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. 

quantocky surveying

As I said at the start of the recent avalanche of book review posts, the reason for the logjam is that we've been on holiday recently - two holidays actually, though most of the reading was done on the first one. It wasn't all reading, though, my goodness no. 

• We stayed here, just outside Washford a couple of miles inland from Watchet on the north Somerset coast. Not massive for five people but perfectly fine, especially given that the sunny weather enabled a lot of sitting on the verandah reading or outside in the garden eating barbecue food. 
• We made an initial foray into Washford to have a look at Cleeve Abbey, which is quite interesting but which we had to whizz round at high speed as they were about to close. Free entry, though, thanks to our Cadw membership and their reciprocal arrangement with English Heritage.
• After being ushered towards the door there we went up the road a couple of hundred yards to the charmingly rustic White Horse Inn for a cheeky pint. I had an Exmoor Gold, not my favourite thing but perfectly quaffable on a warm day.
• On the Saturday morning Nia and I did the short drive into Minehead to bag their parkrun for our collection. It's a bit of a funny one, all along the seafront so it's very flat but the course is only a kilometre long, so there are five 180-degree turns and it's quite narrow, and consequently not as fast as you might expect. In any case I'm struggling with chronic back pain and sciatica at the moment so I was happy just to trundle round and finish. 
• We'd set aside a day for going back to Minehead and spending some time at Butlin's, one of only three remaining under the original name (the other two being at Bognor Regis and Skegness). It's easy to imagine that there were dozens of these in the holiday camp's heyday in the second half of the twentieth century, and of course it was enough of a cultural trope to generate a whole long-running situation comedy in Hi-De-Hi!, but there were only ever ten of them. The main idea in terms of us visiting was to make use of their water park, which is perfectly fine and has all the usual waves and slides and flumes and the like, but is probably not as good as similar facilities at places like Bluestone, Bracknell's Coral Reef and CenterParcs, the bruising full-body rapids at CenterParcs being the gold standard all other water parks should aspire to. Elsewhere in the park we pumped a few quid into the tuppenny waterfalls, had a ice-cream and went (or at least the kids did) on some fairground rides, which commendably were free with the day pass we'd bought.
• Last Minehead-related thing - if one of my kids had asked me: Dad, why is it called Minehead, I would probably have sat back in my chair, put my slippers up on the table, lit up my pipe and said, well, they used to do mining there and the village was where the, if you will, "head" of the mineshaft and associated workings came out. Good job that didn't happen as that would be completely wrong; in fact the name is an Anglicised version of the Welsh word mynydd, which means "mountain", a very generous description of the modest hill west of the town. 
• We also visited Dunster Castle, again, gratifyingly, for free by virtue of our National Trust membership. I'd never been before (and it is quite interesting) although I had visited Dunster village with Hazel back in 2011. We had a quick wander round the village this time as well and rectified an omission from the previous visit by going to the pub, in this case The Stag's Head where I had a pint of St. Austell Tribute. One very exciting thing that happened during our visit to the castle was Alys spotting a namesake (a fairly rare occurrence), in this case Alys Luttrell, lady of the castle in the first half of the twentieth century. You will of course be able to verify that that is Alys' hand doing the pointing by the size of her thumbnails.
  

• I hadn't been to the area since spending a couple of days here at the wedding of some friends of Hazel's (spoiler alert: they have since divorced) back in the very early days of this blog when I was still charmingly giddy about having recently hooked up with my future wife. Having much more recently done some walking in the Malverns and the Cotswolds and, in passing, bagged the highest point in each, I was keen to do something similar in the nearby Quantocks while we were here. My original notion was to do some sort of point-to-point walk making use of the West Somerset Railway, which has a station at Washford and runs diagonally down the west side of the Quantock ridge between Watchet and Taunton. I couldn't find a way of making this work without constructing an absurdly long walk that was mainly on the flat getting to and from awkwardly-placed railway stations to catch awkwardly-timed trains for awkwardly-large ticket prices, though, so in the end we drove to Crowcombe, parked in their handy village car park and did a round trip walk incorporating Wills Neck (the highest point in the Quantocks at 384 metres or 1261 feet) and a portion of the Quantock ridge before dropping off and coming back into the village from the other side. I say "ridge" but you really have very little sense of it being a ridge in the way that you do on top of the Malverns; it's just a broad plateau. Thirsty after our exertions (just under twelve kilometres or seven-and-a-half miles) we then went to the Carew Arms for a refreshing beverage. I was in need of something cold so I had a pint of Ice Breaker, about which I would say, eh, it's fine. Route map and altitude profile (this one is from GPS Visualizer) are below in the usual way.

