the last book I read

The Children Of Dynmouth by William Trevor.

We're in the sleepy Dorset village of Dynmouth, where all seems nice and placid and normal. Almost too nice and placid and normal.....when awkward teenager Timothy Gedge hatches a plan to steal the show at the annual seaside talent contest, and decides to acquire the props he needs from various members of the local community, his blunt persistence and prurient curiosity reveal secrets that had previously been hidden.

There's the local vicar Mr. Featherstone and his wife, who's just had a miscarriage, Mr. and Mrs. Dass, whose son left the village in mysterious and never-spoken-of circumstances, Mr. Plant the local handyman, who despite being a pretty unprepossessing character seems to have been putting it about a bit among the local women, including Timothy's mother, and Commander Abigail and his penchant for bracing early-morning dips in the sea and perhaps just a little too close an interest in the boys of the local scout troop. And then there's Kate and Stephen, two younger children whose respective mother and father have just married each other and are away on their honeymoon, Stephen's mother having died after throwing herself off the cliffs near Dynmouth. Or was there something more sinister to it than that? Timothy seems to think so.

Gradually Timothy builds up his set of props for the show while sowing fear and confusion in the local community, so much so that eventually Mr. Featherstone takes it upon himself to intervene, though in a typically mild and British sort of way.

And that's about it - all done and dusted in about 190 pages, no shootings or beheadings or car chases or anything, lots of talk and acute observation of social awkwardness, in particular that peculiarly British sort of desperate avoidance of anything resembling confrontations or emotional outbursts. Timothy clearly suffers from some sort of what would now be called an autism-spectrum disorder (and would have been known in the 1970s as just "being a bit odd"), exacerbated by his unfortunate upbringing - absent father, shiftless mother and older sister, neither of whom were too fussy about shutting or locking the door when they were having it away with a series of random men on the living room carpet. We're invited to consider the same nature/nurture questions as we were by We Need To Talk About Kevin, though that book stacked the deck slightly by portraying Kevin's upbringing as pretty normal and stable (plus, to be fair, Timothy hasn't actually murdered anybody yet).

In a lot of ways William Trevor is a sort of male equivalent of the Penelope Fitzgerald/Beryl Bainbridge/Muriel Spark school of dark little fables I've alluded to a couple of times before. The other book of his I've read, Felicia's Journey, conforms to the same sort of pattern and was filmed in 1999. IMDB reckons The Children Of Dynmouth was adapted for a Screen Two presentation in 1987 as well.

Now the awards bit: The Children Of Dynmouth won the Whitbread Prize (now the Costa Award) in 1976 (as did Felicia's Journey in 1994), so you can add 1976 to the list given here.

rice to see you, to see you....rice

Here's the first new addition to the photo gallery - some pictures I took when we went up the big three Brecon Beacons peaks (Pen y Fan, Corn Du and Cribyn) from Brecon with our fellow Munro-baggers Jenny and Jim back at the end of March. This is pretty much the same walk as the one I did with Dad and Ray (in slightly warmer weather) back in July 2008. Once we'd got back home I took the opportunity to give the Christmas fire-pit and paella pan combo a workout, and very successfully too.

witness the power of this fully operational photo gallery

I'm very pleased to be able to announce that the photo gallery is back up and fully operational. I haven't had time to add any more stuff yet from the backlog I've accumulated in the last couple of months, so the New York pics are still the latest lot. More to come soon though. That is all.

your daily racism/knickers mashup

I had to go over to my local Tesco to get some petrol earlier so I was able to have another interesting random mid-morning Radio 4 programming encounter. This one was a programme about the real-life events depicted in Bob Dylan's classic early-60s song The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll. It's off the 1964 album The Times They Are A-Changin', probably Dylan's starkest and most serious "protest" album (and a steal at £4.97 on Amazon).

It's interesting for many reasons, not least because of the real-life context. Dylan's song is a pretty straight re-telling of the incident and the subsequent court case and verdict, which in turn is a classic illustration of early-60s racism - privileged white guy kills downtrodden black woman and is essentially let off with only a token jail sentence.

It's also interesting for the mondegreen that it contains - I obviously wasn't listening all that closely on my first few hearings of the song, because I'd always understood Hattie Carroll to have been murdered by two blokes called "Williams and Zinger" (though strangely they wielded only one cane between them). In fact it was just the one bloke - William Zantzinger, who coincidentally died a year or so ago. He always claimed that he'd been shamefully misrepresented by the song, but he does genuinely seem to have been a massive racist and just generally a bit of a shit.

Incidentally the official Dylan website has a handy little interactive facility which allows you to listen to the first minute or so of all the songs on Dylan's countless albums; handy if you're trying to decide which one to buy.

As always with Dylan the song's influence has percolated its way into popular culture, for instance with the last line of the chorus being used as the title for the frankly bizarre (and commercially doomed) Wendy James/Elvis Costello 1993 collaboration Now Ain't The Time For Your Tears.

