the last book I read

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household.

Our unnamed narrator has been a bit of a silly boy. Not content with the life of a slightly bored upper-class well-off playboy, he decides to make use of his big-game hunting expertise to bag the biggest prize of all: a coyly-unnamed dictator in a coyly-unnamed middle-European country (but absolutely no prizes for guessing who the author had in mind in a novel first published in 1939). His motives for such an adventure are, at this stage, unclear, and he claims to have done the stalk purely for sport, never intending to pull the trigger. At least, that's what he tells his interrogators when they capture him, his plan having been foiled by a momentary change in wind direction causing him to pause with his finger on the trigger for long enough for a patrolling guard to spot him and cosh him on the back of the head.

Clearly his captors aren't going to let him live, although, having tortured him and generally roughed him up quite a bit they need to make his death look like an accident. So they dangle him off a nearby cliff and leave him to fall off at his leisure, which he duly does, only to land in a bit of marshy ground that prevents him from dying, though not from leaving substantial amounts of back and arse skin and the occasional lump of flesh attached to the cliff face on the way down. 

Finding himself unexpectedly alive, if a bit scraped, our muddy hero takes himself off to a nearby tree to convalesce, having the presence of mind to lay a false trail to a river a short distance away to throw his pursuers off the scent. Once his arse cheeks have knitted together enough to allow him to walk he heads off to try and make his way out of the country and eventually back to England. This seemingly impossible task is aided by his acquisition of a boat, thanks to an interaction with a sympathetic native he meets near the river. Using the boat to reach a port where British ships dock (again unnamed but quite likely Hamburg) he wangles his way onto a boat headed for London by striking up a rapport with the ship's mate, hides out in an unused water tank for a few days and eventually slips off the boat and into London.

It soon becomes clear that his pursuers aren't going to do anything as civilised as shrug and go home again once a national boundary has been crossed, though, and our hero finds that he has a tail, which he loses in the most emphatic manner by dragging him onto the live rail at Aldwych. This is great in the short term but does mean that the British police are now very interested in him as well, so a swift exit from London is required. So after collecting a wedge of cash our hero makes his way to Dorset, a place he knows well, and decides to go to ground until things blow over. Going to ground is what he literally does, in fact, finding an old holloway choked with vegetation where he can dig a primitive shelter into one of the side banks. Even here he is not safe, though: although evading the police is relatively straightforward, evading the agent that the enemy have sent to flush him out is less easy. 

After the enemy agent, masquerading as an Englishman called Major Quive-Smith, has picked up his trail and made an abortive attempt to shoot him, our hero retreats to his hideout, only to find that the Major has taken up residence in the farmhouse across the next field on the pretext of doing some shooting. There follows a game of cat-and-mouse which ends with the subterranean hideout being discovered and barricaded shut with its occupant inside it, whereupon Quive-Smith conducts an interrogation through a ventilation-hole to discover the would-be assassin's motives. These are opaque even to the would-be assassin, but are teased out over a few days of questioning: the narrator had a lover whom he brought to this location but who was involved in international relations in some way and was eventually captured and shot by agents of the power that Quive-Smith represents. This was what prompted the hunting expedition, and yes, of course he intended to pull the trigger.

What Quive-Smith does not know, though, is that our hero has been busy inside his cramped quarters, in gaps in the conversation, and has been building a MacGyver-style makeshift ballista out of some animal innards and wood. And the next time Quive-Smith puts his eye to the ventilation tube he finds himself getting ventilated in a pretty big-ass way with a catapulted piece of ironmongery through the frontal lobe. Our hero quickly digs himself out of his shit-infested hellhole, nicks Quive-Smith's clothes and passports, waits for the obligatory villainous sidekick to show up, kicks the shit out of him and makes him drive to Liverpool to make good his escape by boat to Tangier. Once there he assumes one of Quive-Smith's many identities (finding, fortunately, that they look quite similar) and slips back into mainland Europe, resolved to having another pop at taking out the dictator, and not fucking it up this time. 

When I was a teenager I had a hardback compilation (sadly I don't have it any more) of stories called something like Great Escape Stories, which contained extracts of various classic works including Airey Neave's They Have Their Exits, Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel, almost certainly The Great Escape, this chase sequence from Dick Francis' Dead Cert and the opening chapter of Rogue Male, which plunges the reader into the action immediately after the narrator has dropped off a cliff into some mud and is a quite ridiculously thrilling piece of writing. Almost more remarkable than that is how the action is never allowed to flag, even when the narrator spends (in a novel of 180 pages) most of the time between about pages 70 and 160 hiding in a hole in the ground. 

It's easy to see Rogue Male's influence by reading just about any thriller written since; in particular you can see its echoes in the character of James Bond: capable, resourceful, laconic, intensely interested in women but wary of attachment, not blinded by patriotism but with a keen sense of right and wrong and capable of merciless brutality when the situation demands it. In terms of Rogue Male's own influences, I have never read John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (published in 1915) but it seems an obvious influence as a tale of pursuit, although of course part of the point of that (as I recall anyway) was that Richard Hannay was innocent of the crimes of which he was accused, whereas our narrator here is not.

It's only fair to point out that, in common with most novels published in 1939, this contains a fair amount of the old racism and sexism. Among the good things that it contains are a genuine affection for the outdoors, nature and the natural world; the only sentimental moments that the narrator allows himself are with the large cat that co-habits the sunken lane with him and he calls Asmodeus, whose innards (after Quive-Smith kills him) provide the twangy bits for the makeshift crossbow, in an it's-what-he-would-have-wanted sort of way. It's easy for this sort of admirable twig-whittling enthusiasm (enabled by the privilege of being well-off enough to have leisure time) to curdle into a scorn of the squishy townies with their full-time jobs and no idea how to gut a stoat and make it into a hat, and it's a short journey from there to the sort of blood-and-soil ideas that, ironically (given Rogue Male's central plot premise), Hitler among others espoused. Robert Baden-Powell, for instance, the poster-boy for robust outdoor pursuits and plenty of jolly campfire songs and whittling, was quite a big fan of both Mussolini and Hitler.

