midsummer merthyr

My excuse for largely ignoring Father's Day up to now has been: well, its falling on the third Sunday in June means it's never more than a week or so from my own father's birthday, so a card and some minor celebration for that pretty much takes care of it.

Obviously now I am a father twice over I'm all over Father's Day like a rash. To the accompanying charge of hypocrisy I say: guilty as charged. Now bring on the cards, and have my adoring children scrubbed and set before me at a respectful distance.

Since my lovely wife had bought the girls a couple of matching T-shirts this year we decided to go and take some impromptu photos in the garden, which I think came out rather well. We also did a quick jaunt over to the RSPB reserve at Nash (one of our regular haunts) for some fresh air and a short walk punctuated by a couple of impressive threenager-style tantrums from Nia.

Only a few days later it was our fourth wedding anniversary - apparently the occasion for gifts themed around linen, silk, fruit, flowers, or electrical appliances, depending on whose bullshit list of stuff you adhere to. I suppose if you bought your spouse a juicer wrapped in a floral-patterned linen bag that would tick most of the boxes. Anyway, rather than get sidetracked by any of that nonsense, and since the weather forecast was good, we decided to have a day at the beach. As we hadn't been there before and it looked interesting, we went over to Merthyr Mawr between Ogmore and Porthcawl. What you'll discover if you visit is that even if you park up in the car park below Candleston Castle, the nearest point of access, you've still got a walk of a mile or so across some steep sand dunes to get to the beach - no joke if you've got a three-year-old, a twelve-week-old and a load of gear with you. Additionally, since the Ordnance Survey apparently consider the well-established dunes to be a transient coastal feature, they don't bother putting any contour info on the maps, so you really just have to pick your way along whatever looks like the best path as you go along.

The upside of all that effort, though, is that when you get to the beach the likelihood is that it'll be largely deserted - we had the mile-and-a-half stretch to ourselves apart from a couple of horse-riders and a couple of joggers. We managed to find a flatter way back later by walking south-east down the beach, finding a path upstream along the banks of the River Ogmore, and then cutting inland back to the car park.

It was a hot and breezy day, so as a responsible parent I urge you to remember to get plenty of sunblock on your kids. I do also urge you, however, not to do what we did and be so preoccupied with doing this that you forget to put any on yourself. Both Hazel and I were sporting some pretty spectacular sunburn by the time we got home.

Photos can be found here.

what, your hairy tube?

Here's a Headline Of The Day for you, on the face of it an utterly inconsequential showbiz story about two people who may once have been C-list celebs a decade or so ago, but the Daily Mail have managed to slip a bit of innuendo in just to spice things up a bit:

To be fair, I've trimmed a few extraneous words off the end of the headline just to focus the reader's mind a bit, but those are the words as they appear in the headline. I expect he then went on to kiss her in the Shepherd's Bush area, and then took her up the Arsenal, at which point they probably both got off.

book now to avoid disappointment

You'll have been wondering, after the last post documenting the senseless slaughter of another author, how potent the juju I evidently wield is. Well, that answer seems to be: it varies. While my first victim, Michael Dibdin, lived less than two months after first featuring in the list, others have survived for over seven-and-a-half years, although there does seem to be a cluster of deaths between there and eight years; Gabriel García Márquez at seven years and 284 days is the current longevity record-holder. Doris Lessing is the oldest victim at 94, but there is a cluster of six authors between 85 and 90. Michael Dibdin and Iain Banks are the only two who could really be said to have been taken "before their time".

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	2y 291d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	7y 218d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	7y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	7y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d

So the message seems to be: if you featured in a book review in this blog between seven and eight years ago, and you are now over 80, you are probably fucked. Surveying the book reviews between the middle of 2007 and the middle of 2008 suggests the most likely candidates are Joyce Carol Oates (age 77), David Lodge (age 80) and Milan Kundera (age 86). Keep an eye on the obituaries.

proper bo

I caught most of episode 3 (of 3 - episodes 1 and 2 are here and here) of How To Be Bohemian on BBC Four last night, presented by the lovely Victoria Coren Mitchell, with just the occasional knowingly foxy look to camera as if to say: yeah, I've done a bit of the old boheeming in my time, let me tell you. I concede that I could have imagined that last bit. Anyway, as if to mirror my reaction to people who self-identify as "bohemian", the programme was a mixture of fascinating, amusing and irritating. A couple of things that caught my eye and/or ear:

• Seasoned stalkers of Victoria Coren Mitchell will have clocked that there would have been a good possibility of her being pregnant at the time the programme was made - it was hard to tell based on the segment I saw as she was spending a lot of time in (presumably chilly) artists' garrets in a selection of large coats. The tiniest amount of research reveals that yes, she was.
• The programme provided the second recent-ish instance I've spotted of Led Zeppelin's Good Times Bad Times being used as incidental/soundtrack music, this time as backdrop to a bit about the 1950s turning into the 1960s and rock and roll providing a whole new series of more raucous outlets for people's creativity. Presumably it was chosen for its bracingly abrupt opening, representing in some way the shift in the prevailing cultural Zeitgeist, rather than its being specifically representative of the time, since the timing would have been a bit off if so - Led Zeppelin's first album was released in 1969.
• A moment of annoyance was provided when the lovely Vicky was interviewing everyone's favourite groovy vicar and ex-Communard Richard Coles - Coles seemed to be suggesting that perhaps he could call himself bohemian these days just by virtue of being a Christian, since it's practically ILLEGAL these days what with radical atheism pretty much taking over the world, and seemed to get at least nodding agreement to this utterly absurd claim. Come back when we've got atheist bishops getting seats in the House of Lords, Richard, and then you can have a go at telling me you're doing some radical swimming against the tide. Until then, no bohemian points for you, Jesus boy.

the last book I read

The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban.

