the tweet smell of success

A quick blog-related public service announcement: those of you who are paying attention may have noticed the addition of a groovy real-time(ish) Twitter feed in the sidebar, just in case you hadn't had enough of my tedious fucking opinions about stuff and disappointingly puerile sense of humour after dipping into the blog. As with all things blog-related and indeed Twitter-related I did it solely for my own amusement; it's actually pretty easy and reasonably idiot-proof instructions can be found here and here.

why can't he see, he's lumley to me

Here's another one for the file marked: is it a coincidence? Or is it perhaps....Something More? No, it's just a coincidence.

When I dashed off my jokey tag-line at the start of the Milan Kundera book review a few months back, I was dimly aware that I was paraphrasing (in addition to Flash Gordon) something I'd actually read on the back of a book way back in the dim and distant past.

there's this guy, Bernard, and he only has fourteen hours to save the Earth! There's only one problem: HE HASN'T GOT A HEAD.

I thought no more of it until a rambling and wide-ranging conversation with a couple of work colleagues the other day brought forth (can't remember why) the name Brian Lumley, author of various lurid supernatural fantasy novels, mainly in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The series of novels he's most famous for is the Necroscope series, and it occurred to me during the conversation that it was on the back of one of these that I'd seen the blurb that I nicked the parodic version above from (though frankly, as you'll see below, I've toned it down somewhat if anything).

The book in question is the second in the series, titled Necroscope II: Wamphyri! That's not my exclamation mark, it's part of the title. Sadly I can't find a back cover image to go with the front cover one reproduced here, but both that Amazon page and Lumley's own website reproduce the blurb originally printed thereon:

THINGS IN THE GROUND THINKING THEIR THOUGHTS…

…Thoughts they can express only through Harry Keogh, Necroscope. For that's Harry's talent, and his burden: he reads thoughts of the dead in their graves – and the thoughts of the UNdead!. Except…the undead are thinking things that are totally – unthinkable!

WAMPHYRI!

Yulian Bodescu's mother fainted at the tomb of Thibor Ferenczy, vampire. Corrupt from birth, now Yulian feels a strange compulsion: to discover his real father and spread his works abroad. Only Harry Keogh, prisoner of the metaphysical Möbius Continuum, can stop him. Harry's other big problem is this:

HE DOESN'T HAVE A BODY!

Tremendous. I should add that I've never read any of these books, as they always seemed a bit on the pulpy and ludicrous side, and furthermore shading over into the realms of fantasy, something I've always steered clear of. Of course there is at best a fuzzy and ill-defined line between what you might call supernatural horror and fantasy, both of which are predicated on the existence of some sort of supernatural realm in a way that, for instance, science fiction isn't. I was never a big consumer of horror fiction outside of Stephen King (very little of whose output, I would contend, really falls into that category) and the occasional James Herbert anyway.

I should also make clear that to the best of my knowledge Brian Lumley is not in any way related to Joanna Lumley, and is therefore unlikely to be able to, so to speak, shed any light on her anus.

the last book I read

Blood Hunt by Ian Rankin.

Gordon Reeve is a man. A man with a past. A past including Things. Things you don't want to know about. As the back cover blurb says, he is "a professional killer with an anger management problem". So when his brother Jim, an investigative journalist, turns up dead in San Diego and Gordon takes the call as nearest next-of-kin, his ex-SAS instincts are aroused as soon as he turns up out there and finds the local police insisting on a verdict of suicide while being slightly evasive about certain details.

It turns out Jim had been into a story, something to do with the BSE crisis in cattle in (in Britain anyway) the early 1990s, and the received wisdom that it was the rendered remains of sheep, not to mention their own relatives, that calves were being fed that was to blame for the epidemic. Jim was investigating an alternative theory, something to do with organophosphate fertilisers, that led him in quick succession to Co-World Chemicals (manfuacturers of said fertilisers, among other things) and an untimely death.

Gordon retraces some of Jim's investigative steps and soon finds himself coming to the attention of some dubious characters, firstly on his home turf in Scotland and later when he visits Jim's journalist friend Marie Villambard in rural France. Gordon sees the first lot off easily enough, but the second encounter results in a bloodbath, Marie's death, Gordon's being pursued by Interpol and his suspicion that an old acquaintance from his murky past may be about to make a reappearance in his life.

Gordon returns to America and, via some murky SAS-fu involving some more violence and some judicious illegal drug use, manages to extract some information about Co-World Chemicals and their illegal drug research. Having satisfied himself of the reasons for Jim's death, he turns his attention to his old army colleague Jay, his former partner on a doomed mission behind Argentinian lines during the Falklands War. Jay doesn't really care about the ins and outs of CWC's corporate crimes, he just wants to gut Gordon like a fish and piss in his dead eye sockets.

So Gordon decides to make his last stand on his home turf, one of the small islands off the coast of South Uist. Having ambushed Jay and his hired goons there and reduced their numbers, he leads them back to the hills of South Uist where he offs them one by one before a final showdown with Jay.

As you can see from the cover picture above, this was one of a series of books that Ian Rankin published under the pseudonym Jack Harvey; there were three of them published between 1993 and 1995. The purpose of the pseudonym was presumably to differentiate these books from those published under Rankin's own name, which apart from a couple of very early ones are all set in the Rebus universe. There's plenty of precedent for doing this, from Stephen King/Richard Bachman to Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine; reasons range from just needing another outlet for unreasonable prolificness to wanting to experiment with other styles and/or genres. As Rankin himself says in this interview:

The Harveys were big, fat airport-type thrillers: you'd buy one for a flight and you'd chuck it away at the other end. But they kind of let me go off the leash a little bit and let me do things that I couldn't do in the Rebus books.

