staycation vacation location

Here's a couple of photo galleries documenting a couple of small holidays we had during late August and early September. You might describe them both as "staycations", depending on your definition of the word - i.e. is it a break from work where you stay at home, or just a regular holiday where you don't leave the country? Both definitions seem to be in use. Actually, now I think about it, the first trip might contravene even the second, more generous definition, since we live in Wales and the campsite is in England, though only just.

Our first trip was to the Forest Holidays campsite at Bracelands, near Christchurch in the Forest of Dean. We've been here a couple of times before, once as part of our Forest of Death cycle trip in May 2008, and once almost exactly three years ago, when Nia was about the same age as Alys is now. This was the trip where the campsite entry barrier attempted to eat my old Ford Focus, a scenario we avoided this time in a few ways - firstly by not having the Focus any more, secondly by attaching a large roof box to the top of the Mondeo as a barrier (though I suspect it wouldn't have stood up to having a site entry barrier land on top of it), and thirdly by actually going to a slightly different place, the tent section of Bracelands having moved down the road a bit since we were there before. The site we were previously in now contains some little log cabins which look lovely, though they do seem to be eye-wateringly expensive to hire.

Secondly, we made a repeat visit to Bluestone in Pembrokeshire, this time with our NCT chums Huw and Zoe and their two children. Lots of the obligatory hooning around in the pool with the kids, one cheeky visit to the onsite pub for a pint (very decent Reverend James this time, though it is by no means my favourite thing - a bit dark and malty for my taste), and one bit of adult time (steady on, it's not what you're thinking) where we put the kids in the crèche for the morning and went off to do their High Ropes challenge, which is Go Ape! in all but name. Interestingly the only way in which the Bluestone version differs from Go Ape! proper - which we've done twice, once at the Forest of Dean and once at Margam Park - is that it doesn't include the Tarzan Swing into the big cargo net, which is the scariest bit as it requires a proper step off into the void. Perhaps they didn't want to traumatise the Mums and Dads too much before they went back to pick up the kids.

directions to Tenby are as follows: past Eightby and Nineby; if you get as far as Elevenby you've gone too far.

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) September 2, 2015

We also took a trip to the beach at Tenby, where Huw and I had a go at throwing a boomerang (one of these, I think) he'd recently acquired. I have thrown a boomerang precisely once before in my life, in a school field in Market Drayton in about 1992. On that occasion a good hour or so of attempts yielded precisely one successful throw and catch; here maybe half that time yielded two, plus a couple of near misses. Perhaps my technique is improving. Remarkably I have photos of both sessions: compare and contrast the differences in both boomerang technology (the 1992 model was an old-skool green wooden V-shaped one) and my waist measurement over the course of about 23 years. Note also how my beautiful daughter has done her best to photobomb the recent photo.

There are some quite interesting and extensive caves in the cliffs at the south beach at Tenby (the boomerang picture above is taken from a vantage point just in front of them), some brief exploration of which yielded the inevitable scalp injury which you can view below, and compare with the earlier one inflicted by the kitchen doorway at our old flat in Newport.

One of the myriad benefits of having a luxuriant thatch of head hair is a fraction of a second's early warning that you're about to hit your head on something, allowing you to take evasive action - plus of course a bit of padding in the event of an impact. If I'd still had the 1992-era haircut I'd have been fine.

Anyway, Forest of Dean photos can be found here, Pembrokeshire ones here.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Topsy and Tim's Mum (as portrayed by Anna Acton) in the newish (and mildly controversial in some quarters) CBeebies adaptation of the venerable old book series by Jean and Gareth Adamson, and Dave Bartram, lead singer of 1970s pop stalwarts (and, in hindsight, much as I loved them at the time, ghastly cheesy novelty act) Showaddywaddy. Similar hair, cheekbones, enormous gob.

come and have a rifle through my pottery barn

Here's a quick round-up of some recent arrivals in my Hotmail inbox. There's a lot of tedious low-level spam, which I won't bore you with, though I must say there has been a disappointing dwindling in the number of 419-type scam e-mails I get and also the amount of Arabic pornography.

I'm still getting mail from the barely-restrained potential spree killers at Bud's Gun Shop, though. Nothing as good as the bullet earrings for the wife, but I do like the way the latest assault rifle offer comes with a tasteful background of what appears to be (tastefully monochrome) blood and brain splatter, just to illustrate what you can expect to see when you decide to prove to your boss that you're mad as hell and you're not going to take it any more.

I've also had an e-mail from the apparently respectable retailer Pottery Barn; a receipt for a purchase I supposedly made on September 1st. Just to be clear, I have never bought anything from Pottery Barn, but I was interested to see what they thought I'd bought, especially as its original retail price was $121.99, though I apparently ended up paying a bargain price of $49.97. This was a branch of Pottery Barn in Edmonton, Alberta, which I apparently visited in person (i.e. rather than doing the whole thing over the internet), so these are Canadian dollars. At current rates of exchange that works out at £24.57 - not a fortune, but I'd want to know what I was spending it on. The trouble is it's almost impossible to tell from the description on the receipt (see below) which renders it as follows: CLFT CYL TBL LB BL.

Well clearly there's been a bit of radical disemvowelling and abbreviation here, so my best guess is that this is a CLEFT CYLINDER TABLE LABIA BALL, which I assume to be some sort of heavy-duty sex device which requires securing to a table prior to use.

Fortunately there's a product number on the receipt as well, and you can use that on the Pottery Barn website to retrieve the details you want. It turns out what's being described is CLIFT GLASS CYLINDER TABLE LAMP BASE, LIGHT BLUE. To which my reaction is twofold: a) how disappointing and b) bloody hell, one hundred dollars (Canadian, admittedly) for an empty bottle with a light bulb stuck in it. A two-and-a-half-feet high bottle (and presumably a reasonably large light bulb), but still.

the early-21st-century blog post of raw sexual frenzy

A couple of brief follow-up points from the last book review: firstly I should have noted that The French Lieutenant's Woman won a couple of literary awards, notably the now-defunct WH Smith Literary Award in 1970. The Shooting Party was the other recipient of that award to appear on this list.