None of that matters, though - this is an absurdly thrilling read which I recommend unreservedly to anyone. The introduction by Robert Macfarlane (who I previously mentioned here) recounts his (ultimately doomed) efforts to find the location of the hideout in the vicinity of Chideock in Dorset, We did some walking round here when we stayed in a holiday cottage near Bridport in 2013 so we may have come close to stumbling across it ourselves. Robert Macfarlane also, as it happens, wrote the foreword to two more novels which I got for Christmas (all in the overdue-reissue-of-neglected-classic genre); no clues but I will mention it here when I get to them.

oddly, three of the eight new novels I was gifted have forewords written by the same person: @RobGMacfarlane

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) December 29, 2020

Rogue Male has, it hardly needs to be said, been filmed a few times, firstly as Man Hunt in 1941 and then as  a TV movie starring Peter O'Toole in 1976, which also saw Michael Sheard aka Mr. Bronson from Grange Hill in the role of Adolf Hitler which he reprised in the third Indiana Jones movie in 1989. 

it's a bit parky out there

So this is basically The Lockdown Diaries part 2, part 1 being the preamble to the last post of 2020 which actually turned out to be the usual nerdy obsessing over blog stats and book-related trivia. 

One of the things that the rules dictate during the periods of more draconian lockdown is that you can go out for exercise, but that you have to do it from home, i.e. no driving to local beauty spots, still less hooning off to the Brecon Beacons to get up a mountain, more's the pity. So Nia and I have established a regular running regime, currently focused on the 4.7-kilometre round trip from our house which featured in this earlier post. In the three months since that post Nia's personal best for that route has improved from 28:34 to 26:42, which suggests to me that some time during 2021 or 2022 at the latest she will be slowing down to wait for me rather than the other way round. 

For trips out as a family of five a slightly different approach is required, and the best approach is to head for a green area and just let the kids explore and run about. None of the areas within walking distance of the house can measure up to the vast majestic splendour of the Siberian taiga or the Okavango Delta, but you have to take what you can get. As always if you're forced into a minute examination of your local neighbourhood to try to wring maximum value out of it it's surprising what little hidden gems can be found in close proximity to your doorstep. This list basically expands on the earlier one here which listed some parks and other green areas we'd discovered in Newport. Here's a few places we've been during lockdown:

• The nearest area of proper wild-ish country to where we live is the green space on the other side of the M4, generally known as St. Julian's Park. There are a few obvious ways into this from where we live - the path from the top of Beechwood Road which goes under the M4 at the elevated section between junctions 24 and 25, the path from further up Christchurch Road which goes over the top of the M4 via a footbridge, or further along towards Christchurch village via the open space known as the Lookout (or possibly the Viewpoint, depending who you ask). Anyway, it's apparently crawling with interesting plant and animal life, documented on this official checklist. Personally I wouldn't know a devil's-bit scabious if I was pissing on one, although I do have the remarkable Seek app on my phone, which I was sceptical about but which turns out to be very good. Anyway, we've been over here a few times, including the walk below whose middle section involved, as all the best walks do, us bimbling around getting lost, blundering into a cemetery and eventually winding up at our intended destination slightly wetter and later than intended.
  
  

  

  
  
• Less spectacular, but nearer the house, is an intriguing little diagonal slash of green in the middle of the area of otherwise fairly dense housing just east of where we live, marked on the Ordnance Survey map as Lawrence Hill. That's the name of the general area, not the green bit which I'm pretty sure isn't significant enough to warrant its own name. Anyway, if you walk along Christchurch Road to the bridge over the M4 you can cut down a footpath which brings you out at the top of this little area, and then walk back down it to get home again. The aerial view is a bit deceptive as it suggests you'd be able to gambol about all over; in fact the slope (downhill from the M4) is very severe and you can't really do anything but stick to the central path, but it's a nice place to spend 15-20 minutes if you just want a quick bit of fresh air.
  

  

  
  
• Lastly, on New Year's Day we went out to explore the green area we'd spotted a few times off Aberthaw Road, just a couple of minutes from the house (and avoiding the steep initial climb that's required to get to any of the places up the back of the house). I had been here once before; as I recall I had the boy with me in some carrying device (probably the Baby Bjorn) and had come out for a walk in a desperate attempt to get him to go to sleep. I'd stayed on the roads most of the way and just cut into the park right at the bottom to do a circuit of Lliswerry Pond (the park as a whole doesn't seem to have a name). If you come into the park at the top, off Aberthaw Road, you find it's a much bigger grassy area than it appears to be from the road and quite a good spot for a run about. Lliswerry Pond, where we ended up, is apparently the flooded remnants of a quarry and supposedly a good angling spot, if hauling rancid mutant dace out of a muddy pond and then throwing them back is the kind of bag you're into. I recall being able to do a complete circuit of the pond on my previous walk (probably a couple of years ago), and Google Maps' satellite view still shows a complete path, but we found that a section of the path on the south side had been closed off in a pretty permanent-looking way, presumably either because of bank subsidence or because that corner's proximity to the main railway line provided an easy access point for feral youths wanting to cause mischief.
  

