the last book I read

The Mirror And The Light by Hilary Mantel.

Cromwell! Crommers. The Cromster. His Royal Cromulence. El Cromerino, if you're not into the whole brevity thing. We've met a couple of times before, of course.

Cromwell is very much The Man among those in the orbit of King Henry VIII as our story begins in May 1536. Much of this credit derives from his extricating the king from his first two marriages, to Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn - indeed as the book opens Anne's blood is still dribbling around on top of the scaffold where she has just met her end at the hands of a French swordsman, and various flunkies are chasing her head around trying to put it in a bag. 

The king has various reasons for wanting to be rid of troublesome wives: most obviously their inability to provide him with heirs, and specifically a male heir, but also his roving eye, tendency to boredom, inability to keep it in his codpiece and general sense that he's the bloody king and should be able to do what he likes. So part of his eventual desire to get rid of Anne Boleyn was her troublesome penchant for female babies (the future Queen Elizabeth I in particular), part of it his distaste for her outspoken feistiness - exciting and a little bit sexy in an illicit mistress, less so in a Queen where quiet demureness is more the thing - but also, more specifically, his fancy for the bashful gaze and shapely calf of young Jane Seymour, one of the current Queen's ladies-in-waiting. 

So for the moment the king's marital turmoil is settled and other concerns take priority. One of them is the deterioration in Henry's physical state following his jousting accident in early 1536 - formerly an enviable athlete, unusually tall and imposing by 15th/16th-century standards, Henry's chronic leg injury makes him frustrated and irritable and, without his lavish eating and drinking habits being moderated by lots of hunting and jousting and general roister-doistering, he starts to put on weight. Not only that, there are rumours of unrest up in the wild and distant north of England. Mainly a protest against the Reformation by those still keen to do a bit of the old Catholicism, it soon becomes a general vehicle for lots of disparate and ill-focused grievances against both Henry and Cromwell, a man suspected of having an undue influence over the king. This is eventually put to rest by some flexing of military muscle and a few well-chosen beheadings, but it all occupies time and effort.

Better news is in the offing, though: Henry has managed to impregnate Jane, and she successfully delivers him a son, the future Edward VI. Worse news is in the offing pretty hot on the heels of this, though, as Jane suffers some post-birth complications and eventually dies a couple of weeks later. 

So Henry is single again - not, for once, of his own volition. And so thoughts turn to another marriage. Not as simple as just swiping right on Tinder, though - there are complex political factors to be considered in choosing the right match. Make a marriage that cements a beneficial political alliance and everyone's happy - well, as long as the king is also happy, and the chosen lady stimulates the king's interest in the right ways, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Another factor in all this is that Mary, the king's daughter by Catherine of Aragon, briefly estranged but now (largely at Cromwell's instigation) back in Henry's good books, is of marriageable age. 

Mary is a tough nut to crack in terms of finding a potential suitor she's prepared to give the time of day to, though, and the delay sparks some scurrilous rumours that Cromwell is trying to manoeuvre things so that he gets to marry her himself. Meanwhile a complex series of negotiations has resulted in the selection of Anne of Cleves, daughter of an influential German house that would be a valuable ally against France and the Holy Roman Empire, as a bride for Henry, and court artist Hans Holbein is dispatched to paint her portrait and deliver it to Henry. 

This is where the wheels start to come off - Henry pronounces himself delighted with the portrait, Anne commences the long trek westwards to England, and when she arrives Henry has the delightful idea of visiting her in disguise, which goes about as well as you might expect. Basically upon Henry's ta-dah transformation from some wheezing middle-aged fat geezer disturbing her for no clear reason to her king and future husband, Anne fails to rearrange her face quite quickly enough to register her delight, and Henry, sensitive about his age and appearance, notices. Furthermore (possibly just as a self-justifying reaction, or maybe genuinely) Henry feels that the Holbein portrait was a bit flattering and that she is not perhaps All That in the looks department herself and despite a bit of unenthusiastic firkytoodling in the royal bedchamber he is unable or unwilling to hoist the royal standard, knight her with the royal sceptre and consummate the marriage.

Eventually an agreement is reached to annul the marriage, honour is seen to be satisfied all round, and Anne is packed off to a country house with a generous pension. Henry's confidence in Cromwell's infallible judgment has taken a knock though, and when an ill-timed bout of illness lays Cromewll low at home for an extended period, those keen to see Cromwell ousted get to work in the king's ear: those who have always resented a low-born type rising to such an exalted role, those who want his job(s) and titles for themselves, and those with something to gain by encouraging the king's newest fancy: a likely-looking teenage strumpet by the name of Catherine Howard. 

Once the king's mood has turned against you, things move fast, and Cromwell soon finds himself carted off to the Tower to face a host of trumped-up charges of treason and heresy. Cromwell's letters to the king go unanswered (and probably unread, and quite possibly undelivered) but the king's residual regard for him does at least extend to allowing him a reasonably dignified death by the executioner's axe instead of by being publicly burned or disembowelled. And so it is that on July 28th 1540 Cromwell ascends the steps to meet his maker, and his story ends.