Secondly, my old second-hand early-1970s paperback edition of the book carries a fairly sombre black cover with a detail from Richard Redgrave's 1844 painting The Governess, currently on display in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Just in case that was a bit downbeat for you, though, the whole thing is jazzed up a bit by carrying the following legend:

You know, with the best will in the world I'm not sure that's really an accurate description of what the book's about, or, at least, that description would lead you to expect a bit more, y'know, action than the page or so that the reader actually gets. Just as the description of the protagonist of Algis Budrys' Who? in the film version (aka Roboman) as THE KILL MACHINE WITH THE MEGATON MIND seemed to be trying too hard to sell what was actually some quite cerebral source material, this seems to be trying to knock out a few copies to unsuspecting lovers of bog-standard Victorian bodice-rippers, most of whom would (I suspect) have been sorely disappointed.

Similarly I always thought the chosen tag-line for the excellent Serenity - "They aim to misbehave" - was a bit of a strange choice, since it conjures up a bit of an image of a band of wacky space loonies having zany adventures. And in a sense that's what does happen, but for all the humorous moments it's a film with some deadly serious points to make, and if you were led to expect Spaceballs, well, again, disappointment is the most likely outcome. Then again that's the most likely outcome if you actually watch Spaceballs, too, so maybe it doesn't matter.

Lastly, here's an interesting interview with John Fowles from the Paris Review in the mid-1980s. There's a lot of interesting material in the Paris Review's Art Of Fiction series available online, including similarly in-depth interviews with a number of authors who have featured on this blog, including Vladimir Nabokov, Jonathan Franzen, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, Haruki Murakami, Jack Kerouac, Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates, Hilary Mantel, William Gibson and probably many others.

the last book I read

The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles.

Charles Smithson is your fairly typical upper-middle-class Victorian gentleman - no particular need to hold down a day job, in line for an unspectacular but perfectly serviceable inheritance, dabbles with a bit of amateur naturalism and paleontology and has even flirted with a bit of the racy revolutionary (and indeed evolutionary) thinking of scientists like Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin.

A bit of amateur naturalism and paleontology are two of the things on Charles' mind during his stay in Lyme Regis; the other principal one is spending some time with his fiancée Ernestina, the daughter of a wealthy tradesman, and a perfectly delightful creature, though, in more modern parlance, not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

One windy day Charles and Ernestina are out walking on the Cobb, Lyme Regis' iconic harbour wall, when they spot a black-clad hooded figure at the far end, staring motionlessly out to sea. Ernestina, better-schooled in local lore than Charles, explains that this is a minor local celebrity known as The French Lieutenant's Woman, as well as by certain other less polite descriptions. Charles is intrigued, but thinks little more about it until, out walking in the Undercliff, happens unexpectedly upon the same woman, sleeping, and wakes her. Intrigued by the stories he has heard about her in town, he engages her in conversation when they have a similar chance meeting a few days later, whereupon he learns that her name is Sarah Woodruff and she works as a governess. He also learns something of her notorious liaison with the French lieutenant, although a lot of it raises more questions than it answers: since she seems completely sure that the encounter meant nothing to him and that he has gone forever, why does she moon around gazing out to sea as if watching for him?

Well, you can see what's going to happen here; Charles has fallen in love with Sarah, her enigmatic and independent nature and apparent revelling in her own notoriety providing a spicy alternative to the pretty but bland prospect of marrying Ernestina. Charles tries to escape the inevitable by using some of his contacts to get Sarah a job in Exeter, but then she sends him her address, he goes to visit her, and they have a brief and frenzied sexual encounter. Well, that's torn it. Quite literally, actually, as it turns out Sarah was a virgin, and therefore at least one part of her mystery Frenchman story was fabricated. But why would she do that?

Thoroughly obsessed now, Charles breaks off his engagement to Ernestina, thus ensuring himself a good dose of public disgrace and the making of some powerful enemies, and returns to Exeter to declare his love for Sarah. Only it turns out that Sam, his faithful manservant, wasn't so faithful after all and has failed to deliver the letter telling her to await his return. Pursuing her to London, he engages various private detective agencies to locate her, but to no avail. By now thoroughly pissed off with the whole affair, he jaunts off around the world for a couple of years, eventually ending up in America, where eventually he is contacted by his lawyer and learns that Sarah has been found. Hot-footing it back across the Atlantic, he finds her working in some slightly ill-defined capacity in the house of artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Can he persuade her that they can still make a life together?

Well, before you try to answer that question, let me just stop you and say: it's nowhere near as simple as that. While all this narrative has been going on, it's only been going on on the most pathetic level of reality. Even while the standard Victorian melodrama has been playing out, there's been plenty of authorial intervention to add late-20th-century historical context to what's been going on, and at various points the rug is pulled from under the reader completely: upon Charles' arrival in Exeter the author (Fowles, obviously, or some fictionalised version of himself) offers us a glimpse of a conclusion to the novel where Charles returns to Lyme Regis, marries Ernestina, they fire out a volley of puppies and all proceeds according to the original script. Then he crumples that ending up, throws it away, has Charles visit Sarah and give her a brief but pivotal scuttling, and alea iacta est.

That's not all, though: as Charles is travelling to London on the train, Fowles inserts himself physically into the narrative as the bearded stranger who shares his carriage, and looks at him while he sleeps to try to work out what to do with him next. Then, at the novel's conclusion, Fowles offers two possible endings to the novel, one where Sarah and Charles reconcile (and it's revealed to him that their brief liaison produced a child) and one where they don't (and he never knows). Which one is the "real" one? Well, none of this is real, the same as any novel. As with Invisible and a few other novels in this list, how frustrated you feel by this will depend on how much you're prepared to be made to think about what you're reading. It's all stuff that's been made up by some guy, it's just that traditionally he doesn't keep poking you in the shoulder to remind you.

