that's dentertainment

One of the things that will have been a major factor in determining the specific flavour of your COVID-19 lockdown experience, it seems to me anyway, is whether you have kids or not. Many people have (as part of a generally commendable look-on-the-bright-side attitude) written about how, hey, lockdown is tough and the general loneliness and sense of social dislocation is a mental challenge, but at least it's given them a chance to really get to grips with learning to knit, whittling that scale model of the Taj Mahal, playing the euphonium, and of course baking a bewildering variety of bread products, assuming that they'd panic-bought enough flour and yeast. 

As entertaining as those anecdotes are, my first thought is always: aha, there's someone who doesn't have kids. I mean I'll grant you we did have a half-hearted crack at making bread, but any serious hobbying designed to eat up several consecutive hours is a non-starter. I should add I'm not about to attempt to reach a verdict about whether a child-free or child-rich environment is better/worse/harder/easier in terms of surviving lockdown with sanity mostly intact, I'm just making the point that it would have been two very different experiences. As brilliant and generally delightful as our three kids are I will confess to finding the need to keep them constantly entertained a bit relentless at times, especially when combined with needing to keep up with schoolwork as well.

One of the things I expect a lot of people with kids have done during the period of enforced being-in-the-house is make dens, this being a thing that all kids love doing. I myself recall my parents having a set of rather bizarre brown foam-rubber furniture (probably an absolutely appalling fire hazard by modern standards) when we were kids, whose corner units, when flipped on their side, were perfect building blocks for dens. We don't have any of those, but as you'll see below the kids did manage to come up with some alternatives. Nia, as befits the oldest of the group, was generally chief engineer, with Alys providing labouring muscle and Huwie fulfilling a key quality assurance role by running into things and attempting to break them. 

So here is a pictorial summary of the 2020/2021 den-building season:

Number one is a solo effort from Nia. The legend on the front reads "Nia's umbrella den. Must have permishion." She insisted that she was going to spend the night in it, and subsequently did, commendably bloody-mindedly as it can't have been that comfortable. 

Use of umbrellas as a key element of den construction is going to become a bit of a theme, as you'll see. Luckily we have quite a few of them as Hazel has a stash of white parasol-style ones from her wedding photography supplies. 

The next one is an extension of the original concept to include a couple of extra umbrellas, some towels, a large number of clothes pegs and our pop-up Peppa Pig tent. An increase in the amount of interior room, but as you can imagine it's a bit of a complex labyrinth of umbrella-stalks once you're inside. 

The next one harks back to the original, but increases the headroom somewhat by introducing a couple of kitchen chairs into the mix. This one has a slightly yurt-y look to it, though we were unable to grout it with yak butter in the traditional manner as Asda were out of that as well.

Number four is similar to number two, but the addition of the two upright white parasols in the centre of the structure gives it a vaguely Middle-Eastern feel, or possibly just evokes thoughts of the Mound Stand at Lord's. 

Structural details of this next one are unclear except that it evidently encompassed one of the sofas. Huwie is revelling in the illicit thrill of being somewhere his sisters have probably forbidden him to be. 

A sudden shift of both location and design ethos for the next one as we relocate to the bunks in the girls' bedroom and a stark and simple design in white. There was a version of this which enclosed the top bunk (Nia's) as well via the addition of a couple of my old golf clubs and another couple of sheets, but I don't have a photo of it. I'm not sure whether Huwie is just messing about on the floor or has just been violently ejected from the enclosed lower bunk by the girls.

The next one is more of a pre-fabricated den, in that it's one of my old tents, which the kids insisted on sleeping in out in the garden. The original idea was that we'd put our family enormo-tent up and all sleep in it - what larks! - but tragically there wasn't room so Hazel and I had to take one for the team and sleep in our own bed. 

Those were all from the first half of 2020; what I like to call "denthusiasm" wore off a bit after that, or perhaps it was just my inclination to bother taking photos of them. Anyway, the next couple are from this year after we rediscovered our mojo. Here's one from February which all three of them insisted on spending the night in. You can see that it's basically three adjoining interconnected slumbering podules: Alys on the sofa, Nia in the middle on the floor and Huwie in the Peppa Pig tent. 

Finally, this one from a couple of weeks ago: no thought to sleeping comfort this time, just maximum unsupported internal span thanks to a light bedsheet-based design and use of four kitchen chairs. Once again the boy is taking his quality assurance role very seriously by seeing how many of the clothes pegs he can remove before the whole structure collapses on his head. 

So there you have it. I just get the feeling that we're starting to exhaust the possibilities now, so either we need to start getting back to normal life again or I'll need to start sawing up some furniture. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today's pair is Nadia Whittome, Labour MP for Nottingham East, and Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Most pictures of Kahlo have a rather severe look to them as she wasn't really into smiling for the camera, and the particular image of Whittome you see here is a screengrab from a Zoom call that I saw posted on Twitter where she has her hair in a more scraped-back style than usual and is unsmiling throughout, probably as a result of being forced to listen to Alastair Campbell. To be fair she is usually less severe in both demeanour and hairstyle (not, just to be clear, that I demand that female MPs are all smiley and unthreatening; they can of course present themselves however they like).

I guess my fridakahlometer is still calibrated to a higher degree of sensitivity than usual in the wake of reading The Lacuna.

the last book I read

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré.

George Smiley is in a bit of a rut. He's in enforced early retirement from MI6 (colloquially known as "the Circus") after a botched mission involving an attempted rendezvous with a Russian double-agent in Czechoslovakia, which resulted in a Circus field agent getting a pretty substantial hot lead sandwich. It wasn't Smiley's project, but rather the brainchild of his superior and mentor Control; nevertheless its failure resulted in the disgrace not only of Control but of anyone perceived to be one of his close associates. 

Still, a chance to relax from the old spying game and spend a bit more time with the wife, I expect. Well, not exactly, as Smiley's wife Ann is chronically, serially and fairly publicly unfaithful to him. So he spends his time trying to ignore her infidelities (which she mainly has the decency to conduct elsewhere anyway), catching up on a bit of reading and occasionally mooching down to his club for dinner.

