incidental music spot of the day

End by The Cure (from their 1992 album Wish) on the BBC's documentary Rowing The Arctic last night. If you happen to click on that iPlayer link while it's still active, it's from about 41:35 for 20 seconds or so and then another minute or so after that behind Mark Beaumont's commentary.

I was never the biggest fan of The Cure, as in general I have a bit of a problem with Goth miserablism, in that instead of it tearing at my very soul in the prescribed manner I tend just to find it hilarious. They have been around pretty much for ever, though, so there's a good chance of the odd good tune popping up here and there, and End is a cracking one which probably appeals to me more than most of The Cure's output because it features relatively little of Robert Smith's voice and lots and lots of guitars. I exempt Love Cats and Friday I'm In Love from any of this criticism, as obviously everybody loves those. Here's a live version of End from the Paris Live8 concert in 2005, with bonus Spanish subtitles.

As for the actual non-musical content of the documentary I have to simultaneously salute the courage and endurance of the people involved and admit to some slight irritation with the increasingly contrived nature of these stunts. I guess on a planet of finite size most of the obvious firsts have already been taken, you know, the North and South Poles, Everest, that sort of thing, so now people have to come up with variations on the basic themes - solo to the Pole, up Everest without oxygen, across the Andes by frog, that sort of thing. And in every case they now have to take a camera crew (or at least a digital camcorder) with them to record the whole thing for the subsequent documentary film, with coffee-table book and souvenir beermat tie-ins. I accept that this is how these trips get funded these days, but still. And there's something a bit grating about someone who's chosen, of their own free will, to ascend Kilimanjaro by spacehopper while blindfolded doing a tearful piece to camera saying "this is so hard, I don't know if I can do it": well, you chose to impose these ridiculous conditions on yourself, so, basically, shut it.

And one has to observe that even with the somewhat contrived definition of "pole" being used here (the conveniently southerly 1996 location of the magnetic North pole) the expedition failed according to its own terms, since they had to drag the boat 3 miles over ice to reach their destination. Not that I'm, you know, having a pop or anything.

deity or no deity

Today's crackpot theory is one I came up with after a couple of weeks off work on paternity leave. Now obviously parenthood is the best thing ever, but there's no doubt that it does restrict your opportunities for, say, just wandering off down the shops or up a mountain for a few hours if the fancy takes you. So one of the things you end up doing, while trying to keep a small person fed and warm and entertained and, well, alive, is watch a substantial amount of daytime TV.

You have to be a bit careful, obviously you don't want to accidentally end up watching Loose Women or, worse, have your eyes fall upon the unguarded portal to Hades aka That Which Once Seen Can Never Be Unseen, or, as it's known in the TV listings, The Jeremy Kyle Show. In general you're better off finding one of the free channels which just re-run old game shows on a constant loop - Challenge is a good one as it has re-runs of old episodes of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? as well as Alexander Armstrong's Pointless, which I rather like as it appeals to the nerdy trivia-obsessed pedant in me.

You can also, with a bit of judicious channel-hopping, spend most of the day watching re-runs of Deal Or No Deal, and here's where this post starts to coalesce into something resembling a point. It's about religion, almost inevitably, so feel free to sigh heavily and stop reading now, if you like.

One of the standard arguments that religious adherents trot out when they get involved in an argument with an atheist goes something like this: well, religion has persisted in the human psyche for thousands and thousands of years, hasn't it? So therefore, by your own argument, Mr. Evolution, it must be of some use to us, mustn't it? Therefore it must be true. Aha, checkmate, etc.

Now of course the "therefore it must be true" bit is clearly bollocks, and easily demonstrated as such by pointing out the huge range of mutually contradictory religious worldviews that exist, but there's some interesting mileage, from a purely anthropological perspective, in examining why this sort of stuff is so persistent, since it clearly is.

The most persuasive explanation I've ever read goes something like this: once early man stopped swinging around in trees eating bananas and generally just roaming about wherever he pleased hunting and gathering as he went and started doing things that required him to stick around in one place, like building proper dwellings or planting crops, little communities of people started to aggregate and we developed into a properly social species. One of the side-effects of many little communities with their own patches of land is an inevitable competition for resources, and therefore conflict between communities. So there's a great deal of utility in being able to know who is "one of us" and who is an "outsider" quickly and easily. This is trivial when everyone in your community is either a member of your immediate family or at least someone you know by sight, but less easy when communities get bigger than this. So it's useful to have a shared collection of stuff that you and your kind know about, and that outsiders don't. Now there's not much point in this stuff being universal real-world stuff like "the sky is blue", "rain is wet", and stuff like that, as that doesn't help. So it's positively a benefit to have a collection of stories that are a bit out of the ordinary, say about burning bushes, parting of seas, guys coming back from the dead, yadda yadda yadda. If some of these myths are of the Just-So Story variety that seem to explain natural phenomena like the sun coming up in the morning, periodic flooding, locust infestation, etc. etc., well then so much the better. Add to that the evolutionary benefit of believing things your parents tell you - like "cliffs are dangerous", "fire is dangerous", "lions are dangerous" - without insisting on testing it out for yourself, add several thousand years, mix well, and hey presto, organised religion.

Anyway, the Deal Or No Deal connection is that I watched a few new-ish episodes after not having seen ths show at all for a couple of years, and noticed a few changes. Firstly, Noel Edmonds' hair and beard combo has undegone a radical transformation from a greyish bouffant and goatee combo back then to a frankly terrifying dark brown full beard and yellow-ish (but still fairly bouffant) hairdo combo now, courtesy of (I assume) a large amount of Just for Men hair dye and beard treatment. More importantly, as far as my theory goes anyway, the language used within the game has mutated into a jargon probably incomprehensible to those who don't watch the show regularly. The jokey "West Wing", "East Wing", "pilgrims" stuff was there before, but now we've got all manner of other stuff like "the death box" (number 22), "the guv'nor" (an offer of £26,000), "the power 5" (the top 5 red amounts), "5-box" (the penultimate banker's offer, made when 5 boxes remain), and many more that probably passed me by because I simply didn't understand them. Add to this the constant stream of bullshit about "strategy" (satirised by Charlie Brooker here), convoluted explanations from the players about their reasons for choosing a particular box (birthdays, usually), and liberal application of the gambler's fallacy among assorted other irrationality and I think you have quite a close model of how religions develop and eventually ossify into arcane and incomprehensible ritual accessible only to the chosen. Admittedly the adherents of Deal Or No Deal haven't started killing each other in some dispute about dogma yet, but I expect it's only a matter of time.