Herman Orff is a writer. Of novels, in theory, but having published two to very little in the way of critical acclaim or sales he's been making a living lately writing material for comics. He's planning a third crack at making it as a novelist, but seems to be suffering from a nasty case of writer's block.

Providentially, at this point Orff receives a leaflet advertising a sort of electronic sound therapy which can supposedly lube up the artistic faculties and get the creative juices flowing again. It turns out that this operation is run by a bloke called Istvan Fallok, who it further turns out is an ex-lover of Orff's ex-lover Luise. Orff undergoes the treatment, which prompts an extended waking dream involving Persephone and the girl from Vermeer's Girl With A Pearl Earring.

Well, so far so freaky, but basically not out of the normal run of stuff, you might say. OK, well how about this: on his way home Orff hears a plaintive voice coming from the muddy banks of the Thames, and finds the severed and decomposed head of Orpheus, which he picks up and has a lengthy conversation with, as you would.

Strange things continue to happen as Orff tries to decide how best to cure his writer's block: he starts up a tentative relationship with Istvan Fallok's assistant (and ex-lover) Melanie Falsepercy (false percy -> percy phoney -> Persephone, you see?), he travels to The Hague to try to see the Vermeer painting (but finds it's been loaned to a museum in America) and finds everyday objects (a cabbage, a children's football, half a grapefruit) transforming into the head of Orpheus and talking to him. Hardly surprisingly after all this he suffers an attack of angina and ends up in hospital. Eventually, via his computer, Orff has a conversation with the legendary Kraken, gives up his ideas of trying to re-tell Orpheus' story and decides to pursue something stranger instead.

This is the fifth Hoban to appear in this list and certain common themes do start to emerge, just as they do for regular readers of, say, John Irving. In Hoban's case this seems to include Orpheus (who also featured in Kleinzeit), hospitals (Kleinzeit again), Odilon Redon (briefly mentioned here, also features more centrally in Come Dance With Me), and the idea that reality is like a moving picture, a series of still images that, if it could be slowed down enough, would reveal an underlying reality in the gaps between frames - "the moment under the moment" as it's referred to here, made more concrete as the basis for the "flicker drive" in Fremder.

What The Medusa Frequency is "about" is harder to pin down - it seems to be mostly about the creative impulse, its mysterious origins and the difficulty of recapturing it once it's slipped away. It's also about lost love, the difficulty of hanging on to a reliable memory of something that seemed overwhelmingly important at the time, and the jarring effect of meeting someone else who has a whole separate set of similar memories involving the same person. There's also some serious metafictional shit going on, as it appears that the whole text of the novel is actually the text of the third novel that Herman Orff has been trying to write.

Anyway, I'd urge anyone to get into reading some Hoban - they're smart (but wear their erudition lightly), funny and short (The Medusa Frequency is a skinny 143 pages).

it's in the trees; it's coming

It is now increasingly obvious that having one of your books featured in what I obviously should have been calling The Electric Halibrary for the last eight-and-a-half years is a curse akin to being slipped the runes, watching a cursed video, or crossing some stereotypical gypsy type and being given the evil eye, and after a mystically-determined period of time has elapsed being duly dragged off to hell.

So you can chalk up another for that list today, as James Salter, whose A Sport And A Pastime featured here just over a year ago, has died. To be fair, he was 90, so if you didn't know better you could just say, well, that's a coincidence. 

Anyway, the full list now reads:

• Michael Didbin
• Beryl Bainbridge
• Russell Hoban
• Richard Matheson
• Elmore Leonard
• Iain Banks
• Doris Lessing
• Gabriel García Márquez
• Ruth Rendell
• James Salter

I haven't read any of his other books, but there are those who speak highly of The Hunters and Light Years, and he published All That Is, his first novel in over 30 years, in 2013, just before getting a fatal dose of bad karma. 

headline of the day

My recollection of my drinking exploits on my own wedding day are mainly of being bought a succession of pints - mainly of the excellent Kingstone Gold which I'd specifically organised a few barrels of after a rigorous vetting and tasting process - by various people, having a couple of sips, and then putting them down somewhere in order to attend to some official duty or other or have some photographs taken, and then never picking them up again. All of which meant that I was commendably sober for all of the important stuff up to and including the first dance, although once my official duties were discharged I did get my head down and do some serious quaffing.

An approach which the young (and I do mean young - bride and groom appear to be about twelve) man here might have been well-advised to take, given the spectacle he made of himself. Still, judging by the headline, his new family didn't hold a grudge and did their best to make him feel welcomed into the family afterwards.

I am reminded of the popular (but probably apocryphal) story involving former footballer Rodney Marsh and legendary England manager Alf Ramsey, supposedly during what turned out to be the last of Marsh's nine appearances for England:

He played a mere nine times for England. There was a reason for that, too. When Alf Ramsey told him, "If you don't work harder I'll pull you off at half time," Marsh replied: "Crikey, Alf, at Manchester City all we get is an orange and a cup of tea." He was never picked again.

what are you waffling on about

I'll tell you what really grinds my gears: yeah, that's right, potato waffles. I know they may be waffly versatile and all, and moreover capable of being cooked in a toaster if you can't be arsed to use the oven, but there's still a problem.

Look (on the left) at how the individual waffles are arranged in the box - 3 stacks of 4 waffles each, arranged so that the long edges are facing you as you open the end of the box. That's only really a rational arrangement if everyone in the world eats waffles in groups of four, and no-one ever eats one, two or three waffles at a time. Since my elder daughter is the prime waffle consumer in the household - I never eat them, though I suspect my wife of being an occasional clandestine wafflist - and is a girl of fairly modest eating habits, one at a time tends to be how they get consumed. So you're left with one, two or three waffles flapping about loosely in the end of the box, threatening to fall out at any moment and restricting your ability to secure them by folding the end of the box over.

