it used to be all fields round here, you know

Anyone else find maps completely fascinating? Especially old maps, especially where things on the ground have changed significantly since the map was published? No? Just me? Well, screw you, it's my blog.

This is a postscript to my inconsequential ramblings about last weekend. In the upstairs corridor of the pub we stayed in there was a framed map of the local area from, I would guess, the 1930s or so. It took me a minute or two to realise why I didn't recognise the landscape, and then I realised it was because there was no lake. My puny photographic skills were inadequate to the task of photographing a glass-fronted picture from close range in dim light, but as luck would have it I had a professional photographer on hand to help out.

Wimbleball Lake was constructed in the late seventies; some pictures of the construction can be found here.

Here's a snapshot of the relevant area on the current 1:25000 OS Explorer map:


Here's the same area in an old UK road atlas I've got, which I would date approximately at the late 1950s (no motorways, and Dulverton has a railway station, so it's definitely pre-1960s):



Here's the same map, with the present location of the lake sketched (pretty roughly) in:



Here's the expertly snapped old map from the pub wall:


This one has some contours on it which almost suggest the outline of where the lake would eventually go. Here's the same map with a rough sketch of the present lake location, just in case it's not obvious:

the last book I read

Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan.

Papa? Nicole?

Yes, we're in France, where Raymond and his precocious teenage daughter Cécile live a life of carefree hedonism punctuated by holidays on the French Riviera where they loll languidly around drinking champagne and having decadent affairs. During one of these holidays an old friend of Cécile's (long-dead) mother comes to visit and strikes up an intense relationship with Raymond. Cécile, fearing the end of her carefree existence, conspires with her young lover Cyril to prise the couple apart, with tragic consequences.

It's one of those novels which starts by recollecting some mythical golden summer from years past, a sure sign that some sort of disaster is in the offing. Sagan was only eighteen when she wrote the book, but it doesn't read like a sixth-form essay, possibly because it's too short (a fraction over 100 pages) to outstay its welcome. I suppose your perceptions are coloured by what you read last, as well, and it's quite nice to follow a big thick meaty one with something short and refreshing (as the actress said to the bishop), like a refreshing glug of wine after a big meal, before moving on to the next course.

Interesting tangentially-Sagan-related factoids: the title Bonjour Tristesse is taken from a poem by the French poet Paul Éluard, whose wife Gala left him to become the wife and muse of the legendary Spanish surrealist nutter Salvador Dalí. Also, Sagan (whose real name was Françoise Quoirez) took her surname du plume from a character in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, which I will get round to reading some day, honest. I've been training by eating madeleines, so that's a start.

pirate merchandise

Having trouble achieving an authentically piratical tone in your e-mails on International Talk Like A Pirate Day? Try plugging one of these into your laptop.....

shiver me timbers

I hope you've remembered what day it is today. If so try taking the Pirate Personality Test (see below).

You are The Cap'n!

Some men and women are born great, some achieve greatness and some slit the throats of any scalawag who stands between them and unlimited power. You never met a man - or woman - you couldn't eviscerate. You are the definitive Man of Action, the CEO of the Seven Seas, Lee Iacocca in a blousy shirt and drawstring-fly pants. You’re mission-oriented, and if anyone gets in the way, that’s his problem, now isn’t? Your buckle was swashed long ago and you have never been so sure of anything as your ability to bend everyone to your will. You will call anyone out and cut off his head if he shows any sign of taking you on or backing down. If one of your lieutenants shows an overly developed sense of ambition he may find more suitable accommodations in Davy Jones' locker. That is, of course, IF you notice him. You tend to be self absorbed - a weakness that may keep you from seeing enemies where they are and imagining them where they are not.

What's Yer Inner Pirate?
brought to you by The Official Talk Like A Pirate Web Site. Arrrrr!

incidental music spot of the day

Jeff Buckley's Grace, the title track from his only "proper" studio album before he carelessly got himself drowned in the Mississippi in 1997, on Nicholas Crane's entertaining Great British Journeys series on BBC2. Fine album though it is, it's the astonishing cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah that seals the album's legendary status - well, that and him being dead, anyway. If you haven't heard it, sort it out, pronto.

the last book I read

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.

I haven't read a real big doorstop of a novel for a while - Riven Rock was probably the last one that might qualify, but this is bigger (650+ pages). For all its thumping weight I zipped through it pretty quickly, though.

Enid and Alfred Lambert live in the fictional midwestern town of St. Jude; Albert is increasingly in the grip of Parkinson's disease and dementia, Enid is in denial about the whole thing, an increasingly difficult position to maintain in the face of Alfred's increasingly slender grip on reality, not to mention more mundane things like being able to make it to the toilet in time.

Meanwhile their three children have some problems of their own: investment banker Gary is an uptight control freak increasingly in the grip of depression and paranoid about his wife and children ganging up on him behind his back, chef Denise is simultaneously sleeping with her boss and his wife, and feckless Chip has been sacked from his cushy academic post, dumped by his girlfriend and is now doing PR for a shady character in Lithuania. Meanwhile Enid harbours somewhat unrealistic fantasies about getting the whole family together for one last big Christmas celebration in St. Jude.

It's one of those novels that starts off by sketching some brief details about the present, firing off into the past to fill in everyone's back-story, linking them all together as it goes, and then emerging back into "now" to tie up all the threads at the end. This can result in a bit of reader frustration as you wait to get the discursive bits out of the way and get on with what you feel, instinctively, is the "real" story. I had some problems in this area with, to name but two, John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany and Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, highly entertaining books both, but in both cases by the time the back-story was out of the way there was only a handful of pages to tidy up before the book ended. Clearly this is a problem with my expectations, and them not being met by the books' structure, but there it is. The Corrections just about avoids this by emerging into the present in the nick of time to make you care about the stuff that, by the book's internal timeline, hasn't "happened yet", if you follow me.