It should also be noted, while we're speculating about the depths of irrationality to which people might sink, that Noel Edmonds is a bit of a devotee of the splendidly fluffy and inane self-help psychobabble known as Cosmic Ordering, and has written a book on the subject. Someone who has also jumped on this particular bandwagon is astrologer Jonathan Cainer, whose televisual ambushing at the hands of The Amazing Randi and Fry & Laurie back in the early 1990s really never gets old.

levon knows I'm miserable now

Here's a brief and slightly belated tribute to Levon Helm, who died last Thursday. I've mentioned my great love for The Band here before, and their first album Music From Big Pink in particular, and Helm (the only non-Canadian in the line-up - he was from Arkansas) was a vital and integral part of their sound as vocalist and drummer and (as pretty much every member of the band was) multi-instrumentalist. One of the great things about The Band is that they had three "lead" vocalists (if you disregard the couple of songs Robbie Robertson sang on) in Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, all three of whom are now dead, as it happens. I think Helm was my favourite singer of the three, though, featuring on classic songs like Rag Mama Rag, Up On Cripple Creek and The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

Both of those linked clips are from Martin Scorsese's classic 1978 documentary - if you will, rockumentary - The Last Waltz, which you should snap up ludicrously cheaply on DVD right now. Album-wise you will certainly want the first two albums Music From Big Pink and The Band, and I retain a bit of a soft spot for their underrated third album Stage Fright as well. The 1972 live album Rock Of Ages and the ramshackle collection of Bob Dylan collaborations The Basement Tapes are well worth a listen too.

Here's a couple of other Band clips: a bracingly brisk run-through of The Weight (with Helm singing the first couple of verses) from the 1970 Festival Express tour, and a studio run-through of King Harvest (Has Surely Come), also from 1970.

Drummer/vocalist is a job few people have managed to do successfully, as Levon Helm did. There are a few obvious examples like Phil Collins and Don Henley, and there are drummers who sang the occasional lead vocal like Roger Taylor, Ringo Starr and Micky Dolenz. Karen Carpenter started out as a drummer, too, but eventually moved to the front of the stage (as did Collins and Henley). The only other example that springs to mind is Andy Sturmer of the mighty Jellyfish, who used to play a mini-kit while standing up at the front of the stage.

Levon Helm also gave his name to one of Elton John's more interesting songs, and also Elton and partner David Furnish's son.

the last book I read

Invisible by Paul Auster.

It's 1967, and aspiring poet Adam Walker is in the middle of his studies at Columbia University, partly to further his poetical ambitions and hone his creative and literary skills, but also to avoid the draft. At an academic drinks party he meets the enigmatic European Rudolf Born and his girlfriend Margot. Their lives bcome intertwined: Born offers to give Adam creative control of a new literary magazine he is proposing setting up and funding, and Adam and Margot start a clandestine affair.

Not clandestine enough, as it turns out, as Born rumbles them and confronts Adam with his knowledge. He seems pretty relaxed about the whole thing, though, so it's something of a surprise when Adam and Born are confronted by a mugger on the corner of Riverside Drive and West 112th Street and Born whips out a switchblade and stabs their assailant in the stomach, fatally it later transpires.

Needless to say the magazine deal is off after all this, and Adam, after receiving some threatening communications from Born, delays reporting the incident to the police until after Born has fled back to Europe, something that causes him years of guilt.

Forty years of guilt, as it turns out, as we then zoom forward to 2007 to discover that the first part of the novel is the contents of the first section of a manuscript that Walker, now dying of leukaemia, has sent his old college friend Jim for a literary evaluation. After an exchange of letters between the two, part two soon follows. Far from being a continuation of the business described in the first chapter (I'm struggling hard to avoid a series of The Born Identity puns here) this is a description of Adam's last summer in the USA after graduating and before leaving for Paris to take up a scholarship there. Most of the summer was spent sharing an apartment with his sister, Gwyn. Adam and Gwyn became very close as children after the death of their younger brother, and in their early teens shared a night of guilt-free sexual experimentation very similar to the hypothetical one described here and here. Well, the temptation of flat-sharing proves too much for the flimsy taboo of incest to withstand, and they're soon fucking like crazed weasels.

Adam and Jim arrange to meet, but Adam dies before this can happen, leaving Jim with the skeletal notes of the third section of the book. This describes Adam's time in Paris, where he by chance runs in to Margot and Born again, seperately this time, rekindling his relationship with Margot but also hatching a plan to foil Born's plans to marry wealthy widow Hélène Juin, by the fairly simple method of befriending Hélène and her daughter Cécile and then spilling the beans about the stabby New York incident.

We then discover that Jim has been in contact with Adam's sister Gwyn, and that she has read the first three sections of the book, and agreed to their publication as long as all the names and locations are changed. Furthermore we learn that what we've just read is the result of that process, so in other words Adam Walker wasn't really called Adam Walker, he didn't really go to Columbia, etc. etc. We also learn that Gwyn categorically denies ever having indulged in any incesty shenanigans with her brother (hence her desire for anonymity).

Jim has also been in touch with Cécile Juin, and the last section of the book is another transcription of a manuscript, this time a portion of Cécile's diary describing her last encounter with Born, now an elderly and overweight recluse living on a remote Caribbean island. Having agreed, after an exchange of letters, to travel to the island to meet Born, Cécile is somewhat taken aback when Born first asks her to marry him, and subsequently (after she turns him down) to help him write a memoir of his life, a life with some murky secrets including clandestine work for the French government and just the possibility of having been a double agent for the Russians as well. Not thrilled by a lengthy stay on a remote island taking Born's dictation (ooer), Cécile refuses, and leaves. The end.

