a modest disposal proposal

I was standing around in the car park at Greenmeadow Golf Club with my friend Huw the other day having a conversation about death, as one does. Not, to be fair, a subject plucked out of the air on some morbid whim, but prompted by the evidence of a funeral wake just finishing in the golf club bar. Greenmeadow does what I would imagine is a pretty good business catering for funeral groups, since it's right next door to a crematorium.

Anyway, the question arose: what arrangements should the avowed atheist make for the event of his or her own demise? This is really a question about two different things:

• what sort of an event do you want to organise and invite people to to pay their respects, express their grief (which you'd selfishly hope there might be a little bit of) and generally give you a bit of a send-off? 
• what do you want done with your physical remains?

Death is arguably even more tied up with religious and magical thinking than birth and marriage are, and I suppose that's not surprising. One of the ways in which religions get their adherents to do as they're told is to dangle the carrot of eternal blissful reward in some imaginary better life that occurs after death. So since death is therefore an essential part of the process, indeed the essential part of the process, religion is able to make a big claim on overseeing the ushering of people from this life to the next. After all, you need to be sure that the right voodoo incantations are said at the right time, otherwise there could be a last-minute hitch and the deceased ends up in the wrong place.

Actually the two questions above aren't completely separate, since means of disposal of the physical remains often forms part of the massed send-off activities. Think of the countless comedy sketches involving massed mourners and coffins either being lowered into graves or trundling along the conveyor into the crematorium incinerator. Alternative methods are available, principally involving burial of the remains in some supposedly more "natural" way. In practice this means methods not involving embalming the body, and using more easily degradable containers for burial, either a fabric shroud or an easily degradable coffin.

While the "greener" burial options seem clearly better, burial in general seems to me absurdly wasteful of space. In these times of soaring world population and competition for space do we really want to be reserving significant areas for the burial of dead people? Take Newport as an example: there are three council-run cemeteries, two very big ones and one smaller one up in Caerleon. The Americans have this weird thing for above-ground burial, as well, which is profoundly strange. Just pop the deceased in a cupboard and pop back in to see them anytime! Except that certain natural processes will still occur, and there is a thing called exploding casket syndrome which sounds extremely undesirable.

Moreover, as anyone who's watched The Matrix will tell you, the human body has a considerable amount of energy locked up in it, and it seems a shame to allow this to go to no more useful purpose than feeding some worms and warming a patch of soil up a bit. I don't have the figures for how much energy a dead human contains, but when you consider that something like half a million people die in Britain every year, that's a lot of unexploited potential energy there.

So what are the options? Well, there are some obvious ones like just feeding the dead down a conveyor belt straight into power station furnaces. A milder version of this has already been tried, in Redditch, where the heat generated by the local crematorium was used to heat a nearby swimming pool. The fact that this proposal was met with some quite serious opposition from people who thought it was "weird" and/or "sick" just goes to show that people are intensely weird and irrational about death.

So what else? Well, here in Newport we recycle all our food waste, including discarded raw and cooked meat. Couldn't something on a larger scale work for dead people? You know, green-topped bin for general refuse, orange-topped bin for garden waste, pink-topped bin for deceased relatives. Other options are also available, but, well, you've got to draw the line somewhere.

I actually do think that the default option should be that the body becomes the responsibility of the state for disposal, and would be carted off for either composting or incineration at some central facility where any energy released could be captured and used for other purposes. You could still do the individual cremation or burial thing if you wanted, but at punitive cost. As far as my mortal remains are concerned, assuming you're not going to go with this idea I'd be quite happy to give them up for the greater good once all the re-usable organs have been harvested.

dawkogeddon

There have been a couple of moments of late where I considered adding a footnote so one of the many Richard Dawkins/Twitter/foot/mouth incidents, and then never quite got round to it. The only time I did get round to it what pushed me over the edge was only partly imagining I had something interesting to say, and partly the fact that I'd just knocked up an amateurish image mashup of Professor Yaffle in a Gestapo hat, so I wanted an excuse to use it.

In addition to the usual immediate hoopla in the wake of the last couple of incidents, there has also been a bit of more general discussion about whether Dawkins is an asset or a liability to the atheism "movement" (inasmuch as there is one) in general.

Just in case you missed them, the last couple of major twittersplosions have related to:

• Dawkins' attempt to explain the fairly basic point that saying "X is worse than Y" doesn't imply approval for Y. Unfortunately (after warming up with a few innocuous ones) he chose the horribly inappropriate examples of being raped by an acquaintance or a stranger as X and Y, and then when people went: whoah, that's not cool, he threw his virtual hands up in faux-innocence and said, look, you can swap the order if you like, that's not my point. 
• Then, this week, Dawkins got involved in a conversation about the horribly oppressive Irish laws regarding abortion, in the wake of some minor tinkering to make them slightly less horrible. It all started well, with Dawkins upholding the primacy of the woman's right to choose whether to continue the pregnancy or not, but then (possibly after some well-placed provocation) went spectacularly off the rails with Dawkins saying that the only moral choice in the event of discovering your foetus had Down Syndrome would be to abort. 

