sorry, I'm feeling a little horse

I was entertained for a couple of hours on Twitter (on X, if you musk, I mean must) yesterday by some increasingly lurid speculation about what a woman named Charlotte Dujardin had done to a horse in a video that had been submitted to, and was under investigation by, some central authority governing equestrian sport and moreover was of a serious enough nature for her to immediately withdraw from the upcoming Paris Olympics.

A bit of background for the non-horse-adjacent such as myself: Charlotte Dujardin is a prominent equestrian sportswoman in the somewhat esoteric field of dressage who also happens to be the joint-most-bemedalled British female Olympian of all time. You might, as I very definitely already have done, make a relative value judgment about the lung-busting athletic prowess of cyclist Laura Kenny (the other joint record-holder) and someone making a horse walk sideways and do a bit of skipping, but that's what the record books show.

Anyway, the incriminating video, despite what internet speculation might have had you believe (i.e. some sort of Catherine the Great thing), contains some footage of Dujardin getting a bit enthusiastic with a whip while training a horse in an indoor training ring. No doubt there are acceptable guidelines for how hard and often you're allowed to hit a horse with a whip, both in official competition and elsewhere, and I have no reason not to believe those who say Dujardin is exceeding them here, but I do also wonder how people think horses get trained to do the weird stylised movements that dressage requires. I mean, it'd be lovely if you could get them into a meeting room and go through all this stuff on a whiteboard as if you were discussing football tactics, but horses are - and I'm aware there might be people outraged at this statement - EXTREMELY DIM and you've got to do things in a more basic way.

I was reminded here of the furore in 2021 around the widely-circulated photograph of Irish racehorse trainer Gordon Elliott sitting on a dead horse while making a phone call. I could have understood a degree of outrage if he had subsequently been revealed to have strangled the horse to death with his bare hands, but no, it had just (as far as I can gather) dropped dead while out on a training gallop. Again, those seemingly outraged that the death of horses might be seen as a relatively normal day-to-day thing in the multi-million-pound horse-racing industry seemed to be ignoring some fairly obvious realities which I had a go at articulating at the time.

Back to the current controversy - you will be unsurprised to learn that someone has already been and made sure that Dujardin's Wikipedia page has been updated with a sober and objective summary of the current situation.

Some of the material that made its way onto the internet during the initial excitement contained some links to Horse & Hound, the publication of choice for the Barbour-jacket and shooting-stick set. While I was there I was offered a couple of other links, one of which was to this story:

Just to be clear, in the equestrian community "sheath" is the euphemism of choice for "cock", so this, just to be even clearer, is an interview with a woman whose job it is to prise lumps of hardened knobcheese out of the ends of horses' cocks. I mean, someone's got to do it, I suppose. Nothing I could say here will be better than just letting the article speak for itself, so here you go:

This is just about perfect; my only complaint is that Horse & Hound weren't tempted to borrow the Daily Mail's usage habits and make occasional references to HIS ENORMOUS HORSEHOOD or something similar.

Note also that specialist horse knob cleaning products are available, including this one which tries (unsuccessfully) to put a slightly cutesy spin on the whole business. 

schauffele schauffele catchy python

You'll recall I made some scornful references to my general disinclination towards "checking exhaustively" and the like in my post about the Scheffler/Schauffele distribution of the first two majors of the golfing year. Well, my interest was further piqued by Bryson DeChambeau winning the US Open in June, and then further piqued by Xander Schauffele winning the Open at Troon just the other day. More specifically, what I mean by that is: it's not difficult to notice that the name DeChambeau shares quite a few letters with Schauffele, and then to pose the more general question: what's the maximum number of letters that the four major winners in a particular year have shared? 

This is one that is going to require checking exhaustively, and manually doing the legwork would be extremely tedious even for an enthusiast of data-related nerdery like myself. So I plunged off down a different alley, still squarely located within the general Nerd Central district, extracted the relevant data from Wikipedia, massaged it into shape a bit, and then wrote a Python program to do the relevant comparisons for me. 

The results are in the table below. These are the years when there was at least one letter common to all four major winners; implicitly it only includes years when all four majors were held, so nothing pre-1934 (when the first Masters tournament was held), a few missing years during World War II, and no 2020 (when the Open was cancelled). Also, we're only considering surnames here, and I've trimmed the occasional "jr." and "III" off the end of surnames where that made the comparison problematic or challenged my rudimentary Python skills.

