the fourth-last book I read

Gabriel's Moon by William Boyd.

Gabriel Dax has his life pretty well-worked-out: a reasonably lucrative career as a writer of travel-related books which allows him to just swan off to places that interest him, as long as he can persuade his publisher that there's a book in it, a nice easy-going relationship with his girlfriend Lorraine based mainly around vigorous and mutually-fulfilling sex with refreshingly few demands for commitment being made, and a cordial but arm's-length relationship with his older brother Sefton involving occasional visits to Sefton's family home for Sunday lunch and equally occasional errands run by Gabriel on Sefton's behalf, often coinciding with one of Gabriel's research trips, and usually involving the delivery and handover of some seemingly innocuous package to some seemingly random individual. 

The only cloud on Gabriel's horizon is his troublesome insomnia, something that seems to be related to a traumatic event in his early childhood: the death of his mother in a house fire, a fire which Gabriel himself - six years old at the time - barely escaped (Sefton was safely off at boarding school at the time). 

As part of one of his research trips Gabriel finds himself in Léopoldville, the Belgian colonial capital of Congo (nowadays Kinshasa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo respectively). While he is there (in mid-1960) he reconnects with an old university friend who is now working in the newly-established post-colonial government and who offers him an intriguing opportunity: interview the new Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. Gabriel does this and comes away with some tapes featuring some exclusive material including some intriguing speculation from Lumumba himself about shady foreign influences who want him dead, even to the extent of naming names - none of which mean anything much to Gabriel. 

On his return to England, Gabriel delivers a draft article to a newspaper, expecting to be in possession of a lucrative scoop, but finds that the piece gets spiked for ill-defined reasons. Something to do with sensitive material in the article, something to do also with the coup that's happened since and controversially removed Lumumba from office. Whatever, the article isn't getting published and Gabriel isn't getting paid. 

Perhaps, as a result of this, Gabriel is slightly more receptive to an offer of alternative earnings than he might otherwise be, or perhaps it's just something about Faith Green, who approaches him a few days later with a revelation - she was on the flight back from Léopoldville with him and seems very well-informed about Congolese politics - and an offer: go to Spain, buy a pencil sketch from a Spanish artist and deliver it to an agreed contact, get paid, job done. Faith makes no secret of knowing Sefton, nor of them both working for some murky outpost of the Foreign Office, and of this "errand" being of the same variety that Gabriel has already been doing without giving it much thought.

Gabriel, after some token resistance, agrees and carries out the mission, which he finds interesting and stimulating and seems to have gone well. He decides to stay on in Spain for a few days and meets a young American girl, strikes up a tentative romance and agrees to transport a parcel for her to an address in Cambridge, and it's only when he's at the airport that an instinct makes him look inside the parcel and find a couple of packets of heroin. 

Having dodged - possibly literally - a bullet there Gabriel decides the old espionage game is too dangerous and attempts to settle back into his old life, while also trying to exorcise some of the ghosts of his past (and cure his insomnia) by doing some digging into the circumstances of the fire that killed his mother. But his new life won't be shrugged off that easily. Firstly it becomes apparent that the CIA have taken an interest in him and may have been responsible for the attempt to frame him with the heroin; this interest seems to be linked to the Lumumba tapes and what they may reveal about US involvement with the coup that removed Lumumba and installed Joseph Mobutu in his place. Secondly, Faith Green would like another drawing acquired from the Spanish artist and delivered, and Gabriel seems oddly unable to say no to her. Is it because he wants to get her into bed? Well, partly, yes. Anyway, Gabriel carries out the mission with similar results to the last one - the drawing is acquired and delivered to its recipient, Kit Caldwell, in Cádiz. But this time the drawing comes with information: Caldwell is a Russian spy and planning to defect, taking all he knows with him. Gabriel is preparing to return home, his mission complete, when he happens to call at Faith's hotel and see her in conversation with his brother Sefton. Realising he's been manipulated, he decides in a fit of pique to tip off Caldwell and facilitate his defection before returning home. 

His fascination with Faith Green having by this time curdled into mild obsession, he employs an acquaintance to tail her and find out where she lives. Not only does he do this but he finds out that she is currently taking a holiday in Southwold, so Gabriel, having nothing better to do, decides to make his way there for some light stalking. Tracking her down by spotting her distinctive Mercedes, he stakes out the house where she is staying, apparently with another man, and spies on her for a few days before she corners him in a pub and demands to know what he's up to. Taking a commendably forgiving view of his antics, she then brings him back to the house and allows him to stay the night - no funny business, just full sex. The gentleman friend is away for a few days, fortunately. 

Once everyone has returned to London, Faith is back in touch with another mission, this time a bit more dangerous, over behind the Iron Curtain, in Warsaw, and once again involving Caldwell, who, it turns out, is at least a double agent, and possibly a triple or even quintuple one. Gabriel demands that this time if he's going to be doing proper grown-up spying that he be issued with a gun and the means to conceal it while travelling, which Faith and her organisation (some murky offshoot of MI6, but - hey - aren't they all) agree to surprisingly readily. And just as well, it turns out, because after Gabriel decides to spurn the standard plane home and cover his tracks by getting a ferry from Hamburg instead, he is confronted by the CIA guy who's been on his tail since Gabriel's first trip to Spain and is keen to tidy up a few, hem hem, loose ends. Gabriel is obliged to pop a cap in his ass and tip his body overboard into the North Sea, thus completing his journey from Just Some Guy to International Superspy And Unstoppable Killing Machine. 

