Plainsong

Do you see? They live on the plains.

This is a lovely, delicate story set in 1980s rural America in a small town. It's a little like A History of Violence, but without the violence. It's a little like No Great Mischief, but without the immigration. It's a little like... it's a lot like a lot of other books, really. The story is nicely told, the characters are all nicely painted, you read it through pretty quickly.

It was recommended to me by some of my relatives who go to book groups, and in a way it's a perfect book group book. It doesn't take long to read, but contains a lot you can talk about. There are a number of identifiable characters, some children, a little mental illness and a desirable male lead. Which isn't to do the book down at all, I just noticed it.

Watson's Apology

Another novel that is based on actual events from the nineteenth century, this one is everything that Harry Thompson's is not. Short, bitter, small-minded, shrill. This is the first Beryl Bainbridge book I've read that I really haven't liked. It's based on the case of a clergyman who was found guilty, after forty odd years of marriage, of brutally murdering his wife and then attempting to take his own life, claiming that she drove him to it. Bainbridge's apology for his actions is a catalogue of sadness, missed opportunities, tiny triumphs in mediocre lives, repressed sexuality, misunderstandings, and a very boring court case. I didn't even read it all the way to the end, just skimmed the court proceedings. I'm sure she was making some kind of point with them, but for the life of me I can't figure out what.

This Thing of Darkness

This is Harry Thompson's first novel, and if I'd commissioned it myself, I couldn't have asked for something more suited to my own tastes.

Write me a book, I would say, that fictionalises real events and people. Give me a tragically flawed hero in the old naval mould, who commands a ship with panache and courage, and who is constantly fighting with his naturalist sidekick, who has many old-fashioned ideas of duty and kinship and who is always on the side of the weak and downtrodden. Give him some interesting scientific ideas that are rejected by the establishment but which are ultimately proved to be correct.

Except I would have said, don't kill him at the end. Leave it open for a sequel. Perhaps that's why it's as well I wasn't the one commissioning this book, because then you wouldn't have got the story of Captain Robert Fitzroy, commander of the Beagle and exuberantly religious foil to Charles Darwin and his new scientific discoveries. The whole book is a marvel, very much in the Patrick O'Brian vein, full of intellectual discoveries and quarrels and adventures and boys' fun, but, because the characters are real people, it's also full of the nastiness, selfishness, sickness and depression from which real people suffer in a way that fictional people do not. Darwin comes over, not as unlikeable, but as ambitious, vain, and a little spoiled. Fitzroy himself is a manic depressive and something of a Tory snob. Darwin is prepared to make his own mind up about the things he sees and hears, while Fitzory shoehorns everything into his existing view of the world. Darwin is the fittest who survived, Fitzroy is the old order who didn't.

Preserved Killick

Our cat, Killick, died last night at the vet's. He was a little under the weather on Tuesday night, and was very sick all day Wednesday. I took him to the vet yesterday morning and they kept him in and gave him antibiotics and fluids, but he didn't bounce back.

Poor guy was only a year and a half old. He never got the hang of retracting his claws and so you would often come upon him in a room, patiently waiting with one paw above his head for you to free him. He would chase after hair elastics and bring them back for you to throw again. He would crouch at the top of the stairs when you threw his ball up there, his ears flattened against his skull and his eyes crazy wide as if he was going to spring into action any second. Then he would just watch the ball go right over his head and go back to looking at you again.

Glasgow Botanic Gardens

We went there last Tuesday and sat around in the cold and had a lovely afternoon. When it was too cold to sit outside and read our books, we went inside and looked at exotic plants. Man, banana plants have HUGE leaves. Huge.

I have discovered a new pet hate

Because of course I don't have enough of them already.

I hate vegetarians who sit near you at dinner and make the noise of the animal you're eating. It's tiresome and childish and does not make me want to stop eating the animal (I'm 36, for fuck's sake. I have thought about the connection between the fuzzy wuzzy ickle baa lambs in the field and the lovely Moroccan-inspired stew in front of me, thanks), but actually just makes me want to club the vegetarian over the head, kill them and eat them, while all the time making a little whingey vegetarian noise.

It happened at dinner the other night. Eventually a plate of chicken came out and the person in question made chicken noises. "Well done," I said "that's the sound a chicken makes. Good girl." Then she shut up. Perhaps she felt her work was done.

I came home and ate the dogs afterwards, just to prove a point.

Wedding!

I've been to a lot of weddings in my time, and I'm pleased to report that this was my favourite. There's something about watching a sibling who you love like a brother get married. It's got all the benefits of your own wedding (you get to dress up nice, go to the hairdressers, see people you've known for years and really quite like, be made a fuss of) with none of the drawbacks (expense, nerves (although I was nervous), talking to people you've invited out of duty but don't really like, standing around for endless photos). You know pretty much everyone there and, if you've always been friendly with your family members, you like pretty much everyone there. The added bonus here is that the Brother's new family is great too, and we all get on really well.

Apart from some technical hitches with the hotel and the weather - it pissed down rain ALL DAY on the Saturday, so there isn't one single outside photo where we're not getting pissed down rain on - the whole event was magnificent. Speeches were great, and were given before the meal, which has the advantages of allowing the top table to enjoy their meal, and giving the guests who may not have known each other all that well a nice topic of conversation. Everyone cried shamelessly, including the best man and the groom, and we all got to dance to Gay Bar later on. Which is the very best kind of party.