The tragedy here is that in both cases he had a semblance of a point. You visit any internet discussion of, say, female "circumcision", and there will be some clot on there complaining that no-one's mentioned male circumcision yet and that therefore WELL I GUESS YOU FEMINAZIS MUST THINK THAT'S JUST DANDY. The trouble is that quite apart from the foolish (or possibly deliberately provocative, depending on your viewpoint) choice of example, Dawkins himself was guilty of exactly the behaviour he was seeking to criticise with his behaviour at the time of Elevatorgate back in 2011. Possibly prompted by, ooh, about a million people pointing this out, he later issued a sort of mumbly half-apology to Rebecca Watson (though without mentioning her by name), which I guess we should take as progress of a sort, Dawkins not generally being big on admitting being wrong about anything.

Equally clearly there's nothing whatsoever wrong about defending reproductive choice; the whole point, though, is the word "choice". You can't on the one hand say yes, of course a woman should have full autonomy in matters relating to her own body, including terminating a pregnancy on demand if that's what she wants, without having to satisfy anyone that her reasons are acceptable, or, worse, undergo some unnecessary and humiliating invasive procedure beforehand, and then say, but, actually, this particular choice would be immoral and I disapprove.

Just to be absolutely clear, my position on this is that if a woman is pregnant with a foetus that she discovers, after the relevant tests, has Down Syndrome, and she wants to abort it, that's what she should do. Conversely, if a woman is pregnant with a foetus that she discovers, after the relevant tests, has Down Syndrome, and she wants to continue the pregnancy, that's what she should do. That's what "choice" means, no moral judgment implied or necessary.

One interesting corollary of that (moving away from the Dawkins discussion for a moment) is that I don't therefore see a rational argument for legislating against sex-specific abortion. That's not to say that I don't find the whole religious and cultural framework that dictates a lot of these decisions distasteful (although there is some evidence that its prevalence is overstated anyway), but the solution to that is to change the culture, not restrict reproductive freedom.

To answer the question posed in the second paragraph, which probably seems like months ago, there's no doubt that Dawkins has, in the past, been an exceptionally powerful advocate for atheism, mainly through The God Delusion - which, regardless of your opinion of its literary merits, has been the catalyst for large numbers of people to "come out" as atheist - but also through his just being a high-profile person, who was already independently famous for other things, who was also an atheist and not afraid to say so.

I suppose there's an argument that he has, in a way, been the victim of his own success - because the godless community is now so large and so vocal (though still a tiny minority compared to the religious one), particularly online, it's become more inclusive as well, and the previous stereotype of an atheist as an oldish, academic straight white guy no longer applies as much as it did. Add to that the widening of the "atheism" movement to incorporate a whole bunch of other social justice issues like feminism, gay rights, etc., all of which fit nicely under the banner of more general "rationalism", and Dawkins seems more and more like a representative of the past. A bit like that beloved old grandparent who you love having round for Sunday lunch, but you've got to watch him because he will eventually come out with something phenomenally racist.

The problem, though, is that out in the wider world Dawkins is still the public face of atheism for a lot of people, and because a lot of these people are knee-jerk authoritarians there will be an assumption that his pronouncements reflect the opinions of atheists generally. And those who have an interest in maintaining the religious status quo will say: see, told you all that God Delusion stuff was rubbish, now let us all bow our heads in prayer. To ease the frustration of all this, here's a handy infographic (from here) to allow you to navigate these incidents more easily:

supplies!

It's that time of year again, where I stock up with a vast quantity of Korean noodles to see me safely through the winter. This year's batch are now safely stowed in the utility room (see picture) ready for gradual consumption over the next year or so, or in a more concentrated burst should it all kick off when Barack Obama and his fellow NATO heads of state are in town in a couple of weeks and we have to barricade ourselves into the house until it all calms down.

As you'll be aware, it's the excellent Wing Yip that I get my internet noodles from, and one of the things their website does is keep a history of details of past orders. So I can see at a glance exactly when I placed an order, and how many packets of noodles I ordered each time. I can also see the occasional extra products I ordered at the same time, so I can for instance remind myself of the can of Famous House Grass Jelly Drink that I ordered as a bit of a dare, and of the fun we subsequently had in the office trying it when it turned up. Here's a couple of pictures:

Basically this is a sort of murky greeny-brown liquid with little cubic lumps of green jelly in it, not especially attractive to look at, although of course that is entirely a product of culture and upbringing. It's well popular in Asia, so they must presumably like the look of it. Other versions are available that are heavier on the jelly and lighter on the liquid and for which I imagine you might need a spoon.

In addition to the somewhat faecal appearance, I was slightly put off by the jelly as I'm not particularly fond of drinks with "bits" in, fruit juice for instance. My view here is: either it's food and I need to chew it, or it's a drink and I don't; don't start blurring the boundaries. But for the full experience you need to consume the whole thing, jelly and all, so I did. I can't honestly say it was all that pleasant, but it wasn't especially unpleasant either.

Back to the noodles: it occurred to me that it would be of interest (if possibly only to me) to work out how many packets of noodles I'd got through over the last 6 years or so since I put the first bulk order in. So here's the order history:

Order date	Quantity	Unit price
15/07/2008	30	0.45
07/05/2009	60	0.59
28/01/2010	80	0.59
14/12/2010	80	0.65
07/11/2011	80	0.59
28/08/2012	100	0.59
01/10/2013	120	0.49
15/08/2014	120	0.55

Working out how many packets I get through per year is slightly tricky because I don't eat all the packets I order; there are a few people at work who usually take a few off me. A completely unscientific pulling of a number out of my arse results in a figure of 15% of each order passed on to other people (note that I don't say "given", since I do expect payment). Apply this across the board and you end up with a figure of roughly 470 packets of noodles consumed by me in the last six years, at a rate of one just under every five days. Say three a fortnight, give or take. Note that I'm also ignoring the fact that something like 90% of the packets I eat these days are shared with a small person; I'm not about to try and account for that as well though. Here's a year-by-year chart; no definitive number for 2014 yet but all the indications are that it'll smash all previous consumption records.

the full fonty

It was as recently as September 2007 that I mentioned having attended a christening, and the attendant difficulties this poses for the committed atheist. I promised to expand on this a bit and then never did; well, we went to another one last weekend which prompted me to finally follow that post up. I should say that we have been to a few during the intervening 7 years as well.