  

getting stuck in at the crease

It's nice to see poor old Jeremy Hunt finally catching a break and someone else stepping into the breach to get called a cunt on broadcast media. This time it was the turn of Pakistan cricket captain Mohammad Rizwan, currently leading his team on a tour of New Zealand, one of the few places in the world where you can currently hold a sporting event in front of an actual non-socially-distanced crowd of actual people, thanks to New Zealand's spectacular success at containing COVID-19.

Rizwan can feel a bit aggrieved, as he'd just contributed an invaluable 61 to help Pakistan out of a hole after an early clatter of wickets. Nonetheless he'd have returned to the pavilion and taken off his pads only to be informed that one of the local TV commentary team had just called him a cunt.

As you can hear on the video below, the problem here is the commentator's attempt to say "counter-punch" to describe Rizwan's innings of 61 off 71 balls, but somehow he manages to end up saying "a real cunt" with some vehemence. 

🤣

Rizwan is a real.....what???

BAHAHAHAHA pic.twitter.com/XDiPU53hEs

— Rob Moody (@robelinda2) January 4, 2021

This isn't a completely unprecedented way for someone to find a way of saying "cunt"; this example from the radio is quite similar (in that Lynn Bowles was trying to say a word starting "count" and mangled the vowel sound for some reason).

kanpur mumbai mysore pune

 A couple of footnotes from yesterday's book review:

• Other books in this series whose action takes place principally in India are Midnight's Children (mentioned, as disparagingly as ever, in the post) and A New Dominion. Minor sections of The Marriage Plot and Around The World In Eighty Days take place there as well. 
• It's practically impossible to write a review of a novel involving colonial types in India attempting to retain their stiff upper lip, standards of dress and impeccable table manners in the face of artillery bombardment and the gradual destruction of the buildings they're in without making reference to this classic scene in Carry On Up The Khyber. Clearly it's not literally impossible, because I managed it, but only because, having dug out the link, I then forgot to mention it.
• J.G. Farrell is the second author with that pair of initials to feature on this blog, after J.G. Ballard. Other featurees who chose an authorial moniker comprising a pair of initials and a surname include A.L. Kennedy, J.R. Hartley, sorry, I mean L.P. Hartley, E.L. Doctorow, T.C. Boyle, J.P. Donleavy, G.B. Edwards, J.M. Coetzee, B.S. Johnson, J.D. Salinger and W.G. Sebald.

the last book I read

The Siege Of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell.

We're in India, in 1857. Nice enough country, India, if it wasn't for the bally natives, what? I mean, the civilising influence of the Empire has made it a nice enough place to live, although the bally heat is a bit trying, especially for the ladies, bless 'em, but there are always elements who, instead of accepting a perfectly reasonable offer of several years of gainful work as a reliable punkah-wallah, get ideas about ejecting the British altogether and running their own affairs. Dashed disrespectful, frankly.

Here is the town of Krishnapur, populated with a fairly typical crew of British people from all strata of society - the Collector, Mr. Hopkins, the Dunstaple family - soldier Harry, daughter Louise, just mooning around waiting for a suitable proposal of marriage from a suitable chap, and their father, a doctor - and George Fleury, recently arrived in India, a vague acquaintance of the Dunstaple family and already with an eye on Louise.

Rumours of unrest filter through from nearby towns, but it seems to be only the Collector who thinks that something major is afoot, until the bloodied survivors of a rebellion in a nearby garrison arrive and everyone retreats inside the Residency and attempts are made to fortify it against an imminent attack.

And an attack is indeed imminent, as the local sepoys start peppering the Residency and its occupants with musket and mortar fire. While the Residency has a reasonable supply of ammunition and weaponry, not everyone inside is trained or cut out for siege warfare. Obviously there are a lot of women and children, but anyone else of fighting age - Fleury, for instance - is pressed into service to man a cannon and shovel some grapeshot. Fleury actually acquits himself pretty well, but there are inevitably casualties which diminish the fighting force still further, and the ammo and food supplies can't hold out forever. 

As the siege wears on, the trappings of mid-19th-century civilisation begin to slip away. After giving corpses a proper burial becomes too tiring and hazardous they are simply tossed down a well, and as food stores dwindle and hunger takes hold there is an unseemly scrabble for the remaining goodies with tins of peaches being auctioned off to the highest bidder. Those without the resources to acquire this stuff have to make do with whatever they can scavenge: horses, dogs, insects.

Gradually it becomes clear that the entire Residency cannot be defended any more and the occupants retreat into the most easily-defended section to make their final stand in the dwindling hope of rescue. Just at the last moment, though, rescue does arrive in the form of a battalion of British soldiers, allowing most of the principal characters - Fleury, Harry, Louise, the Collector - to escape with their lives.

The Siege Of Krishnapur was one of the early winners of the Booker Prize in 1973 - between G. in 1972 and The Conservationist in 1974, both previously featured on this blog - and seems to be one of the few Booker winners whose critical regard has gradually risen over the years. While I wouldn't make the sort of hyperbolic Best Book Ever claim that this piece makes, I think I can see why that is. I very much enjoyed the skewering of absurd colonial attitudes, the unthinking racism and the lack of curiosity about how the natives might feel about having their country occupied by a bunch of port-swilling toffs (it's heavily inspired by the real events of the siege of Lucknow during the Indian Rebellion of 1857). One thing the general tone of comic satire does is clash slightly jarringly with the sections of the book which deal unflinchingly with the disposal of the dead and the appallingly primitive medical treatment of the (just about) living, who are variously depicted as dying in childbirth, losing body parts to gangrene or, in the later stages of the siege, succumbing to cholera and scurvy. I'm not completely sure there is a smooth transition between the comic bits and the rotting-corpses bits, which just emphasises the point I've made before that black comedy is a wickedly tricky thing to bring off successfully. Similarly, the sections where the two doctors Dunstaple and McNab argue publicly and at length over their competing theories regarding the origin and transmission of cholera have the feel of passages Farrell wrote and felt were too good to throw away, even though they slow the narrative down. 

