Life happens between books

Warning: Wardrobe May Contain Lion And Traces Of Snow

2011-08-27T12:46:00.020+01:00

I've just read a book that reminded me of how I used to feel when I was around 11 and YEARNED with all my heart for life to be less real than it is. It was (or, at the time of writing, will be, as not in fact published till September 15th) The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I won't do any of that smug "I've got a proof copy" stuff, or indeed add any spoilers, so if I say it's AS GOOD AS "JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR NORRELL" you will know what I mean, and if you don't you probably aren't a huge fan of Wardrobe literature.
Wardrobe literature, since you ask (yeah yeah), is anything that lets you believe that somewhere, if you can only find it, there is a door to somewhere amazing, or a box that contains something amazing, or a tiny odd shop that sells something amazing, etc etc, that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the boring old tax-paying workaday hangover road-rage noisy-neighbour Real World is just a waiting room for somewhere much better, where anything is possible. Wardrobe literature introduces the real world and then dismisses it. It doesn't bamboozle you by throwing you headfirst into Middle Earth or Earthsea, like a travel brochure for somewhere exotic you will never visit and don't speak the language anyway. Devotees of wardrobe literature get excited by antique shops and libraries. They feel a prickling of the hairs on the back of their necks when they see, you've guessed it, a large old wardrobe, or a hidden door, or dusty attic steps. They stop telling people how excited these things make them because they worry that it sounds a bit childish, but the feeling never goes. The phrase "based on a true story" makes them sigh heavily and switch off.
I have attached a very sketchy reading list below. If I have glaringly omitted anything, please let me know...

Suggested Wardrobe Literature for adults:

The Solitudes, Little Big - John Crowley
Declare, Last Call - Tim Powers
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susannah Clarke
The Twelfth Enchantment - David Liss
The Magicians - Lev Grossman
The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
Waking The Moon - Elizabeth Hand
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Rivers Of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Farundell - L R Fredericks
The Glamour - Christopher Priest
The Book Of Skulls - Robert Silverburg
Mockingbird - Sean Stewart
Time And Again - Jack Finney
Prospero's Children - Jan Siegel
Weaveworld - Clive Barker

Suggested Wardrobe Literature for children:

Anything by the extraordinary and unmatchable Diana Wynne Jones
The Dark Is Rising series - Susan Cooper
The Perilous Gard - Marie Pope Osborne
Marianne Dreams, Thursday - Catherine Storr
Castle Of Bone - Penelope Farmer
Elidor , The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen, The Owl Service - Alan Garner
A Traveller In Time - Alison Uttley
The Giant Under The Snow - John Gordon
Mistress Masham's Repose - T H White
The Children Of Green Knowe - Lucy Boston
Stravaganza: City Of Masks - Mary Hoffman

The House Of Arden - E Nesbit
Tom's Midnight Garden - Philippa Pearce
And, it goes without saying, the Narnia books by C S Lewis.

How I Pass The Time When I'm Unable To Sleep

2011-06-10T11:45:00.003+01:00

I am the very model of a blogger unreliable,
My application's sketchy and my updates rarely viable,
My posting is erratic and my facts unverifiable,
I am the very model of a blogger unreliable.

Not Funny

2011-06-07T14:45:00.006+01:00

Oh calm down, I don't mean "Life Is Very Serious" or anything like that. Just that since I haven't written anything for ages I felt I had to break the back of it at some point, and I have nothing amusing to frilly it up with. This will be one of those po-faced and humourless blog entries that should have been written by a 17 year old boy striving to understand the mundanity of life, followed by discovering the Nietzschean darkness of his tormented soul, before going crazy with a paintball gun in the local dry-cleaner's (that's the PG version).
I apologise if any of you are 17 year old boys. If you are, my goodness have you subscribed to the wrong blog feed. All the hot teenage wannabe-Goth chicks are on MySpace, and anyway they fancy Robert Pattinson (really no idea why, I'm with you on that one).
So here's the problem - I used to write this because it made me snigger in a frankly immature way. I am now my own worst critic; every time I start a blog entry I find my lip curling in what practised writers refer to as the "Sarcastic Bystander" way. The hint, apparently, to avoid taking yourself too seriously, is to imagine everything you write being read aloud by a sarcastic bystander: "Lolita, my light, my life, my sin, my soul... seriously Vlad, you fancy yourself a bit with the poncey alliteration, don't you?"
ANYway. Upshot is I have decided not to be such a prat about blogging. I will do this more often. Even if I sneer at myself as I do it. Possibly I will (in the manner of Stella Gibbons putting asterisks next to the prose passages she was most proud of in Cold Comfort Farm) highlight selected blog entries with "well, it made me laugh, anyway". Or just do a David Sedaris and actually be funny...

Fingers Crossed

2011-02-14T16:47:00.005Z

Just had an email from First Direct saying they would send me some paperwork to be signed, and "subject to the usual checks" I would soon become one of the happy Elect, frolicking in a flowery meadow of elite-hood, rather than wearing the scarlet letter S.
Of course now I'm panicking - will their "usual checks" be the equivalent of Talking To Her Mates After A Reasonably Good First Date? Will they find out that, financially speaking, I have a tendency to cry when drinking gin and stand on pub tables slurring mournfully along to "Don't Cry Out Loud"? Am I the kind of bank customer who equates to a slightly needy ex who sticks Garfield cartoons to her fridge and has a rear car window shelf full of cuddly toys and bejewelled tissue-box holders?
My other worry (even more irrational) is that I will turn out to be the victim of a huge scam - and that First Direct doesn't exist at all, but is an offshoot of Reverend James Willy Enterprises plc - and I and countless others have fallen victim to their seductive ads showing happy bankers talking to "real people" (or no-life "we're all MAD here!!!!!!" wonks as per the ad, but I digress).

But all of this is academic at the moment, as I wait by the letterbox, like a Victorian soldier's sweetheart, waiting for a tiny billet doux to raise my spirits... Oh First Direct, will you be my Valentine?

"Vouchsafe how many years you have resided at your present address, fair maid", quoth he.

You say Santander and I say Salander

2011-01-27T12:30:00.004Z

Had another exciting (! SO not.) exchange with my current financial services provider, the extraordinary circus sideshow that is Banco Abbey De Santander Nacional or whatever (regularly voted number 1 for appalling customer service! No argument from this customer, oh no). Who blocked my card because of "an unusual transaction". Then claimed they hadn't blocked it, but said they'd unblock it. The "unusual transaction" was a direct debit of £3.29 that goes out once a week, regular as clockwork. The man in the Complaints department agreed that it was a strange course of action to take - but hey, that's the wacky world o' banking! So yet again I'm vowing to move to First Direct (please don't ruin my day by telling me they're just as bad, I'M NOT LISTENING LA LA LA). When I have a day off. And I will follow this by channelling Lisbeth Salander for enough time to hack their website to say "We're Crap! And Proud Of It! And There's NOTHING You Can Do! Ha Ha Ha!!!" Well, I can dream anyway.
Apart from that brief blip, a good week so far - so good, in fact, that I have a sore shoulder from trudging home, my bag straining at the seams with proof copies of things I ACTUALLY WANT TO READ. I'm amazed I have time to update at all. In fact I haven't.
And finally: an invoice we received the other day. Nice to know the lovely Bookpoint are branching out and providing other items than books and stationery.

What the more chi-chi menus describe as "a melange".

2011-01-20T12:17:00.004Z

How swiftly time passes when you're failing to update a blog (here I would like you to imagine a montage of tiny scenes from my daily life, book pages blurring as I read, hair growing inch by inch as time speeds by, waistline also increasing exponentially as the twin evils of Christmas and We Have To Finish These Leftovers wreak their vile havoc, all to the haunting strains of "Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler On The Roof).

That's enough of that.

There is very little to say about Christmas 2010 apart from the fact that it was calm, relaxed, and I got everything I wanted. I have accordingly struck at least one ridiculously expensive perfume off my WANT list.

Oh yes, we went on holiday! I would elaborate, but it was Thailand again, and I've already bored you all with tales of the slow loris we saw in Khao Lak AND my near-addiction to chilis, so I won't go on, except to say that no, we do not have a sex-dungeon full of ladyboys (in reply to people who say with deep suspicion "Thailand again?"). I had a moment while eating a VERY HOT Panang curry where the endorphin rush brought on by the chilis caused the inside of my head to start to expand, and I may or may not have seen the face of Buddha in a thousand revolving lotuses, or perhaps that was the lemongrass martini I had had several of beforehand. Either way, sod you, Carlos Castaneda.

I read, and was bowled over by, Dark Matter by Michelle Paver. I think there's some kind of blind spot that makes authors of grownup fiction think that writing kids' books must be a piece of cake (McNab, Patterson, Ryan, Grisham, I'm looking at you and frowning), despite the fact that this is completely untrue. Talented authors of kids' books are rare and wonderful things, and having once written successfully for children they seem better able to turn their hands to very good adult fiction (Geraldine McCaughrean, Diana Wynne Jones, etc). Dark Matter is so creepy and implicit that I was very glad indeed I was reading it in the sweltering Thai sunshine - it's set in the Arctic, about a jolly 1930s group of exploring chaps who fall foul of some nameless malevolent presence in the long wastes of the sunless Arctic winter. Fabulously atmospheric and, like M R James, best read in a brightly-lit house full of people. HIGHLY recommended.

Updates to ensue more regularly...

Perfume, pubs, people-watching, all of that.

2010-09-16T22:43:00.016+01:00

So in the pub the other night - people-watching, like one does. At the table next to us, a couple. We decided (after they'd gone, we're not animals, for God's sake) that they were either a long-married couple on the verge of meltdown ("You bastard, Adrian, I told you not to gamble away the solar panel subsidy!!!") OR on a first date where they had both been grossly misrepresented, either by mutual friends ("They said you looked like Brad Pitt!" "Well they said you looked like someone off Strictly Come Dancing, but they didn't mention it was Anne Widdecombe!") or themselves ("Fun-loving curvy blond/e... loads of personality... my mum says I'm handsome..." fill in gap).
At some point during the starter I turned to my brother-in-law, who takes us out to dinner regularly to thank us for allowing him to occasionally sleep on the cardboard placemat we like to call a spare bed (for work purposes only - he has a very nice family up North). I said "Are you covered in Vicks?". In my defence, he hadn't been feeling well. He was slightly taken aback, and said no, so I remained mildly confused. Until the angry couple left, after having spent most of the evening (while they weren't glaring at each other) texting other people. And I realised it was her perfume, namely (and I will name names) "Pomegranate Noir" by Jo Malone.
Don't get me wrong, I like it, especially on my friend Nix, but it is boldly heavy on what it claims to be opoponax (??? answers on a postcard), pepper, and patchouli. These are its claims, but I say there's a truckload of eucalyptus in there too. In large and over-optimistic first-date splash-it-all-over amounts, it smells of Vicks Vaporub. Or a koala, startled in the act of shoplifting some Vicks Vaporub and a pomegranate. And why not, if I was Jo Malone I'd use some high-flown word like "opoponax" rather than "Vicks".
At this moment I wondered whether their burgeoning relationship could have been salvaged if he hadn't got all the wrong olfactory signals, and either thought she had flu or was perhaps an aggressive man.

YOU KNOW YOU WANT IT. LOOK AT HER. ALL WOMAN.

..EH???

2010-09-16T13:04:00.006+01:00

I'm going to blame my increasing deafness on waxy build-up (sorry, if you're eating) and the poor acoustic quality of the average restaurant/pub. I never seem to have problems at home or, mostly, at work. But I have been suffering from what I can only call "Freudian deafness" for years - in my previous career in Frenchish Airways I spent a lot of time on the phone and had to double-check the obvious mispronunciations : "Caen" instead of "Cannes", "Dakar" for "Dhaka", and on one memorable occasion something that could have been Biarritz, Bayreuth or Beirut. The travel agent wasn't sure which one the customer wanted (my tip? Don't book with them EVER), so I ended up saying "Do they want surfing, opera or bomb-craters?". She didn't know that either. It was a 66% chance the customer ended up in the wrong place.
I also frequently mis-heard the word "y-fronts" for the far more commonly used "reference" ("If I could just take down your y-fronts for this booking?"). Oh, the hilarity.
The end result of constantly saying "Sorry, could you repeat that?" is, inevitably, that your ears get lazy and you say it to everything. But it helps if at least the context is an indication of where the conversation should have been going - after all, y-fronts rarely get mentioned in the context of booking an airline ticket. Mr F and I went out for dinner on Saturday, to a fantastically nice (if slightly pricey) old-school proper Italian restaurant (osso bucco, Chianti, rabbit ragu, that kind of shenanigans) and while it was lovely, the acoustics were slightly trying. And at one point, while he was attempting to discuss burning news issues of the day (Koran-burning, in fact), I said "Sorry?" once too often. "THE PASTOR, THE PASTOR!!!" he yelled. Three waiters looked up in panic. Try saying it aloud. It wasn't just me.

Sorry again

2010-09-13T12:49:00.002+01:00

The "posting regularly" issue seems to be a tricky one for me. I promise I'll start again now the days are chillier and there's less to do in the sun at lunchtime. In the meantime, here is a picture of my lovely new socks, which I was forced to buy as shoes now seem to be obligatory. I miss my FitFlops.

Life Isn't Fair, Darling

2010-08-09T13:00:00.004+01:00

I am struck by the TOTAL UNFAIRNESS OF LIFE as I sit here with a COLD, in SUMMER, gloomily stuffing my face with Day Nurse capsules and contemplating whether to go and buy more Kleenex or just use loo roll to blow my already-reddening nose. I can handle sunburn in summer (and in fact am often forced to, what with the gingerness and generally lax attitude to sunscreen) but to have a cold in August seems rankly mean of Fate or whoever. Apparently the loo roll option is unwise, as it's generally made from wood pulp (rougher on the face) rather than cotton pulp. Oh, who cares anyway. Whatever happens I'm going to look like a crimson Spacehopper for the next week. The summer cold is particularly vile because you can't even wrap yourself in a duvet and sweat it out in front of a nice warm fire - and since I'm on a stupid stupid Atkins-type diet I can't have honey in my hot lemon and honey. Or hot lemon, as it now would be if I could face anything hot.
ANYWAY.
Reading a lot of amazingly good stuff at the moment -
the new Kate Atkinson ("Started Early, Took My Dog", due out 18th August), always good to see Jackson Brodie again, I'll let you know how it goes;
a quite extraordinary book by Tim Powers called "Last Call" which manages to convince you that Bugsy Siegel was in fact the last but one Fisher King, that the Castle Perilous is a casino in Las Vegas, and that if you ever play poker with Tarot cards you risk losing your immortal soul;
Procopius's "Secret History" which is basically the Byzantine version of the National Enquirer (you'll never guess how the Empress Theodora used to supplement her income in those pre-imperial career days!! No, really!!) - scandalous, gossipy, unputdownable;
"Ottoline And The Yellow Cat" by Chris Riddell, a completely charming childrens' book with illustrations worthy of Edward Gorey (but more optimistic).
I will also report back on "Brooklyn" by Colm Toibin and "Bel Canto" by Ann Patchett (book group choices) when I've got them out of the way. Sadly the cold has turned my brain into porridge and all I secretly want to do is read comics.

