a hilariously ironic blog post title

I was picked up and taken to task, and quite rightly, by my good friend Doug a short while back for using the phrase "achingly dull" twice in separate blog posts in relatively quick succession (actually on closer examination they were a little over two years apart, but I think Doug's point stands) to describe the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, gawd bless 'em. Not that I think it's an inaccurate description, as I'm sure that they are fantastically vacuous in person, despite the healthy glow of unearned privilege and the expensive orthodontics, but it behooves one to try not to repeat oneself, even when one's self-editing faculties are dulled by a raging throatful of republican bile.

Anyway, I was inspired to wonder what other blogversational tics I overuse, perhaps without realising it. A futile exercise pretty much by definition, you might say, since if you don't realise it, well, you won't realise it. And you may be right, but I think a capacity for sober, objective and unforgiving self-analysis is a quality to be admired and striven for. So in that vein I offer you the following: a catalogue of my overuse of the word "hilariously" during the lifetime of this blog. I find myself drawn to this word as it conveys a sort of sense of the jaw-dropping ridiculousness of much of the world and the people who inhabit it. But anyway, I probably overdo it, as is evidenced by the list that follows. Note that I've restricted myself to instances where the word "hilariously" qualifies an adjective in the classic adverb/adjective kind of way.

So:

• hilariously expensive
• hilariously unreflective
• hilariously flimsy
• hilariously stilted
• hilariously miscast
• hilariously po-faced
• hilariously inappropriate
• hilariously rubbish
• hilariously fatuous
• hilariously doomed
• hilariously bollocks
• hilariously shit
• hilariously lame
• hilariously benign
• hilariously anachronistic
• hilariously threadbare
• hilariously half-arsed

Of course, now I've done that, I will be unable to use the word ever again, except perhaps in an ironically self-referential kind of way. Conversely you might argue that once you start doing blog posts about word usage and frequency in your own blog posts you've already disappeared most of the way up your own arsehole anyway. I'm reminded of the novelist in David Lodge's Small World who was provided with a computer analysis of his own writing style and word usage and found himself unable to write ever again. We shall see.

Another way to monitor word usage is to use the excellent Wordle, which provides a graphical view of word frequency. Here's the word cloud for the current front page of this blog:

You can just paste a load of text in as well. No prizes for guessing which song lyric this cloud was derived from, but you can see how you could generate an interesting quiz out of it; just present the cloud and get people to name the song.

the last book I read

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett.

We're in an un-named South American country, where the ruling regime have arranged an operatic recital for certain key local and foreign dignitaries in a bid to butter them up and attract a bit of financial investment to shore up their fragile economy. Their key target is Mr. Hosokawa, the head of a massive Japanese electronics firm, and they've lured him all the way from Japan by engaging the services of internationally-renowned opera diva and soprano Roxane Coss - Mr. Hosokawa being a bit of an opera nut and a fan of Ms. Coss in particular.

Little do the representatives of the ruling regime know that Mr. Hosokawa is such a devoted fan of Roxane Coss that he's quite prepared to travel halfway round the world to get a prime seat at a private recital, despite having no intention whatsoever of investing any of his corporation's money in the country. All that business is rendered irrelevant halfway through the gig, though, when a group of revolutionaries storm the building and take everyone hostage. The group's intention was to capture the country's president, but as he's ducked out of the gig at the eleventh hour to catch his favourite TV soap opera they find themselves having to make do with the vice-president and a load of foreign dignitaries and industrialists. They immediately release all of the women (except Roxane Coss, who has some value as a high-profile hostage) and the infirm, leaving 50-odd men and one woman.

There now follows a bit of a stalemate, while competing demands are exchanged, and the captors and captives settle into their daily routines in the expectation of a long siege. It's not easy keeping yourselves amused in these circumstances, but people find a way: Mr. Hosokawa plays chess with revolutionary leader General Benjamin, and once a proficient pianist is located among the hostages Roxane Coss keeps her operatic pipes lubricated by giving regular recitals.

Inevitably, close relationships start to form between the captives and the captors - the inevitable Stockholm Syndrome stuff, but also some more intimate liaisons. Mr. Hosokawa and Roxane Coss fall in love, as do teenage female revolutionary Carmen and Mr. Hosokawa's interpreter Gen Watanabe.

Clearly, though, for all the sense of suspension of reality that has set in, none of this is going to end well, and when it does end it's going to be at the expense of some of the relationships that have built up, because the protagonists are going to end up on opposite sides, and some of them are probably going to end up dead. And sure enough, when, after several weeks, the government's patience finally runs out and the army are sent in to bring the siege to an end, some people are rescued, and some are the recipients of a hot lead sandwich, either deliberately or as some of the inevitable collateral damage associated with liberations of this sort.

The first thing to say about this is that in general I enjoyed it very much, lest what follows be seen as an endless sequence of nit-picky criticisms. The main characters are rounded-out enough to be interesting and for the reader to care about what happens to them, not so easy in a medium-length novel (318 pages) where there are quite a lot of characters. That said, most of them are implausibly nice, even the revolutionaries. General Benjamin, the one we get to know best, plays chess and stoically bears the pain of a nasty attack of shingles, even while he's trying to overthrow the ruling regime.

As for the hostages, the French diplomat pines for his wife and cooks fabulous meals, the Russians smoke and drink too much but are generally well-intentioned, and the principal characters of Roxane Coss, Mr. Hosokawa and Gen are all dangerously close to Mary Sue territory. I mean, it's never happened to me, but I would imagine being kidnapped by armed terrorists is a fairly stressful experience, and one could be forgiven for occasionally being a bit snappy and cranky, but no, everyone's pretty fluffy and delightful throughout. I suspect that in general long hostage sieges (Bel Canto is actually loosely based on the Lima siege of 1996) are a bit more grim and savage, with the occasional arbitrary executions, the dubious hygiene and the constant hunger and thirst, but here it's all roast chickens from the lavishly-appointed kitchen and opera recitals courtesy of our heroine. And it's a bit convenient that after Roxane Coss' original accompanist dies in a diabetic coma early on there just happens to be an unsuspected piano virtuoso (one of Mr. Hosokawa's underlings) among the hostages ready to step into his shoes.

