why did the halibut cross the ocean? to see his flatmates

In a shocking and shameful dereliction of duty and a betrayal of everything that this blog stands for, I note that we have only done one halibut-related post in the last FIVE FREAKIN' YEARS, and that one was really just a passing mention before my attention wandered onto the subject of Katy Perry's tits. Oh sure, there's been Halibut Towers this and The Curse Of Electric Halibut that, but that butters no parsnips compared to raw unadorned data about large flatfish of the genus Hippoglossus.

The previous proper halibut post from October 2012 was mainly concerned with the catching of a whopping 186-kilogram specimen off the coast of Norway (as you'll see from the following stories, Norway is pretty much Halibutsville Central when it comes to big ones). In similar vein, today's Daily Mail carries a story about a British fisherman landing the "world's biggest ever halibut" while on a fishing trip to, you've guessed it, Norway. So what you'll be thinking is: wow, I wonder how big that was - the 2012 one made no claim to be a record-breaker but this one must be bigger than that, at the very least. So you'd perhaps be surprised to learn that this one weighed in at a mere 153 pounds, which is a fraction under 70 kilograms. It turns out that this is one of those records where you have to read the small print carefully - it's the biggest "shore-caught" halibut on record, the other monster ones being presumably landed onto boats.

Undeterred by this the fisherman carried out one of the primary obligations of the halibut-wrangler, which is to lie down next to the fish and pose for the photo. The canonical measure of halibut size (in contrast to giant squid size, where the standard London bus is used) from the selection of things deemed to be understandable by Joe Public, who has literally no idea how much a kilogram weighs, is some hand-wavey estimate of how many human-meal-sized portions it would yield. You'll recall my scepticism about the number quoted for the 186kg specimen - the claim made here is as follows:

The fish made 160 fillets, which would be worth around £4,000 to a high end fish restaurant

Two obvious thoughts: firstly that is under a sixth of the number of portions claimed for the 186kg halibut, a fish a little over two-and-a-half times as large. Since I found the original estimate implausible, maybe that's OK, though. But, secondly, if you do the price calculation, 160 portions fetching £4000 works out at 25 quid a portion. Can that be right? Well, Waitrose charge £28.99 a kilo for halibut, which works out at between £5 and £7 for a fairly normal-sized portion. Maybe "high end" restaurants (whose suppliers won't be charging as much as Waitrose, don't forget) really do apply that much of a mark-up.

Anyway, the proper world record for catching a halibut, no ifs, buts, maybes or nonsense about having to be standing on the shore, on a Tuesday, wearing a woolly hat and blue underpants, is a gargantuan 233kg specimen (although the Daily Mail, as is their wont, stick bloody-mindedly to various forms of imperial measurement throughout) caught by German fisherman Marco Liebenow back in 2013. "Heavier than a wild gorilla", apparently. A wild one, mind. Wild? I was absolutely livid, etc.

the last book I read

Matter by Iain M Banks.

Here on Earth we take the whole planet occupation thing for granted. Simply evolve over a series of aeons from single-celled amoebae floating around in the primordial soup and over time progress in a leisurely manner to the current pinnacle of development occupying a comfy wing-backed chair puffing ruminatively on a pipe-stem perusing the paperwork for some complex hire-purchase agreement, all without ever really considering whether we're entitled to be here or not.

On a Shellworld, however, things are a bit more complex: these are artificially constructed worlds (the exact construction methods and the identity of the architects being a bit of a mystery) with various species (depending which Shellworld you choose) acting as custodians and getting to pick and choose who occupies each of the many concentric levels. So you might have humanoids on one level, beating the shit out of each other as humanoids do, and then some giant whale-creatures on the water-filled next level, and some freaky-ass motherfuckers resembling sentient hot-air balloons floating about on the next level, with the whole thing overseen by some gigantic blue lobsters. A bit more like renting a room in a shared house than just casually inheriting an entire planet.

Anyway, this particular Shellworld, Sursamen, has the usual motley selection of occupants, but our main concern is with the Sarl, basically humanoid types who occupy one of the levels, and conform very precisely to humanoid cliché by being bloodthirsty slaughtering warlike types. As we join the action there's a battle going on, during the course of which the current king, Hausk, is mortally wounded and is unexpectedly ushered into the netherworld by his supposed right-hand man, tyl Loesp. Unknown to any of the regicidal mob, the king's son, and the rightful next king, Ferbin, witnesses the whole thing and flees for his life with his comedy manservant, Holse.

Ferbin was never especially keen to be king, although pretty keen on cashing in on the whole playboy prince thing with the drinking and the whoring and the like. But that doesn't mean he'll be happy to hand the throne over to the man who murdered his father. As it happens, though, Ferbin has some other family contacts: his sister, Djan Seriy Anaplian, left home many years previously to join a shadowy organisation called The Culture (ahaaaa, etc. etc.). So he and Holse set off to find her.

It turns out that not only is Djan Seriy Anaplian a citizen of The Culture (I can't improve on "AI-moderated anarcho-utopia" from here so I'm just going to re-use it), she is an operative with Special Circumstances, the super-exclusive ultra-badass black-ops division who can kill you just by looking at you. Furthermore, she was on her way to Sursamen anyway in an unofficial capacity to pay her respects to her dead father, and is happy to turn it into something a bit more official. The added complicating factor is that Djan and Ferbin's half-brother Oramen remains on Sursamen, theoretically as Prince Regent, awaiting the occasion of his eighteenth birthday whereupon he will inherit the throne from tyl Loesp, who's been appointed some sort of Lord Protector. The trouble is, as everyone but Oramen knows, tyl Loesp isn't going to let that happen and is going to ensure that Oramen meets with an "accident", probably of the furiously stabby variety, some time before his birthday.

In the meantime Oramen is being kept out of trouble by being sent to oversee the excavations of an ancient city gradually being exposed by the retreat of a gigantic waterfall. This process is exposing some seriously strange shit, and when winter arrives and the whole falls area freezes over this allows excavations to continue behind the falls, whereupon some seriously strange shit is revealed, of the planet-endangering variety. Luckily, Djan, Ferbin, Holse and a small army of Culture drones and sentient missiles arrive at this point and embark on a furious pursuit to the planet's core to try and avert disaster.

