the last book I read

The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. 

Subtitled Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, this is a book primarily concerned with *checks notes* sex, and the evolution of human nature. "Sex" is a slightly problematic term here for several reasons, not least because it refers to two separate but related things - the binary separation of the human species into male and female (I can sense you shifting nervously in your chair, but we'll come back to that later), but also the physical act of love, coitus, jiggy jiggy. etc. 

The whole business of combining two sets of chromosomal material - zipping each one in half, sticking them together again, ensuring all the bits line up - is quite an overhead, though, and that's before you get into the overhead of taking a lady out to dinner, maybe a movie, some dimmed lights, scented candles etc., to get her in the mood for little bit of chromosomal combining, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Compare this with just splitting yourself in half and ending up with two genetically identical clones (as some species have done perfectly happily for a gajillion years) - possibly slightly painful, but quick, efficient and no-one has to argue over who picks up the taxi fare or has to sleep in the wet patch. 

I'm being slightly flippant here, obviously, but the point is that it really is a major overhead in energy terms and would clearly be selected against by evolution were it not for the benefit that it must confer. But what is that benefit? Essentially the first half(ish) of the book addresses that question, and the second half(again, ish) explores some of the sometimes counter-intuitive ramifications of choosing to do things this way. Some of the first half of the book covers similar themes to those covered (in more detail) in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, specifically all the stuff about the gene being the principal unit of selection and reproduction, and therefore responsible for some behaviour that would otherwise seem inexplicable, like altruism in favour of close relatives (who carry a similar set of genetic material). In the interests of full disclosure I should add that I read somewhere between a third and a half of The Selfish Gene, probably 20+ years ago, but never finished it, not because it wasn't an interesting read but more than likely because some shiny and tempting volume of fiction hove into view and distracted me. 

The main benefit of sexual reproduction, it seems, in large and complex organisms in particular, is that the regular mixing of genetic material into new and unique patterns provides a means of flushing out undesirable genetic mutations, and also staying one step ahead of the massed ranks of crazed and homicidal micro-organisms (viruses, parasites, etc.) that are out to invade our bodies, kill us and then feast on our rancid liquefied remains. It's more difficult for them to get into your house, steal your stuff and shit on the carpet if you keep changing the locks.

Hoary old phrases like "survival of the fittest" encourage the assumption that it's the organisms with the "best" genetic material that get first dibs on reproducing and populating future generations, and there is a very basic sense in which this is true - those with really disastrous genetic mutations are highly likely to die before they can reproduce. But this disregards sexual selection, i.e. how organisms decide which organisms of the opposite sex to mate and reproduce with. To put it another way, how would they know who had the "best" genetic material without running extensive genetic tests as part of the courtship process? One answer is for the candidates (and it's almost always the males, it being the females doing the selecting for the obvious reason that they carry the young) to display some physical adornment that advertises the good health and vigour necessary to produce, say, absurdly long or decorative tail feathers, but also the strength to overcome the physical handicap imposed by such things and survive to robust adulthood. Indeed, the more absurd and cumbersome the decoration, the more impressive the individual's achievement in thriving despite it, and so a sort of escalating feedback loop is created. 

So in fact the organisms that do best at passing their genes on to the next generation are those who are the most successful at attracting mates, not necessarily those with the "best" genetic material, assuming that term even means anything.

That's all very well for peacocks, you'll be saying, but I don't have a massive multi-coloured fan sticking out of my arse to attract the ladies. What have I got going for me? Well, in addition to all the obvious stuff like being fairly tall, reasonably symmetrical features, relative youth, solvency, good prospects, there is a theory that part of the reason humans evolved these gargantuan brains is as a result of sexual selection. This is in conflict with the usual explanations around needing the big brains for things like tool use and most obviously language and its uses for constructing large-scale societies, situation comedies and complex hire purchase agreements. What if the large brain and its function as a generator of charm, wit and poetry was itself a sort of virtual peacock's tail? That would explain its being larger than even dealing with language would seem to require, a sort of runaway feedback mechanism limited only by the female body's capacity to give birth to large-headed babies without needing impractically large hips, and as a consequence impractically expensive trousers.

I'm not sure I completely buy that theory, but it's an interesting idea. The difficulty with all this is avoiding the charge of concocting plausible-sounding just-so stories that fit the data without hard evidence that these supposed mechanisms actually exist. To pre-empt this charge Ridley does offer a blizzard of citations in the 30-page bibliography at the end, although I have no way of distinguishing between Professor George Eminent of the University of Science and A. Dimwit from the Academy of Dubious Claims, or at least not without doing a lot of legwork I'm not prepared to do.

It's interesting while reading a science-y book like this written by someone with an obvious regard for data and evidence and try to tease out their own biases - in Ridley's case the clearest one is a general dislike for anyone who leans (in his view) too far towards the nurture side of the nature/nurture argument, in particular the pioneers of social science such as Émile Durkheim, but also some more regular science-y people like BF Skinner and the behaviourists. I'm fairly sympathetic to Ridley's views here but it is interesting to note that in the 30-odd years since The Red Queen's publication in 1993 the "everything is culture" school of thought seems to have become more prevalent.

I couldn't say whether this is a view inherently linked to what you might (inaccurately) call the "everything is genetics" viewpoint, but the other thing you occasionally get a whiff of when Ridley strays into more general non-sciencey musings about society is a slightly unpalatable right-leaning free-market libertarianism. The relevance of this is to Ridley's ill-fated tenure as chairman of Northern Rock during its time as an early victim (in late 2007) of what's become known as the 2008 financial crisis. It's highly debatable how much Ridley's own role as non-executive chairman allowed him to dictate policy but it's certainly true that statements like this (from this 2007 George Monbiot article in the Guardian and therefore second-hand, so I have to trust that it's genuine) have a bum-clenchingly Ayn Rand-ish sound to them:

Bureaucracy, he argued, is "a self-seeking flea on the backs of the more productive people of this world ... governments do not run countries, they parasitise them".

The elephant in the room that I have failed to acknowledge thus far is that the unstated premise of the whole book - i.e. that biological sex exists, is a highly-robust genetic mechanism and results in two sub-categories of Homo sapiens which have identifiably different physical bodies and attributes, some of which extend to behaviour - is now controversial in some quarters. This is a problem not solved by substituting the word "gender" for the word "sex", although Ridley does this to solve the different problem of confusion between the two different meanings of the word "sex" as mentioned above.