There's a lot made about the redemptive power of music, yadda yadda yadda, and fair enough I suppose, but it seems unlikely that among 60-odd people there wouldn't be a few unmoved or even positively irritated by opera, even when you've got a real-life diva belting it out less than ten feet away. And the epilogue that follows the climactic shoot-out is positively bizarre in its incongruous lack of continuity with everything that's gone before. Interestingly when the book was itself turned into an opera the writers decided to ditch the "absurd" epilogue altogether.

The other book I was reminded of while reading this was Iain Banks' Canal Dreams, which is superficially similar in that it features a world-famous musical virtuoso in a hostage situation somewhere in the Americas (that was in the Panama Canal; the specific location of Bel Canto is never revealed). That book was somewhat different in its depiction of violence, though, and in having the heroine turn into some sort of gun-toting ass-kicking Buffy/Terminator type by the end.

Bel Canto won some pretty heavyweight awards when it was published in 2002, most notably the Orange Prize (now the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction - my list goes 1997, 2002, 2005) and the PEN/Faulkner Award (my list goes 1995, 1996, 2002).

and a beaver biryani for the wife

This came through the door while we were away earlier in the week. I promise you I have not digitally manipulated this image in any way - well, beyond a bit of cropping and resizing anyway.

Now the word "Tarka" may well have some meaning I'm not aware of - Google Translate offers no assistance in any of the obvious languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Urdu. Historically most Indian restaurants in the UK have been run by people from Sylhet, which is in what is now Bangladesh, and Google Translate doesn't specifically offer a Sylheti option, but it's apparently quite similar to Bengali, so it probably wouldn't have helped anyway.

If you're labouring through this in a fug of bafflement, let me help you out: the reason this is funny is that there is a well-known joke that goes as follows:

Waiter (imagine something a bit like this): And what can I get you sir?
Customer: I'd like a Chicken Tarka, please.
Waiter: Chicken.....Tarka?
Customer: Chicken Tarka.
Waiter: So.....Chicken Tarka.
Customer: Yes.
Waiter: So....Chicken Tarka. Chicken Tarka?
Customer: Chicken Tarka.
[Note that you can continue in this vein for as long as you think your audience will put up with it before proceeding to the punchline]
Waiter: So, just to recap: Chicken Tarka.
Customer: That's right.
Waiter: Are you sure you don't mean Chicken Tikka, sir?
Customer: Ah, no, you see, it's like Chicken Tikka, but it's a little otter.

Boom and indeed tish. There is even a recipe for Chicken Tarka online, which is doubly delicious, firstly because it all looks very nice, and secondly because the blog author seems to have missed the joke entirely. The answer to your next question is yes, they do appear to be American.

Just to spoil the joke a bit, it is of course true that there is a dish known as Tarka Dhal, and indeed it appears on the Tarka's menu just as it does on pretty much every other Indian restaurant's. This interesting Guardian article reckons that the "tarka" bit is "a mix of spices fried in oil or ghee until sizzling and aromatic". Which to be fair, sounds nicer than eating an otter anyway.

fiddy thirst state

The high disposable income glory glory days of a lavishly-stocked whisky cupboard groaning with all manner of intoxicating spiritous delights are long gone, sadly, and in these straitened times when most of my meagre income goes on nappies, nursery fees and hilariously expensive tiny shoes the old whisky cupboard is struggling along with just a skeleton staff.

But there is the odd bright spot, like this bottle of Glenfiddich Rich Oak that I picked up for 20-odd quid a month or two back. This is your basic Fiddy plus an unspecified amount of time maturing in "virgin" oak casks, which I take to mean casks that have not previously contained any form of alcoholic spirit - unlike the usual sort which will have previously held either sherry or bourbon (or, occasionally, something more exotic). Indeed the claim is made that this is "the first virgin American and European oak finished whisky in the world." That, as almost all claims about whisky uniqueness are, is hedged about with so many qualifiers as to be almost meaningless to the casual drinker, so the thing to take away is just the extra two years of cask maturation compared with the standard product.

And that makes quite a difference, it seems, as this is notably different from the light and grassy delights of the 12-year-old. It's quite a bit sweeter, for one thing, with a pronounced honey/toffee/Werther's Original (but without the paedo overtones) thing going on, and noticeably darker and richer. It's very good, and, dare I say it, more interesting than the standard 12-year-old, but it's still a bit, you know, nice for my tastes. The now seemingly defunct Caoran Reserve had, by contrast, a few rough and unruly edges and was all the better for it.

glasses: a spectacular history

So, lots of us wear glasses. Some of us find that to be a pain, what with the taking them off and putting them on, having one pair for reading, one pair for looking at far-away things, one pair for X-ray vision, etc., etc. I, on the other hand, having been wearing glasses since I was about two years old, find it as natural as breathing, indeed I feel odd being out of bed and not wearing them. Now naturally I don't mean I've been wearing the same pair of glasses since I was two, that would be ridiculous. My prescription would have changed a bit, for one thing, and while I've always had a fairly large head it has certainly got bigger over the years.

So since I've got some old family photos on a DVD, let's have a look at changing glasses fashions over the years. Just to elicit some sympathy, let me start by pointing out that in addition to your basic long-sightedness I suffered from a lazy eye as a small child, so I started out with glasses and an eye-patch. Cute, huh?

1973(ish): the John Lennon round pebbly specs look.

1978: your classic NHS tortoiseshell rims.

1979: similar, except these would have been purchased in Java, so the NHS bit doesn't apply.

1986: scary aviator-style ones seemingly designed to obscure half the face. The giant plastic nose-piece is a bit weird too.

1998: similar, but slightly smaller and in a funky red-and-black colour scheme. You'll have to excuse the slitty bleary eyes; this was taken in Dublin and I was probably very drunk and/or hungover.

2001: a return to the Lennonesque round design; not such a good look after 28 years of galloping head expansion though.

2004: heading towards the sober middle-aged rectangular look.

2006: gone properly rounded rectangular now. All I remember about these is that a) they were by Quiksilver and were well expensive and b) they lasted all of a few months before being sat on and mangled by Doug (or possibly by me after a night out with Doug). It was Doug's fault, anyway, is my point.

2008: this pair got broken as well, in this case solely through my own fault; a misplaced golf club in a moment of pique (note that I wasn't wearing them at the time) causing a fatal weakening of the nose bridge resulting in an unexpected snappy failure a few months later. It was at about this time that I realised that I was nearly forty and it was about time I put away childish things and stopped randomly breaking pairs of glasses.