Wendy James is of course most famous for having a few hits with Transvision Vamp in the late 1980s - I vividly recall going to a gig of theirs at the Anson Rooms in Bristol in probably 1989 and joining a group of baying students down the front trying to get a glimpse up her skirt. There was one bloke (not me, honest) who had clearly given up any pretence of listening to the music and just kept bellowing GET YER MILKERS OUT constantly for the entire gig in an impressive display of persistence and stamina. Ah, youth.

[A footnote: anyone having a nostalgic trawl through Google Images for pictures, as I did to retrieve the one displayed on the right, should be warned that there appears to be a Wendy James who is in the, hem hem, adult entertainment business. So some of the images will be a bit NSFW (and, less importantly, of the wrong person).]

the last book I read

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

Susie Salmon is 14. And has been for a while. Because she's dead! Raped and murdered by a near-neighbour on - hang on - page 15 of my paperback edition. Well, that'll be the end of her involvement in the story, then? But no - the remainder of the book is narrated by her ghostly spirit from heaven. Well, we gather it's a sort of preliminary heaven for those who still have some business that connects them to the physical world - in Susie's case concern for the welfare of her immediate family in the aftermath of her murder, and a desire to see some retribution for her killer.

Needless to say the family is traumatised by events - particularly since Susie's body is never found (the killer has cut it up, crammed it into a safe, and chucked it into a local sinkhole), only some bracelets and other circumstantial evidence. Susie's father, Jack, reckons he knows who did it, though, that Mr. Harvey from up the road - single, keeps himself to himself, all the usual stuff. Jack passes on his concerns to Detective Fenerman who's leading the investigation, but in the absence of any evidence there's not much he can do. Eventually Susie's sister Lindsey solves the problem by breaking into Mr. Harvey's house and stealing some incriminating drawings, but while the police investigation gets into gear Harvey packs up and skips town.

Meanwhile the family move on with life in their own ways - Jack's obsessive behaviour causes Susie's mother Abigail to leave and head off to California, where she ends up working at a winery; Abigail's eccentric mother Lynn moves in with the family; Lindsey starts up a relationship with local boy Sam Heckler; and younger brother Buckley may or may not be having occasional ghostly sightings of his dead sister. Susie's schoolmate Ruth also seems to have been gifted with some form of second sight following Susie's death, but in her case it seems to be a more general Sixth Sense-style seeing dead people rather than anything specific to Susie. Meanwhile we learn that Mr. Harvey is a serial killer, mainly of young girls - some of whom Susie meets in her limbo-world.

Years pass, people grow up, Lindsey and Sam get engaged, Ruth and Susie's former nearly-boyfriend Ray Singh strike up an odd relationship, and things are set up for a climax whereby everything comes together. Sure enough Jack has a heart attack in the garden and is rushed to hospital, Abigail rushes back from California to be at his bedside for a tearful reconciliation, Mr. Harvey returns to town for ill-defined reasons, and Ruth and Ray swing by the sinkhole on the outskirts of town for equally ill-defined reasons, whereupon Ruth has some sort of seizure (presumably brought on by her psychic sensitivity to Susie's buried remains) which allows Susie to swoop down and take possession of her body for a while - just long enough for her and Ray to sneak off and consummate their nearly-relationship of years before.

Eventually Mr. Harvey gets his comeuppance while trying to pick up another young girl, and Lindsey and Sam announce that they are expecting a child. These events seem to trigger an end to Susie's lingering presence on Earth and she ascends to "proper" heaven, where the Diet Coke and Snapple flow like water and there are fluffy ponies to ride and all the cake you can eat, or something like that.

A bit like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Lovely Bones is such a publishing sensation that nothing I say is going to have any impact. Part of the reason it's been such a bestseller is its featuring as one of Richard And Judy's Best Reads back in 2004; it's also recently been filmed. My reservations about heavily-hyped book club books are well-known to readers of this blog (see here and here, for instance), and I think The Lovely Bones is a perfect example of the problem - these are books for people that don't read books.

If you want less sweeping and snobby criticisms, here's a couple. It's pretty light and fluffy and saccharine; despite the veneer of shocking grittiness provided by describing (though not particularly graphically) a young girl's rape and murder in the first few pages nothing really bad happens to anyone thereafter, apart from Mr. Harvey right at the end. And speaking of endings, the tying up of the various plot strands seemed pretty unsatisfying to me. Take Mr. Harvey, for instance: are we to understand that Susie intervened in the real world in some way to bring about his death, say by giving a ghostly jiggle to that icicle to make it fall? If not, what would have happened? Was it that that was keeping Susie in limbo? If so, and the icicle thing was pure chance, would Mr. Harvey surviving have condemned her to further hanging about until some other chance event did for him? Or was it Lindsey's pregnancy that released her? If so, Mr. Harvey's death seems tacked on just to give us some convenient "closure", i.e. the bad guy getting his comeuppance. If you're going to re-use the old-as-the-hills device of having someone cursed to wander the earth clanking their ghostly chains, moaning and occasionally frightening small children until their spirit is released by some cathartic event, you need to be sure that your readers know what that event is, and notice when it's happened. And I really don't know what to make of the brief encounter between Susie (in Ruth's body) and Ray in the room at the back of Sam's brother's bike shop: I mean, Ruth's body may be 20-odd but the whole point of Susie's existence in limbo is that she hasn't aged, so essentially Ray is fucking a 14-year-old. Is it just me that finds that a bit weird, particularly given the circumstances of her death in the first place?

