the bloggers read and the readers blog

Couple of follow-ups to previous posts:

I was struck by an arresting phrase on page 132 of The Piano Teacher, during one of Erika's trips to the Prater park in Vienna to do a bit of discreet voyeurism.

It's the last sentence there, specifically the bit that says "the whores hustle and the hustlers whore". It took me a minute or two to remember that this is the title of a song from PJ Harvey's 2001 Mercury Prize-winning album Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea.

I'd assume that it'd be too much of a coincidence for the song title not to have been lifted from the book, and the book's themes of sexual disgust are quite Harvey-esque, so I think it's quite plausible she'd have read it. Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea is the glossiest and most commercial album she's ever released, but it's all relative, so don't go expecting S Club 7 or anything. And it's great, but probably not as good as the really stark stuff like this rendition of White Chalk from 2007.

Secondly, you'll remember my attempts to date a world map that my sister had used as some quirky gift-wrapping paper - well, this flowchart from the excellent xkcd webcomic seeks to provide a step-by-step method for doing the same job. I haven't exhaustively tested it, but I think my map takes you down the route that ends at the "PERSIA OR IRAN?" box and therefore ends up with a date of 1935-1940. Since I'd calculated 1932-1936, and if we charitably assume that we're both right, that narrows down the date of my map still further to 1935-1936.

the last book I read

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek.

Erika Kohut is the piano teacher of the book's title, tutoring and mentoring a group of students at the Vienna Conservatory. After a hard day bashing the ivories she heads home to the apartment she shares with her mother, and later in the evening to the bed she shares with her mother. Yes, there's something a bit rum going on here, as we discover in the opening pages where Erika buys herself a nice dress and goes home and has a proper knock-down hair-pulling fist-fight with Mother about profligate spending and having improper thoughts about men.

So we can see that Mother is controlling Erika's life to a slightly unhealthy degree. We learn that there was a Father, for a while, but he got packed off to a mental asylum (which was probably a relief, to be honest) and subsequently died (ditto, I shouldn't wonder). We also learn that one of Erika's outlets for asserting some degree of control over her own actions and her own body is self-harm, some of it of a disturbingly sexual nature. She also roams the streets of Vienna seeking out sex shows to watch, though she seems to derive little pleasure from watching, instead just sitting there primly with her handbag and haughtily ignoring the more usual raincoat-clad clientele.

Erika has a new student, Walter Klemmer, who takes a fancy to her despite the gap in their ages (Erika is in in her late thirties). Erika isn't used to male attention, although she has occasionally "known" men, hem hem, in the past. So things take a while to come to the boil, but when they do, and Erika and Walter have a charged encounter in the toilets at the Conservatory, her wilder repressed desires are unleashed, and she writes Walter a letter detailing all the stuff she'd like him to do to her, most of it eye-wateringly slappy and bondage-y. She also increases the riskiness of her voyeuristic behaviour by hanging out in a local park and watching people having sex in the bushes.

Walter is a bit taken aback by all this, to be honest, as he was really after something a bit more vanilla and just fancied a bit of older woman. After a couple of further unsatisfactory encounters, Walter decides to get what he originally wanted by going to Erika's apartment, locking Mother in the bedroom, and beating and raping Erika in the living room.

Erika goes to the Conservatory the next day armed with a knife and some vague idea of stabbing Walter, but, after watching him laughing and flirting with some female students for a while, she instead stabs herself in the shoulder and returns home. We're invited to infer that Erika will just return home and resume her more repressed existence, once she's put some Savlon and a plaster on that shoulder wound, anyway.

So it's the basic boy meets girl, girl unveils brutal and deranged sex manifesto, girl loses boy, boy rapes girl, girl stabs herself kind of story we've all heard a thousand times before. Not exactly a laugh-a-minute, as you can imagine, though it has a sort of savage energy that propels you along. As with some earlier books in this series it's hard to find a "way in" to any of the characters, since they're all damaged and disturbed to various degrees. It's quite bracing to read something so wilfully spiky and clearly uninterested in giving the reader an easy time, though - in that respect I was reminded a bit of Notice which also contains some queasy scenes of sexual violence.

The Piano Teacher is probably best known for its 2001 film adaptation featuring a much-garlanded performance from Isabelle Huppert as Erika. I haven't seen it, but it sounds like a pretty faithful rendering of the book. Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, not without some controversy, with one of the judges resigning and issuing a statement describing Jelinek's work as "whining, unenjoyable public pornography", which is probably a bit harsh. Links to other Nobel laureates can be found here.

The Piano Teacher also pops up on various lists of "best foreign novels", including (at number 40) this one. Of the 100 novels I've listed there I've read, if my counting is correct, thirteen. Other list-nerdery: although Jelinek is Austrian, this book doesn't yield anything to add to the foreign-language list here since "Austrian" isn't a language except as a dialect of German, which I've already bagged.

it's all good fun until someone loses an EU

So, Brexit, then. And while it's awfully tempting to dismiss the 52% of the UK population who voted to leave the European Union as just a rabble of dimwitted racists, and I'm not saying there isn't a good deal of truth in that, it might just be more productive to try to work out what the hell went wrong.

A few things are obvious: no-one really thought there was an economic case to be made for leaving, so no-one really seriously bothered trying to make one. So basically there was just a lot of dog-whistling around the subject of immigration, which has turned into an elephant in the room totally out of proportion with its actual importance (since the British public are as utterly wrong about the immigration figures and impact as they are about just about any other subject you could care to mention). So when people urge political parties to really tackle immigration, what they really mean is address people's largely imaginary concerns about it and their mistaken perception of its impact. This is actually quite hard to do without just pointing out to people that they are massive racists, which as a vote-winning strategy is not great.

Equally obvious is that, of the major Leave campaign figureheads, Boris Johnson is a brazen and ruthless political opportunist who was campaigning for a Remain vote as recently as February 2016, and moreover as a European correspondent in the 1990s was personally responsible for a whole stream of the sort of barmy Eurocrat banana-straightening stories that fuelled UK Euroscepticism in the first place. Nigel Farage, by contrast, is a proper old-school fascist of the type that always seem hilarious and buffoonish right up until the point where they acquire power and it becomes clear they weren't joking after all. Like that comical Charlie Chaplin lookalike guy in Germany in the 1930s. I mean, who remembers him now?

A gazillion words have already been written bemoaning the barking irrationality of the Leave vote, and in particular how places like Ebbw Vale were persuaded to cast a vote profoundly in opposition to their own best interests, so it might be more profitable to explore a couple of wider (but still related) issues, like, for instance: who can we blame? I have a couple of suggestions.