None of which should imply that I didn't enjoy this, because I certainly did. There's no chance of Farrell joining the list of authors who have been victims of the Curse of Electric Halibut, as he died at the early age of 44 near his home in Ireland after falling off a rock while fishing in the sea. In addition to the 1973 Booker, Farrell was retrospectively awarded the Lost Man Booker Prize for Troubles, published in 1970 and ineligible at the time (along with all other novels published in 1970) because of some amendments to the eligibility criteria. The Siege Of Krishnapur was also shortlisted for The Best Of The Booker in 2008 (if you have sharp eyes you can see a reference to this on the cover of my edition), one of a few Champion Of Champions awards the Booker has rather self-indulgently cooked up over the years, most of which end up giving an award to Midnight's Children, for reasons I cannot imagine.

the year of not living dangerously

Well, here we are at the end of another year, one which has, on balance, sucked ass most egregiously for an exceptionally large number of people. I would include myself and my immediate family among that number while at the same time acknowledging that by most objective criteria we've been exceptionally lucky: my job enables me to work from home very easily (I'd already been doing it a couple of days a week since Huw's arrival in late 2016), we've all been healthy and virus-free (apart from the inevitable round of coughs and sniffles every time the kids went back to school) and we've managed to retain whatever meagre wisps of sanity we were in possession of at the start of the year. 

During the heady days of summer between the first and second waves of the coronavirus pandemic we managed to get away for a couple of camping trips, one in Devon and one in Yorkshire, but apart from that we were largely confined to barracks. One of the side-effects of being away less often is that I got a lot more reading done - at least, I assume that's the cause of the numbers you'll see below, but as I have precious little explanation for some of the peaks and troughs in previous years it could just be random variation. 

Anyway, here are some graphs (as always, click to enlarge) which chart some blog and book statistics for this year and also 2019, since I don't seem to have blogged about it at the time. Similar posts can be found from early in 2019, 2018, 2016 (twice), 2013 and 2012. Since I'm not going to finish my current book before the end of tomorrow, and nor am I intending any further blog posts this year after posting this one, I can now declare the blog activity closed for 2020. Statistical nuggets here include:

• 2019 was a poor year for reading activity with 17 books and an aggregate total of 5147 pages, better than 2016 and 2017 where my time would have been partly taken up with wrangling a premature baby, but ahead of only 2014 in "normal" years. 
• 2020, by contrast, was a bumper year with 24 books read (more than any year since the all-time high of 2011) and a mammoth total of 9223 pages, exceeded only by 2011, the year of my honeymoon and also the last child-free year of my life. The only other years in which I've read 24 or more books were 2007, 2009 and 2010, but none of them could match 2020's page count.
• As a consequence, 2020's average book length smashed all previous records at just over 384 pages (2015 with 333 was the previous record-holder). Six of 2020's 24 books were over 500 pages; even 2011 only included four, 2007 one and 2009 none. Longest book of the year was House Of Leaves at 709 pages (some of, them, admittedly, only containing a single word); shortest was Behind The Waterfall at 199. 
• Overall blogging frequency remains low by historical standards, but 2020's total of 68 posts (this one being the 68th) is the highest since 2016's 77. The book-reviews-as-a-percentage-of-total-blog-posts number just avoids being the highest ever at 35.29% (2018's was very slightly higher).

you must lower me into the steall

A couple of further notes on that Scottish trip, as my memory has now been jogged by looking at the photo gallery, and as I don't seem to have blogged about it at the time: we stayed in one of the cottages here between Glencoe village and Ballachulish; perfectly nice as I recall and well-situated for Glencoe and Fort William. Just to prove that point we'd stayed in the same cottage the previous year and knocked off a pair of Munros in each of those locations. The plan was to do something broadly similar this time. That's not quite how it went, though, and the reasons why not may have some general applicability for those planning and doing mountain walks. 

First attempted expedition was to do the Ring of Steall, one of the great Scottish horseshoe ridge walks, which incorporates four Munros with the option of a couple more if you start super-early and don't mind doing a couple of out-and-back detours from the ridge. Most people will find that four does them quite nicely. The standard route here is to park in one of the car parks up Glen Nevis directly south of Ben Nevis itself and then do the route in a clockwise direction, the start and finish point being at about twelve o'clock. One of the first things you have to do if you take this route is cross the Water of Nevis via the bridge in Steall Meadows. Meh, no biggie, you'll be saying. Weeeell, yeah, but this bridge is a little out of the ordinary. Here are pictures of me, and subsequently Jenny, crossing it.

It is a bit intimidating, and the consequences of falling off are unpalatable (I mean, you wouldn't die, but you'd get extremely wet), but it's not utterly terrifying once you're on. The wires are as taut as they reasonably can be, while still conforming to the laws of physics, so it's not like slacklining, but you do need to keep your mind on the job. Different people have different triggers for going a big rubbery one, though, and this guy (who ended up doing broadly the walk we were planning to do) seems to have bailed out and preferred to ford the river on foot. To be fair, the river was probably a bit shallower when he did it. Hazel was also, it's fair to say, not especially enthused about the prospect, but, in her defence, we'd just discovered she was pregnant with what turned out to be Nia, so a slightly raised level of caution was probably understandable. I have no pictures of Hazel crossing the bridge, probably because the inebriated-docker-strength swearing directed at me throughout fogged the images. At least, I laughingly said when she arrived safely on the other side, we don't have to come back this way. I should really learn to keep my mouth shut.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the next thing you have to do is ford another, smaller river just below a waterfall. Since it had been raining for the previous fortnight the waterfall was in spectacularly torrential spate - quite a sight, but it meant that a high proportion of the rocks that would normally present themselves as stepping stones were submerged, and after much searching around we concluded that there wasn't a way across that didn't carry a risk of getting either drenched or killed. So we turned back, somewhat reluctantly as it meant that we had to go back the way we'd come, including the bridge. It's actually not so bad on the way back as it's slightly downhill, although that does make getting on in the first place slightly more hair-raising as the drop is a lot longer.