Let's take a step back. This is a perfectly fine and very readable book, though pretty insubstantial. Part of the reason it's been so successful is that it seems superficially "deep" because it's narrated by a ghost, and therefore is, like, you know, about death in some way. But it isn't, really, in the same way that American Beauty was less profound than its use of the same narrative device made you think it was. And the book's ending just seems horribly botched to me, as if Sebold couldn't really think of a good way of ending it and just bailed out and hoped no-one would notice. Well, I noticed. If you want a couple of books that are, like, you know, about death in some way but address the subject in a less clichéd and more interesting way, you could try Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend In A Coma or William Golding's Pincher Martin.

do not want

Just in case you're unable to find a suitable outlet to express your feelings about the election result, or indeed anything else, here's a couple of shortcuts to the appropriate noises. Just press the buttons.

• Good
• Bad

The second one is of course from here.

the last book I read

Our Lady Of The Forest by David Guterson.

Ann Holmes has had a problematic adolescence - repeatedly raped and eventually impregnated by her mother's violent boyfriend, she has fled (via an abortion clinic) to the run-down former logging town of North Fork, Washington, where she now lives in a tent in a campsite on the outskirts of town, scratching a living foraging for mushrooms in the damp woods surrounding the town and selling them. Otherwise she passes the time hanging out at the campsite smoking dope and occasionally indulging in a few "special" shrooms, the ones you don't generally make risotto with (unless you throw awesome dinner parties).

One day while foraging in the forest she has a visitation from the Virgin Mary, who among the usual turn away from sin, be excellent to each other stuff makes some specific demands about building a church in her name on the exact spot the vision takes place. At least this is what Ann reports to her friend Carolyn back at the campsite; Carolyn is a bit more sceptical about the whole thing. Not everyone in the local community is, though, when word gets around, as it inevitably does. Ann's daily pilgrimages up to the spot where the first visitation occurred acquire a motley band of followers, and the local Catholic Church start to take notice, primarily in the person of Father Collins, a young-ish priest not so institutionalised that he is immune either to doubts about his beliefs or indeed to the charms of a young teenage girl looking to him for guidance.

Times are hard in North Fork after the logging industry died off, and it turns out people are pretty keen to believe - people like Tom Cross whose son has been in a wheelchair since a tree fell on him in a logging accident and who now ekes out a living at various part-time jobs while hanging out joylessly at the local bars and occasionally breaching the terms of the restraining order his wife took out against him. Some take a more pragmatic approach to the whole situation - Carolyn's initial scorn gives way to a realisation that there is money to be made, and she assumes the role of Ann's spiritual guardian and chief co-ordinator of the collection buckets, buckets which fill up pretty quickly when Ann's fame spreads over the internet and thousands flock to North Fork.

Things come to a head when it becomes clear that the timber company who own the patch of forest where the visions occurred aren't just going to hand it over for someone to plonk a church on it, and moreover aren't all that happy about thousands of people traipsing up and down every day trampling the undergrowth and shitting in the streams. Ann's health is also deteriorating; she suffers from asthma and various other respiratory complaints and the constant kneeling in a damp forest isn't helping. The Church have also sent one of Father Collins' superiors down to investigate Ann's claims, and Tom Cross has developed an increasingly manic fixation on getting Ann to perform a miracle and cure his quadriplegic son. A climactic confrontation occurs, following which things resolve themselves, not perhaps in the way anyone had foreseen, but in a way which could be viewed as fulfilling the prohetic words in Ann's visions, depending of course on how strong your need to believe is.

No doubt this can all be read a number of ways depending on your point of view, and no doubt that's the point of it - to me there's quite a bit of broad satire of the sort of people who buy into all this nonsense and mooch around bovinely clutching phials of holy water and relics (with the obligatory link here), but also something a bit more serious about how poverty, hardship and misery breed exactly the sort of conditions where people will clutch desperately at anything which might offer a way out or at least a glimmer of hope that things might be better, however implausible and absurd it might be, and about how organised religion brutally siezes and exploits this to further its own ends.

I read Guterson's Snow Falling On Cedars (later filmed) a few years ago and thought it was excellent, so much so that the two books of his I've read subsequently, East Of The Mountains and this one, pale slightly in comparison. Where all the books are very good is in their evocation of the landscape in which it all takes place; in the case of both Snow Falling On Cedars and Our Lady Of The Forest this means the Pacific Northwest and Washington state in particular - lots of forest and moss and sea mist and general chilly dampness. Where the later two books fall down in comparison with the first one is in being a lot more loosely plotted and meandering; no doubt this is the norm and the strong narrative drive provided by the courtroom drama that forms the background to SFOC is the exception, so I guess it's just down to which order you read them in. Nonetheless if it's advice you're after (and why wouldn't it be?) then I'd suggest Snow Falling On Cedars is the one to go for.

go home or know more about bowmore

My ongoing whisky odyssey takes me to Islay, or in a more literal sense Waitrose, where I popped in on the way back from my Black Mountains walk the other week to discover that they were knocking out 12-year-old Bowmore for £21.99 - about 8-10 quid off the standard price, and I'd just walked 19 miles so I reckoned I'd earned a bit of a reward.