Rankin's own website, and the modern printings of the Jack Harvey books, have reverted to crediting them to Rankin alone now, which is the convention I've adhered to above. I've only ever read a couple of Rebus novels: certainly Black And Blue, and possibly one or two others. They're pretty good, and Rebus is an engaging character despite occupying a similar niche to Kurt Wallander, Aurelio Zen, Ze Coelho and Harry Hole and various other maverick cops who don't play by the rules but (dammit) get results. Blood Hunt is more in the orthodox thriller genre than any of those, and suffers a bit from an adherence to standard thriller cliché, not least in the Didn't You Kill My Brother thing that kicks off the plot, just as in, say, Get Carter. The basic plot MacGuffin involving the BSE/organophosphate thing sort of dwindles off into irrelevance after the halfway point as well, aside from the wholly implausible episode where Gordon doses up a couple of key people with burundanga and extracts video confessions. The climactic section is really just Gordon and Jay trying to kill each other with no reference to any of the main plot, just their shared Falklands experience a dozen or so years previously.

So it's all good fun, and very entertaining, but fairly cliché-ridden, and no amount of arch quirky touches like having Gordon Reeve's cat be called Bakunin or Marie Villambard's dog be called Foucault is going to change that. If you want Rankins then I'd suggest sticking to the main Rebus stuff; if you want an intelligent and brutally gripping non-supernatural thriller then I still can't think of anything I'd recommend more highly than Tim Willocks' Green River Rising.

what are the chances?

I spotted another outing for the old tabloid favourite of a child being born on the same day as its parents last week - this time it was the Ballingalls of Evesham (who all celebrate a birthday on August 1st) who prompted a frenzy of uncritical parroting of nonsense from various drunken hacks, principally the claim that the odds against such an occurrence are 1 in 48 million.

Just to reiterate the point I made at greater length last time, the odds against any random 3-person group (let's say mother, father, baby for the sake of argument, as that seems to have more of a pull for the newspapers, rather than, say, three randomly-chosen people down the pub, although the maths is exactly the same) sharing a birthday are 1 in 133,225. The odds of a random 3-person group all having a birthday on a date you specify in advance are indeed in the neighbourhood of 1 in 48 million, but that's not a situation that arises in any of these tabloid stories. It's easier to see the difference if you just consider one person and reflect on the difference in the answers to the questions "what are the chances of a person being born on May 15th?" and "what are the chances of a person being born on their own birthday?". The odds, given a pair of parents who share a birthday, of their child having the same birthday are - at worst - 1 in 365.

You would expect, if the odds really were 1 in 48 million, for this to be a pretty rare event. You can work out how rare by finding out how many babies are born per day in the UK, and the answer appears to be roughly 2,000 (as compared with just over 350,000 worldwide). So you'd expect one of these events roughly every 24,000 days in the UK; that's about once every 65 years. A very quick Google for similar stories just from the UK reveals the following - there are some variants in terms of which three family members share the birthday, but it doesn't affect the probabilities, and the trigger for the story is always the arrival of a new baby:

• this story from October 2010 about three siblings sharing a birthday - amusingly, the mathematics professor they wheeled in to give an opinion about probabilities gives the right answer, which the headline writer clearly ignored;
• this one from January 2016 about a baby sharing a birthday with dad and grandmother;
• another baby/dad/grandma combo from February 2015.

So, if you include the recent one (but exclude the one in my old post, as that was actually in the USA) that's four in a little under six years, which ought to suggest to the 1 in 48 million folks that they might have made an error somewhere. 1 in 133,225 would suggest an occurrence roughly every 65 days, i.e. once every couple of months. 

the last book I read

Statues in A Garden by Isabel Colegate.

It's the summer of 1914, and Aylmer Weston is a cabinet minister in the Asquith government. It was pretty much a requirement for being a senior MP in those days that you were independently wealthy and didn't have to do anything as mundane and time-consuming as a day job, so Aylmer spends his leisure time hanging out at Charleswood, his country retreat, where his wife Cynthia organises fabulous gatherings and there is much carefree flapping and jolly japery.

Aylmer and Cynthia have three children, Edmund, Violet and Kitty. Edmund is the stolid reliable type, Violet is about to embark on a suitable marriage to a stupendously dull young man, and young Kitty is a bit skittish, so a governess, Alice, is employed to keep her mind on her studies and off unsuitable subjects like ravenously gobbling off unsuitable men. You know what girls are like.

And then there is Philip, Aylmer's nephew, adopted into the family on the death of his parents in India. A more brittle, quixotic character than the others, presumably lacking their easy certainty and sense of entitlement, he soon gets embroiled in an ill-advised business relationship with a man called Horgan, who has some shares to sell in a mining company that is a dead cert for massive profits. So much so, in fact, that Philip would be a fool not to get his family in on the deal; in fact he'd be practically robbing them not to.

So Philip extracts ten grand or so from Aylmer and Edmund (a very serious wedge in those days) and, unsurprisingly, it soon becomes apparent that Horgan's company isn't quite the dead cert he thought it was. As wealthy as the Westons are, losing ten grand or so is going to hurt, but Aylmer is heavily preoccupied with the Irish question and in any case has the upper-class Englishman's desire to avoid confrontation.

So with Violet off doing wedding preparations and Aylmer constantly up in London, Philip finds himself knocking around at Charleswood with little to do and often only Cynthia for company. Eventually the endless rounds of sherry and backgammon start to pall and Philip and Cynthia get down to some serious fucking, discreetly at first but eventually less so, and in the aftermath of one particularly furious encounter the housemaid, Beatrice, finds them in a state of post-coital slumber in Cynthia's bed. Proving that the lower orders really aren't to be trusted, she inevitably blabs to Aylmer in the act of handing in her notice.