Of the 84 "full" years, 29 appear in the list below, and only ten have more than one letter in the matching list. Perhaps slightly surprisingly, the two years (1953 and 2000) where a single player won three out of the four majors only have a single match each, Walter Burkemo and Vijay Singh spoiling the party for Ben Hogan and Tiger Woods respectively. Anyway, the main headline here is that of those ten, nine have two letters in the matching list and only one, this very year of Our Lord 2024, has a whopping four to put it well out in front. Obviously a whole year of people with absurdly long and letter-rich surnames helps. 

Year	Matches	Who
1935	r	Perry, Parks, Revolta, Sarazen
1948	on	Cotton, Hogan, Hogan, Harmon
1949	e	Locke, Middlecoff, Snead, Snead
1951	an	Faulkner, Hogan, Snead, Hogan
1953	o	Hogan, Hogan, Burkemo, Hogan
1960	e	Nagle, Palmer, Hebert, Palmer
1961	er	Palmer, Littler, Barber, Player
1962	al	Palmer, Nicklaus, Player, Palmer
1963	s	Charles, Boros, Nicklaus, Nicklaus
1970	c	Nicklaus, Jacklin, Stockton, Casper
1974	r	Player, Irwin, Trevino, Player
1975	a	Watson, Graham, Nicklaus, Nicklaus
1977	n	Watson, Green, Wadkins, Watson
1979	r	Ballesteros, Irwin, Graham, Zoeller
1980	as	Watson, Nicklaus, Nicklaus, Ballesteros
1983	so	Watson, Nelson, Sutton, Ballesteros
1984	er	Ballesteros, Zoeller, Trevino, Crenshaw
1989	a	Calcavecchia, Strange, Stewart, Faldo
1991	a	Baker-Finch, Stewart, Daly, Woosnam
1993	na	Norman, Janzen, Azinger, Langer
2000	s	Woods, Woods, Woods, Singh
2004	n	Hamilton, Goosen, Singh, Mickelson
2006	o	Woods, Ogilvy, Woods, Mickelson
2010	e	Oosthuizen, McDowell, Kaymer, Mickelson
2011	lr	Clarke, McIlroy, Bradley, Schwartzel
2019	o	Lowry, Woodland, Koepka, Woods
2021	m	Morikawa, Rahm, Mickelson, Matsuyama
2023	a	Harman, Clark, Koepka, Rahm
2024	chee	Schauffele, DeChambeau, Schauffele, Scheffler

the last book I read

The Tiger In The Smoke by Margery Allingham.

Meg Elginbrodde has just received a couple of photographs of her husband, supposedly taken quite recently, in London. Nothing so very unusual about that, you might say, but it's a bit unexpected in this particular case as Martin Elginbrodde's last known location was understood to have been scattered over a wide area somewhere in France during World War II. 

So what's happened? Have his discorporated remains been re-assembled in a vat somewhere? Well, it's not really that sort of novel, so no. Have rumours of his death been exaggerated? Well, maybe, but if so there are some pressing questions, most notably: where's he been for the past several years? And where does this leave Meg's current fiancé, Geoffrey Levett?

Meg is a sensible girl, so she realises this is probably someone faking seeing, or even being, Martin for some reason; but why? Fortunately she just happens to be the cousin of the famous amateur sleuth Albert Campion, who in turn has lots of contacts in the police, so she is easily able to gather a posse of people to help her out when the time comes to meet the mysterious photo-sender to find out what he wants. 

The whole rendezvous doesn't really go as planned; while Campion and his Met sidekick Chief Inspector Luke want her to engage discreetly with her contact and allow them to get a good look at him, she instead spots him (still looking like her husband) from across a railway station concourse, shouts at him and causes him to scarper. An odd thing for him to do if he was actually Martin Elginbrodde, you might say, and you'd be right, as once he's been collared it turns out he's a known wrong 'un called Duds Morrison wearing a false moustache, and, more bizarrely, a distinctive old jacket that really did used to belong to Martin.

So how did Duds get hold of the jacket? And what did he hope to gain by impersonating Martin? Well, he isn't telling during the brief period the police can hold him before having to release him (wearing a false 'tache not technically being a crime), and he isn't telling in a more permanent way shortly afterwards as he turns up bludgeoned to death in an alleyway. 