Aha, you're saying, but while all that's true, any revision to the stacking protocol would mean redesigning the box. Well, not so, as it happens. Observe (above right) how each waffle's width is exactly (or near enough, anyway) four times its thickness. So you could just as easily stack the waffles one by one in the box with their faces touching each other, like the slices in a sliced loaf. Then you could take as many as you liked out and immediately be able to fold the end of the box over to the required point to keep the rest from falling out. I am genuinely curious as to why they don't do it this way. And it's not just the cheapo unbranded ones we get from Aldi that do this; the posh Bird's Eye ones are the same, or at least they were back in the heady days when I had the disposable income to be able to buy them.

I was going to preface this brief rant with some sort of humorous crack about OCD, but I'm wary of doing that as it's become a bit of a humorous short-cut, and of course actual OCD (which 99.9% of people who refer unironically to "my OCD" don't have) is a very real and debilitating thing. So instead I'll just say that people who have a liking for things fitting perfectly into other things - and who doesn't? - (no, stop it, it's not what you're thinking), will find this collection particularly pleasing. No waffles, though.

un train peut en cacher un autre

A couple of loosely-coupled trains of thought: I caught a bit of the discussion on Radio 4's Start The Week this morning, another of the various Radio 4 programmes which start at 9am and which I therefore sometimes catch in the car if I'm not in the office by then (which I rarely am). Tom Sutcliffe was presenting this morning, which is good as I think he's a far more interesting and less irritating host than Andrew Marr, as well as being less prone to saying "cunt" unexpectedly.

Anyway, one of the early topics of discussion was Sir Thomas Browne, legendary polymath, author, science enthusiast and alleged coiner of lots of now-common words such as "ferocious", "electricity" and "suicide".

I remembered reading a quite lengthy bit about Browne in a novel I'd read a few years ago; I was distracted from trying to remember which one it was by one of the guests making a brief foray into the traditional pastime of Dawkins-bashing, the point allegedly being that Browne was all about the science and that, but was a bit nicer about it in the areas where it conflicted with religion. Which is a bit of an unfair comparison for both of them, since Browne lived in a time where explicit pointing out of the falsehood of religious claims could get you killed.

Anyway, I managed to remember where I'd read the Browne profile literally a couple of seconds before it was mentioned on the radio: The Rings Of Saturn by WG Sebald. As I recall it's near the beginning, but since Sebald's books contain almost no narrative as such it's hard to remember which order things happen in, inasmuch as anything happens at all.

All of which led me to recall that I'd owned two copies of The Rings Of Saturn, the second one (which I still have) being purchased shortly after I'd left the first on a bus somewhere in Bristol when I was about two-thirds of the way through reading it. Now I'm normally very careful (some might say slightly obsessive) about books, but I can recall a couple of similar incidents. Here's the full list as I recall it:

• I left a copy of Agatha Christie's 4:50 From Paddington somewhere while I was about halfway through it at the age of about 15. It might even have been on a train, although, I should add, just to be clear, not in the course of murdering anyone. I never have read the rest of it, though judging by the plot synopsis I may as well have just made some random shit up anyway. 
• I left a copy of Paul Theroux's The Family Arsenal on a Bristol bus - annoyingly, I'd picked up the original paperback for about a pound in a second-hand shop, but then had to purchase a spanking new one for about a fiver to replace it so I could finish reading it.
• The aforementioned The Rings Of Saturn, left on a very similar bus at a later date. I have a feeling that this was just before a birthday or Christmas and that I managed to wangle getting a replacement as a present. I was OK with waiting as it's not as if Sebald wrote novels of breathless cliffhanging suspense where you simply have to know what happens next, nor indeed "novels" in the usually accepted sense at all.

Other things I have left on trains over the years include a couple of sweaters, a towel and a blue enamel casserole dish. Note that there was not a casserole inside it at the time.

the last book I read

Not That Sort Of Girl by Mary Wesley.

Rose Peel has made a good, sensible marriage to Ned, a man with money, land, prospects, all that sort of stuff. Only one small cloud on the horizon, really: she doesn't love him. Instead, she is in love with Mylo Cooper, whom she met when he was doing some French tutoring for the sons of some neighbours. This is the 1930s, so Mylo's below-stairs (and possibly slightly foreign) social status and modest financial prospects are a problem big enough to scotch any possibility of them marrying, so good old reliable Ned it is.

Ned is basically a decent man, but he and Rose don't exactly strike up sparks in the bedroom department, if you know what I mean. Partly this may be because Ned is unwilling to give up his habit of occasionally knobbing Emily Thornby, the female half of the oddball pair of twins who live next door to Slepe, Ned's family pile.

So Mylo and Rose are reduced to the occasional clandestine meeting here and there in stolen moments and frantic coupling in various seedy hotels - it being necessary to conceal the affair not just from Ned, but also from Emily and Nicholas Thornby, who would use the knowledge for mischief. As if life weren't complicated enough, not only do both Rose and Emily find that they are pregnant (Rose definitely by Ned, and possibly Emily too), but World War II breaks out. Mylo's fluent French makes him an ideal go-between for helping to spirit French Resistance types back from occupied France, but it's dangerous work, and Rose never knows whether she'll ever see him again.

Eventually the war ends and it transpires that Mylo has survived. Things return to normal, though Rose and Mylo's opportunities to meet are even more infrequent than before, partly because Mylo has married Victoria, a woman from the government department that made use of his services during the war. But they continue to meet on into middle age, until eventually the inevitable happens and Ned dies. Rose is left to reflect on her life, and to wonder what happens now.

The review of The Gate Of Angels listed some 20th-century female authors who'd been late starters, including its own author Penelope Fitzgerald, who'd had her first novel published at the age of 61. Well, we have a new leader in that category, since Mary Wesley was 71 when her first novel Jumping The Queue was published in 1983. It's not entirely clear from her obituary what she spent the previous 71 years doing, apart from doing some intelligence work during the war and embarking on one unhappy marriage and one very happy one. It sounds like a lot of Not That Sort Of Girl (and indeed most of her output, since a lot of the themes seem to be repeated) is based on her life experiences.