Aylmer's uptight stiff-upper-lip upbringing hasn't really equipped him for having to confront his wife with the knowledge that she's been having an incestuous affair with her own nephew/stepson, and after a tense showdown with Cynthia he pops off and drowns himself in the river. Philip feels disinclined to hang about after this, and heads off to London where he immerses himself in Horgan's business and eventually becomes a rich man, partly off the back of some dealings during the First World War which breaks out shortly afterwards, and whose unimaginable carnage puts all the country house shenanigans into perspective.

The obvious thing to say about Statues In A Garden is that it ploughs a similar furrow to the other Isabel Colegate on this list, The Shooting Party. The other obvious thing to say in relation to that comparison is that the later book (Statues In A Garden was published in 1964, The Shooting Party in 1980) is much better, for a number of reasons, not least because the later book introduces some interesting tension between the above- and below-stairs characters. The lower orders don't feature much at all here, apart from Beatrice's moment of glory and some slightly Driving Miss Daisy-esque interaction between Aylmer's mother and her driver, Moberley. It's almost as if Isabel Colegate thought: I really fancy having another crack at that upper-class types on the eve of war thing, only with a richer and more compelling story.

That said, there's nothing wrong with this, beyond its slightness in terms of story. Obviously a bit of the old incest is a compelling plot point, just as it was in previous books in this series here, here, here, here, here and here. Stories featuring the lead-up to World War I are a sort of popular sub-genre of the That Last Golden Summer Before Everything Went To Shit genre, a non-war-related example of which can be found here. A revelation of some sexual shenanigans culminating in a key male character faceplanting fatally into some water was also a climactic plot point in A Fairly Honourable Defeat.

highway 61 not revisited

Another major, another round of 63 to add to the list. This time it was Robert Streb at the USPGA at Baltusrol; this one was via the long-birdie-putt-on-last-hole variety, like Stenson's at the Open.

if I were current #OpenChampionship leader Robert Streb I'd abbreviate Robert to Bert. Then my name would be a palindrome: Bert Streb. #golf

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) July 16, 2015

Jimmy Walker won, so Streb's round makes the current score 23-7 in favour of a 63 not leading to a victory.

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
Phil Mickelson	Open	2016	first	2nd	Henrik Stenson
Henrik Stenson	Open	2016	final	WON	Henrik Stenson
Robert Streb	USPGA	2016	second	tied 7th	Jimmy Walker

Speaking of Henrik Stenson, one of the things sports journalists had to be careful about after his Open win was hailing him as the first Swedish man to win a major championship, there being a long and glorious history of Swedish women winning majors, most notably Annika Sörenstam who won ten of them.

Similarly, I should be clear that the list of 63s above represents the lowest rounds ever shot in a men's major golf championship. The women's list (well, lists, actually) is rather different. Let's start from the beginning: as far as I can tell the round of 63 shot by Patty Sheehan at the 1984 LPGA was the first in a women's major. This set a record that was equalled twice, as follows:

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Patty Sheehan	LPGA	1984	third	WON	Patty Sheehan
Helen Alfredsson	Women's US Open	1994	first	tied 9th	Patty Sheehan
Meg Mallon	LPGA	1999	first	tied 11th	Juli Inkster

Rather than grow to gargantuan proportions like the men's list, though, the women's list was brutally truncated to a single entry by Minea Blomqvist's 62 at the Women's British Open in 2004. This set a new record that was equalled once:

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Minea Blomqvist	Women's British Open	2004	third	tied 8th	Karen Stupples
Lorena Ochoa	Kraft Nabisco Championship	2006	first	2nd	Karrie Webb

But, again, all this was wiped from the record books in 2014, when 19-year-old Korean Hyo-Joo Kim shot 61 on her way to winning the Evian Championship.

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Hyo-Joo Kim	Evian Championship	2014	first	WON	Hyo-Joo Kim

That round remains the sole occupant of the women's list. This is what will inevitably eventually happen to the men's list once one of those lip-out putts finally drops and someone shoots a 62, or just hoofs the door down completely and shoots 59 or something.

the last book I read

The Ionian Mission by Patrick O'Brian.

Meet Captain Jack Aubrey. A burly, bluff sort of cove, not perhaps the sort of man you'd sit down with for a nuanced discussion about politics or the binomial theorem, but a natural leader of men and an experienced naval commander. His skills are less well suited to land-based matters, and as the result of some unwise financial investments he finds himself in a state of mild disgrace as the novel opens, and jumps at the chance to take command of HMS Worcester for a mission to bolster the British blockade of Toulon. This is a tedious mission involving a lot of waiting around, and on a ship that is well-known to be badly-built, but Jack decides that it's still better than being beset by lawyers and creditors on land.

Meet Stephen Maturin. A doctor, Irish-Catalan by birth, and Jack Aubrey's closest friend and advisor and regular ship's doctor. Maturin is a shrewd and secretive character, as befits someone who does a bit of clandestine naval intelligence work on the side, so he and Aubrey are like chalk and cheese, but, hey, opposites attract. Maturin signs on to fulfil his usual ship's doctor role on the Worcester, the two say goodbye to their wives and off they go.

As expected the job they've been asked to do is exceptionally dull, basically involving sitting in one place in a line of ships and making sure no French vessels try to make a run for it. A bit of excitement is provided by a brief mission to a supposedly neutral port in Tunisia to try and provoke the French ships stationed there into firing first and starting a fight, but they basically just shrug Gallicly and refuse to be tempted, leaving Jack frustrated.

His mood is not improved by having to do some sneaky night-time duties to facilitate some of Stephen's spying activities, dropping him off via dinghy on a deserted bit of marshland (somewhere in the vicinity of the Camargue, we're invited to assume) and picking him up later after a botched mission, with his British contact in tow with an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound. Back at the blockade, things seem to be looking up when some of the French ships make a dash for it, and the British set off in hot pursuit, but the wind changes at a crucial moment and the French are able to return to port without any serious damage.

