celebrity croakylikey of the day

So it's RIP Pete Seeger, folk pioneer, political campaigner, environmental activist and the late Kirsty MacColl's step-half-uncle. While he undoubtedly wrote some significant songs, I have to say I find that particular brand of folk music to be a bit off-putting in its wide-eyed earnestness and hearty all-join-in mateyness, and moreover I can't quite shake the mental picture of Keith (as played by Roger Sloman) from Nuts In May strumming his banjo and singing about going to the zoo.

So while Seeger's pioneering work paved the way for the folk revolution of the early 1960s of which Bob Dylan was the figurehead, it's easy to see why it was Dylan's looser, cleverer, more sardonic songs with their mix of traditional protest and personal and sexual politics which really struck a chord with the record-buying public. Add to that Dylan's willingness to experiment musically (in contrast to Seeger's traditionalism) and you have (to me at least) a much more interesting mix. Seeger's reaction to the key moment in Dylan's career, his going electric in 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival, is the subject of some controversy, depending who you believe Seeger either lost his shit completely and tried to cut the cables with an axe or just protested the rotten sound quality which was preventing the audience from hearing Dylan's lyrics.

A bit like JJ Cale, a lot of Seeger's songs are better-known via other people's versions. Here's Peter, Paul and Mary's version of If I Had A Hammer, and here's the mighty Byrds with their electrified version of Turn! Turn! Turn! in 1965. Turn! Turn! Turn! was famously based on some Bible verses, specifically Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, which you need to be careful not to confuse with Ezekiel 25:17 if you can possibly avoid it.

honey I whisky-ed the haggis

It was Burns Night again last night, so I concocted another haggis-based recipe. Why not just go for the traditional haggis, bashed neeps and clampit tatties, you might ask. Well, because it's deadly dull and bland, is why, plus none of it has any texture. Everything being squishy and amorphous so you can just spoon it in is great when you're eight months old, but as an adult I demand more interesting textures in my food, maybe even something that requires me to chew occasionally. I can do that, I have teeth, so let's push the envelope and use them a bit.

The haggis-stuffed-into-some-poultry theme from three years back is a good one, but that last dish suffered from being a bit dry (a problem it shares with the classic neeps and tatties version), so here's my solution to that problem: haggis-stuffed chicken in whisky sauce.

So basically you mash up the haggis - there's 60g or so per breast here, basically one double-pack of these MacSween's haggis slices, which seemed to be all there was available anywhere - with some whisky, slice open a couple of chicken breasts, stuff them, stick them in a baking dish with the cut edge facing upwards to stop everything falling out, pour the sauce over, and bake for about 40-45 minutes. The sauce went a little something like this:

• most of a decent-sized glass of whisky* - use some of the rest to wet the haggis with before you mash it up, and drink the rest;
• a small amount of vegetable stock;
• a dessertspoon or so of Dijon mustard;
• a couple of dessertspoons of honey - any sort will do, but I suppose if you wanted to be fanatically Scottish you'd use one of the heather-based ones;
• a splash of lemon juice;
• a dessertspoon or so of Philly cheese, or a dollop of cream, whichever fits best with your diet regime - note that this is best stirred in at the end.

Once the chicken is cooked, take it out and leave it for 5 minutes while you stir your creamifying agent of choice into the sauce, then slice up the chicken, arrange as artfully as you like on a plate, add some roasty potato wedges and some green veg, bish bosh, sorted. And very nice too.

You'll notice from the "after" photograph that we cooked some asparagus; just to provide a statistical data point for anyone who's interested I am in the (according to Wikipedia) 78% of the human population who don't notice their piss smelling of asparagus after eating it. My piss pretty much still just smells of piss.

[* - my secret whisky blend for this dish is as follows: one part Teacher's to two parts old-school Ledaig. No particular reason except that I only had a thimbleful of Teacher's left, so I needed to supplement it, and I thought something smoky might be more interesting.]

schortbach und zeidz und etwas für das Wochenende

Remember my local barber? The one just down the road bearing the punningly chucklesome name of Herr Kutz? Well, despite my fears for its commercial health and welfare, it seems still to be there, and I'm pretty sure I recall even seeing it with the shutters up and open for business a while back.

If they are struggling in the current grim financial climate where people are probably either growing their hair long to save a few bob or resorting to some hideously botched amateur DIY hair-cutting regime, then they should consider taking a leaf out of the book of the bloke who runs the identically named salon in Plymouth.

This guy (whose name is Anthony Braddon) is complaining that the makers of the latest computer gaming phenomenon Grand Theft Auto V have stolen his hairdressing concept. What he means by this is that somewhere in the astonishingly detailed GTAV universe, as you meander about fulfilling the terms of one of the complex missions, or just kick back and do a bit of exploring in between more important stuff like shooting people and beating up prostitutes, you can find a hairdresser's called Herr Kutz. Where you can probably go in and get a haircut if you want, or just mow down everyone inside with an AK-47 and/or incinerate them with a flamethrower, depending on your mood.

That's about where the similarity ends, though, although Mr. Braddon is most insistent that the fictional version displays a series of similarities with his real-life establishment that absolutely could not have arisen by chance. Like, for instance, the interior of the shop looks like the interior of a hairdresser's. And so does his! And there is a claim that the sign is written in "the same font". Is it, though?

So, basically, kudos to Mr. Braddon for dreaming up a cheap way of getting some publicity for his establishment, which I'm quite prepared to believe offers a veritable cornucopia of tonsorial delights of a splendidly high quality, with no accidental ear-severing, and not even the remotest possibility either of being the unwilling recipient of a Lionel Blair cut or ending up having your throat slashed and being made into a pie. It's somewhat implausible to me that - having presumably trawled the internet looking for stuff to get faux-offended by - Mr. Braddon didn't spot that there are at least three other establishments of the same name in the UK, not to mention one in Canada. With regard to the GTAV use of the name, apparently "he has consulted lawyers over alleged trademark infringement but was told they could not do anything". I'm impressed they managed to stop laughing for long enough to get such a coherent sentence out. Game creators Rockstar North are apparently "yet to comment on the accusations", so they're obviously still pissing themselves.