And with Cromwell's fairly abrupt end the three-novel series that started with Wolf Hall and continued with Bring Up The Bodies also ends. These were hardly slim pamphlets at 650 and 482 pages respectively, but The Mirror And The Light comfortably outdoes them at a mighty 875 pages. That said, it covers a considerably greater period of time than Bring Up The Bodies - just over four years compared with about nine months (Wolf Hall covered about six years). "Historical fiction", to the extent that it exists as a definable genre, isn't really my thing, but all three novels in this series are tremendously enjoyable, largely down to the fascination of Cromwell as a central character, and also of Mantel's perfect judgment of tone - no-one's conversing in off-puttingly flowery language, but at the same time no-one's doing anything jarringly out-of-place like referring to Anne of Cleves as well mingin' innit. That said, The Mirror And The Light is quite an intimidatingly chunky door-stop of a book and weighs in as the third-longest book on this list after Infinite Jest and Until I Find You. Despite various reviewers' assumption that it would be a shoo-in for the Booker Prize (as its two predecessors had been) it only made the longlist in 2020 (Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain won that year).

Anyway, I daresay this kind of stuff isn't for everybody, and you could certainly say that some sections are quite slow and feature a wide cast of characters that it's sometimes hard to keep track of, and there aren't any car chases, but in general I would heartily recommend having a crack at the entire series. It was dramatised for TV in 2024, with Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis reprising their roles as Cromwell and Henry VIII respectively from the earlier series (which mashed together the first two books). 

Incidentally, if you're wondering, as I was, what (if any) the relationship was between Thomas Cromwell and Oliver Cromwell, the answer is that Thomas Cromwell's nephew Richard, who features as a peripheral character in these books, was Oliver Cromwell's great-grandfather, which I think makes Thomas Oliver's great-great-great-uncle.

bake up and smell the coffee

As if to prove I'm not completely hacked off with the whole blogging project, or resigned to using it solely as a means of cataloguing my reading habits, here's a recipe. I don't think we've done one for a while - the most recent one seems to have been the yogurt-y soda bread from back in February. 

Background here is that I have a very excellent Russell Hobbs coffee grinding/brewing machine which I use every morning to create enough strong black coffee to get me into the day and provide the illusion of motivation and general paying attention to things. Normally the amounts involved are enough to provide a couple of average-sized mugfuls (mugsful, if you must) for me and Hazel but last Thursday I'd forgotten that Hazel had a breakfast appointment with her BNI group and wouldn't be in the house, so I ended up with twice as much coffee as I needed. No biggie, you'll say, either drink it or tip it down the sink, and yes, I could have done either of those things, but I hatched the idea of making a coffee cake.

People's affection for coffee cake broadly tracks their affection for coffee as a drink (though no doubt there are exceptions); I like it very much but the current fashion does seem for any coffee-flavoured cake to also involve a large quantity of walnuts, a thing that I do not relish. So making my own afforded me control over the recipe (i.e. no bleedin' walnuts); another factor is that a lot of coffee cake recipes don't include actual drinkable (possibly leftover) coffee as an ingredient, either using powdered or instant coffee directly (perhaps with a tiny amount of water to dissolve it a bit) or Camp coffee essence, apparently still a thing. 

Anyway, after some searching I came across this recipe, which ticks all the boxes, i.e. it uses actual leftover coffee and isn't lavishly festooned inside and out with walnuts. I did have to make a couple of alterations to the recipe, partly because I didn't have any sour cream, partly because I had to adjust for the scale of my traybake tin (mine is roughly 13" by 9") and partly just because I am a free-form jazz cook and don't like to be constrained. So my version of the recipe goes like this:

Coffee Streusel

• 100g plain flour
• 200g light brown sugar
• 2 tsp instant coffee powder (I used Asda Americano powder)
• 1 tsp cinnamon powder
• 120g cold, unsalted butter, cut into cubes
• Pinch of salt

Coffee cake

• 300g granulated sugar
• 100 unsalted butter, melted
• 75g oil
• 3 eggs
• 1.5 tsp vanilla
• 300g plain flour
• 35g cornflour
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 0.5 tsp baking soda
• 180g full-fat Greek-style yogurt
• 90ml hot brewed coffee

Icing

• 180g icing sugar (120g)
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 3 tbsp brewed coffee

If you're doing an item-by-item comparison you'll see I haven't scaled up the quantities for the streusel; this is deliberate as there's already quite a lot of it. You don't need to scale up the cooking time; 35 minutes pretty much did the trick. If you can, as I did, rope in an enthusiastic eleven-year-old to do most of the strenuous beating and stirring while you root around in cupboards and do mental arithmetic then so much the better.

The result is a super-delicious and moist single-layer tray cake with a drizzle of icing on top. Ideal with a cup of some sort of hot beverage, perhaps.

happy vigentennibloggiversary to me

One thing that happens as you get older, in addition to unexplained shooting pains in various limbs, male pattern baldness (see below), increasing irascibility and decreasing ability to make it to the toilet in time, is that you forget things. A significant recent thing that I forgot, or more accurately failed to notice, was the twentieth anniversary of this blog. The initial Hello World post was actually on August 26th 2006, so exactly twenty years and two months ago today.

I can't at this point in my life remember why I started the whole thing up in the first place; it is an odd coincidence that the blog and my relationship with my now wife started up around the same time, but I don't recall starting the blog solely as a vehicle to crow about getting laid on the regular after a bit of a break. I think it was just a thing that a few people were doing in the heady days of Web 2.0 excitement at the bar to involvement in internet content creation suddenly being lowered quite a bit.