Seasoned Banks readers will detect more than a whiff of Inversions here - vaguely mediaeval civilisation, with access to some relatively advanced weaponry (e.g. basic firearms) thanks to some judicious (or foolhardy or meddling, depending on your point of view) nudging by previous Culture involvement, and a badass female Special Circumstances agent. Obviously there is a raft of hard sci-fi stuff that Inversions didn't have - the Shellworlds, all the various alien ships that Ferbin and Djan hitch lifts on, the apocalyptic battle at the end in which (SPOILER ALERT) pretty much everyone dies.

The usual points about the morality of super-advanced civilisations intervening in the development of less-advanced ones are chewed over here (just as they were in Inversions). There's an obvious parallel between the actual physical hierarchy of levels on Sursamen and the implicit multi-level hierarchy of civilisations that runs from the Sarl up through the Oct who administer the day-to-day running of the Shellworlds, the Nariscene who supervise them, the Morthanveld who oversee them and the Culture who in turn consider themselves above all of the others.

Like all Banks' books this is not without flaws: it drags a bit in the middle between Ferbin leaving Sursamen and returning in the company of Djan, in particular during the interlude where they encounter former Special Circumstances agent Xide Hyrlis, whose function seems mainly to be tedious about multiverse theory for a number of pages and then refuse to be of any help whatsoever. And as thrilling as the bit at the end where they blast around the giant turbines and gears at the planet's core is, it all seems a bit compressed (60-odd pages out of 600) and a jarring change of pace given the leisurely unfolding of what's gone before, and the flashing and banging distracts you from the fact that precious few of the Big Questions raised are actually answered. Like, for instance: why do the Iln have such an implacable thing for destroying Shellworlds? And why, if you have such an implacable thing on the go, choose to achieve it by getting yourself buried in silt for several millennia and revived by a suitably advanced civilisation, rather than just, you know, popping off and doing the job straight away?

In the implicit league table of Culture novels that everyone who's read more than one of them keeps in their heads I would say this is in the mid-range along with The Player Of Games and Use Of Weapons - better then Excession which I found a bit tedious, but not as good as Consider Phlebas, Look To Windward or Inversions. It's all good fun and never less than compulsively readable, though, so no complaints.

dry January? more like DIE January

Another day, another gratifyingly early fulfilment of a New Year's resolution, this one being to really step up the brutal and relentless culling of authors who have previously featured on this blog. It's still January and we've already clocked up one, that one being sci-fi/fantasy author Ursula Le Guin, whose book The Dispossessed featured here just over two years ago and who died yesterday aged 88. That's actually fairly quick work by the usual standards of the Curse of Electric Halibut - only Dibdin, Hoban, Matheson and Salter were knocked off more quickly.

I also need to fill in a missing entry from 2017, since JP Donleavy died on 11th September and I seem to have missed it. Unless I've missed anyone else (which is quite possible) that takes the current count to nineteen.

As it happens January 22nd isn't the earliest start to a year of authorial slaughter; 2017 started as early as January 2nd with the demise of John Berger. The belated inclusion of Donleavy means that 2017 is now the joint-deadliest year on record with four deaths, a record it shares with 2013.

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	1y 291d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	6y 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
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d
John Berger	10th November 2009	2nd January 2017	90	7y 55d
Nicholas Mosley	24th September 2011	28th February 2017	93	5y 159d
Helen Dunmore	10th March 2008	5th June 2017	64	9y 89d
JP Donleavy	21st May 2015	11th September 2017	91	2y 114d
Ursula Le Guin	6th December 2015	22nd January 2018	88	2y 49d

valley of the dulls

Sorry to do a follow-up to a follow-up, but I remember how I happened across the Spurn story now: I was fiddling with an Ordnance Survey map (probably my ancient copy of OL13 that I took on last weekend's walk, and which is now extremely crispy and held together with a substantial amount of tape after repeated soakings) and had a recollection of the QI segment about Britain's dullest (i.e. most featureless) map square, which turns out to be in the vicinity of Ousefleet in north Lincolnshire. A few other contenders are linked here: this one just north of the Solway Firth must have been a strong contender in terms of actual on-the-ground features, but contains quite a bit of writing which any map-trawling algorithm would need to know to ignore.

The convention seems to be to look at the 1:50000 Landranger series; even in Ousefleet if you zoom in to 1:25000 there's all sorts of fascinating drainage ditches and the like to be seen. As marvellous as this is from a nerdy academic perspective these places are all phenomenally dull by their very nature on the ground, and by virtue of their physical geography probably boggily nightmarish to traverse. Dull as ditchwater, in fact, quite literally.

Ousefleet is in the vicinity of Scunthorpe, which in addition to being a canonical example of the difficulty of writing sensible text-parsing profanity filters is a sort of marginal entry on the list of amusing UK place names, a subject I addressed at greater length (and with more sniggering) here. Note that photographer Dominic Greyer has made a career (and very nice too) out of spotting and documenting this sort of stuff, and in addition to books now offers all sorts of merchandise if you would like to buy your loved one a mug with, for instance, BELL END emblazoned on it.

a low spurn count

Here's a bit of a round-up of some bits and bobs that probably don't merit a blog post of their own:

I was going to make the point (but forgot) in the account of my Black Mountains walk that this is a particularly good time of year to be up on these hills - not just because a glorious crisp sunny winter's day is a good time to be up a hill pretty much anywhere, but specifically because these hills have a reputation (entirely deserved) for being boggy, even on top of the ridge. This is partly geography - they're big whale-backed ridges with flat tops, rather than the more exciting rocky arêtes that you get in, say, Snowdonia - but partly just a reflection of how relatively un-scary and easily accessible and therefore highly-populated they are, and therefore the amount of erosion that takes place. In some places they've laid some flat stones to form a path and prevent you disappearing up to the knees in peat.

Anyway, the point is that good times to be up there and avoid excessive boggy squelchiness are high summer, when there's been a chance to bake off some of the water (though it's never completely dry) or in sub-zero winter temperatures when everything's frozen solid. You do have to address a few different problems then, though, like not slipping over and shattering a hip, especially at my age.

Other walk-related news: I've uploaded some pictures to the photo gallery, something I mean to get round to doing more often. New Year's resolutions, again.

Speaking of New Year's resolutions, another was to get the old blogging frequency up a bit, as 2017 was the least bloggy year on record with a pitiful 44 posts. Now there are obviously some mitigating factors here, not least being preoccupied with The Boy, but since he's now trundling round the house in his walker shouting the odds and ripping telephone directories in half I'm very much hoping that I'll have a little more time to think about other things in 2018. There is also the Twitter factor, i.e. the increased likelihood that if I see some amusing link or have some throwaway comment to make on current affairs I'll do it on Twitter rather than here. I suspect I will never regain the dizzy heights of 2007 when I cranked out 282 posts, and I'm fine with that, but my limited aspiration is to arrest the decline whereby every year since 2010 has seen fewer posts than the year before. Given the paltry output I managed in 2017 that should be a lowish bar to clear. 

