the last book I read

Hunger by Knut Hamsun.

So our un-named narrator is an aspiring writer in Oslo (during the 50-year period around the turn of the 20th century when it was called Kristiania). The old writing game is a hard one, though, and he's not making a lot of money out of it. Consequently affording the basics in life is tough - things like accommodation and food. Occasionally a kindly editor of some local newspaper or magazine will take pity on him and slip him ten kroner or so for an article, but outside those happy interludes it's all gnawing hunger and misery.

Now clearly our narrator could do what aspiring film actors have been doing in Hollywood for the last 50+ years and get a job doing something else - waiting tables, pole dancing, whatever - to supplement his meagre income. That would be to compromise his lofty ideals, though, so instead he wanders the streets lost in his increasingly strange thoughts and occasionally having outbursts of loud talking to himself and alarming passers-by. Meanwhile his physical and mental disintegration continues. Eventually he  makes a bid for freedom by enlisting, on a whim, on a merchant ship which will take him far away from Oslo and his troubles.

Our hero here suffers from some of the same problems as the protagonists of The Catcher In The Rye and Demian, the main one being that you want to reach in and give him a good slapping for his adolescent self-absorption and intellectual snobbery. Perhaps we fortysomethings forget, though, how much of an upheaval there is in realising that - unless you're particularly fortunate - you'll be required to give up a huge percentage of your time during your adult life in exchange for enough money to live on, and furthermore that you won't be permitted - unless you're exceptionally fortunate - just to spend that time doing what you most enjoy doing, but will instead have to do what other people tell you to do.

The other parallel that everyone seems to draw is between the narrator here and Raskolnikov from Dostoyevsky's Crime And Punishment, and I can see that, although in fairness it must be said that our narrator here at no point murders anyone with an axe.

The most surprising thing about Hunger is how contemporary it feels given that it was written in 1890. I mean, there aren't any robots or digital watches or mobile telephones, but the focus on the internal mental anguish of the main character feels very modern. I understand that "late 19th century Norwegian fiction" might not be the most appetising fictional genre for everyone, myself included, but this is actually pretty readable, and it's only short (160 pages or so). Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 (other books by Nobel laureates on this list can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). His reputation took a bit of a knock after his flirtation with Nazism during the 1940s (when, some say, his physical and mental health had already started to fail), but well, you know, you live to 92 and the law of averages says you're going to spend at least some of that time being a bit of a Nazi. I know I have.

Hunger has also been filmed twice, in 1966 and then again in 2001. The later film seems to have relocated the plot to Hollywood and made the protagonist a frustrated screenwriter instead of a frustrated essayist and novelist. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that neither film is a barrel of laughs, though.

when the music's over turn out the light

A couple of musical RIPs to catch up on. Firstly, Richie Havens, who died on April 22nd. I really only encountered Richie Havens and his music twice, firstly when I saw the film of the Woodstock concert - titled, imaginatively, Woodstock - and secondly when I saw him in the acoustic tent at Glastonbury in 2002, the last time I went to the festival. On both occasions the centrepieces of his set were the two heavily-strummed semi-improvised epics Handsome Johnny and Freedom, the latter being a variation of the old blues standard Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child that Havens basically made up off the cuff while he was asked to fill a gap in the Woodstock schedule while various of the higher-profile acts were stuck in traffic.

Two remarkable things about the Woodstock footage: firstly that Havens appears to have the world's biggest thumbs - most people can't use the thumb on their non-strumming hand to fret barre chords, but Havens seems to manage it. The other thing is that having been born in 1941, Havens would have been only 28 years old at the time of Woodstock; I think if you didn't know that you'd have put him at at least 40 from watching the footage. This is mostly because he's missing most of his teeth, something you'll be able to see quite easily from the footage, what with its close-up up-the-nose camera angles.

Secondly, Ray Manzarek, who died yesterday. Manzarek was the keyboard player with The Doors, and as such probably responsible for most of the distinctive aspects of their sound. As I said here, the fact that he was the keyboardist and the bass player (via a Fender Rhodes) and that the bass parts weren't played on a guitar gave them their unique sound. It was only when they employed the services of a proper bass guitarist for their last proper album LA Woman that they were able to produce something as rocky and sinuous as its title track. Which is not to write off their earlier stuff, particularly when it features in one of the greatest film openings in cinema history.

it's not rocket science

I caught the second half of The Challenger on BBC2 last night. Interesting stuff, for all that the source material is pretty familiar to most. The Challenger disaster was one of the seminal events of my early teenage years, one of those Kennedy moments where I can remember, even 27 years later, exactly where I was when I heard about it - I was in a minibus on the way back from competing for my school quiz team in a local schools quiz organized by the RNIB. It was a particularly chastening moment since I also recall being allowed to skip some lessons five years earlier to witness the launch of the first shuttle Columbia, among great awe and optimism, and it was a sobering demonstration that the course of human endeavour is not a steady upward progression, things do go wrong, and actual people do die in what were presumably fairly horrible circumstances when they do.

The drama mainly focused on the involvement of legendary physicist Richard Feynman in the Rogers Commission set up to investigate the disaster, and his famous demonstration of the problems with the rubber O-rings at low temperatures. While the dictates of successful drama ensure that the lone-maverick-against-the-system angle was probably overplayed, there's no doubt that Feynman's independence and flair for clear and critical thinking was a key factor in determining the source of the disaster.

William Hurt did a pretty good impression of Feynman in terms of not looking completely unlike him and carrying off the mad scientist wig reasonably convincingly. He didn't really attempt to reproduce Feynman's chewy New York accent, though, and retained that distinctive slightly vague, slightly bemused air he has in most of his parts. I think the real-life Feynman would have been a slightly sharper and more abrasive customer. It took me a couple of goes to recognise Feynman's third wife Gweneth, but I got it in the end: Joanne Whalley, still very foxy even at 51.