Gleddoch House vs. The Kirklee Hotel

It's hard not to play compare and contrast with two places you've stayed on your holidays, and I've no desire to start fighting that temptation now. Apart from the fact that you would have great difficulty fitting any sort of a wedding party into the Kirklee Hotel in Glasgow (more of a guest house, really), it wins hands down in all comment card categories.
Kirklee:
*£72 a night for two people
*Cooked breakfast brought to your room
*Nice man who greets you in a smiley way and dashes up the stairs with your suitcase
*£2.00 for a bottle of beer
*Cheap to get to
*Two minutes' walk from Byers Road, twenty minutes from Stevie and Lesley's house
*Tucked away in lovely Edwardian square
*Handy folder full of facts about stuff to do and nice places to eat
*Small bed, but comfy like home
*Functional bathroom, you wouldn't live with it, but it's okay for a few days (and spotless)
*Cheap bathroom products, but you do get a face cloth, two towels, shampoo and conditioner, and soap

Gleddoch House
*£115 a night for two people (special wedding rate)
*Quite good breakfast buffet till 10am, and then if you miss it they bring you a breakfast in the bar
*Nice lady who greets you in a smiley way, but no lifts and no-one to even show you where your room is, never mind carry your bags
*£3.50 for a bottle of beer (and they ran out of Budvar by Sunday night and we had to drink Miller, euuchh, no thanks)
*£25 in a taxi from Glasgow
*Miles from anywhere (which is nice if there's a big group of you, actually. And the views were just lovely)
*Absolutely no information in the room about anything. You have to guess what time breakfast is, guess if there's room service, remain ignorant of the health club facilities, and so on
*Huge, giant bed
*Lovely gushing shower, with Molton Brown shower products, and a shower cap. But! No face cloth, no conditioner, and the cleaning was patchy
*hard to work telly (but there was a DVD player in it, so we could play CDs)

A lot of the Gleddoch's problems stemmed from the fact that they recently changed hands and a lot of staff left, so the place is woefully understaffed and the same four people seemed to be doing all the work looking after about 50 of us for the weekend. But the refit seems to be a bit of a shoddy affair - Mister Monkey tried to open the window in our bedroom and part of the frame came off in his hand. But I hear from those who care about such things that the health club part of the hotel was brilliant.

The Kirklee, on the other hand, is a little family run guest house with seven rooms in it where they really, really want you to have a nice time and come back soon. I would highly recommend it to anyone travelling to Glasgow for a weekend.

Neither place provided broadband services, which in this day and age wouldn't exactly be difficult. We managed to pick up a pretty good wireless signal in the bar of the Gleddoch, but in the Kirklee, nothing.

(I'm also amused that Gleddoch House appear to have had their domain, er, poached. Well done!)

This year's model

Also happens to be this month's Media Crush.

Isn't he cute, with the glasses and all?

I promise proper blogging soon, featuring wedding stuff and so on. But for now, the loveliness of a new Doctor.

Things are looking up

Do you see???

But they are, a bit. I'm in the middle of some hectic contract work at the moment, I've got two job applications on the go, irons in the fire, all that stuff. Could be an interesting year.

And The Weddening next week. Excitement.

FFS!

It's amazing how some things can really push your buttons. I was so close to giving the staff in Waterstone's a piece of my mind, and then, just like that, I couldn't be arsed.

Still though. For fuck's sake.

Standard Time

Just to prove I don't hate Irish authors (just the bad ones), here comes Keith Ridgway's collection of short stories about Dublin people, past, present and future. I read his novel The Parts a couple of years ago and found it excellent in places but a little stretched in the telling and maybe not as brilliant as some found it. His short stories, however, are spot on. Funny, weird, magical, mundane, violent, personal and cryptic. He picks up on great details and paints a Dublin I recognise: just another city that has nasty histories as well as great ones, and has nasty presents as well as sophisticated European ones. Top stuff.

My birthday (Part two)

Presents from The Carpenter and The Lady arrived today, hooray. Another Magnus Mills book (which reminds me that I must read that other Magnus Mills book and give it back to William) with a picture of a ship on the cover, and this four-CD set.
The first thing I did with the Irving Berlin box set was import it to iTunes so that I could listen to it on the iBook. So, once again I am in the amusing position of using thousands of monies' worth of equipment to reproduce crackly mono recordings. I'll be on the wax cylinders before long, I predict.

Why, Lord, Why? (Part two)

One for Ed.

It's grim out east

I find myself struggling to like DBC Pierre. I did like Vernon God Little when I read it, but I would be hard pressed to remember a single thing about it now and I know a lot of people hated it. Recently I heard DBC being interviewed on Rattlebag and he made his new book sound really interesting. He made the situation in the Caucasus sound grim and overwhelming and as though it would make a great subject for a novel. And it would. But this is not that novel.

The story concerns Ludmila and her family who live on the constantly shifting border between two warring zones in... I want to say Armenia(?). At the beginning of the book Ludmila's grandfather, whose pension is the only income the family has, dies. So someone has to become the new breadwinner for this unpleasant, backbiting family. But Ludmila has plans to escape to the West with her boyfriend and make a new life for herself there.
During the meanwhile, over in an England made paranoid by terrorist threats, conjoined twins (one conservative, one liberal, one weak, one strong, oh the symbolism!) are separated and set loose on an unsuspecting public, having lived in a sheltered home all their lives. One of them is looking to crawl back into the home, the other wants to get out and have some sex. And if he has to order a young woman off the Internet from the Caucasus, so be it.

Pierre's dialogue is superb, and his story - what there is of it - is reasonable, but his actual narrative is awful and his descriptions are so offputting that they leave you more confused than you would have been if he'd described nothing at all. Eileen Battersby's comment that you should only write a book if you've something to say is unfair, because he does have something to say about what a luxury it is to be able to worry about terrorism and to fear bombs, when there are so many people for whom getting shot is a very real daily possibility that they can do nothing to avoid because poverty has left them without any choices. But I had to look hard to find that point, and I only found it because I was well disposed towards the book to begin with.

