The garden gnome carries its load cheerfully – guarding  the frozen pond

While on the table the snow cake is waiting….

And then, it snowed some more

Have a happy christmas

I’ve decided to leave well on time.  It’s only just after lunch and I reckon I’ll arrive at the hotel early in the evening.  That means that I will drive most of the way while it’s still daylight.  I get tired driving in the dark for too long, over unfamiliar roads, not sure about exits and what lies beyond, and then deep inside I’m nervous about whether or not the satnav will drop me at the right spot or whether I’ll find myself once more in the middle of nowhere with the female voice calmly telling me ‘You have reached your destination…’, and all around is dark and not a house or hotel in sight.

 An hour and a half later I cruise along the M14, well on my way to the M6, then the M5, then Wales.  It’s quite busy on the road, and the average speed in the outside lane is between 65 and 70 miles per hour, well within the speed limit.  I leave plenty of space between my car and the car in front of me and notice in the mirror that a police car is stuck behind me and at times comes quite close up.  I wonder whether it wants to get along faster, overtake me on its way to somewhere urgent, and I pull into the left hand lane, letting it pass.  Two policemen in the front of the vehicle look at me, sideway,  and then say something to each other.  Something is up and I wonder what it is, they move ahead of me in the left hand lane and then their blue flashing lights come on, briefly.  The sign on top of their car shows in red lettering ‘….me…’, then a pause, then ‘….follow….’ and again ‘….me…’  Arms are out of windows on each side, signaling urgently for me to follow them.  Bemused I follow them, off the motorway, they seem to know where they are, and we drive into the parking area of a road side restaurant or hotel, I cannot remember.   It feels as if I am suddenly inside an airless car, a strange kind of expectation and bewilderment envelopes me; what is it they want of me and I wonder briefly if perhaps one of my rear lights is falling off, or one of my doors is not properly closed, or…  well, all sorts of nonsense. 

When we come to a stop at the very end of the car park, where it’s quiet and there is not another car parked anywhere within the next four rows, the driver gets out and walks up to my car, swaggering in his uniform trousers and blue shirt sleeves.  I’ve come to a stop next to their car and I wind down my window, wondering what on earth they want of me.  My car is in good shape, it’s just been MOT-ed for the first time, had a complete service recently. 

‘Would you mind just answering a few questions’, he says.  ‘You don’t appear to have a valid insurance.’

I must have gaped, my mouth falling open. 

‘Must be a mistake,’ I say.  ‘I’ve only very recently renewed my insurance.’

 I am asked to sit in the back of their car.  It’s all beginning to feel a bit unreal and I wonder about being ‘stopped and searched’, the sort of thing that appears to happen to other people, you read about.   I keep quiet as they show me their little computer screen, fixed to their dashboard, which has my name on it, my address, and the notice ‘no valid insurance’.  What on earth is going on?  What has made them look up my vehicle registration number in the first place and why does it come up with ‘no insurance’? 

 I get my mobile out of my handbag and tell them I’ll ring my broker who will let them know that I have paid and confirm the insurance number.  They do their own calling, to a central office, to a motor bureau of some kind and various others.  I hear one of them say:

‘We have a lady here who has no valid insurance, can you check this up for me please’, and wonder about presumed innocence before being branded guilty.  It becomes clear to me that the central big brother is assumed to be right, it has found me out, and I am the guilty citizen.  It begins to feel slightly Kafkaesque.  Inside I’m fuming but decide to keep my cool, I move slowly and speak slowly.  I’ve got to get to Wales, for that meeting at 9, the next morning.  The policeman in the front passenger seat sits back, taps the computer screen again and says ‘Well, you can see.  There is no record of your insurance.  You don’t know what your broker is up to, do you?  Some of them just take your money and then don’t pass it on.’