Bowmore is the oldest of the still-functioning Islay distilleries, established in 1779. It's perhaps not quite as fashionable these days as the fanatically culty Ardbeg and Laphroaig, but they still knock out a lot of whisky. As I've said before I'm not the biggest fan of the really TCP-and-charcoal-briquettes style of whisky, but I was quite impressed with the few slugs of Bowmore Legend I had out of Andy's hip-flask on the golf course a few weeks back, so I thought I'd give it a go.

This is actually a bit more civilised than the Legend (which doesn't carry an age statement), less antiseptic and more rich and mellow and woody (it's a very satisfying dark brown colour as well). There's still a big whack of peat smoke, though, but not the eye-watering throat-constricting Ardbeg variety. It's more like a nice mellow wood bonfire on a beach, a bit of sea air, maybe a bit of tar and seaweed in the background, and something slightly salty and meaty as well, as if someone was char-grilling corned beef over the wood and seaweed combo.

Now I'll grant you seaweed and char-grilled corned beef doesn't sound great, but actually this is pretty good. The expectation that it would slot in somewhere near the Talisker and the Highland Park turns out to be broadly correct; it's slightly more peaty (though not necessarily more smoky) than the Highland Park, and slightly sweeter than the Talisker, but otherwise very much in the same ballpark. Good stuff.

I for one welcome our new jackbooted Old Etonian overlords

It's been a giddying week: hot on the heels of Star Wars Day and Cinco De Mayo we now have the rather more sobering prospect of a general election.

I don't have the time or the energy for a lengthy screed, suffice it to say you should get out and vote regardless of who you're planning to vote for (well, within reason). Otherwise you forfeit the right to complain about anything until the next election comes around.

As it happens most of the South Wales seats are pretty safe Labour ones, with the two Newport seats forming the eastern edge of a solid block of red. Our local MP for Newport West Paul Flynn had a reasonably solid majority of around 5000 in 2005 (Jessica Morden in Newport East has one of a similar size), and also happens to be a pretty good bloke, as far as I can make out. Sensible on most issues, pretty conscientious about expenses claims (529th out of 647 MPs last year) - his two blogs are a bit of a mess but nonetheless informative and, hey, nobody's perfect.

You may also be interested to know that May 6 is the anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster, as well as being both George Clooney and Tony Blair's birthdays. It's also the feast day of St. Evodius of Antioch, though it's not clear if he ever wielded the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

the last book I read

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.

There's a Gore Vidal quote on the back of my Vintage edition of this book which says:

Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.

Well that's this book review fucked. I'll plough on anyway, though. As always Gore is being a bit hyperbolic for effect but, as always, he's got a point. You're not about to get, for instance, anything much in the way of a description of plot, because there barely is one. Basically Marco Polo and Kublai Khan are sitting in a palace garden, shooting the shit as Mongol emperors and Venetian merchants do, and Polo tells Kublai Khan a series of brief stories, each one a brief description (a page or two at most) of a city, supposedly one that Polo has visited on his travels, but all clearly imaginary; cities slung on ropes across chasms, cities of ghosts, watery cities, cities periodically torn up and rebuilt elsewhere, cities overrun by their own garbage.

And the point of all this? Well, to divert, provoke and entertain, of course, but also to illustrate aspects common to every city like, mundanely, what do you do with all the dead people and rubbish? Polo is also describing aspects of one particular city - his distant home, Venice. It's like a novel-length version of the TS Eliot quotation:

We must never cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.

This being Calvino there are also some post-modern structural games being played here - just as with Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual (a much longer book similarly constructed from short loosely-related episodes with a framing device holding it all together) you can ignore all this if you want to without losing anything much. The authorial dicking about is certainly less intrusive than it is in the other Calvino I've read, If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, though I recommend both books highly. At 148 pages (with a lot of white space for all the chapter breaks) it's very short, and it's not like there's any plot to remember, just a series of little tasty delights to dip into to freshen the palate after the great big beefy main course that preceded it.

headline of the day

Johann Hari in The Independent with an excellent reminder of some of the actual scary policy nuts and bolts behind the weirdly smooth blemish-free potato-ey face of Cameron's Conservatives: basically the usual Tory kowtowing to corporate interests, tax breaks for their aristocratic chums, knee-jerk little Englander Europhobia and wholesale fucking of the vulnerable. No surprises there; more surprising is the choice of headline:


Nice. Probably better than Cameron "revealing" or "exposing" his inner Bush, though. I expect we'll get that after the election. There's already a few stray pubes of crypto-religious twuntery poking out round the sides of the distracting lacy knickers of "compassionate Conservatism". More to come I expect.

a load of balls and a snooker cue

Obscure annoyance of the day: snooker. Not snooker in general; obviously I'm as snooker loopy as the next bloke, and I've been enjoying the blanket coverage on the BBC's red button service. However: it's at about this stage of the tournament that I always experience a hot flush of annoyance - the transition between the second round matches and the quarter-finals.