2009: not much to say about these except that they were black and slightly too small for my head.

2012: the black pair were replaced by this pair of cheapo Vision Express own-brand green metallic ones. I almost immediately saw where the extra money didn't go, though, as my excessively sweaty head corroded the green paint off the side-pieces, exposing the bare metal and bringing me out in a rash. Nonetheless I persevered with them for quite a while with the regular application of black insulating tape. Eventually they were consigned to the great glasses graveyard in the sky by my daughter's grabby glasses-yanking habits, which eventually popped a small screw out, never to be found again, which left one of the arms all floppy and the whole shooting match liable to falling off my face at the slightest provocation. Which is probably why I'm using a fleecy hat to hold them on in this picture.

2013: a bit more strapped for cash these days, I resorted to buying glasses off the internet, and very successfully too, as it turned out. These two pairs are from Glasses Direct - the blue-grey lower pair are just from their standard range, but the top pair (which I intend to be my main pair) are your actual Patrick Cox designer jobs. And still a smidgen over 60 quid for two pairs, including lenses. The internet is great. Apologies for the mad starey eyes of death, by the way; taking selfies in dubious light will do that.

the last book I read

A Kind Man by Susan Hill.

Tommy Carr is the kind man of the novel's title. And a good thing too, because times are hard. What times those are is never explicitly stated, but we're in some sort of poverty-stricken working-class community, probably in the first half of the 20th century. You'd stereotypically assume we were oop North somewhere as well, but no one is rendered as talking with an outrageous accent, so it's hard to tell.

None of that stuff is particularly important, though, as the story is not concerned with the broad sweep of historical events; far from it. Tommy and Eve Gooch (no relation) meet, fall in love, marry, set up house together and have a child, Jeannie Eliza. Times are still hard, and Eve's time is taken up with caring for her daughter and helping out her sister Miriam who is saddled with both an idle and periodically unemployed husband and galloping fertility that keeps her popping out sons that want feeding and cleaning. On the upside, Tommy has a job that brings some money in, and they both adore their daughter.

So having set Eve and Tommy up as honest-to-goodness salt-of-the-earth types, it's time to heap flipping great wodges of misfortune and misery on their heads. Firstly Jeannie Eliza catches a mysterious fever and dies. Then, still consumed by grief, Tommy suffers some dramatic weight loss and then a series of growths in his abdomen and throat. The doctor concludes that he is riddled with cancer, that no treatment is possible, and sends him home to spend his remaining days with his family.

But just as Tommy is sinking into his final coma, and Eve is being desperately summoned back by the neighbours from Miriam's house, where she's been helping out with the kids, Tommy feels a great heat course through him and suddenly his pain is gone. And not only is he cured, seemingly miraculously, but he seems to have acquired the ability to cure others as well, through the transference of the same heat that has apparently cured him.

Once word gets around Tommy becomes something of a local celebrity, and people come from far away to get his hands laid on them. Some of them offer money, which he is reluctant to take, but times are hard, and eventually after curing a rich man's daughter and mother of various ailments he accepts some money for his trouble, and is instantly rewarded by having his powers taken away from him and having the cancer return with a vengeance.

So what are we to make of this? Has Tommy really been granted strange mystical healing powers, or is it all a bit of mass hysteria? And what of his recovery from the great massive tumorous lumps that were about to kill him? If it was the work of one of the pantheon of supposed gods, it's a pretty fickle, capricious and unreasonable god to re-apply the death sentence as soon as Tommy succumbs to the temptation of accepting a bit of money to make his family a bit more comfortable, although of course fickle, capricious and borderline psychopathic are qualities pretty closely associated with any of the supposed gods that humans have worshipped over the years.

The lurch into implausibility (a bit like the levitation business in The 27th Kingdom) aside, this is beautifully written, and barely long enough to qualify as a novel (185 pages, big print, lots of whitespace). What it's for is another matter - a meditation on kindness and goodness? a lament for the inscrutability of divine purpose? a black satire about grief and mass hysteria? Probably not the latter I would imagine, as the supernatural bits are played fairly straight, and Hill has known form as both a religionist and a writer of fiction depicting the supernatural.

the last book I read

Solar by Ian McEwan.

Michael Beard is a physicist, an eminent one but one whose best years are behind him. Those best years included some good stuff, though, including winning the Nobel Prize for some work expanding on Albert Einstein's work on photovoltaics. So now Beard is in his early fifties and surfing on his eminence by sitting on various councils and committees. Meanwhile his fifth marriage is falling apart. Don't get the idea that beard is some kind of square-jawed muscled Adonis though; he's more your stereotypical short fat bespectacled science guy, apparently irresistible to certain types of woman but not really a long-term prospect owing to his aversion to the idea of having children and also his pathological infidelity.

While normally it's Beard's own putting it about that signals the end of his marriages, in this case it's his wife Patrice who is having it away with the Beards' former builder in an indiscreet and shameless fashion. Eventually Patrice moves on to having an affair with Tom Aldous,  a young colleague of Beard's at a centre devoted to climate change research. When Beard returns home unexpectedly early from a fact-finding trip to Spitsbergen and surprises Aldous in his house, a freak accident involving a badly-secured bearskin rug and a sharp-cornered coffee table results in Aldous' death, a death for which Beard manages to frame Patrice's previous lover Ronald Tarpin. Meanwhile there's this dossier of secret research that Aldous had put together for Beard's eyes only, which it turns out contains some good and even revolutionary stuff.

Cut to a few years later and Beard is heading up a team pioneering artificial photosynthesis techniques using a big solar array in a newly-purchased site in the New Mexico desert. Certain of these techniques were based on the contents of Tom Aldous' notes, which Beard hasn't necessarily been scrupulous about properly attributing. He's also embroiled in a relationship with a woman, Melissa, in London, who has finally managed to snare him into fatherhood, and another one with a trailer-dwelling local waitress, Darlene. Beard is in New Mexico for the grand opening and unveiling of the test facility, but constant distractions intervene - Ronald Tarpin, recently released from prison, his own ill-health, comprising morbid obesity and a recently-diagnosed skin cancer, his various mistresses, in particular Melissa and Darlene who have each recently become aware of the other's existence, and the presence of a lawyer acting for Tom Aldous' (and Beard's) previous employer, the climate change centre, who wants to talk to him urgently to discuss some claims of plagiarism and intellectual property theft.