Apparently this is grouped, by some at least, into a genre called "hysterical realism", along with a few other authors I'm familiar with; I can see the sense of the grouping to some extent, though I think the comparison with Thomas Pynchon is stretching it a bit. Franzen is actually interested in people in a way that Pynchon isn't, for a start, though I should point out that this opinion is derived from reading Vineland only and not any of Pynchon's other stuff.

Anyway, I digress. It's very good, and it'll take less time and effort to read than you might think. Give it a go. If you want a bit more analysis straight from the horses mouth, as it were, try this Salon.com interview.

album of the day

Liege And Lief by Fairport Convention.

I don't care what you say, there's a shockingly limited range of subjects which are made the subject of songs in the pop/rock idiom these days. Yes, love, sex, bitches, being a playa, popping a cap in some brutha's ass, all that stuff, and that's all well and good, but what about:

• getting press-ganged into the army, deserting multiple times, eventually getting shopped by your sweetheart, court-martialled and sentenced to death, only to be reprieved at the gallows by Prince Albert who just happened to be passing (The Deserter)
• getting picked up by the local Lady Muck outside the local church and spirited back to the baronial castle for a bit of hide-the-mediaeval-saveloy, and proving yourself every bit the equal and then some of Lord Muck in every department, if you know what I mean, and I think you do, only to be confronted by the man himself, armed to the teeth and not best pleased, and messily slaughtered (Matty Groves)
• wandering round amiably enough minding your own business only to be confronted by a bothersome raven handing out vague prognostications of doom (it's a talking raven, by the way) which you kill in a bit of a tantrum only to find that it was a shape-shifting version of your lady friend, who is now dead - ha! that'll teach you (Crazy Man Michael)
• or being spookily impregnated in some unspecified way by some elfin type lurking in a castle whom you then rescue from being dispatched to hell by the evil faerie queen (Tam Lin)

On a more serious note (and I touched on this a while back as well) British folk music has a bit of an image problem, but at its best it's a uniquely spooky genre, for the obvious reason that a lot of the songs still being performed were written hundreds of years ago, when one's day-to-day concerns really were more in the realm of being raped and disembowelled by rampaging Scots, Vikings, etc., or at the very least starving to death or drowning in the village pond, rather than more superficial concerns like what colour lip-gloss to wear or which particular group of Premiership footballers to get spit-roasted by. Most of the songs here are electrified versions of traditional tunes; Tam Lin in particular is based on a Celtic folk tale of some considerable vintage, and also happens to be a rollicking electric folk epic driven by the late Sandy Denny's vocals and some aggressively choppy guitar work from the great and far-from-late Richard Thompson, who, astonishingly, was only 20 at the time.

If you're only going to have one Fairport album, make it this one. The only others you might need are its immediate predecessor Unhalfbricking for songs like Genesis Hall, A Sailor's Life and the Bob Dylan cover Percy's Song, and its immediate successor Full House (after Sandy Denny's departure), solely for the 9-minute Richard Thompson/Dave Swarbrick electric guitar/electric violin duel of Sloth, which I urge you not to die without hearing, lest your life be revealed, in the final reckoning, to have been a hollow sham of a mockery of a travesty. Don't say I didn't warn you.

just in case.....

.....you skip past the Blogger "welcome" page when on your way to post something, as I often do, and miss it, this is really quite addictive - a (supposedly anyway) live feed of pictures being uploaded to blogs. Click on a picture to be taken to the blog it relates to, or click on "show info" to see a brief synopsis - you'll need to read quickly though. Adjust the scrolling speed with the slider at the bottom, it's all fairly self-explanatory.

an apology, and some blokes with guns

I knew the title of the new Russell Crowe/Christian Bale Western 3:10 to Yuma rang a bell, so when it came up in conversation the other day I confidently asserted that it was a remake of an earlier film, though I couldn't remember who was in it.

I now accept that while I was technically correct and there was an earlier film version, the reason I'd heard the title before was that the source material for the film is a short story by Elmore Leonard, written way back in the 1950s when he was mainly turning out stuff in the Western genre, before switching to what he's most famous for, i.e. brilliantly sly and twisted crime thrillers. I plugged Leonard during a brief discussion in the comments for the Carl Hiaasen book I read a while back, but it bears repeating in a proper blog post, I think. Read Glitz, Bandits, Freaky Deaky, Killshot or Maximum Bob; better still, all of them.

The royalties will be rolling in at the moment (not that I expect he needs them) as apparently there is a film of what I think is his best book, Killshot, in production at the moment, and one of the similarly excellent Freaky Deaky as well.

Leonard books are popular source material for films for fairly obvious reasons, not least that he writes dialogue so brilliantly that you can just dump great paragraphs of it into the script verbatim - recent ones have included Barry Sonnenfeld's Get Shorty - not one of the best books, and a film you'll only like if you don't find John Travolta unbearably smug and irritating - Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown (based on the book Rum Punch) and Steven Soderbergh's Out Of Sight, which is probably the best Leonard adaptation of all, and features a brilliant central performance from Jennifer Lopez which makes some of her subsequent career moves (music, films, marriages) all the more mystifying. And she never returns my calls, the moody bitch.

weekend fun

Just got back from a brief trip away to Exmoor with Hazel - Saturday lunchtime to Sunday lunchtime; less of a mini-break, more of a micro-break, really. Nice though - we stayed at the George Inn in Brompton Regis (here), stopped on the way there for lunch at the Bridge Inn in Dulverton (here - very nice pies), went for a pleasant late-afternoon walk around Wimbleball Lake and then went back to the George to sample some local beer (Dunkery Ale, which was new to me, as well as Exmoor Ale which I'd tried before).