Personally I'm quite partial to a bit of the old metafiction; the key to something like this is that the central story has to be engaging enough that it would work as a "standard" novel in its own right even if the author didn't keep hitting the pause button to walk you round the back of the set and show you the scaffolding holding the plot in place. And it does, although Sarah Woodruff's motivations for doing pretty much any of the stuff she does during the novel are as opaque at the end as they are at the start. Clearly she's meant to be some sort of proto-feminist heroine who doesn't need a man to define her, still less "rescue" her from anything, but she seems so quixotic that it's hard to know.

Here's John Crace's Digested Reads version from the Guardian. My even more digested version is: did I enjoy it? Yes, very much. I think Fowles is a novelist who, a bit like Lawrence Durrell, has waned a bit in critical regard in recent years, and I should point out this is the only thing of his I've ever read, but I thought it was excellent, very easy to read, and the metafictional dicking about was at levels that were acceptable to me, and telegraphed early enough that the rug-pull at the end wasn't that much of a surprise.

The French Lieutenant's Woman is as famous these days for its 1981 film adaptation starring Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep, in, respectively, some extraordinary sideburns and a terrifying wig. I saw it a very long time ago, but it's only on reading the source novel that I appreciate the brilliance of the device that Harold Pinter came up with to convey the famous split ending: have an extra narrative involving the actors playing the characters in the film and give them and the "real" characters one ending each.

It's also another entry on the list of novels featured in the TIME magazine list of best 20th-century novels.

abu dhabi doo

One cricket stat that seems to have slipped under my radar is the remarkable achievement of Pakistan's Misbah-ul-Haq in Abu Dhabi in November last year - I was going to say "last winter", but those terms are pretty meaningless in Abu Dhabi - equalling Sir Vivian Richards' record for the fastest Test century by clouting one off just 56 balls.

As a tribute to people hitting Test centuries at express speed, here's another table for you: people who have hit the most Test hundreds at a run a ball or greater (or, to put it another way, off 100 balls or fewer). The dozen listed here are those who did it more than once. No real surprises with most of the names on the list, indeed I could have probably given you the top two with a good degree of confidence before compiling the list (for which the source data is here).

Player	Country	Number of 100s	Fastest (balls)
Virender Sehwag	India	7	78
Adam Gilchrist	Australia	6	57
Chris Gayle	West Indies	4	70
Brian Lara	West Indies	3	77
Brendon McCullum	New Zealand	3	74
Shahid Afridi	Pakistan	3	78
Ian Botham	England	3	86
Kapil Dev	India	3	74
Tamim Iqbal	Bangladesh	2	94
Mohammad Azharuddin	India	2	74
Ross Taylor	New Zealand	2	81
David Warner	Australia	2	69

It won't have escaped your notice that most of those people are relatively recent - Botham and Kapil Dev take you back to the early 1980s, but that's about it. As with this list (which you'll notice Misbah also features on), that's partly because balls-faced information is increasingly sketchy the further back you go, but also just because the game is played at a relatively breakneck speed these days - the influence of all that one-day and Twenty20 cricket, no doubt, as well as more mundane things like bigger, fitter players, bigger bats, that sort of thing. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it's just a thing.

the kumars at no. 57.40

Here's a quick round-up of statistical nuggetry on the retirement of two admirably nuggety left-handers, Kumar Sangakkara of Sri Lanka and Shivnarine Chanderpaul of the West Indies. Slightly different circumstances surrounding their departures: Sangakkara's planned in advance and allowing the tearful valedictory bat-wave on his departure from the crease for the last time, Chanderpaul's enforced by West Indies management (rather like Brian Lara before him) after a run of low scores, and denying him the chance to go out on his own terms, valedictory bat-wave and all.

By an odd coincidence Sangakkara, Lara and Chanderpaul occupy three adjacent spots (5th, 6th and 7th) on the overall Test run-scorers list, which means that they are also the 1st, 2nd and 3rd most prolific left-handed batsmen in Test history - Allan Border, Alastair Cook, Graeme Smith, Matthew Hayden, David Gower, Garry Sobers and Justin Langer make up the rest of the top ten. Since Langer is 30th overall on the list, you can see that exactly one-third of the top 30 batsmen are left-handed, which gives you an insight into their prevalence in comparison to the prevalence of left-handedness in the population at large (about 10%). There is a catch here, though, which is that not all players who bat left-handed are left-handed in the traditional sense, i.e. doing the "normal" stuff like writing with their left hand. Gower and Lara, for instance, were left-handed batsman and right-handed writers (and occasional bowlers); conversely, Tendulkar batted and bowled right-handed and wrote with his left hand.

Both retirements also necessitate some revision of my obscure hierarchy of batting averages: Sangakkara ends Jacques Kallis' 18-month tenure on the overall list by replacing him. It's worth re-iterating the point of these lists: for each person appearing on it, no-one who has come later has finished with a higher average.

Player	Year	Average
Kumar Sangakkara	2015	57.40
Garfield Sobers	1974	57.78
Ken Barrington	1968	58.67
Don Bradman	1948	99.94

As you can see, Sangakkara wasn't that far from removing Garry Sobers from the list - before his last two matches against India he was averaging 58.04, and only needed to score 133 runs in his last match (rather than the 50 he actually did score) to finish with an average in excess of Sobers'. The 325 runs he would have needed to score to displace Ken Barrington would have been a tall order, and the 9240 runs he would have needed to score to displace Don Bradman definitely would have been.. Nonetheless he collapses the Sri Lankan list to a single entry, just as Kallis and Sachin Tendulkar did for their respective countries on their retirements. I should add, just for completeness, that Sangakkara's old mucker Mahela Jayawardene would have been occupying the Sri Lankan list on his own since his retirement in 2014 if I'd been scrupulous about keeping things up-to-date.

Chanderpaul still talks up his chances of a return to Test cricket, but I think we're pretty safe in assuming that that won't happen, just as we are for Kevin Pietersen of England. I therefore think it's safe to include them on their respective countries' lists. Chanderpaul displaces his old team-mate Ramnaresh Sarwan for West Indies, and Pietersen displaces everyone post-Boycott for England. Michael Clarke's retirement at the end of the recent Ashes series slots him in at the end of the Australian list.

