keir and present danger

I had an interesting exchange on Twitter earlier after I saw this tweet on my timeline, which basically makes the claim that, on the basis of a recent interview, Keir Starmer, if he were to become Prime Minister, would be the first openly atheist Prime Minister of the UK. My first thought was: well, Keir Starmer's leadership of Labour may be distinctly underwhelming on a number of levels, but the statement of non-belief here is commendably clear and non-waffly and pretty unusual for a top-flight politician who might actually harbour some ambition of getting to be Prime Minister one day. 

You'll notice the response from Humanists UK, though, basically saying: yes, this is great, but it's actually not that unusual, as there have been plenty of atheist Prime Ministers, and here are a few examples. My original quote-tweet sounded a note of caution, mainly intended to emphasise how unusually direct I thought Starmer's statement was. I would describe Humanists UK's two subsequent replies as "brusquely dismissive" and "slightly defensive" respectively. I should add that I'm not intending any criticism of them as an organisation or their social media team individually here, but it is a useful exercise in proper critical thinking and scepticism not to take statements at face value, even when they are made by people whose worldview and aims you broadly agree with. It would be ironic, after all, if we were to have what you might call "articles of faith" which are recited by rote but never subjected to any scrutiny.

all this may well be true in terms of their private views, but I suspect none of them are on record as making quite such a bald statement of non-belief. I mean, I may be wrong, but on the other hand it takes seconds to unearth public Goddery such as this https://t.co/0jtwJCbf4H https://t.co/UGkVVzXIsI

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) April 12, 2021

Taking Clement Attlee as the first example, just about all the Google hits for "Clement Attlee atheist" bring back the exchange referred to here which is his biographer Kenneth Harris' recalling (at an unspecified later date) of a conversation they had on an unspecified date, but almost certainly no earlier than mid-1950s, i.e. well after Attlee's stint as Prime Minister had ended in 1951, and probably after he ceased to be Labour leader in 1955. Attlee died in 1967 and Harris' biography of him, containing this brief exchange, wasn't published until 1982. I have no reason to doubt the basic truth of Harris' depiction of Attlee's beliefs, but I think that a) 15 years after your death and b) while still Leader of the Opposition and prospective Prime Minister are worlds apart when it comes to expressing them.

James Callaghan was a Baptist Sunday school teacher in his early life, and the standard Google result for "James Callaghan atheist" is a reference to a television interview in the 1980s where he supposedly professed his atheism. Again, I have no reason to doubt that that is true (although I haven't seen a transcript of the interview anywhere), but Callaghan's stint as Prime Minister ended in 1979 (when he was already 67) and he stood down as an MP in 1987.

Ramsay MacDonald seems to have roved about through various flavours of religious affiliation throughout his early life but to have arrived at what would these days be called humanism by the start of the twentieth century, well before his multiple stints as Prime Minister (the first of which started in 1924). In fact he served as President of the Union of Ethical Societies a couple of times in the early twentieth century, that organisation being a precursor to the British Humanist Association who have now changed their name to Humanists UK. 

Finally, what of dear old Winnie, the increasingly problematic saviour of Britain during World War II? Well, again, most of the obvious Google search terms yield results which all point back to the same source quote, which is one supposedly from a letter he wrote to his mother in his mid-twenties which includes the line "I do not accept the Christian or any other form of religious belief". On the other hand if you trawl through his most famous quotations looking for invocations of God and Christianity as key pillars of civilisation which need to be defended against, variously, Nazism, Communism, Islam, you name it, you will find many. 

So I think if you were to ask yourself the question: which of these people had made clear, unambiguous and widely-circulated public statements of non-belief prior to their being Prime Minister, I think you could only really come up with Ramsay MacDonald. On the other hand it's almost unimaginable that any of the people mentioned here would have been subjected to, or subjected themselves to, an interview where such intrusive questions would have been asked. Times change, and I, for one, view this as progress.

headline of the day

My views on the monarchy as an institution are fairly well-known, and as much as I am a terrible arsehole in a general sense I do recognise that it might be appropriate to allow a moment before steaming in with some WELL ACTUALLY observations. So in the wake of the death of the Duke of Edinburgh I will restrict myself to noting the unfortunate wording hastily cobbled together by the Guardian website sub-editors.

I mean you can't really complain about people mistrusting the press and other media if you've been peddling the same fake news for 73 years. 

the last book I read

The Death Of Grass by John Christopher.

Ah, Britain. Where the sun shines (even if it rains a bit in between, as is only right and proper), people are civilised and life is generally trouble-free. A good, clean country, free of any of those nasty foreign germs that they have, you know, over there. But WAIT A MINUTE: something nasty is brewing in China; a new virus that, while originally seeming to be contained, eventually spreads across Asia and continental Europe and starts to batter at the gates of God's Own Country. Can people, on an individual basis, survive? Can civilisation, in a more general sense, survive?

You can see where I'm going with this, I'm sure. But, for the moment, this is where The Death Of Grass starts. The difference between this and that thing that you're all thinking of right now is (and I suppose the book's title is a bit of a giveaway here) that the virus is one which affects plants, specifically grasses. Feh, so a few people's lawns die, you might say, no biggie, but remember that the grass family comprises just about all the world's major grain crops. The first variant of what becomes known as the Chung-Li virus only affects plants of the Oryza genus, in other words rice. Bad for China, not so bad for Europe. But an apparently successful attempt by the Chinese to develop a crop spray to combat the virus has an unexpected side-effect: a minor strain of the virus, hitherto overshadowed by the voracity of the rice-specific variant, proves not only to be resistant to the spray, but, more importantly, to have a much wider appetite extending to all the members of the Gramineae family, which includes, wheat, barley, rye, oats, you name it. 

Let's meet some people: John Custance, the novel's main protagonist, a civil engineer and a generally resourceful and level-headed sort of guy, and his old friend Roger Buckley, a senior civil servant and a guy with a generally more cynical outlook. It's Roger's connections which allow him to get wind of the new wheat-destroying virus strain before it's official news, and furthermore to learn of the government's plan for what to do if things go properly disastrous: drop nuclear bombs on various major cities to vaporise the inhabitants and stop them spilling out into the surrounding country, which cannot produce enough food to sustain more than a fraction of them anyway.