As always it's hard to work out which bits of this supremely lame non-story originated with Mr. Braddon himself, and which bits have been confabulated by the lazy drunken Daily Mail hack dispatched to suburban Plymouth, probably as a punishment for some misdemeanour - not hating immigrants enough or something. The one bright spot is that, buried in the midst of the article, the careful reader can find - finally! - an explanation for the shop's name. It's - wait for it - "a play on words". Ahhhhh, right.

the last book I read

Waiting For Sunrise by William Boyd.

It's 1913, and young actor Lysander Rief is, along with a whole host of other famous or soon-to-be-famous people, in Vienna. Lysander's presence is for perhaps less momentous reasons, in global terms anyway, though pretty momentous for him - he's consulting an English psychoanalyst, Dr. Bensimon, about an issue of a rather personal nature. Rather unusually for an otherwise healthy young man, Lysander has anorgasmia - so instead of finishing off in the prescribed manner, wiping the old chap on the curtains and bidding his lady friend good day with a jaunty tip of the hat he's hammering away joylessly for hours before eventually having to give up and go and have a cup of tea.

This unfortunate situation hasn't stopped him from still having something of an eye for the ladies, though, and he soon has a chance encounter in Dr. Bensimon's waiting room with Hettie Bull, artist's model and muse and fellow patient, though in exactly what capacity is never made clear. It's certainly not anything to do with a distaste for sex, because no sooner have she and Lysander struck up a conversation than she's inviting him over to her studio for a bit of nude modelling, a transparent ruse that pretty much inevitably ends up with the two of them going at it like knives.

Things take a downhill turn, though, when in quick succession Hettie announces that she is pregnant with Lysander's child and accuses him of rape. Lysander is thrown in prison, but manages to escape back to England with a bit of collusion from some slightly shady types at the British Embassy. Needless to say once Lysander is safely home and World War I has broken out, these shady types come calling on him to repay his debt by doing a favour for them.

This favour involves heading off to the shores of Lake Geneva to try to track down the recipient of some intercepted coded messages from England, and "persuade" this recipient to give up the code cipher that decodes them. Lysander turns out not only to be a master of disguise (putting his acting skills to good use) but also to have some aptitude for certain other espionage skills, like torture. He puts these to such good effect that he inadvertently kills the man he's interrogating, and in making good his escape is repeatedly shot by one of his Swiss contacts. So not a completely smooth operation, but Lysander does come away, in addition to being riddled with bullets, with the code cipher he was after.

Rather than gratefully allowing Lysander to retire from the spying business, though, his handlers want him to do another mission - this time to find the source of the now-decrypted messages in the War Office in London. The outcome of these investigations involves people rather closer to home - literally so in this case as the main suspect is an associate of Lysander's mother. This prompts some agonised weighing of family loyalty against patriotic duty, until, as usually happens in these circumstances, matters are taken out of the protagonist's hands and the stage is set for some climactic confrontations and revelations.

This is the fourth Boyd on this list and (leaving aside A Good Man In Africa which was an out-of-sequence dip into the back catalogue) follows on from Restless and Ordinary Thunderstorms in being quite thriller-y and from Restless in particular in concerning itself with the details of wartime espionage (though that was World War II). The plot here meanders about quite a lot and you get the impression that the various parts (Vienna, London, a brief trip to the French trenches, Geneva, London again) are just separate episodes linked together solely by featuring the same protagonist rather than being linked by a strong narrative thread.

Some of the characters' motivations are a bit thin as well - it's never entirely clear why Lysander's mother kills herself towards the end of the book, since she seems to have been cleared of any suspicion of involvement in the spying plot, and Lysander's own motives towards the various women he's involved with throughout are never very clear either. He has dalliances with old flame Blanche, Hettie, his co-star in Strindberg's Miss Julie, and an unrequited thing for Mme. Duchesne, his Swiss contact, even after she puts half-a-dozen bullets in him, but just when you think he's decided that Hettie is the woman he can't live without he ups and proposes to Blanche after unexpectedly meeting her outside a London theatre during a Zeppelin raid.

Lysander's original reason for being in Vienna - his anorgasmia - seems to be a transparent MacGuffin that Boyd couldn't be bothered continuing with once it had put Lysander where he needed to be for the story to get going. Once he hooks up with Hettie he's soon firing the porridge gun into a succession of willing partners with no problems whatsoever, thus finding himself cured perhaps a little more readily than actually happens in real life.

Europe in 1913 is a pretty rich source of fictional jumping-off points - eve of disaster, early 20th century decadence about to be rudely interrupted by war, the old certainties swept away, disastrous but also cleansing in the dismantling of old class hierarchies, yadda yadda yadda. Of books in this list The Shooting Party is set at around the same time, of books not in this list there are probably hundreds. Vienna is also one of the recurring themes in John Irving's fiction, though not, as far as I recall, in the one Irving on this list, Until I Find You.

So, anyway, it's rollickingly readable, well-written and entertaining, as all Boyds are, and if that sounds like I'm building up to a "but" it's only that I still think Brazzaville Beach and The Blue Afternoon are the best things he's written. You can't really go far wrong with any of them, though.

block WHACK block block WHACK

Just a quick follow-up to the Kallis post - I'll try and keep it brief, as the fraction of my already minuscule blog readership that has any interest in this stuff must be vanishingly small, indeed the odds are it's probably just me. But, hey, any complaints? Get your own blog.

The criticism of Kallis as a bit of a stodgy batsman and not the most exciting to watch is a bit harsh, given his huge value to the South African team in the role he was asked to perform, but contains a grain of truth. His overall career strike rate of a fraction under 46 (note to non-stats-buffs: this is the number of runs scored per 100 balls faced) is low compared with his contemporaries like Ricky Ponting (59), Sachin Tendulkar and Kumar Sangakkara (both around 54), though higher than the proper stonewallers like Atherton and Boycott (both mid-30s).