I glossed over a few bits of plot there, but as you can see there's still a lot of it, especially in a book of only (in my Penguin paperback edition) 263 pages. The main trunk of the plot is obviously the spying stuff and some of the peripheral stuff like Gabriel's childhood trauma (i.e. the house fire), his investigation of it and his visits to a psychoanalyst to explore it seem a bit inconsequential in comparison. Some of this can be accounted for when you realise that this is the first book of a trilogy featuring the same central character (The Predicament and Cold Sunset are the other two) - maybe some of these themes are being developed in order to be resolved in later books. 

This is (it hardly needs to be said) a book in Boyd's espionage thriller genre which also includes Restless and Waiting For Sunrise, and actually Gabriel's character arc isn't that different from Lysander Rief's in Waiting For Sunrise - young man with odd psychological affliction (insomnia here, anorgasmia there) drawn into murky activities which he gradually realises he has a natural aptitude for. As all of Boyd's books, regardless of theme, are it's relentlessly readable, Gabriel is an engaging central character and Faith is an intriguing and enigmatic foil for him who we want to know more about. There's so much going on in a relatively short space of time that some of it feels a bit breathless, though with this sort of book that's not a bad thing as it scoots the reader past some of the more glaring plot implausibilities without having too much time to dwell on them. 

Oddly, the other book it put me in mind of was Dick Francis' For Kicks, the first book of his I ever read back when I was a teenager and also featuring a young man thrown into undercover activity (to expose a horse-related crime ring in this case - pretty much the plot of every Dick Francis book, to be fair), discovering a natural talent for it and transitioning into it as a full-time job. Gabriel's Moon is also the second book on this list to feature Patrice Lumumba and the early days of Congolese independence as a sub-plot, the first being The Poisonwood Bible. There is also a more tenuous link with Brazzaville Beach, still my favourite Boyd of all, in that Brazzaville, capital of the smaller neighbouring state of Republic of the Congo, sits just a couple of miles across the Congo river from Léopoldville/Kinshasa. 

dropping a satisfying backlog

The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed the slightly non-standard title of the last post and wondered: what's going on there then? Well, it's a combination of things: firstly I've just been on holiday for a week and had a really good stint of book-reading, helped by all three kids now being at an age where they're keen to do the same (and by my keen coaching of all of them over the years to be voracious readers, one of my proudest achievements as a parent), secondly all the books I read on holiday were fairly short (in the 200-ish-pages range), and thirdly I finished Under The Banner Of Heaven a day or two before we left and didn't have time to blog it at the time. 

If you're wondering, yes, this is - thanks to the combination of factors described above - the first time that modified title has ever included the word "fifth". A quick scan suggests quite a few occurrences of "second", probably also mostly holiday reading but plausibly occasionally just laxness at getting round to writing a review. I think I've got as far as "third" three times, all associated with holidays significant enough that I can remember them without having to check: 

• our Austrian holiday in September 2008 (relevant title was Norwegian Wood, other two were The Promise Of Happiness and A Small Death In Lisbon)
• our Turkish holiday in October 2010 (relevant title was Falling Man, other two were The Girl Who Played With Fire and Chatterton)
• our honeymoon in Canada in July 2011, here we scaled the (until now) unique heights of "fourth" as well (relevant title was The Little Friend, other three were Hotel Du Lac, The Tortilla Curtain and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest)

the fifth-last book I read

Under The Banner Of Heaven by Jon Krakauer.

Imagine, if you will, the set of circumstances that would have led you, yourself a husband and father, to enter the house of a family personally known to you and to brutally murder a young woman (your sister-in-law) and her one-year-old daughter by cutting their throats with a razor-sharp kitchen knife. And not in an uncontrollable crime-of-passion kind of way, either - slowly, even apologetically, just doing what must be done. 

I would hope, unless you are literally some sort of professional assassin or psychopath, that you would find it difficult to imagine what set of circumstances would motivate you to such a course of action, and you might throw your hands up and say, well, I would literally have to have LOST MY FREAKIN' MIND in some way. 

Ron and Dan Lafferty had a slightly different explanation for carrying out the crime described above, and the background underlying that motivation, and a more detailed description of the crime and its aftermath, are the primary subjects of this book.

At this point we need, as the book does at about the same point in its narrative, to do a deep dive into the origins of the Mormon religion or, more properly, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. No disrespect but you can see why people use the shorter form, which derives from the name of a key prophet and supposed author of some of the religion's early sacred texts which were later dictated to Joseph Smith in the 1820s. 

As I've said elsewhere, Mormonism provides a fascinating insight into how religions develop, occupying as it does a sort of sweet spot between the two-thousand-years-ago respectability of mainstream Christianity and the fairly-obviously-loony (to most, anyway) ultra-modern stuff like Scientology. One of the obvious things that Mormonism and Scientology have in common is a foundational figure (Joseph Smith and L Ron Hubbard respectively) claiming a series of personal revelations via a sort of hotline to God, and in possession of enough personal magnetism and charisma to persuade an early group of adherents of the truth of his revelations.

I'm very conscious of not wanting to re-mount an old hobby-horse here in regard to religion (though my views on it have changed very little from when I used to post about it more frequently), but I think the quote generally attributed to physicist Steven Weinberg is relevant here: 

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

One of the things it also takes, or, to put it another way, one of the things a religion requires to really take hold, is a foundational figure with enough charisma and persuasiveness to tip people past their normal self-imposed moral limits and do stuff like the Mountain Meadows Massacre and, subsequently, use it as a means of cementing a tribal them-against-us mentality among the converted. 