So it's probably something of a relief when he's contacted by someone from the government with a proposition for him: discreetly investigate the allegation that there is a Russian mole in a high-up position within the Circus itself. The Ministry has had a tip-off from maverick field agent Ricki Tarr that something rum is afoot - Tarr is a bit of a loose cannon, to say the least, but his story seems pretty convincing.

Smiley already knows that his former colleague Percy Alleline has succeeded Control as head of the Circus, and that part of the reason for his promotion was an apparently wildly successful project called Operation Witchcraft which involved the acquisition of sensitive Russian intelligence from an apparent KGB double-agent. But can the information be trusted? Has Alleline's ambition to secure his own position as Control's successor overridden his caution about accepting this stuff at face value?

Smiley decides to dig into both Operation Witchcraft and Operation Testify, the Czech mission which eventually cost Control his job. Unfortunately Control himself can't shed much light on anything as he died shortly after being ousted. Smiley enlists the help of Peter Guillam, a former close colleague and someone still within the Circus organisation, to discreetly acquire information for him which he no longer has access to.

It soon becomes apparent that Operation Testify was Control's attempt to acquire the name of the Circus mole; Control knew of his existence and had narrowed his identity down to one of five men, all in the Circus top ranks: Percy Alleline, Bill Haydon (known to be one of Ann's ex-lovers), Roy Bland, Toby Esterhase and Smiley himself, given the respective codenames Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Poorman and Beggarman. Moreover it transpires that the Circus field agent, Jim Prideaux, who got ventilated when the operation was betrayed not only survived but was eventually spirited back to Britain, told to forget everything and found a job teaching at a boys' school. Smiley visits Jim and gets a full briefing on the events in Czechoslovakia, Jim's shooting and subsequent interrogation by the KGB, including the shadowy Karla, Smiley's Moscow opposite number and nemesis.

With some help from Tarr and Guillam, Smiley engineers a fake crisis to give the impression that the Russian double-agent's cover has been blown, in an attempt to flush out the Circus double-agent. Smiley waits at the safe house in the expectation that the Russian double-agent (in reality a triple-agent, or maybe that just makes him an agent again, I'm not sure) and the Circus mole will rendezvous there to discuss what to do next. Sure enough they do, and Smiley and Guillam collar the Circus mole, who turns out to be Bill Haydon. Haydon is held at a secure facility pending his handover to the Russians, but he never gets a chance to sample his new country's hospitality - Jim Prideaux, university friend and possible ex-lover of Haydon, finally in full knowledge of Haydon's betrayal of him before the Czech trip and that he was prepared to let Jim die rather than be exposed himself, pops a cap in Haydon's ass while he's out walking in the prison grounds.

I recall having a conversation with my father about le Carré back when I was a teenager (possibly prompted by my reading of The Little Drummer Girl) and him dismissively saying "oh, it's all just I knew that he knew that I knew that he knew". I mean, I can see what he was getting at, but it is an odd position to take for someone quite into twisty-turny detective fiction - Dad is a big Georges Simenon fan, for instance. Perhaps part of it, in the case of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in particular, is a failure to realise that while it's set in the wold of international espionage, it's really a whodunit in the same way as an Agatha Christie novel, just with the big reveal and associated explanations done in a dingy room in a London safe house rather than in the drawing room of Lord Muck's country mansion.

This is the third le Carré novel to feature on this list, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Our Kind Of Traitor (since filmed) being the other two. George Smiley plays an important but minor role in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, published eleven years earlier and in which Smiley is some indeterminate number of years younger (his age in the various novels in which he features defies the normal rules of linear time as he always seems to be around sixty). The later novels The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People form a loose trilogy with this one. Of the ones I've read (a tiny percentage of the huge number le Carré wrote before his death last year) I'd say Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the best. The only "action" in the traditional sense is the dramatic events in Czechoslovakia, which are described only in retrospect near the end of the novel, but it still manages to be intensely gripping. The way it does this is only partly by the minute detail of espionage activities and tradecraft, but also more subtly by examining the things that motivate people to do what they do, especially when those things involve intense personal danger for little obvious reward, and nebulous ideas like "country" and "loyalty". 

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has been adapted a few times, most famously the 1979 television series starring Alec Guinness as Smiley, and the 2011 film starring Gary Oldman. I was a bit young to remember the TV series, and in any case (as mentioned here) spent all of 1979 outside the UK. I do remember the 1982 adaptation (also starring Guinness) of Smiley's People, though, as my then-schoolmate Mungo was a precocious le Carré aficionado, probably via his father who was a senior civil servant and may well have been an actual spy for all I know. I did see the 2011 film when it came out and thought it was very good, in an authentically drab and glum and rainy 1970s sort of way. Slightly more tangentially le Carré's work was pretty clearly the inspiration for some Fry & Laurie sketches. 

blessed are the teleconferencers

Today's pair are our literal actual Lord and Saviour and Redeemer Jesus Christ, and Hollywood actor Chris Evans. 

A couple of footnotes: while Chris Evans has been in many enormously successful movies (most famously playing Captain America in what I naïvely assumed was about three films but actually turns out to have been at least ten) the only thing I have actually seen him in (without the beard, as it happens) was the ludicrously entertaining whodunit Knives Out which I watched a couple of months ago, and which I thoroughly recommend. Evans' performance, like everyone else's, was somewhat overshadowed by a scenery-chewing turn from Daniel Craig who sports a tremendously chewy accent throughout which I assume is meant to emanate from the vicinity of New Orleans, though I couldn't comment on its accuracy.

As for the other guy, the specific picture here is from a leaflet delivered to our house by those lovable old God-botherers and science-deniers the Jehovah's Witnesses. Social distancing rules dictate that it came through the letterbox with a covering note rather than via the in-person route, and I reproduce the note here, as well as the leaflet content - I feel justified in leaving the contact info on as presumably they want to reach as large a potential audience as possible and would appreciate a signal boost. 