Like the Booker-winning Amsterdam in 1998 this is best categorised under "Entertainments" rather than "Novels", as it's blackly comic throughout. And while some of the set-pieces are derivative of other comic novels - the whole crisp-stealing story is lifted from Douglas Adams' So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, for all that it's acknowledged as such when Beard re-tells the story later, and the delivering-a-speech-while-queasy routine is straight out of Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim - overall it works pretty well. There's inevitably a fair amount of exposition about climate-change issues, about which McEwan is commendably robust in defending the scientific consensus, and some more hand-wavey stuff about exactly what it is Beard is meant to have done to have earned his Nobel back in the day.

I actually enjoyed this more than the rather po-faced and self-consciously literary pairing of Atonement and Saturday, more than the barely-a-novel-at-all On Chesil Beach, indeed probably more than any McEwan I've read since 1997's Enduring Love. The unexpected death of a peripheral character halfway through providing the central protagonist with a moral dilemma does provide an odd parallel with the last McEwan I read, The Innocent, though Beard manages to resolve the situation without having to dismember anyone, which is nice.

Solar won the apparently fairly recently instigated and splendidly named Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction in 2010. My list for this one goes: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2010.

the second-last book I read

Drop City by TC Boyle.

Far out, man. So this bunch of, like, totally beautiful cats have got this place in California where they've set up a hippie commune and are totally going to, like, live off the land, get it together with Mother Nature and just be, like, at one with the whole cosmic vibes of the universe. Yeah?

Well, no, not exactly. For every person that turns up at the commune who's down with all the peace and love stuff but also prepared to do the menial mucking-in stuff like building cabins and peeling potatoes there's at least one who's just in it for the free grub and easy access to drugs and doe-eyed hippie chicks still revelling in the novelty and liberation of easy access to the contraceptive pill. Not only that, but as much as California is one of the groovier states of the USA, massive public drug consumption is still illegal, as is lobbing up a load of buildings that haven't been certified as being in accordance with all the building codes and the like. So the authorities are threatening to lay some kind of major heavy trip on the commune. Bummer. What is also far from cool are the allegations that some of the less mellowed-out members of the commune gang-raped an under-age girl on the premises.

So the commune's de facto leader, Norm, has an idea - his uncle left him a property up in the wilds of Alaska, on the banks of a tributary of the Yukon. If we were really serious about getting away from the trappings of so-called "civilisation", man, we'd relocate up there, where the air is clear, the salmon are leaping, and there's nobody around to care if you want to get out of your head for a while. How hard can it be?

Well, if you're Cecil ("Sess") Harder, pretty hard, as it happens. Sess has got the Alaskan living thing pretty well nailed, with a riverside cabin, a troop of sled dogs and a well-established fur-trapping business. But it's still a pretty harsh and lonely existence, and as much as Sess would like someone to share it with it takes a certain type of woman to put up with the seclusion and remoteness, particularly in winter. But Sess is in luck, as there's a lady called Pamela who's advertised for a husband out in the wilderness because she reckons that "civilised" society is on the brink of a catastrophic meltdown and she wants to hook up with a guy who can render his own bear-fat, make moose sausages and knock together a dog-sled with just a few bits of discarded porcupine guts and some whittling. And when it turns out that all the other marriage candidates are mentally unstable malodorous perverts, Sess is in business. So he moves Pamela into his riverside cabin and they commence a life of robust rustic domesticity, with no neighbours to worry about, or at least as long as the old homestead just up the river remains empty, and who's going to take that on, right?

So the hippies head north from California, blag their way over the Canadian border by pretending to be a rock band, and arrive in Boynton, the last outpost of civilisation before you have to load all your stuff into a canoe and head upriver. Needless to say they are regarded as if they were visitors from outer space, with their psychedelic rock music, flappy loon pants and tie-dyed headscarves. While a few of the party decide to stick around in Boynton, the hardcore group head up to Norm's uncle's place and start settling in. Certain harsh lessons are learned early on - it doesn't matter how excellent the pot is if you haven't got a roof over your head when winter comes, a commitment to lentils and animal rights is a probable death sentence when you need to be laying in meat supplies for the winter, and while you can carry a few freeloaders in sunny California you really need people to pull their weight in the frozen north. Sess and Pamela try to help out where they can, and strike up a friendship with a few of the hippies, notably Marco and Paulette aka Star, but Sess has a few unresolved troubles of his own, most notably his increasingly violent feud with unhinged ex-Marine and bush pilot Joe Bosky. And when Sess takes Marco under his wing and takes him out with the dog team for a fur-trapping expedition and Joe Bosky heads after them in his plane to take a few random pot-shots at them, the scene is set for some violent plot resolution.

This is the fourth Boyle in this series, after Riven Rock, The Inner Circle and The Tortilla Curtain, and dates from 2003, a year before The Inner Circle but after the other two. It's much more of a rollicking adventure story than any of the other three, lacking the moral ambiguity of The Tortilla Curtain and not being shackled to real-life historical events like the other two. That's not to say that for all the Jack London-esque snowy adventure stuff there aren't some sly points being made here - the similarities between the seemingly poles-apart worlds of the hippies and the Alaskan backwoodsmen, for instance, revolving as they do around a shared suspicion of "society" and a desire to withdraw from it, and also the brutally repressive treatment of women meted out by both - for all the groovy peace and love business the women in the hippie commune are still expected to do most of the cooking and cleaning, as well as being uncomplaining sex receptacles as and when required. It's no accident that the action in the book is set in 1970, at the rancid tail-end of the hippie dream, well after the Summer Of Love, after Altamont and in the year the Beatles split up. I think this is probably my favourite of the four Boyles I've read so far, but they are uniformly excellent, and I fervently urge you to get into them.

up the duf

A further update to my table of 63s at major championships is required after the recent PGA Championship at Oak Hill. Jason Dufner, the eventual champion, shot 63 in the second round, and, like Steve Stricker a couple of years before, missed a very makeable putt for a 62 which would have rendered all my lists irrelevant.

