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 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. 

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.

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.

the last book I read

A Question Of Upbringing by Anthony Powell.

Ah, schooldays. It doesn't take much for one's mind to be cast back there: the endless Latin verbs, trying to find one's best tails for evening prep, fagging for Blenkinsop major and getting a good thrashing if his crumpets weren't toasted to perfection, trying to grind various future Prime Ministers into a wall in the name of recreation, all the usual stuff.

Hmmm, well actually perhaps not everyone's schooldays were exactly like this, but those of our narrator here (who we eventually discover is called Nick Jenkins) definitely were. Cast back by a wafer-thin framing device (a page and a half or so at the start of chapter one) into a reverie of his schooldays, at an unnamed school which we're clearly meant to infer is Eton, he recalls friendships with his old chums and room-mates Stringham and Templer, various hilarious scrapes involving their po-faced housemaster Le Bas - including the arguably less hilarious prank of making an anonymous phone call which resulted in Le Bas' arrest - and some out-of-school socialising during the holidays including meeting Stringham and Templer's respective families and navigating complex hierarchies of relative wealth and social class, as well as some more primal stuff involving the first stirrings of feelings, you know, Down There. Nick decides, for instance, that he is in love with Templer's sister Jean based on no more then a couple of mumbly teenage conversations.

Nick also encounters another schoolmate, Widmerpool, during a holiday in France. Previously something of a figure of fun and target for derision, Nick starts to see Widmerpool in a new light after he brokers a truce between two of the other residents of the house they are staying in, a Swede and a Norwegian who have been refusing to speak to each other after a disagreement over a game of tennis, a girl, or possibly both.

And so, schooldays over, it is time to put away childish things and proceed to university, seemingly without having to do anything as tiresomely proletarian as pass exams or undergo any form of entrance selection process. Again, the university is coyly unnamed but is clearly Oxford. Nick is re-acquainted with Stringham, and also encounters Sillery, one of the dons, who seems to have a limited interest in his students' academic progress but instead focuses on establishing political connections, easing his various protégés into influential positions in politics and business. These protégés include Stringham, who, with some behind-the scenes string-pulling (no pun intended) from Sillery, lands a plum (if somewhat ill-defined) job with a prominent industrialist. Templer, who has skipped going to university, pops in to visit with a couple of his London friends, and Nick's sense that his school friendships are gradually unravelling is reinforced when Templer drives a tightly-packed car (Templer, his mates, Nick, Stringham and a couple of random girls they've picked up) off the road and into a ditch, thankfully without seriously injuring anyone. 

Nick, recognising that a fresh start is required, heads off into London to meet his Uncle Giles, the slightly murky black sheep of the family. Will Uncle Giles be able to help him redirect his life?

Well, the answer to that specific question is a shrug and a "dunno", because the book ends at this point. That will be no surprise to anyone vaguely-acquainted with 20th-century literature and Powell's work in particular, as A Question Of Upbringing is the first book of the twelve-volume sequence A Dance To The Music Of Time. In other words if you want to find out what happens next, check out book two (which is called A Buyer's Market). I'm not conclusively ruling out ever doing this, but if you view A Question Of Upbringing as a stand-alone novel in its own right you'd have to say that not a lot of note actually happens. And fair enough, it's not that sort of novel, and if you want explosions, freaky sex and zombie Hitler that stuff is all available elsewhere. It's dryly witty, and there are some sly observations about wealth and class here, and just a sense that our narrator is slightly less rich and posh than some of his schoolmates, although these are just inferences since we never get to meet any of his family. For all that, there is also the sense that Nick is somewhat blind to his own privilege, drifting from Eton to Oxford, and probably subsequently into a nice job somewhere, nice and comfortably without having to sweat too much or wonder where his next meal is coming from. Whether he is deliberately written that way or whether these blind spots are just inadvertent reflections of Powell's own blind spots (he too went to Eton and Oxford) I couldn't say, at least without reading another eleven novels to find out. Beyond this it would be hard to say we actually know anything much about Nick at the end of the book, something noted by John Crace in his Digested Reads column. 