John and Roger decide that a quick getaway from London is highly advisable. Roger also deems it highly advisable to acquire some firearms first, and so they stop off at a gun shop run by an acquaintance of Roger's, with the intention of overpowering him and taking some of his stock. It doesn't quite work out like that, as the gun-seller, Pirrie, is a bit more formidable than they'd expected, but on hearing their story he decides to tool up and come with them. 

They're only a few miles into their journey when they discover that they're already too late to just slip out of London unmolested, and they have to commit murder at a military roadblock to get away. It is clear that the flimsy trappings of civilised society are being shaken off quicker than anyone expected, and further proof is provided when the Custance's car is ambushed at a level crossing and John's wife Ann and teenage daughter Mary are taken away and gang-raped. Further retributive murderings are required to rescue them.

The group's intended destination is John's brother David's farm up in Westmorland (i.e. the southern part of what is now Cumbria). They make good progress as a three-car convoy but the roads are a conspicuous way to travel and eventually the inevitable happens and they are stopped at another roadblock (an unofficial one this time) on the outskirts of Masham. The party manning the roadblock relieve them of their cars and guns and leave them to set out on foot for the remainder of their journey. 

Progress is slow, as the Custances and Buckleys have their children with them (thankfully mostly teenagers), and it is clear that you need to be well-equipped, armed and ruthless to survive. Pirrie turns out to be all three of those things as, having concealed a gun from the raiding party earlier, he leads a raid on a farmhouse to restock with food and guns, regrettably having to murder some people in the process. Pirrie's ruthlessness turns out to have some unpalatable side-effects, though, as he then murders his own wife, Millicent (who has been serially unfaithful to him and clearly has her eye on John Custance), the calculation presumably being that he wanted to, she was not indispensable to the group in the same way as he was, and there were no longer likely to be any consequences for doing so. Furthermore he decides to take Jane, the daughter of the couple he murdered at the farmhouse and who they have brought with them, as his new wife slash sex-slave, because, again, who's going to stop him?

The group presses on, making use of now-unused railway lines to progress northwards, and acquiring more people on the way, something Custance feels is advisable to present a less enticing target for rival groups. By the time they arrive at the valley containing David's farm there are over thirty of them. 

Job done, though, right? Just have a chat with David, get his guys to swing open the big gate, have a nice cup of tea and wait for all this to blow over. Weeeeeell it's not quite that simple. John and David get to talk, but the situation is delicate: there are already too many people in the valley, and let's not forget everyone's going to be living on potatoes for the next few years, assuming they can grow enough. David has made it clear to his colleagues that John and family are to be admitted if they show up, but there's no way they can allow thirty-odd people in. John doesn't have Ann and the kids with him while this conversation is taking place, as Pirrie, the wily old fox, has kept them back to ensure they don't do exactly what David is now suggesting. i.e. slip inside, give everyone else the bird, nice cup of tea, etc.

So what to do now? John now has to make the regrettable decision that he can't allow his party to be kept out, even if it's on his brother's say-so. So he uses a bit of childhood knowledge (the farm used to belong to his grandfather) to navigate a safe course up the fast-flowing river that is spanned by the fence, get through to the other side and plug the men at the machine-gun emplacement before they know what's happening. Once the immediate risk of being machine-gunned inside-out has passed John opens the gate to the rest of his group and they take over command of the farm and valley. There have been some casualties, though: Pirrie took a bullet during the raid on the machine-gun emplacement and is dead, and so is David, who just happened to be taking a turn manning the gun when the raid happened.

Questions remain, with plenty of time to consider them. Will the people now barricaded into the valley be able to retain their civilised ways, especially after the cold-blooded killing that was necessary to get to safety in the first place? And what of the future? Will nature find a way to recover? Will the Americans come riding to everyone's rescue? Will there be enough food for everyone? What do you do if you're allergic to potatoes? The novel ends with most of these questions still to be answered.

Smart-arsed readers of speculative fiction like myself will read the plot synopsis on the back cover of this book and go: aha, well, I can see what's going on here, it's all a bit The Day Of The Triffids, isn't it? Those people will furthermore give a bit of a raised eyebrow to the promotional quote on the front cover (taken from the introduction) which compares it to Lord Of The Flies. Having read it I can see a case for saying it's a bit closer to Lord Of The Flies, even though the basic mechanics of the plot resemble The Day Of The Triffids in many ways. I don't really like the phrase "cosy catastrophe" which is usually applied to John Wyndham's work (and was apparently coined by Brian Aldiss who featured in the last post), as it has a sneery edge that I think is unfair, but I do see what it's meant to convey - a disaster happens and some middle-class people are mildly inconvenienced but band together to sort things out and get the kettle on. To lump The Death Of Grass into this genre would be a mistake, though, I think; the novel I've read which it is closest to is probably Cormac McCarthy's The Road (with maybe just an echo of On The Beach here and there). Both books look the inevitable consequences of apocalyptic events in the eye and follow them to their conclusion: John Custance and his crew cold-bloodedly murder people who have resources that they need - even, at the end, his own brother - and when others spot that Custance's wife and daughter are unarmed and inadequately protected they are brutally abducted and raped, and would probably have subsequently been killed if Custance and the others hadn't rescued them. Furthermore Pirrie's taking of Jane as basically his personal sex-slave is greeted with a shrug and an eh, what can you do by the rest of the group. This stuff is far from cosy, and it's hard to imagine any of it happening in a John Wyndham book. Partly for that reason The Death Of Grass feels a lot more modern than, say, The Day Of The Triffids, even though both were published in the 1950s (1956 and 1951 respectively).

The introduction which I briefly alluded to above is by Robert Macfarlane, this being the final book of the three which I got for Christmas for which he wrote the introduction - the other two were Climbers and Rogue Male. This one was written for the 2009 reissue of the book by Penguin after it had been out of print for many years. I highly recommend reading all three of them (the books, I mean, though the introductions are interesting as well).

