The Time it Never Rained

Some time ago, when William saw Flight 93, he said that it felt so real that when he came out of it, he wanted to ask people if they had heard about that plane crash that just happened.
When I finished reading this book about the effects of a long drought on small Texas ranchers, I was walking to work and it started to rain, and I felt a huge relief. At least the rain is here, I thought.
The main character in the book is Charlie Flagg, an old-fashioned (some might say slightly Libertarian) smallish rancher who works some leased land and some land of his own. He keeps a mixture of sheep and cattle and he has a wife and a son who wants to ride in the rodeo, and he's friends with his neighbours and the Mexican family who work for him, and everyone does okay. But then the rain doesn't come. And it keeps not coming. And latent tensions bubble to the surface. Racism, sexism, town against country, big farming against small ranching. And through it all Charlie Flagg refuses to take money from the government, refuses every handout, refuses to go "into the programme", and gradually the countryside dries up and a whole way of life starts to blow away.
There are elements of Steinbeck in here. And, for someone like me who has never even spent much time on a farm in Ireland, never mind a Texas ranch, it's almost like reading science fiction, because it's a totally alien environment. The book may as well take place on Mars, for all I know.
Sure, some of the lessons are delivered in a slightly heavy-handed manner. For example, the manager who works for one of the huge farming conglomerations may as well have a long black mustache that he twirls periodically. But on the whole this is a great, involving book. I highly recommend it.

Friends have baby

I mention this on my blog because members of my family will be amused to know that they are calling her Elizabeth and shortening it to Lily. Which was Gaggy's name.

Anyway, congratulations friends, and new baby Elizabeth-shortened-to-Lily.

Who will be next?

Actually, who will be next? I should write these things down, really I should.

There's always some poxy bloody thing

So, it turns out that my dogs are not the well-behaved little angels all day long that my neighbours on either side of me have always claimed them to be. I have asked them, on several occasions, to let me know if the dogs were making excessive noise, and they have always shaken their heads and said words to the effect of "you wouldn't even know they were there". Well, my neighbour over the back fence tells a different story. And he came round and told it to me on Friday evening. Now, in fairness to him, he was very polite, and he could have been rude and upset me by simply sticking a note through my door, which would have been unfair and unneighbourly and unkind, and would have made me cry, and equally he could have tried to bully me in some way, which he did not. He simply explained that he works shifts, and he tries to sleep during the day, and he has a new baby coming into the house on Tuesday (that's today) and that the dogs have been driving him mad now ever since I got them and could I please do something about it.

So now I have to keep the dogs indoors, and because I can't afford to hire someone to come and let the dogs out during the day when I'm not here, it means I have to get up at 5.50am, bring them out for half an hour's walk, come home, have a shower, throw on clothes, dash to 7.10 train, come home on 4.15 train (which is not Mister Monkey's train home, might I add, even though he very kindly comes in with me in the morning), so as to be the first one home, in case there is any disaster. And I came home today and there was no disaster, but when I went upstairs to get stuff from my room, Dweezil ran in under the bed, and he got stuck on something and couldn't get out, and when I lifted the bed a little to move it and see if I could get him out, my back went SPROING and I dropped the bed and I think I've broken the frame. And now I hate my neighbour and his stupid breeder of a wife because of this. Sorry, breeders. And I do not love my dogs either, because of this. Sorry dogs. I'm sure that will go away eventually, but right now I resent them enormously.

And now my ranting is over. Thank you for your time.

By the way, that is not a photo of my own bed frame. I did not take one.

If you had to pick one...

...which of these celebrities would you rather have on your side if you were in trouble?

Naming your kids after DART stations: a good plan?

I should point out that the only reason I have these fantastic nuggets of celebrity information is that my Google homepage has a link to People magazine on it. I don't go looking for them, they just pop up.

Still though, bless them.

Lolz!

Love this.

And They Used to Star in Movies

I'm baffled by the Irish Times and their good review of this play (which obviously I can't share with you, because you don't have a subscription and neither do I). I was even more baffled before I read the blurb about the show and realised that it was first performed 30 years ago, and was written by Scott Campbell, a reaonably well-known author.

The play is about Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and Minnie Mouse. Mickey and Minnie have split up, they're all washed up. Mickey hangs around a bar waiting on a call from Visconti in Rome, because Visconti is supposed to be doing a production of Baudelaire's later poems, and Mickey wants in on it. But the call doesn't come. And Mickey gets drunker, and he and Minnie reminisce about the days when they used to be somebody, and then Donald arrives, and he's a successful producer now.