A bit like The Alexandria Quartet, the A Dance To The Music Of Time sequence, whose publication dates range from 1951 (this book) to 1975, has faded a bit in critical regard over the years, though it was still well-regarded enough in 1997 for a four-part (i.e. three whole novels crammed into each episode) TV adaptation to be made. While the general theme here of oblivious posh people going about their daily lives, borne safely aloft on a cushion of unexamined privilege, raises my lefty hackles a bit, it is very readable and pretty short at a whisker over 200 pages. I'd always thought of it as a sort of upper-class English condensed (or perhaps summarised) version of Proust, and maybe it is, although I am ill-qualified to comment, since although I own a copy of the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (in an English translation, obviously) I have never read any of it. Maybe this year? Well, maybe. Having now, after just over 19 years of this blog, cracked part one of A Dance To The Music Of Time, will I now plough on and finish all twelve? Check back in 228 years to find out!

spacelebrity doggylikey of the day

Just a quick one today - I have no idea what sequence of clicks sent me down the YouTube rabbit-hole that led to some detailed second-by-second analysis of the Columbia space shuttle re-entry and break-up, but I assume these are things that have been pushed a bit more than usual by the algorithm given the imminence (February 1st) of the 23rd anniversary of the disaster, and indeed the even nearer imminence of the 40th anniversary of the Challenger disaster (January 28th). Anyway, it struck me, and hear me out here, that the nose of the shuttle, from certain angles, is slightly reminiscent of Brian Griffin from Family Guy. 

the last book I read

Staying On by Paul Scott.

It's the early 1970s, pretty nearly a full quarter of a century after Indian independence and the end of colonial rule. Lots of British people involved in the old system of colonial rule have packed up and gone home, there being no need for them to stick around among a population less inclined to consent to being subjugated and abused. I mean, where's the fun in that? Honestly, if you can't even find a decent punkah wallah to keep you cool while you're sipping a pink gin then you may as well be in Swindon.

Some have stayed, though, and will have a variety of reasons for doing so - maybe they have business interests in India, maybe they've married into Indian society, maybe they just like it there. For some it's more about having been in India for so long that they wouldn't feel comfortable in British society any more, and maybe because the cost of living over there is higher, plus the cost of getting there in the first place, plus perhaps a bit of laziness about uprooting oneself from a reasonably comfortable life and sailing off into the unknown. 

This latter category of people definitely includes Tusker and Lucy Smalley, eking out a just-about-comfortable existence, mainly facilitated by Tusker's military pension, living in the lodge attached to a fairly dilapidated old hotel in the small-ish town of Pankot. The hotel is run by the comically rapacious (money, food, sex, you name it) Mrs. Bhoolabhoy and her somewhat downtrodden husband; Mr. Bhoolabhoy maintains cordial relations with the Smalleys and occasionally enjoys a few drinks with Tusker, but Mrs. Bhoolabhoy regards them generally as an inconvenience and a potential problem should she wish to sell the hotel, something she has considered doing as profits have diminished since the building of a newer, swankier hotel just down the road.

Obviously during the Raj the social structure was nice and clear: the British are in charge and the natives do their bidding or expect a damn good thrashing. But 25 years later it's considerably less clear - some residual deference remains, and some residual expectation of deference remains in people like the Smalleys, both in their early seventies and fairly set in their ways. But for younger Indians in particular there's less of a sense that they should do as they're told by a bunch of elderly foreigners: after all, why should they?

The Smalleys' financial position is in a state of constant precariousness, not helped by Tusker's past unwise business dealings, some gambling problems and ongoing fondness for a drink or two. As befits people born in the early years of the twentieth century it's been Tusker who has held the financial reins with Lucy - objectively the more sensible and responsible of the pair - having precious little to do with it, and in a position of knowing very little about the details, including what her position would be if Tusker were to die, something that's been on her mind since he had a mild heart attack a while back. 

The Smalleys (mainly Lucy) maintain some correspondence with Britain, mainly people they knew from India who've now returned, or in some cases their children, and via this route Lucy learns that a vague acquaintance of an acquaintance, Mr. Turner, is visiting India and wants to pop in to say hello. This prompts a frenzy of excitement about what stuff they can get him to bring from home - with some it'd be Marmite, for Lucy it's a particular brand of blue rinse hair dye - and how they're going to make him welcome when he arrives, resources for lavish banqueting and the like being a bit thin. 

Meanwhile Mrs. Bhoolabhoy has seen the writing on the wall regarding the future of the hotel and has decided to sell up. This means that someone is going to have to write a letter to the Smalleys telling them that their tenure of their little lodge at preferential rates is at an end, and they'll have to find somewhere else to live, and that someone is Mr. Bhoolabhoy. And it turns out that it is the receipt and reading of this letter which is the thing that finally finishes Tusker off, his body being found later that day after suffering a massive heart attack, his hand still clutching the letter.