There's plenty more Feynman available on YouTube, most of which is well worth a watch, including this BBC Horizon documentary from 1993.

what if you were unable to wake from that dream

Don't even think about bothering phoning me or ringing the doorbell between 6:20pm and 6:50pm each weekday night, because I will ignore you: In The Night Garden is on. Nia is absolutely riveted by it, as you can see from the picture, and while as an adult the general inanity and repetitiveness can get a bit wearing, it's quite soothing in a slightly surreal sort of way. A few observations though:

• It's the sort of programme you tend to drift into about halfway through, and it isn't until you watch it all the way through that you realise that the main sequence (i.e. the bit that takes place in the garden) is being dreamt by Iggle Piggle, who in turn is being dreamt by a small child. Honestly, it's like freakin' Inception.
• An alternative theory vis-à-vis Iggle Piggle's involvement is that he's moored his little boat up somewhere and just has to set off back to it at the end of every episode. Given the apparent size of the garden, though, this seems a bit unlikely, as it would be a pretty long walk. My money's on the dream thing.
• Another strong argument in favour of it all being Iggle Piggle's dream: Upsy Daisy's general behaviour. A carefree spirit, wandering around singing, all very keen on the kissing and the tactile handy-holdy stuff with Iggle Piggle, with a skirt that lifts up at the pull of a cord, and conveniently followed around by her mobile bed a lot of the time - she's clearly just some kind of sordid fantasy fuck-buddy dreamt up by Iggle Piggle's libido. A libido whose existence is all the more surprising since he appears to have no external genitalia.
• What's going on with the teeny tiny Wottingers? They're rarely featured, unlike their next-door neighbours the teeny tiny Pontipines who are in just about every episode. Moreover, they are the only characters not to get a mention in the "go to sleep" segment at the end, by contrast with great big lumbering inflatable oafs the Hahoos, whose appearances in the main sequence are equally sparse but who do get a "go to sleep" moment at the end. 
• Derek Jacobi is a trouper, isn't he? It's quite a trip from playing the lead role in I, Claudius or any of his other myriad thespian achievements to singing Makka Pakka, Akka Wakka, Mikka Makka moo! Makka Pakka, Appa yakka, Ikka akka, ooo. Hum dum, Akka pang, Ing, ang, ooo, Makka Pakka, Akka wakka, Mikka Makka moo! but he carries it off with some conviction. 

the last book I read

Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell.

Meet Inspector Kurt Wallander: a tough, uncompromising Swedish cop. Han spelar inte i boken, men vid Gud att han får resultat.

Actually, Wallander is a bit of a mess. His wife Mona (I bet she was! eh? eh?) has just left him, and his daughter Linda isn't speaking to him. Throwing himself into his work, he's eating badly, drinking too much and generally not looking after himself very well. But, at the same time, dammit, results, etc. So when elderly couple Johannes and Maria Lövgren are found at their farmhouse, Johannes dead and savagely beaten and mutilated, and Maria similarly beaten but just about clinging to life, Wallander is called in to take on the case.

The only clues Wallander has to go on are the oddly-tied noose found around Maria Lövgren's neck and her last word before she croaks it at the hospital: "foreign". Naturally this sets Wallander to thinking about the nearby refugee camp and its inhabitants, and also about the local community's dangerously febrile attitude towards it.

But regardless of who was responsible, questions remain to be answered. What was the motive? The Lövgrens had no known enemies, nor anything that anyone would want to steal. And why did whoever carried out the murders feed the Lövgrens' horse before making good their escape? Well, it turns out that Johannes Lövgren wasn't quite the snowy-white pillar of the community he appeared to be: not only did he apparently keep a mistress on the go, but fathered a child with her back in the 1950s, and also had access to a secret stash of money made in nefarious circumstances during the Second World War.

So, cherchez la femme, and possibly her son, and the case will be solved - simple. Well, things get a bit less simple when word gets out via the press of Maria Lövgren's last words and someone takes it upon themselves to murder a Somalian refugee. Rounding up those responsible distracts Wallander and his colleagues from the original murder investigation for a bit, but when they get back to it they quickly locate Erik Magnusson, Johannes Lövgren's illegitimate son. Simmering resentment of Lövgren's treatment of his mother, concern about not inheriting his rightful share of the money - he'll be our guy, surely? Trouble is, Magnusson has an airtight alibi for the night of the murders, so it can't have been him.

So all looks lost; several months pass and the investigation has no new leads. It's only when Wallander has a moment of inspiration after a trip to the bank that he remembers the bank teller with the near-photographic memory that he questioned back in the early days of the investigation. A quick bit of questioning and a look at some CCTV footage later and Wallander's team have a couple of suspects - two men who followed Johannes Lövgren into the bank when he went to make a clandestine withdrawal of some of his secret stash - and it looks like Maria Lövgren was right after all, as they're foreigners. After a bit of trawling round the refugee camps Wallander has a couple of names, and the scene is set for the climax with the usual chasing around and fighting and tying up of loose ends.

Nordic noir is big business these days, and it's interesting to reflect on why that might be and why we Brits find it so fascinating. I think part of it is that we think that the Scandinavians, with their liberal governments and their relaxed attitudes to communal public nudity, are just generally more hip and groovy than us, and are almost certainly having more fun, particularly of the sexy variety, than we are. There's therefore also probably an element of envious glee at seeing their perfect society crumbling round the edges as they have to address the unpalatable truths of their recent eugenics scandal as well as some simmering racial tensions. Whatever the reasons, Mankell's books, as well as those of the late Stieg Larsson and many others, sell in large numbers, sufficiently so for several Wallander adaptations to have been made for TV, most recently starring our very own Kenneth Branagh, who you'll notice is the cover star of my TV tie-in version of the book.