England

Player	Year	Average
Kevin Pietersen	2014	47.28
Geoff Boycott	1982	47.72
Ted Dexter	1968	47.89
Ken Barrington	1968	58.67
Herbert Sutcliffe	1935	60.73

Australia

Player	Year	Average
Michael Clarke	2015	49.10
Mike Hussey	2013	51.52
Ricky Ponting	2012	51.85
Greg Chappell	1984	53.86
Don Bradman	1948	99.94

South Africa

Player	Year	Average
Jacques Kallis	2013	55.37

India

Player	Year	Average
Sachin Tendulkar	2013	53.78

Pakistan

Player	Year	Average
Mohammad Yousuf	2010	52.29
Javed Miandad	1993	52.57

Sri Lanka

Player	Year	Average
Kumar Sangakkara	2015	57.40

New Zealand

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

West Indies

Player	Year	Average
Shivnarine Chanderpaul	2014	51.37
Brian Lara	2006	52.88
Gary Sobers	1974	57.78
Everton Weekes	1958	58.61

Zimbabwe

Player	Year	Average
Andy Flower	2002	51.54

will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I shoot 64

Another major, another round which equalled the major championship scoring record for an individual round but didn't break it. You might expect that a major tournament which resulted in a new record for the overall finishing score in relation to par would have been a good candidate for seeing a new single-round record as well, but we didn't get one. Best round of the week was Hiroshi Iwata's 63 on Friday, which necessitates another revision to my list of major-championship 63s. Here's the up-to-date list:

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Johnny Miller	US Open	1973	final	WON	Johnny Miller
Bruce Crampton	USPGA	1975	second	2nd	Jack Nicklaus
Mark Hayes	Open	1977	second	tied 9th	Tom Watson
Jack Nicklaus	US Open	1980	first	WON	Jack Nicklaus
Tom Weiskopf	US Open	1980	first	37th	Jack Nicklaus
Isao Aoki	Open	1980	third	tied 12th	Tom Watson
Raymond Floyd	USPGA	1982	first	WON	Raymond Floyd
Gary Player	USPGA	1984	second	tied 2nd	Lee Trevino
Nick Price	Masters	1986	third	5th	Jack Nicklaus
Greg Norman	Open	1986	second	WON	Greg Norman
Paul Broadhurst	Open	1990	third	tied 12th	Nick Faldo
Jodie Mudd	Open	1991	final	tied 5th	Ian Baker-Finch
Nick Faldo	Open	1993	second	2nd	Greg Norman
Payne Stewart	Open	1993	final	12th	Greg Norman
Vijay Singh	USPGA	1993	second	4th	Paul Azinger
Michael Bradley	USPGA	1995	first	tied 54th	Steve Elkington
Brad Faxon	USPGA	1995	final	5th	Steve Elkington
Greg Norman	Masters	1996	first	2nd	Nick Faldo
Jose Maria Olazabal	USPGA	2000	third	tied 4th	Tiger Woods
Mark O’Meara	USPGA	2001	second	tied 22nd	David Toms
Vijay Singh	US Open	2003	second	tied 20th	Jim Furyk
Thomas Bjorn	USPGA	2005	third	tied 2nd	Phil Mickelson
Tiger Woods	USPGA	2007	second	WON	Tiger Woods
Rory McIlroy	Open	2010	first	tied 3rd	Louis Oosthuizen
Steve Stricker	USPGA	2011	first	tied 12th	Keegan Bradley
Jason Dufner	USPGA	2013	second	WON	Jason Dufner
Hiroshi Iwata	USPGA	2015	second	tied 21st	Jason Day

A couple of further thoughts occurred to me: firstly that you can - broadly speaking - make a 63 in two ways: either by being on for a 64 and then holing a birdie putt at the last, or by needing a par for a 63 and getting it. Iwata was in the second group, and he got there by getting up and down for par from short of the 18th green. But there must be a subset of players in the second group who two-putted for a par, and therefore had a putt for a 62. I know, for instance, that the most recent two players on the list, Stricker and Dufner, fall into this category, and both putts were very makeable ones. These two interesting articles suggest that there were people who had shorter putts than that for 62s: Mark Hayes in 1977 had a six-footer for par on the last and missed, Greg Norman three-putted the last green in 1986, the crucial putt being from around five feet, and most surprisingly of all the great Jack Nicklaus had a putt of no more than two or three feet for a birdie on the 18th at Baltusrol in 1980 and missed it. That's one criterion for "closeness" to a 62, another would be how close what turned out to be the penultimate putt came to going in. Johnny Miller in 1973, Tiger Woods in 2007 and Nick Price in 1986 all had putts that got a pretty good portion of the hole before lipping out; Price claims his did a full circuit of the hole and still stayed out, though that story may have grown a bit in the telling, as war stories do.

My second thought was: at some point this 27-item list is going to be collapsed to a single item, whenever (as is pretty much bound to happen eventually) someone holes one of those putts for a 62 (or something even lower). But there must have been a point just before the 1973 US Open when there was a similar multiple-item list in existence featuring a whole host of players who'd shot 64 in a major championship. I wonder if it's possible to reconstruct that list?

Well, probably, but I'm not about to present you with anything that I'm claiming is complete or definitive. What I can tell you is as follows:

• The first player to shoot 64 in a major championship was Lloyd Mangrum in the first round of the 1940 Masters, where he eventually finished second.
• The first player to shoot 64 at the US Open was Lee Mackey jr in the first round in 1950; he followed that with 81-75-77 and eventually finished 25th.
• The first player to shoot 64 at the USPGA was Bobby Nichols in the first round in 1964; he went on to win the tournament.
• The man Nichols beat into second place in 1964, Jack Nicklaus, got there by shooting a 64 in the final round.
• In the very next major, the 1965 Masters, Nicklaus shot another 64, in the third round this time, and went on to win the tournament.
• Mark Hayes' 63 in the second round of the 1977 Open set a new record for that championship, beating the venerable previous record of 65 set by Henry Cotton in 1934. So what that means is that there was never a 64 shot at the Open that would have qualified for the list - needless to say there have been plenty of Open 64s subsequent to Hayes' 63, but of course they don't count.