Having bent Worcester all out of shape in the furious pursuit, Jack takes her to Malta for repairs and is assigned his old frigate HMS Surprise for a delicate mission to the Ionian Sea (the triangular bit between western Greece and the bootheel of Italy, basically) - the idea being to play off some of the local beys against each other to Britain's advantage and retake some of the key islands (including Corfu) from the French. Having chosen the best strategic ally, Jack then finds himself becalmed in harbour (in what would be modern-day Albania) before escaping and launching a furious pursuit of one of the rival beys who wants to scupper Britain's interests. Meeting him at sea (and with Surprise outnumbered by two ships to one) a furious naval battle ensues with much indiscriminate dispatching of grapeshot and cannonballs flying around taking people's limbs off. Jack gets to work off some of his frustration at being denied a proper battle earlier by doing some proper boarding and cutlass-wielding activity, a surrender is obtained and Jack and his crew live to dress their wounds, claim some booty and head off for further adventures. Hurrah!

One of the things about picking books up randomly second-hand is that you often get hold of one that turns out to be part of a series, and the law of averages dictates that it'll seldom be the first book. So you then have to decide whether this is a self-contained story that just features some recurring characters (The Redeemer is a good example of this), whether you really need to read the series in order for it to make any sense (the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series, for instance), or something in between: linked stories, recurring characters, probably better to read the whole thing in the right order but you can read individual ones and they'll still make sense (the Ripley novels, say).

The Ionian Mission probably falls into the last category (what posh literary types call a roman-fleuve): it's the eighth book in what's generally known as the Aubrey-Maturin series, which comprises twenty books (there won't be any more as O'Brian died in 2000). So while it's probably better to have read them in order in order to pick up on some of the references to previous adventures and to better understand how some of the minor characters fit into the overall context, it's certainly not essential.

The novels were published over the course of thirty years (1969-1999; The Ionian Mission was published in 1981) and describe events over a period of roughly fifteen years between 1800 and 1815. Their critical reputation has taken a gradual upward curve over the years, from being regarded as a sort of modern-day Hornblower saga to being the work of (as the blurb on the front of my copy says) "the greatest historical novelist of all time". I dunno about that, but I enjoyed it very much - the evocation of life on board ship is exceptionally vivid, even though O'Brian makes no concession to those who aren't familiar with sailing and naval terminology. The structure of the novel would be slightly odd if it were not understood that this is part of a long series - the "Ionian mission" of the title only materialises around page 250 of a 350-page book, and the battle with the Turks at the end occupies only the last 15 pages of the book. Stephen Maturin's brief spying mission is ill-explained and seemingly inconsequential as well, though I'm sure it fits in as part of a longer narrative.

More generally, certain conclusions about the series and characters can be drawn from this single instalment, most obviously that Maturin is a sort of authorial alter ego, with Aubrey perhaps representing some personality traits that O'Brian wistfully aspired to. Maturin also acts as a sort of Basil Exposition for various bits of arcane naval stuff, generally via the vehicle of having some lubberly hanger-on saying "I say, Dr. Maturin, what does the captain mean by "luffing"?".

So while I'm not sure that naval adventure fiction, however subtly and intelligently written, is ever really going to be My Thing, and I'm not going to be rushing out to stock up with the other 19 books in the series, I wouldn't rule out reading another one or two in the future.

Many people will know the novels through the film adaptation Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World, which came out in 2003. The horribly-botched title reflects the idea that this was intended to be the first of a series of films, a series that in the end never materialised (although the first film was a modest commercial success), though there are still those who'd like to revive the idea. But it did at least perform the almost-impossible task of getting both the Hitchens brothers to agree about something - basically that the film was fine, but the books are better.

O'Brian also did some work as a translator of French literature into English, and I find that my knackered old Panther paperback edition of Henri Charrière's Papillon credits him as translator.

if you notice this notice you will notice that this notice is not worth noticing

When we moved into our house in June 2010 one of the things my late predecessor warned us about was not to leave any vehicles parked on the pavement out at the front of the house, in contravention of the double-yellow markings. Not such a problem for us as we've got a driveway which can accommodate up to three cars, but it's occasionally tempting for visitors who don't want to go and park up round the corner for some reason - heavy stuff to load and/or unload, general laziness, that sort of thing. Leave your car there for a NANOSECOND, we were warned, and the long arm of the law will display its great vengeance and furious anger; and you will know their name is Gwent Police when they lay their vengeance upon thee.

Turns out that while this may have been true in the heady days of the mid-to-late-noughties, it isn't true any more. I don't want to get all EVIL TORIES WITH THEIR CUTS AND AUSTERITY AND THAT on your ass, but it is nonetheless true that most forces have seen numbers cut and, as much as I'd like police priorities to be primarily focused on my personal comfort and convenience and more generally being the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness, that shit ain't the truth. And one aspect of the cuts has been the general slackening-off of illegal parkers getting their collar felt.

Our little section of pavement is a bit of a honeypot for the illegal parker, as it happens, as there is a handy rank of shops over the road (Spar, kebab shop, post office, chemist, betting shop) with limited parking in front of them. So there's an understandable temptation for people to just pull up on the kerb, dash across the road, pick up a large doner and chips and then be off again. And in a sense I don't mind that, as long as parkers display a minimal level of sense and park in front of one of the many generous sections of wall that are provided (picture courtesy of Google StreetView, just in case that wasn't obvious).

It's really only when people ignore the wall sections and park across the end of our drive that annoyance ensues. I have on a couple of occasions arrived back from picking up the girls from school/nursery/childcare only to find a car abandoned across our drive with freely available sections of wall on either side.

hey @SolusCoaches, is YJ04NGE still one of yours? https://t.co/hfvpCSbUGB because some terrible arsehole was driving it yesterday.

