celebrity lookeylikey of the day

A multiple-choice one for you today, involving Conservative Education Secretary Michael Gove. Doug says strange incomprehensible 1980s kids' TV puppet thing Pob; I say ubiquitous 1980s comedy movie actor and, slightly bizarrely, latterly country music recording artist Rick Moranis. What do you think?

passion: christ

Annoyingly, it seems any future wordy rants will have to be run through a sort of pre-posting filter to ensure that there isn't already a YouTube video posted as part of the David Mitchell's Soapbox series which expresses the whole thing far more succinctly than I ever could (and with the advantage of swooshy visual effects as well, to be fair). I'll offer you just one example (as you're perfectly capable of finding the rest for yourself): the hugely irritating constant use of the word "passionate" in the most absurdly inappropriate circumstances. Personally I blame Tony Blair; he was constantly banging on about it: a summary is here, but it's easy to find specific examples here, here and here.

frankly I could care less about this blog post; but not much

Like any aspiring Grammar Nazi, I pick and choose what to get all aerated and arsey about based on nothing more rational and empirical than my personal whims and prejudices. So while I find the inability to recognise the distinct meanings and correct usages of the following to be infuriating:

• uninterested and disinterested
• odious, odorous, onerous and otiose
• loose and lose
• insidious and invidious

et tediously cetera, I on the other hand say meh and indeed feh to things like split infinitives. I even sympathise with those who are tempted to drop an apostrophe into a possessive "its" (though needless to say I never do it myself, goodness me no). I also accept the distinction between less and fewer but refuse to get too bothered about it, mainly as a sort of self-defence mechanism as I know it's something I get wrong myself quite frequently. I suppose I could rationalise my arbitrary picking and choosing of what to object to by distinguishing between rules that you just have to remember because THOSE ARE THE RULES and misuses where some nuance of meaning is actually in danger of being lost.

Here's an odd one, though, prompted by browsing through the comments on Orac's excellent Respectful Insolence blog the other day. Note the phrase "I could care less". Odd, isn't it? It seems to be exclusively an American usage (note the bonus "I could give a shit" at the end as well); we Brits would say "I couldn't care less", and clearly rightly so - no chance of any misidentification of word meanings here, everyone knows what all those words mean, and the American usage is clearly conveying the precise opposite of the intended meaning. Here's a few more examples. The stock excuse seems to be: it's sarcasm. To which I say: wait, let me get this straight - you, an American, are lecturing me, a Brit, about sarcasm? Well that seems entirely appropriate. Look, we bloody invented it, so have another burger and shut up. It's not sarcasm, it's just stupidity, so deal with it. Why is this one, specific, relatively harmless mis-usage so annoying? I really have no idea. But it bloody is, so cut it out.

Further scholarly analysis of the phenomenon can be found in this Boston Globe article, and, inevitable, at Language Log. Following on from the Mitchell & Webb sketch linked at the top here's David Mitchell on this exact subject.

happy kiloblogiversary to me

Mention of my favourite John Wyndham book The Chrysalids in the last book review reminds me of an interesting bit of trivia I picked up the other day: the song Crown of Creation by seminal late-60s San Francisco hippy anarchists Jefferson Airplane is inspired by the book, to the extent of borrowing great chunks of its lyrics wholesale from the book, as evidenced by this blog post and also this scanned excerpt from my elderly Penguin paperback copy:


That bit turns up about 1:36 into this clip of the Airplane playing Crown of Creation on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1968. Now I know what you're thinking: we'll forgive the lovely Grace Slick the white silk pyjamas, but why is she in full blackface make-up? Has she fallen into a vat of warm Marmite, or is that just an inadvertently revealed sex fantasy of mine? Well, I assume it's in connection with the Black Power salute she finishes the song with, a quick go with the Kiwi Parade Gloss round the facial area being the best way to demonstrate solidarity with one's oppressed brethren, apparently. Or to acquire more wives.

Other important news: my blog dashboard thingy tells me that this is my ONE THOUSANDTH BLOG POST since the first one back in the heady days of August 2006. That was 1601 days ago, so that works out at one blog post every 38 hours 25 minutes and 26 seconds. Obviously that's an average, and I tend not to blog while asleep, so there will be peaks and troughs. And here they are in graphically represented form. Firstly by month (click to enlarge):


As you can see my most active blogging months were November 2006 (the winner with a whopping 38 posts), September 2007 (32), October 2009 (31) and November 2007 (30), those being the only months where I've averaged at least one post a day. Here's the yearly breakdown:


What that one reveals is the shocking drop-off in blogging frequency in 2010: a paltry 175 posts, compared to the magnificence of 2007 with a mighty 282 posts and a drop of nearly 27% year-on-year compared with 2009 (239 posts). Must do better.

the last book I read

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Kathy is a late-twentysomething or early-thirtysomething with some sort of job in social work, medical care, something like that, reminiscing about her schooldays. Nothing so strange or out of the ordinary about that, right? Well....