The other thing Joseph Smith brought to the table in the early days of Mormonism was an intense desire for young women and a general inability to keep it in his britches. In an entirely coincidental and unrelated development, around this time Smith received some further divine revelations including an unequivocal thumbs-up for the practice of polygamy; Smith himself selflessly volunteered to set an example in this regard and is generally reckoned to have had between 30 and 40 wives by the time of his death in 1844. 

The polygamy business, which the mainstream Mormon church keeps trying to disavow and distance itself from, and various fundamentalist Mormon sects (including the one the Lafferty brothers were adherents of) keep reviving, is probably the main thing that keeps Mormonism a fringe concern except in certain hot-spots in the USA, the other being the inherent ludicrousness of the foundational texts and their method of being brought into being. Now as a non-judgmental utilitarian liberal type you'd have to say well, look there's nothing actually wrong with polyamory or polygamy per se if that's what everyone involved wants, everyone involved has a clear picture of what's going on and no-one's getting hurt, unless of course that's specifically what they want. The trouble with the Mormon version is that it's tied up with a bunch of other much less palatable stuff, firstly a fairly grim set of attitudes to women in general and secondly a disturbing penchant for older men marrying extremely young girls. 

A case in point - Warren Jeffs features as a fairly peripheral character in Under The Banner Of Heaven, having only recently (on the book's publication in 2003) become the head of the FLDS, the largest of the fundamentalist polygamy-endorsing splinter groups. Only a year or so later, in 2004, a series of lurid allegations started to emerge and (and I'm skipping quite a lot of detail here) Jeffs is currently in prison in Texas serving a life sentence for a series of sex abuse charges against underage girls.

Back to the Lafferty case, though - once the law caught up with the Lafferty brothers a key consideration in the ensuing trial was this: could they plead insanity? Devoid of any other context you would think there'd be a strong argument: hearing voices in your head telling you to go and off and murder your sister-in-law (Brenda Lafferty was married to Ron & Dan's younger brother Allen) for no actual real-life crime other than being a bit more feisty and outspoken than your religious upbringing would have liked her to be, and her daughter for no real-life reason whatsoever (what possible reason could there be, after all). 

Once you yoke that imaginary friend telling you to KILL stuff to an actual religion, it all gets a bit more tricky, though; after all, while most people don't slit anyone's throat as a result many religions claim some or all of their adherents have a personal hotline to God down which messages may occasionally be transmitted, and we don't say all religious adherents are by definition insane, do we? Hahahahaha my goodness no. 

The slightly paradoxical effect of this special pleading for religion is that as a result Ron & Dan Lafferty received harsher sentences than they would have if their lawyers had been able to make an insanity plea stick, something neither brother seemed especially bothered about, both taking the view that they'd done their appointed task and that some misguided real-world punishment by Godless heathens was an inconsequential price to pay in comparison with an eternity at God's right hand with Joseph Smith beaming down approvingly while they marry as many twelve-year-olds as they liked.

Jon Krakauer is probably best known for his book Into Thin Air (mentioned here), which recounts his involvement in the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. Under The Banner Of Heaven can't hope to be anywhere near as viscerally thrilling as that, and some of the deep dive into the early days of Mormonism, as essential as it is, meanders a bit when what the reader really wants is to know what made the Laffertys tick and why they did the unthinkable things they did. Of course none of that is really forthcoming, their motivations being bafflingly opaque right to the end; none of that is the author's fault of course. 

Speaking of bafflingly opaque motivations, Krakauer's earlier book Into The Wild was filmed in 2007 and tells the true story of the last days of Chris McCandless. Despite being much less obvious material Under The Banner Of Heaven was also adapted into a loosely-fictionalised TV mini-series in 2022.

oh for fox sake

I'd started writing the previous post a few days before I eventually hit the "publish" button, but if I'd been paying more attention when I eventually did so I'd have noticed that there were goings-on at the Open Championship on that day that warranted my attention, in particular the rounds of Lucas Herbert and Sam Burns, completed within about half an hour of each other on Friday afternoon.

There is something to be said for a pause for reflection before steaming in with the old size nines and whacking out a blog post, though, because if I'd done one there and then, or tacked that stuff onto the end of the other post, I'd have found myself having to do another one only a day or so later when eventual champion Ryan Fox posted his own round of 62 on Saturday. 

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
Xander Schauffele	USPGA	2024	first	WON	Xander Schauffele
Shane Lowry	USPGA	2024	third	tied 6th	Xander Schauffele
Lucas Herbert	Open	2026	second	tied 6th	Ryan Fox
Sam Burns	Open	2026	second	3rd	Ryan Fox
Ryan Fox	Open	2026	third	WON	Ryan Fox

A few supplementary notes: the three 62s were achieved in three different ways: Herbert had a five-footer for a par and a 61 which he missed, Burns holed out from a bunker for a birdie, and Fox had a putt from 50 feet or so for a birdie and a 61 which he missed but knocked in the subsequent one for a par. Fox's last-hole birdie for victory the following day means that two of the eight 62s have resulted in a victory (the other being Xander Schauffele at the USPGA in 2024); that win ratio of 25% is very slightly higher than the equivalent number for the old table of 63s, as that yielded 7 wins out of 31, i.e. 22.58%.

ryu having a laugh?