Here's a couple of graphs:

Every cloud has a silver lining, and in the case of 2017 you can see that while my reading habits were affected a bit, the total number of books I read didn't see the same steep drop-off as the general blog posting did. As a consequence the "book posts as a percentage of overall posts" number is at an all-time high of 29.55%. 

As it happens this seemingly small drop-off (13 books against 15 in 2016) masks the extent of the fall a bit, as it turns out that 2017 also holds the record for shortest average book length (253 pages) and therefore fewest overall pages read (3292 compared with 4404 in 2016). Here's some more graphs:

Lastly, and completely unconnected to blogging or statistical nerdery, I can't remember exactly what series of link-following led me to this article about the Spurn peninsula in East Yorkshire, but you'll (possibly) recall that Hazel and I visited it way back in August 2007 (so this is one of those 282 posts). We drove on the excitingly rough and evidently frequently repaired and re-routed track down to the car park by the old lighthouses and had a bit of a walk around (it is, as you can imagine, rather exposed and windy). Well, it turns out that back in December 2013 there was a particularly vicious storm which washed away a section of the road, as well as most of the vegetation and sand dunes which hold the peninsula together, and you haven't been able to drive down there since.

You'll recall that the general (though not completely uncontroversial) consensus is that the spit has been destroyed and re-formed (slightly further west each time) many times in the past, typically every 250 years or so, and that it's overdue for such an occurrence to happen again but that it's been held at bay by a series of shoring-up measures dating back to the 1850s. Well, it sounds like nature has finally found a way through. You can see the damage pretty clearly on Google's latest satellite photo - pre-2013 (have a look here, for instance) there was a narrow green strip running all the way along. So it'll be interesting to see what happens now, given that the authorities seem to have plumped (probably rightly) for a policy of managed retreat, i.e. letting nature take its course. What you would expect to happen is for future storms to eventually carve a permanent channel through the breach and then gradually eat away the spit all the way down to the end, and then for the longshore drift and silt deposition process to start to build a new spit from the mainland end. Note that we're talking geological timescales here, though - none of us is going to see it.

a mountain sense of excitement

It's always nice to at least make a start on fulfilling a New Year's resolution early doors, less than a week after New Year's Day in this particular case. The resolution was the pretty bland one made by approximately a gazillion people across the country: get a bit more exercise. In my own case one of the ways I wanted to do this was by getting back into some regular mountain expeditions, and as it happened I had a free day yesterday (Hazel and her sister Paula having cooked up some childcare activities not specifically requiring my assistance) and, moreover, the weather forecast was for it to be cold, but clear and sunny.

That sounded like perfect walking weather, so I quickly came up with a route incorporating some terrain I'd walked before (and some I hadn't) and which involved not too long a drive to get to the start point. What I ended up with was parking in the free car park at Llanthony Priory and setting off up the steep path up the side of Loxidge Tump that eventually brings you out on the top of the ridge which carries a section of the Offa's Dyke Path. Once I'd joined that it was a long and fairly flat ridge walk all the way to the trig point at the top of Hay Bluff. Then (replicating a section of this walk from March 2011 in slightly different weather conditions) I dropped down across the Gospel Pass road, up onto Lord Hereford's Knob (fnarr, etc) and then down the Daren Lwyd ridge back into the Vale of Ewyas and back along the road to the car park.

Route map (created here) and altitude profile (via GPS Visualizer) are below; as always do the right-click/open in new tab thing for a better view (same goes for the photos above).

Since physical geography doesn't arrange itself expressly for the convenience of the walker there are always ways in which a walk could be improved (see this one for instance). Here's a few thoughts on this one:

• as you can see from the altitude profile, the initial mile-and-a-half or so involves quite a steep ascent. It's nowhere near as steep as the graph makes it look, as the vertical scale is exaggerated somewhat, but it certainly gets the lungs going early doors. This is pretty much inevitable when you want to join a ridge halfway along; the only way to avoid this would be to do the whole ridge in a giant horseshoe walk (a bit like this one) starting somewhere near Pandy, but that would be a long walk and in January there probably wouldn't be enough daylight to do it;
• it would be nice if there were a definite summit to attain, ideally at the highest point of the day. The highest point of the day was actually the top of the Black Mountain at 703 metres, but this is almost impossible to pinpoint as it's only fractionally higher than the ridge on either side and isn't marked by anything useful like a trig point or even a cairn;
• once you come off the Daren Lwyd ridge at Capel-y-ffin the walk back along the road is longer than you'd ideally like - you don't mind a mile or so just to warm down and loosen up the legs, but this is around three miles, which gets to be a bit of a slog by the end;
• given the amount of exercise I've had in the past year or so (very little, mainly owing to being preoccupied with a baby boy with some medical and feeding challenges) I probably should have eased back into hill-walking with something about half the length (the track log says it was 15.3 miles) and not attacked it at quite the berserk speed that I'm inclined to adopt when I'm off the leash and out on my own. 24 hours later I'm in the early stages of what I expect to be a fairly crippling bout of DOMS; all my own fault of course.

Nonetheless it was great to be out for the day, and the weather was about as perfect as you could expect in early January: crisp, cold and sunny, no cloud on the tops at all (but plenty of snow), pretty much exactly as forecast. It did start to get rather windy once I got to Hay Bluff and continued to blow until I dropped off the steep end of the Daren Lwyd ridge and got out of it. A ridge walk in the Black Mountains? Hey, more like a FRIDGE walk in the WHITE Mountains, amirite?

mounds of love, by Kate's bush

Here's a couple of recent news (or, more accurately, "news") stories which revisit some stuff featured a few years back right here on this very blog.

Firstly, here's a disturbing tale of dismemberment featuring a faulty elevator which may have just been badly maintained or could have been, like, possessed by Satan in some way. I mean, it's possible, right? It's disturbing partly because of the basic detail of the story as related in the text, but also because of the graphic video of the incident embedded in the Daily Mail story which auto-plays as soon as you open the page. So, for that reason, please observe this prominent TRIGGER WARNING before you click through to the story.

