criclebrity lookeylikey of the day

Here's a timely one with the Ashes series in Australia about to kick off (tonight, in fact) and all England supporters filled with a mixture of trepidation (the last three Australian Ashes series have finished 5-0, 4-0, 4-0 in Australia's favour) and that most crippling and corrosive of all emotions, hope. I suppose a good start would be the series not being effectively over after the very first ball as it was last time. 

Anyway, here's England's unexpected nemesis from last time Scott Boland and actor Wes Bentley, one of the breakout stars of the multi-Oscar-winning American Beauty, a film which seems to have had a sharp (and probably partly Spacey-related) drop-off in critical regard in the last couple of decades but which I recall seeing a couple of times and quite enjoying, while noting that it seemed to think itself slightly cleverer and deeper than it probably actually was. One odd thing about it, though, is that all three of the young actors who were shot to stardom after playing major roles - Bentley, Thora Birch and Mena Suvari - have, while continuing to work in films, receded into relative obscurity since and not become the major stars that everyone predicted they would be. Bentley seems to have navigated the standard actorly route of sudden colossal stardom -> drug addiction, extreme mental derangement -> sobriety, return to regular film work prototyped by Robert Downey jr. among others. The only thing I'm aware of having seen him in since American Beauty is the remake of Pete's Dragon which also starred Robert Redford.

I'm not going to do a separate post for it, but we haven't done an "incidental music spot of the day" for a while so I will just draw your attention to the trailer linked above making use of Baba O'Riley by The Who, a song which has featured here before, back in 2007. 

the last book I read

The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.

Brendan Doyle is just quietly minding his own business being a professor of English literature when a man comes to him with a modest proposal; join me on an assignment - a well-paid assignment, moreover - wherein your interest and expertise in the works of 19th-century poets will be of immense practical value. 

Well, that all sounds great, but what could the nature of this assignment possibly be that would require the services of an expert in early-19th-century English poetry? Ah, well, I'm glad you asked: I, elderly and eccentric millionaire J. Cochran Darrow, have somehow discovered a series of portals that permit travel between different locations in time and space. The nature of this wavily-defined thing is such that you don't have total control over the when and where, and it just happens that I've found a portal that will shortly (literally in a few hours from now) be accessible from our current location in 1983 Los Angeles and which links for a period of time with 1810 London and will permit a small group of customers, paying lavishly for the privilege, to travel there/then, hear an in-person lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with extra context and biographical detail supplied by you, and then return home again. Pretty cool, huh?

A bit of exposition is offered by Darrow in the course of explaining the assignment to Doyle, and the reader also gets the benefit of a brief prologue set in 1802 wherein a couple of mysterious wielders of sorcery attempt to summon up the ancient Egyptian God Anubis, as you do, and succeed only in inflicting harm upon themselves and opening up a series of rents, "gates" if you will, in space-time radiating out in both directions from 1802 and allowing those possessed of the relevant arcane knowledge to travel between them.

So anyway, Darrow, Doyle, and various millionaire enthusiasts get dolled up in suitable period garb and travel back to 1810 to hear Coleridge speak; all goes pretty smoothly for everyone except Doyle, who is coshed senseless and abducted by mysterious persons who turn out to be, among others, Doctor Romany, one of the magicians associated with the 1802 shenanigans who is keen to understand and contain what's been unleashed. Doyle, having missed the window of opportunity to return to 1983, escapes and flees back into London.

But how to survive in early-19th-century London? Doyle finds his way into a loose guild of beggars and street thieves and is taken under the wing of the slightly Artful Dodger-esque Jacky. Meanwhile he is hatching a plan to make contact with another poet of the time, William Ashbless, whose more obscure oeuvre he has made a special study of, and whose documented movements he is familiar with to the extent of knowing that he'll be in a particular tavern in a day or two's time. 