So what's going on? Who offed Duds? How did he come by the jacket? What's Geoffrey - who seems to have disappeared - up to? How is old Mrs. Cash, who has connections to Meg's family but also seems to be a bit of a shady character on the quiet, involved in all this? And what's going on with the motley band of musicians who parade around the town in military uniforms and seem to have been in suspicious proximity to the scene of Duds' murder?

Well, the answer to the Geoffrey question is that he was with Duds when he died, having chased him down the alley in a bid to get some information out of him about the whole Martin Elginbrodde thing. That meant that he got in the way of Duds' assailants - the Army band - and therefore had to be kidnapped to ensure he couldn't identify any of them, so he's been trussed up like a turkey in their basement hideout while they try and work out what to do next. 

The point of all this, it turns out, is that the band all served together in the army, along with Martin Elginbrodde, and took part in a shady black-ops mission somewhere in France to rub out a couple of key enemy agents. The actual rubbing out was done by Jack Havoc, another ex-army colleague and a bit of a dab hand with the old killing. Moreover, Havoc has just escaped from prison after they foolishly entrusted him to a psychiatrist for an evaluation, whereupon he killed him and exited via the window (probably a bit like this). The band are aware that there is some treasure to be retrieved from the house in France where the mission took place, but only Havoc knows the details, and even he doesn't know some key facts.

Sure enough Jack Havoc arrives in the hideout, takes charge of the group and reveals some more details - the nature and location of the treasure were known to Martin Elginbrodde, and he made arrangements to have the information passed to Meg in the event of his death and her getting married again. The actual information resides in some documents which Martin wrote and which Jack means to get his hands on before Meg does the deed. Needless to say Geoffrey, at this point, realises he's in a lot of trouble.

Meanwhile Albert Campion's finely-tuned detectival instincts have led him to smell a rat regarding the Army band and to arrange to pay a call (with the police in tow) to their lodgings, a basement under a shop. They don't have any sort of warrant or any reason to detain the band, who soon make themselves scarce, but a snoop around soon reveals Geoffrey Levett, bound and gagged in a corner.

Good news for Geoffrey, but Jack Havoc remains at large, and fiercely focused on getting to the treasure. Meanwhile Martin's document comes to light - guarded by an old friend of the family until what he deemed to be the right moment to hand it over - and Geoffrey, Campion, Campion's wife Amanda, and Meg, now in possession of the treasure's location, head off to France to find it. 

So, all's well that ends well, then? Well, not quite, as Jack Havoc is still at large, and as well as being a bit stabby is also a shrewd and resourceful guy. Meg's father, Canon Avril, has his number, though, and has twigged that he is in fact old Mrs. Cash's no-good son and a childhood acquaintance of Meg's. Fat lot of good that does him, though, as Jack administers a (for once, non-fatal) stabbing, extracts the location of the treasure and heads off to rustle up a boat to take him across the Channel, with Chief Inspector Luke in hot pursuit. And so the scene is set for all parties to converge on the abandoned clifftop house where the treasure is secreted, and to discover what it is, who's going to get to go home with it, and who isn't going to get to go home at all.

The Tiger In The Smoke is actually the first of the "couple of slim paperbacks" I coyly alluded to here after I picked them up from the shelves in the Acton Trussell village hall. I'd vaguely heard of Margery Allingham before, and I was vaguely aware that there'd been a TV series based on the Campion series, starring ex-Dr Who Peter Davison as Campion. That series adapted eight of the eighteen books in the series that were published during Allingham's lifetime, but didn't include The Tiger In The Smoke (the fourteenth in the series, published in 1952). In many ways, despite it being highly-regarded by many, this isn't that surprising, as a) it's not really an orthodox whodunit and b) Campion himself is a very peripheral character in it. That said, he does provide the single most significant moment of deduction in the whole book, i.e. the realisation that the Army band are the people responsible for Duds' death, a realisation that almost certainly saves Geoffrey Levett's life.

The chapters set in the underground lair while the gang try to work out what to do next and await Jack Havoc's arrival are genuinely thrilling, and there is a significant dissipation of tension when the police come calling and Geoffrey is rescued. This is a good 60-plus pages from the end of the book, though, and at this point the story changes into a somewhat different kind of story as the main characters zoom off to France for a treasure hunt. This is all fine, but structurally it's a bit odd, and Jack Havoc's eventual (apparent) demise is a bit unsatisfactory - basically he's very tired after all his nefarious activities and rather disappointed at the nature of the treasure (i.e. nothing he can nick and sell on for a fortune) and so he slinks off down a drainage ditch to avoid the police and eventually jumps off a cliff. Um, what?

