leanston, meanston, deanston

Better do this whisky post before the bottle disappears - a very real danger as it's the only one in the cupboard at the moment. The brief glory days of immediately post-birthday (supplemented by the Christmas backlog) have long since been whittled away and we're into the long dark teatime of the soul that precedes Christmas 2025 and hopefully a bit of a bump in the stocks.

Anyway, this is Deanston, not one that you see in supermarkets a lot, although I seem to remember Marks & Spencer used to sell it. I happened to see it on the spesh for about £25 on Amazon a while back so I decided to snap it up; I mean, why not, right?

Deanston distillery is located a few miles west of Dunblane, fairly southerly as Highland distilleries go though not as far south as Glengoyne. It's a fairly young distillery, being opened in 1965, but inhabits a set of buildings with an interesting history which were used as a cotton mill for around 200 years before being re-purposed for whisky production. 

This is the entry-level Virgin Oak expression, the name referencing the year or so the whisky spends in new oak casks which have never before held any spirit. This alone would not qualify the spirit to be called Scotch whisky, as it must first be matured for at least three years in casks that have previously held some other spirit; in this case American bourbon. So you might say, well, this whole Virgin Oak thing sounds like a bit of a gimmick then, and I'd say, yes, you may be right there. In their defence it is bottled at a beefy 46.3% which represents some commitment to delivering a bit of oomph at the cost of wringing out a bit of extra profit. It would be easy enough, after all, to just dilute the whole thing down to the standard 40% and squeeze out roughly an extra bottle for every seven or so bottles at 46.3%, so respect to them for not doing that. They also make a big thing on the packaging of it being non-chill-filtered, and there are no cryptic messages in foreign languages which denote the inclusion of extra colouring. There is, as it happens, a slightly complex relationship between chill-filtering and the bottling strength of your whisky which I won't attempt to explain but which you can read about here.

All that don't amount to a hill of beans if your whisky tastes like donkey ass, though, in fact slightly more concentrated donkey ass might even be a bad thing. No worries on that particular score, though. I mean it's not especially startling, adhering to the present-day standard of being a no-age-statement whisky sitting below the 12-year-old which they are thereby able to charge more money for and which I don't deem myself able to afford what with having kids to feed and all that malarkey.

But, to be fair, there's nothing wrong with it, any more than there's anything wrong with a whole host of unpeated Highland and Speyside whiskies that I'd struggle to tell apart in a blind taste test. I'd put this in the top half of the imaginary chart, because it's got some nice dried-fruit spiciness going on. A sploosh of water doesn't hurt here, especially since the higher bottling strength means it won't damp the aforementioned oomph down too much.

slider way, give it all you got

Here's a crackpot theory for you, and, as all the best theories do, it has to do with Robert Redford, who died last week at the age of 89, and shoes.

The only films in which Redford starred which I could say with complete confidence that I've seen are Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, The Sting, All The President's Men, The Great Waldo Pepper, Out Of Africa and Pete's Dragon. The first three there are obviously classics, the fourth is a bit of fluff with some surprisingly dark moments thrown in (such as Susan Sarandon falling off an aeroplane, or when Redford's character has to cave a fellow aviator's head in with a hunk of timber to prevent him burning to death in his crashed plane), the fifth is a bit turgid for my taste and I can't honestly remember Redford even being in the last one, presumably because I was distracted by a giant furry green CGI dragon.

Anyway, the central point made in a number of the obituaries was that it was easily to be distracted from his acting ability by how absurdly handsome he was, something easy even for a tediously vanilla heterosexual bloke such as myself to appreciate. That is something that Redford himself complained about (but not too much; I mean, come on) in the context of it limiting his range of roles. The quote that was circulating on the internet after his death was this one from director Mike Nichols in relation to Redford being considered for the role that eventually went to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate:

“I interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands, of men,” Nichols explained. “I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser.’ And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘O.K., have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wasn’t joking.” 

What you might be asking at this point is: yes, but what does all this have to do with shoes? Well, I'll tell you. I was at Newport Leisure Centre the other day taking the girls to a swimming lesson, and there were several people there sporting what these days seems to be quite a common footwear combo of shortish white sports socks pulled up quite tight, and sliders. I assume the original idea was to give some sort of post-training-session Premiership footballer vibe, but it seems pretty ubiquitous now. One of the Dads who was supervising the activities of his child in the showers even had socks and sliders on and must have been getting wet socks. 

So, getting to the point, my thesis is this: there are two sorts of people in the world, with two fundamentally different sorts of outlook on it, and life. The first sort either apply absolutely no thought whatsoever to what might happen beyond two minutes from now, or have a sort of blithe assurance that all will be well, nothing can or will go wrong, and they won't ever get into a position where they get stranded (e.g. if the car breaks down) on the way home from the swimming run and have to hike across a field in the dark in sliders, flip-flops, whatever. The other group of people assume that these things may well happen and that some more robust ready-for-anything footwear may be required. I myself for instance do own a pair of flip-flops, but they are strictly for home or holiday use and never worn in any situation where I might be required to do anything involving walking any significant distance or driving a car. I might wear my Converses or Vans if I'm in a cazh mood and the weather is warm and dry, with the caveat that I probably wouldn't wear the Converses for the swimming run as the thin canvas material and those two little instep holes mean they suck up water pretty effectively.

Looking at it another way I think this probably also divides down the nerd/jock boundary, where the nerd contingent might be slightly more inclined to get into the habit of wearing shoes that facilitate a quick getaway in the event of trouble. To put it another way, people who might feel a need to escape from other people (anyone who was ever bullied at school, for instance) might be more inclined to wear escape-facilitating footwear than those who might more generally expect other people to run away from them.

The pursuer/pursuee (yeah, I know, not really a word) model works for linking this back to Robert Redford as well - imagine (if you can) being someone who looked like him. I don't want to use the phrase "beating them off with a shitty stick" but it seems pretty appropriate here; it's hard to imagine him ever having to expend very much effort to be in the company of someone who wanted to get into his pants. The only advantage for the rest of us who might have to work slightly harder is that (this is what I choose to believe, anyway) since we had to work a bit harder at attracting a partner in the first place, and additionally might have more of an incentive to keep them around, we might be more inclined to generosity and attention to detail in the bedroom department, if you know what I mean, ladies. 

a salt with a deadly ramen

There I was, enjoying a piping-hot mid-week bowl of lunchtime noodles as I am occasionally to be found doing, only to have my wife come into the kitchen and say, hahaha, the internet says those will probably kill you. This was unexpected and slightly unwelcome news to me, as I'd been scrupulously careful, as I always am, to avoid the risk of accidentally shooting myself in the nuts with multiple rockets during the noodle-preparation process. 

