the last book I read

The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting by Milan Kundera.

Before we go any further here, one should pause to ask: what exactly is a novel? Can it be a made-up story layered on top of and intertwined with actual historical events? Why certainly. Can it have spaceships and entire planets made out of a sort of sentient pink custard? Sure, why not. The entire story told by a dead person? Knock yourself out. A sort of semi-fictionalised travelogue featuring lots of grainy black-and-white photographs of random stuff? Yeah, OK, if you like.

So here is a novel, but it's not necessarily the sort of novel where you can start a summary by saying: there's this guy, Bernard, and he only has fourteen hours to save the Earth! There's only one problem: HE HASN'T GOT A HEAD.

I finally started writing my techno-thriller novel, so far it's going great! pic.twitter.com/dDHTMcnsag

— Pixelated Boat (@pixelatedboat) April 13, 2016

Sometimes you have to start by saying a bit about the structure of the thing. So in this case that means saying: this is a novel made up of seven separate bits, a couple of which overlap and feature common characters, and most of which feature people who are from Kundera's native Czechoslovakia, back when that was a thing. There are some loose themes linking the bits, clues to which are given in the novel's title, but broadly speaking they all revolve around life in Czechoslovakia before and after the Prague Spring and how that made things very difficult for people and forced some of them (Kundera for one) into a life in exile. A potted summary of the seven parts would go something like this

• I: Lost Letters - Mirek travels to the home of his former lover Zdena to retrieve some love letters he sent her more than 20 years previously. He is tailed everywhere in Kafka-esque fashion by the secret police, who eventually arrest him. 
• II: Mother - Karel's mother comes to visit, which is a bit awkward as he's got plans for a threesome featuring him, his wife Marketa and their friend Eva. After a bit of Robin-Askwith-in-Confessions-Of-A-Communist-Dissident stuff featuring near-interruptions from Mum she eventually retires to bed, thus allowing some serious three-way boning to occur, leavened with a bit of existential angst lest anyone start enjoying themselves too much.
• III: The Angels - some fragmented stuff involving two young women trying to make sense of Eugène Ionesco's play Rhinoceros, and also the author himself (or a fictionalised version thereof) in a previous incarnation as a writer of horoscopes.
• IV: Lost Letters - Tamina, a Czech exile, wants to retrieve some old letters to her (now dead) husband that she left in Prague, and attempts to persuade a couple of her new friends (by sleeping with him in the case of the male friend) to travel to Prague to get them for her.
• V: Litost - Krystina, a married woman in her thirties, is in the early stages of an affair with a younger student. Having agreed to come and stay with him (and presumably consummate their relationship at some point during the night), plans are derailed when the student is dragged along to a meeting of poets which runs on well into the night. For this and other reasons Krystina refuses to sleep with him when he eventually returns.
• VI: The Angels - Tamina is mesmerised by a young man who appears one day in the cafe in which she works; she goes on a journey with him which concludes with a boat trip to a mysterious island populated entirely by children. Eventually she tries to escape and, finding herself unable to get back to land by boat, swims for it and drowns.
• VII: The Border - Jan's main concerns are his relationship with his girlfriend Edwige, the occasional liaison with some other random woman, the sickness and imminent death of his friend Passer, and, y'know, the usual existential angst. After an unsatisfactory experience at an orgy run by his friend Barbara, the novel ends with Jan and Edwige wandering along a nudist beach somewhere.

So, as you'll gather from that, some of it is a very literal depiction of the problems caused by the oppressive Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, while some of it is much more allusive. You'll get no insight from me, for instance, on what the episode with Tamina and the children in part VI was meant to convey, other than that it features some slightly queasy sexual episodes that reminded me of similar episodes in Children Of Darkness And Light. And some of the philosophising reminded me of some similar passages in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, the previous Kundera in this list.

My personal feeling is that TULOB is better, despite TBOLAF being hailed as a work of genius by some, John Updike among them - the more linear narrative makes it easier to grasp what's going on and care about the outcome a bit more. Some of the sexy sexy stuff here is a bit odd, too - there's quite a bit of sex, but much of it is fairly mechanical and joyless, and Kundera has, or appears to have, what you might call a slightly 1970s attitude to topics like male infidelity and rape. But perhaps this is meant to reflect the deadening of emotion associated with constant surveillance and the constant possibility of being dragged off to a show-trial somewhere and never seen again: who knows.

The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting also features a cover image that might be a bit on the vicar-frightening side; previous examples have included G. and The Anatomist. 

that's survey to do it

Nice to see that in addition to the Daily Mail the list of people monitoring this blog for ideas includes BBC Four, who evidently decided to tailor a programme to my exact specifications in a (successful, as it happens) bid to lure me in to watching it.

That programme was A Very British Map: The Ordnance Survey Story, which, as the name suggests, was largely about maps, and as an added bonus contained a short section about triangulation points, and mentioned in passing that some people bag them as a hobby.

A couple of mild criticisms: firstly for perpetuating the idea that paper maps are some sort of quaint anachronism that will eventually be consigned to the dustbin of history - while it's no doubt true that paper map sales have fallen, people will still want and need them for all sorts of good, practical reasons even while they're drooling over their wrist-mounted GPS podules at the same time.

Also, rather bizarrely, the woman doing the narration insisted on pronouncing the name of the organisation as "Ordinance Survey" throughout. Now the respective definitions of "ordnance" and "ordinance" do swim about a bit in my head, if I'm honest, but I do remember pretty reliably that the map guys make use of the word without the "i" in it.

incidental music spot of the day

Your very own Won't Get Fooled Again in the early stages of Channel 5's The Best of Bad TV: The 70s. You can pretty much imagine what featured here, I expect: various dwarves in rubber suits running around bumping into the scenery in old science fiction series, various crappy game shows with hilariously awful prizes, and some sphincter-tightening sexism and racism from comedy classics like The Comedians and The Wheeltappers And Shunters Social Club.