Lots of plot strands here that we'll just summarise to save time: the mysterious Dog-Face Joe, seemingly able to swap bodies with unsuspecting individuals (who inherit the ruined shell of whatever body he was previously in, usually for a short period ended by its death) and the odd outbreak of seemingly insane short-lived hairy individuals attacking people around London all turn out to be aspects of the same thing, the continued existence of the other 1802 magician, Amenophis Fikee, after the events of that night evicted him from his original body. The first magician, Doctor Romany (the one who briefly abducted Doyle in 1810), is running a pickpocketing and murdering guild of his own, headquartered in some subterranean caverns connected to the sewer system and the Thames, and continuing his attempt to conjure up various Egyptian gods. Finally Darrow, Doyle's mysterious benefactor from 1983, has returned to 1810 and is using his knowledge of stock market performance in the intervening 173 years to make a fortune and negotiating with Dog-Face Joe aka Fikee to make use of his body-swapping knowledge to achieve eternal youth.

Keeping up? Excellent. So Doyle gets to experience first-hand knowledge of some of this when he is forcibly body-swapped in the tavern he'd gone to to meet Ashbless (who didn't show) and wakes up in a different body which has just taken a large dose of strychnine. Luckily Doyle has enough knowledge to be able to vomit up the poison and after a day or two is as right as rain and, moreover, inhabiting a body that's considerably younger and physically more imposing than his old one. Doyle soon realises that in some weird paradoxical time-travel accidentally-becoming-your-own-grandfather way he is actually William Ashbless. He's not sure what the magicians are up to but resolves to thwart them, with some help from some locals who are in the know. This involves a bewildering series of trips including a time-hop to 1684 and a brief trip by sea to Cairo to meet (and subsequently kill) the chief magician. Upon returning to London, Doyle/Ashbless, Jacky and, slightly bizarrely, a laudanum-crazed Samuel Taylor Coleridge are abducted into the subterranean caverns and, after some odd encounters with some of the mysterious creatures who also live down there (remnants of some botched magical experiments) and a couple of telling interventions from the Egyptian gods who the magicians have been bothering (notably the snake-god Apep), Jacky and Doyle/Ashbless are vomited out into the Thames while the magicians and their various minions are consumed by Apep and Ra and various other entities not best pleased at being bothered from their centuries-long slumber.

Doyle is now in the odd philosophical position of being free to live out the rest of his life as Ashbless while knowing, from his 20th-century studies, most of the biographical details up to and including the date and manner of his death (thankfully a few decades off yet). He also knows the name of his future wife and WAIT A MINUTE Jacky reveals to him that she's been a woman disguised as a man all along and her real name is, well, I expect you can join the dots here. Ashbless and the future Mrs. Ashbless link arms and head off to enjoy their future together, with only the small inconvenience of Ashbless already knowing pretty much all of it.

That was quite a long synopsis and you can see I had to skate over some of it - and omit some of it altogether, including the rationale for Jacky actually being an upper-class young woman disguised as a street urchin - lest this become the longest blog post ever. The TL;DR version would be: there's a lot going on here, possibly a bit too much to allow every plot contrivance to be tied up satisfactorily at the end. The nature of how the gates work is hand-waved away and while they're obviously important to the plot (important enough to give the book its title, after all) they're arguably just a contrivance to insert Doyle in 1810 where the rest of the action takes place. 

The important thing is not to worry about any of that too much and just be swept along by the action, and as long as you do that then this is generally a hoot. The committee that awards the annual Philip K Dick Award evidently thought so too, as The Anubis Gates was the winner in 1984. Powers won it again in 1986; his two wins sandwich the only other recipient I've read, William Gibson's Neuromancer. Powers is also known for his 1987 novel On Stranger Tides which was loosely adapted into the fourth Pirates Of The Caribbean film. 

Many echoes of other fictional works here, as you can imagine - here's a few:

• there is an odd parallel with the only other novel in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series to appear on this list, Time And Again, in that both start with our protagonist being approached by someone he doesn't know and offered a large sum of money to make use of some ill-defined time-travel device to travel to the 19th century and carry out an assignment.
• a couple of weird parallels with the work of Douglas Adams: firstly the use of Coleridge as a plot device, with the suggestion that some of his experiences may have bled through (facilitated by his heroic opium intake) into his later poetry, is similar to what happens in The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul, the second Dirk Gently novel [postscript: it was actually the first one, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. In my defence it's a long time since I read either of them]. Secondly both The Anubis Gates and the later novels in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy series feature a plot device of the main character having foreknowledge relating to his own death. In Ashbless' case it's the date and circumstances, in Arthur Dent's case it's knowing that he can't die yet because he hasn't visited the nightclub on Stavromula Beta where he carries out one of his multiple accidental murders of the creature Agrajag.
• the idea of a ka as a sort of disembodied vital essence is familiar from the works of Dennis Wheatley, in particular his 1956 novel The Ka Of Gifford Hillary (which I have never read). In the particular context of The Anubis Gates its meaning is extended to a sort of animated copy of a person conjured from the usual blood/hair combo and therefore a bit more like a golem. It was also used (with some further twisting of its original meaning) by Stephen King in the Dark Tower series.
• the body-swapping thing, in particular - as I put it elsewhere - the "unceremonious yeeting" of the body's previous occupant, is a device used in Ancillary Justice and more briefly in Transition.

Tim Powers provides the latest in a shortish series of different authors on this list who share a surname. Here are the ones I've spotted on a brief trawl of the archives, in no particular order:

• Tim Powers and Richard Powers
• Iain (M) Banks and Russell Banks
• Jim Harrison and M John Harrison
• Graham Swift and Jonathan Swift
• Ali Smith, Alexander McCall Smith and Michael Marshall Smith - depending of course how your surname-classification rules work
• F Scott Fitzgerald and Penelope Fitzgerald - as above

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Seen on Facebook this week, this short video inviting "wrong answers only" to the question of who the mystery golfer is. There's limited fun in this, as his identity is revealed in the caption at the bottom, but I do have a suggestion. So here's Swedish golfer Jesper Parnevik (for it is he, sporting a moustache and bouffant hairdo combo that he didn't have during his prime playing days of the late 1990s and early 2000s) and American novelist Kurt Vonnegut.

I've no idea of the date of the footage; I don't want to assume it's recent just because the algorithm threw it into my timeline in the last couple of days. All I can tell you is that Parnevik didn't have the 'tache/'fro combo when he bagged his only PGA Champions Tour victory in 2016, so it's probably more recent than that. He doesn't play much these days.

Anyway, both of these guys have featured on this blog before: Vonnegut twice as a book featuree (Cat's Cradle and The Sirens Of Titan) and prior to both of those on the occasion of his death in April 2007, and Parnevik in the course of a throwaway aside at the end of this post about Ayers Rock/Uluru in late 2019. Parnevik also continues the strong tradition of golfers featuring in this category, as evidenced most recently just a couple of months ago. 

sudeley, life has new meaning to me

Part two of the mappage catchuppage features a couple of lower-level walks, though not without summit-conquering of a sort, as you may have already seen if you looked at the photo gallery I linked to in the last post. 

Anyway, back in June a group of us decided to get together for a weekend away, as we didn't get to see each other very often for the usual middle-aged reasons: gradual geographical dispersion, kids to be fed and entertained, increasing physical decrepitude, male pattern baldness, piles, gout, etc. We hired an AirBnB in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire with the intention of doing some walking in the Cotswolds and a bit of eating and drinking and general hanging out, shooting the shit and all that. It fell to Steffen and myself to do most of the route-organising and I think we did a pretty decent job, coming up with a long walk on day 1 when we had all day and a slightly shorter one for day 2 when everyone wanted to be on the road back by mid-afternoon. 

Day 1 comprised a 20-kilometre clockwise circular walk starting and finishing at the house and encompassing the highest parts of the entire Costwold group of hills as well as a couple of other points of interest including the Bela's Knap long barrow. The high plateau of Cleeve Hill and Cleeve Common is a pleasant place to be, especially in the warm sunny weather we were fortunate enough to have. Another pleasant place to be is the Rising Sun in Cleeve Hill village where we stopped for a couple of refreshing pints (Otter ales, if I remember rightly) and some light lunch. 