The school in question is Hailsham, a full-time boarding school where Kathy spends her time hanging out with close friends Ruth and Tommy, and just doing the normal things that kids do. Well, apart from the slightly creepy things that seem to be going on that probably weren't where you and I went to school: the regular intrusive medical exams, the encouragement of the kids to produce artwork which is then taken away for a mysterious "gallery" somewhere, the extreme fear and paranoia about the outside world. And why does the mysterious "Madame" who periodically comes and collects the pupils' artwork seem to view the kids themselves with such barely-suppressed revulsion and horror? And why is there never any mention of the parents?

As the children grow towards adulthood the answers to these questions gradually emerge: they are genetic clones who are being raised to adulthood solely to act as a source of organs for transplants. Eventually they will be called upon to become "donors", and, when enough of their organs have been harvested, they will "complete", i.e. (just in case you're not keeping up) die. In the meantime some will be trained as "carers" who provide help and support to those going through the various stages of the donation process.

Kathy, Ruth and Tommy leave Hailsham and are assigned to the less regimented surroundings of The Cottages, a former farm where they co-habit with other future donors. Most of these have grown up in places other than Hailsham, and it soon becomes clear that for all Hailsham's slightly oppressive creepiness it's probably nicer than most of the alternatives. So much so in fact that a hopeful rumour goes around that if a young couple should be able to prove their love for each other they may be able to appeal to the governing authorities at Hailsham and win a three-year "deferral" of the start of the donation process. Incidentally, by contrast with the stringent rules prohibiting things like smoking (got to keep those organs fresh and juicy), there is a fairly permissive attitude to sex and lots of pairing off occurs, most notably Ruth and Tommy.

Eventually the time comes to move on again: Ruth and Tommy are both called up for their first donations, and Kathy becomes a carer, a job she is naturally well-suited to, so much so that she is granted the rare privilege of being able to choose her donors. Naturally she chooses to remain in contact with Ruth and Tommy, and it's on an outing in the car with the pair of them that we see the brutal reality of the euphemistically-sanitised "donation" process: Ruth is weakened and in constant pain from a recent donation (she has trouble bending over to negotiate a barbed-wire fence) and during the car journey back to the clinic suggests that, since she isn't going to be around for much longer, Kathy and Tommy should try to secure a deferral for themselves. She then reveals that she knows how they can contact "Madame", which, a while later after Ruth has "completed", they do, only to discover that there is no magical enchanted kingdom with cake and lemonade and ponies, and that the appointed order of things will play out as it always does, even for them.

All of which provides another opportunity to ask the question I asked after reading The Road - is this science fiction? More importantly, does the categorisation even matter? For what it's worth I would answer "yes, a bit" and "no, not at all" respectively. There's a sense in which Ishiguro has taken an inherently science-fiction-y subject and then taken great pains to deliver it in as un-science-fiction-y a way as possible: it's written in a matter-of-fact, slightly breathless, faux-naïve way, as if it were a young girl's journal (which is what it essentially is, after all), and there is a conscious avoidance of providing any sort of scientific context to what's going on, which is fine, but raises a load of unanswered questions in the mind - assuming you have that sort of mind - like: why are all the clones infertile? what organs are they harvesting that allow you to survive three or four goes before "completing" - surely if you're next on the list and someone needs a heart transplant then you're pretty much restricted to one "donation"? what about tissue rejection? what's the social and political context for all this, given that a) it's set in a broadly recognisable UK and b) it would be unthinkable at the moment? has there been some sort of revolution? a war? or what?

Scientific and political plausibility aside the most important question is: why don't any of the prospective donors make a run for it? They're allowed plenty of leeway and autonomy in terms of being able to roam about at will (the central three characters and a couple of others from The Cottages pile into the car and head off to Norfolk on a whim at one point) once they've left Hailsham, and it's not as if you can identify a clone just by looking at them. There's a sort of bovine acceptance of their fate which, while perfectly plausible in a society where they're institutionalised not to imagine that there is any alternative, makes you think: surely someone must have just snuck off and never shown up when they got the letter telling them to report to the liver-extraction unit?