I'm making this sound more exciting than it really is, honest.

Because I didn't realise the play was written in the mid-70s, I perhaps did not give enough weight to the film-making mood of that era, with its emphasis on realism and the decline of Disney cartoons. Disney was past its best for several reasons, and cartoons were not the big business they were in cinemas 30 years before that, or, dare I say it, today. The fact that it appears to take place around the time of the McCarthy hearings is more confusing still. But that's beside the point. I shouldn't have to sit around guessing when the play might be meant to be happening in order to enjoy it. If you're going to put on a play from an earlier time, you either have to do it as a period piece, or it has to be timeless. This was neither. It also isn't funny. and it's poorly staged. And the performances are waaaayyy too loud. Bewley's Theatre is a small space, kids. Rein it in. And your American accents are not so great that you can afford to take your sweet time over every single sentence. I think it would have been much funnier if, when being their public selves, they had talked in American accents, but then, between themselves, they had dropped it and just used their normal Irish ones. It would have been like a homage to Alexander, and could have brought the whole thing right up to date.

Phear teh kiten

Here's Dweezil now. He looks much better, and he and Linus are getting along famously, which means that Linus (who is at least four times Dweezil's size) completely ignores Dweezil at all times, until the leaping around his tailular area gets too much for him and he eventually smashes Dweezil in the face like James Cagney at breakfast time.

Good cat times.

The Golden Ocean

Some time ago, I talked about the voyage of Commodore Anson into the great South Sea. Here's what I said:

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.


Well, Patrick O'Brian thought it would be a capital idea to write a novel based on the adventures of two young Irish lads who sign on for Anson's voyage. Luckily, and I don't think it's giving away too much to say this, they have a fondness for lemons. This is a lovely precursor to the Aubrey-Maturin books, and it only makes me sad and wistful to have finished it so fast, bringing me ever closer to the end of O'Brian's works.

1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

This is a great book. James Shapiro talks about the English campaign in Ireland, the summer of the invisible Armada, proto-musicals, translations of Tacitus, the death of chivalry and the glimmerings of globalization, theatre companies composed entirely of little boys, the changes in the acting profession, the work of publishers, and the effects that all of these things may or may not have had on the work of Shakespeare, specifically on the plays he wrote in that year (which included Love's Labor's Lost, Julius Caesar, Henry V, and oh yes, Hamlet). He is very clear about where he's speculating and where he's employing facts, and he really opened me up to a fresh understanding of theatre of the time.
Just a great book. There's no point in my trying to recount any of the many hundreds of anecdotes, but trust me, they're in there.

Paper anniversary

It turns out that Dublin is not a bad place at all to go for the weekend, if you've got a bit of cash put aside. We both clocked out of work early on Friday and checked into our hotel. After a lovely nap, we stepped across the Green to meet MarkW and head up to Ranelagh to meet folks for drinks. We had dinner in McSorley's first, where I had truly excellent fish and chips, and then we headed next door to good old Birchalls for a huge feed of pints. Well, I didn't have a huge feed of pints, but everyone else did.
Next morning, we had breakfast in the Metro, then went to the Chester Beatty (because it's our paper anniversary, DO YOU SEE?) with Damien and Sinead. It was great. The ideal place to go with a hangover, and we even got to enjoy the ignorance of a couple of middle-aged American women who were determined "not to tarry" looking at Islamic artefacts, who thought that the fragments of gospel codexes in the exhibits were the real actual gospels, and who stared at our food in the Silk Road as if we were in some sort of zoo. And they wonder why people don't like them.
And we bought a poster with two monkeys on it. Very cute.
After more hangover clearing nap action, we met Simon and Caroline and Diana for cocktails in the hotel bar, and then went for our fabulous dinner in One Pico. I love it there. The food is great, the service is great, the room is pleasant and comfortable, and the sommelier is is helpful and not snobby and he suggested a wonderful dessert wine which I cannot remember the name of now, but Mister Monkey will. Expect to see the name in the comments tomorrow. Wonderful, wonderful meal. And plenty of lovely romantic chat. Amusingly, last week we actually went through our wedding folder, which still sits by the bedside table, with all the speeches and messsages in it, and read our vows again. It was a little like one of those review things you do in work, where you set your review your objectives for the past year and try to decide if you've met them or not. We seem to be doing alright*.
It was a great weekend. I recommend Dublin, if you've got the cash and a bunch of really nice mates to go and hang out with.

