The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew That it Was None of his Business - Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch

I think I have just found the stand-out read of 2007.

I have received this book as a Christmas present after my friend J told me about it and I refused to believe that such a book could exist. Basically, this is a large colourful children's picture book about a mole who wakes up one day to find a Mr Whippy - style turd on his head. The irate the mole goes round all his animal friends, asking if they have perpetrated this outrage. By way of an alibi the other animals show the mole what their spoor looks like and how it does not match the one he's wearing. For example, the goat:

"'Me? No, how could I? I do it like this!' and plippety plop - a pile of toffee - coloured little balls tumbled on the grass. The little mole found them almost appealing."

Eventually, the mole meets some flies who are able to taste his shit-turban and tell him what animal it comes from. And then he's out for revenge, crimping off a little mole length on his enemy!

I was amazed by the subject matter of this book. I am going to keep a copy out on display in my living room for visitors to leaf through... That's right... it'll be a glass coffee table book!

The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman by Bruce Robinson

A coming-of-age tale by the writer of "Withnail and I" set in the 1950s. And what a strange decade the 1950s were: beating your children was acceptable while masturbation was beyond the pale.

Thomas Penman is 15 and lives with his godawful parents who hate him and each other. His father actively beats and bullies him while his limp and useless mother spends all her time boiling up cheap, nasty meat for her dogs which she allows to shit in the house. By the end of the book you can practically smell the shit and dogmeat. Also living with them is Thomas' beloved grandfather who is dying of cancer. Being 15, Thomas is not so much concerned with the gaping hole that the old man's death will leave in his life, but with what will happen to his grandfather's prodigious collection of pornography on his demise. Grandfather is not a loveable, white-haired, Werther's-toting old gent! Following the trauma of serving in the First World War, he went a bit strange and devoted himself to creating rather eccentric porn - such as erotic stories about boys at public school and pictures of naked women whose bums he has replaced with a second pair of breasts. The jewel in this porno crown turns out to be a picture of a woman with who seems to have a duck up her arse, with just its head sticking out. If Grandad dies, Mum and Dad will go through his things and this priceless collection will be thrown away. And so the young, gonad-driven Thomas begins the sneaky rumaging through his grandad's stuff that will eventually expose all his family's secrets.

I really enjoyed this book, mostly because it is filled with lurid descriptions of rather disgusting things, whether they are old, incontinent dogs, the contents of teenage boys' minds, the hypocrisy of nearly all the adults or the grisly deaths of crabs exploded by Thomas and his best friend as a hobby. All of life is here and looking pretty unwholesome. Here's a taste taken from a description of how Thomas lurks about his home:

"More often than not he located in the hall, wedged between the wall and a piece of furniture called a tallboy. When there was no one around this was his favourite spot. It was a dark, secret place, with bland wallpaper covered in dots. No one else ever got in here. (The only other person who ever got in here was his grandfather who had been known to exploit the isolation to hang his testicles over the banisters.)"

From now on whenever some old timer tries to tell me that things were better in the 50s when children weren't cheeky, women knew their place and gays could probably be burned at the stake, I shall be thinking of the woman with a duck up her arse...

Book-Related Disappointment...

Last week I had a brilliant idea for a book. Not a novel, but one of those amusing stocking filler books without much content (ideal for a lazy git like me to write). It was going to be the Schott’s Miscellany of Christmas 2008. My idea was to write a dictionary of words that sound rude but aren’t. I had the words “crapulent”, “turdiform” and “pismire” to begin with and despite my friend’s protestation that “Three words do not make a book.”, I was confident that the F, C and S sections of any decent dictionary would yield further results.

Imagine, then my disappointment at coming across “Butt Rot and Bottom Gas: A Glossary of Tragically Misunderstood Words” by Eric Groves in my local Waterstones! Large quantities of easily-earned money no longer await me and it’s back to the day job...

Words I have had to look up...

Of late I have found myself having to resort to the dictionary a great deal. I thought I would share the words I've been looking up so that you (whoever you are) can get really good scores when doing the "Improve your wordpower" page in old copies of Reader's Digest in doctors' waiting rooms.