So, anyway, you get an invitation to a christening. These are family occasions of great significance to those who choose to participate in them, sometimes because of genuinely deeply-held religious convictions, but just as often because of long-standing family tradition or adherence to perceived social norms, that sort of thing. And often the people who choose to participate are friends and want you, the aforementioned atheist, to be there and share their day with them. So what do you do?

The short answer to that is: you must do what your conscience dictates. Personally I don't find that I feel it necessary to refuse to attend altogether; that strikes me as a bit churlish. There are limits to what I'm prepared to participate in once inside the church, though - most obviously, if anyone ever asked (and I don't suppose they would) me to be a godparent to their child I would have to thank them politely and sincerely for thinking of me and then decline, given the nature of the vows you have to make. In the event of the untimely demise of the parents I'm good for all manner of support, but I'm not going to promise to bring up the child in the Christian faith. And I don't buy that whole thing of: well, just say the words, it doesn't really mean anything. No, if you're going to the trouble of setting up the framework in which these words are said, then they do have meaning, and promises are important things which I take very seriously.

Like I say, though, it's only someone exceptionally oblivious to my views on these matters that would ever ask me to be a godparent, so a much more likely scenario is just that I'll be a member of the congregation. Obviously that makes it a bit easier to "lose" oneself, but there are still rules:

• I don't get involved with the massed responses to the various protestations of faith and rejection of Satan and all his minions and that sort of stuff;
• I'll have a bit of a sing if it's a tune I know - I mean, why not? That bit about the "purple-headed mountain" in All Things Bright And Beautiful gets me every time, though;
• I don't get involved with the whole ingestion of bread products thing, however many people who've parked themselves on the wrong side of the pew from me might have to squeeze past me to get out. And none of that "just a blessing, please, father" stuff either; I'm staying firmly in my seat;
• In the unlikely event of some groovy vicar engaging me in conversation during (or indeed after) the service about some aspect of the liturgy I will not give nodding consent, either explicitly or by omission, to any of the Goddy stuff. We came perilously close to having to implement this rule at the weekend as the vicar was doing the rounds of the various children in the congregation asking when they'd been christened; if he'd got to Nia we might have had to have a conversation he wouldn't necessarily have relished. 

I don't want all that to sound like it's a big ordeal, because it really isn't, but you do have to decide which bits you're going to let slide and which bits you're going to refuse to assent to. It's not really that difficult, and the desire to spend time with your friends generally overrides the desire to be needlessly awkward. Ceremonies where bits of delicate anatomy were being severed would be more problematic, naturally.

Where the circumstances are more directly under my control I'm prepared to be a bit more hard-nosed about it, though, so stuff that I deemed non-negotiable was:

• I wasn't going to get married in church
• I wasn't going to have Nia christened

Fortunately Hazel (while a bit less up-front about it) is generally as unimpressed with these voodoo rituals as I am, so there wasn't much of a conflict. I think generally if you get to the stage of getting married and/or having kids and you're all surprised to be having major disagreements about this sort of fundamental stuff then you probably have to conclude that you don't know each other well enough to be doing either.

knowing your arts from your elbow

Having roundly mocked the Desert Island Discs choices of both Hilary Devey (in a post mostly dedicated to Margaret Thatcher) and Sister Wendy Becket, as well as mocking the musical illiteracy of Heather Rabbatts, it behooves me in the interests of fairness and balance to give credit where it's due on hearing a generally interesting and excellent series of choices last week.

I suppose it's almost axiomatic that a professional musician would take a bit more of an interest in music and be a bit more generally knowledgeable about it than Joe Public, so it probably shouldn't be much of a surprise that Guy Garvey of Elbow came up with some good stuff. I suppose the surprising bit is that he managed it despite his own band putting out stuff that I find, in the main, grindingly dull. I recall having a Twitter conversation a while back wherein I described their best-known song and the new wedding first-dance tune of choice One Day Like This as "a great lumbering flightless turkey of a song", a description I stand by unreservedly. I also feel obliged to invoke Alan McGee's splendid description "bed-wetters' music"; although he coined that in reference to Coldplay I think it does the job here too.