You'll recall a couple of previous lift-related posts wherein I describe my wholly rational suspicion of them as a vertical transportation device, even though we're told they are Perfectly Safe and accidents Hardly Ever Happen, just like planes. That's all precious little comfort to the Chinese lady involved in the leg incident, assuming they managed to get her to hospital before she bled to death, and still less to the unfortunate Russian lady involved in this incident in 2014. No point rushing her to hospital, sadly. Oddly, that Daily Mail story is dated exactly one day after my more recent lift-related blog post (if you look at the comments you'll see I noted this at the time). Coincidence? OR IS IT?!!?!? Well, yes. And then there's this Spanish lady, messily dispatched by a lift (ironically, literally in a hospital this time) shortly after giving birth to a daughter. The angry and vengeful lift gods clearly have it in for the ladies at the moment.

Secondly, while I don't pay much attention to my blog stats any more - partly out of laziness, and partly because there are some suspicious patterns in the visit activity which I suspect are bot-related and render the stats a bit meaningless - I can tell you that my most-visited blog post of all time is still this one from 2010 about the lovely Alice Roberts and her televised skinny-dipping activities. Just to save you the trouble, I can reveal that it's not nearly as exciting as you (and everyone else visiting the page) were probably hoping. But seven years on in these days of Naked Attraction you've got to give the viewers at least a little bit of what they want, so when Kate Humble stripped off for similar reasons for her new series Kate Humble: Off The Beaten Track it was obviously felt obligatory to flash a bit of arse on camera. And while there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, and - just to be clear - I'm certainly not uninterested in Kate Humble's bottom, I was a bit vexed that the various furiously masturbating tabloid journalists embedding the video clip in their stories couldn't muster the one-handed keyboard skills to type the exact location of the lake Kate and her companion were frolicking in. Somewhere in Snowdonia was the best they could do, though I accept it's probably only me that cares. Anyone hoping for a furtive glimpse of, hem hem, "humble pie" will be disappointed, though.

the last book I read

Stick by Elmore Leonard.

Ernest Stickley jr. is a little bit whooaaahh, a little bit wheeeyyy, a bit tasty, a bit dodgy. He's a geezer. Leave your car lying around, he will nick it. As a consequence, as we meet him he's just finished a seven-year stretch for armed robbery and is in the market for something to do.

Something to do, in the short term, turns out to be hanging out in Miami and tagging along as assistant bagman to his old friend Rainy while Rainy does a delivery for Chucky Buck, a local drug dealer. What Rainy and Stick don't realise is that this particular payment is to one of Chucky's key suppliers, Cuban gangster Nestor Soto, in compensation for Chucky accidentally involving some of Nestor's men with some undercover cops at the cost of some money, product and inconvenience to Nestor. Moreover, the compensation deal comes with a little extra spice: Chucky's agreed, as part of his penance, that Nestor's men get to kill the bagman.

As it turns out, it's Rainy who actually carries the bag, and promptly gets his ass ventilated for his trouble. But a second bagman wasn't part of the plan, and Nestor's boys see him as just an added bonus, so Stick has to make a sharp exit, pursued by a hail of bullets. So now Chucky's boys and Nestor's boys are looking for Stick. So he should probably leave town, right? Well, the thing is, Chucky had promised Rainy five grand for making the delivery, and, since the delivery was made, Stick reckons that money is now owed to him. Also, Stick's ex-wife lives nearby and Stick hasn't seen his now-fourteen-year-old daughter since she was seven and is keen to reconnect. And, in any case, he's not the sort to be scared off by some Cuban heavies with big guns.

So after a chance encounter with local wheeler-dealer Barry Stam in a car park - during the course of which Stick helps Barry out by breaking into his Rolls-Royce - Stick gets a job as Barry's chauffeur, a job which comes with free accommodation in the servants' quarters of Barry's massive mansion in Bal Harbour. Barry has many connections in the local area, including foxy investment advisor Kyle McLaren (who, it turns out, is a bit susceptible to the rakish charms of slightly shady types like Stick), but also to Chucky and Nestor, whom he occasionally has over to the house for business and social meetings, occasions at which Stick is expected to be in attendance as barman and general dogsbody. Awkward.

One of Barry's latest schemes is to try and get his local contacts (Chucky and Nestor included) to invest in a new film project that a producer friend is trying to get off the ground. The initial version of the project gets a pretty dim reception, mainly due to the concept being a bit shit and the financing arrangements technically illegal, but Stick starts to see a way whereby he might be able to cook up a scam to persuade Chucky to invest in a (completely fictitious) re-jigged version of the film project, thereby relieving him of the five grand he owes Stick plus a substantial extra wedge for good measure. The trouble is he needs to find a way to do this without either torpedoing his burgeoning relationship with Kyle (who, while susceptible to Stick's personal charms, is a bit dubious about being involved in actual lawbreaking) or getting himself killed by Chucky or Nestor's goons, who are already looking for an opportunity to discreetly waste him anyway.

As I said back at the time of reading Riding The Rap in 2009, you know what you're going to get with an Elmore Leonard book, and Stick ticks most of the boxes - sly characterisation, snappy dialogue, twisty plot, a bit of humour, a bit of sex and violence, 300 pages tops, bish bosh, sorted. This one (published in 1983) is a pretty good one. The main reason it's not as good as the really good ones (Killshot is probably my absolute favourite) is partly related to the thing I mentioned in the Riding The Rap review about re-use of old characters. This is an early example (possibly the first, I haven't checked) of this, Ernest Stickley having previously appeared in 1976's Swag. There's just a suspicion that Leonard likes the Stick character a bit too much - having him, for instance, bone Barry's bimbo girlfriend Aurora, Barry's 'luded-up wife Diane and Kyle (though the last encounter is a bit unsatisfactory, presumably because he's knackered and/or dehydrated by then) all in the same night is just a bit implausible and doesn't really serve to advance the plot very much. Stick is also generally just a little bit too cool and on top of every situation, though the same criticism could be levelled at Raylan Givens (from Riding The Rap) and probably a few other Leonard protagonists as well.

Stick was filmed in 1985, starring Burt Reynolds in the title role. Not a bad bit of casting, I'd say, though I already knew about the film before I'd read the book, so maybe it was inevitable that I pictured Stick as looking a bit like Burt Reynolds anyway. I've never seen it, but it seems to follow the disappointing pattern of a lot of Leonard adaptations by not being very good. This seems to have been caused by a bit of monkeying with the script including the tacking-on of a climactic bit involving Stick rescuing his daughter from some kidnappers (nothing of the sort happens in the book), but also by Reynolds having a director (one Burt Reynolds) unwilling to rein him in and get him to conform to the character in the book a bit more. As Siskel and Ebert say, the film (as it is with all Leonard's books) is right there on the page, you don't need to tart it up or change it.