I notice that I'm a bit behind on keeping track of major golf tournament scoring records, so let's tidy that up. I was prompted to check back on previous blog entries by the recent Evian Championship, this being the newest of the women's majors, having had major status since 2013. It turns out the round that I had listed as the single lowest in history - Hyo-Joo Kim's 61 - occurred at the second Evian Championship to be classed as a major, in 2014. What I had failed to keep track of was that there had been two further rounds of 61, both at the same major, oddly also the Evian Championship, in 2021. These should have prompted a revision to the table as below:

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Hyo-Joo Kim	Evian Championship	2014	first	WON	Hyo-Joo Kim
Jeongeun Lee	Evian Championship	2021	second	2nd	Minjee Lee
Leona Maguire	Evian Championship	2021	final	tied 6th	Minjee Lee

However, somewhat ironically, the thing that brought all of that to my attention at the 2026 Evian Championship was a thing that rendered all of it completely irrelevant - Haeran Ryu's round of 60, the lowest ever shot in a major by a human of either sex.

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Haeran Ryu	Evian Championship	2026	third	WON	Haeran Ryu

So the major scoring records for the five women's majors look a bit lopsided, with all the super-low scoring being done at the Evian; that's now three shots ahead of the LPGA and Women's US Open whose records still stand at 63, and two ahead of the Women's British Open and the Chevron Championship which stand at 62. If there's ever been a three-shot difference between low scores in different men's majors it must have been a very long time ago; the best I can do within what you might hand-wavingly call living memory is the two-shot difference between Johnny Miller's 63 at the 1973 US Open (and Bruce Crampton's 63 at the 1975 PGA Championship) and Henry Cotton's 65 at the 1934 Open Championship which stood as the record for that tournament until Mark Hayes lowered it to 63 in 1977.

incidental music spot of the day

We're still doing, when we're at home and not away doing other things, the Saturday pizza-and-movie nights we instigated as a desperate effort to stay sane during the dark days of the early COVID-19 lockdowns in spring and summer 2020. You can do your own maths here: six-and-a bit years times 52 weeks minus a few weeks when (more frequently outside of lockdown periods obviously) we were away doing exciting holidaying or something equals quite a lot of movies to get through. We have certainly repeated ourselves a few times as well, but I imagine there'd still be somewhere between a hundred and two hundred movies. 

A lot of other things have happened during those six years, of course, the most obvious one being that the kids are now fourteen, eleven and nine respectively, compared with eight, five and three when we started. So Nia and Alys are now old enough to want to watch things like The Hunger Games, something that they wouldn't have wanted to do (and nor would they have been allowed to) during 2020. 

Anyway, the loosely-related point of that lengthy preamble is: a couple of weeks ago we (or rather the kids; I don't get a say in this, my goodness no) decided to watch The Adam Project, a time-travel science-fiction thing that looked at least mostly kid-friendly. I will confess to being slightly resistant to the acting charms of Ryan Reynolds with his ultra-21st-century ironic knowingness and fourth-wall-breaking, but it was fine, all the usual annoyances about time-travel movies notwithstanding - the impossible looping causality paradoxes, the awkwardness of meeting your future self and discovering you'd turned into some cartoonish supervillain, accidentally becoming your own grandfather, as well as some, erm, other, more gnarly stuff.

Anyway, I noticed a couple of interesting uses of classic rock tunes during the course of the movie: firstly Led Zeppelin's Good Times Bad Times, the canonical track one, side one, album one as mentioned here (also featuring a movie link), and secondly Boston's Long Time, usually played with its lengthy intro Foreplay attached. As an aside, I've never been entirely sure whether the title of that section is a pun given that it features a long and extended bout of organ-twiddling. Anyway, you'll have noticed that both songs feature the word "time" in their titles; I would imagine that this is not a coincidence. Just to ruin (or at least partly undermine) that theory, the film also featured Pete Townshend's 1980 solo hit Let My Love Open The Door over the closing credits.

they malverned me

It was our fifteenth wedding anniversary last week (crystal, since you ask); various family commitments meant that we could only get away for a night and most of a day but that did afford an opportunity to do some walking in the Malvern Hills, somewhere I'd never been. 

Any walk in the Malverns will be constrained by the shape of the terrain, a distinctive north-south spine of rock poking out of the otherwise pretty flat ground. In particular, that topography makes it difficult to construct a satisfactory circular walk without either following an essentially out-and-back route (i.e. traversing the ridge twice) or incurring a lot of low-level walking at one end of the walk or the other. Conversely, organising a one-way end-to-end traverse of the ridge involves either two cars, or a reliance on public transport of some sort.

In addition to all that, if the aim of your walk is to walk the full length of the ridge, staying on top of it as much as possible, you have to decide how much of a purist/completist attitude you're going to take (this will additionally be constrained by what the people with you are prepared to put up with). So we could have done what this guy did and walk the entire ridge from its low-level start down at the southern end at Chase End Hill, but that would have involved some logistical shenanigans that we couldn't really be arsed with, plus an early start that we equally couldn't be arsed with, considering part of the point of the trip was to have a nice night away, dinner, a few drinks and not have to get up at some absurd hour.

A brief interlude for some accommodation details, then: we stayed in Colwall, largely for reasons of navigational and logistical convenience, but it happens also to be a nice little village with, crucially, a railway station (we'll come back to this later) and also the Colwall Park Hotel, a nice little country pub/hotel with pretty decent food and excellent Butty Bach which I took the opportunity of having a few of with dinner.

