what the hell am I doing golfing in LA

The recently-concluded US Open at the Los Angeles Country Club followed, in some ways, a familiar pattern for recent major golf championships: hey, Rory's in contention, can he hold it together on the last day, push on and finally win a first major since 2014 - erm, no.

One way in which it didn't conform to the typical pattern for US Opens was the low scoring, particularly on day one. In particular, there were two leaders who posted a score of eight under par, which given the typically miserly US Open par score of 70 means that they posted rounds of 62, which, as I'm sure you'll know, equals the major championship scoring record. As I'm sure you'll also recall there was a period of 44 years where the major championship scoring record stood at 63, a score first achieved by Johnny Miller at the US Open in 1973 and equalled no fewer than 30 times subsequently before finally being beaten by Branden Grace at the Open in 2017. That round collapsed the record list to a single entry before this year's US Open; the rounds of Rickie Fowler and Xander Schauffele on day one here increase that list to three entries. Note also that just as the old list had a 24-7 split in favour of a round of 63 not winning you the tournament, none of the three 62s posted so far got its owner over the winning line either.

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Branden Grace	Open	2017	third	tied 6th	Jordan Spieth
Rickie Fowler	US Open	2023	first	tied 5th	Wyndham Clark
Xander Schauffele	US Open	2023	first	tied 10th	Wyndham Clark

Both 62s here were of the standard two-putt-par-on-the-18th variety, which means that both men had a putt for a 61, quite long ones in both cases.

All major rounds of 63 continue to be an irrelevance for the purposes of this list, so Tommy Fleetwood's second major championship round of 63 merits barely a raised eyebrow, both of them having been subsequent to Grace's 62. Even Brooks Koepka's two 63s in successive PGA Championships in 2018 and 2019 only get a shrug and a "so what", even though they both contributed to tournament wins. Rules are rules I'm afraid. Greg Norman and Vijay Singh are the only two men to make multiple 63s while the list was "live".

the last book I read

Temples Of Delight by Barbara Trapido.

Alice Pilling's life is pretty good by most people's standards - comfortably-off parents, albeit a bit on the slightly vulgar nouveau riche side prone to occasionally pronouncing French words incorrectly, a nice place at a nice private school for nice girls - but she craves a bit of, I dunno, excitement, even danger. This promptly arrives in the person of Veronica McCrail, known to all her friends as Jem, a tall and confident girl much given to snarky back-sassery to teachers, enthusiasm for works of subversive art and literature and hilarious stories of her hilarious family and their adventures - all pretty transparently bogus, but Alice is a sweet and trusting and gullible type, so it's all good. The two strike up a close, if somewhat mismatched, friendship, which is abruptly terminated when Jem fails to secure a scholarship to continue her studies in the Upper School (the sixth form, basically, or, erm, year thirteen or so in the crazy modern system). 

Alice's continuing academic excellence has her lined up for a place at Oxford, and it's there that she meets with Roland Dent, a local schoolteacher, and they strike up a relationship. While Alice seems quite content to drift along having nice day trips and occasionally hanging out with Roland's schoolboys who are slightly breathlessly intimidated by an Actual Woman, Roland already has some major plans for Alice which culminate in his making her Mrs. Dent. On a trip to the north of England with some of the boys Alice and Roland take some time out for a drive in the countryside, whereupon he makes it clear that they will shortly be parking in a secluded woodland spot so that he can deflower her, whereupon she makes it clear that this will be happening over her dead body and as if to prove the point drives the car off a bridge and into a river.

In the wake of this unsuccessful relationship, and while recuperating from the crash, Alice then enters, perhaps rather rashly, into another relationship with Matthew Riley, the young man who helped to rescue her and Roland from their drowned car. Then, after five years of silence, a letter arrives from Jem with some news: firstly she is in a Catholic hospital in Hampshire dying from cancer, secondly that she is pregnant and due to give birth imminently, and thirdly that she has come into possession of some information about a novel shortly to be published by an American publisher which she believes plagiarises some of her own teenage writings, and wants Alice to deal with it after she's gone.

Dealing with the novel situation involves engaging with Giovanni Angeletti, the American publisher in question, who happens to be in the country and accompanies Alice on a lengthy search for Jem's original manuscript. Once this is found Giovanni takes it upon himself to track down Jem and, having done so just too late to allow Alice to see her again before she dies, drops the bombshell that Jem's dying wish was that Alice be the legal guardian of her (safely delivered) child. 

So Giovanni will now jet off back to America and out of Alice's life, right? Well, no, actually, as in addition to there being a few novel-related (not to mention baby-related) loose ends to tie up, it turns out Giovanni has a non-academic interest in Alice, even after she reveals that she herself is pregnant, presumably as a result of her brief (and now ended) relationship with Matthew. Will Jem's writings ever see the light of day (now under her own name rather than that of the plagiarist)? Will Giovanni still want to make Alice the third Mrs. Angeletti? Will Alice want to become the third Mrs. Angeletti, especially after discovering that both the previous holders of that title died in slightly mysterious circumstances?

