can I get a witness

I had those Jehovah's Witnesses round the house again a couple of days ago, a scant six years after their last visit. This particular pair (and it seems to be pairs, usually) were middle-aged blokes, the one who did the talking being a bit Scottish, I think.

As before I was in the middle of working, so I kept it brisk and polite and didn't get lured into any sort of theological exchange of views, as tempting as it might be. I accepted the bit of literature they were offering, as I find these things quite interesting, in a "know your enemy" kind of way.

The interesting thing about this particular tract, and the way it was presented, is that the focus groups have obviously concluded (scarcely surprisingly) that getting all in-your-face with the God stuff straight away isn't really a goer, and that it's better to sneak up on all that via some other topic. So while I can't remember exactly how the current script goes, it's something like: I wonder whether you'd be interested in a leaflet on the subject of teen depression. Do you suffer from teen depression yourself? Or maybe know someone who does? Or just any teens in general? They might not appear to be depressed, but who knows, they might just be putting a brave face on it. Here's the front cover of the leaflet:

Now I'm evidently hopelessly ill-informed about religious publications, because while the title sounded a bit suss for a serious bit of medical/therapeutic literature, I didn't specifically know that Awake! is the name of one of the main Jehovah's Witnesses publications (the more famous one being The Watchtower). Nevertheless it took me about five seconds to smell a bit fat Goddy rat here, at which point I trousered the leaflet and bid them a cordial good day.

Flipping the leaflet over exposes the subterfuge, though, as there's lots of contact and website details on the back, below a random and slightly barking article about the Saharan silver ant which seems to be doing a bit of Just Asking Questions while obviously trying to make some sort of point regarding Intelligent Design. The feature article starts off innocuously enough by making some fairly obvious points about depression - you know, some people get it, some don't, it's a bit of a bore, it can be quite serious, it makes you feel a bit rotten, some people find going out for a nice walk helps - and waits till a couple of pages in before it starts making reference to Bible verses. It pointedly omits any mention of antidepressant drugs as a possible treatment, but aside from that (well, and the Bible verses) it's all pretty anodyne. It's not until a bit later in the leaflet that we get into the serious stuff with a prominent article on abortion. It's not actually as fire-and-brimstone as you might imagine, but does sneakily ramp up the evil quotient by making the un-evidenced claim of a link between abortion and depression. It doesn't, as far as I can see anyway, repeat the often-made and entirely bogus claim that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer, but I wouldn't want to rule out the possibility of them having made that argument at some point. The print version does also attempt to reassure those who have had either a miscarriage or an elective abortion with the prospect of meeting their "unborn child" in heaven later, which sounds fucking delightful.

Preying on those in a state of mental vulnerability is of course standard practice for proselytising religions, as is a firm opposition to any treatment regime that doesn't involve embracing their particular belief system, in a very real and financially binding sense. Take a look at the Scientologists' bullshit "personality tests" and visceral hatred of psychiatry for another example - to be fair to the Jehovah's Witnesses they can't really compete with the Scientologists in the arena of overtly cartoonish evil and absurdity; whether this makes them more or less dangerous is an interesting subject for debate.

If you're wondering where the bonkers blood transfusion stuff is on the JWs' shiny new website, rest assured it's still there, and they're still bothering, for reasons I can't really fathom, to try to make the case that this is a stand based on solid scientific evidence, while later in the same article conceding that it's "a religious issue rather than a medical one". I would say "well, at least it keeps them off the streets", but clearly it specifically doesn't do that, or they wouldn't be ringing my bleedin' doorbell of a Wednesday afternoon.

the last book I read

The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies.

So here we are at the college of St. John and the Holy Ghost, affectionately known by its denizens as Spook, in a city which I don't recall being named but which we are presumably meant to infer is a thinly-fictionalised version of Toronto, that being where a great many of Davies' novels are set.

As all academic institutions do, Spook carries a varied cast of eccentric academic types: professor Clement Hollier, priest Simon Darcourt, exotic half-Gypsy temptress Maria Magdalena Theotoky, Hollier's graduate student and erstwhile lover, and John Parlabane, defrocked monk and ex-student at Spook, recently returned to the college in an impoverished state to presume on the generosity of his old friends Darcourt and Hollier.

Hollier, Darcourt and their devious colleague Urquhart McVarish are thrown together by the recent death of Francis Cornish, art collector and benefactor of the college - Cornish has named the three men, along with his nephew Arthur, as co-executors of his will. The elder Cornish's somewhat haphazard methods of cataloguing his art collection make the task of disposing of the collection somewhat time-consuming. The collection also includes a manuscript which may or may not be some unpublished writings by Rabelais, one of Hollier's key areas of study.

Many plot strands branch off here: Maria's Gypsy mother, her Tarot readings and her devious schemes to rekindle Maria's romance with Clement Hollier; Hollier's attempts to retrieve the Rabelais manuscript from Urquhart McVarish, who he suspects has stolen it, by getting Maria's mother to put a Gypsy curse on him; Ozias Froats and his research into human excrement; John Parlabane's attempts to get his dreadful autobiographical novel published.

Things reach an unexpected conclusion when the deaths of Parlabane and McVarish are discovered in quick succession, followed by the delivery of a letter to Maria and Hollier which turns out to be an extended confession-cum-suicide note from Parlabane in which he describes the lurid arrangement he and McVarish had agreed upon to satisfy McVarish's unusual sexual tastes, and the circumstances in which he subsequently murdered McVarish during the course of an elaborate sex game.

The novel ends with Arthur Cornish proposing marriage to Maria, and being accepted, and various publishing houses expressing a belated interest in Parlabane's novel in the wake of his posthumous notoriety.

Very much like the previous Robertson Davies novel in this series, The Cunning Man, this one features a lot of hugely entertaining philosphical discussion and digression on a whole host of interesting topics, but not a great deal actually happening until, to quote myself from the previous review: "a few deaths at the end just to tie up a few loose plot strands". It's not a book that appears to have been written out of a burning desire to make a particular point, unlike, say, Surfacing or The Dark Room. But that's fine, different books do different things in different ways. The character of Maria Magdalena Theotoky, in particular, is one you want to spend more time with, and as it happens The Rebel Angels is the first book in a trilogy, so the keen reader has the opportunity to do just that. Davies was a bit of a one for trilogies; all of his novels were grouped into threes except the last two (The Cunning Man was his last published novel) whose planned capping-off into a trilogy was thwarted by Davies' death in 1995.