So it seems a bit paradoxical that Kallis ranks second on the six-hitting list, almost as if he had a bit of a split personality while batting and would occasionally go berserk and whack a couple into the stands before settling down to blocking everything again.

So I therefore propose a new statistical measure which compares the number of sixes hit by a batsman with his overall scoring rate. You can't just divide one by the other, though, goodness me no, as since the sixes count is cumulative that would disproportionately favour people who've had very long careers. A fairer way would be to weight the formula with the number of innings batted in, as follows:

VMSI = (number of sixes hit) / (overall strike rate x number of innings)

VMSI stands for Violent Mood Swing Index, which is what I'm calling it. I mean, what else would you call it?

As before, let's restrict it to people with over 3000 runs to get rid of some of the freaky statistical outliers. Here's the top 25:

Name	Matches	Innings	Runs	Strike rate	Sixes	VMSI
CL Cairns (NZ)	62	104	3320	57.09	87	146.53
NS Sidhu (India)	51	78	3202	44.33	38	109.90
CD McMillan (NZ)	55	91	3116	54.95	54	107.99
A Flintoff (Eng/ICC)	79	130	3845	62.04	82	101.67
Misbah-ul-Haq (Pak)	46	78	3087	41.22	32	99.53
MS Dhoni (India)	81	127	4342	59.74	75	98.85
Imran Khan (Pak)	88	126	3807	47.52	55	91.86
JR Reid (NZ)	58	108	3428	33.84	33	90.29
AC Gilchrist (Aus)	96	137	5570	81.95	100	89.07
BJ Haddin (Aus)	54	91	3007	58.61	47	88.12
CH Gayle (WI)	99	174	6933	59.90	90	86.35
JH Kallis (ICC/SA)	166	280	13289	45.97	97	75.36
ML Hayden (Aus)	103	184	8625	60.10	82	74.15
CG Greenidge (WI)	108	185	7558	49.02	67	73.88
KP Pietersen (Eng)	104	181	8181	61.72	81	72.51
CL Hooper (WI)	102	173	5762	50.27	63	72.44
CH Lloyd (WI)	110	175	7515	57.77	70	69.24
BB McCullum (NZ)	82	141	4684	60.76	59	68.87
IT Botham (Eng)	102	161	5200	60.71	67	68.55
IVA Richards (WI)	121	182	8540	69.28	84	66.62
WJ Cronje (SA)	68	111	3714	44.63	33	66.61
BC Lara (ICC/WI)	131	232	11953	60.51	88	62.69
Mohammad Yousuf (Pak)	90	156	7530	52.39	51	62.40
V Sehwag (ICC/India)	104	180	8586	82.23	91	61.48
HH Gibbs (SA)	90	154	6167	50.26	47	60.72

A few things to note:

• Chris Cairns is out in front by quite a startling margin, by virtue of his remarkable sixes per innings rate and his brisk but not startling strike rate.
• Kallis comes in 12th, but note that he is first among batsmen with over 7000 runs, fourth among batsmen with over 4000 runs, and that of the people above him only Sidhu, Misbah and Gayle are full-time batsmen, all the others being all-rounders of one kind or another who typically batted at number 7 or lower and were given a bit more licence to swing the bat.
• A few names you wouldn't expect pop up, like the late Hansie Cronje and Navjot Sidhu of India. Sidhu in particular was notorious for (among other things) periods of scrupulous defence punctuated by some furious smiting, generally of spinners. In fact if you follow that link you'll see the first line of the Cricinfo biography reads "Navjot Singh Sidhu's cricket had a schizophrenic touch to it". QED, I'd say, since that's pretty much exactly what this index is a measure of.
• The men who do the breakneck scoring every day of the week, in particular the likes of Adam Gilchrist and Virender Sehwag, appear at 9th and 24th respectively in the list, undone by their high scoring rates.
• The reason the list seems to favour relatively modern players (John Reid is the only man on the list to have played Tests before 1965) is mainly because stats like exact numbers of balls faced and boundaries hit are not reliably available for older matches. 

kallis? kallis? who the bleep is kallis?

As predicted, the accuracy and relevance of my statistical data-mining in the last cricket-related post have been rapidly overtaken by events, the specific event in question being the slightly unexpected retirement (or, if you insist, "retiral") of Jacques Kallis from Test cricket following the Boxing Day Test against India in Durban, a match in which he fittingly scored a century.

A lot of the tributes written after his retirement describe Kallis as being one of the most under-rated of great cricketers, and I think this is probably true, for a number of reasons. Firstly it's often forgotten that he was a great all-rounder, not just a batsman - he did bowl a lot less in the later stages of his career, but he still ended up fifth on the all-time wicket-taking list for South Africa with 292. Secondly, there was a perception that despite his awesome power he was a bit one-paced (and, by implication, selfish) as a batsman, too concerned with protecting his wicket and his average to be able to let himself go when the match situation demanded it. There's probably some truth in this, but it is also true that Kallis owns the fastest Test 50 ever scored, and is second on the all-time six-hitting list with 97, three behind Adam Gilchrist.