Speaking of films, one thing that struck me here is that Stick is a bit of a prototype for the character of Chili Palmer from Get Shorty, one Leonard book which was filmed pretty successfully. Both have the same real first name (Ernest), both are shady types who drift into involvement with the movie business and bring their real-life experiences to bear on bringing some realism to movie scripts written by soft Hollywood fat-cat types with ponytails. The action in both books also starts off in Miami, though Get Shorty swiftly relocates to Los Angeles. There's even a bit where a principal villain gets pushed off a balcony.

As I've said before, if you read the late-1980s sequence that goes Glitz, Bandits, Freaky Deaky, Killshot, that could be all the Leonard you'll need. There really aren't any bad ones, though.

the last book I read

The Human Stain by Philip Roth.

Coleman Silk is an ex-professor of classics and former dean of faculty at a New England university. Despite being of retirement age (seventy-one) the "ex" bit was not entirely of his own volition; he resigned a couple of years before the book opens to avoid the fall-out from an accusation of racism following some careless (or entirely blameless, depending on your point of view) use of language during a lecture.

Various things were set in motion by these events: Coleman's wife Iris died (a death caused, in Coleman's mind at least, by the stress of the racism affair), Coleman engaged his friend, novelist Nathan Zuckerman, to help write a book repudiating the accusations, and Coleman embarked on a relationship with Faunia Farley, a woman half his age who survives by working multiple menial jobs in the local area including some cleaning and janitorial duties at the university.

Even though Coleman has no marital ties, has left the university, and therefore it's not really any of anybody else's business, the relationship ruffles some feathers in the local community. Faunia's ex-husband Lester, a Vietnam vet with a nasty case of PTSD and an associated simmering disdain for the rest of the human race, gets wind of things and is none too pleased. Delphine Roux, Coleman's ex-colleague at the university, takes it upon herself to mount a feminist crusade to rescue Faunia from the filthy patriarchal old scrote who's just out to exploit and demean her.

Coleman cools off on wanting Nathan Zuckerman to be the agent of his literary revenge and decides just to chill out and concentrate on banging Faunia; unfortunately Lester Farley isn't too keen on letting them get on with that unmolested and after a couple of highly-charged encounters at Coleman's house ups the ante somewhat by running Coleman's car off the road into a ditch and killing both of them. It's at Coleman's funeral (through a meeting with Coleman's sister) that Zuckerman makes the shocking discovery that far from being of Jewish descent, as he'd always allowed people to think, Coleman was in fact African-American, and had made the conscious decision after leaving the US Navy as a young man to cut all his real family ties and pass for white, this being the best way for a plausibly pale-skinned black man to get on in post-war America. Zuckerman decides that this would be a much better subject for a book than what Coleman had originally suggested, and decides to call it The Human Stain.

So we're in the realms of revelations of the "and that book was.....THIS ONE that you've just been reading, haha" variety, just as we were with Sweet Tooth and a few others over the lifetime of this blog (a few other examples are linked to from that Sweet Tooth review). Nathan Zuckerman is pretty clearly an authorial alter ego, a means for Roth to effectively insert himself into the story, though not as obviously as in The Plot Against America and various others which feature a central character called Philip Roth.

The central revelations about Coleman's ancestry and the general unfolding of the plot don't happen as linearly as I've described them above; there is a lot of hopping about along the story's timeline and shifting of narrative viewpoint: mostly Zuckerman, but occasionally Faunia, Delphine Roux or Lester Farley. While Faunia's inner motivations are directly relevant to the plot, a load of backstory about Delphine and a couple of interludes describing Lester's outings with his post-Vietnam support group trying to re-integrate him into polite society serve a purpose which isn't ever very clear. Delphine Roux, in particular, seems to exist only as a receptacle for some disproportionate authorial hatred (of, presumably, educated and uppity women, or perhaps just women in general) in a way that's faintly disturbing. Her motivations for doing any of the things she does are entirely unconvincing, and she just seems to be a personification of some notions of "political correctness" that Roth dislikes. Indeed there seems to be a general inclination to rail against the mostly imaginary concept of "political correctness" here, from the idea that Coleman should be held entirely blameless for some intemperate - though unintentional - use of racially-charged language to a more understandable distaste for the prurience and hypocritical puritanism underlying the Clinton impeachment hearings that happen in the background to the story (which is set in 1998).

Seventysomething authors need to be wary of this sort of stuff lest it make them seem like some out-of-date old git; Roth is too clever and writes too well for that charge to stick, but there was an unpalatable undertone of "the world's gone mad" which left a slightly sour taste. A few other quibbles: while it seems that Faunia has been lying about being illiterate, she's not meant to be highly educated, and the same goes for Lester and Coleman's sister Ernestine. Nonetheless they all have lengthy expository passages which seem far too wordy and articulate, almost as if written by a professional novelist who couldn't quite bring himself convincingly down to their level.

Quibbles aside this is powerful stuff; its central themes of identity and how we choose to define ourselves to others are still highly relevant. It's a deeper and more serious book than Portnoy's Complaint, the only other Roth I'd read, though that was one of his early works, published in 1969. The Human Stain won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2001, as did Bel Canto and Independence Day. It was made into a film in 2003 featuring a few odd casting decisions: Anthony Hopkins as Coleman Silk (I'd pictured him as looking more like Alan Arkin) and Gary Sinise as Nathan Zuckerman (much younger than in the book where he's meant to be a rough contemporary of Coleman).

Roth is one of the holy trinity of modern American novelists, along with John Updike and Saul Bellow, both of whom have featured here before, and both of whom are dead (though in both cases the death bit came first). Roth's days on this earth are of course now numbered.

sage and uncle stuffing and granberry sauce

A couple of examples, as if further proof were necessary, that Electric Halibut surfs the very bleeding edge of the Zeitgeist, protected only by a stout pair of comfortable shoes. It's all about death, but then, isn't everything, ultimately?