Today we made our leisurely way back to Bristol via the coast road and Minehead, where we stopped for a quick look around. After a thrilling seafront game of crazy golf, we stopped off at the railway station (the terminus of the West Somerset Steam Railway) as there seemed to be some sort of commotion - turns out it was the 2007 Somerset CAMRA Real Ale Festival, no less. Featuring the splendidly named Tone Valley Jazz Band, as well as (more importantly) a huge range of beer, principally various excellent ones from the Cotleigh Brewery (based just down the road in Wiveliscombe). I should point out I didn't indulge myself in any of their excellent product (though I did pick up a souvenir glass - see picture on the right), but I know it well as they were heavily featured at the Buckland Dinham Real Ale Festival last year.

I took a few photographs, nothing very thrilling I'm afraid, but feel free to have a look.

I see dead people

A few significant names in the obituary columns recently, most notably Andy Roddick's mum Anita, and opera singer and part-time 40-ton pasta silo Luciano Pavarotti.

A couple you might have missed are:

Joe Zawinul, legendary Austrian jazz keyboardist, composer, collaborator with just about anyone who was anyone in the world of jazz over the past 40 years, and founding member of seminal jazz-rock outfit Weather Report, whose 1977 album Heavy Weather I played to death back when I was a student.



Michael Jackson. No, not that one, the man with what seems to me like the second-best job in the world (and if Scarlett Johansson's gynaecologist ever appears in the obituary columns I'll be sure and link to it here), sampling and writing about beer (and more recently whisky) for a living. The great service he did for beer enthusiasts and the brewing industry worldwide is to point out that brewing beer is a craft as complex and worthy of study as, say, winemaking, and the end product just as diverse, complex and interesting as the end product of the winemaking process (that would be wine, just in case you're not keeping up), and that it's only unwarranted snobbery that views beer as somehow inherently more proletarian.

Of course it's a fine line between the very good and important work that Michael Jackson did and the arran-sweatered, half-pint-mug-with-a-handle, Cornish-pasty-crumbs-in-the-straggly-beard, two-pints-of-your-finest-ale-stout-yeoman morris-dancing enthusiasts that give real ale drinkers a bad name, as witheringly accurately satirised in Viz's occasional The Real Ale Twats strip, more of which can be seen here and here. The fact that Jackson was a rotund chap with some slightly startling facial hair didn't help either. Another obituary by fellow beer writer Roger Protz can be found here, including the following Jackson quote which will do nicely as an epitaph:

No one goes into a restaurant and requests 'a plate of food, please'. People do not simply ask for 'a glass of wine', without specifying, at the very least, whether they fancy red or white, dry or sweet, perhaps sparkling or still ... when their mood switches from the grape to the grain, these same discerning folk often ask simply for 'a beer', or perhaps name a brand, without thinking of its suitability for the mood or the moment ... beer is by far the more extensively consumed, but less adequately honoured. In a small way, I want to help put right that injustice.

yarrr!

Just so you've got plenty of time to rustle up an eye-patch from a piece of black card and some old knicker elastic, glue a stuffed parrot to the shoulder of your overcoat and practise brandishing a gold telescope and saying "yarr-HAAARRRRRR" a lot, this is advance warning of International Talk Like A Pirate Day, next Wednesday (September 19th). More info here, as well as here for UK residents.

It's a pretty self-explanatory festival, really, just involving, well, talking like a pirate. Hints can be found on the websites above, but broadly speaking think Robert Newton as Long John Silver in the classic film of Treasure Island, or possibly Tom Baker (pictured right) as Captain Redbeard Rum in Blackadder II, but definitely not Johnny Depp in the Pirates Of The Caribbean films (save that for International Talk Like Keith Richards Day, as soon as someone invents it).

So, if you work in a call centre, say, try amending your usual anodyne phone greeting to something like: "Yarrrr! This be Brian of the good ship Acme Insurance. How can I be helpin' ye this fine seafarin' day? A free tot o' rum wi' every policy, yarrr. You don't get that with the scurvy dogs at Direct Line."

There's a Bristol connection, for those that don't know, which is that the Admiral Benbow pub at the start of Treasure Island is generally accepted to have been based on the real-life Llandoger Trow down by the Floating Harbour, a pub which is very much still open today, though missing a couple of end gables after these were blown off by the Luftwaffe, the filthy swines. It's all been tidied up and made good now, though.

Plenty of piratical events are planned, both on the high seas (well, maybe) and for the more landlubberly inclined. Personally I'll be splicing the mainbrace, sinking a noggin of rum with a comely serving wench, and trying not to get keel-hauled (those barnacles really smart). Yarrr!

subterraneamania

Did a bit of sightseeing as planned: the Rocks Railway is, to be honest, a bit underwhelming as you can't see down the tracks to the bottom station because there's a World War 2 blast wall in the way (the tunnels were used as an air-raid shelter), but nonetheless interesting, while the caves are much more extensive than I'd imagined, and really quite impressive. Photos of varying quality (as I was aiming the camera in the dark most of the time) can be found here.

World Cup thoughts

In case you hadn't noticed, the 2007 Rugby World Cup kicked off on Friday. And with a bit of a bang as well, with Argentina turning over the hosts France 17-12, and deservedly so. Here's a few observations and some no doubt wildly inaccurate predictions.....

Wales

Comfortable enough in the end against Canada today, but they were far from great overall. The new slate-grey change strip is far from great as well. Gareth Jenkins will have a few selection headaches before the crucial game against the Wallabies, not least: does he try and start with both James Hook and Stephen Jones? If so, which way round? I'd be tempted to start with Hook at outside-half and Jones at inside centre, with Tom Shanklin (Wales' best player from what I saw today) outside them. They can always mix it up and swap positions occasionally. If we (as reason dictates we probably will) come second in Pool B then we'll play the winners of Pool A, which I'll stick my neck out and say will be South Africa, in the quarters. And then catch a flight home shortly afterwards.

