incidental music spot of the day

The opening bars of White Room by Cream over the opening moments of the Radio 4 adaptation of Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? at 9pm yesterday evening. I caught the first 20 minutes or so of it at the end of a long drive back from Derby, long enough to also catch a snippet of Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) later on as well.

Two filmic links, firstly that Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? was the basis (with the usual liberties taken with the plot) for Ridley Scott's classic 1982 film Blade Runner, and secondly that the canonical use of Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) in film is towards the end of Withnail And I as the two protagonists return to London. Get in the back of the van!

the last book I read

Metroland by Julian Barnes.

Chris and Toni are a couple of 16-year-old schoolboys in suburban early-1960s London. In addition to the usual teenage pursuits of malodorous spottiness and relentless wanking they also cultivate some slightly more cerebral ones, mainly scoffing at the stupidity of their school contemporaries, despising the bourgeois sterility of their parents' lives and fantasising about heading off to France and being bohemian poetic types, France being the centre of all that is arty and revolutionary as well as containing lots of knowing Gauloise-toting French girls who are gagging for it.

We then jump forward to 1968, and Chris has realised at least part of his fantasy by being in Paris, on the flimsy pretext of writing a thesis about French theatre. He's soon enthusiastically pursuing the other half of the Paris fantasy as well, by meeting sultry French girl Annick and persuading her to relieve him of his virginity. So bound up is he with cashing in on the sex thing at every possible opportunity that the seminal events of May 1968 rather pass him by, something he's slightly embarrassed about in hindsight, particularly since Toni reminds him about it constantly.

The last part of the novel happens in 1977 - Chris has settled into his own version of suburban sterility and tedium, or so Toni would have him believe anyway. Married to Marion, the clever, down-to-earth English girl he met towards the end of his time in Paris, father to a young daughter and occupant of a steady job and a nice house, Chris certainly seems to have embraced the whole bourgeois middle-class thing with a vengeance. So why is he so happy? And is Toni really as scornful of Chris' lifestyle as he purports to be, or is he just jealous?

This was Julian Barnes' first novel, published in 1980, and follows many of the standard rules for first novels: most importantly, write about what you know. The bits describing Chris' childhood are supposedly reasonably close to being autobiographical - Barnes certainly did grow up in suburban north-west London, and the close ties with France are real, Barnes being if anything more celebrated as a novelist in France than he is in Britain.

It's pretty short (176 pages in my Picador edition) and less experimental than some of Barnes' later stuff, Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters in particular. It's very good on the business of how bright, slightly smug teenage boys act (and I know, because I used to be one), and raises some interesting questions about how youthful idealism mutates into a strong desire to do nothing more than just hang out with your wife and kids. It's fairly slight, though, and as with the rest of Barnes' books one ends up perhaps admiring the cleverness of it rather than really engaging with the characters. I would recommend the pair of love triangle books Talking It Over and Love, Etc. and the darker, slightly Ian McEwan-esque Before She Met Me. Barnes won the Booker Prize in 2011 for The Sense Of An Ending, having been nominated three times before - I think there may be just a hint of a lifetime achievement award being handed out there, just as for some other past recipients.

Metroland won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1981, as did A Good Man In Africa. The usual list can be found there. It was also made into a film - starring Christian Bale and Emily Watson among others - in 1997.

mapsolutely fabulous

Inspired by this quiz in the Guardian last week - which you should go and do first; I got a distinctly average 7/10, and that was aided by a couple of lucky guesses - I've harvested a few pictures of maps from some (fiction) books on my bookshelves. These are in no particular order, and I'm not promising that I've captured every book I own that contains a map, but as it happens this quick skim yielded a nice round ten pictures, so here they are. Have a look (click for embiggenment) and see if you recognise any. If it helps at all, four of these are from books which have featured in this blog - I have omitted the obvious one, Riddley Walker, since I've reproduced the map here before, and that would be too easy. Answers in comment #1, unless someone beats me to it.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

bulbous developments #4

Right, you know the drill by now, so no frills, here's the low-down: latest bulb to expire was bulb number 11, which went a week ago on June 6th. This was another of the surviving 40W incandescent jobs, so no money/days calculation here. I just thought you might like to know.

mine eyes have seen the gory of the nailing of the Lord

Just a follow-up to the last post, with reference to the 1970s Bible-stories book in particular - you might say, well, as long as you set up the context correctly, i.e. it's just some old stories and not actually true, where's the harm?

As it happens the book I've got - which a quick look at the front page reveals was given to Hazel for her christening in April 1978 - has some illustrations which reveal the child-friendliness of these charming old stories.

Here's the Great Flood - Noah and his family are all fine (animal poo build-up problems aside), sailing off over the horizon in their great big ark, but everyone else is completely fucked:

And then there's the first Passover - those who were foolish enough not to smear their front door with a sufficient amount of goat guts having their first-born arbitrarily killed:

Here's old Moses reading out the ten commandments - just to make the point that this is NOT A JOKE and God is REALLY SERIOUS about this shit, he's doing it in front of a blood-smeared altar upon which there are some pots with all manner of unspeakable animal remains in them:

Here's where this shit really gets real: Salome carting around the head of John the Baptist (looking a bit surprised, as I imagine you would be) on a plate:

And finally, from the otherwise more mellow and cuddly New Testament, here's that nice Jesus chap being nailed to a tree:

The point is that far from being a collection of cosy harmless morality tales, this is an unmitigated series of Bronze Age horrors with no redeeming moral message whatsoever, unless of course you actually believe your kids need to be traumatised into obedience lest they meet a fate far worse than any of those illustrated in unnecessarily lavish detail above, i.e. burning in hell for all eternity. Since that's all utter nonsense the best thing is probably to keep this well out of the reach of children.

