we are family; here's a list arranged in a tree

One thing I did find myself occasionally doing while reading Dalva is referring to the Northridge family tree to remind myself which of the various John Wesley Northridges was married to whom. As it happens there isn't actually a family tree printed in Dalva, but as luck would have it there is one in The Road Home which I took a handy snap of with my mobile phone just for quick reference. Here it is:

Not actually a massive number of people in total, but some confusion possible nonetheless owing to the multiple marriages and occasional out-of-wedlock sexy sexy times going on. Anyway, this set me to thinking - very much like the occasional list of books featuring explanatory maps, most recently Tokyo Express, are there any other books that have family trees in them? My gut feeling here is there will be considerably fewer of these, as in most cases there isn't a need. It's really only sprawling family sagas with gigantic casts of inter-related characters that justify including one, and the only examples on this list I could find (The Road Home aside) were Hilary Mantel's two Thomas Cromwell books, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, both of which contain similar family trees representing the Tudor royal family and the various pretenders to the English throne. 

Outside of books which have featured on this blog the only other one which sprang to mind was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years Of Solitude (recently serialised for TV), which contains the family tree below; a bit like The Road Home, part of the usefulness of this is to distinguish between multiple characters who have pretty much the same name. 

the last book I read

Dalva by Jim Harrison.

Let's meet our main character, who is called *checks notes* Dalva. She's forty-five and living in California, doing excellent and worthy social work with abused and underprivileged kids, but feeling the pull of her childhood home in Nebraska, in a very general way, and in a far more specific way an urge to finally track down the son she gave up for adoption at sixteen after a brief but intense fling with a young half-Sioux man who worked on her grandfather's farm.

An opportunity is provided when her friend and occasional lover Michael, a drink-sozzled university professor, takes an interest in the diaries of her great-grandfather, John Wesley Northridge, an unconventional guy for his time and a big supporter of the rights of the native Sioux in the face of their vicious subjugation by the settlers of the Nebraska plains in the second half of the 19th century. Dalva takes it upon herself to deliver Michael to the Northridge farm and stay for an indefinite amount of time facilitating his access to old man Northridge's journals and whatever other material can be found, and possibly persuading him to take it a bit easier on the old sauce for a bit. Of course this also affords Dalva an opportunity for an extended reunion with various family members, in particular her mother Naomi and sister Ruth, as well as the various long-term staff and hangers-on at the farm whom she has known since childhood.

Of course what this also affords Dalva an opportunity to do is re-live some of her formative childhood experiences, in particular the series of events surrounding the arrival of Duane Stone Horse, the taciturn half-Sioux boy and incomparably expert horse-wrangler taken on by her grandfather (also John Wesley Northridge, as was her late father), his and Dalva's brief relationship and her subsequent pregnancy and the series of furtive shenanigans required for her to have the baby and then give it away. Her relationship with Duane was brief because her grandfather sent him away once he realised that Duane was the baby's father; this, it turns out, was because the old man knew something Dalva didn't, specifically that Duane was John Wesley Northridge III's son - product of an equally brief extra-marital relationship with a native Sioux woman, Rachel - and therefore Dalva's half-brother.

No chance of an emotional reunion between Dalva and Duane, though, because Duane has been dead for fifteen years or so - wounded and shell-shocked after serving in Vietnam and suffering from incurable cancer, he checked out in an impressively dramatic manner by swimming out into the open sea off the Florida Keys on his horse and then offing both of them with a pistol (horse then himself, presumably).

Michael's journal investigations don't go entirely to plan, partly because of his enduring fondness for The Drink and also his decision - while evidently a bit bored during one of Dalva's occasional absences - to attempt to lure local girl Karen into the sack by offering to use some big city contacts to help her establish a modelling career. Perhaps if she were to supply some Polaroids of a, hem hem, candid nature that he could pass on? This plan works better than Michael could have predicted as not only does Karen supply the goods, she also supplies, as it were, the goods, by agreeing to shimmy out of her bathing suit and sit on his face. Barely has he finished going WAHEEEYYY at this, though, than a male family member decides to strike a blow for Karen's honour and puts Michael in hospital with a broken jaw.

It only remains for a couple of outstanding items to be revealed and resolved: firstly a mysterious letter left for Dalva by her grandfather in the family safe which alludes to some specific entries in the great-grandfather's journal and alludes to some items which can be found in the always-locked cellar. This turns out to be the mummified remains of some meddlesome soldiers who came a-calling after Northridge has returned to his farm to settle into retirement, asked too many questions and were aggressive towards Northridge's Sioux wife, whereupon he shot the lot of them and bundled them into the cellar, subsequently taking their horses and abandoning them many miles away to throw pursuers off the scent.

Secondly, a young man called Nelse has been doing some work with Naomi cataloguing wildlife and doing some light horse-wrangling and such like. Dalva hasn't up to this point had much to do with him but eventually Naomi and Nelse call upon her with the revelation that Nelse (now nearly thirty) is her long-lost son. 

That revelation is just about the last thing in the book (it literally happens on the penultimate page) and won't actually be a revelation to anyone (like me) who read Dalva and its successor The Road Home in the "wrong" order. The two books' timelines overlap somewhat, but the second book then extends the timeline forward to incorporate Dalva's cancer diagnosis and her preparations for her own death. It also centres other narrative voices, in particular Dalva's grandfather and Nelse himself. Dalva, as the title suggests, is mostly delivered in Dalva's voice, although the middle section is presented as an extract from Michael's journals. Michael, presented here as a vaguely comic character, is used as a vehicle for delivering a bit of satire on academic pursuits, and indeed on any vaguely squishy city types who can't ride a fish, gut a horse and whittle a makeshift shelter out of a giant redwood. Dalva herself, on the other hand, is an intensely endearing central character - my only reservation is just the faint suspicion that, as a woman written by a man, she represents some sort of outdoorsy male fantasy of an ideal woman: fit, active, clearly absurdly hot even in her mid-forties, and with a commendably robust, guilt-free, no-strings attitude to sex.