New Zealand

Surely, surely, this will be New Zealand's year? There are only two ways I can see them tripping up - one is unexpectedly meeting France in the quarter-finals and France producing another absolutely miraculous performance like they did in the semi-final in 1999, the other more likely one is either Australia or South Africa producing an epic defensive performance and strangling the life out of them, like the Australians did in the semi-final in 2003 and the Springboks did in the final in 1995. I'm not putting any money on it, though.

The Rest

The bookies have South Africa as second favourites. I disagree. The Australians look like a better side than they were in 2003, and they've got a few players coming towards the end of their careers who are going to want to go out with a bang, including possibly the most under-rated player in world rugby, Stephen Larkham. The other thing about the Aussies (and indeed Aussie sportspeople in general) is there's absolutely no chance of them bottling it under pressure. They know how to win, by whatever means necessary. Do the All Blacks? The answer to that question will probably dictate who wins the tournament.

None of which means to say the South Africans are a bad side. They don't have the sustained excellence of the Wallaby back division, for instance, and their half-backs are not the greatest (though I wouldn't want to tell that to Butch James in a dark alley) , but on the other hand they do have Bryan Habana on the wing. As for the French, now is as good a time as any to trot out the "depends which France turns up", "can beat anyone on their day" clichés, but I suspect they're not quite good enough, and nor are England. Ireland may well be good enough, but historically they tend to flatter to deceive in this kind of big tournament. And Brian O'Driscoll will be the most-targeted player in the tournament, with the possible exception of Dan Carter. O'Driscoll also shares with Jonny Wilkinson an almost masochistic relish for diving face-first into rucks and throwing himself into tackles on 19-stone second-row forwards, which is highly commendable, but not always in the best interests of himself or his team.

My overall prediction? Fiji to pip Namibia 7-6 in the final.

No, only joking. New Zealand to beat South Africa in the final.

While you're waiting to see if I'm right, here are a couple of rugby-related lookey-likeys of the day: firstly the man who lifted the World Cup in 1995, Francois Pienaar, and macrobiotic tantric sex god Sting.


Secondly: Scotland coach Frank Hadden and Top Gear slightly-less-annoying-then-the-other-two-twats bloke James May. Stay with me on this one: you've got to ignore the hair, and focus on the smirk and the slightly jowly chops. No? Please yourselves.

new boots!

Meant to post this before going to Yorkshire, but forgot. Here it is anyway: a solemn moment - the passing of my faithful old Berghaus boots, purchased from Blacks in Bristol about 15 years ago and with many many miles on the clock. I think the double whammy of the Three Peaks Challenge last July and then the ill-fated Dartmoor trip in January finished them off. So I had to get myself a new pair - I chose a pair of fully Gore-Tex lined Salomon boots from the Kathmandu shop at the top of Park Street. And I got a free pair of socks! I wore them (boots and socks) for a couple of walks up in Yorkshire, and they're very comfortable. Just in case you can't work it out: old ones on the left, new ones on the right.

Bourne yesterday

Went to the Showcase cinema in Bristol yesterday to see The Bourne Ultimatum. And you know what? It's pretty good. Aerial Telly makes a couple of good points, in particular that for a so-called suspense thriler it's remarkably free of suspense - Bourne loses his memory in the first film, discovers in the same film that he's a former CIA assassin, and, erm, well, that's about it for suspense. The main suspense in the third film is, having discovered that he was, pre-amnesia, knobbing the Julia Stiles character (and why not?), whether Bourne will do it again before the end of the movie.

To its credit the film doesn't adhere to the standard secret agent thriller cliché in this department; to be fair it also delivers handsomely on the other half of the suspense thriller deal, i.e. the thrills. Shooting, fighting, car chases, CIA skullduggery (including a nicely weaselly turn from David Strathairn as the head of a covert CIA operation - yes, another one), bombs, murdering people with a towel in a shower cubicle, the works. It's also just slightly subversive in a sly sort of way; the general theme of unaccountable secret government agencies practising kidnap, assassination and torture outside the reach of the law, and this being something to be resisted rather than celebrated à la 24 or Bond, could be seen as a dig by British director Paul Greengrass at the USA of extraordinary rendition, Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Or maybe not. Note also how shockingly Scott Glenn has aged since Silence Of The Lambs - I know it was 16 years ago, but still.

missed one!

....and it's one which ties the previous two posts together quite neatly: Secret Underground Bristol tells the story of lots of fascinating things which are buried under the streets of Bristol, including the two I mentioned in the previous post, as well as things like the River Frome which runs unseen under the centre of the city, and Pen Park Hole, a massive (60 metres deep) underground cavern situated roughly here. No chance of that one being opened up to the public unfortunately, as you'd be not so much "wandering round" as "plummeting to your death".

book 'em, Danno

Book-related (sometimes slightly tangentially) news that caught my eye this week:

• The Klaxons winning the Mercury Prize. Personally I'd have given it to Amy Winehouse, but maybe the prizegiving committee felt that that would only have encouraged her to spend the proceeds on brandy and smack. Pies might have been a better idea - Aerial Telly agrees. The book connection is that their album (Myths Of The Near Future) and debut single (Gravity's Rainbow) are named after books - a short-story collection by JG Ballard and Thomas Pynchon's legendarily unreadable 1973 magnum opus respectively.
• An interesting article about Ian McEwan in The Independent earlier in the week. I sympathise with objection 5 to some extent - fine though Atonement (now a film) and Saturday were (I haven't read the Booker-shortlisted On Chesil Beach yet - waiting for the paperback), I much prefer the slightly edgier early stuff like The Cement Garden and The Comfort Of Strangers, and I think his best books are the middle period running from The Child In Time in 1987 through Black Dogs up to Enduring Love ten years later.
• Dawkins reviews the Hitch in The Times Literary Supplement. Apart from a few very minor caveats, guess what - he likes it.
• Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things micro-reviewed in today's Independent. I think the evolution and persistence of irrational beliefs and what it reveals about the human brain's pattern-recognition capabilities, and the trade-off between the extraordinary cognitive leaps resulting in the invention of the wheel, the internal combustion engine and the Coco Pop and the brain's occasional tendency to eat itself, is an extremely interesting subject, certainly more so than debunking the beliefs themselves, which is a task approximately equal in difficulty to harpooning a walrus in a bathtub.