It wouldn't be completely ridiculous to group Mary Wesley in with the list in that other book review comprising Penelope Fitzgerald, Penelope Lively, Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge and Alice Thomas Ellis - formidable ladies of a certain age (at the time of writing, most of them are dead now) writing books that appear fairly cosy and orthodox on the surface but which are just a little bit more waspish and subversive than they appear to be. On one level Not That Sort Of Girl is a fairly bog-standard story of long-thwarted love finally freed to express itself, but under the surface there is some sharp satire of the ridiculousness of 1930s ideas of class and morality, and the dreadful bind an intelligent independently-minded woman with a healthy liking for sex could find herself in. The sort-of-joke with the book's title is that Rose actually is that sort of girl, she's just not that sort of girl, you know, the other sort.

There's also something a bit darker going on with the Thornby siblings - it's made as clear as it can be without being explicit that we're meant to infer that Nicholas is the father of Emily's daughter Laura (and it's made clear in the later book Second Fiddle that this inference would be correct). So Not That Sort Of Girl chalks up another entry for the incest list which also features The War Zone, Clea, Invisible, Notice and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

It's not especially groundbreaking, and not that much actually happens, but I enjoyed it very much. It's very sprightly and zesty for a book written by a 75-year-old, and there's some relish about Wesley (evidently a game old girl) writing with gusto about sex and occasionally swearing like a docker.

There is also a lengthy section featuring World War II; the complete list of books in this list featuring that as a theme is too long to reproduce - and in any case I can't be arsed to do the research - but recent-ish entries include Turbulence, Free Fall and The History of Love.

There's a suspicion that Wesley is one of those authors where you don't need to read the whole oeuvre, since all the books cover a narrow-ish range of themes. The book for which she's most famous is probably The Camomile Lawn - which, just to prove the point, features country-house types, World War II and some shagging - which was adapted into a TV series in 1992 featuring the lovely Jennifer Ehle, the lovely Tara Fitzgerald and some splendid nudity. Tara Fitzgerald also appeared in the 1995 adaptation of another Wesley novel, The Vacillations Of Poppy Carew.

king hell

If you are or have ever been an avid reader of Stephen King's books, and why wouldn't you be, then this is a fascinating little project: the Guardian's James Smythe is re-reading all of King's novels in chronological order of their publication, i.e. starting with 1974's Carrie.

My King-reading history (also alluded to in the Cell review) goes something like this: I read The Shining when I was about 13 or 14 and was absolutely blown away by it, to the extent that I went on to read just about everything he wrote between that book (his third published novel, first published in 1977) and 1991's Needful Things. As I recall it was at the time of the paperback publication of It in 1986 that I "caught up" and started buying the books as they came out. Having been less than blown away by the sequence of The Tommyknockers, The Dark Half and Needful Things I took a breather from buying the books which has pretty much lasted to this day, broken only by 1998's Bag Of Bones (which was pretty good) and 2006's Cell (which was OK).

As I said here, my favourite Kings are the sequence which runs from The Shining via The Stand (note that the standard edition of this now appears to be the 1300-page extended version rather than my 750-page original version) and The Dead Zone to 1980's Firestarter. Anyone with the vaguest interest in fiction in general should read these, and should ignore their usual categorisation as "supernatural horror" or such like. Firstly, of those four only The Shining really falls into that category, and secondly, just like the science fiction/not science fiction thing, it's ridiculous. You might just as rationally decide not to read any books which featured dogs, rivers, the colour yellow or the month of September anywhere in the plot.

Needless to say there'll be agreements and disagreements. Here's a few:

• Given that I greedily gobbled up everything that followed The Shining, it seems odd in hindsight that I never went back and read either of its two predecessors, Carrie and Salem's Lot. I have however seen the Brian De Palma film of Carrie and the David Soul TV movie of Salem's Lot, both of which were pretty good.
• Smythe is a fan, so it's no surprise that the verdict on most of the books is that they're pretty good. One that he notes as an exception to this is Firestarter, which you'll recall I listed (and still do) as probably my favourite King of all. One of the main criticisms seems to be that you can summarise the plot in a single paragraph: well, I'm pretty sure you could do that for every King book, and indeed every literary work ever written. Here's The Shining in a single sentence: bloke gets job at hotel, goes mental. See? Easy. 
• Conversely, he regards the rabid dog story Cujo very highly, whereas I recall not thinking that much of it. I can illustrate that for you by telling you that I'm pretty sure it's the only one of the "classic era" Kings that I own that I've never been back and re-read. Conversely I must have read Firestarter at least half-a-dozen times. 
• He also lists The Dark Half, which I'd rate as no better than average by King's standards, as his favourite of all. 
• He's generally quite keen on the early books written as Richard Bachman, and so am I, although I didn't read any of them until they were anthologised as The Bachman Books in the mid-1980s. Interestingly, modern versions of this anthology omit the school-shooting story Rage as there was some suspicion that it inspired at least one copycat incident. My copy includes it, although as it happens I think it's the weakest of the four. I agree completely that The Long Walk and to a lesser extent The Running Man (almost nothing like the very silly Arnie film based on it) are obvious precursors of The Hunger Games and its sequels. 
• I agree completely that in comparison with most of his other books 1983's Christine is a bit of a turkey.
• I also agree that his very next published book, Pet Sematary, is probably the most purely horrific thing he ever wrote, for general gruesomeness and NO DON'T OPEN THAT DOOR scariness. 
• I furthermore agree that the vaguely science-fiction-y lost aeroplane story The Langoliers, the first part of the collection of short novel-length stories Four Past Midnight, is one of the very best things he ever wrote.
• The notes that monitor the recurring threads in King's books are fascinating: most obviously writing about writers and writing, which he returns to obsessively, but also the various metaphors for addiction that run through the books, again echoing King's own real-life struggles - he claims not to remember the writing of either Cujo or The Tommyknockers.
• As with any other prolific author whose works you read a lot of, which ones you cherish the most is dependent on a whole host of external factors, most importantly the order you read them in. The first ones you read will tend to make the most impression on you, and over-familiarity with the author's stylistic tics may eventually put you off reading more. 