So all of those would have been on the list, but I couldn't say whether there would have been any others. Chances are there probably were, but without trawling through the entire database of major championship results I can't be sure. It is almost certain, however, that Jack Nicklaus will be the only person to have featured on both lists. Obviously it follows that before the 1940 Masters there would have been a similar list of 65s with at least one entry on it, Cotton's round at the Open in 1934. Good luck with that one.

incidental music spot of the day

The Stake by the Steve Miller Band during Sky Sports' coverage of the USPGA championship from Whistling Straits. Cracking tune, mildly controversial at the time because of its riff's close resemblance to that of Rocky Mountain Way by Joe Walsh, released a few years earlier. Here's a live rendition of The Stake from March of this year which demonstrates that despite being nearly 72 Miller a) still knows how to rock out and b) has more hair than I do.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Diminutive Swedish golfer and 2015 Memorial Tournament winner David Lingmerth, and comedian, playwright and screenwriter Patrick Marber.

great big number twos

I was interested to discover which songs had kept the five Queen number 2 hits I referred to in the previous post off the top slot, and, having done that, made the unwarranted inference that you'd be interested too. Well, whatever, I've done the research now so you're getting it anyway.

• Killer Queen spent two weeks at number two, the weeks of 10th and 17th November 1974, for both of which it was kept off the top spot by David Essex's Gonna Make You A Star.
• Somebody To Love was kept off the top spot by Showaddywaddy's Under The Moon Of Love for one week, 5th December 1976.
• The double A-side of We Are The Champions and We Will Rock You spent three weeks at number 2, and was kept off the top spot for the first two of those (13th November and 20th November 1977) by Abba's Name Of The Game, and then, just as Name Of The Game dropped down the chart the following week, was leapfrogged by the dreaded Mull Of Kintyre.
• Crazy Little Thing Called Love spent two weeks at number 2, 18th and 25th November 1979, for both of which it was kept off the top spot by Dr Hook's When You're In Love With A Beautiful Woman. 
• Radio Ga Ga spent two weeks at number 2, 5th and 12th February 1984, for both of which it was kept off the top spot by Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Relax. 

Personally I wouldn't feel able to say that any of the number 1's listed there were better than the song they kept at number 2, but there's a long and glorious history of this in the UK charts, from The Beatles' Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever double A-side being thwarted by Englebert Humperdinck's Please Release Me to Ultravox's Vienna meeting a similar fate at the hands of Joe Dolce Music Theatre's Shaddap You Face. This particular injustice was voted the worst of all time in a poll by Radio 2 a couple of years ago. 

beelzebub has a blogging platform put aside for me

So there we were, the wife and I, all prepared to have an early night and watch something edifying on the TV, maybe something from our extensive DVD collection like Citizen Kane or The Seventh Seal or maybe the entire Three Colours trilogy. But, instead, we got caught up watching The Nation's Favourite Queen Song, like a high society couple on the way to a romantic dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant being lured into an alleyway by a syphilitic tramp waving a lukewarm KFC bargain bucket laced with crack.

Now obviously you'll have instant recall of my blog posts from eight years ago, so you'll recall this one wherein I cited Queen's A Day At The Races as one of the key albums of my formative years (i.e. my parents owned a copy). That album came out in 1976; my period of proper full-on Queenmania was a bit later and probably ran for two or three years between about 1983 and 1985. During that period I bought every album they'd released up to that point (yeah, even the Flash Gordon soundtrack). The Works was the only proper album that came out during that period and its major singles Radio Ga Ga and I Want To Break Free were probably the band's last great moments before the inevitable decline set in - One Vision and A Kind Of Magic are fine songs, but the accompanying album has a lot of fairly uninspiring filler off the Highlander soundtrack, and by the time of their next proper album The Miracle in 1989 I'd gone to university and had my head turned good and proper by the musical delights on offer.

Anyway, the point of mentioning this sort of TV show is always to bitch about the selections that were made, so here goes:

• Firstly, there's far too much stuff from after A Kind Of Magic - my (possibly controversial) view is that pretty much everything after 1986 is best forgotten about, so 3 out of 20 from this period is too much, especially when two of them (The Show Must Go On and These Are The Days Of Our Lives) are clearly unavoidably associated with Freddie Mercury's death, and therefore immune from criticism.
• I would have had Somebody To Love in my top three, or even two, or even possibly one. Number ten is definitely too low, anyway.
• Christ knows what Who Wants To Live Forever is doing in this company; I can only assume this is another one that people have decided they like because the lyrical theme foreshadows Mercury's eventual death in some way, rather than because it's, y'know, any good. It's A Hard Life is a pretty ordinary song to be in a top 20 as well, especially at the expense of, say, Fat Bottomed Girls, which despite being toe-curlingly politically incorrect is irresistibly good fun.
• Some minor quibbles about the order of other entries: I Want To Break Free being above Killer Queen is a bit of a nonsense, as is Under Pressure being above Another One Bites The Dust. Nice to see both entries from this list getting a look in, although to be honest Under Pressure is a bit of a horrible mess of a song. I've always thought Don't Stop Me Now was over-rated as well, but I think people like that whole I Will Survive/I Am What I Am slightly camp self-empowerment thing.
• Since it was almost inevitable that Bohemian Rhapsody would be number one, the race was really to see what would make number two, and as it happens I think We Will Rock You is an excellent choice. The sparse instrumentation and brevity (just under two minutes) mean it's worn better over the years than some of the more overblown stuff. Obviously the magic bit is at the end, where we get a little whine of guitar drone through the last chorus, the big powerchord, and then an "all right" from Mercury as he hands the song over to Brian May's closing solo. Even the solo itself is interesting (guitar nerdery alert), since as well as being a little masterpiece of brevity it's an example of a different, cleaner, more chiming guitar sound May used on 1977's News Of The World and pretty much nowhere else. The criminally underrated minor single Spread Your Wings features a similar sound (and clearly had its video shot on the same day) as well as featuring the principal guitar solo right at the end of the song. By the next album (Don't Stop Me Now, for instance) we were back to the bigger, syrupy, chorus-y sound, as well as having the solo in the middle of the song. 
• Speaking of things getting to number two, Queen are an interesting example of a group who had a lot of number 2 hits but precious few number 1's, during their main period, anyway. Between 1974 and 1984 they had five number 2's (Killer Queen, Somebody To Love, We Are The Champions/We Will Rock You, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Radio Ga Ga), and two number 1's, Bohemian Rhapsody and Under Pressure, and you could argue that's only one-and-a-half, really. A piece of associated trivia: Creedence Clearwater Revival had five number 2 hits on the US singles charts, but never a number 1, although Bad Moon Rising was number 1 in the UK in 1969.