Overall I didn't think Dalva was as good as The Road Home, but as always that may just be a consequence of the order I read them in. It just seemed a bit more meandering narratively, in the early sections in particular, and the late and slightly off-handed revelation of oh yeah, I shot some guys and hid them in the cellar, you might want to tidy up a bit, was a bit jarring. Just to be clear, though, it's still very good and I'd highly recommend reading both books, preferably in the intended order.

incidental music spot(s) of the day

It seems that Adriano Celentano's 1972 single Prisencolinensinainciusol is the advert music of choice at the moment, as I've seen (or more accurately heard) it used in two places lately, firstly this easyJet advert and secondly this advert for Poretti beer. 

I first encountered Prisencolinensinainciusol while watching this episode of QI, which was first broadcast in December 2014 - I couldn't say whether I watched it "live" or not; probably not. Anyway, Adriano Celentano seems to occupy a similar niche in Italian popular culture as Serge Gainsbourg occupied in France - massively popular and influential in his own country, little-known outside it. Celentano is still alive (at 87), however, Gainsbourg very much is not.

Just to recycle a couple of observations from this tweet (plus a couple of new ones):

• it's an absolute banger and somewhat ahead of its time for 1972
• its influence on Yello's The Race in particular seems clear to me: insistent beat, semi-spoken lyrics, parpy horn stabs and all
• Mike Reid's cover version Freezin' Cold in 89 Twoso was released not, as you might have assumed, in 1989, but in 1974 and is not significantly more comprehensible than the original despite presumably containing some actual English words. He definitely says THAT'S TRIFFIC at one point, though
• Celentano is name-checked (at about 2:05 here) in Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3 by Ian Dury and the Blockheads

The other thing I noticed this week was during a viewing of Beethoven's 2nd, the vastly-inferior sequel to the barely-tolerable Beethoven, featuring a dead-eyed Charles Grodin, phoning in a performance while presumably looking forward to paying off his mortgage, and also some "endearing" kids and a large St. Bernard dog, which we Brits, as custodians of English as she should be spoke, would pronounce St. BER-nard in the proper God-fearing way. The Americans, however, pronounce it as St. Ber-NARD with the emphasis on the second syllable in a slightly weird and jarring way. This is by no means my biggest gripe with the movie, just to be clear.

One of my many other gripes is the seemingly arbitrary use of Jimmy Olsen's Blues by the Spin Doctors as musical overlay to some sort of comedy montage. I have fond memories of the Spin Doctors being A Thing for about five minutes back in the early 1990s and I did at one point have a copy of their album Pocket Full Of Kryptonite, which has a few rockin' tunes on it, along with some more questionable stuff. The good stuff includes the hit singles Two Princes and Little Miss Can't Be Wrong, as well as the opening track Jimmy Olsen's Blues. Now I had no idea who Jimmy Olsen was, but it's pretty clear from the subject matter of the song that he's part of the Superman universe, that being what the song is about, and one of the lines in the song provides the album's title. A song with that clear and specific a set of subject matter is a bit of an odd choice for a film sequence completely unrelated to it; to put it another way, it's a bouncy tune and I guess it works fine as long as you don't listen to the lyrics, something I concede the film's target audience of under-10s probably don't do. 

I should add I also remember seeing the Spin Doctors at Glastonbury in what this clip tells me was 1994 - my principal memory is of some crunchy renditions of the hits and a bit too much free-form guitar noodling from the undoubtedly very talented Eric Schenkman, which I evidently had not taken enough drugs to fully appreciate. 

we'll tear your sole apart

Time for a deep dive into the world of shoes; my shoes in particular. I have no authority to speak for or about anyone else's shoes, nor would I be so presumptuous as to seek to do so. But I am conscious that I have in the past marked the passing of certain items of footwear, in particular shoes dedicated to the specific pursuits of running and walking, and by walking I suppose I sort of mean mountain hiking, rather than just going down the shops; you can pretty much wear any shoes for that, after all.

So I see that I commemorated the passing of my old Saucony running shoes in favour of a fairly cheapo pair of Crane-branded ones from Aldi; at some point after that I upgraded those to a pair of blue Nikes for running purposes, probably around the time I decided to have another crack at getting into doing parkruns in 2018. Those did me for a while but earlier this year I decided it was time to invest in another pair. Now at some point between about 2018 and 2025 there's been a revolution in the world of running shoes whereby every pair you can buy now has these absurdly thick bouncy soles. This has caused some controversy among elite athletes who could suddenly complete entire marathons in a single bound and some restrictions have had to be applied. The pair of Asics shoes I eventually bought are by no means the most extreme example but, as you can see from the photo, are much thicker than the old wafer-thin Nikes, though of course these have had to endure the best part of a decade of being pounded flat by my gargantuan weight. I should add that the new ones are also absurdly comfortable and forgiving of my elephantine running style and certainly reduce the impact of my clumsy lumberings so that I can now hear my music over the deafening thwacking of my feet on the pavement. As a data point I haven't broken the world marathon record or anything while wearing them but I have recently slightly lowered my long-standing parkrun PB. More tedious parkrun evangelism and nerdy stattery in a later post.

You might also recall the progression of my walking shoes from the old Salomons, which bit the dust after a soggy visit to Pembrokeshire in 2010, through the brown Tevas (which are probably still my favourite pair of walking shoes of all the various ones I have ever owned), to the blue Karrimor pair I bought in late 2016. That pair were first-choice walking shoes for only a relatively short space of time as they weren't all that good and were replaced by a pair of grey Mammut shoes I got in Go Outdoors in what was probably around 2018. I can narrow the date down in this way because while I'm still in the Karrimors in this photo at the top of Pen y Fan in June 2018, I'm in the Mammuts in the following photo of me atop Striding Edge in the Lake District in April 2019.