By contrast, let me once again commend to you the work of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, partly because they're just terrific stories, but also for the subtle messages of equality and tolerance that get unobtrusively slipped into the books. Here's Tabby McTat's new owners, Prunella and Pat - it's never deemed worthy of special mention that they are a pair of middle-aged lesbians - why would it be, after all?

And the knights-rescuing-princesses thing is nicely subverted in Zog when Princess Pearl announces that Zog and the knight can just ruddy well cut out all that nonsense about fighting for her honour, as she doesn't need saving, thank you very much, and she's going to go off and be a doctor.

Try any of that stuff in the Bible, and they'll probably stone you to death. It's even worse than saying Jehovah.

first they came for the gruffaloes

I suppose there's an argument that Richard Dawkins provides a vital service for the rationalist community by acting as a sort of lightning-conductor for abuse and hatred, owing to his being atheism's most publicly-visible spokesperson. And it is true that a lot of the vitriol directed at him is entirely undeserved, and motivated either by a visceral reaction to the perceived threat to the cosy religious status quo, or by some hopelessly ill-thought-through notion of "balance" that shies away from his public statements as being too "strident".

That said, it is also true that some of his public pronouncements are ill-thought-out and badly-presented, and just confirm the view a lot of people already have of sceptics as joyless, humourless hyper-pedants, and of Dawkins himself as some sort of representative of the rationalist thought police, like a sort of cross between Professor Yaffle and Hitler. This is especially true of his Twitter feed, constrained as it is to 140 characters, which is a pretty hilarious record of ill-thought-out statements, general piling on by the rest of the Twitterverse, and then some huffy clarifications, grumpy retractions and complaints about people not understanding nuance or sarcasm or whatever.

The latest spat actually didn't originate on Twitter, but as a result of a speech Dawkins gave at the Cheltenham Science Festival, where, despite later claims that various media outlets had taken his words out of context, he pretty clearly did suggest that fairy tales are at least potentially harmful to children:

I think it's rather pernicious to inculcate into a child a view of the world which includes supernaturalism – we get enough of that anyway. Even fairy tales, the ones we all love, with wizards or princesses turning into frogs or whatever it was. There’s a very interesting reason why a prince could not turn into a frog – it's statistically too improbable.

Needless to say this generated something of a Twitter storm and required him to clarify his thoughts via various media outlets, though he still didn't seem entirely clear, simultaneously claiming that he'd never claimed fairy tales were harmful:

I did not, and will not, condemn fairy tales. My whole life has been given over to stimulating the imagination, and in childhood years, fairy stories can do that.

and that, well, maybe he had, but now he'd changed his mind:

If you did inculcate into a child's mind supernaturalism ... that would be pernicious. The question is whether fairy stories actually do that and I'm now thinking they probably don't. It could even be the reverse.

Of course part of Dawkins' intention here would have been to draw a parallel with religion and its assorted implausible tales, it being a fairly common atheist trope to refer to them scoffingly as "fairy tales" - I've done it myself often enough. I think he's probably taking aim at the wrong target, here, though, unless there are parents who, in addition to reading these stories to their children, insist that they are LITERALLY true and that if you keep sucking your thumbs some crazy person really will come along and cut them off. It's not the implausible content of the stories that's the issue, but rather the fact that there is a subset of implausible stories that some people would have you believe are the literal truth, and furthermore get all punchy and bomb-y if you try to point out that they're not.

There is another problem, of course, which is: what's a fairy story? I mean, I grant you that the whole pumpkins turning into gold carriages, frogs turning into princes thing from what you might consider "classic" fairy stories is obviously not real, but then what of talking pigs? Dragons? And let's not forget there really is no such thing as a gruffalo. Strip away anything not corresponding to the real world and you discard something like 99% of children's literature (and indeed adult literature); you're really just left with the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Haynes manual.

I was prompted to go off at a mental tangent by all this and think about how much I do, or should seek to, police my daughter's reading material. I don't so much mean the religious stuff, since we don't exactly get a lot of that pushed on us, although I did come across an old hardback Children's Bible Stories book in a pile of stuff the other day which I think must once have been Hazel's (I've hidden it again now). I think I'm more inclined to be all censor-y about the stuff that's pushing the gender essentialism, pink for girls, blue for boys, Disney princess tropes, since all that stuff gives me the heebie-jeebies. We have acquired (by what means I'm not sure) a couple of books that I deem to be over the line in this regard, and I've made sure that they've been shoved down the back of the book rack where they're unlikely ever to be pulled out and read. I answer my own questions about whether I'm being too sensitive about all this by telling myself I can afford to be, given the blizzard of cultural influences in the opposite direction she'll be subjected to once she gets out into the world.

Of course this is fairly easy when you've got a large degree of control over what cultural influences your child is exposed to, but what about when they go to school? This is where you have to make some tricky judgments about what to let slide and what to dig in your heels about - just as I wasn't prepared to bow to prevailing cultural orthodoxy and have Nia christened, I certainly wasn't prepared to have her go to an overtly religious school, not least because there is usually some sort of entry test involving gauging the devoutness of the parents, and that would not have gone well.