There was also a spot for the public information film Dark Water: pretty creepy, but not a patch on The Finishing Line. A quick scan of this compilation suggests it's not in the list (it was not a Public Information Film in the strict sense) but there is nonetheless some excellent nightmare fuel in there. Here's The Finishing Line, if for some reason you don't fancy sleeping tonight.

and on the third day he blogged again

A couple of religion-related stories in the news around Easter (so a few weeks ago now, but y'know, sue me, I've been busy), occupying spots somewhere near the tragic and comic ends of the spectrum, respectively.

Firstly, David Cameron's at it again with his Easter message: farting all sorts of meaningless soundbites out of his potato-ey face-hole. The co-opting of things that are clearly universal human things, or at least things that most societies that have progressed beyond making crudely-fashioned drinking vessels out of each other's skulls and crudely-fashioned flutes out of each other's femurs have adopted as the best ways to behave, as somehow quintessentially Christian values, is a pretty common one, even while being a) patently ridiculous and b) implicitly making the claim that any other religions that claim them as foundational values are WRONG and have STOLEN THEM from Christianity.

Some of the things that Cameron is claiming LITERALLY DID NOT EXIST until some bunch of ill-educated goat-herds threw the Bible together some time during the first couple of centuries AD are such hilariously anodyne concepts as:

Values of responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion and pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities.

Needless to say things like "hard work" are things that pre-Christian societies like the ancient Egyptians and Greeks knew nothing of, while they were building the pyramids and the Parthenon and that. Interestingly the paragraph above appears to be an almost word-for-word retread of part of a speech he gave in Oxford back in late 2011. I guess once you've got your shtick down there's no point trying to re-work it. Zoe Williams in the Guardian picks all the bullshit apart far better than I've done here.

The other obvious riposte, made more pithily by Stephen Fry here, is that what Christianity considers its foundational values have changed over time - not much "compassion" on show during the crusades, for instance. If you want a modern example, look at attitudes to things like women's rights and homosexuality - things the various churches would have been implacably opposed to back in the day, and would have found wider society broadly in agreement, but since societal attitudes have moved on and become generally more groovy and inclusive those same churches are increasingly desperately hanging onto its coat-tails to try to retain some relevance.

Cameron knows what he's doing, of course: no public statement of this sort will be issued without there being some point to it in terms of keeping the core Conservative voting bloc onside. Cameron's Machiavellian strategist Lynton Crosby will no doubt have run the figures and calculated that there's more value in issuing some vaguely comforting platitudes to the ageing spinsters and apoplectic retired colonels who vote Tory habitually than in saying anything vaguely meaningful to people who care about statements actually making sense, since the stuff-making-sense demographic won't be voting Tory in large numbers anyway.

Secondly, there's this rather bizarre story about the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby wanting to standardise the date of Easter. Now I actually quite like the rather haphazard appearance of Easter in the calendar, for a number of reasons, one of which is: since I'm exceptionally averse to advance planning I rarely know when Easter is more than a couple of weeks in advance, so the four-day weekend is always a pleasant surprise. But, says the Archbish, people find it confusing, so we should try and have it on the same date every year. As always it's interesting to try and put yourself in the head of someone who, while seemingly able to do normal things like drive a car, operate a bank account and make it to the toilet in time, also believes some hair-raisingly irrational shit, and try to work out what makes them tick.

The obvious criticism of Easter as it stands is: look, this is meant to be the most significant thing in the Christian calendar, and the whole significance of it rests on its being the commemoration of some actual events that actually happened, as ridiculous as they might sound. So surely that would necessitate the festival being on the same day every year? Christmas is on the same day every year, after all. And the current arrangement with the whole business of it being linked to the cycle of the moon is a bit of a DEAD GIVEAWAY of its pagan beginning-of-spring nature-worshipping origins (although it should be said that the whole thing about the conveniently-named pagan goddess Ēostre is fairly thinly-evidenced).

Amusingly, though, the Telegraph article demonstrates that either the Telegraph's reporter or the church authorities themselves haven't grasped the actual nature of the problem, since there's talk of keeping Easter to a Sunday:

Now you can see the point of this, since there's a well-established tradition of having the Good Friday and Easter Monday bank holidays bookending the Easter weekend, and if Easter suddenly starts happening on a Wednesday then there's the whole question of what happens to them. As much as I don't care about imaginary Jewish zombies, I don't want to lose my four-day weekend. And those Lindt bunnies are pretty awesome as well.

The trouble is, of course, if you keep it to a Sunday you aren't fixing the date of Easter at all, you're just introducing a slightly simplified arbitrary rule for calculating the Sunday on which it occurs: the first Sunday in April, say, rather than the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox as it currently is. To which the obvious riposte is: why would you bother? And I suppose the obvious answer is: because it keeps the church in the news, and provides at least the illusion of the people in charge being open to change, responding to criticism, moving with the times and all that horseshit.

My advice to the Christian churches is this: either leave things as they are, thereby implicitly acknowledging that your absurd Bronze Age voodoo belief system survives mainly by virtue of how deeply culturally embedded it is, and that actually the last thing you want to do is to make people think too much about what any of it means, or fold up your tents, sneak away into the night, and stop bothering everyone. Or, I suppose, thirdly, produce some proper evidence for the resurrection (and, moreover, that the guy who was resurrected was the Son of God, and, even moreover, that there's this guy called God who totally exists) that ties it to some specific date which we can all then agree hereafter to call Easter. Job done.

meet the new song, same as the old song

As a further tribute to Prince, here's a two-item music list for you: songs which start, do the basic tune for a bit, then have a sort of break-down section where things go a bit wibbly-wobbly for a while about two-thirds of the way through, before cranking back up to the original riff/chorus/whatever for a brief finale, then almost immediately signing off.

• Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who. A song only a year younger than me and still one of the top two or three most viscerally thrilling rock songs ever recorded, this smashes out one last colossal powerchord before a section featuring just the pulsing synth line that runs through the whole song, then gradually winds up Keith Moon to a frenzied drum tattoo that precedes Roger Daltrey's throat-stripping YEEEEAAAHHHH (as featured regularly on CSI:Miami), the brief bit about "meet the new boss, same as the old boss", a few more powerchords, and then thank you and goodnight.
• I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man by Prince. This has a longer break-down section featuring some nice jazzy guitar-playing which eventually winds back  up to a "one, two, three, four" (well, on repeat listening it's actually "one, two, one, WOOOO") and a quick blast through the song's main riff, and then before you know it it's gone, with just a wisp of guitar feedback hanging on the air.

Both songs were also issued as singles with the break-down section edited out (plus quite a bit more stuff in the case of Won't Get Fooled Again) to bring them both down to about 3½ minutes. In both cases it's the longer version you want.

Here's the raw data, complete with WAV file profiles for both songs: the break-down section in Won't Get Fooled Again runs from about 6:35 to about 7:45, while the longer one in I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man runs from about 3:45 to about 6:00.

funk off and die

As I said at the time of the deaths of David Bowie and Glenn Frey earlier in 2016 (a year which statistically is exceptionally celebrity-death-heavy so far, so it's OK for you to say that), which celebrity's death you feel personally affected by will reflect your past life, upbringing and what sort of cultural stuff you were exposed to or chose to expose yourself to.

So, anyway, what I'm building up to is that Prince's death this week is a much more significant event to me than either of the other two, largely because Prince formed a part of my formative music listening habits in a way that Bowie and the Eagles didn't.

I don't know what's a typical age to start buying records (this of course was back in the days when vinyl "records" were the primary medium of music delivery), but I suspect 13 is probably a bit later than most. I think I may technically have "bought" this John Denver album in Korea back when I was about six, in that I was invited to make the final decision and it was paid for with money that was nominally "mine", but I deem my first "proper" single purchase to be Every Breath You Take by The Police in 1983, swiftly followed by I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues by Elton John and Gimme All Your Lovin' by ZZ Top. All good songs, and choices which I stand by 30-odd years later, but all very white, very male - very gay in Elton's case, as it happens, but he wasn't quite as up-front about it at the time.

So when Prince really became a big thing in the UK around the time of When Doves Cry there was a fair bit of paradigm-smashing going on - black guy, not really conforming to traditional notions of masculinity but still clearly beating off the ladies with a shitty stick in his offstage life, making music with a funky dance-y edge while still being a brilliant rock guitarist, all that sort of thing.

It's interesting to consider how one's musical tastes evolve - everyone likes to think that they just like what they like, as the end result of a completely objective process of listening to stuff and working out what's good and what isn't, but of course this is nonsense, and every single choice you make is influenced to some extent by prior experiences, who you knew, what they liked, where you first heard things and stuff like that. In the case of Prince, my recollection is that my friend Tom had a copy of the 7" single of Let's Go Crazy, and its organ-backed spoken intro, lyrics suggesting transgressive sexy sexy times and squealy rock guitar finale all seemed pungently exotic and exciting to me at the time. But I should apply a bit of self-awareness and add that Tom was a lot cooler than me, so maybe there was an inclination to give this more of a favourable first listen just because it was him who'd introduced me to it? Who knows. In my defence he was also into The Cult in a big way and (She Sells Sanctuary, which is a cracking tune, aside) I always thought they were a bit shit. I suppose the key thing to say is that this marked a move away from being musically influenced by my parents' record collection to being musically influenced by my contemporaries, sometimes moving into the realms of stuff my parents wouldn't necessarily "get".

So I went and bought the Purple Rain album and played it to death for a year or so, with further transgressive thrills provided by Darling Nikki with its references to female masturbation, something my 14/15-year-old self may very possibly not have even been previously aware was a thing. I had copies of the next two albums, Around The World In A Day and Parade, through the magic of home taping (which turned out not to be killing music after all) before buying the double album Sign O'The Times in 1987. We parted company a bit after that, and I don't think I've purchased a non-compilation Prince album since, but there was, in hindsight, lots of good stuff after that, just spread a bit more thinly. Sign O'The Times is the one if you must have only one; if you also had Purple Rain and a comprehensive singles compilation (this one, for instance, which is the one I have, although it only includes stuff up to 1993) that would be a pretty good start.

So here's my favourite ten Prince songs, in no particular order, and written down largely off the cuff, so no guarantee of completeness or definitiveness, nor indeed originality, since a lot of these are the big hits. If you want to know what other people, doubtless more knowledgeable about the unexplored nooks and crannies of his vast back catalogue, think, plenty of other opinions are available.

• I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man - I think this may be my favourite Prince song of all, just because it's such a joyous summery tune, and in its 6½-minute album version gives Prince the chance for a bit of a rock guitar workout, something he usually kept on a tight rein on the albums. Its lyrical theme of man rejecting a woman's offer of a one-night stand because he knows she won't feel good about it afterwards typifies Prince's generally groovy and empowering attitudes to women and female sexuality, not something you could say about many mid-1980s male artists.
• Little Red Corvette - cars as metaphor for sex, horse-riding as metaphor for sex. It's about sex, basically.
• Sign O'The Times - atypical in that it's got a socio-political edge to it, but typical in that it typifies Prince's gift for minimal backing arrangements (Kiss being the classic example of this). Also one of the small group of songs to lyrically reference the Challenger shuttle disaster.
• Dirty Mind - well this is just pure filth, with the pulsing synth groove humping your leg like a randy Yorkshire terrier.
• Alphabet St. - a bit of jangly funk guitar, a bit more lyrical depiction of non-vanilla sexy sexy times ("I would like to.....watch").
• Pope - a track from the 1993 Hits compilation, this previously unreleased song is a pretty silly throwaway tune that was obviously just Prince mucking about in the studio, but is still sharp, funny and ferociously funky.
• Cream - well, again, it's just (just!) about sex, but it's an irresistible sinuous groove that owes more than a little to Get It On by T.Rex.
• Sexy MF - extreme funkiness, liberal use of the word "motherfucker" and some bowel-loosening parpy horn stabs.
• Purple Rain - yeah, I know, but think of it as a sort of mid-1980s Hey Jude; similar tempo, lengthy coda and all. And it's another one from the more rock-guitar-oriented end of his range, which fits my personal prejudices.
• Raspberry Beret - another glorious summer tune; boy meets funky scantily-clad hipster girl in the corner shop and they head off to a deserted barn on his motorbike to go at it like knives. The Hindu Love Gods' brutish meat-and-potatoes cover version is worth a listen too.