It's easy to see how this novel would be knuckle-chewingly infuriating to some - we never get much in the way of clear resolution of any of the plot points, and there are many: did Born really murder the mugger in New York? Did Adam and Gwyn really have a stolen summer of transgressive happy sexy joy joy time, or was the whole thing a fantasy of Adam's? And was Born really (as he suggests) responsible for the car crash that left Cécile's father in a vegetative coma? There are so many different layers of narrative from so many different people (Adam, Jim, Gwyn, Cécile) that it's impossible to know what's "real" from what's not. Presumably this is Auster's point, though: none of it is actually real, after all, it's just a novel. And there's absolutely no reason why we should care about, or feel slightly cheated by, the revelation that (for instance) "Adam Walker" wasn't the "Adam Walker" character's "real" name, because he was never real to begin with.

You have to be good to get away with all of this metafictional rug-pulling without it just being annoying, and it's remarkable how compulsively readable this is, even while you know you're just being fucked with at various points. At Swim-Two-Birds, Christy Malry's Own Double-Entry, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Kleinzeit, Invisible Cities and Slow Man pulled off similar tricks. Inevitably these sort of shenangians tend to polarise the critics: some loved it, some didn't, and some wrote lengthy hatchet jobs dismissing Auster's entire body of work. My opinion, for what it's worth, is that I enjoyed it, more so than the only other Auster book I've read, The New York Trilogy, which was much more explicitly arch and experimental.

I should also add that I picked up my almost-new paperback copy of Invisible a couple of weeks ago for the princely sum of ten pence in a charity bookshop in Chepstow. I conclude two things from this - firstly that whoever owned it first was less impressed than me by the metafictional playfulness, and secondly that I frickin' love charity bookshops. At a cover price of £8.99 that's a whopping 98.9% discount, and a spare £8.89 for me to spend on crack and whores.

Lastly, mention of Invisible Cities prompts me to the observation that this is the first book in this now quite lengthy series whose title is a part of the title of another book in the series. The only other pair that might qualify would be G. and Good As Gold, and you'd have to disregard the full stop which is an integral part of G.'s title, so I don't think it really works.

monty, you terrible c*nt

Just to prove the point about Colin Montgomerie's commentary habits, here's a few links:

This Guardian article prior to the 2011 US Open bigging up Luke Donald and writing off Rory McIlroy's chances (oops):

We all know at the US Open we talk about the length of the course, we talk about the rough, we talk about everything, but it's the guy who holes out who's going to win, there's no question about that.

Lee Westwood is good enough – there's no question.

This interview during the 2010 Arnold Palmer Invitational:

We now have an Asian winner of a major, and as you say, the CA Championship there recently at Doral, I don't believe there was -- or was there one American in the top 10, you know, and there was only one American in the top eight of the Accenture Match Play. So there is a changing of the guard, there's no question.

This 2012 Masters post-mortem:

We have had Lee now having seven top 3s in majors and it does get to you, there is no question.

This Tiger-centric 2011 Masters post-mortem:

It was amazing he didn't continue on the back nine. His putting is just not as good as it was. When he gets that putting back to Tiger Woods-like, he will win again. There is no question.

- and finally this interview after his first-round 69 in the 2011 BMW PGA Championship (he eventually finished in a tie for 7th):

I can see well beyond that, seven birdies today was encouraging, there's no question.

I have nothing to prove here and it's a nice position to be in in a way that I can go out and enjoy my golf now, and if I can get the putter going, I still can compete, there's no question.

So he says it a lot. There's no question.

hubba bubba

A couple of thoughts in the aftermath of the exciting climax to the Masters last weekend and Bubba Watson's eventual play-off victory.

• Watson himself is an interesting character - no doubt a more complex character than the amiable doofus he comes across as both on and off the course, and certainly a more serious golfer than the crazy swing and the pink driver would suggest.
• Almost inevitably for a high-profile American sportsperson he's also a born-again Christian; to his credit though in the coverage I saw of the green jacket presentation ceremony he managed to avoid banging on about the fact that, as it does every few years, Masters Sunday fell on Easter Sunday. Some of the press coverage suggests I may have just dropped off for that bit, though. Other notable God-botherers and Easter Masters champions who stunk up the post-tournament ceremonies and interviews with their maunderings about imaginary Jewish zombies include Zach Johnson in 2007 and Bernhard Langer in 1993.
• I think I'm right in saying that Watson is the first ever Masters champion to share a surname with a previous Masters champion (in this case the great Tom Watson, champion in 1977 and 1981). The Masters was the last of the major tournaments not to have namesake champions at some point in its history; this is partly because the Masters only started in 1934 and just doesn't have as much history as the others.
• Just to prove the point, the Open Championship's long history features various generations of Willie Parks and Tom Morrises, as well as more recent examples like Fred Daly and John Daly.
• The US Open list features Willie Smith and Alex Smith way back in the day, and more recently Bobby Jones and Steve Jones, Lou Graham and David Graham and Byron Nelson and Larry Nelson.
• The (unrelated) Nelsons feature in the USPGA list as well.
• Flitting between the Sky Sports coverage and the BBC coverage provides some interesting insights into the various conversational tics of the commentators and summarisers. Sky have Colin Montgomerie whose stock gambit is to append the phrase "there's no question" to the end of any statement of opinion he makes, as if to pre-empt any, well, questioning. So, was your breakfast OK, Colin? Well, the sausages were absolutely first-rate; there's no question. But the bacon was too salty. Butch Harmon, on the other hand, seems to be waging a single-handed war to get us to say "3-par" and "5-par" instead of "par-3" and "par-5" when referring to specific holes. I've no idea why, and I think if it was really going to take off and catch on it would have happened by now. The BBC, on the other hand, have cuddly old Peter Alliss, who is probably a bit past his sell-by date these days, but still capable of occasional matchless moments of wild improvisational genius.

Finally I offer you a golf-related lookeylikey of the day - European tour journeyman turned US PGA tour journeyman and maker-of-a-very-decent-living-thank-you-very-much-but-probably-not-quite-good-enough-ever-to-win-anything Brian Davis, and rubber-faced comedian and bloke-who-inexplicably-fills-huge arenas-but-who-I-don't-really-get-though-I-thought-he-was-pretty-good-in-There's-Something-About-Mary Lee Evans. I think in both cases it's the sense of the bottom half of the face being slightly too big compared with the upper half, and containing slightly too many teeth.


And they've both got caps on! What are the chances?

the last book I read

The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey.