Anyway, Elbow's musical failings, myriad though they are, are not the subject here. In general, Garvey came across as a pretty decent bloke, and, though one might quibble over the specific song choices, Tom Waits, Joan As Police Woman, Public Enemy and Sly And The Family Stone are pretty irreproachable. I can't claim any knowledge of Joseph Canteloube, other than that he seems to have been named after a type of melon, but a few observations about the remaining selections:

• Talk Talk's New Grass is the best thing on their last proper album, 1991's Laughing Stock. This is not music you can listen to while doing the washing up, this is music that demands your full attention and rewards you for it. Here's some fascinating audio of Talk Talk's main man Mark Hollis talking about the album's recording process.
• Joni Mitchell's A Case Of You is one of the best things on her classic 1972 album Blue, but interestingly Garvey specifically chose a much later version because he liked the sound of her voice. Fair enough, but I think the fresh jangly charm of the original is much better. That's some sort of dulcimer she's playing in the clip. Sadly these days Mitchell seems to be spending a lot of time campaigning to have the entirely imaginary Morgellons syndrome recognised as an actual thing, instead of something useful like making music.
• I know very little about Jolie Holland, but the song she's singing here is an adaptation of the WB Yeats poem The Song Of Wandering Aengus, which has special significance for me as it was the poem I chose to be a reading (read, impeccably, as I knew it would be, by my sister Emma) at my wedding to the lovely Hazel back in June 2011. 

if the cap fits

Speaking of hats, as we were, reminds me that my current gardening and emergency going-outside-to-do-stuff hat that hangs by the back door is the black baseball cap that Doug kindly provided for me for my stag weekend back in May 2011. The reason it's been relegated to this instead of, say, golf, is that it carries a bespoke design of Doug's own devising. See for yourself:

In case you can't make it out, what we've got here is a grainy reproduction of this photograph from 2007 (with Hazel cropped out) with the following legend added:

ASK ME: "What's the difference between peanut butter and jam?"

While wearing this (as I was obliged to do) on our drinking expedition into Trecastle, what I was obliged to say in the event of anyone taking the bait and asking me the question was as follows:

"Well....I can't PEANUT BUTTER my COCK up your ARSE."

- which, I think you'll agree, is both punningly amusing and a bit threateningly rapey at the same time.

This is not the first piece of ridiculous headgear I have ever sported, though, far from it. Here's a picture of me and Ray up near the summit of Blencathra in the Lake District in what my records say was late 2003. Note that the utterly ludicrous fleecy hat that I'm wearing makes Ray's fluorescent orange one look almost sensible by comparison. It was (and is, since I still have it) actually a pretty decent fleecy mountain hat, the only drawback being that the enormous surface area meant that it soaked up quite a bit of water in wet conditions, which made it rather heavy after a while.

millinery lookeylikey of the day

During the somewhat inconsequential hoo-hah about the disgusting state of recently discarded England wicketkeeper Matt Prior's cap, I was struck by how similar it looked to my battered and venerable Nike golf cap. There was a time when they looked even more similar, even down to the salty sweat tidemarks, but a couple of rounds of golf in rainy conditions of late have given mine a bit of an inadvertent wash. The faded (and, bizarrely, slightly pink) areas still give you the general idea of where my corrosive (and possibly slightly pink) sweat has seeped over the years. Note that both Matt Prior and I have foreheads that are slightly sweatier on the right side. Something to do with being right-handed maybe?

Note the overall similarity in the patterns - basically you sweat into the internal cap-band and that then spreads out by capillary action up towards the top of the head and out towards the front of the brim.

Since I strongly suspect Prior's England career is now over, his cap will presumably be getting sealed away in a trophy cabinet somewhere. I reckon mine is good for another decade or so at least before it disintegrates.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Currently crocked England fast bowler Liam Plunkett and slab of Hollywood beefcake (and Scarlett Johansson's ex-husband) Ryan Reynolds. Look out for Plunkett & Reynolds, the sequel to Plunkett & Macleane, in cinemas near you soon.

hardcore porch

Well, in the end I got about a fortnight of putting my feet up DIY-wise before I had the urge to go and hit some stuff with a hammer again. This was partly prompted by discovering that my good friend Andy had some spare OSB left over after building himself a very impressive double garage a few months back, and, moreover, might be able to lay his hands on a bit of spare roofing felt as well - all of which sounded ideal for fixing up the roof on the rear porch, which was in a state of advanced decay.

Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, I hot-footed it up to his place (stopping off to take in 9 holes of golf on the way up) to collect the stuff, and set about a bit of experimental demolishment of the porch on my return. I was half-expecting to find that the whole structure was irretrievably rickety and buggered after several years of repeated rain soakings, but I came to the conclusion that the superstructure was reasonably sound, and that with a new roof and a bit of reinforcing here and there we could probably get a few more years out of it before it collapsed in a splintery heap and killed someone.

I like to have the house to myself when doing DIY, partly because I don't want the bairn getting underfoot and accidentally copping a lump-hammer in the eye, but also so that I can give free rein to my tendency for sweary frustration with inanimate objects when required. So when Hazel and Nia were out for the afternoon on Saturday I decided to tackle the job.

Getting the old roof off was ludicrously easy as you could pretty much put your finger through it, and it yielded to the gentlest of presses with a hammer. Various other rotted bits of trim had to go as well, and it was during the course of the removal of all this that I discovered that the builder of the porch (my predecessor, I assume) had incorporated three pound coins into the structure, presumably as some kind of voodoo offering to the angry rain gods in the knowledge that he was about to bung up a half-arsed plywood roof that would only be a viable long-term proposition if it never rained ever again. This being South Wales that was somewhat over-optimistic. Anyway, since I can't be doing with that sort of superstitious nonsense I pocketed the coins and have since spent them on beer and chocolate.

Once the preparation had been done the actual construction of the roof was relatively straightforward, requiring only the possession of a circular saw and the ability to hold a sheet of OSB in place with one hand while steadying yourself on a stepladder with the other hand, while simultaneously holding some screws in a third hand and screwing them in with a fourth. Use of mouth and feet for some of these tasks turns out to be essential.