Why? Well, I'm glad you asked. It's the length of the matches. Ever since the modern format of the tournament was established back in 1980 (the year before the first tournament I remember watching, Steve Davis' first title in 1981) the lengths of the five rounds in the main televised stages of the tournament have been as follows: best of 19, best of 25, best of 25, best of 31 and best of 35 (i.e. first to, respectively, 10, 13, 13, 16 and 18). The only change was in 1997 when they changed the semi-finals to be best of 33 (i.e. first to 17). So, in other words, the second round matches and the quarter-final matches are THE SAME LENGTH. It's literally madness, particularly when there are second round and quarter-final matches going on in parallel, because then you can't tell what stage it is just by looking at the "best of" figure on the screen. Also, while by this scheme the second round matches are deemed to be three frames more important than the first round matches, and the semi-finals a whopping four frames more important than the quarter-finals, the final is deemed only to be one frame more important than the semi-finals, which seems rather unsatisfactory.

If you decide that the first round will be first to 10 and the final first to 18, then you have a ready-made sequence of 12, 14, 16 for the intermediate rounds. Why would you not do it this way? I literally cannot imagine. If you allow a bit more leeway for change then you might come up with a scheme of 10, 12, 14, 16, 20 for the five rounds, which I reckon would be just about perfect.

Best of 35 is comfortably the longest match on the snooker calendar these days, but, if you still feel that's a bit long, be thankful you weren't watching back in the 1940s, when the final was a gruelling best of 145 frames. And they weren't exactly scooting round the table knocking in centuries every five minutes back then, either; it must have taken months.

Incidentally the two most recent years during which the scoring system was adjusted coincide with the only two years in which the modern championship has been won by a player from outside the UK (Cliff Thorburn and Ken Doherty respectively). So if you get wind of further changes (probably any day now as soon as the WPBSA get wind of this blog post) stick a monkey or two on Neil Robertson or Ding Junhui.

a view to a bill

The always diverting Strange Maps triggered my Ooh Ooh I've Been There alarm this morning with this post featuring a napkin from The View revolving restaurant at the New York Marriott Marquis on Broadway. I would have dabbed red wine and bits of chocolate cake from my slavering chops (and there was a certain amount of slavering going on towards the end after all the drink we'd put away) with an almost identical napkin during our visit there. Here's a menu in case you fancy popping in for a quick snack. And in case you can't be arsed to click on the link here's the map featured on the napkin:


The only thing I will say about the revolving restaurant thing, great gimmick though it is, is that since the "core" around which the restaurant revolves obviously stays still, getting up to blearily weave your way to the toilet becomes even more disorienting than it would otherwise be. You should resist the temptation to just give up and go in a plant pot or someone's salad, though. Standards.

pope on a rope

Much excellent hilarity to be had in the reactions to the complete non-story about some Friday afternoon e-mail prankery among junior civil servants in the Foreign Office.

And what was the source of the outrage? A just-for-fun list of things the Pope should consider doing on his impending trip to the UK. Now if you or I had been tasked with doing that (particularly on a Friday afternoon) we'd have come up with the usual nonsense about wrestling the Queen, nude, in a vat of baked beans, or chainsawing a live cow in half or something like that. But no, this was actually a list of quite sensible stuff like blessing a civil partnership, launching a helpline for abused children, etc.

What's interesting is that while a large majority of professed Catholics would probably not object in principle to a lot of the stuff listed, they would nonetheless agree with Malcolm McMahon, the Bishop of Nottingham, when he says:

This is appalling. You don’t invite someone to your country and then disrespect them in this way. It’s outlandish and outrageous to assume that any of the ideas are in any way suitable for the Pope.

It would be fascinating to get any of those people to articulate why it's "outrageous" to suggest these activities for the Pope despite their believing they are generally a good thing. As always, though, there's probably some internal mental safety valve that prevents that sort of self-questioning, lest their minds should react like one of these.

The best bit of the BBC TV report on the story was when one of the talking heads they'd wheeled in offered the opinion that there was a very real danger here that members of the Catholic Church might be made to feel that their beliefs "weren't being taken seriously". To which the only rational response is HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA NO SHIT YOU CRETINS. Or something like that.

Laughter is perhaps not the appropriate response to Damian Thompson's jaw-droppingly inane blog post on the subject in the Daily Telegraph (apparently it's all Political Correctness Gone Mad or something), at least once you realise that the commenters are not taking the piss. As always Poe's Law makes it hard to be sure, but hey, it's the Telegraph. Thompson has a fair bit of previous in this department as well.

The Guardian article takes a more balanced view, as you might expect, with an undertone of amused bafflement both at the absurdy defensive overreaction from the Catholics, and from various senior Government officials (including David Milliband) who've been falling over themselves to fawningly apologise for the whole thing.