So here's another motley collection of larrikins and galahs, then - the Catchprices. On the surface the shambolic proprietors of a car dealership in the fictional Sydney suburb of Franklin, beneath the surface there's something a bit weirder going on. Elderly matriarch Frieda nominally owns the business, but she's getting a bit scatty these days so most of the day-to-day running is done by her son Mort and her daughter Cathy, with assistance from Cathy's husband Howie and Mort's son Benny.

Everyone has their own dreams of escape - Cathy is an aspiring country singer, Benny listens obsessively to Paul McKenna-esque self-actualisation tapes and imagines himself being transformed into an angel (possibly of the avenging variety). A couple of the Catchprice clan have managed to get away, in varying ways - Benny's elder brother Johnny has joined a Hare Krishna group and transformed himself into Vishnabarnu, while Mort and Cathy's brother Jack has become a wealthy property developer.

Into all this comes Maria Takis, eight months pregnant and tasked with conducting an audit of the business for the Tax Office. There seems to be a general view among the Catchprice family that this spells doom, based on their inside knowledge of all the various dodges, fiddling and general incompetence that's gone on over the years. So they try various tacks to convince Maria to abandon things, starting with some slightly creepy stalking courtesy of Benny, and followed up by Jack's slightly more orthodox powers of persuasion.

It turns out that Maria's finely tuned moral compass means that she's not that interested in hunting down small-scale crookedness like what's been going on at Catchprice Motors, and more interested in bringing down the tax dodgers among the privileged elite - the very same circles that Jack Catchprice moves in, as it happens. As if that wasn't complication enough, Jack and Maria start to conduct a romance.

The reader shouldn't get the idea that the Catchprices are just a bunch of lovable oafs, though, as there's a darker side that soon becomes visible - the legacy of father/son sexual abuse passed down from Frieda's late husband Cacka to Mort to Benny, Benny's dark obsessions nurtured in his dank basement room, and Frieda's habit of carrying round lumps of sweating gelignite in her handbag. When Frieda decides to deploy the contents of her handbag to rid herself of the burden of Catchprice Motors once and for all (as well as destroying any auditable evidence), and Benny simultaneously decides to move his stalking of Maria Takis to the next level by "inviting" her to pay a visit to his basement room, the stage is set for a quite lidderally "explosive" finale.

I should start by saying that this is the second Peter Carey book I've read, the first being the 1988 Booker Prize winner Oscar and Lucinda. I found that one to be a long and only intermittently rewarding slog, to be honest, so it's perhaps not surprising that I think this one is a lot better, not least because it's barely half as long. That's not to say I was totally blown away by it, though - the cast of grotesques and caricatures are a bit difficult fully to believe in or care about, with the exception of Maria and Jack, whose sweet romantic interludes are a bit incongruous in comparison. And the ending where Benny and Maria and Maria's now-imminent baby have a life-or-death struggle in Benny's porn dungeon while Catchprice Motors collapses into rubble around their ears is all a bit of an eleventh-hour swerve into Silence of The Lambs territory.

So, you know, it's fine, but if it's Australian fiction you're after I'd say you might be better off with Tim Winton, Patrick White or Thomas Keneally.

in which kate middleton's crack is irreparably widened

I humbly submit here for your critical appraisal my latest work of challenging and confrontational performance art - a searing and unforgiving indictment of the inequalities inherent in the concept of a hereditary monarchy, and a thoughtful reflection on the atrocities carried out in its name.



My earlier, less successful attempt at the same thing is recorded for posterity here.

This sort of visceral, zeitgeist-y art terrorism doesn't just make itself, you know. I had to consider the choice of tools carefully - I pondered for a while the symbolism of taking an axe to William's shapely neck, but decided that might be a bit dangerous and would probably just propel the mug across the room to smash against a distant wall somewhere, out of camera shot.


So I went for the great big lump hammer in the end; a wise choice I think.


In the interests of full disclosure and candour I should point out that this is not just wanton destruction - the mug in question had sustained a crack in an accidental dishwasher-related incident the previous week and would have had to be thrown away anyway. In any case, while I am no friend of the monarchy, the mug was given to us as a wedding present (a slightly ironic one, admittedly) and was a perfectly good mug, at least until it got cracked. I realise this takes the edge off the performance art piece slightly, but hopefully you'll have proceeded through this blog post in a linear fashion and watched the video before reading this bit.

The mug was one of a set of two, as it happens, and while the other remains un-cracked and therefore currently in use for hot beverage storage and transportation, it's not impossible that it too could sustain irreparable damage at some point, at which time I may unleash another video upon an unsuspecting world. Maybe I'll have a shit in it or something.

the last book I read

Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd.

Adam Kindred's been a bit of a silly boy - set up nicely over in the US with a lucrative and stimulating job as a climatologist and a happy marriage, he succumbs to the temptation of a furtive quickie with one of his students, who inconveniently turns out to be a bunny-boiler and bombards him and his wife with texts and phone calls, all of which end up costing Adam his job and his marriage. So he finds himself back in the UK setting up job interviews, one of which brings him to London.

He's sitting in a café mulling over the interview he's just had at Imperial College when he meets Philip Wang, who's sitting at the table next to him. They strike up a desultory conversation over a cup of coffee, Wang leaves, and Adam thinks no more of it, until he realises that Wang has dropped a folder on the floor as he left. He phones Wang and agrees to come and meet him at his flat (which happens to be just round the corner) to return it.

Adam gets buzzed up to Wang's flat and is slightly surprised to find Wang in the bedroom with a bread knife protruding from his torso and blood pissing out all over the floor. Having not helped the situation by yanking the knife out and getting his fingerprints all over it, he then realises the killer may still be in the flat and scarpers down the fire escape. Now at this point the obvious thing to do, and the thing anyone would do in real life, would be to go straight to the police and report the murder. But that would make for an unsatisfyingly short novel, so instead Adam pops into the pub round the corner for a pint to calm down a bit, and then decides to head back to his hotel to freshen up first. Back at the hotel he has two close encounters, firstly with the killer who has pursued him and whom he manages to deter with a bit of ninja-style combat with his briefcase, and secondly with the police who screech up just as he's making a sharp exit.

So you're a wanted man, on the run in central London. Clearly your best course of action here is to hide in a hedge for a bit and collect your thoughts. So Adam locates a convenient bit of ground by Chelsea Bridge (the little isosceles triangle between the road and the river here, in fact) and decides to lie low for a bit until he works out what to do next.