So we got up the following morning, moved the car fifty yards down the road to the railway station car park, and then headed off over the station footbridge and in a generally southerly direction. Basically the choice of Colwall as start point meant that there was a bit of a walk in to get to our chosen access point to the ridge - as you can see from the route map below this results in the walk being shaped like a wobbly letter J with Colwall at the bent end. 

So we cracked on up to the summit of Herefordshire Beacon at 338 metres (1109 feet), which seemed like a satisfying southerly point, all the minor hills to the south of it being lower. This is also known as British Camp, that technically being the name of the Iron Age earthwork that occupies its upper slopes. This first bit is an up-and-back trip from the British Camp car park, which is less satisfactory than a nice neat loop but did provide an opportunity on coming back down to pop into the imaginatively-named Malvern Hills Hotel for a refreshing beverage and a toilet stop before tackling the main ridge. 

Once on the main ridge there is, as with all ridge walks, a bit more up and down than you might expect, but it is in general a delight with (thanks to the flatness of most of the surrounding terrain) spectacular views all the way over to the Black Mountains, the Brecon Beacons and beyond. Named summits that we passed over during this section of the walk were Black Hill, Pinnacle Hill, Jubilee Hill and Perseverance Hill, all really just the tops of gentle undulations in the ridge rather than magnificent craggy peaks in their own right. 

There's another pronounced dip known as Wyche Cutting (at least partly man-made, I think) before the last and highest section of the walk; this handily contains another pub where we repeated the pint-and-a-piss routine from earlier. And then it was off up Worcestershire Beacon, the highest point of the day at 425 metres (1394 feet), and a few more subsidiary hills (Summer Hill, North Hill, End Hill), before dropping down into the northern end of Great Malvern and making our way to the railway station at Malvern Link, but not before a celebratory pint at the Bakery Inn. Refreshed, we then caught a train from Malvern Link to Colwall (two stops, less than ten minutes), picked up the car and headed back home. 

These are definitely hills rather than mountains, but (if you're lucky enough to have a glorious clear sunny day as we did) the magnificence of the views compares favourably with much higher summits, and it's a satisfying walk of almost exactly ten miles which you'll notice conforms to a couple of my informal rules: the low-level walk just to get to where you need to be is at the start rather than the end, and the main focus of the day (the highest point, invariably) is somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the way round. 

the moor the merrier

First of the outstanding walking posts is the follow-up to the Cotswold trip in the autumn of 2025 featuring the same group of people; this time we opted to rent this property for a couple of nights as it afforded reasonably easy access to the north-eastern part of Dartmoor. And as we know, no trip to Dartmoor can ever go spectacularly tits-up. Before we did any walking we did have a pleasant evening trip to the local(ish) pub and micro-brewery, the Beer Engine in Newton St. Cyres. 

One thing that you might not unreasonably expect to be a bit different between a jaunt onto Dartmoor in January and one in June is the weather. That, it turns out, is an expectation that can turn out to be wrong, although barring some absolutely apocalyptic turn of events you are at least guaranteed more hours of daylight to work with.

Anyway, the plan was to drive from the house to the village of South Zeal, park up there and head up onto the top of Cosdon Hill (or Cosdon Beacon, take your pick). This is a respectable 550 metres in height (1804 feet), not quite as high as Yes Tor and High Willhays a bit further west. We took a route that turned to the south just after leaving South Zeal, principally in order to take in the Bronze Age stone row that occupies the eastern flank of the hill, and which some people are calling "the most impressive triple stone row in Great Britain". Those people, I would guess, visited it in somewhat better weather than we did; although it was quite impressive we were disinclined to linger. Anyway, from there we turned to the west, smashed straight up to the summit trig point and then took a route roughly south over Little Hound Tor and then north-west. The original plan here had been to then ford the River Taw and head up and over Belstone Tor and into Belstone village, have a cheeky pint at the pub and then bimble back along the footpath that hugs the banks of the River Taw into South Zeal. A pretty good plan, I think, but a group decision was reached that a more direct return might be prudent given the unrelenting shittiness of the weather. So we skirted round the northern flanks of Cosdon Hill and arrived back in South Zeal, whereupon we took ourselves to the Oxenham Arms, a pub where I had stayed with my then-girlfriend Anne in the summer of 2000, a trip where we went up Yes Tor and High Willhays in absolutely glorious weather, setting an entirely unreasonable expectation for future trips. Anyway, the pub's proprietors were very accommodating about us dripping several gallons of water onto their seats while we carried out some vital rehydration activities. Anyone reading the website blurb and wondering where the standing stone is that's been incorporated into the pub's walls, it's in the back bar, second door on the left after you come in. 

Total walk distance was 13.7km, or about eight and a half miles. Route map and altitude profile are below, below that are a Cosdon Hill summit photo, and, for comparison purposes, photos of me at the top of Yes Tor in 2007 (rain, wind, darkness) and 2000 (glorious sunshine).