Lessons here are: don't assume little blue lines on the map are insignificant streams which you can just step across, and remember river volumes are highly variable (we found the same thing here and on our ascent of Ben Lui in 2009 but managed to get round it with some radical route re-planning both times). Also, don't assume everyone in the group has the same triggers for going NOPE NOPE NOPITY NOPE, and be understanding when it happens at an obstacle that seems relatively trivial to you.

Anyway, we ended up driving back and going to Kinlochleven for the afternoon, firstly for a mooch around the ice climbing centre (and a visit to the bar, obviously), and thereafter for a session in the Tailrace Inn. We didn't go to the visitor centre, which houses The Aluminium Story, a guide to Kinlochleven's quite interesting industrial history - I forget whether we found it was closed or were just distracted by the prospect of a pint. The other pub that were are in right at the end of the photo gallery, incidentally, is the splendid Clachaig Inn in Glencoe, which I previously mentioned here.

Our next attempted mountain walk was to conquer the two Munros conveniently placed round the back of the cottage where we were staying - well, not exactly, but close by to the south of the A82 between Ballachulish and South Ballachulish (which, confusingly, is due west of Ballachulish, although it is south of North Ballachulish). These two (Sgorr Dhonuill and Sgorr Dhearg) form part of an overall group of peaks known as Beinn a'Bheithir, and are relatively benign in terms of height and difficulty. I have a feeling we didn't set out until relatively late in the day (after lunch, perhaps) as we were waiting for a break in the unrelenting downpour; I think we eventually decided to just go anyway as otherwise we would run out of daylight. We had intended to do this route, only anti-clockwise, to get the boring low-level bit on the road out of the way first. 

That should have been easy, and the entrance off the A82 onto the complex of forestry tracks that leads up into the valley from where you can scramble up onto the summit ridge is completely obvious (it's here). We nonetheless managed to waste a phenomenal amount of time scrambling about in a pathless wood failing to locate the path, probably owing to either mistaking a war memorial for a church or vice versa and leaving the road too early. Whatever the reason, we eventually emerged, wet and frustrated, onto the correct path and followed it for a bit, but before we could start gaining any serious height the heavens opened again and we soon decided that it was a bit too late in the day and we were already a bit too wet for an expedition of this magnitude and we should probably knock it on the head, particularly since the clouds which were dumping gallons of water on us were starting to shroud the summits a bit. You can get an idea of the conditions from the two photos below, which show Jenny and Hazel just about to set off from the cottage, and Jim showing his contempt for the whole situation by having a piss on some logs. 

The lesson here, apart from the obvious one of learn to read a map, you cretin, is that often the most difficult and frustrating bit of a walk, navigationally speaking, is right at the start while you try and find a way onto the hill you're aiming for while respecting the boundaries of other people's property and picking your way around all the other stuff (buildings, fences, walls, lakes, trees, branches of Screwfix) that you don't get so much of once you've gained a bit of altitude. Once you've done that it's also much easier to see where you're going and where you've been, and the contour information from the map and the terrain also helps. 

Just writing this blog post down has rekindled feelings of annoyance and frustration at being thwarted twice within the space of a few days (not to mention marooned on Mull in between), and a determination to one day get back and conquer the six Munros we missed out on, plus a few of the remaining 260 or so I haven't done yet. Obviously having been locked in the house for most of the last ten months hasn't helped either. Realistically this might have to wait ten years or so until the kids are old enough to come with us. Will I still be up for twanging precariously across a wire bridge at the age of 60? Of course I will.

and you will know us by the trail of deadly toxins

You will of course remember this post from 2012 and my breathless excitement at having spotted an interesting Google Maps anomaly, something it turns out some people spend just about all their waking hours searching out and cataloguing. 

For those of you who don't remember, or can't be arsed to follow the link, the interesting anomaly was an aeroplane passing between what I referred to at the time as "the Googlecopter" (but would of course have actually been a satellite) and the ground just at the moment an image was captured, and thereby appearing to be parked rather inconveniently on the outfield at Bagshot Cricket Club. Google Maps' commendable desire to keep satellite imagery up-to-date means that the plane no longer appears (and nor does the one in Russell Square in central London).

Anyway, I was noodling around looking for some stuff up in the west Glasgow area the other day - a section of old railway path that I'd walked 20-odd years ago which turned out to be the section of National Cycle Route 7 running roughly west from Paisley Canal railway station - and my attention was drawn to what at first appeared to be a long straight section of motorway heading roughly north-west and culminating in what appeared to be an impressively long bridge to nowhere in particular. It didn't seem to be possible to drop the little yellow StreetView man onto it, though, so I zoomed in for a closer look.

