throw grammar from the train

I'm always up for a bit of pedantry about grammar and word usage, and like everyone else I have my own personal line in the sand regarding what's tolerable and what's not, so that everything on one side is all THIS WILL NOT STAND and WELL THAT'S JUST NONSENSE and BLOODY KIDS RUINING EVERYTHING and everything on the other side is all well, you know, language evolves, it's fine, take a chill pill, grandad.

The obvious problem is that no two people have the line situated in exactly the same place, which makes for some interesting disagreements. So for instance when I was listening to Midweek on Radio 4 this morning and Libby Purves started complaining about people saying "it looks like X will happen" instead of "it looks as if X will happen" I had a moment of scoffing at her clearly ridiculous pedantry, just because that happens to be a usage I don't care about, or, probably more significantly, don't bother to observe in my own writing or speech.

The context of the conversation was that one of the guests on Midweek was Rebecca Gowers, the great-granddaughter of Sir Ernest Gowers, author of the still-in-print usage guide Plain Words, which she's just edited a revised and updated edition of. (You'll note that ending a sentence with a preposition is a grammar law about which I am not especially bothered about.) As far as I can gather the original purpose of the book was to encourage the cutting away of unnecessary frills and jargon from written communications - presumably of the "I remain, sir, your lordship's most humble and obedient servant" variety originally, but still relevant in these days of thinking outside the box and leveraging our core values going forward.

I was also put in mind of this article from a week or two ago by Grace Dent in the Independent, the trigger for which seems to have been the Twitterstorm over Gemma Worrall's ill-advised tweet about "our" president "Barraco Barner" [picture is from here]. The problem with the reaction to the tweet is severalfold, the main problem being that Gemma Worrall's principal crime was apparently not her woeful level of knowledge about the world and dubious spelling skills, but rather just Being A Woman On The Internet. This is about the most heinous online crime you can commit, as Caroline Criado-Perez, Anita Sarkeesian and Rebecca Watson will be able to tell you after enduring an avalanche of horrific rape and death threats after having the temerity to talk about feminism and sexism in online forums.

On the other hand, Spiked's Brendan O'Neill (writing for the Telegraph) reckons it's all OK and we should stop worrying about it, and, moreover, pointing out that the astonishing invective directed at women on the internet might just possibly be a window on some underlying societal problems is pretty much literally equivalent to implementing Nineteen-Eighty-Four-style totalitarianism. On the other hand, Brendan O'Neill is a tiresome professional contrarian and an utter bellend. You can fill up your Male Privilege Bingo card here: "the standard of discussion on the internet leaves a lot to be desired", "incivility", "delicate sensibilities".

Back to the pedantry: it's also true that a nit-picky obsession with the minutiae of spelling and punctuation at the expense of engaging with the content of the writing is a bit irritating, and suggests spare energies that might be more productively directed elsewhere. If you're involved in a heated online discussion about, say, the conflict in Syria, and you're derailing the discussion by taking issue with someone's usage of the word "decimate", you're probably not contributing anything useful. Barracobarnergate in particular illustrates how fraught with danger taking someone to task for spelling and grammar mistakes on the internet is, given that Muphry's Law will always apply.

On the other hand, writing and language exists to convey meaning and some agreement on what means what is crucial. Take “infer” and “imply” as an example: we need to have agreed meanings for words or communication will be impossible. That particular example might be resolvable a) because it’s not that important and b) by reading for context, but if I start saying “banana” when I mean “horse” and then getting all uppity and DON’T YOU OPPRESS ME when people have no idea what I’m talking about, I don’t think anyone would claim it’s somehow everyone else’s fault.

On the other hand, words' meanings do change over time, and eventually the "wrong" definition becomes the "right", or at least "usual", one. "Disinterested" is a classic example where the switch is probably now unavoidable, by contrast I had literally no idea that there was any other usage for the word "nonplussed" than its standard one of "confused" until I heard my wife use it twice in fairly quick succession in a context where she couldn't possibly have meant "confused". It was only on reading this that I discovered that it's now quite widely used to mean "unfazed" or "nonchalant", which is the context she used it in. You live and learn.

As I've said elsewhere, I try (not always successfully) to be relaxed about this sort of thing as long as the meaning is clear. So I'm not at all bothered about insisting on "different from" in preference to "different to" or "different than", since that's an entirely arbitrary rule that gains you nothing in terms of clarity. On the other hand I'm not at all happy about the "nonplussed" thing, and you can rest assured I'll be having a word next time. In general these days I take the approach of not publicly correcting stuff any more as long as the meaning is clear, while still silently judging people for their crass mistakes.

The other thing to be said about the Grace Dent article is that there's a strong element of: well, you may scoff at her rudimentary language skills and flimsy grasp of geopolitics, but she's got a job and probably earns more than you, you internet pedants with your degrees and your Nobel prizes. What are they worth now, eh? The problem with that is firstly that it seems dubious to judge the worth of a job on the basis of what you can get paid for doing it - by that rationale we value Premiership footballers more than nurses by a factor of several thousand, which I don't think many people would be comfortable with. So while it may very well be possible to make a better living as an eyebrow-plucker and fanny-waxer than as a Classics graduate I'm not sure that equates to a judgment of the two things' respective value. The other thing is that there's an uncomfortable tension between expressing dismay at the internet abuse heaped on women on the one hand, and on the other hand celebrating an occupation that in large part only exists because of some fairly ridiculous societal norms about how women should present themselves to the world: entirely hairless and orange seemingly being the current preference.

100 blogs of solitude

Couple of follow-up thoughts after the Free Fall review the other day:

Among the gazillion other awards given to Lord Of The Flies, it also appears in the TIME magazine list of 20th century novels (strictly, the 100 best novels written in English since 1923) that I've referenced here several times before. Novels in this series that appear in that list are On The Road, At Swim-Two-Birds, Infinite Jest, Snow Crash, Never Let Me Go, Blood Meridian, The Catcher In The Rye, The Corrections, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Watchmen. My current count on that list stands at 39.

Speaking of lists, you'll notice I linked to this list elsewhere in the review, mainly because it's been doing the rounds on Facebook lately and makes the contentious-sounding claim that "the BBC think you'll only have read 6 of these books", which is the perfect goad (for someone like me, anyway) to make you go "right, I'll show them: gimme that list". There's some confusion over the provenance of the list - while it appears superficially similar to the BBC's Big Read top 100 from 2003, it's not the same. Needless to say someone on the internet's done the research and tracked it down to being a list constructed for World Book Day in 2007. There appears to be no reliable source for the "you'll have only read 6 of these, you plebs" quote anywhere.