Wasps. Rubbish.

2010-07-10T12:31:00.005+01:00

Torvill & Dean. Possibly too large to fit in a halogen uplighter lampshade.

Phew, what a scorcher. Having the windows open at all times has meant a lot more in the way of flying wildlife indoors. This has been great for the cats, who like to show what terrifying predators they are by messily dismembering a daddy-long-legs or two on the carpet, before losing interest and leaving us to clear up the crime scene. However, not so great for us, as the insect population seem drawn in droves to the halogen uplighter, and die smokily and pungently in it. I'd like to give you an image here: the tragic lovers in Torvill & Dean's interpretation of Ravel's Bolero, whirling round and round gracefully before hurling themselves into a volcano. Imagine that, only substitute a few flies and the odd wasp for Torvill & Dean. No music, obviously. It's amazing how strong the smell of burnt wasp is. Like burning hair, but nastier and a lot more persistent. Also, when you look up at the uplighter from beneath, the pretty glass shade is full of the crispy silhouettes of dead insects. Nice.

Yu in Chiswik area? Yu seek basment? Look no more furthers!

2010-07-02T13:18:00.005+01:00

spe·cious –adjective
1. apparently good or right though lacking real merit; superficially pleasing or plausible
2. pleasing to the eye but deceptive.

So that's probably not a 10 foot celling.

*With thanks to the eagle eye of Mr Fishwife, who has learnt, over the years, that nothing pleases me more than total, nitpicking, pedantry.

Paranoia

2010-06-15T12:20:00.009+01:00

So after some months of quite hair-raising ineptitude on the part of Banco Santander De Abbey National (or whatever), I am in the process of switching to First Direct, mostly because I haven't heard anybody I know moan about them so far. This, however, involves sending them a current bank statement - IN THE POST??? ARE THEY MAD???
I have a problem with paranoia - being part of a generation brought up on Watergate, Vietnam, etc, my first reaction to anything is to wonder what's in it for somebody else. Why would that nice Chinese general choose me, out of all the possible bank account holders in the world, to look after $1,000,000 for him until he can defect to the West? Ditto the Portuguese National Lottery (whose email address, oddly, is in Russia), who so much want me to win that the fact that I never bought a ticket seems no obstacle - and some unspecified kindly-intentioned do-gooders in Nigeria who have found me to be the closest living relative of deceased billionaire Franklin Ngombo? Flattered as I am by their touching faith in my honesty, I have had to decline so many of these offers I now feel like Scrooge. I am tormented at night by visions of poor Reverend James Willy of Unicef (his real name! But of course probably not), wringing his hands and wondering why I have not replied to his email begging me to look after orphanage funds because, and I quote, THE CHILDREN TODAY IS OUR FUTURE UNICEF HAVE BEEN USING ALL MEANS TO MAKE SURE THE WORLD HAVE A NEW CHANGE BY CONTRIBUTION FROM GOOD MINDED PEOPLE ALL OVER THE WORLD WHO DONATE TO MAKE SURE THE WORLD IS GOOD FOR ALL HUMAN (Capitals and lack of punctuation all courtesy of the Rev Willy).
Having become the cynical old bag I now am, I wouldn't consider giving anybody even my postcode these days - I am aware that all my social networking shenanigans links to itself, Facebook to Twitter to Blogger etc, but hopefully it's a closed loop - and I should be grateful that I am so wary of handing information out that I even balk at sending a bank statement to another bank - but I still am. On the plus side, I don't do actual conspiracy theories - life's too short, and I'm too busy losing sleep over the unfortunate General Weng and his desperate attempts to get his money into my bank account, the poor love.

In which I blame the ash cloud, the election, BA and George Osborne (just because he's a little tick).

2010-05-25T15:12:00.009+01:00

This is terrible. I apologise hugely. I have developed a fear of posting in direct proportion to how long I've left it. It is exactly like the syndrome where you haven't done the essay so you don't go to the lecture, which means you don't get the next essay. I may do the blog equivalent of sneaking about avoiding lecturers in a minute. However there are many factors I can pretend to blame, so I am going to pretend that it was a combination of BA strikes, the ashcloud, the election, the Lost Booker Prize, and possibly also George Osborne (because he has a face you couldn't tire of slapping) rather than my own idleness and lack of inspiration.
Anyway - on my own in the shop today, a joy I have experienced before - realising that cheese on crackers is possibly not a meal designed to be eaten at the till. In fact I now know that the only food that can be eaten without scattering crumbs (or large pieces of mayonnaisey chicken) all over you/the till/books is in fact a large piece of cold meat, without marinade (too messy) or breadcrumb coating (too friable). You will run the risk of looking like somebody at a Ye Olde Joust 'N' Disco Barbeque, but far better that than getting mayonnaise on a customer order.
More later when the extraordinary aroma of TCP from a rather peculiar customer has dissipated and I can wipe my watering eyes enough to see the computer.

Why I am very trying to watch television with.

2010-04-23T22:20:00.006+01:00

Imagine you're watching something you particularly like on television. A cliffhangingly suspenseful thriller, perhaps. A lyrical pastoral idyll in period costume. A comedy. Here is a piece of advice I will give you: do not ever watch it with me. A few examples follow, and imagine they're being uttered during the moments where someone on screen is saying something vital to the plot:

Sense & Sensibility/Emma/Cranford : "Ooh! Loooovely wisteria! I'd love a dress that draped like that. Seriously, would you ever consider wearing a tailcoat? Those white breeches didn't do a lot for men, did they?"...

Ashes To Ashes/ Life On Mars : "THE CLASH! Yay I love this song! Pause it, pause it, I'm just going to find the CD... OK don't. What is it about Gene Hunt, honestly? I don't remotely fancy Philip actual Glenister. I think the graffiti represents death. I think he's actually Sam Tyler. Oh I love her boots. I think I had a pair of those in 1983, or maybe Kate did..."

Our Mutual Friend/Bleak House: "Ooh! Looooovely candelabra! God imagine not washing your hair for weeks. My scalp feels itchy. Why is Dickens always so foggy and greasy? Where's Jack The Ripper? Wouldn't this benefit from a bit of Jack The Ripper?"

Desperate Housewives: "That's me. I do exactly that. That's exactly me. No, she is. No, maybe her. You're a man, is she attractive? Is she too skinny? Could we get that shrubbery?"

Glee: (in floods of sentimental Disney tears) "I love this song. I love that song. Oh God, Lionel Ritchie, how lame. Oh they have to do Don't Rain On My Parade again"...

And so forth. I actually never talk through Mr Fishwife's chosen television moments (rugby, The Pacific, occasional orgies of grainy B&W tank footage on what we call the Hitler Death Channel) because what would I say? "Oooh! Loooovely scrum cap. Was their last kit pink? Did he really just shoot that Japanese POW? That's outrageous. Is that a Panzer? Did Albert Speer design those tents? Why are we in Melbourne all of a sudden?" etc. Apart, obviously, from my absolute jawdrop moment last week with the schmancy pink Stade Francais kit, I usually read. You may well imagine he gets a better deal than I do, and I would have to agree with you.

Sunday Miscellany

2010-04-11T15:50:00.008+01:00

Sunday afternoon, and I'll just get past the "What I had for lunch" bit: cheddar, smoked ham, unsalted butter and wasabi on crusty fresh white bread. With a 10-litre mug of builder's tea. Now just smacking my lips and twiddling my hands mid-air with a distant expression on my face as I try to remember if there's anything cake-related in the kitchen, and, if not, whether I can be arsed to make a whole batch of chocolate brownie cupcakes just to have one now. Or maybe four. Laziness will probably win out over greed, which is a good thing as I stopped being able to describe myself as "willowy" sometime in my 20s, and recently have wondered whether "approximately humanoid" is acceptable as a description.

Mr Fishwife is watching some rugby - I speak as one who knows very little about rugby, but even I can see that this is just rugby-for-the-sake-of-watching-rugby: The teams are both dressed like Where's Wally*, although for clarity one team is in red/white stripes and the other is in red/ivory, and although I can't read very well from here (short sight, damn it) it appears to be Whifflet playing Sproin, which can hardly be major league stuff. In fact it's so minor league I am probably down on the team list as a substitute prop-forward.

I, on the other hand, am doing something useful and worthwhile - frenziedly editing the Ocado order I placed yesterday, mostly at 7 pm but partly at 1 am. HOW did those family packs of Magnum choc ices end up in there? Has somebody hacked my Ocado account? That would explain the caramel syrup, the 4 packs of Chunky Peanut Butter KitKats, the clearance Easter eggs (half price!!). It is the work of seconds to high-mindedly remove them and replace them with fresh fruit and organic courgettes. If, you know, it wasn't vitally important that I wash my hair first. Damn, too late to edit. Oh well.
I should point out that I am deeply in love with Ocado - why has it taken me this long to realise that somebody else will not only push the heavy trolley round the supermarket but also deliver it? In a van painted to look like an onion? And send you a little text message beforehand telling you to expect Vladimir In The Onion Van??? Obviously my mind was on, er, higher things.

The author would like to state that she has received no incentive, financial or otherwise, to write a favourable piece about Ocado Ltd Online Retail. More's the pity. Although they did once sub me a free bottle of Macon-Lugny because they didn't have the bread rolls I was after, which in value for money terms was quite a result. I keep ordering the bread rolls, in a triumph of hope over experience, but sadly I mostly get bread rolls.

*Should just add : the rugby has now become an altogether higher-grade, Heineken Cup affair. Stade Francais are playing. They appear to be dressed as Malibu Barbie, in full head-to-toe sugar pink, with natty matching sugar-pink socks and scrum caps. The kit was obviously designed by Hello Kitty, although I probably won't be telling them that to their faces.

Forward planning

2010-03-30T12:50:00.002+01:00

Today I forgot my lunch.
I also forgot (although less of an obvious oversight, given the weather) sunglasses, which would have been useful for some of the day, and an umbrella, which would have been useful for the other half.
I forgot that couscous is not ideal when eaten with a fork at the best of times, but especially when eaten with a fork over your keyboard while perched on an inappropriately-sized Ikea barstool at a worktop the incorrect height.
I forgot those Creme Eggs under the till were there for Easter Egg Hunt purposes, and not for general desultory staff consumption.
I also forgot that there is NO WAY to eat one quickly and furtively between dealing with customer enquiries, and the best a prospective bookbuyer can expect is for the staff member eating one (yes, that would be me) to panic, glance around frantically for somewhere to put half-eaten egg, fail as eggs traditionally don't stand on their ends, shove the whole thing into their mouth at once and end up communicating through a mixture of sign language and scribbled notes.
I forgot that accidentally chewing a piece of garish Creme Egg tinfoil can cause a nasty shock to your fillings.
I forgot that Converse Allstars are delightful footwear except when it rains, when they are frankly as useful as a blotting paper hat.
But I did get paid today, and tomorrow I will forget that whenever I spend more than 25p at a time my bank feels impelled to phone me and check my card hasn't been stolen by international racketeers.

Quite extraordinary

2010-03-10T12:31:00.007Z

Day off, and having just been out to get milk I am reclining on the sofa pretending to watch PMQ, although actually I'm reading. Phone rings. Against my better judgement I answer it, because while it's 99% likely to be a telemarketer, there's a 1% chance it might be someone I actually want to talk to.

Her: Hello, is that Mrs Fishwife?

Me: Speaking.

Her: This is the West London Carpet Cleaning Company - do you need any carpets or upholstery cleaning?

Me: No, thank you.

Her: Thank you for your time.

Me: Not at all.

WHY CAN'T IT ALWAYS BE LIKE THAT??????

I'm now starting to think I may have imagined it.

In a similar vein, I went to the bank with a Canadian bank draft (long story) to deposit - I took NOT ONLY my passport BUT ALSO my marriage certificate as the draft was made out to my maiden name. After several depressing attempts at this in the past ("Canadian dollars? I din know they had dollars!"), I was all prepared to argue the point that YES it was dated August 09 but NO it hadn't expired as it was a draft, see, it says draft here, not a cheque, and drafts don't expire, yes, that is me, here's my passport, blardy bla bla.

Lovely young Mr Gandhi of the Banco de Abbey Santander Nacionalista de Londres took one look, filled out a form, took two photocopies, et voila.

I am now back on the sofa dazedly watching something or other and wondering if I went to sleep last night and woke up in a parallel universe where everybody is helpful, efficient and polite. Obviously I will now have jinxed it, and Mr Ocado ("he will be delivering in the Courgette Van!!!") will spill a full bottle of fabric conditioner on the carpet and tread some cat food into it, snarl, punch me and steal the TV. Oh well.

An update: AND AND AND Mr Ocado was an hour early!!!!!! And (of course) charming. Although I'm always slightly disappointed that the Courgette Van (or Lemon, or Strawberry) isn't actually shaped like any of those things. Can't have everything...

Fancy-Schmancy

2010-02-25T12:42:00.014Z

"Is this the one you ordered, sir? Are you sure? Isn't it pretty! Here's the front label... aaaand the back label! Do you want to feel the print? It's embossed! And there's gold leaf on it!!!"

Sadly our waiter wasn't dressed quite this fruitily.

I got taken out for dinner yesterday, mm-hmmmm very nice; I actually wore a dress!!! Which is fantastically rare for me in winter - if there's one thing I hate more than draughty skirts it's TIGHTS. Nasty laddery chilly clingy things that they are. And every time we eat out (not so often, I hasten to add) I remember why I am sort of a liability in semi-swanky places:
When being fawned upon by the wine waiter I invariably find myself trying hard not to snort with laughter as I think of QVC presenters demonstrating Diamonique jewellery - much the same spokesmodel wrist action is used, whether what they're flourishing is a bottle of Chablis or a tennis bracelet (no, I have no idea what one is either) - it's the mime equivalent of "Nice, isn't it? Ooh, so pretty. Look at it from this angle. Now this one. Looooovely." - all of this while you're pretending to taste the wine, which frankly would have to be downright OFF for you to risk making the spokesmodel/sommelier cry at this point by saying No (unless you're one of those scary city-boy alpha-types who automatically rejects the wine just to show what an oenophile you are, and you betcha that's how you refer to yourself too, as well as bon viveur, you great ponce).
... Er, that was it. I had scallops with black pudding, and braised ox cheek with mash. Very nice too. And the wine was actually very good.

