Elizabeth Costello

J.M. Coetzee is not an easy or fun writer, and Elizabeth Costello is not an easy or fun book. Although it says clearly in white letters on the cover that it is fiction, it is not really a novel, but a series of lectures or essays around the themes of animal rights, evil, writing, confinement, humanity, religion, art, and the proper exercise of power. Clever thoughts and neat, spare turns of phrase abound. On the surface, it is about us following Elizabeth Costello, a writer, through a number of engagements such as delivering lectures, accepting prizes, visiting her sister at a hospital in Africa. All of these engagements bring out a different set of beliefs and trigger a different lecture, a different essay on one of the topics Coetzee has prepared earlier. Elizabeth Costello is in some of these positions - she is herded like an animal, argued with, misunderstood. Her personal space is invaded. She is struck, she reveals herself, she writes, she eats or does not eat, she tries to get into heaven, she goes to Antarctica. You, the reader, get to make of it what you will. The blankness of Coetzee's writing lets you make up your own mind about her, and whether she is mouthing his words or not. It's all very clever.

But of course, because I am the kind of person who does not normally read challenging fiction, fiction made of clever thoughts, I am suspicious of this book. Is Coetzee really clever? Or rather, are the ideas he discusses here really clever, or are they really basic philosophical questions that are so simplistic they can be inserted into a loose narrative and be packaged as fiction, even though they're not?
Was this an experiment to make me, a reader of fiction (and a reader of Booker Prize winners, at that, and therefore a reader of quality fiction, not any old tat) think that I am clever? Is it a mindless book dressed up as something more, like the ape from Kafka's story, which Coetzee discusses? Or is it really the well-thought out quality it appears to be at first reading?
It's hot. I'm tired, and I may or may not be rambling.

Sea of Glory

How is it, Nathaniel Philbrick asks, that a squadron of American ships can sail to Antarctica and be the first to map it as a continent, make some of the most useful charts of Pacific islands (some of which were still in use until the Second World War), come back with a collection big and important enough to start up the nation's first public science museum (the Smithsonian), and draw up some of the most accurate charts of the American northwest, and no-one has ever heard of them?
The answer: politics and bad management skills. Charles Wilkes, leader of the Exploring Expedition, was not a facilitator. He was a maverick and an ambitious weirdo who didn't know anything about the sea. He was promoted into a job he wasn't trained for and left hanging by the people who stuck him in there. When he got back from doing his job, he was buried because he raised too many questions and was unpopular. Sounds familiar?

Depressing, isn't it?

Happy July Fourth, America.

Bandwagoning Beijing

That's a phrase I came across last week in work. I've also been reading (skimming) stuff about Colombian paramilitaries, American televangelists who are trying to breed a red heifer (using god's own, er, mutations and natural selection) and some boring studies about fund-raising.
The lion sits at the desk next to mine. The christmas decorations sit on the desk behind mine. I will take a picture of the lucky cats soon.

Plucky Canada has own day

To all my homeys in and from the frozen north. Happy Canada Day.

Phrases you don't like to hear, part three

Daleks and Cybermen together could upgrade the world!

One down, approximately 275 to go

This morning I start my new job. This is hard on me for one major reason (try to hold back your derision): it is full time. Apart from the year I spent working in the bookshop (and even then I had days when I could work at home during the week) I haven't worked a full-time job in six years. It also means getting up early every single morning to go out with the dogs. This is fine for now, but it was almost unbearable last winter and I can't see it being any better this year. Still, if I prove to be good at the job, I should be working from home in a year's time.
Crappy walking weather this morning though. As Mister Monkey said last week, if someone had put you down in Laytown this morning, you wouldn't know what time of the year it was. It could be October. Shivery.

Phear Teh Cuteness 2!

We're going to need a bigger boat.

The Virgin's Lover

More historically accurate flushes of passion from the pen of Ms. Gregory. This is one of her snappier stories, a cheery romp through the affair of Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, and the irritating little problem of his wife. Gregory is at her best when she's fleshing out the raunchier byways of familiar historical figures rather than inventing her own tales from scratch.
Like her? You'll like this. Don't know? This is a pretty good one to start with.
What do we learn from it? Well, what we learn from every single story about the reign of Elizabeth I. You do not fuck with William Cecil.