Finally, yes, of course there are significant parallels between the events of the early part of The Death Of Grass and the events of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular I was put in mind of the early days of the initial lockdown when nobody really knew what was going on, it was almost impossible to get to a supermarket and when you did the shelves had been stripped bare. Newport is a fairly modestly-sized city as cities go but I recall feeling oddly claustrophobic and trapped - I imagine people in London must have had it worse. Obviously things settled down fairly quickly but it was a salutary reminder that the mutually-agreed societal conventions which keep people giving way at roundabouts, staying out of each other's houses and not making makeshift flutes out of each other's femurs are more fragile than you might like to think. Diseases which attack wheat do exist, by the way, and global agriculture is by no means on top of all of them.

John Christopher (who wrote under many names including his real one, Sam Youd) is probably most famous among people of my generation for his young adult novels which were made into the TV series The Tripods in the mid-1980s. I remember watching a handful of episodes and being mildly diverted by it, but my main recollection is that it was terribly slow, especially compared with things like Doctor Who and Blakes 7 with which it shared some superficial similarities. Like both of those it suffered, in hindsight, from the quality of (and budget available for) its special effects. The Death Of Grass was made into a film called No Blade Of Grass (the book's US title) in 1970, featuring a slightly larger number of marauding motorcycle gangs than I remember from the book, and some tremendous work from Voice-Over Guy.

with phallus aforethought

Before I start here I should probably issue a trigger warning for discussion of GIANT GENITALIA. Anyone still harbouring trauma from real-life adverse experiences with GIANT GENITALIA should probably consider bailing out now.

So: you'll recall my reference to the unexpectedly large passage in The Godfather dealing with Lucy Mancini and her, ahem, unexpectedly large passage. Most of this stuff happens well into the second half of the book, but Lucy does briefly feature right at the start of the book (at Connie's wedding) when she and Sonny Corleone sneak off to an upstairs room for a quick knee-trembler and it is made clear that only Sonny's gargantuan cock can satisfy her, sex with anyone else resembling chucking a cocktail sausage into a wheelie bin or some similar metaphor.

Via one of those odd synaptic brainfarts that occasionally happens at times like this I was put in mind of my teenage attempts to write a best-selling novel, in collaboration with my best friends Mungo and Tom. I've mentioned Mungo a couple of times here before, including referring to his current occupation in the world of economics; well, it appears Tom is now a well-respected lawyer doing work in the charity sector that sounds terrifyingly close to being Of Actual Benefit To Humanity in some way. And, assuming those photos are reasonably recent, still with an annoyingly full head of hair. He's still ginger, though, so, you know, swings and roundabouts. Anyway, I imagine both of them will be delighted to find that the Google crawlerbots have now linked their names with a frivolous blog post prominently featuring the words GIANT GENITALIA.

The GIANT GENITALIA connection is this: we were unsure as to the best subject matter for a novel but were very clear that we wanted enormous sales realising flipping great wodges of cash as rapidly as possible, so there had to be EXCITEMENT and ADVENTURE and thus almost certainly SEX. I can't speak for Mungo and Tom (well, actually I'm 99.9% sure that I can) but my actual experience of sex (furious and relentless wanking aside) at this point was restricted to fast-forwarding through James Herbert books trying to get to the good bits. So we started writing, and, keen to do the fun stuff before any of the tedious scaffolding that establishes the plot and characters, went straight to writing some sex scenes. I do recall that one of them was on a plane, for reasons I can't now recall and which we may have not bothered to provide at the time, and featured a female character uttering the immortal line "bored of that cockpit and want to try mine?" which I remember Mungo (who came up with it) being very proud of.

Anyway, there was a whole section of plot missing after that which would have explained how we got to the next section, which was set on an island, some unspecified apocalypse having happened in between to make humanity revert to more primitive ways. By some also-unexplained sequence of events - radiation effects, speeded-up evolution, experimental knob surgery, who knows - certain members (ooer) of the human race had acquired comically outsized genitalia. Just in case you couldn't imagine what that looked like we also did some sketches - mainly Tom, I think, who was quite a handy artist - which got stashed under my bed or in a cupboard somewhere and forgotten and were later discovered by my mother, which was nice. 

Just as well we abandoned our writing efforts, then, you might say, as no respectable publisher - outside certain niche markets, anyway - would countenance publishing a book containing this sort of lurid nonsense. And I would have agreed with you, right up until about a decade later when I first read Brian Aldiss' Helliconia trilogy of science fiction novels, in particular the final one, Helliconia Winter. Here, while the centuries-long winter takes hold on the planet below, the orbiting space station Avernus monitors and sends information back to distant Earth. The space station itself, though, experiences evolutionary changes over the course of its millennia-long vigil, some of them enhanced by experimentation by the scientists aboard - well, you've got to relieve the boredom somehow, haven't you? Some of these are of a nature oddly reminiscent of our own feverish teenage imaginings:

Aldiss, as it happens, has a bit of previous in the sex-writing department, having published a trilogy of novels in the 1970s - A Hand-Reared Boy, A Soldier Erect and A Rude Awakening - which is a loosely-autobiographical series of sex comedies well outside his normal science fiction genre. They're hard (ooer) to come by (ooer) these days, but second-hand copies can still be found. I can't vouch for them as I've never read them. 

the last book I read

The Godfather by Mario Puzo.

Heeeyyyyyyy, fuhgeddaboudit. I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse. Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes. EYYYYY I'M TALKIN' HERE; go get me a plate of meatballs and gabagool and some cannoli and never take sides against the family again. Capisce?

Happy now? OK. We're in New York, just after the end of World War II, and it is the day of Don Vito Corleone's daughter's wedding, a day on which, according to Italian-American custom, he cannot refuse to grant a favour requested of him. That being the case, and the Don having the power and influence to grant certain favours beyond the reach of most men, there is naturally a queue of wedding guests eager for a moment of the Don's time between his various father-of-the-bride obligations. Caution is advisable here, though, the granting of a favour will put you in the potentially awkward position of being in his debt, and one day the Don or his associates may come to you for repayment of that favour.

We also meet the rest of the Corleone family: daughter Connie, whose wedding day this is, eldest son Santino (known as "Sonny"), the heir apparent to the Corleone family empire but dangerously hot-headed and impulsive, second son Fredo, generally regarded as not the sharpest knife in the drawer, adoptive son Tom Hagen, the Don's personal lawyer, and youngest son Michael, just returned from military duty and accompanied by his American girlfriend Kay Adams. The family runs, according to official records at least, a business importing and distributing olive oil from Sicily, but in reality is one of the most powerful New York Mafia crime families. 

