railways or some such Industrial Revolutionary source. Again no. Two months ago, almost to the day, I found out that the valley was, in the early twentieth century, filled in with rubbish. That's rubbish. Garbage. Detritus. Not the sad but necessary spoilage from the engine that drove the empire but just rubbish. Now I’m as proud as any Geordie of having won life’s lottery by being born in Newcastle upon Tyne but there are times when your local pride takes a knock and this discovery was one of them. Apparently the mayor and corporation decided they’d had it with building bridges across the valley and so decided to fill it in and then build housing on top. Not surprisingly, once the rubbish had reached the requisite level it was found that it was not suitable for building housing on so it was grassed over and is now a pleasant green space. The '60s visionary nutter, corrupt vandal and, oh the sorrow to us, council leader, T Dan Smith, whose dreams for Newcastle remain current nightmares, decided to build a stadium there but that wasn’t on either. It’s still marked on the maps as ‘City Stadium’ but all that’s there is a solitary running track which I think is a touch misleading. Now while all this makes for a good sermon (for lo your stadia are built on garbage) or metaphor, it is mildly embarrassing for a proud northerner like myself. You can just hear the southerners telling each other: ‘No point in giving them valleys up there, they’d just fill them with rubbish.’ Still, at least we didn’t stick a railway platform over Boudicca’s grave so I suppose it all evens out in the end.

Cross Purposes

2010-04-26T22:37:00.002+01:00

A genuinely odd conversation the other day. It was one of those situations I’ve never actually heard of in real life but which pops up now and again in rather forced ‘comic’ writing, you know, the sort of writing by people who you suspect got their sense of humour by attending an accredited course and will show you a certificate to prove it. Anyway, the set-up was as follows. I thought we were talking about my friend’s new hair style, she thought I was talking about the branch of Asda we happened to be outside of. This Asda is built on stilts so that cars can park under it.

Her: So what do you think?
Me: It looks great!
Her: Really? Everyone I know thinks its rubbish.
Me (genuinely startled by the forthrightness of her friends and her sang froid in the face of their disapproval): Really? Well, I like it.
Her (seemingly surprised): Well, I don't. It shakes in high winds, because it’s on pillars.
Me: Does it? Oh well in that case I suppose...

At this point I was at a total loss as to what to say other than a vague panic as I wondered when hairdressers starting using pillars and, indeed why, along with a slight sense of relief that this at least explained her remarkably laid back attitude. I mean no new hair cut is any good if it quivers in a breeze. Then at last, and a tad too late, the penny dropped which was just as well.

Oh, and the Asda was crap.

Cry God for England, Harry and St Chad

2010-04-24T16:58:00.005+01:00

As usual yesterday, St George’s Day (23 April), saw a bit of chatter about how sad/bad/mad (political correctness for the use of) or indeed good it is that we don’t celebrate it which was odd because every year we do celebrate it with a plethora of articles etc whinging or cheering about how we don’t celebrate it. In a way I rather like that, it seems somehow English.

Now personally I’m all for having a bank holiday as

a)I think we need more public holidays, my understanding is that we have the least of all in all of Europe, and;

b) the 23rd of April is also, by tradition, Shakespeare’s birthday and the day of his death (there was a gap between the two) and this fits my secularist instincts.

Here’s a few clips to remind us why Shakespeare’s birth/deathday should be a national holiday:

and

I chose Mark Antony’s speech from Julius Caesar as we are in an election and Henry V’s speech as it does reference St Crispin and it might annoy the French.

Actually I think we should have a new patron saint. St Edmund, as in Bury St Edmunds, is sometimes mentioned in this context, though I would go for either the Venerable Bede or St Cuthbert, partly for reasons of regional pride, though St Cuthbert doesn’t come across as someone you’d like to have a drink with. Perhaps St Hilda then? Personally my favourite English saint is St Dunstan who was tempted by the devil in the form of a comely wench while he, St Dunstan, was working in a smithy’s forge. Noticing that goat’s hooves were peeking out from under said wench’s skirt, St Dunstan saw through the disguise and so grabbed the devil’s nose with some red hot tongs he had to hand. The devil ran off and cooled his nose in a nearby spring which tastes of brimstone to this day. Now there’s a saint I can do business with. Not sure what day is officially his. Just a sec…ah, May 19th (all hail Wikipedia).

But of course, the saint who really should be our patron saint is that old friend of me and mine, St Chad. So next year let’s all have a proper early spring holy day on the second of March, the day of St Chad.

Oh it's a luvlee 'oliday with Marry

2010-04-03T13:04:00.007+01:00

Listening to a topical satire programme on the radio a couple of weeks back, I was surprised to hear a comedian doing a routine on Dick van Dyke’s accent in Mary Poppins.

Now I know what you’re expecting and doubtlessly a smile is reaching across your features as you prepare for the chucklesomeness that comes from observing the failure of an actor to master an accent. But first consider this. Mary Poppins was released in 1964, which means that we’ve been chortling over Dick van Dyke’s accent for 46 years. That’s close to half a century. People, I put it to you that this joke is old and maybe it’s time to move on. I know it’s a bad attempt at cockney and while I didn’t notice it when watching the film as a child, it was genuinely startling the first time I heard it as an adult.

And it’s not even as though it’s the only bad accent out there. James Doohan’s Scottish accent as Scotty in Star Trek springs to mind (a tradition kept alive by Simon Pegg in the latest film version) as does Sean Connery’s attempt at Irish/American in The Untouchables and there are others including, I’m told, some remarkably odd attempts at Mancunian in an episode of Frasier. Yet still it is almost impossible to talk or write about Mary Poppins without referencing the accent. The Times recently printed a list of top children’s films, and even though only fifty words were allotted to each one, the accent was commented on. When Mark Kermode discussed the film in an article a few Christmases back it was startlingly noticeable that he did not mention it at all.

So why this defensive kneejerkery whenever Mary Poppins is mentioned? We are all aware of van Dyke’s deficiency in the cockney accent department and it’s not as if a new adult British viewer is liable to miss it. There really is no longer a need to point it out and, quite frankly, riffing about it on a topical comedy programme is downright bizarre. Come on Marcus Brigstocke, why not really stick it to Palmerston while you're at it and Mitch Benn can do a funny song about the charge of the Light Brigade. This is moving away from being humorous and drifting into the realms of OCD. Are we so desperate to reserve our cool in the face of an openly sentimental children’s film? Is it because it is cockney he cocks (sorry) up? Had it been Somerset or Geordie would there be such a fuss? I suspect not.

So here is my clarion cry, and I’m surprised how nervous I am making it. As John Cleese once commented, an Englishman would rather be told that he is a bad lover than that he has no sense of humour, but I shall be bold. Leave it people. The joke’s old and obvious and it’s time to move on. Let’s laugh at James Cameron’s name for the ultra-rare substance the humans are looking for in Avatar, ‘unobtainium’. Now that really is funny.

Happy Easter

And the moral of the tale is...er

2010-03-30T15:49:00.012+01:00

An article about fairy tales appeared in the Guardian the other Saturday with the writer, Bidisha, commenting on how marvellous it is that they’re being re-written as subversive stories. Here's the link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/27/fairytale-fantasy-childrens-books

I can’t say I entirely agreed with her and I posted a comment that, with your forbearance, I shall repeat here:

Bidisha falls into the trap that a lot of political minded people do of assuming that stories are actually about something else, a Dan Brown style code to be deciphered by the wise. But sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story is not necessarily a fable and it is, I think, the stories that just are stories that survive to following generations. ‘Eric or Little by Little’ anyone? Popular enough in its day, now pretty much forgotten as opposed to 'Wind in the Willows' or 'The Railway Children' which don't really say anything beyond how cool it is to live near a river or a railway.

