albums of the day

I've just noticed I haven't done a proper one of these since the end of 2007, so I thought I'd better rectify the situation, pronto. I wouldn't want you to think that I either haven't been doing the washing-up regularly, or haven't been listening to the occasional album while doing so, it's just that I haven't had as much time to write stuff up. Anyway, here's a brief synopsis of my recent listening:

Saturnalia by The Gutter Twins.

The Gutter Twins are Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees (and a lengthy solo career), and Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs. If you're at all familiar with their respective output you won't be expecting a collection of sunny bubblegum-pop with singalong choruses, and you'd be right not to, as this is a relentlessly black and sepulchral collection, with lots of industrial clanking and grinding behind the two gravelly vocalists.

Clearly you've got to be in the mood for this sort of stuff, and the tracks Dulli dominates suffer from the same problems as the Afghan Whigs' stuff suffered from, i.e. plenty of dark rocky energy but a shortage of melody. The Lanegan-led mid-section from Idle Hands through Circle The Fringes, Who Will Lead Us? and Seven Stories Underground is the best bit, but it's all pretty good. Even The Sun liked it, slightly strangely.

Ágætis byrjun by Sigur Rós.

We're back in "post-rock" territory again here. Crazy Icelandic blokes playing electric guitars with a cello bow and singing in a made-up nonsense language probably isn't for everyone, and it's all a bit one-paced, but when it works it's terrific. Generally these are slow-building mid-tempo tunes which build towards some sort of anthemic crescendo towards the end - when this works it's fantastic, particularly on the 10-minute Viðrar vel til loftárása which is much the best thing here. A lot of the other songs strain for transcendence without ever quite getting there, though; you can almost see the neck veins standing out as the song lumbers along the runway without ever quite taking off. Jónsi Birgisson's wavering falsetto vocals are something of an acquired taste as well, but, again, as long as you're in the mood, great. Note that this probably wouldn't be the same sort of mood as for Saturnalia, just in case that wasn't clear already.

The Caution Horses by Cowboy Junkies.

Blimey, this takes me back. I seem to recall Doug and I playing this album a lot when we were sharing a student flat, which would have been around the time the album first came out in 1990. Critical opinion seems to have decided that it's not as good as its more lo-fi predecessor The Trinity Session, but I suspect it depends on which order you encounter them in. To the impartial observer this is still pretty sparsely instrumented, just Michael Timmins' softly strummed electric guitar, his sister Margo's vocals and the occasional bit of pedal steel or accordion. The best things here are the opener Sun Comes Up, It's Tuesday Morning and the radical reinvention of Neil Young's epic Powderfinger; some of the other songs can tend to be a bit florid in the lyrical department (Rock and Bird being an obvious culprit). Again, the right mood is essential, so, to recap, what you'll be needing is:

• Saturnalia: sleazy druggy bleakness and depravity
• Ágætis byrjun: wide-eyed transcendence and optimism
• The Caution Horses: lovelorn melancholy, possibly while milking a three-legged goat in a log cabin, or something like that

incidental music spot of the day

I Lost It by Lucinda Williams over the closing credits to Virgin Memories on BBC2, part of the Bare Facts season. Chosen presumably for the obvious suitability of the title, rather than for the lyrics being about anything specifically relevant to the content of the programme.

the last book I read

Every Man For Himself by Beryl Bainbridge.

So, we're on this large ocean liner steaming from Southampton to New York in April 1912. It's night-time, the ship is at full speed, and there are icebergs about in the north Atlantic. I won't spoil the ending for you....

Well, needless to say it's not really about the Titanic, fascinating subject though the whole business still is nearly a century later. Rather this is a book about the end of the carefree years of optimism and progress of the early 20th century, an ending suggested by Bainbridge's previous novel The Birthday Boys (about the ill-fated Scott expedition, also in 1912), and one that would be echoed on a much larger scale by the outbreak of the First World War just a couple of years later.

The main narrator, Morgan, an adoptive nephew of the owner of the shipping line that owned the Titanic and a minor engineer involved in its construction, is a slightly awkward initiate into the world of privilege inhabited by the passengers on the ship's maiden voyage, some of whom are based on real-life passengers like John Jacob Astor IV and Benjamin Guggenheim. There are various darkly humorous incidents exposing the idleness and pomposity of this particular section of society, and, more importantly, their utter helplessness when faced with a genuine crisis.

Bainbridge has a particular liking for people's cosy routine being rudely shattered by outside intervention, in this case, of course, a ruddy great iceberg. None of the characters is really sympathetic enough for us to expend much energy rooting for them to survive, except perhaps Morgan himself. Then again one of the drawbacks of the first-person narrative is that you already know that the narrator survives the events being described, unless something awfully post-modern is going on, which isn't really Bainbridge's style.

Needless to say a mountain of books and films have been made with this as the subject; one that's interesting for unique reasons is Morgan Robertson's Futility, or The Wreck Of The Titan which describes the sinking of the world's largest passenger liner, the Titan, after hitting an iceberg in the north Atlantic. The unique bit is that this novel was first published in 1898, fourteen years before the Titanic sank. Spooky. I remember first reading about this odd coincidence in a book I had as a child called Oddly Enough which was a collection of odd and coincidental stories. Unsurprisingly there are rather a lot of books which have this string in the title, and most of them are collections of crazy and amusing anecdotes from this wacky old world of ours. I would need a cover picture to be completely sure, but I have a feeling this is the book I'm thinking of. Looks like it's out of print, but it can be had second-hand. Maybe I'll get hold of one for old times' sake and share a few more nuggets with you.

don't mention the bears! I mentioned them once, but I think I got away with it

Some more photos for you: our long weekend cycling in the Forest Of Dean. The photo captions are fairly self-explanatory, but just a few notes:

• The campsite at Christchurch is very good: run by the same people as the Spiers House campsite that Hazel and I stayed at in Yorkshire last year, as well as some of the campsites in the New Forest that we stayed at on our last cycling trip.
• The well-maintained series of old railway lines that form the main trails through the main part of the forest are very pleasant to cycle on. More information about the original lines can be found here; some interesting stuff on the remaining bits of track can be found here. If you search on that page for "Mierystock Tunnel" you'll see a couple of interesting pictures: the situation as of now is very much as per the second picture, i.e. the northern tunnel portal has been dug out, but there's no evidence of any work currently being done to restore the original route through the tunnel (the path is still routed up and over the road at this point). Maybe they ran out of grant money?
• The path up the Wye from Monmouth to Kerne Bridge is less pleasant to cycle on; large sections are not really suitable for bikes at all. The bit between Biblins footbridge and Symond's Yat is OK, the rest not so good. And carrying a pannier-laden mountain bike over gates and stiles is really tiring.
• The picnic and barbecue area at Beechenhurst Lodge is a great spot for lunch on a hot day, especially if you've pre-arranged to be met with supplies of sausages and lager.
• Apparently you shouldn't mention bears in Ruardean, for various insane reasons. We passed through at about 9:30pm on Saturday, and we weren't stopping, so we couldn't test the theory out, unfortunately.

waiting for Garfield

More internet genius for you: take Jim Davis' original Garfield strips, remove (via some sort of Photoshop wizardry, presumably) any trace of Garfield himself from them, and what you're left with is a series of brief vignettes of almost Beckettian emptiness and despair. Have a look at garfield minus garfield for some examples; here's a couple.

dude, pull my finger

Here's a perfect illustration of the abysmal quality of science journalism, as well as the more general tendency of journalists to cannibalise each others' work to occasionally ridiculous effect: the story that's been all over various news sources this week about the bloke who miraculously grew back a finger after having it sprinkled with some magic dust (aka "extra-cellular matrix").

Those of a naturally healthy sceptical bent would have reacted first with fascination and secondly with various questions, such as: a) how much finger did he lose in the first place? b) is this sort of recovery unprecedented? c) how do we know it was the "magic dust" that did the trick? The answers given in the articles vary a bit but can be summarised as being, respectively: a) ooh, lots b) ooh, yes, I expect so c) well, it's magic, isn't it? The lack of anything resembling detail in any of the stories, and the fact that the original incident seems to have happened way back in 2005, would lead you to smell a big fat sweaty nicotine-stained journalistic rat at that point.

Needless to say it turns out that the truth is somewhat more mundane, in that the actual answers are: a) the whole finger-tip, essentially, but not all of the nail and little or no bone b) not at all c) we don't, in fact it seems highly unlikely that it was.

Bad Science has some more detail, including some amusing backtracking by the news sources when it became clear we weren't about to be able to lop the odd limb off during a bit of careless gardening, sprinkle some magic pixie dust on the gushing stump and have it spontaneously regenerate chameleon stylee. Here's the BBC's effort.

The only morsel of actual interest in all of this is the revelation that doctors have discovered that it's better, in situations like this, to leave the stump alone as much as possible for it to heal, rather than do what they used to do, which was to apply a skin graft over the exposed stump. It turns out that this inhibits the regrowth of the dermal and epidermal layers (presumably by "confusing" them in some way) and results in the wound healing less well and invisibly than just leaving it to sort itself out. That's an actual science story, right there.

berry nice

Couple of quick links for you:

I haven't done a squid post for quite a while, so here's one for you: the colossal squid caught off New Zealand just over a year ago has been defrosted and dissected by an international team of scientists at the Te Papa Tongarewa museum in Wellington. A brief photographic summary can be found here; more details are available at the Te Papa blog. Nice to see that they've done the taste test and confirmed that it tastes of piss.

Secondly, I've set up a YouTube account to post occasional amusing stuff to. I've got a couple of things lying around to post, one of which I've uploaded just as a test. It's a short film shot and directed by Andy and starring me. The subject matter is the slightly odd loganberry-flavoured beer we were drinking at the legendary Square & Compasses pub in Worth Matravers on our last Swanage trip. It's called Logan's Berry (you see what they did there) and it appears to be brewed by Downton's in Salisbury. I couldn't honestly say I'd recommend it, but then I don't really like beer that's been mucked around with, which rules out things like Young's Waggledance and Chocolate Stout as well.

Derry good

Here's a slightly more detailed synopsis of our Irish trip, if you want it:

We flew from Bristol to Derry with Ryanair for the princely sum of 1 penny Sterling per person each way. Ryanair being Ryanair it didn't quite work out as cheap as that, what with credit card booking fees and various sneaky mystery surcharges levied at the airports, but we still got to Ireland and back for around ten quid each, which is pretty good.

Day 1 (Saturday) we just hung around Derry, checking in at the excellent Abbey B&B in the Bogside, which turns out to be an ideal base for checking out the city. We had a walk round the city walls and then went to the pub to sample the local Guinness - and very nice too.

On the Sunday we went over into the Republic Of Ireland - the border is only a couple of miles from the city, and in contrast to the bad old days of the 1970s and 1980s you'd barely know you'd crossed it apart from the change in the format of the road signs and the speed limits changing from miles per hour to kilometres per hour. We drove out via Donegal town to the Slieve League cliffs, which claim to be Europe's highest sea cliffs, though this seems to be a subject of some dispute. They are certainly extremely impressive, though I would say a cliff purist (if such things exist) would probably prefer the Cliffs Of Moher near Galway. Why? Well, the Slieve League cliffs are essentially just a large-ish (a smidgen under 2000 feet) mountain that happens to be next to the sea, and thus one face falls impressively precipitously (though not vertically) into it, while the Cliffs Of Moher are a proper level-bit-of-land-sudenly-ending-in-a-vertical-drop kind of thing. Here's a photo of the Cliffs of Moher, taken by me on our boys' drinking trip to Galway and Connemara in early 2006:


And here's a graphical representation of the comparative topography (not to scale, obviously, Slieve League is considerably higher), just to illustrate that it all depends on how you define "cliff" (not like this, I would suggest):

Anyway, whatever the respective merits, we gazed upon the rocky majesty of the cliffs from the car park, at which point I suggested that we really ought to go and climb up on top of them. My very understanding and tolerant girlfriend agreed, so we did (photo link in previous post).