As always, once I'd gone and checked out the article Hazel had seen on the internet it turns out the reality is slightly less exciting than the headlines suggest, the shock revelation being that primarily noodle-based meals are quite high in carbohydrates (I mean, no shit) but are also extremely high in salt. This latter observation is undoubtedly true, as the 3.6 grams of salt that a standard packet of the Nong Shim ramen noodles contains constitutes around 60% of an adult's recommended daily intake. 

Yeah, you'll be saying, I see that, but that's surely only a problem if you're eating these things every day. And you are right, of course, but the whole variety and moderation thing doesn't generate those sweet sweet clicks that food websites crave even more than another delicious bowl of spicy noodles. So, for that reason, someone went and did the diligence and ate nothing but a variety of packets of ramen noodles for a week, and arrived at the shock revelation that it's probably not a great idea. This is its very own sub-genre of internet food "journalism", as you can see, some of the stunts probably being more toxic and inadvisable than others. I'm not sure when this all started but I think Morgan Spurlock may be at least partly to blame.

I was moved to wonder what the current rates of noodle consumption are here at Halibut Towers - this is more difficult to calculate over the last few years than it was back when I was tracking it in a serious way, because Wing Yip have closed their online store and I spent a couple of years trawling the far reaches of the internet for noodle bargains before returning to Amazon in the last couple of years. In any case, the numbers from back in, say, 2014 are meaningless in comparison with today's numbers, since we're now up to three enthusiastic noodle-consumers in the house. Nia and Huwie are on a couple of bowls a week on average, and if I have a couple as well that's very nearly a bowl a day between us on aggregate. Alys, contrarian as always, does not relish them.

That finger-in-the-air estimate is borne out by my recent Amazon order history, which shows that we collectively consumed 440 packets in 584 days between January 2024 and August 2025. I have no data on our collective sodium levels or blood pressure, and that's probably just as well.

My only hope here is that the mild scepticism about a perhaps-too-simplistic link between salt intake and blood pressure expressed in the excellent book The Man Who Ate Everything turns out to be true. Even if it isn't, this is a hugely entertaining read which I recommend highly.

I don't have a lot of food-related book recommendations but I would also suggest you read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, a bit more of a downer but fascinating and well worth a go.

you don't know jack

Following on from the last book post and its predecessor, I observed at the end of the Jack Maggs review that its title was the latest in a short series of titles that were just someone's full name. A similar list could be constructed for Jack, its exact composition depending on the rules we decide to specify. Most obviously we could make a list of books whose title is a single word which is clearly someone's given name, or a near-variant or diminutive form of it (Jack Boughton's given name is actually John, for instance).

If we did that, and with the caveat that this may not be exhaustive, since that would require a degree of effort and attention to detail that I can't be arsed with, we'd end up with a list that went something like: Jack, Dalva, Lila, Rebecca, Beloved, Fremder, Clea, Walter, Lolita, Balthazar, Justine. 

If we included single-word names that were pretty clearly someone's surname then we might end up adding these: Ravelstein, Stoner, Mountolive, Demian, Chatterton, Kleinzeit, Utz.

Finally, single-word names that clearly refer to a particular person but which are some sort of nickname rather than strictly a given name: Candide, Fiskadoro, Nostromo, Lanark, Stick, Pilgermann. 

A full analysis, should you require one, of one-word, two-word and indeed many-word titles featured on this blog can be found here.

the last book I read

Jack by Marilynne Robinson.

So here is John Ames Boughton aka Jack, who you'll recall we met in Home and Gilead and who was an occasional off-screen presence in Lila, and who was in many ways the most interesting character in those books, having a murky past involving various unforgivable misdemeanours, much dissolution and misbehaviour and equally much saintly patience and forbearance from his father and siblings. Well here he is getting a whole book to himself, or mostly to himself.

We're back a few years before the events of Gilead and Home here, probably at the tail-end of the 1940s. Jack is living in St. Louis, holding down a succession of menial jobs which just about allow him to rent a dingy room in a boarding-house. Despite this he occasionally finds himself on the street if his drinking habits get the better of him. As luck would have it he is looking reasonably respectable when he helps Della Miles pick up some papers that she's dropped during a rainstorm, and senses an instant connection. Only one problem: Della is black, and for all that she's highly-educated and with a respectable job as a schoolteacher, that's still a pretty insurmountable problem. 

A couple of further encounters and an ill-fated first date later and Della happens to find herself locked in a cemetery at night, and who should happen to be skulking around on one of the benches but Jack, who takes it upon himself to look after her for the night. Luckily Jack is a man of some reading and erudition and is able to engage her in diverting philosophical discussion to while away the long hours until the caretaker arrives to open up the gates in the morning. 

And so a tentative romance ensues, though obviously severely constrained by several different factors - obviously there's the whole forbidden inter-racial thing, and it is literally rather than figuratively forbidden, inter-racial marriage being illegal, at least in Missouri, but there is also Jack's own inherent unreliability. Partly there is his weakness for The Drink, but this is really just a symptom of a more general problem: a tendency to deliberately torpedo his own happiness and then try to escape the consequences by fleeing, either literally or by recourse to the bottle. That in turn may be just a symptom of some deeper issues around self-worth and not wanting people to rely on him for anything for fear of letting them down - better to let them down hard and early to get it out of the way.

Jack - the son of a preacher, don't forget - seeks refuge in a church in one of the black neighbourhoods of St. Louis, looking for a couple of things: firstly, some soup, and secondly some sort of homely reassurance that things will be OK. The minister is reluctant to offer this, though, and points out all the ways in which Jack will be ruining Della's life if things continue. 

Of course Della is not some unwilling participant in all of this, and has her own challenges to overcome, particularly her own father - also a preacher, as it happens, and also not especially keen on the whole thing, not out of some reflexive hatred of whitey (although maybe a bit of that too) but more that Della will be letting herself in for a world of hurt and anguish regardless of how respectable and upstanding a white man she happens to choose, and a shifty intermittently-employed drunkard is just the cherry on the cake.