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) 11 March 2016

Hazel has experienced the same thing and as she's more prone to getting all irate and SOMETHING MUST BE DONE about these things she suggested getting a sign made that we could put on our gatepost. So she and her sister Paula cooked up some wording and Paula got a sign made on a classy bit of Welsh slate as a birthday present. That was in May but I've only just got round to putting it up.

I should reiterate at this point that I had nothing to do with the wording other than auditing the spelling (at Paula's request). My personal view is that the words "Polite Notice" on a notice of this sort are either a) redundant, since it's obvious, or more likely b) passive-aggressive bullshit, since it's not really polite at all. But I really didn't feel that I cared enough to get involved. Anyway, the sign is up now, so we'll see whether people oblivious enough to park across a clearly visible driveway are inclined to stop and read a sign and modify their behaviour based on its wording. Personally I have my doubts.

Ironically, we've had fewer problems with inconsiderate idiots just lately, as the pavement space by our front wall has been partially occupied for the last three weeks or so by a small silver Nissan hatchback. It's parked quite neatly in front of the wall, so it's not inconveniencing us in terms of being able to get in and out, and it's positioned in such a way as to make it impossible to just swing onto the pavement and end up blocking our drive; you'd have to swing onto the bit of pavement in front of the house next door and then reverse back. Clearly people aren't going to do that, since the whole point of the manoeuvre is to park and abandon the car as quickly as possible with minimal repositioning.

But, on the other hand, it's clearly been abandoned, and sooner or later someone's going to set fire to it or break in and start sleeping in it. The reason it's no longer being driven becomes clear if you use the DVLA's vehicle enquiry service to look up its tax and MOT status: while it's taxed until the beginning of September, it doesn't have a current MOT. And sure enough if you have a sneaky look inside there is even an MOT certificate refusal printout on the passenger seat, which reveals some minor-sounding electrical issues and some more serious-sounding exhaust and emissions problems as the reason for failure.

In keeping with my low-ish level of concern about the situation I've been indulging in some gentle low-level trolling of Gwent Police on Twitter, just to try to prompt them to take an interest. I suspect that when I finally decide I'd like it towed away I may have to ring up and register some sort of official request, though.

This car parked outside our house for a couple of days now. Bonnet slightly open, looks abandoned. @gwentpolice pic.twitter.com/ZFtbLDzqkr

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) 6 July 2016

celebrity fantasy edificylikey of the day

I could not begin to guess how many times my elder daughter has watched Frozen, but it's a lot. I myself have seen significant chunks of it on a number of occasions, though I've never watched it all the way through. Oddly, I am much more familiar with the second half of the film, as I generally seem to wander in around the time Elsa (or, to put it another way, Idina Menzel) is belting out the film's signature song, Let It Go. This does mean I generally catch the bit where Anna says to Kristoff "I want you to take me up the North Mountain" and I have to suppress a snigger.

As if the vocal gymnastics of the song didn't give her enough to do, Elsa also conjures up a spectacular crystalline ice palace out of thin air while she's singing. Well, she is magic, after all. It was only on the most recent viewing of the scene that it occurred to me what it reminded me of: the similarly spectacular crystal palace that Dr. Manhattan builds during his exile on Mars in Watchmen.

As always, I am far from the first person to make this connection, and, as this Slate article points out, there are a number of plot parallels as well: key character with extraordinary powers that they are obliged to rein in to be acceptable to society, voluntarily exiling themselves and giving those powers free rein. Dr. Manhattan doesn't sing, though.

cobblers!

Among the huge collection of books that we read with Nia and Alys are a number that either Hazel or I had as children. Now there's a bit of a vetting and weeding-out process that these things have to go through before we approve them for consumption by our own kids, mainly to ensure that they aren't terrifyingly bloodthirsty religious tracts, unspeakably violent in some other way, or over the edge in terms of adhering to outdated sexist stereotype: you know, passive pretty princess in pink awaiting rescue by some muscular square-jawed prince in tights brandishing a MASSIVE SWORD in some eye-wateringly Freudian way.

I don't want to give you the impression that our childhood reading material was a horrendous parade of rape and disembowelment, and most of the books are fine. Which isn't to say that some of the "classic" fairy stories aren't a bit weird, though. There's the health and safety implications of uncontrolled eating of porridge off the pavement, for example, but consider also the hoary old tale of The Elves and the Shoemaker. What's going on there then? I mean, I get the basic thrust of the story, but why were the elves compelled to come in and do all that hard work in the first place? The shoemaker and his wife are basically a nice couple and they reward them in the end, at which point they skip gaily off never to be seen again, but I don't think we're meant to infer that they were doing all the cobbling in the expectation of reward. There's some back-story there that we're not privy to, I think.

Clearly the reason we're not given the elves' back-story in our Ladybird edition is that the authors and illustrators (whoever they were) were too busy shoehorning in a load of lascivious subtext. Take a look at the shoemaker and his wife.

He's a wizened little goblin of a bloke with a luxuriant white moustache, while she's clearly much younger and a bit on the buxom side. No wonder they're practically reduced to penury - he's got no time, still less inclination, to be spending hours hammering shoe-leather together when he could be upstairs hammering her nubile young flesh.

Even the title of the book is a smutty joke in innocent disguise. The Elves And The Shoemaker? Look at the initials: TEATS. Utter filth.

tanks for the memory

Here's one for the "coincidence?? OR IS IT??!?!!!? yes; yes it is" files - last night while I was cooking dinner I caught the second half of what turned out to be a repeat showing of an episode of Underground Britain on Channel 5. Quite interesting as it included presenter Rob Bell visiting the old Inchindown fuel storage facility near the Cromarty Firth, one of those things that's big enough to be measured in football pitches, as part of the ascending London bus/football pitch/Wales alternative chummy slightly patronising man-in-the-street SI scale of size comparison units.