The following day we went north-east into County Antrim to visit the Giant's Causeway. Since we didn't come to Ireland especially to visit it I don't feel qualified to comment on Dr. Johnson's famous quote, but it was pretty impressive, so I suspect Johnson of being, in this particular instance, a bit of a johnson. We also visited the Carrick-a-rede rope bridge and the Bushmills distillery. Unfortunately we were too late for a distillery tour, but we bought some miniatures which we necked back at the B&B, which seemed to do the trick.

On Tuesday morning we took a guided tour of Derry organised by the people at the Museum Of Free Derry. And very fascinating too - if you're of a similar age to me, your earliest memory of The Troubles will be of the coverage of the IRA hunger strikes, and Bobby Sands in particular, in the early 1980s, and the bizarre reporting restrictions involving having an actor read Gerry Adams' words over footage of him speaking in the 1980s and 1990s, but of course the conflict has much deeper and more complex roots than that, including Bloody Sunday which, it turns out, happened not 100 yards from our B&B in 1972.

The current peaceful power-sharing situation really does give even a raddled old cynic such as myself cause for optimism: if what seemed like a completely intractable conflict can be resolved as satisfactorily as this then there may be hope for other similar problems as well (and God knows there are plenty of them) in other parts of the world. Most remarkably, it seems that bellowing old demagogue Ian Paisley will more than likely be remembered with some affection by people on both sides of the conflict following his recent retirement from front-line politics, something that seemed utterly impossible when I was growing up.

Anyway, I seem to have gone on a bit, but my point is that this is a part of the world well worth a visit - Donegal in particular deserves a bit more than the day we were able to spend on it. So, to summarise: dere's more to Oireland.....dan dis.

24 hours from Ulster

A longer post on the same subject will follow when I have time, but for now here are some photographs from our long weekend in Northern Ireland (and Derry in particular).

[Footnote: Doug tells me the small terrified furry creature we encountered on top of Slieve League is in fact a hare, not a rabbit, so I have bowed to his superior expertise in this area and corrected the captions accordingly. I thought it tasted a bit funny, now I think about it.]

the web site you seek; cannot be located but; countless more exist

See what you miss if you don't pay attention?

Haiku have a 5-7-5 structure, in terms of syllables per line - most people know that, myself included. But have you ever considered the metric structure of a limerick? Assuming that you're going to exclude the smart-arsed mucking around with the form of ones like this:

There was a young man from Peru
Whose limericks stopped at line two

- or its counterpart:

There was a young man from Verdun

- then your orthodox limerick has an 8-8-5-5-8 structure. That's 34 syllables. Skip back to the top and count the syllables in a haiku. That's right, 17. So one has twice the syllables of the other. Take that idea to its logical conclusion and you get this. Genius. On such leaps of intuition and creative thinking is modern civilisation built.

On an unconnected topic, I ordered a couple of bike accessories from the excellent people at Wiggle the other day. Now there may be a time in a Briton's life where the American usage of the word "fanny" ceases to be a source of sniggering amusement, but I certainly haven't reached it yet, and frankly I hope I never do. Click the image for a bigger version (of the word "fanny", among other things), as always.

And finally, while we're sniggering away to ourselves, here's those filthy haiku and limericks you were wanting.

Expelled: rumbled

Well, Expelled has had its US release (on Friday I think), and the reviews are in. And, well, generally speaking, they're not good. Haven't got time for extended ranting but here's a flavour of what other people think:

• The Guardian
• The New York Times (there's a few entertaining loonies in the comments section here as well)
• Variety
• Slate
• Scientific American
• Scientific American again
• Scientific American, erm, again
• Colorado Confidential
• The Orlando Sentinel
• The Waco Tribune
• Fox News - now you might imagine Fox would be sympathetic after this bit of mutual bone-headed backslapping from Bill O'Reilly and Ben Stein during the promotional build-up, but no, they pretty much thought it sucked a big one as well.

There are some more links from the Rotten Tomatoes page. Current RT rating: not good. No news as yet on a UK release date, I'm afraid.

candid camera

It is an immutable law of nature that you will only notice that your passport is about to expire when you've already booked up lots of imminent travel that requires you to use it. And so it was when Hazel and I booked up a couple of trips for April and May, only for me to discover that my passport expires in August (yes, I know August is after May, but there's a requirement for six months future validity to travel to a lot of places).

So, anyway, I've got to get a new one, which of course entails getting passport pictures taken. As standard UK passports are valid for ten years this provides a handy opportunity to see how much you've aged since the last photo was taken, and to be horrified at your transformation from apple-cheeked youth into Keith Richards. Here's my two photos for comparison purposes:


Not really a dramatic transformation, I think, to be fair. My hair's a bit greyer and thinner (though less so than I'd feared), and that's a truly disastrous pair of glasses I'm wearing in the 1998 picture, but apart from that they're not too dissimilar, possibly because I was a bit hungover when both pictures were taken, the 1998 one in a branch of Boots in the middle of Edinburgh, and the 2008 one in another branch of Boots right here in Newport a week or so ago. That picture up in the attic is obviously still doing its job.

You can do a lot of the passport application process online now, though obviously there's some handing over of photographs (and your existing passport if you're renewing) which has to be done the old-fashioned way, i.e. in person or by post. Further information can be found here. Not at all, here to help.

the last book I read

Happy Ending by Francesca Duranti.

My recent changes in transport capability have meant that I now have less reading time available to me - specifically, the three-quarters of an hour or so I'd get during the bus/train combo which made up my journey home is no longer available to me - you can read a book while steaming over the Severn Bridge at 70mph, but it's not generally advisable. This isn't a complaint, as the benefits of car ownership vastly outweigh the drawbacks, but I do find I now have to consciously make time to read. Luckily this particular book is quite short anyway.