Eric, or Little by Little by Frederick W Farrar, for those who do not share my interest in the history of children's books, is in the words of the author ‘…the history of a boy who, in spite of the inherent nobleness of his disposition, falls into all folly and wickedness, until he has learnt to seek help from above.’ I have not read it and although that precis makes it sound rather fun, I gather that it is not.

Anyway, to return to the morals or otherwise of stories. It is, of course, not as simple as I make out above but forgive me, I was writing for Guardian readers and they can be simple souls, bless. C S Lewis’ Narnia books are an obvious exception by my overarching rule and Charles Dickens wrote Nicolas Nickleby partly to expose the dodgy boarding schools of his day. But I still hold that it is possible to read too much into a story in many cases and that in our utilitarian age we sometimes try too hard to identify something that simply isn’t there and forget that the story can be its own sole reason.

PS
That was weird. Blogger decided, for reasons best know to itself, to translate the title and labels into Hindi without so much as a by your leave. Odd that.

Meretricious, moi?

2010-03-13T14:39:00.001Z

What follows is something I wrote for an application to join a database of freelance writers. I don’t know what got into me. They asked for 150 words on what constitutes good writing. For reasons that now escape me, this is what they got:

The usual suspects shuffle to the fore, ashamed and shy, avoiding each others’ glances. Of course we must have accuracy, flexibility, a knowledge of what we are trying to achieve and who the reader is going to be. Of course we must have reliability and punctuality. Douglas Adams could get away with missing deadlines, the majority of us cannot. Being an established bestseller can excuse a great deal, guaranteed sales soften late submission. Spelling and grammar must be tools we are comfortable with while remembering always David Crystal’s dictum that the only true crime against grammar is ambiguity. And at all times we must be mindful. Mindful of the requirements of the client, the requirements of the piece and above all else, our own limitations. What makes a good writer? Honesty? Maybe. So it is with that thought in mind that I give my true answer: Damned if I know.

I don’t think they’ll be asking for my services in the near future. I particularly like the Delphic remark about grammar which I have attributed to David Crystal who never did me or mine any harm. I have no idea what got into me.

On the other hand, it is exactly one hundred and fifty words.

I can believe six impossible re-imaginings before a sequel

2010-03-12T17:41:00.010Z

I haven’t seen the new Alice In Wonderland film yet and don’t really intend to. Not that I’m against the idea, I’m just a bit Depped and Burtoned out at the moment.

Now you’re all probably aware that the film is in fact an original story featuring characters from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and, What Alice Found There (credits for getting the titles pedantically correct please) but which picks up when Alice is nineteen and under pressure to marry someone she does not love.

And here’s the odd thing (note also the scrupulous avoidance of the word ‘curious’). Tim Burton’s film has been described as a re-working or a re-imagining but never as what it actually is, a sequel. I assume that Disney did some research and found that the word ‘sequel’ did not sit well with their target audience, or something equally odd. However, it does seem appropriate that the latest and most anticipated version of the Alice stories should come with a confusion over what to call it. Apparently for Tim Burton and the Disney Corporation, like Humpty Dumpty, words mean what they want them to mean.

Please Don't Touch

2010-03-10T19:55:00.003Z

At the Laing Art Gallery the other day (for reasons too complicated and sensitive to go into here) I found myself wondering through the 19^th century gallery with a refugee from Eritrea. He was fascinated by our veneration of the actual picture. What, he wished to know, was the difference between a perfect copy of Holman Hunt’s Isabella & the Pot of Basil and the original that we were looking at? Why was the former of less value than the latter given that they looked identical?

This was one of those questions that appear obvious until you have to actually answer them. The best I could come up with, under his polite scrutiny, was that as a culture we in the West value highly the original object itself, almost to the point of iconography. Talking later to a friend and colleague from my book dealing days confirmed this idea. Collectors value a first edition of a book over a later identical or even better edition. The only other theory I could come up with was the idea of originality. We value the object, the painting itself as a tangible thing, because until Hunt laid down his brushes, it never existed before. There may be earlier pictures on the same subject but this one, as Betjeman puts it, ‘interprets his age in a way so pleasing to ours’ and so we value it, so much so that we place a barrier before it and stop viewers from even touching it.* We must stand at a respectful distance and worship. My companion heard me out but I’m not sure I persuaded him that we’re right in our attitudes. But then I did not entirely persuade myself. And as it happens, I prefer the John Martin’s The Destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah anyway.

You have to admit, it is livelier.

*Very impressive attendant at the gallery who explained to my companion why visitors are asked not to touch the pictures with both great politeness and unpatronising reasons.

And An Orchestra Played In Eldon Square

2010-03-06T18:33:00.005Z

Now this is cool:

Do not spam

2010-02-26T21:19:00.002Z

A feature of googlemail that I rather like is that you, the user, get to decide which messages are spam. This contrasts nicely with a friend of mine’s e-mail account which scanned his incoming messages with the zeal of a 21^st century Revd. Bowdler and then deciding which were suitable for his view. This, inter alia, meant that all messages from a car club he was a member of were condemned because of their frequent references to lubrication. And we all know the problems the virtuous town of Penistone has had over the years. Googlemail at least allows you to choose. All messages come your way until you classify one of them as spam. Thereafter all messages from that sender become spam. This is great. This means that if I was a) unfilial; and b) she was computer literate I could class my mother (silver hair for the use of) as spam. I can do it to anyone. My boss (if I currently had one), my girlfriend (as before), friends and relatives could all find themselves – as far as googlemail is concerned – wallowing in the same moral stew as those impertinent people who keep trying to sell my pills by making personal innuendoes about my prowess and misspelling my name in the process which is doubly tactless. In a world where choice is stripped away from us in the name of safety, protection, security and – ironically – choice, this is a small freedom to be cherished. Enjoy it while you may.

Go Children of the Country/ The Day of Glory Has Arrived if that's all right with everyone here? Jacques? Happy? Good! Er, right then. Allons!

2010-02-24T21:33:00.008Z

VERY WELL, THEN. [said Death] THE HOGFATHER CAN TEACH PEOPLE THE UNREAL MEANING OF HOGSWATCH.

Albert spat over the side of the sleigh. 'Hah! "Wouldn't It Be Nice If Everyone Was Nice", eh?'

THERE ARE WORSE BATTLE CRIES.

Terry Pratchett

Hogfather

1996

One of the odder things to come out of the Brown is a bully allegations is the number of commentators lining up* to complain that so what if he gets angry and shouty and grabby, he’s the leader and we don’t want someone soft in this time of crisis do we? The implication being that unpleasantness towards your work colleagues is a sign of strength of character and moral seriousness. It isn’t, of course, and the fact that people are peddling the idea that it is says more about the moral collapse of English politics than any amount of unpleasantness in the cabinet office. George MacDonald Fraser wrote in awe of his old commanding officer, General Slim, noting that the only time he saw him snarl at one of his soldiers was to reprimand one who had attached a skull to the bonnet of his jeep. He then tempered his rebuke by pointing out that it might have belonged to one of the soldier’s comrades killed in the retreat. This does beg the question that it would have been more morally acceptable to display an enemy’s skull which is a matter for another day. Genghis Khan displayed the skulls of his enemies I believe and he was, according to one of my brothers, a paragon of religious tolerance. The Ancient Celts were headhunters, a fact that tends not to be referenced in Enya songs or new age shops, though both would be rather more fun if it was. I’d take them much more seriously if they had the head of Richard Dawkins scowling at me from a glass cabinet instead of an overpriced geode. But I digress.