While Della is in Memphis dealing with her family Jack does what he does best and flees to Chicago, where he makes quite a nice respectable life for himself for a short while working at a bookshop, until he happens to mention to his landlady that the "wife" he's left back in St. Louis and who may be joining him later is a coloured lady, at which point he is swiftly shown the door. Having pretty much nowhere else to go, he turns up at Della's father's church in Memphis and is taken back to the family home on the understanding that this is a one-off event during the course of which Della will be invited to make an irrevocable choice between Jack and her family.

Since this is effectively a prequel to Gilead and Home, the reader who's read the books in something resembling publication order will already know that Jack and Della don't get to waltz off together into the sunset, maybe to a state with less draconian laws regarding inter-racial marriage, but instead that Jack turns up at his father's house pretty obviously having left somewhere in a hurry at the start of those two books' timeline (this would be at least seven or eight years later), and that later on Della shows up looking for him. So that knowledge colours the reader's perception of Jack, in particular of how it ends. 

If you were of the opinion that, instead, you wanted to read the books in the order of when they were set, then broadly speaking Jack and Lila happen around the same time (maybe a year or two apart, it's hard to tell), and then there's a gap of maybe seven or eight years (judging by the age of, for instance, John Ames' son in Gilead) and then Gilead and Home happen roughly in parallel. I'm not sure why you would do this, though, to be honest.

What I would say about Jack, as beautifully written as it is, is that I expected to enjoy it slightly more than I actually did. That's because Jack is an interesting character in the first two books, Home in particular, who you feel you want to know more about and who has some enjoyably spiky interactions with his father and siblings. There is a bit of a repeated cycle in Jack, though, of Jack and Della having some delightful stolen moment somewhere, Jack going back to his lonely room and reflecting that actually she'd be better off without him, resolving to confront her and end it for her own good, and then turning up on her doorstep only to find her waiting to reassure him and persuade him to stick around. A few cycles of this process occupy more of the book than they perhaps should, and things which we know happen (i.e. from reading the earlier books), like Jack and Della having a child, don't happen within the quite narrow timescale the book's narrative occupies (probably a couple of months at most). That it's probably the least satisfying of the four books in the series shouldn't be taken as too much of a criticism, as the standard is very high, and I think if you're going to read one (probably in the order they were published, so starting with Gilead) you should probably read all of them.

I very deliberately choose not to analyse my own thought processes in terms of how I decide which book to read next; if I had done so here it might have occurred to me that the title of this book is a shorter version of the title of the previous book in the series, Jack Maggs. I couldn't swear to it but I think the only other example from this list is the pair of Invisible and Invisible Cities, though they were a couple of years apart. That's if you require the shorter title to appear at the start of the longer one, of course; if you relax that requirement you get things like Home appearing in The Road Home and Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant. 

[STOP PRESS: there's also the pair of Transit and Transition]

celebrity lookeylikeys of the day

I've got two for you today, which it seems to me fall into the categories, respectively, Fairly Commonplace and Incredibly Niche, although that is of course partly a matter of perspective.

Firstly, JJ Spaun, this year's US Open champion and unwitting instigator of incredibly laboured punnery (see below), and Jeffrey Wright, fine actor with a wide and varied body of work but pictured here as James Bond's CIA buddy Felix Leiter, solely because while playing this role he happened to have roughly the right sort of beard. 

finally - FINALLY! - after a couple of near-misses, I get to do the YOU SPAUNY GET joke. holing a 64-foot putt for it (with the caveat that he did have a spare one if he'd needed it) makes it even more perfect #golf #USOpen https://t.co/vbe07yEf1l

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 16, 2025

I try not to get in my own way too much with a lot of self-analysis once my brain has popped one of these unbidden into my head, but of course when people of colour are involved you have to ask yourself: am I, even entirely subconsciously, Doing A Racism here? I think there are two answers to that: the first one is, well, I can't possibly know for sure, so probably best not to worry about it, and the second is that I'm pretty confident a jury would not convict me of this pair being the most tenuous and squint-requiring supposed resemblance on this blog. Even applying the incredibly restrictive condition of only considering US Open golf champions I think most people would agree that the Lucas Glover one was more obscure. The Webb Simpson one was pretty good, though, although technically he wasn't a US Open champion at the time of the post.

Secondly, American stand-up comic - well, not exactly stand-up, as you'll see if you follow the link - Fiona Cauley and wild warrior woman Ygritte from the TV series Game Of Thrones, as played by Rose Leslie. I should point out that I have never watched an episode of Game Of Thrones, or, as Stewart Lee would have us call it, Peter Stringfellow's Lord Of The Rings. This is partly because I just don't watch TV very much, partly because there's just SO MANY SEASONS of it to get through, and partly because it's firmly in swords and sorcery and Things Of Power fantasy territory, something that doesn't really do it for me, tits notwithstanding. I really am only aware of either Fiona Cauley or Ygritte because some ill-judged clicking on some short videos a while back has unleashed the fearsome power of the Facebook/YouTube algorithm on me and now I get an unavoidable steady diet of stand-up comedy and Game Of Thrones clips presented in my feed, during the course of which I happened to see these two people in quickish succession.

dark bookmark skidmarks

A couple of book-related points relating to recent book-related posts. 

Quite a few of the articles about From A Buick 8 make some reference to how it ties in with King's Dark Tower series. This is a series of nine novels, none of which I've read, published between 1982 and 2012, which are more in the fantasy realm than the (mostly) real-world supernatural horror genre that King is most famous for. It's not quite as simple as that, though, as there are references to the Dark Tower universe in many other novels, sometimes clear and central to the plot (Insomnia, for instance, which I haven't read) and some retconned via references to books published before the first Dark Tower novel, The Gunslinger, was published in 1982, for instance The Shining and The Stand. This page on King's own website lists the places where other non-core Dark Tower novels refer to events in the Dark Tower series, or where Dark Tower novels reference people or occurrences in other works. Those works include From A Buick 8, as it happens, and I quote (from that page):

The Buick 8’s previous owner was most likely a low man and the car a portal to the todash spaces from which creatures escape.

I have literally no idea what any of that means, and there is a sense in which it doesn't matter in terms of enjoying the novel as a stand-alone work. There is also a sense, though, in which not being familiar with the wider universe leaves a slight gap in the reader's understanding of the car's origin and its previous custodian.

I'm going to come out here and say I do not love this, and would prefer it if the novels could just be novels without having to tie in to some wider universe which you're expected to know about. I recall being a bit vexed when the episodes of The X-Files changed from being one-off weird monster things you could just dip into at will to pieces in some giant conspiracy theory jigsaw to which you were required to bring some background knowledge (like who the constantly chain-smoking dude was). Part of this is that, as much as I love Stephen King's books, I have no intention of committing to read any of the Dark Tower books, partly because ploughing through the whole series is a major commitment that I'm not inclined to make and partly because it's further into the realm of fantasy than I really like, that being a genre I have a limited appetite for.

