a nob's as good as a wank to a blind horse

You'll recall my celebration of the atavistic urge to draw cocks (preferably with all spunk coming out the end) on things: walls, hillsides, rooftops, fresh falls of snow - well, I think what I'm about to show you is an example of something similar, or just of extreme childishness, which may in the end be pretty much the same thing.

having a bit of a clear-out of some old laptop folders and found two bits of scurrilous amateurish image-editing I must have done in idle moments. seems a shame not to share them here. #filth pic.twitter.com/DHU8Y9qa17

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) March 28, 2018

Images reproduced here just to save you some clickage. Original words were "mince" and "cute", fairly obviously.

The basic rule is: the Photoshop (or, more accurately, MS Paint) work must be extremely simple or I can't be arsed. Anyway, one of the photos I took of the Winking Owl bottle inspired a) a similar urge and b) the recollection that I'd done something similar a while back with a pack of walking socks I'd bought.

wine based blogging

Here's another one for the Slightly Sinister Weird Shit Concealed By Seemingly Innocuous Labelling Practices files. I buy quite a lot of wine from Aldi, primarily, and I'm quite happy to admit this, because it is quite nice and, moreover, super-cheap. I'm not a big connoisseur of wine, still less a wine snob, but I do broadly know what I like, and highly quaffable South African Pinotage and Australian Shiraz for less than four quid a bottle are very much up my alley, thank you very much. The Chilean Merlot, if you can stretch to an extra ten pence, and aren't a bit funny about drinking Merlot, is pretty good too.

The bottle of Winking Owl red that we acquired the other day set my Spidey-sense a-tingling, though. Nothing obviously wrong with it, like being blue instead of red, or making me instantly go blind and have a rectal prolapse, and let's face it we've all had a bottle of wine that made that happen from time to time, amirite? No, it was more a general sense that it wasn't as nice as the other bottles that went for a similar price (this one was a smidgen under four quid). Not battery acid or anything, just a general impression that made me do that quizzical plap-plap-plap thing with the mouth and hold the glass up to the light in a suspicious manner.

Closer examination of the bottle revealed a couple of interesting things: firstly that the alcohol content was quite low at 10.5% (most New World wine clocks in around the 13% mark), and secondly that the assorted disclaimers and guidelines about responsible alcohol consumption limits and recycling on the label on the back of the bottle included the odd legend "WINE BASED DRINK".

It turns out this stuff has been knocking around for a while, as there seems to have been a brief hoo-hah about it back in 2015 in the wake of this Daily Mail article. It being the Mail you should obviously take any numbers or maths within the article with a big pinch of salt - for instance the article makes the following claim:

Industry guidelines state that any drink containing less than 75 per cent wine must be described as a 'wine based drink'

A moment's reflection should reveal that this must be wrong, or at least incomplete, as it doesn't specify a lower bound, and therefore implies that you could sell, for instance, Ribena as a "wine-based drink". It'd also be nice to think that to be described unequivocally as "wine" a bottle would have to be, you know, 100% wine. Anyway, this industry insiders' website makes a much more plausible claim, as follows:

The International Organisation of Vine and Wine states that to be called a ‘wine based drink’ the product must contain a minimum of 75% wine, though producers do not have to divulge what the remaining 25% is made up of.

That has the virtue of actually making sense, though the second part is a bit worrying. You'd like to think the producers are just cutting it with some grape must or something, rather than Cillit Bang or dog sweat, but you never know. My brief encounter with it leads me to recommend fairly strongly that you spend the extra 40p or so and buy something that's actually labelled "wine". Opinions elsewhere on the internet vary quite widely: this reviewer is blithely unconcerned about the subterfuge, while this ostensibly quite in-depth article doesn't even mention the "wine based drink" thing but does enthuse at some length about what a relatively small amount of arsenic there is in it:

From the testing we've done, Gallo does it right. They try to be competitive and try not to have excess arsenic in their wines. To me that's proof that it's not necessary to have excess arsenic in wine.