We had originally planned a lower-level walk on the Sunday around the woodland area reachable on foot from Newton St. Cyres, but since everyone's kit was completely waterlogged from the previous day we decided instead to head into Exeter, a short drive away, and do a dry walk around the harbourside there. Not very much to say about that other than it was a pleasant and leisurely six kilometres (just under four miles) and started and ended at the very pleasantly-situated Double Locks pub. Getting to the pub car park did require traversing the narrowest bridge I have ever driven a car over, though, and I am clearly not the only one who approached it with a bit of trepidation judging by the encouraging signage they've deemed it necessary to put on the approach (pics from Google Maps):

That's all very helpful, but to be honest the main thing that convinced me that the Mini would be OK was the sight of my friend Martyn's giant Range Rover squeezing across just ahead of me. Anyway, if you're ever in Exeter and fancy something similar the map is below; I haven't bothered with the altitude profile for reasons which I assume are obvious. 

it's the fort that counts

A few loose ends to tidy up, mostly documenting of interesting walks that I deem worthy of mention here. This isn't exactly that, but is something I missed from my list of What We Did On Our Holidays when we went for a long weekend in Dorset a month or so ago. I see I did briefly mention that we'd been to Weymouth, but forgot to mention that in addition to walking around the harbour area and paying a very brief visit to the beach we also went to Nothe Fort, an interesting fortified complex occupying a site overlooking the harbour mouth and Portland Harbour to the south which has served many purposes over the years since its construction in the second half of the 19th century.

Most of the exhibits in the main central courtyard on the hot sunny day we were there were concerned with its use during the Second World War - essentially the same use as it was put to in the 19th century, i.e. as a base for launching big lumps of exploding metal at seagoing vessels belonging to the enemy; only the flag flown by the enemy and the technical complexity of the exploding devices really changing much over time. 

There was also an interesting audio-visual installation featuring some old black-and-white photographs from the fort's lengthy period of dereliction in the second half of the 20th century, and some recent sound recordings of the people who used to use it as an unauthorised adventure playground during that time; mostly teenagers at the time but in their sixties and seventies when the recordings were made. These were interesting, although as with anything involving old-ish people reminiscing about their childhood adventures there was the occasional unpalatable whiff of Kids Today With Their Bloody Computers and some suggestion that It Never Did Us Any Harm, as long as you don't count Fat Alan who fell off a wall onto a rusty spike and died.

A note on pronunciation; the audio-visual material we watched fairly consistently pronounced it Nothe to rhyme with "betrothe" or "clothe", rather than to rhyme with, say "both", "broth" or "frothy". The picture below shows Huwie and Alys at the controls of a Bofors gun, about to mercilessly shell downtown Weymouth to secure enough beach space to build a sandcastle.

the last book I read

A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles.

It's a tricky time to be an aristocrat in Russia, the early 1920s. Admittedly if you've got as far as the 1920s then you've at least survived being brutally purged in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 revolution, but still, if you've chosen to stay in Russia rather than taking the easy way out and swanning off to Paris to live out your days then you may find things less easy than they used to be, what with the peasants having ideas above their station like, you know, running the country and all that.

So here's Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, former heir to a country estate near Nizhny Novgorod, an estate now obviously requisitioned by the new government. The Count himself is still around, though, and swanning around Moscow being a fabulously urbane socialite in a way that grinds the gears of the new governing regime somewhat. So much so, in fact, that they concoct a show-trial at which the Count is accused of being a parasite, an anachronism, an idle, dawdling flâneur who represents the last vestige of a corrupt regime that must be swept aside for the greater good. But he's quite charming and everyone quite likes him, despite themselves, so instead of ordering him out the back to be summarily shot they instead subject him to house arrest in the Hotel Metropol. Not so terrible, you might say, especially since he has made a third-floor suite at the Metropol his residence for a few years now anyway. But the sentence comes with a few extra strings attached - firstly no nice comfy suite but a boxy attic room, and secondly a reminder that if he should breach the terms of his house arrest it'll be No More Mr. Nice Communist and he will be the recipient of a hot lead sandwich.

For all that he has never been obliged to do anything as coarse and proletarian as actually work for a living, the Count likes to keep busy, and he soon finds things to do: firstly knocking though the boarded-up connecting doors between his room and the empty one next to it to afford himself a bit more space, and secondly taking on the job of head waiter at the hotel, a job which requires that he attend regular planning meetings with the hotel's maître d' and the head chef, who soon become his close friends.

Other people also come into the Count's orbit and become friends, or in the case of film star Anna Urbanova, a regular at the hotel, a bit more than friends, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. There's also Nina, a young girl with a keen sense of curiosity and a hotel pass key which allows her access to various parts of the hotel off-limits to normal guests. There are also a couple of representatives of the Communist regime, which continues to keep half an eye on what the Count is up to, and, mainly after the Second World War, some Americans, who appear to be brash types throwing money around drunkenly but who the Count soon clocks as spies. 

Years pass, and Nina grows into a young woman and gets involved, along with her husband, in some activities inimical to the current regime, and there comes a day when Nina has to head off to try and get her husband released from some remote gulag. Before doing so she entrusts her daughter, Sofia, to the Count, who is thus - approaching fifty and with no children of his own - thrust into effective fatherhood. 

Sofia grows up into an intelligent and feisty young woman, but there are inevitably a few bumps in the road, notably when she falls down the stairs and fractures her skull. This entails a dash to hospital in a cab and, as a matter of necessity, the Count's first venture outside of the hotel in twenty-plus years. Fortunately - again - people he knows inside the Communist regime view his plight with some sympathy and arrange to have him spirited back into the hotel once Sofia is safely in the hospital before some jobsworth spots him and pops a cap in his ass.