Firstly, I heard a bit on the Jeremy Vine Show on BBC Radio 2 the other day about an attempt to set up a facility in Sandwell in the West Midlands to do what's now apparently being euphemistically referred to as "liquid cremation" or "water cremation" but is basically the same alkaline hydrolysis process that was referred to here (the people doing it seem to have settled on "resomation" as a nicely incomprehensible brand identity). Given the objections that were raised to the ridiculously benign and environmentally-friendly proposal to use the heat generated by a crematorium to heat a swimming pool (not far away, in Redditch, so maybe this is a West Midlands thing) you can imagine the sort of bullshit complaints that people will have raised here, and sure enough the project has been indefinitely delayed because people didn't like the idea of the harmless liquid residue being flushed down the drain, and thereby indirectly into the drinking water system.

No-one raising this objection could offer any logical reasoning for objecting, just an ill-thought-out "yuck" response and some annoyance at being obliged to think about death, something most people are intensely weird and irrational about. What they imagine happens to all the decomposing liquid goop that drains out of bodies buried in cemeteries I have no idea, let alone all the actual shit that gets flushed down people's toilets every day.

Secondly, anyone considering the standard salt and pepper shakers at the dinner table might want to consider a third cruet option to jazz up their Christmas roasties and sprouts a bit: the cremated ashes of a loved one! That's what Debra Parsons from Folkestone is going to do this year, and why not? Well, I mean, I can think of a few reasons, but maybe that's just me being up-tight and conventional about post-death rituals. And there I was laughing at people who think death can be transmitted into a swimming pool by heat in some way!

Just to be half-serious for a minute, I'm not convinced that either laughing at or uncritically nodding approval of what are clearly some deep-seated and Complex Issues is really serving Debra Parsons' best interests (her mother's best interests are pretty much irrelevant at this stage), but presumably the various newspapers paid her for her time, so I suppose it's all good. I imagine the inevitable gargantuan Boxing Day morning shit will have an extra poignancy to it for her as well. Anyway, the important point, as always, is that I thought of it first! As it happens I do think my method is better - if you must do it on Christmas Day then wash the capsule down with some celebratory bubbly or something, rather than ruin a perfectly good Christmas dinner by sprinkling grit all over it.

elektrischer Heilbutt: jetzt mit farbstoff

One thing I noticed while sitting around in a pair of crusty urine-soaked underpants morosely swigging neat whisky out of the bottle the other day was the small print on the back of my (now empty) bottle of Auchentoshan, in particular some stuff that appeared to be in a foreign language.

If you're struggling to read it, perhaps because you're sitting around in a pool of your own piss swigging whisky out of the bottle and the salty tears of despair and self-loathing are making your vision go all wibbly-wobbly, what it says is:

Mit farbstoff. Farven justeret med karamel.

The first thing that's slightly odd about this is that it's not in English; the second thing that's slightly odd is that it's actually in two different languages. The first bit is in German and just means "with colourant" or "with dye"; the second bit is is Danish and means "colour adjusted with caramel". What both of them signify is that there has been the addition of a quantity of E150a during the bottling process to darken the colour of the whisky.

I was in Tesco a few days later and snapped a few pics of some more bottles that bore the same legend. This is by no means a comprehensive survey, it's just to illustrate how widespread the practice is. From top to bottom these are Ardmore, Bowmore, Laphroaig and Old Pulteney respectively.

The whisky community are a funny and perhaps slightly obsessive bunch, and there is much discourse around the rights and wrongs of artificially colouring whisky. A lot of this stems from the entirely nonsensical idea that whisky is some sort of "natural" artisanal product, water from the crystal-clear distillery stream, peat-fired stills stoked by some Groundskeeper Willie-esque be-kilted lunatic striding in through the mist every morning with a hod of peat on his sinewy shoulder, the resulting spirit lovingly filtered through the unruly ginger pubes and down the milky inner thighs of a laughing freckle-faced Scots lassie while the evocative skirl of bagpipes wheezes wispily from a nearby glen, and finally re-collected and left to mature in a rustic barn, tended lovingly by some infinitely wise bearded custodian until the mystically-divined moment of perfect readiness and then being drunk in chunky tumblers by square-jawed types in Aran sweaters in front of a roaring log fire while munching on shortbread. In fact it's a highly industrialised process and whisky acquires colour and flavour from plenty of places not directly related to its original distillation, most obviously the casks in which it's matured. It's worth also noting that those who claim that they can taste the caramel in the finished product are almost certainly lying or mistaken, unless perhaps you go for one of the comedy "black whisky" products like Loch Dhu or Cú Dhub, which claim to derive from heavily charred casks, and maybe they do, but you can bet your ass they also have a colossal amount of E150a dumped in as well. And don't get them started on chill-filtration!

I can't honestly say I'm much bothered about it either way; a gazillion other food and drink products have far more noxious colouring and flavouring products in them and they haven't done me any harm, my word no, apart from these terrible headaches and the occasional murderous rages and blackouts. What amuses me about the labelling is the weaselly nature of a clearly English-language product bearing statements in (I assume) only the languages of the two countries which legally require explicit disclosure of these kinds of additive, in (presumably) the hope that most people's eyes (including the subset of people who might care to the point of going and buying something else if it were printed in English) will just skate over it uncomprehendingly. 

I suppose, just to backtrack on that slightly, what may be a concern is if the whisky producers are using caramel colouring to give a false impression of age to the sort of no-age-statement whisky that many are now offering as their entry-level product. The Bowmore shown here is a good example: I have a bottle of this, it's called No. 1 and it's cheaper than the 12-year-old that I tried a while back (and liked very much). But is it as good? Well, to be blunt, no - it's perfectly nice and quaffable but doesn't have the depth that the 12-year-old has. And that's pretty much what you expect from something containing whisky that hasn't matured for nearly as long (a good chunk of it is probably between 5 and 8 years old). Obviously from an economic perspective the younger and rawer the spirit you can foist off on the consumer the better it is for you, long-term storage being an expensive business. Whether it's better for the consumer is another matter. Caveat emptor, though, innit, as they say in Denmark.

break on theroux to the other side

One thing I forgot to mention in the last book review was that Barefoot In The Head is full of allusions to the mystical writings and teachings of GI Gurdjieff and his acolyte and collaborator PD Ouspensky and various associated concepts (kundalini, for instance). None of it makes much sense, to be honest, but that's scarcely surprising since a) precious little of the rest of the book makes any sense anyway and b) the original teachings are a nonsensical mish-mash of stuff stolen from various religions and mixed with a bit of more up-to-date 20th-century self-actualisation bullshit.