Davies also sported, during his lifetime, one of modern literature's more spectacular beards.

anatomy of a (joke) murder

As I'm sure most of you know, Twitter, in addition to being a hive of scum and villainy, has its own little unwritten rules and points of etiquette that change and mutate every few minutes, so that however constantly plugged-in you are, you'll always be a few steps behind. Well, I say "unwritten", but of course someone somewhere is probably documenting them (pointlessly, since it'll be instantly out of date) in an epic multi-tweet thread right now.

Anyway, my specific point here is this: those of us who tweet tweet about lots of different things, from HEYYYY HOW ABOUT THAT LOCAL SPORTS TEAM to OMG TRUMP IS GOING TO LITERALLY INCINERATE US ALL to HERE ARE SOME CUTE CAT GIFS. Also, from time to time we might want to share a joke of our own devising, in a throwaway sort of way, as if tossing out a witticism down the pub. Trouble is, a throwaway gag down the pub floats away on the ether and is gone, whereas unless you've got some very specific account settings on the go (or go around specifically deleting individual tweets) your tweet is going to be hanging around FOR EVER, or at least until Donald Trump gets us all incinerated and we revert to bashing each others' heads in with rocks for entertainment.

So let's say that there's a thing going on in the news, and you think to yourself: if we were discussing this in the pub I'd lob a gag in here, cos I've just thought of one. But I'm sitting at my desk in my pants, so perhaps a tweet will be more appropriate. But should I check to see if it's an original joke? I don't want to be accused of joke-theft; similarly while I don't expect to be immediately given my own radio show on the basis of a single tweet I don't want everyone moaning about me being LIKE THE GAZILLIONTH PERSON to do that gag this morning. But, equally, you don't want to spend an hour obsessively Googling to see if anyone's done the gag, because a) that's an hour that could be spent doing other stuff and it is JUST A JOKE after all and b) you'll inevitably find at the end of that process that you would have been first if you'd just bashed a tweet straight out, but now that you've spent an hour fannying about LIKE A GAZILLION PEOPLE have done it.

Case in point: the rather humorous lettuce shortage this week that everyone who pretends to like salad pretended to give two shits about before waddling out and picking up a KFC. The idea of it being Europe-wide triggered a synaptic thing in my gagular cortex, and I tweeted the following:

the Europe-wide #lettuce crisis reminds us how much we have in common with our EU neighbours. That's why I voted Romaine. #boomtish #euref

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) February 3, 2017

I immediately followed this up with a bit of faux-nonchalant weaselly arse-covering, as follows:

I expect it's been done. the secret, as always, is not to bother checking. #twitskillz

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) February 3, 2017

I thought no more of it until someone re-tweeted the following a bit later the same day:

THIS EUROPEAN LETTUCE SHORTAGE IS EXACTLY WHY I VOTED ROMAINE

— Castaignede (@Castaignede) February 3, 2017

So I thought: I wonder how many other people had the same idea? Turns out there were quite a few, most of them earlier than me, with the caveat that Twitter's time-stamping of tweets is a bit confusing.

This wouldn't have happed if people voted romaine #lettucecrisis #lettuce

— Burgonista (@CorbynFactCheck) February 3, 2017

Shortage of lettuce driving prices up in supermarkets. If only we'd voted Romaine

— Louise J (@Lweez_J) February 3, 2017

#lettuce rationing?
This is why I voted romaine

— Tommy Ettling (@maldoror84) February 3, 2017

Maybe there wouldn't be a shortage of iceberg lettuce in the UK if we'd voted ROMAINE.. #Lettuce. #VegCrisis. pic.twitter.com/6PFWcnH1TO

— Jamie Hough (@jmehough) February 3, 2017

All of these people can go fuck themselves, though, as they're as guilty of plagiarising stale jokes as I am. Check out these tweets from during the EU referendum campaign back in May and June 2016.

Lettuce consider the #EUref. Vote leaf or romaine? pic.twitter.com/vq1fP5vUku

— James Doeser (@jamesdoeser) May 18, 2016

Don’t lettuce leaf the EU. VOTE ROMAINE! #voteremain #EUreferendum #remain #Romaine pic.twitter.com/5JXQiB2LIt

— Common (@common_bar) June 22, 2016

Romaine leaves. The entire EU referendum debate in a lettuce. pic.twitter.com/YoLJFZH5l6

— Tom Hamilton (@thhamilton) May 22, 2016

Is that the first time that particular joke was done? Well, in relation to the UK possibly leaving the EU, very possibly. But in a more general sense, the Remain/Romaine pun must have been done countless times before. Really this is a more general variation on the old non-Twitter-specific conundrum: who makes up jokes? We all know lots, but how many of those did we make up? Probably none. I suppose there's some value here in distinguishing between one-off punnery and properly-constructed jokes, though as always there's not a bright and well-defined line separating the two concepts. In fact this (i.e. where do non-groany/punny jokes come from) is essentially the premise of the Isaac Asimov short story Jokester, which I have in the early-1970s collection Earth Is Room Enough (as also mentioned here).

As always when talking about jokes it's worth repeating the old one about how deconstructing jokes is a bit like deconstructing your cat: you might learn something of interest but the cat will never be quite the same afterwards. As if to illustrate the point, I've no idea who thought that one up either.

I'm not okay, you're not okay

I don't do many of these Goddy posts any more (a paltry four in the whole of 2016, though to be fair there weren't that many posts of any kind during 2016 - compare this with eight in 2015 and a whopping twenty-four in the childless blogging glory glory days of 2007), but this was too good to allow to pass without comment: savour with me, if you will, the rich creamy deliciousness of full-fat cognitive dissonance as some groovy vicar type decides to incorporate a reading from the Koran in a Christian Epiphany service in Glasgow and then gets all surprised when people are outraged at the fact that the text contradicts standard Christian teaching.