But eventually the Mammuts too became a victim of their own success, by which I mean they were so comfortable they ended up getting worn all the time, and needed replacing, which they have now been by this splendid pair of North Ridge shoes, also purchased from the excellent people at Go Outdoors only a few days ago. You will notice, though, that the super-thick and bouncy soles thing has now extended to walking shoes as well. 

Note also that I still possess both the blue Karrimors, which are very much relegated to mowing the lawn and other gardening activities these days, and my pair of grey Tevas which I bought as a backup for the brown pair, never liked or wore quite as much, and which a couple of decades later the soles are starting to fall off. What will happen now is that the Mammuts will be relegated to general odd-job shoes and the Karrimors and Tevas will be relegated to, erm, the bin. The ciiiiircle of liiiife, etc. 

the last book I read

The Hunted by Gabriel Bergmoser.

G'day, mate. Welcome to Australia. Land of Fosters, Castlemaine XXX, kangaroos, Shane Warne and all sorts of bonzer fair dinkum stuff. So come and visit! Although there's always a few less appealing things, like the crocodiles, but also a few people whose welcoming matey Aussieness has curdled in the sun and the solitude, like a pair of yellow crusty sweat-soaked underpants, into something altogether less pleasant.

Speaking of solitude, here's Frank, a man of slightly shady and dubious past including many things he'd rather forget, running a remote petrol station and shop on a remote rural highway. It's not the middle of nowhere, but you can definitely see it from there. Rather unexpectedly, Frank is currently accommodating a guest, his grand-daughter Allie, delivered to him for a brief stay while her parents work through some marital issues. 

Allie is a typically surly and uncommunicative teenager, not especially impressed at being dumped out in the sticks where nothing ever happens. Well, careful what you wish for, as things are about to Kick Off in a big way.

First, random couple Charlie and Delilah show up, needing fuel but also slightly lost and slightly grumpy with each other. They are followed onto the forecourt shortly after by a second car which swerves wildly to a halt, and from which emerges a female figure festooned in mud and gore who promptly collapses onto the tarmac.

Frank, Delilah and Charlie take the new arrival back to the house and Charlie - who turns out, handily, to be a nurse - stitches up the several nasty gashes she has in her leg while she is unconscious on the sofa. Meanwhile Allie minds the front desk and the till, and is soon visited by a shady-looking bloke who's very interested in whether she's seen a young woman recently, probably driving a car, maybe a bit dishevelled-looking. Erm, awkward.

Probably time for a bit of a flashback into a prior timeline to find out who this young woman is and what she's been up to, right? You betcha. But first we have to meet Simon, a city boy out on a road trip to find the "real" Australia in some ill-defined way. Perhaps this slightly mysterious girl he meets in a bar will help him? Or maybe she will just agree to sleep with him; that would be good too. Simon and the girl, whose name turns out to be Maggie, head off down the highway together with no particular destination in mind until, at Maggie's suggestion, they turn off the main highway down a rutted track. I mean, what's the worst that could happen, right?

Well, what happens in the short term is that they meet up with some young blokes seemingly out hunting and, after some initial tension, are invited back to their village to throw a few prawns on the barbie and blow the froth of a bit of the amber nectar. They are even offered some rustic but acceptable accommodation for the night. All nice and friendly and relaxed, and maybe Simon's detection of a bit of an edge beneath the rugged blokey banter is just him being a nervous city boy uncomfortable with this sort of thing? Maggie seems to be enjoying herself anyway. Or is she?

Spooked by some of his encounters with the locals and suspicious of Maggie's motives, Simon decides to escape the following morning in the car, but doesn't get very far before he is dragged from the car, given a beating and then offered a choice, be killed on the spot or provide a bit of sport by trying to escape into the bush and be hunted down. 

Maggie, meanwhile, is doing a bit of snooping around and comes upon a shed in which various meat is hanging from hooks in various states of ripeness. but WAIT A MINUTE these are actually people, presumably the remnants of people who have stumbled upon the village in a similar way in the past. While still reeling from this discovery Maggie is surprised by one of the villagers, but he is even more surprised when she stabs him in the throat with a meat hook and escapes. There is still the little matter of getting out of the village, though, something Simon was unable to do. Simon, however, is, or rather was, a soft namby-pamby city boy and Maggie, it turns out, has been hardened by a series of abusive childhood experiences into a one-woman killing machine just waiting for an opportunity to be unleashed. And this is that opportunity, right here. 

So Maggie slips away, under cover of darkness, and, inconvenienced only slightly by stumbling into a man-trap and having her leg lacerated, finds a car and makes good her escape, with only a couple of brutal killings required on the way. Her subsequent wild flight back across the scrub leads her to the road and the forecourt of Frank's garage. 

So now we're back where we came in and Reg, the guy who turned up asking after Maggie, smells a fairly obvious rat and finds his way over to the house, whereupon he finds Maggie, and shortly afterwards finds the contents of both barrels of a shotgun heading for his head. But he's got friends, including the various characters that Simon and Maggie have already met, and soon they turn up with revenge on their minds and only a few people standing in their way: Frank, Allie, Maggie, Charlie and Delilah, and Greg, a random guy in a suit who just happened to turn up on the forecourt at the wrong moment and would really just like to exit the whole situation, none of his business, no questions asked, thanks very much.

After a tense stand-off at the garage attention turns to the house, and Maggie and Allie are besieged while Charlie, Delilah and Greg are taken as hostages by the gang. That just leaves Frank, who just happens - like Maggie, legacy of a troubled past - to be something of a merciless killing machine himself, which is quite handy. The siege continues, various hostages are offed in messy ways, Frank makes it back to the house to help out the girls, and eventually it falls to Maggie to bring things to an end, with a bit of help from Allie, new to the whole merciless slaughtering game but showing a promising aptitude for it.