The Dufmeister also bucked a recent trend by becoming only the second man in 27 years and 16 major championship 63s to follow up such a round by actually winning the tournament. And it was nice to see the usual heartwarming scene of toothy family togetherness on the 18th green bucked as well as Dufner made an unashamed grab for his wife's arse as she embraced him after he'd holed the winning putt. And why not? I expect he probably sank a long one later that evening as well. Maybe she even let him play the back nine; it's not every day you win a major, after all.

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Johnny Miller	US Open	1973	final	WON	Johnny Miller
Bruce Crampton	USPGA	1975	second	2nd	Jack Nicklaus
Mark Hayes	Open	1977	second	tied 9th	Tom Watson
Jack Nicklaus	US Open	1980	first	WON	Jack Nicklaus
Tom Weiskopf	US Open	1980	first	37th	Jack Nicklaus
Isao Aoki	Open	1980	third	tied 12th	Tom Watson
Raymond Floyd	USPGA	1982	first	WON	Raymond Floyd
Gary Player	USPGA	1984	second	tied 2nd	Lee Trevino
Nick Price	Masters	1986	third	5th	Jack Nicklaus
Greg Norman	Open	1986	second	WON	Greg Norman
Paul Broadhurst	Open	1990	third	tied 12th	Nick Faldo
Jodie Mudd	Open	1991	final	tied 5th	Ian Baker-Finch
Nick Faldo	Open	1993	second	2nd	Greg Norman
Payne Stewart	Open	1993	final	12th	Greg Norman
Vijay Singh	USPGA	1993	second	4th	Paul Azinger
Michael Bradley	USPGA	1995	first	tied 54th	Steve Elkington
Brad Faxon	USPGA	1995	final	5th	Steve Elkington
Greg Norman	Masters	1996	first	2nd	Nick Faldo
Jose Maria Olazabal	USPGA	2000	third	tied 4th	Tiger Woods
Mark O’Meara	USPGA	2001	second	tied 22nd	David Toms
Vijay Singh	US Open	2003	second	tied 20th	Jim Furyk
Thomas Bjorn	USPGA	2005	third	tied 2nd	Phil Mickelson
Tiger Woods	USPGA	2007	second	WON	Tiger Woods
Rory McIlroy	Open	2010	first	tied 3rd	Louis Oosthuizen
Steve Stricker	USPGA	2011	first	tied 12th	Keegan Bradley
Jason Dufner	USPGA	2013	second	WON	Jason Dufner

jjrip

A quick word on the demise of JJ Cale, who died aged 74 at the weekend. He's one of those guys people know more through his songs being covered by others, so here's a few you might remember:

• Eric Clapton's covers of both After Midnight and Cocaine, in both cases fairly close approximations of the originals with some of the subtlety sucked out
• Lynyrd Skynyrd's rocked-up version of Call Me The Breeze
• Spiritualized's trancetastic Run, which is basically a sneakily renamed cover of Call Me The Breeze
• Santana's somewhat more histrionic version of Sensitive Kind
• basically the entire career of Dire Straits, though I don't know that they ever specifically covered a Cale song

Cale's own versions of his stuff are the ones to go for, though, as they've got a shuffly laid-back charm that sounds easy but evaporates when anyone else tries to reproduce it. If one were in the mood for strained metaphors one might say that JJ Cale is the Anne Tyler of swampy country-flavoured rock music: simple on the surface but with more going on the closer you look. Like Tyler there is a certain uniformity to it all, so you probably don't need the whole oeuvre unless you're particularly fanatical, not that Cale (who was by his own admission not a big fan of hard work anyway) put out albums all that frequently, or not after his 1970s heyday anyway. If you look at the list you'll see the aversion to effort extends to album titles as well: while he managed to rouse himself to picking a single-word title for six of his first eight albums (arguably seven of nine depending how you interpret the hyphen in his ninth album Travel-Log), his fifth, eighth and tenth albums are called 5, #8 and Number 10 respectively.

I own the two late-70s albums Troubadour (aka the one with Cocaine on it) and 5 (aka the one with Sensitive Kind on it); if you have his first album Naturally (aka the one with Call Me The Breeze on it) as well, that would probably do you.

Here's a few for you: a late-70s performances of After Midnight, Boilin' Pot and Cocaine, and an acoustic rendition of Travelin' Light from the mid-90s.

royal spoil

Last one for the moment, I promise: one of the other things I've experienced in the course of general Facebook discourse illustrates quite neatly the way in which reflexive reverence for the royal family is very like reflexive adherence to religion. You can imagine, based on the blanket coverage even in the usually more sensible corners of the UK media (and top marks to the Guardian for offering a "Republican" button to switch it all off), how much inane royal baby chatter there's been on Facebook lately.

That's mildly irritating to me, but understandable and fine and I don't get all aerated about it - people can post what they like, and I'm not the Facebook police, after all. But I do demand that the same courtesy be extended to me if I wish to post an update or a comment mildly dissenting from the mass fawning and forelock-tugging. However, the usual reaction is a sort of tutting "why are you spoiling it for everyone?".

The religious parallel, which I hope is clear, is with things like the atheist bus adverts, where a general background noise of public goddism is deemed to be the default, but any overt reference to atheism, however mild, prompts a spate of mass swooning and pearl-clutching. It's the sort of (possibly willed, possibly unconscious, I don't know) blindness to what's around you every hour of every day that's the target of this hoary old parable:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

That specific wording is from this series of quotes from David Foster Wallace's This Is Water, which is a transcript of his commencement address to students at Kenyon College in Ohio in 2005. As usual with DFW it's a bit verbose and convoluted but has some good stuff. It's available in book form, but best to watch and hear it as originally delivered, I think.

last refuge of the scoundrel

I should point out that while the conversation referenced in that last post was a pretty good stab at filling out the Unthinking Deference To Unearned Privilege Bingo card, other royalist tropes are available. Off the top of my head a couple we didn't cover are:

• they do a lot for tourism! Look at all the Americans visiting Buckingham Palace. Because of course a) literally everyone who visits Buck House gets a personal audience with the Queen and b) literally no-one visits the palaces at Versailles or Schönbrunn any more now they aren't inhabited by your actual living breathing royalty.
• they seem like nice people! and they've just had a baby! WHY DO YOU HATE NICE PEOPLE!? AND BABIES!! I'm sure they're lovely. And I'm delighted that all is well with the baby, just as I'm generally disposed not to wish ill upon any other pair of randomly-selected prospective parents that I don't know from Adam. Actually, I say I'm sure they're lovely; what I actually think is that I'm sure they're achingly dull in person to the extent that you'd have to chew your own lower limbs off if you ever got stuck in a room with them, but on the other hand they're both blandly attractive with nice teeth, which is the main thing. I think we can all agree that Prince Charles is an idiot, though. So much so that when Liz finally pops her clogs I think we should take the homeopathic approach to the succession; maximum royal power will be achieved by successively diluting the number of monarchs until it is at an infinitesimal and indeed undetectable level. 