Paul Scott is of course most famous for the Raj Quartet, which is in turn best known for its 1984 TV adaptation, The Jewel In The Crown. Staying On is a sort of footnote to this series of much chunkier books, and the Smalleys feature as minor characters in the later novels in that series. I didn't know this when I bought my second-hand copy a few years ago and I can tell you that you have no particular need to plough through the quartet to appreciate this, unless you want to, of course, in which case have at it. Staying On, despite being written later, was actually adapted for TV first, in 1980, and the whole thing appears to be available on YouTube. It stars Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, more famous from Brief Encounter, as the Smalleys.

None of the great sweep of history that I imagine (possibly wrongly) features in the Raj Quartet here, just two fairly unexceptional people eking out the last few years of their lives (the last few days, in Tusker's case). No suggestion that Tusker was a particularly good soldier, despite eventually rising to the rank of colonel, nor a particularly effective businessman, nor even a particularly attentive husband, though he clearly does love Lucy in his own gruff and inarticulate way. There's an odd mix of comedy and pathos here with the two sometimes clashing with each other a bit, but you do feel a pang of sympathy for the Smalleys, desperately hanging on to the only life they've ever known while the country reinvents itself under their feet. I do agree with this Guardian review that Mrs. Bhoolabhoy is something of a grotesque caricature, but overall I enjoyed it; the 1977 Booker panel evidently felt the same way. Scott was unable to attend the presentation as he was already ill with the cancer that was to kill him a year later; he was also apparently a chronic alcoholic which probably didn't do much for his general health.

Previous Booker Prize winners on this list are: G. (1972), The Siege Of Krishnapur (1973), The Conservationist (1974), Midnight's Children (1981), Hotel Du Lac (1984), The Remains Of The Day (1989), Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), The God Of Small Things (1997), The Sea (2005), The Gathering (2007), Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up The Bodies (2012). The Siege Of Krishnapur, Midnight's Children and The God Of Small Things also feature in the list of books set primarily in India, a list that I would have expected to also include a few others off this blog, but the only one I can think of is A New Dominion; novels that tangentially feature India would include The Marriage Plot and Around The World In Eighty Days. 

celebrity lookeylikeys of the day

I've got two for you today, which it seems to me fall into the categories, respectively, Fairly Commonplace and Incredibly Niche, although that is of course partly a matter of perspective.

Firstly, JJ Spaun, this year's US Open champion and unwitting instigator of incredibly laboured punnery (see below), and Jeffrey Wright, fine actor with a wide and varied body of work but pictured here as James Bond's CIA buddy Felix Leiter, solely because while playing this role he happened to have roughly the right sort of beard. 

finally - FINALLY! - after a couple of near-misses, I get to do the YOU SPAUNY GET joke. holing a 64-foot putt for it (with the caveat that he did have a spare one if he'd needed it) makes it even more perfect #golf #USOpen https://t.co/vbe07yEf1l

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 16, 2025

I try not to get in my own way too much with a lot of self-analysis once my brain has popped one of these unbidden into my head, but of course when people of colour are involved you have to ask yourself: am I, even entirely subconsciously, Doing A Racism here? I think there are two answers to that: the first one is, well, I can't possibly know for sure, so probably best not to worry about it, and the second is that I'm pretty confident a jury would not convict me of this pair being the most tenuous and squint-requiring supposed resemblance on this blog. Even applying the incredibly restrictive condition of only considering US Open golf champions I think most people would agree that the Lucas Glover one was more obscure. The Webb Simpson one was pretty good, though, although technically he wasn't a US Open champion at the time of the post.

Secondly, American stand-up comic - well, not exactly stand-up, as you'll see if you follow the link - Fiona Cauley and wild warrior woman Ygritte from the TV series Game Of Thrones, as played by Rose Leslie. I should point out that I have never watched an episode of Game Of Thrones, or, as Stewart Lee would have us call it, Peter Stringfellow's Lord Of The Rings. This is partly because I just don't watch TV very much, partly because there's just SO MANY SEASONS of it to get through, and partly because it's firmly in swords and sorcery and Things Of Power fantasy territory, something that doesn't really do it for me, tits notwithstanding. I really am only aware of either Fiona Cauley or Ygritte because some ill-judged clicking on some short videos a while back has unleashed the fearsome power of the Facebook/YouTube algorithm on me and now I get an unavoidable steady diet of stand-up comedy and Game Of Thrones clips presented in my feed, during the course of which I happened to see these two people in quickish succession.