But there will still probably be some absurd uniform rules, and inevitably there will be some sort of exposure to religion in one form or another. What about nativity plays, for instance? Do schools in general still do those, or is it just the fundamentalist Christian ones? Would I feel obliged to veto Nia's participation, or would that be heavy-handed? And what if the school organised an outing to Noah's Ark Zoo Farm? I think that might be the thing that tipped me over the edge into torching the place.

water way to plan a walk

Anyone reading the extraordinary weather predictions being made by the Daily Express late last week could have been forgiven for thinking that going out for a walk on Saturday would have been literally madness. I mean, who would willingly subject themselves to "hailstones the size of cricket balls", "DEADLY lightning strikes" and "extreme tornado activity", except someone in the grip of severe mental derangement?

Other weather forecasting methods are available, though, and the BBC Weather website actually reckoned that the place we were heading for would be relatively rain-free on Saturday. Additionally there is Dave's Rule Of Weather Forecasting, which has two parts, as follows:

1. Chances are tomorrow's weather will be very much like today's;
2. If you want to know what the weather will be like the day after tomorrow, wait until tomorrow and then apply rule 1. 

Incidentally it is true that there really was an extreme weather event back in 1843 ( this is the "Worst HAILSTORMS in 170 YEARS" that the Express refers to) which really did involve some severe hailstorms. I'm highly sceptical of the claim of "hailstones leaving craters FIVE FEET deep across England", though, even so.

Anyway, I can ruin the suspense for you now by revealing that, a bit of initial drizzle and a couple of brief squally showers aside it was shorts and T-shirts weather most of the day. Not a hailstone in sight, not even a little one.

This is the latest in a series of walks that has previously taken in a number of routes in the Gloucestershire area, as well as a couple in Wales. We decided for this one that we'd head over towards the western Brecon Beacons and have a tour of the Ystradfellte waterfalls. Basically these are sandwiched between the main peaks of Pen y Fan and its neighbours and the more remote Black Mountain (venue for my stag weekend in May 2011), about an hour's drive from Newport.

No great elevation involved - highest point is a smidgen under 300 metres - but a bit of up and down and some scrambling, particularly in the vicinity of the waterfalls, of which there are many: Sgwd Gwladus, Sgwd Clun-gwyn and Sgwd yr Eira being the most impressive of the ones we saw. Sgwd yr Eira is particularly noteworthy for having a path running across the rock face behind the waterfall which the intrepid walker can take if he or she doesn't mind getting a bit wet.

There's a fair amount of variation in the amount of water coming over the various waterfalls, depending on how much rain has fallen on the hills above the falls in the past few weeks. I'd say they were reasonably full but not exceptional yesterday, somewhere between the bare trickle they get reduced to in the summer and the raging torrents they become after persistent heavy rain. Compare for instance the picture of Sgwd Gwladus (the first picture) here, and the one here, and note the before and after pictures of Sgwd yr Eira here.

Here's the route map - if you can't get it to display big enough, try this one. We parked in the Dinas Rock car park in Pontneddfechan and did a clockwise circuit from there.

The GPS tracking info (from which that map is drawn) reckons the round trip was 10.8 miles, more than enough distance to justify stopping off for a cheeky pint of Rhymney Bitter in the Angel in Pontneddfechan before heading home. As always there are some photos, here. To augment the photos, Robin captured a couple of brief snippets of video footage in the vicinity of Sgwd Gwladus and behind Sgwd yr Eira.

the last book I read

Fanny Hill or Memoirs Of A Woman Of Pleasure by John Cleland.

What is a bright, ambitious and, as it happens, comely and buxom young girl of fifteen to do when both her parents are carried off in quick succession by the pox and she is left without any means of supporting herself? You'll recall young Kate aka Bob being left in a similar situation in the first episode of Blackadder II and failing to heed her father's advice:

Father: I'm sad because, my darling, our poverty has now reached such extremes that I can no longer afford to keep us. I must look to my own dear tiny darling to sustain me in my frail dotage.
Kate: But father, surely...
Father: Yes Kate, I want you to become a prostitute.

Well, it turns out Kate's old Dad knew what he was talking about after all. After heading up to London to seek her fortune under the supervision of an older friend, who promptly abandons her, Fanny is taken under the wing of kindly old Mrs. Brown, who it turns out is a serial "rescuer" of young girls, and who provides them with bed and board and expects very little in return except a bit of the old whoring. Fanny is a bit taken aback by this, at least at first, being an innocent country girl, but soon gets the idea after a bit of gentle girl-on-girl action from roommate Phoebe, and a bit of hiding-in-the-cupboard voyeurism.

Just as Fanny's future seems to be mapped out, though, she meets a young man called Charles, sleeping off an excess of drink in Mrs. Brown's kitchen, and after a courtship lasting all of a couple of minutes the pair decide that they are in love and that Charles will take her away from all this and set her up as his mistress. So they slip away and spend the next few weeks living together, during which time Charles relieves Fanny of the tiresome burden of her virginity.

Disaster strikes when Charles is sent overseas at short notice by his father, and Fanny is once again left on her own. But she is a shrewd and resilient girl and soon gets herself set up as the live-in mistress of the wealthy Mr. H, whom she doesn't love but who treats her well enough. All goes well until one day she comes home early and sees Mr. H giving the chamber maid a good seeing-to, whereupon Fanny is roused to take revenge by seducing the delivery boy and is caught in the act by Mr. H.