The list was apparently constructed after an online survey of 2000 people - consequently, like any such list constructed after a public vote, particularly on the internet, it's a bit lumpy in terms of content. I reckon these lists are always skewed by a combination of:

• books people may or may not have read or liked but feel obliged to nominate in response to perceived cultural obligation (e.g. Austen, Dickens, the Bible, Shakespeare);
• books people have seen a film or TV adaptation of (I strongly suspect this, and more specifically Colin Firth, explain's Pride And Prejudice's occupation of the top spot);
• nerdish obsessions (Potter, Tolkien)
• what I disparagingly like to call "book group books", i.e. the likes of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, The Kite Runner and Life Of Pi;
• fondly remembered childhood stuff (Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl and The Wind In The Willows among others for people of my age or older, Potter and Pullman for the younger generation);
• books read by people that don't really read books (I presume this explains the presence of The Da Vinci Code at #42 since I can't think of any other explanation).

I totted up my total and it came to 35, which isn't especially high compared with some people's. The distribution of books I had and hadn't read was quite interesting, though - where I really fell down was that I don't have the background of doing, say, English A-level and having to wade through a reading list with all the 18th/19th century classics on it. So I've never read anything by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy or any of the Brontës, who between them account for 16 of the books on the list. I do have a copy of Pride And Prejudice - which I once got about a third of the way through but never finished - sitting on my bookshelves, along with copies of Moby-Dick and Germinal staring out reproachfully at me for ignoring them for as long as I have. One day.

I put the Pullmans and the Potters on the "not applicable" category, really - no disrespect to them and I'm sure if I was 11 or 12 they'd be the best thing ever (I suspect I'd have enjoyed the Pullmans more, though), but since I was 25 when Northern Lights was published and 27 when the first Harry Potter book was published, those weren't options open to me at the time.

I do feel slightly bad about casually dismissing the likes of Captain Corelli's Mandolin and The Time-Traveller's Wife as "book group books", which basically just means books that were very popular and a lot of people recommended to each other. It's just an aspect of my general disinclination for being told what to do, however harmlessly. A brief reading of the plot synopsis does make it sound as if Audrey Niffenegger swiped some major plot points in The Time-Traveller's Wife from Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens Of Titan anyway. I'd be inclined to put Birdsong into the same category but for the fact that I have a copy of that one which I expect I'll read once I've completed the mental recategorising of it into the category Books Whose Existence Is Acceptable To Me.

I did get the sense that of the 35 books I ticked off, a lot of them were books I'd read quite a long time ago. That's borne out by the fact that only four of them (compared to twelve from the TIME list) appear on this blog (which documents all my fiction-reading since late 2006): The Catcher In The Rye, The Great Gatsby, The Lovely Bones and On The Road, and all of those except The Lovely Bones (which, as you'll know if you read the review, would not be on any 100 Best Books list I'd be prepared to put my name to in any case) are on the other list anyway.

the last book I read

Free Fall by William Golding.

Samuel Mountjoy is a respected and established artist, but, well, it's not all been glamorous exhibitions and critical acclaim. Born to a feckless single mother and brought up in a slum, and later as the ward of a priest, he rose to the dizzy heights of having his work exhibited in the Tate.

Yes, but has it made him happy? Well, no, not really. And so as he looks back at his life with some confusion and dissatisfaction, he tries to pinpoint where the choices were made, consciously or unconsciously, that brought him to where he has ended up, and wonders whether he could have chosen differently.

As a child? It's Sammy's being manouevred by his devious friend Philip Arnold into desecrating a church that leads indirectly to Sammy being taken on (after his mother's death) as a ward by kindly old closet paedophile Father Watts-Watt.

At school? Faced with the opposing teaching worldviews of goddy, cold, bitter Miss Pringle and easy-going, gentle atheist Nick Shales, Sammy naturally chooses the path associated with the person who's been nicer to him.

In his love life? Developing a furious obsession with pretty, demure Beatrice Ifor while still at school, Sammy mounts a well-organised campaign to woo her, but, having eventually worn her down to the point of consenting to sleep (somewhat joylessly) with him, he finds that he has lost interest in her and promptly goes off and marries someone else.

Eventually World War II breaks out and Sammy finds himself taken prisoner and interrogated by the Gestapo. After a bit of verbal sparring with Gestapo officer Doctor Halde, Sammy finds himself locked in a pitch-black storeroom to reconsider his refusal to divulge any information about the series of recent escapes from the camp, and also to anticipate the delightful prospect of being tortured to obtain it. The fear and the darkness induce in Sammy what might be mild hysteria, or might be some sort of psychotic episode - and, we seem to be invited to infer, the frenzied reconsideration of his previous life that occupies most of the book - before he is released from his confinement and returned to his prison quarters, possibly as a changed man, possibly not. Who knows?

Free Fall was William Golding's fourth novel, published in 1959 at the end of the busy early period of his career that produced four novels in five years. Golding's biographer John Carey reckoned that it was the lukewarm critical response to Free Fall that prompted the five-year period of writer's block, or possibly sulking, that preceded the publication of The Spire in 1964. Frank Kermode's potted summary of Golding's early books (we'll come back to the first one in a bit) from his review of The Spire warrants reproducing here:

In the years that followed Golding did much to confirm this belief, but very little towards making himself a popular novelist. The Inheritors is a technically uncompromising, fiercely odd, even old-fashioned book about the overthrow of Neanderthal man, wonderfully distinguished but inconceivable as a big seller; Pincher Martin is as difficult as it is masterly; and Free Fall is complex, original, and in many ways reader-repellent.

I think "reader-repellent" is probably overdoing it a bit, but Golding's books are generally - while relatively short - dense, gnarly and difficult and make demands on the reader that some will find onerous and unappealing, and Free Fall is no exception. It's probably more linear and less wildly weird and eccentric than either The Inheritors (which I see I've namechecked here and here) or Pincher Martin (which I mentioned here), and to be honest, probably not quite as good as either of them, but it's still writing of great power, even when you feel like there's some Great Meaning afoot that would snap into focus if you could just look at the words from the correct angle. In the case of Free Fall this is to do with notions like choice and free will, a concept that tends to dissolve into incoherence if examined too closely, particularly with an eye not blinded by religious thinking. Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True has a series of very thought-provoking articles on free will from a secular/scientific perspective if you're interested.