Basically what happened was that a young Muslim woman was invited to do a reading at the service, in the interests of some fluffy ill-thought-out ideas about "inclusivity" and/or "interfaith dialogue", and read (or sang, depending which account you read - the video embedded here reveals it's sort of in the eye/ear of the beholder) a passage from the section of the Koran concerning Christ's birth. The reading was in the original Arabic, so would have been incomprehensible to most of the attendees, but someone identified it and controversy ensued.

The differences between Biblical and Koranic orthodoxy on the question of Christ's birth are fairly minimal, to the disinterested observer anyway - although obviously the ability to get murderously irate over minor doctrinal differences is pretty much the defining feature of organised religions throughout history. Anyway, there's broad agreement over what happened, but the Koran goes out of its way to make the specific point that despite the whole virgin birth thing Christ was not the son of God as the Bible insists. I suppose I have to concede that the divinity of Christ is fairly central to Christian theology - the clue is in the name "Christian", after all. What I mean by "minimal" above is that there's no dispute in either religion about the claim that there was a woman called Mary who had a baby by mysterious means who was called Jesus Christ.

Anyway, the amusing thing here is firstly the apparent surprise that different religions make differing claims about the world, and secondly the general flappery over what the appropriate response is. Can we call it "blasphemy" for the central claims of one religion to be repeated in the worshipping-place of another? Not only might that be deemed "disrespectful", it also seems to set us off down what might be a bit of an unpalatable slippery slope: it almost sounds like the Christians are saying that their version of the story is true, and the Islamic version isn't (and, similarly, that the Muslims are saying the exact opposite). That's not the kind of "interfaith dialogue" the groovy vicar brigade want at all.

The tricky balancing act anyone claiming to be offended here has to tread is explaining why repeating some of the basic tenets of Islam is OK in a mosque, or Sainsbury's, but not OK in a Christian church, while simultaneously avoiding any consideration of how the conflict might be resolved. Should Christians take Muslims aside and try to explain why they're wrong? If so, what convincing arguments in favour of their own position should they muster? There's a paper-thin distance between trying that and implicitly acknowledging that there might be a thing called "reality" against which fact claims could be verified to see whether they're true or not (and, moreover, that if they do turn out to be true they're as true in Westminster Abbey as they are in Mecca, or indeed Sainsbury's), and furthermore that there is a third possibility, which is that both religions could be wrong. It's always worth pointing out at this point that there is just about no proper historical evidence that a person matching the various descriptions of Jesus Christ ever existed.

Vaguely connected to that, here's a little texty-graphical meme (which may have originated here) of the sort that people love to share on Facebook, and sure enough a couple of my friends shared it in the run-up to Christmas. I charitably assume it's because they were amused by the bit at the end relating to Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, rather than because they thought the bits preceding it were sensible or worth sharing.

The first couple of paragraphs sound, if you don't think about them too much, sensible enough in a hey-let's-just-all-get-along-the-world-is-like-a-great-big-onion kind of way, and certainly the bits about homophobia and reindeer-bullying are perfectly fine to all right-thinking people. But wait, let's just go back to the start: it's not okay to say that the claims about the world made by religions are false? How would that work? Maybe we're meant to focus on the words "shaming" and "silly" and imagine marauding bands of atheists interrupting church services to point and laugh at the congregation and hijack the pulpit for readings from The God Delusion, as has happened precisely never ever. I mean, I agree that that would be an unreasonably dickish way to behave, but it is implicit in the definition of the word "atheist" that you think religions believe stuff that is not real, and it's hardly reasonable to require that we never mention it, especially given the amount of time the devout spend tediously banging on about their inane beliefs.

Even if you exclude atheists from being able to speak in public forever, you've still got a problem: just about every religion's set of core tenets contains at least one which implicitly refutes at least one core tenet of another religion somewhere. You can believe, for instance, that the Christian God created the world (maybe in seven actual days, maybe in seven metaphorical "days" conveniently corresponding to actual cosmological/geological time), or you can believe that the world was formed from the flesh, blood and bones of Ymir by various Norse gods, or you can believe that the entire universe was sneezed out by the Great Green Arkleseizure, but you can't believe more than one of them, and whichever one you choose you're implicitly saying the other two are untrue.

So, in summary, criticising religion is not okay, and since religions themselves implicitly do this, religions themselves are not okay. But of course saying this constitutes criticism of religion, which is not okay. Uh-oh.

the last book I read

Surfacing by Margaret Atwood.

Our unnamed protagonist (again!) is a young woman working as an illustrator in the city who returns to her childhood home in the wilderness of northern Quebec upon hearing of the disappearance of her father. Unsatisfied with what she's heard from the authorities, she decides to search for him herself, bringing her boyfriend Joe and their friends David and Anna along for the ride, or more accurately to provide the ride, since it's David's car they're travelling in.

The old family home is a pretty spartan affair on an island in a lake, accessible only by boat. The foursome settle in, and it's all pretty good Five On Kirrin Island fun in the early stages, eating sardines out of a can sitting on a jetty, foraging for mushrooms in the woods, that sort of thing. But soon some tensions start to creep in: the narrator's relationship with Joe, while well-established enough for them to have moved in together, seems a bit shaky, and while David and Anna are married their relationship is less straightforward than it seems as well, mainly owing to David being something of a shit. Plus there is the ever-present possibility of finding Dad swinging from a tree or half-devoured by beavers, which puts a slight damper on the party atmosphere.

Expeditions are organised, including a canoe trip to a different lake to go fishing, during the course of which the group encounters a group of American tourists and evidence of their indiscriminate wildlife-killing habits. Meanwhile, Joe and David amuse themselves shooting scenes for their experimental movie, using whatever is available: a fish being gutted, a putrefying heron, Anna (who they've browbeaten into stripping off her bikini) jumping naked off a jetty. Once this becomes tiresome they progress to some more serious games: Joe bones Anna, and David attempts to do the same to the narrator, although she isn't having any of it.