The Don's wish is that Sonny, as long as he mellows a bit, should inherit his role as head of the family businesses, and that Michael should continue to pursue a life outside of them in order to provide an avenue for the family businesses to eventually go completely legit and give up the old garrotting and murdering. Not just yet, though, as someone sells out the Don while he's making an incognito trip into New York and gunmen from a rival family put several bullets into him. The family soon learns that this is the work of a rival gangster, Sollozzo, working for another family, and also that the welfare of the Don, who miraculously survives the shooting but is now incapacitated in hospital, is being endangered thanks to the police captain, McCluskey, entrusted with guarding the Don but actually on Sollozzo's payroll.

It is clear that Sollozzo and McCluskey need to be taken out, but none of the usual guys will be allowed near them. Michael volunteers himself for the meeting that is to be arranged, and, with some family contacts providing prior knowledge of the meeting's location, manages to arrange the concealment of a gun on the premises with which Michael puts a cap in both men's asses, and is then obliged to flee to Sicily until the heat is off.

While Michael is away he conducts a romance with a local girl, Apollonia, but it is soon clear that he is not safe even in rural Sicily, as Apollonia is killed by a car bomb meant for him. Meanwhile back in America Sonny has been lured into an ambush and machine-gunned to death. 

Michael returns to America and takes control of the family, with the recovered but now semi-retired Don as his advisor, before his sudden death from a heart attack. Michael decides to relocate the family businesses to Las Vegas, where expansion is rapid and rich pickings are to be made in hotels and gambling. Before the move can be completed, though, there is some unfinished business to be concluded in New York: a ruthless campaign of revenge on the heads of the rival crime families and those involved (including some Corleone family insiders) in the attempts on the former Don's life. Thus Michael consolidates the Corleone family's position in New York, exacts revenge for the murder of Sonny and the attempted murder of the Don, and secures his position as the new Don.

These days The Godfather is somewhat overshadowed by the film of the same name, but it's important to be clear that the novel pre-dates the film by about three years (1969 compared with 1972) and was already a legitimate publishing phenomenon by the time the film was made. My copy, which I have had for at least 25 years and was a bit battered when I bought it, dates from before the film was made and proudly carries the claim that 6 million copies had already been sold. 

The basic story told here is the same as in the film, with the narrative set in the book's nominal "now" reproduced almost identically in the film. Certain bits are omitted - all the Vito: The Early Years stuff in New York was left until Part II (though the return to Sicily to carve up the old Don who had his father murdered isn't in the book), and the sub-plot involving Johnny Fontane (clearly modelled on Frank Sinatra) is omitted altogether, apart from the bit that's required to get us to the legendary set-piece with the horse's head. Also omitted is the extremely bizarre sub-plot involving Lucy Mancini* and her enormous vagina, which Las Vegas surgeon Jules Segal arranges to have tightened up (complete with quite lengthy surgical descriptions) and then makes enthusiastic use of, something probably not strictly in line with ethical medical practice. Some of the descriptive stuff around Johnny Fontane's various sexual encounters is slightly odd, also, for instance:

I think in general the films have more of a claim to be enduring works of art than the book, which is a tremendously entertaining thriller with some odd lumpy elements (see above). It's hard to appreciate 50+ years later how many of the now-ubiquitous Mafia clichés originated here, as they're so baked into popular culture. What I can say is that the first film in particular (which, contrary to much current film critic orthodoxy, I think is by far the best) is one of the first properly "adult" films I ever remember specifically choosing to watch, rather than just being in the room while, for instance, my father was watching something. The only other film which made a similarly indelible impression was its near-contemporary The French Connection which I probably watched at a very similar age. 

* More like LOOSey Mancini**, amirite?
** More like LOOSey MINGini, amirite?

that's dentertainment

One of the things that will have been a major factor in determining the specific flavour of your COVID-19 lockdown experience, it seems to me anyway, is whether you have kids or not. Many people have (as part of a generally commendable look-on-the-bright-side attitude) written about how, hey, lockdown is tough and the general loneliness and sense of social dislocation is a mental challenge, but at least it's given them a chance to really get to grips with learning to knit, whittling that scale model of the Taj Mahal, playing the euphonium, and of course baking a bewildering variety of bread products, assuming that they'd panic-bought enough flour and yeast. 

As entertaining as those anecdotes are, my first thought is always: aha, there's someone who doesn't have kids. I mean I'll grant you we did have a half-hearted crack at making bread, but any serious hobbying designed to eat up several consecutive hours is a non-starter. I should add I'm not about to attempt to reach a verdict about whether a child-free or child-rich environment is better/worse/harder/easier in terms of surviving lockdown with sanity mostly intact, I'm just making the point that it would have been two very different experiences. As brilliant and generally delightful as our three kids are I will confess to finding the need to keep them constantly entertained a bit relentless at times, especially when combined with needing to keep up with schoolwork as well.

One of the things I expect a lot of people with kids have done during the period of enforced being-in-the-house is make dens, this being a thing that all kids love doing. I myself recall my parents having a set of rather bizarre brown foam-rubber furniture (probably an absolutely appalling fire hazard by modern standards) when we were kids, whose corner units, when flipped on their side, were perfect building blocks for dens. We don't have any of those, but as you'll see below the kids did manage to come up with some alternatives. Nia, as befits the oldest of the group, was generally chief engineer, with Alys providing labouring muscle and Huwie fulfilling a key quality assurance role by running into things and attempting to break them. 

So here is a pictorial summary of the 2020/2021 den-building season:

Number one is a solo effort from Nia. The legend on the front reads "Nia's umbrella den. Must have permishion." She insisted that she was going to spend the night in it, and subsequently did, commendably bloody-mindedly as it can't have been that comfortable. 

Use of umbrellas as a key element of den construction is going to become a bit of a theme, as you'll see. Luckily we have quite a few of them as Hazel has a stash of white parasol-style ones from her wedding photography supplies. 