land of confuzhion

The English language is a great thing, don't get me wrong, but it has its limitations. Do you mean funny ha ha or funny peculiar? Do you mean hot as in high temperature or hot as in it's got a lot of chillies in it? There's that sort of thing, but there's also some more basic stuff like being able to unambiguously render certain sounds. So any word with a "th" at the start, for instance, relies solely on prior knowledge and perhaps some context to determine whether it's a soft "th" (as in, say, "thought" or "theme") or a hard one (as in, say, "this" or "that"), whereas, for instance, Welsh can easily distinguish between them by using "th" for the soft one and "dd" for the hard ("voiced", more accurately) one.

The example which came up today was as follows: like many offices the one I work in doesn't enforce a rigid suit-and-tie regime, but equally (dress down Fridays aside) you can't just rock up in jeans and a hilarious T-shirt with some near-the-knuckle slogan on it. Some sort of casual shirt/chinos combo is the usual strategy, and the term "business casual" has sprung up to describe it. That's all fine, but there's a natural tendency to want to abbreviate, and the obvious abbreviation here is just to retain the first syllable of each word. So that would be biz, erm....well, there's a problem here, isn't there? It turns out there is no letter combination that will unambiguously render the sound of the "s" from the middle of "casual".

Those who have tried to do it have taken one of a number of approaches; well, I say "a number", I think there are three, as follows:

• "biz cas" - just shorten "casual" without any thought to the resulting pronunciation; this is obviously highly unsatisfactory;
• "biz caj" - I see what they've tried to do here, but it looks weird and the sound still isn't quite right;
• "biz caz" - probably the closest sound-wise, but still not quite right, unless you happen to pronounce "casual" as "caz-yoo-wul" in which case a) this is going to be the one for you and b) what is wrong with you?

I think the answer is probably to take a cue from our Russian friends and adopt the use of "zh" to render this particular consonant sound. So you'd render it as "biz cazh", as in: Marshal Zhukov and Dr. Zhivago had a bit of leizh time, so they dressed up in biz cazh, much to their mutual pleazh.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright and comic actress Sally Phillips. Pictures carefully chosen as they only really look alike when they're smiling, largely because they've both got a short upper lip frenulum which produces a little point in the middle of the top lip when they do a full teeth-revealing grin. I spot these little things so that you don't have to.

Here's Martha Wainwright doing a very slinky version of When The Day is Short on the David Letterman show.

the last book I read

Our Kind Of Traitor by John le Carré.

Perry Makepeace and Gail Perkins have got precious little to complain about, on the face of it. He is an Oxford University lecturer, and she is an up-and-coming-lawyer, and they've no problem affording to swan off for a holiday in Antigua, which is where we find them when the book opens.

Perry is a pretty good amateur tennis player, and has inadvertently caught the eye of a possible opponent, a mysterious, bald, portly Russian called Dima, who challenges him to a match. While Dima is quite a lot better at tennis than one might have anticipated, Perry still wins, at which point it turns out that the tennis match wasn't really the point of the whole exercise - the point being that Perry seemed to Dima like a quintessential fair-play English gentleman type to make his big confession to: that he wants to defect to the west and bring his extended family with him, an exchange sweetened by the usual handover of secrets, principally secrets relating to his extensive criminal activities as a money-launderer for the Russian mafia, and, who knows, maybe the Russian government as well.

Of course Perry isn't an actual spy, he's just some guy, so he's got to find a way of communicating what he's found out to the British intelligence services. He seems to find this remarkably easy, considering they don't exactly advertise in the Yellow Pages, and so he and Gail are placed in the care of Luke and Hector who are supposedly going to organise Dima's transit to the UK and freedom, as well as a similar escape route for his family, comprising his wife, two grown-up sons, teenage daughter Natasha, and the two young daughters of his protégé Misha, recently murdered by the Russian mafia. And of course the Russian mafia would have an interest in a bit of the old murdering if they ever got wind of Dima's intentions.

An elaborate plan is cooked up which involves Gail and Perry meeting Dima again in Paris, as if by chance, including attending the 2009 French Open final, while he is there to sign over some of his money-laundering rights to some younger successors, and thereby quite likely his own death warrant as well. The challenge for the spooks (and for Perry and Gail) is to spirit away Dima before the Russian mob can get to him, and park him and his extended family in a safe house in Switzerland where they can await the official summons to come to the UK (Dima first, then the rest once it's been established that he has useful knowledge to offer) once the relevant groundwork has been done. However, getting the official ticks in the appropriate boxes turns out to be a bit more challenging than the spooks had hoped, and even when the official word has apparently been given there's still the chance of the whole operation being sabotaged by an intervention from the Russian mafia. Or was it the UK government?