Things to note: despite the slightly clumsy wording in the note, I don't think we're meant to infer that Jesus Christ himself is available in person for consultation via the medium of Zoom. Secondly, anyone inclined to skip the linked video (you may even be able to scan the QR code in the image) Why Did Jesus Die? on the grounds that they already know the answer to be "because they nailed him to a tree" should be aware the video probably takes a slightly less literal approach to answering the question. Finally, the slightly baffling reference to a "pearl of high value" in the last image alludes to Matthew 13:45-46; as always with parables the meaning is a bit opaque, but if you assume all parables basically resolve to a) give all your money to the church and b) go and evangelise your freakin' ass off so that others may do the same, you won't go far wrong. 

the last book I read

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver.

Oh, Mexico; it sounds so sweet with the sun sinking low. Well, Harrison Shepherd isn't here on holiday, it's just the latest in a series of short-term homes he's shared with his mother, Mexican by birth and currently shacked up with some slightly shady Mexican businessman in the coastal location of Isla Pixol.

Subsequently, as Mother's relationships come and go, Harrison moves around, spending time in both Mexico and the United States, and occasionally spending some time with his father, who lives in Washington DC. It's while attending a DC boarding school that Harrison starts to suspect that he may not be as other boys, in that he doesn't share their interest in other girls.

All the while Harrison has been obsessively keeping diaries, something he continues to do after he returns to Mexico, following a hasty and early exit from school. The diary covering this period has been conveniently destroyed, but we are invited to infer that there was some sort of homosexual scandal necessitating a swift departure. While looking for work in Mexico City Harrison is employed as a plaster-maker by celebrated muralist Diego Rivera and eventually becomes a permanent live-in member of his household staff, which also means falling into the orbit of Rivera's charismatic wife, Frida Kahlo. 

Harrison graduates from plaster-maker to cook, which means providing for the wide selection of guests the Riveras play host to, mainly people who share their radical socialist politics. The ante is upped considerably in 1937 when none other than Leon Trotsky and his entourage come to stay, and Harrison, in addition to his cooking duties, is put to work as Trotsky's secretary. Trotsky keeps up a furious schedule of work in exile, as well as finding the time to have an affair with Frida, the randy old goat. Harrison comes to think of him as a friend, which makes it all the more painful when Trotsky is assassinated in August 1940. All of the members of the household come under suspicion, and, fearing that the contents of his diaries may be of interest to the police, Frida arranges for Harrison to flee to the United States on the pretext of delivering a batch of her artworks to a museum.

Once back in the USA, Harrison has to find a new career, and after his war work is completed and his father dies he moves out of the city to Asheville, a small town in North Carolina, where he busies himself writing a historical novel, set in Mexico. Slightly unexpectedly this is a huge hit, as is its sequel, and Harrison unexpectedly becomes a celebrity. So far so terrific, but now we're into the late 1940s and full-blown COMMIE PANIC. No-one is safe from being interrogated about their past, nor from being obliged to sign forms proclaiming their ideological purity and their dedication to America, Mom, apple pie etc. So when the FBI come sniffing around Harrison, as a high-profile author and semi-celebrity, and start asking: so, is there anything in your past life that might be of interest, honesty obliges him to say: well, not really, unless you count that time I LITERALLY LIVED WITH TROTSKY.

The FBI's interest in Harrison does not go unnoticed in Asheville, and rumours soon start to circulate about the exact nature of Harrison's military discharge and the propriety (or otherwise) of his relationship with his faithful stenographer and assistant Violet Brown. When Harrison is summoned to give an account of himself in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he decides that this might be a good time to leave Asheville and return to Mexico, not that this is likely to put him beyond the FBI's reach if they did decide to pursue charges. Harrison has other ideas in mind, though, and after he and Mrs. Brown return to Isla Pixol Harrison disappears after going for a swim in the sea. He is presumed dead, and his will is discharged which leaves pretty much everything to Violet. It is only on the death of Frida Kahlo three years later that Violet receives a trunk of items, including many of Harrison's clothes and possessions from his 1930s residency in Mexico, but also a note from Frida which suggests that all may not be as it seems.

This is the third Barbara Kingsolver book I've read, and the second to appear on this list after The Poisonwood Bible nine years ago (Prodigal Summer is the other one). It's a book of two halves, really, the first mainly concerned with Harrison's time associating with the real-life characters who populate the Rivera residence(s). Frida Kahlo is the focus here, an extraordinarily magnetic character and seemingly irresistibly attractive to men despite being partially crippled and suffering from all manner of other health problems, many of them the legacy of a horrific bus accident when she was eighteen when she was impaled by a piece of wreckage. The second half of the book is mainly concerned with the absurdity and injustice of the anti-communist paranoia of the 1940s and 1950s, and the terrible and bitter irony of a country attempting to combat infiltration by a supposedly sinister and totalitarian regime by proscribing and criminalising the inner thoughts of its citizens. There is an odd parallel here with the previous book on this list, Johnny Got His Gun, in that its author Dalton Trumbo (who is briefly mentioned in this book) was blacklisted by the same committee. 

While this is generally very enjoyable, and by no means a slog despite its considerable length (670 pages), a couple of criticisms nonetheless: firstly it is a bit slow in places, and secondly Harrison Shepherd is a rather bloodless and passive character, content to be swept along by the stronger will of others (his mother, Frida, Trotsky, even Violet Brown) rather than initiating anything major himself. Partly this is a limitation of the novel's chosen structure: if you write a novel featuring real-life characters interwoven with your fictional ones, there is a limit to the extent to which the fictional characters can interact with and materially affect the lives of the real ones. If you were to have, say, Harrison Shepherd assassinating Trotsky, or intervening heroically to prevent his actual assassin Ramón Mercader from doing the deed, you're into the Inglourious Basterds realm of alternative history. I was put in mind of this passage (referring to principal protagonist Arthur Dent) from Douglas Adams' So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, not otherwise a book with many points of similarity to this one:

To be fair to Harrison, overt and publicly-apparent fucking of the sort that he would be interested in (i.e. with other men) would be as certain a route to public ostracism and possible legal proceedings in the 1940s as having suspected Communist tendencies.

There is an odd parallel with current events as well, in that some of the later section takes place during the US polio epidemic of 1948, and so there is a widespread quarantine in place which prevents people meeting face-to-face, especially in Asheville which is portrayed as a polio hotspot. 