Firstly, and most obviously, David Cameron. I'm inclined to blame Cameron for a lot of things, as you know, but this referendum really is his fault, since he promised it back in 2013 as a sop to the truculent faction of borderline Nazis in his own party who he feared would otherwise defect to UKIP in large numbers.

But, you might say, what's wrong with having a referendum? This is democracy in its purest form! Anyone arguing against having a referendum must basically HATE DEMOCRACY. This is quite difficult to argue against, since the counter-argument basically boils down to: people are idiots. It's quite salutary to remember why parliamentary democracy exists: because it's absurdly impractical to canvass everyone's opinion on any particular subject (modern technology means it's easier than it's ever been, but it's still absurdly slow and difficult) and it's desirable to bundle up that decision-making capacity - region by region, say - into a single elected representative whose job it quite literally is to be engaged and informed on the topics that decisions might need to be made about, while the people who elected him or her get on with their day jobs amid their usual fug of ignorance.

I'll tell you who else is to blame, though: the media. The BBC, for one, has come in for some criticism in the past for, as this Huffington Post article puts it, "sacrificing objectivity for impartiality", or, in other words, promoting some bullshit idea of "balance" in a debate by presenting both sides and being reluctant to take a position on how those sides align with reality. Both of those linked articles were about climate change, but the same charge can be levelled at the BBC's (and other broadcasters') coverage of the referendum. If there are two sides, and one side is peddling easily-debunked lies and nonsense, it might actually do the viewing public a service if the liars were held to account. To put it another way, the current model only really works when politicians occupy a position somewhere within the bounds of what you might call "reasonableness" or at least can be trusted (most of the time) to be arguing in good faith - once you get a statistical outlier like Farage or Johnson (or Donald Trump, to pick an example from elsewhere) who will just brazenly lie, and, if challenged, shift their position and lie again, the system can't really cope. And treating people like Farage like any other politician legitimises and normalises his political views - look at how often he gets invited onto Question Time, say. I haven't seen Nick Griffin get invited back, and pretty much the only difference between them is that Farage looks less like a thug and has a posh voice.

On that subject, it's interesting to reflect how much we as a nation are still unconsciously in thrall to archaic notions of class, and more specifically notions of what a member of the ruling class looks and sounds like. Take the currently-beleaguered Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, for instance. Now I'm certainly not going to claim him as the potential saviour of humanity, but my experience is that most people, even those not inclined to vote Labour, think that he is clearly a man of principle, honesty and decency who talks a lot of good and compassionate sense on issues regarding social justice. However, ask those people whether they can see him as Prime Minister and they'll probably laugh and say: well, no, of course not. But why not? Because, I put it to you, that's not what members of the ruling class look like. Rather than looking like a scruffy and slightly humourless geography teacher, the ruling classes wear sharp suits, have braying penetrating posh voices and have arrived at the top of the political ladder without acquiring any messy baggage along the way by ever having expressed any sort of principled view or taken a stance that might now be inconvenient.

Furthermore the ruling classes have their debating skills honed at debating societies at Oxford and Cambridge where they become well-practised not only in arguing for causes they have no belief in (equally handy for a career in the legal profession if the political thing doesn't work out), but also in the art of the meaningless sound-bite, the swift and pithy put-down, and the sort of wordless braying and hooting that will stand them in good stead in the House of Commons. So, for instance, despite being a monumental failure as a Chancellor even by his own self-imposed measures, George Osborne still gets a free pass as a "serious" politician because he's a toff who can afford some nice suits, as well as, as some may have alleged, a boatload of cocaine. Similarly, Tony Blair, despite not being a Tory, looked the part, while Ed Miliband, while he had the suits, talked a bit funny and once made a bit of a hash of eating a sandwich, so clearly he wasn't quite the thing.

Now it's certainly true that, as well as not having much support among the Parliamentary Labour Party, Corbyn's approval figures with the general public aren't great either. But one thing we know after the referendum is that Joe and Josephine Public are easily swayed by bullshit tabloid stories, and if there's one person the tabloids love writing bullshit stories about, it's Jeremy Corbyn.

I think, as it happens, that it's likely he'll have to go, but I'm troubled by the whole business as a natural Labour voter for several reasons. Firstly I don't see an obvious successor, secondly I wonder how the Labour party membership have got so out of step with the PLP and the public (or vice versa, depending how you look at it), and thirdly the tabloid venom, which is just an aspect of the wider problem I've described above, can't be a healthy thing in the 21st century. But then again neither can a vote to leave the EU. So, in summary, fuck you, Britain.

Actually, hang on, lots of Brexit- and Corbexit-bemoaning there without any proposals for solutions. So, briefly, here's a couple of ideas:

• Stop legitimising racism by saying either that a large tranche of the Leave vote wasn't motivated by it or that lots of people have "legitimate concerns" over immigration. No they don't, they just hate brown people. Tiptoe round the issue and you are part of the problem.
• Electoral reform. If, as looks possible, the Labour party splits into left and centre-right factions and the LibDems experience an uptick in popularity as a result of their commendably bold anti-Brexit stance, then we're going to be in the sort of multi-party environment we haven't been in since forever. Which is all great, but for the first-past-the-post system which will ensure massive Conservative majorities forever under those circumstances, particularly if the Scots take themselves out of the picture by leaving the Union after a second referendum. Some sort of proportional representation system whereby every vote counts might go some way towards hauling general election voter turnout upwards towards the 70-odd percent that the referendum got. 
• Stop having referendums, as they're clearly a terrible idea, particularly if most voting happens under the first-past-the-post system, and therefore encourages the view that people can register a "protest" vote (perhaps as part of a general unfocused desire to register dissatisfaction with the political process) without it having any consequences, as some people seem to have done here.
• Have a look at the House of Commons. Yes, tradition, heritage, all that bullshit, but it's toe-curlingly embarrassing to watch the general school-playground quality of the exchanges in there. If some of the I-refer-the-right-honourable-gentleman-to-the-answer-I-gave-some-moments-ago bullshit has to be swept away in order for Joe Public to feel involved in the policy-making process, then so be it. Alternatively, require ministers to regularly appear before some sort of select committee for some much more forensic questioning, get some non-political subject matter experts in to grill the hell out of them, and make sure it's televised.

the last book I read

Home by Marilynne Robinson.

The "home" in question is the Gilead, Iowa home of Robert Boughton, former Presbyterian minister. Formerly the home of his wife and eight children (four boys, four girls) as well, but times change and stuff happens - his wife died and the children all drifted off into their own lives.

A bit of orientation with regard to dates - the year when these events take place is never explicitly stated in the book, but references to the unrest in Montgomery place the date somewhere between 1955 and 1957.