When you consider that the eventual product could, presumably, legally be up to 25% arsenic, you have to salute their commitment to customer service. Cheers!

in sixness and in death

Another quick follow-up to a previous post: Nutshell brings to six the number of Ian McEwan books I've read and reviewed for this blog, which is a record, jointly held with two other authors, Russell Hoban and Iain Banks. Banks of course sported an M from time to time depending which genre he was writing in: the six books featured on this blog comprise four with the M and two without.

Number of books	Author(s)
6	Ian McEwan Russell Hoban Iain (M) Banks
5	TC Boyle William Boyd
4	Lawrence Durrell
3	Cormac McCarthy Stieg Larsson Patricia Highsmith William Gibson Beryl Bainbridge

Of the people on this list, Bainbridge, Hoban and Banks were victims of the Curse Of Electric Halibut, while Durrell, Larsson and Highsmith avoided it by taking the wise precaution of already being dead before I started this blog in 2006. The others remain, as of today, alive.

chateauneuf du splat

One final Lake District holiday-related anecdote: during the trip we did a certain amount of sitting around drinking wine, as you'd expect, mostly after the kids were safely packed off to bed. During the course of one of these wine-facilitated conversations I made some expansive hand gesture, probably to illustrate the terrifyingly incisive political point I was making, and caught the rim of my wine glass in so doing, knocking it away from me and causing it to topple.

Now for most mere mortals that would be that: crash, splosh, tinkle, glass and wine everywhere and probably some unwelcome vinous tsunami with razor-sharp shards in it arriving in someone's lap. But because nature and years of ascetic self-denial and close study of the sacred texts have endowed me with the reflexes of a FREAKIN' NINJA, I was able to grab the glass with the same hand I'd nudged it with and attempt to right it before any wine was lost.

Sadly, a momentary loss of muscular co-ordination, a few extra foot-pounds of energy per second per second, and a slight misalignment of thumb and index finger on the stem of the glass resulted in a whiplash effect of startling speed and power whereby the base of the glass slid away from me across the table and the bowl of the glass swung towards me, ejecting about half the wine in a high-velocity spray into my face and onto the wall behind me, probably leaving a shadow in the wine splatter in the shape of a freakishly large human cranium. I was nonetheless able (ninja skills again) to keep hold of the glass and prevent it from either hitting the table and breaking or spilling the remainder of its contents. This is one of the few occasions where wearing glasses is a positive advantage, as I would otherwise have got an eyeful (possibly two) of red wine, which would probably have stung a bit.

This was all highly amusing, of course, and rightly so, to the other people around the table. But there comes a time when the laughing has to stop and the cleaning up has to begin. What I can tell you is that red wine on an emulsion-ed wall is a bit of a bitch to get off, and the standard bleach-enrichened surface cleaner sprays talk a good game but in practice only change red splodges and rivulets to dull grey splodges and rivulets. It was only a couple of days later when I found some actual honest-to-goodness concentrated bleach in a cupboard that I was able to don some Marigolds, return to the scene of the stain and get mediaeval on its ass with some proper caustic chemicals, with fairly miraculous results, which I assume saved us from having to make a shamefaced confession to the letting agents and have some of our deposit docked. One caveat: the wall in question was white; I can't vouch for the effects of applying neat bleach to a wall of any other colour.

the last book I read

Nutshell by Ian McEwan.

They did a bad, bad thing. Well, strictly speaking they haven't done it yet, but plans are afoot for Trudy and her lover, Claude, to really cement their commitment to their relationship by doing a murder. The couple that slays together, stays together, and all that.

There are a few complicating factors, though, as if doing a murder and trying to get away with it were not complicated enough already. The primary motive for the impending murder appears to be that the London townhouse Trudy and Claude currently inhabit actually belongs to Trudy's estranged husband, John. So if John were, hem hem, out of the way in some way, Trudy and Claude would be free to realise the value of this asset (likely to be several million quid). Hence, murder. Oh, a couple of other things: Claude is John's younger brother, and Trudy is deep into the third trimester of being pregnant with John's baby.