Sofia shows an aptitude for music, the piano in particular, and soon starts picking up gigs with youth orchestras which entail travel, including outside Russia. This gives the Count an idea for a scheme which will allow Sofia to escape the regime (with a bit of help from the Count's American contacts) and for the Count and Anna to live out the rest of their lives together without having to do so within the confines of the hotel he's spent the last thirty years in.

A Gentleman In Moscow was donated to me by my mother after she'd read it with her book group. It's hard for me to describe it as a "book group book" without sounding snottily, snobbily dismissive, but, well, I'm going to anyway. That's not to say it wasn't an engaging and enjoyable read, but there's a genre of books with a historical setting, wide time-span (usually many years), slightly whimsical in tone, very little sense of the characters being in any physical peril or of anything too experimental or metafictional happening like not ending up with a nice neat tying-up of loose ends that I tend to lump together as "book group books". That probably doesn't make any sense, but whatever. The lack of peril is jarring in this case because Stalinist Russia was pretty good at ruthlessly eliminating anyone who was even a mild inconvenience to the smooth running of the state. 

It's also quite meandering and episodic plot-wise, especially since the Count's situation at the end of each episode except the last is the same, i.e. still in the hotel, and the Count himself is a man of great personal charm, erudition and saintly patience who starts to seem a bit of a Maryovski Sueovich by the end.

Needless to say as befits a book group book it's been adapted as a Netflix series, starring Ewan McGregor who seems to be leaning into the slightly magical charming twinkliness of the character in a way I daresay I would find a bit annoying if I ever watched more than five minutes of it. But I won't, so that's fine. The character also seems to retain his luxuriant moustache throughout the timeline, whereas a major plot point in the book is his loss of it pretty early on. 

Anyway, the book is perfectly fine and highly readable, with just a hint of "if you like that sort of thing" attached. I will also add, as a final thought, that if you were to be in a position of being stuck in the same hotel for thirty years or more, "AMOR TOWLES" is the sort of thing you might find yourself bellowing down the phone to room service fairly regularly.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

I was struck, on reading through the various obituaries and tributes for music industry mogul and Arista label founder Clive Davis, by his resemblance to actor, comedian and gravelly-voiced professional Londoner Mike Reid.

Reid (who died back in 2007) got a mention (the only one, as far as I can tell) on this blog almost exactly a year ago in a musical context. Reid's voice, general look and mannerisms were, I'd assume, largely the inspiration for the Fast Show's Dave Angel character. Davis, on the other hand, sounds (or sounded, anyway) pretty much exactly like you would expect him to sound. 

loitering within tent

A few notes from our brief trip to Dorset over the Bank Holiday weekend: -

• We stayed in a campsite called The Dorset Hideaway, which does what it says on the tin by being tucked away in a secluded rural spot. "The middle of nowhere" is a relative term, especially in southern England, but it is a mile or two from the nearest villages. Those villages are Shave Cross, which is really just a few houses and a pub which appears to be currently closed, and Whitchurch Canonicorum, which is very slightly larger and has a pub which does appear to be a going concern, though we didn't get a chance to call in. Anyway, the campsite is perfectly nice, though it pushes the "glamping" angle quite heavily (as you'll see from the website) and, possibly as a consequence, doesn't really have enough toilet facilities for us plebs in the tent field, especially on the hottest weekend of the year when it's busy. 
• It's a pretty handy location for the various beaches in the area, though, which is an important consideration when it's scorchingly hot. As it happens the Jurassic Coast isn't the best place for traditional sandy beaches; most of them are either various grades of shingle or, at best, a mixture of sand and shingle. Great for fossil hunting, less good for sandcastle building. The best beach for traditional stuff like that is probably Charmouth, which just happens to be the one we were closest to; other more shingly experiences can be had at Bridport, Lyme Regis, Sidmouth and Exmouth. We did also go to Weymouth, which has a reasonably sandy beach, although as it was Bank Holiday Monday when we went you'd have struggled to see any of the sand through the expanse of shoulder-to-shoulder flesh that was occupying it. 
• We didn't go to the beach in Bridport, but we did go to a couple of food and drink establishments that I deem worthy of mention: firstly Mercato Italiano, somewhat bizarrely situated in a warehouse on an industrial estate but serving excellent pizzas, and secondly Soulshine, a cafe in the centre of town which supposedly does nice food but which we only had time to pop into quickly for a refreshing glass of fizzy rhubarbade. 
• We briefly met up with some friends for a lunchtime picnic after packing up at the campsite on the Wednesday - they live in Bournemouth so we went for something in between there and the campsite. I selected this location, fairly unscientifically, by looking at an Ordnance Survey map and finding a big green area that also had the big blue and white P that denotes a car park. That turned out to be Powerstock Common Nature Reserve, a funny little place tucked away under a disused railway bridge (more on this in a minute) and featuring all manner of delightful species of butterfly, newt, and, thrillingly, a population of rare mud snails who I would hope have the good sense not to slurp out onto the paths to be crunchily trodden on by unsuspecting walkers.
• But enough of that heartwarming gastropod-centric nature crap, you'll be saying, what about this disused railway you so mouth-wateringly dangled in front of us just a bullet point or so back? Well. This is the remnants of the old Bridport branch line which connected with the still-operational main line between Bristol and Weymouth, was earmarked for closure in the Beeching report of the early 1960s but limped on until 1975 before eventually closing. All the track has been lifted and part of the trackbed incorporated into a circular walk round the nature reserve of probably no more than 4 kilometres or so, but which we didn't have the time, inclination or, in some cases, shoes to attempt.