Secondly, among the bits of promotional blurb on the back of my copy of Jack Maggs is the following review snippet from the Evening Standard:

Wait, what? Let's take a closer look:

I can see what they were probably trying to convey here - the reader will be reading so compulsively fast that they may fly out of control in some way analogous to losing control of a car - but, depending how childish you are, it's hard to avoid other interpretations. 

the last book I read

Jack Maggs by Peter Carey.

It's 1837, and Jack Maggs is in London. This is of note because he's meant to be in Australia, and indeed was transported there on the understanding that returning to England would mean an automatic death sentence. So why is he here? And why, when he appears to be a man of fairly substantial independent means, has he taken a menial job as a footman at the house in Great Queen Street owned by Mr. Percy Buckle, a man of similarly humble origin transformed into a man of wealth and status by a handy inheritance?

Mr. Buckle likes to entertain interesting people, and one of those people is Mr. Tobias Oates, amateur magician, published novelist and semi-professional mesmerist. Look into my eyes, not around the eyes, into my eyes, etc. Upon putting Jack Maggs into a trance it quickly becomes clear that he has a wealth of exciting secrets to reveal and Oates quickly books him in for a series of sessions. Maggs is a bit suspicious but agrees, realising that this gives him some leverage with Mr. Buckle who wants to ingratiate himself with his new friend. Oates isn't entirely straight with him, though, selling the sessions as some sort of hypnotherapy to help smooth out Maggs' mental state, while actually using them to get Maggs to describe his prior life, eye-watering crimes and adventures and banishment to the other side of the world, the idea being to gather some material for a future novel. As an aside, Oates isn't being entirely straight with his own wife Mary either, since he hasn't told her that he's been knocking off her sister Lizzie, who conveniently happens to live in the same house.

It turns out that Jack Maggs is particularly interested in the occupant of the house next door to Mr. Buckle's, one Henry Phipps - interested enough to break into the currently empty house and write a series of letters to him, letters whose content is sensitive enough that a series of subterfuges is deemed necessary including writing in invisible ink and in mirror writing. But why? And, come to that, why isn't Henry Phipps in his house where he could just be called upon and all this subterfuge avoided?

Part of Jack Maggs' agreement with Tobias Oates rests on Oates' acquaintance with a man called the Thief-Taker, someone who can supposedly track down anyone, upon handing over of an acceptable fee of course. Oates takes Maggs to where he can be found, which turns out to be Gloucester, a quick scoot down a couple of motorways lasting no more than a couple of hours in our glorious mechanised future, but a bumpy coach ride lasting several days in the 19th century. 

While they are away a bit of intrigue plays out involving some of the other members of the Buckle household - fellow footman Edward Constable and housemaid Mercy Larkin. Constable knows Henry Phipps, it turns out, in the sense of knowing his current whereabouts (holed up at his club after getting wind of Jack Maggs' arrival), but also in the more Biblical sense of having indulged in a bit of highly irregular (for 1837 anyway) man-on-man bumsex activity with him in the past. Mercy has a similar sex-based arrangement with Mr. Buckle and is also a highly expert snoop and busybody and knows everyone's business, including Henry Phipps' and a good deal more of Jack Maggs' than he would like.

Oates and Maggs meet with the Thief-Taker and find him to be an obvious charlatan and mainly concerned with relieving them of a large sum of money, something Jack Maggs is very willing to murder rather than allow to happen. Having done a bit of slightly messy murdering in the back-room of an inn it then becomes necessary for Oates and Maggs to make good their escape, which they do by stealing a boat and escaping down the River Severn to Bristol, and thence back to London. During the course of this journey Oates reveals that not only is he having some personal issues with his wife and her sister, issues made more complicated recently by his having impregnated Lizzie, but moreover he too knows perfectly well where Henry Phipps is. Maggs, understandably a bit vexed by this, agrees not to kill Oates as long as he facilitates a meeting with Phipps, and moreover agrees to help Oates out of his current mess by acquiring some back-street abortion pills from one of his shady contacts.

And so we finally learn what Jack Maggs' connection to Henry Phipps is - Phipps, as a small orphaned child, offered some kindness to Maggs while he was being transported from place to place as a criminal, and, after he'd served his prison term in Australia and made his fortune, Maggs in return became Phipps' benefactor and allowed him to live in the house in Great Queen Street (which Maggs owns). After many years of anonymous benefactorship and providing Phipps with a regular income, Maggs, who has constructed a whole fantasy life for Phipps as a fine and upstanding gentleman, comes to England to gaze with pride upon his boy.

The trouble is that not only is the real-life Phipps a bit of a shit, he's also terrified of meeting with Maggs, whose fearsome reputation precedes him. Some of Phipps' associates persuade him that if a situation could be engineered where Phipps came upon Maggs unexpectedly in his house, he'd have a valid excuse to shoot him, thereby solving his problem and, as a bonus item, inheriting the house. And so the scene is set for a climactic showdown.

Just as with A Thousand Acres and Temples Of Delight it was only after I'd finished Jack Maggs and started looking for some background material online, in preparation for writing this blog post, that I discovered it's a very loose adaptation (a re-imagining, if you must) of another, older work, in this case Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. The character of Jack Maggs is based on the convict Abel Magwitch and Henry Phipps on the main protagonist Pip. As with the other two, I was not particularly familiar with the source material (I've never read any Dickens and only seen a few brief snippets of the 1946 David Lean/John Mills film) and to be honest that seems like a good thing in terms of my capacity to enjoy Jack Maggs as a stand-alone work in its own right, something (i.e. enjoy it) I did very much. It's definitely the best of the three Peter Carey novels I've read, Oscar And Lucinda and The Tax Inspector being the other two. It's not perfect, though: the plot device of having Jack write the secret letters to Henry (and thereby explain some background detail to the reader) is a bit clunky, and some reviewers were a bit grumpy about Carey being soft-hearted enough to allow Jack a happy ending, something I reckon most readers will have built up enough of a grudging regard for Jack to be fine with, though. 