zowie Cavie

If you happen to be in Bristol this weekend you might be interested to hear that it's Bristol Doors Open Day tomorrow, when lots of places which are ordinarily inaccessible to Joe Q Public like you and me open their doors so us nosy parkers can have a good old snoop around. Too many places for anyone to visit all of between the hours of 10am and 4pm - barring of course Father Christmas, who can do every house in the world in a single night, and of course God, who is omnipresent, so in a very real sense he's visiting all of them right now - so you'll need to pick some sites of interest to you. I quite fancy having a look around Redcliffe Caves (pictured left) and the remains of the old Clifton Rocks Railway. See you there!

last one for a while, honest

I know that's too many in a row now, but John Humphrys in The Times is having a pop now as well. In a slightly less boneheaded manner, to be fair, but there is a sense in which the wishy-washy agnostics are more annoying than the raving evangelicals. And he does trot out many of the same nonsense arguments as Yazz, though he doesn't go so far as to assert (as she does, and I missed this one from the list in the previous post) that Richard Dawkins thinks raising a child as religious is worse than paedophilia. Do I need to point out that he says no such thing? I hope not. Anyway, the Pharyngula commenters have some fun with the Humphrys article here. And, just for a laugh, some George W Bush quotes on the subject of religion can be found here. Number 1 sets the tone:

I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did.

Are we frightened yet?

this really is absolutely tremendous

You know, I think Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has done what I was reasonably confident couldn't be done, and written an even more blitheringly vacuous and incoherent piece on atheism than the Dominic Lawson one I referenced in a previous post. And this article is quite a bit shorter than the Lawson one, so she's really had to get some high-octane claptrap in there. A few highlights:

• love! you know, and the beauty of the sunset, the smile of a child, the smell of fresh-cut grass on a summer evening, yadda yadda yadda (much rambling deleted here), ergo, God.
• atheists are fundamentalists too! Apparently.
• Hitler was an atheist!
• look at the churches! Aren't they lovely?

All this stuff has been vigorously and thoroughly debated many times over, so clearly Yazz hasn't been keeping up. Points 1 and 4 aren't worth responding to, but, for the record, point 2, despite being patently ludicrous, crops up often enough in the blogosphere to have a law (Blake's Law) named after it. If you followed that last link you'll see point 3 falls into the same category, though Godwin's Law is generally deemed to apply to any online argument, not necessarily one about religion. The Hitler/atheism link, just as a footnote, quite apart from proving nothing if it were true (As I pointed out in a much earlier post, he was a vegetarian too, so....what? Oh yeah, nothing), isn't. Actually the Wikipedia article entitled (amusingly) Reductio ad Hitlerum nails this particular fallacy more specifically.

a purple-headed mountain COVERED in chrism

I went to a christening on Sunday (though not the full-body version pictured here) - not only the third time I'd had to wear a suit in three weeks (I don't have to for work any more), but also the third time I'd had to go to church in three weeks (the other two were weddings). This does prompt a certain amount of conflict between my sincerely held (I trust that's obvious) views on religion, and more complex social instincts like pragmatism and the desire not to cause offence and to be, well, nice.

I might come back to that in a later post. This post is just to poke fun at two things which made me snigger to myself at the time: firstly that we sang All Things Bright And Beautiful, and that line about "the purple-headed mountain" always cracks me up, and seconly that the vicar did a bit of anointing with oil before the full dousing with water bit, and I happen to know that the oil in question (which is, incidentally, holy, thanks to some elderly bloke in a dress waving his hands over it) is called "chrism", which always provokes a bit of a Beavis and Butt-head style fit of chuckling. So, to recap: a man in a dress smearing chrism over small infants. Won't someone think of the children?

well bugger me

While I'm on the subject of Republican morality I must just mention this story in the Independent today, as it was referenced on The Panda's Thumb, by, erm, well, me, apparently. Good to see I'm putting the boot into the right people, even when I don't know I'm doing it.

The story also has all the classic elements of a Republico-conservo-religious scandal: respectable middle-aged pillar of the community, church-goer, family man, etc. etc. getting up to some really top-quality squalid furtive homosexual activity. Not that there's anything squalid per se about rampant gay sex, unless of course your whole political career and religious belief system is based on denouncing it as wrong and sinful. Ted Haggard and Mark Foley deserve honourable (if that's the word) mentions here as well.

do as they say, not as they do

Just a brief postscript to my vaguely US election-flavoured ramblings earlier - this Doonesbury cartoon from a few months back, which makes an obvious but worthwhile point about the Republicans' usual claim to be the party of aw-shucks honest-to-goodness downhome rootsy morality (religiously-derived in most cases, or so they would claim anyway).

And before we Brits start getting too smug and superior about it, David Cameron's latest musings on the subject of Family Values reveal a similar hardcore right-wing set of policies lurking under that cuddly "call me Dave" exterior. Gradually the matey disguise is peeling away to reveal the green scaly jackbooted sabre-toothed lizard beneath. Which is all quite amusing on one level, but let's not forget this bloke could, in a sequence of events I hope fervently will never come to pass, be Prime Minister of this country by 2009 or so.

incidental music spot of the day

Hocus Pocus by Focus over the closing credits of the new series of Saxondale. I haven't seen any of the second series beyond the 5 minutes plus credits I saw last night, but I thought the first series was quite good. Certainly above Tony Ferrino and Dr. Terrible's House Of Horrible on Steve Coogan's CV, though below the mighty Partridge of course. Refresh your memory here.