It is nonetheless a fact that my life has evolved somewhat since late 2006, most notably in that I am now a married father of three, and have moved house three times, the two most recent moves involving actual adult stuff like home ownership and mortgages. As a result of those things (mainly kids and mortgages rather than marriage, to be clear) a significant percentage of my hair has fallen out and what remains is somewhat greyer than it used to be. Photos below are from the respective trips to Swanage in September 2006 and September 2026; to be fair all of my fellow Swanagers have changed a bit too in twenty years, although you should note that Robin has not changed into a bald guy with a long beard, that's Harry.

In my defence, among the middle-aged things that you might stereotypically have expected me to do are gaining a load of weight and turning into a Nazi, neither of which I have done. Well, I suppose I should qualify that statement by saying: while it is empirically verifiable that I weigh almost exactly the same now as I did then, whether my views have taken a right-wing lurch is probably not for me to say. I don't think so, though. It should also be noted that I'm mildly sceptical about the trope of people getting more right-wing as they get older, though I accept that offering up a single data point (i.e. me) isn't a refutation.

I would imagine that if you took the cohort of people who started up a blog around 2006 you would find that upwards of 95% of them abandoned it within a year or so and some percentage of the remaining 5% abandoned it at some point in the intervening nineteen years; of the tiny sliver who stuck with it I'd imagine most of them would show a similar posting profile to me: initial wild enthusiasm (282 posts in 2007 alone) and prolixity settling into a cynical weariness with offering any sort of opinion on the world and a rather sparser posting schedule (51 posts in 2025), maybe leaning on some regular hooks to hang stuff off (in my case mostly book-related stuff) to retain some sort of posting discipline and avoid complete stagnation. For what it's worth I do find the discipline of trying to occasionally corral my thought into a coherent shape to be beneficial, and I continue to do it because it amuses and entertains me to do it. I think that is the only reason that would ever keep anyone doing it, outside of the unlikely scenario of becoming some sort of viral internet sensation and (even more unlikely) actually being able to monetise it in some way. There, though, you'd presumably be on some sort of obligatory posting schedule and I'd imagine that might become a chore, although the income would be nice.

Anyway, I have no plans to pack it in; leading candidate for causing me to do so would be the Blogger platform being shelved and having to relocate to some other platform at a high cost of time and effort (and perhaps actual monetary cost). Second on that list is probably my own death; assuming that doesn't happen I'll see you in 2046.

taking a bite out of a double decker

You might remember this post from a few months back chuckling at some people's inability to read prominently-displayed road signage, or possibly their inability, having successfully read it, to realise its relevance to the vehicle they're currently driving. We had a rather alarming close-to-home demonstration of the phenomenon just a couple of days ago; not only was it right here in Newport, but it involved one of the buses specifically provided by the council to get pupils to the school both of our girls attend. Not, thankfully, the specific bus that Nia and Alys catch in the mornings - they tend to get this one or this one while, as far as I can make out, the incident occurred on this one. 

Anyway, it was the standard double-decker bus going under low bridge scenario, or, more accurately, most of the bus going under while a small amount off the top got left behind. The various articles featured prominently on national news show the scary aftermath of the incident. The Metro article luridly uses the word "decapitated" to describe what happened to the bus, clearly in an attempt to draw in some ghoulish readers who expect that to be the fate of some of the passengers. This is clearly theoretically possible, but I can't find any evidence of it ever happening, and in fact death and even serious injury are less common in these sort of incidents than you might imagine. A very quick and lazy Google search yields a host of similar incidents:

• This one in Leicester in 1958, a textbook encounter with a railway bridge, this one still in existence. No injuries as the bus was empty at the time.
• Another incident at exactly the same bridge in 2009, this time with a busload of schoolchildren, some of whom sustained minor injuries.
• A much more serious incident in Cwmbran in 1982 where six people were killed. The article is commendably non-lurid about the details, but you would assume it's a bit of an all-or-nothing thing: either you get a bridge in the face at 30mph, in which case we can all imagine the consequences, or you duck and you don't, in which case you probably get away with cuts and bruises. Anyway, the bridge in question was demolished shortly afterwards and that part of the old railway partly used as the route of the new A4051; the bridge was in the location now occupied by this roundabout but the stubs of the old embankment are still visible. 
• An incident in Eccles last year; this time the offending bridge was an aqueduct carrying the Bridgewater Canal (so it was, in a very real sense, a "Bridgewater water bridge"). No deaths but three people with serious injuries.
• One in Bath in 2023; a relatively poor effort here with only the front section being caved in; roof integrity was largely maintained; no injuries.
• One in Tottenham in 2016; five people hospitalised.
• One in Macclesfield in 2011; a few minor injuries.
• One in Swansea in 2021 with one fatality; it seems insensitive to speculate too much about the details but she apparently died 11 days later in hospital, which I assume (though I am not a doctor) is longer than you'd last if your head had come off.
• An interesting central London variation in 2015 where a large overhanging branch, rather than the usual railway bridge, was the culprit. Again, a few minor injuries.
• Other similar occurrences in Bournemouth, Rochdale, York, Coventry, Kilmarnock, Edinburgh and no doubt others too numerous to mention.