Plastic surgery for the thrifty

2010-02-18T14:40:00.006Z

I've just had a brainwave. Yesterday I was talking to someone I met on Twitter, but in REAL LIFE in a bar (legalese comment inserted here about preserving anonymity, yadda yadda, you know who you are, lady) about Botox and whether it's worth it - "Does it hurt?" I asked with horrified fascination - apparently the answer has a lot of f-words in it and a Yes. Also she said you can't move the top half of your face for ages and although everybody thinks you look younger, they also secretly wonder if you've had a stroke. So, although I'm not unhappy with the way I look for my age, I thought : GAFFER TAPE. You heard it here first. I'm not sure if they do something approaching flesh colour (or a range of flesh colours), but it's ideal. Can be removed at the end of the day with, surely, less pain than 27 facial injections. Aaaaaand, for the more semi-permanent Phil Spector effect, duct tape, which can then be hidden under the wig you have Superglued on.
You may end up looking like this:

..however I think you'll agree that a little suffering is necessary for true ageless beauty. Or you could just bite the bullet and have Botox, which I have to say anonymous Twitter lady was a great advert for. Or, if you're me, neither, just ensure all your lighting is low wattage.

Moan, moan, moan.

2010-02-16T12:48:00.005Z

Yeah yeah yeah, it's gorgeous. Try slogging across it in driving Arctic rain.

So Hammersmith bridge is closed all this week for construction work (obviously I've read all that stuff about NOT GIVING AWAY TOO MUCH PERSONAL INFO ON YOUR BLOG so as to avoid stalkage, but frankly there is only one bookshop in Barnes, so a determined stalker could find us fairly easily if pressed). Hammersmith Bridge is closed, which means that I have to get out of Hammersmith Tube, and walk across the bridge to get a further bus. Not too bad in the big scheme of commuting, I agree, but it's all relative - I'm so used to a few stops on the tube, wander out to the bus stop, tra la la. This bungs a whole fifteen minutes of exercise into my day, both ways, and furthermore it was absolutely chucking down this morning, so I spent this morning's little journey doing exclamations of indignation in my head - to the point where I was worried I'd start saying them out loud. Rough transcript as follows:

Oh bugger, it's... it's running off my nose! It itches! But my hands are too wet to wipe my nose! GET OUT OF MY WAY! Why are people with umbrellas incapable of moving to one side to let you pass? IT IS ILLEGAL TO CYCLE ON THE PAVEMENT!!!!! My nose itches! IT ITCHES!!! No really, hit me with your umbrella!!! DON'T BOTHER STOPPING, IT'S ONLY A BUS STOP AND YOU'RE ONLY A BUS!!!!!!!! There's a wet patch on this seat! Is it... me?

And so forth. My inner monologue on the way to work (when not muffled by the louder voice of whatever book I'm reading) tends to be a thing of sleepy oh wowness since I'm not fully awake until I've had my first coffee at 9.30ish. Today I have morphed into my occasional alter ego Mrs Freakishly Short Fuse. Sigh.

Adventures In Drunk Internet Shopping

2010-02-04T10:30:00.009Z

Hurrah! Paid again. And after doing the sensible stuff (big Ocado shop, paying bills, dreaming of an iPhone), I went slightly crazy on (shhhhhh) Amazon - well, I may work in a bookshop, but I feel no guilt in buying CDs, DVDs and books that are out of print on line, especially when they are cheaper than the postage required to get them to me. I consider myself an object lesson in How Not To Buy Stuff On The Internet, however, and here are several cautionary facts you should consider if, like many, you love and admire me so much you wish to emulate my every action (pause for snigger).

1) Internet shopping while drunk is a foolish, foolish thing.
2) If you do not know how big your oven is, how can you be sure that the nonstick roasting tin with removable rack will fit? Eh???
3) Absolutely nothing is the colour it appears on screen. Not the nail varnish, not the t-shirt. What appears a gorgeous deep fuchsia will inevitably turn out to be a deeply unflattering and nylon-y looking salmon. I speak the truth here.
4) Nobody needs more than 15 plain black long-sleeved tops.
5) If it doesn't say "brand new, unopened" it will smell. Or have a suspicious-looking stain.

The second week of every pay month is marked by lots and lots of tiny packages turning up for me at work, mostly CDs, often DVDs, with varying degrees of delight or shame. I can always tell how drunk I was when I placed the order (in my defence: at home, usually late Friday after big nice dinner and a bottle of wine, on Mr Fishwife's laptop, Me: "C'nIvergo nyour laptop?" Him: "DO NOT START SPENDING MONEY ON CRAP." Me: "Juss wanna look at amazon. Oh! Yay! I bought you a looooovely t-shirt!! What chest size are you again? Doesnmatter, I've already paid..." usw) by how embarrassing the item is when it turns up. Xanadu, anyone? The Best Of Grandmaster Flash And The Sugarhill Gang?

HOWEVER neither the Internet nor the demon drink had anything to do with my new-found love for Mad Men, although I have just received the DVD of season 1 and am feverishly planning a marathon of Old Fashioneds, waspie corsets and smoking everywhere. To which end I give you my new giant ladycrush and secret role model, the flawless, fabulous, plus-sized Joan.Earth has not anything to show more fair. Nor more curvy. Sadly her chief attractions are hidden behind the accordion, but what the hell. I promise I will never get so carried away by the combined temptations of Fabuloso Spanish Brandy and payday that I buy an accordion.

PS AND she was singing "C'est Magnifique".

So here it is.....

2009-12-24T12:45:00.002Z

Merry Christmas! Hope we get some more of this, but only after everybody's home.

Have a wonderful Christmas, whether religious or secular.

Oh come ONNN.

2009-12-19T12:49:00.002Z

'Tis the season to be pedantic, so who am I to fly in the face of tradition?
I have bought many packs of Christmas cards over the years, and they fall into two categories: Silly and Religious. This year is no exception, and I have some nice Nativity ones, which say "Merry Christmas" inside them, and some nice non-Nativity ones (geese, Miss Piggy and 1950s skaters, since you ask), which say "Season's greetings" or similar.
I am not particularly bothered about what Christmas cards say inside them - yes, we all know it's one of the Big Two of the Christian year, but I don't (as an agnostic myself) feel personally affronted if this is either pointed out to me or studiously (and with great PC) avoided.
After all, it's nice to think someone thought of you and sent you a card, whatever the feeling behind it.
HOWEVER. I bought some nice Robert Sabuda pop-up Christmas cards (well, I think they're nice, so that's the important thing), which combine some seriously Nativity pop-up images with some inoffensively snowman 'n' reindeer pop-up images (perfect for the rabid Zen Vegan in your life). And the one with the pop-up The Baby Jesus In A Manger says "Happy Holidays" in it.
Let's be honest, the sentiment "Happy Holidays" is designed to show Those Of Other (Or No) Faiths that while you wish them a nice break over the December 24th - January 2nd period, you wouldn't dream of trying to convert them at swordpoint like your ancestors might have done. Affixing this to a picture of The Baby Jesus is as pointless as asking people to come to church with you for a coffee. I appreciate the strenuous efforts the manufacturers were making to remain politically correct (and I am, as I may have already said, a fervent agnostic), but there are limits.

The unpronounceables

2009-12-04T12:27:00.004Z

I come from a family to whom second languages are a breeze, and often third/fourth languages (if you count Swiss-German/French dialect as a language and not just a dialect). I will just say here that my pathetic contribution is French, and that's it. I once had a lengthy conversation while Interrailing, sitting outside the umpteenth cathedral I refused to go into, with a charming ancient Italian bloke in my A-level Spanish. We understood each other perfectly. It helped that the girls and I had had some wine at lunch, also that he was slightly deaf. And at the point where it turned out he was trying to set me up with his son (not present) I feigned a sudden lack of interpretation skills.
Having a facility for languages, however, is actually no help at all in the world of bookselling. Many customers, and this is not at all a criticism, don't know how to pronounce the names of foreign writers, and frankly nor do we most of the time. I know in theory that Houellebecq is pronounced Wellbeck, but prefer to pronounce it Ooouelleblablablabecque. Ditto with Chuck Palahniuk, who is now officially Plalalalalalaniacccchhh. Or maybe it's easiest to say "It's in paperback fiction under H. Just before Elizabeth Jane Howard." - all of which brings back to me the early days of Salman Rushdie's fatwah, and how suddenly it was The Done Thing on the BBC news to refer to him as SoolmAAhn RooshdEE.
Certain words are also a minefield - I mean we all know in theory how to say "genre" but tend not to, as you end up sounding like a Saatchi underling trying to sell Tracey Emin's used pants to an awestruck art novice. Especially if you add the unforgiveable word "oeuvre" which, if not considerately and inclusively pronounced "hoover", marks you out as so pretentious you need shooting. I love Nabokov (sorry), and wouldn't dream of saying "oeuvre" about his body of work.
We recently invented some incorrect pronunciations (it was a quiet afternoon) for use on the more studiedly poncey customer : my personal favourite was Alain-Benet (to be pronounced like JonBenet), although he was run a close second by Dan Brun and Jean Greeshamm.

Dear Father Christmas

2009-11-21T12:27:00.007Z

I've moaned about this before, but the Mighty World Of Retail starts Christmas early. In our defence, a combination of postal strikes and far-flung relatives have caused the local customers to panic slightly about posting Christmas cards, so we now have a lot of them out. And advent calendars. Well, they start on the 1st of December, so there's my excuse. Oh, and obviously wrapping paper - those presents bound for New Zealand have to be seasonal. Oh, and books people might want to send like A Child's Christmas In Wales, yadda yadda yadda...

All in all, apart from not having Now That's What I Call Yuletide braying loudly in the background (we have no radio, no CD player, no speakers - not even on the PC - and the woman from the Performing Rights Society who rang to check didn't believe me, either), we have gone the way of all flesh and are now more or less 100% festive. I apologise. I also apologise for the microscopic specks of spectral green glitter on my face (thank you, Roger LaBorde stationery) that leap into vivid and scary life at certain angles but seem resistant to scrubbing. I am currently pretending I am a sparkly-faced Twilight-style vampirette, albeit one who was "turned" too old to stay young and glam for all eterniddeee.

In this scarily early spirit of festivity, I have composed my Christmas list (Mr Fishwife's favourite trick when asked what he would like for Christmas/birthdays is to reply vaguely "Oh, something nice.."). No excuses for me, here it is in all its magnificence. No hints.

1) This, to live in. I'd settle for a copy, built in a stately clearing of my choosing.

2) One of these. Alive, obviously, not in the form of a coat for some creepy oligarch's ho.

3) The Koh-I-Noor. 105 carats of pure bliss. I wouldn't wear it, far too big, but possibly I'd use it as a doorstop or something..

Go on, spoil me. And I honestly don't mind if I get two Koh-I-Noors. And I could always use the second St Pancras to keep my snow leopards in.

My Ears Were Not Made For This, an addendum...

2009-10-27T12:42:00.003Z

"Hold on there, baby, while I hide the bicycle pump from thieves... mmmHHMMMMM..."

I had completely forgotten about this, but was reminded by Mr Fishwife yesterday: if you listen very carefully to Let's Get It On by Marvin Gaye, as it's starting fading out and he's crooning seductive words of LERVE to his lucky laydeee, there is DEFINITELY the sound of one of those parpy parpy clown bicycle horns. Seriously. Every time I hear it I imagine he's suggestively honking the horn on his Grifter as he parks it behind the garage and starts taking his cycle clips off. Thank you, Mr F, for actually making me laugh out loud.

My Ears Were Not Made For This

2009-10-26T12:27:00.005Z

Currently, for some reason, I seem to be running on a very short fuse. Things that normally I would allow to wash over me are annoying me more than is strictly reasonable. And bizarrely a lot of them seem to be musical. There are too many songs out there that aren't trying hard enough. I'm aware this is very subjective so I apologise in advance if any of them is your personal favourite, but the tetch demands to be released...

1) Songs that fail to live up to the initial promise of the intro
Well, at the moment just the one: Sweet Child Of Mine by Guns and Roses. A sublime introduction that promises great things. And then, after a perfectly OK but not special set of verses and choruses, winds down to a dreary "we can't decide what to do with the end of this and are even singing about it... where do we go where do we go where do we go...". Poor effort all round, Mr Rose, must try harder.

2) Songs that are totally let down by an inappropriately jaunty bit
Here Comes The Night by Them/Van Morrison. What went wrong here? Excellent intro. Excellent chorus. And then the verse has a ridiculously misplaced Benny Hill oompah quality to it. Every time I hear it I want, in a Frankenstein way, to rip out the verses and replace them with something from the Doors.
Spirit Of Radio by Rush, and Jane by Jefferson Starship. What was wrong with those post-prog people?? Why couldn't they leave things alone and not meddle? These songs are the musical equivalent of a cake that has been iced, decorated, and then iced some more, and then soaked in rum, and then served in a lettuce basket with a smoked salmon garnish. Although when I say "smoked salmon garnish" I mean "startlingly embarrassing misguided reggae-style bridge". There's a point in the middle where you actually have the feeling that you're watching your father breakdance at a wedding. Dear God, somebody stop the horror.

3) Songs that are just downright lazy and were phoned in by artists too complacent to care if their work was sub-standard or not
Do I need to say any more than All You Need Is Love by the Beatles? Combining a dirgey sub-Maharishi melody with the most offensive tuba-driven chorus, this resembles nothing so much as a badly-organised minibus singalong on a mental hospital's Chessington day out. Except the singers aren't even pretending they're enjoying themselves. The wah-wah-wawah-waaaah trombone on the chorus sounds like the incidental music from a Carry On film, where Charles Hawtrey has just put on a hat full of custard. Poor, poor, poor.

That's all for now. There'll be more. I haven't even started on the worrying tendency to try to make things youth-accessible by adding rap sections yet.

A brief rant

2009-10-10T13:39:00.005+01:00

So the bookselling world rejoices in the extremely well-deserved Booker win of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. A marvellous and thoroughly absorbing read (as opposed to "absorbent" - Dan Brown's entire oeuvre springs to mind). And once again, a situation arises that any bookseller out there will be wearily familiar with. What, I ask the rest of you, would most people do on hearing that a book has been given a prize? Why, they may wish to buy it, or if not actually buy it, to pick it up and leaf through a few pages. So what do the publishers do, with distressing and lemming-like regularity, in the face of this sudden burst of publicity and interest? They re-issue the book with the words "Winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize" on the front cover. And while the book is being thus reissued, it is usually impossible to get copies. Which means that a good percentage of people who might otherwise have bought the book in a frenzy of literary good will, unable to get a copy right now this minute, may change their minds and not buy it at all. Seriously, has no publisher ever thought that it might be a good idea (and a huge financial saving) simply to print rolls of stickers saying "Winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize" and send them out to bookshops/distributors etc? I can't possibly be the only person who's had this idea...