We're in Tuscany, in summer. Violante, the aging matriarch of an old aristocratic family, waits for her family to congregate at the familial estate and frets about who will take over the running of the estate after her death. And frets with good reason, as her surviving family are a bit of a mess. Son Leopoldo and his American wife Cynthia have a strange sexless relationship while Leopoldo conducts half-hearted affairs with other women. Daughter-in-law Lavinia is a strange, neurotic, child-like creature, seduced and then abandoned by a series of unsuitable men, including Violante's late son Filippo, whose method of abandonment was more spectacular than most - driving his car off a viaduct.

Watching over them is family friend, neighbour, former art forger and now respected art dealer Aldo, who also acts as an on-off narrator of various parts of the story.

The obligatory fly in the ointment to shake the family out of their various neuroses is provided in the shape of Marco, a school friend of Lavinia's (absent) son Nicola who drops in while on a backpacking trip. Young, pretty and monosyllabic, he casts a spell over the whole family, from a couple of borderline homoerotic encounters with Leopoldo by the swimming pool, to a perfunctory seduction of Lavinia after she lets him stay at her villa.

Having been thus shaken up, the pieces of the family fall back together in a more satisfying arrangement for all concerned: Leopoldo and Cynthia finally consummate their ten-year marriage, and Aldo's decades-long unrequited love for Lavinia looks like it may finally bear fruit. His narrative purpose fulfilled, Marco then departs.

So, happy endings all round, as the title suggests. And very nice too, in a fairly lightweight sort of way. This New York Times review compares it to John Updike, though I think that's probably being a bit generous.

see you later, elevator

As any rational person does, I have a slightly irrational fear of lifts. Possibly for that reason, I found this New Yorker article fascinating. Fascinating, but not entirely reassuring, since the thread that holds the loose series of factoids and anecdotes together is the story of one Nicholas White, who was trapped in a lift in a New York office block for forty-one hours back in 1999.

Watching the CCTV footage (of the speeded-up, time-lapse variety, thankfully) of his ordeal helps pin down the nature of the various competing fears involved - plummeting to your death in a heap of mangled twisted metal, obviously (although, as the article explains, this is phenomenally unlikely unless an aeroplane flies into the building, which is, in turn, just to prove the point, phenomenally unlikely), stepping absent-mindedly into a gaping lift shaft, sure, but also the non-fatal consequences of being trapped, alone, with only your own thoughts for company, until someone finds you. Even if you're not claustrophobic, there's just the sneaking suspicion that the small compartment, possibly with mirrors on the walls, will turn into a kind of Total Perspective Vortex and that by the time you're eventually found, your hair will have turned white and you'll have clawed out your own eyes as your brain turned inside-out and ate itself.

If none of this sounds likely or dangerous enough, you could always try lift-surfing.

Shifting back to the nasty gory deaths with the rending and tearing of flesh for a moment, my lift-based nervousness isn't helped any by film sequences like this one from Final Destination 2 and the one about two minutes into this montage/mashup from Damien: Omen II. Nor, indeed, by actual true stories like this one (oddly, very similar to the incident in the first of the film clips above). Maybe I'll just take the stairs.

dead funny

A disclaimer up-front, before we start: the death of anyone is of course a tragedy to those who knew and loved them, and is in no way a suitable subject from which to obtain comic mileage. Right, now that's out of the way, let's crack on.

I was having a conversation today in which the subject of recent celebrity deaths came up, probably after Charlton Heston's demise a week or so ago (at which point I must link to his finest cinematic moment, and one of the, ooh, I dunno, four or five best film endings anywhere, ever). That prompted a look back at who had died so far this year - Jeremy Beadle, Paul Scofield and Edmund Hillary, to name but a few, but more amusingly some of the people I'd never heard of but who have names worthy of mention, and, in some cases, envy (or ridicule, as appropriate). Here are a few that caught my eye, in reverse order of demise, i.e. most recent first:

• Buzz Nutter, American footballer.
• Frosty Freeze, member of the Rock Steady Crew. Come on, you remember them.
• Chalmers "Spanky" Alford, jazz musician. No detail on his Wikipedia page as to the origin of his nickname, sadly.
• Metropolitan Laurus, head of the ROCOR. The best known of the Laurus family, he is survived by his younger brothers Bakerloo Laurus, District Laurus and Docklands Light Railway Laurus.
• Vicki Van Meter, pilot. Which reminds me of the old joke about the Irishman who thought Hertz Van Rental was a Dutch footballer.
• Bill Bolick, country singer. Strangely, he decided to call the band he co-founded with his brother Earl Bolick The Blue Sky Boys, not, say, Total Bolicks or Utter Bolicks.
• Al-Bandari bint Abdulaziz, minor Saudi royal. In some cultures it would be a source of mild embarrassment for a woman to have the middle name "bint".
• Static Major, singer & rapper. Not his real name, I regret to say (nor was Frosty Freeze, mind you).
• Mindrolling Trichen, Tibetan spiritual leader. This is some serious shit; you thought Ezekiel 25:17 was some cold-blooded shit to say to a muthafucka before you popped a cap in his ass, but imagine rolling a brutha's mind. That's some serious spooky-ass Buddhist voodoo shit, right there.
• Max Bănuş, journalist. Huhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh. Banus.
• Schoolboy Cleve, blues musician.
• Rose Hacker, activist. Not a gardener, sadly, as that would have been more amusing.
• Floyd Boring, ex-Secret Service agent. That is the best undercover name ever. Except perhaps for Undercover Elephant.
• Pratap Chandra Chunder, Indian cabinet minister, and big fan of the old 14 pints of Stella and a crabmeat vindaloo combo of a Friday night.

May they all rest in peace.

two whales in a Ford Focus

Not much point passing your driving test if you're not going to subsequently go out and get yourself a car, so that's what I did last week. And here it is:

Having driven it around quite extensively for the last week I'm very pleased with it: nice comfortable driving position even for a 6'1" bloke, big boot, and the 1.6-litre Zetec engine is quite sporty. I mean, it's not a Ferrari, but then again I couldn't get my golf clubs in the back of a Ferrari, at least not without taking the engine out, which would be a bit counterproductive.