So Fanny is out on the street again. But her adventures have given her a clear instinct for self-preservation, a head for money-making, and a pretty good idea of where her, hem, hem, talents lie. So it doesn't take long for her to get set up in the house of Mrs. Cole, another smart old madam, and really get to grips with the prostitutional life. And what a life! If she's not participating in eight-way orgies, there's riverside skinny-dipping action, some spicy flagellation and even a bit of through-the-keyhole spying on some hot forbidden penetrative man-on-man action.

But all good things must come to an end, and eventually Mrs. Cole decides she's getting too old for the old whoring game and retires to her little cottage (Dunwhorin, presumably) in the country. Landing on her feet once again, Fanny takes up with a kindly sixtysomething gentleman who just happens to possess a considerable fortune (which he soon makes Fanny the sole beneficiary of) and a dicky heart, leaving Fanny, still barely nineteen, a woman of considerable independent means. So when she meets Charles again, returned from his overseas trip but fallen upon hard times, she's in a position to make him an offer to their mutual benefit. And so to bed.

Fanny Hill is such a cultural and comedy staple that it's hard to know what to expect when reading it. You'll need to know that it was first published in 1749, and allegedly written piecemeal over the preceding 20 years, so there'll be some archaic language to get through. But, as with some other books, the unfamiliarity of the language really isn't much of a burden once you get used to it, and the flowery prose in which the central scenes are rendered can't conceal the utter filth they contain:

Standing then between Harriet's legs, which were supported by her two companions at their widest extension, with one hand he gently disclosed the lips of that luscious mouth of nature, whilst with the other, he stooped his mighty machine to its lure, from the height of his stiff stand-up towards his belly; the lips, kept open by his fingers, received its broad shelving head of coral hue: and when he had nestled it in, he hovered there a little, and the girls then delivered over to his hips the agreeable office of supporting her thighs; and now, as if he meant to spin out his pleasure, and give it the more play for its life, he passed up his instrument so slow that we lost sight of it inch by inch, till at length it was wholly taken into the soft laboratory of love, and the mossy mounts of each fairly met together. 

Basically the flimsy plot devices, such as they are, just serve as the scaffolding to hold the sex scenes together. It hardly needs saying that this is as rose-tinted a view of the business of prostitution as Pretty Woman or Belle de Jour, probably more so given that the action takes place in the mid-18th century, not exactly prime female-empowerment territory. Apart from anything else the vexed issue of contraception never really arises, except in that it's pretty clear that no barrier methods are being used. Fanny does get pregnant during her brief sojourn of living with Charles (and subsequently miscarries) but how all the rest of the uninhibited unprotected fucking isn't resulting in sprogs popping out everywhere isn't clear. On the plus side the whole notion of unabashed female hunger for, and enjoyment of, sex was a good deal more subversive then than it is now, and Fanny is a very engaging central character who clearly enjoys her job greatly, and not just for its money-making aspects. A bit like The Fermata, analysis beyond just revelling in the joyous filthiness of it all is probably missing the point.

There have been many under-the-counter-in-a-brown-paper-bag film adaptations of Fanny Hill over the years; the BBC did a rather more respectable one back in 2007, which necessarily took a bit more of a soft-focus approach to the sex (thereby, arguably, defeating the object) but which may be of interest to anyone wondering where they'd seen the female flatmate from those BT Infinity adverts before.

One last thing: it's unclear from the various online dictionaries whether Fanny Hill is the inspiration for the use of the word "fanny" to describe (US readers should probably stop reading now to avoid confusion) the female genitalia. It's listed as a possible derivation here; most other dictionaries don't offer any clues. My giant Chambers dictionary is similarly tight-lipped (ooer) on the subject.

paris in the the spring

We've been on a couple of trips lately that have generated some photos, so this is mainly just somewhere to hang the links from. A few explanatory notes, though:

• 
  Hazel and I went to Paris on the Eurostar at the beginning of May, a quick 48-hour jaunt organised (and, more importantly, paid for) by Utility Warehouse, who Hazel does some work as a distributor for in addition to her photography activities. I can't give you the promotional spiel for UW, but if you want to have a look at what they have to offer, start here. Anyway, the point is we got a free trip to Paris out of it, staying at the very nice Hyatt Regency Paris Étoile out at Porte Maillot on the north-eastern corner of the Bois de Boulogne. Not much time to do anything out of the ordinary run of touristy stuff, but we did take a twilight river cruise on the Bateaux-Mouches on Friday night, and took advantage of a glorious sunny day on the Saturday to do a walking tour of Paris, starting at the Eiffel Tower and heading out to Montmartre and Sacré-Cœur. Photos can be found here. 
• A couple of weeks later we went off on a family trip (i.e. with Nia this time) to Bluestone in Pembrokeshire. This is a self-contained family holiday village complete with shops, pub (featuring excellent Doom Bar), swimming pool and various sporting activities. The best description I can give you is that it's a little bit like a cross between CenterParcs and The Prisoner, but without all that unpleasantness with the giant beach balls if one should stray beyond the boundaries of the complex. We verified this by venturing out a couple of times, once to cycle around Canaston Woods and once to go to the seaside at Freshwater East, which is lovely and - largely because it's not right next to a town with shops and toilets and amusement arcades and the like - very quiet. We also called into Tenby on the way back home, which is much more in the stereotypical British seaside town vein, but still very nice, and features the Pembrokeshire Pasty & Pie Co.'s excellent shop just a couple of minutes' walk from the beach. Photos can be found here.

filamentary, my dear Watts on

More exciting developments with the kitchen lighting, so I hope you've got your Bulbsplosion Bingo cards handy. First to expire was bulb number 12, one of the surviving 40W incandescent bulbs of indeterminate age (but given the general instability it's probably a few months at most), which gave out on May 24th. No pence per day calculation for this one, for obvious reasons.