Compare and contrast with A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, which also deals with former USSR states and how people got out of them. Billed as a comedy, this book is in fact more like one of those chirpy, hummable Beatles songs that actually turns out to be lyrically dark and quite depressing.

The story concerns a family of Ukrainian immigrants to Cambridgeshire. When the mother dies, the father (who is eighty-six) decides to marry a thirty-four year-old Ukrainian woman in order to help her stay in England after her visa runs out. The novel follows the efforts of his two middle-aged daughters to extricate their hapless father from the clutches of this scheming woman and her supposedly genius son. It's a very quick read and does actually have some stuff about tractors in it, but for the characters in this book, much of the awfulness of Eastern Europe is consigned to the past and has a discreet veil drawn over it. Until, of course, it rears its loud, garish head again in the shape of Valentina, who terrorises everyone and everything around her in an effort not to be sent back to Ukraine.

The book raises some serious issues about older people and their rights and abilities, but ultimately relies on a whimsical and Anne Tyler-ish wrapup that allows everyone to feel better about themselves. Maybe I'd have liked it better if it was grimmer all over, but then, I'm maybe a little young to be the target market for this book, and maybe the target market has had enough of that unpleasantness to be going on with, thank you very much.

The Shadow of the Sun

Columbo gave me this book last year around the time I got married, which just shows you how big my to-read pile is that I only got around to this recently. It's a great book, lovely American-style paperback that flops open and feels smooth to the touch and is easy to read on the train.
Oh, and what's in it is great as well. Ryszard Kapuscinski is a Polish journalist who wrote articles about his life in Africa from 1955 onwards, taking in the broad sweep of post-World War Two independence movements, dictatorships, famine, reconstruction and everyday African life. He acknowledges the difficulties inherent in attempting, as a white Northern European person, to get to the root of the nature of Africa, but he does a great job of sketching the basics. I like that he looks at geographical as well as political and historical factors, and that he never lets you forget some very basic facts, namely that Africa is very, very hot, and that it is very difficult to live there. I enjoyed this book immensely and will seek out more of the same.

My birthday

An Fear Moncai's birthday present to me finally arrived. On a gloomy day when I am feeling ill, he arrives home from work with a new Canon Digital SLR for me. Because he got a bonus in work.

He is nice.

We decided we like this photo because it shows our living room in a good light. Groovy accessories, clever telly, highly groomed cat. The filth with which we are generally surrounded does not show up much. Just what I've always wanted - a camera that makes my whole life look better.

Oh, the embarrassment

I have a horrible feeling I'm going to want to see The Da Vinci Code when it comes out. I always enjoy Ron Howard's films, I like Tom Hanks, I adore Paul Bettany, and I thought the book was fun.

The shame.

Even more shameful is the fact that this blog entry is merely an excuse to post a picture of Paul Bettany on my blog. Again. Although I am not using any of the publicity stills from the film, because they make him look like a young Emperor Palpatine.

White heron

Truth be told, it can get a little lonely out here by the sea. Far away from all the friends in more ways than one, there's some connection lost there.

But then some mornings I get out for the walk and it's rainy and blowy but I've worn the right hat and coat for once and I'm bundled up and the dogs are leaping around trying to decide if they're hunting or playing and a white heron flies overhead and lands on the river to fish. I've never seen a white heron before, and it's good to be able to stand and watch it for a while without fear that someone is going to come along and disturb us. After a bit it saw me, though, and started to do its "I'm not a bird, I'm a stick!" routine, so there was no point in watching it anymore.

More baby announcements today on the list. Feels very springtime.

A night at the theatre

When you only ever go to the theatre to see things written by people you know, or actors you went to college with, or something experimental in a small room above a pub, there's a whole level of polish and style and years of craft that you never get to see. A whole world of actors who can make their voices carry across a full house without ever seeming to raise them above the conversational, without covering the front row in spittle.
Mister Monkey and I went to see Brian Friel's The Faith Healer at The Gate, starring Ralph Fiennes, Ingrid Craigie, and Ian McDiarmid. Quite the cast of heavy hitters, and quite the night they delivered. The play is great and interesting and says much about the nature of playacting and storytelling and desire for glamour and a belief in unattainable happiness and a need to be noticed and loved and to be in the spotlight. The simple staging, in which monologues are delivered to the audience as if the audience were a journalist interviewing each of these people about their memories, is very effective and successfully brought us into the action so that, even from the very back of the theatre we wanted to answer the actors whenever they appeared to fumble for their places in the story.
It was just great. I would be interested to see it again with a different cast, just to compare, because I thought that Ralph Fiennes in particular was absolutely mesmerising, and not just, you know, because of the charm and everything.

The Known World

I waited so long for this book to come into the shop, and was looking forward to reading it so much, that I suppose it couldn't help but be disappointing. It could be the frame of mind I was in when I read it. It could be a whole lot of things, but I just wasn't engaged by it, despite its credentials. I usually like a Pulitzer winner. I usually like an epic tale of hardship in the American South. The fact that this was an epic tale of hardship in the American South that also included a black slave-owning family only made the book more attractive.
But I couldn't follow it. I kept having to go back and reread sections because I found the names confusing and the characters blank. Nothing much happened that I haven't read in other books. The timeline was constantly disrupted, which I know is a deliberate style to make the book seem more like an oral history, and the actual story moved very, very slowly. I'm sorry I didn't like it, but I just didn't. It was, well, it was boring.