we are family; here's a list arranged in a tree

One thing I did find myself occasionally doing while reading Dalva is referring to the Northridge family tree to remind myself which of the various John Wesley Northridges was married to whom. As it happens there isn't actually a family tree printed in Dalva, but as luck would have it there is one in The Road Home which I took a handy snap of with my mobile phone just for quick reference. Here it is:

Not actually a massive number of people in total, but some confusion possible nonetheless owing to the multiple marriages and occasional out-of-wedlock sexy sexy times going on. Anyway, this set me to thinking - very much like the occasional list of books featuring explanatory maps, most recently Tokyo Express, are there any other books that have family trees in them? My gut feeling here is there will be considerably fewer of these, as in most cases there isn't a need. It's really only sprawling family sagas with gigantic casts of inter-related characters that justify including one, and the only examples on this list I could find (The Road Home aside) were Hilary Mantel's two Thomas Cromwell books, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, both of which contain similar family trees representing the Tudor royal family and the various pretenders to the English throne. 

Outside of books which have featured on this blog the only other one which sprang to mind was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years Of Solitude (recently serialised for TV), which contains the family tree below; a bit like The Road Home, part of the usefulness of this is to distinguish between multiple characters who have pretty much the same name. 

incidental music spot of the day

Hey, we haven't done one of these for a while (three-and-a-half years or so in fact), but I was struck by the loose yet funky tune that plays over the latest Haven Holidays advert, as it was highly recognisable to me as Can You Get To That by Funkadelic. My recollection is that I discovered Funkadelic off the back of some sort of Greatest Guitar Solos Of All Time article in a music magazine that pointed me to Maggot Brain, which certainly fits the bill as it is essentially a ten-minute guitar solo courtesy of guitarist Eddie Hazel.

That in turn led me to the album of the same name, and thence a few of the other albums from their early/mid-1970s heyday, including my favourite one Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On which not only was a fixture in the CD player in the RV we hired for our honeymoon in Canada in 2011, but also provided, in Sexy Ways, the first dance song at our wedding in June 2011, a choice I absolutely stand by 14 years later, even as I largely disown the improvised dance moves I came up with to accompany it.

As an aside, if the Stone Roses hadn't heard the title track of Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On before they wrote the lengthy funky stop-start outro to I Am The Resurrection then I'll eat my hat. 

smallebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today's pair are my son Huw and 1970s yellow cartoon weirdo Bod. Small skinny-legged person, three-letter name, voluminous upper garment coming down below waist level, profile view that makes them appear to only have one leg.

A bit of context for both halves of the image: the thing Huwie is standing on is a groyne (no, stop it) on Southbourne beach where we were last weekend, and the thing Bod is looking at is, and I quote: "an enormous bowl of strawberries and cream". This is from the episode Bod's Dream which can be seen here. The thing people who grew up in the 1970s forget about Bod is that the animated bit was only the first 4-5 minutes of a 15-minute show, and the rest of it was filled with some stuff-spotting puzzles, random songs and the interminable adventures of Alberto Frog And His Amazing Animal Band, culminating in the impossibly thrilling climax wherein Alberto chose a flavour of milkshake for a reward (for solving some mystery or other) from a shortlist of about three. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

I experienced a jarring moment while reading about the upcoming change in presenter on the Radio 2 breakfast show. I should make it clear that while I do listen to the show, in very specific circumstances that we'll come to in a second or two, I don't really care who presents it, and I find both Zoe Ball and Scott Mills fairly uninspiring as radio presenters. The reason I listen to it at all is that it's the noise that my alarm clock/radio is programmed to make at the appointed hour in the morning, on weekdays anyway. I can't say I actually pay much attention to the show's contents, but instead generally whack the snooze button once and then when it goes off again heave myself out of bed, mostly drowning out the radio with a cacophony of groaning and creaking and farting noises. 

