incidental music spot of the day

The Dress Looks Nice On You by Sufjan Stevens in episode 7 of series 4 of Stella on Sky the other day. I'm a big fan of Stella, just as I was of Gavin & Stacey, though in both cases the whole comedy/drama/tears/laughter not-quite-one-thing-or-the-other thing won't be for everyone. The same could probably be said of Sufjan Stevens - I love it, but: whispery folky gorgeousness? or insufferably fey twee whimsy? It's a fine line. However, his songs certainly seem to be rich pickings for incidental music compilers; previous spottings can be found here, here and here.

Stevens' Fifty States project (of which 2005's Come On Feel The Illinoise! was the second instalment) now seems to be permanently parked. If this 2009 interview is to be believed he was never that serious about it anyway.

His Fifty States Project, which he announced in 2003 as an epic song cycle about every American state, hasn't quite got off the ground. It began with an album about Michigan, then came Illinois, but there it stopped. "I have no qualms about admitting it was a promotional gimmick," he laughs.

There is a non-state-related new album, Carrie & Lowell, out now. Generally well received but I haven't got round to sampling it yet.

Back to the original song: The Dress Looks Nice On You features on Stevens' 2004 album Seven Swans, an album awash with religious and indeed explicitly Christian themes. That it's still so great despite all that is a testament (YSWIDT) to the quality of the songs. Here's The Dress Looks Nice On You in concert - the clip doesn't specifically identify when & where it's from, but similar clips are supposedly from Austin City Limits in 2006, which sounds plausible.

far canal

Funny what you notice when you're only half paying attention. I put the old Ford Focus in for an MOT today, and much to my forehead-slapping chagrin forgot to take my current book with me (no, it's a secret, you'll have to wait and see). So, faced with a half-hour wait, I was reduced to scouring the little table in the reception area at the MOT centre for reading material. Pretty slim pickings if you're not a fan of motoring magazines, but there was one item of interest: a slightly foxed hardback copy of Wales From The Air, with a foreword by Jan Morris.

Well, that'll do, I thought. Let's start at the beginning. Hmmm, that's odd....

You may be having difficulty reading the text on the left as it'll be a bit small. You may also be having difficulty reading the text on the right, but that'll be because it's in Welsh. Here's a larger version of the English text:

This is all very interesting, but the trouble is that the picture above isn't of the Pontcysyllte aqueduct. The Pontcysyllte aqueduct looks like this, and, as you can see, spans the Dee valley in glorious isolation without a railway viaduct next to it. I know this because I have been across it, in both directions, in a canal boat. This was on our canal boating holiday in April 2000 - here's a couple of pictures:

Both of these pictures show us travelling northwards across the aqueduct; neither of them features me, sadly, since I took them, but as a bonus you do get my mate Martyn doing the hilarious "falling off an aqueduct" pose.

The aqueduct pictured in the book is the Chirk aqueduct, a few miles further south. We went over this one a couple of times on the same trip, as previously mentioned here - note the (slightly higher) railway viaduct also featuring in the picture. The Chirk aqueduct crosses the River Ceiriog, a tributary of the Dee, which this page boldly claims to be the fastest-flowing river in Wales. 

As proof-reading howlers and basic failures of research go this seems like a pretty major one to me. I don't know if the pilots who took the pictures were given specific instructions as to what to photograph, or whether they just flew around and snapped anything that looked interesting and relied on the book people to label it accurately. Someone dropped the ball here in a big way, anyway. 

up a gumtree

We've recently been having a bit of a rethink of the upstairs room arrangements in the light the impending arrival of our second child. What this basically means is that we have to provide some living space for this small person, ready for when he or she turns up, and consequently all the other stuff that formerly occupied the upstairs space has to be crammed into a slightly smaller amount of space. As it happens this provides an opportunity to consider whether some of the stuff we've got lying around is really necessary, or whether we're likely to ever make use of it.

Having concluded that there's some stuff that can go, we decided that we might as well try and get some money for it, so I created a Gumtree account and posted a few items up there. So far we've managed to get rid of, for modest amounts of money, but with the convenience of not having to dispose of them:

• a double bed including mattress
• a 5-way metal ceiling spotlight
• an office chair
• a filing cabinet

Just in case anyone's interested there's a very nice pair of Wharfedale S500 hi-fi speakers still available for a very reasonable price, though that may well be an attempt on my part to sell a product that no-one uses any more, since everyone's got their entire house networked into iTunes via their media server now. Well, I haven't, as it happens, but I expect all the kids have.

I was slightly apprehensive about engaging with Gumtree simply because it implied also engaging with, you know, people. And, sure enough, although the people who have actually bought stuff managed to get their act together enough to communicate clearly, find our house, and remember to bring the agreed amount of money and some suitable transport, I did get involved in a couple of clabby text conversations that I eventually abandoned as they clearly weren't going to lead anywhere useful. The only useful thing they did was provide a bit of baffled amusement, and it's in that spirit that I reproduce them here.

This one was about the speakers - the only sniff of interest they've generated so far, but not in a form resembling human communication closely enough for me to be able to close the sale:

This guy wanted the bed. He also really wanted me to deliver it, even after I'd told him I wasn't going to, though clearly not explicitly enough:

Once I've got it through an MOT, hopefully not at sphincter-tightening cost, I'm going to put the Ford Focus up there, so we'll see what utterly mental responses that generates.

the last book I read

Ravelstein by Saul Bellow.

Abe Ravelstein is an old-ish Jewish professor of philosophy, with a formidable academic reputation, and, late in life, a public and commercial profile as well after publishing a book of his potted philosophical insights to great acclaim and unexpected sales success - a sort of Brief History Of Time, but with fewer black holes and more philosophy.

Ravelstein isn't actually the narrator of this book, though; that job falls to his old friend and colleague Chick (we infer that this is either his surname or some sort of affectionate nickname). As the novel opens Chick and Ravelstein are in Paris discussing the possibility of Chick writing Ravelstein's biography, a job Ravelstein wants Chick to take on partly because he wants his old friend to cash in on the money-making opportunity created by Ravelstein's own unexpected fame and fortune.

We learn a bit (though not much) about the two protagonists' back-story - not much about how they met or became friends, but some detail about their personal lives. Ravelstein is gay and lives with his much younger lover Nikki, while Chick seems to be a serial marrier of younger women, dwelling a bit on his former wife Vela, an exotic physicist, and his current wife Rosamund, one of Ravelstein's former pupils.