The Guardian article does also give a scoop on a major showbiz story you may have missed:

Among its other suggestions were that the now-Catholic Tony Blair and the singer Susan Boyle might be suitable candidates to be introduced to the Pope, while the atheist Richard Dawkins and Wayne Rooney – who married in a Catholic ceremony – might be less suitable.

Wait a minute - Richard Dawkins and Wayne Rooney got married in a Catholic ceremony? Maybe the fusty old Catholic Church is getting a bit more groovy after all.

The amusing (in a way) footnote to the story is that the FO employee on question has now apparently been "demoted" - if that's the case then it's richly ironic that his punishment for indirectly pointing out that some members of the Catholic clergy rape small children exceeds in severity that meted out to the priests who actually did the kiddy-raping, most of whom were simply transferred to different dioceses.

I wonder if it's too optimistic of me to imagine the whiff of a paradigm shift in the air - all it takes is a few people to stop and examine the basis on which they give a free pass to certain groups to peddle bigotry and intolerance (not to mention actual criminal behaviour) and fleece their followers for enormous sums of money, and for other people to look round and go "well.....actually I was only doing it because you were", and suddenly the whole house of cards falls away and it becomes clear that there was just a small slimy tentacly green blob inside the Dalek costume all along. Or maybe it'll be a bit like this. By Vectron's knees!

Anyway, if you fancy treading on the Pope's velvet slippers a bit have a look at the various resources here.

none more black

My excellent and attentive web hosting provider assures me that my photo gallery will be back up and running literally Any Day Now. I've got a bit of a backlog of stuff to upload, but here's a sneak preview. These are a few photos of a couple of recent outdoor jaunts, one Hazel and I did a few weeks ago, and one I did on my own yesterday.

We did a last-minute impromptu getaway on Good Friday for a night in a B&B , which turned out to be the Ty Newydd Country Hotel just down the road from Penderyn village. Now if you've been paying attention then you'll know that Penderyn is home to Wales' only distillery, so obviously with a few hours to kill on Friday afternoon it would have been rude not to stop in and have a look around. You can get a very basic tour with a couple of free snifters afterwards for a fiver a head, so that's what we did.



Here's a couple of Penderyn facts for you:

• The way their wash is produced (it's specially brewed to Penderyn's specifications at the Brain's brewery in Cardiff and then tankered up) would disqualify them from calling their product "single malt Scotch whisky" were the distillery in Scotland; the rules dictate that while there's no requirement to malt your barley on-site (and very few distilleries do) or bottle the end product on-site, you must do everything else on the distillery premises. Fortunately as the only distillery in Wales they can make their own rules.
• The peated expression (which was probably my favourite of the ones I tried) is produced by finishing the standard Penderyn spirit in casks that previously held Laphroaig. This is basically the same method used to make the Glenfiddich Caoran Reserve.
• There are apparently no plans to release any aged expressions of Penderyn; I suspect this is largely down to the volume of spirit they produce from their single still. If you're going to start laying down casks and leaving them for ten years and more you need a bit of spare production capacity, and it sounds like they're pushed to keep up with demand as it is.

Anyway, the following day we went over to Glyntawe, which is maybe 8-10 miles north-west of Penderyn as the crow flies, though a fair bit further by road. This is a good base from which to explore the western peaks of the Brecon Beacons, collectively known as the Black Mountain (though in fact it's several mountains). Because these aren't quite as high or as easily accessible by road as the eastern Beacons, and Pen y Fan in particular, they see only a tiny fraction of the visitor traffic that the eastern Beacons do, which on the one hand is a shame as these are interesting and challenging hills, but on the other hand is just fine by me, meeting other people not really being the point of the whole exercise (just the opposite in fact).


Other reasons we didn't meet more than half a dozen people all day would have included it being Easter Saturday, and also that there was quite a thick covering of snow on the ground once you got above 1500 feet or so, drifts of a good couple of feet near the top in fact. The highest point of the Black Mountain is Fan Brycheiniog at 802 metres (2631 feet); it has two summits of identical height, one of which has a trig point, the other having to make do with a low cairn.


As Hazel was off photographing a wedding yesterday I thought I'd take the opportunity to get another walk in, particularly as it was such a glorious sunny day. The route I chose was broadly the same as the one shown on this map (taken from this interesting list of walks on BadgerTrek). A couple of reasons for this: firstly I wanted something long and challenging to fully capitalise on being out on my own (no disrespect to my regular walking companions) - the route on the map claims to be 17 miles, and since I parked a bit further away in Crickhowell here I probably had to walk another couple, so I reckon 19 miles would be about right. Secondly I'd had in mind for a while a trip taking in Waun Fach, the highest point in the Black Mountains at 811 metres (2661 feet), and it's legendary for being a bit boggy, so a hot dry day at the end of a longish sequence of hot dry days seemed like the ideal time to tackle it.

A quick explanatory word: the Black Mountain in the Brecon Beacons is different from the Black Mountains of which Waun Fach is the highest point, and of which the Black Mountain and the Black Hill are subsidiary peaks. Hope that's clear.