The key points about all of King's oeuvre are firstly that even the slightly ropier books (Cujo, Christine, Cell - there's a crackpot theory for you; King books starting with "C" are not so good) are absurdly, relentlessly gripping, and secondly that what makes him different from the Shaun Hutsons and the James Herberts is that he writes characters that you can care about, lots and lots of them in the case of the epic books like The Stand, where he juggles 20-odd major characters. Failure to understand that this is what makes him great, rather than the gruesome bits (though he's obviously pretty good at them too) is probably the reason some of the film adaptations are so bad, Pet Sematary being a particularly egregious example.

no, mr. pond, I expect you to die

Since major combat operations in terms of DIY on our house are now complete (which isn't to say there aren't a couple of niggly things I ought to be attending to but haven't got round to yet), I'm available, in theory at least, for other activities elsewhere. As it happens, my completing our downstairs bathroom coincided with my parents moving to their new house in Abergavenny and deciding that they wanted to tart up the garden a bit. So my father and I have spent various spare days over the last year or so tackling various bits of garden renovation and restructuring, principally:

• emptying and removing the old pond from the lower level that took up a lot of room and was an obvious magnet for some sort of Don't Look Now-style kiddy death tragedy;
• levelling the area where the pond used to be and putting some turf over it to make a lawn;
• digging up a couple of huge spiky triffids from the flower-beds on the lower level and providing a nice well-defined edge between lawn and flower-beds by installing some railway sleepers;
• building some steps to provide access from the upper-level patio and main barbecue and wine-consumption area to the lower level;
• rearranging the fence by the barbecue area to provide a bit of extra space to accommodate a giant chimenea;
• replacing the steep stone steps between levels at the side of the house, and levelling off the easy-to-miss extra step by the corner of the conservatory.

Things that were learnt during this process include:

• Draining a pond is a lot easier if you have a length of hose, a drain at a lower level than the pond and some knowledge of the siphon effect. Then you can just get the system set up and flowing and retire to a nearby seat with a couple of tinnies (partly medicinal, to wash away the partial mouthful of pond water you'll almost certainly have got while getting the siphon going) while the magic happens, rather than have to shuttle back and forth with buckets of murky water for the next two hours.
• Those long hex-headed Timberlok screws for fixing railway sleepers together are brilliant.
• If you want to make steps out of railway sleepers, don't want unsightly screws sticking out of the middle, but haven't got some convenient wooden side rails to fix them to, one thing you can do is: build a brick/rubble base for them to sit on with two lengths of plastic pipe embedded in it (making sure the pipes are free of cement internally), wait for the cement to dry, drill two Timberloks halfway into the underside of the sleeper, pour some runny cement into the pipes and then sit the sleeper on the base so that the Timberloks sit in the pipes. Once that's dried you'll be able to get an elephant down there without it shifting about. Obviously careful measurement to synchronise siting of pipes and Timberloks is essential.

Anyway, photos can be found here.

stroking dick through the covers

As a tribute to the current exciting Test series being played between England and New Zealand, I offer you this two-item list: former New Zealand Test bowlers whose names simultaneously conjure up thoughts of both male and female genitalia.

• Bob Cunis: the secret here is you've got to pronounce the surname with a short "u", i.e. to rhyme with "pumice" rather than "Eunice". Anyway, the famous quote about his name is usually attributed to commentator Alan Gibson, probably, if the references to his drinking habits in these two obituaries is to be believed, after a refreshing lunchtime tipple or two:

This is Cunis at the Vauxhall End. Cunis - a funny sort of name. Neither one thing nor the other.

• Dick Motz.

in excelsis mondeo

Following on from my election manifesto What I'd Do If I Were In Charge as summarised here (alternative title: Things Are Going To Be Pretty Ruddy Different Round Here From Now On Let Me Tell You) here's a couple of extra items.

You'll recall there was some stuff in the original list about changes to house-building regulations, well, this is a perfect opportunity to crack down on some of the ridiculousness inherent in modern car design as well. I know that the majority of cars driven in the UK are probably manufactured outside it, but let's ignore that for the moment; I'm in no danger of being asked to actually implement any of this shit anyway, so it doesn't really matter how ill-thought-out it is.

We already know what item one is going to be: more human-readable diagnostic information in the event of a fault being logged by the engine management system. In other words, cars must carry an on-board version of the little diagnostic gizmo I was obliged to buy off Amazon. Since most cars now have a display screen and menu options built in anyway, the engine diagnostic menu could just be added to this.

Item two is as follows: for fuck's sake make changing the headlamp bulbs a bit easier. It can't be beyond modern vehicle science to come up with a way of, for instance, changing the main beam bulb on a 2008 Ford Mondeo that doesn't involve undoing two Torx screws and one cross-head screw, wiggling the entire (quite large) headlamp housing free from its position and removing it, unclipping the protective cover from the back, pulling out the bulb holder, removing the bulb, replacing it with a new one, and then putting the whole lot back together again, having, if you're sensible, tested the whole set-up first to make sure it's working. Not only that, but since I didn't have any Torx bits of the relevant size I had to buy some, although that did afford me the opportunity to buy this rather neat little ratchet screwdriver kit off Amazon for the absurdly reasonable price of £3.49.

As I've said before, I'm not especially expert with car maintenance, but I'm perfectly capable of following instructions. So I'm extremely thankful for the existence of YouTube and its excellent selection of car maintenance videos, including this one which describes and demonstrates the elaborate procedure I described above - in particular the advice regarding replacing the bulbs between 3:40 and 4:00 is invaluable and I urge you to take heed of it if you're attempting the same job. If I'd been trying to do it from a series of grainy still photos in the Haynes manual, or, worse still, having to work it out for myself, I probably wouldn't have dared even trying to start. And that's the problem: you don't really want to be going straight to a garage to get a bulb replaced, but equally you definitely don't want to be going to a garage with a headlamp housing with various vital bits sheared off or shattered because you've had a go at fixing things yourself and made a colossal bish of it.