Anyway, the batting average progression table now looks like this:

Player	Year	Average
Jacques Kallis	2013	55.37
Garfield Sobers	1974	57.78
Ken Barrington	1968	58.67
Don Bradman	1948	99.94

Break it down by country, keep the 3000-run minimum restriction, add one that says averages of over 40 only, and you get this:

England

Player	Year	Average
Andrew Strauss	2012	40.91
Michael Vaughan	2008	41.44
Marcus Trescothick	2006	43.79
Graham Thorpe	2005	44.86
Geoff Boycott	1982	47.72
Ted Dexter	1968	47.89
Ken Barrington	1968	58.67
Herbert Sutcliffe	1935	60.73

Australia

Player	Year	Average
Mike Hussey	2013	51.52
Ricky Ponting	2012	51.85
Greg Chappell	1984	53.86
Don Bradman	1948	99.94

South Africa

Player	Year	Average
Jacques Kallis	2013	55.37

India

Player	Year	Average
Sachin Tendulkar	2013	53.78

Pakistan

Player	Year	Average
Mohammad Yousuf	2010	52.29
Javed Miandad	1993	52.57

Sri Lanka

Player	Year	Average
Sanath Jayasuriya	2007	40.07
Hashan Tillakaratne	2004	42.87
Aravinda de Silva	2002	42.97

New Zealand

Player	Year	Average
Stephen Fleming	2008	40.06
Mark Richardson	2004	44.77
Martin Crowe	1995	45.36

West Indies

Player	Year	Average
Ramnaresh Sarwan	2011	40.01
Brian Lara	2006	51.88
Gary Sobers	1974	57.78
Everton Weekes	1958	58.61

Zimbabwe

Player	Year	Average
Andy Flower	2002	51.54

Bangladesh don't get a box as they have no-one meeting the entry criteria. Again, recall that for each entry in the list, no-one who has come later has finished with a higher average. There's an interesting contrast between the English and Australian lists, one that reflects the pitiful nature of England's performances (i.e. a desperate lack of runs) in the recently-concluded Ashes series. Note that no-one since Ken Barrington, 46 years ago, has finished a Test career for England with a career average of over 50, and that no-one since Geoff Boycott 32 years ago has finished with an average of over 45. Contrast that with the Australian list - the recent retirement of a couple of big cheeses has obliterated some detail from the list (note that Kallis and Tendulkar's retirements collapse their respective lists to a single entry), but a bit of research reveals that since 1982 there have been six batsmen finishing with a career average of over 50 (Chappell, Ponting, Hussey, Steve Waugh, Matthew Hayden and Allan Border) and a further five finishing with an average of over 45 (Gilchrist, Dean Jones, Damien Martyn, Justin Langer and Simon Katich).

Again, this could all change - Kevin Pietersen, Alistair Cook, Jonathan Trott (doubts about his England future notwithstanding) and Ian Bell all currently average between 46 and 48, though their numbers have all headed south a bit during the recent Ashes debacle.

it's a family affair

Hot on the heels of the revelations of my distant claim to the Stapledon millions comes even more exciting news: following an exchange of e-mails with my aunt (who is well into all this ancestry stuff) I can now reveal the full tangled web of family literary connections - here's an updated and expanded family tree:

Clickage will embiggen if it's all getting a bit difficult to read; obviously the bit I'm going to be suggesting you focus your attention on is the bit at the bottom right wherein it is revealed that your actual Jeffrey Flippin' Archer and me are fourth cousins once removed. If you have a look at the chart at the bottom of Archer's Wikipedia page you'll notice that it has his great-grandfather being called Robert Clibbett whereas I have him as Richard Clibbet (on my aunt's say-so). There are several variant spellings of Clibbet (for instance Olaf Stapledon's Wikipedia page renders it as Clibbert), but I can't account for the disagreement over the first name.

It's very easy to scoff at Jeffrey Archer, and I'm not necessarily saying you shouldn't - a serial liar, fantasist and philanderer, to be sure, and no-one would make any great claims of literary merit for the books - but for all that I did read and heartily enjoy some of his novels when I was in my teens, mainly the two big doorstops Kane And Abel and First Among Equals. Anyway, now I know we're related, watch yourself with the criticism, 'cause it's faaaaaahhhhmly, innit. You slaaaaag.

you're having olaf: is he having olaf?

Here, then, extremely belatedly, is the promised second footnote to the Last And First Men book review. This one is about Olaf Stapledon himself, rather than some inconsequential bollocks about imaginary faces on book covers.

As you can discover easily enough on Wikipedia, Olaf Stapledon was the son of William Clibbet Stapledon and Emmeline Miller. You'll have to trust me on the rest, though - here we go: William Clibbet Stapledon was the son of Elizabeth Clibbet and William Stapledon, and Elizabeth Clibbet was the daughter of William Clibbet, who in turn was the son of persons unknown (but who presumably went by the names Mr. & Mrs. Clibbet). So, if you're keeping up, you'll have already worked out that this Mr. X. Clibbet was Olaf Stapledon's great-great-grandfather.

Here's the good bit, though: this mystery Clibbet was also my great-great-great-great-grandfather. He also had a daughter called Susan Clibbet, who had a daughter called Blanche, who in turn had a daughter also called Blanche, who had a daughter called Edith, who had a daughter called Susan, who is my mother!

So Olaf Stapledon and I are distant cousins. Working out the exact relationship in this sort of situation gives some people a migraine, but it's actually fairly straightforward once you know the rules - the Wikipedia page explains it pretty well, and also has a cheeky chart if you can't be bothered to work it out yourself, or just want to check your results once you have. You'll be able to use the chart to verify that Olaf Stapledon and I are third cousins twice removed. Here's a sketched family tree (relevant parts only):

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Actress and star (along with Danny DeVito and Billy Crystal) of 1987 film Throw Momma From The Train Anne Ramsey, and crime author (of The Talented Mr. Ripley, among others) Patricia Highsmith.

The cherry on the Bakewell here is that Throw Momma From The Train is a sort of meta-remake of the 1951 Alfred Hitchcock film Strangers On A Train, which in turn was based on an original novel by the very same Patricia Highsmith.

Well, most slightly batty old women look the same, you might argue, and perhaps you're right. As it happens, old photographs reveal Highsmith to have been startlingly attractive as a younger woman, if you like the dark intense types. If your SafeSearch settings are the same as mine, you may be as startled as I was to see what appears to be a topless photo about three rows down the Google image results page. This is apparently genuine (and needless to say probably NSFW), taken by photographer Rolf Tietgens in 1942 when Highsmith was 21. You don't get that with Agatha Christie.

merry whiskmas

So here's another annual tradition - the post-Christmas whisky round-up. I'm pleased to say that my relatives and in-laws have now grasped the basic principles here, which are:

• whisky as a Christmas present is great;
• it really doesn't matter if two people end up both buying me a bottle of whisky, even if it ends up being the same brand;
• just because you bought me a bottle last year doesn't mean that it would be inappropriate for you to buy me another one this year.