• The bridge itself incorporates a height/clearance warning sign and you just know I checked that shit against the database from the earlier post. This is in a much more commonly-encountered height range than the weirdly low bridge at Bishton so it's already been bagged; the example given is from Bromsgrove. All I would say to whoever daubed the accompanying graffiti, which says, if you're struggling, "STOP DEMOLITION OF THIS BRIDGE" is: well, so far so good, lads.
• Lastly, it was Hazel's birthday on the Tuesday - all I would say here is: if you have chocolate-based presents to hand over on an occasion such as this, then a tent on the hottest few days of the year isn't the best place to store them, at least if you want to ensure they're in tip-top store-fresh condition when they eventually get opened. 

nurse! the curse has got worse

Time passes, fashions change, civilisations come and go, the cosmic ballet goes on, but the Curse of Electric Halibut grinds on in its relentless way regardless of all this, biding its time, pruning an author here, a novelist there, occasionally capriciously annihilating a few in quick succession, but never stopping.

The latest victim (a month or so ago) and - unless I've missed one, which is perfectly possible - the first of 2026, is Australian novelist David Malouf, two of whose novels (according to Wikipedia he only wrote nine) have featured here: The Conversations At Curlow Creek in early 2010 and his most famous novel Remembering Babylon in late 2013. That means that the curse length of 16 years 99 days slots Malouf in in a solid fourth place behind Mario Vargas Llosa, David Lodge and Kinky Friedman, and just ahead of Milan Kundera. Malouf was a pretty respectable 92 years old; the leader there remains Jennifer Johnston at 95. 

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	94	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
Isabel Colegate	24th October 2009	12th March 2023	91	13y 140d
Cormac McCarthy	22nd September 2009	13th June 2023	89	13y 265d
Milan Kundera	27th March 2008	11th July 2023	94	15y 105d
Christopher Priest	6th January 2015	4th February 2024	80	9y 26d
Paul Auster	22nd April 2012	30th April 2024	77	12y 8d
Kinky Friedman	19th December 2007	27th June 2024	79	16y 191d
David Lodge	4th March 2008	1st January 2025	89	16y 301d
Jennifer Johnston	23rd July 2012	25th February 2025	95	12y 215d
Mario Vargas Llosa	12th April 2007	13th April 2025	89	18y 1d
Frederick Forsyth	8th November 2021	9th June 2025	86	3y 214d
Daniel Woodrell	12th January 2016	28th November 2025	72	9y 320d
David Malouf	14th January 2010	22nd April 2026	92	16y 99d

giovanni more books?

If you read the Wikipedia page for Giovanni's Room you'll see that there is a reference to it appearing on a list of "100 best gay and lesbian novels" in 1999; that list can be found here with Giovanni's Room at number 2. By my calculations (and counting The Alexandria Quartet as one, as they do here) I've read just nine of these, the ones I haven't already mentioned being A Boy's Own Story, Myra Breckinridge, The Swimming Pool Library, Naked Lunch, Pale Fire, Moby-Dick and To Kill A Mockingbird. Now you might say, as I did upon reading the list: well, fair enough, A Boy's Own Story, for instance, is pretty explicitly a gay coming-of-age novel, but the elements in, say, Moby-Dick (i.e. the whole Ishmael-Queequeg thing), are at best hinted at and not necessarily central to the plot, and I honestly (with the caveat that it must be thirty years since I read it) can't remember any in To Kill A Mockingbird. Scout is a bit of a tomboy by the standards of the time so you might argue for some challenging of traditional gender roles, but it's a bit of a stretch, unless the original text included some ferocious lesbian frottage that my 1980s Pan paperback omitted for some reason.

Anyhoo, as it happens there's been another "100 best novels" list doing the rounds this week, and it's this one from the Guardian. "Never has such a list been more needed", says the accompanying article explaining the methodology, which is a fogeyish reference to how kids today don't read books any more because they're all too busy sexting and playing Roblox, but which I also think is a bit of a stretch given how many of these lists there are out there already. The methodology is of interest, though, because this one was from a poll of novelists; others are quite commonly compiled from a public vote, and the two methods always generate quite different lists. I could have predicted in advance, for instance, that a list of novelists' favourite novels would have Middlemarch at number 1 (full disclosure: I've never read it), because they always do. Anything compiled by polling Joe and Josephine Public, on the other hand, will always feature Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings highly, among other things.

Anyway, my overall count from the Guardian list is, I think, thirty-two, of which nineteen have featured on this blog, and they are: Beloved, Pride And Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Moby-Dick, Midnight's Children, The Remains Of The Day, Lolita, The God Of Small Things, Wolf Hall, Giovanni's Room, The Leopard, Never Let Me Go, Blood Meridian, My Antonia, Rebecca, The Talented Mr Ripley, Ragtime, Invisible Cities and The Road. 

There are a handful of novels which feature on the gay and lesbian list and the Guardian list; I can't be bothered to try and find them all but Giovanni's Room is certainly among them, as is Moby-Dick. One that significantly isn't is To Kill A Mockingbird, which is absent altogether from the Guardian list. I don't want to get into the game of critiquing the contents of either list (though you might have noted that I have done exactly that a couple of paragraphs above), but a measure of how surprising I find this is that I had to re-do the search a couple of times just to make sure I hadn't messed it up (it does appear on the two previous Guardian lists from 2003 and 2015 I linked to above). That's one where I would side with the public vote, which would undoubtedly have included it.