The Lacuna won the Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly various other things including the Orange Prize) in 2010; previous winners on this list are Bel Canto, We Need To Talk About Kevin and Home. Nonetheless if you were to ask me for a single Kingsolver recommendation I would still point you towards Prodigal Summer. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today it's Theresa May's former chief of staff, advisor and election strategist Nick Timothy, and Bridget McCluskey's former chief of PE staff, bullying advisor and expulsion strategist Geoff "Bullet" Baxter.

just say N2O to drugs

Here's a supplementary item to add to yesterday's Mystery Object round, and it's another one you might want to wash your hands after handling, although to be fair that applies to pretty much everything at the moment. I was loading small children into the car to deliver them to school/childcare when I spotted the item below nestling on the edge of our driveway, next to the wall.

Now I'm not as up with current drug fashions as I used to be but I reckoned there was a pretty good chance that this was an item of drug paraphernalia. It's a similar shape to something like an amyl nitrite capsule, but those are usually glass as they're designed to be crushed. A moment of reverse Google image searching revealed that this is a nitrous oxide canister, huffing laughing gas being apparently all the rage at the moment. Not much else to laugh about, to be fair.

The Sun is of course the best place to go for some cold hard facts on this subject, but even viewed through the lens of some right-wing moral panic nitrous oxide seems to be relatively benign, with the obvious caveats which apply to pretty much anything, i.e. don't attempt to operate heavy machinery while under the influence, inserting pressurised gas canisters directly into bodily orifices is probably a bad idea, and there is an upper limit to the amount it's safe to take and going beyond that may have unpleasant and permanent consequences. All of which advice (apart from the sticking gas canisters in your arsehole bit) applies equally well to more socially acceptable stuff like, say, gin.

There is also an amusing typo in the first Sun article which, if it were true, would make the drug considerably less appealing to its users:

cheesy walkers

Here's another lockdown jaunt in the Newport area: having pretty much exhausted the supply of green spaces accessible on foot from the house we got in the car to make the short jaunt over towards junction 27 of the M4 and the Allt-yr-yn nature reserve (note for non-Welsh people re. pronunciation: something like "all-tureen" will probably do). I'd been here a couple of times before for solo walks and you can also end up in pretty much the same place if you follow the canal south and under the M4 from the Fourteen Locks visitor centre. The canal in question is the old Monmouthshire and Brecon canal, the main arm of which ran up from central Newport to Brecon, and which is still navigable in places, though not, as it happens, the section here which runs along the north side of the nature reserve and separates it from the M4. 

Anyway, between the road where we parked and the canal there are some interesting woodland areas to be explored, including a couple of clearly man-made ponds. Just like with Woodland Park there is a back-story here involving a big house that no longer exists, in this case called, unsurprisingly, Allt-yr-yn House. Old maps (the one below is from 1937) show it but the main building seems to have gone now. There was also a lido which seems to have sat above the couple of ponds we explored; it's unclear exactly how much of that remains but I don't recall seeing anything, and we would have walked around pretty much the exact area where it would have been. I expect it was probably landscaped into a natural-looking pond when the area was made into a nature reserve. 

That was very nice and I recommend it highly; a few photos from our walk can be found here. We also did a walk up around Usk which, while much less interesting as a walk, did yield another entry for my occasional Mystery Object contest. Here is a pile of them in a field (the complete pile was considerably bigger and must have comprised a couple of hundred):

And here are a couple of closer views of the one I picked up and brought home with me:

As always someone on Twitter either had the knowledge or was prepared to put in the legwork to find out what it was, and it turns out these are "biomarbles" which are typically used as a hi-tech filtration device for various kinds of noxious industrial and farming effluent. The web page here is a bit vague about what their actual real-world application is, as it's obviously for industry insiders who know what things like "a perfect solution when surface area is more important than voidage" mean. There is an explanatory (well, sort of) video, though. Obviously the implications of finding a large number of them just dumped in a field is that they've probably already been used for their primary purpose, that is to say filtering noxious solids out of noxious liquids, and so a thorough wash of the hands is very much in order.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Relentlessly monotonic electrobore with occasional tuneful moments Gary Numan, and relentlessly tedious contrarian with occasional stopped-clock moments Claire Fox. My moment of recognition was prompted by seeing the photo reproduced here in this tweet commemorating Numan's 63rd birthday, which is today. The tweet says 62nd, incidentally, but Wikipedia disagrees. Looking that up also reminded me of the amusing factoid that Gary Numan is 13 days older than Gary Oldman. 

the last book I read

Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo.

Joe Bonham has just a vague inkling that something, somewhere, may have gone Badly Wrong. Drifting in and out of consciousness, he experiences lengthy dreams of his past life: childhood, adolescence, work, friends, girls, right up to the point where he spends a tender night with his nineteen-year-old girlfriend Kareen on the eve of his departure to fight in the First World War.

He gradually starts to experience periods of actual consciousness among all the dreaming and comes to the realisation that something has indeed gone badly wrong and that he is in hospital, unable to move. He recalls being in a trench with a group of other soldiers, a blinding flash as a mortar shell hit, and then nothing.

Gradually the reality of his situation begins to become apparent, bit by bit. I can't scratch my nose - one of my arms is gone! Well, it could be worse. Wait, the other arm is gone too. Well, mustn't grumble. At least my legs are - wait, they're gone too. And I seem to be deaf. And blind. And now I think about it, most of my face seems to be missing as well. Fuck.

This situation takes a bit of getting used to, as you can imagine. Gradually Joe learns to sense what's going on around him through touch and the vibrations he feels as people move around the room, even to the extent of being able to recognise specific doctors and nurses by the weight and pattern of their tread on the floor. He learns to keep track of the passage of time by the pattern of the nurses' comings and goings and the feeling of the sun on his skin through the windows. But how to find out more information, like: where am I? How long have I been here? Does anyone know who I am or that I'm here? And how to communicate my wishes? And, more importantly, what are my wishes?