There was a time not that long ago when doing this (i.e. conflating "sex" and "gender") would have got you scolded/abused/cancelled, the idea being that "gender" was more about your self-presentation and even self-identification, in some individuals (i.e. transgender people) differing from your biological sex. More recently there has been a move towards the scolding/abuse/cancellation stuff switching to being directed at those who insist that they're different things (and maybe even that "gender" is just a slightly woolly and artificial sub-category of the more general group of things which could be called "what you're like"), and towards the ideologically pure position being that they're the same thing. 

Expressing any sort of a dissenting opinion about this stuff is liable to have you dismissed as basically Hitler, or, worse, JK Rowling, but for what it's worth I can see, from a strictly ideological/political standpoint, why people might do this (i.e. insist that they're the same thing and both equally social constructs - "everything is culture" again, I guess), since acknowledging that biological sex exists opens the way for the establishment of female-only categories in, for example, sports, and female-only spaces elsewhere, e.g. rape crisis centres. I do think denial of clearly demonstrable reality is unhelpful and unlikely to be sustainable, though.

Anyway, back to the book - not much more to say except it was an enjoyable and thought-provoking read, and of course significant in the context of this blog in that it represents my first blog foray into the non-fiction genre. I'm pretty happy with the decision, overall, though I'm not going to continue with the practice of trailing in advance what genre my next book is from; you'll have to wait and see. 

slider way, give it all you got

Here's a crackpot theory for you, and, as all the best theories do, it has to do with Robert Redford, who died last week at the age of 89, and shoes.

The only films in which Redford starred which I could say with complete confidence that I've seen are Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, The Sting, All The President's Men, The Great Waldo Pepper, Out Of Africa and Pete's Dragon. The first three there are obviously classics, the fourth is a bit of fluff with some surprisingly dark moments thrown in (such as Susan Sarandon falling off an aeroplane, or when Redford's character has to cave a fellow aviator's head in with a hunk of timber to prevent him burning to death in his crashed plane), the fifth is a bit turgid for my taste and I can't honestly remember Redford even being in the last one, presumably because I was distracted by a giant furry green CGI dragon.

Anyway, the central point made in a number of the obituaries was that it was easily to be distracted from his acting ability by how absurdly handsome he was, something easy even for a tediously vanilla heterosexual bloke such as myself to appreciate. That is something that Redford himself complained about (but not too much; I mean, come on) in the context of it limiting his range of roles. The quote that was circulating on the internet after his death was this one from director Mike Nichols in relation to Redford being considered for the role that eventually went to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate:

“I interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands, of men,” Nichols explained. “I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser.’ And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘O.K., have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wasn’t joking.” 

What you might be asking at this point is: yes, but what does all this have to do with shoes? Well, I'll tell you. I was at Newport Leisure Centre the other day taking the girls to a swimming lesson, and there were several people there sporting what these days seems to be quite a common footwear combo of shortish white sports socks pulled up quite tight, and sliders. I assume the original idea was to give some sort of post-training-session Premiership footballer vibe, but it seems pretty ubiquitous now. One of the Dads who was supervising the activities of his child in the showers even had socks and sliders on and must have been getting wet socks. 

So, getting to the point, my thesis is this: there are two sorts of people in the world, with two fundamentally different sorts of outlook on it, and life. The first sort either apply absolutely no thought whatsoever to what might happen beyond two minutes from now, or have a sort of blithe assurance that all will be well, nothing can or will go wrong, and they won't ever get into a position where they get stranded (e.g. if the car breaks down) on the way home from the swimming run and have to hike across a field in the dark in sliders, flip-flops, whatever. The other group of people assume that these things may well happen and that some more robust ready-for-anything footwear may be required. I myself for instance do own a pair of flip-flops, but they are strictly for home or holiday use and never worn in any situation where I might be required to do anything involving walking any significant distance or driving a car. I might wear my Converses or Vans if I'm in a cazh mood and the weather is warm and dry, with the caveat that I probably wouldn't wear the Converses for the swimming run as the thin canvas material and those two little instep holes mean they suck up water pretty effectively.

Looking at it another way I think this probably also divides down the nerd/jock boundary, where the nerd contingent might be slightly more inclined to get into the habit of wearing shoes that facilitate a quick getaway in the event of trouble. To put it another way, people who might feel a need to escape from other people (anyone who was ever bullied at school, for instance) might be more inclined to wear escape-facilitating footwear than those who might more generally expect other people to run away from them.

The pursuer/pursuee (yeah, I know, not really a word) model works for linking this back to Robert Redford as well - imagine (if you can) being someone who looked like him. I don't want to use the phrase "beating them off with a shitty stick" but it seems pretty appropriate here; it's hard to imagine him ever having to expend very much effort to be in the company of someone who wanted to get into his pants. The only advantage for the rest of us who might have to work slightly harder is that (this is what I choose to believe, anyway) since we had to work a bit harder at attracting a partner in the first place, and additionally might have more of an incentive to keep them around, we might be more inclined to generosity and attention to detail in the bedroom department, if you know what I mean, ladies. 

happy quadricentennial to me

So as I coyly alluded to in the previous post, the appearance of an Anita Shreve book in this list often marks a key moment in its history, an anitaversary if you will, and this one is no exception, being the 400th book to appear in this list since The Weight Of Water almost exactly 18 years ago. I see that last time (Sea Glass was the 300th book) I provided some stats, so I'll update them here:

Milestone	Date	Days	Pages	Pages/Day
100	15th September 2010	1474	28361	19.24
200	2nd February 2015	1601	30761	19.21
300	16th September 2020	2053	31782	15.48
400	30th September 2024	1474	33460	22.70

• Note that this was the joint-quickest century on record, oddly occupying the exact same number of elapsed days as the first one. Note also, however, that each century has involved longer and longer books, on average anyway, and so the last hundred were read at the highest pages-per-day rate of all. Note also that the first ever book review was in a September (2006), and then three of the subsequent milestones (all the ones involving an Anita Shreve book, as it happens) also took place in September (2010, 2020 and 2024). Coincidence? OR IS IT??!!
• Longest book in the fourth hundred was The Pope's Rhinoceros at 753 pages; shortest was The Thirty-Nine Steps at 119 pages. 
• Number of distinct authors for each hundred in chronological order: 93, 88, 92, 93.
• Number of authors who were new to me (generally, not just among books reviewed here) for each hundred in chronological order: 40, 36, 42, 55. The fourth hundred was therefore by a comfortable margin the most adventurous in terms of trying new stuff, which is interesting, but which I'm not aware of having been a conscious decision.
• Male/female split for each hundred in chronological order: 75:25, 72:28, 80:20, 71:29. So the fourth hundred was the most female-author-heavy yet, but only by one and still with a male to female ratio of well over two to one.