I should give a tip of the hat at this point to the good people at Globe Motors in central Bristol, who made the whole purchase process very painless, and generally gave a convincing impression of not being Frank Butcher - I would suggest they consider putting a splash more petrol in their cars before letting customers drive away, though. I noticed the petrol light was on and the gauge was on the bottom edge of the E when I started the car up, and, having driven no more than a mile and a half or so through some heavy-ish traffic to the nearest petrol station, the engine spluttered and died as I pulled onto the garage forecourt. Luckily I had Andy with me so he was able to give me a push for the last ten feet or so so I could fill up. At least I now know how much a completely full tank of petrol costs - about £62, since you ask.

I've also sorted myself out with a TAG for the Severn Bridge - basically a little plastic box that you fix to the inside of your windscreen behind the rear-view mirror, which then enables you to drive up to the bridge barriers and have them automatically open for you, without you having to interact with the surly plebeian characters in the toll-booths. It doesn't save you any money, but it's nice not to have to rummage around for change and, since, shamefully, even in the 21st century, they don't yet accept plastic (although they do on the M6 Toll - hey, I don't make the rules), it's a way of avoiding potential embarrassment if you happen not to have enough cash on you. Obviously you've got to remember to keep the account topped up, so I haven't completely eliminated the risk of being escorted to a cashpoint by the police, but I've done the best I can.

Wye oh Wye oh Wye

It was a nice day on Saturday so we went for a walk. There's only so much interest that can be generated by walking around central Newport, so we decided to go and have a look at the Wye Valley, which is barely half an hour's drive away.

So - we parked up in the car park at Tintern Abbey, which unfortunately has some unsightly scaffolding attached to it at the moment, and walked up over the old wireworks railway bridge and along the riverbank to Brockweir, where we adjourned to the very pleasant Brockweir Inn for a drink and to watch the Grand National. Then we walked back down the old railway line to Tintern station, which has been tastefully restored into a sort of cafe and picnic area with some interesting sculptures, and then back to the car park, stopping off on the way to buy some cuddly toys in the shop at Tintern Mill, as you do. Pictures can be found here. That's me laying hands on Sabrina the river goddess in a familiar way on the left there.

This part of the country is the start point for a couple of long-distance walks: the Offa's Dyke Path which heads up past my parents' place near Abergavenny, and the Wye Valley Walk which follows, as you might expect, the course of the Wye all the way back to its source on the boggy slopes of Plynlimon, subject of an earlier post and photos.

telling porkies

Here's another in the vein of my couple of earlier posts regarding absurd food packaging slogans - I was making some meatballs earlier and I noticed the label on the pack of pork mince I was using. Here it is:


Couple of things to notice: firstly that this pork mince is apparently "ideal for use in recipe dishes". Right you are then. So, in culinary terms, that rules out......well, nothing at all, actually. Helpful.

Secondly, the rustic farmhand pictured has apparently, and I quote, "been supplying pork to Tesco from my farm in Suffolk for over 25 years". Unless he's as spectacularly well-preserved as me I'd say the bloke in the picture was 30 at most, which would require me to believe he was running a supermarket meat-supplying operation at the age of five. Clearly what's meant is that the farm has been supplying pork for over 25 years and this chap is the latest in a long line of cloven-hoofed troglodytic products of unholy incestuous union who have run the place down the years. So why can't they be clear and say that?

an eggzellent zuggeztion

Updates on a couple of previous posts:

Firstly, exciting news on the Absolutely DVD front: the complete box set (i.e. all four series) is being released on April 28th and can be obtained for a mere £24.98 from Amazon. Hats off to Andy for his slightly scary monomaniacal obsession with the whole business. Perhaps he could now move on to sorting out the Whoops Apocalypse debacle for me?

Secondly, an addition to my more recent list of women who rock. I'm not particularly familiar with the Guillemots' music, and perhaps I should keep it that way, lest them turning out to be rubbish invalidate my including a picture of the exotically lovely Aristazabal Hawkes, who is their bass player, in support of my theory. Anyway, it's too late, I've done it now.

you're my best mate, you are

Time for another photo-montage, I think. I came across this old photo of me and my old mate Paul in a bar in Wellington, New Zealand the other day (on my 31st birthday, if I remember rightly) and I thought to myself, I bet I've got an embarrassingly large number of similar pics taken over the years. Ground rules here are:

1. I have to be in the picture

2. I have to have an alcoholic drink either in my hand or on the table in front of me

3. There is no rule 3

I'm ashamed to say it was very easy to find 60+ of these; in my defence I do do lots of other healthier stuff as well, in fact I've combined the two activities (mountain climbing, cycling, etc. and drinking) in a few cases. Have a look for yourself.

April fuel

Well, mid-day seems to have come and gone without me being the victim of any deeply tedious practical jokes, which is good. Strange how I'm the only one who came to work naked today as requested, but I guess the others must have just forgotten.

I don't see an obviously fake story in the Independent today; but I haven't been through it with a fine-toothed comb, so I might have missed it. According to this round-up last year's story was about grow-your-own Viagra. The full-page BMW advertisement on page 4 of today's Indy caught my eye though, with its patented Canine Repellent Alloy Protection: more here and here. Apparently BMW have a bit of previous in this department. More classic hoaxes here and here.

A bit of further digging reveals that it's the Indy story on page 3 about Gordon Ramsay being refused a restaurant licence in Australia on grounds of "decency" that's the hoax. And it seemed so plausible. Ah well - I'm off out to the woods to harvest some spaghetti for dinner now.

scent of a woman

Here are a couple of amusing Onion articles satirising.....well, I hope it's obvious what they're satirising. America is a weird and schizophrenic place, it hardly needs saying. Then again if everyone was a sane and rational non-lunatic there wouldn't be such rich source material for the satirists. Yin and yang, if you will; it's almost like it was designed that way. Hold on a minute.....