So this year's Christmas whisky haul was an encouraging four bottles, though only one was one I hadn't tried before. Fortunately I have three others of relatively recent acquisition in the cupboard to bulk out this post. I think it's often instructive to look at these in pairs, so here goes:

The first one is Strathisla. As I've said before, most Scottish distilleries lay claim to some sort of superlative, however esoteric, but Strathisla's is fairly simple: it is the oldest continuously operating distillery in Scotland. Needless to say there are a whole host of other distilleries (notably Glenturret and Bowmore) which make subtly different versions of the same claim, and no-one really seems to know the definitive answer.

Anyway, Strathisla's main claim to fame today is that it is the major constituent of the Chivas Regal blend, probably the second-most-famous blended whisky in the world after Johnnie Walker (the other claim is that the distillery complex is one of the most-photographed in Scotland). The single malt hasn't historically been that easy to get hold of, but as of recently they seem to be making a bit of a push into the supermarket sector by updating the packaging  from the old flat brown medicine bottles to some brighter clean white packaging. As far as I can gather the composition of the whisky hasn't changed, though.

Let's try a bit. It smells great - buttery, nutty, quite sweet, with the usual Speyside almonds and magic markers. To be honest what follows (i.e. taste-wise) is a slight disappointment - it's nice and biscuity and slightly less sweet then you'd expect, but it's not as rich and interesting as the initial sniff would suggest, and it doesn't hang about much in terms of aftertaste either.

Secondly, The Singleton Of Dufftown. Now I'm naturally inclined to be ill-disposed towards this one, as the silliness of the naming annoys me somewhat. What this is is a 12-year-old single malt from the Dufftown distillery, located in the town of the same name which is the spiritual (pun sort of intended) home of Speyside whisky and home to half-a-dozen active distilleries, most notably Glenfiddich. So why couldn't they just call it "Dufftown 12"? Well, mostly because the distillery is owned by Diageo, and they wanted a way of sexing up some of the products from their lesser-known distilleries like Dufftown, Glendullan and Glen Ord under a single "brand".

Despite that annoyance, though, this is really quite good. It's very inoffensive, as befits something clearly designed to compete with the standard 12-year-old versions of the Speyside behemoths like Glenfiddich and Glenlivet, but none the worse for that. It's slightly lighter and fudgier (and perhaps less interesting) than the Strathisla when you have a sniff, but there's more going on when you actually get to drinking it. Nothing massively startling, mind you, but just nice a sweet biscuity whisky that doesn't die away after a couple of seconds like the Strathisla does. If you're viewing it in the light of its obvious competitors I can't speak for the Glenlivet but I'd say it's more interesting than the standard Glenfiddich.

The second pairing is a couple of slightly more hairy-chested brutes - firstly Talisker Dark Storm. I'm very fond of the standard Talisker, and this one is supposedly a darker, smokier version of that, matured in heavily charred casks. It's currently only available in airport duty-free outlets which is where my father picked up a bottle for me on his travels a few months back.

It's been a while since I sampled the bog-standard 10-year-old Talisker, but this one certainly does seem very dark and smoky, perhaps veering towards the rich dark smoky Islay malts like Bowmore and Lagavulin compared to the standard Talisker which is more salty and peppery. It's tremendously rich and sweet to drink, perhaps slightly overpoweringly so, a bit like the Lagavulin. I don't usually, but this is one (particularly at 45.8% ABV) that might benefit from a dash of water. If pressed I'd probably have to say that the standard bottling is a better all-round whisky.

Next we head south of the border. We've done this before, of course, but this time we're off to Norfolk to sample the delights of the only proper distillery in England. The imaginatively-named English Whisky Company produce a number of products, Chapter 9 being their peated expression. They've only been going for a few years, so there aren't any really aged stocks, as you can see by the colour - very pale and straw-coloured, like healthy well-hydrated piss (the Talisker, by contrast, representing the morning after a night on the Guinness and vindaloo). There's plenty of peat, though, which combined with the paleness of the whisky makes it seem like some of the younger Ardbegs, without being quite so much like drinking an ashtray. It tastes young - quite hot, quite raw, a bit like the Penderyn, but without being off-putting.

If we're considering all this as a preamble to a pair of verdicts in the head-to-head contests, then I suppose the winners would be the Dufftown and the Talisker. That won't stop me drinking all of them in due course, though.

turning over a new leaf

Here's the obligatory (and yet strangely unnecessary) annual statistical micro-analysis of my reading and blogging habits. General blogging first: all I have to say here is that unless I cough up another post tomorrow (which is unlikely, especially since I deem throwing in a one-liner just to get the numbers up to be caddish and unsporting) this year will pip 2012 by one blog post as my least bloggy year yet at a measly 109 posts. I wouldn't want you to think that this means that my enthusiasm for the blogging project is waning, it's just that I've been doing a lot of home improvements and toddler-wrangling and I just don't get as much time as I used to. 2007 remains the benchmark for frenzied blog activity with a monster 282 posts.

As for the book-blogging sub-genre, 2013 is the year in which the stats reveal I've read the fewest books since records began (in 2006) - a paltry 19. Last year's 21 was the previous low, with 2011's 33 being the glorious zenith of my reading activity, no doubt helped by a two-week honeymoon during which I guzzled down several (among other activities, if you know what I mean, and I think you do).

Interestingly, though, if you do the sums by total page-count instead of just numbers of books, 2013 actually comes out ahead of 2012, by 5995 pages to 5985.