One of the things that people inevitably do in large enclosed spaces is a bit of the old shouting, just to test out the echo and reverberation properties of the space. In an attempt to apply a bit of a sciencey gloss to this the programme wheeled in Trevor Cox, a physicist specialising in acoustics, who, it turned out, had made use of the space in early 2014 to set a world record for the longest-lasting reverberation. This Herald Scotland article gives a bit more detail, although strangely it does refer to him as "Steven Cox" throughout.

So then this morning I was listening to Radio 4 on the way to work, as I usually do, and Jim al-Khalili's The Life Scientific came on. Jim's guest? None other than Trevor Ruddy Cox, acoustic physics guy and possessor of the world record for longest reverberation. It fair makes you think: maybe there really is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will. Oh all right, no it doesn't.

regarding Henrik

Among the ludicrous number of records set by the thrilling last round of the Open Championship at Royal Troon today, and Henrik Stenson's victory - lowest aggregate score (264) in major championship history, equal-lowest score in relation to par in major championship history, first Swedish player to win a men's major - the ones that resonate most closely with the particular obsessions of this blog are the two rounds of 63 that bookended the tournament. Not only were they made by the two men (Mickelson and Stenson) who contended for the title, but they illustrated perfectly the two ways in which 63s can be made. Stenson's was the textbook grandstand finish, winnng in style with a 15-foot birdie putt on the 18th to become only the second man after Johnny Miller in 1973 (the very first 63 of all) to shoot 63 in the last round of a major to win. Mickelson, on the other hand, had a putt for a 62 which looked to be in all the way until it lipped out at the last moment, something that Johnny Miller, Nick Price and Tiger Woods (and possibly others) can sympathise with.

Stenson's round therefore becomes the seventh of the 29 to deliver a win, while, inevitably, Mickelson's becomes the 22nd that didn't - he becomes the sixth player to shoot one and finish runner-up. This year's Open also becomes the fourth major championship to include two separate rounds of 63, after the 1980 US Open, the 1993 Open and the 1995 USPGA.

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
Phil Mickelson	Open	2016	first	2nd	Henrik Stenson
Henrik Stenson	Open	2016	final	WON	Henrik Stenson

No mention of this year's Open will ever be complete without comparing the Mickelson/Stenson duel to the Watson/Nicklaus Duel In The Sun at Turnberry in 1977. I agonised about whether I should list that as the first Open I remember seeing when I was constructing this list, as I have a definite memory of seeing it, and the climactic bit on the 18th green (and Tom Watson's spectacular 1970s check slacks) in particular, as a small boy, but I couldn't say with absolute certainty that it was live, or reasonably near-live. I'm pretty sure it was, and it's not conclusively ruled out by our having been out of the country (as we were for the 1975, 1976 and 1979 Opens), but I decided I couldn't be sure enough to include it, so I went for 1981, which I was sure about, instead. Possible nicknames for this and future head-to-head duels at Open Championships are below, and can be tailored to the prevailing weather conditions as appropriate:

• the Battle In The Breeze
• the Fracas In The Fog
• the Melee In The Mist
• the Scrap In The Squall
• the Disagreement In The Drizzle
• the War In The Warmth

things can only get batter

Haven't done a recipe for a while, and those I have done in the last couple of years seem to have been mostly desserts. So here's a ridiculously simple one very much in the vein of the yogurt flatbread one from back in 2013, but if anything even more quick and idiot-proof. I got the original idea from a recipe printed on one of the paper inserts with one of our periodic organic vegetable boxes from Riverford, but plenty of versions are available on the internet, all pretty much the same.

Farinata

You will need:

Chickpea flour (50g)
Warm water (150ml)
Olive oil (a teaspoon or so)
Salt and pepper

Those quantities will make a generous one-person pancake; scale up as required. Put the water in a bowl, grind the salt and pepper into it, dump the flour in, whisk it about a bit, add the oil (you could add other flavourings at this point if you want, some herbs maybe), whisk some more. Most recipes say to then leave it for a couple of hours, but mine got barely 20 minutes and didn't seem any the worse for that. Heat some olive oil in a pan, pour the batter in, leave it for a couple of minutes and then loosen it up with a spatula. Once it's acquired some colour on the bottom slide it out onto something ovenproof (baking tray, pizza stone, etc., or just leave it in the pan if you've got a posh ovenproof skillet) and stick it in the oven for 10-15 minutes.

 

the bloggers read and the readers blog

Couple of follow-ups to previous posts:

I was struck by an arresting phrase on page 132 of The Piano Teacher, during one of Erika's trips to the Prater park in Vienna to do a bit of discreet voyeurism.

It's the last sentence there, specifically the bit that says "the whores hustle and the hustlers whore". It took me a minute or two to remember that this is the title of a song from PJ Harvey's 2001 Mercury Prize-winning album Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea.

I'd assume that it'd be too much of a coincidence for the song title not to have been lifted from the book, and the book's themes of sexual disgust are quite Harvey-esque, so I think it's quite plausible she'd have read it. Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea is the glossiest and most commercial album she's ever released, but it's all relative, so don't go expecting S Club 7 or anything. And it's great, but probably not as good as the really stark stuff like this rendition of White Chalk from 2007.

Secondly, you'll remember my attempts to date a world map that my sister had used as some quirky gift-wrapping paper - well, this flowchart from the excellent xkcd webcomic seeks to provide a step-by-step method for doing the same job. I haven't exhaustively tested it, but I think my map takes you down the route that ends at the "PERSIA OR IRAN?" box and therefore ends up with a date of 1935-1940. Since I'd calculated 1932-1936, and if we charitably assume that we're both right, that narrows down the date of my map still further to 1935-1936.

the last book I read

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek.