Clearly the intention here is that we don't get too hung up on the sciencey stuff and focus instead on the human story. A story which, in a twisted sort of way, is quite optimistic - as much as it's about accepting your fate, it's also about making the best of the time available to you in the face of the certain prospect of it all eventually ending in a big smear of pain and fear at a time not of your choosing. Which, if you think about it, applies to all of us, though hopefully we might carry on a bit longer, and avoid the organ-harvesting death squads. We all get it in the end, though.

This is the first Ishiguro I've read (though I do have a copy of The Remains Of The Day on my shelves which I have yet to get to) and I thought it was excellent, though I would have liked some context just to anchor the whole thing in the real world a bit more. Those quibbles aside, though, the gradual revelations are nicely done without getting all Basil Exposition on our ass, and it's pretty short (280-odd pages in my film tie-in paperback edition, but print it in a sensible-sized font and it wouldn't be much more than 200), so I recommend giving it a go. It's basically a more literary treatment of some ideas that crop up in all manner of other places: the central plot device is not dissimilar to that of The Island (which was a bit silly - well, it's a Michael Bay film - but did feature Scarlet Johansson in a white jumpsuit), the no-one living past 30-ish element was similar to Logan's Run (which was a bit silly and looks dated now but did feature Jenny Agutter in a curtain), and there are bits that will be familiar to anyone who's read either The Handmaid's Tale, The Chrysalids or Brave New World.

Here's the obligatory lists and awards round-up: Never Let Me Go was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2005, as was The Accidental (John Banville won that year for The Sea); it also appears in Time magazine's list of 100 best novels of the 20th century, as did Blood Meridian, The Catcher In The Rye, The Corrections, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Watchmen.

the last book I read

A Fairly Honourable Defeat by Iris Murdoch.

I have a venerable paperback copy of the Faber Book of Parodies which contains a brief (5 pages or so) parody of an Iris Murdoch novel by fellow novelist Malcolm Bradbury. It begins thus:

"Flavia says that Hugo tells her that Augustina is in love with Fred."

More of this later. In this particular novel (published in 1970, about halfway through Murdoch's prolific career) it's Rupert who is in love with Hilda, and shares with her a comfortable upper-middle-class existence in a nice house in London. Hilda's younger sister Morgan has just returned from America after her estrangement from her husband Tallis and a doomed affair with Rupert's colleague Julius (who is also back in the country); meanwhile Rupert's younger brother Simon is living in domestic bliss with his gay lover Axel. I hope you're following this.

Most articles about Murdoch and her novels point out the recurrence in the novels of a demonic and charismatic male "enchanter" character who bends the actions of the other characters to his will for his own ends - a character based on Murdoch's own ex-lover Elias Canetti, apparently. A Fairly Honourable Defeat seems to conform fairly closely to this structure, as no sooner has Julius been introduced (and described as slim, white-haired and aquiline, which immediately conjured up an image of a slightly older Julian Assange) than he cooks up a plan to split up Simon and Axel and to lure Rupert and Morgan into an affair by the judicious redistribution of some old love letters. Whether this is to deflect the unwanted continuing affections of Morgan towards him (she's already turned up at his flat, stripped naked and thrown herself at him by this stage) or just for a bit of a laugh isn't clear.

Anyway, the bait is taken, and Rupert, who is a philosopher and fancies himself an expert on goodness and morality and therefore well-qualified to lead Morgan sensitively through her apparent infatuation with him, arranges a series of assignations with Morgan, one of which Julius contrives to eavesdrop on with Simon. Meanwhile Axel is becoming increasingly suspicious of Simon's relationship with Julius. While all this is being conducted largely in the luxurious surroundings of people's well-appointed apartments or upmarket public spaces like the British Museum, Morgan's husband Tallis is living in squalor in a rented flat, lecturing on history to unappreciative students and tending to his cantankerous father who has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer (though he thinks it's arthritis and Tallis hasn't got round to telling him otherwise yet).

Misunderstanding piles on top of misunderstanding and the characters' impeccable British reserve (and general inability to express themselves clearly and economically without hugely discursive waffly philosophical rambling) leads to an inevitable confrontation when Hilda finds out what's been going on between Rupert and Morgan, even though nothing really has, or not in terms of exchange of bodily fluids anyway. Hilda flees to the family cottage in Pembrokeshire, Simon cracks and confesses his part in Julius' machinations to Axel, and Julius explains what he's been up to to Tallis, whereupon Tallis marches him to a phone box and makes him explain everything to Hilda. Meanwhile Morgan, not knowing where Hilda has disappeared to, has broken into Rupert and Hilda's house to find some clues, only to discover Rupert's body face-down in the swimming pool. Suddenly the phone rings - it's Hilda! All has been explained and forgiven and she's coming home. Could she have a quick word with Rupert? Er, no, not really.