I suspect the satirised/satiriser divide is broadly along the lines of recent US election maps, such as the one below from 2004:


So you've got your Democrats (in blue) sitting in their beachfront condos in their loafers sipping lattes and reading The Onion, and then you've got the Republicans in the Bible Belt sitting in their tractors eating onions.

If religio-political satire doesn't float your boat, how about masturbation and oral sex? Articles about them, I mean.

Those last two are probably SFW, just about; this one most definitely is not. But is it for real? I've no idea. Surely not? Needless to say it's German.

it gets tiring being right all the time

Let me give you a couple of examples in a purely cricketing context following my last couple of posts on the subject:

Stephen Fleming's scores during the recent New Zealand v England Test series (won 2-1, not entirely convincingly, by England) were as follows: 41, 66, 34, 31, 59, 66. A microcosm, if you will, of his entire Test career: get in, score between 30 and 70 fairly briskly, look a million dollars, get out, go back to the pavilion, have a nice sit down and a cup of tea. As he himself said, with disarming modesty, after his last innings at Napier: "If I had scored a hundred, it would have been an anomaly".

No sooner do I big up Virender Sehwag on his return to the Indian Test team than he goes completely berserk against a pretty decent South African bowling attack at Chennai yesterday to score the fastest Test triple-hundred ever made. Inevitably there was an element of after the Lord Mayor's show about today, and he only added 10 runs to his overnight 309 before he was out, but he has already rendered some of my carefully-crafted stats out-of-date: his 319 off 304 balls breaks his own record for the highest score made at more than a run a ball, he joins Don Bradman, Javed Miandad and Brian Lara in scoring 250+ more than twice, and Bradman and Lara in scoring 300+ twice, and he extends his consecutive 150+ scores record to ten.. His 257 runs on day 3 is also the most runs in a day for 54 years.

the last book I read

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being by Milan Kundera.

I don't like leaving books half-read; once I've started I'll generally plough on to the end even if it turns out not to be as great as I thought it'd be. There are very few books on my shelves that I've had a go at and not finished - as far as I can remember (as the initial attempt was 10+ years ago in each case) they were all abandoned temporarily to go and read something else (probably a new Stephen King or something) and then never returned to, i.e. not just thrown back on the shelves because I couldn't get on with them. A quick scan reveals three, in fact, and they are Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness Of Being. Or at least they were, because I've tidied up that last loose end now. By an odd coincidence, one of the principal characters in TULOB (as I'll refer to it from here on) owns a dog which she calls Karenin after Anna's husband (though, oddly, it's a female dog).

A bit of background: Kundera is from the former Czechoslovakia and was involved in the Prague Spring of 1968, eventually relocating to France in 1975, where he has lived ever since. Unsurprisingly his experiences are reflected in his novels, this one for instance. Quite a bit of it is set in 1968 and plays out against a background of the Prague Spring and the subsequent Soviet invasion, though it's highly non-chronological and jumps around all over the place as well.

The story: Tomas is a doctor, Tereza is a photographer. They meet, fall in love and marry, though Tomas continues to sleep with other women, most notably his mistress Sabina, an artist. Sabina in turn is involved with Franz, an academic. Their bed-hopping and various other activities are really just a jumping-off point for various philosophical musings, most prominently (as it's the inspiration for the novel's title): if we only have one life, does anything we do really matter? If so, shouldn't we just do what we want to all the time? On the other hand, if we do only have one life, isn't anything we do so insignificant as to be futile?

Any book which sets up its characters just to illustrate a philosophical point is going to have a problem, particularly when the authorial voice intrudes as often as it does here:

Tomas's son belongs in the same category. Let me call him Simon. (He will be glad to have a Biblical name, like his father's).

And that problem is making you believe enough in the characters to care when good or bad things happen to them (like, for instance, the oppressive workings of the Communist regime - both Orwellian and Kafkaesque, you might say, depending on how pretentious you are - and also the author killing most of them off in various ways at the end of the book). I'd say Kundera just about manages it; I was in no danger of abandoning the book halfway through this time.

A more wide-ranging (and longer) critical essay is available here: the book was also made into a well-regarded film starring recent Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis and the lovely Juliette Binoche. Never seen it though.

Let me start a new way of ending these posts - themes referenced in other books in this series:

• The Prague Spring and the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia: Utz
• Oppressive regimes in a more general sense: The Colour Of Blood, The Autumn Of The Patriarch
• Metafiction and the authorial voice: The Sirens Of Titan, Slow Man, Vertigo, Thinks...

he's short, he's fat, he's got a spotty back, Jeffrey Archer

Here's the internet as a force for good again. Yes, I know, there's still an awful lot of naked women doing all manner of eye-watering things with root vegetables, but still. Actually, I say "awful" - in fact some of it's fantastic. But anyway.

Time was if you wanted to construct a completely fictitious past for yourself, you could probably get away with it if you were brass-necked and brazen enough about it all, just because of the sheer time and effort involved in anyone checking up on you. Fat insane fraudster and loony religion-inventor L. Ron Hubbard is a good example. Jeffrey Archer is a more recent one - it was only when he started getting involved in juicy liaisons with prostitutes that people (Michael Crick, most persistently) started checking up on all the other stuff like whether he'd actually been to Oxford University and various other stuff.

Trouble is, in this age of mass media and the internet, anyone can check up on pretty much anything, relatively easily. So if you're inclined to make something up, especially if you're in the public eye, think carefully. Advice that Heather Mills would have been well advised to heed before concocting various bullshit stories about being kidnapped as a child and being recommended for a peerage by a mysterious "Lord MacDonald", not to mention omitting to mention her former career as a nude model in, hem hem, "educational" videos. Did she really think nobody would check? The brief but highly entertaining hatchet-job McCartney v McCartney: The Ex Files on ITV1 the other night told the full sorry tale. I have to confess to a certain amount of sympathy for Heather Mills - in a divorce dispute with everyone's favourite cuddly mop-top multimillionaire professional Scouser there was no mystery as to whose side the public would be on - but she does seem to have lost her marbles a bit lately.