So is it possible to get things done in difficult circumstances by being nice and pleasant to people? Of course it is. I would go further and say that it is more efficient as a willing worker beats a dozen driven slaves. This does not mean an end to discipline and good order or that every decision has to be cleared with the typing pool, although it is my strong belief that a great deal of life would be improved if important decisions did have to be cleared by the least powerful. After all, it is they who tend to be the most effected and have the least hang-ups about pet projects, psychopathic disorders, personal vendettas or messianic tendencies.

Oh, one thing that has come out of all this for me is that it has confirmed a truism my own experience has taught me: all bullies are by no means cowards but every bully is convinced that he is the victim.

*in a disorderly manner and presumably pushing, kicking, pinching and giving each other chinese burns and dead legs

For you Chadwin, the war is over

2010-02-20T15:41:00.003Z

I see that a Scottish brewery has brewed a beer with a strength of 41%. That’s 1% higher than most malt whiskies, alcoholism fans! Previously they had brewed one at 32% to the dismay of assorted pecksniffs out there and then a German brewery got to the 40% mark and so here we are. Now I am not that fascinated in this tapsters’ arms race but I was taken with the fact that the Scottish beer is called Sink the Bismarck. For those of you whose knowledge of the navies of World War II is not all it might be, let Wikipedia illuminate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_battleship_Bismarck

There is also, of course, the 1960 war film Sink the Bismarck! which starred Kenneth More in the days when you weren’t allowed to make films in Britain unless he had a major role.

I have to say that I am mildly surprised that there have not been complaints. After all, the war ended 65 years ago and we really ought to give the Germans a break. I am conflicted (sorry) about this. One of the worst moments of national embarrassment I have suffered was when I was training a German volunteer in the fine art of sorting and pricing books donated to a charity bookshop. I emptied out a bag onto the sorting table and, you’re way ahead of me, they were all of the ‘Shoulder Flashes of the Wehrmacht 1938 – 1944’ type. I made an English squeaking noise about these books selling terribly well (which they did) and she sadly said “In England war very popular”. She never came back.

On the other hand, I did once manage to get a totally gratuitous reference to the war into a best man’s speech and cannot share The Guardian’s tutting disapproval of the England football fans habit, when their team is playing Germany, of sticking their arms out sideways and swaying from side to side while humming The Dambusters’ March. It is, of course, partly my age. I did a fair bit of my childhood in the ‘70s and it was impossible to escape the war if you were a young boy. Comics with titles like Hotspur, Victory and Warlord abounded and every newsagent had a spinner of those Commando War Library picture stories. The most startling thing about 2000AD when it was first published in 1977 was not its knowing humour and sneaky politicising, but the fact that it had no WWII stories in it. It seemed to be part of the BBC’s charter that they had to show 633 Squadron every Thursday at six o’ clock and the television schedules were awash with series such as Colditz, Secret Army, Tenko and so on. I remember a teacher at prep school gently pointing out to us that swastikas and RAF roundels were not really festively appropriate decorations for the Christmas crackers we were making for the school tree. The only wonder of it all is that I’m not in the habit of always carrying a gas mask with me whenever I leave the house or fretting about Nazi paratroopers disguised as nuns.

Still, all friends now and I’ll drink to that, but only a small glass please.

SheffieldInDayA

2010-02-05T15:02:00.002Z

Owing to a series of mildly odd events, I found myself in Sheffield for a day the other week. All very pleasant, albeit wet and an appallingly early start. I’m with the uncle who, on being told that his train left at 6:00 am, responded ‘You mean there’s one in the morning as well?’ Many moons ago I lived in Sheffield for a few months and as part of the diaspora are domiciled there I visit fairly often. However, this was the first time I’d been in the centre for ages and it’s all changed. I couldn’t even work out where the Leadmill was which was embarrassing as my first job was there. There was also a big wheel in a square which was odd. The actual reason for my visit turned out to be a bit of a wash out but it gave me a chance to meet up with one of the clan elders and receive new orders. We also visited the Millennium Gallery where they were staging a John Ruskin themed exhibition with the title Can Art Save Us? I was slightly disappointed to get to the end to find that in their studied opinion, yes it can. I’d been rather hoping for a twist ending along the lines of ‘nah, not really.’

The Millennium Gallery is part of a group calling itself MuseumSheffield. It used to be called Sheffield Museum apparently but the council farmed out the running of it to a private company which immediately rebranded itself in a fit of prioritising. At first this wilful reversal is disconcerting, but after a while it grows on you, or on me anyway, and I spent the next few days amusing myself and dismaying companions by referring to MuseumBritish and TerrierScottish. Try it yourself and see that I’m wrong.

Snow with occasional outbreaks of war crimes

2010-02-01T21:15:00.003Z

It’s hard not to fondle that chip on your shoulder when there’s a heavy snowfall here in the north east of England and it is not mentioned anywhere in the national news. Had the south east had the snow we had on Saturday morning, Blair’s evidence to the Chilcott enquiry would have been relegated to the humorous ‘…and finally’ section with reporters yet again placed in snow-covered fields and streets to look cold and a tad fed up while stating the bleeding obvious to camera. The Daily Mail would be calling for an immediate election because the editor’s street hadn’t been gritted while adverts from solicitors offering to sue the Met Office if you’ve slipped would be all over the cable channels.

Meanwhile, Blair. Wasn’t that odd and more than a little creepy? I’m surprised that there has been some disappointment that he didn’t break down and weep or do a Jack Nicholson from out of A Few Good Men (‘You want the spin? You couldn’t handle the spin!’) or just explode into a miasma of smug complacency, but then he never was going to do any of these things. While our involvement in the invasion of Iraq is the most appalling thing a British Government has done in my lifetime, expecting Blair to admit an error or show remorse is like expecting, well it’s like expecting Tony Blair to admit an error or show remorse. He’s that rarest of things, his own simile.

But weep not. He knows that he has lost the only thing a politician truly craves for, his legacy. Not the architect of new labour, not the man who broke the political mould. His legacy is a memory of an intellectual lightweight who tried to buy profundity and greatness on the backs of a hundred thousand corpses.

The King & Us

2010-01-27T20:07:00.005Z

It’s an oddish name, Chadwin, and one much given to misspelling and simply getting wrong. For years family tradition had it that it meant ‘man of the village’ but one of my sisters-in-law who studies such things reckons we were originally the servants of St Chad, Bishop of Mercia. I’m sure she’s right. It would explain, after all, why we of the Chadwin diaspora, before our sabbath meal, turn to face the midlands and give the ancient toast of ‘Next year in Lichfield’.

Having a mildly off-beat name has its ups and down. The ups are that it’s different and off-beat. The downs tend to be people persistently getting it wrong. For some reason an awful lot of the populace insist of spelling it with a ‘y’ instead of ‘i’ and I once had a sports teacher who could not grasp that I wasn’t called ‘Chadwick’. And don’t get me started on my first name. Even one of my aunts gets that one wrong. Then there’s the nickname by which I am generally known which, unbeknownst to me, turned out to be shared by a prominent female singer in the late ‘60s as I found out the hard way when I introduced myself at primary school. Don't talk to me about the sweet sound of childish laughter. She faded somewhat into memory and I began to relax, but then a startlingly popular film was released in the ‘70s which, inter alia, featured a heroine with self-same name to whom John Travolta sang a song. Despite having carefully avoided said film I know all the lyrics as said song has been sung at me on many occasions. And people wonder why I sometimes get tetchy.

The Chadwin name is from the paternal side. Meanwhile, on the distaff side, my mother’s forebears once kidnapped the king of Scotland during of a series of rows with the landlord. They were part of the ‘invite your enemies round for a big meal, get them drunk and then slaughter them all’ school of dispute resolution which makes for tense family get-togethers I can tell you. And their name is a right bugger to spell but you really need to make the effort if you want to survive the entree.