Murdoch was a lecturer in philosophy at Oxford as well as a novelist and has a pretty fearsome reputation. So it was with some trepidation that I approached this, the first novel of hers I've read (though I have a vague recollection of reading the first couple of chapters of The Good Apprentice in someone's flat during my student years). I have to say it wasn't really what I was expecting - plenty of Big Philosophical Ideas, to be sure, but a lot easier to read than I expected (even at a fairly beefy 447 pages), as well as more broadly comic in places (the scene where Morgan strips off at Julius' flat, then - after he leaves - calls Simon round, swaps clothes with him and then disappears into the night, leaving him to be discovered by Julius on his return, is all a bit Brian Rix). It would certainly be easy to criticise - it's all very upper-middle-class, nothing really happens until Rupert does his faceplant into the pool at the end, and there's no sense that the way in which the characters behave mirrors in any way how actual people act, or that, for all the bed-hopping, any real red-blooded passion is being experienced by anyone. But I enjoyed it, overall, and I certainly wouldn't rule out reading some more, though I suspect you don't really need to read all 26 novels.

Regular blog-watchers will know that that last criticism (lots of agonised mooning around and no action) is one that I levelled at Lawrence Durrell a while back as well, so it's an odd coincidence that the Faber Book of Parodies, in addition to the Murdoch one (which I can now re-read with new eyes and declare to be pretty spot-on) contains a Lawrence Durrell parody ("my tartan undershorts clung coldly to my alabaster thighs") by the very same Malcolm Bradbury.

Iris Murdoch's life and final descent into dementia was dramatised in the 2001 film Iris, which I haven't seen, but which is generally well-regarded. This trailer contains a hilariously inappropriate gravelly Voice-Over Guy narration, though.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Leading member of Australia's frankly inadequate trundly medium-pace Ashes bowling attack Peter Siddle and Marty McFly's nemesis in the Back To The Future trilogy Biff Tannen (as played by Thomas F. Wilson). Crew-cut, teeth, general air of constant incoherent fury: it's all there.

many of whore

I have, as usual, little to say about queasily exploitative pub karaoke shitefest X Factor, so I simply offer you my wry amusement at the finely calibrated decision-making process that was clearly brought into play when deciding on winner Matt Cardle's debut single.

Let's go with something a little bit more edgy than the usual overwrought power balladry gloop, they will have said, after all Matt is an edgy guy, I mean as edgy as you can be, anyway, when you've instantly torpedoed any faint hope of artistic credibility you may ever have had and revealed yourself as a shameless fame whore and willing bent-over unlubricated corporate glove puppet by being on X Factor in the first place. All that stuff aside, though, he's got stubble, and he wears a cap. So, like I say, pretty edgy.

So let's go for a smoothed-out and airbrushed and generally emasculated version of Biffy Clyro's crunchingly anthemic Many Of Horror. That'll strike the right sort of balance, as long as we cut down on the guitars, the beards, the tattoos and the general abrasive Scottishness, and get everyone to keep their shirts on. Wait a minute, though: that title is a bit, well, you know, harsh, isn't it? Can we do something with that? Well, there must be other lyrics in the song, surely? Just grab the first line of the chorus, that'll do. Ladies and gentlemen, Matt Cardle and When We Collide.

The thing about the original title, though, which does appear in the lyrics in a sort of middle eight about two-thirds of the way through, is that as written the word "horror" is required to occupy only one syllable, something that only really works if you've got a really thick Scots accent. Here's Simon Neil's rendition - maybe one-and-a-half syllables, I suppose. If you're English, as Matt Cardle is, you've either got to cram two syllables into one, or (and this is the option they took) just sing "many of whore" and hope that shouting really loudly over a big orchestral backing will get you through it. Check it out.

Note that they couldn't resist shoehorning in a huge truck-driver's gear change before the last chorus as well. Nice.

christmas spirit

Time for the ceremonial tasting of the Christmas whisky gifts. Santa emptied his bulging sack down my eager chimney to the tune of two bottles this year, so we'd best check 'em out.