The "most read authors" chart now looks like this:

Number of books	Author(s)
11	Iain (M) Banks
7	TC Boyle
6	Ian McEwan Russell Hoban William Boyd
5	William Gibson Jim Crace John le Carré
4	Lawrence Durrell Anita Shreve Beryl Bainbridge Robertson Davies Patricia Highsmith
3	Cormac McCarthy Stieg Larsson Hilary Mantel Alison Lurie Graham Swift Paul Theroux Anne Tyler Barbara Trapido Marilynne Robinson

a world in a grain of xand

Another men's golf major, two more additions to the list of record low rounds. You'll recall that that number has stood at 62 since 2017, and the list has now, as of the completion of the 2024 PGA Championship, expanded to five entries. Xander Schauffele's round on the first day at Valhalla is the more significant of the two as it provides the first example of a round of 62 leading to a victory, and also the first example of a golfer shooting the new(ish) record low score twice. You'll recall that Greg Norman and Vijay Singh were the only double-featurees on the old list. 

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Branden Grace	Open	2017	third	tied 6th	Jordan Spieth
Rickie Fowler	US Open	2023	first	tied 5th	Wyndham Clark
Xander Schauffele	US Open	2023	first	tied 10th	Wyndham Clark
Xander Schauffele	USPGA	2024	first	WON	Xander Schauffele
Shane Lowry	USPGA	2024	third	tied 6th	Xander Schauffele

Two further related topics: firstly I can't hear Xander Schauffele's name without mentally singing "every day I'm Schauffele" in the style of "every day I'm shufflin'" from LMFAO's 2011 dance-floor banger Party Rock Anthem.

Secondly I was struck by the oddity of Schauffele winning the PGA after Scottie Scheffler had won the Masters; in particular that the name of the winner of the second major of the year contained 88.9% (i.e. eight out of nine) of the letters in the name of the winner of the first major of the year (only the "r" is missing). But is this a record? Well, no, or at least not if you allow for the trivial case of the first two majors of the year being won by the same person (and therefore the rating being 100%). That's rare, but has been done a handful of times, most recently by Jordan Spieth in 2015. 

A wander through the archives will convince you that there have been years where the rating has been zero (i.e. no letters were shared) - Floyd and Pate in 1976, Faldo and Irwin in 1990, Immelman and Woods in 2008, Willett and Johnson in 2016 for example. In other years the numbers bounce around somewhere in between. More than 50% seems rare - for instance Phil Mickelson in 2010 shares 55.6% of the letters in his surname with Graeme McDowell, but if you look at the following few years you get 30% in 2011 (Schwartzel/McIlroy), 50% in 2012 (Watson/Simpson), 40% in 2013 (Scott/Rose) and 16.7% in 2014 (Watson/Kaymer). 

I'm going to conclude that the Scheffler/Schauffele sharing ratio is a record, without checking exhaustively, because it seems almost impossible that it isn't, and I can't be arsed to do the legwork. I haven't looked, and am not going to, at the equivalent comparison between second and third majors of the year, but if the upcoming US Open is won by newcomer Rendax Easelchuff I imagine that would also set a record. 

I hate you, leopard

I'm sure that you, like me, are a deeply tedious and unappealing person to be with at parties owing to your propensity for offering up "fascinating" trivia factoids at the drop of a hat: Birmingham has more canals than Venice, Gary Oldman is thirteen days younger than Gary Numan, et teeth-grindingly cetera. Those two do at least have the virtue of being true, though the Birmingham one is considerably less impressive than it sounds once you consider the relative sizes of the two cities. 

Another one that I've heard a few times is: did you know that Olive out of On The Buses was married in real life to Ape Being Attacked By Leopard from 2001: A Space Odyssey? This one is only really suitable for trotting out in the company of people old enough to remember On The Buses - a group, I should add, which actually excludes me as I don't think I've ever seen it. This is partly because I was only three when its original run ended in 1973 and partly because it was on ITV, which there was a largely-unspoken ban on in our house for reasons I've never quite been able to fathom in hindsight. Anyway, Olive was one of the main characters, requiring actress Anna Karen, in real life a slim occasional model, to don large amounts of padding, an unflattering wig and glasses. It's fair to say On The Buses doesn't see much repeat action these days as it's no doubt Highly Problematic in a whole variety of ways. 

Anyway, back to the claim - what is certain is that Anna Karen was married to a guy called Terry Duggan, from 1967 to his death in 2008. He was a comedian and actor who appeared with his wife in several things (On The Buses included). His Wikipedia page does make brief and slightly vague reference to him having also "learned acrobatics which led to film stuntman roles", but there is no mention of 2001 in his filmography. Go to IMDb, though, and you will see that he is credited with the role of "Ape Attacked By Leopard". So who is right?

Well, closer examination of the Wikipedia edit history reveals that there was an update - fairly recently, in late 2023 - that removed that role from his list. There is an explanatory note which says that the role was indeed played by a bloke called Terry Duggan, but a different one, and links to this article. Lots of interesting stuff there related to the shooting of the Dawn Of Man sequence at the start of 2001, ending with the famous match cut from the flying bone to the spaceship, and in particular this:

Terry Duggan was a acrobat and stuntman born in Coventry in 1935 (no relation with Terry Duggan the comedian). Duggan had already worked with the Chipperfield's, a famous british circus, and later joined a member of the family, Jimmy, who had started a film animal business and at that time of the shooting of 2001 was operating Southampton Zoo. 

There is also a footnote, as follows:

(dec.11: the article has been updated with the removal of the picture of Terry Duggan the comedian, who was not the Duggan involved with the Chipperlfield's and 2001. As Mission Control would say, IMDB and Wikipedia are "in error" in saying that they were the same person. Source: Mr.Duggan' sister thanks to Jamie Clubb.)

There is a link to the blog of the Jamie Clubb mentioned in the footnote, and some relevant entries are here and here. This is the most relevant paragraph:

The bounce article referenced Terry Duggan, a wild animal trainer who worked with my two great uncles and my grandfather when they ran "Chipperfield's Circus". I am not directly related to the Duggans, but we share cousins and they have been connected to my family for a very long time now. Terry and my great-uncle, Jimmy Chipperfield, were involved with the prologue sequence of Kubrick's film, where a leopard attacks a member of a tribe of australopiths.