One thing I did note on doing a bit of further reading was that Gurdjieff's concept of an enneagram (basically a bit of tosh involving a lot of bullshit numerology) put me in mind of the equally bullshit Scientology concept of an engram, a sub-conscious mental image of a traumatic event from a person's past which needs to be "cleared" before the person can achieve the same terrifying level of insight and mastery as, say, Tom Cruise. I don't think there's actually any etymological crossover between the words, and I have no idea if L. Ron Hubbard was influenced by Gurdjieff, but I wouldn't be surprised, because there are a lot of common themes of self-realisation through force of will and similar hogwash.

A couple of clips from the (still totally compelling and awesome, by the way) Cruise video were featured in Louis Theroux's 2015 documentary about Scientology which I (by chance) caught the other night.

hard to be very optimistic about Louis Theroux's #Scientology documentary when he finishes an article with this: pic.twitter.com/vDdNysPjPq

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) October 14, 2015

I should say at this point that I'm not the biggest fan of Theroux's wide-eyed faux-naif approach to film-making, nor am I the biggest fan of the Nick Broomfield How I Failed To Make This Film  school of documentaries about thwarted documentary-making (and therefore largely about the documentary-maker rather than his purported subject), generally realised by attempting to get access to a figure or organisation who perfectly obviously was never going to agree to it in the first place.

That said, it turns out that Theroux's shtick is perfectly suited to what he ended up doing, which was wandering about trying to start conversations with the various packs of swivel-eyed numbskulls who were sent out to try and obstruct and disrupt his film, while, paradoxically, ending up providing it with most of its material. The bits where he hung out with Marty Rathbun and various jobbing LA actors trying to recreate scenes of alleged abuse by David Miscavige and others didn't really seem to have a point to them, other than to highlight the absurdity of the Scientology "tech" - basically a lot of shouting at inanimate objects. I mean, I myself shout at inanimate objects quite a lot, especially in the course of my occasional DIY activities, but I haven't tried to turn it into a religion.

A couple of quite interesting Theroux interviews (the first, absurdly, longer than the film itself) about the film are here and here. Note how Theroux is much sharper and less bumbly in real life than in the persona he adopts in the documentaries. Anyway, My Scientology Movie is a lot of fun, but ultimately just a series of episodes of amusing trolling of the religion, rather than a serious attempt to analyse it. If you want that you're probably better advised to watch Going Clear, released earlier the same year.

Going back to Gurdjieff, and sticking with the subject of films for the moment, the single fact about Gurdjieff that I knew in advance was his having possessed an absolutely tremendous moustache. Another absolutely tremendous moustache that's been in the news recently is Kenneth Branagh's monstrous face fungus in the role of Hercule Poirot in the remake of Agatha Christie's Murder On The Orient Express.

You'll note that Branagh's 'tache represents a considerable upgrade on the fairly neat and modest effort sported by Albert Finney in the 1974 film, a design emulated fairly closely by David Suchet in the long series of TV adaptations of the Poirot stories. The key consideration in remaking a whodunit, of course, is who dun it, and whether in remaking it you're going to mess with the original story in order to keep your viewers guessing. The answer here seems to be no, or not in any significant way, so if you remember the ending of the earlier film (and who doesn't?) then you're going to know how this ends, broadly speaking.

the last book I read

Barefoot In The Head by Brian Aldiss.

It's the late 20th century, and there's been a war. So far so standardly post-apocalyptically dystopian, but this war was a bit different from your usual face-melting nuclear holocaust. Dubbed the Acid Head War, it culminated in some unnamed Middle Eastern state releasing bombs over parts of Europe that released aerosolised LSD (or some similar hallucinogen) into the air, thus sending the populations FREAKIN' MENTAL.

No immediate damage to infrastructure and all that stuff, but obviously people's capacity to use it in the designated responsible manner has deteriorated somewhat as they're all wandering around looking at the flashing psychedelic light show in their heads and going AAUUMMMNNNGGGHHH I CAN SEE THROUGH TIME. So there has been a general deterioration in society: rubbish piling up, lots of car wrecks on the roads, general breakdown of the rule of law, that sort of thing.

Into this bizarre world comes Colin Charteris. This is the name he has assumed as he drives up through Western Europe towards Britain, though in fact he is of Serbian origin (and therefore presumably originally called something else). We meet him making a stop-off at Metz; France was neutral during the Acid Head War and therefore escaped being directly targeted, though of course there's nothing in any international peace treaty to stop wafts of mind-bending vapour drifting over the German border or the English channel.

Charteris makes his way into Britain, and almost immediately starts to experience the effects of the gas (and presumably the tainted water supply): in the early stages this manifests itself as some weird time-dilation thing whereby he sees alternative versions of himself peeling away and taking other paths at points where decisions are made. He heads north, with no particular aim or destination in mind, and on the way picks up a rabble of assorted followers who see him as some sort of Messiah, for ill-defined reasons. He makes speeches at various impromptu rallies, as a result of which a larger group decides to head back south into Europe in pursuit of some equally nebulous final destination.

The group heads back through France and Charteris' Messiah status is cemented when his little sports car is destroyed in an accident but he miraculously survives! (It turns out he was travelling in another car at the time.) The group sets up camp and Charteris finds the time to impregnate his on/off girlfriend Angeline before they move on again into Germany and get themselves arrested, the Germans, stereotypically, having retained a bit more of a regard for The Rules even in the general lysergic haze.

The plot isn't really the point here, though, and just as well since it's pretty minimal: Charteris drives in a loopy (in every sense) route around Europe with a motley band of followers to no particular purpose until he winds up in Germany, where, we are invited to infer (though it's left very vague) that he is killed, thus confirming his status as a latter-day Jesus Christ. No, the point is the language in which the book is written: fairly linear at the beginning as we start off in relatively un-psychedelic France, but becoming weirder as the drugs get a grip and eventually ending up as a great fractured mess of puns, allusions, mashed-together words and general nonsense that seems pretty clearly intended to echo other experimental works like Finnegans Wake (which I should point out I have never read beyond the first couple of pages, and almost certainly never will).

The other very clear authorial echo here is of JG Ballard, in general for the post-apocalyptic landscape of decaying gardens and abandoned helipads, but in particular for the stuff about the fragmentation of time, and the odd fetish for car crashes - there's even a section where one of Charteris' disciples re-enacts Charteris' spectacular crash for the purposes of filming it, a scene that is mirrored almost exactly in Ballard's own Crash. I say "echo" but it's important to be clear about the chronology here: Barefoot In The Head was published in 1969, Crash in 1973. That said, much of Crash is an expansion and re-working of some ideas from 1969's The Atrocity Exhibition, so it's unclear who thought of it first or whether any cross-pollination of ideas was involved. The thing that's unique to this book is the interludes featuring fragments of poetry and songs that sit between the chapters. Some of these are no more than a couple of lines but do actually serve to break up the fearsome density of the prose, like a refreshing mouthful of wine between courses.