As for the song - well, it's nice to look back on those halcyon days (1973 in fact) when an instrumental built around a driving rock guitar riff broken up by occasional random passages of yodelling, flute-playing and spouting of strange Goonish gibberish can be a hit single (#20 in the UK, #9 in the US). Ah, more innocent times. Well, they were for me anyway, though to be fair I was only three at the time.

vote godless bastard in 2008

The Hitch is on a book tour of America in support of his new book, and he's writing about it in his Vanity Fair column, with his usual panache. He does raise one interesting point, among many:

One day a decent candidate for high office will say that he is not a person of faith, and the sky will not fall.

Well, I wonder. My feeling is that that will happen around the same time as the Presidential candidates can have a rational discussion about abortion, something that seems a very long way off indeed. I strongly believe, for instance, that as sparky and intelligent a woman as Hillary Clinton has, in private, no time whatsoever for the sort of irrational horseshit that she's required to pay lip service to in public. One day she will, when asked a question in a candidates' debate regarding "faith", feel free to respond in the appropriate way, i.e. with braying scornful laughter and pointing. I'm not convinced that will happen any time soon, though, but I'm increasingly convinced that those of us not susceptible to the charms of unicorns or the Flying Spaghetti Monster standing up and saying so instead of being so bleedin' polite and tolerant is the best way to speed up the coming of that day.

the last book I read

Eclipse by John Banville.

So: actor Alexander Cleave has an attack of stagefright and flees the theatre scene to take refuge in his childhood home in the country. There he finds down-at-heel local solicitor Quirke and his feral daughter Lily squatting on the premises, is pursued by his wife Lydia and reflects on his childhood, career and marriage and his strained relationship with his troubled daughter Cass, while being troubled by what appear to be occasional ghostly apparitions.

All of which is well and good, but largely this is a book that dispenses as much as possible with all but the bare minimum of plot in favour of a whole lot of internal reflection. And very beautifully written internal reflection it is too, in a chilly sort of way. You could certainly make the same criticism as I did some time ago of The Heather Blazing, which is that the central character is a bit too cold and unsympathetic to really engage with or care much about. And you need to care at least a bit to be moved by the moment when reality intervenes at the end and Cleave's apparitions are revealed (in his mind at least) to be premonitions of disaster.

I had a similar slight problem (i.e. technical brilliance accompanied by a slightly chilly forbiddingness) with the only other Banville I've read, The Book Of Evidence, which was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1989 (Banville finally won the Booker with The Sea in 2005). Not that I'm knocking books that are a bit "difficult"; I can read a Harry bleedin' Potter every day of the week, just as soon as my intellectual self-respect deserts me completely. Probably any day now.

more moors

Expanded version of earlier post with a new link to the Yorkshire photos, as the first lot only seemed to upload partially. A few accompanying observations which may be of interest:

Sunday: The Spurn peninsula is (to me anyway) a unique and fascinating geographical phenomenon; formed by longshore drift and the constant washing of sediment down the coast from the soft shoreline south of Flamborough Head, then eventually, as the same process narrows the neck of the spit, completely destroyed and washed away every 250 years or so, only for the process to immediately begin again a bit further north and west of the previous spit. By this timetable the current peninsula should have been destroyed in around 1850, but various groynes and other strengthening activities have increased its lifespan by another 150+ years. But this is only delaying the inevitable; driving along it now you can see where the peninsula road has been constantly re-routed over the years. Some time soon, probably within a few decades, Spurn as we know it will be gone. And then in another century or so it'll be back. Permanent sand spits can be much much bigger, a couple of good examples are in the Baltic. So as long as you can speak Lithuanian you'll be fine.

Monday: We stayed at the campsite at Middlewood Farm - very nice, but a bit windswept if the weather's a bit damp and breezy, which it was. While it was a bit nicer, in the morning, we walked along the track of the old Whitby to Scarborough railway between Fylingthorpe and the bricked-up tunnel at Ravenscar, stopped at the old alum works for lunch and then headed back to Robin Hood's Bay for an ice-cream and a pint. Lots of plaques etc. referring to the town being the end-point of Wainwright's Coast To Coast Walk. You can even get a plaque of your own to take away with you, if you like, just in case you have the sort of friends who, after you've been away walking for a fortnight and return exhausted and mud-spattered, choose not to believe you unless you can produce an engraved souvenir plate of some sort. Frankly in those circumstances you might be better off investing in some new friends.

Tuesday: Whitby Abbey is quite atmospheric in the fog - seems somehow appropriate as this is where Count Dracula came ashore (in the form of a giant hound) in Bram Stoker's novel. There is a Dracula Experience in the town, which I was expecting to be some sort of museum of literary delights, but turns out to be some sort of ghost train ride with people clanking chains and making woo-woo noises. The lunchtime fish and chips was very nice, though.

Wednesday: The highest point on the North York Moors is Round Hill on Urra Moor at approximately 1490 feet. So naturally I wanted to go and stand on top of it; this proved less easy than you might imagine in thick fog on a fairly featureless heathery plateau. We found it eventually, though. We had a sadly abortive attempt at cheese racing in the evening - Morrison's cheese slices have sadly inadequate seam sealing, though, resulting in fatal leaking of cheese.

Thursday: We stayed at the campsite at Spiers House for the second half of the week. On Thursday we took the waymarked 9-mile walk from the campsite around the Rosedale valley, and extended it by a couple of miles to the New Inn at Cropton, which has its own brewery out the back! And the beer is very nice, though calling their basic ale Two Pints (two pints of Two Pints, please) is a little bit arch and cutesy for its own good.