Among all the kvetching some serious events happen: Ravelstein contracts AIDS (whether from Nikki or someone else is never really explained) and succumbs to a whole host of secondary ailments including Guillain–Barré syndrome, which result in his eventual death. Chick has a bit of a wrestle with his conscience about writing the biography, but then has events taken out of his hands somewhat when during a supposedly therapeutic Caribbean holiday with Rosamund he contracts ciguatoxin poisoning from a dodgy tropical fish platter, is taken ill, whisked back to the USA and comes perilously close to dying himself.

That's about it for narrative, as it happens. To be fair, narrative isn't really the point, the point being more the musings of two old Jewish-American codgers on the subject of death, human relationships, philosophy, and, well, just being Jewish-American. It's a fairly short book (230 pages, large-ish print), so we never get to know either of the protagonists especially well, so when the book ends with Chick, now just about recovered from his brush with death, basically saying: "What about that Ravelstein, eh? Crazy guy. But what a mensch." - we have to reply: well, I'll have to take your word for it.

Like Frankie & Stankie this is a book that makes more sense, in terms of understanding the author's motivation for writing it in the first place, once you know the closeness with which it parallels real-life events in the author's life. So clearly the Chick character is a thinly-disguised Saul Bellow, while Ravelstein is his friend Allan Bloom, whose book The Closing Of The American Mind is the model for Ravelstein's own bestseller. Chick's penchant for serial marriage to younger women mirrors Bellow's own (he was married five times) and Chick's most recent ex-wife Vela is presumably based on Bellow's fourth wife Alexandra, a mathematician.

This was Bellow's last novel, published in 2000 when he was 85 (he died in 2005), so it's not surprising that ageing, frailty and death play major roles. But while it's easy, given the real-life parallels, to see why Bellow cares about the characters, it's not that easy to see why the reader should. There's no faulting the quality of the writing, but if you want a Bellow from the three I've read I'd say Herzog is deeper and more satisfying, while Henderson The Rain King is more fun.

men with funny-shaped balls

Great excitement at Halibut Towers last weekend as Wales managed to hold off Ireland to win a thrilling encounter 23-16 and keep alive their slim hopes of winning the Six Nations Championship going into the last round of matches this weekend. Basically it boils down to either having to rely on a couple of unlikely results in the other two matches (specifically, France beating England and Scotland beating Ireland) or, more likely, having to beat Italy by a hatful of points (probably 40 or so) and then hoping Ireland and England win by relatively narrow margins.

Much hoopla in the aftermath of a heroic defensive effort from Wales, and rightly so, in particular much bandying around of the stat regarding their tackle count, which was quoted as being 289 after the game (37 of them by lanky long-necked lock Luke Charteris), but now seems to have been downgraded to 250 (31 of them by Charteris). Both of those are still apparently records (the previous team record being 208 by Italy against Ireland last year), but it set me wondering: who decides this stuff? Presumably there's someone who sits around watching the game and, in real time, or very nearly, logging when each tackle is made and by whom. Not only that, someone (presumably not the same person) is meticulously calculating how much distance each player has travelled with the ball, and there's also some more general logging of possession and territory stats. We have to also conclude that there's some scope for these things being revised after the game, presumably as a result of a post-match review deciding that some things that were logged as tackles weren't really tackles, and so on.

Anyway, as memorable a game as that was it perhaps doesn't qualify for the list I've just thought of, entitled something like: top ten Five/Six Nations matches I specifically remember watching at a specific venue, usually (but not always) somewhere other than my house.

Wales v France 1978

As I've said elsewhere, this was the first rugby game I can specifically remember watching, though it's almost certain that I'd watched several others before. We would almost certainly have watched it in our house in Three Acre Road, Newbury, here. It was evident even at the time (well, perhaps not to me, as I was only eight) that this was the end of an era for the golden Welsh generation of the 1970s: the last Five Nations match for Gareth Edwards and Phil Bennett, and what would have been the last one for Gerald Davies as well had he not been ruled out at the last minute by injury. Quite how much of an end wasn't immediately apparent as Wales won another Triple Crown (their fourth in succession) in 1979, and only missed out on a Grand Slam as the result of a one-point loss to France in Paris. Thereafter they won one further Triple Crown (in 1988) in the next 26 years until the Grand Slam year of 2005 (more on that later). A couple of other statistical nuggets: firstly this match was 37 years ago TODAY, and secondly, and perhaps surprisingly, it was the first occasion where two teams both with three wins out of three played each other in the final round of matches with the Grand Slam at stake. This situation was repeated in 1984, 1990, 1991 and 1995 in the old Five Nations and in 2003 after it expanded to the Six Nations.

Wales v England 1989

This was about the single high point of Five Nations watching during my university days, since the three seasons between 1989 and 1991 saw Wales lose ten games, draw one and win one (this one). This game (it finished 12-9 to Wales) was the last in a glorious sequence where Wales hadn't lost to England in Cardiff since 1963, a sequence that was firmly ended in 1991 when England won 25-6 thanks largely to Simon Hodgkinson's boot. I watched this on the frankly inadequate television in the TV room at Badock Hall, and my recollection is that Mike Hall's match-winning try was a bit of a chip and chase job with a somewhat dubious slap of the ball into the turf at the end which would probably have been disallowed in the modern era of TV replays.

Wales v England 1993

Another Wales-England match in Cardiff, another against-the-odds win for Wales, another chip-and-chase try, this time featuring Ieuan Evans outsprinting a snoozing Rory Underwood. 10-9 to Wales at half-time, and my main recollection of the second half is England camped in Wales' 22 trying to batter a way through and being repeatedly repulsed, the match eventually finishing 10-9 with no scoring at all in the second half. It does seem inconceivable in hindsight that all the pressure couldn't at least have manufactured a chance for Rob Andrew to have a pop at a drop-goal - maybe it did and he kept missing. Anyway, I watched it at my then-girlfriend Posy's flat in Shrewsbury (somewhere near here) - apparently she was rather concerned that I was having either some sort of seizure or a heart attack after the final whistle went. Actually it turns out that YouTube have the whole thing, so you can check my memory for yourself.