The next one is an extension of the original concept to include a couple of extra umbrellas, some towels, a large number of clothes pegs and our pop-up Peppa Pig tent. An increase in the amount of interior room, but as you can imagine it's a bit of a complex labyrinth of umbrella-stalks once you're inside. 

The next one harks back to the original, but increases the headroom somewhat by introducing a couple of kitchen chairs into the mix. This one has a slightly yurt-y look to it, though we were unable to grout it with yak butter in the traditional manner as Asda were out of that as well.

Number four is similar to number two, but the addition of the two upright white parasols in the centre of the structure gives it a vaguely Middle-Eastern feel, or possibly just evokes thoughts of the Mound Stand at Lord's. 

Structural details of this next one are unclear except that it evidently encompassed one of the sofas. Huwie is revelling in the illicit thrill of being somewhere his sisters have probably forbidden him to be. 

A sudden shift of both location and design ethos for the next one as we relocate to the bunks in the girls' bedroom and a stark and simple design in white. There was a version of this which enclosed the top bunk (Nia's) as well via the addition of a couple of my old golf clubs and another couple of sheets, but I don't have a photo of it. I'm not sure whether Huwie is just messing about on the floor or has just been violently ejected from the enclosed lower bunk by the girls.

The next one is more of a pre-fabricated den, in that it's one of my old tents, which the kids insisted on sleeping in out in the garden. The original idea was that we'd put our family enormo-tent up and all sleep in it - what larks! - but tragically there wasn't room so Hazel and I had to take one for the team and sleep in our own bed. 

Those were all from the first half of 2020; what I like to call "denthusiasm" wore off a bit after that, or perhaps it was just my inclination to bother taking photos of them. Anyway, the next couple are from this year after we rediscovered our mojo. Here's one from February which all three of them insisted on spending the night in. You can see that it's basically three adjoining interconnected slumbering podules: Alys on the sofa, Nia in the middle on the floor and Huwie in the Peppa Pig tent. 

Finally, this one from a couple of weeks ago: no thought to sleeping comfort this time, just maximum unsupported internal span thanks to a light bedsheet-based design and use of four kitchen chairs. Once again the boy is taking his quality assurance role very seriously by seeing how many of the clothes pegs he can remove before the whole structure collapses on his head. 

So there you have it. I just get the feeling that we're starting to exhaust the possibilities now, so either we need to start getting back to normal life again or I'll need to start sawing up some furniture. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today's pair is Nadia Whittome, Labour MP for Nottingham East, and Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Most pictures of Kahlo have a rather severe look to them as she wasn't really into smiling for the camera, and the particular image of Whittome you see here is a screengrab from a Zoom call that I saw posted on Twitter where she has her hair in a more scraped-back style than usual and is unsmiling throughout, probably as a result of being forced to listen to Alastair Campbell. To be fair she is usually less severe in both demeanour and hairstyle (not, just to be clear, that I demand that female MPs are all smiley and unthreatening; they can of course present themselves however they like).

I guess my fridakahlometer is still calibrated to a higher degree of sensitivity than usual in the wake of reading The Lacuna.

the last book I read

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré.

George Smiley is in a bit of a rut. He's in enforced early retirement from MI6 (colloquially known as "the Circus") after a botched mission involving an attempted rendezvous with a Russian double-agent in Czechoslovakia, which resulted in a Circus field agent getting a pretty substantial hot lead sandwich. It wasn't Smiley's project, but rather the brainchild of his superior and mentor Control; nevertheless its failure resulted in the disgrace not only of Control but of anyone perceived to be one of his close associates. 

Still, a chance to relax from the old spying game and spend a bit more time with the wife, I expect. Well, not exactly, as Smiley's wife Ann is chronically, serially and fairly publicly unfaithful to him. So he spends his time trying to ignore her infidelities (which she mainly has the decency to conduct elsewhere anyway), catching up on a bit of reading and occasionally mooching down to his club for dinner.

So it's probably something of a relief when he's contacted by someone from the government with a proposition for him: discreetly investigate the allegation that there is a Russian mole in a high-up position within the Circus itself. The Ministry has had a tip-off from maverick field agent Ricki Tarr that something rum is afoot - Tarr is a bit of a loose cannon, to say the least, but his story seems pretty convincing.

Smiley already knows that his former colleague Percy Alleline has succeeded Control as head of the Circus, and that part of the reason for his promotion was an apparently wildly successful project called Operation Witchcraft which involved the acquisition of sensitive Russian intelligence from an apparent KGB double-agent. But can the information be trusted? Has Alleline's ambition to secure his own position as Control's successor overridden his caution about accepting this stuff at face value?

Smiley decides to dig into both Operation Witchcraft and Operation Testify, the Czech mission which eventually cost Control his job. Unfortunately Control himself can't shed much light on anything as he died shortly after being ousted. Smiley enlists the help of Peter Guillam, a former close colleague and someone still within the Circus organisation, to discreetly acquire information for him which he no longer has access to.

It soon becomes apparent that Operation Testify was Control's attempt to acquire the name of the Circus mole; Control knew of his existence and had narrowed his identity down to one of five men, all in the Circus top ranks: Percy Alleline, Bill Haydon (known to be one of Ann's ex-lovers), Roy Bland, Toby Esterhase and Smiley himself, given the respective codenames Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Poorman and Beggarman. Moreover it transpires that the Circus field agent, Jim Prideaux, who got ventilated when the operation was betrayed not only survived but was eventually spirited back to Britain, told to forget everything and found a job teaching at a boys' school. Smiley visits Jim and gets a full briefing on the events in Czechoslovakia, Jim's shooting and subsequent interrogation by the KGB, including the shadowy Karla, Smiley's Moscow opposite number and nemesis.

With some help from Tarr and Guillam, Smiley engineers a fake crisis to give the impression that the Russian double-agent's cover has been blown, in an attempt to flush out the Circus double-agent. Smiley waits at the safe house in the expectation that the Russian double-agent (in reality a triple-agent, or maybe that just makes him an agent again, I'm not sure) and the Circus mole will rendezvous there to discuss what to do next. Sure enough they do, and Smiley and Guillam collar the Circus mole, who turns out to be Bill Haydon. Haydon is held at a secure facility pending his handover to the Russians, but he never gets a chance to sample his new country's hospitality - Jim Prideaux, university friend and possible ex-lover of Haydon, finally in full knowledge of Haydon's betrayal of him before the Czech trip and that he was prepared to let Jim die rather than be exposed himself, pops a cap in Haydon's ass while he's out walking in the prison grounds.