As gripping as The Hunted is, and it certainly is, the first thing you find yourself doing is ticking off things that resemble other works in a similar genre. For one thing, the whole premise broadly resembles the plot of the 2005 film Wolf Creek. Some more specific things: the Greg character in his role as Weaselly Corporate Guy resembles both Ellis from Die Hard and Craig Toomy from The Langoliers, and the business right at the end where Maggie rips off someone else's face and wears it to effect an escape is straight out of Silence Of The Lambs. And you can't really have human torsos on meat-hooks without it being reminiscent of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Then you move onto the plot contrivances that seem a bit clunky and awkward: Allie's parents' somewhat quixotic decision to house her with Frank, someone they haven't seen for years (haven't they got any mates?), the whole back-story with Maggie's mother which doesn't really add anything, and the thing with the two periods of siege where the villagers conveniently give the besieged people many minutes thinking time before steaming in and setting fire to things. 

So it's certainly not perfect, and does sort of give the impression of being bolted together from some bits of other classics of the genre with some perfunctory plot grouting in between, but it does its brutal business very effectively and in only a relatively slim 266 pages. 

the last book I read

Rabbit Redux by John Updike.

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is in his mid-thirties, living with his wife, Janice, and their teenage son, Nelson, in a (fictional) city in Pennsylvania. He works a fairly dead-end job (alongside his father) as a linotype operator at a local printing firm, a job which is under threat of becoming redundant as a result of advances in computerised typesetting. 

Harry and Janice have a chequered history together: married quite young, and parents of both Nelson and a younger daughter, Becky, who Janice drunkenly drowned in the bathtub while Harry had briefly left the family home to shack up with a prostitute. But age has calmed things down a bit, or at least it has on Harry's side. Janice, on the other hand, feeling neglected and restless, begins an affair with local man Charlie Stavros, exotically Greek to Harry's corn-fed American, and an anti-war Democrat to Harry's hawkish Republican. Plenty to chew on there, as we're at the cusp of the 1960s turning into the 1970s and the Vietnam war is in full swing.

Keen to exercise his freedom now that Janice has swanned off with another man, Harry starts hanging out at a local jazz club and soon acquires a couple of lodgers: Jill, a young white girl from Connecticut and Skeeter, an eccentric black Vietnam vet with some radical political views and a mild Messiah complex. Harry is conscious that Jill is young enough to be his daughter, and moreover intermittently addled by the increasingly hard drugs Skeeter is plying her with, but when a bunk-up is offered is nonetheless unable to resist the urge to go WAHEYYY and climb on with some gusto. 

The loose commune at Harry's house is the focus of some local scandal, especially given Skeeter's increasingly eccentric behaviour and Jill's increasing detachment from reality and dependence on harder drugs, including, eventually, heroin. Harry seeks some solace by hooking up with the woman next door, Peggy Fosnacht, who despite being considerably older and plumper than Jill is a much more rewarding lay. It is while over at Peggy's in a post-coital slumber that Harry gets a call from Skeeter alluding vaguely to Bad Stuff happening at the house, and when Harry gets there he finds it on fire and with the fire service in attendance. Once they eventually get the fire under control they do a sweep of the house and bring out Jill's body - Skeeter had made good his escape but she was too deep in smack-induced slumber to wake up. 

So with his house destroyed and his erstwhile sort-of-girlfriend dead, and, moreover, with the axe finally falling on his job at the printing firm, Harry finds himself (and Nelson) back living with his parents again. As it happens Janice is starting to cool off on the whole Charlie Stavros thing and the end of the book finds Harry and Janice testing out a tentative reconciliation.

Rabbit Redux is the second book in the Rabbit series (which comprises four novels and a concluding short story) and a sequel to Rabbit, Run which I read probably thirty years ago. My recollections of that book are fairly hazy but I seem to recall having slightly mixed feelings about it, partly because of the unlikeability (if that is even a word) of the central character. Oddly, despite my being much closer to Rabbit's fictional age (mid-twenties) then than I am now I enjoyed Rabbit Redux considerably more, perhaps because my advancing age means I identify more closely with Rabbit's character traits (general grumpiness, irascibility with young people, persistent horniness). Marry Me is the only other Updike on this list, way back in 2009. 

As often happens, what it's actually about is a little more difficult to pin down. The idea of producing one of these novels every decade or so is presumably to produce a sort of audit of the current state of the USA through the eyes of a fairly ordinary everyman character (Rabbit has no pretensions to intellectualism); in the case of Rabbit Redux this means late-1960s topics like Vietnam and sexual politics. Much of the sex stuff was probably bracingly frank at the time, but has lost the power to shock fifty-odd years later. 

One odd parallel with a recent book on this list: Light Perpetual also featured a character whose job involved manual typesetting and who found themselves having to rethink their whole career after automation meant their former job no longer existed. 

leaving the parc? I'm in the darc

A couple of unstructured thoughts after returning from a long weekend at Center Parcs with the family.

Firstly that "with the family" is how most people choose to go to Center Parcs; there are doubtless reasons why as a couple or small group of child-free adults you might choose to take a holiday at Center Parcs, but it's not completely clear to me what they are. That is in no way a criticism of either Center Parcs as a place or those people as people, it's just that a lot of the stuff is clearly targeted at people who have kids: the pool with its many exciting slides and rapids, the easy access to various kinds of food, the boating lake with various relatively sedate and low-speed child-friendly boat adventures. Yes, you'll be saying, but you can take the bikes and go and do lots of healthy bike stuff on your bikes. To which I would say, well, sort of. We'll come back to this.

Secondly, a word on spelling: "Center" in the American style with the "er" instead of the "re", and Parcs in the European style with the "c". These things reflect the organisation's Dutch origins, although following a split in 2001 the UK and Ireland operation is now a wholly separate organisation, though (presumably) retaining the spelling for continuity and brand recognition and stuff like that.