Hillary Clinton finds herself in a similar position at the moment - I have no idea what posessed her to go off on a tangent about dodging sniper bullets on a trip to Bosnia in 1996, but she surely can't have imagined that no-one would dig up some film, or at the very least some contemporary newspaper articles, to show that she'd made the whole thing up. I suspect Bill taught her everything she knows.

As I always say, honesty really is the best policy. Not particularly for moral reasons (though obviously there is that aspect too) but just for purely lazy and utilitarian reasons. If you lie you instantly have to maintain two versions of reality in your head, and remember which one you've fed to which people. Not only that but someone, somewhere, will check up on you. Obviously if you can avoid committing share fraud, having numerous affairs, consorting with prostitutes and persuading people to lie about it for you in court, that helps as well. To recycle an old Archer joke: I saw Jeffrey Archer lying in the street yesterday. Well, he was in the street, I just assume he was lying. Boom boom.

One corollary of all this is that it would be almost impossible for someone like Frank Abagnale (subject of Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, also on TV a few nights ago) to get away with what he did even once, let alone repeatedly for five years. Which isn't to say there are no longer opportunities for fraud, just that your fraudster is more likely to be sitting in his bedroom fiddling with a computer than jetting around the world on Pan Am getting serviced by stewardesses.

Just so I'm not accused of being less than even-handed in my treatment of the Democratic presidential candidates, here's the Hitch getting a good head of steam up about Barack Obama's nutty religious mentor.

now that's what I call a Good Friday

We went for a bit of an exploratory walk around Newport on Good Friday with our friends Hannah and Mark. I took a few pictures, which can be viewed here. Before the whole thing descended into a pub crawl we saw a few places of interest which were new to me:

• The striking Newport City footbridge was opened just over a year ago and takes you over the Usk from central Newport to.....
• Rodney Parade, home ground of Newport RFC and the Newport-Gwent Dragons. I presume on match days there's some form of security in place to prevent you just wandering in off the street, but the place was deserted on Friday and the gates were open, so we had a bit of a snoop around. Then we wandered back over the Newport Bridge to.....
• Newport Castle. It's not the most spectacular or well-preserved castle in the world, or even South Wales, but I can't help feeling the city could make a bit more of it. It's slightly awkwardly situated right between the main road and railway bridges into the city, and hemmed in on the landward side by a roundabout (it originally extended back quite a way into what is now the city centre, but that's all gone) but they could at least let you have a wander round what's left.

Then we checked out some pubs. We started in the Pen & Wig at the bottom of Stow Hill - very nice draught Bass (a pleasant surprise as a really good pint of Bass is a rarity these days - cheap too) and nice potato wedges, and then moved on to the Red Lion a bit further up the hill - very good Black Sheep and Deuchars IPA, and a pool table. Once we'd dragged ourselves away from there we had a quick pint of Everard's Pitch Black stout in the Six Bells at the top of the hill, and then we went to the recently opened Swan Lake Russian restaurant next door. And very nice too. The beer (and the complimentary vodka, and the couple of bottles of Georgian wine) have dulled my recollections a bit, but the food was very good, borscht and all.

the Easter Bunny dies for our sins, and is promptly eaten by me

Haven't done a recipe for a while, so here goes.

Rabbit Casserole

I learnt this from my mother many years ago, but I have a feeling it may have been a Delia Smith recipe originally. It's not listed on her website, though she does have a few ideas for big-eared lagomorphs.

First, catch your rabbit. If that sounds like a lot of unnecessary hard work, buy some. You used to be able to get rabbit joints or occasionally bagged up diced rabbit from Waitrose and sometimes from Sainsbury's, but I haven't seen any of the high-street supermarkets selling it for a while now. However, we were in the covered market in the centre of Newport on Saturday and we discovered that the excellent D Cueto Butchers stocks whole rabbits. Great big fresh juicy ones, too, with (it turned out) the innards still in.


Before any cooking can commence, the rabbits need preparing. This is not for the faint-hearted or squeamish, so it's a good test of whether you're a "proper" carnivore or not. If you have an attack of the vapours at having to snap backbones with a meat cleaver or pull kidneys out with your bare hands, consider switching to a primarily cheese sandwich-based diet. Us hardcore types do it with a fairly severe red wine and port hangover as well, just to test ourselves. Here's an in-progress shot:


You see what I mean about fresh. For anyone who isn't a student of anatomy: heart at the top just by the ribs, liver in the middle, kidneys at the bottom. And here's a nice pile of portioned-up rabbit (given a quick rinse as well to get the last few bits of fur off) ready for the pot.


Now for the rest of the ingredients. And here they are (except the bacon which I only remembered at the last minute):


So that's:

• a couple of onions
• some garlic (mine is the lazy variety out of a jar; obviously fresh is better if you can be arsed)
• some mushrooms
• some decent mustard (Maille Dijon as pictured is excellent) - a generous teaspoon or so is all you need
• some herbs - sage is pretty much compulsory; I bunged a bit of thyme in as well
• some juniper berries, crushed; the best way is gently but firmly with a meat-tenderising hammer on a chopping board. A rolling pin is an alternative, but you do tend to get a bit of tiddlywinks-style action going on whereby the berries fire across the room and break windows. You want about 20-30 of them for a big casserole (two whole rabbits), less for a smaller one or it'll just taste like you've boiled everything in neat gin.
• two cans of cider. As I don't drink the stuff these are just some leftovers from a party. Strictly some decent scrumpy would be better than Magners ersatz "traditional" Irish cider lovingly brewed in a million-gallon vat in a missile silo on the outskirts of Dublin, or possibly Birmingham, but this was all I had in the house. Again, one can would probably do normally, but I had a lot of rabbit.
• Salt & pepper

Ingredients not pictured:

• Some bacon (half a packet or so)
• Some chicken stock. Or vegetable, it's up to you.