As with the diagnostic thing, I realise there's no commercial incentive for car manufacturers to comply, but equally there was no commercial incentive for them to fit seat belts either, which was why legislation was required. So let's legislate the shit out of this, and look forward to a world of simple screw- or snap-in bulbs that you can do one-handed while sipping a nice G&T.

from here to paternity

After the arrival of our second daughter Alys at the end of March I was determined not to spend quite as much time sitting around watching Deal Or No Deal as last time during my fortnight off. In any case, having a new baby around plus an energetic three-year-old changes the situation a bit, and my duties this time revolved more around helping to keep Nia involved and occupied rather than wrangling Alys, although I bow to no man in my ability to change shitty nappies and get copiously sicked on. So we had to find some places to go to keep us entertained. Here's what we came up with:

• Fourteen Locks: I've been up here a couple of times before, but they've done some (lottery-funded, I think) restoration of some of the locks and a general tarting-up of the visitor centre. Also, there was a kid-centric activity day on involving a sort of duck-based treasure hunt up and down the towpath that runs from the visitor centre to where the canal ducks (you see what I did there) under the M4 near junction 27. 
• Fforest Fawr: this is the woody area up to the north of Castell Coch, not the larger area of the same name (which just means "big forest") in the middle part of the Brecon Beacons National Park. There is an interesting sculpture trail including wizards, dragons and some artefacts clearly left behind by a passing giant. Needless to say we stopped in at the Lewis Arms in Tongwynlais on the way back for a pint and some fish and chips.
• The Newport Wetlands bird sanctuary near Nash: I'm not an especially enthusiastic twitcher, but this is a great place for a bit of sea (well, estuary) air and a run about, even if you wouldn't know a snowy egret if you were pissing on one. 
• Dewstow Gardens: this is a strange little Victorian fancy, lost for half a century but dug up and restored about 15 years ago. Lots of quirky little water features, underground grottoes and the like. Great for kids, as long as you're constantly vigilant for the many ways they can fall in things and drown. 
• Caerwent: this is one of two major sites of Roman remains in the vicinity of Newport, the other being Caerleon. Basically Caerleon was the military garrison and Caerwent was the market town; the old town walls are still pretty impressively in existence and there are a couple of other buildings whose foundations are well-preserved and on display.

A selection of photos (also including some of Nia enjoying her birthday present, a garden slide) are here. Technically the next two are places we've been in the last week or so, rather than during my paternity leave period, but I include them as they're useful things to know about if you've got kids to entertain:

• Bryngarw House: we ended up here after an abortive attempt to go to the Kite and Superhero festival at Margam Park last weekend. To be honest the festival bit didn't sound all that appealing to me, but the park is quite a nice place for a run about. By the sound of all the subsequent media coverage we did the right thing by bailing out after sitting in a traffic jam between M4 junctions 37 and 38 for an hour or so. Frankly anything involving getting parked without too much queueing would have seemed like bliss after that, and we didn't do much more than sit on the grass, have a picnic and go on various climbing frames and slides in the adventure playground, but it was all very nice. 
• Perrygrove Railway: this is not only a perfectly nice little narrow-gauge steam railway but also features a couple of attractions irresistible to kids of all ages (including my own age): a treetop adventure and a miniature indoor village featuring lots of little hidden staircases and secret tunnels. I'm pretty sure I had more fun than literally anyone else here regardless of age during our visit, even if I did nearly get stuck a couple of times. 

keep that ginger where I can see it

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the last book I read

The Ginger Man by JP Donleavy.

Sebastian Dangerfield is a bit of a boy. An American, in Ireland to study for a law degree at Trinity College, Dublin, he has married and had a daughter with an English woman, Marion, and they've rented a house outside Dublin. Now very often marriage and fatherhood mellows a man; there's a realisation of the need to settle down, provide for one's own future and for others, that sort of thing.

None of this applies to Dangerfield, clearly, though, as he embarks upon a rampage of drinking, petty theft, brawling, criminal damage, unpaid bills, hiding from landlords and creditors, non-attendance at lectures and general arseholery. Marion and baby Felicity have to move out of the house after a couple of spectacular plumbing disasters and increasingly frantic attempts by the landlord to extract rent payments, but Dangerfield is too busy exposing himself on a tram and pursuing local girl Chris to really notice.

Once he catches up with Marion in her new place of residence he's clearly unchastened by the experience as he continues his hell-raising ways, interspersed with the occasional bit of domestic violence, until Marion's patience is exhausted and she takes off to Scotland with their daughter. Thus freed of responsibility, Dangerfield ramps up the hedonism, seducing the lodger, Miss Frost, as well as another local girl, Mary, whom he persuades to promise to come to London with him, and to steal some money from her family to finance the trip.

Once in London he hooks up with some old friends and perpetrates several more drink-fuelled outrages before Mary turns up to join him, and so the familiar cycle of drunken abuse and morning-after remorse begins again.

The Ginger Man was something of a cause célèbre in the late 1950s and early 1960s owing to the tortured circumstances of its original publication, and its censorship-busting sexual frankness (Lolita, Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer were all in the news for similar reasons at around the same time). So it would have been the sort of book there'd have been a transgressive thrill in owning.

Of course the sexual content, while not exactly tame, has by now certainly lost most of its power to shock, so it's interesting to read the book 60 years after its original publication and see how it stands up. I suspect it seems like less of a bawdy farce and more dark and tragic to modern readers, just because the trope of the carousing Irish drunk is a bit less appealing than it once was, and people are less willing to accept the subordinate role of women as long-suffering child-carers and occasional sex receptacles and/or punchbags with precious little agency of their own.