Those of you with absurdly long memories will recall that I read Juggling, which is a loose sequel to Temples Of Delight, back in early 2007 (it was the 12th book review on this list, this one being the 370th). Back in those days the reviews were a bit less verbose so I see that I didn't include much in the way of plot detail, but basically it involves Alice's two daughters and their adventures. I don't remember much about it (I mean, it was 16 years ago) but I remember enjoying it greatly, as I have every Barbara Trapido book that I've read (with the possible exception of Frankie & Stankie which I did have some reservations about). Temples Of Delight is no exception, despite the implausibilities of plot - partly this is because some parts of it, and some of the characters, are supposed to mirror the plot and characters of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. You've got to be a bit careful with this to avoid your readers concluding that you're just manoeuvring your characters into situations according to some pre-conceived formula, rather than just letting things happen, but of course if your readers are smart enough to worry about this stuff they'll presumably be smart enough to realise that this is actually how most novels get written anyway, just less transparently. Another similar example on this list is A Thousand Acres which mirrors the structure of Shakespeare's King Lear, and just as there I was not troubled by any particular familiarity with the source material here, which in many ways is probably a good thing.

Anyway, Temples Of Delight is itself a delight to read; I suppose what I would say is if you have the choice it would probably be better to read it and Juggling in the "right" order in order to have the shared narrative flow a bit better. Doesn't really matter, though. 

all the pretty hearses

You'll recall how I, even now only dimly aware of the awesome and terrible power I wield via this blog, joked about how the recent death of Martin Amis wasn't my fault, since I'd never posted a review of any of his books here. Well, just to redress the balance, here's one that definitely is my fault: Cormac McCarthy, who died today aged 89. I did speculate here back in 2013 that given his relatively un-prolific rate of output it was unclear whether we'd get any more novels before the inevitable happened - well, evidently mindful of this, and perhaps conscious that he was pushing his luck time-wise since my review of Blood Meridian appeared here all the way back in July 2009, he had a clearing of the decks in 2022 and knocked out two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. 

But the Curse Of Electric Halibut will not be denied, and when it finally took effect McCarthy had clocked up a survival span of just under fourteen years, wresting the previous record from the cold dead hands of Alison Lurie. McCarthy's demise adjusts the average age and curse length values to just over 82 and just under six years respectively.

The Road and No Country For Old Men are the other two novels that appear here, and all three are excellent in their own way. The Road would be The One, though. 

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
José Saramago	9th May 2009	18th June 2010	87	1y 40d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	1y 291d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	6y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
David Cook	24th February 2009	16th September 2015	74	6y 205d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
William McIlvanney	7th September 2010	5th December 2015	79	5y 90d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d
John Berger	10th November 2009	2nd January 2017	90	7y 55d
Nicholas Mosley	24th September 2011	28th February 2017	93	5y 159d
Helen Dunmore	10th March 2008	5th June 2017	64	9y 89d
JP Donleavy	21st May 2015	11th September 2017	91	2y 114d
Ursula Le Guin	6th December 2015	22nd January 2018	88	2y 49d
Anita Shreve	2nd September 2006	29th March 2018	71	11y 211d
Philip Roth	23rd December 2017	22nd May 2018	85	0y 150d
Justin Cartwright	7th September 2008	3rd December 2018	75	10y 89d
Toni Morrison	18th July 2010	5th August 2019	88	9y 20d
Charles Portis	3rd April 2018	17th February 2020	86	1y 320d
Alison Lurie	24th March 2007	3rd December 2020	95	13y 254d
John le Carré	21st February 2008	12th December 2020	89	12y 295d
Joan Didion	14th December 2010	23rd December 2021	87	11y 12d
Hilary Mantel	22nd October 2010	22nd September 2022	70	11y 338d
Greg Bear	4th October 2021	19th November 2022	71	1y 48d
Russell Banks	4th December 2018	7th January 2023	82	4y 35d
Cormac McCarthy	22nd September 2009	13th June 2023	89	13y 347d

the last book I read

Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill.

There is a woman. A woman with no name. Well, presumably she has a name in her actual life (yes, yes, all right, fictional life) but we're never told what it is. She meets a man, also nameless, and they start up a relationship which eventually leads to marriage and the arrival of a daughter. 

Having children changes the dynamic of the relationship, as it always does, and both parents' concerns shift towards keeping a small person alive and entertained rather than indulging themselves and each other. Moreover, while both have jobs it's the wife ("the wife" is how she's referred to pretty much exclusively for most of the book) who has to make most of the sacrifices to accommodate childcare needs - hey, because patriarchy, amirite, ladies?

So the husband (again, this is how he is referred to, although the story is told exclusively from the wife's point of view) is off at work while the wife is at home watching CBeebies in her slippers. She is a writer and teacher of writing so there is at least the possibility of doing some work during this time, and she does a couple of writing projects, notably a sort of general history of space exploration in collaboration with an ex-astronaut, though she struggles to find a fresh angle on the well-known material. 