Wales v England 1999

Another Wales-England match, but despite being nominally a "home" game for Wales it was actually played at their temporary home of Wembley while the Millennium Stadium was being built (it opened later the same year). Glorious sunny day at Wembley, Wales hanging on by the skin of their teeth thanks to Neil Jenkins' boot, and then the glorious climax of Scott Gibbs thundering through for the decisive try, at which point the small Wales contingent among the horde of baying English supporters in O'Neill's Irish bar in Bath (it's called Molloy's now) erupted in jubilation. All except me, as I was unwilling to assume the conversion was a formality, even though it was Jenkins taking it. Fortunately it went over, and I was free to go a big rubbery one for a couple of minutes. Strangely, once I'd composed myself a bit the white-shirted brigade had drifted away rather than stick around and witness my protracted glee; can't say I blame them. The icing on the cake was that this marked the first of three successive occasions where the Celtic nations took turns to deny England a Grand Slam in the final game - Scotland did it in 2000 and Ireland in 2001.

Wales v England 2005

Well, you see the theme developing by now re. the usual opposition: no great expectations coming into this match after a championship whitewash in 2003 and two wins in 2004, but Wales dominated for long stretches and should have been well ahead. However, Charlie Hodgson's penalty in the 75th minute put England 9-8 up and it looked like another defeat was on the cards. But we'd reckoned without Gavin Henson and his golden thighs silver boots. I watched this in the Old Fish Market in Bristol with Robin and John and Hayley and various others, to whom I retrospectively apologise for shouting so much.

Wales v Ireland 2005

Last game of the tournament and one where I really should have been getting drunk in a pub somewhere. However a terrible failure of planning meant that I was running in the Bath half-marathon on the following day, and, not trusting myself to stay off the sauce if I'd been to the pub, I instead barricaded myself in my Bristol flat with some orange squash and an inflatable daffodil. The match was only intermittently tense as Wales were at one point 29-6 up, but frankly for a first Grand Slam in 27 years I was prepared to forgo a bit of nail-biting.

Wales v England 2008

We'd moved to Newport in January 2008, and we thought we'd celebrate by going to a pub to see the first game of the Six Nations. Not really knowing the area we ended up in the quaint and pokey surroundings of Langton's cafe/bar in the centre of town, watching a game where Wales got taken to the cleaners in the first half, and were at one point 19-6 down before two late tries gave them a cheeky 26-19 win, one that set them on the way to another Grand Slam. Judging by Google Street Maps' time-travel facility Langton's stopped being Langton's not long after we were there and turned into Johnnie Rocco's American Diner, and appears now to have been empty for a couple of years.

Wales v England 2012

Another pub, this time the Hanbury Arms in Caerleon, another desperately tense encounter with the deadlock finally broken with 5 minutes left when Scott Williams dispossessed Courtney Lawes on halfway and gathered his own kick to score. Extra spice was provided by the group I was with mainly comprising English supporters, and Hazel being no more than three or four weeks short of her due date with Nia. We had to promise the landlord that we wouldn't get too excited and induce any childbirth shenanigans - well, we failed on the first count but as it happened Nia stayed put for another six weeks or so, so that was OK.

Wales v England 2013

Another slight failure of planning, combined with the constraints of Ray's availability with his van, meant that we had to set aside the day of the game to build a garden fence, in what ended up being torrential rain. Having received occasional shouted score updates from indoors, when we eventually finished the job and came in it was still 12-3 to Wales with about 25 minutes to go. However pretty much as soon as we'd popped a tinnie and sat down the floodgates opened, Alex Cuthbert ran in two tries and wild celebrations ensued.

Honourable mention, though they're ineligible under my own self-imposed rules, should go to the first and second Lions tests in South Africa in 1997, both of which I watched in the Byron (also not there any more) on the Triangle in the centre of Bristol, where (for the first one anyway) I just wandered in after seeing the rugby on the TV through the window and realising it'd just kicked off. As with the 1995 Ryder Cup, part of the pleasure is the unplanned nature of the whole thing.

there's a feeling I get when I look to the west

A couple of photo galleries for you, one associated with the couple of trips we took to London in late January as described here.

The other documents our short break in Pembrokeshire a few weeks ago (for, among other things, my birthday). We stayed in a little chalet at the Pembrokeshire Heritage Park, which is here just near Stepaside, or, as the blurb on the website says, "set in the idylic Pleasant Valley". Pity about the spelling, but you get the general idea. While you can in theory hire chalets in the park, they're mainly geared to selling them to people - we got the use of ours because it's owned by our showbiz chum Clare and she kindly let us borrow it for a few days.

We've done quite a bit of holidaying in Pembrokeshire in recent years:

• over near Haverfordwest in July 2009
• a flying visit to a log cabin the Llanteglos Estate over near Pendine in May 2010
• over on the west coast at Aberbach, later in May 2010
• in much the same place with a 10-week-old Nia in June 2012
• to Bluestone in May 2014

In a shocking failure of internet maintenance, I seem to have neglected to blog any details about the log cabin/Pendine trip - all I can really recall about it is that we took a trip to the impressively huge Pendine Sands and the Museum Of Speed that's situated just behind it. Disappointingly, on the day we went JG Parry-Thomas' car Babs wasn't on display for some reason - this being the car that Parry-Thomas broke the land speed record in at Pendine in 1926 and was then killed in the following year. Equally disappointingly, the lurid and widely-circulated story about Parry-Thomas' death - that he was decapitated by a snapped external drive chain - seems to be now generally held to be untrue. What certainly is true is that Babs was buried in the dunes at Pendine after being wrecked and was then dug up in 1969 and restored. I also have a dim recollection of a slightly foetid pint of Bass in the Springwell Inn in Pendine village.

Anyway, back to the present day: things to see within easy reach (walking range with a 3rd-trimester pregnant person and a pretty energetic nearly-3-year-old, say) include:

• the remains of Stepaside Ironworks (also known as Kilgetty Ironworks) right on the doorstep in the Heritage Park car park;
• a walk down the path of an old railway to the beach at Wiseman's Bridge where there is also a pub, which we visited for a cheeky pint of Doom Bar;
• a walk further along the same old railway route, including passing through three exciting echoey tunnels of varying length, to Saundersfoot. Saundersfoot is basically a smaller and quieter version of Tenby, with a nice beach and a couple of pubs, including the Royal Oak where we went and had some fish and chips and another pint of Doom Bar. The food was perfectly nice, though it appears they have been up before the beak for some hygiene infringements in the past. We suffered no ill-effects, anyway. 
• Tenby Dinosaur Park! Like all nearly-3-year-olds Nia is nutty about dinosaurs, so we took her to see some a couple of miles west of Tenby, here. Not only are there a whole host of life-size plaster dinosaurs in their little woodland area (including Nia's favourite, the triceratops) there's an outdoor playground (bit wet the day we were there) and a big indoor "Dino Den" with lots of soft-play stuff and ballpits and the like. 