It's certainly true that apart from the drinking, fucking and fighting precious little actually happens in terms of plot, and Sebastian Dangerfield couldn't really be said to have much of a character arc, being just as irredeemable at the end of the book as at the start. That said, it is written in an endearingly manic stream-of-consciousness way, veering wildly between first and third person without warning.

I'm not sure that, if you ignore all the historical baggage, this is a great book, though it is a perfectly entertaining one. Like anyone who had instant success with his first book, Donleavy spent the rest of his career trying - and largely failing - to live up to it. Some disagree - the Modern Library, for instance, named it in their 100 best novels of the 20th century. It's clearly still a source of interest, as can be seen from this article about Donleavy (still alive at 89, though now clearly doomed to be a future entry on the blog reading list of death) from the Irish Independent just three days ago.

It's one of those books that seems ripe for screen adaptation, until you realise that not much happens and there's a lot of interior monologue that will be difficult to render on-screen. Nonetheless there was a TV adaptation done in 1962, somewhat sanitised no doubt, starring Ian Hendry as Dangerfield. It's also supposedly been a long-standing ambition of Johnny Depp to bring The Ginger Man to the big screen; nothing yet though.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Model and general showbiz socialite partygoing type Cara Delevingne, and Jay from various Kevin Smith films, as played by Jason Mewes and more usually seen in the company of Silent Bob (aka Smith himself). Beanie hat, hair, eyebrows, bish bosh, sorted.

I don't attend prestigious fashion shows or trawl the society gossip columns all that much, so I know very little about Cara Delevingne. One thing that strikes me, though, is the weirdness of her surname: if you skim over it as most people do you'd assume it's spelt "Delavigne" and pronounced vaguely Frenchly as "Deller-veen". Or, to put it another way, like Avril Lavigne's surname, but with a "De" in front of it. But look more closely: firstly it's "Dele-" not "Dela-", which is weird, since French doesn't work that way ("de le" being rendered as "du"), secondly there's a rogue "n" before the "g". So does that mean it's pronounced more Germanically as "Deller-ving-nuh" or something? I've no idea, and while this Evening Standard article gives some interesting background on her ultra-posh ancestry it doesn't help with any of that.

I expect it's some sort of upper-class shibboleth like the old Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh-Beauchamp thing where the nobs can chortle at the lower orders struggling with all these extra letters they've bunged in just to trip us up. Most people seem to just go with "Deller-veen", anyway.

oh, the freudianity

Hot on the heels of the John Inverdale moment, here's the BBC's Assistant Political Editor Norman Smith calling Nigel Farage a cunt live on air - it's about 18 seconds into this clip.

A little bit harsh, you might say, even for the leader of UKIP. What Norman Smith was trying to say, in relation to Farage's somewhat comical resignation and almost immediate un-resignation from the UKIP leadership in the wake of the general election, and after some reports of unrest over Farage's leadership, was "personality cult". So there's another entry for the many different ways otherwise respectable broadcasters can contrive to accidentally say the word "cunt". Here's a reminder:

• James Naughtie and Andrew Marr spoonerising "Hunt" and "Culture";
• Nicky Campbell spoonerising "Kent" and "Hunt";
• Jeremy Paxman mispronouncing "cuts";
• John Inverdale mashing up "coloured" and "tinted";
• Norman Smith mispronouncing "cult".

I'm sure there are other people out there who will find other ways. The price of not accidentally saying "cunt" is cuntstant vigilance, as Eleanor Roosevelt may or may not have once said.

never ending tory, ah-ah-ah ah-ah-ah ah-ah-ah

So, as we all settle down to watch the government snooping on our private communications, gleefully gutting and privatising the NHS, ruthlessly squeezing the poor, disabled, unemployed and the suspiciously foreign, and just generally doing the usual bog-standard cartoonish supervillainy, what should we do?

Well, if "we" in this context means progressive left-leaning liberal types concerned with things like equality, fairness and social justice rather than things like tax breaks for the ultra-rich, screwing the underprivileged and sucking people's brains out through a straw, then your primary concern is going to be with the state of the Labour party, what went wrong this time, and what needs to happen between now and the next general election in 2019/2020.

1) Grow a pair, stand up for your record and stop trying to be the Tories. The biggest thing that prevented a Labour victory this time, aside from Ed Miliband's personal approval ratings, some ill-defined fears about the SNP, voters' understandable but misguided desire to give the Liberal Democrats a kicking, or, almost too horrifically to even contemplate, the notion that voting UKIP might be a good idea, was the success of the Conservative narrative regarding the economy, the deficit, and borrowing under the previous Labour administration.

That narrative goes something like this: Labour spent wildly, profligately, when they were in power, buying Bentleys for Polish plumbers and financing Bangladeshi lesbian dance collectives in Birmingham until the public coffers were empty and the whole country was in hock up the wazoo. Then, when the deficit was out of control and we, the people of the UK, were literally on the brink of all having to sell our children for medical experiments, the Conservatives stepped in, did what had to be done, including making tough decisions where necessary, and brought things under control.

It should hardly need saying that this is bullshit, but apparently it does, as that narrative seems to have been not only swallowed whole by the electorate, but also by the 2015 Labour party. Or, more likely, they decided that it simply wasn't possible to refute given the soundbite-y environment which they're obliged to inhabit during the campaign. That's the trouble: folksy narratives comparing national economies to households and talking of "tightening our belts" and "tough choices" play well with the public because they sound superficially plausible; unfortunately the idea that economies are just large-scale households is nonsense, and they behave differently in all sorts of counter-intuitive ways.

These paragraphs by 1996 Nobel economics laureate William Vickrey (from a longer essay here) are well worth reading:

Deficits are considered to represent sinful profligate spending at the expense of future generations who will be left with a smaller endowment of invested capital. This fallacy seems to stem from a false analogy to borrowing by individuals. 