Erika Kohut is the piano teacher of the book's title, tutoring and mentoring a group of students at the Vienna Conservatory. After a hard day bashing the ivories she heads home to the apartment she shares with her mother, and later in the evening to the bed she shares with her mother. Yes, there's something a bit rum going on here, as we discover in the opening pages where Erika buys herself a nice dress and goes home and has a proper knock-down hair-pulling fist-fight with Mother about profligate spending and having improper thoughts about men.

So we can see that Mother is controlling Erika's life to a slightly unhealthy degree. We learn that there was a Father, for a while, but he got packed off to a mental asylum (which was probably a relief, to be honest) and subsequently died (ditto, I shouldn't wonder). We also learn that one of Erika's outlets for asserting some degree of control over her own actions and her own body is self-harm, some of it of a disturbingly sexual nature. She also roams the streets of Vienna seeking out sex shows to watch, though she seems to derive little pleasure from watching, instead just sitting there primly with her handbag and haughtily ignoring the more usual raincoat-clad clientele.

Erika has a new student, Walter Klemmer, who takes a fancy to her despite the gap in their ages (Erika is in in her late thirties). Erika isn't used to male attention, although she has occasionally "known" men, hem hem, in the past. So things take a while to come to the boil, but when they do, and Erika and Walter have a charged encounter in the toilets at the Conservatory, her wilder repressed desires are unleashed, and she writes Walter a letter detailing all the stuff she'd like him to do to her, most of it eye-wateringly slappy and bondage-y. She also increases the riskiness of her voyeuristic behaviour by hanging out in a local park and watching people having sex in the bushes.

Walter is a bit taken aback by all this, to be honest, as he was really after something a bit more vanilla and just fancied a bit of older woman. After a couple of further unsatisfactory encounters, Walter decides to get what he originally wanted by going to Erika's apartment, locking Mother in the bedroom, and beating and raping Erika in the living room.

Erika goes to the Conservatory the next day armed with a knife and some vague idea of stabbing Walter, but, after watching him laughing and flirting with some female students for a while, she instead stabs herself in the shoulder and returns home. We're invited to infer that Erika will just return home and resume her more repressed existence, once she's put some Savlon and a plaster on that shoulder wound, anyway.

So it's the basic boy meets girl, girl unveils brutal and deranged sex manifesto, girl loses boy, boy rapes girl, girl stabs herself kind of story we've all heard a thousand times before. Not exactly a laugh-a-minute, as you can imagine, though it has a sort of savage energy that propels you along. As with some earlier books in this series it's hard to find a "way in" to any of the characters, since they're all damaged and disturbed to various degrees. It's quite bracing to read something so wilfully spiky and clearly uninterested in giving the reader an easy time, though - in that respect I was reminded a bit of Notice which also contains some queasy scenes of sexual violence.

The Piano Teacher is probably best known for its 2001 film adaptation featuring a much-garlanded performance from Isabelle Huppert as Erika. I haven't seen it, but it sounds like a pretty faithful rendering of the book. Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, not without some controversy, with one of the judges resigning and issuing a statement describing Jelinek's work as "whining, unenjoyable public pornography", which is probably a bit harsh. Links to other Nobel laureates can be found here.

The Piano Teacher also pops up on various lists of "best foreign novels", including (at number 40) this one. Of the 100 novels I've listed there I've read, if my counting is correct, thirteen. Other list-nerdery: although Jelinek is Austrian, this book doesn't yield anything to add to the foreign-language list here since "Austrian" isn't a language except as a dialect of German, which I've already bagged.

it's all good fun until someone loses an EU

So, Brexit, then. And while it's awfully tempting to dismiss the 52% of the UK population who voted to leave the European Union as just a rabble of dimwitted racists, and I'm not saying there isn't a good deal of truth in that, it might just be more productive to try to work out what the hell went wrong.

A few things are obvious: no-one really thought there was an economic case to be made for leaving, so no-one really seriously bothered trying to make one. So basically there was just a lot of dog-whistling around the subject of immigration, which has turned into an elephant in the room totally out of proportion with its actual importance (since the British public are as utterly wrong about the immigration figures and impact as they are about just about any other subject you could care to mention). So when people urge political parties to really tackle immigration, what they really mean is address people's largely imaginary concerns about it and their mistaken perception of its impact. This is actually quite hard to do without just pointing out to people that they are massive racists, which as a vote-winning strategy is not great.

Equally obvious is that, of the major Leave campaign figureheads, Boris Johnson is a brazen and ruthless political opportunist who was campaigning for a Remain vote as recently as February 2016, and moreover as a European correspondent in the 1990s was personally responsible for a whole stream of the sort of barmy Eurocrat banana-straightening stories that fuelled UK Euroscepticism in the first place. Nigel Farage, by contrast, is a proper old-school fascist of the type that always seem hilarious and buffoonish right up until the point where they acquire power and it becomes clear they weren't joking after all. Like that comical Charlie Chaplin lookalike guy in Germany in the 1930s. I mean, who remembers him now?

A gazillion words have already been written bemoaning the barking irrationality of the Leave vote, and in particular how places like Ebbw Vale were persuaded to cast a vote profoundly in opposition to their own best interests, so it might be more profitable to explore a couple of wider (but still related) issues, like, for instance: who can we blame? I have a couple of suggestions.

Firstly, and most obviously, David Cameron. I'm inclined to blame Cameron for a lot of things, as you know, but this referendum really is his fault, since he promised it back in 2013 as a sop to the truculent faction of borderline Nazis in his own party who he feared would otherwise defect to UKIP in large numbers.