Eventually, after she's escaped the situation in a canoe to go off and do some exploring, the narrator has a disturbing experience while diving in the lake at the base of a cliff. What is the murky vision which looms up at her from the depths? Is it her father's bloated corpse? Or the reproachful ghost of the foetus she aborted some time back? Who knows?

However, not long after her return, a boat arrives from the nearest village to inform the group that her father's body has been found in the lake. The group gets ready to depart back to civilisation, but our narrator has something of a moment and flees, shedding her clothes in the process and hiding out in the forest until everyone else has gone. She then has some sort of quasi-supernatural/religious experience where the spirits of the island tell her which bits of the island she is permitted to venture onto. After a couple of days of running around dressed only in a blanket and foraging for roots she regains her equilibrium a bit, retrieves her clothes, and as the novel ends we leave her standing at the edge of the woods watching a rescue party pull alongside the jetty.

Surfacing was the second novel of Margaret Atwood's long literary career, published in 1972. Obviously not every novelist's output follows the same arc but this is quite a typical early novel in that it's a) quite short and b) clearly inspired by events from the novelist's own life, in this case Atwood's childhood where she really did live in a similarly remote place.

It's an odd book in some ways: seemingly very naturalistic and straightforward at the start, it gets stranger as it goes on, first as it becomes apparent that the ex-husband and child the narrator alludes to in the first part of the book are clearly fictitious and part of some elaborate defence mechanism she's built to assuage the guilt of an abortion, and secondly around the time of her (possible) encounter with her dead father when things get a bit more weird and hallucinatory, it's less clear what's real and what's not, and the reader has the odd sensation of the previously firmly-grasped plot slipping through his/her fingers. Things appear to snap back into place by the end, although a bit of ambiguity remains: will she step onto the rescue boat or flee back into the woods?

So what's it about? It's about 200 pages. No, but what's it about? Well, see the brief plot synopsis above. No, but, you know, what's it about? Clearly we're in the realms of feminist literature here: it's the early 1970s, North American women are in the process of becoming liberated and independent and not reliant on a man to define or support them. We're presumably meant to draw a contrast between the rugged canoe-wrangling practicality of the narrator and her ambivalent relationship with the monosyllabic Joe, and the more stereotypical relationship that Anna and David have, with him constantly belittling her and her desperate to ensure that he never sees her without make-up, even in a tent in the Canadian wilderness. Quite what the mystical fugue that the narrator enters into during her period alone on the island is meant to convey I'm not sure: an extreme reaction to grief at her father being confirmed dead? some kind of mystical she-witch sense of oneness with nature? I couldn't say. Some of the horrible shouty polluting humans versus nature stuff was slightly reminiscent of the excellent 1978 Australian film Long Weekend, which I recommend to you if you haven't seen it.

Atwood is of course most famous for her 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale, which won numerous science fiction awards despite Atwood's amusingly sniffy disdain for the "science fiction" label. That and the later novel Cat's Eye are the only other Atwoods I've read - if you must have only one it would really have to be The Handmaid's Tale, but Surfacing is worth a look. It was made into a somewhat obscure film in 1981, which appears to be available in its entirety on YouTube.

celabourity lookeylikey of the day

Leader of the Labour Party and thereby Leader of Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition Jeremy Corbyn, and the Wise Old Elf from the splendid Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom (whose real name, proper series enthusiasts will know, is Cedric). One of them is an elusive and mystical creature whose various crackpot schemes invariably end in disaster, and the other is a cartoon character. Boom, and, strictly entre nous, tish.

a quick update on the wanke situation

Brief upfollowage on a couple of recent (and not so recent) blog items:

• my linking to the Not The Nine O'Clock News That's Life sketch in the previous post reminded me that this was another one that we did a half-arsed run-through of as part of our sixth form revue in what must have been about 1988. I definitely remember the "Prince Philip exploded" line being one of mine, so I guess I took Rowan Atkinson's lines.
• one thing I meant to mention in my comments on The Plague Dogs was that the book (set primarily in the Lake District) features some illustrations by Alfred Wainwright. As always with Wainwright the static stuff (hills, rocks, fences, etc.) is brilliant and the living things less so; whenever AW whimsically included a figure (usually meant to be himself) in his illustrations for his hillwalking guides it was always a bit jarringly unconvincing in comparison with the landscape bits.
• if you have an exceptionally good memory you may remember my mentioning the Mosul Dam back in late 2007, the dam at that time being apparently in danger of catastrophic failure and collapse at LITERALLY ANY MOMENT. Fast-forward to early 2017 (i.e. about nine years) and, as this long New Yorker article makes clear, the dam is in danger of catastrophic failure and collapse at LITERALLY ANY MOMENT. You can see why people are sceptical about these sorts of warnings from science-y types. The article includes some fascinating detail about the daily maintenance activity required to keep the dam's foundations from dissolving - basically pumping a gazillion gallons of concrete into the holes that keep appearing. The article also includes a poignant picture of a young boy taking his inner tube out on a fishing trip on the Tigris downstream of the dam - presumably we're meant to imagine some Spielbergian kids-in-peril scene featuring him looking up to see a wall of water with jagged bits of concrete sticking out rushing towards him while dramatic DUN-DUN-DURRRR music plays. Note that the boy's home village (see picture caption) has a similarly fnarr-fnarr name to the place in this old post. I'm ashamed to say I was too busy sniggering about that to muster the appropriate amount of concern for the boy's welfare.
• I was unaware until following a link from some other film trailer I was watching on YouTube that there is a film of Stephen King's Cell, subject of a book review in 2012. Some fairly heavy names involved, including John Cusack as central protagonist Clay Riddell and Samuel L Motherfuckin Jackson among the supporting cast. As far as I can tell from the trailer there is a good deal more shooting and stereotypical zombie flesh-eating than in the book, and the scene in the airport with the crashing plane and the exploding wasn't (as far as I remember anyway) in the book at all. In common with most film adaptations of King novels, this appears to be an epically terrible film, and it's not as if King can blame the film-makers, since he co-wrote the screenplay (including, apparently, changing the ending).