A Pound of Paper

John Baxter's memoir of his book collecting is all the things I like in such a book. It's a quick read, full of interesting little asides and anecdotes about books and people and places. It's also got some top tips for making yourself popular with Parisian shopkeepers.
Book collectors are funny people. They appear to attach no value to the words in a book, only to the object itself. They see minor details that most of us miss - a tiny line of numbers close to the spine, an extra zero here or there, a missing errata slip where one should be, and so on. Like record collectors, they pore endlessly over boxes of apparent junk in the vague hope that they just might come across a first edition of something amazing, or something that will fill that last hole in their collection.
They hate the internet, by and large. It has removed much of the mystique from what they do and has made it easy for anyone to pass him or herself off as an expert.
I suspect that they wish they were private detectives. This is a fun book.

Proof, if proof be need be...

... that wasps are just the creepiest things on earth

I'm so glad I didn't watch that David Attenborough programme.

The Ultimate Question

Why, lord, why?

Pack Up the Moon

Bleucch, eucch.

So many things wrong with Anna McPartlin's book, I barely know where to start. I was asked to read it and review it on Newstalk106's lunchtime show. The other guest reviewer, I was surprised to see, was Dermot Lacey, a strange, showbizzy kind of politician who appears to be so completely consumed with being popular and being elected that he has lost all of his critical faculties along the way. Along with his powers of hearing and listening. During the review I said that I thought it was good that young women were writing books that were relevant to other young women in the same social category as them, I just didn't think this was a good example of that type of book. He said that he didn't care if the book wasn't socially relevant, he thought it was a good book anyway.
He reminded me of my least favourite kind of man, the ones who don't listen to women, who don't listen to anyone, in fact, except for other men who are exactly like them. You know the kind of guys who sell you a crappy car or fuck up a simple plumbing job or arrive three hours late to move your furniture and then, when you complain to them about the level of service you've received in return for your hard-earned money, they roll their eyes at your husband or father as if to say "women, eh? They just don't get that this is how the world works". I do not like men like this. I did not like this man. I did not like this book either, but I've ranted about it so much that I've lost the will to rant about it any more. Suffice to say that I think it's a disgrace that women are expected to pay a tenner to buy this sort of shoddily written, shabbily edited rubbish. Of course, what would I know? I just think that people should do their jobs well. Including writers.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye

I could easily write the same review for this as I wrote for The Girls of Slender Means. Short, punchy, single event causes mayhem, ripples of strange behaviour upset the status quo, etc. Really, more people should write like Muriel Spark. Fewer people should write like Anna McPartlin. The world would be a better place. Okay, maybe not the world, but bookshops certainly would be better for it.

All the clocks in the house are wrong

As soon as I get better and can get the hell off this sofa, I will buy batteries for the clocks. I will buy a new lightbulb for the little lamp in the sitting room so that the corner of the room that the telly's in isn't only lit by the glow of the telly. I will post the Pinefox the book I promised him. I will pick out the books I haven't read yet and arrange them in some way so as to make it easier to find them when I want to read them.
There are so many things I will do when this crappy winter is over.
That is soon, right?

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Another break from Aussie convicts. This is a subtle horror story from Stephen King about a nine year-old girl who gets separated from her mother and brother while out hiking and has to try to find her way back to civilisation, dodge nameless horrors in the woods, and has only her personal stereo and its tinny reception of baseball games far away to keep her company. I read this at one sitting, which is the only way to read Stephen King really. He builds up a great atmosphere here, doesn't lay it on too thick, and has his usual fun with homey details in the middle of great fear. I liked it a lot, partly because I love stories about people walking and covering loads of ground. My favourite parts of Lord of the Rings are the walking parts. However, I do think he has a nerve calling it a novel when it barely skims a hundred pages.
PS, Tom Gordon is a baseball player. No, I didn't know that either.

The Necropolis Railway

Just one of the books I read while reading The Fatal Shore just to give myself a little break from the relentless size of the thing. This is a thriller, supposedly, that I kept thinking was going to turn out more thrilling than it really did. The title promises all kinds of spooky steam-age goings-on, but really it's a fairly straightforward story about a young man who comes down to London to work on the railways and gets mixed up in some bad blood about unions and land sales leading to moider; it's Steamtown. Interesting historical research though. There really was a necropolis railway, the spirit of Edwardian London is evoked quite faithfully, and so on. But the story, I thought, was weak. Ah well. It passed the time and at least it was short.

The Fatal Shore

It is a constant source of disappointment to me that Mister Monkey can read history books galore and actually retain facts from these books, while I learn only vague concepts. For example, he has just finished reading a big fat book about Persia and has learned many exciting things about Persia which he will happily share with you (if he ever updates his bloody blog, that is). I read a whole exciting novel about Persia last year, and the only thing I can remember is that there was once a Persian king called Arses.
I'm a bit like that about Australia now. Even after reading six hundred fairly dense pages about transportation and the colonial beginnings of Australia, all I can really tell you is an amusing story about a bloke called Pearce who was a cannibal. Or that you really, really didn't want to end up getting transported to Norfolk Island. Or that you didn't want to be a woman who got transported. Otherwise, there were worse things that could happen you than being sent to Botany Bay. In general, you worked hard, you got your ticket-of-leave, and you had a chance to be set up with some land and you could get some convicts of your own and start your own farm or business or whatever it was you had been doing in Ireland or England before you got greedy or stupid and did whatever it was that got you transported in the first place. In fact, one of the British government's biggest problems, once the colony was up and running, was to retain some sort of threatening air about it, which was very difficult seeing as how things were pretty crap for the English poor at that time.
It's a very good book, even if it does repeat itself a little and sometimes there's a little too much talk about architecture for my liking (namely, any at all. I don't care about architecture), but there's no way it should have taken me two months to read.