Center Parcs is not the only game in town when it comes to village-style experiences with centralised food and entertainment facilities, and we have previously gone (three or four times, I think) to Bluestone, which is over near Narberth in west Wales, and generally had a lovely time each time, If my records are correct the last time we were there was in December 2018, so the kids were a lot smaller then. One thing that affects is the kids' desire for more gnarly pool adventures now they're a bit older, and it must be said that the rapids at Center Parcs are a good deal more adrenaline-fuelled than anything Bluestone has to offer, as nice as the Blue Lagoon is. It should also be said that adults of adult height and weight being cajoled by their kids into traversing the rapids upwards of 30 times over the course of a long weekend will come home with a substantial collection of bruises to ankles, hips, etc. and in my case one ear filled with a lethal cocktail of earwax, pool water, cryptosporidium and child's piss which seems reluctant to unbung itself. I'm sure it'll be fine though. Anyway, more objective analyses of alternatives to Center Parcs, including Bluestone, can be found here. 

One thing I definitely can say about Bluestone is that, as lovely as cycling around the site is, it's also possible to seamlessly incorporate a trip off-site if you want to do a longer ride. I know this because we did it in 2014 as part of our first visit, when we hired a couple of bikes and one of those little trailers which we put Nia in (she'd have been two at the time).

The photo shows me and Nia heading around one of the paths at the northern edge of the resort which eventually leads up into the western end of Canaston Woods and joins the Knights Way. We did a fairly unambitious route up here, over to the bridge by Blackpool Mill and back again, with a few stops for exploring in between, all without at any point having to pass through a gate, an airlock or any other security barrier or being stopped by any sinister uniformed individuals slapping us across the face with a leather gauntlet and demanding to see our papers. The mill, by the way, was pretty much abandoned in 2014 but has since (under Bluestone's management, though it's outside the resort) been transformed into quite a ritzy-looking restaurant.

Anyway, when we planned our Center Parcs trip I noticed that the site (the first UK Center Parcs site, opened in 1987) was right next to the much larger Sherwood Pines Forest Park, a place with lots of cycle trails. Excellent, I thought, since now Nia has graduated from being a two-year-old in a trailer to a terrifyingly fit and active thirteen-year-old with her own bike, we could do with somewhere to go that offers longer rides than the Center Parcs site, which is fairly small. A quick look at an OS map shows that there is a big junction of paths right by the top left corner of the Center Parcs site; surely, you might think, an ingress/egress point for those wanting to do some longer cycling routes. Not so, as it happens, or not that we could find, anyway. Google Maps suggests that there is an egress point along the western boundary of the site but Nia and I cycled out there and had a look without finding it, and taking the route marked in red to the corner of the site doesn't yield an escape route either, there being a high fence on your left all the way round. 

The charitable view here is that this is more about keeping non-residents out than keeping residents in, especially important, one would imagine, at the Longleat site where non-residents who might want to get in include ACTUAL FREAKIN' LIONS, but there is a suspicion that it is a bit of the latter as well. Given that residents are issued with wristbands with some sort of RFID device which controls access to your lodge, swimming pool lockers etc., it's not impossible to imagine some sort of gate system controlled by the same device. Or they could just be less uptight and take the more easy-going approach that Bluestone take; don't signpost the route either internally or externally but make it available for those enterprising enough to want to take it. My personal inclination is to be irritated by cycling down a track that I expected to lead to freedom and adventure and personal autonomy and choice and be confronted with this:

In the end we found plenty to do without getting out into the wider forest area, and it is clearly physically possible to leave the site by the main entrance and loop round back into the Sherwood Pines site, albeit at the cost of 3-4 kilometres of extra distance. The whole thing is a little vexing, though, and does conjure up memories of the delightful public relations disaster that the Center Parcs organisation endured when trying to appear sufficiently reverent in the wake of the Queen's death in 2022. 

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LEAVE YOUR LODGE https://t.co/FvuMjS2HRy pic.twitter.com/YVjRaC1fcP

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) September 14, 2022

A couple of footnotes: firstly anyone planning a visit to Bluestone and noticing its convenient next-door proximity to the Oakwood theme park should be aware that Oakwood has now, as of earlier this year, closed down permanently.

Secondly, this trip was actually my third visit to Center Parcs (all of them to the same Sherwood Forest site), this one and our previous family visit in 2023 but also a trip waaaaaay back in what would have probably been either 1992 or 1993 with my then-girlfriend Posy and her family during the course of which this absolutely splendid photo was taken of me. 

My principal recollection of that trip is of me and Posy's younger sister's boyfriend (who I suppose would have been about 18) spending most of the week leaving the girls to do their own thing and disappearing off to the sports hall for a ferociously-competitive series of bouts of various racket sports, bouts from which I have chosen to recall I emerged triumphant.

the last book I read

Kudos by Rachel Cusk.

We are back in the company of our nearly-anonymous narrator from Outline and Transit. I say "nearly" because her name is Faye (indeed the three-book sequence is informally known is some quarters as the "Faye trilogy"); we know this because it's (slightly archly) mentioned exactly once in each book (page 227 of 232 in my copy of this one).

Kudos opens pretty much exactly as Outline did; our narrator (a novelist) is on an aeroplane on her way to some literary event and strikes up a conversation with the man sitting next to her. Well, I say "conversation", but that implies some sort of reciprocal two-way thing, and in fact, in common with most of the conversations in all three books, this is largely one-way, the anonymous stranger telling a story after minimal prompting from our narrator, this story being a convoluted tale of woe involving his wife and daughter and a dead dog.

On arrival in Berlin for the literary event our narrator checks into her hotel and meets with her publisher, a couple of other authors, of varying ages and degrees of career development and success, and an interviewer. A similar process occurs with the ensuing conversations - with minimal encouragement people expound at some length on a variety of topics, usually centered around some event in their own lives but with plenty of more general philosophical musing on the side. Then there is an organised walking tour of Berlin, with the narrator and the guide, Hermann, striding purposefully off ahead of the group and finding that the subsequent waiting around for everyone to catch up offers further opportunities for conversation. Back at the hotel canteen the various authors struggle to negotiate the complex coupon system that enables them to get food, and we meet a couple of other authors, Gerta and Ryan. Ryan is the same guy as we met early in Outline, but now transformed from easy-going guy doing a casual teaching gig to terrifyingly driven, highly successful, gaunt, Fitbit-obsessed exercise fanatic.