Then, on May 27th, two more - firstly bulb number 7, another of the valiant surviving incandescent 40W brigade.

Also, bulb number 1, the first of the 28W halogen bulbs to expire. This one clocked up 28 days, which at an initial cost of £4.28 works out at an eye-watering 15.3p per day.

You'll notice that I'm lagging behind a bit on replacing the blown bulbs. I should get on and do this as I may as well use up the remaining ones in the cupboard, plus it'll also make it easier to track which ones go phut. I'm not intending to purchase any more until I've got some more conclusive evidence of which ones I should be buying. I suspect it'll end up being the LED ones, but I don't want to jump the gun. It's also important to be self-aware enough to recognise my natural inclination towards believing it's the IKEA bulbs that are the best, just because a bulb-buying trip to IKEA will also afford me the opportunity to stock up on meatballs and bizarre fish products.

the last book I read

The Blood Doctor by Barbara Vine.

Martin Nanther is a writer and, as Lord Nanther, a hereditary peer entitled to sit in the House of Lords. This right derives from his inheriting the peerage bestowed on his great-grandfather Henry Nanther by Queen Victoria - Henry Nanther having served as one of the Queen's senior physicians for many years.

Martin plans to write a biography of his great-grandfather, his interest having been piqued by some old documents which came into his possession after his mother's death which reveal some interesting titbits from Henry's personal life: he kept a mistress in London for many years, and married his wife Edith only after having previously been engaged to her younger sister Eleanor, that engagement ending when Eleanor was brutally murdered and her body thrown from a train.

Henry's medical speciality was diseases of the blood, and so he was invited to be Queen Victoria's resident expert on the so-called "royal disease" of haemophilia, from which her son Leopold suffered and of which her daughter Alice was a known carrier, Alice being responsible for infecting the Russian royal family as well.

Martin's suspicions are aroused when he starts researching his family tree for the biography, since several branches of it seem to feature sons who died very young, including Henry's own son George. This has a particular resonance for Martin as he and his second wife Jude are trying to conceive a child, but Jude has suffered a series of traumatic miscarriages. Is there some similar "bad blood" in the Nanther line?

Martin's family research leads him to various family members he had never even known existed, and to Switzerland, where pioneering studies of haemophilia were done in various isolated mountain communities, and where Henry was known to have been on several walking holidays in the mid-19th century. Is there a link between this and the mysterious early deaths of some of the male Nanthers? And who killed Eleanor? Was Henry involved? And if so, why?

You'll recall from the other Vine in this list that there are various themes that run through a lot of the books, and many of them are present here - the events that form the book's central puzzle (there is no "crime" in any meaningful legal sense) are over 100 years in the past and have to be uncovered by careful research involving lots of poring through letters and diaries, and there's a bit of homosexual subtext in that it's suggested Henry chose to do the things he's eventually revealed to have done after the death of his, hem hem, "close friend" Richard Hamilton in the Tay Bridge disaster in 1879.

The Vine books don't stand and fall on the quality of the central mystery, and just as well - I couldn't at this point tell you what it was in any of Asta's Book, The House Of Stairs or The Brimstone Wedding, though I read and enjoyed them all. The Chimney Sweeper's Boy's central protagonist having to flee and assume a new identity after accidentally giving his brother a blowjob in a sauna sticks in the mind, for some reason. The revelation of what Henry has done here is neither especially surprising nor at all plausible, but in a way it doesn't matter.

This is the most recent of all the Vines I've read, and they do seem to have gradually bulked up over the course of her career - the early ones are all around 300 pages, The Chimney Sweeper's Boy and Asta's Book are over 400 and The Blood Doctor is a beefy 466 pages. To be honest rather too much of this is taken up with meticulous family tree reconstruction that has the reader constantly diving back to the explanatory chart at the front, and none of which is as exciting as all the (literally) gory detail about haemophilia and its transmission. There's a lot here about "blood" in all its literal and colloquial senses - haemophilia, Martin and Jude's struggle to conceive (which turns out to be due to an unrelated genetic disorder), the House of Lords and the abolition of hereditary peers.

It's very good and very readable, but if you want some Vines I would suggest you try some of the earlier ones - A Fatal Inversion, The Brimstone Wedding, King Solomon's Carpet and No Night Is Too Long would do for starters.

bulbous developments #2

We've been away for a week, and it appears that another few bulbs took this as their opportunity to say "goodbye, cruel world" and "hasta la vista, baby" and furiously incandesce themselves into oblivion. Actually, one couldn't wait and gave up the ghost before we'd even left, but we found two more had committed filamentary seppuku on our return. You'll be wanting to tick these off on your Bulb Bingo card, so here they are:

Firstly, bulb number 10, which went on May 9th - this was an incandescent 25W job, which at 99p for 10 days works out at, let's say, 10p per day.

Then on our return today, two more. Firstly bulb number 4, one of the new batch of incandescent 40W ones, which at £1.49 for 18 days works out at a smidgen under 8.3p per day.

Then, later, bulb number 5, another incandescent 25W one, which at 99p for 18 days works out at 5.5p per day.