On the other hand, there is this page which purports to be written by a relative and which does make the 2001 claim in relation to Terry Duggan the comedian and husband of Anna Karen. So who do we believe?

My gut instinct is to believe that these were two different people; it seems implausible that someone whose day job was as an actor and comedian would be entrusted with the job of wrestling a leopard, still less be inclined to accept it. On the other hand, someone who worked pretty much full-time with circus animals would be an ideal fit for the job. 

So I think we tentatively conclude that this is a myth - that obviously shouldn't stop you from watching 2001, though you might want to secure 3-4 undisturbed hours and get lightly baked first. As for On The Buses, I couldn't say I'd recommend it, but you do you.

reading, blogging and arithmetic

It's early January, so as well as reflecting on your New Year's resolutions, and how soon you can get away with discreetly abandoning them, it's time for the 2023 blog stats round-up, and some deep stattery relating to my book-reading habits in particular. 

One thing that I've been troubled by in recent years is that while the book-related posts are pretty much a given, as I have a pretty strict regime of doing a post-read review on every fiction book I read, the non-book-related posts have taken a dive lately. 2024 wasn't exactly a bonanza year for that stuff but did at least feature 36 non-book-related posts (weeeeell, strictly, 36 posts that weren't specifically reviews of a book I'd just read; some of them were almost certainly book-related) alongside the 23 book reviews. The book posts therefore comprised around 39% of the total, less than 2021 or 2022 and arresting an inexorable rise over the lifetime of this blog.

Focusing on the book stuff specifically, 2023 was almost exactly identical to 2022 - exactly the same number (23) of books read and a page count only 31 pages different. Longest book was The Overstory at 625 pages and shortest was its immediate successor The Ice Palace at 139. The average book length of 324 pages is actually quite high by historical standards; the only years with higher numbers were 2015, 2021 and the absurd statistical outlier, 2020, which I apparently spent reading a series of colossal doorstops. I guess never leaving the house that year freed me from the constraint of having to be able to physically carry my current book. 

Where was I? Oh yes, SEX. Sex sex sex. Well, it was only a furious last-minute thrust wherein three of the last four books were by female authors that brought 2023 to a thunderous climax and thereby up to parity with 2022, with six out of 23 books by women. At 26% that ratio just scrapes over the overall historical average of just under 25%.

Anyway, here's the usual set of graphs. 

Finally, this Washington Post article from this week contains the chart reproduced below which tells you where your book-reading habits put you among the general population. To be clear, this will be a sample cohort comprising American people, and I might make the assumption that Brits read more books on average, but I actually have no reason to think that's true. Anyway, my 23 books puts me between the 88th and 92nd percentile. And yes, the implication of the top line on the chart is that 46% of people completed zero books during the year.

welcome to the machine

Here's an odd thing I noticed yesterday which I surely can't have been the first person to question, and which I'm mildly surprised isn't readily searchable on the internet, what with obsessive Beatles completism being a thing, and people like Mark Lewisohn making an entire career out of cataloguing every aspect of their existence and recorded output. 

As you can imagine there's plenty of Beatle material on YouTube as well, from amusing Beatles-themed quizzes and challenges to all sorts of fascinating micro-analysis, from the rubbishness of the bass-playing on The Long And Winding Road to the identity of the mystery singer on some of the ad lib bits towards the end of All You Need Is Love to the identity of the mystery bass-player(s) on While My Guitar Gently Weeps. It's that last video that caught my eye - not so much for the central topic which is interesting but a bit obscure, but for the flash of a song list (presumably an early one for The White Album) which occurs at about 11:13. There are some handwritten notes in bluish-green felt pen alongside the typed song titles, which appear to give some visual cues for each song, maybe as notes for a planned promotional film or something similar. Anyway, the video pans down the song list and eventually (at around 11:18) we get to a song called What's New Mary Jane. This song is of interest to Beatles obsessives as it didn't make the cut for The White Album and was a "lost" Beatles track for many years until a version (this one entitled What's The New Mary Jane) surfaced on one of the Anthology collections in the mid-1990s. 

Stay with me here, because that's not the interesting bit. Have a look at the note next to the song and you'll see it says "Alexis machine".

A bit odd, right? Most of the other descriptions (the ones immediately above and below, for example) are fairly self-explanatory, so what's this about? And who is this Alexis Machine guy?

First thing to do is establish what this document actually is. This turns out to be surprisingly difficult to do, by which I mean that I'd have assumed that anything even slightly connected with the Beatles would have been obsessively analysed on the internet. This image proves surprisingly tricky to track down, but feeding this Japanese-language web page containing the image through Google Translate reveals that the image was contained in some of the extensive batch of souvenir material issued with the Super Deluxe Edition of the album in 2018. I'm unclear whether this is the same as the 50th anniversary edition, but I assume it probably is. A series of shots of the promotional booklet can be found here and include the image below. No indication as far as I can see whose writing it is - one of the Beatles? George Martin? Someone else?

So what's going on here? Well, I have two things for you. The first thing is that one of the assorted freaks and weirdos who came into the Beatles' orbit in the late 1960s was a guy who they (John Lennon in particular) referred to as Magic Alex. His real name was Yannis Alexis Mardas, and one of the things he did for the Beatles was make electronic machines. He later became head of Apple Electronics, despite having no technical expertise whatsoever; nice work if you can get it. He was also apparently credited as co-writer on early versions of What's The New Mary Jane, before later being removed for some reason. 

So it seems there's a good chance that the phrase is meant to refer to him in some way. But there's another thing: I know the phrase as the name of a character in the book The Dark Half by Stephen King. Well, actually it's not quite as simple as that: the book's principal protagonist, Thad Beaumont, writes violent thrillers under the pen name George Stark, thrillers whose protagonist is called Alexis Machine. 

There's another layer to the (glass) onion here though: King himself, appropriately for a book mainly about writing, borrowed from two other writers for the names of his characters: George Stark is a nod to Donald E. Westlake, who wrote novels under the name Richard Stark, and Alexis Machine is a nod to a character of the same name in a novel called Dark City by Shane Stevens, which seems to be out of print but of which second-hand copies can be had for as little as, erm, 78 quid. 