Photos can be found here. Meanwhile here's a soothing animated GIF of the tide coming in and going out again at Wiseman's Bridge.

terry's all cold

This is by way of a brief RIP tribute to Terry Pratchett, who died today aged 66. I had a bit of a splurge of reading Pratchett's books 25 or so years ago which basically took in the first seven Discworld novels, which still occupy a small area of shelf space in my bookshelves, as you can see below.

Like Douglas Adams, Pratchett was first and foremost a comic writer, the weird fantasy universe he chose to set the books in merely being the one which most readily allowed him to explore whatever real-world topic he felt like satirising without having to laboriously conjure a different world into being for each book. I have to say that in my view the books weren't as funny or as interesting as Adams' books, but that's probably partly because Adams didn't write very many and Pratchett was ridiculously prolific, so there's the (probably irrational) sense of the ideas being spread more thinly.

Anyway, my recollection, which may be wrong, was that I bought the last two or three of my Pratchetts roughly as they were published in paperback (Pyramids was published in 1989), and, having read the last one, decided that that was all great, thanks very much, and they'd all been very enjoyable, but that I'd got the idea and didn't really have the urge to read any more.

As it happens my withdrawal from Pratchett-reading was well-timed, as having (up to that point) produced seven books in about the same number of years, Pratchett ratcheted up his productivity to the extent of cranking out another 26 Discworld books in the next 15 years, and eventually 41 overall, so that's an awful lot of reading I'd have been signing up for.

Pratchett is also famous for his advocacy for Alzheimer's sufferers, having been diagnosed with a rare form of the disease at an unusually young age, and also for the right to die (assisted dying, assisted suicide, call it what you will). He was also a vocal atheist and had links to both the British Humanist Association (their excellent tribute is here) and the National Secular Society. All of which makes him a good bloke in my book.

power steering, central locking, cunted windows

Good to see John Inverdale keeping the BBC's end up in terms of regular inadvertent broadcasting of the c-word to the nation, continuing the rich tradition previously upheld by such national treasures as Nicky Campbell, Jim Naughtie, Andrew Marr and Jeremy Paxman. Inverdale (no stranger to the occasional on-air faux pas) blotted his copybook during BBC Radio 5 Live's coverage of the Cheltenham Festival.

It's interesting to compare how these on-air slips arise: the Campbell one was caused by the unfortunate proximity of the words "Kent" and "Hunt", the Naughtie and Marr ones by the unfortunate proximity of the words "Hunt" and "culture", and the Paxman one by a mispronunciation of the word "cuts". Inverdale, on the other hand, seems to have been a victim of indecision - having started to say "rose-coloured glasses", he evidently realised halfway through that "rose-tinted glasses" would be the more usual form of the phrase, with disastrous results.

Here's the YouTube audio clip - a slightly longer one is available on the Daily Telegraph website here, but be warned you have to sit through some advertising and, unforgivably, they blank out the key word, presumably to avoid giving the eightysomething retired colonels who comprise their readership a collective coronary.

the last book I read

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley.

Larry Cook is an Iowa farmer, who's built up and expanded the farm he inherited from his father and grandfather by some shrewd acquisitions of neighbouring farmland from those who didn't share his work ethic or his nose for business.

Needless to say keeping on top of this sort of operation requires day-to-day dedication, and moreover a supporting team who will take care of the administrative duties like washing clothes, keeping the house clean, cooking dinner, looking after the kids, helping out with the harvest when necessary. This duty falls first on the wife and thereafter on the children and their spouses, those who choose to stay in the vicinity anyway.

In Larry's case his wife died 20-odd years ago, nominally of cancer but presumably at least partly of exhaustion. Since then the burden of domestic tasks has fallen mostly to Larry's two oldest daughters Ginny and Rose, and the burden of helping out with farm activities to their respective spouses Ty and Pete, the youngest daughter, Caroline, having escaped to a career as a lawyer in nearby Des Moines.

At a party thrown by a neighbouring farmer, Larry springs a bit of a surprise - he's effectively retiring, and has had legal documents drawn up to transfer ownership of the farm and all its assets jointly to the three sisters. Ginny and Rose, after a bit of thought, accept, while Caroline, possibly suspicious of her father's motives, possibly just reluctant to be drawn back into day-to-day farm business, is a bit more hesitant. At this point Larry impulsively cuts her out of the deal and splits the assets equally between Ginny and Rose instead.

From this point things start to unravel fairly quickly. Larry finds himself a bit aimless without the day-to-day concerns of keeping the farm afloat and quickly enters a spiral of increasingly drunken and eccentric behaviour. Meanwhile Jess Clark, the son of Harold Clark, the farmer next door, returns from a long exile which began when he was drafted into the Vietnam War, and soon embarks on a brief affair with Ginny. Ty, who has shouldered most of the responsibility for the running of the farm, takes out a large and risky loan to finance setting up a pig-breeding operation and doing all the necessary construction.

Things get worse. Larry has a change of mind about the handover, and, with some help from Caroline (with whom he has quickly effected a reconciliation) brings a legal action to try and have the handover annulled. Rose has a heart-to-heart with Ginny wherein she reveals that Larry abused her sexually when she was younger, and she strongly suspects that he abused Ginny as well, though Ginny claims to have no recollection of it. Ginny's involvement with Jess having petered out, Rose starts sleeping with Jess, and Pete, having been clued in by Rose both to the childhood abuse and the present-day affair, drunkenly drives his truck into a lake and drowns. Larry, increasingly mentally unstable, has a very public meltdown at another community gathering, and eventually moves out to go and stay with the Clarks up the road. On returning to her childhood bedroom to do some tidying up after his departure, Ginny experiences a rush of repressed memories and realises that Rose was right and Larry had been abusing her, too.

Ginny finds living with Ty's constant absences on the farm and Rose's relationship with Jess increasingly intolerable, and eventually tensions rise to a point where Ginny decides that she has to get away. She takes a job as a waitress in a nearby town and lives in happy ignorance of events at the farm for a couple of years, until eventually both Ty and Rose call on her, Ty to tell her he's selling up and moving to Texas to start a new life and wants a divorce, and Rose to tell her that her breast cancer has returned and that she's in hospital. By this point Larry has also died of a heart attack.