Other than the Swedish setting, though, the Larsson and Mankell books don't have that much in common. The Larsson books are big, fat, lurid thrillers with lots of frankly unlikely chasing around and plot twists, while Faceless Killers is pretty grimy and low-key; Mankell even denies us the satisfaction of a neat thrilleresque plot resolution by having the Lövgrens just randomly tortured and killed by some random opportunists who happened to see Johannes pick up a load of cash in the bank.

Strip away the cultural unfamiliarity and this is a fairly bog-standard police/crime affair, though. The semi-alcoholic cop whose personal life is a shambles but is still capable of crazed intuitive leaps of crime-solving is a pretty well-worked one, as anyone who's read any of Ian Rankin's Rebus novels can tell you. And the dénouement here where Wallander and his team switch from chasing Erik Magnusson and start going after the right guys seems weirdly compressed, occupying as it does only the last 25 pages or so of the book.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, and it rocks along very entertainingly, but I'd be reluctant to say it's any better than a whole host of other crime fiction not set in Scandinavia, the Rebus books for example. If you want a genuinely weird Scandinavian crime thriller I would strongly recommend Peter Høeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow. If you just want crime fiction set in an unfamiliar (or at least non-British) location then I would even more strongly recommend Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series.

long overjew

Let's laugh at some Jews. I don't mean in a Holocaust-y kind of way, merely at the ridiculousness of some of their more outlandish religious practices.

You'll recall my unseemly chortling over the kosher telephone, the kosher light switch, the kosher lift and the kosher fridge. Well, here's a rather more public display of hilariously unreflective obedience to authority, however barking that authority's rulings may be: a bloke sealing himself inside a plastic bag on a plane.

An over-cautious approach to on-plane hygiene, you might think, or perhaps it was just that he wanted to ensure not a single morsel of airline food would pass his lips. But no, it's nothing as sensible as that; apparently certain ultra-Orthodox Jews are so pure that they will be irredeemably tainted by proximity to a cemetery. And not just any form of proximity, this is strictly vertical proximity we're talking about here. You can sidle up as close as you like in terms of horizontal separation, right up to the boundary fence, and you'll be fine, but even if you're 35,000 feet above it you'll be tainted. Look, I've drawn you a picture.

So the critical thinkers in the audience will be asking the following sorts of questions:

• What form does this impurifying agent take?
• How might we detect it?
• Why does it only spread vertically and not horizontally?
• Does it go down or only up? What if you were in a Tube train under a cemetery?
• Why does the plastic bag stop the zombie voodoo but six feet of earth, 35,000 feet of air and the aircraft superstructure doesn't?
• How would you tell, after the fact, if you or someone you were with had become impure owing to unwitting exposure to cemetery-based tainting? Is there a test?
• Is there really anything about intra-aircraft impurity security in the ancient scrolls?

What I really love about this is that the answer to the last question is clearly "no", so you (as an orthodox Jew) need to rely on the teaching and interpretation skills of your local rabbi. In this case the rabbi, one Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, came up with the plastic bag solution after some serious thought and just making a whole bunch of stuff up at random, as follows:

Rabbi Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, the leader of the Lithuanian Haredi community in Israel, published a halakhic ruling in the past stipulating that Cohens mustn't fly in this plane because they are prohibited from flying over a cemetery. Later, Rabbi Eliashiv found a solution to this issue, ruling that wrapping oneself in thick plastic bags while the plane crossed over the cemetery is permissible.

So basically in the absence of anything in the Torah that says Thou Shalt Not Fly In A Plane Over A Cemetery he just pulled something out of his arse.

There does seem to be a bit of previous for all this stuff in modern Judaism, though. If you've ever encountered the concept of an eruv then you'll be forced to marvel at the ingenuity of modern Jews in subverting the supposedly unquestionable tenets of their whole religion. It is amusing to the non-believer, though, to see the utterly ridiculous contortions the devout will go to to be able to still live and do stuff that they need to do while obeying some squinty-eyed version of the letter of the law of their own particular brand of idiocy, while ignoring the most obvious solution to the problem, which of course is to abandon the idiocy altogether.

the last book I read

Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie.

Virginia "Vinnie" Miner is a fiftysomething American academic on her way over to Britain for a trip conducting research for her area of expertise, children's stories and rhymes. Solitary, something of an Anglophile and well-practised in her travelling routine, she is somewhat vexed to be waylaid by brash Chuck Mumpson, a tourist from Tulsa, who happens to be sitting next to her on the plane over.

Fred Turner is a twentysomething American academic in Britain for a shorter trip conducting research for his area of expertise, the work of John Gay, leaving his wife Ruth ("Roo") back in America and their volatile relationship in an uncertain state.

Don't get the idea that Vinnie and Fred are going to have some sort of tender May to December romance or any of that sort of heartwarming crap, because it's not like that at all. They do know each other, though, and it's through Vinnie that Fred meets - and starts up a relationship with - Rosemary Radley, an actress who may or may not also be a minor aristocrat, but who certainly is archetypally actressy in being what sympathetic people might call "flighty", "free-spirited", "eccentric", etc., but the rest of us would just call "mental".

Meanwhile Vinnie has unexpectedly found herself keeping in touch with Chuck Mumpson, and despite her initial reservations finds herself becoming quite fond of the big lumbering oaf. When Chuck decides to extend his stay (not having much to go back for, his marriage seemingly being in a similar state to Fred's) to do a bit of family tree research in deepest darkest Wiltshire Vinnie even finds herself drawn into having a full-blown affair with him.

But the two academics are on borrowed time in Britain, and will both have to return to America before the start of the autumn term. Rosemary takes the impending separation badly, behaving increasingly eccentrically (and drunkenly) and eventually locking herself in her flat and refusing to see Fred at all. Vinnie's relationship ends in somewhat different circumstances as she learns that Chuck has had a fatal heart attack down in Wiltshire.