As you'd expect, 2011 is well ahead with a whopping 10597 pages. So the question you'll be asking is: which year did I read the longest books, on average? And the answer, astoundingly, is also 2011 with an average book length of 321.12 pages. 2013 comes second on that list with an average length of 315.53 pages, bolstered no doubt by Infinite Jest being the first book of the year. 2008 is the year with the lowest average length, as I spent the entire year reading a selection of flimsy pamphlets with an average length of a mere 273.95 pages. Hardly worth bothering, really.

when in abergavenny do as the abergavennians do

I took my father out for a post-Christmas walk earlier today to clear a bit of the tryptophan and saturated fat from the artery walls. Nothing especially interesting in that, I suppose, nor indeed in our choice of walk, which was to tackle the far from awesome challenge of the Little Skirrid aka Ysgyryd Fach, conveniently situated within walking distance of Mum & Dad's new(ish) house, just the other side of the railway station and the A465. A round trip of around three and a half miles, and an ascent to the dizzying height of around 270 metres (886 feet), but quite a nice walk, if a little soggy and slippery underfoot.

Apparently the Little Skirrid and its more interesting big brother Ysgyryd Fawr (generally just referred to as "the Skirrid") a couple of miles up the road are two of the hills known collectively as the Seven Hills of Abergavenny. The others are the two best-known Abergavenny hills, Blorenge and Sugar Loaf, and the three minor hills Deri, Rholben and Mynydd Llanwenarth, all of which are really just outlying ridges on the south side of the Sugar Loaf without obvious "summits". Those given to occasional attacks of cynicism might conclude that the last few were added out of desperation just to get the number up to the magical seven (i.e. the same number as Rome). Further half-hearted lazy internet research reveals that this is a fairly common claim made on behalf of a whole host of places.

Anyway, here's the GPS track log and altitude profile, for what it's worth - the round trip took us just under two hours, but in slightly less treacherous underfoot conditions you could probably knock half an hour or so off that.

Our intention had been to pop into the Great Western by the railway station for a cheeky pint on the way back, but it was shut, unfortunately. The one Abergavenny pub recommendation I can give you is that the Hen & Chickens in the centre of town is excellent.

the last book I read

Remembering Babylon by David Malouf.

It's the mid-19th century, and we're in north-eastern Australia. Lachlan Beattie and his two cousins Janet and Meg are out playing and exploring along the boundary of their family property when a strange ragged human figure appears and prostrates himself before them, claiming in broken English to be "a British object".

This, it turns out, is Gemmy Fairley, born and brought up in London, former dogsbody at a timber mill and apprentice to the local ratcatcher and later a ship's boy, cast ashore when he contracted some fever that the crew were presumably keen to avoid catching. Taken in by an aboriginal tribe, he spends the next sixteen years living with them and learning their ways before the gradual incursion of the white man into their territory brings back memories of his former life and offers the opportunity of escape.

Gemmy's sudden appearance causes some consternation among the small pioneer community - English-born he may be, but sixteen years of outdoor living have left him browned and weatherbeaten and not much resembling any of the members of a community featuring a high proportion of bluey-white Scots. On top of that, how long do you, as a white man, have to live among savages before some vital spark of civilised humanity is extinguished and you become irredeemably one of them? And don't they have access to some sort of mystical congress with some Great Spirit of the land who can move the very trees and rocks to do his bidding? So what if Gemmy has surrendered himself just so he can be their eyes and ears within the white community? After all, it's not as if anyone asked the blacks' permission to steam in and start cutting down trees and building roads and the like. Maybe they're a bit pissed off about it?

Gemmy himself doesn't participate in any of these discussions, preferring to keep himself to himself and just do odd jobs round the farm owned by Jock McIvor (Lachlan's uncle and Meg and Janet's father) in exchange for bed and board. But this doesn't prevent all the community's irrational fears being projected onto him, or the finger of suspicion being pointed at him when various random mishaps occur, as they inevitably do. So eventually it's decided that it would be best if Gemmy were removed from the heart of the community and went instead to live with old Mrs. Hutchence on the edge of town - she'll be happy to take him in, and everyone already considers her to be a bit batty anyway.

We then leap forward fifty years to the time of the First World War. Janet is a sister in a religious order and Lachlan is a government minister. He comes to visit her partly out of brotherly concern and partly on official business - both he and she have been publically found to have been (entirely innocently) in contact with people of German origin for various reasons during a period of intense public paranoia, something which is probably going to ultimately cost Lachlan his job and Janet a period of unwanted notoriety.

The point of the epilogue, presumably, is to illustrate the universality of the points being made in the main part of the novel - tribalism, xenophobia, general suspicion of outsiders and anyone who seems to be operating according to an even slightly different set of social norms from one's own, be they German or Aboriginal or whatever. The tension with the aboriginals is particularly, well, tense, because of the way in which the European settlers have taken over their lands without much in the way of negotiation. This was a central theme of the previous Malouf novel in this list, The Conversations At Curlow Creek, a similarly slim volume (200 pages or so) that didn't go out of its way to explain itself but left the reader to do a bit of work for himself. I actually think this one is better, for all that Gemmy himself drifts out of the narrative about two-thirds of the way through and we never conclusively find out what happens to him. The point, I suppose, is that the specific details of his fate are not really the point.

The specific plot device of a person of European origin emerging from the Australian bush to attempt to re-integrate themselves into white society (with varying degrees of success) has been a theme featured in a couple of previous novels in this series, notably Strandloper and A Fringe Of Leaves. As in those books the central character here is based on a real person, in this case James Morril.

In addition to being shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize (which was eventually won by Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha as featured here quite recently) Remembering Babylon won the inaugural International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1996; my list here goes: 1996, 2000, 2002.

incidental music spot of the day

Led Zeppelin's thumping Good Times Bad Times on the trailer to the new film American Hustle. The film looks fine, if a little bit Son Of Casino, and does feature the very delightful Jennifer Lawrence, a woman of robust good sense on a variety of topics, not least hotel room butt plug etiquette.