Is he kidding?   My broker confirms that everything is fine, and quotes the insurance number, which I pass on.  They obviously don’t believe me and I give them the broker’s telephone number, my insurer’s name, the insurance number and laboriously they follow it all up via their call centre, each making a number of calls.  Meanwhile, the policeman sits back and starts elaborating all the horrendous things that can happen to me if they don’t get confirmation.  My car can be impounded; I will be liable for driving without insurance.  The continuous assumption that I am guilty of some heinous crime is infuriating, but I keep my mouth shut.  I want to get out of here as quickly as I can, and be on my way.

Twenty-five minutes later a call from the centre confirms that I have insurance, that all’s fine.  The two men don’t offer an apology, and instead try to instill on me that this is all the fault of my not having a proper broker (‘blast your broker!’, the driver says), or that I have an insurer who does not play by the book, somehow.  The policeman in the passenger seat, his thick and hairy right arm, bare from the elbow, with a large faint blue-green tattoo, smirks when I try to open the door to get out and be away:

‘You’ll find you cannot get out,’ he says.  ‘It’s locked, because we do have real criminals in here sometimes.’

The driver gets out and opens the door for me.  They do not acknowledge that they  have inconvenienced me in any way.  I wonder about that half an hour of their time and mine: what on earth made them look up my number in the first place?  Nothing better to do when cruising along a busy motorway, but to look up the first registration number you get stuck behind, a nice car, a female driver? 

‘Traffic police; they play car bingo,’ a colleague tells me later.  ‘They probably decided that they needed to make up their quota by having another car model starting with a V.’

 When I arrive at my hotel, which is just outside a small Welsh village, it is completely dark.  Welsh country lanes and valleys are the darkest on earth, I think.  The receptionist says he’s giving me an upgrade and I spend the night in one of the largest and most comfortable rooms I have stayed in for a long time.  I open one of the windows and the stillness, the fresh and frosty country air together with a light and warm cover, send me off into a long and deep sleep.  There’s not a sound, until the alarm wakes me up for the working day.

The year’s drawing to an end and so are the noughties.  Papers are being filled with ‘definitive lists’ of great events, the most read books, the best books, etc.  I realise that I haven’t kept pace at all these last few months, I’ve stopped recording my reading lists, have been slack on reviews.  All this made me think, again, about the advantages and disadvantages of retiring, of chucking it all in and start a different life.  Not yet, though.  I’ll come to that some time; meanwhile I’ll brood on the list of advantages and disadvantages of retiring…

For now, I’m going to draw up that list of books that I’ve recently read but not reviewed.   This, mind you, is purely for my own satisfaction: I want a complete record of the books I’ve read this year, finish the 2009 list to the bitter end.  Why?  Well, I don’t know, just because I want to, I’m a finisher in the jargon of business staff surveys.

Here it goes, without a sense of the sequence in which they were carried along with me, on trains, travels, bedtime reading or whatever:  this is the pile of books and short stories that I’ve recently read or half read.  

Helen Garner – The Spare Room.  This is the story of Helen who agrees to put up her old friend Nicola, knowing that she has cancer.  Nicola is determined to use ‘alternative’ ways of beating her cancer, even though it seems apparent to everyone around her that she is fooling herself and insists on everyone else agreeing that this treatment, that is only available in Melbourne, hence her self-invite to Helen, will indeed prove to be the miracle cure.  It’s a quick read, this book and well written, even though I found both Helen and Nicola quite irritating at times in their apparent inability to tell each other what they really think.

Jonathan Franzen – The Corrections.  How come I never read this before?  The writing is tremendous and once can only envy the seemingly effortless way in which the stories unfold – stories of members of Enid and Alfred’s family, Alfred slowly descending into Parkinson’s disease and his long suffering wife Enid for ever trying to have a full family gathering for a last Christmas, their three children, their idiosyncrasies, hopes, differences.   It is a marvellous book and if you haven’t read it yet, ask a copy for Christmas!