And so the two academics arrive at the point of having to return home. Fred returns with a bit of a spring in his step, as he's had word from Roo that she is keen to meet up and hopes for a reconciliation, while Vinnie returns with rather more mixed feelings. Should she be sad at Chuck's death, and maybe feeling some pangs of guilt that their energetic sexing might have played a part in his demise, or happy at having (however briefly) loved and been loved? And after all, she's never been very good at living with people, and she and Chuck were too different for it to have worked out in the long term.

Foreign Affairs won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1985 - it therefore becomes the third Pulitzer winner on this list after Independence Day and The Road. It seems in a lot of ways a bit light for such a heavyweight award; Lurie cynically suggests in this 2003 Guardian interview that its being the only one of her books in which she killed off a major character probably swung it for her. Of course readability and the appearance of lightness while tackling such heavy subjects as sex and death is a cherishable skill in itself, Anne Tyler being the obvious point of comparison in terms of female American novelists. Another obvious point of comparison would be with David Lodge; the whole thing of academics criss-crossing the Atlantic and their various romantic entanglements while away from home is very familiar from Changing Places and Small World in particular. Of books in this list Weekend turns on a similar plot device as well.

Foreign Affairs was also made into a made-for-TV movie in 1993, starring some quite high-powered names. I think Brian Dennehy is a pretty good fit for Chuck Mumpson, though I must say I'd pictured Vinnie Miner as looking less like Joanne Woodward and more like Edna Mode from The Incredibles. I'd also pictured Fred Turner as being a bit more square-jawed and orthodox-looking than Eric Stoltz. And yes, all right, less, you know, ginger: there, I said it.

I think this is better than the previous Lurie in this list, The Truth About Lorin Jones, as I wasn't so sure about the slightly broad (though probably affectionate) swipes against feminism there, as well as some plot implausibilities. I think it's probably not quite as good as the only other one I've read, 1974's The War Between The Tates. Maybe you should start with that one.

good mourning Britain

Well. What to say about Thatch? Or, at least, what to say that hasn't already been said, and since I haven't read absolutely everything that's been written on the subject, as there's rather a lot of it, the answer to that may well turn out to be: nothing whatsoever. But, just to be clear, it's not going to stop me saying it anyway, as I have a number of crackpot theories on the subject.

• Here's the first one: governments and politicians have rather less ability to influence the mysterious ebb and flow of economics than is popularly believed. And where they do influence it, rather more is down to blind luck than they would like to have you believe. This is a corollary of a wider theory that says: the success or failure of governments and politicians in general, and therefore who gets remembered by history as a success or a failure, is more down to blind luck than you might think. It certainly could be argued that Thatcher was a lucky Prime Minister, for instance, with the huge economic windfall of North Sea oil revenue in the 1980s (in addition to the more calculated cash grab of privatisations and selling off of council houses), and the (in hindsight) opportune timing of the Falklands War enabling her to surf a tide of patriotic fervour to victory in the 1983 general election. She was also fortunate in the self-destruction of the Labour Party in the 1980s which rendered them essentially unelectable until their recovery at the tail-end of the decade under Neil Kinnock.
• I think it's significant that I am of the generation which grew up and became politically aware during the Thatcher years: I was nine when she became Prime Minister, and twenty when she was ousted. So I have to view my overall view of her (not especially favourable in general, in case you hadn't got that already) through the distorting lens of having been a teenager for most of her tenure and therefore inherently likely to view all authority figures as deserving of my visceral hatred. That is soooo unfair; I hate you.
• One of the defining characteristics of the conservative authoritarian mindset, of which Thatcher was a prime example, is a general lack of empathy, i.e. the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes and try to see things from their point of view. Almost more important is the lack of any desire to try to do so, and even the viewing of such a desire as some sort of sign of moral weakness. One of the effects of this is to make Conservative governments inherently hostile to the recipients of state benefits, since they cannot help but view the need to receive such things as a sign of laziness and moral degeneracy. I say "governments", plural, because of course the current administration has been peddling the same sort of rhetoric, with all the talk about "workers" and "shirkers" and the shameful attempt by George Osborne to co-opt the Philpott case as some sort of argument against state hand-outs. 
• Crackpot theory number two: I suspect that one of the main reasons that Thatcher was uniquely ill-disposed towards benefit claimants and the underprivileged in general was as a side-effect of her personal circumstances - as a woman in the toxically sexist environments of first science and then subsequently politics (mind you, pretty much everywhere was a toxically sexist environment in the 1950s) it must have taken some pretty remarkable drive and single-mindedness to wade through all the bullshit to get to where she wanted to be. All of which probably meant that she simply couldn't understand people who were unable to get through or over the barriers their life and circumstances had put in front of them. It also made her, despite her iconic status as the first woman Prime Minister of the UK, not much of a friend of feminism. After all, what are all these silly women complaining about? What glass ceiling? I made it, why can't they? Just pull yourself together.
• As Mark Steel in the Independent points out, all the banging on about her being a "conviction politician" is picking a slightly strange thing to celebrate. Having strongly held convictions is only a good thing if they are right, and even if they are a general refusal to consider counter-arguments or other points of view isn't really very healthy. You know who else had strong convictions? That's right, Hitler.
• Crackpot theory number three is a corollary of number two: most self-made types, entrepreneurs and the like, are not only instinctively unpalatable conservative authoritarian types who can't understand why everyone can't just do what they did (and - see theory one - fail to realise how much dumb luck was involved), but more generally just really tedious and awful people outside of a business context. This theory was partly confirmed and partly undermined by listening to Hilary Devey (her off Dragon's Den) on Desert Island Discs a few months back - she came across as a nicer person than her pantomime persona on DD would have had you expect, but she scoffed at any notion of there being any barriers to women succeeding in the business world, and her choice of tunes was heroically dreadful.
• Back to Thatch: the other side of the sexism thing is that I'm quite sure one of the reasons she inspired such visceral dislike during her lifetime and premiership is simply the fact of her being a woman. Clearly the trade union movement would have hated a conservative Prime Minister implacably opposed to their very existence anyway, but the fact that they, almost exclusively men, were being told what to do by A BLOODY WOMAN must have added a bit of extra sting. Some of the post-mortem glee has been a bit too focused on her gender for my taste as well, notably the bid to get Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead to number one. Note, however, that while I think it's a bit of a crass stunt I absolutely oppose the craven antics of the BBC regarding its appearance (or not) on the Radio 1 chart show at the weekend. It's in the charts, it's based on sales, don't editorialise, just play it. Rather magnificently the Daily Mail still managed to spin this spineless cave-in to conservative pressure as a victory for the Trot faction at the BBC; that is some impressive cognitive dissonance right there.
• While a lot of people did take the opportunity to make a point of celebrating the event of her death, there was a sense in which she'd already got away from us, since she'd had dementia for the last decade or so of her life. There's an interesting parallel with her great ideological soul-mate Ronald Reagan, who had a long downward slide into dementia at the end of his life too. So crackpot theory number four is that the long battle between right-wing ideology and reality eventually destroys the brain. 
• The ding-dong over Ding Dong is one aspect of another area of stupidity: the whole ridiculous notion of not speaking ill of the dead. Personally I favour the sort of robust post-mortem assessment provided by the late Christopher Hitchens on the demise of Jerry Falwell: "if you'd given him an enema you could have buried him in a matchbox". 