the last book I read

Sing Backwards And Weep by Mark Lanegan.

Just to set the scene, for those not in the know, Mark Lanegan was the lead singer of the band Screaming Trees, usually grouped under the grunge banner as they were a rock band based in Seattle in the early 1990s. He later had an extensive solo career and was a prolific collaborator in a variety of styles. But hey, that stuff is literally what the book is about, along with a bunch of other non-music-related stuff.

Lanegan was born in 1964 in Ellensburg, smack in the middle of Washington state. "Smack" is appropriate here too (and later, too, as it happens, in a different context) because his upbringing was harsh, his mother in particular favouring the spare-the-rod approach to child-rearing. As a consequence the young Lanegan jumped at the opportunity to go and live with his father after their marriage ended, but certain habits had become ingrained by this time, or perhaps were just hard-wired regardless of circumstances - a general distaste for being told what to do, an instinct for petty theft, an early drink habit (mirroring his father's) and a general misanthropy, and mistrust of other people.

Ellensburg was not the most promising place for a bright but wild and directionless teenager and the young Lanegan built up an impressive rap sheet of petty crime, mostly fuelled by drink and drugs. Salvation of a sort arrived in the larger-than-life figure of Van Conner, whose parents ran a TV/VCR store and gave Lanegan a job. Van and his older brother Lee had a band in which Van played the bass and Lee played the guitar and wrote most of the material; Lanegan was soon on board, initially as drummer, and, later, once his minimal drumming skills had become apparent, as lead singer. 

Screaming Trees signed to SST Records in the late 1980s and released a few albums to fairly lukewarm interest, before being signed to Epic at the start of the grunge boom and releasing their major-label debut Uncle Anaesthesia; everything up to and including Uncle Anaesthesia is now disowned by Lanegan, who only started making music he felt comfortable with when he insisted on being involved in the songwriting process and constructing songs that suited his vocal range. So in his mind Screaming Trees' legacy rests on their last two albums, 1993's Sweet Oblivion and 1996's Dust. And in this he is almost certainly correct. During this time he was constructing a body of solo work as well, starting with 1990's The Winding Sheet.

One of his collaborators on that album was a young Kurt Cobain, and the other thing that both Lanegan and Cobain were both doing around this time was really getting into heroin in a big way. By the time of Dust Cobain, like many of Lanegan's friends, was dead and Lanegan was a full-time junkie, cooking up crack in his squalid apartment, scouring the streets for heroin, getting arrested and beaten up on a regular basis. After enduring an utterly miserable time on Screaming Trees' late-1996 European tour in support of Dust, schlepping from city to city desperately trying to score enough gear to be able to function for the next show, more and more haggard and emaciated, Lanegan returned to the USA and eventually accepted an offer of a place in a rehab centre courtesy of, of all people, Courtney Love. The book ends with his lengthy stint in rehab and an offer of work and accommodation on his release from -  again, slightly bizarrely - Duff McKagan of Guns'n'Roses. 