1. Demiurge - Sounds as if it ought to be half an urge, but turns out to mean an ancient Greek magistrate or a deputy god responsible for creating the material universe.
2. Acromeglic – Medical term to describe someone suffering from a form of pituitary cancer which causes them to make too much growth hormone (notable sufferer = Andre The Giant!). To my great upset, I found this word in one of my sister’s columns. So much for my theory that I’m the bright one...
3. Pismire – Another one that sounds like one thing but means another. Actually an ant.
4. Quintain – A target for practising jousting.
5. Halidome – holy place, sanctuary.

Will Storr vs The Supernatural - Will Storr

I would never have read this book if left to my own devices, but it was sent to me by my sister and she can be very insistent. I don’t want to have a battle of wills with someone who can run 26 miles!

As I checked out the book I noticed that it was made out of recycled articles written for such respected scientific journals as “Loaded” and “The Face”. The day I turn to Loaded to unravel the mysteries of the universe for me will be the same day I get my tits out and claim it’s feminism. Despite this, the book is actually quite good fun. For the most part, Will Storr uses the Louis Theroux method of simply following people about and letting them make fools of themselves, rather than subjecting them to rigorous cross-questioning. There are some amusing descriptions of how Will manages to scare himself on some of the outings, and I find the juxtaposition of the paranormal and the everyday in some of the quotes very funny. For example there are two self-appointed anti-Satanist vigilantes who claim that Clapham Common is popular with sinister group The Friends of Hecate partly because it is the confluence of six leylines, and partly because it has good parking facilities. I also liked the way several people in the book say they are, “Going to do a Ouija board.” the same way that I might say that I am “going to do a poo”.

Despite being an Atheist with no belief in the hereafter, I think it would be kind of nice if ghosts did exist, because it would make the world more interesting. But there are some bits when the quality of the “evidence” given by paranormal investigators in the book just makes me want to put my head in my hands. These include Electronic Voice Phenomenon, photos of “orbs” and man who claims to have met a werewolf. It seems that for every normal, sane person who has seen something they can’t properly account for, Will meets 4 or 5 shysters, attention-seekers and nut-jobs, including the cast and crew of Living TV’s Most Haunted!. And then there are the very, very many mediums all of whom have a American Indian spirit guide – I’m not sure there are enough dead Indians to go round!

I think that one of the main reasons that I remain very skeptical about ghosts is that I have seen one and I don’t think what I saw was the spirit of a dead person: One summer in the late 90s, I went on my first and only package holiday. My friend and I stayed in a Spanish resort which closely resembled Blackpool for a week. One night as I was drifting off to sleep on the settee (we had a double bed and a settee, for some reason), I saw a transparent white lady in a Victorian dress sitting on the stool next to me. My eyes were open and I could see the cupboards on the other side of the room through her. Not only that, but she held one of my hands and I could actually feel the pressure of her fingers. The experience was absolutely terrifying, especially since I couldn’t move at all. Unable to do anything else, I thought hard at the woman to go away and she slowly faded out. When I eventually calmed down a bit, I started to think a bit more sensibly about the experience. I was staying on the 7^th floor of an apartment block built in the 70s or 80s. How could anyone have been strolling about 7 floors in the air over 100 years ago? Sadly, my visitor must have come from my own demented brain. My experience has shown that it is possible to be in a mental state in which you are awake but dreaming. So when people claim, as in this book, to have witnessed supernatural events, I don’t assume that they are liars or mad, but I don’t necessarily think that what they saw was real either.

Not only have I visited places that could not possibly be haunted and seen a ghost, but I have looked for them at an allegedly haunted caving hut and seen nothing. I have noted that people who have seen the Ystradfellte ghost (which takes the form of an old woman who tells you off for making a mess in her cottage) tend to have known that the hut is supposed to be haunted, and also been in the pub. If you chose to investigate these sightings, be warned: All caving huts are very basic and this is the worst one I’ve ever stayed in. The ghost is probably its best feature and may not even show.

Borges Hurts My Brain...

Have you ever picked up a book, started reading and thought, “Oh, dear. I’m not sure I’m clever enough for this.”? It happened to me last night when I picked up a book of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories. In the space of a few short pages I experienced great confusion and had to resort to the dictionary. I need a rest before I try to read the next one!