Jack Maggs won the Miles Franklin Award for Australian fiction in 1998, a prize previously won by a couple of Tim Winton books on this list, Cloudstreet and Breath. It's also the latest book on this list whose title is just the full name of its main protagonist. The most recent other example was Charlotte Gray whose review contains a list of the others (there are now, I think, five in total).

caught in the middle of a hundred and five

You might recall, if you're inclined to notice obscure cricketing milestones, some headlines a few years back about England's Joe Root scoring a hundred in his hundredth Test match. He was the ninth batsman to achieve the feat, and the first to turn such a century into a double-century. His innings of 218 remains the highest by a batsman in his hundredth Test, although Australia's David Warner emulated the feat of scoring a double-century when he became the tenth and most recent member of the club in 2022. The graphic below was produced by Cricinfo when Root joined the club in 2021.

There are, at the time of writing, 78 cricketers who have played at least 100 Test matches (Colin Cowdrey was the first to reach the milestone in 1968 and marked it by scoring 104), and by my rough calculation only around 20 of them have been primarily bowlers, which means there are roughly three times as many batsmen as bowlers on that list. That seems unsurprising, as bowling is a much more physically demanding activity than batting.

One bowler who has recently joined the list is Australia's Mitchell Starc, whose 100th Test came against the West Indies in Kingston in July, and was marked by Starc returning the remarkable figures of 6 for 9 in West Indies' second innings. That prompted me to think: since a 5-wicket haul is (roughly) the bowling equivalent of a century, how many bowlers have done that in their 100th Test match? I've done some slightly half-arsed research and I think I have the data below. It's a much smaller list than for the batsmen, but worthy of note I think.

Bowler	Country	Opposition	When	Figures
Shane Warne	Australia	South Africa	March 2002	6-161
Muttiah Muralitharan	Sri Lanka	Bangladesh	February 2006	6-54
Ravichandran Ashwin	India	England	March 2024	5-77
Mitchell Starc	Australia	West Indies	July 2025	6-9

Starc, as you can see, is the first proper fast bowler to perform the feat, the other three being spinners. 

river deep, mountain high

More exciting outdoor-adventurousness news as promised, but first a bit of scene-setting: we went on holiday to Scotland at the end of July. It's a long old drive so we stopped off on the way to visit our friends John and Tracey at their home in Silverdale, just south of the Lake District. We were only there for a day or so but did get to do a bit of exploring, in particular the spectacular coastal location at the northern end of Morecambe Bay. 

Morecambe Bay is a vast expanse of estuarial sand and mudflats and fairly notorious for its shifting landscape and dangerous tides, and most famously (in recent times anyway) for the incident where over 20 Chinese cockle-harvesters drowned in 2004. Just to demonstrate the fickle nature of the landscape, there was until recently (properly recently as in a few weeks before we were there) a vast flat expanse of sand extending out from Silverdale Cove to the main channel of the River Kent as it emerged from its mouth a couple of miles to the north, but recent heavy rain had induced a sudden course change and the river had turned south, carved out a great gouge in the sand and created a substantial sand cliff only a couple of hundred yards from the beach, which Alys and Nia kindly posed by for scale and subsequently hilariously pretended to push their little brother off.

Despite the apparent foolhardiness of attempting such a thing, guided walks are periodically available, weather and tide conditions permitting, and a person with the grand title of the Queen's Guide To The Sands (well, presumably King's Guide these days) has the job of scoping out a safe route. As publicly-accessible walking routes go it's probably not as dangerous as the Broomway in Essex - less chance of being maimed by discarded military ordnance, for instance - but definitely not to be trifled with. It is at least still passable, though, unlike the Wadeway in Chichester Harbour where you would now disappear into a canal halfway across.

Anyway, we didn't do any of that, preferring to head home for a refreshing beer and a soak in the hot tub. The following day we headed off to continue our journey north to our destination of Hunter's Quay holiday village near Dunoon on the Cowal peninsula, which I see I mentioned here. I see that I laughingly make reference to there being no point building a bridge across from the mainland (the intervening channel being basically the confluence of Loch Long and the Firth of Clyde) as it wouldn't get much use. That may be true, but more pertinently it's a couple of miles across and would therefore be a fairly major feat of engineering, not to mention one spanning a major shipping lane. Whatever, there isn't one, and so once you've got as far as Gourock (which you do by basically heading north into Glasgow and then turning left) you are obliged to queue for a ferry. Anecdotally, and I'm not saying this justifies the cost of a bridge, the ferry terminals were pretty busy in both directions when we crossed, and by no means everyone got on the first one that showed up.

Anyway, the holiday village was perfectly nice, featuring the usual chalet-slash-static-caravan accommodation and the usual array of food and drink facilities plus some entertainment for the kids. I'm always unavoidably reminded of Hi-De-Hi in places like this but it was actually perfectly nice. More importantly a) Hazel had managed to wangle a super-cheap deal for a short break and b) a shortish drive north (no ferries required this time) takes you to the north end of Loch Lomond and the vicinity of the Arrochar Alps, some of Scotland's most southerly and therefore most easily accessible Munros. Technically the most southerly Munro is Ben Lomond, but from where we started it's rather awkwardly situated on the east side of the loch, and in any case I'd been up it before, back in about 1999.

So, emboldened by everyone's conquering of a rather wet and soggy Pen y Fan for my birthday in February I devised a walk (basically this one) that would bag two Munros and offer the possibility of a crack at The Cobbler, just short of Munro height but an interesting scrambly challenge. I had mentally earmarked that last bit as very unlikely to come off, but it's good for Plan A to be ambitious as long as there's a Plan B you can fall back on. 

There's a car park by the shores of Loch Long just outside the village of Succoth, which I expect you can make up your own jokes about - you know, Elizabeth I visiting and declaring "the mountain view enchanteth most delightfully, but the neighbouring village sucketh most egregiously", that sort of thing - anyway, point is it offers a good starting point for the walk. If you've been paying attention, though, you'll have clocked that Loch Long is a sea loch, and that therefore you are going to be obliged to gain all 3000+ of those Munro feet without a head start. Moreover, if you follow the anticlockwise route I'd devised, the usual route of ascent up Beinn Narnain, the first Munro, is a relentless direct upward slog along the remains of an old cable railway, of which only a few lumps of concrete footing remain. Once you get out of the woods the relentlessness eases off a bit and it's quite pleasant, though challenging. Eventually you arrive at a pretty intimidating wall of rock which you have to find a scrambly way up to get onto the summit plateau and bag the trig point. Beinn Narnain is 926 metres or 3038 feet and (depending which list you use) is around 257th of the 280-odd Munros on the current list.