Anyway, here's a before and after picture. A more detailed photo gallery can be found here.

sainsbury's giveth and sainsbury's taketh away

Thanks to Google StreetView's splendid time-travel facility, I can now demonstrate what I was talking about here by showing you the view across the scrubby wasteland to the old railway embankment (featured in the image attached to the original post) from July 2008, and the view of the roundabout at the bottom of the new approach road to Crindau Sainsbury's from August 2012. Feel free to convince yourself that they are from the same viewpoint (or as near as possible given the reorganisation of the road layout) by orienting yourself using the distinctive white house in the middle right of the two pictures.

Here's another pair of views (2008 and 2012) of the same thing from a different angle, and here's the view from up on the former railway embankment, now Heidenheim Drive, in 2009 and 2012. Note that the aerial view has been updated too.

Contrast this glorious march of progress with the same process happening in reverse for the former city centre Sainsbury's branch on Wyndham Street just a mile or so down the road - bustling in 2009, derelict in 2012.

welcome to the piggledome

If you clicked on the photo gallery link in the last post, you might have noticed that once you get to the end of the golf-related stuff there are some other pictures not obviously related to what's gone before. These are some pictures of the In The Night Garden Live show that we took Nia (and some of her cousins) to see last week.

To be honest Nia's interest in watching the TV show has waned slightly of late, although we still generally have it on in the 6:20-6:50 slot just to provide a marker for the segue into story time and bedtime, so I was a bit concerned that she wouldn't be all that keen on the stage version. My fears were unfounded, however, as once she'd got over a bit of initial nervousness about the pre-show darkness and noise she was absolutely beside herself with excitement, and has been telling everyone she meets all about it at high volume ever since.

The show we went to was in Cannon Hill Park in Birmingham - basically it's presented in a sort of mobile inflatable big top which they just pack up and move on to the next venue. It was all quite well done, to be fair, though I was ready for some human conversation and an ice-cream by the end.

scouse of the driving fun

Since my lovely wife managed to snag some tickets for the final day of the Open Championship as an unexpected but very welcome birthday present earlier this year, we found ourselves off to Liverpool last weekend, which as it happens is a city I'd never been to before. That being the case we decided to make a weekend of it and spend Saturday doing some touristy stuff before heading off to Royal Liverpool on the Sunday morning.

So, as you can imagine, this involved stuff like having a look at the Cavern Club, the Liver Building, taking a ferry 'cross the Mersey and all that sort of stuff. That will no doubt be tediously familiar to you, so here's a couple of slightly more tangential facts about the local area:

• While the Mersey between Liverpool and Birkenhead is criss-crossed with a couple of road tunnels and a railway tunnel, you have to go a surprising distance inland before you encounter a bridge, or more accurately a pair of bridges, spanning the narrow bit of river between Runcorn and Widnes, as well as the Manchester Ship Canal which runs alongside the river at this point. So far so meh, you might say, but until 1961 there was another bridge on this site, known as the Widnes-Runcorn Transporter Bridge. Now you'll be aware that in Newport we have one of only two working transporter bridges in the UK, and the one that makes a claim to be the largest operational one in the world, although the one in Middlesbrough makes similar claims - it all depends which measurements you're talking about. Anyway, the Widnes-Runcorn one was older and bigger than either of the remaining ones, but was crushed by the ruthless utilitarian jackboot of progress, mostly because as fascinating as transporter bridges are, it is an extraordinarily slow and inefficient way of getting traffic across a river, which would be why they never really caught on. The stubs of the approach roads and some of the buildings remain, everything else has gone.
• Needless to say there are a gazillion establishments named after Beatles songs or other Beatles-related stuff. On just the walk through central Liverpool on Saturday I spotted establishments called Imagine, Rubber Soul, Glass Onion and Eleanor Rigby. No doubt the whole city is riddled with them.
• We did a quick on-foot tour of the city's two cathedrals - as striking as Paddy's Wigwam is it's Giles Gilbert Scott's monumental Anglican cathedral that really catches the eye. As with the bridges it really depends which measurement(s) you choose to use, but by some measurements this is the largest Anglican church in Europe. It's certainly pretty impressive (and huge) close up, anyway.
• The stripy knitted tree-warmers we found on Park Lane on our way to the Anglican cathedral were apparently put there as part of the Liverpool International Street Art Festival. This activity is known as "yarn bombing". As things with the word "bombing" in them go, this is one of the nicer ones.
• While walking from one cathedral to the other we came over all thirsty so we stopped for a pint in the amusingly-named Ye Cracke on Rice Street, which didn't look like much from the outside but turned out to be a little murky spit-and-sawdust gem complete with the inevitable "John Lennon once drank here" claims but also (more importantly) a very delicious and refreshing pint of Hopsack from the Phoenix Brewery in nearby Manchester. 