But why Radio 2? The rudimentary reasoning goes as follows: Radio 4 might either be not loud enough to wake me up, or the topics discussed on the Today programme might distract me into shouting at the radio or something and make me late. Radio 1, on the other hand, is probably a bit brash and noisy and inclined to Young People's Music which, honestly, is just shouting with a beat. What about craftsmanship? Ballads? Anyway, Radio 2 it is. The added advantage of Zoe Ball's show in its current form is that she does a sort of version of Thought For The Day (called, if you please, Pause For Thought) just after the first snooze interval elapses, so that gives me a good incentive to get up and turn the radio off before Kate Bottley or someone similar comes on and tells us all about how if Jesus were here today (and of course he is, in a very real but also not actually real sense) he'd be down at the local multi-storey car park doing some sick parkour in baggy shorts and a hoody, or something.

Anyway, I seem to have gone on a bit, but no harm done. The point is that the article on the BBC News website included a picture of what appeared to be a crude and slightly cruel effigy of Scott Mills hewn from shiny pinky-orange wax and then left in a room that was slightly too warm for a couple of hours, but was in fact, it turns out, the actual Scott Mills. The first thought I had was that he looked a bit like those two guys who'd had their chins extended (among various other procedures) so that they ended up looking a bit like Vic & Bob's The Ponderers, only with more terrifying hair and teeth. The trouble was, I had no idea of their names. Luckily I am pleased to be able to report that a Google search for "weird plastic surgery guys" proved instantly fruitful and revealed their identity: Grichka and Igor Bogdanoff, both of whom died within a week of each other of COVID-19 in early 2022. That's Grichka in the photo below, or so the internet tells me, but it doesn't really make much difference.

all right, smart alec

You might recall that when I reviewed Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy here a while ago I mentioned that I'd seen the highly-regarded 2011 film (starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley) in the cinema when it came out, and furthermore that I'd never seen the 1979 TV series, which famously starred Alec Guinness as Smiley. 

Well I'm just checking in here to tell you not only that the full seven-part series is now available on BBC iPlayer, but that I have spent a few days, as I believe the kids say, binge-watching it. I mean, a proper binge-watch would have done the full thing in a single five-hour sitting breaking only to occasionally go for a wee and buy more Pringles, whereas I managed about an episode a day for a week.

Anyway, you'll be wanting a verdict, I imagine. It's worth making the point first that order is important here, and mine is: 2011 film, book, 1979 TV series. Obviously the TV series, occupying over twice the screen time of the film, has a bit more space to stretch out and luxuriate in the detail, and even include some stuff from the book that the film didn't have time for. As far as the actors go I'd say Mark Strong is a better fit for Jim Prideaux, Ian Bannen being a bit too old and not physically imposing enough, and Colin Firth's Bill Haydon has a slightly more brittle and less reptilian charm than Ian Richardson's. Yes, yes, but what about Smiley? Well, Alec Guinness is slightly more twinkly and charming than Gary Oldman, and you get more of a sense of his penetrating intelligence. Oldman's Smiley is grey and cold almost to the point of anonymity, which of course is what makes him such a dangerous adversary. That said, and with the caveat that Smiley's age in the various books he appears in is a bit elastic, Guinness was probably a bit older than the book's version of Smiley. Of course both versions can exist without either detracting from the other, or there having to be a definitive verdict about which one is better. On the other hand, this is the internet, so people will of course get all aerated about it. 

The other Alec Guinness series, 1982's Smiley's People, is also available on iPlayer. They missed out the second book in the loose trilogy, The Honourable Schoolboy, apparently for cost reasons, presumably because it features some exotic overseas locations that they couldn't afford to film in. I have some tentative aspirations to read all three books so I may defer watching that series until I've done so. 

our father who art in heaven, I lost my mess in pew eleven

One other thing, also tangentially book-related: we went to a family gathering last week and it was held in the Community Centre in the village of Acton Trussell, which we've been to before as it's conveniently located near to several of Hazel's extended family. I see that I mentioned it briefly once before, as the book I was reviewing (William Maxwell's They Came Like Swallows) was one that I'd acquired from their quite extensive shelves on a previous visit. I see that at the time there was an honesty box in place; this seems to have gone now, probably as a result of no-one carrying small-denomination coins around any more post-COVID. Instead there seems to be some sort of loose book-swap scheme in place where you're encouraged to swap in a book when you take one out. Sadly I didn't come armed with any spare books, so I am now in credit to the tune of a couple of slim paperbacks and need to redress the balance on my next visit. 