So Ginny returns to the farm to look after Rose's two daughters while Rose is in hospital, where she eventually dies. The farm and all the buildings and their contents are to be sold to pay off debts, so Caroline and Ginny meet at the farmhouse to attempt to divvy up some family possessions, immediately have an argument and go their separate ways, Caroline back to Des Moines and Ginny back to her waitressing job, this time with Rose's two daughters in tow.

And that's it. Reading that back it all sounds like it's set in Grimsville, Iowa, and I suppose it is in that a whole relentless load of trouble is shovelled onto the central characters, and everyone is left in a state of either death, divorce or exile at the end. That it doesn't feel as depressing as it ought to is a testament to Smiley's skill as a writer - the details of the vastness of the Iowan landscape, the intricate details of family relationships and the interaction with the tight-knit local community where everyone knows everyone else's business are so fascinating that the fact that everyone's lives are going to shit around their ears is almost incidental.

The other thing about A Thousand Acres is that it's clearly based on the King Lear story (as in, you know, Shakespeare and that). As this New York Times review says, that poses a difficulty in that you want to acknowledge it, while at the same time not getting into some trainspottery listing of similarities and differences at the expense of just enjoying the novel. As it happens I was in the fairly happy position of not being especially familiar with the play (I don't think I've ever seen it on either stage or screen), so beyond the obvious parallels of the principal characters' names (Larry, Ginny, Rose, Caroline versus Lear, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia) and the knowledge that it's a tragedy (and so things were unlikely to end well for all concerned) I didn't have the background knowledge to do the comparisons and was able to just immerse myself in the story.

A Thousand Acres won two of the heavyweight American fiction awards when it was published in 1991, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. My brief lists for these go: 1953, 1961, 1981, 1985, 1992, 1996, 2003, 2007 and 1991, 2000, 2002 respectively. For what it's worth I thought it was exceptionally good and - just a thought - if you're looking for your Great American Novel you could do worse than start here.

incidental music spot of the day

More Sigur Rós, this time during the opening moments of The Living Mountain: A Cairngorms Journey on BBC Four earlier this evening. Remarkably I was able to pinpoint this one rather more exactly than here, as it's one of their most memorable tunes. I still can't tell you what it's called, as it doesn't officially have a title (unofficially it's called Njósnavélin), but it's the fourth track on their 2002 "brackets" album.

The program itself was an interesting celebration (by travel writer Robert Macfarlane) of the little-known book The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, written in the 1940s but not published until 1977. Not a book I was previously familiar with, but it sounds fascinating from the snippets available to read at the Amazon link. That's not to say I agree unreservedly with all the sentiments expressed in the programme - as much as I advocate and encourage a bit of wandering about, smelling the flowers and looking at the scenery I can't really get behind an approach that "abandons the summit as the organising principle of a mountain". If I'm going up a mountain then the focal point of the day is standing on top of it, whatever other delights might be experienced on the way up and down. No doubt this is reflective of some patriarchal notions of conquest in my irredeemable male psyche, and makes me some sort of nature rapist. Oh well.

So on the one hand some of it sounds a bit hello clouds hello sky for my taste; on the other hand nobody who loves mountains would deny that there's a sort of transcendent thing going on when you're standing on a lofty peak on a clear day with no-one else for miles around. This in turn is probably reflective of some profound misanthropy on my part, something I'll cop to without any protest at all.

headline of the day

Not much to add to this, really:

- except to commend the nice deadpan tone of the article in Wigan Today describing the original incident, especially this bit:

He then began performing a sex act and walked over to the postbox and “started to make sexual advances towards it.”

See, you can't just leap onto a postbox and start humping it, you've got to start by making some "sexual advances" - you know, looking away all bashfully before casting coquettish glances back over your shoulder, that sort of thing. Not an easy thing to do with the required dignity and panache while sitting on a bench with your trousers around your ankles.

A statement read by the prosecution described the defendant as drunk.

Since the police are treating the death as "non-suspicious" I assume that Mr. Bennett failed to be sufficiently chastened by his experiences (or possibly just didn't remember them) to make the lifestyle changes that he needed to make. Or maybe he spoke out of turn in the Chinese restaurant and someone slipped him a tainted spring roll. I do have a recollection of sitting in Mr. Kong's Chinese restaurant off Leicester Square with my friend Tony and some others back in the late 1990s having a competition to see who could say TRIADS the loudest before someone emerged from the kitchen and attacked us with a meat cleaver. Luckily the staff failed to conform to racist stereotype and just ignored us.

Bennett was also obliged to sign the Sex Offenders register as a result of the postbox incident, which seems fair enough for an incident in a public place bookended by a lot of other trousers-down public exposing behaviour. The 2007 case of the Scottish man who attempted to have sex with a bicycle seems a bit less clear-cut to me, since he was in the relative privacy of his room at the time. This follow-up article mentions another man who was nicked for two separate incidents involving a shoe and a traffic cone. There's really no accounting for taste.

knocked out in the semi-vinyls

Tonight's randomly-inspired music list of the day goes a little bit like this: the CD format gives recording companies a nice round blank canvas to work with, which you can fill in a whole variety of different ways. Back in the early days nobody really made the effort, since the little silver disc with just a bald track listing on it was novelty enough, but lately people have started trying to fill the space with something a bit more interesting.

So here's a couple of entries for a sub-genre of the CD decoration genre: CDs mocked up to look like LPs, or vinyl records more generally. I'm not going to claim that I've exhaustively scoured my own collection for every single example I own, but these three presented themselves, so they'll do for starters:

Ashes & Fire by Ryan Adams:

Superunknown by Soundgarden:

Deep Fried Fanclub by Teenage Fanclub:

I think, strictly speaking, judging by the size at which the central labels are rendered, the first and last are meant to be 7" singles and the middle one is meant to be an LP. You're probably not going to shell out for an album just because the CD looks like a vinyl record, so the potted reviews are, respectively: one of his best recent albums, one of the great rock albums of the 1990s, a fairly inessential B-sides and odds & sods collection.

I invite further nominations (with photographic proof, of course).

the last book I read

The Redeemer by Jo Nesbø.

Stop me if you've heard this one before, but: Harry Hole is an uncompromising maverick Norwegian cop. Han spiller ikke etter boka, men av Gud han får resultater.

So, the checklist. Recovering (and occasionally relapsing) alcoholic? Check. Broken marriage and strained relationship with ex-spouse and child? Check. Succession of police partners getting offed messily in the course of investigations? Check. Vexed relationship with more "orthodox" police superiors? Check. But, dammit, results, etc.? You betcha.