*Oh, alright. Substantially better than alright, really. Even if we did make ourselves sad by breaking off to talk about bomb dogs somewhere in the middle of it all.

They do not move

To restore something of a proper Saturday night at the movies feel to the evening, we then watched Inside Man, which is an interesting name because it relates, obviously, to the idea of having someone on the inside for a bank job, but also because it gives you some idea of what makes people tick. Money, naturally. Power, of course, and not just the power to order people around, but the power to hold secrets and trade information and rewrite history so that it all comes out the way you like it. In this film, as in real life, Whitey (or Wealthy, if you like) holds all the power, and although Denzel can get things done, he can only operate with the cooperation of Whitey, and can only advance to the next level on Whitey's say-so.
On the other level of the inside man, it's a nice little heist movie with a nice conceit, except that not a lot really happens. Although Jodie Foster spends the entire movie in shoes so improbably high that they make her legs look as though they are about to burst open, thus giving her the impression of being poised for action and ready to pounce at any moment, she does not really do anything.
On both levels, it's quite confusing and there are many questions I didn't know the answers to by the end of the film. Such as

BIG SPOILERS FOR INSIDE MAN FOLLOW!!!

How did they know to go after the box? I didn't get the answer to that one. Why was Christopher Plummer satisfied with Jodie Foster's assessment of the situation? Didn't everyone just seem to give up too easy at the end? I mean, I'm not saying they had to be all White and Exley about it, but a little more doggedness and wrapping things up, no?

BIG SPOILERS OVER.

It was an okay film, but really only okay. Because it's Spike Lee directing, he can assemble quite a cast, but no-one, not even Denzel, has much to do really. Will Spike ever get it together to make a truly excellent film again? I hope so.

Taking a chance on love

Yesterday was the Monkey wedding anniversary, and we celebrated by clearing a space in the drift of books and newspapers and LRBs on the kitchen table and eating a bowl of pasta by candlelight and drinking some lovely red wine that we brought back from Paris in May. But we were sad. Because when we sat down to eat we had just finished watching Brokeback Mountain, which is a very sad film. By rights, Mister Monkey asserted, it should have made us happy in way, because it is a film about people who want one thing but carry on living another thing and so never get the thing they want, but we did not do that and we set aside the censure of others in order to get the thing we wanted--

HUGE BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN SPOILER!!!!!

although admittedly it was most unlikely that anyone was going to beat either of us to death with a tyre iron


HUGE BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN SPOILER ENDS!!!!!

--and so now we are happy, unlike the men in the film. And the film made me angry too, because it seemed like a very modern story, of two people who want to pursue something that is slightly outside the ideal for modern American people, and so they would in some way be bringing shame on others, and so they must be suppressed and stopped by other jackasses in big hats, and it made me sad again to think that economic necessity ties people to jobs and situations when all they want to do is ride their horses around, but of course this is how it is for everyone, so why should they be any different? And of course it slightly annoyed me to see two white men who have access to much (well, one of them does anyway, and he did offer help to the other one) but because they can't have things exactly the way they want them, they have to mess it all up for everyone, especially the poor sheep who got killed by the coyote because they were supposed to be watching him and they weren't. Hmm, maybe it's a film about the evil effects of transnational corporations? You know, the white American men are too busy fucking each other to notice that the sheep are getting hammered out there?
I could go on. The main thing about the film is that you can cover it with any meaning you want, because it's such a huge space with so little dialogue in it (and only half of that is intelligible) that you can have the characters be anyone you want without fear of them saying anything to contradict you. The open spaces (of where? That's right, Alberta) are so beautiful, and the human spaces are so grim and awful, that at times you wonder why everyone in the film doesn't take off to Brokeback Mountain to go fishing. Of course everyone won't. But once in a while, when you do, it all works out okay.

What time is love?

Ladies, is he not quite the catch?

Fear it!