So by the rule I've just invented (but which seems reasonable enough) that says the expensive bulbs need to perform at least as well as the longest-lasting incandescent bulb, the required minimum expiry dates for the 4 quid LED bulbs and the £7.98 energy-saver are now 73 days and 145 days from their respective installation dates, or, to put it another way, July 19th and September 21st. Watch this space.

bulbous developments #1

Great things are afoot - the first two bulbs from the sample group as featured in this post have gone phut and, indeed, kablooie. And already the results are interesting - it was two of the high-powered incandescent 40W bulbs that went (at roughly the same time, on Monday 5th), as you might expect, but it was two of the new ones rather than two of the old ones that had already been cycled on and off an indeterminate number of times.

If you care to refer to the original bulb layout diagram, it was bulbs 2 and 3 that expired. This is actually quite opportune, in a way, as I just happen to have in my possession two new IKEA LED bulbs which I can now slot into the two gaps that have just opened up.

At first glance they are less blue than I was led (see what I did there?) to believe they might be - they are broadly the same sort of yellowish hue as the incandescent bulbs. Their "colour temperature" rating is 2700K, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Anyway, now the science bit: the two dead bulbs both lasted a pitiful 6 days each, at a cost of a smidgen under 25p per day. At that rate of attrition the LED bulbs only need to last 16 days to be better value, but I'd hope they might manage a bit longer than that. Time will tell.

didn't they do whale

Those of you who have been keeping an eye on developments with the possible imminent exploding whale situation in Newfoundland should be advised that it now looks as if the whale has taken the less exciting course of action and sprung a slow leak, making it now very unlikely that it's going to go pop or, indeed, kablooie. I know this because I've been keeping up with the latest news at hasthewhaleexplodedyet.com which has all the information you need, and the latest picture shows the whale all deflated and wrinkly, like a week-old party balloon.

Which is a pity, in many ways - though I expect the residents of the small Newfoundland town where this latest blubbery behemoth washed up are fairly relieved not to have their houses festooned in rotting whale entrails - because exploding whales are awesome, as I seem to remember saying towards the end of this earlier post. One should never miss an opportunity to link to the video of the Oregon whale-dynamiting in 1970, for instance, so here it is. No video exists, as far as I know, of the actual moment the Taiwanese sperm whale went off, though there is plenty of the gory aftermath.

There are a couple of other notable incidents, though - this one from the Faroe Islands where a sperm whale explodes while a marine biologist is trying to cut it open, and this one from Uruguay where the same thing happens (in a slightly less spectacular way, it must be said) while a whale carcass is being loaded onto a truck for disposal. I think the best of the rest is probably this one from somewhere in the Netherlands - what really makes it is the unflappable yellow-coated guy just phlegmatically sucking on his pipe as the malodorous tentacly Lovecraftian horror unfolds all around him.

the last book I read

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis.

Elizabeth Harmon is just eight years old when both her parents are messily killed in a car crash and she becomes an orphan and, as orphans do, gets packed off to an orphanage in Kentucky. This place likes to keep its potentially trouble-making youngsters nice and placid and compliant, and achieves this with some questionable drug-dispensing practices, basically involving keeping the kids dosed up with enough downers to pacify a rhinoceros.

So far, so One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, you might say, and, well, perhaps. But Beth's escape comes not from getting lobotomised and then asphyxiated by a seven-foot Native American, still less from hurling a stone washstand through a window and then jogging off into the night. No, Beth discovers that she has a freakish aptitude for chess after a chance encounter with the school janitor, Mr. Shaibel, while running a menial errand for a teacher. Mr. Shaibel is a keen player and grudgingly agrees to show her the rules. Needless to say she is soon running rings round him, and soon becomes something of a local curiosity, being periodically wheeled out to perform exhibitions against local school teams, whom she slaughters mercilessly despite playing twenty of them at the same time.

It's only when Beth is adopted by odd couple Mr. and Mrs. Wheatley that her chess career really takes off. Once Mr. Wheatley has disappeared on an endless "business trip" that it soon becomes clear he isn't coming back from, Beth decides to enter a local chess competition (having "borrowed" the entry fee) and wins. Mrs. Wheatley, previously a bit dismissive of Beth's chess obsession, now starts to sit up and take notice, and the two of them develop a nice little routine - Mrs. Wheatley organises the travel to chess tournaments, arranges the hotel and various other administrative stuff and then spends the rest of the time mooching round the hotel getting discreetly sloshed, and Beth takes care of the chess - the prize money from the tournaments pays all the bills.

The only downside of this arrangement is that Mrs. Wheatley has a bit of a tranquiliser habit, not to mention a bit of a booze habit, and some of these habits start to rub off on Beth, who was already a pretty regular consumer of the little green pills that they used to give out at the orphanage. Mostly she can keep it under control, but when Mrs. Wheatley expires after a bout of hepatitis on a chess-playing trip to Mexico, Beth is left to look after herself, and soon embarks on a gruelling dawn-to-dusk schedule of wine and gin consumption that leaves her fearful of having fried the precious brain cells that are the source of her freakish aptitude for chess.

Beth decides to invoke some help from her former dorm-mate at the orphanage, Jolene, the sort of sassy, no-nonsense black sidekick we're all familiar with from the movies. Soon enough Jolene has Beth eating properly, heading down the gym and, most importantly, cutting out the pints of white wine for breakfast. Beth's chess is soon restored to its former potency, and after a hard-fought win in the US championships she enters a couple of international tournaments, where she will inevitably come face-to-face with the Russians, and their intimidating world champion, Borgov.