I recall having a conversation with my father about le Carré back when I was a teenager (possibly prompted by my reading of The Little Drummer Girl) and him dismissively saying "oh, it's all just I knew that he knew that I knew that he knew". I mean, I can see what he was getting at, but it is an odd position to take for someone quite into twisty-turny detective fiction - Dad is a big Georges Simenon fan, for instance. Perhaps part of it, in the case of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in particular, is a failure to realise that while it's set in the wold of international espionage, it's really a whodunit in the same way as an Agatha Christie novel, just with the big reveal and associated explanations done in a dingy room in a London safe house rather than in the drawing room of Lord Muck's country mansion.

This is the third le Carré novel to feature on this list, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Our Kind Of Traitor (since filmed) being the other two. George Smiley plays an important but minor role in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, published eleven years earlier and in which Smiley is some indeterminate number of years younger (his age in the various novels in which he features defies the normal rules of linear time as he always seems to be around sixty). The later novels The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People form a loose trilogy with this one. Of the ones I've read (a tiny percentage of the huge number le Carré wrote before his death last year) I'd say Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the best. The only "action" in the traditional sense is the dramatic events in Czechoslovakia, which are described only in retrospect near the end of the novel, but it still manages to be intensely gripping. The way it does this is only partly by the minute detail of espionage activities and tradecraft, but also more subtly by examining the things that motivate people to do what they do, especially when those things involve intense personal danger for little obvious reward, and nebulous ideas like "country" and "loyalty". 

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has been adapted a few times, most famously the 1979 television series starring Alec Guinness as Smiley, and the 2011 film starring Gary Oldman. I was a bit young to remember the TV series, and in any case (as mentioned here) spent all of 1979 outside the UK. I do remember the 1982 adaptation (also starring Guinness) of Smiley's People, though, as my then-schoolmate Mungo was a precocious le Carré aficionado, probably via his father who was a senior civil servant and may well have been an actual spy for all I know. I did see the 2011 film when it came out and thought it was very good, in an authentically drab and glum and rainy 1970s sort of way. Slightly more tangentially le Carré's work was pretty clearly the inspiration for some Fry & Laurie sketches. 

blessed are the teleconferencers

Today's pair are our literal actual Lord and Saviour and Redeemer Jesus Christ, and Hollywood actor Chris Evans. 

A couple of footnotes: while Chris Evans has been in many enormously successful movies (most famously playing Captain America in what I naïvely assumed was about three films but actually turns out to have been at least ten) the only thing I have actually seen him in (without the beard, as it happens) was the ludicrously entertaining whodunit Knives Out which I watched a couple of months ago, and which I thoroughly recommend. Evans' performance, like everyone else's, was somewhat overshadowed by a scenery-chewing turn from Daniel Craig who sports a tremendously chewy accent throughout which I assume is meant to emanate from the vicinity of New Orleans, though I couldn't comment on its accuracy.

As for the other guy, the specific picture here is from a leaflet delivered to our house by those lovable old God-botherers and science-deniers the Jehovah's Witnesses. Social distancing rules dictate that it came through the letterbox with a covering note rather than via the in-person route, and I reproduce the note here, as well as the leaflet content - I feel justified in leaving the contact info on as presumably they want to reach as large a potential audience as possible and would appreciate a signal boost. 

Things to note: despite the slightly clumsy wording in the note, I don't think we're meant to infer that Jesus Christ himself is available in person for consultation via the medium of Zoom. Secondly, anyone inclined to skip the linked video (you may even be able to scan the QR code in the image) Why Did Jesus Die? on the grounds that they already know the answer to be "because they nailed him to a tree" should be aware the video probably takes a slightly less literal approach to answering the question. Finally, the slightly baffling reference to a "pearl of high value" in the last image alludes to Matthew 13:45-46; as always with parables the meaning is a bit opaque, but if you assume all parables basically resolve to a) give all your money to the church and b) go and evangelise your freakin' ass off so that others may do the same, you won't go far wrong. 

the last book I read

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver.

Oh, Mexico; it sounds so sweet with the sun sinking low. Well, Harrison Shepherd isn't here on holiday, it's just the latest in a series of short-term homes he's shared with his mother, Mexican by birth and currently shacked up with some slightly shady Mexican businessman in the coastal location of Isla Pixol.

Subsequently, as Mother's relationships come and go, Harrison moves around, spending time in both Mexico and the United States, and occasionally spending some time with his father, who lives in Washington DC. It's while attending a DC boarding school that Harrison starts to suspect that he may not be as other boys, in that he doesn't share their interest in other girls.

All the while Harrison has been obsessively keeping diaries, something he continues to do after he returns to Mexico, following a hasty and early exit from school. The diary covering this period has been conveniently destroyed, but we are invited to infer that there was some sort of homosexual scandal necessitating a swift departure. While looking for work in Mexico City Harrison is employed as a plaster-maker by celebrated muralist Diego Rivera and eventually becomes a permanent live-in member of his household staff, which also means falling into the orbit of Rivera's charismatic wife, Frida Kahlo. 

Harrison graduates from plaster-maker to cook, which means providing for the wide selection of guests the Riveras play host to, mainly people who share their radical socialist politics. The ante is upped considerably in 1937 when none other than Leon Trotsky and his entourage come to stay, and Harrison, in addition to his cooking duties, is put to work as Trotsky's secretary. Trotsky keeps up a furious schedule of work in exile, as well as finding the time to have an affair with Frida, the randy old goat. Harrison comes to think of him as a friend, which makes it all the more painful when Trotsky is assassinated in August 1940. All of the members of the household come under suspicion, and, fearing that the contents of his diaries may be of interest to the police, Frida arranges for Harrison to flee to the United States on the pretext of delivering a batch of her artworks to a museum.