By the way, I have a theory that you can tell how seriously someone takes their literature by how they pronounce “Borges”. Pronouncing the “e” like “ay” is a bad start, and the longer they roll the r for, the less fun a person is likely to be. If you have the misfortune to find yourself speaking to someone who talks about how much they love “Borrrrrrgayz” the best thing to do is to claim to be rewriting “Mill On The Floss” with a speedboat chase at the end. This will stop them from speaking to you again.

Monstrous Regiment - Terry Pratchett

Well, I needed some light relief after the last two books. What is there to say about this book though? It is the 136th Discworld book and people who liked the other ones will like this one; people who didn't, won't. Still, I can't always be pushing back the boundaries of weird fiction. I need some easy, cosy reading sometimes.

In Monstrous Regiment war and gender politics are up for discussion as a whole platoon of girls cut their hair and stick socks down their trousers in order to enlist in the army of Borogravia, an ultra-nationalistic war-crazy state which I suspect might be modelled on Serbia. In a typically Balkan way, Borogravia actually has nothing to be proud of except its fierce national pride. After centuries of fighting anyone they share a boarder with, all of the surrounding countries have united against Borogravia, which would sort of serve it right, except that thousands of ordinary everyday folk are about to get killed by invading armies or starve in the aftermath. Don't worry too much though, because Mr Pratchett hasn't written a sad ending yet, and he's not about to start now.

A Brace of Dystopias

This week, I have mostly inhabited dystopian visions of the future as I have been reading Alan Moore's “V for Vendetta” and “Gun, With Occasional Music” by Jonathan Lethem. It was a combination that gave me nightmares and resulted in my occasionally getting my dystopias confused. Let's do the classic graphic novel that is “V for Vendetta” first:

V for Vendetta – Alan Moore
Britain has become a fascist state following a nuclear winter and the breakdown of law and order. The oppressed citizens are constantly surveyed by CCTV cameras (Oh, the prescience!) and controlled by ruthless secret police. Gays, lesbians, political campaigners and anyone who isn't white have been rounded up and sent to extermination camps. The only person left fighting against the government is a lone anarchist who wears a Guy Fawkes outfit and uses the codename “V”. Although it is established early on that V has superhuman speed and strength after being the victim of secret government experiments, he doesn't really seem to make much use of them. I would suggest that what really sets him apart from the rest of humanity is that he has The Power Of Not Giving A Shit. It is not caring what happens to him or what he has to do to anybody else that makes him such an effective terrorist.

I must admit that I find anarchy completely unappealing as a political cause. It is my belief that government is necessary because people are fundamentally bad and would probably start eating one another if left to their own devices. In the book, V nobly bows out right as he is winning and thus avoids the fate of every real-life successful rebel, namely becoming the next dictator.

Although I really enjoyed the story, the style of the illustration meant I had trouble telling some of the characters apart. Various government agents seemed pretty interchangeable. And the Fascist leader's name is Mr Susan! I can't be afraid of a Mr Susan. What kind of name is that for a villain? It sounds like a character from The Mighty Boosh*.

V for Vendetta was written in the ‘80s when there were 3 million unemployed, and riots in the inner cities both largely caused by Thatcherism. Today we have lost our right to demonstration, to free speech and armed policemen have shot random civilians and what is Mr Moore doing now? Pornography, that’s what! I guess maybe this is part of the ageing process; we all start out full of revolutionary fire, but finally prefer a bit of self-gratification to armed struggle any day. Nevertheless, Mr Moore remains my all-time favourite Rasputine look-alike.

*after further thought there was indeed a Mr Susan in series 1. He lived in the Mirrorworld and was made entirely from dusters.



Gun, With Occasional Music – Jonathan Lethem

Conrad Metcalf is a down-at-heel private eye, struggling to make a living in a future where asking questions is illegal. The news has been replaced with a musical interpretation of the day’s events and the citizens are allowed free access to government supplied drugs (heavy on the forgettol) which they use to make their lives bearable.