Anyway, the route up from Crickhowell takes in the Iron Age hill fort of Crug Hywel from which the village takes its name, as well as the shapely twin peaks of Pen Cerrig-calch at 701m (2300ft) and Pen Allt-mawr at 719m (2359ft). The best that can be said of Waun Fach itself is that the views back down the ridge from its slopes are impressive; the summit plateau itself is a vast featureless bog with only a disembodied concrete stump in the middle of an eroded muddy depression to mark the spot where the trig point once stood. Even after a long dry spell some of the terrain was still a bit squelchy; in the wet it must be a bleak treacherous marshy hellhole, and if you insist (as I do) on standing by the summit marker to have your photo taken you might have to swim for it.



Again, because these hills don't quite have the glamorous appeal of the eastern Beacons they're really not all that heavily frequented - apart from the group of mountain bikers that crossed my path just before the Waun Fach ascent I don't suppose I met more than a dozen people all day. I bet you could barely move on top of Pen y Fan though.

parking fine! well that's all right then

Anyone regularly leaving the M5 at junction 16 as I do will know that there is currently a certain amount of seemingly purposeless digging and traffic cone activity at the Aztec West roundabout, and a corresponding reduction in the number of usable lanes. All the more surprising, then, to see a sign very like the one reproduced on the left here as I left the motorway. The irony was positively Morissettian.

That might in itself not be worthy of mention were it not for the coincidental fact that not 24 hours earlier I'd seen a link posted on Facebook to this lengthy list of similar amusing road signs and vaguely related stuff. Enjoy.

take me to the river

Continuing my New Year's resolution to make it to more music gigs, we went to see Cerys Matthews in concert last week. I was never that big a fan of Catatonia, to be honest, but the tiny proportion of her solo output that I've heard suggested that she'd taken a turn for the acoustic/rootsy/folky/country since the band split up, which sounded a bit more interesting. More pertinently, though, the gig was scheduled to take place at the Riverfront Arts Centre in Newport, one of the few cultural bright spots in central Newport, which is otherwise a fairly unappealing concrete jungle without much in the way of nightlife. So I felt it was important to go along and give the place our support (and also some money) and also to check out the facilities. Plus it's only about ten minutes walk from the house.

It turns out the Riverfront is an attractively modern-looking building quite literally right on the riverfront (as the name suggests), and pleasantly light and airy inside - lots of whitewash and exposed wood, that sort of thing. The upstairs bar also sells bottled Rhymney Bitter which is very pleasant. The main auditorium probably holds about 500-600 people, I would guess, which is about the right size for an intimate gig featuring Cerys Matthews and two blokes with guitars sitting on chairs in the middle of the stage; they'd have seemed a bit lost at Wembley Stadium. Anyway, it was all very pleasant, Cerys' slightly scatty garrulous comedy Welsh barmaid persona is quite appealing, and the music was an entertaining mix of American and British folk tunes (plus a brief blast through Mulder And Scully for the Catatonia fans), concluding with a rousing singalong of Sosban Fach. Good stuff. Just enough time left for a couple of cheeky pints of Samuel Smith's in the Murenger House, and then home to bed.

the last book I read

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.

Mikael Blomkvist is in a bit of a spot. He's just lost a libel case after publishing what turned out to be unfounded allegations against a prominent Swedish businessman and financier, and consequently Millennium, the magazine he runs (with his colleague and occasional lover Erika Berger) and in which the allegations were published, looks like it may be going down the tubes as well. Also, the loss of the libel case means he's going to have to spend three months in prison pretty imminently.

So when elderly industrialist Henrik Vanger comes to Blomkvist with a proposal, Blomkvist isn't really in a position to refuse. What Vanger wants is for Blomkvist to write a history of the Vanger dynasty. Well, actually, this is just a cover for what Vanger really wants, which is for Blomkvist to investigate the unsolved disappearance of his niece Harriet way back in 1966. Reluctantly, since it will involve several months living up in northern Sweden some hours away from his home in Stockholm, Blomkvist agrees.

In parallel with all this we are introduced to Lisbeth Salander, straight out of the box marked "quirky anti-heroines". Tiny waif-like creature? Check. Tattoos (including the titular dragon)? Check. Bisexual? Check. Murky past of unspecified but vaguely alluded-to horror and abuse? Check. Salander is also a brilliant computer hacker who does freelance work for a firm of security consultants, in which capacity, it turns out, she was hired to do some digging up of information on Blomkvist for Vanger's lawyers before the job offer was made. Eventually Blomkvist and Salander meet, and she agrees to help out with the investigation.