More teh cuetness in the Monkey house. Housemate Niall brought home a kitten that he found on a building site in Cavan. It was being kept in a mayonnaise tub, and the people who had found it were going to just turn it loose again, so he took it home. It is called Dweezil, and after three days of hiding behind things in the small room, it has been to the vet (it's a boy!) who pronounced him fit and well and just a little bit earmitey. A few more days will tell us for sure if he's got anything he's going to pass around, but otherwise we should be introducing him to Linus some day next week.
Hmm. The photos do perhaps make him look eviller than he really is. I will try to get better photos.

What are you doing at home?

I'm not well.

Bleeuucchh.

I wasn't well yesterday--breakfast made a run for it almost as soon as it was eaten--but I went to work anyway. This morning, however, my husband FORBADE me to go to work, because I am still sick. Forbidden! By my spouse!

Fair enough, like.

Illness update

ComedyB Jr is coming out of the hospital on Tuesday. He is much better now.

Bait and Switch

This is really quite a terrifying book, for several reasons. One, it really manages to knock home the idea that America's interior is largely composed of windowless rooms where people are either trying to convert you to religion, or extort money from you in some other way. Two, it reminds you again of just how stupid people can be: people in the job market seem to really believe all that enneagram crap that we used to do in the Theo for a laugh (which seems strangely at odds with their fairly serious Christian beliefs. I thought proper Christians didn't believe in all that stuff?). Three, it offers a view of the kind of dystopian future we could end up in here in Europe if we don't hang on to our employment laws for as long as possible. The next time I hear someone from IBEC moaning about the strict employment laws in Ireland, or the minimum wage, I'm going to send them a copy of this book.

The Seeds of Time

Why don't people read John Wyndham? I asked in the pub one evening. It turns out they do, so that's me wrong. There's not a huge amount to say about this charming collection of well-intentioned, funny, and ever so British sci-fi stories, except that I wish I had the edition pictured here, and that I am now really looking forward to reading The Day of the Triffids, which I also bought for €1 in my old shop.

Wideacre

Which I also read during my weekend of chick lit and rom com hell. This is a cut above, however. It's a bit like Flambards or Gone With the Wind, only with a much darker edge. The story follows a girl who is born onto the Wideacre estate and loves it so much that she learns every single thing there is to learn about it, its people, its crops, wildlife, so on and so on. But of course she is a woman, and this is eighteenth century England, so there's no way she can ever own or run her beloved estate. That honour is left to her ever-so-slightly rubbish brother, who is very attractive, but gullible, and cursed with something of a kinky streak that saw him getting kicked out of public school.

So the girl decides to do everything in her power to ensure that she and her heirs get to keep hold of the place she loves. Of course it all goes horribly wrong, how could it not? Interestingly though, the thing that undoes her is not really her shocking incestuous relationship with her brother, which after a while takes on the characteristics of just another chore that she must perform in order to get her way, but her lack of business training and her inability to deal with the mounting debts that are being incurred because she wants to buy out the entail on the property. As usual there's some excellently researched background detail, and even the irritating style that Phillipa Gregory sometimes has doesn't get too much. I wouldn't go giving this to your Mam for Christmas or anything, but it's a thumping holiday read. Much, much better than 90 percent of the chick lit I've read in my life. All the words are spelled correctly, for one thing.

My weekend of chick lit and rom com hell

So, I have been accused of some things. Some of you may remember the pirate issue. And the fun issue. And recently I was accused by a Dublin councillor and former Lord Mayor of not having any sense of romance. Well. A lady doesn't take kindly to such accusations. So, when all my housemates, and my husband, were out of town recently, I decided to make a girly weekend of it. I bought myself some chocolate and some ice cream, and settled down with a Mills and Boon book.
I saw Marriage Under Siege in the bookshop some time ago, and must confess to being surprised that M&B even had a line of books set during the English Civil War. Not, you would think, a sexy time. Not even really a romantic time. But of course, I am wrong. Family pitted against family! Divided loyalties! Puritans! What could be more sexy/romantic?
Everything.
Everything about Marriage Under Siege is poor. The "story", the "characters", the interpretation of the politics surrounding the war. And the worst part was that the sex scenes weren't even any good. But of course that could partly be my own fault, because I kept imagining that the Witch Smeller General was going to arrive in at any moment and cauterize wounds and burn women at the stake or something, but he never did. Mills and Boon books are even worse than you think. They're not even a laugh. Avoid them.
Avoid also Heartbreakers, which I also watched on this weekend of NOTHING ON. As usual, Gene Hackman's got some great lines in it, but nothing on a par with his foliage speech from The Birdcage. Still, I don't think he gets to do enough comedy. And, while you're avoiding things, really, really be sure to avoid Alex and Emma, starring Luke Wilson (who does not make a good leading man. It seems to be difficult for him to talk, like the way it's difficult for Nicolas Cage) and Kate Hudson, who is okay normally, but awful to the core in this thing. If you have to choose between Heartbreakers and Alex and Emma because someone's going to kill you if you don't watch one of them, just take the bullet. It would be better for you.