Of course this neglects all the great songs that he wrote for or had covered by other people as well, from I Feel For You to Manic Monday to Nothing Compares 2 U.

the last book I read

Ragtime by EL Doctorow.

It's New York City (and its environs) in the first decade-and-a-half of the 20th century - so if there were ever a time and place where it could be said that Great Things Are Afoot, this would be it. The invention of the motor car, the skyscraper, the movies, all fuelled by a relentless influx of immigrants from all over the world; mainly Europe but plenty of more exotic places as well.

And the people: Henry Ford, JP Morgan, Harry Houdini, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Emma Goldman - all in or around New York at this time doing their various things for the advancement of humanity.

Amid all this momentous stuff there are some actual people living their lives as well. For the purposes of the novel these are: a WASP family living in New Rochelle, just outside the city, an Eastern European immigrant and his young daughter, and a black musician and his fiancée. The WASP family are known, slightly impersonally, as Father, Mother, Mother's Younger Brother and "the boy". Father goes off on expeditions, including Peary's 1909 North Pole expedition, while Mother's Younger Brother moons around fairly aimlessly in that way young men do until he becomes obsessed with socialite Evelyn Nesbit and the media circus surrounding her and her husband Harry Thaw. Having met Evelyn through the radical Emma Goldman and conducted a brief affair with her, Mother's Younger Brother finds himself open to radical ideas.

As it happens Coalhouse Walker has a radical idea for him - having been victimised by some of the New York fire department and had his car (a Ford Model T) confiscated, Coalhouse embarks on a campaign of terror against the city with an expanding band of sidekicks to get compensation. Coalhouse also has a fiancée, Sarah, and a child, who ends up living with Mother and Father after Sarah dies. Coalhouse ropes Mother's Younger Brother (who has an aptitude for explosives) into his cause, but things inevitably end in tears, and, in Coalhouse's case, a bullet-ridden death at the hands of the New York police. Meanwhile some of the carefree living will have to stop, as World War I is on the verge of breaking out.

I suppose you'd classify Ragtime at least partly as "historical fiction" in that it takes a real, well-documented period of time and some real, well-documented historical figures and weaves a fictional narrative around them. It mucks around with the rules slightly by having some of the "real" people do things they probably didn't actually do, like the rather fanciful whimsical interlude of Freud and Jung riding on the Tunnel of Love at Coney Island. As always there are some shades of grey here - I'm not sure you'd class, for instance, Turbulence as "historical fiction" despite its featuring some real-life events.

The trick with this sort of thing is to ensure that the transitions between real-life stuff which is documented in the history books and the stuff you've made up just to drive the story along aren't too lumpy and jarring. The only place where this doesn't seem seamless is in the character of Coalhouse Walker, his transition into urban terrorist, and his co-opting of Mother's Younger Brother into his band of outlaws. Interestingly this bit of the novel was apparently adapted (or stolen, depending how happy you are with the amount of attribution Doctorow gave for doing it) from an earlier (19th century) novel called Michael Kohlhaas by German author Heinrich von Kleist, itself apparently based on the real-life (16th century) story of Hans Kohlhase and his doomed attempt to get some redress for the mistreatment of his horses.

The distancing device whereby few of the (fictional) central characters have names is a slightly odd one - it doesn't divorce you from caring about individuals in the same way as Last And First Men does, but it does keep you at arm's length in terms of engaging with what happens to them. It also just reinforces the point that the book's main concern is the Great Sweep Of History, rather than the little people who populate it, and if some of the individuals get a bit lost, well, so be it. There might therefore be a sense in which you find it difficult to engage with any of the major characters - apart from the bit where Mother's Younger Brother falls out of a wardrobe while having a furtive wank in Evelyn Nesbit's hotel room. Well, we've all done it.

As with Under The Volcano, this is a dead cert for just about any list of "great 20th-century novels", and sure enough it pops up in the TIME magazine list of 100 greatest 20th-century novels. It was also made into a film in 1981 which featured James Cagney in his last appearance.

Here's Doctorow's appearance in the Paris Review's Art of Fiction series of long meandering interviews.

deadlift, snatch or clean and jerk

Here's a curious coincidence: no sooner do I speculate on the relative merits of furious spin-bike training and furious self-abuse than the Daily Mail knock out a lifestyle piece along pretty much the same lines. Compare the respective dates: my blog post appeared on April 13th, the Mail article on April 15th. It's almost as if someone at the Mail, maybe even Paul Dacre himself, is reading this blog for inspiration.

The Mail article plays down the likely calorie-burning benefits of masturbation as compared to something like going for a jog or to the gym. On the other hand with some of those there may be a cost involved, and you have to do tedious administrative things like put some trousers on. Swings and roundabouts, as always.

I've got a bike you can ride it if you like

It's time to address the sensitive subject of my weight. No, no, don't try to fob me off with all that "weight? are you mad?", "you look fine", "you are like a LITERAL Greek god, you magnificent creature" stuff, we've got to grasp the nettle and face up to it.