Livin' La Vida Nigel

2009-10-03T12:15:00.008+01:00

There's a time when you really have to take a deep breath and shout "SENSE OF PROPORTION" at yourself, preferably aloud so you worry that the neighbours might have heard; hopefully you are therefore less likely to do it again. It happened to me this morning, when I was vaguely considering making chicken soup for lunch and found, to my horror, no chicken stock in the freezer. Imagine that. Appalling. I was brought up with a very Nigel Slater "get the most out of a meal" ethic - you never throw a roast chicken carcass away without first having stripped all remaining meat off for sandwiches, and having boiled the bones for stock, which then ends up as peculiar unlabelled bags in the freezer. At one point there were six, which was fine. But evidently we have eaten a lot of soup recently, hence the shocking stock drought. Good God, am I going to have to use (gasp) Knorr????? Pause for deep zen breathing and a lie down.
The Slater ethic has now filled my freezer and half my fridge with suspiciously anonymous bowls of whatnot. I acquired a Sharpie recently (the finest indelible write-anywhere marker in the world, excellent for surreptitiously correcting spelling on laminated airplane instruction cards) but the problem is that being indelible it can't be, obviously, erased - so Tupperware boxes have multiple scribbled-out messages on them that read "apple sauce, NO, RATATOUILLE tomato soup 1994". Items are only readily identifiable when defrosted, and sometimes leftover beef stew doesn't add a great deal to a fruit cake. A nice woman came into the shop the other week and (this happens a lot in Barnes) said "Does anybody want a bag of windfalls? We've got too many." And like the freezer-stuffing fool I am, I took two. Some painful hours of peeling, coring and throwing away the bruised half of each apple ensued - I now have six bags of apple sauce in the freezer too. Would it have been so hard to say no?
I should really point out that none of this is the sign of great virtue - it's further proof of my insidious OCD. I so can't bear to throw food away that sometimes I even put things in the freezer in order to avoid putting them in the bin. A couple of weeks ago I bought what I stupidly thought was a bunch of chard at the rip-off farmers' market up the road - of course it turned out to be pak choi, which don't get me wrong is fine, but even Sainsbury's has it. I wanted chard, with cheese sauce. Having chopped it up, washed it, and even blanched it, I was forced to accept the inevitable - I now had a saucepan full of limp Chinese cabbage. So I froze it. It's still there, silently reproaching me. Maybe one day I'll get it out and do something faintly repulsive with it. I even labelled the bag "CHARD JUST DEFROST AND COOK WITH CHEESE SAUCE actually it might be pak choi". What am I hoping for? That it may just morph into chard through the power of positive thinking? Or that Mr Fishwife will throw it away when he can't fit some hot cross buns in the second drawer down? I need help. Or, failing that, a bigger freezer. It could be worse - Mantua Maker was staying the other week, and raving about the delights of the huge freezer she and Professor MM have acquired - "We needed a larger one because we're involved in this pork scheme with another couple" she said (I can only assume this isn't a Northern euphemism for swinging). At least nobody has tried to involve me and Mr Fishwife in a pork scheme.

Holiday Miscellany

2009-09-25T12:40:00.007+01:00

Yes, this is the staggeringly photogenic village we stayed in for a week. Stunning, old-world charm, all that Guide Verte palaver. And, much to my surprise, at no point did we stumble across a Boden photo-shoot complete with toothily beaming blondes in casual slouchy moleskin trousers and jaunty Fair-Isle tanktop playing boules with toothless old men ("Amelia: My favourite colour is : The colour of my boyfriend's wallet!").
HOWEVER there are several drawbacks to the exquisite charms of a mediaeval village that the cautious traveller should know about. Firstly, I defy you to try manoeuvring any vehicle larger than a skateboard through those picturesque arches. I spent many a happy hour leaning out of the passenger side of our hired Renault Sardine-Tin tucking the wing-mirror in and yelling "You're fine... you're fine... seriously, you've got at least two inches here...". And this is a left-hand drive hire-car, so I'm feeling strangely empowered by sitting on the side I always think of (at home) as The Seat Of Power, and getting all bossy as a result. At one point as we went the giddyingly "wrong" way round a roundabout (yes, of course it was the right way for France, it just felt wrong) I said "Mind the kerb!" once too often, prompting Mr F to say (for the first time ever) "Oh please just leave me alone" in a tone of utter exhaustion.
Another drawback was the fact that, while it did indeed boast (yes, boast) two boulangeries, a butcher and a general store, all of these were MASSIVELY overpriced, because they were well aware that any and all visitors to their bijou hamlet were going to be not only well-heeled but also unable to get anywhere else in a hurry. We cheated our way round it by heading for the gigantic LeClerc supermarket every morning to stock up on reasonably priced loo-roll etc (I swear, around £1.25 in the supermarket, somewhere around £4 for four rolls of basic in the shop. For that price I'd want it hand-hemmed in lace by Belgian nuns).
I should point out we did, in fact, have a lovely time. Apart from the two days where it rained nearly horizontally, forcing us indoors off the sunny grapevine-bedecked terrace and into the tiny sitting-room, where the only TV channels were English (which in itself tells you a lot about the main holiday lets they do), and found ourselves watching "The Hairy Bikers Do Wales" or something similar. But apart from those two days of strangely deja-vu British-style cottage holiday-ness, it was fantastic. Our main concern (apart from the extraordinary muscularity of the Euro; HOW MUCH?????) was how to get through a bottle of Calvados in a week so as not to leave any behind or to make the concierge think we were alcoholics by leaving an empty bottle (we snuck it out and hid it in a bin).

Turn on, tune in, get tetchy

2009-09-03T12:25:00.005+01:00

Technology is very unforgiving to the sizeable proportion of the population who can't afford to upgrade to a widescreen TV, or HD TV, or Blu-Ray, etc etc etc. I was watching something or other last night and realised, at a vital point in the plot where a RELEVANT PIECE OF INFORMATION was shown, I could only see the middle section because the picture was cut off at the sides. I got unreasonably grumpy about this, and actually found myself making "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" noises out loud - along the lines of "Well! They'd better not think I'm going to rush out and buy some vastly expensive piece of widescreen kit just because they're bullying me into it, oh no."... more or less what I was saying 15-20 years ago (my memory is hazy) about upgrading from vinyl/cassette to CD. However. It does have some diverting side-effects, such as the fact that the onscreen guide can't fit long programme titles side by side, so overlaps them. Curious hybrids we have sadly been unable to to watch include:

Real Housewives Of The Bill
Britain's Sexiest Newsnight
The X-Files: I Want To Meet The Fockers
Three Men And a Little Taxi Driver
I Know What You Did In Bruges
Slap Her, She's Being John Malkovitch
The Lion, The Witch, And Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Shrek (an all-star cast in that one!)

And, doubtless, many many more. (late addition: here are some of them)
Sleeping With Dirt
Churchill's Antiques Roadshow
Unseen Russia For God's Sake
Masterchef The Hairy Gary Rhodes
Holy Warriors: Richard The Disappearing
Oblivion: The Ten Biggest Hits Of The 90s
Liar Liar The Bachelor
I Now Pronounce You Chuck And The Breakfast Club

Unfortunately since the remote (or, as we and many millions of others call it, "the doofer") has pretty much ceased to work, we may be forced into buying a giant flat slab of LCD and hang it on the wall as if it's some kind of artwork. Sigh.

Dummies' Guide to the Booker longlist

2009-08-27T12:28:00.012+01:00

(with grateful thanks to Mr Fishwife for his contributions)
So many books, so little time. I present here the easy crib notes for the vast quantity of (some of them also vast) books on this year's Booker longlist. Yes, I know it's the Man Booker really, but I hate calling it that, and I have actually been asked twice "Is there a Woman Booker prize too?". So don't bother reading them: amaze your friends and astound your colleagues with these nuggets of information*.

A S Byatt "The Children's Book" : Not many people know that A S Byatt was approached to continue Enid Blyton's much-loved Noddy series. This book is about Noddy and his desperate but hilarious attempts to find Big Ears's lost teaspoon! (warning: contains scenes of incest and sniper action).

J M Coetzee "Summertime": Reproduces faithfully the first school essay J M Coetzee (or "Johnny" as he was then) wrote about wot he done in the school holidays. Apparently his father's sandcastle-building skills weren't up to much, but the ice creams were delicious. He got an A-.

Adam Foulds "The Quickening Maze": Honestly, the faster you try to get out, the more lost you get. Just keep turning left.

Sarah Hall "How To Paint a Dead Man": It's a doddle. They don't fidget like live models do. Just make sure you keep the windows open and the central heating off.

Samantha Harvey "The Wilderness": Could really do with a pergola and some radical pruning to those brambles, otherwise fine. Maybe a water feature?

James Lever "Me Cheeta": Yu lose tu me at cards. I taik yur money.

Hilary Mantel "Wolf Hall": Hotly tipped to be this year's winner. The prequel to her spellbinding "Who Let The Wolves Out?"

Simon Mawer "The Glass Room": Lovely to look at, nice to hold, but if you break it, we say "sold"!

Ed O'Loughlin "Not Untrue And Not Unkind": true, and kind.

James Scudamore "Heliopolis": The renaming of Sun City has almost doubled its tourist income!

Colm Toibin "Brooklyn": Not a lot of people know that Brooklyn is a bit like Hoxton. Bit of a schlep on the Metro though. If I were you I'd stay in the Village.

William Trevor "Love And Summer": See above, for Coetzee. Billy Trevor was a little older, though, and as a result this touchingly ill-written account of wot he done on his summer holidays with next door's Dutch au pair contained language the teacher felt it better not to read aloud. He got a D.

Sarah Waters "The Little Stranger": "Darling? Darling? I thought all Saffy's party guests had gone home? Hmm? ...No, he says he's waiting for his mummy. Well we must have invited him, he's got a party bag and everything..."

*Disclaimer: some of the information contained in this post may be (wildly) inaccurate and is not for quotation or press distribution until a finished copy is issued.

Nuptials, saucy Restoration poetry, and the return of Gertie Blood.

2009-08-10T12:31:00.011+01:00

So, sunny summer weddings. Are they great or what? Particularly when the bride (let us call her Steak, for she is a vegetarian) concludes her touching speech of love to her new husband with the words ".. and I can't wait to start my life with you and start having lots of pasty little ginger freaks." The groom (let us call him Kidney), a more or less dead ringer for Frankie Boyle (or either of the Proclaimers), did a "fair comment" kind of shrug. Could any love be greater? Not a dry eye in the Gladstone Library of the Liberal Club. My only quibble was with the three flights of giant stairs one had to navigate in either direction to have a cigarette - surely if I provided proof I voted Lib Dem I'd be allowed to light up under the vast oil painting of Winston "Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em" Churchill? Sadly (and, in fact, legally) no. Not even in the vast Edwardian grandeur of the Smoking Room.

How stately and gorgeous is that? Less so when you've been up and down it 100000 times because the lift is full of band equipment...

Highlights of the day (for me) included some random tourists approaching the bride on the lawn outside and asking if she'd take a picture, er, of them. "I'm a little busy right now", she said, as if the long sparkly white dress hadn't given it away. And the bride's sister-in-law saying "Yes, the hen weekend in Newcastle was great, except that Sir Bobby Davro had just died so all the football fans were in mourning"*.

My part in this excellent day was the reading of "The Good Morrow" by John Donne. Complicated not at all by my fear that I would blush in an unseemly way on reading the line "Suck'd we on country pleasures childishly?" - yes, I know, I know, we're all grownups, but frankly John Donne meant it to be a tad racy (as any student of Shakespeare kno, reference to "country pleasures" and "country matters" are generally intended to be a euphemism). Luckily I was so enthralled by the sheer loveliness of my own voice in the scholarly setting of the Gladstone Library that I failed to even clear my throat. Although I took the precaution of looking at Steak throughout (smiling radiantly yet tearfully like a proper bride), rather than Kidney, who would have gurned at me.

HOWEVER. All weddings have that moment where you bump into someone and realise you knew them years ago; in my case, while sneaking into an empty sideroom (trying to find a balcony rather than brave the stairs for the billionth time), who should I see gazing down at me from the wall but the lovely Lady Colin Campbell (aka Gertie Blood). She's been gracing my sidebar (as have Steak & Kidney) for over a year now, and I've got used to dropping into the National Gallery to say hello every now and then - but there she was.

Surely that has to be an excellent omen of something.

* Note for non-football fans - Sir Bobby Robson = recently deceased giant of British football, latterly much-loved manager of Newcastle United. Bobby Davro = mediocre TV impressionist. Non-deceased, non-giant, non-much-loved.

Targeted by psychopaths

2009-07-18T12:24:00.006+01:00

I may have mentioned before how much I love the Internet. Maybe several times, who knows? There's a wonderful birthdayish feel about ordering things, paying for them, forgetting about them, and then a week or two later getting lots of presents in the post. However. I seem to have become the target, recently, for any and every pointless "homeware" catalogue the postie can shove through our letterbox. I wouldn't dream of suggesting that my address has been pimped out by somebody I actually subscribe to (Lakeland, I still love you!! Call me!!), so can only assume it was a one-night-stand (i.e. something I bought for Christmas from some company I'll never use again) who has stitched me up like this. I religiously tick every box that says "I do NOT wish to be contacted with exciting offers by your carefully-chosen partner companies thank you very much, now or ever", but there's obviously some loophole even the pathologically cautious like me have missed.
My most recent unsolicited arrival was the catalogue for Really Linda Barker, which seems to specialise in cast-iron rabbits and "wall art". As I flicked idly through it I realised that far from being an advertisement for Ms Barker's range of metalwork chinoiserie (well, it's all made in China), it's actually one gigantic cry for help. In her own words : "Looking back through my previous collections, I've noticed I have a growing obsession with hooks, and for some reason, chickens". Which, to the trained eye, says "STOP ME BEFORE I KILL AGAIN". It's a short and fatally easy step from an obsession with hooks and chickens to ending up like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, experimenting with livestock and wearing a waistcoat of badly-cured human skin. And why restrict this worry to the otherwise wholesome-looking Linda Barker? God knows what festers in the mind of Johnnie Boden. Why does he so keenly want to share his views on feather-stitch and patent leather with you? WHY????? Is he making himself a girl-suit like Buffalo Bill in Silence Of The Lambs???
Best not to ask really.