The overwhelming sense you get from the sections of Sing Backwards And Weep devoted to unsparing descriptions of the business of heroin addiction (and a lot of the second half of the book is devoted to it) is how utterly, grindingly miserable it all is. I've never dabbled, but by jiminy the highs must be pretty amazing for people to endure the downsides. Those more well-versed in the nature of addiction than me would no doubt say, well, that's the whole point, isn't it; it doesn't start like that, but once you're in you can't get out, and I expect they're right. The other thing that comes across is what an ox-like constitution Lanegan must have had to survive what he subjected himself to, still less be able to function as a rock singer, even if only intermittently, but simultaneously how extraordinarily lucky he was to survive when so many of his friends - Cobain, Jeffrey Lee Pierce of The Gun Club, Layne Staley of Alice In Chains, Kristen Pfaff of Hole - did not. 

The book, despite being published in 2020, ends around the turn of the millennium when Lanegan was completing the process of getting clean, and therefore omits some of the really interesting bits of the second, post-Trees, half of his career, including his stint with Queens Of The Stone Age and his early-2000s albums Field Songs and Bubblegum which are my favourites of his solo work. Perhaps a second volume covering that period was intended, but what we got instead was a brief memoir of Lanegan's brush with death during the COVID-19 pandemic, Devil In A Coma, before his actual death at the age of 57 in 2022. 

It's quite interesting, having read the book, to revisit some of the video material available in the light of knowledge of when Lanegan was clean, or not: for instance compare the fit-looking, animated (by his own laconic standards anyway) Lanegan from this interview with Josh Homme in 2001 with the cadaverous, unshaven, black-eyed, emaciated junkie who you can almost smell through the screen from Screaming Trees' appearance on Later With Jools Holland in 1996. 

Anyway, the book is excellent, if unsparing and harrowing. The whole point, though, as interesting as the details of Lanegan's life are, is the music, and there is an exceptionally wide and varied body of work to get into, Lanegan's raspy baritone being just about the only common factor. Sweet Oblivion and Dust are essential, obviously, and the Last Words compilation of stuff that would have gone onto a subsequent Trees album had they been able to find a label to release it is quite interesting. Field Songs and Bubblegum are my favourites from his solo material (though I certainly haven't heard all of it), though some of the more electronic/industrial stuff on the later albums like Blues Funeral is interesting too. The collaborative stuff is too varied to do justice to here: I quite liked the first album he did with Isobel Campbell, but one was probably enough (they eventually did three) and I very much liked the Black Pudding album he did with guitarist Duke Garwood. I haven't listened in full to the pair of albums he did with Soulsavers, but the two cover versions I have heard off the second album (Broken) - Gene Clark's Some Misunderstanding and Will Oldham's You Will Miss Me When I Burn - are excellent. 

the last book I read

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn.

Ah, the south of France. Some nice coffee and a pain au chocolat on the verandah for breakfast, a stroll around the grounds before lunch, maybe some pâté and some crusty bread for lunch, a nice salad, a nice crisp bottle of white, lovely. You could while away pretty much a whole summer like that, with some minor variations, but that probably wouldn't make for a very interesting novel, but for the addition of one vital extra ingredient: EXTREME MENTAL DERANGEMENT.

The specific south of France location we're in, by the way, is the home of David and Eleanor Melrose and their five-year-old son Patrick. Eleanor's family have money (the house is theirs) and this has enabled David, despite qualifying as a doctor, never actually to have to practise as one. So what does he do all day? Good question: mainly it seems to be eating and drinking, occasionally entertaining visitors (which of course is really just a pretext for more eating and drinking) and devising ways of mentally tormenting and manipulating people. The people in question are mainly his wife Eleanor, who he occasionally asserts his power over by making her perform bizarre demeaning tasks like crawling around eating food off the floor, and his five-year-old son Patrick. Eleanor's situation is not helped by her being a raging alcoholic and half-cut all the time. 

On the day the book starts David is warming up with a bit of light sadism by killing some ants and considering terrorising their French maid by forcing her to have a conversation with him while carrying a heavy and awkward basket of laundry. He then moves on to inflicting pain on Patrick by picking him up by his ears, before later summoning him to his room for a beating, the reasons for which Patrick is unclear about, but which culminates in his being raped by his father. Refreshed by this brisk physical activity, David proceeds downstairs for some lunch and a bottle of wine from the cellar. 