A Correction

2010-01-23T18:39:00.005Z

Glancing back over my previous post I notice that the last sentence appears to be saying that the best memorial a novelist can hope for is to be read by me. Modesty does rather demand that I clarify this. What I meant, of course, and as those of you who are paying proper attention would have realised, is that the finest memorial a writer can have is to be read at all once the fleeting caprices of contemporary criticism have moved on. It's a fun game to play. In a century, who will be the Dickens of his or her day? Who will be the Shakespeare* of the 21st century. It is of course impossible to tell but I like to think that in the twelfth circle of hell there is a nineteenth century equivalent of Mark Lawson screaming "Don't they realise that James Thomson's The Seasons is the defining work of the century and Mrs Gaskell is just respectableladylit?"

*Oh all right, Allan really

R I P Robert B Parker

2010-01-21T16:59:00.004Z

Certain people who like to parade their moral superiority and sensitivity complain if someone mourns the death of a person they have never met but who may have effected their life in some way, said person normally being in the public eye. The hell with such people I say. I was saddened by the deaths of John Lennon, Alan Hull, George Mackay Brown and Ian Dury for example. And I am saddened by the death of Robert B Parker:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/20/robert-b-parker-obituary

Mr Parker was one of these authors who was very successful in his own country but not so much here and I’m one of the few people I know who actually read him. If you’ve looked at the above obituary, you will see that he was best known for the Spenser novels. I’m not really that fond of private eye stories and I (whispering this carefully) don’t entirely care for Raymond Chandler – funny but too nihilistic for my taste. Parker’s hero, on the other hand, was rather good humoured which makes for a pleasing change in contemporary crime fiction. He also had friends and a girlfriend and a dog and it is the description of these relationships which made the books stand out, for me anyway. I was aware that the books were written in a single draft with Parker rarely taking more than three months over each one and it does occasionally show. There is a certain sameness that creeps in but the intelligence and the genuine anger at complacent hypocrisy that permeates the Spenser novels goes to forgive a lot. I’ll read one tonight, if not two, and if there’s a better memorial to a writer I cannot think of it.

Now We Has Blog

2010-01-16T17:46:00.004Z

A cold wet dreary day. A day for – as Snoopy has it – sitting indoors, looking out of the window with a cup of tea while sad songs play on the stereo.

So I did that.

Alright, being of a more Mediterranean disposition than the Lutheran Charles Schultz I had a glass of wine rather than a cup of tea and I was listening to favourite songs from the musicals courtesy of Spotify rather than sad songs on the stereo, but the theory remains sound.

I’m fond of songs from musicals though I have to careful as I grew up with the original cast soundtrack on album of a few which means that they can induce an intense nostalgia that is almost a tangible pain. Of course, only certain ones. No Sound of Music which I have neither heard all the way through or ever seen, an omission I take a certain pride in, nor West Side Story which for some reason irritates me. No the musicals that get me going are, in no particular order, Guys & Dolls, High Society, Fiddler on the Roof, My Fair Lady and Oklahoma!. The last has one of the great songs of dark comedy, ‘Poor Jud Is Dead’. Have a listen, it’s horrible:

I grew up singing this in an unpretty piping voice! No wonder I developed a taste for the macabre in later years and have many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. My father loved it, along with ‘True Love’ from High Society, an altogether nicer song which he adored for its sea-faring rhythm:

So, off to wallow for a while in the past. You don’t get wet and you don’t get wrinkles, or at least not for a while.

We'll keep the strawberry blond flag flying here

2010-01-14T23:10:00.004Z

Gave blood the other day. This is not an attempt to garner praise unto myself, the last time I did so was a shame-making quarter of a century ago. No, the reason I mention it is that although I had an appointment, I had to wait fifteen minutes because of the number of other donors. I am not complaining. Au contraire, as the man said on the Bay of Biscay when asked if he had dined*. I am saying that this was great. After all, unlike other countries, you get nothing beyond a cup of tea and the possibility of a biscuit for your time and mild discomfort. Furthermore, it was a cold and slippery Monday in January during the worst snow in fifteen years. As a society this is something we can all be proud of and it is a snowball with a stone hidden in its core in the face of those who insist that humans only operate out of selfishness. You know the ones, they pop up on the radio and television and saying how they have to be paid a vast sum of money with a guaranteed bonus on top in order to keep the top talent. I refer, of course, to the bankers. It is a truism to the point of a cliché that people do not need or want a lot of money to do the right thing. Sorry, most people do not. Greedy stupid people do. And I think we can all agree (at least those of us outside of the greedy stupid community) that giving a lot of money to greedy stupid people is not a good idea. Bit stupid really. Not an original thought, I grant you, but an important one which needs to be repeated to ourselves and others again and again until they get it.

Anyway, onto more important issues. Those of us who are members of what I suppose should now be referred to as the red-haired community have finally come of age as a political force. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a schism! Yay! Old veterans of the wilder edges of the left wing of the tail end of the last century will know well that no movement has truly come of age until it has split. Being another century, this is of course a very media-friendly split over alleged gingerism in Dr Who. Apparently the BBC received 100 complaints about the last episode and no, not about David Tennant’s apparent inability to end a line of dialogue at the same speed with which he started it, but about the new bug’s apparent approval of the fact that he isn’t a red head. Others of the auburn ascendency however agree that the character was in fact lamenting the fact that he had yet again failed to regenerate with red hair which is a running joke in the series. Only one hundred complaints mind, doesn’t seem very many to me. I’m sure there were more about the violence or the bad grammar or the gay characters. That’s the kind of dreary Mary Whitehouseisms that normally sets the ‘phone lines buzzing and e-mails doing whatever e-mails do when they’re busy – guggling? Anyway, not important, the main thing is that we of the copper tendency are split on this matter, and that, in the end, is all that is really important.

*Stolen from The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L Sayers

Is this a topless tower I see before me jesting Pilate?

2010-01-13T17:18:00.006Z

Saw the new Sherlock Holmes film yesterday. I enjoyed it, my companion was more lukewarm (if you can be more lukewarm) and we discussed it amiably over a pint afterwards. Today having several other things I needed to do as a matter of some urgency, I had a look at some of the responses to the film on-line and in the forums.

Golly, as a girlfriend I used to have would say at inappropriate moments.

The anger, the loathing, the darkness, the horror, the horror. I was quite startled at the depths of feeling this film has produced. I shouldn’t have been of course. I remember the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine/Babylon 5 war in the ‘90s. For those of you who had a life at the time, this concerned the rivalry between the fans of those two science fiction television programmes. Both series were set on futuristic space stations and each side was convinced that the other was a spoiler attempt or outrageous rip-off. It is said that there were death threats, it got so bad. In the end the widow of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, had to step in and appear as a guest star on the other show to try and get everyone to calm down. Odd.

The Holmes army seems to fall into three basic categories: only Basil Rathbone will do; only Jeremy Brett will do; they’ll both do but no-one else or we’ll start killing the hostages. These people, as my mother (silver hair for the use of) says, do not have enough to worry about. On The Guardian forum there’s a good solid dose of snobbery as well.

It is of course very peculiar to watch these violent disagreements going on if you have no strong feelings on the matter. When the aforementioned Guardian placed The Wire at number 14 of their fifty best TV series list the other day, one poster was unable to even type coherently he was so angry. As it happens, I haven’t seen that series and no longer intend to. After the hysterical praise given to it, it can only be a crushing disappointment, like Withnail & I.