On to the golf. Luckily we had a beautiful sunny day to walk the course, so we made the most of it by arriving fairly early (about 9am) via the excellent Wirral Line rail link which deposits you at Hoylake station no more than 10 minutes walk from the course entrance. Having availed ourselves of a coffee and bacon bap combo from the tented village we set out onto the course. Fortified by that, as well as the lunch we'd taken with us and a couple of pints of Stella from the on-course bars we managed to get round a good number of the holes and park ourselves in a couple of good spots where we could a) get a good view and b) try to get on television. Our best chance of that was probably on the fourth green, where members of the last two groups (Dustin Johnson and Rickie Fowler) chipped back onto the green from right under our noses, on the ninth where we found a good spot to recline with a pint and a sandwich and on the twelfth where none other than Tiger Woods hoicked his second shot wildly into the crowd only about ten yards from where we were standing. I keep meaning to watch back some of the coverage on the BBC iPlayer and see if I can spot us, but I haven't yet and I suspect I never will.

Unlike at the PGA Championship at Wentworth there isn't really any standing room around the 18th green, so you have to make a decision early on whether you're going to try and see as much golf as possible out on the course and then take your chances later, or try and bag a seat in the stands 3 or 4 hours before the leading groups come through and just stay there for the rest of the day. We didn't fancy this second option very much, so we watched the last couple of holes from the bar area in the tented village, on our way there nearly getting run over by a golf cart carrying none other than Samuel L Monkeyfighting Jackson to some VIP viewing area or other.

Speaking of the PGA Championship, I believe I'm right in saying that, slightly surprisingly, Rory McIlroy is the first man to win it and the Open in the same year, just as Martin Kaymer was the first to win the Players Championship and the US Open in the same year a month or so ago.

Anyway, photos (the golf ones being mostly grainy mobile phone camera shots as technically photography is prohibited on championship days) can be found here.

gene therapy

I note that it's something like eight years, back in the very earliest days of this blog in fact, since I last enthused about Gene Clark's 1974 album No Other. And I need very little encouragement to enthuse about it, since it is one of the most remarkable albums of the 1970s or any other decade for that matter.

The specific catalyst for this post, however, is my discovery of this video of a concert at the Music Hall Of Williamsburg in New York in January of this year, wherein an assortment of members of various hipster-ish bands re-enacted the entire album in its original running order. A recipe for some sort of horrific car-crash, you might think, but actually it genuinely seems to have been done with a good deal of care and love, and the results are for the most part pretty splendid, especially given that the album's sound wouldn't have been the easiest to reproduce in a live setting (Clark himself never attempted to tour in support of the album on its original release).

My personal highlights are the two songs featuring Fleet Foxes' front-man Robin Pecknold, Life's Greatest Fool and Strength Of Strings, partly because they showcase the stupendous female backing vocal ensemble. I must also mention From A Silver Phial, not so much because Hamilton Leithauser makes an especially memorable job of the vocal but because it remains one of my favourite songs. It's a pity that the high-definition video doesn't include the encores, as then I could have linked to a better-quality version of Victoria Legrand's spooky version of Clark's Hear The Wind, but it's still worth a listen.

house of the tiling fun

When we moved into our current house in June 2010, it was with the knowledge that there would be a few things we'd want to change around the place. I think unless you're moving into some sort of pristine showhome or you're a gazillionaire and you've designed the place down to the last detail, from the cocktail bar and recreational ball pit in the conservatory to the cocktail bar and recreational studded sex harness in the bedroom, then it's likely that you'll at least want to apply a lick of paint here and there to freshen things up, even if you're not knocking walls down.

Our predecessors (the male half of whom - the previous occupant of my shed - is now sadly deceased) had been in the house for 30-odd years, and some of the decor was obviously of similar vintage. That weird shiny vinyl wallpaper with the swirly patters or the bumpy embossed stuff is all a bit 1970s - indeed so, I would argue, is the whole concept of wallpaper. So that had to go from a couple of places, as did the strange chain attachment hanging from the ceiling in the spare bedroom. Aha, you'll be saying, the recreational sex harness. Well, maybe, but the story we were told is that my male predecessor was a former amateur boxer and that it had at one time been the attachment for a punch bag. You may choose to believe that story or not as you wish.

Anyway, not to get ahead of myself, here's the order in which we tackled the various decoration & renovation tasks. Where there is a link on the room name/description this will take you to a photo gallery.

1) second downstairs reception room - this was the first priority as it was intended to be Hazel's client reception & album viewing area and would enable her to relinquish the separate office space she was renting for this purpose at vast expense. Bit of wallpaper stripping, a lick of paint and some new light fittings, nothing too major.

2) the master bedroom - second priority as my wife refused to allow me to erect my IKEA bookshelves until we'd painted the wall they were going to sit in front of. Wallpaper stripping and painting mainly - sounds simple but it's an absolutely gargantuan room with lots of fitted cupboards, so it was all a bit fiddly in places.

3) the spare bedroom - this room featured possibly the most bizarre decor in the whole house, as most of one wall had been given over to wall-to-ceiling cork tiles for who knows what purpose - thankfully my fears of finding my predecessor's mother-in-law walled up behind it proved groundless. Less thankfully they were an absolute bastard to remove and necessitated getting the wall where they'd been replastered afterwards. There was also some furniture which had been fitted flush with the wall and floor by removing the relevant sections of skirting board and carpet, thus also necessitating complete replacement of both. And then there was the recreational sex harness as mentioned above.

4) what is officially one of the two small bedrooms towards the back of the house, and had been my "office", but was then designated as Nia's room (or "the baby" as she was then, as she hadn't been born when we started) and so needed to be converted. The usual de-wallpapering (some particularly horrible grey swirly vinyl stuff) and painting, plus converting the cupboard containing the boiler and water tank into a storage cupboard for baby clothes via an ingenious removable shelving system of my own design.