Theatre score!

I never get hard-to-get-tickets. But now I have tickets for Brian Friel's Faith Healer at the Gate next month. Starring Ralph Fiennes! And Ian "I wasn't always Emperor Palpatine, you know" McDiarmid! The excitement!

Dead pool 2006

The kids on ILE are playing this Dead Pool, but most of the people I wanted to pick are not available and I'm too much of a luddite and a non-joiner to figure out how to add them.
So, I'm playing by ILE rules, which are:
You must pick ten well-known people who are alive.
You can change your picks until the end of January.
For each person who dies, you score 100 points minus their age.
You must not be complicit in the death of anyone in your dead pool.
Want to play?

Here's my team so far:
Hilda Braid
Charlie Haughey
Bruce Forsyth
Gary Glitter
Margaret Thatcher
Muhammad Ali
Ariel Sharon
Esther Williams
Jerry Lee Lewis
Marcel Marceau
But it could all change between now and January 31st.

And like that it was all over

Blah blah twelfth night blah, but it feels all over, doesn't it? Maybe it's working part-time that does it. I'm not on holiday, I haven't taken any extra time off over Christmas, and the fact that it all fell on a weekend makes it even stranger. I get a total of one extra day off work for the holidays, which somehow seems wrong.
Not that I haven't been sitting on my ass, mind you.
This year I revived the childhood practice of actually telling people exactly what I want for Christmas, and it has paid off handsomely. Books with pictures of ships on the front (a special mention here to the lovely Folio Society edition of Thomas Cochrane's memoirs from Eoghan) and new beds for the dogs were the favourites, as well as my own virtual dog on the Nintendo DS. I haven't quite figured out how to work it properly, and it turns out you can't really use it on the train because you have to talk to it in a loud voice, and my real dogs don't like it very much, but it's a good thing to have around. It reminds me that I don't always have to be doing something useful with my time, or worrying about not doing something useful.
Nice to see no major natural disasters this year either.
New year's eve will see me and Mister Monkey settling down with a full haggis dinner and a nice bottle of ice wine in front of the new Bose speakers (another favourite present) before having an early night. Start as you mean to go on, I say.

What's a blog for, if not to complain about UPS?

I ordered a package from the US. I didn't know it was coming by UPS, no-one told me. "By Air" it said on the company's website. I guessed, you know, pixies or something. So I was quite surprised on Monday evening to come home and find a UPS InfoNotice in the hall telling me that the driver had tried to deliver the package at 9.40am. Surprise surprise, I was at work. There was nothing on the notice to tell me when they would be back to deliver again, because Irish delivery guys never like to tell you anything, because then you might expect some fucking level of fucking customer service from them.
Anyway, mea culpa, I forgot to bring the InfoNotice to work the next day and didn't call them. Sure enough, the driver had been and left another one, this time at 9.10am. Again, no clue as to when this masked stranger might turn up again, but I had a pattern to work from so I guessed it would be today. So I rearranged my morning and reckoned I would go into work a little bit late.
And I waited.
And I waited.
And I waited.
At 10.30 I called UPS and was told that the driver had left the depot with my package and that if I didn't want to wait for him I could always feel free to drive over to Ballymount Industrial Estate and get the package myself. I declined.
And I waited.
And I waited.
And I waited.
At 1.30pm I called UPS and asked if they had any idea when I might get my package. The girl on the phone said no, they don't give times, but it would "probably" be before 5pm. I pointed out to her (in a much more polite way than I am doing now) that shipping companies with far less sophisticated networks can at least tell you within three hours or so when they're likely to deliver. Mighty UPS, one of the biggest delivery companies in the world, apparently, can't do that. I asked, very politely, if there was some way I could register a complaint. The girl said yes, she took my name and phone number and said she had registered it.
So I waited.
And I waited.
And I waited.
At 5pm I phoned them again and got someone who could be based in Ireland, but let's face it, is more likely to be based in a faraway land. She left me on hold for 15 minutes while she checked where my package was. It turns out, right, that the driver had to return to the depot early and couldn't complete his deliveries today. So I would get my package on Friday.
Good thing it's not important, I told her. I then apologised to her for being abrupt, but said that I was pissed off and even though I wasn't pissed off with her, she was the one on the phone. She laughed and said that the despatch centre was very busy at the moment.
It amuses me that some poor woman who is possibly on the other side of the world is trying to make amends for the fact that Irish delivery guys just don't change. Just because White Van Man is now Brown Van Man doesn't make him any happier about sitting in heavy traffic on a rainy day.
All this over some stupid Christmas present that the person may not even like or want.
My humour is not good today.

Fat comic and the forces of sodomy

Post titles like that make me glad I don't have Adwords on my blog.

We went to see Dara O'Briain in Vicar St. last night. Whatever its limitations when seeing bands, Vicar St is a great place to see comedy, especially if you've got front row centre seats on the balcony, where you get to look down at the full house below you. Dara really is just a quality performer. Two hours of varied, hilarious, well-observed, clever comedy that never understimates the intelligence of the audience is hard to come by, but he delivers it.
My particular favourites are the image of some young person jogging along beside technology asking "what have you got for me today, technology?"
"Well, I've got a phone that you can carry around and call people from anywhere in the world!"
"That's brilliant! What have you got now?"
"I've got a phone with a camera attached, so you can take pictures of all your friends!"
"That's brilliant! What have you got now?"
"I've got an iPod that plays your music and stores your photos!"
"Oh shit, I've got a stitch. You carry on without me, I think I've gone far enough."
He breaks up the second half of the show very cleverly too. Having been invited on to the BBC's Room 101, he spends some time thinking about all the things he hates (opining that comedy is the ideal art form for petty things you hate. Broad strokes of emotion? Leave that to music. Irritating people you met on the train? Comedy!) but of cours they only used a few. So he has made a list of other ones, which he gets someone in the audience to read out. It's a good plan, because as soon as the interest in one topic starts to flag (assuming it does), he can just switch to the next thing. Smart.
He is just class, bless him.