Now a man hiding in a hedge isn't really going to drive the narrative along, so we need more plot strands. Here's a couple, then - Wang's death has caused a bit of (understandable) consternation at the company he worked for, Calenture-Deutz, as they were in the throes of FDA approval for a new anti-asthma drug which could make them gazillions of pounds, and for which Wang was the head of the research team. Meanwhile Jonjo Case, former SAS paratrooper and current hush-hush no-questions-asked killer for hire, is looking to try and clear up the loose ends from his latest job, rubbing out this science guy who was getting too near some inconvenient truths. This Adam Kindred guy taking the rap for the murder is handy and all, but it'd be even better if he was to meet an unfortunate accident as well, just to rule out any nasty surprises later. Meanwhile foxy London copper Rita Nashe, freshly transferred to the river police unit, is investigating a report of some scruffy-looking guy dismembering a seagull on a patch of waste ground by Chelsea Bridge....

Adam decides that he can't spend the rest of his life living in a hedge, even though he's been able to keep himself fed by a bit of begging and bin-scavenging (and seagull-murdering). After meeting up with single mother and prostitute Mhouse and going along to her deranged revivalist church in Rotherhithe (mainly for the free grub) he enters into a financial arrangement with her whereby he rents her spare room. Well, it's better than a hedge. Inevitably he ends up "entering into" her in a more physical sense as well, once appropriate payment has changed hands. Meanwhile he's also doing a bit of amateur sleuthing on the side based on the contents of the dossier from Wang that he's still got. It's all a bit difficult when you don't officially exist, though.

Help is at hand, however - fellow churchgoer Vladimir has a source who can get hold of fake passports, and he's used one of them to get himself a bank account, a credit card and a job. Having suggested that Adam move in with him, he then ups and dies of a drug overdose. This is great in one sense, as Adam can (after a judicious haircut) pretend to be him and take over his job, which just happens to be as a porter in a hospital, but awkward in another sense as there's this bit fat Russian in the spare room who needs disposing of, and he's starting to smell a bit. But, you know, omelettes, eggs, and all that sort of thing.

Just to throw a spanner in the works, though, old Jonjo Case is still around, and he's gradually following the trail that leads to Adam. First port of call is to pay a visit to the Rotherhithe sink estate and see if Mhouse knows where Adam is, and then casually kill her after she's served her purpose. When Adam reads about her death in the paper he feels obliged to stick his head above the parapet (in his new hospital porter persona) and confirm her identity, and in so doing meets the officer in charge of the case, none other than foxy Rita Nashe, whereupon sparks fly and both of them come over all unnecessary in the trouser department.

Eventually Adam's amateur sleuthing reveals the dastardly plot around the asthma drug trials and the reason Wang had to be unceremoniously rubbed out (he Knew Too Much, basically), and with some help from Rita's dad engineers a bit of corporate espionage which ensures that bad old unscrupulous Big Pharma get what's coming to them, and the police are tipped off as to the identity of those really responsible for Wang's death. And so Adam (now thoroughly settled into his hospital porter identity) and Rita link arms and stroll off into the sunset together.

There are a few loose ends, though - while Jonjo Case is off Adam's back in the short term, having been obliged to flee across the Channel to the Netherlands after being revealed as Wang's murderer, he departs metaphorically shaking his fist back towards London and giving it all the I'll Get You, Penelope Pitstop, so will he return to wreak his revenge? Also, sweet though Rita and Adam's relationship is, she still knows him as Primo Belem the hospital porter (the name on Vladimir's black-market passport), a subterfuge which (as Adam himself concedes) can't possibly survive the two of them actually living together. And as unquestioning as she's been up to now about a lowly hospital porter conducting international espionage, you can't help thinking she'll be a little bit upset when he tells her the truth.

These are strands (there were a few in Restless as well) that would have been tied up more securely in a bog-standard thriller, so is Boyd - perhaps conscious that he's been slumming it a bit genre-wise - doing this on purpose to distinguish Ordinary Thunderstorms from a bog-standard thriller and pitch it more into the realm of literary fiction where loose ends are often left at the end? There is some slightly arch business going on with the name (Ingram Fryzer) of the drug company boss as well - as well as being the name of Christopher Marlowe's murderer it's presumably also a punning echo of another real-life drug company.

Criticising what is essentially a thriller for being a bit implausible is a bit churlish, but there are a few bits which strain the reader's disbelief-suspending powers - Adam's not going straight to the police on discovering Wang for one thing, not to mention his rashly yanking the knife out of Wang's side (surely everyone knows not to do this?), thereby both getting his fingerprints all over it and hastening Wang's demise. The convenient circumstances of Vladimir's death and Adam's inheriting of his new job - which just happens to be in the very hospital where some of the drug trials were carried out - are a bit, well, convenient as well, as are the points in the story (the initial encounter with Jonjo Case and the subsequent briefcase-fu, disposing of Vladimir's body) where Adam turns into a sort of proto-Jason Bourne at the drop of a hat. Most bizarre of all is the episode towards the end where Adam casually murders Vincent Turpin, a vagrant who was trying to blackmail him - a murder we're presumably meant to applaud since it's been revealed that Turpin is a bit of a paedo and therefore fair game. I suppose, to be fair, it would be hard to name a successful and satisfying thriller that was not hugely implausible when you sat back and thought about it afterwards, though.

It would be remiss of me not also to mention the other works whose plots Ordinary Thunderstorms echoes, most notably The Fugitive - man arrives at scene of murder just as actual murderer makes good his escape, is assumed to have committed the murder himself, escapes, reveals unsuspected resourcefulness, unearths dastardly medically-themed plot, infiltrates medical institutions to gather evidence, reveals evidence, brings down evildoers, the end. More than one of Robin Cook's medical thrillers (Fever is probably the best one) contain similar medical conspiracies that need to be exposed as well. The main character finding a body at the start of the novel and subsequently having his whole life turned upside-down also echoes the plot of Boyd's own earlier novel Armadillo (not one of his best), and I suppose as the canonical innocent-man-on-the-run-trying-to-clear-his-name story John Buchan's The 39 Steps should get a mention here as well.