We then move on to a barely-distinguishable literary event in a slightly warmer coastal location, probably Spain or Portugal, and more authors, in particular Sophia and her taciturn friend Luis, part of a group who go out to a restaurant, talk gloomily about their various divorces and push mysterious oily fish round their plates for a couple of hours. Then there are more interviews, and a meeting in a restaurant with the narrator's editor and translator wherein wine is drunk and further talk is talked. Going for a walk to clear her head, the narrator takes a phone call from her son, and, having talked him down from the grip of some minor crisis, wanders onto a nudist beach, strips off and takes a dip in the sea.

We can probably get the griping out of the way first: this is the third novel in this vein and so the novelty of Outline's structure and narrative voice has worn off a bit (not that it was as unprecedented as some seemed to think anyway), the business of most of the characters being either writers or critics or interviewers (i.e. people who either write, write about writers or talk to writers about writing) runs the risk of the whole thing disappearing up its own fundament, and the central character's own passivity and humourlessness grate a bit after a while. It's all very white and middle-class as well; I'm not well-versed enough in Marxist literary theory to feel emboldened enough to call a novel "bourgeois", but if I were this is the sort of novel I might do it for. The other obvious point to make is that in a novel supposedly populated by actual human beings who resemble in at least some respects the ones you and I know who populate planet Earth, nobody speaks in a way that at all resembles how actual people speak. This is just a structural problem with any novel that wants to articulate complex philosophical ideas and doesn't have an omniscient narrative voice that can just dump great big tracts onto the page: at least one of your characters has to articulate those ideas in a way that sounds like a series of things someone might plausibly actually say, which is inherently tricky. The gimmick of having the narrator's name be uttered only once, usually right at the end of the book, comes across as just that (i.e. a gimmick), particularly in Kudos where it's uttered by her son, slightly jarringly as he's just referred to his father as "Dad".

Tish and pish to all that, though, because this is still intensely readable (helped by being quite short), a brave and interesting formal and structural experiment, and there's nothing wrong with a book that makes some demands on the intelligence of its readers. It's easy, but dangerous, to make assumptions about how much events here are meant to mirror the author's own life: recently-divorced fortysomething novelist, mother of two teenage children, etc. etc., but what does seem pretty clear is that Cusk herself is fiercely intelligent, slightly intense and a bit humourless, rather like her narrator here. 

Previous series of at least three books where all of them feature on this blog are Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy and William Gibson's Bridge trilogy. Only one book to go for Patricia Highsmith's Ripley series to join that list: watch this space.

the last book I read

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the last book I read

Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford.

We're in Woolworth's. I mean, back when Woolworth's was a thing, and therefore being in one was a thing you might possibly do. That actually only rules out dates later than about 2008, but we're much earlier here; in fact we're in 1944, during the Second World War. And here are our five main characters: Jo, Val, Ben, Alec and Vern, all small children aged about five. But why have we chosen this moment to meet them? Well, something significant is about to happen, but we'll circle back to it at the end, if you don't mind. 

So now we commence a series of flash-forwards, first by five years to 1949, and then in a series of fifteen-year jumps to 1964, 1979, 1994 and finally 2009, when each of the main cast of characters is around seventy. All five start out in the (fictional) London borough of Bexford but then take different paths through life.

Alec goes from wise-cracking schoolkid to cocky twentysomething looking for a break in the newspaper business, which he gets as a typesetter. His natural bolshiness and interest in left-wing politics also make him ideal as a union representative. The fact that his job is in jeopardy by the late 1970s isn't any reflection on his skill at it, but just a reflection of the changing times and the development of computers that will eventually make his entire job obsolete. Alec fights against the inevitable, and leads his colleagues in a lengthy strike, but eventually finds himself out of a job and takes a swerve into the teaching profession. 

Vern, a big, ungainly kid, matures into a big, formidable adult making a slightly dodgy living in the property rental business and nursing a slightly incongruous love for opera on the quiet when no-one else is listening. Eventually the business climate takes a downturn and he is back to square one (not to mention being booted out on the street by his wife), but gradually puts his business back together so successfully that he's able to afford lavish trips to indulge his love of opera; the full black tie and quail's eggs extravaganza. But a change of fortune is always just round the corner, and if you spend your life pissing everyone off in pursuit of your aims, including your own family, you may find that they are disinclined to help out when you really need them.

Jo and Val, the twins, take different paths through life: Val falls in with a group of ne'er-do-wells led by the charismatic Mike, whose slightly cool and exciting rocker rebelliousness has by the late 1970s curdled into skinhead ultra-nationalism. But at least if he slakes his thirst for a bit of the old ultraviolence out on the streets then he won't feel the need to come home and take it out on the missus, right? Eventually the inevitable happens and Mike administers a beating to a young Asian bloke that tips over into murder and he gets put away for a long stretch. After Mike eventually dies in prison Val gets a job as a volunteer for the Samaritans, dispensing some of her hard-earned life experience. Meanwhile Jo has spent an entertaining couple of decades in California as musical sidekick and occasional lover to Ricky, a fellow Londoner who has become a proper massive rock star. Eventually that comes to an end, as all things do, and she returns to England and a job as a teacher in a secondary school.

Finally there's Ben, already by his twenties in the grip of some fairly serious mental illness and on a pretty heavy prescribed drug regime. a few years later and he appears to be off the prescription drugs but self-medicating fairly heavily with brain-numbing quantities of weed while just about holding down a job as a bus conductor. After another fifteen years his life appears to have taken a miraculous turn for the better after a chance meeting with Martha, the Nigerian proprietor of a café where he's got a part-time job - she straightens him out by marching him off to the GP for a proper prescription of anti-depressants, and once he's sorted out in the old noggin department promotes him to full-time employee and eventually husband. 

So by the last instalment in 2009 everyone's had their fair share of triumph and disaster, marriage and divorce, birth and death, tears and laughter, light and shade, etc. Has anyone changed the world, become Prime Minister, found a cure for athlete's foot or anything like that? Well, no, but who is to judge the value of an individual life? And who knows what small barely-noticeable ripple that one of us might make during our time here might eventually accumulate into something momentous after we've gone?