Eventually he has a flash of inspiration from his army training: Morse code! And so he starts methodically tapping his head on the pillow to spell out S.O.S., hoping that his current nurse will notice. After seemingly doing this for months, and presumably acquiring neck muscles like Arnie, all he has to show for it is the nurse misinterpreting his frenzied headbanging as pent-up sexual frustration and administering a perfunctory handjob. Which is obviously nice, but doesn't really get him anywhere communication-wise.

The breakthrough comes when the regular nurse fucks off on her Christmas holidays and he acquires a different nurse. This one instantly clocks that he is trying to communicate, draws some letters on his chest with her finger to test his receptiveness, recognises that he's using Morse code and runs off to fetch someone who knows how to interpret it to work out what he's saying and tap on his forehead to communicate with him. 

Once the initial thrill of finally demonstrating that he's not a completely decerebrated vegetable has worn off, though, some facts have to be faced. The establishment are clearly never going to agree to his idea of being paraded round the country and displayed as a sort of cautionary exhibit for those inspired to rush off and get involved in future wars. And just as clearly Joe is never going to magically regenerate limbs and a face, so, while the ability to communicate is an improvement, his options for the rest of his life are pretty limited. And he can't even choose to end his life, because how would he do it?

Dalton Trumbo is far more famous as a screenwriter whose credits include Roman Holiday and Spartacus, some of his output published under pseudonyms as he was blacklisted and imprisoned during the McCarthy era. Johnny Got His Gun was by far the most celebrated of the handful of novels he wrote. It was first published in 1939, just in time to be celebrated as an anti-war novel (which it undoubtedly is) during World War II, and then after some years out of print enjoying a surge of popularity during the Vietnam war. This resulted in a film being made in 1971, directed by Trumbo himself, which in turn was the inspiration for Metallica's 1989 single One. I must confess to never really getting the hang of Metallica, or the whole thrash genre in general, apart of course from Enter Sandman which is a cracking tune.

Anyway, I enjoyed this very much, despite it not being, in general, a barrel of laughs, and bluntly polemical in places, its principal point, after all, being that War Is Bad, and that the mythologised idea of heroic soldiers marching off to heroic victory or heroic death has an unpalatable side-effect of a whole host of casualties variously maimed, splintered, shredded, gouged, gassed and rendered generally unphotogenic and whom the pro-war brigade would prefer to sweep under the carpet, exhibit A being Joe here. How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death? 

The whole nightmarish idea of being a fully-aware sentient being trapped in a body which does not allow you to express yourself to others is a trope which has been used a number of times over the years, from Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream to the real-life story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, both of which I see I mentioned here in this post from 2009.

the last book I read

Notes From An Exhibition by Patrick Gale.

Rachel Kelly is a painter, originally American but settled since her twenties in Cornwall (Penzance, specifically) with her husband Antony. Together they have settled into a comfortable old-ish age, their three surviving children widely scattered and living their own lives.

Rachel has at various points in the past been quite famous but her reputation has faded somewhat in recent years, as her work has changed from large, ambitious, chaotic, semi-abstract work to smaller, more figurative pieces. When the gathered family (well, most of it) clear out her attic studio following her sudden death from a heart attack, though, they discover that she has had a late surge of creativity and has been working on a series of abstract works in her older style, on massive canvases.

The impromptu family gathering gives us a chance to get to know the family, and, in a series of flashbacks to various past times and to various different characters' viewpoints, Rachel herself. What is immediately clear is that she was not an easy woman to live with, either as a wife or a mother, and all the children carry some scars from her treatment of them over the years. The main reason for this is that Rachel suffered from bipolar disorder, which at the time would have been called manic depression. Most of the time she took a cocktail of drugs to manage it, but felt that they dulled her creativity, and was not convinced of their safety in pregnancy (this latter reason could of course partly have been a ruse to indulge the first), and so used to take occasional holidays from the regime, during which time her behaviour could be erratic.

Both of her surviving sons, Garfield and Hedley, are slightly timid and wary of asserting themselves, presumably as a result of not wanting to create any ripples to disturb Rachel's calm moods or draw attention to themselves during the darker ones. As a result of this Hedley is having a hard time communicating his discomfort to his lover, Oliver, an art gallery curator, over Oliver's new friendship with another wild and unpredictable female artist. Partly to avoid confronting this situation Hedley agrees to stay on in Penzance to look after his father and assist him with delving into Rachel's early life, something she was extremely cagey about while she was alive.

During this period the last of the children unexpectedly shows up - Morwenna, known to all as Wenn, always the black sheep of the family and the major inheritor of Rachel's artistic talent, but also Rachel's mental disorders, which have meant her living a strange nomadic sort of life with lengthy gaps where none of her immediate family knew where she was. 

Antony's internet pleas for information eventually bear fruit in an unexpected way: Winnie MacArthur, who turns out not only to be Rachel's sister but to have known her by a completely different name, Joanie Ransome. Clearly this warrants some explanation, and Winnie, evidently reasonably comfortably-off and with some free time, agrees to travel to Penzance to share the information that she has. 

And so we come to the last two sections of the book, which finally confront the two questions the reader has been fretting over for most of the second half of the book, both of which seem to have been equally pivotal to Rachel's life: what exactly happened to Rachel's youngest son Petroc, killed in a car accident in his mid-teens? And what the heck is with the Joanie Ransome/Rachel Kelly switcheroo?

Rachel's back-story is a fascinating one including much teenage angst, early manifestations of her mental disorder, commitment to a mental institution and an exciting escape in the company of one Rachel Kelly (remember our Rachel is still Joanie Ransome at this point) and, upon Rachel's meeting an unfortunate demise under the wheels of a train, assuming her identity and fleeing to Europe to start a new life.

The Petroc segment, which is actually the one which concludes the book, doesn't add a great deal to what we already know, since it finishes before the actual moment of Petroc's death, mown down by a drunken driver (almost certainly someone he knew) on a country lane while walking back from a party while Antony and Rachel were on a rare trip abroad to New York for a show of her work. His sunny optimism - he's just lost his virginity and left his older siblings Hedley and Morwenna happily dancing - is made all the more poignant by our knowledge of what is about to happen to him.