Obviously the elephant in the room here is Golding's first novel, 1954's Lord Of The Flies, still appearing on Best 100 Books Ever lists 60 years after its first publication. It was one of the first proper "adult" novels that I ever read (at probably 15 or 16) and made a massive impression on me. No doubt it vexed Golding (a somewhat irascible character by all accounts) greatly that his first book was the one that defined him, but there it is. I would recommend - nay, insist - that everyone read Lord Of The Flies; what I would say to those wanting to venture further is that Pincher Martin and The Spire are probably the ones to try. Just don't expect always to understand what's going on.

Golding also won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 - these two book reviews contain a couple of relevant lists.

chavalanche!

I suppose you might argue that if you voluntarily submit yourself to the hive of scum and villainy that is Matalan, you deserve everything you get. And, moreover, not one of the (relatively) upmarket regular Matalan stores either, but the Matalan Clearance outlet tucked away round the back of the Newport Cineworld like some shameful family secret.

Now I'm not knocking cheap goods, hell no, far from it - times are tight and we can't all be forking out for the latest teflon-lined kevlar-impregnated designer undercrackers at forty quid a leghole. But you need to know what you're getting into - obviously the upside is extreme cheapness of goods, but the downsides include the general random chaotic pile-it-high layout, the lack of any facilities for trying anything on, and of course most importantly the inherent dangers of spending lengthy periods hanging out with the lower orders, with their coarse features and their big sausagey fingers and their sketchy grasp of Proust. And, my dear! The smell!

I presume the reasons for not having fitting rooms are severalfold - obviously it frees up space that can then be used for flogging more stuff, plus of course it saves having to assign a member of staff to patrolling the area ensuring that none of their malodorous feral clientele have nipped in for a quick knee-trembler. The other advantage of making the customers work out what size they need essentially by guesswork is presumably relying on there being a percentage of people who get a £5 top home, find it doesn't fit, and then decide they can't face having to take it back and just stuff it in the back of a cupboard and forget about it.

A case in point: my last trip yielded a quite nice navy blue zip-up sweater-y top that turned out to be too small (but which I haven't taken back despite not really being able to wear it), a pair of corduroy jeans that fit quite nicely and I'm very pleased with, and a stripey shirt that appears to fit pretty well but which the semi-sentient creature who served me contrived to leave the anti-theft tag on. Clearly (unlike my adventure with the Talisker at Tesco) Matalan's budget doesn't stretch to installing the detectors on the exit doors that set off the klaxons when you do a runner, presumably because it's not really worth it, so it wasn't until I got it home that I realised. I suppose strictly it doesn't prevent me from wearing the shirt, but it necessitates a choice between leaving the security tag dangling out and proud and looking like a common criminal or tucking it into the trousers and enduring an unsightly bulge in the groin area, and I've already got one of those, thank you very much. Plus you'd never be quite sure going into a shop with similar security arrangements that you wouldn't set their system off and have your ass tased to within an inch of its life before you'd had a chance to explain.

So it had to go. Much information is available on the internet about getting these things off, most of it heavily caveated with some ass-covering words about only doing this if you've acquired the goods legitimately, and if you've just nicked them STOP READING NOW, etc., etc. Since I wasn't sure whether the tag attached to my shirt contained an ink pack that would splatter indelible blue stuff all over everything in the event of its getting broken I decided to go for method 3 on the first list, step one of which is to stick your garment in the freezer.

Give it 24 hours or so to be confident(ish) that it'll all be frozen, though I should note that there are those who say the ink is formulated not to be freezable in a household freezer. Bear in mind though that these people will also have got this information off the internet, so approach with caution. Note also that in theory INKMAGEDDON will only occur if you fracture the large tab (pictured), as long as you can get the small tab off the back without this happening you should be OK. Freezing everything is just a belt-and-braces approach in case of unexpected smashage.

Yes, fine, you'll be saying, but when do we get to the bit with the great big hammer and the hitting and the smashing? That time is now. Here's a video.

unrhyw un awydd peint?

Here's an interesting article listing 75 great Welsh pubs. Inevitably this prompts a bit of trainspottery box-ticking in the mind of someone who has, well, that sort of mind, so my sub-list (i.e. the ones I've been to) comprises the following numbers:

1, 8, 17, 31, 34, 37, 38, 41, 43, 44, 51, 52, 53, 58, 67, 75

- so that's 16 out of 75, which, while clearly leaving some scope for improvement, isn't too bad. Just to pick out a few notable ones:

• the Plough and Harrow in Monknash (#1) is just down the road from where our friend Kate used to live, and also not far from St. Bride's Major, former home of Charlotte Church and Gavin Henson. The one occasion I've ever been in the pub provided the slightly surreal situation of competing for the barmaid's attention with Gavin Henson - commendably she stuck to strictly orthodox bar protocol and served me first, since I'd got to the bar first. I can confirm that he is a) quite tall, b) quite orange and c) wears mirrored aviator sunglasses indoors, even in quite dingy pubs. Make of that what you will.
• we went to the Sun Inn in Llangollen (#8) on our canal-boating trip in 2000 as referenced here, before doing a bit of highly irregular permit-free overnight mooring here.
• I maintain that, while it's perfectly OK, you probably wouldn't give the Worm's Head Hotel (#31) a second glance if it weren't for the fact that its beer garden offers one of the most spectacular views in Britain, at least among views available from beer gardens anyway.
• the Bear in Crickhowell (#34) was the venue for a post-walk pint after Huw and I went up Table Mountain a few months back.
• the Ancient Briton in Pen-y-cae (#38) was the venue for a very similar post-walk pint after Hazel and I had been up the Black Mountain in the snow back in April 2010.
• I had a pint in the Ship Inn on the shores of Red Wharf Bay in Anglesey (#44) while my ex-girlfriend Anne and I were over there in the summer of 2000. 
• the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel at the foot of the Llanberis Pass in Snowdonia (#51) was previously mentioned in another pub-related list here.
• we went to the Sloop in Porthgain (#52) for lunch (and a pint) on our trip to Pembrokeshire in June 2012. 
• the Murenger House (#58) remains comfortably the best pub in central Newport, not that that is much of an accolade. It's a nice little place only marred by its being tied to Sam Smith's brewery and therefore obliged to serve their rather uninspiring beer.
• the King's Head in Llangennith (#67) has been the venue for much beery hilarity over the years, usually while we've been staying at the Hillend campsite down the road.
• we went to the Blue Anchor at East Aberthaw (#75) with Jenny and Jim after we'd taken Nia for her first visit to the beach at Barry Island.