Send in the Idiots

You'd be forgiven for thinking that I haven't read a single thing lately, but you'd be wrong. In fact I read all the time these days, at work. Why, just this week I read about how Benin, Burkina Faso, and Mali banded together with Brazil to use the WTO to force the USA to cut subsidies to its cotton farmers. And about the interesting new situation with regard to intellectual and indigenous property in Africa, where state governments don't play that strong a role, and the possibility that windfalls to certain tribes or ethnic groups from transnational corporations (for a malaria drug, or oil, or ancient treasures) might exacerbate existing tensions between groups and seve to further weaken the state government's position. And about public administration and financial reforms in Uzbekistan. And about acculturative stress in Korean and Indian immigrant adolescents in the US.
And it turns out that I'm not bad at reading lengthy articles and creating 150 word summaries of them. It turns out that I can skim them pretty well and then pass the salient information on to someone else. And it makes me very happy to be in that kind of job.
But I have been reading books. Honest. Why, here's one now.
Send in the Idiots is a book about autism by a man who was diagnosed as autistic when he was a boy and sent to a special school in New York. In this book, he tracks down some of his classmates and spends time with them in order to write about what it is like to be autistic. Now, most of the people he hooks up with are pretty functioning autistic folk. They have jobs, and they live away from their parents, and some of them even have relationships. But the autism is always there and it informs everything about them. And not all of them make it. There's a definite air about them of being aware that they are the lucky ones. There's even a story that proves it. It's an enjoyable book. I don't know if you can really take much away from it except some people's experiences of living with a particular condition; I wouldn't use it as a basis for claiming to know all about autism or anything like that, but it's a good book, well written, with some interesting broader theories about the condition thrown in. The marketing is quite creepy, though. The copy I bought was an advance readers' one, and on the back it says stuff about how the book is guaranteed to be a big seller because interest in autism is huge right now. It seems like such a calculating thing to say.

End of an era

The Perrier award is no more. Controversial in recent years, because of Perrier's connection to the evils of the world, thankfully it's now being sponsored by Intelligent Finance (no chance anything bad can be associated with them, right? I mean, a financial services company, always squeaky clean, right?).

So, new award, new name. The Comeddies. Because they're sponsored by If.com. Clever, no?

Anyway, Accentmonkey interest in the awards rests on David O'Doherty, or Phil Nichol, or God's Pottery in the newcomer category. It would be so great if once, just once, the person I wanted to win actually won. Surely by spreading it around three of them, I've got to have a chance.