Eleanor, meanwhile, has gone to meet some of the Melroses' weekend guests from the airport, picking up her friend Anne, an American ex-journalist who lives nearby with her philosopher husband Victor, on the way. Eleanor has supped deeply from the various reviving bottles of cognac she keeps in the car in a bid to quell the hangover and nausea after the previous night's indulgence, so by the time she gets to Anne's house she is absolutely smashed, and Anne persuades her to let her drive. Eventually everyone arrives safely back at the Melroses' - Eleanor, Victor, Anne and David's old friend Nicholas and his young, newly-acquired girlfriend Bridget.

Everyone arrives, gets on the booze (naturally) and retires to their rooms to freshen up and get ready for dinner, which follows a standard pattern of upper-middle-class bitchiness: firstly about people of their mutual acquaintance who aren't there and later, as the drink takes hold, about each other, probing known lines of weakness. David is the acknowledged master at this, picking on Nicholas' tendency to pick up young women who fall for his handsomeness and minor aristocratic title but then find him middle-aged and boring, Victor's consciousness of being not quite as posh as David and Nicholas, and Anne's liberal views that mark her as an outlier within the group. 

Patrick, meanwhile, waits on the stairs, having tried vainly to attract his mother's attention after falling down and breaking a glass earlier. Often required to construct a rich internal fantasy life to fill the periods of complete neglect by his parents and the lack of anyone of his own age to associate with, he dreams of escape and revenging himself on those who have wronged him.

Context is all with a book like this, on the face of it an oddly structured one where the pivotal event - the rape of a small child by his father - happens almost exactly at the halfway point, and where the end of the book, where some climactic event might be expected to occur, is occupied by a dinner party where some entertaining verbal sparring happens and two of the less insufferable attendees decide to leave early. It all makes a bit more sense when you understand that this is the first in a series of novels featuring the central character of Patrick Melrose (well, central over the course of the series, presumably; he's quite a peripheral character here) and, moreover, that the events depicted are closely based on the author's own life - including, unfortunately for him, the sexual abuse bits. 

It's quite a short book (less than 200 pages, large, widely-spaced text) in which St Aubyn manages to set up a cast of characters, round them out concisely so we feel as if we know who they are, and mercilessly skewer their shortcomings and pretensions (and, in David's case, their borderline-psychopathic monstrousness). Aside from Patrick, who is only five and therefore largely blameless (although you do get a sense of some stored-up Issues that might be troublesome in later life), Anne is about the only vaguely likable character. In an odd way I thought it was reminiscent of Penelope Fitzgerald in the sort of literary TARDIS effect of rich characterisation crammed into a small number of words and pages, though with added bumrape of course.

Posh people, without anything pressing to occupy their time like a need to earn a living, mooching around drinking like fish and being Just Awful is a possible recipe for a story that's just annoying and hard to care about, and the writing has to be very good to avoid all of that happening. Luckily it is, and the reader's knowledge that Patrick is stuck in the middle of all of this, soaking it up and filing it all away for later, tethers the story to something the reader might actually care about.

The original Patrick Melrose novels were published as a trilogy between 1992 and 1994; St Aubyn later revisited the series and wrote another two several years later. The whole five-novel series was adapted for television in 2018, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the adult Patrick Melrose. I'm not going to make any rash promises here and now about reading all of the books, but I'll certainly be seeking out the next one (Bad News).

the second-last book I read

Random Acts Of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack.

Lola Hart is a pretty regular twelve-year-old, worried about all the usual things: school, her Mum and Dad, her younger sister Cheryl (known to all as Boob), troublesome feelings, you know, down there. Oh, and the incipient total collapse of society, as well. 