Once back in the USA, Harrison has to find a new career, and after his war work is completed and his father dies he moves out of the city to Asheville, a small town in North Carolina, where he busies himself writing a historical novel, set in Mexico. Slightly unexpectedly this is a huge hit, as is its sequel, and Harrison unexpectedly becomes a celebrity. So far so terrific, but now we're into the late 1940s and full-blown COMMIE PANIC. No-one is safe from being interrogated about their past, nor from being obliged to sign forms proclaiming their ideological purity and their dedication to America, Mom, apple pie etc. So when the FBI come sniffing around Harrison, as a high-profile author and semi-celebrity, and start asking: so, is there anything in your past life that might be of interest, honesty obliges him to say: well, not really, unless you count that time I LITERALLY LIVED WITH TROTSKY.

The FBI's interest in Harrison does not go unnoticed in Asheville, and rumours soon start to circulate about the exact nature of Harrison's military discharge and the propriety (or otherwise) of his relationship with his faithful stenographer and assistant Violet Brown. When Harrison is summoned to give an account of himself in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he decides that this might be a good time to leave Asheville and return to Mexico, not that this is likely to put him beyond the FBI's reach if they did decide to pursue charges. Harrison has other ideas in mind, though, and after he and Mrs. Brown return to Isla Pixol Harrison disappears after going for a swim in the sea. He is presumed dead, and his will is discharged which leaves pretty much everything to Violet. It is only on the death of Frida Kahlo three years later that Violet receives a trunk of items, including many of Harrison's clothes and possessions from his 1930s residency in Mexico, but also a note from Frida which suggests that all may not be as it seems.

This is the third Barbara Kingsolver book I've read, and the second to appear on this list after The Poisonwood Bible nine years ago (Prodigal Summer is the other one). It's a book of two halves, really, the first mainly concerned with Harrison's time associating with the real-life characters who populate the Rivera residence(s). Frida Kahlo is the focus here, an extraordinarily magnetic character and seemingly irresistibly attractive to men despite being partially crippled and suffering from all manner of other health problems, many of them the legacy of a horrific bus accident when she was eighteen when she was impaled by a piece of wreckage. The second half of the book is mainly concerned with the absurdity and injustice of the anti-communist paranoia of the 1940s and 1950s, and the terrible and bitter irony of a country attempting to combat infiltration by a supposedly sinister and totalitarian regime by proscribing and criminalising the inner thoughts of its citizens. There is an odd parallel here with the previous book on this list, Johnny Got His Gun, in that its author Dalton Trumbo (who is briefly mentioned in this book) was blacklisted by the same committee. 

While this is generally very enjoyable, and by no means a slog despite its considerable length (670 pages), a couple of criticisms nonetheless: firstly it is a bit slow in places, and secondly Harrison Shepherd is a rather bloodless and passive character, content to be swept along by the stronger will of others (his mother, Frida, Trotsky, even Violet Brown) rather than initiating anything major himself. Partly this is a limitation of the novel's chosen structure: if you write a novel featuring real-life characters interwoven with your fictional ones, there is a limit to the extent to which the fictional characters can interact with and materially affect the lives of the real ones. If you were to have, say, Harrison Shepherd assassinating Trotsky, or intervening heroically to prevent his actual assassin Ramón Mercader from doing the deed, you're into the Inglourious Basterds realm of alternative history. I was put in mind of this passage (referring to principal protagonist Arthur Dent) from Douglas Adams' So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, not otherwise a book with many points of similarity to this one:

To be fair to Harrison, overt and publicly-apparent fucking of the sort that he would be interested in (i.e. with other men) would be as certain a route to public ostracism and possible legal proceedings in the 1940s as having suspected Communist tendencies.

There is an odd parallel with current events as well, in that some of the later section takes place during the US polio epidemic of 1948, and so there is a widespread quarantine in place which prevents people meeting face-to-face, especially in Asheville which is portrayed as a polio hotspot. 

The Lacuna won the Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly various other things including the Orange Prize) in 2010; previous winners on this list are Bel Canto, We Need To Talk About Kevin and Home. Nonetheless if you were to ask me for a single Kingsolver recommendation I would still point you towards Prodigal Summer. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today it's Theresa May's former chief of staff, advisor and election strategist Nick Timothy, and Bridget McCluskey's former chief of PE staff, bullying advisor and expulsion strategist Geoff "Bullet" Baxter.

just say N2O to drugs

Here's a supplementary item to add to yesterday's Mystery Object round, and it's another one you might want to wash your hands after handling, although to be fair that applies to pretty much everything at the moment. I was loading small children into the car to deliver them to school/childcare when I spotted the item below nestling on the edge of our driveway, next to the wall.

Now I'm not as up with current drug fashions as I used to be but I reckoned there was a pretty good chance that this was an item of drug paraphernalia. It's a similar shape to something like an amyl nitrite capsule, but those are usually glass as they're designed to be crushed. A moment of reverse Google image searching revealed that this is a nitrous oxide canister, huffing laughing gas being apparently all the rage at the moment. Not much else to laugh about, to be fair.

The Sun is of course the best place to go for some cold hard facts on this subject, but even viewed through the lens of some right-wing moral panic nitrous oxide seems to be relatively benign, with the obvious caveats which apply to pretty much anything, i.e. don't attempt to operate heavy machinery while under the influence, inserting pressurised gas canisters directly into bodily orifices is probably a bad idea, and there is an upper limit to the amount it's safe to take and going beyond that may have unpleasant and permanent consequences. All of which advice (apart from the sticking gas canisters in your arsehole bit) applies equally well to more socially acceptable stuff like, say, gin.

There is also an amusing typo in the first Sun article which, if it were true, would make the drug considerably less appealing to its users:

cheesy walkers

Here's another lockdown jaunt in the Newport area: having pretty much exhausted the supply of green spaces accessible on foot from the house we got in the car to make the short jaunt over towards junction 27 of the M4 and the Allt-yr-yn nature reserve (note for non-Welsh people re. pronunciation: something like "all-tureen" will probably do). I'd been here a couple of times before for solo walks and you can also end up in pretty much the same place if you follow the canal south and under the M4 from the Fourteen Locks visitor centre. The canal in question is the old Monmouthshire and Brecon canal, the main arm of which ran up from central Newport to Brecon, and which is still navigable in places, though not, as it happens, the section here which runs along the north side of the nature reserve and separates it from the M4. 