"Oh look, there's a daisy-chain of human hands in the rigging!"

Dies Irae

2009-07-02T12:03:00.012+01:00

I have no intention of moaning about the weather; I think it's a regrettable part of the British psyche that we are inclined to moan about whatever weather we have and yearn for what we don't. Rain is rubbish, and I think I speak for everyone when I say this (apart from ducks and gardeners - and in the latter case, hurrah! Enjoy your garden! And the fact that there hasn't yet been a hosepipe ban! In the former case, migrate already!).
I will, however, just offer you an instance under which rain and/or typically British low summer temperatures might be preferable.
Imagine you are on a journey; it is a short journey (average under one and a half hours). Between two major English cities - let's say London and Oxford. On a coach company who will remain nameless, but let's call them BUM RUBBISH CRAP BUM BUM POO Limited.
Many different choices would have been made in my life had I been in possession of all the facts before making a decision.
For example, had I been in possession of the fact (as the coach company were) that a large part of the M40 was closed off due to a lorry bursting into flames.

(Not actually this lorry. Looks dramatic though, doesn't it? It had bloody better, is all I can say.)

Or the fact that this meant that ALL traffic between the two hypothetical cities was diverted down what amounts to, frankly, a cart-track (or, as it is officially known, the A40). A very scenic and pretty road, but there's a reason it isn't the main artery between the two cities.
Or that, due to the day in question being Oxford University Open Day, every form of transport between EVERYWHERE IN BRITAIN and Oxford would be heaving with excitable teenagers absolutely bursting to get to Oxford and do their big Mary Tyler Moore twirl in the street, throw hat in the air, yes YES I'm going to take this city and make it my own... Oh you know.
In a nutshell, I ended up jammed up against a coach window while Saffy or Ottoline or Tash or whatever (pick one) spent the journey shrieking on her mobile phone, No but she's like sooo not like capable of y'know like expanding on the question, I mean I like said to her but like did Darcy and Elizabeth like DO IT and she just went like quiet and she like just can't think outside the like text as the coach crawls (or, at times, just sits) down a succession of very pretty country lanes, somewhere in the middle of a huge trail of traffic doing the same thing.
FOR FOUR AND A HALF HOURS.
I checked - at one point we took an hour to go 4 miles. I was on the verge of getting off, walking a couple of miles up the queue, and seeing if there was another coach further up. As the engine idled, so did the aircon. Saffy/Ottoline/Tash started to do that aggrieved heavy sigh thing which teenagers the world over don't seem to realise doesn't actually make things happen any faster.
Oh all right, I'll cut a long story short. We finally got to London, by which time I had the desire to kiss the tarmac, smoke five cigarettes at once, and hurl forcibly into the nearest bin the Iris Murdoch I had read twice on the journey.

On the plus side, my increasingly unhinged and rambling texts had alerted Mr Fishwife to my impending meltdown, so he had the wine ready.
I won't complain again. This is beautiful weather. Not for travellers in coaches who might have taken the train home had they been apprised of the true nature of things by the BUM RUBBISH CRAP BUM BUM POO Ltd coach company, but you know. Mustn't grumble.

It's all terminology, innit.

2009-06-08T12:59:00.010+01:00

I may already have shocked and horrified thousands (or, let's be realistic, mildly amused tens) by quoting Mr Fishwife : "I don't see the point of fiction, myself." I should point out here that, in his defence, Mr Fishwife is an intelligent, articulate, well-read person. It's just that his idea of a good read tends to be the breeze-block-sized tome entitled Stalingrad, The Somme, or Hitler: The Dancing Years (... Obviously I made the last one up - far too frivolous). "Why would I want to read books about a bunch of people having nervous breakdowns in Islington?" was his initial defence; fair enough, I thought, me neither, although to consider this tiny tiny microcosm of the genre as representative of the whole of Fiction is to consider Betty Blue representative of all subtitled movies. The point of these books is not the plot development (surely everyone knows the name of Hitler's hairdresser by now?) but the nerdily desperate hope that this particular historian may have new material. No twists, no turns, no denouement.

HOWEVER.

Over the weekend, I enjoyably worked through not one but three works of fiction*. None of them, I might add, set in Islington. Every now and then I would look up at the television and it took me a while to notice that he was watching the same rugby match for the third time. "Haven't England already played Argentina?" I said. "Oh all right, all right," he replied defensively "You know how you like to reread a book for the style and the language? Same thing." My conclusion is that there is a frustrated literary stylist in all of us. In some people it only reveals itself as a love of the finer points of a rugby match.

* The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters - excellent, very creepy in a postwar Daphne du Maurier kind of way, and unusually not a Sapphic interlude in sight.
Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler - I do like her. And found myself distressingly identifying with the slightly tetchy 60-year-old male main character.
Turbulence by Giles Foden - Actually still only halfway through this one so will have to reserve judgement until I've finished. Beats Ladysmith into a cocked hat though. Up there with The Last King Of Scotland so far.

Oops

2009-05-28T15:27:00.001+01:00

For some reason that last post came up as 23rd May. No idea why. Sorry.

More Guilty Pleasures

2009-05-23T12:35:00.031+01:00

As promised! : Guilty Pleasures 2 - Son of Guilty Pleasures.

This one is a lot more difficult as, with film and TV, one man's guilty pleasure is another man's CULT VIEWING. These are the ones I genuinely feel slightly guilty about.

Film :

Ratatouille. God I love the rat. My secret kitchen alter ego.

Murder On The Orient Express. I spend far too much time perfecting my Wendy Hiller impersonation : "You will have the goodness to bring me.. the poached.. sole. With one small new.. poTAto. And a grrrreeen salad." And Sean Connery saying to Poirot "Can you give me your word - as a foreigner..." And, most importantly, the fact that even though Poirot works out who dunnit, he lets them off because JUSTICE HAS BEEN SERVED. I always get a lump in my throat at the end where they're all drinking champagne. "Her name was, I believe, a Miss FrrreeBody."

The Amazing Mr Blunden. Made in 1972 by the same crew and producers as The Railway Children, and with an amazingly similar look and feel: strangely 20-something girls playing 13-year-olds in Edwardian pinafores and tam-o-shanters. Great plot though - all about ghosts, redemption, etc... makes me cry every time. A great Bank Holiday film. Also stars Diana Dors as a gin-soaked old hag with a very stupid, very pretty, blonde daughter - slightly poignant as 20 years earlier she might have played the part herself.

TV:

Oh this is a hard one to admit to, but luckily there's just the one - My Super Sweet 16. I am so embarrassed by this that I may as well have a bag on my head as I type. I usually hate reality TV of all kinds, as while I thrive on schadenfreude I hate the fact that everybody looks a fool, a pompous twit or a bully, regardless of their intentions. I have friends who are TV editors, and I am starting to think they're probably possessed of some kind of evil genius; editing is key to how someone looks on TV. That and appropriate soundtrack (amazing what the Benny Hill theme can do to, say, a dignified solicitor or adoring parent).

The fundamental point of this programme is to show, in all its blingy horror and grotesque excess, the lengths the VERY RICH will go to to ensure that their (for the most part) unprepossessingly spoilt offspring have the best 16th birthday party of all their peers. Action is invariably as follows: scene in a vastly overpriced dress boutique (it's always a boutique, never just a shop) where daughter screams at her friends for wanting to wear the same dress. Instance of daughter shrieking "I HATE YOUUUUU" at whoever happens to be handy (parent, BFF, boyfriend). Plan for party to be Moulin Rouge themed, only to remember that cow Kelly had the same thing for hers. Sulk. New theme for party (LA Gangsta!!! Great, we can all dress in as little as possible and dance in a way that our parents will disapprove of!!!) proposed. Invitations ostentatiously only given to less pretty girls and every boy in school. Guest list lost by bouncers. Tantrum. Tantrum. High spirits, saucy dancing, embarrassingly obviously hired cast members from Hollyoaks to boost popularity rating. Boyfriend misbehaves. Tears in ladies' loo. Then the high point of the evening - DADDY'S BOUGHT ME A PORSCHE!!!!!!! Credits roll.

I'm so humiliated by admitting this that I need to lie down. Off to watch series 4 of "The Wire" now to remind myself that I do have taste really...

Guilty Pleasures (not technically a meme)

2009-05-09T12:40:00.017+01:00

Lovely Foxy emailed me a link to a Guardian article about how top chefs secretly love crisps/salad cream etc. Actually quite fun (and secretly reassuring) to read, although I say Spot The Pseud. I don't think homemade blueberry pancakes count as guilty - doesn't a REAL guilty pleasure have to have a brand name in front of it? So as a tribute (mostly to Angela Hartnett - I think I love her) I am giving you a selection of guilty pleasures. Not really guilty pleasures, because obviously I'm too embarrassed to admit to them (lard! Marion Zimmer Bradley! "Clouds Across The Moon" by The Rah Band! Aaaaaaarghh!!!) but the socially acceptable ones...

Food : BabyBel cheese. Walker's Prawn Cocktail crisps. Fanta. Findus Crispy Pancakes. Hellmann's Mayonnaise. HP Sauce. Lemon barley water. That horrible (yet compulsive) tinned chicken supreme you can get from M&S. The chunky peanut butter KitKat. Cheap shish kebab in limp pitta with hummus and extra pickled chillies, hold the salad. Bearing in mind that I'm on a very low carb diet, most of these are things I have feverish withdrawal dreams about (as are pasta, roasties and toast).

Books : How dangerous is it when you work in a bookshop to admit that while you do mostly read interesting and worthwhile literature, sometimes you crave the book equivalent of a bag of crisps? To which end:

"Gone With the Wind" - a pot-boiler, true, but the absolute queen of pot-boilers. It has transcended its pot-boilerdom in the same way that Bizet's "Carmen" has.

-anything by Jilly Cooper - to be read behind the adult equivalent of a bikeshed, chewing your hand so you don't shriek out loud with delighted schadenfreude as she blithely describes inner-city comp school children as "black and terribly sweet really", and play Spot The Hero (he's inevitably the one with a dog - also English, posh, charmingly slobbish) Or Villain (foreign, greasy, cruel to animals, into kinky sex).

And. With a deep breath, I will admit that I am currently sniggering in secret over "Fools Rush In" by Anthea Turner. It was notorious in my W*terstone's days as the book that sold about 47 copies nationwide (well, in W*terstone's, anyway), never even made it into paperback, and ended up mostly pulped. It is, nonetheless, an object of awful majesty. It cost me 1p plus p+p on Amazon. Not only is it a testament to the most hilariously twee, self-congratulatory personality I've ever come across, but it is also ghostwritten - and even that didn't stop it being compellingly terrible. Only a genuine fool would ask a very very bad chick-lit writer to ghost her autobiography. Some choice phrases: "My little hand strayed to the chocolate box" (she's in her 30s at this point), "My eyes filled with tears as I watched him drive away in his Jaguar" (good to know that as your One True Love drives out of your life you can appreciate a fine automobile) , "The gentle British holidaymakers (this is in Magaluf! - ed.) were devastated by the news of Princess Diana's death. I gave them what comfort I could." She also has a disturbing tendency to refer to her more successful sexual encounters with the phrase "It was good to be in experienced hands". I am torn between recommending it (seriously, it's a whole Fray Bentos steak 'n' kidney pie of awfulness) and really not wanting to give it any more press than this. Examine your consciences. 1p on Amazon. I will say no more.

Music/TV/Film: - I think I'll do that next time. I'm exhausted by the literary equivalent of a binge on salad cream and tinned pineapple rings.

Flailing of hands

2009-04-27T11:32:00.016+01:00

As long as I can remember, I have waved my hands around too much.

- Cue montage of Lucy Fishwife at assorted ages gesticulating wildly and (a) smacking, or worse, innocent bystander in face* (b) knocking over glass of, inevitably, red wine on tablecloth/bride's white dress/small baby (c) accidentally bidding for a Rembrandt. Well, not the Rembrandt but you get the idea.

Shortly after I graduated I had a job working in the Royal Ear Hospital in Bloomsbury. I was "Clinic Supervisor", which actually translates as "temp who makes appointments/tea and fetches medical records". As you may well imagine, most of the patients had hearing problems, and after I'd been there about three days one of the speech therapists came to see me. "We've had a complaint from one of my clients," she said sternly. "He can't understand your signing". It turns out that while I had remembered to speak clearly so he (and other profoundly deaf patients) could lip-read, I had forgotten that my wildly flailing hands were a distraction to people used to looking at hands for meaning. My lips were saying "Yes, Tania is just finishing up with a client and can see you in five minutes", while my hands were saying "Cheese! Nailgun! Exterminate my beans and vote tapir!!!". I sat on my hands after that when anyone with a hearing aid approached me (although I couldn't help wondering - how DO deaf Italians manage? Surely it's a constant barrage of meaningless information?).

However. While idly Wiki-ing Hinduism the other day (I was reading Hindi cyberfiction and had forgotten what Ganesh rides on. A rat. Further reason to love rats!) - I came across the concept of mudras. In pictures of Hindu gods (also Buddha), the position of the hands (and, in the case of Shiva, feet) is vitally significant. I have decided, although luckily no longer in the ear trade, to adopt certain positions which are symbolic of something soothing - for example :

I will look slightly odd, but the likelihood of me poking someone in the eye with my biro or knocking coffee into the computer is greatly lessened.

*Aged 16, I was waving my hands around and poked a lit cigarette up the nose of Bronwen Roberts's boyfriend. Bronwen, if you ever read this, I'm still sorry!!!!

Gong-Tastic

2009-04-11T15:44:00.013+01:00

It's awards season again and the marvellous Tania Kindersley of Backwards In High Heels has very kindly passed on a gong to this blog. The award exists to be passed on (as they all should) so below are the rules:

1. You have to pass it on to 5 other fabulous blogs in a post.

2. You have to list 5 of your fabulous addictions in the post.

3. You must copy and paste the rules and the instructions below in the post.

Instructions: On your post of receiving this award, make sure you include the person that gave you the award and link it back to them. When you post your five winners, make sure you link them as well. To add the award to your post, simply right-click, save image, then “add image” it in your post as a picture so your winners can save it as well. To add it to your sidebar, add the “picture” widget. Also, don’t forget to let your winners know they won an award from you by emailing them or leaving a comment on their blog.

Alors – the 5 fabulous blogs.

If you have been left out, it’s only because there are so many of you whose blogs I enjoy and want to spread around.