meet the wankers

With reference to this BBC News story about "name meshing" as practised by zany modern people getting married I'll just say: I thought of it first! Except that I didn't, because this Telegraph article from November 2012 reckons that people in America had already been doing it for six years. Oh well.

A couple of other things: it's interesting, if you watch the video, to see what a relatively large proportion of the couples doing interesting mashups of their names are same-sex couples. I imagine that there's maybe a sense of being less weighed down by the baggage of "tradition" in these cases, since the whole idea of same-sex unions is pretty recent (and I acknowledge that there's some way to go yet), and therefore a bit more of a sense of freedom to make your own rules. Or it could be pure chance, and that could just be bollocks. Who knows.

The other thing is that the BBC article makes a reference to lovable showbiz couple Chris O'Dowd and Dawn Porter having done this when they got married in August 2012. That's not quite right, as it happens, as while she seems to have adopted the name Dawn O'Porter, apparently seriously, he remains resolutely Chris O'Dowd, so it's not really a very good example. If they were following the rules (inasmuch as there are any) it really ought to be something like O'Dorter or O'Dowter anyway, the general convention being roughly half of each of the original names plus whatever mucking about with the bit in the middle you need to do to make it pleasing/pronounceable/amusing.

Clearly these rules can lead to some amusing imaginary celebrity pairings. I'll start you off with rock'n'roll pioneer Carl Perkins (whose 81st birthday it would have been today, had he not died in 1998) and tennis star Chris Evert becoming Carl and Chris Pervert, and stylist Gok Wan and actress Zoe Lucker becoming Gok and Zoe Wanker. No doubt you can make up your own.

the last book I read

A Stone Boat by Andrew Solomon.

Harry is a concert pianist, travelling round the world knocking out a bit of the old Schubert, Rachmaninoff and the like, and negotiating the upcoming recording of a CD of his work. He's in a nice safe relationship with an Englishman, Bernard, and still very close to his parents and his younger brother Freddy. The only cloud on the horizon is his mother's polite disapproval of his gay lifestyle, not a big enough problems to sour their relationship, but a source of some tension nonetheless.

At least, that's the only cloud on the horizon until Harry's mother is taken ill on a family trip to Paris and medical investigations reveal that she has cancer - almost certainly some form of bowel cancer, though the book is fairly coy about the details. The initial prognosis is encouraging, and Harry continues his nomadic lifestyle, flitting back and forth across the Atlantic between his various musical engagements in Europe, Bernard in London and his mother in New York.

Eventually, though, it becomes clearer that the first round of chemotherapy has not had the effect that everyone had hoped, and that the prospects are a bit darker than had been thought. At this point Harry ends his (always fairly half-hearted) relationship with Bernard, moves out of his flat and returns to New York to base himself there. As his mother's treatment continues and her condition deteriorates, Harry throws himself into the new York gay scene and has various fleeting hedonistic encounters, as well as branching out into boy-on-girl action for a brief but intense relationship with his old friend Helen, the demise of which inevitably results in a cooling of their friendship.

Harry's mother has planned ahead for the time when the general grimness of prognosis and the pain and indignity of day-to-day existence become too much to bear, and has been stashing away sleeping pills in readiness for a life-ending overdose while she's still capable of administering it herself. Eventually she decides that the time has come and summons her husband and two sons to her bedside for a few final words of love and wisdom - in Harry's case this includes apologising for her earlier suggestion that it was the stress caused by his lifestyle that brought the cancer on in the first place. Then, having made her peace, she scarfs down a lethal dose of pills and - a few hours later - dies.

And that's it, really. The first thing to say is that this, Solomon's only novel, is a thinly-disguised autobiographical account of the death of his own mother Carolyn (as far as I can recall the mother in the novel is never named). The second thing to say is that it's all very beautifully written. The third thing to say is that it's very difficult to find fault with a work clearly wrenched from some very personal grief and anguish (a bit like this one, say), but that I'm going to go ahead and do it anyway.

It is perhaps fair to say that a set-up involving a clearly very rich and privileged family - there's no suggestion that Harry's piano-playing career, as lucrative as it may be, is funding any of the family's New York flats or European holidays, they're evidently very wealthy entirely separately from that - is going to find that the bar is set a little higher in terms of eliciting sympathy for the characters. I mean, getting cancer, or even having a much-beloved mother get cancer, is a legitimate tragedy, of course, regardless of your social and financial circumstances, but agonising about what colour peonies to order for a party or whether to play the Schubert or the Scarlatti at your CD recording session are not concerns that are going to resonate that much with Joe Average.