A couple of near misses - we parked up in the car park behind Tafarn Sinc (#6) in Pembrokeshire before bagging Foel Cwmcerwyn back in 2009, without ever quite realising that it was there, otherwise we'd have gone in. I also parked round the back of the Cwmdu Inn (#2) when I did my Royal Wedding avoidance walk back in 2011. It is also quite possible that I've been in more of these (particularly the ones in Cardiff) without specifically remembering their names.

No review of a list of this sort is complete without a bit of quibbling, so I'll just add that I'd have included the Old Arcade in central Cardiff as I think they have the best Brains SA anywhere, and I also have a soft spot for the Albany just up the road from Hazel's old flat in Roath. And familial loyalty obliges me to bemoan the absence of the Lewis Arms in Tongwynlais. If you play the video below the pub list you'll notice that the beardy bloke saying nothing very interesting is drinking a pint of Wye Valley HPA in the Bell in Caerleon, which I've been to a couple of times and would also probably be on my list. It was also the venue for another slightly underwhelming celebrity encounter, this time with big-nosed shouty snooker bloke Rob Walker who seemed to be in the middle of a "10 Miles 10 Pints" fun run/pub crawl mashup at the time, judging by his and his companions' attire.

bakerman is baking bread

I caught an episode of Danny Baker's Rockin' Decades a week or two ago on BBC4, always a good place for the occasional unexpected item of interest. This one focused on the 1990s, this being apparently the third in a series, the first two of which featured, you'll be surprised to hear, the 1970s and the 1980s.

The 1990s was really "my" decade in terms of music, by which I mean the decade where I really got my horizons broadened and got exposed to some genuinely interesting and quirky (and in some cases, utterly unlistenable) stuff. Well, actually that period would include the very tail-end of the 1980s as well, which just illustrates the slightly contrived nature of carving things up into separate decades, not to mention the focus on "rock" rather than "pop", as if that really means anything, and the insistence on restricting the discussion to just British bands. But, well, you've got to impose some structure on an idea that presumably started life as Danny and some mates just chewing the fat down the pub.

Even those who find Danny Baker less irritating than I do would probably have to concede that he's never found a TV format that really worked - he's good on the radio where he can just hog the mic for a couple of hours and ramble on about whatever takes his fancy, but on TV you tend to be a bit more constrained by programme structure and length. And the format of Rockin' Decades only sort of works - the ostensibly unscripted chatty bits are fine, but there's an awkward gear-change every time Baker leans forward to deliver an obviously scripted interjection (usually introducing a clip) across his guests and straight to camera. And you can almost smell his resentment at having to let anyone else talk, given that that's time during which he has to stop talking.

The guests were fine, generally, both Josie Long and Alexis Petridis seeming genuinely enthused by being able to give their personal obsessions (with David Devant & His Spirit Wife and Earl Brutus respectively) an airing. Louise Wener had the least to say, so I should probably just observe that she is still quite foxy even though she's inevitably a bit more mumsy-looking these days, and that while Sleeper weren't all that great you should probably have Inbetweener and Sale Of The Century even if you don't have anything else.

The programme skipped across a couple of my favourite British 90s albums a bit quickly for my liking - Primal Scream's Screamadelica was passed over slightly sniffily as a shameless bit of dance-rock bandwagon-jumping and My Bloody Valentine were mentioned in complimentary terms but then passed over for a bit about Chapterhouse, of all people. And they never (to my knowledge) mentioned Teenage Fanclub at all - Grand Prix would be in my top five British albums of the 90s without a doubt.

The only thing that got my hackles up a bit was the section right at the end where everyone was asked to nominate an album - Alexis Petridis nominated Oasis' Be Here Now, which was a sort of archly ironic non-choice, and Josie Long had a Belle & Sebastian album which I suppose is fine if you like that sort of thing - I wouldn't have chosen either but they at least conformed to the programme's stated inclusion criteria. However - Louise Wener chose Garbage's first album, which is good, and which I own, but which is surely at least 90% American. I mean, yes, Shirley Manson is Scottish, but the rest of the band are American, and the album was recorded and produced in the US. Worse, Danny Baker chose XTC's Oranges And Lemons - nothing wrong with it, and they are at least definitely British, but it was released in 1989! And he must have known this, because a) he's supposed to be generally knowledgeable about music but also b) it must have been staring him in the face from the back of the vinyl LP he was holding up! If you're going to have rules, however arbitrary, then have enough respect for your audience to adhere to them, otherwise you'll just look like you're taking the piss.

Sadly none of the three programmes in the mini-series is now available on iPlayer, but here are a few YouTube clips from the 1990s edition.

mapocalypse now

One of the many fascinating things about Riddley Walker is the little map at the front of the book which makes sense of some of the corrupted place names in the book and puts the whole thing in some sort of geographical context - it's basically set in Kent after it's been radically re-landscaped by the ill-defined nuclear disaster and what we can assume to be some accompanying rise in sea level.

Here's the map (right-click and open in a new tab to enlarge):

Note how both the Isle of Thanet (aka The Ram) and Dungeness (aka Dunk Your Arse) have been severed from the mainland, while the low-lying land separating Sandwich from the sea and most of the Isle of Sheppey have been submerged. The funny thing about this is how similar it looks to this map of the same area at around the time of the Saxon invasion of Britain, so probably 5th century AD or so.

I'm not sure when Dungeness was joined up to the mainland, but the Isle of Thanet remained a proper island until the late 17th/early 18th century, separated from mainland Kent by a waterway known as the Wantsum Channel. This eventually silted up, but its course - south from Reculver, then east to the mouth of the modern-day River Stour between Sandwich and Ramsgate - can be clearly seen on modern-day Ordnance Survey maps:

In the light of what's been happening to the Somerset Levels recently, it's sobering to reflect, while making use of this virtual sea-level readjustment tool, that it would take a sea-level rise of no more than about 3-4 metres to return Thanet (and Dungeness) to being an island.

the last book I read

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban.

It's 2000-2500 years after some unspecified nuclear disaster occurred in the vicinity of Canterbury. And not your low-key Chernobyl-type event with a few abandoned towns and some radioactive sheep, either, this was your full utter devastation for hundreds of miles, not a living thing left unincinerated, the ground barren for generations kind of thing.

Humanity survives, as humanity will, though in somewhat reduced circumstances - civilisation has regressed to dark-ages semi-anarchy with small bands of scavengers scratching a living off the land and avoiding the jaws of the packs of marauding feral dogs. One of the things that they scavenge is the half-buried remnants of the old pre-apocalypse industrial landscape, huge metal and concrete structures whose purpose they have no idea of. The only entertainment is provided by travelling showmen who perform a sort of adapted Punch & Judy show ("The Eusa Show") incorporating garbled elements of the supposed events leading up to The Event.