But, now, here is daughter Glory, the youngest child, back to stay for an unspecified length of time after the breakdown of her lengthy engagement to a fiancé who eventually turned out to be married to someone else, and moreover not especially keen on paying back all the money Glory had given him. So, chastened, here she is back for a while, which basically means cooking and cleaning and tending to Dad rather than kicking back on the porch with a mint julep.

Hot on Glory's heels, and more surprisingly to everyone, comes her brother Jack, the black sheep of the family, fleeing some unspecified disaster in his own life. Jack's history includes a troublesome childhood, getting a local girl pregnant and then leaving his family to pick up the pieces when the baby died, alcoholism and disappearing off the radar for years at a time. Just to illustrate the point, he arrives hungover and with just the clothes on his back, his suitcase having been lost in some ill-remembered incident.

Jack and Glory and their father fall into a domestic routine, though relations between Jack and his father are polite but awkward at first. Of course, Gilead being a small town, word gets around, and this creates some tension, since Jack's name is mud in certain quarters, not least with Reverend Ames, Robert Boughton's old friend, ministerial opposite number (Congregationalist vs. Presbyterian, whatever the difference is) and theological sparring partner. No baying mob arrives at the house with pitchforks - it isn't really that sort of book - but there are a few tense dinners at the house with Reverend Ames in attendance and a couple of pointed theological discussions during which Jack (a well-educated and Bible-literate guy despite his dissolute ways) tries to tease out an answer to the mystery of his own nature. Was he born bad? Has God cursed him in some way? Boughton sr. struggles with similar questions: is Jack the way Jack is because of some deficiency in parental love? If so, how come the other seven children didn't turn out the same way?

Jack tries to ingratiate himself with Reverend Ames by attending church, but after receiving a fire-and-brimstone sermon that he feels is specifically directed at him he falls off the wagon somewhat and is discovered in a pitiful state in the garage by Glory, who helps him clean up and make himself respectable.

Jack's disintegration isn't Glory's only problem, though, as Reverend Boughton's health is starting to fail. This is a problem for Jack, too, as he has a desire to make his peace with his father in some ill-defined way before either his father dies or Jack's desire to disappear and be away from responsibility and scrutiny gets the better of him, as he's self-aware enough to know that it eventually will. But what can Jack say? That he's found Jesus and repented of his evil ways? That would be a lie, but is the sin of lying outweighed by the comfort it would bring his father? But then, if he did that, would his father believe him anyway?

Inevitably, by the time Jack has agonised over what to say, his father has deteriorated to the point where he only intermittently recognises who Jack is. Nonetheless Jack says his piece, and, as the other siblings are summoned to oversee what it's assumed will be their father's last few days, Jack slips quietly away.

There is an unexpected coda: after Jack has departed and before the other siblings arrive Glory gets a visit from Della, Jack's wife from St. Louis and the woman he has been writing to intermittently since arriving at the Boughton house, presumably to explain and/or apologise for whatever misdemeanour led to him setting out on the road in the first place. It turns out that not only is Della black (and hence very ill-at-ease in rural Iowa) but that she and Jack have a son together. Once she's discovered that Jack has gone, Della departs, with Glory promising to pass on any communication.

As you can see, it's not a thrill-a-minute action-fest, any more than it is a slapstick laugh riot. Obviously it's not intended to be either of these things, though, and it is what it is, a slow, meditative character-driven story in which stuff does happen, but low-key stuff of the kind that actually happened to people in 1950s Iowa, i.e. not involving transsexual zombie Hitler or exploding spaceships.

What it also is is a book suffused with religion - Jack himself is portrayed as an unbeliever, but even he seems to have a yearning for the kind of meaning (however illusory) that religion provides to some of its adherents. And of course Boughton sr. and Ames are well into the old theology, exchanging cherry-picked Bible quotes with each other to support some arcane doctrinal point or other. All of which sounds like it ought to be supremely irritating to the atheist reader, but it isn't, because these are wholly convincing characters. Many characters in many books do things and hold views I disagree with or disapprove of, after all, and if I insisted on only reading books populated by versions of myself it would be very dull indeed. So my enjoyment of Home is (obviously) a testament to Robinson's skill as a writer - just to illustrate this point, when she engages in a more informal discussion of science and religion about a third of the way into this longish Paris Review interview it certainly does stray into supremely irritating territory fairly quickly.

It's not just about old men quoting the Bible at each other, though: it's about people's ambiguous relationship with ideas like "home" and "family" - simultaneously yearning to be there but feeling stifled when you are there, for instance. It's about the mysteriousness of other people's character and motivations, and even the mysteriousness of one's own. It's about what remains unspoken as much as what is spoken - Jack clearly decides early on that he can never tell his father that he's married to a black woman, for instance.

The key other thing to say is that this is a sort of companion to Robinson's hugely successful and award-laden 2004 novel Gilead, portraying essentially the same set of events from a different point of view (Gilead was a series of letters from Ames to his young son). It's not a sequel, and Robinson's view is that the books can be read in any order you like. As this New York Times review puts it, the two books

do not coexist in a relation of chronological sequence or thematic priority, but instead turn together like enmeshed gears impelling a single narrative machine

- a bit like the first three books of the Alexandria Quartet, in other words. I suppose it's a measure of how much I enjoyed Home that I'll be seeking out Gilead on future book-buying trips (though these are strictly rationed these days). Home itself won the Orange Prize (it's the jollier-sounding Baileys Prize these days) in 2009 - previous winners featured on this blog are Bel Canto (2002) and We Need To Talk About Kevin (2005).

thou shalt not bear false tweetness

Quick follow-up on yesterday's religious conversion thing - as always I am surfing the bleeding edge of the Zeitgeist, as the appearance of this article in the New Yorker on the same day shows. Lawrence Krauss doesn't specifically use the words "Pascal's Wager", but nonetheless makes the point that people's expectations of deathbed recantations from atheists are based on the assumption that the immediacy of their death makes the terms of the wager suddenly seem more attractive. Which is patently ridiculous, of course, since utter nonsense doesn't stop being utter nonsense just because you happen to be facing up to imminent death.

The questions directed at Richard Dawkins after his recent minor stroke and gradual recovery show a similar sort of thinking, mixed with a bit of the "no atheists in foxholes" gambit, i.e. the assumption that atheists do believe in God really, they just affect not to because they're a bit pissed off about having to go to church when they were kids, or not getting that pony they prayed for, or being repeatedly brutally raped by a parish priest, or some such petty insignificant nonsense.