The actual high point of the day, and indeed of the Costwolds as a whole, is the summit of Cleeve Hill at a fairly modest 330 metres (1080 feet). The actual summit is a fairly anonymous trig point a couple of hundred yards from a car park and a couple of radio masts (you can see it marked with a "330" at the bottom of the map below); the grander viewpoint with a single tree, some memorial plaques and benches, another trig point and a toposcope a kilometre or so to the north-west is more impressive, but a few metres lower. Crucially this is also the county high point of Gloucestershire, which enables me to tick that off on my list. Going purely by the county list linked in that magazine article, and not getting involved in an argument about the sense of listing long-defunct counties like Huntingdonshire and Merionethshire, my list currently comprises the following:

England

• Berkshire
• Cornwall
• Cumberland
• Derbyshire
• Devon
• Dorset
• Gloucestershire
• Herefordshire
• Lancashire
• Somerset
• Westmorland

Wales

• Brecknockshire
• Caernarfonshire
• Cardiganshire
• Carmarthenshire
• Monmouthshire
• Pembrokeshire

Scotland

• Aberdeenshire
• Banffshire
• Inverness-shire
• Stirlingshire

In need of sustenance after the walk we had an evening in Winchcombe which included visits to the White Hart and Plaisterer's Arms and a curry afterwards. All very nice, as is the food in the White Hart where those of us who'd come down on the Friday night to wring maximum possible value out of the weekend had gone for dinner.

We had to check out of the house on Sunday morning, so we decided to start day 2's walk a mile or so down the road at Sudeley Castle, which fortunately has a nice big (and free) car park which you don't feel too guilty about making use of without actually visiting the buildings ("castle" is a bit of a stretch; it's a large country house). Sudeley is mainly famous for being the home of Catherine Parr, widow of Henry VIII; she moved there upon remarrying after Henry's death and is buried in the grounds. I must admit I was ignorant of what happened to her after Henry's death, in particular that she'd subsequently married Thomas Seymour, brother of Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour, and that for all the "divorced, beheaded, survived" stuff she only outlived Henry by about a year and a half, dying of complications from childbirth in September 1548 at the age of thirty-six.

I would describe this as a pleasant country ramble, memorable for being spent in excellent company and very pleasant weather rather than for anything exceptional about the details. The eleven or so kilometres (clockwise again; gently uphill for the first half, gently downhill for the second) got us back to the car park just after lunchtime and we eased our collective conscience about the car park situation by buying an ice cream from the cafe before heading off home. A few photos from the weekend can be found here.

the path of least resistance

Following on from the Blorenge and Scottish walks described in earlier posts, a few more maps I spotted in my collection from recent outings and which I thought might warrant a mention here. Firstly, Pen y Fan. Now you'll probably be aware that I've featured ascents of this particular mountain a few times before on this blog; I won't attempt to collate all of them but you might start here, here, here and here. But it is, let's not forget, the highest mountain in Southern Britain, a slightly woolly claim but one which essentially means that if you draw a horizontal line on a map of Britain a few feet south of the summit of Cadair Idris, as I've done below, the highest point in the region south of that line is indeed the summit of Pen y Fan. Yes, granted, you've defined your terms in such a way as to get the answer you want, but it's not an insignificant thing. 

Anyway, sometimes you want to find new and interesting ways to get up and down (and you almost always can), but sometimes you just want to smash up, bag it, smash down again, bish bosh, sorted. Other considerations are who else is coming along on the walk and how much gratuitous extra distance and effort they'll be prepared to tolerate without getting all whiny and annoying, and indeed who is in charge of route planning. I get a bit twitchy if this isn't me, but sometimes it isn't and you have to take an attitude of Zen-like acceptance in the face of whatever ill-thought-out bullshit other people come up with.

Examples, you say? Gladly. Here is the walk we did for my birthday back in February, a time of year when I get a free one-off opportunity to annoy everybody by making them do an activity of my choosing, which of course is going to be some tedious outdoorsy shit. So I'd proposed a trip up Pen Y Fan, which Nia had done a couple of times before but neither Alys nor Huwie had. I can't remember whether we'd done any advance planning for the Scotland trip at this stage but I might have had the thought of using it as a warm-up for the more strenuous mountain walking that would be involved there. My sister-in-law and brother-in-law and their two boys wanted to come as well, so I thought I'd better play it safe and just do one of the quick routes. So we parked up in the recently-expanded Pont ar Daf car park and did a circular route up via the path from Storey Arms and back down the main path which terminates at the car park, a round trip of a little over eight kilometres, or five miles if you prefer, in a clockwise direction on the map below.