The common factors here seem to be:

• driver unfamiliarity either with the route, driving a double-decker as opposed to a single-decker bus, or even with the concept of bus-driving at all
• unscheduled route amendments due to either roadworks, other traffic issues, getting lost, taking a short-cut back to the depot
• in general railway bridges as the immovable obstacle, although there are some variations involving tree branches, canal aqueducts and hospital footbridges. 

The potential decapitation thing did put me in mind of this tweet describing a dimly-recalled childhood incident:

weird childhood recollection: someone telling me a story about a 4-man bobsleigh team whose vehicle left the track and hit a tree, neatly decapitating all the riders and careering off down a hill. weirdest bit is I recall it being my Dad that told it to me https://t.co/Bgr5dG7L5b

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) February 16, 2022

The incident described, assuming I'm recalling the anecdote correctly, never happened as far as I can tell, though people have obviously died in painful ways while competing in luge and bobsleigh races. In general this sort of thing is extremely rare, not least because for good and sound evolutionary reasons the human head is pretty tenaciously tethered to the human body; people whose heads were prone to flying off in high winds tended not to survive long enough to reproduce. You actually have to try pretty hard to induce your head to come off, usually by doing something incredibly ill-advised such as this.  

Lastly, those inspired by the previous post to frenzied stats-nerdery in relation to UK bridge signage will be fascinated to hear that the location of the crash on East Usk Road is not the type specimen for the (fairly common, I'd imagine) 12'6"/3.8m height combination; this is to be found in Kings Norton in the southern suburbs of Birmingham.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

We've had dogs that look like islands, and cartoon dogs that look like spacecraft, but I don't think we've ever had a dog looking like a person before. Time to rectify that omission, so here's a small furry dog (probably a toy poodle, I guess, or one of the annoyingly-named cross-breeds like a cavapoo or a cockapoo) that looks like Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead.

Jerry is not a bad name for a dog, as it happens. My views on regular human names as dog names can be examined at slightly more length here. My views on The Grateful Dead as a music-making entity can be found summarised here: that post is nearly twenty years old but I stand by the central opinions, i.e. the early-70s folky albums Workingman's Dead and (especially) American Beauty are the pinnacle of their recorded output: as a live spectacle I'm sure they were terrific if you were a) there in person and b) off your tits on some psychedelic substance or other to make you slightly more receptive to aimless vaguely-jazzy guitar noodling for tens of minutes at a time. 

Garcia's public image as your slightly disreputable but essentially benign cuddly teddy-bear-ish psychedelic rock uncle is of course somewhat at odds with his being a ferocious heroin addict for much of his adult life, something which obviously contributed to his death at the age of only 53 (younger than me) in 1995 and made him, in the words of his own daughter, something of a "shitty father". As with Shane MacGowan, the romantic image of the elegantly wasted rock star is one thing, actually having to deal with the unpalatable day-to-day offstage realities is somewhat different. Some people find owning a dog to come with similar challenges, I expect.

the last book I read

The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again by M. John Harrison.

Shaw has had a bit of a rough time, including some sort of unspecified breakdown, but is gradually trying to put his life back together, in a fairly gradual and unspectacular way involving moving around various dingy rooms in shared houses and a succession of odd jobs, culminating in some ill-defined work for a guy called Tim who has an office on a rickety old barge moored alongside the Thames. Tim maintains a website called The Water House whose purpose is unclear but which seems to revolve around documenting weird water-related occurrences in the London area and beyond.

One of Shaw's first assignments is keeping an eye on a court case involving a guy called Patrick Reed (no, not that one), up before the beak for some minor public order disturbance related to some weird sightings he has claimed to have: specifically, the appearance of strange rapidly-growing green finned creatures in the toilet bowl whenever he has a piss. It's not clear what Shaw is meant to do about any of this except gather information that may or may not end up on The Water House. Shaw also spends some time with a psychic called Annie Swann, who may or may not be Tim's wife, or possibly ex-wife, or possibly sister, and who spends most of their sessions passed out in some sort of trance. 

Shaw has a girlfriend, Victoria, with whom he has a very casual, arms-length sort of relationship. As if to illustrate this she relocates from London to Shropshire to renovate her recently-deceased mother's hous, in what we're invited to infer is somewhere in the vicinity of Ironbridge. Our viewpoint shifts to Victoria's for this section of the novel as she oversees various building and repair work, while at the same time getting to know her neighbours and some of the people of the town. And a rum bunch they are too, from Pearl, who lives next door and runs a local café, to old Ossie who may or may not be Pearl's father, and may or may not have been Victoria's mother's lover at some point in the past, to young Tommie, who keeps trying to persuade Victoria to read Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies.

The house is damp, it rains constantly, and the water makes its way inexorably down to the Severn, but not before flooding some fields behind the houses, where Victoria witnesses the bizarre spectacle of Pearl stripping naked, walking into one of the pools, and disappearing from sight, despite the pool being only a couple of feet deep at most. 

Victoria takes a break and travels back to London to reconnect with Shaw, but finds him oddly preoccupied with his job, even while he can't really explain what the job is, although it has recently included a trip to the Midlands (in the rain, naturally) to retrieve something from a garden swimming pool, a pale greenish-white something that twitched and thrashed and needed to be transported away wrapped in a tarpaulin.