The accusations by Dawkins' supporters (or, at least, fellow non-believers) that the Church of England were "trolling" him by publicly offering up a prayer for his speedy recovery seem to me to exhibit the same sort of bad faith (no pun intended) assumption in the other direction, though. Yes, obviously the C of E spokespeople will be aware that Dawkins would scoff at the notion of there being someone to offer up a prayer to (as would I), but the point is that the people offering up the prayer believe in its efficacy (well, probably), so let's all just view it as a nice and conciliatory gesture and stop being arseholes for five minutes.

blessed are the carpet-shitters

It's a bit of a trope in the atheist movement to share stories of how you, the free-thinking rational atheist person, came to throw off the shackles of the religion you were brought up in and embrace evidence and all that good stuff. And I'm certainly not here to knock that, since for all that non-belief has come a long way lately it's still fighting against the dominant cultural paradigm, which is to at least pay lip service to the idea of some overseeing deity who made us all, looks out for us, really hates the gays, etc. etc. So the whole solidarity/consciousness-raising thing has considerable value. The Richard Dawkins Foundation, for instance, has a whole page dedicated to converts' stories, and some of them are genuinely inspiring and humbling, particularly to someone like me who never really had much of a journey to make or that many challenges to overcome.

There's an expectation, though, that these conversion stories will all operate in one direction, that direction being from belief to non-belief, and a tendency to scoff at any tales of conversions in the other direction. To be fair, you could certainly argue for some justification for a sceptical attitude towards such stories, given the history of bogus claims of "deathbed conversions" attributed to various historical figures from Thomas Paine to Charles Darwin to Christopher Hitchens, and the rather distasteful affair of Antony Flew, a philosopher and high-profile atheist (well, high-profile in philosophical circles, anyway) who supposedly underwent a conversion to Deism late in life and wrote a book about it - or, rather, a book was written to which his name was prominently attached. As proper rationalists, though, it behooves us not to dismiss these out of hand, since there are undoubtedly people who genuinely do go from a state of non-belief to some sort of belief in some sort of deity, however woolly and ill-defined.

An example popped up on my Twitter feed the other day - that tweet and the ones that follow it give you a flavour of what to expect, but it's worth reading the article that it links to, which is here. Obvious but important things to say: I have no reason to doubt Nicole Cliffe's account of her journey from non-belief to belief, and she herself acknowledges that it happened at a period of some internal personal turmoil. What's fascinating from an atheist perspective is to try to imagine what sort of mental process could have been going on to prompt something like this. It's all too easy to say: well she's clearly had some sort of undiagnosed stroke or something, or GONE FREAKIN' MENTAL in some other way, but if we rule this out, what then? The trouble is that nothing in the article comes even remotely close to explaining something as seemingly (to an atheist, at least) inexplicable as this, something which seems (again, to an atheist) like Tim Robbins standing in that river in the rain for a bit and then voluntarily crawling back up that shitpipe and consenting to be locked in that tiny cell for the rest of his life, and occasionally recreationally bumraped in the showers.

One might also want to ask people who write articles like this: OK then, can you set out in reasonably clear terms what it is you believe, being sure to make a clear distinction between those things you think are actually real, and those which are some sort of metaphor for something which in turn may or may not be real? Read Sarah Perry's essay here, for example, and see if you can suppress your irritation at the inability to distinguish between "story" and "actual thing", nor indeed to grasp the idea that distinguishing between these things might be a useful or desirable thing to do. It's the same sort of thing that Karen Armstrong has parlayed into a whole career of writing books and then talking about them on various media outlets.

But, you might say, as irritating as all this is, these people are not hijacking commercial aircraft and flying them into buildings, they're not throwing gay people off high rooftops, and they're not terrorising already-traumatised women outside abortion clinics, so where's the harm? And I'd mostly agree with you; in general as long as people aren't demanding that their absurd beliefs be used to constrain the actions of others in some way (e.g. by killing them, in the most extreme cases) then I guess you can believe what you like.

It would still be better for the people concerned, though, and to a lesser extent for everyone else, if they didn't believe absurd stuff, just because of the general desirability of what you might call good epistemic hygiene. A sort-of analogy might be: if you don't wash your hands after having a shit, the person you're most likely to make ill is you, so maybe it doesn't matter to others. But there is a good chance you'll make your children ill, if you have them, and a smaller chance of infecting other people. Plus, once you've diverged from good sense, where do you stop? Who's to say that in a few months you won't just be shitting on the floor? What principle tells you that not washing your hands is OK, or even desirable, but shitting on the floor isn't?

I suppose the other aspect is just that I'm more inclined to sympathise with someone clinging to religious thought in, say, Iran, where access to material (books, the internet, other people) that might facilitate an escape from religion is heavily restricted and the consequences of public atheism much more severe, than with people doing so in a liberal western democracy, albeit one where, ridiculously, we still have an unelected head of state and religion remains embedded in our government and legal systems, but nonetheless one where the consequences of "coming out" are generally minimal. There's also this notion that agnosticism as opposed to atheism is the more "sophisticated" position to take, whereas in fact all that does is demonstrate that you know nothing about science or philosophy, in particular the branch relating to how knowledge is acquired.

So, basically, what I'm saying is: this tweedy wishy-washy sort of religious belief may be safe for discussion at your next Church of England coffee morning, but don't let your guard down too far as someone could shit on the carpet at literally any moment.

the last book I read

The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting by Milan Kundera.

Before we go any further here, one should pause to ask: what exactly is a novel? Can it be a made-up story layered on top of and intertwined with actual historical events? Why certainly. Can it have spaceships and entire planets made out of a sort of sentient pink custard? Sure, why not. The entire story told by a dead person? Knock yourself out. A sort of semi-fictionalised travelogue featuring lots of grainy black-and-white photographs of random stuff? Yeah, OK, if you like.

So here is a novel, but it's not necessarily the sort of novel where you can start a summary by saying: there's this guy, Bernard, and he only has fourteen hours to save the Earth! There's only one problem: HE HASN'T GOT A HEAD.

I finally started writing my techno-thriller novel, so far it's going great! pic.twitter.com/dDHTMcnsag

— Pixelated Boat (@pixelatedboat) April 13, 2016

Sometimes you have to start by saying a bit about the structure of the thing. So in this case that means saying: this is a novel made up of seven separate bits, a couple of which overlap and feature common characters, and most of which feature people who are from Kundera's native Czechoslovakia, back when that was a thing. There are some loose themes linking the bits, clues to which are given in the novel's title, but broadly speaking they all revolve around life in Czechoslovakia before and after the Prague Spring and how that made things very difficult for people and forced some of them (Kundera for one) into a life in exile. A potted summary of the seven parts would go something like this