Most of the Vanger dynasty still live on the (fictional) island of Hedeby, which functions as a sort of family compound. And a rum lot some of them are too, especially Harald, Henrik's older brother, with his links to Sweden's murky flirtation with Nazism back in the 1930's, and icy and intimidating matriarch Isabella, wife of Henrik's late nephew Gottfried. The younger generation seem more accommodating - Gottfried's son Martin (brother of Harriet) is now the CEO of the Vanger corporation now that Henrik is in semi-retirement and seems keen to help, and when Blomkvist calls on Harald's daughter Cecilia and she answers the door clad only in a bathrobe it turns out she's happy to be very accommodating indeed, if you know what I mean. You'll have worked out by now that Blomkvist is a bit of a playboy (and pretty clearly a thinly-disguised authorial alter ego) with a typically Scandinavian lack of hang-ups about sex; just to prove the point he starts sleeping with Salander as well just for good measure after she comes to stay on the island with him.

Anyway, the investigation progresses, clues are found, false trails are followed, people turn out to be not all they seem to be, and gradually the solution to the mystery is revealed. I won't spoil it for you, but a gruesome tale of religious mania, misogyny, Nazism, serial killing and incest it is too, complete with the obligatory secret subterranean porn dungeon for the hero to be rescued from in the nick of time as he is about to be buggered to death or something similar.

Nothing I might say about TGWTDT is going to affect its status as a publishing megaphenomenon, at least part of which is down to the poignancy of Larsson dropping dead only a short time after delivering the manuscripts for the first three novels in the series to his publisher (there are rumours that he planned to write up to ten books). The Swedish setting is interestingly quirky as well; it's a bit more exotic than St. Mary Mead, anyway. One certainly might argue that the exotic Arctic setting added a veneer of artiness to films like Insomnia and Let The Right One In that made them seem more interesting than the police procedural/serial killer flick and mildly quirky vampire film they would otherwise respectively have been, and you could probably say the same for this book (and maybe for Henning Mankell's highly-regarded thrillers as well, though I haven't read any of them so I couldn't say).

Which is not to say there's anything wrong with it, just that the overblown praise is a bit much for what is essentially a pretty workmanlike, and occasionally slightly clunkily written (though of course Reg Keeland's translation could be to blame) serial killer thriller. To pick a similar novel for comparison, it's neither as well-written nor as bonkers as Peter Høeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow, for example (though Smilla and Salander's shared quirky skills and up-front sexuality make them first cousins). The ending is oddly constructed as well; once the horrific family secrets are revealed we should really be wrapping things up and getting our coat, but instead we get another 70 pages or so of internal machinations at Millennium and Salander's incomprehensible financial shenanigans in Zurich and the Cayman Islands, the purpose of all of which is to give the crooked financier who got Blomkvist sent to prison right at the beginning his comeuppance. Fine, but it doesn't really compare, excitement-wise, to the revelations that came before (not to mention the porn dungeon stuff).

There is also a disturbing undercurrent of sexual violence against women running through the book (as its original title Män som hatar kvinnor – "Men Who Hate Women") shows more clearly. Whether the slightly unwholesome relish Larsson takes in describing all of this is mitigated by having a Buffy-style ass-kicking heroine as well is a subject of interesting debate.

I'm sounding a bit down on the whole thing there, so just to recap: I wouldn't want you to think that a) I didn't enjoy it and b) I won't be reading the other two - I did, and I'm sure I will. Just, you know, let's all just calm down a bit.

simon says clap your hands

Here's a bit of unexpected good news: the British Chiropractic Association have dropped their libel case against Simon Singh. This is a refreshing victory for good sense and rationality (and science) and comes on the heels of Singh's victory in his preliminary appeal a couple of weeks ago which allowed the prospect of a full libel hearing, something the BCA obviously decided would not be in their best interests, what with it inevitably focusing on the evidence for and (more importantly) against the claims they make for their treatments.

Feel free to offer your congratulations at Sense About Science; once you've done that pop over to Libel Reform and add your name to the petition. As Singh rightly says, his success in this case has come despite the current libel laws, and at the cost of a wholly unreasonable amount of time and money despite his manifestly obvious rightness in every aspect of what he wrote.

The BCA's typically weaselly and disingenuous statement on the matter is here.

you radiate cold shafts of broken glass

More election-themed stuff to come soon, probably, but for the moment here's just a quick tip of the hat to the Independent's John Rentoul for managing to weave a selection of Pink Floyd lyrics into this piece about the Conservative Party's manifesto launch.

The connection is that the launch took place at Battersea Power Station, famously used for the cover of the Floyd's 1977 album Animals, whence the lyrics in the Independent piece are taken (from Sheep, mostly, though there is a snippet of Pigs in there as well). One of their less well-known albums, it probably suffered from being an album released at the height of punk that featured just five songs: two of them being short acoustic bits of a minute or so each that bookend the other three which are 17, 11 and 10 minutes long respectively - not really in line with the punk ethos of 3 minutes, tops.

Paradoxically, though, this is their punk-est album musically - none of the noodly synths and wailing gospel vocals from The Dark Side Of The Moon here; it's all pretty savage and guitar-driven. Pigs and Sheep are both cracking tunes; to be honest Dogs is a bit long (at 17 minutes) and the central metaphor is a bit overdone by the end, mainly because it's a bit more obvious and less clever than Roger Waters thinks it is. It does feature a couple of glorious long double-tracked David Gilmour guitar solos, though, so it's not all bad news.