I was also musing over the name of the village in my head on the drive up as it seemed faintly reminiscent of something I remembered from somewhere else, and it finally came to me in the latter stages of the journey (somewhere on the M6 I'd guess) - the name of the fictitious village of Stackton Tressell inhabited by cross-dressing comedy duo Hinge & Bracket in their various radio and TV programmes (and the occasional sherry advert) in the 1970s and 1980s was (a bit of Googling revealed) based on the real-life village of Acton Trussell, which just happens to have been where Patrick Fyffe, who played Dame Hilda Bracket, was born. George Logan, who played Dr. Evadne Hinge, was born near Glasgow, since you ask. Dear Ladies, which ran on BBC2 from 1983 to 1985, is the particular Hinge & Bracket vehicle that I remember - I would describe it as gentle comedy evoking the occasional wry chuckle rather than any pant-wetting hilarity.

Also spotted on one of the notice boards in the main hall while I was there was this frankly mind-boggling bit of groovy-vicar desperate grasping at young-person relevance and engagement. I mean I genuinely think that if Jesus were with us today - and, in a very real sense, he is, of course - he'd be rolling about in a paddling pool full of custard, or whatever it is that Messy Church implies.

I mean, even if you can get past the Charlotte Church jokes, there's still a faintly sniggery element here, and it would be highly advisable for their promotional video segments to be a bit more careful about phrasing than they seem to have been about ten seconds in here; the phrase "people just coming in all their mess" would probably have best been avoided.

red is green and green is read, I've got this film stuck in my head

You might recall my doomed attempts to remember some identifying details about some long-ago and dimly-remembered TV advertising tag lines (details like what product they were actually advertising, for instance), and also this plea for assistance with some details of a half-remembered comedy sketch from the 1980s/1990s.

hi, #comedy Twitter. lots of old Smith & Jones sketches on #YouTube, of course, but the specific one I'm after has them sitting in a kitchen having a late-night drink; possibly a party. people keep getting up to leave and then coming back in concert-encore stylee. Irish accents.

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) May 17, 2019

I also put up a request for assistance in placing a film based on an equally vaguely-recalled single scene which had stuck in my mind for some reason, presumably after seeing it, or part of it, on TV a very long time ago:

OK tweeps: mystery film/TV memory time. Probably a movie, probably set during WW2, American guy captured by Japanese guys and taken to some sort of underground lair where they attempt to brainwash him. #films 1/3

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) October 28, 2019

Well, I came across the tweet above earlier by means of some search I can't remember the purpose of now, other than that locating this particular tweet wasn't it, and was inspired to have another go at solving the mystery. I'm not sure whether my Googling keyword selection skills have improved since last time, or if the page I found didn't exist when I did the original search, but whatever the reason I'm pleased to be able to say that I have located the film in question, and it's called Battle Beneath The Earth, a fairly absurd-looking science-fiction thriller from 1967. I mean, some of the details I'd recalled above were pretty clearly wrong - it wasn't set during World War II, the dastardly Oriental villains were Chinese, not Japanese, and I'd remembered the hypno-brainwashing mantra slightly wrong - instead of this:

the new sun rises in the east; the west is dead

it's this:

red is green and green is red, the east sun rise(s) and the west is dead

But, you know, pretty close - crucially, close enough that using "the west is dead" as a search string and excluding the word "witch" from the results to get rid of all the Wizard Of Oz stuff reveals the existence of this page which contains both the quote (slightly misquoted, to my hearing of the original anyway, but good enough) and the title of the film. 

Pleasingly, I was able to validate that this really was the film I remembered by looking for the specific scene on YouTube, which has the full movie, for anyone interested in camp 1960s vaguely-racist paranoia. The specific brainwashing scene I'd sort-of-remembered is here. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Red Bull Formula 1 head honcho Christian Horner, currently *cough* in the midst of some, erm, personal issues, and Scottish comedian and internet provocateur Limmy, whose current incarnation as a video game streamer on Twitch I find somewhat baffling but which clearly makes him happy and pays the bills, so it's all good. The longer-form TV stuff he used to do is pretty good, and the things like the compilation of short clips originally posted to Vine featuring his increasingly deranged plasterer is a thing of bleak Beckettian brilliance.

I hate you, leopard

I'm sure that you, like me, are a deeply tedious and unappealing person to be with at parties owing to your propensity for offering up "fascinating" trivia factoids at the drop of a hat: Birmingham has more canals than Venice, Gary Oldman is thirteen days younger than Gary Numan, et teeth-grindingly cetera. Those two do at least have the virtue of being true, though the Birmingham one is considerably less impressive than it sounds once you consider the relative sizes of the two cities. 