Firstly, Sainsbury's Taste The Difference Highland Single Malt (an award-winner, no less). Now it may be supermarket-labelled, but we can say several things about this straight away; it must adhere to the official Scotch whisky rules, so it must really be a Highland Single Malt, i.e. the product of a single distillery in the region, and it must really be at least 12 years old. But which distillery? The label says it's been bottled for Sainsbury's by Ian MacLeod Distillers, who own the estimable Glengoyne Distillery. So is it Glengoyne? Well, Ian MacLeod also produce the As We Get It mystery pot-luck range of malt bottlings, as well as some stuff from other distilleries, so really it could be just about anything. Dr. Whisky reckoned an earlier MacLeod might have been a Blair Athol, but, well, you know, guessing is half the fun. Let's have a sniff.

Well, it's quite sweet and buttery, and maybe a little bit spicy on top, but not the sort of spice you stick in curries, the sort you get in cakes - you know, cinnamon, nutmeg, that sort of thing. Taste-wise it's pretty similar - the tasting notes on the bottle allude to some smoke at the end, but I didn't spot much. From that I deduce that it's not one of the lightly smoky West Highlanders, i.e. Oban and Ben Nevis. It's more like the Dalmore, though without being quite so rich and marmaladey. I suppose it could be a Glengoyne, though I have a feeling it isn't - it's certainly not that similar to the 10-year-old Glengoyne I had a bottle of a while back. In fact overall it's more like a polite Speysider (Cardhu, say) than one of the more hairy-chested Highlanders. Absolutely nothing wrong with it though.

That's the chalk done, now for the cheese - I also got (from my father) a bottle of Laphroaig Quarter Cask. Laphroaig is a bit of a whisky legend: Islay distillery, famously polarising in a Marmite-y sort of way, allegedly (though it's quite possibly an apocryphal story) allowed into the USA during Prohibition by being marketed as medicine or possibly disinfectant or toilet cleaner. Quarter Cask, as I understand it anyway, is a throwback to some older methods of whisky-making where smaller casks were used compared to the great big standard hogsheads - apparently the Ardmore is finished in a similar way. What with the basic physics involved here (surface area to volume ratio and the like) this should mean that more whisky is exposed to the wood.

It's still Laphroaig, though, so the smell is still like a physical assault: smoke, seaweed, Listerine, TCP, Toilet Duck, Mr. Muscle oven cleaner, latex gloves, car tyres, as well as some earthy vegetable stuff like lentils or cauliflower. Same with the taste, though it seems slightly woodier (as you might expect) and sweeter and less minty than the standard 10-year-old Laphroaig. It also seems a deeper brown colour; the standard bottling always seems to me to have a slightly greenish tinge to it. For all that most of that didn't sound very complimentary or appetising, I really like it, more than the standard one. In some ways the added sweet woodiness puts it somewhere between the standard Laphroaig and the Bowmore; I say this is a good thing.

non-hypnotic music to break up the catatonic state

Here's a bit more Beefheart for you: a BBC documentary from 1997, narrated, almost inevitably, by John Peel. Part one is here, and it's followed, as you might expect, by parts two, three, four, five and six.

fast and bulbous

So it's RIP to the legendary Captain Beefheart, who died a couple of days ago. If you wanted to out-weird your friends when I was at university you needed to look no further than a copy of Beefheart's 1969 magnum opus Trout Mask Replica, one of the strangest rock albums ever recorded (it almost goes without saying that it was one of John Peel's favourite albums). I couldn't honestly say I've listened to the whole thing all the way through more than twice, but I do have a sneaky hankering to buy a copy now (my old tape copy has long since bitten the dust). I can say, however, that I listened many many times during my student years to the slightly more easily digestible 1972 album Clear Spot (available on Amazon in a single-CD double-issue with the inferior The Spotlight Kid, whose main redeeming feature is the growly I'm Gonna Booglarize You Baby, which may or may not be a paean to the joys of anal sex), which seems to me a perfect distillation of the Captain's trademark barking weirdness with some proper tunes.

You don't often hear Beefheart played, nor indeed even mentioned, on the radio, but funnily enough I listened to an episode of Desert Island Discs only a month or so ago on which poet and professional Northerner Ian McMillan chose the scary clanking and shrieking of Moonlight On Vermont from Trout Mask Replica as one of his eight musical items.