To be fair, I find the fact that Charles (a known crank about a wide variety of topics) is a big supporter of homeopathy to be less worrying than that Jeremy Hunt, someone who is specifically paid to know better, is as well. A homeopathic concentration of Conservative politicians in positions of power would be highly desirable as well.

william, it was really nothing

I had an educational exchange of views on Facebook last night which helped to crystallise some of my annoyance about the acres of uncritical blanket coverage devoted to the arrival of the royal baby. In fairness to the media, it is the silly season and there is literally fuck all else to report, except David Cameron's laughably ill-thought-out and undemocratic attempts to police the rude bits of the internet. More on that later, perhaps.

I take the view that if you put your ill-considered views on the internet you are personally responsible for any public ridicule you receive, and furthermore if that ridicule causes you personal offence or discomfort then you should consider re-evaluating those views. I certainly willingly submit my own ramblings on this blog, on any topic, to those rules. That plus having redacted the names of the protagonists (except my own) clears my conscience regarding reproducing the Facebook exchange here. I do so not to poke fun (well, maybe a bit) but to illustrate the ticking-off of various Royalist Bingo boxes.

I hope it's legible; Blogger's image reproduction options remain a bit shit, unfortunately. I've labelled a few points that I think are of interest.

1. first appearance of the "if you don't have the monarchy, you'll have President Blair; IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT" trope;
2. not really sure what this is about; yes, there are other rich people in the world, and some of them may well have come by their riches by dubious means, but not many of them are heads of state. In any case this is a blatant "look over there" argument;
3. a variant on number 1; get rid of the royal family and the only choices are a US-style presidency or Zimbabwe-style anarchy. Personally my preference is for something like the Irish system whereby the President is pretty much a ceremonial role, with the ribbon-cutting and the state openings of parliament and the like, but can express opinions freely. My affection for this system is no doubt tied to my affection for the current Irish president Michael D Higgins, who I think is a pretty splendid bloke. Here he is just shooting the shit on a talk show in a casual way, a way you couldn't really imagine Lizzie Windsor doing, and here he is in slightly more combative mode (to be fair, a year or so before he became president) ripping some Tea Party guy a new one. 
4. argumentum ad populum. If 51% of the population don't agree with an opinion you hold, you are apparently not allowed to express it.
5. I presume that this is a reference to the Crown Estates; obvious points in relation to this are that firstly the monarch's claim to these inheres in their office as monarch, and not in their person, so it's a moot point what the position would be if the office got abolished, and secondly it's another "look over there" dodge. To put it another way, I'm allowed to say "cancer is bad" without having found a cure, and in a similar way I should be allowed to say "hereditary monarchy is bad" without having a specific roadmap for its abolition. 
6. argumentum ad populum again
7. this is a whiplash-inducing oscillation between two positions, firstly the PRESIDENT BLAIR position from #1, but also the entirely contradictory position that the monarch wields no political power anyway. Well, if that's the case it doesn't really matter who does the job, does it? or even if the job exists at all?
8. I couldn't resist throwing the God thing in as a bit of chum in the water. I have literally no idea where this came from though, or what it's meant to mean;
9. Well, that was asking for both barrels;
10. And a bit of passive-aggressive bullshit to finish. 

I should say, in the interests of full disclosure, that there were a handful more comments after the point where I've cut the thread off, but none of them particularly relevant to the topic. As I've said before, the subject of the monarchy is quite a good litmus test for people you thought were just regular people; express the mildest dissent from the default position and some of them will lose the plot in a pretty spectacular way.

the last book I read

The History Of Love by Nicole Krauss.

Leopold Gursky is knocking on a bit, probably eightysomething. He's a retired Jewish locksmith, who came to New York from Poland (the bit of it which is in modern-day Belarus) after surviving the Holocaust.

Alma Singer, on the other hand, is just starting out in life. She's fourteen, and having to juggle coping with a widowed mother and a younger brother who thinks he may be the messiah (or more accurately one of 36 of them), and also the beginnings of those troublesome sticky feelings, you know, down there.

Two parallel narratives, you say? Well, then there must be a thread connecting them that enables things to be all brought together at the end in a satisfying manner, amirite? Well, possibly, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Firstly, Leopold's back-story goes a bit like this: back in Poland/Belarus he was in love with a girl called Alma, and wrote a book for her. Not easy hauling a manuscript around while you're hiding from the Nazis in a coal-bunker, so he entrusts it to his friend Zvi Litvinoff until things have cooled off and he can reclaim it. The hiding-in-coalsheds period lasts longer than anyone could have imagined, and by the time it's over Zvi is in South America and Alma has headed for New York, both of them assuming that Leopold is dead.

Not so, however, and Leo soon heads for New York himself to be joyfully reunited with his love. Trouble is, in the intervening couple of years Alma has got married to and had a son by another man. Not only that, but before doing all that she had given birth to another son, this one being the one she was unwittingly carrying when she and Leo parted. Alma and Leo remain in occasional touch, but Leo isn't able to have any sort of relationship with his son, Isaac, still less reveal the truth of his parentage.

Back to Alma (the younger one) now: when her father was courting her mother he gave her a copy of a little-known book called The History Of Love by Zvi Litvinoff which he'd bought in a second-hand shop in Buenos Aires. Back in the present Alma's mother is working on a translation of the book into English (from the original Spanish) at the request of (and financed by) the mysterious Jacob Marcus.

With half a mind to trying to engineer a romance between her mother and Jacob Marcus, Alma decides to research the real-life Alma as portrayed in the novel. This leads her to the real-life Jacob Marcus, who turns out not to exist but instead to be an alter ego for Isaac Moritz, Leo and (the older) Alma's son, a famous writer in his own right but, unfortunately for Alma, just recently deceased. Alma leaves a note at his house, which is picked up by Isaac's younger brother, who calls her house to explain that Isaac knew the novel's true authorship (i.e. Leo, later plagiarised by Zvi Litvinoff after he'd decided Leo was dead). Alma's brother answers the phone, and decides to engineer a meeting between Alma and Leo in Central Park, the tentative beginnings of which mark the end of the book.