So when Robert Karlsen, a senior Salvation Army officer and pillar of the Oslo community, is executed in a very public way by a mysterious assassin at a pre-Christmas carol singalong and heroin addict soup handout, it's Harry Hole who gets the job of investigating. One of the first things he discovers is that despite the gunman having been in the plain view of several people, no-one seems to be able to remember or agree what his face looks like.

Things soon get a lot more complicated: it soon transpires that a) the actual target of the hit was Robert's brother Jon Karlsen and b) the killer has worked out he's shot the wrong man and is sticking around to try to finish the job. So Harry has to simultaneously protect Jon from being bumped off and find out who the killer is and why he's got it in for the Karlsen brothers, on the face of it both paragons of religiously-inspired moral rectitude and charitable selflessness.

Oh, come off it, you'll be saying at this point: we all know that religious sects, even one as apparently upstanding as the Sally Army, are hotbeds of repressed (and not-so-repressed) sexual perversity and operate an internal code of silence to keep their nasty little secrets from ever seeing the light of day. So it's only a matter of time before some unspeakable shit comes floating to the surface. And, to be fair, we already know this, as there was a sort of flashback prologue featuring an un-named 14-year-old girl at a Salvation Army retreat being raped in an outside toilet by an un-named man, but, we're invited to infer, someone who we've probably already met in the "present day" part of the narrative.

Harry tracks down the hitman's boss (who also turns out to be his mother) to Zagreb, where she reveals that the person she was engaged by to organise the hit was (drum roll) Robert Karlsen himself. But why would Robert want to have Jon killed? Cherchez la femme, perhaps? Is it something to do with Jon's girlfriend Thea? Or fellow Salvation Army officer (and possible love interest for Harry) Martine? Or is it something to do with Sofia, the young Croatian girl who lives in the block of flats that's the subject of a complex (and quite possibly crooked) property deal involving Jon Karlsen?

Well, I won't lay out the full plot details here, not least because I'm not entirely sure I understood them myself. The very basic version is: Jon Karlsen posed as Robert Karlsen in order to go to Zagreb to take out a hit on Jon Karlsen (i.e. himself) in order to then swap soup-ladling shifts with Robert and engineer his killing in his (Jon's) place. It turns out being a high-ranking Salvation Army officer doesn't stop you from being a psychopathic serial rapist and cop-murderer with an interesting sideline in sucking people's eyes out with a hoover attachment. Needless to say our elusive Croatian friend is a multiple killer as well, but given the choice of sparing his life or Jon's at Oslo airport Harry decides to let him go.

The Redeemer is the sixth novel to feature detective Harry Hole, but there's no particular need to have read its predecessors (I certainly haven't) to "get" this one. It's very much in the Scandi-noir genre which also features Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson in the book genre and things like The Killing on TV, and is still clearly big business judging by the amount of hype and the stellar cast lavished on the current Sky Atlantic offering Fortitude. Concentrating on the books, since I haven't seen any of the TV stuff, I think The Redeemer is probably more exciting than Faceless Killers, and better-written and less silly than The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and its successors. That said, it's 562 pages long, and some of the sub-plot about Jon's property dealings could probably have been left out without detracting from the overall effect very much (a bit like all that stuff about toilets in The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest). It's good, though: I'm not about to rush out and buy all of them, but I wouldn't rule out dipping in again in future. The bottom line is that I wanted to find out what was going to happen next, which is the highest compliment available in the thriller genre.

language, timothy

I'm a sucker for a book list, as you know, so when I came across this list of foreign novels YOU MUST READ in the Independent this week (I have read one, Norwegian Wood, and own another, Foucault's Pendulum) and spotted a link to a story about a woman who'd set herself the task of reading a book from every country in the world, I was intrigued. Needless to say this was a stunt itself designed to generate a book (and here it is) but it's quite interesting nonetheless.

Slightly frustratingly, there isn't just a list of what she read, but you can get it from here since the relevant book from each country is the hyperlinked one. There aren't many places where the list coincides with stuff I've read, but it does happen occasionally, specifically for Australia, Norway and Russia.

A quick and very unscientific scan of my bookshelves for novels originally written in foreign yields the following list of authors, in no particular order:

• Italian: Alessandro Baricco, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Primo Levi
• French: Alain-Fournier, Michel Houellebecq, Françoise Sagan
• Norwegian: Knut Hamsun, Jostein Gaarder
• Russian: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Danish: Peter Høeg
• German: Franz Kafka, Heinrich Böll, Patrick Süskind
• Czech: Milan Kundera
• Swedish: Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell
• Hungarian: Sándor Márai
• Spanish: Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa
• Japanese: Haruki Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, Kenzaburō Ōe
• Hebrew: Amos Oz
• Portuguese: José Saramago

Plenty of gaps to be filled in there, even just in Europe: Polish, Greek, Finnish, Dutch. There are a couple of authors who you assume might generate some entries on this list, but who turn out to have actually written most of their novels in English, like Chinua Achebe and Vladimir Nabokov.

capital gains

As anyone who knows me will be tired of hearing by now, my daughter is utterly amazing and captivating and a joy to spend time with, not to mention being a frickin' genius. Nonetheless it is true that the freedom for Hazel and me to just take off and go away somewhere for the weekend is a bit constrained these days, partly because we just can't afford it any more, but partly because of the logistical challenges of finding somewhere to deposit the bairn.

So it was a pleasant change to be able to make a couple of trips up to London in late January and early February, one a flying visit just for a few hours and one for a couple of child-free days. The flying visit a couple of weeks ago was to pick up a new car, one of the perks of Hazel's "other" job as a distributor for Utility Warehouse. You might have seen the odd UW Mini around the place; well, distributors of a certain level of seniority are eligible to have one - not for free, but as part of a leasing package whose rates are quite good, and since we wanted to get rid of the old Focus the timing was pretty much ideal. Here's Hazel getting the official ceremonial key handover from Network Director Wayne Coupland outside UW Network HQ on the Edgware Road.

Another UW jolly a couple of weeks later, this one being the equivalent of the Paris trip last year. In theory this was supposed to be a trip to another European destination, but since Hazel's now 7 months pregnant and would have been ineligible to fly at the time of the trip we persuaded the company to give us a personal jaunt to London instead, which they kindly agreed to.

Our last proper trip to London was in June 2011, a few weeks before we got married, and we replicated part of that trip by having a jaunt on the London Eye. It was worth the repeat trip because the London skyline has been changing a bit lately, what with the appearance of the Shard, the Cheesegrater and the Walkie-Talkie.