Lola attends a private school in New York City, but her parents aren't exactly rich, and their financial position isn't especially secure - her father works as a screenwriter trying to sell scripts to Hollywood directors and her mother has recently been laid off from a teaching post and is trying to find another one. But there is civil unrest both in Los Angeles where Lola's Dad is trying to sell his scripts and closer to home in New York, and no-one's bothered about buying film scripts.

So Lola's Dad gets a fairly menial job in a bookstore in New York, under the borderline psychopathic Mister Mossbacher, and Lola's Mum gets some occasional freelance editing and proofreading work, but it's not enough to pay the school fees and the rent. So the family ups and moves from their nice suburban residence to a smaller apartment in the less desirable surroundings of the Lower East Side, and by less desirable I mean nearer to the bits of the city that are literally on fire with roving street gangs attacking passers-by and making castanets out of their testicles already.

You can't stay indoors the whole time, though, and Lola ventures out and meets some of the other residents of the area, including some girls of roughly her own age, in particular African-American Iz and her friends Jude and Weezie. Iz seems to have an actual home and at least one parent, but Jude and Weezie seem to exist on the edge of "normal" society and straddle the boundary between it and the lawless areas, places Lola is afraid but also slightly excited to venture into. Iz and Lola's friendship develops into a tentative romance with a bit of innocent(ish) fumbling during sleepovers, and some friction develops with Jude and Weezie about their group expanding to admit a fourth member; eventually Weezie and Lola have a full-blown fight and Lola discovers a previously-unimagined talent for physical violence.

Society continues to crumble, Presidents come on the TV to issue calming advice, or to announce further military crackdowns in troubled areas, and are assassinated on a monthly schedule. Dad, worked to exhaustion at the bookshop by Mister Mossbacher, quietly has a heart attack and dies at the kitchen table, and Boob goes to live with her aunt in California, itself troubled by violence but probably safer than New York. Lola and her group of friends ease into a routine of occasional petty crime, usually pickpocketing on the subway, and some of the proceeds help keep Lola and her Mum's heads above water, although it's debatable how much Mum knows about any of it given the size of her prescription tranquiliser habit.

With Dad dead and Mum unable to work Lola has to decide what she's going to do to survive, which basically boils own to a choice of crimes: underage prostitution or violence. Lola, having already displayed an aptitude for it, chooses violence and decides to get some practice in by brutalising Mister Mossbacher in the stairwell of his apartment block with a baseball bat. It turns out that this puts her beyond the pale even with Iz and her group of friends, and Lola closes the narrative by reflecting on the completion of her journey to the dark side. 

The whole of Random Acts Of Senseless Violence is presented as entries in Lola's diary, and part of the story, as well as the stuff explicitly described in the text, is the gradual transition (over just short of five months) from little-girl excitement about toys and her new bedroom to a dark manifesto of her violent intentions delivered in a rich street slang (images below are extracts from the first and last pages of the book, just to illustrate the point). This sort of stretchy future-English carries echoes of Nadsat from A Clockwork Orange, and of Riddley Walker and Feersum Endjinn from this list.

As with a few other books on this list (Lanark, True Grit, Stoner and The Queen's Gambit plus maybe others I haven't spotted) Random Acts Of Senseless Violence carries a foreword by another author on this list, in this case multiple featuree William Gibson, who recommends it regularly and whose quote you can see on the front cover (though it's not from the foreword). 

My paperback edition is another book in the excellent Gollancz SF Masterworks series, in common with quite a few other books on this list (most recently Grass); it's also another where you might question what the "science fiction" categorisation even means: no death rays or spaceships here, nor even anything much resembling the internet. It's probably not quite what I expected from reading the recommendations and the cover blurb but I enjoyed it very much; in common with a few other people I do think the title is ill-chosen, misleading (i.e. in terms of the actual content) and probably repels quite a few potential readers who would otherwise read and enjoy it. 

the third-last book I read

Longitude by Dava Sobel.