berger off

Well, so there I was, chortling to myself at how Richard Adams' death had nothing to do with me when the Grim Reaper decided to issue a little reminder about how he was in charge and I'd better watch myself. The way he chose to do it was by knocking off John Berger, art critic, novelist and general overachieving polymath, and, crucially, former book review featuree on this blog, at the age of 90. So, without further ado, here's the current novelist death list - the tally currently stands at fifteen:

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	1y 291d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	6y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d
John Berger	10th November 2009	2nd January 2017	90	7y 55d

Having corrected some of the horribly botched maths in earlier versions of this table, I find that Berger's death was the longest-delayed of all those directly attributable to this blog, and that the average time between the fateful blog post landing and the relevant author croaking is a little over four years.

the black rabbit strikes again

I feel as if I should write something brief to mark the death (at a pretty respectable 96) of Richard Adams, if only to exonerate my own blog from suspicion. While I have read a few of his books, none of them were within the lifespan of this blog, and so the Curse of Electric Halibut cannot be blamed. As you'll see I have referred tangentially to a couple of his books within some old posts, though.

Obviously he's mainly famous for Watership Down, and rightly so as it's a classic. As with all books nominally classified as children/young adult literature there's probably an optimal age to read it, maybe early teens. I think I was probably about fifteen when I picked up the old Puffin edition (pictured on the right) that my parents had had lying around on a shelf for years, but I can't really remember. Many people's recollections will have been coloured by the 1978 film, and if I'm honest I couldn't swear with complete confidence which order I encountered them in, i.e. I might quite possibly have seen the film first. The loathsome Art Garfunkel song aside it's actually pretty good and a very faithful adaptation of the book.

My other reason for writing this post, though, is to steer you away from Watership Down and onto some other stuff. Looking at his slim list of novels I actually find I've read all of them apart from the last one, Traveller. All of the ones I've read are well worth a look:

• Shardik is a dense and complex fable set in an imagined world (map reproduced here) which would have been intensely reader-repellent to probably 90% of the people who read it thinking it was going to be Watership Down with bears. Adams apparently considered it the best thing he ever wrote, and he may have been right.
• The Plague Dogs is probably a bit more in the young adult-friendly vein than Shardik, and it's very good, and was also filmed. I haven't seen this one, but unusually they changed the book's happy ending for a more downbeat one; usually it's the other way round. This is really the only one of Adams' other novels that reads like an attempt to write something similar to Watership Down; it's certainly the only other one to feature anthropomorphic animals (the bear in Shardik is less central to the story than the cover art and blurb suggest and is utterly wild and unpredictable), and it's really the only other one that'd be suitable for, or comprehensible to, children and young adults. 
• The Girl In A Swing is a complete departure from any of the other books: definite adult theme, no animals of any kind. It's a sort of queasily erotic mystery story with possible supernatural undertones. I had no idea until five minutes ago that this one was also filmed, in 1988.
• Maia is a sort-of prequel to Shardik; like Shardik it's really a book for adults, not least because there is quite a lot of sexy sexy times in it (cover art featured here). For a book of over a thousand pages it's a hoot to read and I've done so at least twice. No necessity, in my opinion, to have read the much more gnarly and complex Shardik first unless you want to; this one is much more of a rollicking adventure story. It also features the only fully-realised and convincing female characters in the Adams oeuvre; the females in Watership Down, for instance, being an afterthought and only brought into the new warren be impregnated by Hazel and his chums.

the last book I read

Pilgermann by Russell Hoban.

There have, regrettably, been quite a few times during human history when it's been tricky and/or downright dangerous to be a Jew. Germany in the last years of the 11th century, for instance. Sure, you can get by, but you have to accept certain constraints on your activities and movements. Certainly if, as the (unnamed) protagonist here does, you decide to take advantage of the opportunity to slip a length of kosher bratwurst to the local tax-collector's wife and than saunter back through the streets in a smug post-coital haze, you may find yourself in trouble. And trouble is certainly what our hero finds, as he's set upon by a mob who lop off his Jewish jewels and leave him to bleed to death.

While lying in the street bleeding (though not, as it turns out, to death) our protagonist cries out to God for deliverance and is rewarded with a vision of Jesus telling him to go (after going home and tidying up a bit) on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Quite the trek from Germany, but, having little to keep him where he is, he sets off. As if the ever-present threat of getting murdered were not enough, he acquires a motley group of travelling companions, of various degrees of actual concrete existence outside his own head: the headless corpse of the tax-collector he cuckolded, the pig who ate his discarded genitals after he was attacked, a strange bony figure called Bruder Pförtner who appears to be a manifestation of Death.

Like a great many pilgrimages to Jerusalem, this one is fated never to reach its destination: captured while hitching a ride on a boat, our hero is sold into slavery to a merchant called Bembel Rudzuk, a man of philosophical bent who is immediately persuaded to grant Pilgermann (the name he's now using for himself, which just means "pilgrim") his freedom. His original quest now derailed somewhat, Pilgermann and Bembel Rudzuk head off to the ancient city of Antioch, where they decide to use a spare piece of land to build an enormous tile pattern with a tower in the middle - the layout of the tiles (featured on the front of my paperback version, if you look closely) is a design thought up by Pilgermann and meant to represent some philosophical concept or other.

This is all well and good, but real life must intervene, and Pilgermann and Bembel Rudzuk find themselves caught up in the siege of Antioch, this being the time of the Crusades. As well as the group of apparitions that accompanied him to Antioch, Pilgermann is now troubled by visitations from what appears to be a harbinger of his own death, more frequently as the crusaders, led by the terrifying Bohemond, draw closer to the gates of the city. It looks like he won't be getting to Jerusalem after all.