Our eponymous hero decides he wants to see a bit more of the world after seeing his father killed while trying to extract some giant metal artifact from the mud and abandons the (relative) safety of his local community to wander the old grassed-over highways of Kent and try and make sense of things. As he does so he discovers more of the garbled history of pre-apocalypse England, but also the dangers that the insatiable human need to understand poses. To borrow a line from another post-apocalyptic novel, Stephen King's epic The Stand:

All of that stuff is lying around, waiting to be picked up.

Sure enough there is a sort of miniature arms race going on as rival groups try to acquire sulphur to make rudimentary gunpowder - the other two ingredients being readily available. Given how utterly clueless these people are about proportions, safe ignition methods and the like, they are soon re-enacting The Event in miniature and wiping themselves out. Riddley takes it upon himself to take an updated version of The Eusa Show around in an attempt to prevent mankind from haphazardly working its way up to a point where it can once again destroy itself.

As it happens the plot here is, to a degree, secondary, which is just as well as not a huge amount actually happens. The most startling feature of Riddley Walker is the language in which it's written - since paper is a bit on the flammable side a disaster capable of rendering human flesh into two little bubbling pools of fat in a pair of shoes in a matter of nanoseconds is certainly going to destroy any written matter in the vicinity, and therefore the ability to read and write is a rare one, and even for those (like Riddley) who do possess it any notion of standard rules for spelling and grammar have gone out of the window, not that anyone has windows any more. Try this for size:

She said, 'Its some kynd of thing it aint us yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals … Its all 1 girt thing bigger nor the worl and lorn and loan and oansome, Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us on like we put on our cloes. Some times we dont fit. Some times it cant fynd the arm hoals and it tears us a part. I dont think I took all that much noatis of it when I ben yung. Now Im old I noatis it mor. It don't realy like to put me on no mor. Every morning I can feal how its tiret of me and readying to throw me a way. Iwl tel you some thing Riddley and keap this in memberment. Whatever it is we dont come naturel to it.'

There's no getting away from the fact that this makes the book difficult to read, and requiring of a considerable investment of effort on behalf of the reader. This is not unique, of course, the most obvious other example being the Nadsat in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. Other novels to dabble with this sort of thing include Iain M Banks' Feersum Endjinn (which I should say I've never read, but whose phonetic argot seems very Riddleyesque), and of course Nineteen Eighty-Four, though that restricted itself to some academic discussion of Newspeak rather than attempting to render any of the narrative in it.

The most obvious point of comparison is with Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Riddley Walker arguably being much the same story but with a much more immediately destructive initial event and 2000+ years of distance. In a way it's a more optimistic novel than The Road, though, as at least it's clear that organic life will survive, in whatever form, at least until humanity works out a way of obliterating itself again. The Road retains the implicit possibility that despite the commendable will to survive of the protagonists, the utter collapse of plant life may mean that humanity is fucked.

The other principal thing this has in common with The Road is that it is absolutely essential reading for anyone who is even slightly interested in modern fiction. Ignore the "science fiction" tag, as I think we've established that these words have no meaning. It's very different from the other two Hobans in this list, Come Dance With Me and Kleinzeit; those are charmingly playful, this is deadly serious.

paternoster qui es in sheffield

You might recall my post about lifts from a few years back, and the embedded link to this fascinating New Yorker article on the same subject. I can't remember how the subject came up, but we were having a conversation at work the other day that touched on the concept of the paternoster lift, and occasioned some speculation over whether there were any still in operation anywhere, or whether health and safety considerations had seen them all replaced by more enclosed and less potentially limb-severing modes of inter-floor transportation.

Just to back up a bit, the paternoster lift is a series of open-fronted boxes attached to a chain mechanism that describe an endless loop up one side of a vertical shaft, around the top, and back down again (and around the bottom and back up again, and so on). It moves (albeit pretty slowly) continuously, so passengers just step on and off as required. I imagine there's a bit of practice required in order to master the timing, just as with stepping on and off escalators.

So there are a couple of obvious questions that occur to everyone at this point, and they are:

• what happens if you stay on to the top (or the bottom)? Do you come back round upside down? Or some more severe variant like inside out, or something? The answer, reassuringly, is no (to both);
• what happens if you leave some part of your anatomy hanging out of the front of the compartment, or trip on your way in or out and land half-in/half-out of the compartment? The answer is that in theory modern set-ups are required to have various failsafe arrangements involving infra-red beams, hinged sections of floor and the like which mitigate the risk of getting cut in half like the doctor out of Damien: Omen II. I'm not volunteering to test any of them, though.

As with the blue police box thing, you'd imagine locating a definitive list on the internet of the few remaining ones would be easier than it actually turns out to be, but it does appear that there are a few left in the UK, mainly, for some reason, at universities. I suppose maybe there was an overwhelming demand from the students for them to be retained just for their curiosity value and potential for amusing student pranks. There are also a few left in continental Europe, for instance in Prague, Hamburg and this rather magnificent one in Copenhagen.

The one at the Sheffield Arts Building is reputed to be the largest one in the world, though I'm not sure how reliable that claim is. Others in the UK can be found at Leicester University and the Albert Sloman Library at the University of Essex. The Leicester one is notable for featuring in this video dating from the very early days of the #neknominate craze back in May 2013, when just downing a perfectly normal pint of lager in vaguely amusing circumstances was deemed sufficiently "out there" to qualify. These days unless you're riding a horse through Tesco, drinking a pint of your own urine with live goldfish in it, or just killing yourself by necking a gallon of neat vodka, industrial valve cleaner or molten plutonium you may as well not bother.

Back to lift-related matters - the Wikipedia page claims that there have been 5 deaths in paternoster lifts between 1970 and 1993. Since the expectation is that these would be more dangerous than standard lifts, that seems quite low, although without some context in terms of deaths per passenger journey it's a bit meaningless. I've seen a statistic of 20-30 deaths in standard lifts per year in the USA, but most of these are maintenance staff rather than standard passengers, and therefore a large proportion weren't technically in the lift when they got killed.

Of course there is a sub-category of lift accidents involving genuine punters and not being in the lift, and that is the one involving people stepping into open lift shafts when the doors open at the wrong time. The most famous recent incident of this was when former racing driver Stirling Moss plummeted down the lift shaft in his own home, but there have been many others, plus a recent near miss at the Sochi Winter Olympics. In most of these cases my genuine sympathy is diluted by just a light splash of criticism: at least have a look before just stepping through the door, surely?