Where else may one find such sound and fury? Dr Who? No, though some Tennant fans get a tad shirty if you gently point out that he didn’t so much act in his last episodes as swivel his eyes and hair in random directions as the mood took him. Liked his Hamlet though. James Bond? No, though there was some promising skirmishing when Daniel Craig was cast. Dracula? Nary a squeak to my knowledge. Incidentally, the best vampire film out there is the appealingly named Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter. No, honest, it was written and directed by the people who made The Avengers.

So where and what is my ignition point? What sets me off into incandescent fury? I’m not a football fan so nothing there. With a superior air that I like to feel I can carry off rather nicely, I assumed I was above such things and could look and laugh at all that.

I was wrong.

If you’re bored and you wish to reduce me to the kind of gibbering fury that so convulsed that Wire fan mentioned above, then suggest to me that Shakespeare did not write his plays. Suggest that Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe (current favourite with these braindead morons) did instead. I had intended to blog on this subject a month or so ago after some correspondent to The Times trotted out the Marlowe theory in the letters page but found I was actually unable to do so as I was so angry. I’m having difficulty now. I’ve no idea why this one so infuriates me, but it does. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a forum I need to add to…

Mine's An Opinion, If You're Asking

2010-01-08T15:35:00.002Z

David Yallop, lately editor of the Sun tabloid and author of a book about being a recovering alcoholic, was on a radio ‘phone-in the other day getting very outraged with a caller who questioned his authority to make proposals about the law concerning alcohol sales. Now I naturally wish Mr Yallop all the best in his continuing struggle against alcoholism and hope the book sells well but I do wonder about the validity of his comments about the law. The harsh fact is that Mr Yallop’s relationship with alcohol has failed catastrophically and so his suggestions may be as useful as a boy racer’s proposals on traffic calming. Kindly do not misunderstand me. It was his insistence that his personal experience trumped all other input that was worrying. My concern is with the idea that personal experience gives total understanding of that experience. I suffer from depression which means that I can describe how it effected me and correct some of the misconceptions that abound about the condition, but I am no authority on the correct treatment of it. I prefer the talking therapy to anti-depressants, but that’s only because it seemed that the former worked for me and the latter did not. My opinion is not sacrosanct, I may have grossly underestimated the effect of the drugs, and others are welcome to disagree and my experience does not make me a counsellor. After all, if I broke a leg I would rather have it set by a qualified doctor who has never broken anything than by a journalist who has had a broken leg and who has written Crutches of Shame: My Broken Leg Hell.

So Here It Is...

2009-12-24T13:10:00.003Z

As once again the BBC has let us down, here's a meritricious creepy story for Christmas Eve. Apologies.

Well I don’t know. Kids today. I’d’ve had a leathering from the da if I’d carried on like that.

I’m not going to apologise. I’m trying to rest and every night they’re at it with their noise and music and laughs and I think they get a fire going up there and I’m pretty bloody certain that’s not allowed by the council.

I mean I’m not asking for much. Just some peace.

So I made a noise?! So what? You’d have made a bloody noise yourself in my place. Night after night with the music and the shouting. Taking drugs no doubt and that cheap cider. It’s not good enough and I’m not going to lie back and put up with it. I’d go to hell rather. I really would.

Oh did I scare them, the little dears! Well they brought it on themselves with their noise every night and a saint would have broken if five sodding nights running he’d had to put up with it.

So I hammered and shouted and screamed and hammered some more and at last they hushed up and so I shouted at the absolute top of my voice:

“KEEP IT DOWN UP THERE!”

And it worked. Blessed silence for a moment and then the screams and the sound of their running away. Typical, can give it out but can’t take it. What do their parents teach them these days? What about the teachers?

I mean, that’s no way to behave in a cemetery.

I just want to rest in peace.

Merry Christmas

May All Your Christmases be Decorous

2009-12-23T14:30:00.003Z

Well that was a year. 2009, when things got spoilt by people or organisations pushing it just a bit too far. Take Remembrance Sunday. As a teenager and a young man, not many appeared to wear poppies and certainly none of my peer group did. Then there was a slow re-emergence of poppy wearing and more people were doing it but it wasn’t commented on particularly. This year however, the Daily Mail spoilt it all by having a moronic campaign attacking anyone not wearing one with particular attention to footballers for some reason intelligible only to them. I’ve been wearing a poppy out of personal choice for ten years or so and I may well not next year if the Daily Mail is going to turn it into one of their dreary outrages. Mind you, they’ll probably be against them by then on the grounds that they cause cancer or because red is the colour of communism or because red is the same colour as ginger hair. And where did that come from? When did it become socially acceptable, nay desirable, to openly express fear and loathing of redheads? I must declare an interest here. I am a redhead, or was anyway. Some people unlucky enough to know me say it’s darkened to a browny colour or start wittering on about strawberry blond. Possibly they’re being kind as having ginger hair opens you up to unwarranted abuse these days, or at least from Tesco and Rod Liddle. In case you missed the story Tesco produced and then withdrew a Christmas card showing a redhead sitting on Father Christmas’ lap with the message ‘Santa even loves gingers’. So not content with destroying the high street and playing merry hell with the planning laws Tesco now see fit to mock the colour of my hair. I want extra points for that. Rod Liddle moaned in The Observer that the mother who complained should have taken the joke and wittered on about being muzzled by political correctness. Well, I’m happy to be accused of being a humourless killjoy by pointing out that restraining from mocking children for having a slightly uncommon physical attribute is not being politically correct, it’s being f**king civilised.

Which rather neatly brings us to the Christmas Number One. Of course I’m pleased that the Cowell nullity has been beaten by something else and there’s enough of the teenager in me left to be amused that this year’s winner has got swearing in it, but I also sigh slightly. Again, it’s gone too far. We wouldn’t be in this odd situation if Cowell had not seen fit to place one of his Midwich songs at the number one slot every bloody year. I have no issue particular with the X Factor, who am I to Jedward or Jedward to me? I fear not for the future of music. This generation’s version of punk will arrive. It always does when too much control from the top is imposed. But I have a nostalgia for the days when there was a minor interest in who would be the Christmas Number 1 and Cowell removed it and I don’t know why. He had to push it that bit too far and here we are.

So a Christmas wish and a hope for the new year, that busybody newspapers and over mighty supermarkets and music tycoons all calm down and leave us to our own devices. Just for a while.

A Burning Issue

2009-12-14T19:49:00.002Z

I was just wondering, is David Tennant the only person in Britain who can gurn with the top half of his face only?

I haven't got enough to worry about.

Morning Thoughts

2009-12-14T19:44:00.001Z

Listening to the radio early this morning while preparing to go out and do something necessary but mildly irksome, I heard a report that Tony Blair has announced that he had always been determined to invade Iraq because he believed that it was the right thing to do. I apologise if this is a lapse of taste, but I’m afraid the very first thing that occurred to me was that this was exactly the same defence that Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, used. I tell you one thing, it’s a hell of a thought to start the week with. Beware of people who are absolutely convinced that they are right and are out to do what they believe regardless of censure or condemnation. As Oliver Cromwell said: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.” And this is old Noll speaking, not a man known for his compromising attitudes as Charles I, Parliament, Christmas and the Irish found out in roughly that order. And people wonder why I’m not a morning person.

A Shameless Plug

2009-12-07T19:01:00.003Z

Feast your eyes upon this:

http://www.2012thesecretofthecrystalskull.com/

I really should declare an interest. The authors are family. They were kind enough to ask my advice about the manuscript and as they were then wise enough to ignore it, it’s turned out rather well.

All I Ask Is A Narrowboat

2009-12-05T17:40:00.004Z

So I’ve been away for a week. On a canal in a boat. I’ve been boating on and off all my life, apart from a gap during my teenage years when I needed to concentrate on being stroppy for a bit, and have an unaccountable liking for it despite the fact that it can be uncomfortable, is often cold and sometimes wet with the added risk of drowning, being crushed between bank and boat or being sliced up a right treat by the propeller.