Comparing this book with the only other le Carré in this list, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, is quite instructive: that one was written at the height of the Cold War (1963) and for all its moral ambiguity and the grubby moral compromises of the major characters there's still a pretty robust certainty that the Brits are the good guys and the Russians are the enemy. By the time Our Kind Of Traitor was published (2010) the Cold War is over and those moral certainties have fallen away, indeed the whole idea of loyalty to one's own country up to the point of sacrificing one's own life for it seems faintly ridiculous. So instead what motivates the major characters here is more prosaic things like money, sex, self-interest and the desire to protect one's family.

It seems to me that le Carré is a bit more interested in people here, too - apart from the two big set pieces at Roland Garros and in the hotel in Berne, most of the narrative interest is with the characters and their background and motivations. There is a bit of a jarring shift of viewpoint after the first hundred pages or so, which have focused on Perry and Gail, to a whole load of background information about Luke, which is fine but brings the plot to a bit of a halt while it's happening. And I was left somewhat unsatisfied by the ending - I like a bit of ambiguity as much as the next man, but this left too many unanswered questions for me. It's a bit like Infinite Jest in that there's a dawning realisation, as the reader contemplates the slim number of pages remaining, that the narrative arc isn't going to be completed and the loose ends aren't going to be tied up in the way you might want them to be.

I'd say, those caveats aside, that this is a bit warmer, more welcoming and easier to read than the Cold War era novels like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, since it doesn't have that book's grim East German setting or its focus on the minutiae of espionage, although le Carré can't resist throwing in a bit of cloak-and-dagger stuff in the subterranean spa at Roland Garros. He's probably less highly-regarded as a writer than he should be, which is almost certainly down to the same sort of genre snobbery that regards science fiction writing with a snort of sniffy disdain. For all the excellence of some of the novels which have won the Booker Prize, for instance, over the years, there's a certain kind of novel which gets on the shortlist, and science fiction and espionage novels aren't it.

There have been a lot of films of le Carré novels over the years, and apparently Our Kind Of Traitor is soon to join that list, as there's a film scheduled for imminent release starring Ewan MacGregor as Perry, Naomie Harris as Gail and various other big names. Variety, in their inimitable style, describe it as a "contempo spy suspenser", which I suppose is about right.

I've started so I'll finish

Quick follow-up on a couple of earlier posts:

• I should have mentioned during the Pride And Prejudice review that this is another book that I bought many many years ago (25 years plus, I should think) and once started reading but never finished. Previous books in that category on this list are On The Road, Good As Gold and The Unbearable Lightness Of Being - I really should have remembered Pride And Prejudice since I specifically mentioned it in a couple of those earlier reviews. My recollection is that I made a decent start on it, maybe getting somewhere between a quarter and a third of the way through, and the abandonment wasn't because I wasn't enjoying it, but more likely because something like a new Dick Francis or Stephen King paperback came out and distracted me and I never quite got round to going back to it. These days I have put away the capriciousness of youth and am more ruthlessly self-disciplined in these areas, and I never start a novel until I've finished the previous one. I might have a fiction and a non-fiction book on the go at the same time, but never two fiction books. Well, I suppose maybe in exceptional circumstances like forgetting to take my current book with me when I'm away from home and having to get hold of something else to read, but not otherwise.
• Similarly, I should have spotted that Solaris permits me to fill in a blank entry on this list of novels originally written in other languages, since it's the first one I can recollect reading that was originally written in Polish.

hayling frequencies open, captain

A couple of photo galleries to catch up on from various recent travels:

Firstly, we went to an owl sanctuary for my Dad's birthday. Now I'm aware that there is an element of the Alan Partridge about this, but it was actually quite interesting. Dad is a bit of an amateur ornithologist, Nia likes owls, and we didn't bother to solicit Alys' opinion on the matter, so it was all good. And as it happened it was a nice day and they had various other non-owl wildlife on display as well.

The sanctuary in question is here, just up near Kington, an hour or so's drive from my parents' place in Abergavenny. And it pretty much does what it says on the tin in that they have a lot of owls, of a bewildering variety of species. They also have sheep, goats, alpacas, various rodents, tortoises, ducks, geese, the whole nine yards, as well as a picnic area and the inevitable gift shop where we bought Nia a little cuddly snowy owl, which she promptly christened Snowy, in common with probably 99% of snowy owl toys purchased there.

Last weekend we took ourselves off for a bit of a tour of the south coast, starting off by staying a couple of nights in a little cottage in Emsworth which Hazel had found on Airbnb. Emsworth is a town between Portsmouth and Chichester which has several pubs - including the Bluebell where we had a nice fish & chip lunch and a pint of Doom Bar - and a pleasant little harbour area from which you can walk along the edge of Chichester Harbour, the big tidal area between the mainland and Hayling Island. Better still, the cottage we were in, just north of the main town area, was right next to a charming little miniature nature reserve, and, more prosaically but very usefully, a branch of Tesco.

We'd chosen the location as it was handy for the second half of our trip, but also because it was in close proximity to Paulton's Park, home of lots of exciting rollercoaster-y delights à la Alton Towers (only without the crashing and the limb-severing, hopefully) for older children, but also home of Peppa Pig World, where we'd promised we'd take Nia. Luckily it was a weekday outside of the school holidays so the queues were reasonably short. At busy times it must be absolutely hellish. Anyway, Nia had an absolutely brilliant time, which was the main thing, and it was generally very good and very well-run. Needless to say visitors are obliged to exit through the gift shop, but we got away fairly lightly by purchasing a small cuddly George and a story book at a total cost of about twelve quid. Our triumph at this was short-lived, as we promptly lost George during a trip across the nature reserve and had to buy another one off the internet to replace him.

We happened to catch Chichester Harbour at low tide when we went for our walk, so we were able to wander some distance out onto the mudflats and gaze across to Hayling Island. This is the only one of the three islands (Portsea Island, Hayling Island, Thorney Island) in the extended tidal harbour area (technically it's a ria) that's still a "proper" island, the other two being, via various sea-wall construction and land reclamation, pretty much joined to the mainland these days apart from the odd tidal creek.