If the paternoster lift still seems a bit tame for you, and you demand a more exposed and dangerous way of travelling between floors, try the belt manlift as deployed at various factory facilities. You really don't want to be attempting to go "round the top" on this one, though.

the last book I read

A Sport And A Pastime by James Salter.

It's the mid-1960s, and there's not much for young American men to do while mooching around avoiding the draft except to go off to Europe and have adventures. That's what our un-named narrator is doing, hanging out in a house owned by some friends in Autun, a small mid-French town near Dijon. Just generally swanning around, hanging out with similarly indolent expatriate American types, drinking too much and half-heartedly lusting over other people's wives, until he one day encounters twentysomething college dropout Phillip Dean.

The two strike up a friendship, and no sooner have they done so than Dean in turn strikes up a relationship with a young waitress, Anne-Marie Costallat, and the two are soon at it like rabbits. Once this preliminary scene-setting is out of the way (we're about a third of the way into a slim 190-page book at this point) most of the rest of the book is an account of a sort of meandering road trip taken by Dean and Anne-Marie in an old convertible that Dean has "borrowed" in slightly murky circumstances from an American friend. Their principal activities on this road trip are a) driving around, b) having dinner and c) fucking, and really the first two are just extended foreplay for the third.

Eventually, as all wistful accounts of That Last Golden Summer do, things come to an end - Dean comes to the end of his money, or at least to the end of the series of top-ups he's engineered by borrowing money from his friends, the narrator included, and has to cash in his remaining funds to pay for a flight home. Naturally there are protestations of love and promises to return that no-one really believes, though presumably the expectation would have been of a gradual petering-out of letter-writing through apathy, rather than the more shocking conclusion of Dean's death in a car crash, news which the narrator has the responsibility of breaking to Anne-Marie.

As anyone who skims the shortlists for the Literary Review's annual Bad Sex Award will know, writing about sex convincingly and without it being either horribly un-erotic or unintentionally hilarious is a very difficult thing to pull off (ooer), so if, as here, you're hanging an entire book off it (a book in which precious little else actually happens) you'd better make sure you get it right. And to be fair, this is very good, neither ridiculously flowery and metaphorical, off-puttingly mechanical, nor framed in any sort of Hollywood-esque soft-porn soft focus where no-one has any body hair, both partners always come at the same time and no-one farts halfway through or has to sleep on the wet patch afterwards.

It was still fairly racy to write about this sort of stuff when A Sport And A Pastime was published, in 1967, and it's still pretty graphic by modern standards. It's amusing from a historical perspective to note that while there is a whole uninhibited variety of standard fucking, and a couple of fairly matter-of-fact excursions into anal sex, the single episode of fellatio in the book is framed as something thrillingly transgressive. But it's commendably modern in Anne-Marie's hungry and enthusiastic involvement - she's not just coyly compliant while Dean is getting his rocks off, she wants hers too, and there's no suggestion that she's unrecoverably scarred when Dean abandons her to return to America. A few tears, a bit of Gallic shrugging and a Gauloise and she's as right as rain.

Of course, the quality of the writing aside, one has to ask, while reading: these are the narrator's words, not Dean's, and since we can presumably rule out either the narrator being psychic or Dean having handed over his personal sex diary for publication before jetting off home and emulating his namesake's demise, how does he know all these details? We're presumably invited to infer, again, some level of unreliable-narrator-hood here, with an undercurrent of what one might call Gatsbyitis, i.e. a sub-textual love story between the older, wiser, more inhibited narrator and his fabulous, unfettered, tragic friend whose experiences he lives vicariously through.

celebrity croakylikey of the day

So it's RIP Pete Seeger, folk pioneer, political campaigner, environmental activist and the late Kirsty MacColl's step-half-uncle. While he undoubtedly wrote some significant songs, I have to say I find that particular brand of folk music to be a bit off-putting in its wide-eyed earnestness and hearty all-join-in mateyness, and moreover I can't quite shake the mental picture of Keith (as played by Roger Sloman) from Nuts In May strumming his banjo and singing about going to the zoo.

So while Seeger's pioneering work paved the way for the folk revolution of the early 1960s of which Bob Dylan was the figurehead, it's easy to see why it was Dylan's looser, cleverer, more sardonic songs with their mix of traditional protest and personal and sexual politics which really struck a chord with the record-buying public. Add to that Dylan's willingness to experiment musically (in contrast to Seeger's traditionalism) and you have (to me at least) a much more interesting mix. Seeger's reaction to the key moment in Dylan's career, his going electric in 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival, is the subject of some controversy, depending who you believe Seeger either lost his shit completely and tried to cut the cables with an axe or just protested the rotten sound quality which was preventing the audience from hearing Dylan's lyrics.

A bit like JJ Cale, a lot of Seeger's songs are better-known via other people's versions. Here's Peter, Paul and Mary's version of If I Had A Hammer, and here's the mighty Byrds with their electrified version of Turn! Turn! Turn! in 1965. Turn! Turn! Turn! was famously based on some Bible verses, specifically Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, which you need to be careful not to confuse with Ezekiel 25:17 if you can possibly avoid it.

honey I whisky-ed the haggis

It was Burns Night again last night, so I concocted another haggis-based recipe. Why not just go for the traditional haggis, bashed neeps and clampit tatties, you might ask. Well, because it's deadly dull and bland, is why, plus none of it has any texture. Everything being squishy and amorphous so you can just spoon it in is great when you're eight months old, but as an adult I demand more interesting textures in my food, maybe even something that requires me to chew occasionally. I can do that, I have teeth, so let's push the envelope and use them a bit.

The haggis-stuffed-into-some-poultry theme from three years back is a good one, but that last dish suffered from being a bit dry (a problem it shares with the classic neeps and tatties version), so here's my solution to that problem: haggis-stuffed chicken in whisky sauce.

So basically you mash up the haggis - there's 60g or so per breast here, basically one double-pack of these MacSween's haggis slices, which seemed to be all there was available anywhere - with some whisky, slice open a couple of chicken breasts, stuff them, stick them in a baking dish with the cut edge facing upwards to stop everything falling out, pour the sauce over, and bake for about 40-45 minutes. The sauce went a little something like this:

• most of a decent-sized glass of whisky* - use some of the rest to wet the haggis with before you mash it up, and drink the rest;
• a small amount of vegetable stock;
• a dessertspoon or so of Dijon mustard;
• a couple of dessertspoons of honey - any sort will do, but I suppose if you wanted to be fanatically Scottish you'd use one of the heather-based ones;
• a splash of lemon juice;
• a dessertspoon or so of Philly cheese, or a dollop of cream, whichever fits best with your diet regime - note that this is best stirred in at the end.