• I: Lost Letters - Mirek travels to the home of his former lover Zdena to retrieve some love letters he sent her more than 20 years previously. He is tailed everywhere in Kafka-esque fashion by the secret police, who eventually arrest him. 
• II: Mother - Karel's mother comes to visit, which is a bit awkward as he's got plans for a threesome featuring him, his wife Marketa and their friend Eva. After a bit of Robin-Askwith-in-Confessions-Of-A-Communist-Dissident stuff featuring near-interruptions from Mum she eventually retires to bed, thus allowing some serious three-way boning to occur, leavened with a bit of existential angst lest anyone start enjoying themselves too much.
• III: The Angels - some fragmented stuff involving two young women trying to make sense of Eugène Ionesco's play Rhinoceros, and also the author himself (or a fictionalised version thereof) in a previous incarnation as a writer of horoscopes.
• IV: Lost Letters - Tamina, a Czech exile, wants to retrieve some old letters to her (now dead) husband that she left in Prague, and attempts to persuade a couple of her new friends (by sleeping with him in the case of the male friend) to travel to Prague to get them for her.
• V: Litost - Krystina, a married woman in her thirties, is in the early stages of an affair with a younger student. Having agreed to come and stay with him (and presumably consummate their relationship at some point during the night), plans are derailed when the student is dragged along to a meeting of poets which runs on well into the night. For this and other reasons Krystina refuses to sleep with him when he eventually returns.
• VI: The Angels - Tamina is mesmerised by a young man who appears one day in the cafe in which she works; she goes on a journey with him which concludes with a boat trip to a mysterious island populated entirely by children. Eventually she tries to escape and, finding herself unable to get back to land by boat, swims for it and drowns.
• VII: The Border - Jan's main concerns are his relationship with his girlfriend Edwige, the occasional liaison with some other random woman, the sickness and imminent death of his friend Passer, and, y'know, the usual existential angst. After an unsatisfactory experience at an orgy run by his friend Barbara, the novel ends with Jan and Edwige wandering along a nudist beach somewhere.

So, as you'll gather from that, some of it is a very literal depiction of the problems caused by the oppressive Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, while some of it is much more allusive. You'll get no insight from me, for instance, on what the episode with Tamina and the children in part VI was meant to convey, other than that it features some slightly queasy sexual episodes that reminded me of similar episodes in Children Of Darkness And Light. And some of the philosophising reminded me of some similar passages in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, the previous Kundera in this list.

My personal feeling is that TULOB is better, despite TBOLAF being hailed as a work of genius by some, John Updike among them - the more linear narrative makes it easier to grasp what's going on and care about the outcome a bit more. Some of the sexy sexy stuff here is a bit odd, too - there's quite a bit of sex, but much of it is fairly mechanical and joyless, and Kundera has, or appears to have, what you might call a slightly 1970s attitude to topics like male infidelity and rape. But perhaps this is meant to reflect the deadening of emotion associated with constant surveillance and the constant possibility of being dragged off to a show-trial somewhere and never seen again: who knows.

The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting also features a cover image that might be a bit on the vicar-frightening side; previous examples have included G. and The Anatomist. 

that's survey to do it

Nice to see that in addition to the Daily Mail the list of people monitoring this blog for ideas includes BBC Four, who evidently decided to tailor a programme to my exact specifications in a (successful, as it happens) bid to lure me in to watching it.

That programme was A Very British Map: The Ordnance Survey Story, which, as the name suggests, was largely about maps, and as an added bonus contained a short section about triangulation points, and mentioned in passing that some people bag them as a hobby.

A couple of mild criticisms: firstly for perpetuating the idea that paper maps are some sort of quaint anachronism that will eventually be consigned to the dustbin of history - while it's no doubt true that paper map sales have fallen, people will still want and need them for all sorts of good, practical reasons even while they're drooling over their wrist-mounted GPS podules at the same time.

Also, rather bizarrely, the woman doing the narration insisted on pronouncing the name of the organisation as "Ordinance Survey" throughout. Now the respective definitions of "ordnance" and "ordinance" do swim about a bit in my head, if I'm honest, but I do remember pretty reliably that the map guys make use of the word without the "i" in it.

incidental music spot of the day

Your very own Won't Get Fooled Again in the early stages of Channel 5's The Best of Bad TV: The 70s. You can pretty much imagine what featured here, I expect: various dwarves in rubber suits running around bumping into the scenery in old science fiction series, various crappy game shows with hilariously awful prizes, and some sphincter-tightening sexism and racism from comedy classics like The Comedians and The Wheeltappers And Shunters Social Club.

There was also a spot for the public information film Dark Water: pretty creepy, but not a patch on The Finishing Line. A quick scan of this compilation suggests it's not in the list (it was not a Public Information Film in the strict sense) but there is nonetheless some excellent nightmare fuel in there. Here's The Finishing Line, if for some reason you don't fancy sleeping tonight.

and on the third day he blogged again

A couple of religion-related stories in the news around Easter (so a few weeks ago now, but y'know, sue me, I've been busy), occupying spots somewhere near the tragic and comic ends of the spectrum, respectively.

Firstly, David Cameron's at it again with his Easter message: farting all sorts of meaningless soundbites out of his potato-ey face-hole. The co-opting of things that are clearly universal human things, or at least things that most societies that have progressed beyond making crudely-fashioned drinking vessels out of each other's skulls and crudely-fashioned flutes out of each other's femurs have adopted as the best ways to behave, as somehow quintessentially Christian values, is a pretty common one, even while being a) patently ridiculous and b) implicitly making the claim that any other religions that claim them as foundational values are WRONG and have STOLEN THEM from Christianity.

Some of the things that Cameron is claiming LITERALLY DID NOT EXIST until some bunch of ill-educated goat-herds threw the Bible together some time during the first couple of centuries AD are such hilariously anodyne concepts as:

Values of responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion and pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities.

Needless to say things like "hard work" are things that pre-Christian societies like the ancient Egyptians and Greeks knew nothing of, while they were building the pyramids and the Parthenon and that. Interestingly the paragraph above appears to be an almost word-for-word retread of part of a speech he gave in Oxford back in late 2011. I guess once you've got your shtick down there's no point trying to re-work it. Zoe Williams in the Guardian picks all the bullshit apart far better than I've done here.

The other obvious riposte, made more pithily by Stephen Fry here, is that what Christianity considers its foundational values have changed over time - not much "compassion" on show during the crusades, for instance. If you want a modern example, look at attitudes to things like women's rights and homosexuality - things the various churches would have been implacably opposed to back in the day, and would have found wider society broadly in agreement, but since societal attitudes have moved on and become generally more groovy and inclusive those same churches are increasingly desperately hanging onto its coat-tails to try to retain some relevance.

Cameron knows what he's doing, of course: no public statement of this sort will be issued without there being some point to it in terms of keeping the core Conservative voting bloc onside. Cameron's Machiavellian strategist Lynton Crosby will no doubt have run the figures and calculated that there's more value in issuing some vaguely comforting platitudes to the ageing spinsters and apoplectic retired colonels who vote Tory habitually than in saying anything vaguely meaningful to people who care about statements actually making sense, since the stuff-making-sense demographic won't be voting Tory in large numbers anyway.