The book is written in the style of Raymond Chandler, complete with unusual metaphors and the hero wise-cracking at the expense of the cops and the gangsters, both of whom then dutifully rough him up a bit and turf him out onto the street. I rather like this aspect as the humour prevents the book from just being unremittingly bleak. And it’s full of amusing ideas, like science fiction ought to be. There are evolved versions of animals who don’t quite qualify for full human rights, which means that one of the suspects can take a sheep as a lover and the hero can be pursued by a kangaroo-thug. I also liked the made-up, futuristic surnames like “Phoneblum” and “Teleprompter”. I think this is a book that I will not be recommending, but forcibly lending instead.

I find a dystopian USA a lot easier to take than dystopian Britain. I think this is cos the States strikes me as probably qualifying for dystopia already. When I visited Texas in 2000, both independent thought and decent cheese seemed to have been made illegal and of the two, I missed cheese the most. Mind you, that’s the thing about dystopias; they’re not really warnings about the future so much as comment on what we’re already living with. Another thing that occurs to me after reading this book, is that although I’ve now read several books which were “in the style of Raymond Chandler”, I’ve never read any actual Raymond Chandler. Surely this ought to be remedied!

Isca: The Fall of Roman Exeter - Derek Gore

There is something great about reading books set in your home town. It makes you feel like you live at the centre of the universe. For that reason, I may be very slightly biased towards Isca. Bias may be increased by the fact that the author works in the Archaeology department of Exeter University, my alma mater*.

Slightly disappointingly, Isca does not really fall so much as slowly fade away. The Roman governor is taking less and less interest in the south west, and the whole area has started to go a bit Mad Max. The local people are being pushed into choosing which of the local warlords they will work for in return for protection from the other local warlords and Irish raiders (confusingly called Scotts).

Against this backdrop our hero, the young Victoricus runs away from his feudal lord, Cynan and goes to Exeter to seek his fortune (slaps thigh). In the process he finds love, befriends an old man, and gets captured a hell of a lot. In fact, he could give any of Dr Who’s companions a run for their money in the getting captured stakes.

If I had to sum this book up in one word I would chose “sweet”. Nothing really horrible happens to any of the main characters, although the potential is definitely there in Dark Ages Britain. When some minor characters are cruelly done in by the villains, it all takes place off camera. At the end, events seem to be building up for a big, set-piece battle – then the bad guy’s troops mutiny and everyone goes home for tea instead. If I sound disparaging, I don’t really mean to; I actually find this innocent “Bumper Book of Stories for Boys” approach kind of charming. It makes me think that Derek is a gentleman.

Not only is the story very sweet, but as the author is an actual archaeologist, all the details of daily life and the construction of the fort and towns are accurate, thus enabling me to painlessly educate myself. Like an episode of "In Our Time" with a plot.



*Latin for “Place where you fret about grades, maths and problems classes while a bunch of rich kids drink themselves senseless”. Not that I’m bitter. If I was, a rugby tosser would have drunk me.

Maus – Art Spiegelman

By now anyone reading this blog is bound to be thinking, “God, are there any books you actually like, you moany old witch?” Well, yes, there are and this is one of them. I thought Maus was brilliant, even though it made me cry.

For those who have been living under a stone, or who have a policy of deliberately ignoring comics (foolish!), Maus is the story of the Holocaust, told in cartoon form with the Jews depicted as mice and the Nazis drawn as cats. Never have cartoon mice been so upsetting! It shows how Art’s parents, Vladek and Anja Spiegelman survived the Ghettos and the death camps. There is also a thread of the story set closer to the present day which deals with the author’s difficult relationship with his father.

Despite his victim status, Vladek is not portrayed very sympathetically, and we see that part of the reason for his survival is that he never shared anything if he could trade it instead. Harsh months of saving scraps of paper to swap for extra food or cigarettes to buy favours have left Vladek going through life as a mean, rubbish-hoarding Mr Trebus figure. Vladek’s miserliness and Anja’s suicide in 1968 show that despite emerging alive at the end of the war, both have been seriously damaged by the experience.

Maus: Read it and weep.

Holiday Reading Results

Well, true to my predictions, “Arthur and George” was all but reduced to papier mache after being in my rucksack the day my platypus leaked. I’ve read that and Isca, but Justina Robson didn’t even get a look in. She’ll have to go back on the shelf for another day…

I have some notes on books I did manage to read, so I should be able to come up with a post for each of them. In the mean time, I am back to re-reading The Sandman comics and thoroughly enjoying them. I know I am enjoying them as I’ve read 3 already and the only thing I can find to complain at is that the text says that Matthew is a raven, but he is clearly drawn as a crow. For that matter so are Odin’s ravens.

For the edification of the nation, here is my idiot’s guide to corvids:


Jackdaws: Relatively small and usually come in large packs. Make a really weird noise.

Rooks: Medium sized. Black with a pointy white beak. Say “Ark!”. Usually seen in large packs.

Crows: Almost identical to the Rook, but has a black beak and is usually seen in ones and twos. I like crows. They pair for life, you know. Like gothic, carrion-eating swans....

Ravens: Bloody enormous. Beak is hooked, not pointy. Say “Gronk!” not “Ark!”. Live on cliffs and crags so usually seen in mountainous areas rather than farmers’ fields. Like flying upside down to impress the lady ravens.

Arthur And George - Julian Barnes

The book is based on a real-life episode in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took up the case of George Edalji, a second-generation Indian Solicitor wrongly accused of mutilating livestock. Although Sir Arthur’s intervention succeeds in obtaining a full pardon for George, I found it very disappointing that we never find out who really did commit the crime. This is most unsatisfactory!

For me, the most interesting aspect of the book is the portrait it paints of Arthur Conan Doyle, which reminds us that the creator of Sherlock Holmes was nothing like so logical as his most famous character and believed in both spiritualism and cardboard fairies.

Conversely, I found the worst part of the book to be this sentence which occurs when Arthur is out in the Arctic shooting ducks: “Every bird you downed bore pebbles in its gizzard from a land the maps ignored.” Maybe I’m just too literal, but I found this needlessly opaque and pretentious. Still, that’s the sort of thing the booker judges seem to like...

I don’t think I would bother to read another book by Julian Barnes, but I might give his alter ego who writes detective novels, Dan Kavanagh a try. At least that way I might actually get to find out whodunit!

Holiday Reading

It's that time of year, now that spring is in the air, when those two wet gits - er, let me try that again...

It's the time of year, now that all the politicians are on holiday when the quality papers, slightly desperate for material, fill up space with lists of what novels the great and good are taking on holiday with them. This is an opportunity for celebrities to try to kid on to the public that they will be reading War and Peace or Gibbon's Decline and Fall in Tuscany, and not tucking into Harry Potter/Jilly Cooper/The Bourne Idiocy at all... So here is my list of holiday reading. It's not all that special but at least it's true:

1)Isca: The Fall of Roman Exeter by Derek Gore
This is coming mainly because the book is physically small (a strange size a bit smaller than A format) so it will fit nicely in hand luggage. And it will remind me of home. And it looks a bit easier than Edward Gibbon. I bought it ages ago on a whim when I saw the author sitting ignored next to a big pile of his books in WH Smith. It's signed and everything...

2) Mappa Mundi by Justina Robson
A fairly safe bet. 600-odd pages of SF should keep me going for a bit.

3)Collins Pocket French Dictionary
Good for deciphering menu items.

4)Arthur and George by Julian Barnes
A bit unsatisfactory, this book, as it's a very large paperback, of a sort which generally doesn't travel well. However, I don't think I'll manage to finish before I set off so it might as well come with me.

Why I don't think John Sutherland is related to Keifer

I knew he was an elderly academic, but I still imagined him as better looking than this. That is why I don't approve of putting author's publicity photos on books: it gives me the chance to exercise my predjudices, of which I have many.

Maybe I should begin a quest for the worst author photo ever. Mind you, I've already got one of Spider Robinson which I suspect might be world-beating...

In other, less abusive news, the Booker longlist has been published and you know what? Because I'm not part of an organised book club I don't have read any of them unless I want to! Oh joy! (I am now capering, but you'll just have to imagine it.)

How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland

I saw the title of this book and began to worry that my usual method (running my eyes along the words and letting pictures form in my head) was inadequate. Ever since my twenties, when I decided to leave the genre ghetto and occasionally read something other than science fiction, I have worried that there is something wrong with me because I spend a lot of time wishing the pace of the story would pick up a bit rather than marveling at the richness of the prose. Illogically enough, I hoped there might be some sort of lit. crit. magic bullet which would enable me to “get” the sort of books that win prizes rather than finding most of them tedious.

Much of “How to Read a Novel” is not about reading books at all, but about the various cunning ploys used by publishers to sell them. Much of the rest of it seems to be a collection of things John Sutherland wanted to get off his chest after his stint as a Booker Prize judge. When Mr Sutherland gets around to discussing the actual reading, his line is that no type of novel is intrinsically any better than any other type, and no one person's reading of a novel is more correct than anyone else's. This is admirably egalitarian, but it leaves me no further forward in my quest to better appreciate fiction. My sense of having been cheated by the book was enhanced by the fact the I had read huge swathes of it already – they had been published in the Guardian! According to my Academic Auntie, the book I should have read if I wanted to get more out of my novel reading is “Literary Theory” by Terry Eagleton.

Despite the fact that I cannot really recommend this book, there were some parts I enjoyed. Like the bit about wanting to write in the margin. More people should do this. Like Mr Sutherland, I see it as participation rather than vandalism and I enjoy reading marginalia left in a book by someone else. I once borrowed a book from my sister that had “C- See me.” written in red pen on the final page. This perfectly summed up the book in question which had been OK, but nothing like the author's best work. So all I have really learned is to keep a pencil handy when reading in order to add my own contributions.

The Descent - Jeff Long

This is a very special book. It was given to me by a friend who acquired it on a caving trip to Papua New Guinnea, with the plan that I would subsequently review it for the caving club journal. As I have missed the deadline for the next journal, this is a high-tech preview of something our dead tree afficionados won't see til winter!

One of the first things to arouse my suspicions was the quote on the front cover which said “One major takedown of a read. A pageburner.”. Surely the expression is “pageturner”? “Pageburner” sounds as if I might want to set fire to this book. Suspicions were confirmed when I glanced inside the back cover to find the words, “Please burn me as I am undoubtedly one of the most appalling books ever written” penned by notorious UK caver Joel Corrigan. I disobeyed orders and read it instead.

I have to admit that Mr Corrigan has a point. This is a very, very badly written book. Firstly the premise of it is just stupid: all the caves in the world link up into one giant master system which is inhabited by savage hominids evolved to live underground. These creatures, named “Hadals” emerge in order to eat, enslave or just mutilate humans. The main part of the book then follows two rival quests: a collection a religious scholars decides that the underworld is a literal hell, therefore there might be a real, live Satan who they could find and broker a truce with. Meanwhile, a global company puts together an team of explorers for a landgrab of underground real estate. What makes the book awful, though, is that the author has obviously not done any research at all. In this book radios work underground and it is possible to look at the earth's mantle through a crack in a rock. At one point a Himalayan expedition is trapped by a storm and their gas canisters run out. The author thinks this will be a problem for them because they won't be able to get their regular caffeine fix, not because they will now be unable to melt snow and will therefore die of thirst! Then there is the stupid way in which the plot turns on the fact that the Hadals can be reincarnated by taking over someone else's body at the moment they die. This key fact is not revealed until very near the end of the book. By this time we have already had a big war between humans and Hadals in which apparently nobody noticed this happening! Perhaps the worst abuse of logic in the book is when the underground expedition picks up a radio distress call which will be sent by that same expedition in the future. This is explained away as being due to the radio signal bouncing off rock strata – backwards in time? I wish I had some sort of award to give out for the clumsiest use of foreshadowing in a literary work 'cos I think I've found the winner right here.

The characters in The Descent seem thin and unbelievable. For example, one of the main characters is a beautiful feminist nun – a combination which strikes me as desperately unlikely! The expedition to claim the underworld for the evil corporate bosses is filled with people who are nothing more than a name which maps to a sticky end. I couldn't keep track of all these people and what's more I didn't give a stuff what happened to them. This meant that all the bits of the book which managed not to be bad were boring instead. In fact, large amounts of this book should have been cut out by the editor. At 560 pages of tosh it is way too long for something meant to be light reading. There are several completely pointless chapters which just seem to be there because the author thought of another unpleasant way for someone to be killed – these could have gone for a start!