So, to recap: it seems plausible that the handwritten note next to a song Magic Alex was (originally) credited as co-writer of is at least partly a reference to him, though the syntax is a bit odd, as it definitely appears to say "Alexis machine" rather than "Alex's machine". If the phrase was specifically meant to be someone's name, though, you'd think they might have capitalised "machine". So is it just a coincidence that the phrase also cropped up as someone's name in a novel? The timeline seems important here: the document would have dated from around 1968, and Dark City was published in 1973. So it's theoretically possible that Stevens saw the document at some point in the intervening five years and thought: oy oy, that'd be a good name for a violent criminal in a hardboiled thriller, I'm nicking that. But how plausible is it that he'd seen something that at the time was just a piece of paper in a studio file? It wasn't part of any White Album packaging until the lavish 2018 reissue as far as I can tell. I'm going to go with: not very plausible at all. But how plausible is it that it was just a coincidence? Well, I haven't done the maths, but that seems a bit implausible as well. Perhaps I'm just resistant to that explanation as it would make the whole thing less interesting.

So it's a mystery. The only person who could have definitively answered the question would be Shane Stevens, whose books I have never read, and if they stay at 78 quid a pop I daresay I never will. Unfortunately we can't ask him, because he died in 2007.

you don't know dick

So you might have seen news of the death of Dick Fosbury a week or so ago, and you'll have been hanging out in the pub with your mates going oh, yeah, Dick Fosbury, the Fosbury flop, you know, revolutionised the high jump - *slurps pint* - revolutionised it. You know, before Fosbury - Mexico, 1968 it was - people could jump about, oh, I dunno, this high *gestures at about knee height*, and then along comes this lanky Fosbury bloke and only goes and leaps clean out of the stadium! Backwards! Revolutionary. Course *colossal belch*, everyone does it now, innit. 

Well, I'm here to be the annoying guy at the next table who acts as a sort of human QI klaxon and goes WELL ACTUALLY it's not quite as simple as that. Thinking about it, this is a bit like the post I did after the demise of Arnold Palmer, with a similar disclaimer that it's not in any way having a pop at Fosbury, just making a couple of observations about how actual events get massaged into a sort of glorious mythic version which irons out some of the inconvenient messy complexities of actual reality.

A brief tangent: it was actually this tweet which prompted me to actually do a bit of research here:

Sports nerds: are there any other examples like Dick Fosbury: mid-level athletes who reached the pinnacle of their sport, just once, due to a brilliant innovation?

— Ian Leslie (@mrianleslie) March 21, 2023

There are some interesting responses in the comments, including the only other example which occurred to me - the switch in ski-jumping from an in-flight posture with the skis extended in parallel to one where they're in a sort of V-shape, which turns out to be considerably more aerodynamic for reasons I can't begin to fathom. I recall seeing (probably on Ski Sunday) a Finnish jumper called Matti Nykänen doing it in the 1980s and it eventually became the standard, just as the Fosbury flop did (with some caveats, see below). 

Anyway, Ian Leslie's tweet was evidently a bit of research in advance of this interesting article about Fosbury. I mean there is a bit of life-coach bollocks in there as well - "seize the adjacent possible", if you please - but even in that exact section there is an interesting point: Fosbury's innovation was only feasible, or safely feasible anyway, because of advances in landing mat technology.

The physics of the Fosbury flop are fascinating and stem from a realisation (Fosbury had a background in engineering) that it wasn't necessary for the whole body to be above the level of the bar at the same time (as, broadly, it was for the variety of previous techniques); indeed in a perfectly executed flop the centre of mass of the athlete passes under the bar. Think of it as exchanging the energy required to lift an entire bucket of water over the bar for the much lower energy required to use a hose to siphon the water over bit by bit. This video shows the progression through the years from the basic scissors (essentially just hurdling the bar; I'm sure you can make up your own jokes about furious scissoring in the women's event) of the early years to some variation of the Western roll in the 1920s and a gradual transition to the full straddle by the 1950s, and then Fosbury and his successors. Note also the equivalent video showing the progression of the ski-jumping world record with the switch to the modest V-shape in the early 1990s and the gradual exaggeration of the posture to the full spatchcock of modern jumpers. 

Here's the mildly contrarian HOT TAKE bit: you would think, from watching that video, which shows only floppers post-1968, that Fosbury's innovation prompted an immediate switch, by everyone, to the new technique, with a bit of embarrassed coughing all round at not having thought of it themselves. Not so, actually, as there was quite a lengthy transitional period where straddlers persisted and in fact claimed the men's high jump gold at the very next Olympics, in Munich in 1972 (for which Fosbury failed to qualify) and the women's high jump gold at the one after that, in Montreal in 1976. The men's world record was only claimed by a flopper in 1973 - Fosbury's Olympic-winning (and, to be fair, Olympic record-setting) height of 2.24 metres in 1968 was four centimetres short of the world record at the time. Moreover, the world record was reclaimed by a straddler, Vladimir Yashchenko, in 1977 and only relinquished finally to a flopper in 1980. As I see I said here, the world records for the two styles are still only ten centimetres apart, despite no-one having seriously competed with the straddle since about 1980. It's interesting to speculate how things might have panned out if Yashchenko's career hadn't been ended by a knee injury when he was only 20, and if his illustrious predecessor Valeriy Brumel, who raised the world record six times in about two years in the early 1960s, and was still the world record holder at the time of Fosbury's Olympic triumph, hadn't had his career ended by a motorcycle accident when he was only 25.

Furthermore, it's interesting to note that Fosbury may well not even have been the pioneer of this style; Canadian jumper Debbie Brill was also doing it in the mid-1960s and it's not clear who thought of it first or to what extent the two pioneers knew about each other. This article is the only one I can find which quotes Fosbury referring to Brill, but it's a bit vague. 

Lastly, it's also interesting to note the progression of the world records for the main jumping events (high jump, long jump and triple jump) and theorise that human progress in this area has stagnated. These are some of the longest-standing records in athletics:

• Men's high jump: Javier Sotomayor, 1993 (30 years)
• Women's high jump: Stefka Kostadinova, 1987 (36 years)
• Men's long jump: Mike Powell, 1991 (32 years)
• Women's long jump: Galina Chistyakova, 1988 (35 years)
• Men's triple jump: Jonathan Edwards, 1995 (28 years)
• Women's triple jump: there was a 26-year gap between 1995 and 2021 but subsequently the record has been raised twice by Yulimar Rojas. Still, you know, exceptions, rules, etc.