Shows we saw at Edinburgh

This year, we had possibly the best balance yet between loads of shows and loads of hanging around with people. Aside from the usual desperate Saturday night scramble for something decent to eat, we remembered all our own rules and avoided overcrowded, really cramped, basement pub-style venues. So that cut out The Stand, sorry Eddie Bannon and friends, and also The Tron, sorry Glenn Wool. However, we did see a lot of stuff. Friday night we went to see Matt Kirshen. He's very funny. Clever, pleasant, likeable, witty, personable. A good comedian. But there were fireworks on Friday night. ComedyB was presenting Best of the Fest in the Abbembelly Booms. It was a typical late night audience. One stag party in, many of the more middle-aged patrons were asleep (it starts at midnight), and the comedians were having to work for it. Glenn was reasonably popular, if a little rambling. And then Rhys Darby came out, and he was also very good. He does sound effect stuff. Then Richard Herring. I was quite looking forward to seeing Richard Herring. I was wrong. His material was alright, I guess, but the drunken element of the audience didn't appreciate it and one of the stag party started a slow handclap. Richard Herring did not appreciate that. First, he berated the drunk bloke for not appreciating his very clever style of comedy. Then, he had a go at the other comedians. "Sorry I can't make silly noises", he said "or be casually racist like Glenn". There was an argument, and he eventually left the stage. Luckily the next act on was Phil Nichol, a man who could make people laugh during an air raid, I'm sure. He pulled his pants down, pulled his t-shirt over his head, and sang songs very loudly and with a kind of frightening energy. Relief all round.
Saturday, we saw Hoodwinked, a kids' film, CGI and all that, you know. It's fine, as these things go. Some amusing jokes, some nice songs, some nice homages to computer games, but something lacking to make it really great. However, it does feature very positive potrayals of both young girlhood and old womanhood, and there is no innuendo, and not a lot of violence. So it's a parents' dream of a film. We had great intentions to do other things on Saturday, but we were very tired, having been up drinking the night before till ever so late.
Sunday, we saw the loveliest film. It was called Into Great Silence, a two and a half hour film about a particularly ascetic silent order of monks and their daily lives. Sadly the director didn't have enough money to shoot the whole thing on lovely film, so a lot of it is filmed on digital video, which gives it too much grain, but otherwise it's superb.
Sunday night we saw ComedyB's show, which was up to its usual high standard and has a Special! New! Opening! which is very flash and swish.
On Monday we saw a children's show, as we usually do, called The Onomatopoeia Society 2: The Etymological Conference, which I thought had some serious flaws: largely, it was too difficult to hear some of the dialogue, and the bit where the Kissing Horse would run out and sing a little song to cover up lazy joke writing was an awful admission that there was lazy joke writing. Why not just write better jokes? ComedyB pointed out that he was annoyed about the show's definition of the word "alliteration"; he claims it only applies to consonants. I confessed that I thought alliteration was when two or more words in a sentence started with the same letter. It turns out that Webster's agrees with me, while other dictionaries agree with him. So everyone's right. Or only some are.
Later we saw God's Pottery do their Concert for Lavert, which was a very moving show in which Gideon Lamb and Jeremiah Smallchild sing songs and try to bring us all closer together (even the Jews and Muslamics), and raise money for a young boy called Lavert, who has cancer. They don't know what kind he has, or who he got it from, but they're going to help him beat it. Great show. I felt affirmed by it.
Then we went and did a lot of drinking, because it was the launch of ComedyB's DVD, his first ever, and we had to help swell the crowd at the party.
Then, much later, we saw some boys trying to jump over things in the street on their bikes and everyone stood and applauded, because we were all so used to being an audience by then that we had to react to them in some way.
And today we came home, and the woman in front of me reclined her seat, so I stuck my knee in her back, and when she complained that I was sticking my knee in her back, I said "No, I'm just getting my magazine out of the pocket", and waved my magazine at her, but really I was sticking my knee in her back. Fuck her.

Sunday dinner in Edinburgh hospital

Yum yum, huh? This is, sadly, what poor ComedyB Jr. had for his dinner last Sunday. He is in the hospital, you see. Apparently last Tuesday he started doing the throw up thing, thought he was just getting "Edinburgh flu", and kind of ignored it. Then on Friday night he was admitted to hospital because he couldn't stop being sick. He has been in hospital since then, with a huge rash on his hands and feet, some kind of abnormalities on his liver, and continued vomiting. He's a lot better now. The doctors think he has some sort of extreme version of streptococcal bacterial infection and have been treating him with antibiotics and have him on a constant drip. He may be in till the weekend. The Mother of all the Byrnes is with him, as is his friend who is also (handily) a nurse, and OldestB lives not too far away. A bit of a blow for ComedyB Jr, who is supposed to be running at least three shows at the fringe. Wish him well, won't you?

Look, Ma, I'm on Myspace!

Here I am!

This is mainly because ComedyB is on Myspace now, and I want to be his friend.

Warp Spasm!

Few things can send me into the berserker rage like people who say "very unique". I know that Mother Monkey and I can be very exacting about our language, and we have our little phrases we'd rather not hear, but honestly, "very unique"?

Man, summer is LOOONNNG

When are all my stories back on? When will the relentless mugginess cease? When will all the people go back to where they came from and leave our beach alone?

By the way, people who go to the beach, you do know that dogs spend their mornings peeing all over the sandcastles you made yesterday, right? So don't, whatever you do, go back to them the next day for some remodelling work. Seriously. My dogs leave no castle unbaptized.

In the meantime, I have found It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a low-budget sitcom from FX. It's no Entourage, but it's funny. Plus it's legally available on your iPod, if you want to go down that route.