What's very obviously apparent both from looking at the contours and the altitude chart a couple of kilometres in, and indeed from listening to the chorus of complaining from my fellow walkers, is that the forced loss and regain of around sixty metres in height in order to traverse the mini-valley containing the Blaen Taf-fawr stream is a bit of a motivation-killer early doors, just as it's a bit of an unwelcome sting in the tail at the end of a fifteen-mile bi-directional traverse of the main Beacons ridge.

Simple, you'll be saying, just use that prominently-marked green path that swings up to the north and, at the cost of maybe an extra half a kilometre across the ground, stays on the contours the whole way. And my answer to that is I'd love to, but it's not really discernible, still less signposted, any more. If you look at Google Maps' satellite view, really zoom in, and squint a bit you can just about convince yourself that there might be a scratch in the ground resembling a path, and if you drop the StreetView man right at the start of the path up from Storey Arms you might just about make out a grassy track ascending through a break in the heather on the left, but I have walked past here a few times, and past where the path supposedly rejoins the main path at the Tommy Jones obelisk, without noticing anything obvious. Next time I'm up there in reasonable weather with no pressing need to keep anyone else fed or entertained I'm going to have a look for it though.

Similarly, while the OS map shows a few alternative paths either side of the main route up from Pont ar Daf, none of those are discernible any longer at ground level. This will be largely because of the considerable path maintenance and landscaping effort that's gone on alongside the car park improvements to reduce the amount of erosion along these heavily-used routes. That does create a feedback loop, though, in that people will then be constrained, or at least heavily encouraged, to only using those routes for ascent rather than fanning out over a number of different routes to the same end-point, and perhaps reducing wear on any individual one. 

A couple of schools of thought on this one; Cameron McNeish, author of a couple of excellent books on Scottish mountain walking that I own, is a fervent advocate of people being, as he puts it, goats rather than sheep and making their own ways up, on the grounds that this reduces wear and tear and prevents a single furrow being worn into the ground that then needs repair and reinforcement. I'm quite sympathetic to this viewpoint, though the counter-example I would offer is Waun Fach in the Black Mountains, recent-ish recipient of exactly the sort of hard landscaping and path constraining that McNeish decries, but which I don't think anyone could rationally say is a worse place to be on top of now than before. 

My second ascent of Pen y Fan this year was as part of the I Am Pen y Fan charity challenge organised by SightLife, the charity my wife works for, and at the start of which we were seen off by charity patron Ceri Dupree, who didn't join us for the walk as the fabulous sequined Welsh flag dress he was wearing would have been rather constricting, not to mention a bit chilly on a wet and windy day. You will see from the summit photo that Huwie resolutely rocked a green sequined tailcoat the whole way to the top as a tribute, though. 

Route-wise this was as vanilla as it gets, just straight up and back from the car park, with a small loop on the way up for those who deemed it desirable and/or necessary (i.e. pretty much just me and the kids) to bag Corn Du. The summit photo I've reproduced above also features in this ongoing Twitter thread and in the recently-updated mega-gallery of trig points and mountain summits. 

the last book I read

Trio by William Boyd.

Here's Elfrida Wing, blearily coming downstairs on a summer morning in 1968 for a nutritious breakfast of some orange juice with a good solid slug of vodka in it, just to set her up for another day of not getting round to writing a novel to follow up her previous one, published a good ten years earlier. The vodka is from one of various secret stashes hidden around the house, although there's currently no need for any subterfuge because husband Reggie is off directing a movie in Brighton. 

Here's Talbot Kydd, producer of Reggie's movie, which goes by the tremendously late-1960s title of Emily Bracegirdle's Extremely Useful Ladder To The Moon. Talbot is a sixtyish ex-army chap, married, couple of grown-up children, but starting to experience unexpected Feelings, you know, Down There, which suggest to him that the life of a regular vanilla heterosexual might not actually be his thing after all. 