Another one that I've heard a few times is: did you know that Olive out of On The Buses was married in real life to Ape Being Attacked By Leopard from 2001: A Space Odyssey? This one is only really suitable for trotting out in the company of people old enough to remember On The Buses - a group, I should add, which actually excludes me as I don't think I've ever seen it. This is partly because I was only three when its original run ended in 1973 and partly because it was on ITV, which there was a largely-unspoken ban on in our house for reasons I've never quite been able to fathom in hindsight. Anyway, Olive was one of the main characters, requiring actress Anna Karen, in real life a slim occasional model, to don large amounts of padding, an unflattering wig and glasses. It's fair to say On The Buses doesn't see much repeat action these days as it's no doubt Highly Problematic in a whole variety of ways. 

Anyway, back to the claim - what is certain is that Anna Karen was married to a guy called Terry Duggan, from 1967 to his death in 2008. He was a comedian and actor who appeared with his wife in several things (On The Buses included). His Wikipedia page does make brief and slightly vague reference to him having also "learned acrobatics which led to film stuntman roles", but there is no mention of 2001 in his filmography. Go to IMDb, though, and you will see that he is credited with the role of "Ape Attacked By Leopard". So who is right?

Well, closer examination of the Wikipedia edit history reveals that there was an update - fairly recently, in late 2023 - that removed that role from his list. There is an explanatory note which says that the role was indeed played by a bloke called Terry Duggan, but a different one, and links to this article. Lots of interesting stuff there related to the shooting of the Dawn Of Man sequence at the start of 2001, ending with the famous match cut from the flying bone to the spaceship, and in particular this:

Terry Duggan was a acrobat and stuntman born in Coventry in 1935 (no relation with Terry Duggan the comedian). Duggan had already worked with the Chipperfield's, a famous british circus, and later joined a member of the family, Jimmy, who had started a film animal business and at that time of the shooting of 2001 was operating Southampton Zoo. 

There is also a footnote, as follows:

(dec.11: the article has been updated with the removal of the picture of Terry Duggan the comedian, who was not the Duggan involved with the Chipperlfield's and 2001. As Mission Control would say, IMDB and Wikipedia are "in error" in saying that they were the same person. Source: Mr.Duggan' sister thanks to Jamie Clubb.)

There is a link to the blog of the Jamie Clubb mentioned in the footnote, and some relevant entries are here and here. This is the most relevant paragraph:

The bounce article referenced Terry Duggan, a wild animal trainer who worked with my two great uncles and my grandfather when they ran "Chipperfield's Circus". I am not directly related to the Duggans, but we share cousins and they have been connected to my family for a very long time now. Terry and my great-uncle, Jimmy Chipperfield, were involved with the prologue sequence of Kubrick's film, where a leopard attacks a member of a tribe of australopiths.

On the other hand, there is this page which purports to be written by a relative and which does make the 2001 claim in relation to Terry Duggan the comedian and husband of Anna Karen. So who do we believe?

My gut instinct is to believe that these were two different people; it seems implausible that someone whose day job was as an actor and comedian would be entrusted with the job of wrestling a leopard, still less be inclined to accept it. On the other hand, someone who worked pretty much full-time with circus animals would be an ideal fit for the job. 

So I think we tentatively conclude that this is a myth - that obviously shouldn't stop you from watching 2001, though you might want to secure 3-4 undisturbed hours and get lightly baked first. As for On The Buses, I couldn't say I'd recommend it, but you do you.

four candles

I tell you what, the life of a tedious atheist is not an easy one, especially at Christmas. I know I don't complain much about it on here these days, but only because the weight of the world has crushed my spirit and, you know, what's the point of anything any more, really? Nonetheless there is a fine line to be walked between going WELL ACTUALLY every time anything vaguely religious is mentioned and nodding along in acquiescence to all of it, just for a quiet life. 

A good example is Christmas carol singing, which I quite like, not because I am filled with religious fervour at celebrating the birth of our lord and saviour Jesus Christ, but because communal singing is quite a nice cultural tradition, especially when it's cold and dark outside. The difficulty here is that if you want to do it you will very probably have to put up with quite a bit of religious nonsense interwoven with the occasional carols, since in general even the Christmas Eve singing happens in the context of a religious service, albeit mercifully shorn of the really heavy-duty praying and sermonising.