The slightly prissy and fastidious tone is a problem as well, mainly because it had me mentally reading the book in the voice of David Sedaris, who is a prize-winning humorist and all but who I've always found fairly irritating. A more reasonable criticism might be that the refusal to go into any of the icky detail of either Harry's sexual adventurings or his mother's illness (which given its nature must have been intermittently messy and embarrassing) make it hard to engage with the characters, particularly as the mother is painted as improbably saintly anyway, even in the face of imminent death.

It's hard to say how much of this is a by-product of reading the book immediately after No Country For Old Men, a book not shy at all about icky details, and one whose tone is so stark and gruff that if it were any starker and gruffer would just be a series of guttural grunts and barks. The contrast in tone and subject matter is considerable, which is obviously not A Stone Boat's fault, but there it is; I don't make the rules.

you couldn't make it up

More interesting deconstruction, reconstruction and redecoration work going on at Halibut Towers at the moment, this time in our downstairs back bathroom. To distract me from the depressing gurgling sound of my bank account being steadily emptied I've grabbed a couple of bits of old newspaper that were acting as makeshift packing and insulation above the old ceiling, and that were revealed this week as the guys doing the work on the bathroom had to rip the ceiling out to move some water pipes and wiring around.

It's instructive to compare the newspaper I found, which is a copy of the Newport Argus from September 1987, with the January 1956 South Wales Argus I found in the loft just over a year ago. Those conservative authoritarian types who subscribe to the (barking) view that the 1950s was some sort of golden age - where you could leave your front door unlocked and the local bobby would doff his hat to you from his bike and then send you on your way with a cheery clip round the ear and everyone stood up for the National Anthem when BBC1 closed down for the night - will find much to support that view by comparing the headlines from the two papers.

So in 1956 we've got "Bigger grant for Newport", "First MCC pair put on 56 runs" and "Pastor dies suddenly at Blaenavon", while in 1987 we've got "Drug dealer jailed for 15 months", "Store theft woman sent to prison", "Teenage burglars get youth custody" and "Youth stole crucifix". They didn't even have "teenagers" back in 1956, let alone "youths".

And you know how lovable doe-eyed children turn into surly feral "youths" and "teenagers" who will knife you up for your meagre pension as soon as look at you - that's right, by not having SOME RUDDY SENSE BIRCHED INTO THEM at a young age, preferably followed by a short sharp dose of NATIONAL RUDDY SERVICE. It looks like Richard Littlejohn was right after all and we really are GOING TO HELL IN A RUDDY HANDCART. And that was a newspaper from over 25 years ago! Frankly I'd be surprised if you could step outside your front door in the general Newport area these days without some 7-year-old crack fiend disembowelling you with a Stanley knife, raping your dead eye sockets and making a crudely-fashioned flute out of your femur. Mind how you go.

deep and crisp and even

All I've ever wanted out of life was for people to say: that Dave, he's a pretty straight guy. You know, when he says a thing, you can be pretty sure that that thing really is an actual thing. No referring to things as things when those things aren't actually things for him, no sirree. So it's a bit galling to have my complaints about not getting up Pen Y Fan much any more instantly rendered superfluous, not to mention ridiculous, by finding myself and my two NCT chums Huw and Alex all simultaneously available on Easter Saturday, and moreover for it to be a reasonably nice day. Plus, Alex had bought himself some new boots, so we needed to go and try them out.

So what we did was drive up to the car park by the waterfalls just round the corner from the site of the old Torpantau railway station - it's marked as Blaen-y-glyn on my OS Explorer map - walk up onto the Craig y Fan Ddu ridge and follow the ridge round to the big peaks, most notably Pen y Fan. All of which would have been pretty straightforward had it not been for the couple of feet of snow up there, and the layer of ice of variable thickness sitting on top of it in places, which made progress slow, unpredictable and somewhat trying at times. Once we got round to Fan y Big and onto more regularly-frequented paths things got a little easier, but the final steep climb up onto the Pen y Fan summit plateau was very icy and requiring of a bit of care and some decent boots. Which is not to say that there weren't some people up there in jeans and trainers, because there were, but I wouldn't have fancied it much. 

From the top of Pen y Fan we then skirted round the bottom of Corn Du (which we skipped going up to save time, just as we'd skipped Cribyn earlier) and along the Graig Fan Ddu ridge almost as far as the trig point; we then variously clambered and arse-tobogganed down the steep slope to the earth dam in front of the lower Neuadd reservoir, and from there back via forestry track and road to the car. A round trip of about 12 miles - that it took us over 7 hours is largely down to the conditions rather than any dawdling or other undue hanging about on our part. A good day out all round, though. Here is the route map and altitude profile combo; note that I forgot to turn on the GPS until we were halfway up the first ridge, so you need to imagine an upward line from the finishing altitude (a smidge over 400 metres) to the starting altitude as captured here, if that makes sense at all. A larger route map can be found here. 

The route we took overlaps (the second half in particular) with the shorter route we took on this walk in January 2009 in icy but much less snowy conditions. The first half overlaps somewhat with this walk we did in considerably warmer conditions in October of the same year. A couple of assaults on Pen y Fan from the Brecon side (i.e. the north) can be found here and here; note that the second one has a recipe for outdoor paella at the end.

Photos from yesterday can be found here.

gray expectations

These days we can't just drop everything and jaunt up Pen Y Fan at the drop of a hat, as parental responsibilities tend to intervene. So when offered the opportunity of going for a walk up a hill on my birthday I had to temper my natural urge to plan some 20-mile yomp and think up something a bit more tailored to include the bairn without prompting a repeat of the Brown Willy incident.