Victoria returns to Shropshire and decides to sell her mother's house, but before she can do so she is beckoned out to the rainy garden at night by an unseen voice, and undergoes some sort of watery transmutation. Shaw, meanwhile, is wrapping up his involvement with Tim and The Water House, though not before an extremely bizarre encounter on the barge with Annie and some dismembered human remains in a barrel which may or may not be Tim, and some scrawled writings which seem to allude to an undocumented human sub-speciation event in the distant past. He decides to properly re-engage with the world and tries to make contact with Victoria again, but receives no reply.

It's important not to to be ashamed, at the end of a book like this, to sit back and go: well, what was all that about, then? Presumably at least some of it is intended to represent actual real stuff happening to actual real people (yes, yes: real within the book's own fictional version of the world) and equally some of it is intended not to be real, like the various characters disappearing from the narrative via physically impossible means into some watery netherworld from which they do not return. Whether "not real" here means "imagined or hallucinated by one of the main characters" or "explicitly supernatural" is probably up for grabs and depends on the reader as much as anything. 

What does seem clear, and Harrison has said as much in interviews, is that the mysterious emergence of the water-creatures, possibly a genetically distinct sub-species of humanity and possibly (via some possibly supernatural means) able to assume the form of regular humans for some period of time, while those same regular humans sleepwalk around too preoccupied with their own petty concerns to notice the world changing around them, is intended to be an allegory for Brexit in particular and the rise of right-wing populism and fascism more generally. 

It's oddly reminiscent of the only other Harrison book I've ever read, Climbers, despite the disparity of the subject matter: central character a bloke leading an odd rootless existence, slightly mysterious past, slightly vague narrative, general air of post-Thatcherite decline and decay. Both books are somewhat outside of what most people would think of as Harrison's principal genre, science fiction, although that definition is notoriously slippery.

Anyway, I enjoyed it very much, even though I could not say that I knew what was going on 100% of the time, and it could be argued that there are quite lengthy sections where not very much is going on at all. Harrison has a very distinctive prose style which won't be for everyone, but sometimes it's good to have your mind stretched. The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020, an award which is meant to reward the writing of genre-bending or experimental fiction. It's the first winner that I've read, although Jim Crace's Harvest and all three of the Rachel Cusk novels (Outline, Transit and Kudos) were nominated at various times. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

You will be extremely unsurprised to learn that I follow a few map-related accounts on Twitter/X, and it was this tweet the other day that alerted me to a fascinating fact, or, if you prefer, prompted me to make the following absurd and unfounded claim: the United Arab Emirates has an interesting shape that strongly resembles a unicorn emerging from a bathtub. 

A couple of other interesting points: as you can probably tell the image on the right is not hand-drawn by me but instead generated by ChatGPT; I decided to take advantage of our current occupation of a sweet spot in time between AI being too useless to be any good to anyone and so incredibly powerful that it destroys us all. I can't imagine that seeding the super-connected AI megabrain with the ability to draw unicorns in baths will specifically be the thing that brings about the singularity and enables it to become self-aware at 2:14 Eastern time, but if it is, I will make this statement in advance: sorry, guys.

The other thing is that you might assume that the unicorn horn represents some sort of oddly-shaped peninsula protruding into the Persian Gulf, and it sort of does, but if you look at an actual map you will see that there actually is some more land up there, but it's not part of the UAE, it is instead an exclave of Oman. The unicorn's distinctive eye is another exclave, just proving my earlier point that at a zoomed-in level national and intra-national borders are a lot more complicated than you might think. 

Other similar map-related nonsense can be found here, here, here and here. 

the last book I read

Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith. 

Meet Tom Ripley, Oh, wait, we've met him before, four times in fact.

And what is Tom up to these days? Oh, well, the usual stuff - a bit of facilitating of the sale of forged art, a few odd jobs for his underworld contact Reeves Minot, but mainly just hanging out at Belle Ombre, his rambling country house just south of Paris, with his lovely and uncurious wife Héloïse, bimbling down to the local bar-tabac occasionally for a demi-pression, and keeping an eye out for anyone who might be in the vicinity of the village asking awkward questions about the series of mysterious disappearances and deaths that have happened in Tom's vicinity over the years. 

And so when Tom gets wind of an American couple, David and Janice Pritchard, who've recently rented a house in the area, his crime-dar starts pinging. What do they want? What are they up to? The sub-text here, obvious to anyone who's read the preceding four Ripley novels, is that if they reach a point of unacceptable awkwardness Ripley might be forced to do a bit of the old murdering, something he only does when absolutely necessary but is extremely efficient at.

David Pritchard soon makes contact with Ripley and makes it pretty clear that he is indeed here because of Ripley, and alludes to some contact with some people on the periphery of the complex web of deceit associated with the art forgery scam, in particular the wife of Thomas Murchison, the art collector who Ripley was unfortunately obliged to bludgeon to death with a bottle of vintage wine lest he blow the whole scheme wide open. Murchison is the victim Ripley is most concerned about, as he dumped his body in a canal only a few miles up the road. 

Héloïse, having nothing as tedious as earning a living to do to occupy her time, decides to swan off to Morocco for a few weeks, and Tom joins her for the first part of the trip, only to find, somewhat bizarrely, that Pritchard has followed them, seemingly just with the intention of causing mischief. Tom is not really a man to be trifled with like this and attempts to warn Pritchard off by beating him up.