Never Let Me Go

This is a deceptive book, looking for all the world like some standard lady-friendly Sebastian Faulks or Wally Lamb book, with its swirly girl on the cover and gentle title. But it's not really. Yes, it's a book about growing up and losing innocence, a book about the relationships people forge in their younger years and how those relationships change as they get older, but in this case the whole thing takes place in a climate of secrecy and oppressive rules.
The special school in which the protagonists live feels something like the school that Eustace Clarence Scrubb and Jill Pole went to, but in this case the students have a Special Purpose (no, not that kind of Special Purpose) and many things about the nature of the world are hidden from them and not discovered until much later (by some, never at all by most).
Sounds promising, doesn't it? Yeah, and it promises to be something big and startling, but then just never quite delivers. The story is sparse to the point of being boring, and all the characters seem to be in a daze all the time. Of course, you could argue that that is what life's like. But if I wanted to read real life stories, I'd read Take a Break, wouldn't I?

Right back atcha

It's good to have mates who look after you even when they are very far away and their heads are all melted with matters of import such as elections, state visits, parenting, and men.

Thanks Queenie.

Hug it out

I never thought I'd see the day when a character played by Jeremy Piven would become my hero, but there's something about immersing yourself in the entire first two seasons of Entourage that makes you forget the real world you live in. And then it becomes even harder to keep your cool on the phone. I rang an estate agent about the Leitrim house this morning. "I'm on a call," she said, "I'll phone you back, probably within half an hour."
That was at 10am. Who does she think she is? In the world of Entourage, there would be a lot more swearing at this point. Then there would be a call from me to her describing all the different ways I would make her sorry for failing to call me back when promised. Because being an estate agent, surely, is all about calling people back when you say you will. Or perhaps I am an idealist.
But I do not have incriminating photos of her, I do not have anything to trade, this is not a million dollar deal, I do not live in that world. Which is good, because really I'm on her side. I poxy hate talking on the phone. That, and the fact that I didn't learn to drive until I was 32 (and the freakish control issues), is the thing that has really stopped me from being good at any job I've ever taken up. Other people live on the phone. I look at them in awe, like it's some sort of super power they have. I have a dislike of phones that almost borders on a phobia.
Maybe it's all the years of working in jobs where I had to call people and tell them bad news. I'm cancelling that meeting. L****n won't be able to make it. Your PC won't be ready on time. The van's not there. We don't have the part. I'm not coming in. Your dress shrank.
Or the begging calls. The calling-in-a-favour calls. The plugging the gap calls. Please can you cover a shift. If you don't come in now, you needn't come in again. Just do us this one favour. I know it's a big order, and we're very sorry.
I hate it. I'd love to be the person who gets to make the good news calls. You got the job. You won. You got the all-clear. We sold your house. That's a call I'd answer.

TV catchup

What do you do during the summer months when there's no House, no Rome, no Sopranos, no ER, no Lost, and there's no West Wing ever again?

If you're me, you find stuff to watch that you don't watch during the year. UKTV Drama is showing Ever Decreasing Circles, which is much funnier and sadder than I remember it. It's also got more of that humour of embarrassment going on than I remember from the first time, but maybe that's just looking at it through the filter of current British comedy trends.

Mister Monkey and I finally finished watching series two of the genius that is Arrested Development. It's hard to pick a favourite character, they're all so great (but if you had to twist my arm, I'd probably pick GOB. Or maybe Buster. Or George Michael. You see the problem). I understand that series three is a bit poor, so maybe I'll not bother with it.

We've also been catching up on Gilmore Girls, which makes a lovely antidote to Entourage, and I've acquired the first episode of Lucky Louie, Louis CK's first sitcom on HBO. Opinion is very much divided on this slightly strange, low-budget, seemingly wooden offering. I thought it was funny, but I could be wrong.

Oh, and of course there's football. If only every match could be as much fun as Italy versus Ghana.