Right, so: chop up and fry the onions, bacon and garlic. Dust the dismembered rabbit bits in some flour and throw them in. Add the juniper berries, herbs and a good grind of black pepper at this point as well. Cook for a few minutes then (before it all starts to stick to the pan) pour in the cider and the stock, which you've stirred the mustard into to dissolve it. Chop up the mushrooms and add them as well. Here's what you end up with:


All you have to do now is turn the heat right down, pop a lid on, and go away and do something else for 2-3 hours. Then cook up something to go with it (mash is good) and eat:

just pop your clothes on the chair

A couple of new links on the blog sidebar you'll be needing some further details on - both photograpy-related, as it happens. So not only can you come here for your fill of erudite book reviews, astute political analysis and extreme religious intolerance, you can get some nice piccies done at the same time, at (depending on your requirements) one of the following places:

• Hazel's new website - as it's new it's a bit light on content at the moment, but there is a portfolio section with some examples of previous work. Anyone requiring photographs of weddings, portraits, corporate events, etc. in the South Wales area (or nationwide if you make it worth her while) should drop in.
• My sister Hannah's website. Anyone wanting rock gigs photographed, both in performance and backstage, in the London area, should have a look here.

In both cases I'm led to understand that no offers of work accompanied by large quantities of cash will be refused.

just to prove the point

Last word on this, I promise - here's my driving test report, with the bits that would enable Al-Qaeda to steal my identity and drive a 1.6-litre Ford Focus at high speed into the Houses of Parliament concealed. The "steering" fault was me hitting the kerb at the test centre approximately 2.6 seconds into the test; I'm happy to say things improved after that (only four minor faults in all!). Notice also how the post-test signature at the bottom right is completely different from the pre-test signature at the top left - I was struggling (successfully as it turned out, just about) not to go a big rubbery one all over the examiner, so my hands weren't too steady.


The other thing that's been bugging me is who my examiner, Bob, reminded me of, and I've just worked it out - Jeff from Peep Show, as played by Neil Fitzmaurice. Only Welsh instead of Scouse.

Arthur C cark

Legendary science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke died in Sri Lanka yesterday, aged 90.

As a writer I would say Clarke was more of a source of ideas than a great writer in the literary sense - the most obvious and famous example of this being the (loose) adaptation of his short story The Sentinel into Stanley Kubrick's seminal film 2001: A Space Odyssey. That said I can't say I've read a huge amount of his stuff - I think the only book of his I actually own is the short early novel Earthlight.

But he was very influential, and a man of clear-thinking good sense and scepticism:

I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future.

This is further demonstrated by his firm instructions for his funeral arrangements. I am reminded of Woody Allen's quote about death at this point as well:

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.

My instructions for my own funeral arrangements can be found in this earlier post.

momentous news

I passed my driving test on Monday. This is quite a major moment for me, so permit me to bang on about it at some length.

It's been a long and tortuous process, characterised by brief flurries of activity separated by years of inactivity, and I can tell you that the test that I passed on Monday was either the fourth or fifth that I've taken since my driving career began 20 or so years ago. I couldn't honestly tell you which of those it is, as my recollection of how many tests I took back when I was a teenager is a bit hazy; it was either two or three. If I had to guess I have a feeling it might have been three, which would make it five overall. But it doesn't really matter, except inasmuch as anyone who might have the notion I've been taking a couple a year since I was 17, and would now be somewhere in the 40s, would be wrong. I'd be skint, for one thing - lessons, not to mention test fees, don't come cheap.

The full test history is, if my assumptions above are correct:

• Three in the late 1980s when I was about 18. I don't recall much about them, except that I failed one when the examiner had to make a "verbal intervention" (which equates to an instant failure, not surprisingly) when I was about (as he saw it, anyway) to kill a cyclist.
• One in March 2000 after a course of lessons with BSM. No complaints about the tuition; the flow of the course was broken up a bit by a badly-timed three-week trip to Africa right in the middle of it, and a couple of cancelled lessons after I got back when I was in bed with what at one stage might have been malaria, but later turned out to be the slightly less serious Not Malaria.
• And finally a week-long intensive course from the good people at Safeway UK, and in particular my excellent and unflappable instructor Paul, culminating in a test on Monday morning at the Newport test centre. Here's a tip for you: if you're planning a test in Newport, make it at about 8:40am, so that there's a good chance the examiner will avoid the rush-hour traffic jams in the town centre, and instead take you off up the dual carriageway towards the M4 and into sleepy suburban Ringland for the usual driving around and manoeuvring activities. I believe it's Route 15 in this list of official test routes.

It also seemed advisable to pass the test before they made it any more complicated; since I took my first one in about 1988 the following additions have been made:

• the theory test
• the parallel parking manoeuvre
• the hazard perception test
• the bay parking manoeuvre
• the "show me, tell me" questions
• the extension of the test length up to a maximum of 48 minutes

So it seemed like a good idea to get it out of the way now before you have to assemble the car from a pile of random parts and make your own petrol out of some coal before setting off.

So.....now I have to buy a car. Despite Andy's best efforts to get me to buy a Land Rover to facilitate future Swanage trips, I think I might start with something a little more practical.

All that remains before I end this self-indulgent rambling is a quick roll-call of those whose generosity and patience I have exploited over the years. This is not exhaustive, so feel free to be offended by your omission if you like.

• the lovely Hazel
• my friends, work colleagues and occasional sporting opponents Robin, Andy and James
• my parents - other notable family-related mentions include my brothers-in-law Ben and Ray
• my ex-girlfriend Anne
• my friend and exciting sports-car owner Alex
• my friends and fellow cheese-racing enthusiasts Mario, Tony, Martyn, Jon, Steffen, Andy and Ian
• my ex-work colleagues Andy and Paul (aka Yorkie)
• my ex-landlady Catherine
• my old schoolfriends Mark, Andrew, Peter, Lucinda and Pippa

Thanks everyone. The frequency with which you'll be asked for lifts should now decrease. Conversely, the frequency with which you'll be run off the road, to death, by me, may go up slightly to compensate. Swings and roundabouts.