This was the novel that Russell Hoban wrote immediately after Riddley Walker, in 1983. It's similar in being an outlier relative to his normal output inasmuch as it's not set in the present day; while Riddley Walker was set a couple of thousand years into some speculatively imagined future, Pilgermann is set 900-odd years in the past. While Riddley Walker was a challenging read because of the bizarre argot in which it was written, Pilgermann is challenging because of the density of some of the more theological passages, and the blurring of fantasy and reality. But what they both have in common, despite the playfulness of some of the prose, is that they're deadly serious, whereas some of Hoban's other books have a whimsical edge to them. I actually think this might be even better than Riddley Walker, despite being pretty gnarly going in some of the more theologico-philosophical passages. I certainly think that the 3-4-year period that saw both books' publication was the pinnacle of Hoban's career, for all that much of the other stuff is charming and challenging in its own way.

That said, while it's fairly obvious what it's about on the surface, i.e. 11th-century Jew gets turned into a eunuch and heads for Jerusalem only to get diverted to Antioch with hilarious and ultimately fatal consequences, if you were to ask: yes, that's what it's about, but, you know, what's it actually about? I'm not sure I'd be able to give you a convincing answer. While the book is suffused with religion, for instance, it's not clear what either the narrator's or the author's views are on the subject. This is no bad thing, as you don't necessarily want to be whacked over the head with a Verdict. Best to just revel in the richness and weirdness of it all and marvel at how lightly Hoban wears his erudition.

Parallels with other books in this series:

• the entire novel being dictated by the dead spirit of the main protagonist is familiar from The Lovely Bones and The Birthday Boys, though the narrator here is a bit more explicit about his situation;
• the business with Bruder Pförtner and his undead chums priapically rampaging their way around the place, raping small children and fornicating with pigs is strongly reminiscent of some of the bizarre rapey interludes in The Infernal Desire Machines Of Dr. Hoffman.

prior knowledge

Here's another one for the slightly esoteric category People Who You Would Have Been Mildly Surprised To Discover Were Still Alive Had You Not Just Discovered They Were Dead. In this case there probably has to be a Well, If You've Even Heard Of Them At All rider attached, as Jim Prior wasn't one of the most famous or illustrious of Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet ministers (he also served in the Cabinet under Edward Heath).

The only reason that I remember Prior, who left the Cabinet when I was 14 and not really particularly politically engaged (like most 14-year-old boys I had more immediate matters to worry about, like disturbing feelings for girls and troubling goings-on, you know, down there), is that he is the only actual person, living or dead, that I have ever portrayed on stage, during the course of an intermittent and far from glorious thespian career.

Let me set the scene for you: I was 10 or 11, in my last or last-but-one year at primary school, and it had been decided that the top couple of classes would put on a show of some sort for the parents (I can't remember, but probably at Christmas). Instead of some sort of glorified nativity play or a musical adaptation with some endearingly amateurish hoofing and singing, the young and enthusiastic teaching staff decided to really stick it to The Man by presenting a searing satirical portrait of early-1980s Britain. So the slightly bemused 10/11-year-old cast were required to portray, among the characters that I can remember, Maggie the Snatcher (scarcely very original), Sir Geoffrey Howe Nowe and, in my case, Cardinal Prior. Beyond those names I have literally no recollection of what any of it was about, other than that Maggie had most of the lines and I didn't get very many. I certainly can't tell you, for instance, what satirical purpose it served to have Prior be a cardinal, thereby joining the small list of dramatic cardinals that includes Cardinal Wolsey, Cardinal Richelieu and Cardinal Fang.

As far as I could gather the thing was mainly the brainchild of one of the teachers, Mr. Kicinski. A perfectly nice bloke, as I recall, whose enduring tragedy is that his laboured political satire was nowhere near as amusing as the nickname his pupils came up with for him: Mr. Kitchensink. I should add that despite his being a tall rangy guy with a beard and the similarity in the names, I am at least 85% sure that he didn't go on (perhaps enraged by his thwarted ambitions in the sphere of the dramatic arts) to be the Unabomber.

My principal other claim to stage fame is my appearance in the school production of Lionel Bart's Oliver! in what must have been 1979, when I would have been nine years old. I'm able to date it reasonably confidently as it was during our time in Bandung, which basically comprised the whole of 1979 (the only entire year I have ever spent outside the UK) plus a couple of months out of each of the adjoining years. My role was a non-speaking one as a member of a troupe of lovable cockney street urchins who did a bit of a tumbling routine, a thing that required what seems in hindsight like months of rehearsal, which must have left precious little time for actual lessons. The picture shows me (on the left) and my sister Emma showing off our costumes at home.

The principal roles in Oliver! are Oliver himself and Fagin. In our production the role of Oliver was time-shared between two people, both girls, as it happens, but as far as I recall the role of Fagin was the same person every time, possibly because it required a slightly older actor, and possibly just because it's a demanding role and they couldn't find more than one person capable of doing it. The person who ended up with the role, to general agreement that she was by far the best thing in the play, was an American girl called Veronica Winegarner. That's a sufficiently unusual name to be Google-able, and a bit of elementary cyberstalking reveals that she is now married to writer Eric Paul Shaffer and lives in Hawaii. That's her on the right in the photo in this blog post; I'm 99% sure that's the same person.

The only other time I can remember being on stage in front of an audience is as part of the sixth form revue we put on during my time at St. Bart's in Newbury. A combination of tediously "edgy" self-written material and lazy rehashes of classic sketches, my involvement was in the latter category as me and my friend Stuart did a version of this Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch. I played the psychiatrist and was utterly brilliant; Stuart played the patient and was fine but had a tendency to forget his lines which required some hasty ad-libbing to get around. Anyway, that was it: the theatre's loss was the IT industry's gain, or possibly the other way round.

headline of the day

Attempt, if you will, to parse this gem from the BBC News website today: Corpse sex kill threat man gets 45 years.

So who was making the threat? The corpse? And if so, what was the nature of the threat? To kill people (or maybe just one particular person, this "man") by having sex with them in some sort of horrific zombie rape/murder rampage? More likely (if we exclude the various zombie scenarios) that it was the man making the threat, but if the corpse then becomes the object of the threat, "kill" doesn't hold much power, a corpse being dead already and all. Indeed making pretty much any threats to a corpse ("sex" included) is a fairly futile activity.