A more interesting topic for discussion, though, might be: is this song the greatest track 1, side 1, album 1 of all time? Or, in proper English, the greatest opening track of a debut album ever? There are a gazillion lists of Greatest Debut Albums, all featuring some fine stuff, and almost without fail featuring Led Zeppelin's eponymous debut album very highly, but I can't think of one on these lists or elsewhere that features an opening track that grabs you by the throat quite so effectively. Here's a selection of runners-up, though, just off the top of my head:

• Foxy Lady by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, from the album Are You Experienced? I once read the rhythm track to this described as being like a sine wave, which is simultaneously wrong (it's fairly basic 4/4) and sort of right in that the riff seems to speed up and then slow down again.
• Do It Again by Steely Dan, from the album Can't Buy A Thrill. Steely Dan are either desperately hip or hideously unfashionable these days; I haven't really kept track. Anyway, this has one of the great intros, so good in fact that it was stolen wholesale for Belinda Carlisle's Circle In The Sand 20-odd years later.
• Tears Of Rage by The Band, from the album Music From Big Pink, as featured here.
• 6'1" by Liz Phair, from the album Exile In Guyville, as featured here.

No doubt there are many more. I suppose the candidates will be those bands who sprung into existence (at least in terms of recorded output, anyway) pretty much fully-formed (Zeppelin, say, or more recently Oasis), rather than easing into an album-releasing career gradually with a few minor works (Queen, U2 or Radiohead, say).

not the face!

I have a couple of footnotes to add to the Last And First Men book review; here's the first.

One of the cool things about my SF Masterworks edition (off the top of my head this is the third book in that series I've featured, The Sirens Of Titan and Roadside Picnic being the other two) is Les Edwards' arresting cover art. It seems inexplicably to have been given a weird dull grey-blue wash in the latest edition, but mine is the original multicoloured version.

The stump of some monument to man's ambition, resourcefulness and hubris that dominates the foreground of the image is a nice touch that evokes either Shelley's Ozymandias or the end of Planet Of The Apes (or possibly both), depending on your cultural preferences. Look a little closer at, it, though, and you'll see something else.

See it? Here, let me help you.

Whether this was deliberate on the artist's part or not I couldn't say. I'd be inclined to guess that it was, just because that bit resembling a nose seems a little too perfect to be a coincidence - it's even got nostrils! But, well, you never know - seeing things that aren't really there is pretty much the definition of pareidolia (or possibly apophenia) after all.

Seeing weird faces in random shit is always amusing, so once again I draw your attention to the splendid Flickr group entitled Hello Little Fella, and of course to the house, cats and many other things that look like Hitler.

the last book I read

Last And First Men by Olaf Stapledon.

How do you like your novels' scope? A minute dissection of a single day? A decade-spanning love story? A family saga spanning centuries? Well, how about the freakin' entire two-billion year history of mankind in all its various forms? How do you like them apples? That ambitious enough for you?

So, the First Men. That's us, with all our digital watches and complex hire-purchase agreements, yet essentially still barely-domesticated shaven apes with unsavoury urges and unsatisfactory methods for conflict resolution. After a couple of thousand years of wary peace and occasional paroxysms of slaughter mankind eventually finds a way (via an uncontrollable runaway nuclear reaction) of all but wiping himself out and rendering most of the planet an uninhabitable blasted wasteland.

The few traumatised stragglers who do remain (mostly the crew of an Arctic exploration ship who happened to be at sea in a nice chilly remote polar region when the doomsday event occurred) find themselves having to repopulate the earth. The radically changed environment (and something of a genetic bottleneck) eventually results in a race of long-lived, big-brained giants: the Second Men.

These great lanky freaks bestride the earth for many millions of years until encountering an unexpected nemesis: Martians! Life on Mars takes a somewhat different form, however: a sort of sentient green cloud of micro-organisms that can harness radiation to have large-scale physical effects - knocking houses down, turning people inside-out, that sort of thing. The Martians' interest in Earth is due to the gradual drying-out of the Martian environment and the tempting lushness of the planet next door. The current inhabitants of Earth aren't giving the place up without a fight, though, and eventually annihilate the Martians with some sort of virus, which also has a devastating effect on Earth, so much so that the giant Second Men are gradually replaced by the smaller Third Men. These little guys aren't intellectual pygmies, though, far from it, and soon start doing some bizarre genetic engineering experiments culminating in the giant-brains-in-silos The Fourth Men.

The Fourth Men don't get out much, what with just being brains the size of a two-storey house, and soon use their fearsome mental powers to devise the Fifth Men, another more mobile race of twelve-foot colossi a bit like the Second Men. And, like the Second Men, it's an external threat that does for them, this time the rapid decay of the Moon's orbit which necessitates packing up and leaving earth. With Mars still a diseased wasteland Venus is pretty much the only option, but some pretty severe terraforming is required before it's habitable, not to mention the extermination of the indigenous life-forms who aren't too happy about the situation.

The radical changes in environment found on Venus trigger further changes including a regressive monkey-like phase (the Sixth Men) a brief foray into flying (the Seventh Men) and a progression back towards where they started (the Eighth Men). But then further cosmic upheaval: the sun enters an expansive phase of its lifecycle and threatens to engulf Venus. Honestly, it's just one thing after another. So a bit more genetic engineering produces the Ninth Men, pre-designed for life on their new home on....that's right, Neptune.

Living on Neptune, as you can imagine, poses a few challenges, and a rapid proliferation of human forms ensues, some more successful than others, culminating in the Eighteenth Men, the apex of the species, who live in happiness, harmony, unlimited energy and leisure for many tens of millions of years before the sun enters another phase of its lifecycle. This time, though, there's nowhere else to go, and the whole species is obliged to contemplate its own demise. A few speculative vials of genetic material are fired into the vast wastes of interstellar space in the hope that they might land somewhere hospitable and start the whole cycle again, but essentially the Eighteenth Men have to come to terms with being the Last Men. Well, we've had a good innings.