Another odd coincidence is that the name of the hospital where Adam gets his portering job is St. Botolph's, the same name as the town in The Wapshot Chronicle. The real St. Botolph is the patron saint of travellers and farming, and also the man who gave his name to Boston, Lincolnshire - and therefore also to Boston, Massachusetts - "Boston" being a contraction of "Botolphston" or something similar.

I wouldn't want you to think the slightly nit-picky tone above means I didn't enjoy Ordinary Thunderstorms, because it's thoroughly readable and very exciting, with characters (unlike a lot of thrillers) you actually care about. It's just that after the excellence of things like Brazzaville Beach and The Blue Afternoon this seems a bit.....ooh, I dunno - unambitious? Start with those, anyway.

the last book I read

The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever.

So we're in New England, in the fictional Massachusetts town of St. Botolphs, and we're about to meet the Wapshots. There's Sarah, who we first meet being carried away on an Independence Day parade float by a runaway horse, her husband Leander, a retired sailor now running day trips for tourists on the SS Topaze, venerable and formidable cousin Honora, owner of the Topaze and of Sarah and Leander's house and not about to let them forget it, and finally Sarah and Leander's sons Moses and Coverly.

Much eccentricity follows, lovable and otherwise. When the Wapshots rescue Rosalie Young from the car crash in which her boyfriend has been killed and let her recuperate in their house, it's not long before her and Moses are getting up to a bit of sneaky doctors and nurses in the bedroom. Honora, who happens to have been hiding in the wardrobe at the time (it's a long story), decides that it's about time Moses (who, we gather, has been putting it about a bit among the local girls as well) went off and made his way in the world. So he heads off to Washington while Coverly runs away to head after him and ends up in New York, and subsequently ends up marrying nice-but-dim Betsey and joining the army.

Meanwhile, back in St. Botolphs, Leander contrives to sink the SS Topaze after a rudder failure in a storm and an argument with some submerged rocks. The salvaged boat is permamently moored near the house and Sarah opens it to the public as a floating trinket shop, with some success, much to Leander's chagrin.

And what of Moses? Well, he meets the enigmatic Melissa though her guardian, a distant cousin and another formidable matriarchal type, Justina. Melissa lives at Justina's family seat, Clear Haven, a rambling and semi-derelict old country mansion with various gnarled old retainers in attendance. After a brief courtship Moses and Melissa are married and take up residence at Clear Haven, where they are subjected to Justina's increasingly eccentric behaviour. Meanwhile Coverly and Betsey have had a falling-out and a brief separation during which Coverly embarks on a brief dalliance with homosexuality - a dalliance comprising fretting about it a bit and resisting the advances of a work colleague rather than any actual hot man-on-man action. Anyway, Betsey soon returns and the natural order of things is restored, some nice cathartic God-fearing heterosexual coupling banishing all that deviant stuff from Coverly's mind, exactly as happens in real life. Moses' problems are solved in a similarly convenient way by Clear Haven being burnt to the ground and its various occupants scattering to the four winds, Moses and Melissa included.

As is obligatory with any family saga of this kind (see here, here and here for examples) there's a big family gathering at the end, prompted in this case by Leander's funeral - his last excursion into the sea for a swim proving fatal. Melissa and Betsey have already produced sons, so the next generation of Wapshots is assured.

I think it's fair to say that this is an odd book in many ways. A good comparison might be to Old School - first novel by a guy previously well-known as a writer of short stories, and one which in many ways reads like a bunch of short stories glued together into novel form. Various elements - Rosalie's time at the Wapshot house, the business with Leander's first wife and her daughter, Moses' mission of mercy to the woman who's fallen off her horse - drift into the narrative and then vanish. The Wapshot Chronicle is weirder than Old School, though, and it's fascinating to see the stuff swimming around beneath the surface here - the women are eccentric and capricious, both the stereotypical matriarchs like Honora and Justina, but also Betsey and Melissa, and the men alternately mesmerised, bewildered and frustrated by them. And then there's the curious interlude featuring Coverly, after Betsey has temporarily abandoned him, and his dalliance with Pancras, his superior at work who tries to persuade Coverly to come on a "business trip" to England with him. Cheever precedes this short section of the novel thus:

And now we come to the unsavory or homosexual part of our tale and any disinterested reader is encouraged to skip.

This all makes mores sense once you know that Cheever himself struggled with his bisexuality for most of his adult life. Oddly, this subject came up on Start The Week on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago as part of a general discussion about how many authors were not generally very nice people in real life. The only comment I have to add to the discussion is how phenomenally camp Colm Tóibín is, a fact which in combination with his Irish accent makes him sound not unlike Graham Norton. Cheever's sexuality issues will be no surprise to fans of Seinfeld, incidentally, as they formed the basis of a whole episode in season four in 1992.

Anyway, The Wapshot Chronicle won the National Book Award for fiction in 1958, as did The Corrections in 2001. My brief list here goes: 1958, 1965, 1988, 2001.

on the tee, Brian Wtf? and Bob Meh

Each year brings a new influx of fresh-faced young hopefuls onto the PGA tour, fresh from illustrious feats either in college golf or on the Nationwide Tour. And, who knows, maybe one of them will turn out to be the new Boo Weekley or Duffy Waldorf - not in terms of playing achievements so much as by having an amusing name. Here are my new favourites, both of whom are currently competing in the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill:

• Jason Kokrak - as the video in that link reveals, it seems to be pronounced "Coe-crack" rather than "Cock-rack"; still pretty funny though.
• John Huh - a man whose name sounds as if whoever registered his birth got distracted by something halfway through. It turns out that he's of Korean ancestry, so my assumption was that it'd be pronounced "Hoo". And maybe it is, but (again, have a look at the video) the US commentators seem to have gone with the comedy pronunciation. It's a bit like Jonatton Yeah? from the excellent (and sadly under-appreciated) Charlie Brooker/Chris Morris comedy series Nathan Barley. And if you're thinking "that's the stupidest spelling of Jonathan I've ever seen", then I have further golf-related news for you.

deploy the 10" shaming wand

I'm glad that the shocking business with abortion legislation in Texas has popped up on Ben Goldacre's radar, because his entirely proper outrage about it illustrates the ridiculousness of his statements in the belief survey I linked to a while back. You cannot rationally simultaneously hold to the positions that:

• the Texas law is an abomination amounting to state-sponsored punishment of women by making them undergo pointless violation and extended anguish and trauma as revenge for wanting to exercise choice and autonomy over their own reproductive health, and moreover an abomination dreamt up principally by fundamentalist Christians
• I'm not really bothered about the question of whether God exists, it's all a bit boring really

Well, if the fundamentalist Christians are right and you really are going to BURN IN HELL FOR ALL ETERNITY for choosing to have an abortion, then it's actually rational and compassionate for them to be enacting legislation that makes getting an abortion more difficult, isn't it? So the question is actually pretty important, isn't it?