Maybe another similar technical revolution is needed. Or maybe we've just cracked jumping, as a species, and that's it, barring evolving some extra limbs or something.

live well, bat often, field much

It's been delightful, over the past few weekends, as COVID-19 lockdown restrictions ease, to be able to meet up with extended family again. This has been made both easier and more enjoyable by the recent spell of sunny weather, which has made it much more pleasant to hang out outdoors in a responsibly well-ventilated manner.

One of the things you can do with large-ish groups comprising a mixture of adults and (mainly) children is play the venerable old game of French cricket. I have combined my memories of playing the game as a child with my fairly extensive experience of playing it as a parent, mainly with Nia and her cousins and assorted aunts and uncles and the occasional grandparent, and I think I'm ready to present my new all-embracing life philosophy, soon to be available in hardback and motivational DVD form, entitled French Cricket For The Soul: How It's Like A Metaphor For Life And That.

A quick preamble to outline the rules: you need a cricket bat and a tennis ball and a few people; I'd say a minimum of about four to avoid too many gaps in the field and too much faffing about retrieving the ball. Basic rules are as follows:

• The batter stands with his or her feet together and the bat held vertically in front of the shins;
• The fielders throw the ball at the batter's legs;
• The batter is out if the ball hits their legs below the knee, or if they hit the ball with the bat and it is caught by a fielder before it hits the ground;
• The ball must be thrown, underarm, from the point where the fielder picks it up;
• If the batter has hit the ball, they may shuffle their feet round to face the next delivery, if they have time;
• If the batter has not hit the ball, they may not move their feet;
• Play continues, ideally, forever, but more realistically until one of the grown-ups has to go and make tea, someone has a tantrum, or someone thwacks the ball into next door's garden.

That's the basic structure, now here is the Life Philosophy section.

• When you are a child, batting seems like the thing to be doing, and moreover while batting thwacking the ball as hard and as far as you can. But, crucially, there is no way, unless you concoct some additional rules, to actually "score" anything, so all you've done is give yourself a long wait while some poor mug has to go and dig the ball out of the compost heap. Alternatively you can just dead-bat everything into the ground to try to prolong your batting stint as long as possible, but a) this just annoys everyone else and b) can be counter-productive in that it leaves the ball very close to you.
• If the ball does end up very close you you (less than a bat-length away, say) you also have to make a judgment involving balancing the needs of others with your own. There will be a fielder the same distance away, or even a bit closer, if, as fielders tend to do if not closely monitored, they encroach a bit while picking the ball up and if you give it the full Ben Stokes there's every chance that the fielder will get a ball or, worse, the toe-end of the bat, delivered at high speed into their face. So you have to temper your wilder ambitions with a modicum of regard to the welfare of others.
• With age and maturity and mellow life-experience what you eventually realise is that the thing to do while batting is, sure, defend your legs if you can, but, when you can lay bat on ball, give some catching opportunities to the fielders, tailored to their levels of catching prowess. So for Nia's 14-year-old cousin (who is a freakish giant and taller than me) I might try and offer some sharp chances at ankle height, while offering some slightly easier ones to Nia (whose catching is pretty sharp) and the occasional gently lobbed chance for the younger cousins.
• In comparison the fielding seems like a chore when you're a child, as everyone wants to be the centre of attention as the batter. Plus, of course, you're not guaranteed to be involved in every delivery as you are while batting - the person throwing the ball is involved, of course, as is whichever fielder the ball ends up going to. It might be you, but there's no way of knowing in advance. So this means that you have to make an up-front investment (i.e. your full attention on what's going on) without any confident expectation of reward (i.e. the ball might go to someone else). Obviously you could do the cost-benefit analysis and conclude that your time would be better spent daydreaming and going lah-de-dah hullo clouds hullo sky, but then you run the risk of the ball defying the odds and actually coming to you and everyone shouting at you.
• Further to this, there's no value in getting all aerated if you haven't had a bat for a while. Have you been daydreaming in the field? It won't just magically get to be "your turn", you know. Get involved, put yourself about a bit in the field, take a one-handed screamer millimetres from the turf and you shall have not only the awed respect of your peers, but a go with the bat as well.
• There are some calculations you can do to maximise (or minimise, depending on your preferred level of involvement) the chances of your being in line for some fielding or, better still, a catch and the associated unimaginable glory (and, of course, being next up to bat) - generally speaking the imaginary semicircular area in front of the batter is the prime catching area. But, especially when younger players are either batting or throwing, one key spot is directly behind the batsman, as there'll be a lot of slightly misdirected throws, not to mention wild swiping and missing. So someone needs to take one for the team and occupy that spot - a position where you're very unlikely to take a catch unless the batsman gets a very thin edge or does some kind of ambitious Dilscoop over their own head, but where you'll probably get quite a bit of fielding to do nonetheless. On the other hand, having done the unglamorous tidying-up duties, the whole game then turns on its head as you, the backstop, become the bowler and the behind-the-batsman area becomes the prime in-front-of-the-batsman area. And so we see the value of doing the unglamorous grafting groundwork for reaping the glorious rewards later.

So we can see, my young friends, that there is much to be learnt from this seemingly simple game, and that, moreover, he who achieves full mastery of the various physical and mental disciplines involved here will find that more general life challenges will, when confronted with a firm throw towards the upper shin area, fend it back awkwardly off the splice and offer a sharp but catchable chance at around knee height. All you have to do is hold onto it.

processing middle names correctly is my middle name

The Tears Of The Giraffe post reminded me of a thing I mentioned on Twitter a while back: the difficulty of accurately categorising (in terms of alphabetical sorting) people whose authorial name is in three bits, like, for instance, Alexander McCall Smith, or, for that matter, Iain Duncan Smith, who actually is - no, seriously - a published novelist. 

question for everyone who files their books in alphabetical order of author's surname, i.e. everyone who isn't LITERALLY insane: how are we filing people with two non-hyphenated surnames? currently fretting about Michael Marshall Smith - under M or S? #books

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 2, 2020

Even in that tweet I have made an unwarranted assumption, which is that if you have someone who professionally goes by three names with no intervening hyphens, names two and three are a sort of combined surname. This is demonstrably untrue for names such as Joyce Carol Oates, double featuree on this very blog - to be fair if you read the thread under the original tweet I do acknowledge as much there. Below is a not-necessarily-exhaustive list of potentially problematic authorial names from my own bookshelves.