So as you can see it's another aeroplane; I don't have the in-depth knowledge to say what type but it's a 4-engined type which means it can't be a Boeing 777 like the Bagshot one; I suspect it may be a 747. The extra info on the second image is the result of me trying to measure the length of the visible vapour trail - it's a little over 8 miles, but it would be a fair bit longer it if wasn't abruptly cut off at its south-eastern end by a transition in the satellite imaging. Of course the abrupt transition could also indicate the point at which the captain turned over the queen of diamonds and threw the switch to release the mind-altering chemicals in order to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

It would be a spectacular but largely pointless feat of engineering to build a bridge to span the western reaches of the Firth of Clyde at this point (a distance of about 4 kilometres), since the Cowal peninsula on the eastern side is a pretty sparsely populated place. Scotland has quite a few of these places along its eastern coast, usually knobbly peninsulas which are poorly connected to the main UK transport system: Knoydart, Applecross and Ardnamurchan are a few other examples.

I have a couple of low-key sort-of Ardnamurchan anecdotes for you: we nearly-but-not-quite went there in September 2011 as part of our last pre-kids Scottish distillery-and-Munro-bagging holiday. This was the holiday when we managed to bag precisely zero Munros as the weather was unrelentingly shitty throughout, but we did get to the Tobermory distillery. We did this by taking the smaller and less-frequented Lochaline-Fishnish ferry (the main route goes from Oban to Craignure), which, it turned out, required a longish drive from where we were staying (at the western end of Glen Coe) along some tiny winding roads which skirt the vicinity of the Ardnamurchan peninsula before turning off south just short of the village of Strontian, after which the chemical element strontium was named (the element was first isolated from minerals mined in the vicinity). Anyway, the weather was rotten but the ferry was still running, but clearly the locals knew something we didn't, as you can see from the photograph below (that's our car).

Sure enough, after we'd done the distillery tour we made our way back to Fishnish only to discover that all ferry crossings for the rest of the day had been cancelled and we'd have to spend the night in Tobermory. Luckily we were able to find a B&B to book into, whereupon we went and got pissed. Every cloud, and all that. A small selection of photos from the trip can be found here - no mountain summits for obvious reasons but a few more amusingly windswept ferry pictures.

My reference to Strontian above inspired me to go and look at other chemical elements named after places and see how many I'd been to: there are some obvious ones like Americium, Francium (and Gallium, also named for France), Californium, Polonium (Poland) and Lutetium (Paris). It would be a stretch for me to claim Strontian, really, as we turned off a couple of miles short of it. The secret to bagging stuff in this list is of course to take a trip to Ytterby in Sweden, after which four elements are directly named and another four more indirectly. I expect there's a Wallander mystery set there whereby a succession of victims are dispatched with lumps of scandium, ytterbium, etc., or if there isn't, there should be.

the last book I read

One Step Behind by Henning Mankell.

Meet Inspector Kurt Wallander. Again. Is he still keeping up his gruelling schedule of not playing by the book but - dammit - getting results? You bet your IKEA-cushioned Swedish ass he is. In fact he's dialled up the mavericity to near-critical health-endangering levels, and a visit to his doctor after a near-death experience of drowsiness at the wheel of his car reveals that he has incipient diabetes, a legacy of his general lifestyle habits which include long hours, little sleep, stress, gallons of coffee, poor diet and occasionally snarfing a couple of herring and a pound of lingonberries off a Billy bookcase.

But at the moment there's little time for lifestyle re-alignment, five-mile jogs and endless Ryvitas: crimes are afoot that require Wallander's finely-tuned detection skills to unravel. It starts with some missing persons - firstly a group of three young people, all good friends and known to be in the habit of organising themed "happenings" involving dressing up in historical costumes, and none of whom have been seen for some weeks. Their parents have received occasional postcards from other European locations, purportedly from their children, but one of them is suspicious that her daughter didn't write "her" postcard. Secondly, Wallander's colleague Svedberg, normally conscientious and punctual, hasn't been seen at work for a few days.

Svedberg's whereabouts are the first to come to light, after Wallander leads a group of police to check out his flat: he's in his flat, in a chair. Well, most of him is; some of his head and its contents is on the wall and there's a shotgun on the floor. A possible connection to the missing youths is provided by the revelation that Svedberg had been working on the case, but had seemingly kept the details of his enquiries secret from his colleagues.

Soon enough the three missing youths turn up, badly decomposed and arranged in a bizarre tableau on a secluded beach. Pretty obviously they haven't been there the whole time, or someone would have found them earlier, but that means that someone killed them, went to the trouble of concealing their remains, probably by burying them, and then later dug them up again and put them on display. But who? And why?

Further murders ensue: the fourth member of the historical dressing-up group (absent from the Midsummer celebration at which the other three were killed owing to a gastric bug) turns up, attempts to kill herself, and (after being rescued) flees to a remote island cottage owned by her parents, where she is pursued firstly by Wallander, who wants to ask her some questions, and subsequently by the killer, who wants to shoot her in the head, and does. Shortly afterwards the killer strikes again, shooting a young couple having some wedding photographs taken on a beach, and topping the photographer for good measure.

Wallander and his team are struggling to keep up; all they have to go on is a photograph found in Svedberg's flat of a woman supposedly called Louise who may or may not have been Svedberg's girlfriend. Circulating her photograph around the neighbouring police forces eventually yields a result: the Danish police identify her and Wallander eventually tracks her down to a bar in Copenhagen and confronts her, whereupon she almost immediately gives him the slip and disappears. Wallander quickly realises why: Louise is actually a man, and slipped out of the bar unrecognised after a quick wig and make-up removal. So was Louise's male alter ego Svedberg's gay lover? Is he the killer?