All change

To the delight of people like Simon and Mr. Monkey, I've made the switch from PC to Apple. It didn't seem like such a big deal now that Apple will sell you a keyboard with a delete key on it, but it has meant big changes in other areas. I now use Safari for my web browsing, and my old blog provider does not fully support it. Sure, I can write a post, but I can't include italics or bold text and other basic, fun things. So I'm testing out Blogger to see if I like it.

This could take a while. I fear change.

Moving house

All the stuff from here down is in the process of being moved over from this blog:
Perfectly cromulent

It might take a while.

50: BRAINS!

Max Brooks' The Zombie Survival Guide is the book I've been waiting for all my adult life. Explaining the zombie phenomenon from start to finish, Brooks explains where zombies come from, how to tell the difference between the genuinely undead and the voodoo'ed unfortunates who were the first to bear the name, and, most importantly, how to deal with four different levels of zombie attack (everything from one or two wandering zombies to a complete infestation).

So, I now know that my preferred weapons would be a hunting rifle and a machete, that I should get a bicycle, spend all my spare money on a safe compound in the tundra somewhere, that I should keep an axe under my bed and use it chop up the stairs if I ever hear zombies at the front door. Be warned! Don't be tempted to set your stairs on fire, even though it's a quicker way to get rid of the stairs, but there's a big risk of you burning down your house.

I should point out that halfway through reading this book I became convinced that there were zombies on Laytown beach and they were going to shamble towards me in the dark at six am. I am not looking forward to the dogwalking next week. This book has not made me any less scared of zombies, is what I'm telling you. So if you see a large red-haired woman lurching out of the darkness towards you with an axe, well, just don't make any moaning noises or I'll have your head off in moments.
Posted Nov. 03 2005, at 9:26 PM
Comments (1)
I'm glad you warned about not burning down my house. Lesley hates it when I douse everything in petrol.
Posted by Stevie on Nov. 04 2005, at 10:53 AM Delete

49: Easy reader

Sometimes when you're having a hard week at work you want to read something easy that doesn't make you feel as though your brain has dribbled out your ear. Stephen Fry's Making History is such a book. There is much about it that is not good. If you do not think of Stephen Fry as a national treasure who should have his own plinth at the V&A, then you probably would find the authorial voice in this novel a little oppressive. If you know a lot already about the early years of the Hitler family and Adolf's part in World War One you will probably find much of the actual narrative a little dull. The characters are quite lame. The plot is ludicrous. Okay, okay, it's just not a good book. But readable, you know?

48: Mighty War in the mind

I will fight anyone who does not love Jon Ronson.

With that out of the way, I thought that The Men Who Stare at Goats might make a good palette cleanser after all the girly time travelling my reading's been doing recently. And it does. It's only a short book - three train trips from my house to the city and it was gone - but there's a lot of information in it.

After the Second World War, the American army became more open to trying to new techniques to, well, control the physical and mental chemistry of its own soldiers and the enemy's soldiers in an attempt to either prevent a war or win one, depending on who was in charge of the military programmes at the time. Experiments included, but were not limited to, staring at goats and other animals to try to remotely stop their hearts, playing discordant sounds and music at the enemy to disrupt brainwaves, hypnotism, the administration of LSD, and so on. Some of these tactics are still in use. Some are credited with limited success while others are openly laughed at for several years, yet resurrected periodically when a new wave of commanders tries to revamp the army and its image.

Jon Ronson is a good journalist to have working on such a project. He is open and willing to be convinced, but not gullible. He is sceptical and grounded in reality, but not sneering and cynical. He doesn't reallly seem to have an agenda except to find out what's going on, maybe tell a few funny anecdotes along the way, but mostly get to the bottom of an interesting question.

As an atheist, though, it is refreshing to see someone make the link between the New Age hippy practices of spoon bending and remote thinking and mass prayer meetings. Yes, it's pretty stupid to think that you can stop a goat's heart from the next room just by staring at it. Is it any stupider than thinking you can influence some deity in the sky to make the Iraqis surrender?

I was also interested in the stories of collateral damage, of what happens when the easily influenced come into contact with military "experts" feeding them "facts" (step forward the Heaven's Gate crew, remember them?) and when people on the inside of these projects decide they want to get out.

I'm not sure I'd recommend it to any ofyour paranoid friends though. If you think they were bad after reading Them, you won't want to go drinking with them after reading this.

47: Buckingham? Bummingham, more like

I know, I know I said I wasn't going to read any more Philippa Gregory after the awfulness of The Wise Woman, but I couldn't resist Earthly Joys, which is the first of her two books about John Tradescant, the great British gardener, and his rise to fortune during the fun and frolics of the reign and death of James I (except for viewers in Scotland, who were watching the reign of James VI) and the beginnings of rumblings of Mighty War.

Alert readers may notice that I read the second of these books earlier in the year and loved it, and that it was, in fact, the book that got me hooked on Gregory's own brand of research 'n' rumpo,. They are the ideal in historical fiction. The characters are more than just vehicles for her research, the stories are interesting, the historical backdrop is fascinating, and you can polish them off with amazing speed and feel you've learned a little something at the end of it all. Of course I now have to go and read some proper history books about the period in order to confirm some details. Did the Duke of Buckingham really sleep his way to the top by shagging not one, but two kings of England? Did the Duke's mother really poison James? I don't know. But I suspect C.V. Wedgwood probably does. I shall ask her.