So we ended up doing a quick trip up Gray Hill, which is over to the east of Newport just south of the Wentwood Forest and next to the Wentwood Reservoir. It's only a smidgen under 900 feet high, and I suspect it's only three miles or so for the round trip, but we didn't want to push our luck with Nia in the papoose and we wanted to be able to get back down in time to go to the pub for lunch. It's a nice walk if you only want a short one, though, although I saw no signs of either the standing stone or the stone circle that are marked on the map.

The nearest pub would probably be the Woodlands Tavern at Llanfair Discoed, and very nice it is too (good Felinfoel Double Dragon as I recall), but as we've been there a couple of times before we decided to go to the Groes Wen in Penhow, on the A48 back towards Newport instead. I had a perfectly decent pint of something I can't remember, and a very nice pie and chips.

A very small selection of photos, including the obligatory summit shot (no trig point, sadly) is here.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Robbie Robertson, chief creative force behind The Band and intermittent solo artist over the past 30 years or so, and the Duke himself, John Wayne, during the late phase of his career when he starred in a couple of pretty ropey Dirty Harry rip-offs, Brannigan and McQ, each time playing a maverick cop who doesn't play by the book, but dammit he gets results, and each time also wearing a pretty spectacular selection of wigs. And no wonder, because Wayne was in his late sixties when the films were made, and he'd apparently been wearing wigs in films since the late 1940s.

Note that I'm not suggesting for a moment that Robbie Robertson wears a wig, though it's possible some Just For Men may be involved, since he is now 69 (about the same age as Wayne circa Brannigan, coincidentally). Perhaps his Mohawk ancestry confers some magical voodoo hair-retaining powers on him. It's the slightly incongruous hair that made me mentally link the two, though.

a house by any other name

Here's a thing I've never really understood: house names. I mean, I understand that back in the day some sort of descriptive thing was how houses were identified, before mapping, widely agreed road names and numbering of houses, and that even now some houses just have names and not a number. But, in general, they've all got numbers, so stop it. Particularly if you're going to foist some abomination like Ersenmine or Shaynoo on the unsuspecting house-purchasing public.

Here's another thing, though, slightly ironically in the light of all that: our house has a name. I mean, it's got a number as well, and when I give out our address I just use the number, but the fact remains that there is a name emblazoned both on the exterior of the house by the front door and decoratively on the internal glass above the door between the front porch and the hallway.

Now I have no idea what the significance of the name is - there are a limited number of options, the most obvious one being the legendary rugby ground in Dunedin, New Zealand. There is also a Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, but strictly that has an extra "e" at the end. There are other places that use the name, but it seems on the whole unlikely that the previous occupants named their house after either a New Zealand sporting goods company (who presumably just took the name from the rugby ground anyway), a firm of Essex accountants or a Manchester dental firm. Maybe my predecessor, in addition to being a furniture-staining Buddhist, was a rugby enthusiast who'd once been on holiday to New Zealand. My old university flat-mate Andy's parents lived in a house called "Tenerife", which I always assumed was because they'd once been there on holiday. Either that or it was a doomed attempt to make a house in the middle of Aldershot seem a bit more exotic. [Weird coincidence footnote: today, March 27th, is the anniversary of the 1977 Tenerife airport disaster, the worst aviation accident in history].

The only place I can recall living in before that had a name was Willow Cottage, in Normanton-on-the-Wolds on the south-east side of Nottingham, where we lived for a couple of years in the early 1980s. To be fair, that didn't have a number, so the name was actually part of the address. And there genuinely was a very big and old willow tree at the bottom of the garden, so it wasn't just a made-up name. I seem to recall the house next door being called "Cartref" (in fact it still is), which is pretty high on the list of boring generic house names, since it's just Welsh for "Home". In a road with no numbering system, you're pretty much obliged to give your house a name, though, even if you don't fancy the idea much. Something boring and generic will do, as long as it's unique - my parents' house is called "Annedd Bach", for instance, which just means "Small Dwelling".

headline of the day

Stand by for a bit more fuckwitted Daily Mail innumeracy. What's wrong with this headline?

The answer, of course, is that the claim in the headline is immediately refuted by the bar graph displayed just below it - with 75 suicide deaths per 1 million people compared with 27 for black people, white people are in fact around 2.78 times more likely to kill themselves. That's still an interesting statistic, as is the one on the other side of the centre-line, i.e. that black people are ten times as likely to die at the wrong end of a gun held by someone else (and a little under twice as likely to die for gun-related reasons overall). The "five times" bit that the headline-writer presumably got his number from is that white people are five times more likely to suffer a gun-related death at their own hands than at the hands of others. Again, an interesting statistic, but not the one the headline claims, because no such statistic exists.

radio blah blah

Light and shade, tears and laughter, etc. etc. on the Radio 4 slot I like to call "the one after the Today programme" this week. On Thursday we had the excellent In Our Time on the fascinating life of Alfred Russel Wallace (and featuring former Welshman of the Day Professor Steve Jones), younger contemporary of Darwin and the man some feel that Darwin stitched up fairly shabbily by quickly publicising and publishing his own work in response to a letter from Wallace revealing that he was theorising along similar lines to Darwin. A more charitable view might be that Wallace played a vital role in energising Darwin to get off his fat beardy arse and finally collate and publish the mountains of evidence he'd been gathering for the previous 20-odd years.

Anyway, that was all very interesting; interesting in a different and more shouty-at-the-radio kind of way was the discussion on Tuesday entitled Christianity At The Crossroads, chaired by John Humphrys and featuring various goddy types as well as the defiantly godless Matthew Parris. The subject matter for discussion was very much as you'd expect from the title: how relevant is the Christian Church (in all its various flavours) to modern life, particularly in the wake of all the sex scandals, in the Catholic Church in particular? The fact that we've got a fairly new Archbishop of Canterbury and a brand spanking new Pope gave the whole thing a bit of extra spice.