Patrick Gale – Notes from an Exhibition.  Another family saga, but quite a different one from the above.  Rachel Kelly moves into Antony’s student life and stays, despite the initial unlikeliness of their being a couple or even staying together.  Antony more or less rescues Rachel from an otherwise bleak future; she is pregnant by a lover who has jilted her.  They do however stay together and make a life in Cornwall, first in Antony’s father’s house which subsequently becomes theirs.  They have a family, three children and Rachel becomes a well-known painter whose demons only Antony and their friend, the local doctor is aware of.  Who is Rachel, where does she come from?  Her children and husband only find out after her death, and having left behind some new and quite extraordinary paintings.  The twists and turns of this family’s life slowly unfold, when we are taken along the journey, sometimes hearing Rachel’s voice, then Antony’s and then one of her children’s, now adults.

Philip Roth’s Indignation is quite a different story, about a studious and intense young man, who escapes from his hardworking overprotective butcher father from Newark New Jersey, only to end up at a university in Ohio where life turns out to be even more suppressive than the claustrophobia of the parents’ home.  It is as if he is on an almost relentless path towards his own destruction, growing up painfully and foolishly, resisting the imposed rigours, questioning settled convictions and beliefs, and ultimately being sent to his death.  It is extremely well written, the terribly suppressed atmosphere of the 50s, the Korean War, the inability to extract oneself from being classified according to one’s parents’ beliefs and class, these are all painted very vividly and this is a really satisfying read.

And then, then there are the short stories, the ones that you have on your bedside table, or can read whilst on a train journey.  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s collection ‘The Thing Around her Neck’ is just brilliant.  Every story, bleak and real, not a word too many and just so fluently written, is great.  I love the simplicity and the starkness of her stories, which are also amusing and funny – she understands human nature, the women who are trying so hard to fit into their own lives, to make the most of it, yet, somehow, never quite escaping their own harnesses.  In ‘A private Experience’, the third story in the book, two women find themselves in the same hideaway when caught up in a riot.  One is from a rich and comfortable background, the other poor; one has lost a Burberry handbag in the melee when trying to escape from the riot, the other her necklace, probably plastic.  It is as if you are there with them, see the unbridgeable gap between them, their pains and sorrows worlds apart, private, yet they spend the night together in that hideous room. The next day the rich girl finds out what has happened to her twin sister.

If you are a lover of short stories, this is for you.  Or give it to someone who loves short stories!

Actually, William Boyd’s Fascination is a similar ‘must read’, although the stories evoke quite different moods and experiences.  I enjoy Boyd’s novels, but his stories as just as good.  These stories move around the place, are very unusual in the sense of evoking characters and places which range wide across the globe and in time.  There are stories about the Second World War, the nineteenth century, about Los Angeles and Russia.  In A Haunting, the narrator carefully notes in his notebook his descent into a kind of madness.  It starts on a plane, on the way from London to Los Angeles and with a faint headache.  The story moves from London to Los Angeles and then to Edinburgh, where at long last he thinks he discovers what has been haunting him.  However, others seem more sceptical, in particular his wife, who refuses to have him back.  Nevertheless, once he has discovered the Kilmaron effect, he is able to fight it and finds that he is free from his feelings for every ….   Well, go and read the story.  I’m not going to give it away here.  It’s fascinating.    Every story has its own fascinating twists and turns, life in all its unexpected details.

Well, I’m quite pleased with this list now.  I’m up to date.  Next year I’m going to try and do something different – this is too much hard work!  Unless, of course, I decide to retire…  But I don’t think so.

Clearly I have not written an awful lot these last few weeks.  That does not mean I have not been reading or thinking or working.  I’ve done a lot, especially of the latter and so that leads to the obvious decrease in blog entries.  The truth of the matter is that I’ve got a couple of reviews drafted, and a lot of stuff in my head;  the reality is that I simply don’t find the time to write it all up…  Meanwhile the autumn rain and winter showers are upon us, energy is at a low, the house needs looking after, xmas presents need to be considered and then bought,  and I’m thinking of simply closing the site until I have more energy / time  (both probably).  I’ll write up a piece on all the books I’ve read and am reading, just to complete the year and for my own satisfaction that I have got a complete record.  I’ll get around to that one of these days.

And now?  For the next few weeks until xmas the diary is just full, full of meetings, projects to be finalised, discussions (yes, including visits to Wales, again) and then, at the end of the day, simply trying to shake it off,  either at home or  in yet another hotelroom.  