Well, I hope you're comfy on that rug, because prepare to have it pulled from under you: the event described in the first chapter is the V2 rocket impact on Woolworth's in New Cross in November 1944 in which 168 people died, including many children. In the fictionalised version of it that features our five protagonists, they are all, with various parents, directly under the point of impact and it is made very clear that they are all pretty much vaporised into their component molecules by the ensuing blast. So what follows is a possible alternative future if some part of the preceding few minutes had played out differently and the rocket's trajectory had altered by a fraction of a degree and it had pancaked harmlessly into the Thames, or possibly slaughtered a different 168 people in a different building.

So how do we feel about this? We'll have to be self-aware enough to realise that any responses like "well, that's rubbish then, none of it was real" are a bit problematic; after all, none of it was real anyway, it's a novel, literally made up by someone. I think my problems with it, to the extent that I have any, are as follows: firstly, if you skip the first chapter what you have left is an interesting but not wholly remarkable set of occasionally intertwining stories about five kids from London and their various adventures in life. That's fine, but pasting the framing device on the front almost looks like an attempt to imbue the stories that follow with a sort of poignancy and significance that they haven't really earned. Secondly (and this is really just the first criticism again in a slightly different form), the first chapter is so brilliantly written, with its Nicholson Baker-esque slowing of time to a nanosecond crawl to describe the rocket's arrival through the roof of the building and the impossibly violent chemical reaction happening inside it, that it raises expectations that the rest of the book can't possibly live up to. The other example that springs to mind of an opening chapter so perfect that the rest of the book was a bit of a let-down in comparison is Ian McEwan's Enduring Love. 

To be clear, there's absolutely nothing wrong with this, but it just felt to me like the structure didn't quite knit together properly, or, to put it another way, the carrot of something bold and structurally experimental was dangled and then never quite followed through on. It is worth pointing out that quite a lot of people disagreed with me, though. 

A couple of footnotes: some of the fragility-and-preciousness-of-life stuff, particularly towards the end, is fairly explicitly Goddy, but not in a way that I found annoying, or perhaps my mild annoyance at the book's structure distracted me. The other thing that struck me was how similar Ben's intrusive thoughts were - particularly during his weed-addled on-the-buses episode - to the borderline personality disorder stuff described by Joe Tracini in his various videos and books. 

incidental music spot of the day

Hey, we haven't done one of these for a while (three-and-a-half years or so in fact), but I was struck by the loose yet funky tune that plays over the latest Haven Holidays advert, as it was highly recognisable to me as Can You Get To That by Funkadelic. My recollection is that I discovered Funkadelic off the back of some sort of Greatest Guitar Solos Of All Time article in a music magazine that pointed me to Maggot Brain, which certainly fits the bill as it is essentially a ten-minute guitar solo courtesy of guitarist Eddie Hazel.

That in turn led me to the album of the same name, and thence a few of the other albums from their early/mid-1970s heyday, including my favourite one Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On which not only was a fixture in the CD player in the RV we hired for our honeymoon in Canada in 2011, but also provided, in Sexy Ways, the first dance song at our wedding in June 2011, a choice I absolutely stand by 14 years later, even as I largely disown the improvised dance moves I came up with to accompany it.

As an aside, if the Stone Roses hadn't heard the title track of Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On before they wrote the lengthy funky stop-start outro to I Am The Resurrection then I'll eat my hat. 

the last book I read

Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto.

A man is dead, on a beach. Suspicious? I should bally well say so. Suicide? Yes, but how? Well, surely he simply shot himself and then hid the gun? Well, no, actually it looks as if he died by cyanide poisoning, as did the young lady found beside him. A classic lovers' suicide, then, by the look of it; an open and shut case. Well, just a minute there, you're forgetting rumpled detective Jutaro Torigai: kare wa kisoku ni shitagawanai ippikiōkami no keikandaga, kekka wa dashite iru.

The suicidal couple are quickly identified as Kenichi Sayama, an assistant section chief at a government ministry, and Hideko Kuwayama, known to everyone as Toki, a waitress at a Tokyo restaurant. So what were they doing at a beach near Fukuoka, many miles south-west of Tokyo and indeed on a whole different island?

Questioning the locals in the vicinity of the beach doesn't reveal much, apart from a couple of sightings of a couple walking in the vicinity of the local railway stations, though the timings of the sightings don't really add up properly. More information is forthcoming back in Tokyo, where it transpires that Sayama and Toki were spotted boarding the express to Fukuoka by a couple of Toki's fellow waitresses from the restaurant, in the company of one of their regular customers, prominent businessman Mr. Yasuda. Meanwhile it is revealed that the ministry that Sayama worked for was embroiled in a corruption scandal - maybe Sayama knew some inconvenient things? Could he have been rubbed out? But how could someone have engineered not only his suicide (or apparent suicide) but that of his clandestine lover as well?

Torigai and his Tokyo counterpart Kiichi Mihara start with the obvious stuff: what were the lovers doing for the few days between being sighted at the railway station in Tokyo and being found on the beach, and what do the waitresses and Mr. Yasuda know? Mihara, a diligent and slightly obsessive guy, soon comes across an oddity: Yasuda and the waitresses could only have had a clear view across the railway lines to the platform from which the express departed during a specific four-minute interval a few minutes before the departure of Yasuda's train. Is this too much of a coincidence? Could Yasuda have engineered things in some way? Was he concerned about revelations of corruption affecting some of his lucrative business dealings with the ministry?

All of this speculation is a bit pointless, though, since the actual murders (if they were murders) happened several days later and several hundred miles away, and it turns out Yasuda has a cast-iron alibi for that period, as he was in Hokkaido for a business trip, a trip also involving a lengthy rail journey from Tokyo. Or was he? Isn't just happening to be right at the far end of the country a bit too convenient? Mihara begins picking away at every aspect of Yasuda's seemingly painstakingly-constructed alibi and sees it start to unravel: no-one actually saw him on the train until a few stops from its final destination, Sapporo, the telegram he supposedly sent earlier from the train was sent by someone else, and his bed-ridden wife Ryoko just happens to be an authority on the minutiae of rail timetabling. Coincidence? OR IS IT?