Chess isn't an obvious subject for a novel, and it's a testament to Tevis's skill that the descriptions of chess games that occupy a fair chunk of the narrative of the novel are as exciting as they are. I used to play occasionally, so I know the basic rules (though I never played enough to be any good), and I recall a bit of the hoopla around the hilariously paranoid antics at the Karpov-Korchnoi world championship showdown in 1978, and the brief flurry of prime-time British TV chess coverage during the Kasparov-Short championship match in 1993. So I do have a bit of an interest, which raises the question of how interesting the novel would be to someone completely unfamiliar with the game. I suppose if you ignore the title and the picture on the front you've only got yourself to blame.

Anyway, Beth Harmon is an interesting, though not especially sympathetic character - we're presumably meant to draw some conclusions about the parallels between the sort of personality that is well-suited to endless poring over chess theory and the sort of personality that can't stop itself shovelling in the gin and pills. Harmon's being a woman is also interesting; at the time of the novel's publication (1983) no woman had ever made any serious impact at the highest level of chess, although seven-year-old Judit Polgár had no doubt already played her first games. There are some elements of heavily-disguised autobiography here as well  - Beth's early promise, brief going off the rails and triumphant return echoing Tevis's own early successes with The Hustler and The Man Who Fell To Earth (both famously filmed), a couple of decades of alcoholism and then a late flurry of novels (including this one) before his death in 1984.

I'd say this is as much of a little forgotten gem of late-20th century American fiction as Stoner, even though it's less self-consciously literary. A couple of further coincidental parallels: the action in The Queen's Gambit starts just as Stoner's ends, in the mid-1950s, and both books have forewords by other authors who feature in this list - John McGahern there, Lionel Shriver here.

here's something bulbous you may be interested in

Allow me to introduce my Great Kitchen Light Bulb Experiment. Our kitchen is lit by, among other things, twelve recessed spotlights in the ceiling, which take the little screw-in R50 spotlight bulbs. All great, and very illuminating, but I suspect that they were wired in (probably by my predecessor, whose enthusiasm for DIY considerably exceeded my own) to a circuit that previously serviced a couple of fluorescent striplights or something similar. What that means is that the circuit is a bit overloaded, the practical upshot of which is that the bulbs tend to blow a lot and it's a constant running battle keeping enough working lightbulbs installed to see what you're cooking.

Normally we buy these standard incandescent 40-watt bulbs from B&Q, though elsewhere in the house we've gone energy-saving wherever possible. So I thought I'd try an experiment: buy a range of different ones and keep a log of when they fail. It's not especially scientific, but it keeps me off the streets. Here's the smorgasbord of illuminatory delights I purchased from B&Q yesterday:

A quick run-through from left to right:

• these 28W halogen bulbs at £4.28 each
• the standard 40W incandescent bulbs we've been using already at £1.49 each
• the 25W version of the same thing at 99p each
• the 9W full eco-warrior energy-saving version at £7.98

There is another bulb option available - LED bulbs, also available from B&Q at an eye-watering £10.98 each. The only reason I didn't purchase one of these was that I happen to know IKEA sell them at 4 quid a pop, so I'll wait until I can get a couple of those. There were four bulbs still working when I started, so I filled the remaining 8 slots with two halogens, two 25W bulbs, the single energy-saver and three 40W bulbs, distributed as randomly as possible. Here's a handy pictorial representation of the distribution:

The way to visualise this is to imagine yourself lying on your back on our kitchen floor with your head pointing roughly north, towards the utility room at the back of the house. I did try to take a (pre-bulb-fitting) photograph from exactly that position, but the ceiling isn't high enough to get it all in. This is the best I could do (same orientation as the diagram):

My intention is to keep a log of which bulbs fail and when and track which ones last the longest. As I say, it's not particularly scientific, because the two banks of bulbs (left and right in the stuck-together photo above) are separately switchable, so some may get more use than others, plus of course some of the individual fittings may be particularly prone to frying bulbs owing to the vagaries of the wiring set-up. But it's the best I can do. I'll probably post individual updates as comments here and then summarise at some later date in a separate post.

chronicle of a death forgotten

I must just publicly chastise myself here for forgetting the pretty significant name of Iain Banks from the list of deceased authors in my recent post on the subject. Not sure how I missed him, though since he pre-deceased Doris Lessing I evidently missed spotting him in the earlier post as well. Particularly shameful since Banks is the current joint record holder for number of books featured on this list with four, a record he shares with Lawrence Durrell (dead) and William Boyd (alive).

So the definitive list now reads:

• Michael Didbin
• Beryl Bainbridge
• Russell Hoban
• Richard Matheson
• Elmore Leonard
• Iain Banks
• Doris Lessing
• Gabriel García Márquez

Honourable near-miss mentions should also go to Kurt Vonnegut and John Updike, both of whom have featured in the list, and both of whom have died during the lifetime of this blog, but in both cases shortly before they featured in a blog post - Vonnegut died in April 2007 and was first featured in October 2007, while Updike died in January 2009 and was first featured in August 2009.

the last book I read

Stoner by John Williams.

So, just to manage your expectations here, this is not the story of some guy who stumbles round California in the 1960s smoking a load of dope (a variant of that story can be found in the early stages of this book, if that's what you want). Instead, this is the story of the eponymous William Stoner, born into a poor farming family in the late 19th century and expected by both his parents and himself to inherit the farm and the associated backbreaking work and responsibility when the time comes. In an attempt to better himself he enrols on an agricultural sciences course at the University of Missouri, a course which comes with some compulsory English literature elements, and has something of an epiphany during his reluctant attendance at these extra classes on hearing a Shakespeare sonnet.