It's not the Black Cuillin, but it is far from easy - considerably more challenging than a good few of my previous Munros, and I was and am inordinately proud of the kids for giving every impression of enjoying the whole thing and seeming engaged by the idea of coming back and doing some more in future. I should also add a word for Hazel who had sustained a badly bruised ankle in a comedy incident with a shot putt at school sports day a couple of weeks earlier but clearly didn't want to let the side down and struggled up anyway. That constraint did mean that we had to abandon the idea of bagging the day's intended second Munro, Beinn Ime, which was disappointing but which I was half-expecting before we'd even set out. 

The walk out down the valley which separates Beinn Narnain from The Cobbler is a delight, as it's a pretty good path alongside a pretty river and affords excellent views of the Cobbler's knobbly profile in particular. A bit of steep zig-zagging back through the woods and you're back at the car park. After a long and strenuous walk like that a pint is very much in order and I heartily commend to you the Village Inn in Arrochar which has excellent ale from the Fyne Ales brewery. Two things to say about Fyne Ales: firstly haha, you see what they did there, and secondly I'd had them before in a pub in Edinburgh in 2011.

Anyway, the important thing here is that this was the kids' first Munro, and the first time I'd had an opportunity to add one to my list since back before we had kids. We actually did three Scottish trips with our friends Jenny and Jim and on those trips bagged four, four and zero Munros respectively, so this was actually the first one I'd been up since 2010. My personal count now stands at fifteen. 

Route map and altitude profile are below: total distance is about twelve kilometres or seven-and-a-half miles.

Just to cap off the holiday activities, once we came to the end of our stay in Dunoon we headed back across to another quite similar holiday park just east of Edinburgh for a couple of days and spent some time doing the usual tourist-y stuff in Edinburgh including a trip down into Mary King's Close which was very interesting, and a walking tour of locations relating to JK Rowling (a former resident of Edinburgh) and the Harry Potter books. I would describe this as a commendably game attempt to get some tourist mileage out of some incredibly tenuous connections: once you've been to the site of the former cafe where she sat and wrote some of the early books you're reduced to pointing at various knobbly buildings and saying: hey, might this not have been partial inspiration for Hogwarts? Go on, squint a bit. Our tour guide was an engaging enough bloke, though, and it was pretty good fun. We didn't have time to climb Arthur's Seat but we did have time for me and Nia to have a crack at the Meadowmill parkrun on Saturday morning. Anyone fancying a bit of Scottish parkrun tourism should be aware that most if not all of the Scottish ones start at 9:30am rather than 9am. Not sure if this is a daylight thing or just a bit of bolshy being different for the sake of it.

back once again with the hill behaviour

We went for a walk up the Blorenge a couple of weeks ago; broadly similar in route and distance to the two previous walks we'd done - the slightly ill-fated (in terms of the health of my ankle and boots) lockdown one in 2021 and the one with some work colleagues all the way back in 2009. So we're not breaking any new ground here but as always there are some points of interest that are worth mentioning, and it serves as an intro to some other more significant walk stuff that we did earlier in the summer and which I'll get to in another post.

So, anyway, I don't want to rehash the content of earlier posts here but you'll recall that the Blorenge is a smallish mountain (or a largish hill, whatever you like, I'm not getting into an argument about categorisation) just outside Abergavenny, really just the steep end of the largest lobe of a sort of cloverleaf-shaped area of high ground centred just north of Blaenavon. Any walk that wants to qualify as an "ascent" in any meaningful way pretty much has to start somewhere in the vicinity of Llanfoist, and it just so happens that there's a car park at Llanfoist Crossing, at the start point of the cycle path that follows the old railway line from Llanfoist to Merthyr Tydfil along some of the bits that haven't been subsumed by the Heads Of The Valleys Road. The only drawback is that the car park is quite small and heavily used by dog walkers so it can be a bit of a bunfight finding a space. I'm not going to be That Guy and suggest you provide minor botheration to the locals by parking on a residential street as an alternative, but clearly that is a thing you could do if so inclined. 

Anyway, you're an adult, sort your own parking out. Having done that you walk up the path that goes under the old Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal and then smashes straight up the hill through the woods directly towards the summit of the Blorenge. On emerging into the open you can, if you so wish, carry on straight up, but a more scenic and less lung-busting option is to take a left turn and head for the pleasant spot of the Devil's Punchbowl, a small pond in what is presumably some sort of glacial cwm. It's apparently man-made, and surprisingly recent (circa 1960s) - it was previously just a low-lying marshy area. Apparently quite a popular wild swimming spot, although when we were there the water level was quite low and it all looked a bit green and murky.

After the brief respite of the fairly flat (even slightly downhill) walk to the Devil's Punchbowl and maybe a brief respite to take in the scenery and have a drink and a KitKat (other chocolate bars are available) you turn south-west and start uphill again, briefly meeting a minor road before turning north for the proper assault on the hill. You'll notice that the path takes a slightly indirect hook-y route before approaching the summit trig point from the north-east and you might be tempted to say: hell, I'm going to cut that corner off. To that I would say: go for it if you want, but I have done it (partly by accident) and generally found it to be a bit of an arse. I mean, you won't die, but the energy and irritation expended in pathless floundering about probably means taking the main path is a better option. You do you, though.

The summit trig point is by a big pile of rocks (which obscure it until the last second coming from the north-east) and, having bagged it and dropped off the top (we went south as this happened to be the direction that got us out of the wind) for a pork pie and a Granny Smith, the walk then drops off the summit ridge to the north-west and eventually joins up with the route of Hill's Tramroad, which includes an exciting tunnel which the kids had some fun exploring and where they shot a video for Huwie's YouTube channel. That path follows the contours round the hillside until it links back with the path up through the woods which takes you back down to where you started.

I think this is the best of the three slightly different routes: the 2009 walk included an extension to loop round the Foxhunter car park and Keeper's Pond (another popular wild swimming spot), which is all very nice but doesn't really add much apart from some lateral distance, and I think the ascent via the Devil's Punchbowl is better than the route along the canal towpath and then an uphill slog along some roads. The 2021 walk took a similar route up (with a bit of inadvertent pathless floundering as described above) but then a much more direct route down, which is fine if you're in a hurry but less interesting than the route incorporating the tramroad and tunnel.

Overall route distance was just over ten kilometres, or about six-and-a-half miles. Details below: latest in the long and varied series of altitude-graph-generating tools is Strava which my Garmin running watch is linked to: this seems not to have the random starting height discrepancy that the old phone app had, which is nice. 

the last book I read

From A Buick 8 by Stephen King.