5) The garden. The first of the really big tasks, and the one I'm retrospectively most proud of. The garden was in a bit of a state as my predecessor had planned to build a one-storey extension at the back of the house, and had done various ground clearance activities in preparation for this as well as building a low breeze-block wall with various wire wall ties protruding from it. The bits that weren't a horrible sharp concrete and wire-based death trap were a jungle of buddleja and various other invasive plants. The impetus for this was - again - having Nia and being aware that once she was properly mobile she'd need access to a garden that wasn't going to rip her face off as soon as she set foot in it. So what we did was:

• tidy up the smashed concrete driveway by extending it to the back door and putting some nice neat brick edging on it
• remove about a quarter of the decking area to increase the area available for putting a lawn on - on removing the decking boards it turned out that a lot of the superstructure was rotten anyway, so it would have had to go one way or the other. Under the decking was a 4-inch thick layer of concrete that I had to hire a breaker from the good people at HSS (which happened to be about 50 yards down the road) to smash up, and under that was a foot-high layer of loamy soil that probably hadn't seen air or daylight for about 30 years.
• cover up the ugly breeze-block wall by facing it with some nice big railway sleepers that we got from the timber yard in Crumlin. We decided to extend the sleepers down the side wall to make a sort of long low bench when we discovered that the lawn level was in danger of being below the bottom of the wall, and that the wall didn't seem to be sitting on any meaningful foundations.
• fill up the areas enclosed behind the railway sleepers to make some raised beds for planting vegetables in.
• use the earth from under the decking to level the rest of the garden up in preparation for making a lawn.
• dump 6 tons of topsoil onto this area and then lay some turf on top of that (in what turned out to be freezing temperatures and torrential rain)
• put a child-proof fence around the edge of the decking area to avoid any plummeting incidents
• extend the side wall upwards by about 3 feet by putting a fence on top of it

I'd never done any hard landscaping of this sort before so I was extremely grateful for the assistance of my ex-brother-in-law Ray, who'd offered us his expertise and assistance in "tidying up" the garden as a wedding present back in June 2011, without (I suspect) quite realising what he was getting himself into.

6) the downstairs bathroom. This is located in a little brick lean-to structure at the back of the house, the best theory for the original purpose of which that I've heard is that it was probably the coalshed. That would explain the obvious bricked-up door on the outside wall, and the fact that the current entrance door from the utility room appears to have been knocked through at a later date. Anyway, it's handy to have a downstairs bathroom, but this one was a bit delapidated and contained a rather manky shower cubicle as well as a ragged hole where our old boiler used to be (it's now been replaced by a much smaller one in a cupboard in the kitchen). I hadn't planned to segue straight from finishing the garden into starting the bathroom, but then the shower packed up necessitating a bit of emergency plumbing (basically cutting off and capping some pipes) and that seemed like a good moment to start a bit of general demolishment.

So what I did was:

• rip out the shower cubicle and its floor tray
• smash all the tiles off the wall and floor
• brick up the hole in the wall where the outlet flue from the old boiler had been
• get a man in to relocate some of the pipework, specifically the inlet pipes for the wash-basin and the shower, replace and skim the ceiling and install a new window to replace the old rotten one
• attach battens to the external-facing walls and then plasterboard them (among other things allowing concealment of the inlet pipes)
• do the same for the internal walls but by sticking the plasterboard directly to the walls
• concrete in the shower waster pipe so as to allow a "wet-room"-style floor tiling arrangement (i.e. by building a slight slope into it)
• build a brick plinth for the wash-basin to stand on
• build a stud wall to enclose the future location of the "back-to-wall" toilet cistern
• seal and waterproof plasterboard and floor in preparation for tiling
• tile the floor (preserving the slope towards the shower drain but also ensuring that the door could still be closed and that there wasn't a step between utility room and bathroom for people to trip over)
• install the toilet and cistern
• tile the walls
• build a cupboard where the old boiler used to be
• install the washbasin
• tidy up, make good, etc.
• christen the toilet by having a big shit in it

So, in my mind at least, that concludes major DIY operations in and around the house for the foreseeable future. That doesn't mean that I can put my feet up completely, as there are numerous other bits of more mundane maintenance that need taking care of: some broken guttering needs replacing (which I'm going to get a man in for), the roof on the porch by the back door is somewhat leaky and rotten, I need to put some more shelves up in the shed, and the side wall could do with repointing. No rest for the wicked....

incidental music spot of the day

The opening bars of White Room by Cream over the opening moments of the Radio 4 adaptation of Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? at 9pm yesterday evening. I caught the first 20 minutes or so of it at the end of a long drive back from Derby, long enough to also catch a snippet of Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) later on as well.

Two filmic links, firstly that Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? was the basis (with the usual liberties taken with the plot) for Ridley Scott's classic 1982 film Blade Runner, and secondly that the canonical use of Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) in film is towards the end of Withnail And I as the two protagonists return to London. Get in the back of the van!

the last book I read

Metroland by Julian Barnes.

Chris and Toni are a couple of 16-year-old schoolboys in suburban early-1960s London. In addition to the usual teenage pursuits of malodorous spottiness and relentless wanking they also cultivate some slightly more cerebral ones, mainly scoffing at the stupidity of their school contemporaries, despising the bourgeois sterility of their parents' lives and fantasising about heading off to France and being bohemian poetic types, France being the centre of all that is arty and revolutionary as well as containing lots of knowing Gauloise-toting French girls who are gagging for it.