Once the chicken is cooked, take it out and leave it for 5 minutes while you stir your creamifying agent of choice into the sauce, then slice up the chicken, arrange as artfully as you like on a plate, add some roasty potato wedges and some green veg, bish bosh, sorted. And very nice too.

You'll notice from the "after" photograph that we cooked some asparagus; just to provide a statistical data point for anyone who's interested I am in the (according to Wikipedia) 78% of the human population who don't notice their piss smelling of asparagus after eating it. My piss pretty much still just smells of piss.

[* - my secret whisky blend for this dish is as follows: one part Teacher's to two parts old-school Ledaig. No particular reason except that I only had a thimbleful of Teacher's left, so I needed to supplement it, and I thought something smoky might be more interesting.]

schortbach und zeidz und etwas für das Wochenende

Remember my local barber? The one just down the road bearing the punningly chucklesome name of Herr Kutz? Well, despite my fears for its commercial health and welfare, it seems still to be there, and I'm pretty sure I recall even seeing it with the shutters up and open for business a while back.

If they are struggling in the current grim financial climate where people are probably either growing their hair long to save a few bob or resorting to some hideously botched amateur DIY hair-cutting regime, then they should consider taking a leaf out of the book of the bloke who runs the identically named salon in Plymouth.

This guy (whose name is Anthony Braddon) is complaining that the makers of the latest computer gaming phenomenon Grand Theft Auto V have stolen his hairdressing concept. What he means by this is that somewhere in the astonishingly detailed GTAV universe, as you meander about fulfilling the terms of one of the complex missions, or just kick back and do a bit of exploring in between more important stuff like shooting people and beating up prostitutes, you can find a hairdresser's called Herr Kutz. Where you can probably go in and get a haircut if you want, or just mow down everyone inside with an AK-47 and/or incinerate them with a flamethrower, depending on your mood.

That's about where the similarity ends, though, although Mr. Braddon is most insistent that the fictional version displays a series of similarities with his real-life establishment that absolutely could not have arisen by chance. Like, for instance, the interior of the shop looks like the interior of a hairdresser's. And so does his! And there is a claim that the sign is written in "the same font". Is it, though?

So, basically, kudos to Mr. Braddon for dreaming up a cheap way of getting some publicity for his establishment, which I'm quite prepared to believe offers a veritable cornucopia of tonsorial delights of a splendidly high quality, with no accidental ear-severing, and not even the remotest possibility either of being the unwilling recipient of a Lionel Blair cut or ending up having your throat slashed and being made into a pie. It's somewhat implausible to me that - having presumably trawled the internet looking for stuff to get faux-offended by - Mr. Braddon didn't spot that there are at least three other establishments of the same name in the UK, not to mention one in Canada. With regard to the GTAV use of the name, apparently "he has consulted lawyers over alleged trademark infringement but was told they could not do anything". I'm impressed they managed to stop laughing for long enough to get such a coherent sentence out. Game creators Rockstar North are apparently "yet to comment on the accusations", so they're obviously still pissing themselves.

As always it's hard to work out which bits of this supremely lame non-story originated with Mr. Braddon himself, and which bits have been confabulated by the lazy drunken Daily Mail hack dispatched to suburban Plymouth, probably as a punishment for some misdemeanour - not hating immigrants enough or something. The one bright spot is that, buried in the midst of the article, the careful reader can find - finally! - an explanation for the shop's name. It's - wait for it - "a play on words". Ahhhhh, right.

the last book I read

Waiting For Sunrise by William Boyd.

It's 1913, and young actor Lysander Rief is, along with a whole host of other famous or soon-to-be-famous people, in Vienna. Lysander's presence is for perhaps less momentous reasons, in global terms anyway, though pretty momentous for him - he's consulting an English psychoanalyst, Dr. Bensimon, about an issue of a rather personal nature. Rather unusually for an otherwise healthy young man, Lysander has anorgasmia - so instead of finishing off in the prescribed manner, wiping the old chap on the curtains and bidding his lady friend good day with a jaunty tip of the hat he's hammering away joylessly for hours before eventually having to give up and go and have a cup of tea.

This unfortunate situation hasn't stopped him from still having something of an eye for the ladies, though, and he soon has a chance encounter in Dr. Bensimon's waiting room with Hettie Bull, artist's model and muse and fellow patient, though in exactly what capacity is never made clear. It's certainly not anything to do with a distaste for sex, because no sooner have she and Lysander struck up a conversation than she's inviting him over to her studio for a bit of nude modelling, a transparent ruse that pretty much inevitably ends up with the two of them going at it like knives.

Things take a downhill turn, though, when in quick succession Hettie announces that she is pregnant with Lysander's child and accuses him of rape. Lysander is thrown in prison, but manages to escape back to England with a bit of collusion from some slightly shady types at the British Embassy. Needless to say once Lysander is safely home and World War I has broken out, these shady types come calling on him to repay his debt by doing a favour for them.

This favour involves heading off to the shores of Lake Geneva to try to track down the recipient of some intercepted coded messages from England, and "persuade" this recipient to give up the code cipher that decodes them. Lysander turns out not only to be a master of disguise (putting his acting skills to good use) but also to have some aptitude for certain other espionage skills, like torture. He puts these to such good effect that he inadvertently kills the man he's interrogating, and in making good his escape is repeatedly shot by one of his Swiss contacts. So not a completely smooth operation, but Lysander does come away, in addition to being riddled with bullets, with the code cipher he was after.

Rather than gratefully allowing Lysander to retire from the spying business, though, his handlers want him to do another mission - this time to find the source of the now-decrypted messages in the War Office in London. The outcome of these investigations involves people rather closer to home - literally so in this case as the main suspect is an associate of Lysander's mother. This prompts some agonised weighing of family loyalty against patriotic duty, until, as usually happens in these circumstances, matters are taken out of the protagonist's hands and the stage is set for some climactic confrontations and revelations.

This is the fourth Boyd on this list and (leaving aside A Good Man In Africa which was an out-of-sequence dip into the back catalogue) follows on from Restless and Ordinary Thunderstorms in being quite thriller-y and from Restless in particular in concerning itself with the details of wartime espionage (though that was World War II). The plot here meanders about quite a lot and you get the impression that the various parts (Vienna, London, a brief trip to the French trenches, Geneva, London again) are just separate episodes linked together solely by featuring the same protagonist rather than being linked by a strong narrative thread.