So here's Troop D of the Pennsylvania State Police - just a bunch of regular guys trying to keep the peace and uphold the law. We're out in the sticks here so it's not any of yer high-falutin' fancy big-city crime, just the usual drunk driving and domestic violence. 

Speaking of drunk driving, one of Troop D's number, Curtis Wilcox, has recently been rubbed out while on a routine traffic stop - not by the driver of the HGV he'd pulled over but by another guy, Bradley Roach, whose addled inattention led to Curtis being smeared along the side of the HGV by his car.

Following this incident Troop D pulls together to look after Curtis' family, in particular his teenage son, Ned, understandably hit hard by his father's death. Ned starts hanging out at the police barracks, doing odd jobs, even occasionally manning the radio, and develops a curiosity about how the whole operation works and what the various rooms at the barracks contain. In particular, Ned is curious about the outbuilding known as Shed B, which appears to contain a near-mint-condition 1950s Buick Roadmaster, just sitting there in the dark. The current commanding officer, Sandy Dearborn, decides that since Ned is pretty much one of the team these days, and given his father's connection to the place (and, it later turns out, his particular connection to the Buick), Ned is entitled to hear the story.

And so we do a wibbly-wobbly dissolve to twenty-odd years previously when most of the current force, Sandy included, were fresh-faced youngsters responding to a call from, coincidentally (OR IS IT, etc.), the very same Bradley Roach, at this time running a petrol station, about a fancy-looking Buick that some mysterious long-coated dude has just abandoned on the forecourt - the dude himself slunk off round the back of the site, ostensibly to use the bathroom, and has now disappeared without trace. The guys on patrol turn up with a tow-truck and take the vehicle back to the barracks, and almost immediately clock that there is something deeply wrong with it, most obviously that the engine is a motley selection of plausibly mechanical-looking bits that don't actually connect with each other, still less function, the dashboard dials are fake, and the exhaust system appears to be made of glass. Moreover the car seems to repel dust and dirt, and even heal itself if the paintwork is scratched. [This isn't a thought that could have occurred to King in 2002 when the book was published, but it's a bit like one of those AI simulations that look a bit like people but on closer inspection have twenty-three fingers, an anus for an eye, etc.] The tow-truck deposits the Buick in Shed B and there it stays, partly because the owner is definitely not putting in a re-appearance, and partly because it's not like anyone can start it up and drive it out of there. And partly for other reasons, too.

There are early hints - beyond the car not actually being a car, I mean - that rum doings are afoot, most notably the disappearance of Curtis Wilcox's patrol partner Ennis Rafferty, who most people on the force believe disappeared while inside Shed B. This leads to some unpalatable thoughts, like: did the car eat him in some way? A pragmatic sort of omertà develops within Troop D: no blabbing of any kind about Shed B to anyone outside of the troop, family, friends, senior police, and most of all the press.

Curtis Wilcox takes a particular interest in the Buick and its behaviour, which comprises occasional spectacular shows of light and electrical interference which stops police radios from working, but also the occasional vomiting up of living or recently-living creatures definitely Not Of This Earth, including a weird insecty-bat-type-thing which Curtis does some gruesome amateur dissection on, and some plant and fish things which decompose too quickly to yield much information other that that they are weird and they stink. These are pretty grim, but at least pose no threat to humans other than putting them off their dinner. The human-sized creature that subsequently comes through does, though, since it is not only not dead but also not especially keen on becoming dead and possessed of enough intelligence, not to mention tentacles, to do something about it. The members of Troop D who happen to be on duty persuade it otherwise by messily murdering it to death with a shovel, with a bit of help from the barracks dog, who subsequently dies of a spectacular case of heartburn.

So what is going on here? The best theory Curtis and his colleagues can come up with is that the Buick is actually some sort of portal between worlds, and that whatever hellish Lovecraftian netherworld the tentacly horrors that periodically appear in Shed B came from, that's where Ennis, and subsequently an escaped prisoner who strays into the shed and whose disappearance no-one particularly mourns, have gone, very probably to be messily murdered in their turn by a host of shovel-wielding space lobsters.

No satisfyingly conclusive information about any of this has ever been forthcoming - definitive news about the car's original driver's whereabouts, how it got onto the garage forecourt in the first place given that it can't be driven, how the exchange of biological material between worlds actually works and what prompts it and the periodic light-shows - which adhere to no particular schedule and outside of which the Buick just sits there refusing to get dirty - to happen. There is a general feeling among the troop that the intensity and frequency of the episodes has reduced somewhat over the years, but the car has definitely not stopped being periodically active even twenty-plus years later.

And so Sandy and his colleagues present this to Ned and say: here, you're up to date. Bit weird, no? Ned, it turns out, is young enough and naïve enough to have been hoping for some neat tying-up of loose ends that would have explained what was going on and perhaps even offered some sort of closure to his father's premature death, and isn't especially pleased to be met with Sandy basically saying: sorry son, life isn't like that. So dissatisfied is he with this, in fact, that he decides upon a dramatic course of action: douse the Buick in gasoline and destroy it, with himself inside if necessary, thereby sealing off the conduit between worlds in some final way and perhaps heroically preventing a future Earth invasion by radioactive space shrimp or something similar.

Sandy sees a number of problems with this course of action, most obviously the prospect of Mrs. Wilcox losing a son shortly after losing a husband, but also something with wider impact: what if the Buick acts as some sort of regulator valve that keeps something in balance between worlds, maybe even between universes, nay indeed multiverses, and whose unexpected removal would have unforeseen and perhaps catastrophic consequences? 

And so Sandy and a couple of the other troopers have to thwart Ned's ill-conceived plan; unfortunately by the time they get to Ned he is already sitting in the Buick's driver's seat with an open can of gasoline. Moreover all this excitement has "woken" the Buick and it starts to become active. And so not only does Sandy have to rescue Ned from his own self-destructive actions, he also has to do so before the portal fully opens and they all get sucked over to an airless alien planet where they will die.