So what's going on? The (very) slightly revised version of the headline on the main story page isn't much help, but it turns out that it was the "man" making the threats, which basically involved first turning living people into corpses by murdering them, and then doing the sex bit afterwards, sex with living people apparently being a bit complex and involving a lot of red tape and potential misunderstandings. Better to murder them first and then save the sexy sexy times until afterwards. Plus it presumably saves any awkwardness over who pays the bill after dinner.

This is one of those headlines where any kind of comprehensibility evaporates once the sub-editors have applied the space-saving journalistic convention of just mashing a load of nouns together without any explanatory prepositions, conjunctions or pronouns. Previous examples from this blog can be found here, here and here. Language Log calls it a "noun pile-up", which I think is pretty good. Previous examples can be found here, here and here - almost inevitably it turns out that they've spotted today's as well, and indeed written nearly the same blog post, although in a slightly more sober academic tone without so much freaky zombie sex. Take your pick.

incidental music spot of the day

Smashing Pumpkins' Bullet With Butterfly Wings on the new trailer for WWI-themed first-person massacre-fest Battlefield 1. Previous trailers for the same game featured Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes (strictly it's a remixed version of the original), which has a similarly ominous bass-driven opening section, although as tediously pointed out here, it's not technically played on a bass guitar at all.

I'm a big fan of Smashing Pumpkins, but I'd be an even bigger fan if their music was mixed differently - in common with most of the songs on the otherwise excellent Siamese Dream, Bullet (which is from the ludicrously ambitious follow-up double album Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness) has the guitars too low in the mix compared to Billy Corgan's vocals, for my taste anyway. The guitars should really fizz and roar out at you in the chorus, with the vocals having to make themselves heard over the top, and that doesn't quite happen.

With reference to that earlier list, Bullet With Butterfly Wings could be a starting entry on another, similar list: songs where there's a vocal-only bit (the "the world is a vampire" line) before the backing music kicks in. I daresay there are hundreds of these, so I'm not going to attempt to construct another list, but you can have Accidents Will Happen by Elvis Costello & The Attractions as your second entry if you like.

Back to TV adverts for a moment, and with reference to this old post musing on when Appletise turned into Appletiser: at what point did adverts for the myriad labour-saving electronic gizmos manufactured by Braun stop pronouncing it "Brawn" and start pronouncing it "Brown"? You'll remember these excruciating 1980s adverts - don't be distracted by the implication that you might want to curl your hair in the middle of a tennis match, listen instead to the pronunciation of the manufacturer's name. Then compare and contrast with these newer adverts. Weirdly, the new rule doesn't seem to have been applied consistently - this advert which appears to be very new still has the old Anglicised pronunciation.

A couple of the recent adverts opt out of saying the name altogether, or indeed saying anything at all, preferring either to give us some words and pictures over a moody electric piano backing, or just to dispense with the product altogether and give us some artfully-posed soft porn featuring the lovely Jessica Alba. And who could blame them?

It's "Brown" with a UK/US "r" sound, mind you, not "Braun" with the full European back-of-the-throat rasp. I guess there's only so much Anglophone audiences can take; plus, I suppose, the full Germanic bark might have conjured up thoughts of a couple of people who bore the name not so long ago who you might not want associated with your grooming products - unless, I suppose, your marketing guys wanted to imply that, for instance, your depilation products would conduct a MERCILESS SWEEP through your lower limb areas, eliminating everything in their path.

just another marnoch monday

Almost exactly thirteen months after complaining that it'd been almost exactly thirteen months since the last whisky post, here's another whisky post. Now I wouldn't want you to think that I'd had no whisky at all since that last post, because that wouldn't be true, but I have been ticking over on either things I've had before that just happen to be on special offer (Highland Park, Chivas) or a couple of things that are just no-age-statement versions of things I've already tried (Glenlivet Founders Reserve, Ardmore Legacy).

Anyway, I was in Aldi the other day and I spotted their own-label Glen Marnoch whisky on the shelves. This particular one claims to be an Islay single malt and was on offer for the bargain price of £17.99.

You have to trust, with these things, that the manufacturers and bottlers are adhering to the rules regarding whisky, which are pretty simple: you can't call it a single malt if it isn't one. That means that the whisky here must have all originated at a single Scottish distillery. and it must be at least three years old.

I don't suppose I'll be shocking you too much when I say that there is no such place as Glen Marnoch, still less a distillery there. So one might speculate: which Islay distillery did the whisky come from? My guess from sampling the highly quaffable contents would be that it's either a Bowmore or a Caol Ila, but the whole point of these things is that the cheapo bottlers' purchase of the source casks is contingent on their keeping schtum about where they got them from. Anyway, it's very good and an absolute steal at less then twenty quid. I'm very much hoping to get some more whisky, some of it with the names of real distilleries on the labels, for Christmas, but this'll keep me going until then.

the last book I read

Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo.

Zeno Cosini is a middle-aged businessman from Trieste attending a psychoanalyst in order to give up his lifelong smoking habit. In an attempt to break his patient's seemingly intractable addiction, the psychoanalyst suggests that Zeno write a memoir of various key moments from his life.

So we learn of Zeno's relationship with his father, up to and including his father's death. We learn of the rather haphazard method he chose of acquiring a wife: ingratiating himself with the local Malfenti family and then working through the daughters in reverse order of attractiveness, starting with pretty but serious Ada who has no interest in him at all and then finishing with plain but amiable Augusta, with whom, paradoxically, he has a long and happy marriage.

A theme starts to emerge here; Zeno bumbling through life, borne along slightly passively by events, never actively evil or malicious but occasionally thoughtlessly self-centred, and in the end succeeding almost despite himself. We see this in the next section of the novel wherein he describes his exceptionally half-arsed business venture with Guido, husband of Ada, and a man who Zeno simultaneously admires and resents for his successful courtship of her. The venture founders owing to both its founders' comical ineptitude and laziness and Guido's weakness for gambling on the stock market, though after Guido's subsequent suicide Zeno manages to win back most of the losses via some equally ill-advised gambling.

The novel ends in Trieste in 1916 with World War I underway and Zeno reflecting on his completed memoirs and deciding to abandon his psychoanalysis and, presumably, crack back into the fags in a big way.