Wallander eventually realises that the killer's detailed knowledge of his victims' plans derives from his having opened and read their mail, and some cross-referencing of postal staff, their delivery shifts and the time and place of the killings finally leads him to knock on Åke Larstam's door. Larstam isn't just lounging around in his pants drinking Stella and watching Pointless, though: he has a detailed escape plan up his sleeve and evades the police once again. Riled by Wallander's interference, he decides to make him his ninth victim and breaks into Wallander's flat to wait for him. Here is the killer's one fatal mistake, though: Wallander rarely goes home, preferring to take occasional catnaps at his desk or in his car. When Wallander does eventually return Larstam takes a pot-shot at him but only succeeds in grazing his cheek, whereupon a chase ensues to some nearby woods, culminating in Wallander throwing off his diabetic lethargy, ambushing Larstam and clocking him one in the mush, rendering him unconscious and ready to be brought in for questioning.

And so to bed. Well, briefly, for there is some wrapping-up activity to be done including Wallander taking the plaudits of his colleagues for his rumpled maverick genius in solving the case and the rueful apologies of the pompous stuffed shirts at Sweden Central for questioning his methods. And then it's off for a well-deserved break, some fresh air and perhaps a green salad.

I purchased One Step Behind in some sort of BOGOF deal along with its predecessor Faceless Killers a few years back. Faceless Killers was perfectly fine, but I'm not completely sure I would have bought another Mankell/Wallander on the strength of it. However, since I already had this one and fancied a mystery thriller I thought I'd give it a go. And this seems to me a much better book, as tired as the old serial killer trope is. It certainly does the minimal job required of a mystery thriller, which is to make you intensely interested to find out what happens next, even though the final revelation is inevitably a bit of a disappointment. Wallander is an endearing protagonist, though it's hard to avoid maverick cop genre cliché in a field already populated by the likes of Aurelio Zen, Harry Hole and John Rebus, not to mention a whole slightly less rumpled parade of the likes of Wexford, Morse, Banks, Dalgliesh, Wycliffe et endlessly cetera. 

Seasoned thriller-readers (and thriller-watchers) will recognise a couple of plot points which echo other works: the means by which the killer gets detailed information about his prospective victims (intercepting their mail which he has privileged access to thanks to his job) is strongly reminiscent of the methods of Francis Dolarhyde in Thomas Harris' Red Dragon (though that was home movies rather than letters). And the episode where Wallander breaks into Larstam's flat to find it customised to Larstam's own requirements is vaguely reminiscent of the similar (though somewhat more over-the-top) scene in Se7en. 

One Step Behind is one of the novels adapted into a 90-minute drama starring dear dear Kenny Branagh as Wallander; judging by this clip of the ending a few substantial plot details were changed, notably Larstam's death, the involvement of Wallander's daughter and a cameo from Tom Hiddleston, none of which appears in the book.

tinker, tailor, soldier, corpse

Authorial deaths are like buses, you wait nine-and-a-half months for one and then two come along in quick succession. Although to be fair they are unlike buses in that you can't buy tickets; that would be a bit weird. Anyway, hot on the heels of the death of Alison Lurie earlier this month comes the death of spy novelist (and former actual spy) John le Carré (aka David Cornwell). Two le Carré books have featured on this blog, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold waaaay back in early 2008 and Our Kind Of Traitor in 2015.

Le Carré was 89, which slots him into seventh place in age order, below the six nonagenarians on the list. He also takes second place (or second-last place, depending how you look at it) in the curse length list at a little under 13 years. 2020 has now featured three authorial deaths; only 2013, 2017 and 2018 (four each) have more. Of course 2020 isn't over yet.

The current list is below; note that I've retrospectively swapped Iain Banks and Elmore Leonard (June 2013 and August 2013 respectively) as they were in the wrong order. 

 

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

spare me the lurie details

Alison, I know this world is killing you. Or, more specifically, the Curse Of Electric Halibut is killing you. It could not, however, be said that Alison Lurie, who died aged 95 on December 3rd, didn't have a pretty good innings. At 95 she wrests the title of oldest curse victim from the cold dead fingers of Doris Lessing, and moreover smashes the previous record for resisting the curse's inevitable clutches, The Truth About Lorin Jones having appeared here nearly 14 years ago in March 2007 (Anita Shreve was the previous holder of that record).

That was followed by Foreign Affairs in 2013 and Imaginary Friends in March of this year. The War Between The Tates is the other one I've read; it seems like a tired old cliché to say it, since it's the one that won the Pulitzer and everything, but Foreign Affairs is probably the best one. Then again maybe that's why it won the Pulitzer. 

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

the last book I read

Looking For The Possible Dance by A.L. Kennedy.

We're in Scotland. I know, I know, far from ideal, but that's where Margaret was born and raised and lives, so that's where we are. Raised mainly by her father after her mother flew the coop early doors - her father told her for a long time that her mother had died, but eventually admits this isn't true.

Margaret is of a generally bright and helpful disposition and works in some sort of community centre as a general helper - manning the tills in the café, helping with bookings and event organising in the community hall - despite the centre's manager, Mr. Lawrence, being a bit of a rum cove who might possibly hate Margaret, or might possibly want to sleep with her, or possibly both at the same time.

Margaret has a boyfriend, Colin, whom she met at university in England and had a thing with; there was then a gap and they then hooked up again later when they were both living back in Scotland. It's hard to be any more definite than that because one of the things that the book does is jump back and forth in time between (and even within) chapters without much identifying context as to when each section takes place. So you have to work it out for yourself as you go along. What certainly can be said is that the following events happen in some order and are described in the book: Colin and Margaret hook up again and have a relationship punctuated by at least a couple of further on/off moments. Margaret's father dies. Colin, while hanging about in the centre where Margaret works waiting for her to finish, has an altercation with a shifty bloke trying to interest some of the centre's patrons in some sort of dodgy loan scheme and sends him packing. Margaret gets involved with preparations for a ceilidh in the hall, despite Mr. Lawrence's misgivings (basically that it all sounds a bit rowdy and that dangerous levels of Fun may be involved).