Anyway, it's all good fun and has some sly humour and some atmospheric descriptions of post-war, pre-Clean Air Act London interwoven with all the robbing and murdering. Jack Havoc is an intriguing villain, and Allingham is a much better writer of prose than some of her crime-writing contemporaries (Agatha Christie, for instance). As an aside it's interesting to note that the country legend of the same name didn't release his first records until 1955, and so this short paragraph wouldn't have seemed as oddly jarring  as it does now.

The Tiger In The Smoke was made into a film, Tiger In The Smoke, in 1956. The Wikipedia page says that the film omits the "principal character" of Albert Campion, but actually, as I said above, he's not really that crucial to the plot at all. It is also the second book in this series to have a title of the form The X In The Y, the other being The Catcher In The Rye.

lookeylikey slash headline of the day

Is it just me who has trouble parsing this headline I saw the other day?

OK, so let's start at the beginning: "I'm a Wimbledon champion marrying fan" - well, OK so you're a fan; I might have hyphenated "Wimbledon champion-marrying" or even "Wimbledon-champion-marrying" just to make it clearer, but let's carry on ... wait, now the rest of the sentence doesn't make sense.

Back up all the way to the beginning and it becomes clear that the starting "I'm" relates to "champion" rather than "fan", and that it was the fan who stopped the champion for a selfie. It didn't help that I initially read "help run tennis" as "help ruin tennis", but that's the fault of my appalling age-related vision deterioration, not the headline writers. 

It seems to me, and I could be wrong, that assuming "fan" to be the subject of the first line is the more natural reading. It would really only have taken the addition of an "a" before "fan" to flip the default reading around, though. I'm not sure whether this is more properly classified as a garden-path sentence or a noun pile-up, or maybe even a crash blossom.

Anyway, the actual story relates to 2017 Wimbledon champion Garbiñe Muguruza, the only player to defeat each of the Williams sisters in Grand Slam finals, and, and I hesitate to say this these days for fear of being LITERALLY CANCELLED, possessor of a very lovely pair of legs. The guy she was accosted by for a selfie in New York just happens to be a top model who was working for Tom Ford at the time, just in case you want to calculate your chances of being able to successfully pull off a similar manoeuvre on the top tennis star of your choice without getting your ass tased and ending up with an ASBO.

Impossible to comment on women's tennis in any way without sounding like a colossal sex pervert. #Wimbledon2014

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 28, 2014

Anyway. it also struck me while looking through some photos of Muguruza for, hem hem, "research purposes" that she looks a bit like Imogen Heap, who I see I used the phrase "strange equine beauty" in connection with here, and also compared with Ronni Ancona. I actually think the Muguruza-Heap resemblance is closer, but I include all three anyway; make up your own mind.

the last book I read

Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson.

Kumiko Yanaka is just like any normal teenager, really: Snapchatting, squeezing spots, being hastily packed off to London by her father, a high-ranking yakuza boss, lest she become a kidnapping (or worse) target in the gang war that's about to break out in Japan. 

Kumiko ends up in the house of, and under the protection of, one Roger Swain, apparently indebted to her father and therefore motivated to keep her safe, but to an external observer a bit of a dodgy-seeming character himself, and with a few other suspicious characters on his payroll, notably Sally Shears, who gets assigned the job of keeping an eye on Kumiko. Sally has mirrored lens implants instead of eyes and a general air of simmering dangerousness, and of being a bit of a loose cannon not necessarily inclined to do Swain's exact bidding.

Meanwhile, in a warehouse in a former landfill site in New Jersey, Slick Henry and his mates are taking a delivery - not your usual couple of Amazon parcels, this one is a comatose man shackled to, and wired into, a giant block of computer hardware.

Meanwhile, in a beach house in Malibu, Angie Mitchell, the world's foremost simstim star (basically immersive virtual reality films), is having some time to herself after getting off a pretty brutal drug habit, and contemplating a return to film-making.