Here's a couple more clips: Sure 'Nuff'N'Yes I Do from 1968 and Upon The My Oh My (complete with slightly wanky Rock Critic intro from erstwhile Whistle Test presenters David Hepworth and Paul McCartney look-alike Mark Ellen) from 1974. If I were you I'd start with the aforementioned Clear Spot and 1967's Safe As Milk and take it from there.

there's snow escape from my snowscapes

Just a brief round-up of a few things:

• I've applied an update to both the drink and mountain top photo galleries - and not before time as the last round of updates was over a year ago. Mainly photos taken since the last update, as you might imagine, but also a few older ones, mainly half-inched from Emma's online photo gallery. I'm sure she won't mind.
• I've also added a few photos taken on a brief walk from the house over to Caerleon and back I went on yesterday. Everyone's been taking snow pics, and I'm not claiming mine add anything to the sum of human knowledge regarding things looking picturesque in the snow, but here they are anyway.
• Finally, the results of the 2010 Bad Faith Awards have been announced, and this year's winner is Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed aka Rapey McRaperson, the Rapemeister General. For some reason a lot of people took exception to his views on intra-marital rape, the summarised version being that well, you married the bloke, so if you're not going to put out on a regular basis, like when he gets back from the pub on a Friday night with bits of kebab stuck in his teeth, you've got to expect a bit of a raping every now and then. It's sexual correctness gone mad.
  

insert chilly/chilli joke here

When conditions are harsh and wintry, as they are in Newport at the moment (the snow picture above was taken about half an hour ago) it's vitally important to ensure you've got enough spicy noodles to see you through till springtime. This lot should do it.

I note from my original internet noodles post that the unit price of a packet of noodles in July 2008 was 45p. As of my latest order this week that price is now 65p - so that's a price increase of 44% in just under two and a half years. So with that sort of galloping hyperinflation there's all the more reason to fill up your store cupboard with delicious noodles, sew yourself into your thermal underwear and batten down the hatches until springtime, whereupon you can emerge blearily, stretch, prise the tappen out of your arse and face the new year with renewed confidence and vigour.

whatchoo talkin' 'bout, willis

I've just finished watching Sky Sports' highlights programme after the highly gratifying events of the first day of the third Ashes Test in Perth. Afterwards they did a bit of a round-up of the morning headlines in the Australian papers, complete with much crowing and general schadenfreude. Charles Colville expressed some bemusement at the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald, though, which read "The feeble and the damage done". Some sort of obscure Aussie cultural reference, he concluded. Well, not quite: I can only conclude that Colville isn't a Neil Young fan, or he would have spotted the reference to Young's 1972 song The Needle And The Damage Done, a grim lament for the heroin-induced death of guitarist Danny Whitten. It features on Young's most commercially successful album Harvest, better known as "the one with Heart Of Gold on it".

I would have thought Bob Willis, who was in the studio as a summariser, might have picked Colville up on it, though, as Willis famously added "Dylan" as a middle name (in addition to the "George" he already had) as a tribute to his musical hero Bob Dylan. A liking for Dylan doesn't necessarily imply a liking for Young, but they're in the same sort of ballpark. Incidentally the Sydney Morning Herald's original headline has now been amended to something a bit blander, so they obviously concluded no-one else was getting it either. Philistines.

the last book I read

The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion.

It's 1984, and the USA is engaged in various murky covert operations in Central America. There's also a US presidential election campaign going on, which Elena McMahon is engaged to cover as a journalist. For reasons murky to everyone but herself (and maybe even to herself) she walks off the campaign in mid-swing and heads off to Miami to visit her father.

It seems Elena has some form in terms of unexplained sudden absences, having walked out on her now ex-husband Wynn Janklow and their teenage daughter Catherine a couple of years earlier for equally opaque reasons. One of the reasons she's decided to resume contact with her father is to bring him the news of her mother's death, but Dick McMahon seems more concerned with a deal he's cooked up with a strictly off-the-record arm of the US government to facilitate the supply of some arms to the Nicaraguan rebels. This is one of those One Last Big Job deals to set Dick up for a cosy retirement drinking bourbon and tinkering with his yacht, but it's scuppered by the sudden deterioration in Dick's health which threatens his participation. Seemingly for no better reason than because she can't think of anything better to do, Elena agrees to step in and take Dick's place - the job being to escort a planeload of arms to a military airfield in Costa Rica, meet the designated contact, pick up a million bucks and come straight back.

Needless to say it turns out not to be quite as straightforward as this - there's no-one waiting at the airfield with a convenient suitcase full of cash, so Elena has to get herself escorted to the nearest town, where she settles in at a hotel and waits for further instructions. These instructions take the form of the clandestine delivery of a fake passport in the name of Elise Meyer and a one-way ticket to an un-named Caribbean island, where Elena again books in at a hotel and waits for some news. Oddly, there seem to be a lot of Americans about, and few of them seem to be holidaymakers.

Gradually it becomes clear that there is going to be no payment for Dick McMahon's arms deal - all the clearer when Elena learns that Dick McMahon has died in a nursing home back in Florida - supposedly of natural causes, but if that were the case why didn't her contact mention it when she spoke to him? Feeling the walls closing in on her, Elena panics and flees the hotel, but with no passport she can't go far.