Posted Oct. 27 2005, at 10:36 AM
Comments (2)
On Buckingham: I think so, but unfortunately CV Wedgwood kicks in after he leaves the scene so she can't help you. If you can track down the Pelican history of 17th-century Britain that'd be a good place to look.
Posted by wwhyte on Oct. 27 2005, at 2:21 PM Delete
We have a copy somehwere at home (if none of the animals has eaten it) but i can't remember it covering that.
Posted by Keith on Oct. 28 2005, at 3:59 AM Delete

46: chicky book alert!

About ten years ago I saw a sketch on a short-lived comedy show with an all-female cast. The sketch starred Terri Garr as the hostess of a book group that was getting together to discuss The Bridges of Madison County. Terri Garr wears a big denim shirt and a bandanna. She fusses about the livingroom. The other women in the book group arrive and they are also wearing denim shirts and bandannas. Not having read the book, I didn't quite get the joke, but it became clear as they discussed the book, with the whole thing degenerating into a fistfight over who was most like the woman in the book.

The Time Traveller's Wife is one of those books too, I suspect. Not satisfied with simply reading it, some women will try to find themselves in it because the lives of the people in it are kind of imaginable in the similarities to us, but impossibly remote and desirable in their differences.

And yes, it is a very chicky book. Which is not to say there's a lot of kissing in it (although there is) and nothing to interest the blokey reader. But it taps into exactly the same romantic desire as the film of Last of the Mohicans and Truly, Madly, Deeply - namely, the desire to have a man who will always find you. Who will always come back to you and do everything he can to make sure that you're okay, no matter what's happening or where he is. And if he ever can't get back to you, you can be damned sure that he is bloody well trying.

My only problem was that I found it a little hard to throw myself fully into the romance of it all because Henry (the Time Traveller), kept reminding me of Eoghan Barry at odd moments. The obsessive running. The playing of loud music. The wearing of t-shirts with band names on them. The love of spending hours in the kitchen making elaborate meals. The overachieving family. The swearing and drinking. You get the picture.

Still, don't let that put you off. Oh. It has. Well, if it has to be in my head...
Posted Oct. 19 2005, at 9:55 AM
Comments (6)
Read this one and really enjoyed it. Passed it on to Marshall who sobbed like an infant while reading it as we sat waiting for a flight to check-in. Chicky, yes. Thankfully our enjoyment was un-sullied by associating anyone we knew with Henry. I don't know any obsessive runners.
Posted by StevieB on Oct. 19 2005, at 10:29 AM Delete
There you are, you see. And Stevie is a boy, who likes football and everything!
I too had a big cry at various points throughout the book. I suspect this might be partly due to two external factors. One, my husband is away and I miss him. Two, I cry at bloody everything.
Posted by perfectlycromulent on Oct. 19 2005, at 11:56 AM Delete
That...could describe anyone. Well, almost anyone.

Mind you, Celeste loved it.
Posted by Eoghan on Oct. 19 2005, at 2:19 PM Delete
I read it and finished it, but I thought it was a pile of maudlin chickylit. For the reasons that you outlined. What is it about women that they need to have a man like that? We're not that fantastic that some bloke should spend his eternity looking for us. I wouldn't do it for a bloke. Having said that, I really liked the male character. Well written.
Posted by Queenie on Oct. 22 2005, at 2:07 PM Delete
Is it also like The Last of the Mohicans in that it features lots of lovingly rendered 18th century battles?
Posted by ian on Oct. 22 2005, at 6:33 PM Delete
Ooh, now we want a film with Alan Rickman in the role of Henry. I could take Sam to that and I'd be SO in.
Posted by Myles on Oct. 25 2005, at 11:05 PM Delete

45: I wouldn't wait underwater

Gun, With Occasional Music is a detective novel set in the near future. Do you like a bit of Raymond Chandler? Did you like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep but find it all a bit serious? Well then, this is the book for you. Funny and gunny.

The pope offers you this bounty

I forgot to take my camera with me to dinner on Thursday night, but here is a small photo of the Pope room in Buca di Beppo's, where Keith's manager, Russ, and all the other guys from his team brought us for dinner on Thursday night. It was your typical nerdy Italian dinner. We spilled food on the table and talked about beards. But no-one could escape the beady eyes of Pope Benedict in the centre of the table on the lazy susan, turning slowly and sweeping the table with his beams of holiness.

When we left, Russ gave us these lovely flowers as a present for our wedding. Bloody Googlers. They're just so nice.

Palo Alto United Methodist Church

Not merely the most interesting building I've seen on this entire trip to the south bay area (or whatever the hell they're calling Silicon Valley these days), but one of the best buildings I've ever seen. It looks like it should move around. Shame we weren't able to go inside.

In these days of having it your way

It's nice that there's one place that doesn't offer you chicken zinger ranch salad box options with low-fat carb free dressings or a piece of fruit for the kids. No. Hamburger, cheeseburger, or two cheeseburgers stuck together.

But there is a secret extra that they don't advertise on the board. Oh yes. The 4x4. You know it makes sense.

That's what a hamburger's...

...all about!

Sorry Stevie, it's all gone.