I know what you’re wondering and yes, I have fallen in, but just the once. It was at Braunston, a name writ large in infamy, and I managed to cut my hand. I still have a scar, albeit a small wimpy one which I sometimes can’t find. I can recommend the A&E department of Rugby General though. Because canals are, quite frankly, filthy, I was filled up with so many antibiotics that the doctor cheerfully pointed out that my spittle was probably the cleanest substance within a radius of at least five miles. It is typical of the boating fraternity that when I told fellow boaters of my accident instead of cries of admiration and sympathy for my bravery and stoicism I would inevitably get a lament of: “Oh, I really wish I’d seen that”. Somewhere in the family vaults is a photo of me dripping water and gore, the taking of which was the first thing my father did after I’d managed to somehow ‘scramble onto the bank’ as Rolf Harris used to put it.

I shouldn’t complain. One my happiest boating memories comes from a sailing trip off Scotland. We had moored up at Colonsay in the Hebrides and were returning aboard after a night in the pub. One our crew was very carefully climbing down the harbour ladder, focusing on the rungs to such an extent that he climbed past the deck without noticing and continued downwards unaware of his fate until he put his foot in the Atlantic. Memories like that keep me warm during stormy watches.

For all that though, my heart belongs on the inland waterways, particularly canals though it is true, as the great Michael Green puts it, that if sailing is mucking about in boats, then on the inland waterways it’s more ‘boating about in muck’.

Oh, and they’re called narrowboats, not barges.

Anyway, As I Was Saying

2009-12-03T19:18:00.003Z

Well that was nice. A week away from the cares and woes of daily living and increasingly fretting about outgoing Dr Who's David Tennant’s habit of showing deep emotion by wrinkling his eyebrows into an odd shape and staring into the middle distance slightly to the left of camera. I needed a break.

It is said that for a blog to really be noticed, you have to do a list. So here is the curious list of ways to amuse a small baby you have been left in control of while you are a) childless yourself; and b) a man:

Prod baby in stomach

Say ‘gerrrschhhhhh’ to baby

Prod baby in stomach again

Look around in hope that one of baby’s parents is in the immediate vicinity with the immediate intention of relieving you of baby

Prod baby in stomach

Wave hand in front of baby’s face while saying ‘whee’ in a loud high-pitched voice

Comfort baby terrified by step 6

Sing The Good Ship Venus to baby. Previously absent parents will suddenly re-appear and object vociferously

Talk to baby in low reasonable tones about a subject close to your heart eg music; films; football; the comparative merits of the various actors who have played Dr Who/James Bond; that weird thing David Tennant does with his eyebrows (delete where applicable)

10/

Prod baby in stomach

Follow the above steps and I can pretty much guarantee that you won’t be asked to look after said baby again.

And I say it's in your other jacket

2009-11-19T19:23:00.007Z

Here’s an odd thing. Outside an office complex in Newcastle is a fifteen foot high statue of Vulcan by Eduardo Paolozzi. It’s huge and it’s impossible to miss. A great hulking thing brooding behind the central station. Here’s a picture:

And now it’s gone. Instead there’s this:

Don’t know if you can make it out, but it’s a pile of shopping trolleys pole-dancing. Yes it is. Look again.

So where’s Vulcan? No-one seems to know. An on-line check on the local paper denies the very existence of the sculptor let alone the statue. Has it been sold to ameliorate these hard times? Is it in someone’s garden? Is it on tour? Has it been stolen? All very odd.

Anyone with any ideas, let me know. In the meantime, I’m off for a week but will investigate further.

Have fun.

Sniggering for Dummies

2009-11-17T19:30:00.001Z

Beer Festivals. They’re rather ritualistic these days. You pay your entrance fee, pay a deposit on a half pint glass, pay for some vouchers and then swap those vouchers for an assorted number of half-pints of beer. As I like and approve of real ale I’ve been to a few of these recently and the similarities are becoming apparent. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful to live in a time where cheerful enthusiasts can put together such occasions, but I am mildly troubled.

The last two festivals I went to (both within the previous couple of months, they’re breeding), I had the exact same experience of being behind new bugs on their first ever festival visit being mystified by the procedure described above. Okay, the voucher business is presumably to do with the licensing laws and the returnable glass is presumably a convenient way to raise funds and so on, but I am concerned that these are becoming closed rituals.

The British are rather fond of these. There is an assumption that you are meant to know without being told that is one of the most irritating aspects of living in this land. Don’t believe me? Try navigating through Paris by bus or London by bus and tell me which is easier. Paris bus stops and buses have maps showing where the bus goes whereas British buses simply give you a time and a bus stop name which is often different from the name the driver has been given. Paris buses tell you which stop they’ve arrived at, British buses assume that you know. It’s an abiding fault in our national character. My loathing for organised sport is partly a result of the fact that no one in sports lessons was prepared to tell me the bloody rules to football, rugby or cricket and to scream at me when I got them wrong. You were expected to know already. How? The British are obsessed with secret knowledge, the idea that of course you don’t do it that way, you do it this way, didn’t you know that? What, pronounce something the way it’s spelt? Pardon me while I snigger.

It does get damn irritating at times.

Anyway, glad I got that off my chest.

'I do not drink ... unleaded'

2009-11-14T15:38:00.002Z

The second Twilight film is released this Friday and the excitement is mounting, apparently. Not seen the first one and don’t intend to see this one either but I did have a go at reading the first of the books. I only got a few pages in before giving up which may be because as a 45 year old man I’m about as far away from the target readership as it’s possible to get. But that didn't seem to be it. No, as far as I was concerned my problem was suspension of disbelief. Oh, not that the pale and rather dishy boy at the back was a vampire, that didn’t bother me. I grew up with Hammer films. No, it was the fact that the heroine’s estranged father tried to win her affection by giving her a truck which she then drove to school. For some reason this did my head in. Oh it’s not that she’s a girl, my head would have been just as done in if it had been a boy who drove a truck to school. No, it was the truck. I was once a teenager, there are teenagers within my family and I have worked with teenagers and never once would I have considered giving any of them a truck. A moped, motorbike, car even if I had the funds, maybe. But not a truck. It just never occurred to me in the same way that it never occurred to me to give them a hovercraft or a Bren carrier (with the Bren gun de-activated of course, I’m not completely irresponsible) or an aardvark.

Anyway, so there it was. I’m trying to read this bestselling book and all the time I’m thinking ‘she’s driving a truck for crying out loud, to school’ and in the end had to return it from whence it came and move onto something else. Personally I think Ms Meyer missed an opportunity here. Vampires are popping up everywhere but truck driving teenagers are rare. The Teenager Who Drove A Truck To School. Now there’s a book I could read.

I've got no limbs...

2009-11-12T17:09:00.003Z

Called into town this morning on business I saw that Fenwicks have got their Christmas display up. This year it’s scenes from the nativity. A good while back they did Pinocchio which I used to pass every morning on my way into work. Interestingly, given my direction of travel, I saw the display backwards, as it were. So instead of a heart-warming story of the puppet who becomes a real boy I instead saw the existentially alarming tale of a normal boy who is turned into a wooden puppet for no readily apparent reason, suffers a series of mishaps and is finally dismembered by his own father. Hell of a way to start the working day.

Has anyone else read the original story? It’s harsh, to say the least. For example, when the good fairy makes a cricket Pinocchio’s conscience the first thing the sociopathic puppet does is kill it. No honest. Its poor sad ghost turns up a bit later. But then only two books have ever given me actual bad dreams and one of those was Bambi.