I don't want this to be about Dr. Ben, though, as in general he is a source of good sense and rationality. That Texas sonogram bill is one of the most sulphurously evil things I've ever seen, though. And again, it's perhaps hard to understand just how evil while sitting here in the UK with our state-funded medical care and our multiple hospitals within easy reach of most people - if your only nearby hospital is a Catholic-run one that won't perform terminations at all, even to save the life of the mother (for fear of getting excommunicated), even if the fetus is already dead, and you then have to travel (assuming that you have the resources to do so, and can get time off work) potentially tens or hundreds of miles to a hospital that will perform the procedure, the last thing you need is to be told that some men somewhere have decided that you, as a weak and feeble-minded woman, clearly won't have realised how human reproduction works or the consequences of what you're about to do, and so you need to be painfully probed, then have an unwanted ultrasound scan shoved in your face and (just in case you close your eyes or something) described to you in detail, and then be forced to wait another 24 hours before having the procedure carried out.

Again, just to recalibrate our ethics-ometer here, the purpose of all this is to:

• shame and humiliate women for exercising choice over their own sex lives, and not just being passive semen receptacles;
• deter people who would otherwise seek abortions from doing so, with the consequence that they either have the child (which the enactors of the bill will instantly stop caring about as soon as it's outside the womb) as God intended or undergo some kind of botched amateur procedure which will take her pansy pinko pro-choice heathen ass out of the gene pool anyway. It's a win-win situation;
• remind people that women may own the wombs, but they and those wombs are owned by men, and suggestions otherwise make baby Jesus cry;
• throw a smokescreen over all this by claiming it's about "providing information" while simultaneously enacting further legislation that will indemnify doctors from getting sued should they withhold information from women that might otherwise have inclined them to get an abortion.
  

Here's a montage of a week's worth of Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury cartoon strips on exactly this subject. To see the one here in readable form (as Blogger only wants to display it really small for some reason) right-click and select "Open in New Tab". To see them in their original form on the website, start here.


To be honest I find Doonesbury a bit incomprehensible a lot of the time as you need to live with it for a while to get to know who the characters are, but this is exactly what political cartooning should be: courageous, savage and satirical. Predictably, despite Doonesbury's status as an American institution (and one whose liberal instincts are hardly a secret) a disappointingly large proportion of newspaper editors who would normally carry the strip failed to display a similar degree of courage (or indeed respect for their readers) and evidently felt it might be better to have a week off and just put up some old Garfield cartoons instead or something.

they mervynned me

Two further quickies: firstly let's give a posthumous Welshman of the Day award to Mervyn Davies, the former Wales and British Lions number 8 and Grand Slam-winning captain in 1976, who has died aged 65. I don't think I ever saw him play "live", as my earliest rugby-watching recollections that I can attach a specific date to are from Wales' next (and last until 2005) Grand Slam year, 1978, by which time Davies had been forced into early retirement by a brain haemorrhage.

Secondly, I caught most of Frost On Interviews on BBC4 the other day, and I was struck firstly by how interesting it all was, despite being at times a bit of a mutually congratulatory circle jerk between Frosty, Parky, the Melvster and others, but secondly by how odd it was to hear Sir David Frost refer to Anthony Eden by pronouncing the "th" in "Anthony" as a "th" and not as a "t", i.e. as in "anthology" rather than "antidote". This sounds odd when someone with a still nominally English accent (though Frost's tortured vowelisations are pretty uncategorisable these days) does it, as it's a specifically American thing. I have no idea why this pronunciation became the standard one in the US while the "t" one is the standard one in the UK. I suppose the many decades Frost has spent in the USA have had an influence (on him, that is, rather than pronunciation habits in general). The Americans still drop the "h" when abbreviating the name, though: the only person Wikipedia has a page for who goes by the first name "Thony" is this obscure French footballer.

they melvynned me

Here's something at once grindingly disappointing and compellingly bizarre: Melvyn Bragg having a pop at "militant atheism" (translation: atheists who talk about it anywhere other than really quietly, in the dark, in a cupboard) and, inevitably, Richard Dawkins in particular. It's very hard to pull out a point from his disjointed ramblings but it seems to be the usual one regarding "respect", i.e. that there are certain fact claims about the universe that are deemed arbitrarily to be off-limits to investigation or criticism or, heaven forbid, ridicule.

While it is fascinating to see the effects of the cultural brainwashing that makes people enthuse about old religious texts, traditions and beliefs without ever thinking to engage with the basic question "yes, but is any of it true?", one would have hoped that Melvyn might have been one of those who had shaken themselves free of it. I do have just a suspicion that, like AC Grayling, Melv is occasionally guilty of being distracted by the leonine magnificence of his own hair. Also: watch it, Melv, you're starting to sound a bit shrill and strident there.

This particular bout of bile was filmed as part of Sky TV's The Book Show, and Melv does bang on incomprehensibly about the King James Bible a couple of minutes in, so I wonder whether this was prompted by his having written a book about the cultural and literary influence of the KJV a few months back.

This is all a great pity, because I am a devoted fan of Bragg's Radio 4 show In Our Time which is a fascinating programme about proper heavyweight intellectual matters which I often hear the first 15 minutes or so of on a Thursday morning and then have to go and catch up with later on iPlayer.

we exist; fear us

A bit more on atheist shrillness, or at least accusations thereof, if you've got a couple of minutes. Someone had the bright idea, after all the shocked pearl-clutching and swooning over atheist billboards in the past, of speculating about what sort of wording would be anodyne enough not to cause conniptions among the devout. Well, inspired by this challenge, someone has undertaken a real-life test of it by attempting to get the banner below stuck on the side of a bus in Pennsylvania. Brace yourselves:


About as inoffensive as it's possible to get, I'm sure you'll agree, since all it's doing is announcing, as if it were some sort of revelation, that atheists exist, and can be found on that wretched hive of scum and villainy, the internet. Amusingly, though, or appallingly, depending on your mood, the transport authority rejected it on the grounds of its being "controversial".