1) The lovely Rol at Sunset Over Slawit. Rol is an astonishing fount of knowledge on music, (especially if it's Morrissey), and ways to cope with being unable to scratch your arm when it's in a cast. He also writes (novel on the way), and nobody seems able to explain how he fits a day job in.

2) The excellently red-haired Laura at The Poet Laura-eate. She is fab. The Wendy Cope of Blogger. Poetry, Oxford current affairs, and a lovely fleur-de-lis backdrop. Plus she knows how to do those Flickr slideshows.

3) The genius that is JRSM at Caustic Cover Critic, a blog whose raison d'etre is to celebrate (or, where necessary, ridicule) the art of the book jacket. An invaluable guide to the beautiful, the unimaginative, the unusual and the derivative. Just lovely, and always funny.

4) Usedbuyer2.0, at the blog of the same name. A bookseller of many years' standing, his blogs are a delight to read; in the last few alone I found references to Cavafy, Edward Lear, Auden, AND quotes, AND room for wonderful digressions on bookshop life in all its strange and peculiar splendour. Also many, many, wonderful clerihews, an artform that is unjustly neglected at the moment.

5) Last but not least, Jonathan at Bookseller Crow. What more can I say than - there is no intentional bias towards the booksellerish in my choices, but Jonathan always makes me laugh.

My Five Fabulous addictions:
It's not like I'm particularly secretive about my addictions, so you probably know all this already, but here are a few of the more socially acceptable ones (the Gitanes and their ilk will be glossed over).

1) Obviously books! Unable to leave a bookshop with fewer than three, usually more. My job and subsequent perks/discount mean I very rarely buy anywhere else, especially since I get free proof copies of many many things, and am on good enough terms with most of the publishers' reps that I can ask them for freebies; under most other circumstances (old, out of print, etc) I recommend Abebooks - worlds superior to Amazon and a bigger range - plus more of your money actually goes to the bookdealer than on Amazon.
2) Perfume. Sorry, I know I'm a bit nerdy on this point but I consider it as important as clothing - ie wearing different ones to suit your mood, the weather, the time of year etc. As a result I have rather a lot. I have nothing against people who have a "signature scent" - in fact I admire their tenacity. But I like the fact that the larger your range, the more you can make olfactory jokes with yourself (nobody else is likely to get it) - like wearing "Rain" by Marc Jacobs when it's raining, or "Rousse" by Serge Lutens because you have red hair. My absolute Mecca for this (apart from, in The Real World, Liberty's) is The Perfumed Court, who will sell you tiny tester-sized bottles of pretty much any perfume so you can try before you commit. Invaluable.
3) COFFEE. Enough said. In an ideal world espresso all the time, but sadly I'm over 25 and can't sleep if I drink it after lunchtime.
4) My/our thick quilted mattress-topper (John Lewis). I have never slept so soundly.
5) If I have an alcoholic addiction here, please note that while I would find life very drab without alcohol, I am by no means an alcoholic. Apparently considering the number of boozehounds and manic-depressives on both sides of my family, this makes me quite unusual. But I do like a nice Calvados.

My Life, As Described By Elvis Costello.

2009-04-05T14:49:00.009+01:00

It's Sunday and I'm still in pyjamas. I have stolen a meme from Rol because I'm a lazy sod but also because it appealed to my twin life-skills of "Doing things that don't require leaving the sofa" and "Minimal research that only requires going as far as the CD rack". My great love for Elvis Costello factored in as well...

Pick an artist, and using ONLY SONG TITLES from only that artist, answer these questions.

1. Are you a male or female: "Shabby Doll"

2. Describe yourself: "Indoor Fireworks"

3. How do you feel about yourself: "Brilliant Mistake"

4. Describe your ex boyfriend/girlfriends: "I Hope You're Happy Now", "Two Little Hitlers", "Goon Squad", "Boy With A Problem", and "I'm Not Angry", depending on who we're describing.

5. Describe your current boy/girl situation: "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding?" , also "Long Honeymoon"

6. Describe your current location: "Welcome To The Working Week"

7. Describe where you want to be: "Payday"

8. Your best friend(s) is/are: "The Loved Ones", "Miracle Man", "Sulky Girl", "Veronica", "Poisoned Rose", "New Lace Sleeves", "Our Little Angel", "You Little Fool", "Leave My Kitten Alone", and "King Of Confidence".

9. Your favourite colour is: "Blood And Chocolate" and "Almost Blue"

10. You know that: "Accidents Will Happen"

12. If your life was a television show what would it be called: "Every Day I Write The Book"

13. What is life to you: "Mystery Dance"

14. What is the best advice you have to give: "Imagination (Is A Powerful Deceiver)"

Hurrah! Quite enjoyed that. Go forth and run with it.

Son Of "Wot I Done On Holiday" - the return

2009-03-23T13:05:00.013Z

Things I enjoy doing on holiday but am slightly ashamed of include hanging around foreign supermarkets. NOWHERE do you get a better idea of what a nation's preoccupations are, and what it considers essential and/or exotic. Thai supermarkets (based on many years of keen observation while Mr F drags his feet behind me wailing "I'm booooored") have vast amounts of hair products - not surprising when you consider that all Thai women have sleek and glossy raven locks. Very little for frizzy hair, sadly for me, as I routinely turn into Harpo Marx two seconds after leaving the air-conditioning in my room, and nothing short of WD-40 or a bag will stop this. All skin products, including baby lotion, promise "extra whitening!" as oddly enough my leprous pallor is considered as desirable in Thailand as a golden tan is here. What we consider exotic (ie lemongrass, fish sauce etc) they consider deeply boring and mundane, so there are aisles full of fantastically cheap "staples" for those of you who, like me, would rather come home with a suitcase full of dried shrimp paste than souvenirs. What we consider mundane is classed as extraordinary foreign delicacies (ie Paul Newman salad dressing, Dolmio sauces, etc). And nowhere else have I ever seen Vanilla Mint Listerine, so I had to buy some. Odd, but palatable. I have a secret suspicion that if I chilled it and added vodka nobody would notice it wasn't a cocktail.

So as I was clearing out my handbag last night (big red one has pretty much broken my collarbone) I found the flyer for BIG NIGHT THAI BOXING AT STADIUM NEXT TO TESCO. Sorry to disappoint you all but this was Ban Niang beach, Khao Lak, not a Tesco near you. We didn't go, mostly because the last time I was persuaded to go to a Thai boxing match it was so hot and the fumes of Tiger Balm were so strong that I actually passed out. There are better ways to spend an evening than being driven back to your hotel in the open flatbed of a pickup, with your head between your knees weeping "I'm not on drugs! Please don't send me to the Bangkok Hilton!". What caught my eye this time round, on the flyer this is, was the thumbnail bio of each contender - under their names were their taglines, which mostly said things like "King of the ring!!" and "Born to fight - born to win!!" My favourites, however, were "The elbow specialist!!" and (on further investigation of the website) "The knees that knocked a hole in the sky!!", at least one of whom (guess, go on) is probably an osteopath or something. Or should be.

And finally - I do spend a lot of my time on holiday people-watching - I have come to the conclusion that there are certain sartorial choices no adult male should ever be allowed to get away with.
1) Crocs on any male over 6 years old, especially in natty shades of lime green, acid blue or hot pink.
2) Hair accessories, especially alice bands. Want to play with someone's hair? Get a Tressy Barbie.
3) Short shorts anywhere but a sports field/court. Makes any man, no matter how young or attractive, look like Donna Summer on rollerskates.
4) Any t-shirt that proclaims you to be a Breast Inspector, or that tries to do your chat-up for you (ie "If I Said You Had A Beautiful etc etc")

Yes I know I'm a fine one to talk in my custom-hacked Comic Relief Morecambe and Wise t-shirt and lost property box sunglasses...

Wot I done on holiday

2009-03-19T10:54:00.016Z

Hurrah! Back at last. I only brought home 8 of the books I took with me, thus freeing up suitcase space for red/green curry paste, cheap fags, a bottle of Maekhong whisky (which, like Metaxa, ouzo, Fernet Branca, slivovitz and the totally indefensible Vanna Tallinn, is nice on holiday but not at home - but do we ever remember this?). Imagine my surprise when there didn't seem as much space as I was anticipating. I can only assume that my clothes expand and thicken mysteriously over the course of a fortnight. Something to do with humidity I expect. Or large amounts of curry paste.

You'd think at my advanced age (ahem) I'd have learnt a few things about holidays, but here are some I seem to have forgotten. Maybe the advanced age has, in fact, something to do with it.

1) When your accommodation is next to a "lagoon" (landscaped, hence the inverted commas, or not), you can bet your bottom dollar there will be mosquitoes. Therefore, when stepping outside to admire the sunset or have a fag, you should really consider use of repellent spray, or not be surprised when you get relentlessly bitten.

2) Just because you haven't ever had a stomach ailment on holiday before, there is no reason to get complacent. God made Imodium for a purpose. That freshly-grated green papaya salad may have seemed a good idea at the time, but its reappearance will be more rapid than you can predict. Mostly unchanged due to speedy transit. On the plus side, it was delicious, at least the first time round.

3) If the management of your hotel deems it necessary to inform all guests, on a more or less daily basis, that IT IS NOT HOTEL POLICY TO ALLOW GUESTS TO PRE-RESERVE SUNLOUNGERS, then you probably have a pretty fair idea of the predominating nationality in the resort.

4) Never underestimate the fun you can have with a badly-translated menu. Classic comedy menu items I failed to order included Caption Morgan rum, cream de mont, fritted ice cream, and pork fitter (presumably what you put under "Occupation" on your passport if you are in fact a porn star). Once in France I was tempted to order "Small Chirttling Savage", but since it was a starter portion of andouillette I gave it a miss.

On a lighter note (I actually had a lovely time!) I have never seen as much wildlife in one go as I did on this holiday. Part of the charm of being further away from built-up areas is the sudden appearance on your verandah (oh yes) of things like kingfishers, mynah birds, black swans, giant snails (5 inches across, damn, I didn't have any garlic butter), a monitor lizard 2 feet long, and on one memorable evening outside a bar, an aptly named Slow Loris taking half an hour to cross 10 feet of telephone wire.

Photograph courtesy of the National Geographic as my camera is appalling. Apparently they are an endangered species, so look your last on all things lovely every hour.

Tune in later for a further instalment, in which I unravel the mysteries of unseemly holiday clothing, how to be completely British on holiday without resorting to tattoos, sunburn and bad behaviour, and unfortunate names for Thai kickboxing champions.

"I was a holiday vampire" confesses local bookseller

2009-02-26T10:07:00.009Z

Hurrah for the hols, as the Famous Five were prone to saying with irritating regularity. I have 22 books, factor 50 sunblock and a selection of garments that more or less approximate a burkha. All I ask is a profoundly shaded seating area with an ashtray the size of a bucket and a relentless stream of waiters bearing ice-cold Chang beer. Yes, on Saturday Mr Fishwife and I will be struggling to Heathrow with our gigantic and overweight suitcases (mine = books, his = diving gear). In our separate and characteristic ways we have been preparing for this departure for weeks. I panic-buy local currency, usually at a vastly inferior rate of exchange to the one I'd have got at the Bangkok airport ATM, and fill my suitcase with books so I'm not tempted to read them before the holiday. Mr F spends every night poring over the long-range weather forecasts, establishes that there will be heavy thundershowers DIRECTLY OVER OUR HOTEL for the entire duration of the holiday, and sulks. And this is before he decides that we are heading into an area of Political Unrest and will be unable to get home due to coup-related airport closures (suits me fine). Invariably I forget my nuclear-blast-proof sunblock and have to buy it locally (you'd have thought with my leprous pallor I'd be forewarned, but this has in fact happened twice).

HOWEVER. All of the above being equal, I am looking forward to two full weeks of blissfully uninterrupted reading. Eating things with indecent amounts of chilli in/on them. Not feeling guilty about drinking cocktails midweek. Getting up early with a smile on my face because I can devote my whole day to deciding what to read and where to have a huge plate of Pad Thai for lunch. My only obligation being to vacate the room for a polite length of time while somebody else makes the bed. Wandering about barefoot or in flip-flops. WARMTH. Seeing the joy of Mr Fishwife as he slowly turns the colour of Ikea Billy shelving (beech veneer option).

Below please find the song that will be on a permanent loop in my head. I apologise for the unnecessary nature of George Michael's white Speedo. I hope you're all thoroughly jealous. I hope our hotel isn't full of people like the ones in the video...

I should just point out the fact that it says "Pat Sharp's House of Fun" in the top right-hand corner. How far back does that take you - and would you rather not have gone there...?

Songs on the brain

2009-02-16T13:04:00.003Z

Songs this week that have ricocheted irritatingly around my head (due to their sharing a title with a book I can see from where I'm sitting) include the following:

"American Boy" - book by Andrew Taylor, song by Estelle
"Almost Blue" - book by Carlo Lucarelli, song by Elvis Costello
"Angel" - book by Elizabeth Taylor, song by Gavin Friday
"Thieves Like Us" - book by Steve Cole, song by New Order

Equally annoying and more contrived are the ones that suggest a song - I've been singing "Revelation" (by C J Sansom) to the tune of "Isolation" by Joy Division, "Holes" (by Louis Sachar) to "Gold" by Spandau Ballet, and most annoyingly of all, "Two Caravans" (by Marina Lewycka) to "Sweet Caroline" by Neil Diamond. Don't bother telling me you love Neil Diamond, I don't care. This is torture. I've resisted having an iPod for years, partly because the length of my commute hasn't warranted it since 2001, and partly because I quite like hearing the world as I go home (how else would I be finding the karaoke pub in Hammersmith such good auditory value?). But I think I may need one, as a kind of homeopathic remedy for the earworms. Because it's either that, or become one of those strange book-industry people who lurks in the stock room singing hymns really loudly to drown out The Voices, and I'm definitely not ready for that.

A couple more snippets because you all seemed to like them (honestly, I bet you're the sort of people who could live on unlimited snacks):

The TV advert for a thrush remedy (yes, the fungal infection, no not the bird) which said "It will leave you feeling yourself again" - possibly unwise on the basis of "If you pick at it it'll never get better"?

The rugby match I wish I'd watched = Nancy vs Nice. I bet that was amazingly civilised. And well-dressed.

Overheard on Saturday night from lovey-dovey couple holding hands over champagne glasses: "..and outside the laundrette I just puked pure water."

Apologies to anyone who got this three times on their feed - never again will I over-edit...

Snippets

2009-02-09T13:51:00.010Z

I'm currently having what we charitably refer to as "kaleidoscope brain" chez Fishwife - mostly down to a weekend of slow but steady alcohol intake, and the fact that due to snow, cancellations and lunches I ended up working 2 and a half days last week (result!!!). I therefore have no coherent idea for a single and on-topic post and can only offer you a small selection of things that have stuck in what passes for my mind over the last few days.