The back-cover blurb for my Penguin Modern Classics version of Zeno's Conscience includes novelist Paul Bailey's claim for it being "arguably the greatest comic novel of the twentieth century". I don't know about that, but then again I don't know what the criteria are for judging. Actually making me laugh out loud? A tiny tiny handful of books have done that, and if you were making the judgment solely on that criterion I'd probably give the title to Lucky Jim. By far the funniest section of the book is the first bit describing Zeno's repeated failed attempts to give up smoking; given that this is a tiny fraction of the book it's slightly odd that so many descriptions of the book imply that this is what it's about. My copy is no exception: the back cover blurb describes it as a "devilishly funny portrayal of a man's attempt to give up smoking and make sense of his life". It's certainly the latter, indirectly, but the former is really just part of the set-up of the framing device. Nonetheless, as you can see, the designers of the front cover artwork deemed it significant enough to make it the main theme of the image.

So given that I wasn't literally pissing myself laughing throughout, it wasn't completely clear what the purpose of it was, which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy it. And critical opinion seems firmly decided that it's a classic of comic modernist fiction, so I defer to their judgment. I guess maybe the stylistic tricks just don't seem quite as daring and unfamiliar as they would have when it was first published in 1923. Zeno himself is an endearingly unreliable narrator, which means that one certainly shouldn't take his versions of his courtship of the Malfenti girls or his personal and business relationship with Guido at face value. You certainly shouldn't read too much into its having taken me 78 days to read it; it's just that I've been busy with other stuff lately. Nevertheless that's the third-longest reading stint in the history of this blog after Infinite Jest and Midnight's Children (96 and 91 days respectively) and just ahead of Sunset Song at 66 days.

Other notable things: while I was in the process of reading Zeno's Conscience I happened to listen to this year's Reith Lectures on Radio 4 featuring philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, and one of his lectures, on the subject of "Country", coincidentally used the experiences of one Aron Ettore Schmitz aka Italo Svevo to illustrate its central thesis. Svevo was also, during the first decade of the twentieth century, tutored in English by none other than James Joyce, and made use of the connection to get Zeno's Conscience more widely published and distributed. Finally, Trieste during World War I also featured heavily in John Berger's G.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Hunky square-jawed hero Eric's manservant (no, stop it) from Disney's The Little Mermaid, the Ladybird tie-in book of which is one of Nia's current favourites for bedtime reading, and current Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, more formally known as The Lord Rees of Ludlow, if you like that sort of thing.

I should add that I've never seen The Little Mermaid, and neither (as far as I know) has Nia, but having read the original story to her from an old book of fairy tales a while back I can confirm that it's a phenomenally grim and joyless tale with some suspicious undertones of puberty, menstruation and general horror of female sexuality (and all the other stuff being a punishment for expressing it). None of which are things that'd play well with the target audience for Disney animated films, so they took the liberty of removing most of that stuff and giving the film a happy ending. Incidentally the manservant's name, as far as I can tell, is Grimsby, perhaps an ironic nod to the grim undercurrents that got sanitised out of the final glossy feel-good product. Or perhaps not, and that's just his name. Sometimes a manservant is just a manservant, as Freud definitely didn't say (the jury's still out on the cigar thing).

clever trevor

So, farewell, then, William Trevor. Alas, we hardly knew ye, cut down in the prime of life at a mere 88 years old by this blog's continuing senseless rampage of authorial slaughter and carnage. The book review that eventually did the trick after a slightly longer than usual six-and-a-half years was The Children Of Dynmouth back in 2010. The only other Trevor novel I've read was 1994's Felicia's Journey (filmed in 1999), which is probably slightly better, though, I should add, not exactly a barrel of laughs.

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	2y 291d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	7y 218d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	7y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	7y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d

William Trevor's Guardian obituary also provided the second example in the last couple of weeks of the slightly jarring sight of an obituary for a recently-dead person carrying the byline of someone who predeceased them, in this case by about six years.

the Guardian obituary of Jimmy Young was written by someone who himself died a year before Young. https://t.co/pQwbfMdTGH #strangedays pic.twitter.com/qMvC11QDEU

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) November 8, 2016

Here's Trevor's contribution to the Paris Review's Art Of Fiction series in 1989.

common as muck

Here's a sort of global version of the UK-only surname distribution tool - stick your surname in here and you'll get some indication of how prevalent it is worldwide. Now fairly obviously Thomas is a popular and widely-distributed name (the 264th-most-common surname in the world, apparently) but there are still some interesting nuggets that can be plucked out of the information provided:

• Thomas is the 4th-most-popular surname in Wales (only Jones, Davies and Williams rank above it), but only the 8th-most-popular in England, 99th in Scotland and 403rd in Ireland;
• It's well popular in the Caribbean, featuring in the top ten in Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, Grenada, Antigua & Barbuda, Dominica, United States Virgin Islands and British Virgin Islands;
• You have to go a bit further south for the place with the most Thomases, proportionally speaking: Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha. Thomas is the most popular surname here, although as there are fewer than 10,000 people spread across the various islands that only amounts to a few hundred individuals, some of them possibly albatrosses;
• There are a few countries at the bottom of the list with only a single Thomas in the whole country. Comparing the "Frequency" and "Rank" numbers for these reveals some interesting variation in what you might call surname diversity in various countries. Have a look at the last three entries on the list, for instance:
  
  So Tajikistan and Burundi are about the same size, but apparently Tajikistan has 11,831 distinct surnames (if we assume that Thomas occupies last or joint-last place on the list), while Burundi has only 1,253. Even more remarkably, Mauritania, with only about a third of the population, has a whopping 38,063 distinct surnames. Similarly, San Marino appears to have many more distinct surnames than Eritrea, despite only having something like 5% of the population.

As for the other list, interesting contrasts can be provided by using my wife's unmarried name, Hannant, as input, since it's far more unusual (219,619th-most-common worldwide). Apparently there are 855 of them in England, but only one in Wales. Whether that's Hazel, her sister Paula, or some third party as yet unknown isn't clear.