Now as utterly delightful and rewarding as parenthood is, and I wouldn't have missed a moment of it, it is true that it does place some constraints on one's leisure time, and that means a reduction in the number of opportunities for getting some healthy exercise, whether that be golf, some sort of after-work racket sports action or just yomping up a hill. Even popping out to the shed for a quick thrash round my home gym is more difficult than it used to be, since it now has to happen between the end of the kids' bath-and-bed routine and dinner time, with the added complication that since cooking dinner is usually my job that also means pushing dinner-time back by half an hour or so.

So I decided something had to be done. I should clarify, I suppose, that this was brought about by a general feeling of not being quite as fit as I used to be, rather than by any sort of crash weight gain necessitating waddling round the house in a muumuu and occasionally losing the TV remote in my neck folds. In fact I weigh almost exactly the same now as I did at the end of 2005 when Hazel and I met. To be fair, that's a good four stone heavier than I was at some points during my university days, but I was painfully skinny back then thanks to only intermittently being able to afford to eat.

Back in the heady days of not having children, Hazel and I had got into a routine of going to an early-morning (7am!) spinning class at the grandly-named Newport International Sports Village, which I used to enjoy greatly despite the earliness of the hour, as you can get a really good sweat up while remaining in the same place. Now you might say, well, just get on an actual bike and go for a bike ride then, but that's actually considerably more complicated as you have to factor in the possibility of adverse weather and mechanical failures, not to mention being sideswiped by a juggernaut and killed. Not insurmountable problems (apart from the being killed bit), but the key here, as with all dieting and exercise regimes, is to realise that Future You is a shiftless feckless lazy fat bastard who will seize the slightest opportunity to weasel out of doing things that involve effort, and that therefore you need to pre-emptively put some structure in place that will thwart Future You from fucking up all your fine intentions. One could also say: I'm a busy man, it's the 21st century and I just want to get to the calorie-burning bit without all the admin, just as I relish being able to switch between songs at a click on iTunes without having to get up and put a different LP on the turntable. Progress, innit.

So I mentioned the possibility to Hazel of purchasing a spin bike for the house, presumably second-hand as a gym-quality one with a proper heavy flywheel typically goes for several hundred quid. Luckily she is a bit of a whiz at eBay and managed to get hold of a very solid Horizon S3+ at a bargain price (I don't know exactly how much as it was a Christmas present). I had to do some engineering work on it to repair the resistance adjusting knob which had a vexing habit of falling off halfway through a workout, but apart from that it was in perfect working order.

The other advantage of going to a spinning class rather than out on the road is that there's an instructor barking orders at you and imposing some structure on the session. Again, you can adhere to some sort of purist view that says: this should not be necessary with a bit of discipline, or you can shrug and say, yeah, but Future You will be on the ale and pies like a shot unless you keep an eye on him, the lazy fucker. At this point you can either hire a personal trainer at exorbitant cost, or you can search out some of the excellent selection of videos available on YouTube, mostly via Global Cycling Network, which seek to give the authentic spin class experience.

The second of our downstairs rooms (I believe "reception rooms" is the accepted estate-agent-ese) is set up as Hazel's photography client meeting room, and therefore, as luck would have it, contains a projector for facilitating viewing of wedding album designs, portraits, etc. So if I hook up my laptop to the projector and fire up a GCN YouTube video, hey presto, a real spinning class in my own home.

This one here is the one I normally use, since it's a good brisk 20-minute interval-training workout (i.e. periods of normal pedalling interspersed with sprints) which, if you commit to it fully, should give you that authentic sweat-dripping-on-the-floor effect by the end. Really this just provides a structure; the intensity level is up to you. As a general rule of thumb I like to try to keep to about 75rpm for the regular sections and crank it up to about 100rpm for the sprints - obviously how high you wind up the resistance is a factor too.

You may, if you wish, speculate about the possible other reasons why I use this particular video, like for instance its all-female class and the woman nearest the camera on the far right with the spectacular breasts in particular. I wouldn't like to comment, but the ladies do appear to be wearing a bit more make-up than would be normal for a spin class (in my experience at least, though of course I may just have chosen the wrong spin class to attend) and some of the sweat in the latter stages does look a bit artfully sprayed-on, particularly in the gratuitous bum-angle shots. But, you know, whatever keeps you interested and gets you through the 20 minutes. Some of the on-screen captioning is a bit (presumably knowingly) fnarr-fnarr as well.

All of which begs the question, and I'm sure you're way ahead of me here: how does the calorie-burning effect of a 20-minute spin bike workout compare with simply using the same video to facilitate masturbating furiously for 20 minutes?

There are various resources regarding the calorie-burning properties of stationary cycling, most of which suggest that a 20-minute workout at reasonable intensity will burn about 200 calories. Information, let alone reliable information, regarding wanking is a bit harder to come by (ooer), but most estimates seem to suggest a 20-minute workout of this kind will burn somewhere between 20 and 100 calories; this may vary depending how closely you adhere to the relax-SPRINT-relax-SPRINT pattern, and of course whether you can hold out for the full 20 minutes. Other considerations include whether you'd prefer to end up with muscular thighs or a massive right arm. So you might decide that it's worth splashing out (ooer, again) on a bike after all.

sithlebrity lookeylikey of the day

It was Nia's birthday today, so we went to Bristol Zoo for a day out. All good fun and Nia had a fine time including getting her face painted. She chose a ladybird design, which made for an arresting effect which I found faintly sinister for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on, until I realised that it was because it made her look a bit like Darth Maul from Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace.

Fortunately we managed to get out and back on the Park & Ride bus without her getting sliced in half by any passing Jedi knights, which was nice. Those of you with long memories will recall that this is Nia's second appearance in this list.

headlines of the day

The day in question being yesterday, actually, but I'm a busy man and I can't always leap into blogging action at the drop of a dangling modifier. Anyway, here's a couple from the Daily Mail.

Firstly, this one illustrating the importance of keeping track of which pronoun refers to whom - in the normal course of sentence construction the "she" and the "her" in the last clause would typically refer to the same person. Not so here, unless there's some sort of My Big Fat Scottish Zombie Wedding thing going on.