Meanwhile hubby is out and about in the office, just hanging out, having lunch with colleagues without a care in the world, and, eventually, having an affair with an attractive young redheaded colleague. I mean I don't want to imply that this is inevitable behaviour; many men (including, just to be clear, me) manage to return to work while their wives are still on maternity leave without feeling the need to put it about relentlessly. The part that probably is inevitable is the part where the wife finds out and is, understandably, not pleased. After an awkward confrontation and a bit of A Scene between the three points of the love triangle outside the husband's office, it is agreed that wife, husband and daughter will uproot from urban New York and try to patch things up in a more rural environment with trees and grass and squirrels and shit.

So far, so meh, you might say: why, this is a perfectly commonplace tale told a thousand times before. There's a couple of answers to that: firstly every tale of conflict and woe has some properties that are uniquely its own, and secondly if you're not going to write a plot-driven heart-pounding arse-quaking thrillathon about sending an army of zombie Hitler clones to reboot the Sun then you might consider doing something interesting and unusual with novel style and structure instead. In this particular case that means the whole novel is written as a series of short paragraphs, many conveying something mostly tangential to the plot but hopefully coalescing into some deeper meaning. 

Ironically this works best in the first half of the book where the tone is much more meandering and discursive; about halfway through the viewpoint shifts from first- to third-person (though still with the wife as the focus) and adopts much more of a linear narrative to describe the marital breakdown. I think this second part is less effective, partly from just being a more orthodox narrative cut up and mucked around with a bit. 

This New York Times review asks the following question about the wife's unwritten second novel, referred to a couple of times in the book:

What is this novel? Why hasn’t it been written?

There is a sense in which one might ask the same question of Dept. Of Speculation itself. It's a very delicate balancing act writing a novel as trimmed of extraneous fat as this: you have to be careful not to trim away so much that you lose a sense of what's actually going on. I should add that this doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it; the structure works pretty well and some of the stuff about childbirth and early-years parenthood is very insightful, and, heck, it's 177 pages of widely-spaced narrow paragraphs so it's very quick to read. 

the best (and worst) of blondie

Literature and sport are all very well, you'll be saying, but what I really want is to stuff my big fat stupid face with some delicious cakey goodness until I fart. Well, Electric Halibut is here for you. It was my wife's birthday last week and, as is (intermittently) traditional, I concocted some goodies to celebrate. A few highlights from previous years include 2020's chocolate brownie cake, a triumph taste-wise but on an unfeasibly massive scale given that we were occupying at that time a moment in human history where it was uniquely difficult to share any of it with anyone outside the house. We did eventually work our way through all of it but it was quite an epic struggle.

And then there was 2021, where I hatched the idea of making some raspberry and white chocolate blondies instead, but in my hurry to get things in the oven (as it was rather late in the evening) made the elementary mistake of omitting all of the flour from the recipe, resulting in the ungodly oily lumpy (and needless to say inedible) goop pictured here. 

Then in 2022 we were in the throes of just having moved house and having to do quite a bit of unexpected junk clearance before getting our stuff organised how we wanted it, so I granted myself a cake amnesty and went and bought one from the shop instead. It was very nice, but to my taste a bit too sweet; then again I can't even remember to put flour in a cake so what the fuck do I know.

H's birthday today so bought this interesting cake. Huwie came with me and was very intent on reading the label. Served it up and he leaned over to H and whispered "Mum, it's a SUSPICIOUS CAKE". Actually very nice and not at all suspicious pic.twitter.com/EgSyJEPmuq

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) May 26, 2022

Anyway, I wasn't about to let 2021's failure define me as a man, a husband, and a cook, so I decided that 2023 was the year that we would finally crack the definitive blondie recipe. And I firmly believe that this is it. Note that it is largely derived from this recipe, with a bit of scaling-up of amounts to fit my 9" by 13" brownie tin and a bit of adjustment of proportions to accommodate the raspberries (which the original recipe doesn't have) and ensure it's not too absurdly sweet.

• 250 g unsalted butter
• 250 g white chocolate
• 125 g white granulated sugar
• 125 g light brown soft sugar
• 4 medium eggs
• 250 g plain flour
• 200 g white chocolate chips
• 50g fresh raspberries, chopped

Melt the butter and chocolate together (I used the microwave; a bowl over a pan of water would work just as well) mix it all up, add the sugar and eggs, mix some more, stir in the flour (if you're using an electric mixer, do this bit with a spoon first to avoid being engulfed in a mushroom cloud) and then the raspberries and chocolate chips (don't use the electric mixer at all here or you will end up with a uniformly pink cake with no raspberry bits in it).

That should give you a thick but still pourable batter which you can pour into a paper-lined brownie/traybake tin and put in an oven at around 180C/gas mark 4 for about 20-25 minutes. As with the brownies you want a slight wobble in the middle when you take them out. Let them cool and then put them in the fridge (overnight is good), then cut into smallish squares (they're pretty rich). You'll find the edge squares are a bit more cakey while the ones from the middle have a denser, rawer texture.

Anyway, they were exceptionally well-received and disappeared pretty quickly, helped by us being away for the weekend with another family of five. Where were those guys back in 2020 to help with the monster brownie cake? Well, locked in their house, obviously, but you take my point.