Locking up for the last time

Yesterday was my last shift as manager in my little shop. I still think of it as my little shop even though two of us have been running it for the last two years, and that is, of course, part of the problem. I always want to have complete control over everything, which is simply not possible when you've got a whole bunch of people working in a place and you're not there every day. So it's better for my mental health to let it go and move on to a job where I really can control everything and if something goes wrong and I don't meet a deadline I have no-one to blame but myself. (Okay, some people might think that it would be a better idea to deal with these control issues, but such people are simply wrong.)

Things I will miss about the shop
That feeling you get when you open a good donation of books. It never goes away, that feeling of 'wow!' and 'aren't people kind to give away such great books?'
The commerce. I just like putting prices on things and having people come and buy them. I like putting things in the window knowing they will sell. I like the surprise of people finding things they didn't even know they wanted.
The books. Being around them all the time. Even the crap ones.
The feeling of doing something worthwhile.

Things I will not miss about the shop
People who can't alphabetise. Even when you explain it to them. It happened recently, even, that I had to explain to someone that Christopher Brookmyre goes after all of the authors who start with A, not just after the first one. I despair of such people. Or people who put books called The Divine Something or other by his Grace Swami Someone or other into the business section.
Junkies shouting "WANKERS!" in the door.
The mad people who won't fuck off.
The unreliability of other people.
The having to chat and be nice and sociable all the time to absolutely everyone, even when you're not actually in work, because you never know.
Not being able to make plans because you don't know what's going to happen in work that day.

I'm looking forward to the new job. Mister Monkey thinks it would drive him mad, but since 90% of it will be reading, how can it be bad? Plus it's writing that has nothing to do with computers or IT. I'm already thinking of doing NaNoWriMo this year, just for kicks. Oh wait, I'll be in Paris for a week in November. Hmm, can I still manage it? I bet I can.

Two days in a row

Such luxury!

And the promise of another lovely day tomorrow too. Screw you, wettest May on record!

Summer here kids

Even though yesterday morning dawned grim and scary in Laytown, with white-suited forensics experts searching the ground outside Pat's supermarket and two young kids somewhere in Laytown missing their nineteen year-old mother, nothing stops the Irish summer juggernaut for long.

The young mother was stabbed to death at 9.30 on Friday night, and by 4pm on Saturday afternoon, you would never know anything had happened, except for the bunches of flowers stuck in the holes of the metal bench at the bus stop outside Pat's. The shop was open again and people came and went for their milk, bread, newspapers, Coke, ice creams, and bottles of cheap wine for the barbie. Smokers sunned themselves in the yard (sorry, beer garden) of the pub next door, and all day long sandals and runners walked back and forwards over the spot where someone was killed the night before. The gardai are, apparently, appealing for witnesses to the stabbing (although they have someone in custody), which is a laugh considering the front of Pat's, like every open space in every small town in Ireland, is always full of teenagers smoking butts, popping wheelies, pushing each other under cars and calling everyone who walks past 'gay' or 'fat' or just 'cunt'. But maybe they were all studying for their exams on Friday night. After all, the weather isn't this good for no reason.

The Pirate Wars Vs. The Prize of all the Oceans

Several years ago I had an argument with some people about Pirates of the Caribbean: Something Or Other About a Pearl, I Think and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, two films about the Great Age of Sail. I didn't like the pirate film as much as the one about the British navy. At the time I put this down to many things. One, I wanted to annoy the people I was arguing with.
Two, the pirate film was a fairly hacky summer blockbuster that was crying out to have been made by Rob Reiner but instead was made by Gore Verbinksi, so instead of being The Princess Bride it was more like Cutthroat Island.
Three, I hate fun. I don't really hate fun, but everyone thinks I do, so I may as well go along with it.
Four (and really, this is the main one), I'm just not that interested in pirates. I don't know why. They sail around in ships and have adventures. They board other ships, launch broadsides against their enemies, live in caves and drink rum. They have a special pirate code (no, they really do) and they live in groovy little colonial outposts in the Caribbean. But I don't care.

Sadly, Peter Earle's book didn't do anything to make me care any more. For a start, it's a bit too much of an overview, and if I like anything, it's a detailed history of one bit-player who turns out to be pivotal in the whole history of everything ever (see Nathaniel's Nutmeg for the best example of this) and provides you with a great test case. But Earle doesn't do this. He sets out his store in good scholarly fashion, tells you what he's going to tell you, then tells you it, citing examples along the way. It ends up being a bit routine. There were pirates here. So the British government sent out ships and passed laws and gradually arrested or killed all the pirates so then there were no pirates. The end. Not packed with dashing incident and anecdote, as one would hope.