You'll recall from the review of Cell in 2012 and a couple of other posts that Stephen King used to be my main man book-wise, but that Cell was only the second book of his (re-reads aside) I'd read in about 15 years. Well you can make that three in over 25 years now as I haven't read one since Cell (you would after all have heard about it here if I had). For a writer as prolific over such a long period as King it's inevitable that various connections to other books present themselves - here's a few:

• Most obviously, before starting the book at least, the fact of the central plot device being a car, moreover a car to which there's more than meets the eye, is highly reminiscent of Christine, one of the clunkier novels from King's classic 1975-1990 period. 
• Once you actually start reading, though, From A Buick 8 is clearly more in the slightly science-fiction genre occupied by The Tommyknockers, another book where critical opinion is, at best, divided. That book has weird tentacly aliens and also a portal between planets via which a small boy gets teleported to an alien planet only to be rescued at the end of the book. The other thing the two books have in common is a relentless darkness and nihilism - weird shit happens, there's no satisfying explanation, we probably wouldn't understand anyway, the best we can hope for is just to endure as best we can and hope that the bad things eventually run down like an old battery. In the case of The Tommyknockers the obvious cod-psychology explanation for the tone is that it was written in the depths of one of King's periods of drug addiction, with From A Buick 8 it was published after King's recovery from being run down by a van in rural Maine in 1999, a collision that nearly killed him. Aside from the general tone, the death of Curtis Wilcox at the hands of an inattentive driver is a pretty close fictional rendering of what happened to King.
• Those thoughts lead tangentially to a non-King book, Roadside Picnic; the Buick here is a bit like the artefacts that are strewn across The Zones there: utterly opaque to our attempts to understand them, mysterious in function and occasionally randomly deadly to humans.
• Back to King - the brief episode where the troopers have to subdue the half-tree/half-squid alien creature, and in particular the bit where we are briefly offered a glimpse out of its multiple eyes at its hideous human murderers coming at it with a selection of blunt implements, is reminiscent both of the brief switch to Craig Toomy's viewpoint (more like Craig Loony, amirite) in The Langoliers, and also of the creepy short story I Am The Doorway from 1978's excellent Night Shift collection. 
• Finally, Ned's inability to accept the inexplicable and arbitrary nature of what the Buick does and his desire to probe into the mystery himself, is similar to what happened to the narrator's son in another excellent King short story, The Jaunt, from 1985's Skeleton Crew collection. I won't spoil it for you, but it does not end particularly well for anyone, least of all the boy.

A bit like Cell, this is probably a fairly minor work in King's gargantuan oeuvre, but it's good fun nonetheless. There is just a sense of the various occurrences of weird freaky shit getting vomited up out of the car's trunk getting a bit repetitive in the book's mid-section, and the switch from the car being - seemingly at least - a dumb conduit for stuff to a sentient entity capable of malign actions like bolting doors to prevent Sandy getting to Ned at the book's climax felt like it slightly undermined the book's logic just to serve a convenient narrative purpose (i.e. adding some tension and peril). Like pretty much anything King's ever written it is relentlessly gripping, though, and I raced through its 400+ pages in only a handful of days, helped by going on a camping trip which provided more reading time than usual.

the last book I read

Desperate Characters by Paula Fox.

Otto and Sophie Bentwood are a couple of forty-ish middle-class New Yorkers, living in a nice apartment in Brooklyn full of nice stuff, eating nice food and generally having a nice life, albeit a bit removed from what coarse earthy proletarian types like you and me might call the "real" world.

Reality intervenes, though, as it always does - Charlie, Otto's partner in his legal practice, wants to dissolve their partnership and this (hardly surprisingly) has made their personal relationship a bit frosty, especially with all the inevitable jockeying for who gets to keep which lucrative clients.

Around the same time, Sophie is feeding one of the various stray cats that roam the local area and is unexpectedly bitten quite severely on the hand. Rather than do what normal non-neurotic people do and go to a doctor for treatment and perhaps a rabies jab, Sophie instead binds the wound up and does her best to ignore the swelling and constant ache. 

So we can see a theme developing here: the Bentwoods' nice cosy middle-class life being invaded and disrupted by external "real-world" factors. Sure enough more weird shit starts to happen: a wordless late-night phone call, which turns out to be from Charlie (and which prompts a slightly bizarre late-night meet-up between him and Sophie while Otto is asleep), a rock being thrown through a window while the Bentwoods are at a party at a friend's house, a tense episode where a black man calls at the apartment and requests the use of the Bentwood's phone and eventually some money, and finally their discovery on visiting their holiday house on Long Island that it's been burgled and vandalised and the perpetrators have taken a nice big shit on the lounge carpet.

Eventually all of this starts to take its toll on the Bentwoods' equilibrium: Sophie has a shouty exchange with her friend Tanya who's phoned up for a gossip about her (Tanya's) latest love affair, and Otto angrily throws a bottle of ink at the wall after Charlie phones him up wanting to sort out some details of the dissolution of their business partnership.

So what are we to make of this? Has the disruption to their hermetically-sealed lives allowed the Bentwoods to get back in touch with their actual feelings? Or have they just been pushed over the edge and GONE MENTAL (and possibly, in Sophie's case, RABID)?

You won't get a definitive answer on any of that from me, as it happens, as this is one of those books I felt must have some significance that just eluded my grasp. It'd probably be too harsh to describe it as just a book about annoying privileged people being privileged and annoying, but I couldn't help but admit to a pang of sympathy with whoever it was took a colossal dump on their living room carpet. To put it another way, it's a very skilled writer who can make a novel work that contains pretty much no likeable characters whatsoever, and for all that Paula Fox clearly was (she died in 2017) a very skilled writer I'm not sure she quite manages it here. It's very clever and perceptive in its own way, though, and I can see the sense of the comparisons to John Updike; I guess I just found it a bit cold and uninvolving.

One of the things the Guardian obituary linked above doesn't mention, incidentally, is that via her daughter Linda, whom she gave up for adoption, Paula Fox is Courtney Love's grandmother. Moreover, if certain lurid but plausible showbiz rumours are true, Marlon Brando may have been Courtney Love's grandfather. 

Desperate Characters was filmed in 1971, starring Shirley Maclaine as Sophie and Kenneth Mars as Otto. This seems odd to me as the only two things I've seen Kenneth Mars in were the two Mel Brooks films The Producers and Young Frankenstein, in both of which he does a scenery-chewing turn as a comical nutter. I'm sure he was an actor of range and subtlety if the part demanded it, though. My Flamingo paperback copy contains an introduction by Jonathan Franzen, whose advocacy of Fox and of Desperate Characters in particular was instrumental in its being reissued after many years out of print. This provides another instance of a book on this list carrying a foreword by another author who appears on the same list; a non-exhaustive list of the handful of previous instances appears at the end of the 2018 review of True Grit.