1) I had lunch on Saturday with my parents; they were passing through West London to see a newly-adapted indie-thrash musical version of Wedekind's 1906 play Spring Awakening at the Lyric. My stepfather, musing, over a pub lunch: "Well, it'll be interesting to see how they fit the competitive masturbation scene to music..."

2) Overheard by my cousin in (of course) Islington: "Mummy! I've got pesto on my gilet!"

3) Hurrah for the return of the rat! Many of you may argue it has never been away and in fact is more with us than ever. I say every culture gets the vermin it deserves, and given the extraordinary stupidity of most popular culture (etc) these days, thank God at least we value brains and adaptability in our animal infestations. I know I've said this before (and will say it again, and no doubt again) but rats are highly intelligent and resourceful, they are loving and protective parents, and wash food before they eat it (where possible). Also they build separate latrine areas in their nests so food and sleeping areas are never contaminated. How unlike most celebrities.

This, you see, is the problem with the weekday lunch. Any more than a glass of wine in the middle of the day and I suddenly lose all ability to follow a train of thought, at least any one that doesn't go STARTER - WINE - MAIN COURSE - WINE - COFFEE - BRANDY - BRANDY - BRANDY - FAGS - INEVITABLE FLU FROM SMOKING OUTSIDE IN THE SNOW. Just had lunch with my friend Nicky Nicky Veronica Veronica, who is the nearest thing to me it's possible to get apart from being a few years older and a Virgo, and after half a glass of wine I had forgotten I had to go back to work. Luckily I remembered, and if my boss is reading this I'd like to say that I'm actually blogging in my tea break.
Best stop now...

Oh but PS - if there's another blog out there that manages to mention pesto and Wedekind in the same post, I'm very surprised...

me me me me me me me me meme

2009-01-31T15:16:00.015Z

The lovely Red Rum ("Your money's no good here, Mr Torrance...") has tagged me. I must write ten interesting and honest things about myself. "Interesting" is subjective, "honest" less so. This will probably be the last one of these I do for a while, as you all now know me better than is entirely healthy, given that we've none of us ever met in what I like to call "the flesh" (mostly because there's so much of it).

1) I've just this second sold a book to the blonde Aussie one from Sheila's Wheels. She was thoroughly charming and if I had a car I know where I'd be getting my insurance from.

2) I have only ever once made hollandaise sauce - it was perfect. I am now so worried that it'll never turn out that well again that I have never reattempted it.

3) I once shared a flat with an inordinately cool Zimbabwean guy called Dumiso; during the course of one rainy Sunday afternoon doing the ironing and watching Zulu we discovered that we were, respectively, descended from Gonville Bromhead and King Cetshwayo. We decided never to speak of it, although whistling "Men of Harlech" became shorthand for "I'm trying to annoy you".

4) I will eat anything except tripe (I hate the consistency), brains (not sure I like the idea of eating something that has ideas) and andouillette (made of bowel, smells of bowel). In my defence, I'm not particularly squeamish otherwise - I will happily eat kidneys, tongue, sweetbreads, black pudding, snails, etc, and in my time have eaten crocodile steak, water buffalo, snake, peacock, a scorpion, and a bee (on purpose, crystallised in honey).

5) I went on an anti-Vietnam War march in 1972 or -3; I was a small child at this point (!) and my deeply peacenik Canadian babysitter took me (I grew up in Montreal). At the age of 6 I knew who Nixon and Ho Chi Minh were, what "impeach" meant, and why there were so many American men suddenly living in Canada...

6) Further to the Canada thing, I was also living there when the October Crisis happened - so am the only one of my contemporaries who has, albeit briefly, lived under martial law.

7) I would sell my soul for the ability to drink a double espresso after midday without turning into a sleepless and jittery speedfreak. I love coffee, love it, love it, and it has ceased to love me since the day I turned 30, fickle swine that it is.

8) My family motto is Nil Desperandum. Which is a toughie to live up to on a drizzly day like today. Mostly I'm an optimist though.

9) I collect nice shiny facts like a magpie collects sparkly bits of tinfoil. In fact if I lived in Philip Pullman's world my daemon would undoubtedly be a member of the corvid family - maybe a rook, because they're sociable, highly acquisitive, and according to myth they like to tell stories.

10) My idea of perfect hell is massage. If there's one thing I hate more than being covered in oil, it's having to make polite conversation with a complete stranger while naked.

I'm going to tag Naweed, because I know for a fact he's never done one of these. Go, dude, make me proud...

Life 2.0

2009-01-29T12:59:00.007Z

Before I start I will just give you two little stories to illustrate this post:

1) My darling friend Foxy Highflyer was recently due to meet a man for a date. He blew her out, pleading a backlog of work commitments, which would have been a perfectly good excuse - if he hadn't, the following day, updated his FaceBook page with the status "Mike is SO HUNGOVER after last night's big bash" (or similar).
2) My equally darling (and foxy) friend Ziggaaah has been seeing, on and off, a man who conveniently lives nearby, and the other morning on her way to work saw his alleged ex-girlfriend emerging from his house well before breakfast time, and his FaceBook status was the same day updated to "Frank is In A Relationship".

Wait! Come back! This wasn't meant to be a moan about MEN. What this is, and here I finally get to my point, is a moan about what we have decided to call LIFE 2.0.©
Life 2.0 is exactly like life, just more so, and more technologically enabled. After all, what these guys were doing is just the cyber-equivalent of getting their mate to "casually" tell you they're not looking for a long-term relationship, or "accidentally" leaving the receipt for a dirty weekend in their suit pocket for you to find. It's not, of course, restricted to the field of relationships. Forgetting your PIN number is the Life 2.0 equivalent of the cashier at the bank refusing to believe that that is your signature. Killing your Tamagotchi.. well, need I go on? I realise I'm in no position to comment, as having a blog doesn't really equate to anything old-style apart from writing a diary which, unless you're very careless, never gets read by anyone else, or maybe writing a newspaper column - except millions of us do it, which certainly isn't the case in the press. I have no idea what the moral of this observation is - and I doubt there actually is one - I suppose it's plus ça change, or something pithy about the equipment changing but not the operator...

Star Crossed

2009-01-19T13:35:00.015Z

Every now and then you can't beat Gone With the Wind as a great, lazy, sandwich-eating way to spend an afternoon. Apart from Gandhi it's the only film I've ever seen that admitted it needed an intermission (and even had special intermission music! You can't fault David O Selznick for grandeur of scale). And I think the intermission in Gandhi was only there because the cinema management thought, quite rightly, that we might need it. I went to see The Unbearable Lightness Of Being as a student, and secretly rechristened it The Unbearable Numbness Of My Bum, although that may have less to do with the undeniable length (and lack of intermission) of the actual film and more to do with the fact that, if you're not a big fan of Daniel Day Lewis, the sight of him saying "Take your clothes off" FORTY-SEVEN BILLION TIMES can get a little wearisome.

Anyway, back to Gone With the Wind - my delightful friend Marky Mark told me that apparently Margaret Mitchell was a total fan of astrology, and had deliberately written the novel so that each of the main characters was a perfect archetype of a particular star sign, as follows:

Scarlett O'Hara = Aries

Rhett Butler = Sagittarius

Ashley Wilkes = Pisces

Melanie Wilkes = Cancer

I think I more or less got that right. It's a great theory but I worry for the future of fiction if, on top of unsolicited quibbling about inaccuracies in period detail etc, the author was also subject to letters arguing that no Libra would behave like that... but then I would worry, being a Pisces.

(The picture above, by the way, comes from my favourite scene in the film, when Scarlett's unlamented second husband has just died, and she's drunk the better part of a bottle of brandy - Rhett comes to see her, and as she's desperately rinsing her mouth out with eau de cologne to hide the smell of booze, Mammy shows him in with the line "Mr Rhett's here to see you, Miz Scarlett. I told him you was prostrate with grief.")

The Point Of No Return

2009-01-12T13:30:00.003Z

At what point in one's life do embarrassing songs simply stop being embarrassing? And why? When we were children we would happily bop about to pretty much anything with a beat (how else to explain the constant popularity of inane dross like the Tweenies, Take 5, Sportacus, etc etc...). And then puberty struck, and everything reduced us to paroxysms of squirming, particularly if our parents liked it. In fact, as I remember, you were only allowed to admit you liked songs/bands of almost proscriptive obscurity - if you'd caught the name late at night on John Peel and nobody else had even heard of them yet, that made it all the cooler. And if they ever got into the charts, you had to stop liking them immediately and whine about how they'd sold out. In my day it was tantamount to social suicide to admit you liked anything that could even vaguely be categorised as "disco" (ie anything poppy with a beat), which led to a huge crisis at parties - in the event that you did anything as uncool as dancing, rather than sneering in eyeliner from the edge of the room, there was very little you could actually dance to. Gothy posturing to Joy Division hardly counts, as it's more in the ballpark of "I will now portray Anomie And Social Despair through the medium of modern dance".
So - when was it that the disco rot started creeping in? I have a memory of a distinct turning point in my second year at college, when I shared a huge house with (among others) a girl who would unashamedly start a Saturday night off with "Never Too Much" by Luther Vandross. It was all downhill from there. And once you've conceded that Abba are possibly the finest popsters in the world, and you stand up to be counted, admitting with barely a blush that you know all the words to "When I Kissed The Teacher", well, the primrose path to Shameless Musical Leanings beckons. Rapidly you find you actually know the dance to Bucks Fizz's "Making Your Mind Up". You play the Nolan Sisters at parties. And songs such as the one below are greeted with whoops of delight rather than the general slinking off in shame that they deserve. Go on, admit when Marks and Spencer used it in an advert you were actually pleased to hear it again...

Christmas with La Boheme

2009-01-02T12:56:00.005Z

Picture the scene. An opera house stage, swagged in crimson velvet. The house lights go down, leaving only the scalloped brass footlights aglow. As the curtain slowly rises, we see before us a threadbare chaise-longue in a draughty, ill-lit Paris garret of the 19th century, upon which a frail figure in a tattered nightgown lies, coughing weakly into a tiny scrap of bloodstained lace hanky. Alone, uncared-for, the helpless figure of Mr Fishwife prepares for his final aria as a cruel world leaves him to perish of consumption. Beside him, the burly figure of, well, me, weeps in a baritone voice (I'm bordering on basso profundo at the moment).

Happy New Year! As I write I'm clutching a packet of Day Nurse capsules in one hand and a large cup of tea in the other. Oh yes, Mr Fishwife's flu has finally got its claws into me and all my attempts to dodge it have failed. Inevitable, really, when one is sharing the same bed as someone already afflicted and they are coughing lavishly into one's face at all hours of the night. So far I fear I may have infected not only Mr Fishwife's mother but also my entire family, Inexplicably Single Martyn and his parents, four of my closest friends, their nieces and nephews, and most unforgivable of all, a pregnant woman. I won't go on again about the joys of Night Nurse, but it beats champagne hands down as this year's best tipple for the festive season. On the plus side, I sneezed on somebody very rude on the Tube.

An odd and apparently separate part of the brain

2008-12-22T12:37:00.015Z

Imagine you're a police officer, and you're attempting to establish whether there have been witnesses to a crime. We've all seen Identikit pictures of suspects on the news, and they look nothing like a real person. Often they look like a Muppet. And when the suspect is black or Asian, often the different parts of their Identikit face are slightly different colours, adding insult to injury. However - apparently there has been extensive research into how people recognise a face in a picture, and the quickest and easiest way to jog their memory is to show them a picture of somebody famous who resembles the suspect, and ask them if they saw a man who looked like, for instance, Tommy Lee Jones (a scary prospect in itself). Without going into too much scientific detail, it's mainly because our memory of a face is as a whole, and breaking it down feature by feature is far harder to do. Fascinating, no? And something I've been doing as far back as I can remember. Whenever someone tells me about a new boy/girlfriend my first question is always "Who would play them in a film?" - obviously you have to make allowances for the fact that leurve can vastly improve the looks of a potential suitor but if they say "Ooh maybe Hugh Jackman...?" I can assume it's some man who is tall, smiley, and quite good-looking (and possibly Australian). One of the best drunken dinner-party conversations I've ever had was when we were all deciding who would play us in the films that would inevitably be made of our lives - Philip Seymour Hoffman loomed large (not playing me, obviously, but as my friend Marky Mark), although my friend Steak and I nearly came to blows over who got Laura Linney. I fobbed her off with Mena Suvari (well, Steak does look about 15). Everyone tried to make Mr Fishwife feel better about his comprehensively (and prematurely) grey hair by saying "Well, obviously George Clooney". And all at once I was reminded, depressingly, of the colleague I once had (who, himself, looked like Hugh Grant in About A Boy) who considered the idea for a while and then finally decided I looked most like Axl Rose.

No, seriously, which one would you prefer if you were me????

Ant and Flea

2008-12-11T13:05:00.005Z

Ah, the joys of chip and pin. Or flea and code confidentiel, as the French like to call it. As if to add insult to injury at this stressful time of year, not only are the shops full to bursting (surely a good sign in a recession?), but heavy electronic traffic means that the card machines take longer to process a transaction, thus leading to so much tsk-ing from customers that it sounds like a small delegation of Kalahari tribesmen. I used to work for A Large French National Airline, some years ago, and one year the annual sales conference was entirely given over to the advent of "le ticketless" - or, as London residents know it, the Oyster Card. An enthusiastic and almost incomprehensible speech in rough franglais was given by a fervent IT nerd flown over from Charles de Gaulle airport, during the course of which it transpired that they hadn't bothered to look up what the English words for "chip and pin" and "electronic chip reader" were. Imagine a room full of French and English salespeople, half of whom can't understand what their compatriot is saying, because his English is appalling but, well, English, and half of whom can't understand what the French guy is saying because his vocabulary is deeply odd. After telling us how an ant would be installed at every checkin desk, he went on to explain that you would simply have a flea in your wallet. The flea would be updated by the sales staff, and then in order to board the plane you would pass another ant. You would show the ant your wallet (at which point all the English sales staff nudged each other and muttered "Let the ant see the wallet, mate"). Then in a frenzy of sweaty specialist excitement (his) and confused silence (ours) he sat down. We were left none the wiser except that you had something in your wallet that you showed to something else. At which point another Big Boy from Paris stood up and said, and here I transcribe as it was spoken, "Euh, many thank to my esteem collègue. His words 'ave given us many food for thought. Let us all give him the clap."