Meanwhile, Mona lies in bed in her slum bedroom in Florida after another hard day getting pimped out to various punters by her boyfriend, Eddy. It's grim and dangerous work, but it pays the rent, and her recounting the tales of what the punters make her get up to is the only way old Eddy can get it up these days.

So if you've been paying attention, and have ever read a book before, you'll expect that these threads will start to come together and interweave as the story progresses. Now read on, etc.

So firstly Eddy returns very excited from a meeting with a prospective business associate: he's made a deal for a substantial amount of money and all Mona has to do is travel to this private clinic and submit to a full medical examination, all strictly above board and definitely not suspicious at all. 

Readers who are doing things in the prescribed order and have read Neuromancer and Count Zero will already know Angie Mitchell from Count Zero - daughter of a prominent bioscientist who fitted her with some state-of-the-art cranial bio-implants (which enable her to access cyberspace without having to plug any wires into anything) before arranging her escape from the clutches of the mega-corporation he was employed by. Unfettered access to cyberspace turns out to be a two-way street, though, and Angie is plagued by visitations from various self-aware AI entities which appear to take the form of Haitian voodoo gods.

In a further echo of Count Zero, the comatose guy entrusted to Slick's care turns out to be Bobby Newmark, Count Zero himself and Angie's former boyfriend. And in a callback to Neuromancer, Sally Shears turns out to be that book's principal female protagonist Molly Millions. The fate of her ex-partner Case, expert cyber-jockey and Neuromancer's other main protagonist, is unclear.

That's all very cute, but what's actually going on? Well, Mona's visit to the mysterious clinic provides a clue - she wakes up after surgery to find that she's been surgically altered - some face work, new teeth, new tits - to resemble Angie Mitchell. But why? Barely any time to contemplate this as Sally Shears arrives, beats the shit out of various medical people and the goons minding Mona, and bundles her into a car. Not long after this, following some more ass-kicking courtesy of Sally, Mona is joined by the actual Angie Mitchell and they speed off to a rendezvous in New Jersey, guided by Angie's voodoo gods. They arrive shortly after some other interested parties - interested specifically in Bobby Newmark and the entity he's wired into - arrive and start killing people. Fortunately Angie has special connections both to the voodoo entities and to Bobby, and equally fortunately Sally/Molly is a one-woman ass-kicking machine, and the other parties are swiftly rubbed out, in time for some stuff to play out which might give a small amount of insight into What The Hell Is Going On.

So: Bobby has been using his bespoke cyberspace rig to investigate the appearance of a new and mysterious entity in cyberspace - the rig having been acquired, not entirely legitimately, from the legendary and insane Tessier-Ashpool family, whose sole survivor, 3Jane, a wholly cyberspace entity these days following the demise of her physical self, has taken the whole thing quite badly and hatched plans for various acts of revenge, including the kidnap of Angie Mitchell and the planting of Mona's body (augmented to look like Angie) to make it look as if she'd died. At the same time the voodoo entities (you'll remember I'm sure that these are the avatars of the various fragmentary remains of the merged single AI that was created at the end of Neuromancer) have become aware of the new artifact and have concluded that it is the handiwork of yet another AI, this one a representative of a wholly alien civilisation. Bobby and Angie, now freed from their physical bodies, head off within cyberspace to seek out the new arrivals.

This is the third book in the Sprawl trilogy (or the Neuromancer trilogy, take your pick). Standard sequelitis means it isn't as good as either of its predecessors, largely because the plot doesn't really make sense. In particular, while the alien incursion into cyberspace is easy enough to grasp (it's a theme used, with a twist, in a few other works including Excession), the whole thing about the plot to kidnap Angie Mitchell and the nature of the Tessier-Ashpool family's involvement is just baffling (especially since, as this lengthy analysis points out, the whole bit involving planting Mona's body assumes a future world where DNA analysis doesn't exist). Sure, it gives Sally/Molly an excuse to kick some ass, and maybe that's good enough. Kumiko's role is all a bit confusing as well, being seemingly just required to facilitate the stitching together of some otherwise unrelated plot strands but not otherwise actually, you know, do anything.

The beauty of Gibson's writing, though, is that this doesn't particularly matter. Again, like Count Zero, this is more of a wham-bam futuristic thriller than Neuromancer, with much less focus on the inner-space world of the cyber-jockeys, but that's fine. As always, if you start with Neuromancer and then just read as many of the sequels as you feel inclined to, that'd be fine. 

the last book I read

Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks.