At this point US government troubleshooter, fixer, smoke-jumper and general can-do guy Treat Morrison steps in - called in to investigate after a panicked visit by Elena to the US embassy, he eventually tracks her down to the remote hotel where she's gone into hiding, at which point an unlikely romance develops. But just as there are things Elena doesn't know about, it turns out there are things Treat Morrison doesn't know about as well, in particular an assassination plot against a senior US diplomatic official on the island. The plot itself may or may not be real, but it provides a pretext for pinning responsibility for the plot on someone; someone who's proving an unexpected inconvenience perhaps....

Joan Didion is probably more famous for non-fiction, and political journalism in particular, than fiction, and this reads in places like a government report - much circuitous euphemism and jargon to skirt elliptically around unpalatable topics, repetition of key phrases, focusing on procedural minutiae rather than real moral issues, and a general tone of spooked paranoia - even though, to be fair, it turns out they are out to get you, in the end.

I can't remember a great deal about the only other Didion novel I've read, which was this one's predecessor Democracy, but the tone and central concerns were very similar, as well as the central characters - tough but brittle and remote female character who is elegant but tough in an Anna Wintour (or indeed Joan Didion) sort of way but, conversely, strangely susceptible to the charms of the slightly older world-weary guy who's deeply embedded in the system but at the same time has a heart of gold, both characters, paradoxically, being drawn together by their very coldness and remoteness. The difference, I suppose, is that in Democracy the central romance was played out over the course of the book and 20-odd years, whereas here it occupies no more than 20-odd pages at the end of the book and barely a couple of weeks by the book's internal timeline. The general paranoia and cynicism of all that's gone before being book-ended by effectively a tale of love at first sight seems like a slightly jarring change of pace, even if it does all ultimately end in tears.

Having said all that I enjoyed this greatly, though it won't be for everyone - there's a degree of metafictional detachment, as the narrator is a journalist piecing together the facts of the affair 10 or so years later - maybe it's even Didion herself? It also takes lot of words to describe a basically very simple plot that could be wrapped up in a dozen or so pages, though it does its circumlocutions in a very entertaining way.

The Last Thing He Wanted was published in 1996, and its immediate predecessor Democracy in 1984. In all Didion has published five novels in 47 years, and none since 1996, and she's now 76, so you may find that that's your lot. If so, and you want one and only one, I'd recommend Democracy.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

It is my contention that stand-up comic and We Are Klang member Greg Davies is simply a freakishly giant version of Rik Mayall.

irony water

While buying some groceries in our shiny new Sainsbury's this evening I came across this product on the shelves with the washing powder and other cleaning products. I did a quick double-take as it looked just like a bottle of ordinary water - my initial assumption was that it was actually some sort of super-enviro-friendly Ecover-esque washing-up liquid made out of grasshopper spit and hemp or something.

But, on closer inspection, it turns out it's actually something called "ironing water", which is, as far as I can tell, water. Well, with just a dash of some nice fruity scent in it, to make all your freshly-ironed shirts smell of pomegranate. Which is pretty much exactly what I want my freshly-ironed shirts to smell of, let me tell you. Best of all, along with the pretty no-brainer usage instructions (basically "Pour into iron. Iron stuff") is this gem: "Do not dilute". WTF? It's fucking water! Is it homeopathic or something? Maybe dilution willl make it MORE POMEGRANATEY THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE.

Sheesh. What a crock. But that hasn't stopped everyone else jumping on the bandwagon as well, Asda and Tesco included. To be fair to Tesco, they appear to be the only supermarket to mention what presumably is the point of the whole thing, such as it is, which is that it's distilled water with no dissolved mineral salts in it, and therefore it won't get the inside of your iron all limescale-y (though there might be a certain amount of pomegranate build-up). Even then they botch the science a bit by saying "contains no limescale" which isn't quite right - normal water contains no limescale, otherwise it'd be all lumpy. It's a bit like advertising Mars bars by saying "contains no plaque" - technically true, but not very helpful.

what a bunch of hunts

Nice of the BBC to keep me entertained by swearing like inebriated dockers as I sat in a traffic jam for an hour or so on the way to work this morning - I missed Jim Naughtie's Spooneristic mis-rendering of Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt's name on the Today programme, although I did tune in in time for the subsequent grovelling apologies. However, just in case late joiners were feeling left out, Andrew Marr repeated the slip on Start The Week, while attempting to refer to the incident during a discussion about Sigmund Freud.