Some of the characters' motivations are a bit thin as well - it's never entirely clear why Lysander's mother kills herself towards the end of the book, since she seems to have been cleared of any suspicion of involvement in the spying plot, and Lysander's own motives towards the various women he's involved with throughout are never very clear either. He has dalliances with old flame Blanche, Hettie, his co-star in Strindberg's Miss Julie, and an unrequited thing for Mme. Duchesne, his Swiss contact, even after she puts half-a-dozen bullets in him, but just when you think he's decided that Hettie is the woman he can't live without he ups and proposes to Blanche after unexpectedly meeting her outside a London theatre during a Zeppelin raid.

Lysander's original reason for being in Vienna - his anorgasmia - seems to be a transparent MacGuffin that Boyd couldn't be bothered continuing with once it had put Lysander where he needed to be for the story to get going. Once he hooks up with Hettie he's soon firing the porridge gun into a succession of willing partners with no problems whatsoever, thus finding himself cured perhaps a little more readily than actually happens in real life.

Europe in 1913 is a pretty rich source of fictional jumping-off points - eve of disaster, early 20th century decadence about to be rudely interrupted by war, the old certainties swept away, disastrous but also cleansing in the dismantling of old class hierarchies, yadda yadda yadda. Of books in this list The Shooting Party is set at around the same time, of books not in this list there are probably hundreds. Vienna is also one of the recurring themes in John Irving's fiction, though not, as far as I recall, in the one Irving on this list, Until I Find You.

So, anyway, it's rollickingly readable, well-written and entertaining, as all Boyds are, and if that sounds like I'm building up to a "but" it's only that I still think Brazzaville Beach and The Blue Afternoon are the best things he's written. You can't really go far wrong with any of them, though.

block WHACK block block WHACK

Just a quick follow-up to the Kallis post - I'll try and keep it brief, as the fraction of my already minuscule blog readership that has any interest in this stuff must be vanishingly small, indeed the odds are it's probably just me. But, hey, any complaints? Get your own blog.

The criticism of Kallis as a bit of a stodgy batsman and not the most exciting to watch is a bit harsh, given his huge value to the South African team in the role he was asked to perform, but contains a grain of truth. His overall career strike rate of a fraction under 46 (note to non-stats-buffs: this is the number of runs scored per 100 balls faced) is low compared with his contemporaries like Ricky Ponting (59), Sachin Tendulkar and Kumar Sangakkara (both around 54), though higher than the proper stonewallers like Atherton and Boycott (both mid-30s).

So it seems a bit paradoxical that Kallis ranks second on the six-hitting list, almost as if he had a bit of a split personality while batting and would occasionally go berserk and whack a couple into the stands before settling down to blocking everything again.

So I therefore propose a new statistical measure which compares the number of sixes hit by a batsman with his overall scoring rate. You can't just divide one by the other, though, goodness me no, as since the sixes count is cumulative that would disproportionately favour people who've had very long careers. A fairer way would be to weight the formula with the number of innings batted in, as follows:

VMSI = (number of sixes hit) / (overall strike rate x number of innings)

VMSI stands for Violent Mood Swing Index, which is what I'm calling it. I mean, what else would you call it?

As before, let's restrict it to people with over 3000 runs to get rid of some of the freaky statistical outliers. Here's the top 25:

Name	Matches	Innings	Runs	Strike rate	Sixes	VMSI
CL Cairns (NZ)	62	104	3320	57.09	87	146.53
NS Sidhu (India)	51	78	3202	44.33	38	109.90
CD McMillan (NZ)	55	91	3116	54.95	54	107.99
A Flintoff (Eng/ICC)	79	130	3845	62.04	82	101.67
Misbah-ul-Haq (Pak)	46	78	3087	41.22	32	99.53
MS Dhoni (India)	81	127	4342	59.74	75	98.85
Imran Khan (Pak)	88	126	3807	47.52	55	91.86
JR Reid (NZ)	58	108	3428	33.84	33	90.29
AC Gilchrist (Aus)	96	137	5570	81.95	100	89.07
BJ Haddin (Aus)	54	91	3007	58.61	47	88.12
CH Gayle (WI)	99	174	6933	59.90	90	86.35
JH Kallis (ICC/SA)	166	280	13289	45.97	97	75.36
ML Hayden (Aus)	103	184	8625	60.10	82	74.15
CG Greenidge (WI)	108	185	7558	49.02	67	73.88
KP Pietersen (Eng)	104	181	8181	61.72	81	72.51
CL Hooper (WI)	102	173	5762	50.27	63	72.44
CH Lloyd (WI)	110	175	7515	57.77	70	69.24
BB McCullum (NZ)	82	141	4684	60.76	59	68.87
IT Botham (Eng)	102	161	5200	60.71	67	68.55
IVA Richards (WI)	121	182	8540	69.28	84	66.62
WJ Cronje (SA)	68	111	3714	44.63	33	66.61
BC Lara (ICC/WI)	131	232	11953	60.51	88	62.69
Mohammad Yousuf (Pak)	90	156	7530	52.39	51	62.40
V Sehwag (ICC/India)	104	180	8586	82.23	91	61.48
HH Gibbs (SA)	90	154	6167	50.26	47	60.72

A few things to note:

• Chris Cairns is out in front by quite a startling margin, by virtue of his remarkable sixes per innings rate and his brisk but not startling strike rate.
• Kallis comes in 12th, but note that he is first among batsmen with over 7000 runs, fourth among batsmen with over 4000 runs, and that of the people above him only Sidhu, Misbah and Gayle are full-time batsmen, all the others being all-rounders of one kind or another who typically batted at number 7 or lower and were given a bit more licence to swing the bat.
• A few names you wouldn't expect pop up, like the late Hansie Cronje and Navjot Sidhu of India. Sidhu in particular was notorious for (among other things) periods of scrupulous defence punctuated by some furious smiting, generally of spinners. In fact if you follow that link you'll see the first line of the Cricinfo biography reads "Navjot Singh Sidhu's cricket had a schizophrenic touch to it". QED, I'd say, since that's pretty much exactly what this index is a measure of.
• The men who do the breakneck scoring every day of the week, in particular the likes of Adam Gilchrist and Virender Sehwag, appear at 9th and 24th respectively in the list, undone by their high scoring rates.
• The reason the list seems to favour relatively modern players (John Reid is the only man on the list to have played Tests before 1965) is mainly because stats like exact numbers of balls faced and boundaries hit are not reliably available for older matches.