To be honest, the sequencing of those two bits (i.e. shifting them right to the end) is slightly odd, and as I said above the Petroc segment doesn't really add much, other than that it was nice that he got to get his end away before he died. The penultimate section is really the key one, in that it explains how Rachel Kelly came to be Rachel Kelly in the first place. This section and the whole sub-plot around Joanie/Rachel has a slightly incongruous Barbara Vine feel to it, not that there's anything wrong with that, but it feels like it belongs in a slightly different novel, and the whole suitcase mix-up which enables the identity swap is a bit of a clunkily implausible MacGuffin. 

But the rest of it is good, the family dynamics in particular being very convincing, as are the highs and lows of Rachel's moods, and there is a general warmth and optimism towards humanity throughout, even its more damaged examples. You have to balance a sympathy for what must have been a debilitating condition with a recognition of the monstrous selfishness and cruelty of her behaviour towards her children, and the feeling that surely even under the most oppressive moods you retain the power to choose to behave differently. I mean, maybe you don't, I really don't know. There is an amusing/appalling interlude with Dame Barbara Hepworth in St. Ives that Gale's afterword is at pains to stress is a fiction, although she does seem to have been a bit peculiar in real life.

Antony is the character who feels a bit underwritten; as it is he's a bit implausibly saintly and forbearing, although we are invited to infer that this is because of his active involvement with the Quaker movement. I am a bit dim so I found repeated reference to his circle of Friends with a capital F a bit odd until I clocked that this is how some Quakers refer to each other. The only other criticism that one might make of the book is that it's all very white and middle-class; I think this isn't really a fair criticism of one book - it might be a fair criticism of me if books of this type were all I ever read, but I like to think that's not the case.

Patrick Gale's website contains some interesting notes on the writing of Notes From An Exhibition, and a link to a video clip wherein he is interviewed about it by Stephen Fry.

the last book I read

The House Of The Spirits by Isabel Allende.

Welcome to a coyly-unnamed South American country, definitely not explicitly referred to as Chile anywhere, but equally definitely Chile if you know anything of South American 20th-century history and the author's own personal history. 

We begin in the del Valle house, where Severo and Nívea live with an indeterminate number of children (it's never quite clear how many), most noticeably Rosa, a supernaturally luminous beauty, and younger sister Clara, possessed of mysterious clairvoyant and psychokinetic powers. Rosa is engaged to be married to a young man called Esteban Trueba, who as the novel opens is away seeking his fortune by overseeing digging operations at a gold mine.

Severo has political ambitions, and his profile rises sufficiently for him to acquire some powerful enemies, some of whom arrange to have him killed. Luckily for him, but unfortunately for Rosa, she drinks from the poisoned wine before he has a chance to do so, and dies. Eventually receiving word of her death and making the long and arduous trek back to the house, Esteban is grief-stricken and heads off to spend the next several years tending his family hacienda. The organisational and management challenges of this perk him right up, as does his habit of enthusiastically exercising his droit du seigneur on the daughters of his tenants, or, to put it another way, being a big old rapist. As an inevitable consequence of this there are a multitude of little Estebans running around the place, all of which he refuses to acknowledge as his own.

Refreshed by a lengthy stint of farm management, horse-riding and rape, Esteban returns to the del Valle house, and, being of a pragmatic turn of mind, requests Clara's hand in marriage instead. Clara is an odd young woman who has spent most of her teenage years entirely mute by her own choice after Rosa's death, but to everyone's surprise immediately abandons her wordless ways and says "yeah, go on then".

Esteban and Clara move into their own house away from Severo and Nívea (who are gruesomely dispatched in a car crash shortly after) and set about starting a family: daughter Blanca and twin sons Jaime and Nicolás. The family divide their time between their city home and the family hacienda, Tres Marías. It is during their time at Tres Marías that Blanca makes the acquaintance of Pedro Tercero García, and they eventually become lovers.

Esteban Trueba harbours political ambitions, and when a potentially powerful supporter, Jean de Satigny, comes to stay at Tres Marías, Esteban encourages him to have the run of the place. While on a midnight stroll Jean happens upon Blanca and Pedro Tercero in a state of naked post-coital slumber after some carefree rutting on a riverbank, reports his find to Esteban, and uses the resulting leverage to request Blanca's hand in marriage. She accepts, seeing an opportunity to legitimise the child (Pedro Tercero's, obviously) she is carrying. Jean de Satigny seems unperturbed by this arrangement, and uninterested in pressing his own attentions on Blanca. The reasons for this are soon revealed: Jean has some more, erm, esoteric preferences which seem to mainly revolve around arranging the household servants into erotic tableaux and then photographing them. Candid photography, he asked him knowingly, etc. Blanca and her daughter, Alba, flee back to the Trueba house.

Esteban, now a senator, detects that change is in the air, and sure enough soon the previously unthinkable happens and a socialist government is elected. Cue much rejoicing from the lower orders, but also outrage from the previously untouchable ruling classes. After some meetings in darkened rooms it is soon decided that the election result cannot be allowed to stand, for the greater good of the country. Fortunately a compliant media and the military need only a small nudge to push them over the edge into full-blown authoritarianism, and a military coup soon ensues, with assurances that the ensuing period of martial law and curfew will be short-lived - just until the immediate threat to the country has passed - as will the accompanying reign of terror visited upon anybody defying the regime's wishes or perceived to be plotting against it. 

This is a problem for Alba, now a feisty young woman, in particular, as her boyfriend Miguel is a dedicated campaigner for social reform and not about to let a little thing like being under immediate sentence of death deter him. No-one is safe, though, and Jaime, a doctor resolutely removed from politics, is arrested on the grounds of having treated the socialist President and therefore being under suspicion as a sympathiser. After being brutally tortured and presented with a confession to sign, he refuses, and is promptly killed. Soon enough the secret police come for Alba as well, and she ends up in the hands of Colonel Esteban García, who reveals himself to be the first of Esteban Trueba's horde of illegitimate children, and to have nursed a lifelong thirst for revenge upon the family. After being subjected to rape and torture, Alba is eventually released (after Esteban Trueba has managed to exert the last vestiges of his influence on the ruling regime), and she and Miguel are reunited. Esteban Trueba, now ninety, dies, Blanca and Pedro Tercero flee to Canada to escape the regime, but Alba and Miguel remain in the family house, awaiting the birth of Alba's child.