There's a sub-genre of fiction to which The History Of Love belongs which can be broadly titled Writing About Writing; sub-sub-genres of this include epistolary novels (like We Need To Talk About Kevin and Restless), and also novels that feature (fictional) works of fiction as key plot points. That second sub-sub-genre is the relevant one here; the trick here is that depending on the requirements of your plot you've got to persuade the readership that the work you're providing snippets of in the text is either a) awful or b) brilliant. Again, the latter is the relevant one here, just as it was in, say, The World According To Garp (which contains several supposed extracts of Garp's writings). The former is represented by things like the awful bodice-ripper romances that Annie Wilkes forces Paul Sheldon to write in Stephen King's Misery. Either way, it's a hard trick to pull off convincingly. This entertainingly grumpy review of the novel makes the pithy point that "If the book-within-a-book were really so terrific, the author would have written that book instead."

My view, for what it's worth, is that this is generally very good, but a bit uninvolving in that we don't really get to know anyone well enough, mainly Alma Singer, who is the most appealing and interesting character. That's mostly because of the digressions into writing about writing, but also because as the novel goes on there's a need to bring all the plot strands together, and also because the novel is just quite short. Because of this the tragic circumstances of Leo's escape from Europe and doomed love for Alma never really bite as hard as they probably should, and the neat resolution of the plot feels a bit, well, neat. You perhaps find yourself admiring the neat clockwork-y precision of the plot's construction at the expense of really engaging with the messy reality of the lives being portrayed. Or maybe that's just bollocks; who knows?

Interestingly, as I only discovered after finishing the book, Nicole Krauss is married to Jonathan Safran Foer, a celebrated novelist in his own right (in fact he is probably more famous than her). Not only that, but their respective second novels (this is Krauss's, Safran Foer's is called Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close) share a startling number of similarities in plot and general construction. That link reckons that Krauss's novel is "strikingly superior to her husband's", though, so I've evidently, if unwittingly, chosen wisely.

stop that racket

So, Wimbledon, belatedly. Actually, if I can just get you to imagine some sort of summary/analysis thing complete with plaudits for Andy Murray (who I think is wholly admirable, just in case this all sounds a bit grudging) here then that'll save me actually having to write it.

Let's go off on a tangent instead. Now it used to be said that Wimbledon and the French Open were the two niche, "specialist" events on the Grand Slam calendar (the other two, now that they've settled down into being hard-court events, providing the level playing-field) - the French favouring the relentless baseline sluggers and Wimbers favouring the serve-volley merchants. As it happens if there's one thing that the recent success of Murray, Djokovic and Nadal (and even Roger Federer) at Wimbledon proves, it's that this is really no longer true, and that these days Wimbledon is a sort of quirky sub-division of the hard court season. Look back at the list of winners and you'll see that the last "proper" serve-volleyer to win the Wimbledon men's singles was Goran Ivanisevic in 2001. Nonetheless I felt obliged to do the research and find out what the stats say is the most "specialist" event of the four. The way I translate that is: here's a list of all the winners of each of the Grand Slam tennis tournaments in the Open era (i.e. since 1968) who never won any of the other Grand Slam tournaments.

Australian Open

• Mark Edmondson (1976)
• Roscoe Tanner (Jan 1977)
• Vitas Gerulaitis (Dec 1977)
• Brian Teacher (1980)
• Johan Kriek (1981, 1982)
• Petr Korda (1998)
• Thomas Johansson (2002)

French Open

• Andres Gimeno (1972)
• Adriano Panatta (1976)
• Yannick Noah (1983)
• Michael Chang (1989)
• Andres Gomez (1990)
• Sergi Bruguera (1993, 1994)
• Thomas Muster (1995)
• Gustavo Kuerten (1997, 2000, 2001)
• Carlos Moya (1998)
• Albert Costa (2002)
• Juan Carlos Ferrero (2003)
• Gaston Gaudio (2004)

Wimbledon

• Pat Cash (1987)
• Michael Stich (1991)
• Richard Krajicek (1996)
• Goran Ivanisevic (2001)

US Open

• Manuel Orantes (1975)
• Patrick Rafter (1997, 1998)
• Andy Roddick (2003)
• Juan Martin Del Potro (2009)

So the numbers are: Australian Open 7, French Open 12, Wimbledon 4, US Open 4. Actually I think there's a case for saying that the French is even more of a statistical outlier than that makes it sound, because the Australian Open has only really been regularly attended by the top players since the late 1980s - for instance Bjorn Borg only ever played in it once, Jimmy Connors twice and John McEnroe twice during his Grand Slam-winning years. Cut down the qualifying period to since, say, 1990 and the numbers become 2, 8, 3, 3. I also strongly suspect that the US Open figure may come down as I think that it's highly likely (injury permitting) that Juan Martin Del Potro will win more Grand Slams.

As a further tangent it's interesting to note that while the French Open has been played on clay throughout its lifetime, and likewise Wimbledon on grass, the other two have had a more varied history: the Australian Open was played on grass up until 1987, and on various flavours of hard court since, and the US Open was played on grass until 1974, on clay from 1975 to 1977 and on a slightly different kind of hard court thereafter. Honestly, make your minds up.

limited parking available

As I've said before, Newport isn't the obvious city of choice if you're looking for somewhere to live or visit - off the top of my head Barcelona, Sydney and New York might be ahead of it in the world pecking order, plus maybe one or two others I haven't thought of, but it does have a few things going for it: it's a handily-placed transport hub for both road and rail, and it's got some interesting industrial history, including the splendid Transporter Bridge.

That said, the city centre is a dilapidated concrete disaster where I seldom venture, despite various mooted urban redevelopment projects, the most recent of which centred around the thousands of well-heeled American tourists who were going to pop in for some shopping between sessions of the 2010 Ryder Cup. However, as was entirely predictable, the golf crowd preferred to lounge around in their out-of-town hotels, get periodically bussed in to Celtic Manor for the golf and then jet back across the Atlantic without having gone anywhere near central Newport (and thus avoiding being stabbed up and robbed).