We also took a trip to the theatre to see The Book Of Mormon, Trey Parker and Matt Stone's satirical musical. I have a bit of a problem with musicals in general, and it's a fundamental structural problem: we're meant to suspend disbelief in the usual way and engage with the drama in the non-musical bits, accepting that these are real people doing real-people stuff, but then also somehow accept that some of the principal people are going to occasionally burst into song with full orchestral/rock band (delete as applicable) backing, in a way that real people, in my experience at least, just don't tend to do. And then, worse still, drop straight back into the drama without any of the other protagonists going: erm, wait a minute, what was all that singing about just then? The more po-faced and gritty the drama (think Les Miserables, for instance) the more grating and ridiculous the effect.

So the only sort of musical that works (in my head, anyway) is one that subverts the ludicrous campery of the musical genre by being ludicrously camp and knowing throughout, not just in the musical bits. In other words, what I suppose I'm saying is that it's really only comedy that works in musicals, but, paradoxically, it only works because it's got a long history of serious drama being delivered in the same format to satirise. Book Of Mormon certainly delivers on the comedy front, as well as delivering, as you'd expect, some general mockery of religion in general and Mormonism in particular. Basically if you liked the South Park movie, which was, despite all the Saddam-Hussein-bumming-Satan stuff, itself basically a musical, you'll like this.

Just as an aside, there's an argument that Mormonism is just Scientology plus nearly 200 years of normalising, the underlying space-based nonsense being very nearly as wacky as Scientology. It's just gained a thin veneer of respectability because the loony that made the whole thing up in his head died in 1844, not 1986.

Anyway, back to London: we had originally intended to go and have a look round the Natural History Museum, but as you might (in hindsight) have expected on a rather wet Saturday afternoon there was a queue a gazillion miles long and an apparent wait time of about an hour and a half, so we decided to go to the pub instead and have a rethink. What we ended up doing was going to the much more sparsely attended Hunterian Museum just round the corner from Holborn tube station in Lincoln's Inn Fields (the largest public square in London: FACT) - the "secret London" article we looked up on the internet that recommended this described it as "The Museum Of Body Parts", which is a bit lurid, but, as it turns out, pretty accurate. As long as you aren't squeamish about seeing cocks in jars then this is a fascinating place.

Things I have seen in jars today: a rabbit's vagina, a horse's nipple, several foetuses, and the diseased rectum of the Bishop of Durham.
— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 31, 2015

That's the FORMER Bishop of Durham, obviously.
— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 31, 2015

One of the most celebrated exhibits is of the startling skeleton of the Irish giant Charles Byrne, whose corpse John Hunter allegedly acquired in slightly dubious circumstances and then boiled the flesh off. No word on what he did with the resulting meaty soup, but, you know, it would have been a shame to waste it. A loosely fictionalised version of Byrne features in Hilary Mantel's 1998 novel The Giant, O'Brien.

After a hilarious failure of research resulted in our attempting to visit Borough Market on the Sunday only to find it's closed on Sundays, we instead did some rather more touristy stuff, including walking across Tower Bridge, which I don't think I'd done before. We also passed the Monument, which I was unable to resist the temptation to climb (311 steps!) to the top of, just so I could say I'd done it.

One of the great joys of London is just wandering around and occasionally nipping off down a side-street and encountering an interesting pub or restaurant. Here's a couple we popped into:

• Shaws Booksellers, just round the corner from St. Paul's Cathedral. Nice little pub, draught London Pride, bish bosh, sorted. It turns out it's also just round the corner from the London HQ of the Church of Scientology.
• The Hoop & Toy, round the back of South Kensington tube station. This is the pub we adjourned to after the abortive attempt to get into the Natural History Museum. London Pride again. 
• Beirut Express just a couple of minutes away down Old Brompton Road, where we went for a Lebanese lunch. Nice lamb-y bread-y things, free olives, vast bowl of houmous. 
• Cabana just a few minutes from Tottenham Court Road tube station. Great Brazilian grub including possibly the rarest steak I've ever eaten. Not quite as epic, I'd have to say, as the Brazilian food we had at Bem Brasil when we were up in Liverpool back in July (and which I seem to have forgotten to mention at the time), but pretty good. 
• We did attempt a nostalgic re-visit to Ye Olde Mitre in Holborn after visiting the Hunterian Museum, just to sluice away the memory of the Bishop of Durham's diseased rectum, but unfortunately (and slightly bizarrely) it's closed at weekends.

got tweets if you want it; don't sound like no sonnet

How many of you have browsed my Twitter timeline and thought to yourselves: hey, this is a bit like bloody poetry or something? That's right, none of you. But rest assured that isn't going to stop me from making use of the new Poetweet facility to turn random lines from recent-ish tweets into poetry. Here are three examples, entitled, respectively, Get out, June 2001 and Was open. Note that you're not constrained to generating poems from your own Twitter feed, you can use any Twitter handle you like.

pages through the ages

A couple of follow-up notes about that last book review: firstly I should point out the odd coincidence whereby the narratives of both Birdsong and its predecessor The Birthday Boys begin in the same year, 1910. The business of tunneling towards the enemy from your First World War trench to plant explosives was also touched upon, more briefly, in Waiting For Sunrise.

Secondly, and more importantly, Birdsong is the 200th book to appear in this list since it started in September 2006. This review in September 2010 marked book number 100, and included a few selected statistical delights, so let's see how the second hundred compares:

• 28 of the second 100 were by women, compared with 25 of the first 100;
• 100 novels in 1580 days is a slightly slower pace than 1475 days for the first 100, but to be fair I didn't have any children back then. Split the 200 into four blocks of 50 and the first three blocks occupy 780, 683 and 564 days respectively, and the fourth, which starts almost exactly at the time Nia was born in April 2012, occupies 1002 days;
• Another explanation for the delay is that the second 100 books comprise 30,761 pages, compared with 28,398 for the first 100. If you do the maths you'll find that that actually works out at 19.47 pages per day, fractionally faster than the first 100 at 19.25;
• The greater page count is partly explained by the presence of Until I Find You, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest and Infinite Jest, which at 924, 746 and 1079 pages respectively are all longer than the 653 pages of The Corrections, the longest book in the first 100;
• The only authors to appear more than once in the second 100 books are: Beryl Bainbridge, Iain Banks (once with the M, once without), Ian McEwan, Lawrence Durrell, Patricia Highsmith, Russell Hoban, Stieg Larsson and William Boyd. Highsmith, Hoban and Boyd feature three times each, all the others twice. So that means the 100 books featured 89 different authors, a slightly less diverse bunch than the first 100 which featured 93;
• Conversely, 44 of the 100 were by authors who were new to me, compared with 42 last time.

