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