Current reality is almost the exact opposite. Deficits add to the net disposable income of individuals, to the extent that government disbursements that constitute income to recipients exceed that abstracted from disposable income in taxes, fees, and other charges. This added purchasing power, when spent, provides markets for private production, inducing producers to invest in additional plant capacity, which will form part of the real heritage left to the future. This is in addition to whatever public investment takes place in infrastructure, education, research, and the like. Larger deficits, sufficient to recycle savings out of a growing gross domestic product (GDP) in excess of what can be recycled by profit-seeking private investment, are not an economic sin but an economic necessity. Deficits in excess of a gap growing as a result of the maximum feasible growth in real output might indeed cause problems, but we are nowhere near that level. 

Even the analogy itself is faulty. If General Motors, AT&T, and individual households had been required to balance their budgets in the manner being applied to the Federal government, there would be no corporate bonds, no mortgages, no bank loans, and many fewer automobiles, telephones, and houses.

Just to throw another Nobel laureate at you, here's a longish (but fascinating) piece by Paul Krugman on financial crises and government austerity drives (here's a slightly shorter piece by the same author). Also, here's a graph of the UK budget deficit from 1979 to 2012: as you can see running a deficit is entirely normal (the only times the budget has been in surplus during that period are 1988-1989 under the Conservatives and 1998-2001 under Labour). Note also that the deficit run by the last Labour administration was well within perfectly normal historical bounds until after 2008 (up to which point the Conservatives had pledged to match Labour spending pound for pound anyway), only increasing sharply in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2009. Note also that since the deficit has come down a bit (but not that much) since 2012 the coalition has now borrowed considerably more in 5 years than the previous Labour administration did in its 13 years in power.

It's worth noting also that the economy was recovering in early 2010 during the last days of the Labour administration, and then went back into recession during the early days of the coalition as George Osborne's austerity policies started to bite. Now one can argue about the causes of the recession, but the point is that the central charge of the coalition picking up a Labour economic shambles is, once again, bullshit.

Basically the problem with refuting the simplistic folksy narrative here is the same as the problem evolutionary scientists have when a creationist whips out the old "why are there still monkeys?" gambit. There's an obvious right answer, but it takes a couple of minutes to outline, and people will have stopped listening well before the end.

Another example of a fatal lack of self-confidence: Liam Byrne's infamous note left for his successor at the Treasury. Clearly just a silly (and highly ill-advised) joke, but, scarcely believably, allowed to be brandished by various Conservatives (including David Cameron himself in one of the BBC debates) as some sort of evidence of Labour's economic failure. It must surely have been possible to challenge this sort of nonsense directly and robustly - seriously? it was a joke; get a grip, man - but no-one seemed to have the will to do it, and so it became A Thing, just like the economic argument.

2) Elect a halfway-sensible new leader. There's not exactly a wealth of candidates, but I quite like both ex-Health Secretary Andy Burnham (who seems to be the current favourite) and Yvette Cooper, who will at least have a ready-made campaign manager now her husband Ed Balls is looking for a job. I can't see David Miliband being a realistic candidate, not least because he isn't an MP currently, but also because he's very closely associated with the Blair/Brown administration and he's got a bit of a toxic surname at the moment.

3) Come up with some arresting policies. Here's a couple for you - this is pretty much my manifesto should I ever run for government:

• A combined affordable housing/green housing scheme. Provide some incentives for building affordable housing, but introduce legislation that says: any new house built in the UK must have one or more of the following built in: a rainwater/greywater collection and re-use system, solar panels, a rooftop wind turbine, a composting toilet. Hell, make it all of them.
• Electoral reform. There's been a lot of retweeting of this chart about how the 2015 election results would have looked under a pure proportional representation system. That's slightly misleading for a couple of reasons: firstly, there are many variants between the current first-past-the-post system and "pure" PR like the alternative vote or single transferable vote systems, either of which are probably a more likely option than pure PR as they retain some connection with the old constituency system, secondly if people know in advance that every vote counts in a way that it currently doesn't they'd probably vote differently. So to anyone worried about the prospect of UKIP getting 82 seats I say: firstly, that's democracy, like it or lump it, secondly, I strongly suspect that wouldn't happen under a different system. Of course there's a bit of a catch-22 situation here, in that any government elected under the first-past-the-post system is going to have a vested interest in keeping the system that got it elected in place, so they're going to be disinclined to change it. This goes double for the Conservatives, the party for whom the phrase "vested interest in the status quo" was invented.
• Compulsory voting. This is a bit of a sharp-intake-of-breath one for people: compulsory voting? As in: you can be prosecuted for not doing it? Well, think of it as being like jury service. It's only once every few years, so I think you can reasonably be expected to get off your fat arse and drag yourself to a polling station. Other countries have it and democracy has not collapsed.
• Legalise drugs. Personally I favour across-the-board legalisation, since I see no rational reason for them to be illegal, but I accept that it might be better to have a phased approach which plucks some low-hanging fruit first. So let's start with cannabis. They tried it in Colorado, and, a year or so later, everything's still pretty mellow.
• Abolish faith schools. Well, you couldn't expect me to get through a whole, fairly lengthy post without having a pop at religion, could you? Michael Gove, who is now, laughably, justice secretary, is a reliable source of horrible right-wing wrongness about just about everything, and this is one of those things. You can get rid of academies, too, while you're at it. The notion that education should be a) administered by the state and b) secular seems to me pretty uncontroversial, but maybe I'm just a crazy old dreamer.

4) the tl;dr version. Be a proper, left-leaning if not overtly left-wing, alternative to the Tories, and you will find that there is a public appetite for it. Aping their policies won't work, because the public will always be drawn to the self-abasing thrill of voting for something truly, chillingly evil rather than something just a bit evil. Also, if you don't get it together before the next election, and David Cameron is serious about standing down, there's the very real prospect of Boris Johnson being Prime Minister. So think on, and shape up.