It's going terribly well, so let's press on. See you again some time in 2019.

the last book I read

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks.

Stephen Wraysford is a bit of a typical English cold fish, but he's been given an ideal opportunity to loosen up and broaden his horizons a bit, as he's been sent on an industrial fact-finding mission to France (Amiens in particular) by his employers at the textile company he works for in England. Not a bad gig for a 20-year-old, as he's being accommodated by the owner of the French textile company, René Azaire, in his own house.

Stephen's loosening-up process extends way beyond learning to quaff red wine at lunchtimes and shrug Gallicly, though, as he's soon (page 57 in my version) getting better acquainted with Mrs. Azaire by going down on her comme une tonne de briques while René is out of the house. The affair gets serious enough for Stephen and Isabelle (aka Mrs. Azaire) to run away to start a new life together, but Isabelle is wracked by guilt and eventually returns to seek forgiveness from René, leaving Stephen bereft. She also neglects to inform him that, after many years of failed attempts to conceive with René, she is pregnant.

That initial scene-setting action takes place in 1910, so you can probably guess roughly what's going to happen next. Sure enough, we leap forward to 1916 and the horrific realities of trench warfare: shrapnel, gas gangrene, people's faces getting blown off and landing on your shoes, that sort of thing. Stephen is now an army officer commanding a trench-full of men, including some whose job is to tunnel into the face of the trench towards the enemy - a horrendously dangerous undertaking, to be sure, what with the constant danger of the whole thing falling in on your head, in addition to the possibility of the enemy tunneling under you and blowing you up. Nonetheless in strict percentage terms it's still probably a better bet than climbing out and going over the top. Just to prove the point, Stephen's company are required to take part in the barely-believable slaughter of the Battle of the Somme, which Stephen somehow manages to survive despite going over the top and seeing most of his men blown into tiny fragments around him.

During brief periods of leave from the relentless bombardment and dismemberment at the Somme and, later, at the Battle of Messines (or the "Battle of Messiness" as I would have called it if I'd been there, hahaha), Stephen makes a nostalgic return to Amiens and has a chance meeting with Jeanne, Isabelle's sister. Jeanne is initially reluctant to divulge any information, but eventually relents and tells him that Isabelle is alive and shortly to leave town to be with her German fiancé, Max, but would like to see Stephen before she leaves. When Stephen and Isabelle meet (chaperoned by Jeanne) it is revealed that Isabelle has been quite severely injured in a shell blast and has suffered injuries and scarring to her arm and face. Stephen and Isabelle part on affectionate terms, although she does once again forget to mention the pregnancy and subsequent birth of their child, now about five years old. Well, it's easy for things to slip your mind.

So far, so linear. But come on, this is a work of 1990s literary fiction, so bring on the fractured timeline shit already. Wait, here it is: interwoven with all the World War I stuff is a jump forward to 1978, where Stephen's grand-daughter Elizabeth Benson is doing a bit of research into her grandfather's old diaries, while simultaneously running her own clothing company and also conducting a clandestine affair with a bloke called Robert who works in Europe and makes regular unfulfilled promises to leave his wife during his brief trysts with Elizabeth. Elizabeth has come across some of Stephen's old diaries and starts to decode them, with the help of the husband of a colleague who has some code-breaking expertise. As she reads Elizabeth starts to gradually take more of an interest in the project, to the extent of making a trip to France (with the added ulterior motive of dropping in on Robert for a quick bunk-up) to look at the battlefield and the Thiepval Memorial.

We return to France for Stephen's final wartime moments, and it looks as if his luck has finally run out as he is trapped underground after a German mine explodes and collapses the tunnels behind him. With the help of Jack Firebrace, one of the British tunnelers, he manages to unearth a cache of explosives and rig it up to blow a hole in the earth above them. Obviously the problem with this is that it's as likely to bury them as it is to free them, but they've got no other options. Sure enough Stephen and Jack are buried, but some German soldiers from a nearby trench dig them out - too late for Jack, but Stephen survives, and without having to engage in any hand-to-hand combat with any Germans, as the war is pretty much over and no-one wants to fight any more.

Back in the "present", Elizabeth has discovered that she is pregnant with Robert's child, and, slightly irrationally, decides that the two of them should slope off to a nice cottage in the middle of nowhere for the last week or so before the due date. Needless to say the inevitable happens, and Robert finds himself doing the old hot-water-and-towels routine while he waits for the local doctor to arrive. By the time the doctor turns up Elizabeth has popped out a healthy baby boy, which she names John after Jack Firebrace's dead son in accordance with Stephen's promise while the two of them were entombed.

My Vintage Future Classics edition of Birdsong has - in addition to some rather bossy "reading notes" at the end - an introduction by the author in which he reveals that the book was written at what sounds like breakneck speed between June 1992 and January 1993. He admits to the speed of composition resulting in a few loose ends, and there are a couple which just grate slightly: the appearance of Stuart as a possible suitor for Elizabeth and rival to Robert is presented as building up to something important, and indeed he ends up proposing to her, in a roundabout sort of way. Once he's left Elizabeth thinking about it and sloped off into the night, we never hear from him again, though, nor is he or his proposal even mentioned, which is a bit odd. The other more glaring omission is any explanation for Stephen's slightly odd phobia about birds. Since it's relevant to a couple of key passages in the book, and was important enough to be alluded to in the book's title, for goodness' sake, it might have been nice to have had some insight into what was going on.

These are minor quibbles about a book I enjoyed greatly, far more than I was expecting to in fact. The grim realities of trench warfare aren't perhaps the most promising raw ingredients for entertainment, but the accounts of the grinding tedium mixed with occasional unimaginable horror and (in the moments before going over the top to attack) the opportunity to contemplate your own almost certain painful death are riveting. It's clearly a struggle not to have the sections featuring Elizabeth seem a bit drab in comparison, and the framing device teeters on the edge of being a drag on the plot rather than augmenting it, but it just about works, even though all the new life/new beginnings stuff at the end is laying the symbolism on a bit thick. I'd have been sure to mention these concerns to Sebastian Faulks when I met him, but unfortunately he hadn't yet written Birdsong at the time, so I couldn't.