Secondly, there's this rather bizarre story about the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby wanting to standardise the date of Easter. Now I actually quite like the rather haphazard appearance of Easter in the calendar, for a number of reasons, one of which is: since I'm exceptionally averse to advance planning I rarely know when Easter is more than a couple of weeks in advance, so the four-day weekend is always a pleasant surprise. But, says the Archbish, people find it confusing, so we should try and have it on the same date every year. As always it's interesting to try and put yourself in the head of someone who, while seemingly able to do normal things like drive a car, operate a bank account and make it to the toilet in time, also believes some hair-raisingly irrational shit, and try to work out what makes them tick.

The obvious criticism of Easter as it stands is: look, this is meant to be the most significant thing in the Christian calendar, and the whole significance of it rests on its being the commemoration of some actual events that actually happened, as ridiculous as they might sound. So surely that would necessitate the festival being on the same day every year? Christmas is on the same day every year, after all. And the current arrangement with the whole business of it being linked to the cycle of the moon is a bit of a DEAD GIVEAWAY of its pagan beginning-of-spring nature-worshipping origins (although it should be said that the whole thing about the conveniently-named pagan goddess Ēostre is fairly thinly-evidenced).

Amusingly, though, the Telegraph article demonstrates that either the Telegraph's reporter or the church authorities themselves haven't grasped the actual nature of the problem, since there's talk of keeping Easter to a Sunday:

Now you can see the point of this, since there's a well-established tradition of having the Good Friday and Easter Monday bank holidays bookending the Easter weekend, and if Easter suddenly starts happening on a Wednesday then there's the whole question of what happens to them. As much as I don't care about imaginary Jewish zombies, I don't want to lose my four-day weekend. And those Lindt bunnies are pretty awesome as well.

The trouble is, of course, if you keep it to a Sunday you aren't fixing the date of Easter at all, you're just introducing a slightly simplified arbitrary rule for calculating the Sunday on which it occurs: the first Sunday in April, say, rather than the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox as it currently is. To which the obvious riposte is: why would you bother? And I suppose the obvious answer is: because it keeps the church in the news, and provides at least the illusion of the people in charge being open to change, responding to criticism, moving with the times and all that horseshit.

My advice to the Christian churches is this: either leave things as they are, thereby implicitly acknowledging that your absurd Bronze Age voodoo belief system survives mainly by virtue of how deeply culturally embedded it is, and that actually the last thing you want to do is to make people think too much about what any of it means, or fold up your tents, sneak away into the night, and stop bothering everyone. Or, I suppose, thirdly, produce some proper evidence for the resurrection (and, moreover, that the guy who was resurrected was the Son of God, and, even moreover, that there's this guy called God who totally exists) that ties it to some specific date which we can all then agree hereafter to call Easter. Job done.

meet the new song, same as the old song

As a further tribute to Prince, here's a two-item music list for you: songs which start, do the basic tune for a bit, then have a sort of break-down section where things go a bit wibbly-wobbly for a while about two-thirds of the way through, before cranking back up to the original riff/chorus/whatever for a brief finale, then almost immediately signing off.

• Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who. A song only a year younger than me and still one of the top two or three most viscerally thrilling rock songs ever recorded, this smashes out one last colossal powerchord before a section featuring just the pulsing synth line that runs through the whole song, then gradually winds up Keith Moon to a frenzied drum tattoo that precedes Roger Daltrey's throat-stripping YEEEEAAAHHHH (as featured regularly on CSI:Miami), the brief bit about "meet the new boss, same as the old boss", a few more powerchords, and then thank you and goodnight.
• I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man by Prince. This has a longer break-down section featuring some nice jazzy guitar-playing which eventually winds back  up to a "one, two, three, four" (well, on repeat listening it's actually "one, two, one, WOOOO") and a quick blast through the song's main riff, and then before you know it it's gone, with just a wisp of guitar feedback hanging on the air.

Both songs were also issued as singles with the break-down section edited out (plus quite a bit more stuff in the case of Won't Get Fooled Again) to bring them both down to about 3½ minutes. In both cases it's the longer version you want.

Here's the raw data, complete with WAV file profiles for both songs: the break-down section in Won't Get Fooled Again runs from about 6:35 to about 7:45, while the longer one in I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man runs from about 3:45 to about 6:00.

funk off and die

As I said at the time of the deaths of David Bowie and Glenn Frey earlier in 2016 (a year which statistically is exceptionally celebrity-death-heavy so far, so it's OK for you to say that), which celebrity's death you feel personally affected by will reflect your past life, upbringing and what sort of cultural stuff you were exposed to or chose to expose yourself to.

So, anyway, what I'm building up to is that Prince's death this week is a much more significant event to me than either of the other two, largely because Prince formed a part of my formative music listening habits in a way that Bowie and the Eagles didn't.

I don't know what's a typical age to start buying records (this of course was back in the days when vinyl "records" were the primary medium of music delivery), but I suspect 13 is probably a bit later than most. I think I may technically have "bought" this John Denver album in Korea back when I was about six, in that I was invited to make the final decision and it was paid for with money that was nominally "mine", but I deem my first "proper" single purchase to be Every Breath You Take by The Police in 1983, swiftly followed by I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues by Elton John and Gimme All Your Lovin' by ZZ Top. All good songs, and choices which I stand by 30-odd years later, but all very white, very male - very gay in Elton's case, as it happens, but he wasn't quite as up-front about it at the time.

So when Prince really became a big thing in the UK around the time of When Doves Cry there was a fair bit of paradigm-smashing going on - black guy, not really conforming to traditional notions of masculinity but still clearly beating off the ladies with a shitty stick in his offstage life, making music with a funky dance-y edge while still being a brilliant rock guitarist, all that sort of thing.

It's interesting to consider how one's musical tastes evolve - everyone likes to think that they just like what they like, as the end result of a completely objective process of listening to stuff and working out what's good and what isn't, but of course this is nonsense, and every single choice you make is influenced to some extent by prior experiences, who you knew, what they liked, where you first heard things and stuff like that. In the case of Prince, my recollection is that my friend Tom had a copy of the 7" single of Let's Go Crazy, and its organ-backed spoken intro, lyrics suggesting transgressive sexy sexy times and squealy rock guitar finale all seemed pungently exotic and exciting to me at the time. But I should apply a bit of self-awareness and add that Tom was a lot cooler than me, so maybe there was an inclination to give this more of a favourable first listen just because it was him who'd introduced me to it? Who knows. In my defence he was also into The Cult in a big way and (She Sells Sanctuary, which is a cracking tune, aside) I always thought they were a bit shit. I suppose the key thing to say is that this marked a move away from being musically influenced by my parents' record collection to being musically influenced by my contemporaries, sometimes moving into the realms of stuff my parents wouldn't necessarily "get".