Anyway, Mihara's persistence eventually cracks the case (SPOILER ALERT from here on, naturally): Yasuda really was at the beach on the night in question and then travelled to Hokkaido by plane in time to hop on the train a couple of stops from Sapporo and make it look as if he'd been on it the whole way. Not only was Ryoko - genuinely incapacitated by chronic tuberculosis, but not, as it turns out, completely bed-ridden - instrumental in concocting the railway scheduling ruse that enabled Yasuda to establish the pretence of Toki and Sayama being lovers (they knew each other, but that was it), but she also was at the beach on the night of the murders and helped her husband do the deed - in the process revenging herself on Toki whom she knew to have been actually her husband's lover, not Sayama's. Her husband's primary motive, as the detectives had already surmised, was eliminating a potential whistle-blower in the corruption investigation who might have jeopardised some lucrative business arrangements, and as a handy by-product offing an erstwhile lover whom he'd got a bit bored with.

Like most murder mysteries the solution here doesn't really stand up to being thought about too much, but the unpicking of the mystery is very satisfying. The shift in viewpoint about a third of the way through from Torigai, who you'd assumed would drive the investigation, to Mihara is a bit jarring - Torigai only popping up thereafter to exchange a couple of letters with Mihara and be the recipient of Mihara's summing-up at the end wherein it is revealed that the Yasudas conveniently offed themselves in their own lovers' suicide pact when they felt the investigative net closing in on them. The minute dissection of rail timetables may not be for everyone, but the whole thing is only 149 pages in my nice new Penguin Classics edition. The original English translations had the title Points And Lines, which I think is probably better.

Previous novels on this list to have been translated from the original Japanese are The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea and the two Murakamis, Norwegian Wood and Dance Dance Dance.

Postscript: I meant to add that this is another book on this list to feature a map, two in this case, the first just a general map of Japan presumably included to illustrate how Tokyo is pretty much in the middle of the country and Fukuoka and Sapporo at opposite ends, and the second to make a bit of sense of the murder location and the maze of train lines that cross and intersect near there.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today's pair are author Harlan Coben and actor, author, amateur chef and mixologist Stanley Tucci.

The only Harlan Coben book I have ever read is Tell No One, which I read a copy of owned by my then-girlfriend shortly after its 2001 publication in a desperate holiday running-out-of-books frenzy, something I would obviously never allow to happen nowadays. I would describe it as enjoyable, gripping and utterly ludicrous, which is all absolutely fine for a fairly pulpy thriller. Like many primarily plot-driven things it and its many successors in Coben's oeuvre are prime material for film and TV adaptations, and sure enough there have been a whole raft of them, most recently the Netflix series adapted from Run Away, which seems to feature a cast of mainly British actors.

Stanley Tucci, meanwhile, is probably right now deep in some method-acting preparation for the plum role of me in the movie of my life. For him to be a perfect fit appearance-wise I probably need to get slightly balder, something which I'm pretty sure will happen all too imminently. 

did an icebreaker at a work meeting the other day where the question was "who would play you in a movie of your life". panicked slightly trying to think of bespectacled bald fiftysomethings and said Stanley Tucci. increasingly convinced of the genius of the idea

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) July 17, 2023

is she sleeping? I don't think so

Clearly I need to be careful about even alluding tangentially to the very existence of The Curse Of Electric Halibut, since my doing so in the last book review has almost immediately resulted (with a bit of time-travel involved, admittedly) in my learning of the death of Jennifer Johnston, novelist, playwright and specifically for the purposes of this list author of The Illusionist, which I read back in July 2012 and mentioned in passing much more recently in my post about The Prestige. 

You will notice that I didn't mention her in any of the various posts where I break my supposed rule regarding not speculating luridly about future deaths; I think my mental picture of the author of The Illusionist would have been of someone quite a bit younger than the 65 that she was at the time. Anyway, she was 95 when she died, which makes her the oldest curse victim, beating by around ten months a record held since relatively recently by Milan Kundera. 

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
José Saramago	9th May 2009	18th June 2010	87	1y 40d
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
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
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
David Cook	24th February 2009	16th September 2015	74	6y 205d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
William McIlvanney	7th September 2010	5th December 2015	79	5y 90d
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
Anita Shreve	2nd September 2006	29th March 2018	71	11y 211d
Philip Roth	23rd December 2017	22nd May 2018	85	0y 150d
Justin Cartwright	7th September 2008	3rd December 2018	75	10y 89d
Toni Morrison	18th July 2010	5th August 2019	88	9y 20d
Charles Portis	3rd April 2018	17th February 2020	86	1y 320d
Alison Lurie	24th March 2007	3rd December 2020	94	13y 254d
John le Carré	21st February 2008	12th December 2020	89	12y 295d
Joan Didion	14th December 2010	23rd December 2021	87	11y 12d
Hilary Mantel	22nd October 2010	22nd September 2022	70	11y 338d
Greg Bear	4th October 2021	19th November 2022	71	1y 48d
Russell Banks	4th December 2018	7th January 2023	82	4y 35d
Isabel Colegate	24th October 2009	12th March 2023	91	13y 140d
Cormac McCarthy	22nd September 2009	13th June 2023	89	13y 265d
Milan Kundera	27th March 2008	11th July 2023	94	15y 105d
Christopher Priest	6th January 2015	4th February 2024	80	9y 26d
Paul Auster	22nd April 2012	30th April 2024	77	12y 8d
Kinky Friedman	19th December 2007	27th June 2024	79	16y 191d
David Lodge	4th March 2008	1st January 2025	89	16y 301d
Jennifer Johnston	23rd July 2012	25th February 2025	95	12y 215d