Melrose is where the heart is

2009-11-11T17:28:00.007Z

Castles.

What’s not to like?

It occurs to me that I’ve never met anyone who admits to disliking castles. Proper ones that is, preferably ruined. Nothing worse than a castle full of inhabitants. That's always the fatal flaw with Bamburgh Castle as far as I'm concerned. No, a proper castle should be in a degree of ruin and in the middle of nowhere, though Richmond Castle’s all right and is indeed in the middle of Richmond. Abbeys are good as well. I recommend Melrose which comes with its own vampire and Robert the Bruce’s heart. Tynemouth Priory is excellent value as it’s also a castle, a WWII gun emplacement and a coastguard station. It’s a sort of English Heritage version of a transformer toy. Dryburgh Abbey not only has Walter Scott buried there (with his biographer Lockhart buried at his feet) but also Earl Haig. That was a surprise. His tombstone is, by his request apparently, the same simple one that was used for the war graves in France and Belgium which would be touching if he wasn’t responsible for there being quite so many of them.

Battlefields, on the other hand, can be a touch dull. I have a soft spot for them but can sympathise with the 1/3^rd of my uncles who slowly froze as I tramped around the Culloden battlefield occasionally shouting out excitedly that I’d found the place where young Wolfe of Quebec fame had probably stood, or some such. Earlier this year, myself and 50% of my brothers and sisters-in-law (and their dog) visited Bosworth field. Except, as you've probably read, it appears we didn’t. The actual site of battle seems to have been a couple of miles away according to new archaeology. Most of the site, it has to be said, is just fields, but in a meadow by the canal is a strangely affecting monument to the memory of Richard III marking the spot where, local tradition has it, he was killed. Someone had left a white rose there. And now it’s possible that it has no link to the battle at all. Ah well.

Stick to castles. You know where you are with them.

AA Gill is away

2009-11-07T17:53:00.002Z

AA Gill shot a baboon in order to find out what it’s like to kill a human. That has to be one of the odder excuses for killing a living thing I’ve ever heard. It’s up there with the narrator of Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues who, you may recall, shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. At least he got the right species whereas Gill seems to have fallen into severe category error.

Anyway, why does he want to know what it’s like to kill a human? Is this a new hobby he wants to try out like hiking and this shooting is therefore the equivalent of a three mile walk through the downs before committing to doing Hadrian’s Wall in five days? If he’s that desperate to know, why not join the army and volunteer for front line duty in Afghanistan? He’d probably say that he’s too old for that option but then I’m too old to fully appreciate the joys of Ballymory but that doesn’t give me the intellectual right to hang around primary schools in order to find out what it might be like. And to those who might say oh come on it’s only a monkey I would be tempted to reply so are you and I mean that biologically, not insultingly.

So farewell then one of my teeth

2009-11-04T18:46:00.002Z

Back to the dentist and out it came. My tooth, or at least, what was left of it. And it didn’t come easy. I was perversely proud of that. It fought to stay with me, which is a damn sight more than some have done.

One odd thing, on my last visit when all she did was take a quick shufti, the dentist had five assistants. This time with a major procedure being carried out, there was just one. As I say, odd.

I had expected that in this 21^st century that some kind of automated device would be used. You know, robotics, computers etc. Somewhat disconcertingly, they use pliers. Alright, dentist pliers, sterilised etc, but still pliers. More disconcertingly, the dentist and her assistant both wore welder type transparent face masks and I was given eye protectors. This didn’t happen 19 years ago*. Dentistry has obviously become more high risk in the last couple of decades.

*see previous post

Stephen Fry, an apology

2009-11-02T18:26:00.002Z

As you may be aware I was mildly critical of Stephen Fry the other week. Do I then hold some responsibility for his upset? Just in case you missed this, Mr Fry announced he would twitter no more after another twitterer said he was a bit boring. This became international news and he’s changed his mind.

I have to be honest, my initial reaction was not overly sympathetic. Mutterings about kitchens and the advisability of staying within one if one is heat intolerant may have been heard issuing from my sneering hate-filled lips.

And yet, and yet.

I have suffered attacks of severe depression in the past. Not manic depression which is what Stephen Fry has but just depression, a sort of alternative for lazy people I suppose. And the thing that you won’t know if you’ve never had an attack of what Winston Churchill called his ‘black dogs’ is how trivial the immediate cause can be. The cliché of the straw and the camel’s back is absolutely spot on here. So, when you’re already vulnerable for whatever psychological or medical reasons then the actual cause can be remarkably trivial. Breaking a plate, missing a bus or being mildly criticised can do it. My last bout was triggered by someone taking forever at a supermarket check out for example. Of course, my depression was not caused by being stuck behind someone for whom the concept of paying for goods received seemed both new and bewildering but the illness is a magnifying glass and you never know what it’s going to light upon. This is why, incidentally, it’s often not a good idea to ask someone what set their depression off because you’ll either be unsympathetic or mystified. Most sufferers in my experience don’t know themselves and, because the depression gods are cruel and capricious, the smallness of the depression’s trigger can become a further cause of it. Still, as they say in the army, if you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t have joined.

I’m still don’t quite get this twitter thing. If I’m that desperate to know the day-to-day activities of someone I’ll stalk them. And on consideration I do think Stephen Fry’s critic was a bit unfair. What did he expect? Deathless wit or profound profundity in every message? Beautifully fashioned haikus four times a day? You don’t even have to pay for this, do you? Ah me.

Still, I will risk saying that I thought Kingdom was not very good.

Oh, and AA Gill is a twat. And if that upsets him then he shouldn’t have shot that poor bloody baboon in the first place.

A Tale for Hallowe'en

2009-10-30T23:59:00.005Z

THE lost traveller said: ‘I must say, it’s very good of you to take me in, a complete stranger.’

His host smiled at him over the candles that stood sentry on the long dining table.

‘It is nothing, I assure you,’ he said. ‘I am grateful that I can be of service. May I press you to some more stilton?’

‘Thank you,’ the other replied, ‘you certainly may. Despite your marvellous supper I am still hungry. The fright I suppose.’

‘It is indeed highly alarming to be lost on the moors, at night and in such weather. Worse on this particular night I imagine.’

He chuckled at his guest’s nonplussed expression.

‘All Hallow’s Eve,’ he explained.

The traveller laughed.

‘I had forgotten the date,’ he confessed, ‘especially after your fine meal. Though I must confess that even in this constantly changing century I have never before dined without a scrap of meat. Vegetables only. I would not have believed it possible, yet it was one of the finest meals I have eaten in many a day.’

‘You flatter me. Doubtless your ordeal has sharpened your hunger. We do not often eat meat here. We cannot often get it you see. I think that this is perhaps right. Meat should be rare. Some more of this rather disappointing port? Or would you prefer brandy perhaps. I do not drink wine, for the gout you know.’

‘Thank you, but your port is excellent. I must say again how grateful I am that you took me in. After all I just turn up on your doorstep with some story about being thrown from my horse while taking a short-cut and this place so isolated. I expected to have the dogs set on me.’

‘That would have been a waste.’

This last was spoken in an unheard murmur. The host smiled again at his guest.

‘Again you flatter me. The pleasure is entirely mine. Here we are starved…’ he poured some brandy into his balloon glass not having tasted a drop of the port, ‘…of pleasant conversation.’

The guest took a deep draught from his glass and then felt suddenly drowsy, more drowsy than he had ever felt before. He could not speak and the remains of his port wine splashed to the floor. He could not lift his head, nor could he respond as his host, now testing the edge of the cheese knife against his thumb said pleasantly:

‘No, as I said, the pleasure is entirely mine.’