And of course, I must make the odd visit to the Amazone website, wishful thinking I might actually find the time to pfaff about in a real bookshop,  order books for everyone for Christmas.  Too busy to blog, clearly.  I will try and get around various sites, visit you and leave the odd comment here and there.  Yes, I do care.  Sometimes however, you have to admit defeat!

Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand  was shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Novel Award and follows on from his earlier first novel Incendiary, which I have not read but will.  Incendiary was published just at the time of the July 07 attacks in London and is about an al-Qa’ida suicide attack. 

The Other Hand is about two women, one an English editor and the other a girl refugee from Nigeria.  Their stories alternate and slowly the reason for their interaction unravels.  The book is both funny and desperately tragic, it is written in a way that you don’t stop to think about it but simply accept that this is how it is: life in all its cruelty and brightness, always two sides to one story.  Sarah is the editor who seemingly has it all and has nothing, she muddles through.  Little Bee is the girl who loses everything and yet, in her naivety and understanding seems at times the wiser of the two, brought about by horrors lived through in Nigeria.

The book points at the cynicism of the English immigration rules and procedures, its self righteous callousness.  The opening sentence is a memorable one:

Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl.

It sums up the indifference with which refugees are treated: better to be a coin and being able to slip through borders and from one place to another, unnoticed, valued, than to be a refugee when borders are closed and you are treated with suspicion. 

Little Bee accidentally escapes from the immigration centre, due to a mix up created by one of the girls and gets in touch with Andrew O’Rourke.  She met with Andrew and his wife Sarah on a beach in Nigeria and the consequences are chilling and reverberate to this new meeting she is trying to set up.  Andrew is depressed and Sarah has an affair, their son Charlie is a batman fan.

The story is narrated alternately by Little Bee and Sarah, each giving her own perspective, each needing the other.  It’s about how each of them remembers what happened and how each struggles now to cope with the consequences.   It’s chilling, haunting and as I said before, extremely funny in places because of its constant reality check; neither Little Bee nor Sarah are heroes , nor does Cleave judge them for what they are. 

The writing is excellent and this is another book that I think everyone should read, for its honesty and realism – neither Little Bee nor Sarah are perfect, there is no condemnation or cynicism about either of them.  They are two people caught up in a melodrama that is far beyond what they bargained for.  Go and read it, if you have not read it yet.  I’m going to get Incendiary.

 

 

Here’s how to do it:   Write that novel that is lurking around in your head, somewhere.  Me?  I haven’t got the time.  I don’t even have time to blog book reviews that I have already written.  Shame.

 

 

I know, I haven’t been very communicative these days, weeks, months, but not because I have lost interest in my blog or in reading or in commenting on the world at large.  Like everyone else I suffer from time-deficiency, almost inbuilt into my constitution nowadays.  I work, try and fit in a bit of reading here and there but when additional necessities such as keeping up your garden or your house rear their heads then I’ve had it, then there’s simply no time or space left for some of your favourite pasttimes: reading, writing about reading, writing about writing, reading about writing, etc.  All that simply gets pushed to the back, or carries on like a kind of subcurrent, hidden.  Until you realise that you have actually managed to read a number of books, only you haven’t got the energy to write about it or to tell others about it.

I do read newspapers, almost as a force of habit, partly because I rarely manage to catch anything on tv, partly because I enjoy holding this thing every day and see it as a kind of connection piece to the big wide world when I’m coped up with yet another report on skills, training, education and public sector programmes on education. 

So today I came across this piece by George Monbiot in the Guardian: Clive James isn’t a climate change sceptic, he’s a sucker – but this may be the reason.  The title alone is quite provocative and because I am reading (well, picking up the odd essay rather) Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia and am extremely impressed by his wide-ranging intellect and immensely clever and skillful writing about everything and everyone that has contributed anything at all to world culture, I was intrigued.   