Secondly, this mind-bogglingly inconsequential piece about Victoria Beckham taking a selfie: the hack who wrote the original headline evidently gave it the care and attention its importance merited and left in two obvious errors (they seem to have now been corrected). The first one just mangles the (already lame) attempted reference to Bend It Like Beckham; the second just raises the question: what the hell is a "ballot pose"? Is it like a ballot box? i.e. something shiny, angular and sharp-cornered with a generous slot in the middle accessible by right to anyone who's on the electoral register? Well, as they say, good luck with that.

Obviously I do know it's meant to say "ballet", really. It's still not quite as funny as the claim about Stella Artois 4 being "a good pallet cleanser", though. Fascinatingly, although the link in that old 2009 blog post is now dead, the Wayback Machine has a couple of archives of it, one roughly contemporary with the post and one from a couple of years later. Here they are, in chronological order.

The sharp-eyed among you will notice that they've had a go at correcting the original error, but have, amusingly, still managed to cock it up, unless there really has been a refinement of the recipe to reposition the product from being suitable for cleaning heavy-duty wooden stacking platforms to being more suitable for cleaning artists' equipment. I assume not, and that the word they were groping unsuccessfully for each time was "palate". But it's Stella, so you never know.

penguin popular 20th-century modern classics presents

A couple of follow-up thoughts after the last book review, mostly relating to my battered old Penguin paperback copy of Under The Volcano which I more than likely picked up on one of my strictly-rationed trips to Hay-on-Wye a few years back.

Firstly, it's always interesting to have a snoop into the endpapers of second-hand books to see if there are any inadvertent revelations about the previous owner(s). In this case there is an official-looking stamp inside the front cover which looks like this:

It turns out that Barnoldswick is in Lancashire, and that Barnoldswick County Secondary School still sort of exists, although it goes by a different name these days. Just for a second there I read the new name as Wes Craven High School, which would literally have been the best thing ever, but sadly the reality is a little more mundane.

Barnoldswick is apparently pronounced Barlick by locals, in one of those insider/outsider shibboleths that you'll find endearing or infuriating depending on your point of view (personally I tend towards the latter). More endearing, to me at least, are the claims to fame listed on its Wikipedia page, two of which make a strong claim for Lamest Thing Ever, as follows:

• Barnoldswick, at 12 letters, is one of the longest place names in the UK with no repeated letters. Only Buckfastleigh in Devon and two places called Buslingthorpe (one in Yorkshire, one in Lincolnshire) are longer at 13 letters.
• It is said, by some, possibly people who ought to get out more, that Barnoldswick is the biggest town in the UK not to be directly served by any A-roads. 

I really want to go and visit now, even if it has to be via an unsatisfyingly slow B-road route. Barnoldswick also sounds a bit like Barnstoneworth, home of the world's worst football team.

My copy of Under The Volcano, which appears to be from around 1963, is from an early series of Penguin Modern Classics. I've got a few books from a few different incarnations of this series over the years, plus a few from other Penguin series whose scope, you'd think, must overlap somewhere. Here's a photo (open it in a new tab for a full-size version):

So The Trial is a Penguin Modern Classic from probably the late 1980s, and The Queen's Gambit is probably no more than a couple of years old. As for the others, A Room With A View is from the old black-spined Penguin Classics series, and Things Fall Apart is from the newer version of the series which have mostly silver covers. Now since A Room With A View was published in 1908 and Things Fall Apart in 1958 (conversely, Under The Volcano was published in 1947), you might reasonably ask: where is the boundary between "classic" and "modern classic"? Things are complicated further by my green-spined copy of A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man which is from a series called Penguin 20th-Century Classics. Finally, Gulliver's Travels (which I should confess is the only one of the books pictured that I haven't read) is from the Penguin Popular Classics series, which is a sort of budget series generally featuring slightly older books whose publication rights are presumably cheaper.

Lastly, I've linked a couple of times before to this list of great closing lines from novels - Under The Volcano is at number 73.

the last book I read

Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.

Geoffrey Firmin, British ex-consul of a town in Mexico, is in one of its bars at 7am on the Day Of The Dead (our own Hallowe'en, broadly speaking) taking the hangover-avoidance advice variously attributed to WC Fields, Dean Martin and Dorothy Parker: "stay drunk". He's therefore somewhat ill-prepared for the unexpected arrival of his estranged wife, Yvonne, whose sudden reappearance marks the beginning of a day of wild adventures; it will also be the last day of Geoffrey's life.

Yvonne has returned to Quauhnahuac, in the shadow of the twin volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccihuatl, in a last-ditch attempt to save Geoffrey from his rampant alcoholism. Not that Yvonne has been blameless in the disintegration of their relationship, mind you, as in addition to having a fling with French film director and local resident M. Laruelle she's also slept with Geoffrey's half-brother Hugh. Right on cue Hugh, who leads a wandering existence as a musician and journalist, turns up at the house. Geoffrey is having a nap and attempting half-heartedly to sober up, so Yvonne and Hugh go for a horse-ride to pass some time.

Partly to escape the awkwardness of their situation, and partly to keep Geoffrey off the whisky for five minutes, the three decide to take a day trip. Taking a bus to a nearby town, they make an unscheduled stop when they pass a Mexican in the road who has been beaten and robbed and is pretty clearly dying. No-one on the bus wants to get involved, though, for fear of being implicated in his death, so eventually they move on. They mooch around for a bit in town, taking in a bullfight and a visit to a bar, where after a few more drinks Geoffrey and Hugh get into an argument and Geoffrey storms drunkenly out.

Yvonne and Hugh decide that they'd better go after Geoffrey, but it's not clear where he's gone. Concluding that he's probably made his way to the next town, and probably done so via a route that includes a couple of bars, they set off through the jungle in pursuit.