And here's Anny Viklund, American actress and star of Reggie and Talbot's movie. A complicated girl with a complicated past involving a bit of a thing for older men into political activism, from her most recent boyfriend Jacques, a French philosopher, to her ex-husband Cornell, a proper domestic terrorist responsible for some actual bombings on American soil and currently a fugitive from justice. Anny is taking a break from all this complicated stuff by having some nice uncomplicated sex with her co-star, a nice uncomplicated bloke called Troy Blaze (not his real name), a pop star trying to break into acting. 

Elfrida hatches an idea to kick her writer's block into touch - no, don't be silly, not cutting down on the sauce, but instead using a real-life fellow writer's life as the framework for a novel. That way some of the plot takes care of itself, and best of all she has a ready-made candidate in mind: Virginia Woolf. Not only were some of Elfrida's early novels loosely compared by critics with Woolf's work, but there's an obvious hook to hang the new book's plot on: Woolf's suicide by drowning in 1941.

Work on the film, meanwhile, continues, with some script doctoring being done by another, younger novelist, Janet Headstone, with whom Reggie is also having an affair. Anny and Troy continue with their acting duties by day and blissful fucking by night until Anny has an unexpected encounter outside her hotel with her ex-husband Cornell, unexpectedly in England and in need of money for some murky scheme that will enable him to evade the hands of the CIA and FBI. Panicking, and keen to get rid of him, she agrees, hoping that handing over a wad of cash will be the end of things. Which, of course, it isn't, as only a few days later the British police and an FBI guy turn up asking awkward questions. Panicking some more, Anny gives them the slip and flees to France, where she can throw herself on the mercy of Jacques, only too keen to help as it offers him an opportunity to a) get back into her knickers in return and b) give the American and British imperialist pigdogs a bloody nose.

This is not great news for anyone involved with the film, though, as it's not finished yet and Anny still has some scenes left to shoot. Talbot hires a private investigator, Ken Kincade, to accompany him to France and try to find her. Kincade is a man of unconventional style and methods but remarkably effective at his job, and also, as an openly gay man (something only very recently possible in 1968), possessed of a sensitive enough gaydar to detect Talbot's inner turmoil and probe him (no, not in that way) about it a bit. Not neglecting the day job, though, he soon tracks down Anny who is hiding out in Jacques' brother's apartment.

Meanwhile Elfrida is experiencing a dwindling of the brief excitement that accompanied her hatching of the Virginia Woolf idea, and moreover is starting to experience some weird side-effects of her epic booze consumption, not just the usual ones of passing out and pissing oneself but also some weirder things like imagining things crawling under her skin. She has also - somewhat belatedly - come to the realisation that Reggie is sleeping with Janet Headstone and in a fit of depression decides to don a heavy overcoat, load the pockets up with rocks, and emulate Virginia Woolf's suicide in the River Ouse. After not even managing to pull this off successfully Elfrida decides that she has hit bottom and it's time to seek help, which turns out to be a nunnery thinly disguised as a rehab facility.

Meanwhile Anny, feeling the net closing in from both Talbot and the FBI, takes off again in Jacques' brother's car, intending to head for Spain but ending up in Cap Ferret, which if you do the right accent sounds like it ought to be in Yorkshire but is actually in south-western France. Surely she'll be safe from her pursuers here?

Talbot, having failed to persuade Anny to return to Brighton and fulfil her contractual obligations, cooks up an alternative ending to the film with Reggie and Janet (one that doesn't require any further contributions from Anny), sells up his stake in the film production company and decides on some radical re-invention of his life, starting with the burly scaffolder who did some work on his house, narrowly avoided dropping some heavy ironmongery on his head, and has definitely been giving him the eye. 

So by the end all three have undergone some major life re-alignments, more so in one case than the other two. I will restrict myself to a PARTIAL PLOT SPOILER ALERT here by merely saying that one of the principal trio of characters dies at the end, without saying which one it is; it might not be the one you expect. Or maybe it is?