Monbiot, writing about the increasing scepticism about the reality of climate change being due to human activities, expressed in books and on websites writes:

An American scientist I know suggests that these books and websites cater to a new literary market: people with room-temperature IQs. He didn’t say whether he meant fahrenheit or centigrade. But this can’t be the whole story. Plenty of intelligent people have also declared themselves sceptics.

One such is the critic Clive James. You could accuse him of purveying trite received wisdom, but not of being dumb. On Radio 4 a few days ago he delivered an essay about the importance of scepticism, during which he maintained that “the number of scientists who voice scepticism [about climate change] has lately been increasing”. He presented no evidence to support this statement and, as far as I can tell, none exists. But he used this contention to argue that “either side might well be right, but I think that if you have a division on that scale, you can’t call it a consensus. Nobody can meaningfully say that the science is in.”

Monbiot continues and accuses in particuar anyone over 60 of being the most vociferous deniers of climate change, even though science, in his view, shows quite clearly that the there is convincing evidence that climate change is man-made.

Anyway, read the piece and in particular the comments (already running into close to 800 and the day is not at an end yet). 

You see, this is why it’s really worth while reading news papers – it’s made me think how even people you greatly admire for what and how they write, at times seem to be getting things completely wrong.  Yes, I mean Clive James, at least if George has quoted him correctly!

Nevertheless, I will continue my enjoyment of Cultural Amnesia.

Michael Chabon is a Pulitzer Prize winner.  I cannot remember now how  Wonder Boys got onto my tbr pile, but there it was in my suitcase, so long ago now, and although it got pushed away at the time when, in the airport, I got my hands on a copy of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl who kicked the Hornets’ Nest, it was there waiting for me once I found out what had happened to Salander. 

Wonder Boys is a good read, this story about a writer and university teacher, Grady Tripp, who attempts to write the follow up novel to his first award winning one.  He’s had the advance from his editor, has worked on the book for years, only he somehow or other cannot finish it.  Sounds familiar?

Grady Tripp has stopped drinking, but does drugs, long evenings and nights full of drugs, and when smoking pot he manages to convince himself that he is now writing the definitive end to the book, only to discover the next morning that  it is just absolutely wrong again and won’t do. 

When his editor, Crabtree, turns up for the ‘Wordfest’, a week’s festival of literary greats, speeches and seminars by writers, editors and university staff, Tripp needs to convince Crabtree that he really is finishing the book. 

Whatever can go wrong, does go wrong, almost as a matter of fact.  Tripp’s wife Emily leaves him, nevertheless, his father in law suggests he comes and celebrates Passover with the family which results in a number of disasters, when he does turn up with his star pupil James.  The only admirer of his book is also his lodger who wants to sleep with him.  Crabtree becomes embroiled with a cross dresser, but he in fact fancies James, who, as it turns out, is a much better (aspiring) writer than Tripp.

All of this makes for hilarious scenario’s which nevertheless have very serious undercurrents.  There is a search for the past and for purpose, and it is not until the very end, just when it all seems to have definitely and irrevocably gone wrong that Tripp realises what a fool he is, and with ‘maturity’ he begins to take responsibility for his actions.  At the same time, writing becomes a job that is taken for what it is, hard work.   He knows he can no longer fool himself.

The story is told from Tripp’s perspective, he relates in first person what is happening and so does not always have insight into other people’s views or reactions.  He guesses and tries to respond accordingly, he does not know what happens behind closed doors, but surmises and often unwittingly lands himself into one bizarre situation after another.

Meanwhile he battles with his book, his 2000 pages masterpiece called ‘Wonder Boys’.  They are all imaginary wonder boys, the characters in this book, until the manuscript in another bizarre twist is blown away and all is lost, the whole charade of what is supposed to be a masterpiece.

The book is  full of pace and is interlaced with references to films and stars, fights, misunderstanding, sexual innuendos  and literary gems; funny and weird, yet believable despite its craziness.

 If you have ambition and despair at ever writing ‘that book’ then read this, and realise how unbelievably hard it is to finish, how many things can get in the way, and do get in the way, and that somehow or other you have to pull through all that and then just maybe you will finish….