Last And First Men was published in 1930, and is cited as an influence by many subsequent science fiction writers, notably Arthur C Clarke. Coincidentally, given her recent demise, my Gollancz SF Masterworks edition features an afterword by Doris Lessing, whose own novel Shikasta was pretty clearly influenced by it. It's probably a book more talked about and cited as an influence than actually read these days, which is a pity, as its scope and ambition are unusual if not unique. There can't be many books which don't even dwell long enough on anything resembling a human life-span to bother giving a single character a name. Ideas featured in countless other subsequent works fly by at bewildering speed: terraforming, ethical issues of the Star Trek Prime Directive variety but also the ethics of wiping out whole species, even when they're trying to do the same to us, post-scarcity society, genetic engineering and increased lifespan and what do do with all those years given that you haven't got to work (this last topic is very reminiscent of Iain M Banks' Culture series as featured multiply here).

It's certainly true that the impersonal nature of the storytelling (an inevitable consequence of the timescale Stapledon chose to grapple with) won't be for everyone, and the book is a bit slow to really get off the runway - there's perhaps a bit too much imaginary future history on Earth before the nuclear conflagration, although the criticisms that (given that a lot of it supposedly occurs on dates which are now in the past) it's "inaccurate" or "silly" seem a bit nonsensical, seeing as they're criticisms I've never seen levelled at, say, Philip K Dick's The Man In The High Castle, which operates along similar lines. It's only once contemporary Man has eliminated himself that the story really starts to kick along, though, so having that happen on (roughly) page 100 of a 300-page book is probably pushing it a bit. And, it hardly needs to be said, although Stapledon's grasp of the (at the time) youthful sciences of quantum physics and genetics is remarkably good, there are numerous inaccuracies - Stapledon's estimate of the age of the universe is too large by a factor of about 1000, and given what we now know of its structure there's no way anyone could live on Neptune, however highly evolved and/or engineered they were.

But there's lots to admire here, much of it surprisingly modern-feeling for 1930, notably Stapledon's scorn for religion and wholehearted enthusiasm for a post-religion world, largely because it enables lots of guilt-free sex. I very much like that he didn't cop out at the end and give man some sort of get-out of casting aside physical existence and ascending to some purely spiritual/mental realm, as that would have been bollocks - nope, the sun's going to explode, you're all going to die, deal with it. Stapledon's other great work (also in the SF Masterworks series), 1937's Star Maker, scoffs at Last And First Men's pitiful lack of ambition and offers a history of the entire freakin' universe.

can I push your stool in for you?

Here's a tempting offer the good people at New Scientist made me in a promotional e-mail the other day:

Eeeewww. Well, we've all overdone it on the shiitake mushrooms from time to time, but I wouldn't necessarily be offering the results to anyone else. Luckily it turns out not to be that sort of stool.

It still doesn't look all that appealing, though, to be honest. The accompanying promotional blurb gives a bit of background info:

This is certain to be the most-talked about item of furniture you ever own. New Scientist is offering one lucky reader the chance to win a beautiful stool made by artist Philip Ross from the reishi mushroom.

Here's a few links explaining what Ross is up to; it's all quite interesting in a freaky sort of way, and of more obvious practical use than the food-related art projects of Cosimo Cavallaro. And presumably if you have a bit of a food crisis you can just grate a bit off the side of your stool and rustle up a tasty risotto.

we must probe deeply into our souls

You can always tell a really good inadvertently doubly entendresque web news headline by the speed with which it's retitled; luckily the pages linking to it sometimes take a bit longer to be updated. So here's this morning's post-crushing-Ashes-defeat headline from the BBC Sport website. As you can see the page itself was swiftly retitled; the link on the home page was left around a bit longer, though - long enough for me to capture it anyway.

It's not clear whether Alastair Cook actually said those exact words; if so maybe it was a subtle commentary on England's inexplicably pitiful performances in the series so far. They certainly have been playing like a bunch of "our souls".

This is not the first time this particular fnarr-fnarr combination of words has been used for comic effect, of course, whether intentionally or not. Steve Coogan's short-lived Latino crooner creation Tony Ferrino didn't have many properly funny moments, but the epic The Valley Of Our Souls was one of them. Don't imagine it's only the low-brow end of the cultural spectrum that does this stuff, though: here's Leo Tolstoy getting a cheap laugh in a very similar way.

turning the tables

Hard to believe it's been eight months since I've been up a proper mountain - how times change, small children, yadda yadda yadda, you've heard it all before - but as my good friend Huw and I both found ourselves at a loose end today we decided to capitalise by getting ourselves out into the hills for the day. As much fun as the snowy Beacons trip was, I was quite pleased to see more normal conditions today - pretty warm for early December, no rain, and no snow up on the tops.

We decided to head up to Table Mountain just north of Crickhowell, maybe forty minutes drive north-ish from Newport. This, regular blog readers may remember, was the start point for my epic Black Mountains horseshoe walk back in April 2010. We didn't feel inclined to a walk of that length (nor would there have been enough daylight to do it), so once we'd knocked off the trig point on Pen Allt-mawr we dropped down into the valley to the east of the main ridge and followed the contours back round the hill to our starting point.

Actually, Table Mountain is a bit of a misnomer, since strictly that is the name given to the small hill (with an Iron Age hill-fort on top) between Crickhowell and the first "proper" peak of Pen Cerrig-calch. I have heard the larger hill referred to as "Table Mountain" as well, though, and while that's technically incorrect you can see why people do it, the long flat-topped summit with trig points at either end being particularly distinctive when viewed from east or west.

Anyway, that's all well and good, you'll be saying, but make with the mappage already. So here it is - 10.8 miles according to my GPS track log, so a pretty respectable day out. I did also take a few pictures, which can be found here. What I forgot to photograph was either the Bear in Crickhowell where we popped in briefly on the way back to the car or the excellent pint of Butty Bach I had there. You'll just have to drop in and see for yourself.

Just by way of contrast, here's me on top of the Table Mountain above Cape Town in January 2000.

headline of the day

Today's Daily Mail in particularly fine stating the bleedin' obvious vein:

In other shock revelations, if you look like a duck, walk like a duck and quack like a duck then the latest research suggest you may well be a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae.