bitter lemmings

the curious incident of the dog int he night-time

Well just for Pat. You may like to know that the book group went well on Friday morning. In fact particularly well this week because for once we did not have to follow the prescribed list of questions for discussion given by the bookclub website, which I cannot direct you to because I never go there myself! The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was not listed. Why? Perhaps because it was a Whitbread prize-winner in the children's literature category?

The only interesting thing to arise out of the discussion was a question raised by one member about how this book could have been a prize-winner and recommended for children when there such bad language in it, in other words a couple of swear words! Derr! Well it is about a fifteen-year-old boy with Asperger's, not that his language is anything but completely 'acceptable,' whatever that means. Where have these people been living all their lives? This kind of attitude could account for the adverse reaction I got on saturday after footie when I called some guy a wanker. Apparently it was the talk of dinner parties up and down Nicosia on Saturday night, from Strovolos to Ayios Andreas. I wonder if it made the national news?

Obviously no lesbo action to report from that meeting but things are looking up. We have our next meeting arranged for June and a night out with wine and the full works. And we shall be discussing Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal, about a school teacher who has an affair with a fifteen year-old-boy. So ebdless potential for scandalous revelations after a few glasses of wine.....

a tristram shandy for our times

Let me pick up from the previous post which fumbled around in the dark for a general sense of Englishness. Living abroad puts you in an advantageous position within which to ruminate about such matters - you are continuely confronted by who it is that you are or, more particulally, who people assume you are. Never happy with a sense of Englishness which reduces me to reciting a literny of people and events - Churchill, Paul Mccartney, Gracie Fields or 1966, 1939-45 etc it is the 'everyday' sense of how you are that roots you. Michael Billig identified this as 'banal nationalism' a universal phenomenon which does not involve flag-waving but is a means through which the nation is constantly flagged in the most mundane of circumstances.

All this came to mind when reading a review, available here, of the recently published novel 'Ring Road' by Ian Sansom. The unspoken subject appears to be Britishness, rather than Englishness, made that much more intriguing since the novel appears to be set in Northern Ireland where Britishness is frequently contested. Yet what seems to find a place here is not the assertive, bowler hatted Britishness of Ulster Unionism but a Britishness that anyone familiar with the UK from St Ives to Gallashields or Southend to Larne would instantly recognise.

It is the Britishness of the everyday which the reviewer, Geraldine Bedell, highlights in the novel:

Ordinariness is not much in demand any more. Even reality TV shows claiming to explore the lives of the unfamous turn their subjects into stars, into Jade Goody-style spectacle, fodder for Heat magazine. The genuinely ordinary - the sort of people who might wear skirts with elasticated waists, eat fish fingers for tea and worry vaguely about fungal infections on their feet (people, in other words, who are like us in ways we might prefer not to mention but know to be true) - are beneath general notice. Except in novels.

Layering detail on wry detail, Ian Sansom has built up a complex, vivid and convincing panorama of life in an unnamed town (presumably in Northern Ireland, where the author lives) that remains obstinately ordinary. In this place, Bob Savory, the owner of the Speedy Bap! sandwich business (and author of a cookery book of the same name) is as close to a celebrity as they've got or as anyone wants. This is a town where a car park going pay and display is a big controversy; where, despite the recent preference for avocados over turnips, fresh herbs remain a rumour.

She goes on:

The tone is part elegy, part satire, part howl, and very, very funny. I laughed more times than I can remember over a novel for years. Sansom is a master of the dying fall and the punchline that jumps out of nowhere; his real subject is language, the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world, and those we use in self-deceit. He revels in marketing speak, in starter homes and u-PVC windows in the new upmarket housing development, Woodsides: 'Which is something of a misnomer because they had to cut down the wood to build the houses.'

He loves names of hairdressers (Upper Cutz, located near Inspirationz, the cards and novelties shop, and Sew Biz, where the Romanian lady alters garments), bakers (the brown-and-yellow cake shop) and supermarkets (Supa Valu) and the way that the promises implied by the names, the invitations to sample wares, are invariably not quite fulfilled...

This sounds like home to me...

the beautful game

As my team of choice languishes mid-division, characterised by uninspired gameplay, I sometimes need to be reminded why it is called the 'Beautful Game'. As a service to our readers - and in commemoration of a recent victory on the soccer field here in Cyprus by a team sponsered by this site - let me recommend this:

'The History Of Football - The Beautful Game' succesfully combines the world's most popular sport with exclusive interviews and unparalleled footage to create an invaluable offering for fans of football. Every aspect of the sport is investigated with icons of the past and present revealing insights into why football generates more excitement, passion and wealth across the world than any other sport.

The complete 13 hour series is here presented in a special limited edition box set. Episode titles: Origins, Football Cultures, Evolution Of The European Game, European Superpowers, Brazil, South American Superpowers, For Club And Country, The Dark Side, Superstars, The Media, Africa - A Game For All, Futures.

7 DVD's for £15.99 free postage included to anywhere in the world. Get buying...

hoisting a stout and defiant television masts

Daily excusions into the bloggersphere frequently end up at the acerbic, acute and frequently accurate postings to be found at Socialism in an Age of Waiting. Left-field marxism of the highest order - angry and recalcitrant but always entertaining.

Today's first post draws attention to the British novelist Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962). I'm left intrigued and want to know more:

Here’s to the memory of Patrick Hamilton, the British novelist, playwright, chronic alcoholic and Stalinist (turned Tory) who was born 100 years ago today. It’s some sort of a comment on the sharp decline in Hamilton’s reputation that there is a lot more on the internet about the 16th-century Scottish Lutheran of the same name than there is about the writer, once highly praised by J.B. Priestley, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing and others whose literary judgements (whatever one thinks of their political judgements) used to command respect and boost Hamilton’s sales. Nowadays he’s probably best known, if he’s known at all, as the writer of the plays that became the films Gaslight and Rope, though he himself dismissed the latter, memorably, as “sordid and practically meaningless balls”...

...The sad thing is that, judging by Nigel Jones’s superb biography, Through a Glass Darkly (1991), Hamilton seems never to have derived much satisfaction from what he achieved, still less achieved all he’d set out to. By the time of his death, in 1962, he was deeply depressed and all but isolated. As he wrote to his brother in 1956:

“... the British working class ... has proved itself despicably incapable of what might have been its historic task, and instead of the Red Flag has hoisted a stout and defiant television mast against the evils of capitalist exploitation ...”

Fortunately, his best novels were written well before he reached this stage, when he was still capable of depicting disappointment and frustration sympathetically and convincingly, without either succumbing to them or, worse still, blaming their victims for the conditions they found themselves in...

And this, from here, suggests an intriguing series of novels to get stuck into:

...In THE WEST PIER, MR STIMPSON AND MR. GORSE and UNKNOWN ASSAILANT, he traced the career of...psychopath, Ralph Ernest Gorse. The character was an early example in thrillers of the cold-blooded and amoral charmer, a forefather of Psycho and Hannibal Lecter. Graham Greene described The West Pier as 'the best book written about Brighton'...There are no murders and no violence, but Hamilton creates a dark, malevolent atmosphere, which perhaps is also a social statement in itself. Hamilton's Marxist views and private admiration of Stalin reflected only marginally from his works - he never joined the Communist Party. He did not depict the heroic working class, but rootless people, petty criminals, prostitutes, and barmaids, whose illusions are broken. "All the novels show a preoccupation with the perils and pleasures of drinking, and Hamilton's Marxism is expressed in his compassion for the hopelessness of his characters' lives." (from The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. by Margaret Drabble, 1998)