Interestingly, a feature of all Ordnance Survey maps of the area is the appearance of a footpath taking a curved route across the channel between Hayling Island and the mainland - it's marked on my brand-new Explorer map, for instance. This is the route of an ancient path called the "wadeway", which was once the only foot route onto the island. It's unclear whether the name derives from the same origin as Wade Court Park just to the north, or just from the fact that you'd have to do a certain amount of wading, even at low tide. These days you'd have to do a bit more than that, as it happens, as the navigation channel of the old Portsmouth and Arundel canal cuts across the route (it's the bit marked as "New Cut" on the map picture, and clearly visible here). Even with a bit of silting up you'd probably find yourself needing a snorkel at some point; I assume the Ordnance Survey retain the route as a historical curiosity and in the hope that no-one would be foolish enough to actually attempt to use it. The stumps on the other side of the modern road bridge are the remains of the old railway bridge that carried the Hayling Island Branch Line.

We went on over to Bournemouth to visit some friends on the Friday, via Staunton Country Park just north of Havant. No owls, but some fairly bog-standard petting zoo/wildlife-feeding stuff, plus an interesting hedge maze which Nia did her best to get lost in. As if that wasn't exciting enough we also got to go to the beach at Southbourne (in glorious sunshine, thankfully) and have a thrillingly late night (by Nia's standards) over at Trafalgar School in Downton while watching our friend Mark play the French horn for the Hyde band. Their finale was an impressive rendition of the 1812 Overture accompanied by a firework display.

So: owl pictures can be found here, south coast tour pictures are here.

nation shall say cunt unto nation

It seems like BBC presenters are queuing up to bombard viewers with a fusillade of c-bombs at the moment. Hot on the heels of John Inverdale in March and Norman Smith in May, here's BBC Breakfast presenter Bill Turnbull dropping it into the middle of a seemingly innocuous piece of autocue-reading.

It's not as immediately obvious as for some of the others (the Norman Smith post attempts some categorisation) what the source of Turnbull's cuntfusion was here, but his own subsequent tweet sheds some light on it:

Memo to self: never confuse 'customers' with 'clients' on air. It's just asking for trouble...

— Bill Turnbull (@billtu) July 21, 2015

So it falls into the same category as the Inverdale incident, a fatal confusion between two words resulting in the start of one and the end of the other being spliced together, with unfortunate results.

A couple of further honourable additions to the list via the excellent Radiofail:

• Jeremy Vine on Radio 2. This one's just a bog-standard mis-rendering of "hunt", but worthy of mention as it includes the phrase "so they can be eliminated in the cunt", which sounds most unpleasant;
• Lynn Bowles mispronouncing "county";
• another one for the bulging Jeremy Hunt files.

here are the shoes headlines

Never mind all that stuff about books and golf, you'll be saying, we haven't had a shoes news update for a while. And you're right, we haven't. So here it is. Let's get the hello clouds, hello sky, reduce/reuse/recycle, tree-hugging hippy crap out of the way first: I've got a much-loved pair of old Dr. Marten desert boots which I sometimes wear to work and which are structurally perfectly sound, but which were starting to look a bit dilapidated owing to their never having been cleaned or polished even once in the ten years or so I'd had them. Finally I decided some polish was probably in order, and since they'd acquired a few marks over the years perhaps of a slightly darker hue than the faded light tan they'd gradually become. As it happens darker brown was all we had in the shoe polish box anyway, so the decision was made for me. Quite a noticeable transformation, as I think you'll agree:

Might get another few years of semi-respectable wear out of those yet. Less salvageable were my two pairs of golf shoes. Both quite elderly, both just about holding together in the uppers department, but both completely knackered in the studs department to the extent that I couldn't get the old ones out or any new ones in. So when the opportunity arose of of buying a set of particularly vomit-inducing orange and grey Dunlops for 30 quid from Sports Direct, I grabbed it with both, erm, feet. All I'll say about their efficacy is: last round with the old shoes: 110; first round with the new ones: 93.

Lastly, my battered old Saucony running shoes. Now I don't want you to think I'm out pounding the streets on a regular basis, but I harbour some fantasies about doing the Newport parkrun a bit more than the pitiful two times I've managed it so far. So I'd been toying with the idea of a new pair, but I don't use them enough to justify much expense. So when I spotted a pair of basic-looking blue Crane running shoes for £9.99 in Aldi, I snapped them up. So far they've only been worn for a stroll round the block (and seem very comfortable), but you can't rush into these things.

our father who art in heaven, help me eagle hole eleven

In the wake of the thrilling climax to The Open Championship, here's a short list of reasons why we should cherish 2015 champion Zach Johnson a bit more than we are perhaps naturally inclined to:

• he's a rare case of a small-ish guy (by modern standards anyway, a slim 5ft 11in makes him not exactly a midget) holding his own among a host of great muscle-bound hulks who bomb it 300 yards through the air by virtue of being very accurate and having a stellar short game;
• he's sneakily successful - of properly active PGA Tour players only Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els, Jim Furyk and David Toms have more tournament wins than Johnson's twelve;
• he had enough self-awareness to tailor his victory speech to the audience and tone down the reflexive Goddiness - he got through thanking Peter Dawson, the greenkeeping staff, the fans, his caddy and his wife before he got onto thanking the Lord;
• he is far from being the only tedious God-botherer on the PGA Tour - of recent major winners both Bubba Watson and Webb Simpson are also pretty serious about the whole Jesus thing, and generally speaking the fairways are awash with simpletons who imagine that offering incantations to an imaginary Jewish zombie will help steady their nerves over critical shots coming down the stretch at major championships.

Other Open news: it was nice to see David Duval having a decent week; he eventually finished in a tie for 49th at four under par, but he had been as high as eight under at one point during the last round. A pretty decent performance for a man whose involvement in golf tournaments is increasingly as a broadcaster rather than as a player, and for whom making the cut is a major achievement these days.

Here's another short list for you: you may recall me singling out Paul Auster's Invisible as a book whose title was a sub-string of another one in the book list: well, the most recent entry provides another example, the pair of Solar and Solaris.