Friday: The North York Moors Railway claims to be the most popular heritage railway in the country. After all, they've got the village out of Heartbeat and Harry Potter (Goathland aka Aidensfield aka Hogsmeade). Far more importantly, the local co-operative shop in Grosmont sells excellent steak pies.

things you should download off iTunes today

It's probably very much the outside scoop to those who are aficionados of The O.C., but I heard Imogen Heap's Hide And Seek on Jo Whiley's Radio 1 show the other day, and it's really very good indeed. The vocoder seems to have made a bit of a comeback in recent years, starting with the fairly unremarkable use of it in Cher's enormo-hit Believe a while back, but this seems a genuinely innovative bit of music. Here's a live version which is quite close to the original, and here's a slightly sparser one apparently filmed at a rehearsal for a radio show of some sort.

She's a slightly strange equine beauty as well; reminds me of Ronni Ancona a bit. She also has a blog, including regular video updates, which reveal her to be slightly posh and scatty if not (in the latest one at least) revealing much about the creative or recording process, though there's some good stuff about plastering and what she cooked for lunch, if that's what you're after.

I don't want to go down the heard-it-all-before route, while stroking my beard and sucking ruminatively on my pipe-stem, but Hide And Seek is not dissimilar to Shadows And Light from Joni Mitchell's seminal 1975 album The Hissing Of Summer Lawns. That song is also available for download from iTunes. One more thing: The Hissing Of Summer Lawns is the Joni Mitchell album most popular with the jazz-heads and the rock critics, but 1972's Blue is The One. Just thought I'd let you know.

grim up north? you decide

It's late, so I'll keep this brief - here are some photos from our trip up north last week, comprising:

• Andy & Rachel's wedding in Hull on August 18th
• Our camping trip to the North York Moors during the following week
• Kevin & Fiona's wedding in Middlesbrough on August 26th (i.e. yesterday)

A fuller summary of our exciting activities will follow, including some captioning of photos. For the moment: the big ruin in the fog is Whitby Abbey, the big ruin in the sunshine is Rievaulx Abbey. Any other large mossy crumbly ruined structures are probably me.

this is my last blog post

....for a week and a bit anyway, as Hazel and I are off on holiday for a week and I don't anticipate having internet access. We're off to Yorkshire, mainly camping on or near the North York Moors but starting off in Hull on Saturday - not because it's a spot of great touristic importance, but because we're going to a wedding there. Though it does have the Humber Bridge which is interesting if you like huge man-made engineering structures (and who doesn't?). Interesting related fact: it's entirely incorrect to refer to the "River Humber" as there is no such thing. The Humber is specifically the estuary formed from the outflow of the rivers Ouse, Trent and Hull (and a few smaller insignificant dribbly ones). So you can say "the Humber" or "the Humber estuary" but never "the River Humber". Remember that.

I'm trying to persuade Hazel that we need to detour between Hull and the moors to visit Spurn Head as I've always found it completely fascinating. I'm not sure she's entirely convinced. Seems to me like an excellent place to blow away a hangover, as well as hats, outer layers of skin, etc.

Photos and more detailed reports on places of interest to follow when I get back after the Bank Holiday.

this blog certified BANNED in China

Bit of a badge of honour, really - Electric Halibut tells it like it is, doesn't take any jibba jabba from no jive turkey, still less from The Man, still less when The Man is some shady operative of the Thought Police in Beijing. Electric Halibut is down with the boys in Tiananmen Square, and feels their pain, except for the getting run over by a tank bit.

Anyway it's official - I'm banned in China. Clearly they can't handle the truth. Test your website here.

feel the warm thrill of confusion, that space-cadet glow

Brief footnote to the previous post: Doug and I went to Glastonbury in 2002 and Roger Waters was one of the headlining acts (mid-evening on the Sunday). The significance of a band featuring just one member of the original line-up that recorded The Wall playing songs from it, particularly the one (In The Flesh) that goes "they sent us along, as a surrogate band" wasn't lost on me, I can tell you. Now that, Alanis Morrissette, is ironic.

Even briefer footnote: Gerald Scarfe has a website featuring lots of artwork, including lots of Wall-related stuff. Have a look, it's really very good.

album of the day

The Wall by Pink Floyd.

This review will be in the form of a few seemingly unconnected random observations. Here goes:

• Pink Floyd are bracketed together with Yes and various others in the group of bands that punk had to happen to act as an antidote to (Steve Jones famously wore an I Hate Pink Floyd T-shirt). If you mark the advent of punk at 1976/1977 then it's certainly true that Yes's popularity had peaked well before this, but The Wall was released in 1979, so.....oh, I dunno. I might have had a point there, but I've forgotten what it was.
  
• Your clichéd progressive rock album has a small number of long meandering tunes on it; certainly something you could say of The Wall's predecessors Wish You Were Here and Animals, but actually The Wall is a series of quite concise songs (26 of them); Comfortably Numb at 6:21 is comfortably (you see what I did there) the longest song on the album.
  
• Roger Waters' son Harry provides the child's voice at the start of Goodbye Blue Sky.
• Another Brick In The Wall Part 2 is a perfect pop single (famously, the first UK number 1 single of the 1980s), and it's David Gilmour's loose-wristed funky guitar part that makes it. My old schoolfriend Mungo (no, that really was his name) was at the school that provided the kiddy choir.
• The film is a bit of a mixed bag; obviously the songs are great, and Bob Geldof isn't bad in a blank-faced sort of way as the central character, but the live-action sequences are just an interlude while you wait for more of Gerald Scarfe's jaw-dropping animation to come along. This is Goodbye Blue Sky, and this is Empty Spaces.
• It starts to get a little bit rock opera towards the end, round about the time of The Trial, not that I'm knocking a song which prominently features the word "defecate".
• Comfortably Numb is another one of these vital-signs litmus-test songs; if this doesn't do the hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck thing for you, then get yourself checked out. The Scissor Sisters' camp disco version should, if there's any justice in the world, result in the perpetrators having their large intestines pulled slowly out through their ears with a crochet hook throughout eternity.
• More than any other Floyd album this one features intelligent combined use of Waters and Gilmour's vocals - for instance Gilmour doing the lullaby bits in The Thin Ice and Mother and Waters doing the oh no, everything's fucked bits in the same songs, and of course Waters doing the verses and Gilmour the chorus in Comfortably Numb.
• Roger Waters dominated Pink Floyd's output increasingly throughout the 1970s, and this album is largely his brainchild. The single dominant event driving the creative juices here is Waters' father Eric's death in 1944 - Another Brick In The Wall Part 1, Vera and Bring The Boys Back Home reference it directly, as does most of Pink Floyd's next and last album The Final Cut in 1983 and the unreleased track When The Tigers Broke Free which was included on the compilation Echoes in 2001. Those are your actual "issues", right there.