So I went and bought the Purple Rain album and played it to death for a year or so, with further transgressive thrills provided by Darling Nikki with its references to female masturbation, something my 14/15-year-old self may very possibly not have even been previously aware was a thing. I had copies of the next two albums, Around The World In A Day and Parade, through the magic of home taping (which turned out not to be killing music after all) before buying the double album Sign O'The Times in 1987. We parted company a bit after that, and I don't think I've purchased a non-compilation Prince album since, but there was, in hindsight, lots of good stuff after that, just spread a bit more thinly. Sign O'The Times is the one if you must have only one; if you also had Purple Rain and a comprehensive singles compilation (this one, for instance, which is the one I have, although it only includes stuff up to 1993) that would be a pretty good start.

So here's my favourite ten Prince songs, in no particular order, and written down largely off the cuff, so no guarantee of completeness or definitiveness, nor indeed originality, since a lot of these are the big hits. If you want to know what other people, doubtless more knowledgeable about the unexplored nooks and crannies of his vast back catalogue, think, plenty of other opinions are available.

• I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man - I think this may be my favourite Prince song of all, just because it's such a joyous summery tune, and in its 6½-minute album version gives Prince the chance for a bit of a rock guitar workout, something he usually kept on a tight rein on the albums. Its lyrical theme of man rejecting a woman's offer of a one-night stand because he knows she won't feel good about it afterwards typifies Prince's generally groovy and empowering attitudes to women and female sexuality, not something you could say about many mid-1980s male artists.
• Little Red Corvette - cars as metaphor for sex, horse-riding as metaphor for sex. It's about sex, basically.
• Sign O'The Times - atypical in that it's got a socio-political edge to it, but typical in that it typifies Prince's gift for minimal backing arrangements (Kiss being the classic example of this). Also one of the small group of songs to lyrically reference the Challenger shuttle disaster.
• Dirty Mind - well this is just pure filth, with the pulsing synth groove humping your leg like a randy Yorkshire terrier.
• Alphabet St. - a bit of jangly funk guitar, a bit more lyrical depiction of non-vanilla sexy sexy times ("I would like to.....watch").
• Pope - a track from the 1993 Hits compilation, this previously unreleased song is a pretty silly throwaway tune that was obviously just Prince mucking about in the studio, but is still sharp, funny and ferociously funky.
• Cream - well, again, it's just (just!) about sex, but it's an irresistible sinuous groove that owes more than a little to Get It On by T.Rex.
• Sexy MF - extreme funkiness, liberal use of the word "motherfucker" and some bowel-loosening parpy horn stabs.
• Purple Rain - yeah, I know, but think of it as a sort of mid-1980s Hey Jude; similar tempo, lengthy coda and all. And it's another one from the more rock-guitar-oriented end of his range, which fits my personal prejudices.
• Raspberry Beret - another glorious summer tune; boy meets funky scantily-clad hipster girl in the corner shop and they head off to a deserted barn on his motorbike to go at it like knives. The Hindu Love Gods' brutish meat-and-potatoes cover version is worth a listen too.

Of course this neglects all the great songs that he wrote for or had covered by other people as well, from I Feel For You to Manic Monday to Nothing Compares 2 U.

the last book I read

Ragtime by EL Doctorow.

It's New York City (and its environs) in the first decade-and-a-half of the 20th century - so if there were ever a time and place where it could be said that Great Things Are Afoot, this would be it. The invention of the motor car, the skyscraper, the movies, all fuelled by a relentless influx of immigrants from all over the world; mainly Europe but plenty of more exotic places as well.

And the people: Henry Ford, JP Morgan, Harry Houdini, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Emma Goldman - all in or around New York at this time doing their various things for the advancement of humanity.

Amid all this momentous stuff there are some actual people living their lives as well. For the purposes of the novel these are: a WASP family living in New Rochelle, just outside the city, an Eastern European immigrant and his young daughter, and a black musician and his fiancée. The WASP family are known, slightly impersonally, as Father, Mother, Mother's Younger Brother and "the boy". Father goes off on expeditions, including Peary's 1909 North Pole expedition, while Mother's Younger Brother moons around fairly aimlessly in that way young men do until he becomes obsessed with socialite Evelyn Nesbit and the media circus surrounding her and her husband Harry Thaw. Having met Evelyn through the radical Emma Goldman and conducted a brief affair with her, Mother's Younger Brother finds himself open to radical ideas.

As it happens Coalhouse Walker has a radical idea for him - having been victimised by some of the New York fire department and had his car (a Ford Model T) confiscated, Coalhouse embarks on a campaign of terror against the city with an expanding band of sidekicks to get compensation. Coalhouse also has a fiancée, Sarah, and a child, who ends up living with Mother and Father after Sarah dies. Coalhouse ropes Mother's Younger Brother (who has an aptitude for explosives) into his cause, but things inevitably end in tears, and, in Coalhouse's case, a bullet-ridden death at the hands of the New York police. Meanwhile some of the carefree living will have to stop, as World War I is on the verge of breaking out.

I suppose you'd classify Ragtime at least partly as "historical fiction" in that it takes a real, well-documented period of time and some real, well-documented historical figures and weaves a fictional narrative around them. It mucks around with the rules slightly by having some of the "real" people do things they probably didn't actually do, like the rather fanciful whimsical interlude of Freud and Jung riding on the Tunnel of Love at Coney Island. As always there are some shades of grey here - I'm not sure you'd class, for instance, Turbulence as "historical fiction" despite its featuring some real-life events.

The trick with this sort of thing is to ensure that the transitions between real-life stuff which is documented in the history books and the stuff you've made up just to drive the story along aren't too lumpy and jarring. The only place where this doesn't seem seamless is in the character of Coalhouse Walker, his transition into urban terrorist, and his co-opting of Mother's Younger Brother into his band of outlaws. Interestingly this bit of the novel was apparently adapted (or stolen, depending how happy you are with the amount of attribution Doctorow gave for doing it) from an earlier (19th century) novel called Michael Kohlhaas by German author Heinrich von Kleist, itself apparently based on the real-life (16th century) story of Hans Kohlhase and his doomed attempt to get some redress for the mistreatment of his horses.

The distancing device whereby few of the (fictional) central characters have names is a slightly odd one - it doesn't divorce you from caring about individuals in the same way as Last And First Men does, but it does keep you at arm's length in terms of engaging with what happens to them. It also just reinforces the point that the book's main concern is the Great Sweep Of History, rather than the little people who populate it, and if some of the individuals get a bit lost, well, so be it. There might therefore be a sense in which you find it difficult to engage with any of the major characters - apart from the bit where Mother's Younger Brother falls out of a wardrobe while having a furtive wank in Evelyn Nesbit's hotel room. Well, we've all done it.