In many ways the notes in the margins of this book are better than the story printed in it. We find fascinating glimpses of expedition life such as the scribbled pencil list of things to go on the helicopter, survey data, and a few torn out pages which have been used by the Papuan porters as cigarette papers. I think we need to a take a minute to consider the challenges faced by the expedition members. Spare a thought for them sitting in the jungle, watching the endless rain and tending their tropical ulcers with only 500g of biscuits a day and a copy of “The Descent” to sustain them.

Although in many ways The Descent is utterly rubbish, I feel that reading it was a natural part of the caving lifestyle. Cavers will always want to do things the hard way. They enjoy cold, dirt, darkness and hardship. They chose to drink in the Hunter's* where the grim surroundings are surpassed only by the grudging service. They will always drink the scariest, most sediment-filled form of ale or scrumpy on offer. The Descent fits in perfectly with this perverse mentality and I therefore expect that this copy will be “enjoyed” by many more of us before it finally falls apart.

Finally, my especial, most favouritest piece of deathless prose from the book is:
“He was the only one who knew it, but they were about to get sodomised by an old-fashioned Himalayan tempest.”

Brilliant!

*I had a quick search online, hoping to make that word a link to an amusing description of the many shortcomings of the Hunter's Lodge, but almost unbelievably no-one has done it! The nearest I could get was the UK Pub Guide which described it as "unprepossessing". That's like describing the Atlantic as "damp".

Leave It To Psmith - P. G. Wodehouse

Hurrah for Wodehouse and an especial hurrah for Psmith! For those who have yet to encounter Psmith, he is an eccentric, aristocratic young man, who has changed his name from the more pedestrian spelling “Smith” in a kind of personal rebranding exercise. Psmith has been a favourite of mine for some years now, being as articulate and immaculately attired as Saki’s Clovis, but much less of a git.

“Leave It To Psmith” sees our hero in reduced circumstances after resigning from a job supplied by his fish magnate uncle, due to a fundamental belief that Billingsgate fish market is no place for a Shropshire Psmith. Despite needing to secure employment, he is unable to resist the temptation to impersonate Canadian poet Ralston McTod in order to secure an invitation to castle Blandings and pursue the beautiful Eve Halliday there. Even before his arrival, Psmith becomes enmeshing in a plot to steal Lady Constance’s diamond necklace – but there are several rival plots to pinch it…

As always with Wodehouse, the best thing about it is the distinctive use of language, which starts finding its way into your everyday speech until the cry goes up in the gentleman’s clubs of Kensington: “BookClubOfOne has been on the Wodehouse again!”

One of my favourite bits is when we find Psmith attempting to pass as a poet while speaking to a horrifyingly wet lady poetess:
“’I sometimes think, Miss Peavey, that flowers must be the souls of little children who have died in their innocence.’
‘What a beautiful thought, Mr McTod!’ exclaimed Miss Peavey rapturously.
‘Yes.’ agreed Psmith, “Don’t pinch it. It’s copyright.””

The Story So Far:

Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was a member of a book club. The wine and the nibbles were OK*, the problem was the books. It seemed to me that in a bid to avoid causing any upset, other members of the group were deliberately picking the blandest books they had ever read. This one, for example. Each month we would meet, only to discover that half the group hadn’t made it through their assigned soporific. We would then have a discussion in which pretty much everyone seemed far too polite (or maybe far too afraid of being thought an ignorant peasant) to offer any genuine opinions. I hung in there, though. Sooner or later it would be my turn to chose the book for the month, and I meant to stir things up a bit, though I hadn’t yet decided whether my weapon of choice would be “Crash” or “American Psycho”… Unfortunately it was not to be. The book club was killed by somebody nominating “Hard Times” by Charles Dickens, and every time the organiser tried to book the next meeting, it would turn out that no one had managed to read it yet and everyone wanted extra time.

It is now about 5 years later and the book club has reformed, but in the meantime what little patience I ever had seems to have evaporated. Having received a list of the books they plan to read, I have chosen not to rejoin. As I am a miserable, old curmudgeon, I have formed a book club of one.

I will read the books I fancy reading and say what I like about them.
I am not interested in looking clever.
I am not interested in reading women’s books about feelings.
I expect I will miss the nibbles…



*Apart from one meeting just after Christmas when the majority of the group were “detoxing” in the mistaken belief that a month of mince pies can be nullified by a week of bottled water.