As I said at the start, it's never explicitly stated that the country in which The House Of The Spirits is set is meant to be Chile, but the events in the last section of the novel identify it as Chile pretty unequivocally, in particular the overthrowing of the government of Salvador Allende (Isabel Allende's father's cousin) by the military regime overseen by Augusto Pinochet which ruled the country from 1973 to 1990. The character "The President" is clearly meant to be Allende (the circumstances of whose death are still in dispute), and the occasional character "The Poet" is presumably meant to be Pablo Neruda, who also died in slightly mysterious circumstances in 1973 and who previously featured on this blog in a more light-hearted context here. 

Magic realism is a slightly lazy and unsatisfactory catch-all term for a whole variety of works by a whole variety of authors, many of them South American but many not, many of them featuring vivid multi-generational family sagas with themes both of real-life political struggle and odd supernatural elements, but some not. What you certainly can say about The House Of The Spirits is that it owes a heavy debt to the foundational work in this genre, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years Of Solitude, certainly in terms of the multi-generational family saga bit, but also in some specifics, for instance: The House Of The Spirits features a character called Rosa the Beautiful and One Hundred Years Of Solitude features a character called Remedios the Beauty; both characters barely utter a word during the novels but are worshipped for their supernatural beauty before dying young.

I mean, clearly there are worse books you could choose to emulate - my only critical comments would be that the way the authorial voice is managed is a bit confusing in places. There are bits that are narrated in the first person by Esteban Trueba and bits (the majority of the narrative) that are written in a third-person omniscient style by an unknown author, or at least unknown until right at the end when the author is revealed to have been Alba, basing much of the text on a series of notebooks handed down to her by her grandmother Clara. Until you know this, some of the transitions between authorial voices are a bit jarring, and the transition between the colourful family saga with occasional tragic bits for the first three-quarters of the book and the full-blown fascist torture nightmare at the end is a bit jarring as well, although of course this could very well have been intentional. The brief and bizarre episode with Jean de Satigny's nudey photo habits put me in mind of the similar episode in Picture Palace. 

Other books which could loosely be said to fall into the same genre among non-South American authors include Midnight's Children and most of John Irving's back catalogue. You'll recall that I was resolutely unimpressed with Midnight's Children but a big fan of most of Irving's work (The World According To Garp in particular), so you can see that it really depends in the individual merits of the individual work, and I can say without reservation (apart from the very minor ones above, anyway) that I thoroughly enjoyed The House Of The Spirits, which is another book that has probably been sitting on my shelves for the best part of 25 years. The only other thing I would say is: we've all had ex-girlfriends who were quiet, enigmatic, hard to fathom, and those would be the Climbers of the ex-girlfriend world; conversely we've all had ex-girlfriends who were theatrical, intense, and seemingly constantly teetering on the edge of near-hysteria. Spending a significant amount of time with The House Of The Spirits is a little bit like spending time with a girlfriend of the latter sort: exhilarating but exhausting and something you should probably verify that you're in the mood for before you start.

As you can see my copy is a tie-in edition to the 1993 film - if ever there was a book that deserved the epithet "unfilmable" I would have thought it was this one, but they had a go, bless 'em, with a stellar cast (most of them jarringly white) even if they probably had to drop 70-80% of the plot.

cricizen kane

I was prompted by the recent resumption of near-normal Test cricket in New Zealand, and in particular by the record-breaking feats of Kane Williamson, to revisit a couple of previous posts featuring deep cricket stat-nerdery and do my best to out-nerd them in some way.

Williamson's innings of 238 against Pakistan in Christchurch was of particular interest to me as it was the first innings of 238 in the 145-year history of Test cricket. You may recall my post from a few years back (January 2013 to be precise) about the esoteric study of yet-to-be-made individual innings scores in Test cricket, and the subsequent flurry of pant-moistening excitement in late 2015 when several entries on that list were knocked off in quick succession. 

Since the compilation of my original list by painstaking manual methods in 2013 I have developed some fiendishly clever automated methods for extracting statistics related to this subject, and I am both proud and, yes, all right, slightly aroused to present some of the results here.

The first thing to say is that there was an error in my original list: the inclusion of 114 as a score which was once the lowest un-made score in a Test match was an error, and the first occurrence of that score was not by Herbert Sutcliffe in 1929 but by Jack Hearne in 1912 (Sutcliffe's innings was actually the fourth 114 in Test history). So the revised progression looks like this:

Score	Player	Date	Match	Span (time)	Span (Tests)
100	JT Tyldesley	3rd July 1905	ENG v AUS	28y 110d	84
110	WH Ponsford	19th December 1924	AUS v ENG	19y 169d	73
125	PGV van der Bijl	3rd March 1939	RSA v ENG	9y 261d	90
139	ED Weekes	11th April 1955	WI v AUS	16y 39d	133
171	IR Redpath	11th December 1970	AUS v ENG	15y 244d	271
186	Zaheer Abbas	23rd December 1982	PAK v IND	12y 12d	267
199	Mudassar Nazar	24th October 1984	PAK v IND	1y 306d	54
218	SV Manjrekar	1st December 1989	IND v PAK	5y 38d	134
224	VG Kambli	19th February 1993	IND v ENG	2y 80d	84
228	HH Gibbs	2nd January 2003	RSA v PAK	9y 318d	423

The five lowest "missing" scores in Tests are now 229, 252, 265, 272 and 273. The last ten innings which plugged a gap on the list were as follows:

Score	Player	Team	Opposition	Date	Venue
238	KS Williamson	New Zealand	Pakistan	03/01/2021	Christchurch
335*	DA Warner	Australia	Pakistan	29/11/2019	Adelaide
264*	TWM Latham	New Zealand	Sri Lanka	15/12/2018	Wellington
303*	KK Nair	India	England	16/12/2016	Chennai
269*	AC Voges	Australia	West Indies	10/12/2015	Hobart
290	LRPL Taylor	New Zealand	Australia	13/11/2015	Perth
245	Shoaib Malik	Pakistan	England	13/10/2015	Abu Dhabi
263	AN Cook	England	Pakistan	13/10/2015	Abu Dhabi
294	AN Cook	England	India	10/08/2011	Birmingham
293	V Sehwag	India	Sri Lanka	02/12/2009	Mumbai (BS)

At the other end of the scale, multiple occurrences of the same score for the same batsman: the highest individual score to be made more than once by the same batsman is 203, by Shoaib Mohammad and Shivnarine Chanderpaul (twice each), the highest individual score to be made three times by the same player is 158 by Kevin Pietersen, the highest individual score to be made four times by the same player is 105 by Alastair Cook and the only batsman to make the same individual score on five separate occasions is Virat Kohli with 103.

The only two instances in Test history of a batsman making two identical scores in excess of 100 in the same Test match were a pair of 105s by Sri Lanka's Duleep Mendis in 1982 and a pair of 101s by Pakistan's Misbah-ul-Haq in 2014, the second of those 101s being at the time the joint-fastest century in Test history in just 56 balls (New Zealand's Brendon McCullum has since taken sole possession of the record).

the last book I read

Climbers by M. John Harrison.

Mike is a young-ish guy living in the Greater Manchester area (he has a house in Stalybridge for most of the novel), working various menial jobs but spending most of his time hanging out with a motley bunch of individuals who spend virtually all their spare time rock climbing in the various outcrops and escarpments within easy reach in the Peak District and the Pennines. 

Mike is a latecomer to the group and a bit younger than most of the others: Normal, Gaz, Mick and sort-of group leader Sankey, a middle-aged former semi-celebrity in rock-climbing circles. Mike soon immerses himself deeply in the esoteric world of rope, bolts, chalk and boots, and of laybacks, jamming and boulder problems.

But what has prompted Mike to locate himself here and take up such an all-consuming hobby? We learn, in some oblique flashbacks, that Mike came up here from London after the breakdown of his marriage to Pauline, a bookshop owner, probably slightly older than him (nothing as straightforward as a bald statement of people's ages is ever offered). It's unclear exactly what the cause or the exact circumstances of the marriage breakdown were, just as it's pretty unclear why Mike and Pauline chose to get married in the first place.

Mike and his climbing chums continue their relentless pursuit of thrills and novelty on various bits of rock around the country, sometimes driving hours in someone's knackered old car, the seats piled high with rope and reeking climbing boots, for a couple of hours supping tea out of a Thermos and contemplating a rain-sodden slab of rock too wet to climb, only to then have to pack everything up and come home again. Normal and Mick have patient and long-suffering wives; Sankey lives alone, so when he falls thirty feet to his death off a relatively innocuous climb he's scooted up several times before it falls to Mike and Mick to sort out his personal effects. Mike has started up a tentative correspondence with Pauline in London, but she seems to have pretty firmly Moved On, so he contents himself with discreetly boning Normal's wife.

Following Sankey's death the group drifts apart: Mick gets a job making professional use of his climbing and abseiling skills but which takes him away from home most of the time, and Normal acquires a new daredevil climbing buddy whose company he seems to prefer. Mike is left, as the novel ends, sitting on a Cornish clifftop he has just scaled, contemplating his future.

As I've said before, I have no particular interest in rock-climbing per se, although it comes close enough to the sort of stuff I do like doing for me to see the appeal of it, and as I said here, the gnarlier end of the sort of mountain scrambling I do like to do is only a fag-paper away from the more elementary end of roped-up rock-climbing. The key difference, I think, other than the necessity of putting your trust in other people's competence (i.e in terms of safe belaying procedure, secure placement of bolts, reliable rope manufacture) to a degree I find unappealing, is that the scrambling is a means to an end, that end being successful arrival at the summit of the mountain, rather than an end in itself. 

Nonetheless there's enough overlap for me to find the subject fascinating; whether someone completely uninterested would enjoy Climbers I'm not sure, but I think there's a good chance that they would. The central technical subject matter aside it's an odd, bleak sort of book; for all the outdoor activity portrayed here there's very little sense of the glory of the wilderness and being out in nature miles away from civilisation - most of the locations are within easy reach of cities like Manchester and Sheffield and occupy that odd sort of polluted hinterland where city and wilderness meet and you can climb up a wall of millstone grit within sight of old colliery workings and fly-tipped sofas, usually in grey drizzle. Published in 1989 and set at least half a decade earlier, there's a sense of Thatcher-era industrial stagnation and despair here which imbues everything with a sort of greyness even when the sun is supposed to be shining.

It's an oddly vague, detached group of characters as well: the central character, Mike, drifts through the narrative without us getting to know him very well or having much insight into his motivations, other than that he's clearly throwing himself into the climbing activity and its associated subculture as a means of avoiding confronting the reasons why his marriage broke down. It's only through a bit of careful reading between the lines that we deduce that Pauline's daughter Nina died in hospital after falling onto a glass-topped coffee table and that this may have been the event that precipitated their break-up, Mike having been very fond of her. Similarly it's only made explicit that Mike has been sleeping with Normal's wife right at the end when someone specifically brings it up in conversation.

M. John Harrison is better-known as a writer of quirky science fiction, Climbers being something of an outlier in his oeuvre. I enjoyed it very much, though, and I think what I said about The Moviegoer applies equally well here: it lingers oddly in the mind after you've finished it. Testament to the excellence of its recreation of the climbing experience (it's evidently at least partly autobiographical) is that it was awarded the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature in 1989, a prize almost exclusively awarded to non-fiction books. 

This is the second book I got for Christmas which carries a foreword by Robert Macfarlane (whose own The Wild Places won the Boardman Tasker prize in 2007); as with its predecessor Rogue Male it's a book intensely preoccupied with landscape and the outdoors and people's relationship with it. As with Rogue Male the text of the foreword is largely reproduced in a Guardian article which you can read without needing to purchase the book; here it is.