This is the seventh William Boyd novel on this list and so we very much know what to expect by now. This one departs slightly from the pattern followed by the big biographical epics like Any Human Heart and Sweet Caress by having multiple viewpoints (three in fact; the title is a bit of a giveaway), but follows them in being smart, occasionally funny, having interesting and believable characters and straddling the line between what you might call "popular" and "literary" fiction, if you insisted on drawing a line where no such thing really exists. It's probably not as good as some of the others, partly because the multiple-viewpoints thing and the book's relative shortness (just over 300 pages) mean that it doesn't feel like we really get to spend enough time with any of the main characters. Boyd clearly had a lot of fun with the 1960s period-specific stuff and the recreation of the film industry setting, something he has direct experience of. As with any William Boyd book it's highly readable and entertaining; Brazzaville Beach and The Blue Afternoon remain the ones, though.

the last book I read

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

Meet D-503, presumably D to his friends as these really seem to be the only names people have; it's not like he's Chad at weekends or anything. He is a resident (a "cipher" in their terminology) of the One State, a totalitarian regime that has sprung up in the wake of a planet-scouring apocalypse of the usual sort - or, I suppose, maybe the One State already existed and brought about the planet-scouring apocalypse as a means of eradicating rival states. Anyway, whatever, the population of the planet has been reduced to some small percentage of its previous level (the text is a bit slippery with terminology so there's some disagreement over whether this means 20%, 2%, 0.2% or something else) and the boundaries of the One State are delimited by some pretty serious walls to keep the usual hairy-tentacled mutant hordes out.

The usual totalitarian rules apply here: everyone lives in apartments with semi-transparent walls so no-one can get up to any nefarious business without other people knowing about it, outside of the regular scheduled sex visits from one's designated fuck-buddy to keep morale up and perpetuate the species. Everyone must be seen to contribute to the public good, otherwise you may attract the attention of the various enforcers of the State's will, a thing you really don't want to do. That attention culminates in gruesome public executions of those ciphers deemed to be beyond redemption. 

D-503 is all right, though, being a high-ranking scientist and mathematician and chief engineer of the Integral, a spaceship being built to facilitate the expansion of the One State and the exertion of its will to other planets. In his downtime D-503 enjoys some nice commitment-free sex - at pre-approved times and locations only, of course - with his designated partner O-90. 

So that's all pretty sweet and only an idiot could fuck it up, right? Well, enter I-330, a free-spirited and unconventional woman much given to inappropriate flirting, smoking and drinking (both prohibited) for whom D-503 has an instant uggghh/phwoarrr revulsion/attraction thing and finds himself arranging clandestine meetings with at the Ancient House, a sort of Museum Of The Before Times which has actual walls and is therefore used by political agitators as a secret base. During one of these meetings a secret tunnel is revealed which lead to the world outside the Wall, a lush green (though possibly slightly radioactive) paradise where recognisable humans and more exotic hairy hominids live in apparent peace and harmony.

Back inside the city D-503's slightly erratic behaviour is causing some awkward questions to be asked, and more generally there are rumblings of societal upheaval and small acts of civic disobedience among the ciphers. To combat this the people in charge have come up with a great scheme: troubled by intrusive thoughts of an independent and questioning nature? Come in to one of our re-orientation centres where these thoughts will be removed from you via our new and wholly benign free operation which will induce calm and untroubled thoughts by the simple application of a few hundred volts to your frontal lobes. And the best part is it's completely voluntary, by which we mean obligatory.

Opting out of the first wave of willing victims trooping into the re-orientation centres to be lobotomised, D-503 takes the Integral on its maiden flight, which is disrupted by I-330 and her associates; this does give D-503 pause to wonder whether she was just using him to gain access to the rocket. No time for too much thinking about that, though, as the craft returns to earth and everyone is arrested. D-503 confesses everything and is allowed to live on in a state of bovine compliance after having the Operation; I-330 refuses to rat out her co-conspirators and is publicly executed. Meanwhile civil unrest continues, the Wall is breached and some people are inconvenienced by hooting gibbons in the course of their daily duties. Can peace and order be restored, or is the One State doomed?