The incident put me in mind of Nicky Campbell's problems (on Radio Five Live, I think) with the name of the West Kent Hunt - amusingly that incident was also compounded by attempting to refer back to it later and repeating the faux pas. It's always the Scots, isn't it? Well, to be fair the Americans seem to do it from time to time as well.

I'm sure Naughtie and Marr are high-profile enough not to be in any danger of suffering the same fate as Radio 4 continuity announcer Peter Jefferson, who was "persuaded" to take early retirement shortly after this on-air indiscretion. And he only said "fuck"!

hitch slap

Say what you like about Christopher Hitchens, but he's certainly not wallowing in self-pity after the diagnosis of oesophageal cancer and its exceptionally grim prognosis a few months ago. In fact if anything he's stepped up his schedule, including an impressive but exhausting round of public debates with idiots, including Intelligent Design advocate Bill Dembski, ex-Prime Minister and increasingly scary orange bloke Tony Blair and philosopher, mathematician and massive gibbering cock David Berlinski.

• Part 1 of the Dembski debate is here - turns out Dembski is an idiot. Who knew?
• Part 1 of the Berlinski debate is here - turns out Berlinski is an idiot.
• Part 1 of the Blair debate is here - turns out, well, you get the idea.

Here's a couple of interesting Independent articles from the run-up to the Blair debate - the first a really tremendously vacuous one by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (who has a bit of previous in this department), the second slightly more interesting.

A couple of further links I commend to you: an interesting recent Guardian piece and an interview of Hitchens by Jeremy Paxman for Newsnight. It's probably sentimentality at the prospect of his likely imminent death (and he does seem a bit more reflective and less polemical in these two interviews), and it's true he does talk a load of old cock from time to time, but I find myself finding Hitch increasingly cherishable - as his RationalWiki page says:

Christopher Eric Hitchens is what every self-respecting gentleman aspires to be, viz. a drunken, chain-smoking, atheistic, foul-mouthed, British smartarse.

On that subject here's Hitch on drink. Wise words. Incidentally the Hitchens caricature above is from this excellent series from Crispian Jago's blog.

letts go nutts

Here's some absolutely textbook fatwa envy (as previously observed here) that I spotted in a couple of different places this week.

Firstly Quentin Letts' Daily Mail review of Bill Bailey's latest stand-up show. Now Bill Bailey is about as benign and unthreatening a comedy performer as you could imagine; Christ knows what sort of an attack of the vapours Quentin would have on witnessing a Bill Hicks routine. Nonetheless once lovable hairy Bill has a few laughs at the expense of some old Caravaggio painting Quent feels the need to go off on one:

He may think himself wildly ­daring, but Christianity is hardly the riskiest target. Would he consider a ­routine mocking Mohammed? No. Didn’t think so. Yet that is arguably where ­comedy has some work to do, if it is truly to be considered radical.

Next, you'll no doubt remember the atheist bus campaign, and also the atheist billboards. All pretty gentle and polite attempts to push back slightly against the unthinking deference granted to religion in society, but nonetheless the targets for some really splendid lunacy from a number of quarters. Well, the venerable organisation American Atheists have produced a pre-Christmas billboard campaign and have paid to have the posters displayed at various prominent locations.


To be honest I think they could have taken a bit more trouble over the wording; it's a bit woolly and it's not entirely clear who it's aimed at. Atheists? Christians? The wavering in-betweeners? But, you know, whatever. It's more important that it's just proudly out there and visible to all. Although of course there are those who would rather it were not, this blogger for one:

...but to declare war on Christianity in the 21st century is hardly as daring as Silverman would like to think. Now, if he would like to try his hand at this sort of thing next year during Ramadan--now that would be a declaration of war that would be worthy of the name.

It's almost cut-and-paste identical to the Quentin Letts one, and indeed to most other examples of the genre. There is an amusing footnote to the Letts/Bailey fiasco which is that the frothing loons at Christian Voice (who basically comprise 2008 Bad Faith Award nominee Stephen Green and a couple of his mates) have picked up on the story - amusingly they're not satisfied with leaving it at complaining about the perceived religious imbalance, but decide on having a go at filling up the full irrational bigotry bingo card in one go.

Now if he took on the laughable idea of evolution, or took a sideswipe at abortion or feminism or sexual immorality, now that would be daring, but also a suicidal career move.
[...]
It could be argued they don't come much higher than Jesus Christ, but again, he is not likely to lose either his life or his livelihood picking on Christ or Christianity as he might if he took on Islam or homosexuality. That would be aiming a bit too high for Bailey.

Top marks.