 

Author name	Middle bit	What is it?
Alice Thomas Ellis	Thomas	probably surname (pseudonym)
Isaac Bashevis Singer	Bashevis	probably surname (partial pseudonym)
Mario Vargas Llosa	Vargas	Spanish patronymic
John Kennedy Toole	Kennedy	middle name
Gabriel García Márquez	Garcia	Spanish patronymic
F. Scott Fitzgerald	Scott	middle name
Alexander McCall Smith	McCall	surname
Joyce Carol Oates	Carol	middle name
Lewis Grassic Gibbon	Grassic	probably surname (pseudonym)
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala	Prawer	surname
David Foster Wallace	Foster	middle name
Bobbie Ann Mason	Ann	middle name
Michael Marshall Smith	Marshall	surname
Brett Easton Ellis	Easton	middle name
M. John Harrison	John	middle name

It's important to point out that these are my best guesses based on some cursory scanning of Wikipedia pages for the authors in question and the application of what seems to me like common sense but could very possibly not be. So for Alice Thomas Ellis, for instance, there isn't much real-world context to go on, since her real name was either Ann Margaret Haycraft née Lindholm or Anna Margaret Haycraft née Lindholm, depending on whether you believe her Wikipedia page or her obituary. But since Thomas is an unlikely middle name for a woman I have chosen to assume it's meant to be the first part of a two-part surname. 

Since I am quite lazy I wanted to have a single rule I could apply to all authors, and so the only rational one seemed to be to file the books by the third part of the name. This avoids things which seem obviously wrong, like filing Joyce Carol Oates under "C", but does produce some results which are wrong the other way, like filing Gabriel García Márquez under "M" rather than "G" and Alexander McCall Smith under "S" rather than "M". But it's the best system I have.

These relatively minor problems are just a tiny microcosm of the problems that can be faced by anyone trying to categorise people's names, particularly those trying to design IT systems and databases that store and display them. This article has an excellent list of the Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong variety and this article builds on it with some real-world examples. (some more can be found here). For all that these are excellent things to remember, especially if your book collection contains anything by Colette or Voltaire, it doesn't necessarily mean that you should abandon the approach of storing "given name" and "family name" as two separate fields, as this is phenomenally useful for the vast majority of Western names, just that you need to design in enough flexibility to store what you might, in your blinkered Western-culture-centric way, consider to be "non-standard" names. 

And, I'd hope it goes without saying, while you're being all woke and accepting inputs from a gazillion different character sets, don't forget to sanitise your inputs.

grudging admiration for the "NULL" brothers and their devious plan to fox any attempt to retrieve their details from any sort of database https://t.co/shQdJCpC0j

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) October 9, 2020

soon may the bloggerman come

This seems at first glance like it fits into the lookeylikey category, but strictly it doesn't as I'm very confident these are literally the same people in two different (but thematically linked) contexts, and indeed locations.

Anyone who hangs out on Twitter for any length of time will be aware that trends come and go, things happen, literally everyone is talking about them, they mutate into memes that people copy, retweet, etc., then five minutes later they've been forgotten. Already in 2021 we've had Bean Dad Twitter, Tasing Himself In The Balls To Death While Doing A Terrorism Guy Twitter and now Sea Shanty Twitter. 

Those of us with a cultural connection to Wales will of course puff ruminatively on our pipe-stems (made out of a hollowed-out daffodil in the traditional manner) at this point and chuckle indulgently at the kids suddenly discovering the joys of close-harmony male voice singing, as this is something of a cultural fixture over here. And there is something rather magnificent about a group of Welshmen of a certain age, probably with a couple of fortifying pints of Mr. Brain's finest ale inside them, belting out Men of Harlech or something similar.

Anyway, while perusing one of the latest of the mashed-up multi-layered versions of Wellerman, the current undisputed number one Twitter sea shanty, I noticed that someone had tweeted a link to this rather splendid rendition of Bully In The Alley, a song in a very similar style ("bully" in this context is apparently one of the seemingly limitless collection of words that just means "drunk"). The thing that immediately grabbed my attention, apart from the barrel-chested magnificence of the guy leading the singing, was the white-bearded guy on the left of the line-up. I felt sure I'd seen him before. Here he is:

Fortunately I am blessed, or perhaps cursed, with a prodigious memory and I recalled almost immediately where it was. When it was was slightly more hazy, but a bit of searching through some old photos yielded this, taken in a shop doorway (presumably chosen for its pleasing acoustics) in Swanage in 2009. 

While the bearded guy on the right with the distinctive shorts and thumbs-in-pockets stance is clearly the guy on the left in the video, notice also how the guy next to him with the distinctive hairline and left-hand-on-ear pose is almost certainly the guy leading the song in the YouTube video. Just a minute there, Sherlock Columbo, you'll be saying, this is all a bit speculative; white-bearded guys in shorts and sandals and rotund types with their fingers in their ears must be ten a penny in folky circles. And I hear what you're saying, but a bit of research (including reading the text below the YouTube video) reveals that these guys are members of a folk troupe called Kimber's Men. If you look carefully at the contents of the open case at the bottom of the Swanage photo you'll see that these guys are offering CDs for sale, and, although the resolution is a bit sketchy, I think you will agree that the upright one is the one pictured here.

Further evidence is provided by the alternative rendition of Bully In The Alley delivered here - the bearded guy in the middle is pretty clearly the guy on the left in the Swanage photo. Just to be clear, this smaller group is Kimber's Men, the large group in the first YouTube video presumably being swelled by the presence of a load of other singers - it was apparently captured at the Deal Maritime Festival in September 2013. 

If you follow the link to the Kimber's Men website above you will note that the white-bearded guy is absent - this is apparently because he died in 2017. His name was Joe Stead and he was evidently something of a legend in folky circles. 

Traditional British folk music carries an unpalatable whiff of real ale and Morris dancing to most people (not that I am averse to the whiff of real ale, as you know) but it's something I like a lot, in carefully calibrated doses. To be honest the fact that it's a thing best enjoyed live in a slightly cramped and sweaty pub just adds to the attraction for me. The reason that Kimber's Men were hanging out in Swanage in the first place was because our visit in 2009 happened to coincide with the Swanage Folk Festival, and I cannot deny that among the many musical acts on display there was quite a bit of Morris dancing, most of it thankfully centred on the wide open areas on the seafront (the esplanade, if you will) rather than in the pubs. Pictures from that trip can be found here.

the year of not living dangerously

Well, here we are at the end of another year, one which has, on balance, sucked ass most egregiously for an exceptionally large number of people. I would include myself and my immediate family among that number while at the same time acknowledging that by most objective criteria we've been exceptionally lucky: my job enables me to work from home very easily (I'd already been doing it a couple of days a week since Huw's arrival in late 2016), we've all been healthy and virus-free (apart from the inevitable round of coughs and sniffles every time the kids went back to school) and we've managed to retain whatever meagre wisps of sanity we were in possession of at the start of the year. 