What we can be reasonably certain of is that the last few events described happen in the following sequence: the ceilidh happens, and is generally a roaring success, except for the unfortunate appearance of Mrs. Lawrence, who turns, up, gets roaringly pissed, has to be rescued from the toilets by Margaret, is bundled into a car and taken home by Mr. Lawrence and then rather unfortunately chokes on her own vomit and dies during the night. Mr. Lawrence decides that this is all Margaret's fault and fires her from the centre on some made-up charges. Margaret, being currently in an "off" period in her relationship with Colin, arranges to head down to London and stay with a friend for a while. Meanwhile, Colin, just wandering down the street minding his own business, is bundled into a cab and spirited away by some shady gangster types who turn out to be associated with the loan shark that Colin ejected from the centre. They and their soft-spoken boss. Mr. Webster, warn Colin off from further meddling in their business affairs by beating him up a bit and then nailing his hands and feet to the wooden floor of an abandoned building. 

Some indeterminate amount of time later, after being reunited with Colin and helping him convalesce (since there is a whole host of things he won't be able to do for a while, like walk or wipe his own arse), Margaret follows through with her plan to go to London. Colin gives her an ultimatum: stay away forever or come back and be with him forever. What will she do? Place bets now!

This is the second AL Kennedy book on this list, and the first thing I'd say about it is that I thought it was a lot better than the other one, So I Am Glad, which I read back in 2009. That one was an incongruous mix of gritty realism and some odd supernatural elements, this one sticks mainly to the gritty realism, and all the better for it. Looking For The Possible Dance was actually Kennedy's first novel, published in 1993 (So I Am Glad was her second). There are some nice gently comic moments, mainly involving the motley crew of performers Margaret has to organise for the ceilidh, and Margaret and Colin are nice, earnest people, perhaps both without that protective shell of cynicism which enables other people to contrive to be looking the other way when bad things happen so they can plausibly avoid getting involved. The moments when the serious shit goes down at the end (Mrs Lawrence's demise after the ceilidh and Colin's naily ordeal) are a jarring contrast to all that, no doubt intentionally. What was also jarring to me was how similar Colin's ordeal was - incurring the wrath of some local Mr Big and getting nabbed by his heavies, taken to a discreet location and brutalised - to that undergone by Ken Nott near the end of Iain Banks' Dead Air, a book I read over seven years ago but, coincidentally, made reference to, and to that passage in particular, only a couple of weeks ago. No suggestion here that Colin is actually dead afterwards, though.

Anyway, I enjoyed this without being, to recycle a phrase from the So I Am Glad review, blown away by it. Nonetheless it won some awards when it first came out, most notably the Somerset Maugham Award in 1994. Previous books on this list to have won the same award include Metroland, A Good Man In Africa and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. 

I note that Kennedy's novella Original Bliss was made into a German-language film (under the title Gleißendes Glück) in 2016. The only thing I have to say about it is that unless its plot diverges quite sharply from that of the novella, which is a bracing but firmly unerotic tale of sexual perversity, the Plot Keywords section on that IMDb page may well lead to disappointment.

light at the end of the tunnel

I will confess (and have done a couple of times before on this very blog) to a bit of a thing for disused railway lines, industrial archaeology and urban exploration. The way I rationalise the railway aspect of this to myself is that I have no interest in trains themselves and all the associated (as I sniffily deem it) geekery, but being impressed by the magnificence of a viaduct is no different from being awestruck by the magnificence of, say, St. Peter's Basilica, it's just a different sort of architecture. The further beauty of old railway architecture is that it can be combined with a rugged and windswept walk in the countryside (or, in certain circumstances, a nice bike ride), another thing that I am very keen on.

This extends to following a few enthusiasts on Twitter, which is how I caught sight of this tweet earlier today. 

Very popular with locals today - the unofficial opening of the Keswick to Threlkeld railway path. Fabulous Victorian brickwork in the tunnel. @herdwick_gal @PeterLazzari1 @ChrisJCoates @keswickbootco @Rambler_Jan @CumbrianRambler @AndrewJ3759 @glocky9 @fellpics @Sunnysidegh pic.twitter.com/H6uwdYdXDQ

— Rathbones of Keswick (@RathboneKeswick) November 29, 2020

This is the railway path between Keswick and Threlkeld in the Lake District which you might recall we walked along in 2008 but were then thwarted from walking along in a similar manner in 2018 by the damage inflicted by Storm Desmond in 2015, which had swept away a couple of old bridges. The picture below is from 2018; the one below it of me on one of the now collapsed bridges, probably irreparably weakening its superstructure with my colossal weight, is from 2008. 

I must say I expected that the rebuilding work would be massively protracted and would possibly never be completed, especially given the lack of progress that seemed to have been made in the couple of years between the damage occurring and our visit. However, things were evidently happening behind the scenes, and two completely new bridges have since been installed (and a third original bridge strengthened and repaired). Some details about the rebuilding project and some videos can be found here. More impressive in some ways than the bridge work was the re-opening of the buried tunnel under the A66 viaduct, whose bypassing by the old path necessitated a section of boardwalk which was a bit hilly and narrow, and therefore a bit awkward if you were either running or on a bike. 

[EDIT] Here's a photo I found from the 2008 collection which shows the eastern portal of the tunnel as it appeared at the time. You can just about see the curved brickwork of the very top of the tunnel opening above what was then ground level.

This video from the excellent people at Forgotten Relics gives a pretty good summary of the work that's been carried out. I'm looking forward to checking it all out on a future visit once, you know, all this (waves hands around vaguely) is out of the way.