So there's this woman, erm ... *checks notes* ... Charlotte Gray. Daughter of a First World War veteran, with whom she has a slightly prickly relationship, keen to help out with the Allied war effort now that it's 1942 and the Second World War is in full swing but a bit removed from the action in her native Scotland. 

So she relocates to London, that being the centre of the war effort, and takes a job at a doctor's surgery. It's not long before opportunities of various kinds come her way, though, largely through the time-honoured route of meeting people at parties: firstly a man called Cannerley who has some connections with the shady G Section who seem to organise clandestine activities in France, and secondly Peter Gregory, an RAF pilot, haunted by the loss of most of his friends over the past few years but still seemingly keen to conduct a daring sortie, all guns blazing, into Charlotte's knickers. 

Charlotte happens to be fluent in French after spending a lot of time there during her childhood, a thing that for obvious reasons is of intense interest to Cannerley and his organisation. After a few discreet meetings Charlotte is inducted into the organisation and given an initial mission: parachute into the occupied part of France, make contact with some local representatives of the Resistance and distribute some vital radio components. At the same time Peter Gregory is being given some orders of his own for an airborne mission into France.

Peter's mission starts first and Charlotte soon gets some bad news: he's gone missing. She decides that the best thing to do is get on with her own mission and see if she can locate him while she's over there. So after some rudimentary spy training (basically: don't do this) and some equally rudimentary parachute training (open door, jump out, try not to die) Charlotte finds herself jumping out of a plane and making contact with some people in the village of Lavaurette, including Julien Levade (codename Octave) who leads the Resistance operation. His father, a semi-retired painter, provides some cover for Charlotte (now going by the name Dominique) by employing her as a housekeeper in his rambling old mansion on the outskirts of the village.

Charlotte conducts various side quests while she's staying in Lavaurette, including travelling as far as Limoges to deliver some vital radio parts, all the while keeping an ear out for news of the fate of Peter Gregory. Charlotte's calmness and efficiency gain the respect of her Resistance colleagues and her superiors in London, but then Shit Gets Real as the flimsy pretence of the independence of the Vichy regime is crushed and the Nazis roll into town, bringing with them a ramping up of the existing regime of rounding up Jews and deporting them. This includes the parents of local boys André and Jacob, the boys subsequently being hidden by the Resistance in various locations around the village, but also old man Levade, betrayed by some weaselly local collaborators. After an I ASK ZE KVESTIONS show-trial at the Levade house the old man is carted off and loaded onto a train, while the local police are charged with guarding Julien and Charlotte. Julien facilitates Charlotte's escape, kills the collaborator and then flees into hiding. Charlotte, meanwhile, heads for Paris, partly with the intention of making contact with someone who can facilitate her return to England, but also partly to attempt to intercept André and Jacob, who were inevitably discovered by the Gestapo and taken away.

Peter Gregory, meanwhile, is alive and mostly well, though limping a bit after breaking his leg parachuting into a tree. By extraordinary good luck he was rescued by some people sympathetic to the Allied cause, and by further extraordinary good luck (his French being rudimentary at best) they manage to arrange his transit to Marseille where he meets up with some English-speaking contacts and is spirited back to England by a circuitous route traversing North Africa.

Charlotte makes contact with her man in Paris and arranges her transport back to England; she also visits the internment camp at Drancy where most of the deportees from the village are held, but the massive industrial scale of the operation prevents her from seeing any of the individuals she's looking out for, still less effecting some sort of daring rescue. With ruthless inevitability the process grinds on to its conclusion, with the internees either dying en route to the death camps (as old man Levade does) or surviving the trip only to then be exterminated in the gas chambers (as André and Jacob are).

Charlotte returns to London to be debriefed by G Section and mildly scolded for exceeding the terms of her original mission, and to be tearfully reunited with (and subsequently de-briefed by, oy oy) Peter Gregory. 

This is the third novel in Sebastian Faulks' loose trilogy of books about France - the other two are The Girl At The Lion d'Or, which I haven't read (although I was present at a book-signing for it with Faulks himself about 35 years ago), and Birdsong, which featured here in February 2015. All three feature the First World War as a major theme - Birdsong is mostly set during it and includes many scenes set in the trenches, and while Charlotte Gray is set during the Second World War it carries heavy echoes of the earlier conflict. Both the older Levade and Charlotte's own father are haunted by their memories of what took place, and Lavaurette is oddly demographically skewed by having a large proportion of a whole generation of men wiped out. 