It's literally impossible to do any background reading around material relating to We (i.e. before actually reading the book) that doesn't prominently mention its influence on later works such as Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four - for context, We was first published in 1924, Brave New World in 1932 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. I should say at this point that my memories of Brave New World are fairly hazy as it's probably thirty years since I read it, but the setting of We - bright science-y utopia with the harsher totalitarian stuff bubbling beneath the surface - is probably closer to Brave New World than to Nineteen Eighty-Four's grimy setting and everyone existing on a diet of cabbage and gin. That said, there are some clear plot parallels in Nineteen Eighty-Four, most obviously the mild-mannered central male character being led astray by a bolshy and unconventional female love interest (I-330 here, Julia there) in a way that leads to their mutual downfall.

So you can chalk up another book on this list most of whose action occurs after some vaguely-described apocalypse, in this case (as in many others) probably nuclear. An informal and probably incomplete list can be found at the end of the Fiskadoro review. It's fascinating to compare We with the better-known books that came after and clearly derived some influence from it, but it's a fascinating novel in its own right as well, and of course Zamyatin's experience of the sort of regime being described and satirised here was a bit more direct than either Huxley or Orwell's, since he lived through the birth of the Soviet Union and had publication of We forbidden there until long after his death. Possibly for that reason We leans a bit more into the satire and blackly wry humour than either of the two other books. 

My Vintage paperback comes, in a somewhat bizarre sales gimmick, with a supposedly 3-D cover with a pair of 3-D glasses attached. At least it says they're included on the cover, but I can't remember whether I actually got a pair when I acquired the book (as a Christmas or birthday present I think). As a consequence I can't tell you whether the faces and text on the cover loom out at you in an alarming fashion when you put the glasses on, but I did not find that this had very much bearing on my enjoyment of the book, luckily.

leanston, meanston, deanston

Better do this whisky post before the bottle disappears - a very real danger as it's the only one in the cupboard at the moment. The brief glory days of immediately post-birthday (supplemented by the Christmas backlog) have long since been whittled away and we're into the long dark teatime of the soul that precedes Christmas 2025 and hopefully a bit of a bump in the stocks.

Anyway, this is Deanston, not one that you see in supermarkets a lot, although I seem to remember Marks & Spencer used to sell it. I happened to see it on the spesh for about £25 on Amazon a while back so I decided to snap it up; I mean, why not, right?

Deanston distillery is located a few miles west of Dunblane, fairly southerly as Highland distilleries go though not as far south as Glengoyne. It's a fairly young distillery, being opened in 1965, but inhabits a set of buildings with an interesting history which were used as a cotton mill for around 200 years before being re-purposed for whisky production. 

This is the entry-level Virgin Oak expression, the name referencing the year or so the whisky spends in new oak casks which have never before held any spirit. This alone would not qualify the spirit to be called Scotch whisky, as it must first be matured for at least three years in casks that have previously held some other spirit; in this case American bourbon. So you might say, well, this whole Virgin Oak thing sounds like a bit of a gimmick then, and I'd say, yes, you may be right there. In their defence it is bottled at a beefy 46.3% which represents some commitment to delivering a bit of oomph at the cost of wringing out a bit of extra profit. It would be easy enough, after all, to just dilute the whole thing down to the standard 40% and squeeze out roughly an extra bottle for every seven or so bottles at 46.3%, so respect to them for not doing that. They also make a big thing on the packaging of it being non-chill-filtered, and there are no cryptic messages in foreign languages which denote the inclusion of extra colouring. There is, as it happens, a slightly complex relationship between chill-filtering and the bottling strength of your whisky which I won't attempt to explain but which you can read about here.

All that don't amount to a hill of beans if your whisky tastes like donkey ass, though, in fact slightly more concentrated donkey ass might even be a bad thing. No worries on that particular score, though. I mean it's not especially startling, adhering to the present-day standard of being a no-age-statement whisky sitting below the 12-year-old which they are thereby able to charge more money for and which I don't deem myself able to afford what with having kids to feed and all that malarkey.

But, to be fair, there's nothing wrong with it, any more than there's anything wrong with a whole host of unpeated Highland and Speyside whiskies that I'd struggle to tell apart in a blind taste test. I'd put this in the top half of the imaginary chart, because it's got some nice dried-fruit spiciness going on. A sploosh of water doesn't hurt here, especially since the higher bottling strength means it won't damp the aforementioned oomph down too much.