Meanwhile Geoffrey has reached his destination - his final destination - a bar right under the slopes of Popocatépetl. Here he drinks some more mescal, reads some old love-letters from his wife, and is confronted by some representatives of the local police force, who are highly suspicious of westerners and take a dim view of Geoffrey's failure to co-operate. Eventually the situation escalates, a scuffle breaks out, and Geoffrey is shot and his body hurled down a ravine. Meanwhile a horse, spooked by the gunfire, runs off down a jungle path and tramples and kills Yvonne.

Well, so that's just your basic story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets girl again, with added pub crawls, extra-judicial killing and illegal corpse disposal, you might say, but as so often a surface reading of the narrative doesn't quite reveal the full story.

The most obvious thing to say is that this is a book liberally soaked, steeped, soused, marinated in booze. Geoffrey gets through a heroic quantity of whisky, tequila and mescal during the course of the book, leavened only by the occasional beer ("full of vitamins") as a pick-me-up, and since most of the story is seen through Geoffrey's eyes (the other bits are written from either Hugh or Yvonne's viewpoint except for the opening framing chapter - set a year later - which is M. Laruelle's) he's the ultimate unreliable narrator - one who's completely arseholed all the time. We've all probably been in the situation of misjudging one's own level of sobriety during a drinking session and imagining that one is holding forth on a variety of topics with consummate wit and charm, while those around us just see some rambling cretin spouting slurred nonsense.

And it's not just the basic drunkenness - long-term alcohol abuse has all sorts of neurological implications, from the painful extremities that Geoffrey suffers from (and which prevent him putting his socks on) to visual and auditory hallucinations. So it's never entirely clear which stuff is actually happening and which bits are just inside Geoffrey's head.

Lowry didn't have to do much in the way of research for Geoffrey Firmin, as he was himself a roaringly hopeless alcoholic, who died at the age of 47 after an unwise cocktail of drink and barbiturates. Under The Volcano was the second of only two novels he ever published, and you get the feeling he knew he wouldn't write anything else of any significance, so he was going to throw everything he had at this one. So it's dense with allusions, digressions, flashbacks, as well as some prodigiously long sentences and some chapters (the last one in particular) which are mainly intimidating stream-of-consciousness walls of text.

That makes it sound difficult to read, but I didn't find it to be that, or at least not in the same way as The Autumn Of The Patriarch, which did some similar tricks with immensely long sentences. That said, you won't race through it, but it's well worth having a go at, if only for one of the most vividly convincing depictions of alcoholism I've ever read: the raw grinding need for a drink, the furtiveness, the terrible hopeless clammy despair and self-disgust on succumbing to temptation, the maudlin regret and wild promises to reform, give up, spend some quality time with the family, play more tennis, etc. etc. Geoffrey isn't just a drunk, though, he's obviously an intelligent man with a moderately distinguished military past, and you care about him enough to find his long meandering stagger towards his inevitable demise tragic rather than comic (though there are a few blackly comic moments).

Under The Volcano is pretty much guaranteed to be on any "best 20th-century novels" list you can find, including the TIME Magazine list that's featured here many times before, but also lists from the Guardian, the BBC, and the Modern Library. Under The Volcano is number 11 on that list; other novels on that list to appear on this blog are numbers 2, 4, 21, 55, 63, 64, 70, 90 and 99.

Under The Volcano was also made into a film, directed by veteran John Huston, in 1984. I haven't seen it, but it gained Albert Finney an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Geoffrey Firmin - F. Murray Abraham won that year for Amadeus.

hotel du lack of pulse

Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble, kill off writers at the double. Hot on the heels (and upturned toes) of Umberto Eco, the latest (and, unless I've overlooked anyone, thirteenth) novelist to succumb to the fearsome destructive power of the Curse of Electric Halibut is Anita Brookner, author of 20-odd slim novels including, most famously, Hotel Du Lac, winner of the Booker Prize in 1984. It was that novel's appearance here back in July 2011 (one of four books I read on my honeymoon in Canada) that roused the Grim Reaper from one of his various chess games and set him off on a leisurely pursuit that eventually ended last week after just over four-and-a-half years.

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	2y 291d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	7y 218d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	7y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	7y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d

So, as with Eco, the overall stats aren't going to be affected much here, since the typical cursed novelist dies in their mid-80s after four years or so. There is an interesting statistical oddity whereby 87 is the most popular age for the curse to take effect - no fewer than four novelists on the list (Matheson, Leonard, Márquez, Brookner) succumbed at that age (no other number appears more than once). There's one at 84, one at 85 and one at 86 as well, so mid-eighties is definitely a danger zone. Then again that's true of non-cursed non-novelists as well.

Here's another of those long, meandering Paris Review interviews, this one appears to be from 1987.

come over here and find me in the Alps

Here's a rather magnificent addition to the dubbed-for-TV swearing files as previously noted here and expertly satirised here - this is the scene from The Big Lebowski where Walter (played by John Goodman) smashes up what he thinks is a car bought by a teenage schoolboy with some stolen ransom money. The plot details aren't important, what's important is the phrase Walter repeatedly uses as he takes a wrecking bar to the car: "this is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass". Marvel, if you will, at what's happened to it here:



Just in case you couldn't make it out, the original line seems to have been mutated (starting at about 0:30) into two different things:

• this is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps
• this is what happens when you feed a stoner scrambled eggs

You do wonder whether film-makers, particularly ones of a quirkily humorous nature like the Coen brothers, might have decided that the rules for sanitising movies for TV consumption, particularly the exceptionally sweary ones like The Big Lebowski (which, I should add, is one of my favourite films), are so restrictive and ridiculous that the only way to go is as ludicrous as possible.

names occupying regions with intense communication hardship

Bear with me once again as I indulge my fondness for map-related trivia. Here's an interesting little website that uses data from the UK electoral roll to pick out hotspots for particular surnames, i.e. regions of the country where that name is statistically over-represented. As the explanatory blog post explains, it's far from infallible, but it's quite interesting nonetheless.