Ripley returns to France, with Héloïse still exploring Morocco with a friend, and decides to take advantage of her absence by attending to the Pritchard situation. And not before time, as Pritchard has now chartered a boat and is dragging the local canals looking for Murchison. Tom enlists the help of one of his English art forgery sidekicks, Ed Banbury, who travels out to the house to assist. Shortly after this a wet rope-tied canvas package is left at the gates of Tom's house, and when he and Ed examine it it turns out to be mainly human bones with a few gobbets of jellified flesh still attached. Ripley identifies it as Murchison by a distinctive ring, which he pockets, and then attends to the business of disposing of the remains. And what better way to dispose of them than by sneaking round to the Pritchards' house in the dead of night and dropping the bundle into the large pond in their front garden?

It's a pretty simple plan, but it pays off in ways Ripley couldn't have foreseen when the Pritchards, alerted by the big SPLOSH from the front garden, come outside, try to hook whatever's been dropped into the pond, and in the process fall in and drown. 

Pretty convenient for Tom, non? He's not completely in the clear, though, as Pritchard had informed the police that he'd deposited a package at Tom's house. Luckily, since no-one else (apart from Ed, who's saying nothing) saw it, Tom can just affect a baffled ignorance, ply the local flics with a glass of vin rouge when they come round asking questions, do some mutual tutting about crazy foreigners with their crazy ways, and then send them on their way. 

And so, as we knew he would be, Tom is in the clear, with, as before, a faint whiff of suspicion around him but nothing concrete. Héloïse, by now returned from Morocco, is a bit vexed at the police coming to her house but is also very disinclined to ask too many questions of Tom and very happy to resume their comfortable life. 

This is the fifth and last book in the Ripley series, published in 1991; it's also the last novel published during Patricia Highsmith's lifetime (she died in 1995 and one further novel was published posthumously). What I would say about the series is that the first three books are much better than the last two, and there's a suspicion that she returned to the series the last two times out of either a shortage of other creative ideas or a knowledge that Ripley books were sure to sell. This is never less than entertaining, though, and it's fun just to spend time in Tom's company in the knowledge that he will never suffer harm or consequences for his actions, still less experience any regret or remorse as a result of them. All of those actions in this book are historical ones, specifically the murder of Thomas Murchison in Ripley Under Ground; while Tom might be somewhat morally culpable for the deaths of the Pritchards no-one would expect a charge of murder to stick. 

A few obvious criticisms: Pritchard's motivations are never satisfactorily explained, Ed Banbury seems remarkably sanguine about getting directly involved in the direct consequences of Tom's murderous activities (actual human remains and all), and the Pritchards' manner of death is wholly implausible (how could they both fall in? how deep can a garden pond be?). But it all bowls along very entertainingly, even when not very much is happening (which is most of the time).

This completes my reading of the Ripley series, over the course of almost exactly fifteen years since the first book. As mentioned here, that means it joins a select group of novel sequences which appear in their entirety on this blog. Incomplete ones which may join the list in future are Peter Matthiessen's Watson trilogy (one to go) and the just-started Patrick Melrose sequence by Edward St. Aubyn. I suspect it's less likely that I'll ever complete either Anthony Powell's A Dance To The Music Of Time sequence or Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. But hey, give it a few years and I might be looking for things to do during my retirement, so you never know.

caernarfon other ice-cream, please?

While the Snowdon day was very much the focus and highlight of the trip as far as I was concerned, we did do some other stuff while we were there, edited highlights of which are below:

• We went up the road (only 15 minutes drive away) to Caernarfon Castle, which is tremendously impressive, largely intact, full of exciting little nooks and crannies to explore and towers to ascend, and, crucially, free to enter for Cadw members. It was also known to the kids from having seen it feature in an episode of GoJetters back when they were much smaller. 
• We went to Anglesey for an afternoon including a quick visit to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch - a blatant tourist trap, to be sure, and the super-long version of the name is largely a Victorian conceit, but it's a bit of fun and provides an irresistible opportunity for a photo under the railway station sign and the purchase of some souvenir T-shirts and/or key-rings and/or fudge.

• In order to get to Anglesey we went in over the Britannia Bridge (which carries the main A55 road as well as the railway line) and back out over the Menai suspension bridge. The latter is older and more architecturally striking, but the former has the more interesting and chequered history, originally carrying a pair of wrought-iron tubes that housed the railway but then falling victim to a catastrophic fire in 1970 which fatally compromised the strength of the tubes and necessitated a rebuild with a different design, making use of the original bridge pillars and re-purposed as a combined road and rail bridge.
• We didn't actually go into Beaumaris Castle but did have a bit of a wander round its outer walls before getting bored and going and finding an ice-cream. It's comparatively small and rounded and cuddly compared with the harsh sharp-cornered polygonal gigantitude of Caernarfon Castle.
• Anyone buying an ice-cream from the Red Boat ice cream parlour and thinking of taking it out towards the pier to eat it will be warned by the people in the shop to watch out for predatory dive-bombing seagulls, and they are not joking; no sooner had Nia had a few licks of her mint choc chip cone with white chocolate sprinkles than some homicidal freakin' albatross attacked her and nicked the whole thing. I recall being menaced by similar large sharp-beaked bastards while trying to eat some chips on the beach at Porthcawl many years ago; evidently they enjoy a varied diet.