The complicating factor in terms of the structure of the book itself should be revealed at this point, and it's this: the first-person narrator of the events described here is Trudy's baby. Yeah, you heard me. Obviously there are a host of questions about this device, and we'll come to those later if that's all right with you.

So anyway, it transpires that John knows about the Trudy and Claude situation, may or may not have a lover of his own (slightly flaky younger poet Elodie) and is quite keen to have his house back. So Trudy and Claude decide to accelerate their plans, and take the opportunity of John and Elodie popping round for a mature adult discussion to slip John an ethylene-glycol-laced fruit smoothie.

You might imagine that there would be some plot machinations at this point that would prevent poor old John (who seems harmless enough if a bit pompous and prone to public poetry declamations at unwelcome moments) from getting offed, but no, the police soon pop round to break the tragic news that he's been discovered face-down on a grassy embankment by the side of the M1. So Trudy and Claude have got what they wanted. But have they got away with it? As some Scottish guy once said: to be thus is nothing; but to be safely thus. Do the police suspect? Were there any incriminating fingerprints on the smoothie container? What has Elodie been telling the police?

When Chief Inspector Clare Allison pops round for an informal chat and a cup of tea, Trudy and Claude's paranoia goes up a gear? Is this just routine? Or is the Chief Inspector doing some sort of Lieutenant Columbo thing and secretly knows far more than she's letting on? Well, the answer, as always, is that it's the Lieutenant Columbo thing, and as Trudy and Claude rush around trying to find passports for a last-minute dash to some Central American country before the police return with the van and the handcuffs our narrator friend (remember them?) decides it's about time they put in an appearance in person.

So on the one hand this is a fairly simple tale about greed, lust and murder, and the near-impossibility of bringing off the latter in such a way as to be able to enjoy the proceeds, which in most cases (of the premeditated variety, anyway) is the whole point of the exercise in the first place. Just about everybody who reviewed it spotted that it's basically a retelling of Hamlet with a few twists. Just as with A Thousand Acres (loosely based on King Lear) I think it's probably better - apart from having to confess to your own literary ignorance - not to be intimately familiar with the source material, as it allows a better appreciation of the book on its own terms. As far as Hamlet goes I know it's set in Denmark, some people die and the central character talks a lot, but I don't think I've ever actually sat through it either on stage or screen.

As it happens, Shakespearian allusions aside, I don't think the central concept here (i.e. the foetus as narrator) really works, partly because it just collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. It doesn't really make sense for the narrator to be musing about how he (or she, it's never made clear as far as I know) has literally no idea what basic outside-world concepts like "blue" and "green" are about, and then later go on to describe in some detail his mother's pink sunglasses, or wax lyrical about the black cherry notes in his mother's choice of Pinot Noir. The absurdity of this central plot device is bothersome, outside of that this is a novel - unusually in McEwan's recent canon and unlike, say, The Children Act - not weighed down by its own seriousness and the thoroughness of the author's background research. It's just a bracing tale of unpleasant people doing unpleasant things, a bit of a throwback to McEwan's early work. That's all fine, but the nature of the narrator is a problem that some people will find it difficult to get past. Not so much the elephant in the room, more like the elephant in the womb, amirite? McEwan does acknowledge some of these problems in this Guardian interview, but basically laughs it off by saying: I felt like doing it this way, so deal with it. Which is fair enough, I suppose.

illusions of grandeur

Just a quick round-up of a few other bits relating to our Lake District holiday a couple of months ago; a belated follow-up, to put it another way, to this post detailing all the hill-climbing activity. But it's not all about the hill-climbing activity, however much I might wish that it were. There is other stuff to do as well, much of it more suited to small children who don't fancy hanging off bits of rock, or who do fancy hanging off bits of rock but have parents who are a bit apprehensive about letting them do it.