Also interesting is the feature whereby you can put in your name and your spouse's name and see if it can work out where you might have met. As it happens there's absolutely no chance of it identifying where I met my wife, for a couple of reasons - firstly because we met (10 years ago this last New Year's Eve!) in Thornton Heath in south London, somewhere neither of us has ever lived, but secondly, and more interestingly, because the hotspots for our respective pre-marital names, Thomas and Hannant, are about as far apart as it's possible to get in mainland Britain, in terms of east-west separation anyway.

The hotspot on the left, somewhere just a few miles north-east up the River Towy from Carmarthen in west Wales, is the one for Thomas. It's obviously pretty unsurprising that this should be in Wales, although as I understand it most of my forebears lived a bit further east, nearer Cardiff. The Hannant hotspot is a few miles north of Norwich, about a third of the way between Norwich and Cromer. I seem to recall my father-in-law telling me he thought the name was of French origin, although other theories are available, including a possible Scottish origin.

Anyway, thank goodness for increased social mobility, as it would take quite a bit of dedication to sustain a relationship over that distance - even if you're ignoring the exact centres of the hotspots and just going from Carmarthen to Norwich Google Maps reckons it'll take somewhere in the region of five-and-a-half hours to drive, or seven-and-a-half if you're on the train.

it's a steady job, but he wants to be a paperback reader

I got the train and bus into work this morning, something I used to do every day but now only do when there's a specific reason to. That reason is usually (and tonight is no exception) that I'm planning to go straight to some sort of social event afterwards involving alcohol consumption and don't want to be sipping orange juice and lemonade all night.

One of the most important things to remember when taking public transport, for the serious bookworm at least, is to take a book with you. I always have my current book in my laptop bag anyway, which is fine for going to work, but I'm planning to leave the bag in the office later so I need to remember to transfer the book to being on my person in some way. This prompted a couple of thoughts about problems which solely afflict dedicated Book People like me:

• if you're not intending to carry a bag, you need a pocket big enough to slip a paperback into. You can generally just about fit a standard A-format paperpack (a standard Penguin, say) into the back pocket of a pair of jeans, but only if it's not too thick (and, I suppose, if you haven't got such a massive arse that the back pocket has no "give" in it at all). This is a bit unsatisfactory, as you'll discover as soon as you try to sit down. What you really need is a jacket with some of those big internal pockets that I like to call "poacher's pockets" although they're actually something slightly different. My battered old Nike fleecy zip-up jacket illustrates what I mean perfectly, as well as giving a tantalising glimpse of my current reading material. No clues!
• even if you have the right sort of jacket, you can still have a problem. Most obviously, it might be glorious summer weather and you don't really want to be wearing a jacket at all. One alternative that I have occasionally resorted to in the past is slipping the book into the external side pocket of a pair of cargo shorts. You need to be careful that it doesn't fall out when you sit down, though, although if you're sitting down for any length of time you'll presumably have the book in your hand anyway, as you'll be reading it.
• freakishly outsize books can cause a problem - these problems range from very thick standard-size paperbacks (Infinite Jest, say) which cause an unsightly bulge in your coat and weigh one side of it down, to paperbacks only available in the giant C-format (aka "trade paperbacks") which probably won't fit in a pocket at all. One example on my bookshelves (which I have yet to read) is Mark Z Danielewski's House Of Leaves, which seems not to be available in any smaller format, presumably because all the crazy typesetting trickery in the original makes it un-reformattable. Probably best to save these for holiday reading when you only have to lug them as far as a sun lounger.
• another nightmare scenario is: you need to take a trip such as the one I'm taking today, but you've nearly finished your current book, and aren't confident that you'll have enough reading matter left to see out the trip. So what do you do? Take a different book? That's unsatisfactory as it means starting one book before finishing another, which not only contravenes some unwritten rules but also muddies the narrative flow. It's like having a glass of beer followed by a glass of wine - lovely, but if the last sip of beer and the first sip of wine have to be mixed together that'd probably be a bit grim. The alternative is to take two books, which is probably better, but the combined bulk may start to cause what I like to call Infinite Jest Syndrome, as above. You could always carry one in each pocket, I suppose, just to even out the weight distribution, although it might then start to look to your fellow travellers as if you were wearing some sort of suicide belt.
• lastly, you'll know you're a proper bookworm when you can't take a trip to the toilet for a sit-down visit without taking your current book with you, and moreover get all twitchy and nervous if you need a poo but can't find your book.
• a corollary to the last one is: I've often wondered about the acceptability of getting my book out of my laptop bag at work and taking it to the office toilet with me. My gut feeling is that it's probably not an acceptable thing to do, but of course all I'm going to do instead is surf Twitter on my phone, so it's not as if there's any productivity cost associated with it.

All very much #firstworldproblems, of course, but none the less real for all that.

is there an eco in here? not any more

Recoil in horror, readers, as the Electric Halibut LIIIIIIBRARY OF DEEEEEEAAAAATH claims another victim. This time it's Italian polymath Umberto Eco: novelist, philosopher, semiotician, literary critic, leg spin bowler, masseur, plasterer, surgeon, groovy cat, gentleman, scholar and acrobat. A formidable CV indeed, but one that did him no good: once I'd read The Name Of The Rose and posted a review to this blog, it was literally guaranteed that he was going to die at some unspecified point in the near, medium or distant future. And so it proved.

The roll call of those directly and specifically slaughtered by this blog, therefore, now reads as follows:

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	2y 291d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	7y 218d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	7y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	7y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d

Eco's death doesn't affect the stats much, as it happens, since the average age for authors to be offed by my book reviews is around 80, and the average time for the curse to take effect is around four years. My nominees from June 2015 (on the occasion of James Salter's death) were Joyce Carol Oates, David Lodge and Milan Kundera. Since I failed to spot Eco then those may as well stand for next time.

Here's an interesting long and wide-ranging interview Eco gave to the Paris Review in 2008, during the course of which he inexplicably failed to predict my hand in his eventual demise.