So when the cretins at Spiked have another of their bizarre periodic eruptions of bile towards atheism and ask questions like this:

Are atheists really a beleaguered minority in the US? Is it really a great taboo today to profess that you do not believe in God?

- then the simple answers are respectively: yes they are, and yes, clearly it is. Not in the coffee shop in Hampstead that you filed your piece from, perhaps, but certainly in Pennsylvania.

Contrast that salutary demonstration of what gets classed as "shrillness" and "stridency" - i.e. anything that's not staying indoors and pretending they don't exist - when perpetrated by atheists with the sort of poisonous bigotry that gets a free pass when it's perpetrated by members of the major religions. Not just a free pass, moreover, but a forum in a supposedly respectable newspaper for you to trot out the view that same-sex marriage is as bad as slavery.

And it's no use Richard Coles getting all groovy vicar on us and saying hey, that's not the kind of religion I do, guys, and if Jesus were around today he would in a very real sense be hanging out with the gays and probably even going to their weddings - it is the wishy-washy "inclusive" C of E bullshit trotted out by the likes of Richard Coles that excuses and enables the vicious intolerance of people like Cardinal O'Brien who purport to believe in the same magic book and magic friend. And in any case, the Cardinal's right and Coles is wrong: the Bible does prohibit being gay. So if you are a gay Christian, then you have some thinking to do: essentially, one of them will have to go. You could live a life of miserable repression and conflict while still being able to hang out at the jam stall with the vicar at the church fête, but on balance I'd suggest ditching the belief in the exact factual accuracy of a book that starts with a story about an enchanted garden, an angry giant and a talking snake, for fuck's sake.

I must just link, as a parting shot, to this article in the New Statesman by Bryan Appleyard, as I think it must be the stupidest thing I've ever read on the subject of religion and atheism, and bear in mind at this point that I've read a few Spiked articles and some stuff over at the Guardian's Comment Is Free section. Almost every single paragraph contains either a reference to atheists being "militant", "fundamentalist" or a "cult", or some gratuitous Dawkins-bashing (by Alain de Botton, among others), or a massive flaming straw man completely misrepresenting what atheists believe - odd, really, seeing as how it's about as simple a philosophical position as it's possible to take. Here's a good bit:

The third leg of neo-atheism is Darwinism, the AK-47 of neo-atheist shock troops. Alone among scientists, and perhaps because of the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins, Darwin has been embraced as the final conclusive proof not only that God does not exist but also that religion as a whole is a uniquely dangerous threat to scientific rationality.

Whoa, hang on: "Darwinism", which I take to mean acceptance of the entirely uncontroversial Theory of Evolution, is in some way to do with God and religion, and not about finches and earthworms and the like at all. How does that work then?

Actually I must reproduce the de Botton bit about Dawkins, just because it's so priceless. Check this out:

He has taken a very strange position. He's unusual, in that he came from an elite British Anglican family with all its privileges and then he had this extraordinary career, and now he stands at the head of what can really be called a cult . . . I think what happened was that he has been frightened by the militancy of religious people he has met on his travels and it has driven him to the other side.

It smacks of a sort of psychological collapse in him, a collapse in those resources of maturity that would keep someone on an even keel. There is what psychoanalysts would call a deep rigidity in him.

Blimey. Well, at least no-one accused atheists of being Nazis. That sort of thing is best left to the Pope.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

As with the Michael Gove one I'll offer you two today and you can take your pick: who does gargantuan Welsh centre (and try-scorer against Italy today) Jamie Roberts most resemble?

Is it actor, ex-fiancé of Julia Roberts and schoolboy shower-based bumrape enthusiast Jason Patric?


Or is it venerable Dandy strongman and cow-pie enthusiast Desperate Dan?


You decide.

live and let Viv

There's been much fond reminiscence in the media this week on the occasion of the great Sir Vivian Richards' 60th birthday, so it seems only fair to throw my own misty-eyed nostalgic maunderings into the pot as well.

I'm slightly too young to remember the legendary West Indies' tour of England in 1976, as I was only six at the time and in any case we were living in South Korea where you could get things like Sesame Street via the American forces' network, but not the Test match coverage, sadly. Anyway, this was the series where Tony Greig made his spectacularly ill-judged remarks about making the West Indies "grovel" prior to the series and was rewarded by Richards carting England around mercilessly for 232 at Trent Bridge, 135 at Old Trafford and 291 at the Oval, and West Indies winning the series 3-0.

So my first memory of seeing Richards bat "live" was for Somerset in the 1981 Benson & Hedges Cup final, where he made an unbeaten 132, the last 50 or so in partnership with his old mate Ian Botham, as Somerset cantered to victory. This was the golden age of foreign imports playing in the English county game, with Richards and Joel Garner for Somerset, Gordon Greenidge and Malcolm Marshall for Hampshire, Alvin Kallicharran for Warwickshire, Glenn Turner and Imran Khan for Worcestershire, Zaheer Abbas and Mike Procter for Gloucestershire and Clive Rice and Richard Hadlee for Nottinghamshire, plus no doubt many more that I've forgotten about.

The first time I saw him bat in a Test match was in 1984 at Edgbaston, where he carried on from his record-breaking feats in the preceding one-day series by making 117, mostly in partnership with Larry Gomes. I had to resort to listening on the radio to his fastest-ever Test century (a record which still stands, despite Adam Gilchrist's best efforts), also against England at Antigua in 1986. His form declined a bit in the late 1980s, but it's typical of the man that when he had to make some runs, in his last ever Test series, also in England in 1991, he made 376 at an average of 53 (and 60 in his last-ever innings at the Oval) to keep his overall Test average above 50.

Statistics schmatistics, though, and you can keep your Pontings and Laras and Tendulkars, with their superior Test aggregates and averages - great though they all are, Viv is still the most exciting batsman I've ever seen play. There may have been lower-order sloggers who hit the ball harder and further (though not many), but none of them made Test double-centuries or averaged 50. And none of them were as ineffably and effortlessly cool, either.