hangin' in the crib

Part two of our summer holiday was spent in north Wales, in particular at this campsite in north-western Snowdonia a couple of miles from Caernarfon. But what is there to see up there? Well, a variety of things as it happens but mainly GREAT BIG MOUNTAINS UP THE FREAKIN WAZOO. We'd hit upon north Wales as it was a place this collective group hadn't been before and it seemed to me like it might provide a means of transitioning from the kid-centric low-level (though delightful) camping trips we'd been doing since popping out five kids between us - Cornwall, Buckinghamshire, Dorset - to something that might perhaps include some more ambitious expeditions. No expectation of getting back to the glory glory days of pre-parenthood full-blown Munro-bagging but I'd hope we might aspire to bag one here and there in future among doing other things. 

To put it another way, I'd spotted an opportunity to drag at least some of our group up a mountain at some point during the holiday and fully intended to seize it with both hands. In fact I thought: well, given that we've only got one shot at this let's super-size that mofo and do the Snowdonia walk I really want to knock off my bucket list: the full Snowdon Horseshoe. 

The disadvantage of this is that it was not a route everyone could be expected to be able to do, nor indeed want to do, and so I was fully mentally prepared to be thwarted at any point up to and including the day of the walk. It's not just people, of course - while we're in the grip of a prolonged period of warm dry weather I hadn't ruled out the weather gods deciding to blanket the whole mountain in cloud and rain for the day, just to fuck me over. 

A brief bit of scene-setting regarding the route: this is the route up and over the Crib Goch arête, around to the summit of Snowdon and then down again via the subsidiary peak of Y Lliwedd, making use of sections of the Pyg and Miner's tracks to get from and to the start point at Pen-y-Pass. I'd never done it before despite having been up Snowdon several times - I couldn't say exactly how many but it's at least six, as follows:

• with my Dad in what was probably the mid-1990s; up the Pyg and down the Miner's, no photos nor any particular recollection of the walk or the weather, quick stop for a pint of Bass in the Pen-y-Gwryd hotel (after which the Pyg track is probably, but not definitely, named) afterwards, below a pair of Sir Edmund Hillary's Everest boots in a glass case above the bar (I see I mentioned that here)
• with my then-girlfriend Anne in spring of 2000, Pyg/Miner's again, foggy at the top
• 
  Three Peaks training run in summer of 2006, a month or so before the actual challenge. Glorious weather, up the Snowdon Ranger, down the Rhyd Ddu, straight into the pub
• the Three Peaks itself, early July 2006, glorious weather again, Pyg/Miner's for speed, brisk jog down the last section to be sure of being back within the 24 hour limit, bottle of bubbly by the minibus in the car park and then a pint in a pub down the road which I think might have been this one in Capel Curig
• with Hazel, late summer 2008, bit misty and drizzly, up the Snowdon Ranger again, down the Rhyd Ddu again, straight into the pub again
• with Hazel's BNI group for a charity challenge, February 2009, up the Pyg track, snowy and icy at the top, down a combination of the Llanberis path and just following the railway line

Anyway, I'm glad to be able to say that it all worked out beautifully: glorious weather, two distinct groups heading for the summit by two different routes who managed to meet up briefly at the summit, and then again at the car park just in time (literally, a couple of minutes to spare thanks to some more jogging of the last half-mile or so) to get the last Snowdon Sherpa bus back to Caernarfon to pick up the cars.

Much has been written elsewhere about the Crib Goch traverse by those much more knowledgeable and experienced than me, and there is plenty of YouTube footage available if you want a preview before deciding whether it's for you or not. One caveat: lots of YouTube mountain footage is filmed using a fish-eye GoPro-type camera, probably helmet-mounted, which makes it look unbelievably high and narrow. Another caveat: lots of Crib Goch footage in particular has clickbait titles like BRITAIN'S DEADLIEST RIDGE!!! It's important to be clear that people genuinely do die up there - or, rather, they start up there, endure a brief transitional period after which they are not up there any more, and then die - but I'd say as long as you're pretty fit, comfortable with hands-and-feet scrambling and have a good head for heights there really shouldn't be a problem. I would, as an aside, be interested to see whether the casualty rate has gone up since the advent of people going up there with cameras making YouTube videos about it, it being really important to concentrate on what you're doing and where you're putting your feet.

The walk is basically in a few distinct sections:

• 
  A couple of kilometres up the Pyg track from the car park to Bwlch y Moch, where the Crib Goch path splits off. There is lots of signage here intended to prevent people straying onto the Crib Goch track thinking it's the Pyg track, which you would have to pretty dim to miss, but which I'm sure people occasionally do nonetheless.
• The first section up onto Crib Goch is a fairly relentless upward scramble up a big rocky pyramid, not particularly exposed but steep and strenuous, and with some scanning of the wall of rock in front of you required to see where the best scrambling route is. In general, and this applies to the whole horseshoe route, you can usually see a light-brownish trail among the grey rock if you look hard enough which shows where people have been before you.
• You the arrive at the first mini-summit and the narrowest section of ridge is visible in front of you: a flat section to the true summit of Crib Goch at 923 metres (3028 feet) and then a gradually downhill section to the first of the pinnacles that occupy the end of the ridge. You can walk along the top for quite a bit of it but there are sections where dropping off the crest and using it as a handrail is the best approach; in general if you're going to do this the left side of the ridge offers the best footholds and is less murderously steep and exposed.
• It is possible to just scramble over the top of the first couple of pinnacles but the usual alternative route is to drop slightly off the crest to the left to skirt round the base. The key move then is to swing back to the right through the gap before the third pinnacle to ascend some rocky steps up over the top of it.
• You then descend to a wider grassy area for a short while which affords a good opportunity for a sit down and a pork pie.
• There is then some more scrambling, not dissimilar to the first section, to gain the summit of Garnedd Ugain, at 1065 metres (3494 feet) the second-highest summit in Wales, and from there a broad rocky plateau leads to the point where most of the main paths up Snowdon (and the mountain railway) converge and thence to the summit area where you can have a wee, buy an ice-cream (or even a beer), and spend around twenty minutes queueing for a selfie at the summit toposcope.
• You then head past the summit building, in the opposite direction to 95% of people, and descend to the point where the Rhyd Ddu and Watkin paths diverge, head left along the Watkin path and almost immediately down a long and steep descent which has some nice rocky steps for the first half but thereafter is tricky and loose underfoot and requires some care. As the path levels out it takes a sharp right turn into another steeply downhill section, at this point Horseshoe-ers go straight on and up a bouldery scramble (similar to the ones on the first section of Crib Goch and Garnedd Ugain but less exposed than either, unless you stray too near the cliffs on the left) to the summit of Y Lliwedd. There are actually two summits in quick succession but the first one is slightly higher at 898 metres (2946 feet).
• Having traversed both Y Lliwedd's tops you then start a long gradual descent which passes through a gap in the crags and drops down to the lakes and the Miner's Track, which will take you back to the car park.

Anyway, the story of our day in a nutshell was that we had perfect weather: sun, no wind, no cloud, everyone did the walk they wanted to do and were best-suited to do, the two groups met up briefly at the summit and then again at the car park at the end, although the Horseshoe group had to re-enact the last bit of our 2006 Three Peaks expedition by jogging the last half-mile or so to be sure of being back in time for the last bus and a quick wee before getting on it. Our group absolutely smashed their challenge; Alys in particular being absolutely in her element and leading the way most of the way round wearing a huge grin on her face, only dropping back a bit on the later stages of the descent when her knees started to hurt. Nia was slightly nervous right at the start of the most exposed section but was fine once she got started. Summit photos from Crib Goch, Garnedd Ugain and Snowdon (the first two are selfies so feature my grinning mug prominently; sorry about that) are below.

I had been a bit concerned about the number of people we'd be sharing the ridge with, as having to pass on the narrow bits is awkward - we deliberately did the walk on a Friday rather than a Saturday to avoid some of the weekend crowds, and overall Crib Goch was fairly quiet. We probably met 15-20 other people in total over the course of our end-to-end traverse of the ridge; obviously there were a lot more people at the summit, most of whom had arrived by other routes. Like Striding Edge, the general convention is that you use Crib Goch as a means of getting to the summit of Snowdon rather than as a means of getting off afterwards, but there were people going in both directions. People do take dogs up there, and occasionally die while attempting to rescue them, but I don't recall seeing any when we were there; there was certainly no repeat of the two guys I met on Striding Edge walking a dachshund along the crest of the ridge.

So how does it compare to other UK ridge routes? The obvious comparison is with Striding Edge, and it's similar in many ways; Crib Goch is a bit narrower, but the main difference is the exposure, which is much more extreme on Crib Goch even while the actual technical demands of the scrambling aren't that complex. You can convince yourself that a fall from Striding Edge might be survivable, one from Crib Goch, especially off the north side of the ridge, would not be. My memories of the only other two comparable things I've done, the Càrn Mòr Dearg ridge round the back of Ben Nevis and the Black Cuillin, are dim and distant enough (probably around 1999) to probably not be very reliable, but I don't recall Càrn Mòr Dearg being as narrow or as exposed as Crib Goch. There are supposedly routes navigable by the experienced walker/scrambler that are more extreme than Crib Goch, like the Aonach Eagach ridge in Glencoe. Maybe next time....

So, to summarise, a fantastic day, one of my favourite ever days out on the mountains, absurdly proud of my girls (and of Huwie, who led the Pyg/Miner's group up with some motivational singing), highly recommended to anyone but do your research and assess your own fitness, competence and inclination first. 

The other thing about Crib Goch is that it is a peak in its own right, and a Welsh 3000 at that, so if you have aspirations (as I do) to bag all of them (14 or 15 depending which list you adhere to) then you will have to do the ridge traverse at some point. The horseshoe walk incorporates all three in the Snowdon range (Garnedd Ugain and Snowdon itself are the other two), which is nice, the rest comprise five in the Glyder range (of which I have done four, Elidir Fawr being the odd one out) and the Carnedd range, none of which I have ever been up BUT fully intend to have a crack at in future. 

Route map and altitude profile are below. The whole walk took us around nine and a half hours, although we did have a fairly lengthy sojourn at the top meeting up with people, buying ice cream and getting Alys a souvenir key-ring for her collection.