I've read a few other books by Brian Aldiss, most notably the epic Helliconia trilogy (now apparently available as one colossal 1300-page volume) but also Greybeard and probably a couple of others. All are good, but none of them is anything like this. To be honest, while Barefoot In The Head is a fascinating and brave genre experiment I'm not sure it really works. The best approach is just to luxuriate in the richness and imaginative sweep of the language and try to let the meaning seep in by osmosis - you can be reassured that fuck all actually happens anyway, so if a few passages are impenetrably baffling you probably won't miss anything crucial.

But, as I've said before, a bit of bafflement is good to keep the brain supple. And, moreover, having had this book sitting unread on my shelves for probably 25 years since I picked up a copy for (if the scrawl on the cover is to be believed) the princely sum of 15p it's nice to finally knock it on the head.

It turns out, completely coincidentally, that Aldiss narrowly avoided being another victim of the ongoing Curse Of Electric Halibut, having died on 19th August this year. I think I missed that at the time, so I didn't know he was dead until after I'd started this book. Rest assured that if he had been still alive he would have been on borrowed time anyway once I'd finished it.

featuring songs by Nine Inch Nails and Skrewdriver

I'll tell you what fascinates me about things like the new Nick Knowles album (yes, it's really a thing, it's happening, and there's nothing you can do about it), and it's not, perhaps surprisingly, the prospect of hearing that nice gruff stubbly cheeky DIY chap off the telly reinterpreting some standards in his own inimitable style in the comfort of my own living room.

obviously first two tracks should have been covers of DIY by Peter Gabriel and SOS by Abba.

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) September 27, 2017

Here's the thing: record companies aren't mugs, still less charities, and they wouldn't offer Nick Knowles the chance to make a record just because he'd always fancied it; there'll be an eye on the bottom line and the calculation was presumably that there'd be enough people out there who'd go and buy such an offering that it'd be worthwhile expending the (presumably considerable) cost of production, studio time, photography, physical production of CDs etc. etc. But who are the audience, and why are they buying it? One of the things that makes us impeccably progressive liberal types objectively better than you right-wing authoritarians is, after all, an urge to understand the motivations of others, to try and work out what drives people to do things, be it ISIS membership, paedophilia, incest or Morris dancing.

This article about Bradley Walsh (whose debut album Chasing Dreams went gold in 2016) confirms my suspicions; i.e. that it's mainly older people who disproportionately (i.e. compared with younger people) purchase physical CDs rather than streaming or downloading stuff off the internet. That's fine, but even then, you have to ask: what do you gain from having Bradley Walsh singing Fly Me To The Moon, rather than, say, Frank Sinatra? Even if you're not down with the whole Amazon thing and prefer actually going to a shop, Sinatra records are readily available, so why wouldn't you just pick up a compilation or something? Presumably not even the most wide-eyed fan of The Chase would make the claim that Walsh's version is better than Sinatra's, so why would you want it? I'm genuinely not having a pop here, I'm fascinated by how utterly opaque the thought process is to me. Take, I dunno, Victoria Coren as an example: it's well-documented that I like her personally in all sorts of inappropriate ways, and very much enjoy her BBC show Only Connect for its fiendish quizzing qualities. But do I therefore say: I would very much relish the opportunity to hear her attempt some sexy, husky, yet endearingly half-arsed and amateurish covers of the songs of seminal female recording artistes like Carole King, Janis Ian and Nana Mouskouri? No, I do not, and I'm not sure why anyone would imagine that I would.

I should add that I'm not ill-disposed towards cover versions per se, but these celebrity renditions (and the albums are generally almost exclusively cover versions) are not radical free-jazz disembowelments and reconstructions of classic tunes for kazoo orchestra, Tuvan throat singer and Bolivian ear-flute; they're very close retreads of the originals, so as not to frighten the horses. Really what I'm experiencing here is the same bafflement I get when one of the Britain's Got X-Factors throws up a Susan Boyle or a Paul Potts or similar who immediately knocks out an album of "standards" in time for Christmas, because, well, it's that nice lad off the telly, and well, he tries hard, doesn't he? And he's very devoted to his Nan, by all accounts, so that's nice.

But by jiminy it's a lucrative line of business for the record companies. I remember Ian McShane (post-Lovejoy but pre-Deadwood) knocking out an album called From Both Sides Now in the early 1990s, including a cover of the Joni Mitchell song of the same name. That seemed to me a bit of a quirky oddity at the time (though it may not have been, in fact everyone was probably at it; Russ Abbott to name but one) but everyone's at it these days. The most cursory Googling reveals recent album releases from Jason Manford, Alexander Armstrong, the aforementioned Knowles and Walsh, that nice Anton du Beke off the Strictlys, and an album of solo piano material from impressionist Alistair MacGowan. Sadly this one appears to have been played straight, rather than being a series of hilarious comedy caricatures of the playing styles of Alfred Brendel, Sviatoslav Richter, Vladimir Horowitz and others.

Best of all is TV funny man and erstwhile Eastenders star Shane Richie, who clearly takes his music very seriously and would like you to know that his thing is totally different from these half-arsed johnny-come-latelys (KNOOOOWWLES!!! *shakes fist*) who just knock out an album in time for Christmas - although his album is, as it happens, out in time for Christmas. I should point out that the new album's title echoes the title of Trevor Nelson's Radio 2 show which, when I first heard it trailed, appeared to my ear to be called Trevor Nelson's Cunt Rissole, which caused some brief confusion.

see what happens when you half-listen to the radio? turns out Trevor Nelson's Cunt Rissole isn't a thing after all. https://t.co/APDKdlhtJy

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) March 15, 2017

But anyway, what I'm saying, in a nutshell, is that I Just Don't Get It. Now there are plenty of wholly admirable mainstream artists with a wholly admirable body of self-composed and self-played material, but whom I nonetheless Just Don't Get in some fundamental way, Bruce Springsteen being one obvious example. But in general those who like Springsteen (and in my experience those who like Springsteen REALLY like Springsteen) at least started with the music, that being primarily what he does. The idea that they would therefore be very interested in, let's say, seeing The Boss present his own daytime DIY-themed TV show (Carpenters On The Edge Of Town or something) seems a bit odd, though I daresay there might be an audience for it.