In the wake of this significant moment he immediately ditches the agriculture courses (and, with them, any aspirations of taking over the family farm) and switches to the full-blown English literature course. Not only that, but on completing his studies he immediately accepts a teaching post at the university, thus defining the course of his future life.

At the same time as he is committing himself to a life of teaching he is making equally irrevocable commitments to his future wife, Edith, a somewhat highly-strung young woman he has nonetheless fallen in love with, though (as was customary in the early years of the 20th century) without really getting to know her at all well. They marry, and it soon becomes clear to Stoner that he has made a terrible mistake. But, it's before World War I, so there's not much he can do about it. 

Clearly the personal and professional life of a university professor isn't going to involve much in the way of ray-gun battles or car chases, but some challenges present themselves nonetheless. Edith gives birth to a daughter, Grace, who Stoner dotes on until Edith mounts a concerted campaign to shut him out of her life. Meanwhile the new head of Stoner's department, Hollis Lomax, takes a violent dislike to Stoner after a disagreement over the merits of Lomax's star student, thus precipitating a feud that lasts for over twenty years. 

On the positive side, Stoner's teaching brings him pleasure and satisfaction, and in his forties he even embarks on a tentative love affair with one of his former students, Katherine Driscoll. In such a claustrophobic community it's impossible to keep such things a secret for long, but Edith seems unexpectedly mellow about the whole thing, possibly out of relief that Stoner is having his, hem hem, "needs" taken care of elsewhere. Hollis Lomax is less sanguine when he finds out, though, and makes sure that Katherine is obliged to pursue her academic ambitions elsewhere.

Stoner's health takes a turn for the worse after Katherine's departure, but he continues his teaching duties until eventually he is incapacitated by the cancer that eventually kills him in his mid-sixties.

And, erm, that's it. No light sabre showdowns, no last minute return of old lovers to declare everlasting love, no comforting reunion with his estranged daughter, no satisfying acts of vengeance against those by whom he had been wronged. But that's the point, really, it's just one man's life. A life that probably didn't work out the way he would have wanted it, either personally or professionally, but who's to say that it was a failure? He spent most of his life teaching the subject he loved, and while his marriage wasn't particularly happy he had his brief Indian summer of true love. And his problems with Hollis Lomax were mostly caused by his own admirably spiky integrity and dislike of pretence and bullshit. My only criticisms would be that it's never entirely clear what the basis for Lomax's hatred of Stoner is, or, to put it another way, why Lomax is so attached to his star student Charles Walker in the face of all the evidence that he is a liar and a bullshitter. Edith's motivations are never completely clear either; I guess we're meant to assume that the impossible situation women of marriageable age were put in in the early 20th century (and for some decades afterwards) has just sent her a bit mental.

So the point of the book is that anyone's life, however seemingly mundane, is interesting and remarkable if looked at closely enough. Williams himself was an English professor, so there's a suspicion that this is at least partly autobiographical, or at least inspired by his own life. Of course what the book also is is a hymn of love to literature, and to Stoner's own lifelong love affair with it. I suppose this does mean that it's a book likely to appeal to people who already like books, if that makes sense at all. In other words, if your question is "why would I read a novel?" this may not be the answer. I think it's a little low-key masterpiece, though, which is not to say I quite understand the extraordinary acclaim that's been heaped on it since its reissue in 2003 (it was originally published in 1965) - though, oddly, more in Europe than in America. I suppose the internet just accelerates the word-of-mouth effect. My Vintage paperback has a foreword by John McGahern, whose Amongst Women previously featured on this list. 

Echoes of other books, as always: the grimness of the brief descriptions of farming life at the beginning echoes My Ántonia, and the excruciating awkwardness of the wedding night fumblings is very reminiscent of the pivotal scenes in On Chesil Beach.

chronicle of a death foretold

Chalk up one more victim for my list of novelists who have been LITERALLY KILLED by my interest in their literary oeuvre - Gabriel García Márquez, who died on Thursday at the age of 87. The book review that was the (admittedly slow-acting) catalyst for his ultimate demise was this one for The Autumn Of The Patriarch in July 2007. That list now reads:

• Michael Didbin
• Beryl Bainbridge
• Russell Hoban
• Richard Matheson
• Elmore Leonard
• Doris Lessing
• Gabriel García Márquez

One Hundred Years Of Solitude is probably the one you want, though I should say I've only read four of the ten or so novels that he wrote - Chronicle Of A Death Foretold and Love In The Time Of Cholera are the other two, both well worth a read. The only critical things I would say are that his penchant for slightly florid book titles may have been an influence on the lesser writers who followed and stank up the bestseller lists with their bloody tractors and mandolins, and secondly that while I realise "magic realism" implies some magical shit kicking off at some point, I can't honestly say that, for instance, One Hundred Years Of Solitude was improved by throwing in the bit about one of the minor characters levitating, any more than these two books were.

Before we get too mournful, though, consider this: now that Márquez is dead we can surely be told the full story behind Mario Vargas Llosa punching him in the eye in Mexico City in 1976, thus ending their friendship. Vargas Llosa is still alive, but he is 78, so I suggest he cracks on and spills the beans, otherwise we may never know.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day; special non-celebrity edition

A three-way today: current Prime Minister of Spain Mariano Rajoy, my beardy friend Phil, and Fred the busker from the Julia Donaldson/Axel Scheffler story book Tabby McTat, one of my daughter's current favourites.