As with Under The Volcano, this is a dead cert for just about any list of "great 20th-century novels", and sure enough it pops up in the TIME magazine list of 100 greatest 20th-century novels. It was also made into a film in 1981 which featured James Cagney in his last appearance.

Here's Doctorow's appearance in the Paris Review's Art of Fiction series of long meandering interviews.

deadlift, snatch or clean and jerk

Here's a curious coincidence: no sooner do I speculate on the relative merits of furious spin-bike training and furious self-abuse than the Daily Mail knock out a lifestyle piece along pretty much the same lines. Compare the respective dates: my blog post appeared on April 13th, the Mail article on April 15th. It's almost as if someone at the Mail, maybe even Paul Dacre himself, is reading this blog for inspiration.

The Mail article plays down the likely calorie-burning benefits of masturbation as compared to something like going for a jog or to the gym. On the other hand with some of those there may be a cost involved, and you have to do tedious administrative things like put some trousers on. Swings and roundabouts, as always.

I've got a bike you can ride it if you like

It's time to address the sensitive subject of my weight. No, no, don't try to fob me off with all that "weight? are you mad?", "you look fine", "you are like a LITERAL Greek god, you magnificent creature" stuff, we've got to grasp the nettle and face up to it.

Now as utterly delightful and rewarding as parenthood is, and I wouldn't have missed a moment of it, it is true that it does place some constraints on one's leisure time, and that means a reduction in the number of opportunities for getting some healthy exercise, whether that be golf, some sort of after-work racket sports action or just yomping up a hill. Even popping out to the shed for a quick thrash round my home gym is more difficult than it used to be, since it now has to happen between the end of the kids' bath-and-bed routine and dinner time, with the added complication that since cooking dinner is usually my job that also means pushing dinner-time back by half an hour or so.

So I decided something had to be done. I should clarify, I suppose, that this was brought about by a general feeling of not being quite as fit as I used to be, rather than by any sort of crash weight gain necessitating waddling round the house in a muumuu and occasionally losing the TV remote in my neck folds. In fact I weigh almost exactly the same now as I did at the end of 2005 when Hazel and I met. To be fair, that's a good four stone heavier than I was at some points during my university days, but I was painfully skinny back then thanks to only intermittently being able to afford to eat.

Back in the heady days of not having children, Hazel and I had got into a routine of going to an early-morning (7am!) spinning class at the grandly-named Newport International Sports Village, which I used to enjoy greatly despite the earliness of the hour, as you can get a really good sweat up while remaining in the same place. Now you might say, well, just get on an actual bike and go for a bike ride then, but that's actually considerably more complicated as you have to factor in the possibility of adverse weather and mechanical failures, not to mention being sideswiped by a juggernaut and killed. Not insurmountable problems (apart from the being killed bit), but the key here, as with all dieting and exercise regimes, is to realise that Future You is a shiftless feckless lazy fat bastard who will seize the slightest opportunity to weasel out of doing things that involve effort, and that therefore you need to pre-emptively put some structure in place that will thwart Future You from fucking up all your fine intentions. One could also say: I'm a busy man, it's the 21st century and I just want to get to the calorie-burning bit without all the admin, just as I relish being able to switch between songs at a click on iTunes without having to get up and put a different LP on the turntable. Progress, innit.

So I mentioned the possibility to Hazel of purchasing a spin bike for the house, presumably second-hand as a gym-quality one with a proper heavy flywheel typically goes for several hundred quid. Luckily she is a bit of a whiz at eBay and managed to get hold of a very solid Horizon S3+ at a bargain price (I don't know exactly how much as it was a Christmas present). I had to do some engineering work on it to repair the resistance adjusting knob which had a vexing habit of falling off halfway through a workout, but apart from that it was in perfect working order.

The other advantage of going to a spinning class rather than out on the road is that there's an instructor barking orders at you and imposing some structure on the session. Again, you can adhere to some sort of purist view that says: this should not be necessary with a bit of discipline, or you can shrug and say, yeah, but Future You will be on the ale and pies like a shot unless you keep an eye on him, the lazy fucker. At this point you can either hire a personal trainer at exorbitant cost, or you can search out some of the excellent selection of videos available on YouTube, mostly via Global Cycling Network, which seek to give the authentic spin class experience.

The second of our downstairs rooms (I believe "reception rooms" is the accepted estate-agent-ese) is set up as Hazel's photography client meeting room, and therefore, as luck would have it, contains a projector for facilitating viewing of wedding album designs, portraits, etc. So if I hook up my laptop to the projector and fire up a GCN YouTube video, hey presto, a real spinning class in my own home.

This one here is the one I normally use, since it's a good brisk 20-minute interval-training workout (i.e. periods of normal pedalling interspersed with sprints) which, if you commit to it fully, should give you that authentic sweat-dripping-on-the-floor effect by the end. Really this just provides a structure; the intensity level is up to you. As a general rule of thumb I like to try to keep to about 75rpm for the regular sections and crank it up to about 100rpm for the sprints - obviously how high you wind up the resistance is a factor too.

You may, if you wish, speculate about the possible other reasons why I use this particular video, like for instance its all-female class and the woman nearest the camera on the far right with the spectacular breasts in particular. I wouldn't like to comment, but the ladies do appear to be wearing a bit more make-up than would be normal for a spin class (in my experience at least, though of course I may just have chosen the wrong spin class to attend) and some of the sweat in the latter stages does look a bit artfully sprayed-on, particularly in the gratuitous bum-angle shots. But, you know, whatever keeps you interested and gets you through the 20 minutes. Some of the on-screen captioning is a bit (presumably knowingly) fnarr-fnarr as well.

All of which begs the question, and I'm sure you're way ahead of me here: how does the calorie-burning effect of a 20-minute spin bike workout compare with simply using the same video to facilitate masturbating furiously for 20 minutes?

There are various resources regarding the calorie-burning properties of stationary cycling, most of which suggest that a 20-minute workout at reasonable intensity will burn about 200 calories. Information, let alone reliable information, regarding wanking is a bit harder to come by (ooer), but most estimates seem to suggest a 20-minute workout of this kind will burn somewhere between 20 and 100 calories; this may vary depending how closely you adhere to the relax-SPRINT-relax-SPRINT pattern, and of course whether you can hold out for the full 20 minutes. Other considerations include whether you'd prefer to end up with muscular thighs or a massive right arm. So you might decide that it's worth splashing out (ooer, again) on a bike after all.