The writing is brilliant.  Conversations are interspersed with narratives that show the what where and  when, in a whirlwind fashion.  There is not much time for reflection, not for the reader, nor for the wonder boys in his book.  The characters are well drawn, from the crazy Crabtree to the shy and gifted James and the Jewish father in law and many more.  Even the dog has character, however scary and only until his untimely death!

Recommended – enjoy.

’10 years that changed everything’ is the headline of the Guardian weekend 17.10.09.  This is a special issue about ‘The noughties’,  that ponders the decade.  What interests me  in this issue  are the sections on communication – nothing is as it was,  the headlines proclaim, can you imagine a world without Google, Wikipedia and Facebook?

Well, I’m not too much into Facebook but I do use Wikipedia and I google all the time, for this, that and the other.   I’m blogging, downloading podcasts, have linked up to BBC iPlayer (although I rarely watch anything) and am a fan of iTunes.  However, my life changes have not included Twitter (I am just not interested in whenever someone else is parking a car, or making a cup of coffee, but then I probably don’t get it!), Comment is Free, the iPhone (although I am the proud owner of a blackberry, does that count?), Craigslist (I’d never heard of this until I read the articles), Spotify (which apparently is ‘more lifechanging than iTunes, with a library of six million tracks, including a remarkable amount of really quite esoteric classical music’ – I must definitely find out what this is about). 

Are you all avid followers of all, or any of the above?  Where do people find the time?  I know, all these are supposed to safe time, but we know what that means.

My most life changing things over the last 10 years  include:

• More and longer hours working than ever before
• My satnav (how would I be able to find all these places I have to get to, without a satvnav?)
• My smartphones, now including the blackberry (I’m still not sure whether these gadgets are progress or whether they simply make you feel even more paranoid about keeping in touch with clients, jobs, family, the latest news, etc.)
• Being able to order any book, whatever I want and whenever I want it, on-line and having it delivered the next day, or at most two days later
• MY BLOG – who would have thought ten years ago that I’d be happily posting my thoughts on books, the world, and anything else that comes into my mind, on a regular basis for everyone to read?

However,  definitely the most life changing part has been the birth of my granddaughter – amazing how life just carries on, regardless.  Whilst I’m growing older and getting used to new technology, inventions, this fast changing world of ours, there she is, born right in the middle of  it and able to take for granted all these amazing gadgets.  How am I going to explain to her that when I was her age, telephone was something that you did via landlines (and, yes, operators if you wanted to telephone someone in another country) and when I was a bit older and on holiday in say Spain, I would have to queue for the one telephone box round the corner of our accommodation in order to let my family know that I was ok?  Sometimes, the queue was some 20 people long!  Now she and I speak to each other via Skype and I can see her, even though she lives across the Channel, talk to her on a regular basis.  Well, that surely is progress and quite amazing.

On top of all this, today’s Sunday Times has an article that claims that for silver  surfers the net could actually be quite life enhancing, and that time spent googling the web is even better for grandparents than reading.  Tests have been carried out that apparently show that brain activity needs extra oxygen and nutrients so more blood flows to areas involved in internet surfing.  In fact, ’searching the internet appears to engage a greater extent of neural circuitry that is not activated during reading.’    Furthermore, this is linked to brain activity of the elderly (not that I would classify myself as yet as elderly!) , potentially slowing or even reversing the age-related declines that can end in dementia.  Well, if that is not a good excuse to carry on googling and blogging then I don’t know what is.  So, granddaughter, as well as being part of all this progress it is actually good for me!

I swept up the leaves in the garden today, it was chilly but windstill.  The bright summer colours are fading fast, with green turning yellow and brown.  Was it only last week that this was my view?

Balmy Cyprus.

And then, at night, the sun setting after a hot day, the heat melting into a comfortable and pleasant evening,

During the day I read 

All gone now, it’s chilly in England and the evenings are drawing in earlier and earlier.  The central heating is on.  I am wistful and unable to write reviews, after a week of catching up with work and reports.  No you’ll just have to wait until I come out of this sense of remoteness, as if it does not matter, none of it.