He stood and it seemed to the traveller that he loomed in darkness. As unconsciousness overcame him he just heard and just comprehended his host’s final words:

‘The thing is, I always like to have a guest for breakfast.’

With apologies to the late great Vivian Stanshall.

And then there’s what I suppose is the shortest ghost story ever. I first heard it as a young teenager. It went something like this:

THE last surviving human sat alone in the room. There was a knock at the door.

Finally have a listen and, as it is said, be careful for there may be some walking this night that should not:

An innovative examination of art, engines, fascism and sexuality. Well, a bit

2009-10-30T16:03:00.005Z

I went to a one-off piece of performance/installation art last night. I was planning to tell you all about it but found that doing so was as dull and irritating as attending it. Wrecked cars, young women in basques and stockings, motorbikes and a porn film featuring one of the ‘artists’ were the main ingredients. High points included a botched entrance of motorbikes which more wheeled into the ‘creative space’* rather than speeding in with a transgressive roar. One of the easy riders panicked and started wardering the others like a father at a daughter’s first teenage party. There weren’t really any other high points. And the beer was lousy. Quite a good fire-juggler though.

I really do try and support contemporary art and then it goes and does something like this. It was derivative, boring, sexist, old-fashioned and trite. It was 'chocolate-boxy'.

You may gather that I didn’t really like it, not much.

It was also distinctly disconcerting to have a comedy stereotype confirmed. This was the kind of thing that pops up in lazy smug sitcoms. Maybe that was the idea. Maybe it was all meant to be ironic.

Now that really would be depressing.

*their words, not mine

Spoiler Alert

2009-10-29T15:43:00.004Z

A minor coincidence today. Mark Lawson wrote in The Guardian today about trailers/articles etc giving away the contents of TV documentaries and just after I'd finished reading that, 50% of my brothers contacted me about a film he’d just seen. It so happens that I knew more than I wanted about that film because Philip French had given a lot away in his Observer crit of it.

As it happens, the self-same Mark Lawson wrote a piece earlier this year bemoaning the fact that he found it hard to discuss a work of fiction without spoiling the ending to which the most common response on-line was along the lines of ‘well if your pleasure in this piece relies on knowing that the butler did it, then it can’t be very good’ which is a slightly odd attitude when you come to think about it.

It seems to date from E M Forster who found the fact that novels have to have a story so irksome that you wonder why he didn’t write something else, poetry or just essays or even perhaps nothing at all. Part of his objection seems to have been that people of a lower social class than him liked a story which only goes to show that there is no area of life whatsoever that the English can’t drag class into. It reminded me of the artist who had a working toilet installed in the middle of the floor in an art gallery and was delighted that the plumbers who’d done the work were totally mystified. So apparently that while beauty is truth and truth beauty, the really important thing in art is to mystify skilled artisans.

There is also arrogance here, I feel. Bear with me. Let us say that I decide to write a story in which Lord Carmody is found hideously burnt to death in his locked study killed by an invisible dragon secreted in the fireplace by his love rival Sir Duncan Duggleby.* Now, as the author of this meretricious piece, it is my decision how the story should be told. In the form of a locked room mystery a la John Dickson Carr and Jonathon Creek? A Tolkienesque high fantasy about dragons? A satirical take on English social mores using the magic realist device of an invisible dragon? These are some of the options available to me.

I decide on the locked room mystery option

Now let us say that I publish the book on vellum with a calfskin cover and because you have offended me, I send you a copy. Now it’s you who has the options. You may read the story the way I wrote it. You may look at the ending first. You may start in the middle and work backwards and forwards as the mood takes you. You may leave it aside and wait for the film adaptation. These are some of the options available to you.

Finally, it being a slow day in the arts world, let us say that a Serious Critic wishes to discuss the piece on Radio 4. Said Serious Critic introduces his (and the offenders here are almost invariably men in my experience) opinion of the whole sorry affair with the words: “By using the invisible dragon as weapon motif and deciding to have Sir Duncan Duggleby as the murderer, A J Chadwin shows that he has totally failed…” and so on.

The Serious Critic has removed without so much a by-your-leave all the options that the writer had considered and the reader had to chose from. And for what? Just so he can talk about it. Just so he can make his point about it. I trust you see why I find it a touch arrogant. It seems such a small return.

*I never said it was going to be a good story

Frying Tonight

2009-10-28T15:20:00.001Z

E-mailing a friend the other night to warn him about this blog, he asked if I was on Twitter. I’m not. Partly because I don’t see the point* but also out of an unfocused irritation with Stephen Fry.

This bothers me.

Can you be mildly irritated by Stephen Fry? Is it ethical? Is it even legal?

A quandary to obfuscate the most perspicacious of us.

*But then I didn’t see the point of having a computer, being on-line, joining Facebook and writing a blog, in that order

What Time Do You Call This Then?

2009-10-24T15:25:00.003+01:00

The clocks go back tonight. Just thought I’d remind you.

According to a piece in today’s Guardian BST was introduced in 1916 because of the perceived benefits Germany obtained when they introduced it in 1915. The Germans introduced it in response to a campaign by William Willett who liked horse riding before breakfast and golf in the late afternoon and disliked doing either in the dark.

Good grief as they say in Peanuts. So all that minor inconvenience and slight dislocation and hysterical editorials in afore-mentioned Guardian saying that if Scotland wants lighter evenings it should have its own time zones.* All for the pleasures of one man.

Mind you, you have to admit, it is rather impressive. One man changed in a fundamental way the lives of the peoples of two countries. One man. And his first success was in a foreign country. A country that his own country was at war with.

I bet that took more than a couple of facebook petitions.

Which leads me nicely to the subject of monomaniacs. I was reading an MR James story the other night and a character is described thus. It wouldn’t be used in a contemporary story. The word seems to have disappeared. When? Why? It’s not as if there’s no call for it anymore, there are still plenty of obsessive people out there. I once knew a lad who could get any conversation round to fishing in about ten sentences. It was quite fun to set him tests. Start with, say, the Schleswig-Holstein Question and see how he get from there to rod and line. Mind you, he must have thought I was a tad odd, what with starting conversations about the Schleswig-Holstein Question or whatever. I should have sold this to Radio 4 as the format for a panel show. David Mitchell could host it.

Anyway, the word seems to have gone. Was there a campaign I missed? Rock Against Monomania? Posters reading: Are You A Monomaniac? You’d Have A Wider Diversity Of Interests If You Weren’t! Was there a counter-campaign? Tee-shirts saying: Monomania. One Thing At A Time.

And ironically of course, both run by single-issue fanatics.

*I’m not making this up. It was about twenty years ago.

It's Competition Time!

2009-10-23T14:57:00.002+01:00

There seems to be some confusion as to what the photograph to the right is of. So in the name of interaction etc I hereby announce that a crisp fiver will be awarded to the first person to correctly identify it.

NB This competition is not open to members of the Chadwin family or anyone who gets the right answer.

Well I thought it was odd

2009-10-23T14:55:00.003+01:00

A young woman wearing pyjamas gave me a train ticket to Hartlepool the other day. I thanked her with the comment that I’d never been there but she told me I wasn’t missing much. She also said Middlesbrough wasn't up to much either. Then in a low confidential voice she said: “I do know I have a penis drawn on my face.” Sure enough, there it was, just by her ear, partly covered by her hair, in green felt tip.

Now this is one of those situations I find difficult to respond to. “Good” didn’t seem quite the right thing to say so I relied on the truth and said that I hadn’t actually noticed.

Well I hadn’t. You might say it’s a hard thing to miss but it’s not something you watch out for either. Not in the circles I move in anyway.

“Well, nice meeting you,” I said and wandered off. I think she may have had a drink or two. Possibly it was her birthday.

I’ve rarely felt so middle class and English.