We then jump forward to 1968, and Chris has realised at least part of his fantasy by being in Paris, on the flimsy pretext of writing a thesis about French theatre. He's soon enthusiastically pursuing the other half of the Paris fantasy as well, by meeting sultry French girl Annick and persuading her to relieve him of his virginity. So bound up is he with cashing in on the sex thing at every possible opportunity that the seminal events of May 1968 rather pass him by, something he's slightly embarrassed about in hindsight, particularly since Toni reminds him about it constantly.

The last part of the novel happens in 1977 - Chris has settled into his own version of suburban sterility and tedium, or so Toni would have him believe anyway. Married to Marion, the clever, down-to-earth English girl he met towards the end of his time in Paris, father to a young daughter and occupant of a steady job and a nice house, Chris certainly seems to have embraced the whole bourgeois middle-class thing with a vengeance. So why is he so happy? And is Toni really as scornful of Chris' lifestyle as he purports to be, or is he just jealous?

This was Julian Barnes' first novel, published in 1980, and follows many of the standard rules for first novels: most importantly, write about what you know. The bits describing Chris' childhood are supposedly reasonably close to being autobiographical - Barnes certainly did grow up in suburban north-west London, and the close ties with France are real, Barnes being if anything more celebrated as a novelist in France than he is in Britain.

It's pretty short (176 pages in my Picador edition) and less experimental than some of Barnes' later stuff, Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters in particular. It's very good on the business of how bright, slightly smug teenage boys act (and I know, because I used to be one), and raises some interesting questions about how youthful idealism mutates into a strong desire to do nothing more than just hang out with your wife and kids. It's fairly slight, though, and as with the rest of Barnes' books one ends up perhaps admiring the cleverness of it rather than really engaging with the characters. I would recommend the pair of love triangle books Talking It Over and Love, Etc. and the darker, slightly Ian McEwan-esque Before She Met Me. Barnes won the Booker Prize in 2011 for The Sense Of An Ending, having been nominated three times before - I think there may be just a hint of a lifetime achievement award being handed out there, just as for some other past recipients.

Metroland won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1981, as did A Good Man In Africa. The usual list can be found there. It was also made into a film - starring Christian Bale and Emily Watson among others - in 1997.

mapsolutely fabulous

Inspired by this quiz in the Guardian last week - which you should go and do first; I got a distinctly average 7/10, and that was aided by a couple of lucky guesses - I've harvested a few pictures of maps from some (fiction) books on my bookshelves. These are in no particular order, and I'm not promising that I've captured every book I own that contains a map, but as it happens this quick skim yielded a nice round ten pictures, so here they are. Have a look (click for embiggenment) and see if you recognise any. If it helps at all, four of these are from books which have featured in this blog - I have omitted the obvious one, Riddley Walker, since I've reproduced the map here before, and that would be too easy. Answers in comment #1, unless someone beats me to it.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

bulbous developments #4

Right, you know the drill by now, so no frills, here's the low-down: latest bulb to expire was bulb number 11, which went a week ago on June 6th. This was another of the surviving 40W incandescent jobs, so no money/days calculation here. I just thought you might like to know.

mine eyes have seen the gory of the nailing of the Lord

Just a follow-up to the last post, with reference to the 1970s Bible-stories book in particular - you might say, well, as long as you set up the context correctly, i.e. it's just some old stories and not actually true, where's the harm?

As it happens the book I've got - which a quick look at the front page reveals was given to Hazel for her christening in April 1978 - has some illustrations which reveal the child-friendliness of these charming old stories.

Here's the Great Flood - Noah and his family are all fine (animal poo build-up problems aside), sailing off over the horizon in their great big ark, but everyone else is completely fucked:

And then there's the first Passover - those who were foolish enough not to smear their front door with a sufficient amount of goat guts having their first-born arbitrarily killed:

Here's old Moses reading out the ten commandments - just to make the point that this is NOT A JOKE and God is REALLY SERIOUS about this shit, he's doing it in front of a blood-smeared altar upon which there are some pots with all manner of unspeakable animal remains in them:

Here's where this shit really gets real: Salome carting around the head of John the Baptist (looking a bit surprised, as I imagine you would be) on a plate:

And finally, from the otherwise more mellow and cuddly New Testament, here's that nice Jesus chap being nailed to a tree:

The point is that far from being a collection of cosy harmless morality tales, this is an unmitigated series of Bronze Age horrors with no redeeming moral message whatsoever, unless of course you actually believe your kids need to be traumatised into obedience lest they meet a fate far worse than any of those illustrated in unnecessarily lavish detail above, i.e. burning in hell for all eternity. Since that's all utter nonsense the best thing is probably to keep this well out of the reach of children.

By contrast, let me once again commend to you the work of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, partly because they're just terrific stories, but also for the subtle messages of equality and tolerance that get unobtrusively slipped into the books. Here's Tabby McTat's new owners, Prunella and Pat - it's never deemed worthy of special mention that they are a pair of middle-aged lesbians - why would it be, after all?

And the knights-rescuing-princesses thing is nicely subverted in Zog when Princess Pearl announces that Zog and the knight can just ruddy well cut out all that nonsense about fighting for her honour, as she doesn't need saving, thank you very much, and she's going to go off and be a doctor.

Try any of that stuff in the Bible, and they'll probably stone you to death. It's even worse than saying Jehovah.