What Newport also has in its favour is some interesting city parks, little green oases which are all the more pleasing for being in sharp contrast with their surroundings. All cities have these, to be fair - my previous place of long-term residence, Bristol, has The Downs, Brandon Hill Park, Windmill Hill and the Oldbury Court and Ashton Court estates. While Newport doesn't have anything to compete with the grandeur of The Downs, there are a few little gems if you know where to look. Here's a few that I've found on my travels over the past few years:

• Tredegar Park - this is in a couple of parts, firstly the area around Tredegar House, which has some nice grounds, a lake, and is the venue for the weekly Newport Parkrun which I have been unwise enough to struggle round a couple of times of a Saturday morning. The second bit is the wilder section just to the north (accessible via a gate off Bassaleg Road) which includes the Gaer hillfort. 
• Belle Vue Park - just round the corner from our old house, this is a pretty Victorian park with some interesting trees and some grassy areas; quite hilly though. 
• Beechwood Park - just round the corner from our new house, this is a pretty Victorian park with some interesting trees and some grassy areas; quite hilly though. Spooky, huh?
• Glebelands Park - tucked away at the end of a single-track road just by junction 25 of the M4, this is quite an extensive grassy area in the crook of the elbow in the Usk where it turns from flowing west to south to cut through central Newport. It's cut in half by the elevated slip roads for junction 25a, and contains the remnants of an old miniature railway, a glimpse of the unimaginably glamorous glory days of which can be seen here. 

• Coronation Park - this is the venue which prompted this blog post when I was there on Sunday for a dog show. It's a long story, but basically Hazel was there in a non-dog-related capacity and I thought I'd take Nia down for a look around. Anyway, it's quite a nice little spot (though like Glebelands Park tucked away down an unpromising-looking road), next to the river and just a few yards from the eastern end of the Transporter Bridge. The bridge's eastern cable anchorage is at the park's north edge (my vantage point for the photo above). 

you kinchie devil

I don't get to buy, let alone drink, as much whisky as I used to back in the pre-bairn disposable income glory glory days, but just occasionally a bargain presents itself. And so it was this week when my local Morrisons were knocking out Glenkinchie for 25 quid a pop.

Glenkinchie is a Lowland single malt, a pretty rare breed these days. The only other one readily available in supermarkets is Auchentoshan. There's also the recently revived Bladnoch, and a couple of new ones that haven't officially produced any whisky yet.

Lowland malts are traditionally very light and mellow, with some of them (Auchentoshan claims to be the only remaining one) triple-distilling their spirit, uniquely among Scotch whiskies, though it's standard practice for Irish whiskey.

Dip in for a sniff and you get some magic markers, a bit of citrus-y lemony stuff and just a smidgen of custard tarts. Taste and it's surprisingly "hot" (at 43%) for something so apparently mellow, but you also get more lemon and custard creams and something that might be bananas.

Talking as we were of triple distillation, I thought a useful contrast might be provided by comparison with Bushmills, a bottle of which I was kindly given either for Christmas or my birthday, I can't remember. This one is a bit paler than the Glenkinchie, and much more estery (i.e. the magic markers again) when you have a sniff; it's sweeter too. Have a swig and it seems simultaneously sweeter and thinner, though you do get a bit of mouth-puckering astringency if you wait a bit.

I retain a soft spot in my heart for Bushmills, since it's the first proper single malt I actually paid my own money for, as recently as 2008, but I'd have to say that the Glenkinchie is the more interesting whisky; it's light and biscuity but deeper and darker and more complex as well. Even then, and as fine as the Glenkinchie is, it's up at the polite end of the spectrum as far as I'm concerned, my taste being more for the big hairy-chested Highlanders like the Clynelish and the Oban and the Ben Nevis. But it would be a shame for Lowland whisky to disappear, and while I'm sure Glenkinchie are doing OK (protected as they are by being part of the Diageo stable) there really are a very small number of distilleries left; same goes for the Campbeltown region which has even fewer.

the last book I read

My Summer Of Love by Helen Cross.

It's the mid-1980s, and we're somewhere in Yorkshire, where 15-year-old Mona lives in a pub with her father, sister and stepbrother, her mother having died of cancer a couple of years previously. Not much to do apart from obsessively play the fruit machines and surreptitiously get pissed, or at least not until Mona starts to earn some pocket-money tending to a horse owned by posh middle-class types the Fakenhams and gradually becomes aware of their daughter Tamsin.

Tamsin has troubles of her own - her parents are on the verge of splitting up, and her older sister Sadie has died of anorexia. With her parents away and rattling around the big old country pile by herself, Tamsin invites Mona over to stay. Well, two fifteen-year-old girls in a house together, you can imagine the consequences: much eating of unsuitable grub and raiding of the drinks cabinet, wild fantasising, protestations of undying love and friendship and a little light lesbianism. Some darker stuff too, though: a bit of vandalism and the beating-up of Tamsin's father's girlfriend Nina, and the setting-up of Phil, slimy local photographer and serial seducer of young girls, as a suspect in the disappearance of local girl Julie Flowerdew.

As summer flings do, this one comes to an end, as Tamsin's father returns, as does, rather unexpectedly, Sadie, who turns out not to be dead after all. Disillusioned with Tamsin's lies, Mona returns to the pub, only to find that Phil has topped himself in his car. As Tamsin and her stepbrother PorkChop catch up with her, the stage is set for a final act of violence.

The summer of 1984 really was exceptionally hot, and it's a well-worked literary trope that this sort of weather encourages both simmering sexual tension and occasional cathartic acts of violence, both of which are present and correct here. The whole thing of friendship and innocence curdling and going rancid in the sun is pretty well-realised, as is the furious intensity of teenage female friendships and the speed with which they unravel. That said this sort of black comedy is pretty hard to carry off, and I'm not sure this is quite well-written enough to do it totally convincingly. Also, any book which sells itself with a pair of scantily-clad jailbait-y milky thighs on the front cover and the clear implicit promise of some ferocious girl-on-girl action within had really better deliver, and what we get here is a bit half-hearted and perfunctory. But, if you're interested, it's on page 156 of my copy.

My Summer Of Love was made into a film in 2004, starring among others the rather lovely Emily Blunt as Tamsin, one which appears to take a number of liberties with the plot of the book.