and another

Stephen Glover nails the slight weirdness of the case against Channel 4's Dispatches programme Undercover Mosque - unless the programme-makers spliced stuff together to put words into the Muslim clerics' mouths that they didn't actually say (and I'm pretty sure no-one's suggesting they did) then the accusation boils down to the programme-makers giving an unbalanced view by editing out all the non-inflammatory stuff about the mosque newsletter, how the fund-raising for the new roof was going and how fundamentally nice and adorable kittens and fluffy rabbits are, in favour of focussing on all that other stuff they just happened to say about beheading people, stoning homosexuals to death, beating and oppressing women, etc.

Either you have TV programmes that are 73 hours long, or some editing of footage is required; it's called journalism. I'm sure the police's motives were good, but there's a danger, post-Lawrence, of bending over backwards not to be seen to be racist to the extent that your collective head disappears up your collective arse.

just a quickie

...the occasionally irritating but occasionally spot-on Charlie Brooker in spot-on mode in the Guardian yesterday on Richard Dawkins' new Channel 4 series The Enemies Of Reason.

If you've ever described yourself as "quite spiritual", do civilisation a favour and punch yourself in the throat until you're incapable of speaking aloud ever again.

incidental music spot of the day

Led Zeppelin's Communication Breakdown from their first album on BBC3's The Real Hustle. There's a whole lengthy blog post here on the subject of how this show and the original drama Hustle are, to say the very least, somewhat morally suspect, but I restrict myself to the music, not least the bit where Robert Plant appears to shout "SUCK ME" before the frenzied guitar solo in the middle. Great.

Incidentally Robert Plant is featuring in the fifth Green Man festival at the Glanusk Estate near Crickhowell in the Brecon Beacons (here in fact) this coming weekend. If you're at at a loose end I'd seriously recommend going along; Plant plays on Saturday 18th but I'd suggest going along the previous night to see the profoundly barking Joanna Newsom and her crazy harp-wrangling antics. I'll be in Hull, otherwise I'd be there with you.

tonight's TV nuggets

I've just caught, pretty much by accident, an adaptation of John Wyndham's short story Random Quest on BBC4. It was fine, not the greatest thing ever filmed, but quite good. Starring Samuel West and the lovely Kate Ashfield, who I last saw in Shaun Of The Dead - since then she appears to have changed her hair colour from blonde to black (for dramatic purposes no doubt) and given up eating (presumably not). Seriously, love, eat some pies, you'll feel better for it.

It's nice, though, to see that BBC4 are still producing "serious" drama. The adaptation updates things a bit (the original story would have been published back in the 1950s) by slotting in a few modern references like Condoleeza Rice being US President. It's certainly not the most interesting of Wyndham's short stories, but it's an interesting (if much-used) premise, the whole parallel universe thing. I have the story in the collection Consider Her Ways And Others; I would suggest if you want a seriously good Wyndham parallel-universe story you should go for Pillar To Post in the collection The Seeds Of Time. And if you want a Wyndham novel, you should shun the better-known stuff like The Day Of The Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos and read The Chrysalids. That's if you only want one; I'd seriously suggest reading all the above, plus The Kraken Wakes.

it really IS silly season all year round for these people

One of the things I like very much about The Independent is that it offers a broad range of views, some corresponding roughly with my own, some not. In many ways the ones that don't are the ones that are the most interesting; for instance I'm pretty sure the Indy only retains the services of Bruce Anderson to prevent its readership getting into a nice contented complacent liberal rut, a very valuable service. Seriously, you need a nice bracing bit of this:

Britain has the highest rate of single-motherhood in Europe, which is why we also have the highest prison population

occasionally, just to make the blood boil, while you imagine old Bruce sitting in his club in his pinstriped suit eating roast beef and spotted dick, guzzling claret and fulminating about the gays. It's good for you.

Dominic Lawson is another candidate, and he's surpassed himself this morning with a really tremendously incoherent article about religion. This is a man who knows where my buttons are, and isn't afraid to get in there and press away furiously. He starts off slowly with a bit of praise for his late brother-in-law John Diamond and for Richard Dawkins (who wrote the foreword for Diamond's last book Snake Oil), then veers off Sanity St. wildly, knocking bins over and everything, by invoking the religion-as-moral-framework fallacy and the "No True Scotsman" argument, throwing the Bible-as-metaphor fallacy smoke-bomb in after it, and then hitting us with the "god of the gaps" argument as we emerge coughing into the daylight. I'd like you to imagine, if you will, the old Family Fortunes double-farty noise after each one of those ingredients in what is a pretty rich and gamey logical fallacy salad.

Lawson's starting-point, before moving on to religion, was the rise of so-called "alternative" and "complementary" therapies (hence the Snake Oil reference), and another of our more reliable conservative wingnut columnists, Mad Mel Phillips, has had a slightly bizarre rant on a similar theme in the Daily Mail. The comments are great, particularly the one about "facts" from the bloke in Scarborough, though that one must surely be satirical. Mustn't it? More wide-ranging, though slightly less sympathetic comments (i.e. they're not from Daily Mail readers) can be found on Richard Dawkins' website (which reproduces the article in full) and on Pharyngula (which links to it).