Ne'er mind, Vicar. But you did a lot better with The Prize of all the Oceans. In 1741, Commodore George Anson set sail from England with five ships and a total crew of approximately 1400 men. He had orders to sail to South America, map some territories and harass Spanish shipping. He had a diasastrous voyage and returned with one ship and about 500 men. But along the way he captured prizes worth about £400,000. Glyn Williams details everything about the expedition and it's all really exciting, including the adventures of the Wager, one of the smaller ships, which ended up wrecked on a remote island in South America, leaving the crew stranded and forced to find their way back to England in a bewlidering variety of ways. A fantastic book, well worth reading. Not least because the Chinese couldn't tell the difference between His Majesty's ship of war towing a prize and, well, pirates.

POTUS has left the building

Following on from the emotional (for me, anyway) demise of The West Wing, I am greatly looking forward to this. Although I am a little suspicious of the pre-season shuffling. Originally slated to appear in the coveted must-see-TV Thursday night at 10pm slot on NBC, they're moving it to Mondays already. So maybe it won't be as strong as all that.

Fingers crossed though.

Allow me to recommend to you...

...Lescure, a wonderful restaurant in a quiet corner of a quiet street, where the waiter makes gentle fun of you and then kisses you goodbye (if you're me, anyway) and very nicely does not speak to you in English but allows you to get through your ordering in your halting French. Good food too - I had a melty boeuf bourgignon and Monsieur Le Singe had magret de canard. Moderately priced as well. The terrace was a little squashed and all the reports said that the interior was very smoky and could get crowded, so I think we did alright. Lovely.

Also, for your consideration, the cafe in the Musee D'Orsay. Okay, the food's only alright, and it's not cheap, but you are sitting inside a GIANT CLOCK. How good is that? Also, if the giant clock thing doesn't thrill you, punters on their way outside to get a panoramic view of the city pass by you at almost head height, so you get to look at a parade of shoes throughout your meal.

I mean, come on! Parade of shoes!!! Sadly they are mostly the kind of sensible shoes that tourists wear to tramp around galleries taking flash photos of Van Gogh pictures, but still...

I would also recommend Le Royal Madeleine, the decor of which has not changed in sixty years. The staff, again, could not have been friendlier or more welcoming. We had no reservation, which was not a problem. After a memorable amuse-bouche of a kind of spicy melon soup, I had a buttery, light, delicate but filling sole meuniere, while my dining companions had shoulder of lamb and jumbo prawns respectively. Considerably more expensive than Lescure, and therefore more of an occasional restaurant, this would be a great place for a romantic meal as the dining area is divided into booths and they play lovely French vocal jazz. Well, I liked it anyway. Crisp white linen on the tables. Cutlery polished to a high shine. Thunderstorm outside. Super.

Both Lescure and Le Royal Madeleine were within a five-minute walk of our apartment, which was a little disappointing, as a nice stroll through the streets is always called for after some hearty French scran, but never mind.

Phrases you don't like to hear, part two

"You can mourn him when London is safe."

Now that's never going to be a good situation, is it?

Talk to the Hand

When I complain about how rude people are, I am "going on" about it. "Here's Accentmonkey, going on about manners again", people think. "How dull and unoriginal".

When Lynne Truss does it, she throws in some speculation and quotes from sociology texts and it's called a book.

Hmm.

Le good news, le bad news

Or is it la? Monsieur Le Singe and I have decided that we need to get a bit of French polishing in before we go back again, because, for all that we both claim to be able to speak and understand French, neither of us can actually do so when the concierge lady in our apartment building is accusing us of illegal parking.

Good news: I didn't kill his mother in Paris. Sorely tempted though I may have been at several points in the holiday, I hardly betrayed my impatience at all (no, really. I'm as surprised as you are). I suspect this is partly due to the impatience being shared equally between Monsieur Le Singe and myself. A trouble shared, and all that. It's also partly due to a nice little routine which saw us dashing off for some alone time for an hour every morning*, and a handy break one evening which allowed us to go and watch The Da Vinci Code.