Emma's excellent and diligent research found us (six adults, three kids) this spacious house in Braithwaite, just down the road from Keswick, and the starting point for our Coledale walk back in the heady pre-kids days of 2008. As with Keswick itself this is an excellent hub for getting to most bits of the Lake District, with the exception of some of the really gnarly remote bits like Wasdale. It was ideal for the three hill/mountain walks described in the earlier post; none of them required a drive of more than half an hour or so. Braithwaite also claims to have three pubs - we'd already visited the Coledale Inn as the finale to our walk in 2008, and revisited it here just to check it was still OK (it is). We also had a pint in the Royal Oak, which is about 2 minutes down the road from the house and has excellent Jennings ale. The third pub must presumably be the Middle Ruddings "country inn and restaurant" which is a few yards down the road in the other direction (i.e. away from the village).

Anyway, places we visited which were not either mountains or pubs during the trip included:

• The Puzzling Place in Keswick - a quaint little place collecting various items grouped around the theme of optical illusions. More Nia's cup of tea than the younger two, to be honest, but they do have an Ames room, which is pretty awesome.

• The World Of Beatrix Potter in Bowness-on-Windermere. Again, probably more Nia's thing than anyone else's, but very well done - lots of multimedia interaction and things to do as well as a "real" Mr MacGregor's garden (i.e. it was outside and had actual plants in it). Certainly a step up from the Peter Rabbit exhibit in Wray Castle that we visited on last year's trip - that one seemed more specifically tailored to people familiar with the TV series, which despite being of American origin is generally fine except for the bizarre driving rock soundtrack they throw in occasionally. Obviously one is required to exit through the gift shop, and obviously Nia persuaded us to buy her a boxed set of Beatrix Potter books, the little minx.
• Whinlatter Forest - we came here last time as well, but it warrants a re-visit as there are lots of trails to explore and they had a different Donaldson/Scheffler-themed thing going on - last time it was The Highway Rat, this time Zog. For what it's worth I prefer Zog as a book, particularly to read out loud. I'd obviously like it noted that I recognise that the structure and metre adopted by The Highway Rat is a homage to Alfred Noyes' The Highwayman, and that's all very clever, but it breaks up the rhythm a bit when you're reading it. Zog also has a nice bit of feminist subversion of fairy-tale tropes at the end, as previously noted here. Zog was also famously read by Queens Of The Stone Age frontman and alleged Donald Trump lookalike Josh Homme in the CBeebies bedtime story slot a while back. Apparently a couple of other stories were filmed but have now been indefinitely shelved following some stereotypical drunken rock pig arseholery whereby Homme injured a female photographer at a gig in Los Angeles in December 2017. Absolutely no attempt will be made by me to excuse this behaviour, but it does illustrate a conflict between a desire to be edgy and ironic and interesting and keep the parents entertained (since clearly most if not all of the kids will have no idea who these people are) and the expectation that the chosen people will be exemplary role models for small children.

I've been experimenting with sharing albums via Google Photos rather than via the old gallery, so this album link can serve as a prototype. Initial testing suggests it works OK but if anyone passes this way and finds that it doesn't, drop me a comment or something.

the end of cartography

A quick follow-up to the last book post: The End Of Vandalism is, I think, the first book I've read since this book-slash-map-related post from June 2014 to contain a map (usual caveats apply, i.e. I haven't completely exhaustively scoured every intervening book to be absolutely sure). Here it is:

The original post was (slightly belatedly) prompted by my reading of Riddley Walker a few months earlier. That book does occasionally prompt a desire to orient yourself by looking at the map; to be honest The End Of Vandalism is such a benignly drifty narrative that the exact geographical details of where the various relatively inconsequential events happen seem neither here nor there. The one significant thing that does happen in a specific location outside of the general Grafton area is Louise's lengthy sojourn in Minnesota, and for obvious reasons that's not on this large-scale map.

The other thing to note is that on replacing it in its appointed place on the shelves I notice that there is now a five-book sequence running from A Natural Curiosity (the third book ever featured on this blog, way back in October 2006) through The End Of Vandalism, Bluesman and House Of Sand And Fog to Talking To The Dead. I notice from the original sequences post that the five-novel sequences there came with the additional constraint that the books had to be by five different authors, something we haven't quite managed here. But on the other hand, I've taken the picture now, so bollocks.