The trouble with the discussion, as it always is with discussions of this kind, is that it was basically a detailed discussion of the warp and weft of the emperor's britches, complete with some disagreements over which colour they should be, whether they should end above or below the knee, whether those little bells attached to the hem are a good idea or not, without addressing the more fundamental question of why the emperor is in fact wandering around bollock naked.

A more sensible starting point for discussion would be: OK, you folks represent organisations that, ultimately, seek to tell people how to live based on an interpretation of the contents of a book that is supposedly the condensed thoughts of a supernatural being who created the world, can be petitioned by prayer, and takes a disturbingly close interest in what we do with our genitalia. This is important stuff, particularly given the dire consequences presented for stepping outside the bounds of what's deemed to be acceptable behaviour. So you will naturally have some pretty compelling evidence that the tenets of your religion are true, and this would be a good moment to present it. Note also that you'll have to account for the church's stated position on various subjects changing over time, usually just after the majority view in society as a whole switched: things like acceptance of evolution, homosexuality, slavery, that sort of thing. But start by convincing us that your supernatural friend exists, otherwise the rest of the conversation is entirely pointless.

Sadly we don't seem to be at a point in human history where that approach is acceptable. The best illustration of this is in that while Matthew Parris musters some robust arguments for things like divorcing the notions of religion and morality, he does still seem to concede without question that a real person called Jesus existed, and that the church that's built up around his teachings has corrupted the message in some way, as well as buggering all those altar boys, which to be fair I don't think the bible explicitly encourages. The reality is that there's absolutely no more reason to believe that the Jesus as described in the Bible existed than, say, King Arthur, and that if you're going to make the claim that no, there really was some guy named Jesus (or more likely Yeshua, Jesus being a subsequent Romanisation of the original Hebrew name) who didn't actually do any miraculous shit but was just a guy around whom various myths coalesced, then you're seriously into So What territory. To steal an argument I read somewhere else, if you're saying that Santa Claus exists, but is actually a plumber from Grimsby who doesn't wear a red uniform or own any reindeer or deliver presents and whose name is Gavin and not Santa Claus then essentially you're agreeing with me that Santa Claus doesn't exist.

So the whole programme was a depressing illustration of the special treatment given to religion compared with any other set of bonkers claims about how the world operates. As depressing as it is I suppose it at least provides a riposte to those who say: relax, you've essentially won, the world is a pretty secular place, chill out, have a cocktail. Clearly we've got a long way to go yet.

the blog cannot hear the blogger

This week's literary Dead Pool also includes the rather more heavyweight name of Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. All I can tell you about him is that his first novel Things Fall Apart is well worth a read - the others (he only wrote five, most of them in the 1960s) may well be too, but that's the only one I've read.

Things Fall Apart also gains extra props from me for taking its title from one of my favourite poems, WB Yeats' The Second Coming. I expect it's highly likely that many other works take their titles from the same poem, since it's so full of rich and portentous phrases, though the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are Joan Didion's 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and the Joni Mitchell song of the same name from her 1991 album Night Ride Home.

More can be found by Googling selected phrases:

• "centre cannot hold" gives you this photography book and this piece of Star Trek-based fiction;
• "ceremony of innocence" gives you this interactive video game thingy;
• "blank and pitiless as the sun" gives you this song by Australian experimentalists sleepmakeswaves;
• "the widening gyre" gives you a couple of books and an episode from season 3 of the TV series Sons Of Anarchy. There's one called "Turning And Turning" as well, just for good measure.

You get the general idea. Needless to say that's not an original thought and if I'd scrolled down the Wikipedia page a bit I'd have found a much more comprehensive list. I'll get me coat.

you spotty little herbert

I see that James Herbert has died, though of course we shouldn't rule out the possibility that he may yet return as a hideously decomposed zombie shade from beyond Hell to tear our very souls apart, so watch out for that.

I own five of his books (The Rats, The Survivor, Fluke, Shrine and Moon), and I've read a few others as well (The Fog and The Magic Cottage, certainly, plus possibly one or two others) - they were big favourites with teenage schoolboys back in the 1980s (when I was a teenage schoolboy) because in addition to the bracingly graphic violence there was always at least one similarly graphic sex scene tossed in somewhere. He was inevitably dubbed "the British Stephen King", but actually he was nowhere near being in King's class either in terms of writing style or being able to construct plots that, when you got to the end of the book, actually held together or made much sense. I strongly suspect that Herbert was the real-life inspiration for Garth Marenghi's mode of dress, all black shirts and leather jackets and slightly self-important spookiness.

It was all good unclean fun for all that, though, and I've always been rather surprised that more of his books weren't filmed, the Rats trilogy in particular. I guess that before the days of CGI the rat effects (particularly the giant mutant two-headed ones) would have been tricky to realise. The one film I have seen based on a Herbert book was the rather ropey 1981 supernatural plane-crash drama The Survivor, which I don't remember a huge amount about other than that the lovely Jenny Agutter was in it, though as far as I recall she kept her clothes on. I gather the atypically whimsical dog-reincarnation story Fluke was also filmed in 1995 (warning: trailer contains dangerous levels of Voice-Over Guy and general schmaltz). Note that the reasonably entertaining 1980 John Carpenter film The Fog has no connection to the Herbert book of the same name.

I should add (warning: plot spoilers ahead) that The Survivor falls into the Oh Right He Was Dead All Along category of (in this case fairly predictable) plot twists. The Rats is probably the one, if you want one. The sex scene starts on page 68, in my copy anyway.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Former world and Olympic downhill skiing champion and golfing WAG Lindsey Vonn, and former world tennis #1 and golfing WAG Caroline Wozniacki.