Anyway, between the road where we parked and the canal there are some interesting woodland areas to be explored, including a couple of clearly man-made ponds. Just like with Woodland Park there is a back-story here involving a big house that no longer exists, in this case called, unsurprisingly, Allt-yr-yn House. Old maps (the one below is from 1937) show it but the main building seems to have gone now. There was also a lido which seems to have sat above the couple of ponds we explored; it's unclear exactly how much of that remains but I don't recall seeing anything, and we would have walked around pretty much the exact area where it would have been. I expect it was probably landscaped into a natural-looking pond when the area was made into a nature reserve. 

That was very nice and I recommend it highly; a few photos from our walk can be found here. We also did a walk up around Usk which, while much less interesting as a walk, did yield another entry for my occasional Mystery Object contest. Here is a pile of them in a field (the complete pile was considerably bigger and must have comprised a couple of hundred):

And here are a couple of closer views of the one I picked up and brought home with me:

As always someone on Twitter either had the knowledge or was prepared to put in the legwork to find out what it was, and it turns out these are "biomarbles" which are typically used as a hi-tech filtration device for various kinds of noxious industrial and farming effluent. The web page here is a bit vague about what their actual real-world application is, as it's obviously for industry insiders who know what things like "a perfect solution when surface area is more important than voidage" mean. There is an explanatory (well, sort of) video, though. Obviously the implications of finding a large number of them just dumped in a field is that they've probably already been used for their primary purpose, that is to say filtering noxious solids out of noxious liquids, and so a thorough wash of the hands is very much in order.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Relentlessly monotonic electrobore with occasional tuneful moments Gary Numan, and relentlessly tedious contrarian with occasional stopped-clock moments Claire Fox. My moment of recognition was prompted by seeing the photo reproduced here in this tweet commemorating Numan's 63rd birthday, which is today. The tweet says 62nd, incidentally, but Wikipedia disagrees. Looking that up also reminded me of the amusing factoid that Gary Numan is 13 days older than Gary Oldman. 

the last book I read

Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo.

Joe Bonham has just a vague inkling that something, somewhere, may have gone Badly Wrong. Drifting in and out of consciousness, he experiences lengthy dreams of his past life: childhood, adolescence, work, friends, girls, right up to the point where he spends a tender night with his nineteen-year-old girlfriend Kareen on the eve of his departure to fight in the First World War.

He gradually starts to experience periods of actual consciousness among all the dreaming and comes to the realisation that something has indeed gone badly wrong and that he is in hospital, unable to move. He recalls being in a trench with a group of other soldiers, a blinding flash as a mortar shell hit, and then nothing.

Gradually the reality of his situation begins to become apparent, bit by bit. I can't scratch my nose - one of my arms is gone! Well, it could be worse. Wait, the other arm is gone too. Well, mustn't grumble. At least my legs are - wait, they're gone too. And I seem to be deaf. And blind. And now I think about it, most of my face seems to be missing as well. Fuck.

This situation takes a bit of getting used to, as you can imagine. Gradually Joe learns to sense what's going on around him through touch and the vibrations he feels as people move around the room, even to the extent of being able to recognise specific doctors and nurses by the weight and pattern of their tread on the floor. He learns to keep track of the passage of time by the pattern of the nurses' comings and goings and the feeling of the sun on his skin through the windows. But how to find out more information, like: where am I? How long have I been here? Does anyone know who I am or that I'm here? And how to communicate my wishes? And, more importantly, what are my wishes?

Eventually he has a flash of inspiration from his army training: Morse code! And so he starts methodically tapping his head on the pillow to spell out S.O.S., hoping that his current nurse will notice. After seemingly doing this for months, and presumably acquiring neck muscles like Arnie, all he has to show for it is the nurse misinterpreting his frenzied headbanging as pent-up sexual frustration and administering a perfunctory handjob. Which is obviously nice, but doesn't really get him anywhere communication-wise.

The breakthrough comes when the regular nurse fucks off on her Christmas holidays and he acquires a different nurse. This one instantly clocks that he is trying to communicate, draws some letters on his chest with her finger to test his receptiveness, recognises that he's using Morse code and runs off to fetch someone who knows how to interpret it to work out what he's saying and tap on his forehead to communicate with him. 

Once the initial thrill of finally demonstrating that he's not a completely decerebrated vegetable has worn off, though, some facts have to be faced. The establishment are clearly never going to agree to his idea of being paraded round the country and displayed as a sort of cautionary exhibit for those inspired to rush off and get involved in future wars. And just as clearly Joe is never going to magically regenerate limbs and a face, so, while the ability to communicate is an improvement, his options for the rest of his life are pretty limited. And he can't even choose to end his life, because how would he do it?

Dalton Trumbo is far more famous as a screenwriter whose credits include Roman Holiday and Spartacus, some of his output published under pseudonyms as he was blacklisted and imprisoned during the McCarthy era. Johnny Got His Gun was by far the most celebrated of the handful of novels he wrote. It was first published in 1939, just in time to be celebrated as an anti-war novel (which it undoubtedly is) during World War II, and then after some years out of print enjoying a surge of popularity during the Vietnam war. This resulted in a film being made in 1971, directed by Trumbo himself, which in turn was the inspiration for Metallica's 1989 single One. I must confess to never really getting the hang of Metallica, or the whole thrash genre in general, apart of course from Enter Sandman which is a cracking tune.

Anyway, I enjoyed this very much, despite it not being, in general, a barrel of laughs, and bluntly polemical in places, its principal point, after all, being that War Is Bad, and that the mythologised idea of heroic soldiers marching off to heroic victory or heroic death has an unpalatable side-effect of a whole host of casualties variously maimed, splintered, shredded, gouged, gassed and rendered generally unphotogenic and whom the pro-war brigade would prefer to sweep under the carpet, exhibit A being Joe here. How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death? 

The whole nightmarish idea of being a fully-aware sentient being trapped in a body which does not allow you to express yourself to others is a trope which has been used a number of times over the years, from Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream to the real-life story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, both of which I see I mentioned here in this post from 2009.