Bastards!
Posted by StevieB on Oct. 10 2005, at 9:21 AM Delete
but whitecastle have the best fries
Posted by on Oct. 21 2005, at 3:35 PM Delete
Ah-ha! Anonymous has issued a challenge. I've never been to White Castle, so I don't know.
Posted by perfectlycromulent on Oct. 21 2005, at 3:37 PM Delete

43: No spice is worth this

At this stage I consider myself something of a connoisseuse of popular history books concerning ships and the sea, and Giles Milton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg is right up there with In the Heart of the Sea as one of the best. Telling the story of the spice trade from the British point of view, Milton has great anecdotes about the beginnings of the wars between Britain and the Netherlands, the formation of both the British and Dutch East India Companies, the reasons for the high value of spices, and some lovely stories about the lives of the people who explored, fought over, and traded with the natives on these remote and hostile islands.

And yes, these books do follow a pattern, as the LRB says. They invite you to imagine a world without the thing the book is about, in order to build up its importance and make you believe that the main subject of the book (invariably some person of great character who has been consigned to the fringes of history in a way that makes you wonder about the fate of Neil Armstrong (especially given that there are already twenty year-olds who don't know who he is)) is a greater historical figure than Nelson or Magellan. Which of course they aren't, unless you're a chemist or a cartographer or lexicographer or whatever kind of specialist the author is.

The most interesting thing about this book, though, is that it starts off being about one thing and ends up being about something else entirely. And for once - hats off to Sceptre for this - the blurb on the back doesn't give away the whole point of the book, so there is actually a nice surprise at the end. Top notch.

Please upgrade me to a better film

Fair fucks to Jodie Foster. At an age when many women are moaning about there being no decent roles for them in Hollywood, she's reinvented herself as an action hero. Trouble is, this is her second maternal protection mayhem movie and neither of them is a patch on Aliens. And this one isn't even a patch on the last one. The description of the story as being Hitchcock on a plane is a good one, but what that doesn't tell you is that it's one of the ridiculous twist-turny Hitchcocks that just has you saying "what?" and "why don't they just..." all the time.

The film tried very hard to distract you from this with lots of footage of Jodie climbing around the insides of a superplane, so that you think you know how a plane works. And the music helpfully tells you from the very beginning that something very bad is about to happen. But this is a slight film and even at an hour and a half it seems too long.

Good thing I bunked in to it and didn't pay. Man, it's so easy to do that in the US.
Posted Oct. 06 2005, at 6:37 PM
Comments (1)
OHMYGOD is that Sean Bean in the photo?
Posted by Queenie on Oct. 12 2005, at 3:41 AM Delete

My gangster's got no nose

I did just type in a proper review of this film, but then stupid blog thing gave me an access denied message, so I'm not doing it all over again. Here's the picture again for Queenie's sake, at least.

Okay, let's try it again. Because I can't be bothered to type it all again, let's just say that the violence is bone-crunching and seriously non-cartoonish and the whole film is dispatched cleanly and efficiently. Like, er, a good contract killing.
Posted Oct. 06 2005, at 6:27 PM
Comments (1)
Gee thanks

I don't like his look in this much. Except for his nice 'smile lines' around his eyes. I think he's the only person in Hollywood that hasn't had surgery.

Although I like some bits of him in the film!!! noo-nee-noo-nee-noo, tum-ti-tum

Posted by Queenie on Oct. 12 2005, at 3:45 AM Delete

42: Don't die, poor brown dog!

No Great Mischief is one of those books that's often knocking about in our shop, looking like a quality modern literary read, but not really exciting much interest among the punters (including me). However, since my trip to Nova Scotia I've been actively seeking to keep the spirit of Canada alive in me and so I sought out this story of Scottish immigrants and their experiences in the land across the water.

It's a beautiful book, dealing with a wide range of subjects including family, oral history, dogs, cars, racism, the decline of the agrarian way of life, the camaraderie of men who do impossible jobs, the borders between countries old and new, and the dangers of alcoholism.

And it has a bit with a brown dog that caught me completely by surprise and made me cry on the train on the way into work one morning.

I will certainly be reading more of Mr. McLeod's work.
Posted Oct. 04 2005, at 12:03 AM
Comments (2)
I don't remember any of that and I have that book and that edition (wot you have on blog). very annoying will have to read it again.

Am reading the Deptford Trilogy at present. Early twentieth century Canada. Very funny, and very very illuminating about the Canadian soul.
Posted by Queenie on Oct. 04 2005, at 4:54 PM Delete
Is that Robertson Davies? Those books come into the shop a lot too. Must look out for them.
Posted by perfectlycromulent on Oct. 04 2005, at 4:59 PM Delete

It's the place to stay in Mountain View

This is the hotel where Keith is living during his six weeks in Mountain View, and the room really does look like this. I think it's great for him to be staying in a hotel room that looks like the kind of studio apartment you'd actually look forward to coming home to, instead of a crappy beige standard business hotel room. And there's an excellent bus service, and an Albertsons right across the road and an In-n-Out Burger just up the road. All in all, it's a good spot to be in.

There's also a very swish looking hi-fi lounge full of the kind of furniture I WANT TO HAVE. We discussed the fact that we're just not collectors. We don't have the stick-to-it-iveness that accumulating collectables requires. If we did, we would have bought that wonderful 1950s table and chairs in Halifax for $150 and paid to have it shipped back home. But we didn't.

Maybe I can get Queenie to do it for me.


Posted Oct. 03 2005, at 11:54 PM
Comments (3)
In-n-out, In-n-out, that's what a burger's all about. I hate you both!
Posted by StevieB on Oct. 04 2005, at 9:31 AM Delete
I saw it the other day I think! So it's still in the shop. I wondered at the time why you didn't buy it, but you were busy.

I'll do it for you no probs if you like.
Posted by Queenie on Oct. 04 2005, at 4:56 PM Delete
I know exactly where the hotel is.
Posted by Columbo on Oct. 27 2005, at 7:11 PM Delete