I think on the whole Birdsong is a better book, as enjoyable as Charlotte Gray is - I think most of this is related to pacing; the Nazis only turn up and things Kick Off in a big way fully two-thirds of the way through the book. Before that we get a fair bit of scene-setting in England, including a brief sex scene which won Faulks the Bad Sex Award in 1998 (which he slightly humourlessly did not turn up to collect), and quite a lot of Charlotte hanging out with Julien and his father and blissfully bicycling from village to village in the sunshine delivering radio crystals and the like, which is lovely but oddly peril-free. The flipside of this is that when Charlotte encounters the full industrial efficiency of the Nazi killing machine she is, as resourceful as she is, utterly powerless to do anything about it, and André and Jacob's harrowing journey to their inevitable end is genuinely quite difficult to read.

Narratively that's obviously the right thing to do, a daring James Bond-style rescue mission being completely implausible, but it's a bit of a downer, and it makes the subsequent tearful reunions in England a bit hollow. This is no doubt intentional - my only quibble would be that the neatness of Charlotte's resolution of her mysterious childhood trauma involving her father is a bit nice and convenient, and the implication that, hey, the boys' deaths in the gas chamber weren't completely in vain because it in some way enabled Charlotte to get over being a bit upset about some childhood shit from twenty years earlier is a bit hard to swallow. Indeed you might reasonably ask: what was the sum total of Charlotte's achievements in France? Some minor courier work and encouragement to the Resistance, sure, but aside from making some cursory enquiries with his contacts she discovered next to nothing about Gregory's whereabouts while she was there and contributed precisely nothing to his safe return home, and, as mentioned previously, didn't manage to save any of the Lavaurette villagers from the gas chambers.

The World War II theme puts Charlotte Gray in the company of quite a long list of earlier books featured here - the review of The Reader has a list. Its having a person's full name as a title puts it on a slightly shorter list which also includes Laura Blundy, Riddley Walker and Fanny Hill. It was also filmed (starring Cate Blanchett as Charlotte) in 2001.

snorklebrity lookeyspikey of the day

Today's pairing features my son Huw, in the pool at our holiday house in Brittany a couple of weeks ago and borrowing some of his big sister's swimming accessories, in particular her face-mounted snorkel, and also the strange underwater artificial dinosaur hybrid submarine that I drew for my school yearbook at Bandung International School in Java in about 1979 (when I would have been about nine). Obviously the shape and positioning of the snorkel is the thing that brought the two together in my mind.

The drawing was accompanied by the following explanatory (well, sort of) text:

It's interesting to unpick all the things that (consciously or unconsciously) influenced both the drawing and the text in my nine-year-old mind:

• The BBRFC on the creature's sleeve, and indeed the rest of the design of the T-shirt the creature is wearing, is a reference to Bandung Barbarians Rugby Football Club, a loosely-organised group of expatriates from various countries (mainly the UK, Australia and New Zealand) for which my father used to turn out. My recollection of the various rugby days out we went to during our time in Java was that they were mainly a pretext for epic beer consumption, probably mainly the product of the Anker brewery with whom the club seemed to have cooked up some sort of endorsement/sponsorship deal, judging by the club T-shirt I am wearing in the images below (probably taken at Pangandaran). The beardy guy piloting the craft is also probably modelled on my Dad, though I should point out he has never smoked a pipe as far as I know.

• The general concept for the creature is clearly adapted/stolen from the Tintin book Red Rackham's Treasure which I read approximately a gazillion times. The smaller shark-based craft there was the brainchild of eccentric genius Professor Calculus. That's his English name, anyway, he was called Tournesol in the original French books. Translations into other languages are available, including, rather marvellously, Welsh; who knows what his name is there. 

• Obviously kids love dinosaurs, and you can see bits from at least three separate dinosaurs in the design of the creature: the head with its distinctive crest is clearly a parasaurolophus, the big fin thing on its back looks as if it's from a dimetrodon, and the spiked tail is a bit like that of a stegosaurus, informally known in slightly tedious paleontological nerd humour circles as a thagomizer. The fins at the rear are presumably a hangover from the fish design I stole the idea from, and I have no idea why the front limbs seem to have their elbows on backwards.