But, you might say, what's wrong with having a referendum? This is democracy in its purest form! Anyone arguing against having a referendum must basically HATE DEMOCRACY. This is quite difficult to argue against, since the counter-argument basically boils down to: people are idiots. It's quite salutary to remember why parliamentary democracy exists: because it's absurdly impractical to canvass everyone's opinion on any particular subject (modern technology means it's easier than it's ever been, but it's still absurdly slow and difficult) and it's desirable to bundle up that decision-making capacity - region by region, say - into a single elected representative whose job it quite literally is to be engaged and informed on the topics that decisions might need to be made about, while the people who elected him or her get on with their day jobs amid their usual fug of ignorance.

I'll tell you who else is to blame, though: the media. The BBC, for one, has come in for some criticism in the past for, as this Huffington Post article puts it, "sacrificing objectivity for impartiality", or, in other words, promoting some bullshit idea of "balance" in a debate by presenting both sides and being reluctant to take a position on how those sides align with reality. Both of those linked articles were about climate change, but the same charge can be levelled at the BBC's (and other broadcasters') coverage of the referendum. If there are two sides, and one side is peddling easily-debunked lies and nonsense, it might actually do the viewing public a service if the liars were held to account. To put it another way, the current model only really works when politicians occupy a position somewhere within the bounds of what you might call "reasonableness" or at least can be trusted (most of the time) to be arguing in good faith - once you get a statistical outlier like Farage or Johnson (or Donald Trump, to pick an example from elsewhere) who will just brazenly lie, and, if challenged, shift their position and lie again, the system can't really cope. And treating people like Farage like any other politician legitimises and normalises his political views - look at how often he gets invited onto Question Time, say. I haven't seen Nick Griffin get invited back, and pretty much the only difference between them is that Farage looks less like a thug and has a posh voice.

On that subject, it's interesting to reflect how much we as a nation are still unconsciously in thrall to archaic notions of class, and more specifically notions of what a member of the ruling class looks and sounds like. Take the currently-beleaguered Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, for instance. Now I'm certainly not going to claim him as the potential saviour of humanity, but my experience is that most people, even those not inclined to vote Labour, think that he is clearly a man of principle, honesty and decency who talks a lot of good and compassionate sense on issues regarding social justice. However, ask those people whether they can see him as Prime Minister and they'll probably laugh and say: well, no, of course not. But why not? Because, I put it to you, that's not what members of the ruling class look like. Rather than looking like a scruffy and slightly humourless geography teacher, the ruling classes wear sharp suits, have braying penetrating posh voices and have arrived at the top of the political ladder without acquiring any messy baggage along the way by ever having expressed any sort of principled view or taken a stance that might now be inconvenient.

Furthermore the ruling classes have their debating skills honed at debating societies at Oxford and Cambridge where they become well-practised not only in arguing for causes they have no belief in (equally handy for a career in the legal profession if the political thing doesn't work out), but also in the art of the meaningless sound-bite, the swift and pithy put-down, and the sort of wordless braying and hooting that will stand them in good stead in the House of Commons. So, for instance, despite being a monumental failure as a Chancellor even by his own self-imposed measures, George Osborne still gets a free pass as a "serious" politician because he's a toff who can afford some nice suits, as well as, as some may have alleged, a boatload of cocaine. Similarly, Tony Blair, despite not being a Tory, looked the part, while Ed Miliband, while he had the suits, talked a bit funny and once made a bit of a hash of eating a sandwich, so clearly he wasn't quite the thing.

Now it's certainly true that, as well as not having much support among the Parliamentary Labour Party, Corbyn's approval figures with the general public aren't great either. But one thing we know after the referendum is that Joe and Josephine Public are easily swayed by bullshit tabloid stories, and if there's one person the tabloids love writing bullshit stories about, it's Jeremy Corbyn.

I think, as it happens, that it's likely he'll have to go, but I'm troubled by the whole business as a natural Labour voter for several reasons. Firstly I don't see an obvious successor, secondly I wonder how the Labour party membership have got so out of step with the PLP and the public (or vice versa, depending how you look at it), and thirdly the tabloid venom, which is just an aspect of the wider problem I've described above, can't be a healthy thing in the 21st century. But then again neither can a vote to leave the EU. So, in summary, fuck you, Britain.

Actually, hang on, lots of Brexit- and Corbexit-bemoaning there without any proposals for solutions. So, briefly, here's a couple of ideas:

• Stop legitimising racism by saying either that a large tranche of the Leave vote wasn't motivated by it or that lots of people have "legitimate concerns" over immigration. No they don't, they just hate brown people. Tiptoe round the issue and you are part of the problem.
• Electoral reform. If, as looks possible, the Labour party splits into left and centre-right factions and the LibDems experience an uptick in popularity as a result of their commendably bold anti-Brexit stance, then we're going to be in the sort of multi-party environment we haven't been in since forever. Which is all great, but for the first-past-the-post system which will ensure massive Conservative majorities forever under those circumstances, particularly if the Scots take themselves out of the picture by leaving the Union after a second referendum. Some sort of proportional representation system whereby every vote counts might go some way towards hauling general election voter turnout upwards towards the 70-odd percent that the referendum got. 
• Stop having referendums, as they're clearly a terrible idea, particularly if most voting happens under the first-past-the-post system, and therefore encourages the view that people can register a "protest" vote (perhaps as part of a general unfocused desire to register dissatisfaction with the political process) without it having any consequences, as some people seem to have done here.
• Have a look at the House of Commons. Yes, tradition, heritage, all that bullshit, but it's toe-curlingly embarrassing to watch the general school-playground quality of the exchanges in there. If some of the I-refer-the-right-honourable-gentleman-to-the-answer-I-gave-some-moments-ago bullshit has to be swept away in order for Joe Public to feel involved in the policy-making process, then so be it. Alternatively, require ministers to regularly appear before some sort of select committee for some much more forensic questioning, get some non-political subject matter experts in to grill the hell out of them, and make sure it's televised.