More good news: Going to the cinema in Paris is as lovely as ever. People do not talk during the film. When the guy behind me kicked the back of my seat and I looked round, he apologised and then didn't do it again. Nobody's phone rang.

Bad news: The movie was a bit rubbish. Also much of the dialogue is in French, which was not subtitled, and Latin, which was subtitled into French. Luckily my reading comprehension is better than my aural comprehension so I was able to figure out most of the Latin bits. Unluckily it didn't make the film any better. Also you cannot stand on the inverted pyramid at the Louvre, so re-enacting key scenes from the film was out of the question. Bah.

Bad news: The Champions' League final was on while we were there, which meant that the city was covered for two days in shouty Barca supporters. They were kind of annoying, although they did lend a certain something to the Musee D'Orsay.

Bad news: It costs a lot of money to go around Paris on tour buses - the only way the mother-in-law could realistically get anywhere, given the inability to walk or go on escalators or be in confined spaces - and it can be frustrating when it takes you an hour and a half to get somewhere you could have got in twenty minutes by walking.

Good news: Fete du pain! Lovely restaurants, pleasant service, oh, it goes on.

Good news: We're going again in the winter. On our own.

*To a cafe! For a croissant and creme! Honestly, some people.

Phrases you don't like to hear, part one

"The giant insect gains the upper hand"

From The Life of Mammals. What are we going to do when David Attenborough eventually dies? Who will tell us what bears are thinking?

A Land of Two Halves

Joe Bennett is an award-winning New Zealand columnist and this is his book about travelling around New Zealand. Things I like about him include his empathy with people and his willingness to sleep in shitty motels in order to save a bit of cash. I like the fact that he's happy to stand around by the side of the road for hours on end while hitching. And the fact that he's written a book about the bits of New Zealand that a lot of tourists don't get to see or spend time in, because they don't hitch around, so they tend to avoid the towns for the most part.

I also like the fact that he loves dogs so much and talks about his commitment to his dog as a serious thing. He would not dream of leaving New Zealand for home (Britain) until his dog died, and he looks forward to the end of his trip and getting back to his dog.

What I don't like about him is that he either is (or pretends to be for the sake of novelty, which is worse) fairly indifferent to the natural wonders of NZ. It's fair enough to be more interested in the people, but to say that you are bored with looking at the views around Queenstown after five minutes is either untrue or it shows you up as, well, a little suspect, frankly.

He also seems to think it's okay for him to litter; he mentions more than once dropping multiple cigarette butts on the ground or throwing things away by the side of the road, of which I sniffily disapprove.

And finally, I just don't think he's that funny. I get where he's supposed to be funny, but I just don't think he is. Not really the book for me, but I thank Columbo for it anyway.

Marry Me

An appropriate choice for the fortnight gone by. Carey Marx is a friend of Elvis P, and Elvis recommended I buy this book. Of course he recommended I buy it new, but I did not. I found it in the Oxfam Bookshop on Byers Road in Glasgow. An excellent Oxfam shop, I urge everyone to patronise it. Carey didn't mind though, he said that he would not be happy until someone told him they'd read a half-burnt copy they found in a skip.

Anyway, the book is good, which is a relief, because there's always that trepidation when you approach a book by someone you know, or someone who knows someone you know. Basically Carey decided that 2005 was going to be his year of adventure, and one of those adventures was going to be that he would find his perfect woman and marry her. Conveniently, this turned out to be an easy pitch for an Edinburgh show and a book. It caught people's imaginations. And, bless him, he worked really really hard at it.

I won't tell you what happens in the end, because that wouldn't be fair. I will tell you that I liked his choice to stick to the storytelling aspect of it at the expense of jokes (unless I've just really insulted him, and actually it was supposed to have jokes galore on every page and I've missed them), and that he does a lot to banish the stigma that attaches to dating in the UK. Yes, I would read another book by him. I would also go and see his standup.

So there you are. Oh! And the book has Elvis P in a cameo appearance. So it was definitely worth it.

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.