I'll tell you what I hate, right - there you are, an early-18th-century ship's captain and supposedly competent navigator, leading a crew of experienced seamen (no, stop it) and supposedly competent navigators, confidently under full sail returning from Gibraltar to London; you've just sat back and lit up a pipe when the entire fleet dashes itself to pieces on some rocks you didn't even know were there. A bit embarrassing for you, or at least it would be if you hadn't been drowned along with a couple of thousand of your men, or, possibly, depending on which version of the legend you believe, nearly drowned, washed up on a remote shore and then promptly murdered for some of the shiny trinkets on your person.

Anyway, this was far from an isolated incident and by the early 18th century the Navy and various other bodies overseeing military and commercial sea travel were getting pretty sick of it. The principal problem they identified was an inability to determine longitude with an acceptable degree of accuracy - the sort of degree of accuracy that prevents you accidentally crashing into a collection of islands and jagged bits of rock several miles wide. 

This is not the place for a detailed lecture on maritime navigation, nor do I have the expertise or inclination to deliver one, but the main point is that to know your position on the earth's surface you need two co-ordinates, latitude and longitude; latitude is pretty easy to calculate and longitude is surprisingly hard in comparison. Many methods were used over the years, from the scientifically-sound but unbelievably complicated in practice such as observing the transits of the various satellites of Jupiter, to the simpler but also bonkers such as stabbing a dog and then dipping the knife in some magic powder at set intervals. 

The simplest solution is just to have two clocks, one set to the time of whatever fixed point you're using as a meridian (nowadays this would be Greenwich but there have been a a few rival ones in use over the centuries, notably Paris) and one set to whatever the local time is at your location. It is a simple matter to then convert this time difference into a longitude. The bit that is far from simple is to produce a clock that is accurate enough for a long enough period of time and in a variety of challenging conditions - wide fluctuations in temperature and humidity, constant unpredictable motion, occasionally being eaten by a giant squid - something that up to the 18th century had been beyond even the most skilful clockmakers.

But *voice-over-guy voice* into this world of approximate timekeeping one man must walk alone, and that man's name is ... John Fashanu. No, wait *checks notes* John Harrison. A carpenter rather than a clockmaker by trade, he dabbles with clocks in his spare time, eventually moving on to making them, originally with the workings being made primarily of wood. Intrigued by the public challenge issued by the Longitude Board (and perhaps a bit by the generous financial reward for a workable solution), he starts working on clocks specifically designed to work at sea, first some large and spectacular steampunk-looking beasts and then, eventually, after more than twenty years of work, the pocket-watch-sized H4, in the process of all this work casually inventing a whole host of technological and engineering innovations like the bimetallic strip. 

Despite H4 and some of its larger predecessors performing well in excess of the accuracy requirements set out by the Board of Longitude, Harrison and his son William never received the full sum promised by the terms of the challenge - this is partly down to Harrison's own perfectionism and the great length of time it took to produce the prototypes, but also perhaps some skullduggery by those with something to gain from promoting the other astronomical methods, in particular Harrison's nemesis and Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne. 

Of course a good story requires heroes and villains, and Sobel makes no secret of Harrison being the hero here, plucky no-nonsense Northern lad pitted against the pompous stuffed shirts at Navigation Central and coming out on top thanks to pluck and grit. The role of villain is played by Nevil Maskelyne (more like Evil Maskelyne, amirite), wielding his royally-appointed power to promote his own impractical methods and doing his best to discredit the results of the marine chronometer tests and even "accidentally" dropping bits of the mechanism on the floor in the course of "inspecting" them. 

I daresay Maskelyne was a more nuanced character than the one portrayed here, but a bit of a broad-brush approach is inevitable in a popular science book, and moreover a pretty short one - my Harper Perennial paperback edition is a large-print 175 pages with quite a lot of chapter breaks. I suppose I'd have preferred a bit more meat on the bones, as it's an interesting story, but it gets the job done pretty effectively. Longitude won several science and general non-fiction awards when it was published in 1996, and was made into a TV series starring lots of famous names including Michael Gambon as Harrison, where I'd imagine further liberties were taken with historical facts in order to provide a bit of narrative drive.