During the heady days of summer between the first and second waves of the coronavirus pandemic we managed to get away for a couple of camping trips, one in Devon and one in Yorkshire, but apart from that we were largely confined to barracks. One of the side-effects of being away less often is that I got a lot more reading done - at least, I assume that's the cause of the numbers you'll see below, but as I have precious little explanation for some of the peaks and troughs in previous years it could just be random variation. 

Anyway, here are some graphs (as always, click to enlarge) which chart some blog and book statistics for this year and also 2019, since I don't seem to have blogged about it at the time. Similar posts can be found from early in 2019, 2018, 2016 (twice), 2013 and 2012. Since I'm not going to finish my current book before the end of tomorrow, and nor am I intending any further blog posts this year after posting this one, I can now declare the blog activity closed for 2020. Statistical nuggets here include:

• 2019 was a poor year for reading activity with 17 books and an aggregate total of 5147 pages, better than 2016 and 2017 where my time would have been partly taken up with wrangling a premature baby, but ahead of only 2014 in "normal" years. 
• 2020, by contrast, was a bumper year with 24 books read (more than any year since the all-time high of 2011) and a mammoth total of 9223 pages, exceeded only by 2011, the year of my honeymoon and also the last child-free year of my life. The only other years in which I've read 24 or more books were 2007, 2009 and 2010, but none of them could match 2020's page count.
• As a consequence, 2020's average book length smashed all previous records at just over 384 pages (2015 with 333 was the previous record-holder). Six of 2020's 24 books were over 500 pages; even 2011 only included four, 2007 one and 2009 none. Longest book of the year was House Of Leaves at 709 pages (some of, them, admittedly, only containing a single word); shortest was Behind The Waterfall at 199. 
• Overall blogging frequency remains low by historical standards, but 2020's total of 68 posts (this one being the 68th) is the highest since 2016's 77. The book-reviews-as-a-percentage-of-total-blog-posts number just avoids being the highest ever at 35.29% (2018's was very slightly higher).

and you will know us by the trail of deadly toxins

You will of course remember this post from 2012 and my breathless excitement at having spotted an interesting Google Maps anomaly, something it turns out some people spend just about all their waking hours searching out and cataloguing. 

For those of you who don't remember, or can't be arsed to follow the link, the interesting anomaly was an aeroplane passing between what I referred to at the time as "the Googlecopter" (but would of course have actually been a satellite) and the ground just at the moment an image was captured, and thereby appearing to be parked rather inconveniently on the outfield at Bagshot Cricket Club. Google Maps' commendable desire to keep satellite imagery up-to-date means that the plane no longer appears (and nor does the one in Russell Square in central London).

Anyway, I was noodling around looking for some stuff up in the west Glasgow area the other day - a section of old railway path that I'd walked 20-odd years ago which turned out to be the section of National Cycle Route 7 running roughly west from Paisley Canal railway station - and my attention was drawn to what at first appeared to be a long straight section of motorway heading roughly north-west and culminating in what appeared to be an impressively long bridge to nowhere in particular. It didn't seem to be possible to drop the little yellow StreetView man onto it, though, so I zoomed in for a closer look.

So as you can see it's another aeroplane; I don't have the in-depth knowledge to say what type but it's a 4-engined type which means it can't be a Boeing 777 like the Bagshot one; I suspect it may be a 747. The extra info on the second image is the result of me trying to measure the length of the visible vapour trail - it's a little over 8 miles, but it would be a fair bit longer it if wasn't abruptly cut off at its south-eastern end by a transition in the satellite imaging. Of course the abrupt transition could also indicate the point at which the captain turned over the queen of diamonds and threw the switch to release the mind-altering chemicals in order to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

It would be a spectacular but largely pointless feat of engineering to build a bridge to span the western reaches of the Firth of Clyde at this point (a distance of about 4 kilometres), since the Cowal peninsula on the eastern side is a pretty sparsely populated place. Scotland has quite a few of these places along its eastern coast, usually knobbly peninsulas which are poorly connected to the main UK transport system: Knoydart, Applecross and Ardnamurchan are a few other examples.

I have a couple of low-key sort-of Ardnamurchan anecdotes for you: we nearly-but-not-quite went there in September 2011 as part of our last pre-kids Scottish distillery-and-Munro-bagging holiday. This was the holiday when we managed to bag precisely zero Munros as the weather was unrelentingly shitty throughout, but we did get to the Tobermory distillery. We did this by taking the smaller and less-frequented Lochaline-Fishnish ferry (the main route goes from Oban to Craignure), which, it turned out, required a longish drive from where we were staying (at the western end of Glen Coe) along some tiny winding roads which skirt the vicinity of the Ardnamurchan peninsula before turning off south just short of the village of Strontian, after which the chemical element strontium was named (the element was first isolated from minerals mined in the vicinity). Anyway, the weather was rotten but the ferry was still running, but clearly the locals knew something we didn't, as you can see from the photograph below (that's our car).

Sure enough, after we'd done the distillery tour we made our way back to Fishnish only to discover that all ferry crossings for the rest of the day had been cancelled and we'd have to spend the night in Tobermory. Luckily we were able to find a B&B to book into, whereupon we went and got pissed. Every cloud, and all that. A small selection of photos from the trip can be found here - no mountain summits for obvious reasons but a few more amusingly windswept ferry pictures.

My reference to Strontian above inspired me to go and look at other chemical elements named after places and see how many I'd been to: there are some obvious ones like Americium, Francium (and Gallium, also named for France), Californium, Polonium (Poland) and Lutetium (Paris). It would be a stretch for me to claim Strontian, really, as we turned off a couple of miles short of it. The secret to bagging stuff in this list is of course to take a trip to Ytterby in Sweden, after which four elements are directly named and another four more indirectly. I expect there's a Wallander mystery set there whereby a succession of victims are dispatched with lumps of scandium, ytterbium, etc., or if there isn't, there should be.