We decided that it might be nice to take the kids along for a bit of a sing this year and so we decided to go to the afternoon carol service at a nearby church. This turned out to be St. Mark's, a short drive away, rather than St. John's just around the corner, purely owing to scheduling convenience. Both churches are affiliated with the Church in Wales, which is broadly the Welsh equivalent of the Church of England. St. John's does allude on its website to being "firmly in the Tractarian/Anglo-Catholic tradition"; fortunately I neither need nor desire to know what the fuck that means, nor how significant any of these minor doctrinal differences are.

Anyway, it was perfectly nice, and they stuck mostly to the well-known favourites in terms of the carol selection, though disappointingly didn't finish will the usual cathartic bellow through O Come All Ye Faithful. There wasn't a huge congregation, probably 60-80 people at most, and so I did encounter the slight catch-22 situation you can find yourself in here, particularly if your voice is on the low side compared to the rest of the singers: you can't really work out if you're singing in tune without singing loudly enough to hear yourself, by which time it's a bit late. In a larger crowd making a bigger noise you can do it more discreetly, or at least conclude that it doesn't matter because everyone else will be carrying the tune along.

There were a couple of readings and a bit of slightly protracted audience participation in terms of populating the stable/manger diorama thingy they'd set up at the front of the church. Some odd differences in scale aside (tiny cow, mahoosive sheep, etc.) they stuck to the traditional animal line-up, rather than the wildly variable cast of characters you see at school nativity plays - fish, scuba divers, spacemen etc. 

The only thing that was out of the ordinary was that after the main business of the service had concluded the congregation trooped over to the back of the church to participate in some bizarre voodoo ritual involving candles and oranges. Those of you who have been paying close attention to my Twitter feed over the years, or just generally know more about stuff than I do, will recognise this as a Christingle.

Nia went to a Christingle church service with her Rainbows group this morning. I have (at best) mixed feelings about the whole thing, as you can imagine, but mainly just bafflement about what #Christingle is. seems to be something to do with oranges. #voodoo #religion

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) February 3, 2019

"A Christingle" is the correct usage, by the way, as the term refers to the object itself, which is, as you can see, just an orange with a candle stuck in it and four cocktail sticks skewering some marshmallows and raisins. 

The question you might usefully ask yourself here is: why does this tradition, apparently cooked up out of thin air by some guy in Germany (not, as you might have assumed, a guy called Chris Dingle) a couple of hundred years ago, seem so bizarre and the metaphors (the orange represents the world, the skewered sweets the four seasons, or possibly the four "corners" of the earth, etc.) so contrived, while the other stuff more central to Christianity's core belief system (the whole Nativity thing with the wise men bringing gifts, the resurrection, the subsequent water/wine business) is given, if not exactly a free pass, some nodding respect even by non-adherents? Any claim that the latter is different because it's based on stuff that actually happened is dubious at best, so you have to conclude that it's mainly about age. Two hundred years is not enough for bizarre shit to fossilise into unquestioned tradition, so I guess the Christingle thing is still in what I like to call the Scientology Zone. 

Anyway, the kids had a nice enough time without coming away filled with religious conviction. Nia is old enough to find the religion thing quite interesting, from a cultural/anthropological perspective, and we did have a conversation on the way home wherein I explained my theory of religion's persistent cultural "stickiness"; basically that it's useful for a community to have shared "stories" to help identify each other, and it's actually more useful for these to be fictitious than for them to be true. More on this here, mainly in the paragraph featuring the Captain Cavemen image, if you want to skip past all the stuff about Noel Edmonds. 

Overall it was quite nice, my squirmy discomfort with some of the more nonsensical elements aside, like being expected to intone a solemn "Amen" at the end of some craven pleadings to a potentially vengeful deity. I was, as I always am, conscious while singing of the absurdity of some of the lyrics - I definitely got a sideways look from Nia at "offspring of a virgin's womb" during Hark The Herald Angels Sing, and another one at "Veiled in flesh the Godhead see" a few moments later, at which I was presented with a mental image of Jesus wearing Lady Gaga's meat dress from the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards.

Finally, that BBC link contains the following paragraph, inadvertently revealing of the charming innocence of the showbiz reporter in the face of smutty innuendo:

Slashed to the thigh, and featuring a cowl neck, the dress came with matching beefy boots, hat and meat clutch. "I never thought I'd be asking Cher to hold my meat purse," said Gaga as she picked up her award for the Bad Romance video – perhaps unaware that Cher doesn't eat meat.