Flowers!

An Fear Moncai sent me flowers, because he is far away and it has been a trying week. The great thing is, I sit way up at the end of my office, so the flower man had to walk past all my coworkers to get to me. Hooray!

Ahab's Wife

Now this is more the thing. An enormous modern take on the epic 19th century novel. A woman's perspective on whaling, a companion piece to Moby Dick, a book that takes every living thing that whaling stories of the time exclude - women, dwarves, dogs, cats, children, slaves, Indians, and openly gay men - and crams them all into one big stove-by-a-whale, ate-my-shipmates, lived-in-a-lighthouse, married-not-one-but-two-nutters, met-Frederick-Douglass-and-Nathaniel-Hawthorne romp. You know the kind of thing. This is a superb book. I recommend it unreservedly.
And I really want a print of that picture on the front, too.

To Hell or Barbados

Perhaps it is that I have finally read everything there is to read about the sea, but more likely it is that Mr. O'Callaghan is not the best writer of narrative history, but this is not an interesting or particularly enlightening book. It tells you in 250 pages that Cromwell sent somewhere between 12,000 and 50,000 Irish people to Barbados as slaves.

And that's kind of it. If you've never read a book about slavery, or transportation, or colonialism, I guess you might get something out of this, but even then it's not very well put together. It is not necessary, in a 250 page book, to repeat information. It's even less necessary to repeat the gory details of the 17th century slave trade, but he does. Lazy editing? Padding? Either way, not the most impressive. I'm sure a really good narrative historian could do a lot with this material, but... you get my drift.

More car news

I've just had the helpful guards from Laytown station on the phone to let me know that if anyone hurts themselves on my car, I will be liable, and so I better get it shifted as soon as possible.

Very useful news at NINE O'CLOCK AT FUCKING NIGHT.

Warning! Contains swearing

Look who's got a myspace page.

Rude Italians

My blog does not get a lot of visitors. I do not have fun stories to tell about Mr. T, nor do I have photos of children with paint all over them. Which is fine and as long as my friends can keep up with my news (in a vague way, with all names changed to protect the innocent), and see that the books-with-pictures-of-ships-on-the-front obsession is still going okay, I'm happy.

Nevertheless, like everyone else who has a blog, I'm always curious to see who the strangers are who wash up here. For some reason, the query that seems to lead people here most often is "rude+italians". I know that this is because I once blogged about a book that claimed that Rome was full of rude Italians. But I've no idea why this is something that people would go looking for. Is it a band name? A play? A pron film? Lazy journalism?

Luckily, idle speculation without the interference of facts or subject knowledge is something at which we excel here in Accent Acres, so I'll get right on that right now.

A good walk spoiled

I get up this morning at my usual time of 6am, determined to get out in the lovely summer sunshine with the Milo and the Cody for a nice walk.

I take a picture of some lovely people who have been camping up at the wall opposite Mosney train station. How lovely for them, I think.

The dogs agree to sit for a picture, as long as I give them a biscuit. Just so I can show everyone what a lovely morning it is, on our lovely walk.

Milo even has a little swim. See how warm it is, even at 7am? Lovely. How happy Mister Monkey will be to see what a nice time we had while he was away.

Oh look. How lovely. My fucking car is on poxy fire. Someone has torched it. At 7.45 in the morning. How nice.

And so the firemen come to put out my car. They do not talk to me or acknowledge my existence. They are busy putting out the fire. Cousin Housemate notices that one of them lights up a fag on his way back to the bee baw.

And now my car is left sitting in the car park, all melty and scorchio. As are my glasses, which were in the car at the time. And the ball throwers for the dogs. And my shopping bags (a carefully assembled collection).

I suppose it's my fault for having such a lovely car in the first place.

Sigh.

Phrases you don't like to hear, part four

We turned north, for Ahab would have another whale.

charismatic megafauna

I learned this phrase yesterday from The Economist, in a piece about the possible resumption of commercial whaling. Which would be very bad.

I know they're talking about minke whales, and not blue whales or right whales, but still.

Alone and unreal

Poor Syd. When I was 19 and 20, he was so important to me. I must have listened to The Madcap Laughs and Barrett (I had the two-in-one double vinyl set) every day for about three years. His songs are great, for singing, like.


Altogether now, yes I'm thii-iiiiiiii-iiiiiiiiiiiinking...

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.