Feelgood horror fiction

2008-12-01T11:42:00.009Z

Yes, there is such a thing. Although I'm using the word "horror" as a kind of general catch-all to include supernatural shenanigans of any kind. I've recently read a number of books whose authors breathlessly cite Stephen King as their muse, their inspiration, and their spiritual father. Sadly, not one of them had what it took. And that's not to say that they were badly written, just that they seemed to have totally missed the point about Stephen King, which is that he doesn't really write horror. I know, I know, he is the mainstay of every Horror section in every bookshop in the world, and arguably made the genre the mainstream moneyspinner it has become for so many publishers. However. Horror, to me, is what James Herbert writes - bleak, nasty, and full of rats, with everybody dead or mutilated at the end. While Stephen King has a limitlessly gruesome imagination, what he also has is a phenomenal sense of decency. You can tell that Stephen King was the fat speccy boy who was mercilessly bullied at school, and as a result has become the champion of the underdog. Almost every one of his heroes is a weak character - a battered wife, a small child, an old woman, a kid with a stammer/glasses/weight problem. And by the end of the book, natural justice has (usually) prevailed in their favour. It's the satisfying and very black-and-white morality of fairy tales. In the same bracket I'd put Muriel Grey (yes, the weeny Scottish Annie Lennox-clone from The Tube), John Connolly and the truly wonderful Phil Rickman. I was having huge difficulties getting off to sleep last night (Sunday night syndrome) and realised that it was because I had three chapters left of To Dream Of The Dead by Phil Rickman - and I had to put the light on and finish it, reassuring myself that embattled female vicar (and Deliverance minister) Merrily Watkins and her grumpy New Age daughter Jane would be OK. Of course they were, because Phil Rickman is (and I say this with the utmost respect for both of them) another Stephen King. Albeit an uncompromisingly British one.

The lovely Phil Rickman (on left). In his day job as BBC Radio Wales' "Phil The Shelf". Won't bother with a picture of Stephen King because you all know what he looks like.

Nightmares are subjective.

2008-11-21T12:30:00.005Z

The chewed skeleton of the dog was later found behind the gazebo.

I have always believed that it's actually a physical impossibility to "wake up screaming" from a nightmare - apparently the salivary glands radically slow production while you're asleep, in order to stop you (sorry if you're eating) drowning in your own spit. This explains why you can tell if somebody is pretending to be asleep because you can hear them swallow, and why you often wake up with a dry mouth. I have had my share of nightmares, and more often than not wake up wheezing rather than screaming - more like the noise of a cat dealing with a furball than a full-throated Hollywood AAAAAIIIEEEEEEE. Imagine my surprise when the other night I was woken by an almost Niles Crane style of shriek ("No, Daphne, that wasn't your mother screaming...") from the slumbering Mr Fishwife. It later transpired he had had a nightmare in which Esther Rantzen was chasing him, with a spear, down a long corridor which also happened to be his grandmother's back garden. Just when he thought it was safe and was hiding behind a shed, she emerged again, this time with a pair of shears. Now what this experience has taught me is (a) the logic of nightmares is random to say the least, (b) maybe I'm wrong about the salivary thing, and (c) people who scream in your ear at 4 in the morning can really disturb your sleep.

Wot I done on my week off

2008-11-17T09:54:00.022Z

1) had a fairly vile cold

2) went to Bletchley Park - humbling - next time I feel embarrassed by my nerd-dom I will think of the cryptographers, translators and early computer-developers of Bletchley Park (Alan Turing* to name but one) and hold my head high. Nerds arguably won the war. And certainly shortened it by at least 2 years! And without wishing to stand on a soapbox and rant, Bletchley Park receives NO GOVERNMENT FUNDING AT ALL. Not a penny**. Which I find frankly disgusting.

3) went to Westfield "shopping centre" (small town more like) - a gigantic, Swarovski-crystal-studded temple to consumerism, virtually on my doorstep. May be the death of Hammersmith as a shopping area, but Hammersmith is a fetid hole in the ground as far as shops go anyway. All I can tell you from my haze of capitalist wonder is: they have a Waitrose. And a Habitat. And a Paperchase. And a strangely tiny Gap. And a whole bunch of shrouded units saying "Gucci - opening soon" and "Prada - opening soon" - no skin off my nose as I'm no big fan of labels.

4) went on a whistlestop gastro-tour of London organised by John Murray publishers for "Eat My Globe" by Simon Majumdar (not out till April 2009 sadly)- Borough Market, jamon iberico, pork pies, Caerphilly, jellied eels, cockles, the perfect martini, the perfect tandoori lamb chop, and Marmite-filled chocolate truffles... what did I learn from this? That £20 per 100g is worth it for the best Spanish ham in London. That jellied eels are an acquired taste but nothing like as nasty as you think they're going to be. That if you're thinking of eating at the frankly stellar New Tayyab you'd better be prepared to queue for at least two hours - but the naan bread alone makes it worth it. That Marmite chocolate truffles are fantastic and barely taste of Marmite (Heston would be proud). Ditto port and stilton chocolate truffles. That the best martinis in London are to be drunk at Hawksmoor. And that snacking all afternoon can make you slightly tetchy but really make you appreciate a good curry.

5) still had a fairly vile cold at the end of it.

* An interesting if ultra-nerdy fact - Alan Turing committed suicide by painting an apple with cyanide and eating half of it. This is why Apple computers have a bitten apple as their logo.

** to sign an e-petition to encourage the government to give Bletchley Park the funding it deserves, go to http://www.savingbletchleypark.org/

This is getting silly

2008-11-06T13:13:00.003Z

The tagging has become a daisy chain of silliness but since I've been tagged again by Brother Tobias here's the Reduced Shakespeare productions view of the same meme I had very recently.

1) Only once, at the age of 11, and it didn't really make any major impact on my general tastes.

2) Mornington Crescent.

3) Yes, but not in brine.

4) Queen Elizabeth I, Frank Spencer, and the lift operator's voice in Are You Being Served.

5) Nothing, although you can keep Kendal Mint Cake in it.

6) A Trafalgar blue Morris Minor.

I won't tag any of you...

Result!

2008-11-06T09:58:00.005Z

A day late, I know. I was off on Wednesday. Oddly quite pleased about this even though it wasn't our election. I know I said I don't do politics, and I don't. So I won't. Still quite pleased though.

Songs on the brain

2008-11-03T14:28:00.008Z

Songs this week that have ricocheted irritatingly around my head (due to their sharing a title with a book I can see from where I'm sitting) include the following:

"American Boy" - book by Andrew Taylor, song by Estelle
"Almost Blue" - book by Carlo Lucarelli, song by Elvis Costello
"Angel" - book by Elizabeth Taylor, song by Gavin Friday
"Thieves Like Us" - book by Steve Cole, song by New Order

Equally annoying and more contrived are the ones that suggest a song - I've been singing "Revelation" (by C J Sansom) to the tune of "Isolation" by Joy Division, "Holes" (by Louis Sachar) to "Gold" by Spandau Ballet, and most annoyingly of all, "Two Caravans" (by Marina Lewycka) to "Sweet Caroline" by Neil Diamond. Don't bother telling me you love Neil Diamond, I don't care. This is torture. I've resisted having an iPod for years, partly because the length of my commute hasn't warranted it since 2001, and partly because I quite like hearing the world as I go home (how else would I be finding the karaoke pub in Hammersmith such good auditory value?). But I think I may need one, as a kind of homeopathic remedy for the earworms. Because it's either that, or become one of those strange book-industry people who lurks in the stock room singing hymns really loudly to drown out The Voices, and I'm definitely not ready for that.

A couple more snippets because you all seemed to like them (honestly, I bet you're the sort of people who could live on unlimited snacks):

The TV advert for a thrush remedy (yes, the fungal infection, no not the bird) which said "It will leave you feeling yourself again" - possibly unwise on the basis of "If you pick at it it'll never get better"?

The rugby match I wish I'd watched = Nancy vs Nice. I bet that was amazingly civilised. And well-dressed.

Overheard on Saturday night from lovey-dovey couple holding hands over champagne glasses: "..and outside the laundrette I just puked pure water."

Inadvisable

2008-10-31T11:02:00.002Z

My route home involves a quick walk through Hammersmith tube station, which, like many tube stations, has a sad and nasty new-build pub in it. Every night as I go past I get a heady whiff of old chip-fat, spilt beer, and the quiet desperation of any pub that is nobody's local. Also... inappropriate karaoke. I can't begin to imagine what mildly deranged urge makes people want to do karaoke at 6 in the evening on a work night, at least initially sober, in a tube station pub, but evidently they do. If I had a pound for every time I've overheard some sad woman singing "Wind Beneath My Wings" (or insert name of unseemly power-ballad here) I'd be halfway to quite a nice secondhand car. Going through yesterday, and admittedly it was nearer 9pm than 6, I heard a man singing, and I swear with my hand on my heart this is true, "Can't Touch This" by M C Hammer. What kind of choice is that? It's the choice of a man who knows he can't sing, but foolishly believes he can rap. With the possible exception of "Walking In The Air" I can't actually think of anything less suited to being sung by an accountant in a suit, but I'm prepared to find I'm wrong, probably this evening as I walk past again...

Zombie Davina, a quick tribute

2008-10-28T12:59:00.006Z

Davina, in last night's Dead Set, shown shortly prior to tearing someone's throat out and feasting on their entrails, in a literal way rather than the usual figurative way of Big Brother...

Davina McCall wins this year's Lucy award for "Celeb who isn't afraid of laughing at themselves and their public image". Although it was a close shave for "Dr" Fox for his almost self parody on Peter Kay's Britain's Got The Pop Factor And Possibly A New Jesus Christ Soapstar Superstar Strictly On Ice - but Davina scoops it, partly because I just don't like "Dr" Fox.

Am I being unreasonable?

2008-10-27T11:09:00.000Z

So I'm at work, and I'm on my own. An irony is that it's easier for me to have a swift cigarette (5mins) (and yes, sorry again) than go to the loo (25 seconds) - having a cigarette means waiting till the shop's empty, then standing outside. I can see people come in, I can hastily fling my smouldering dog-end down the drain in the gutter in front of me (don't worry, full of water), and rush in to be helpful or well-informed or whateverrrr. Going to the loo is another matter, as the loo is out at the back of the shop, which means I have to hope nobody comes in (while I am soundproofed behind two doors) and shoplifts/robs the till. AAAAAAAnyway. So, after 20 minutes of no customers (which is why I have time to write this!) I race out the back, and on my return find a woman standing accusingly at the till.

"There wasn't anybody to serve me!" she says crossly, having been waiting all of 10 seconds.

"I'm sorry," I say, "I'm on my own today. How can I help?"

"Can you tell me where Brookford Road is? "

"I'm afraid not, I don't live round here. Maybe if you ask in the café next door?"

"Don't you have an A to Z?"

"Yes, downstairs in the travel section."

"I don't do stairs." she says crossly, glares at me, heaves a heavy wounded sigh at my unhelpfulness, and leaves before I have a chance to say anything (or even offer to fetch her an A to Z she won't be buying, just cracking the spine and leaving).

Now IS IT JUST ME or is that fairly unreasonable behaviour? We're a bookshop, not a tourist bureau - and while I sort of understand what makes people think that libraries are a place where, to paraphrase Robert Frost, when you go there they have to take you in (untrue and unfair though that is to libraries), where's the logic with bookshops? Is it a backhanded compliment ("You're a temple of intellect and information, so your priorities can't be anything so vulgar as making money")? Or what?? And even if she hoped that I (the person, not the bookseller) might personally know where Brookford Road was, why get grumpy with me for not knowing?

Sorry, not enough coffee.

Meme-o-rama

2008-10-20T12:07:00.001+01:00

I've been tagged by the grotto of delight that is Perfume Shrine, and after trying to think of things about myself that I haven't already said (I'm hardly Mrs Enigmatic) here we go.

Six random things about me :

a)I am allergic to Metronidazole. Never heard of it? Neither had I, until I was prescribed it and nearly died. I persisted in taking it even while the migraine, double vision and swollen joints threatened to cripple me. I thought because it was an antibiotic it would make me feel better. Oddly the fact that I could no longer feel my extremities as I crawled to the loo didn't tip me off.

b) I make the finest, crunchiest, most golden roast potatoes in the world. I will take on all comers. The secret, sadly if you're a vegetarian, is goose fat.

c) Back in my Air France days Omar Sharif once sent me a postcard thanking me for getting him from Cairo to Nice during a baggage-handlers' strike. It wasn't easy, I can tell you. I had to reroute the poor man via Paris AND Amsterdam. At least he was in Club.

d) I was interviewed on Radio 4 a while back about the preponderence of parody books (Bored Of The Rings, The Va Dinci Cod, Barry Trotter et al) in the run-up to Christmas. While I had a fabulous speech all prepared about parody being one of the oldest forms of humour, it was reduced to about 45 seconds in total (including "candid" background noise of me at the till) on air. I got my name read out though! Have also accidentally been interviewed on TV twice but have already covered that...

e) When I was 7 I invented knitting. No lie. Casting on, and everything. My grandmother had to kindly explain to me that it had been around since the egyptians. I still invented it, though...

f) I have double-jointed fingers and can bend them back like a Thai dancer. While this was great when I was at school, making me top pick in certain rarefied gym activities (I can balance a netball on the back of my hand like nobody else), apparently it means I'll have terrible arthritis later in life. Never a silver lining without a cloud, eh? Also means I have to be careful when gesturing, as there's a fine line that separates graceful Pavlova hands from weird bendy E.T. hands... see bottom right.

I'm making myself popular by tagging Steve, JRSM, Reluctant Blogger, Can Bass 1, Scentself, and of course Laura because she just can't get enough memes (snicker). I would have tagged Mantua Maker and Titian-Red but neither of them has a blog (yet).

1. Link to the person who tagged you

2. Post the rules on your blog

3. Write six random things about yourself

4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them

5. Let each person know they've been tagged and leave a comment on their blog

6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Just a quick one.

2008-10-16T11:35:00.004+01:00

I was serving a customer yesterday. As she was paying she was chatting cosily to her beloved on her mobile (I presume that's who she was talking to, as she had suddenly adopted a startlingly twee ickle-girly voice and kept calling him "Baby" - presumably not her bank manager then, although in this financially unstable day and age who knows? Whatever gets you that overdraft). Her attention was caught by a pile of Mr Men bookmarks on the till - she picked up the one saying "Mr Perfect" and said "What's this?" "It's a bookmark." I replied. She put it back. "Oh no, he doesn't read." she said, and left. To which all one can say is: Well, he isn't Mr Perfect then, is he?????

Or am I being overly subjective?

Spread the payments or share the love?

2008-10-11T12:01:00.008+01:00

You think it's bad seeing Christmas decorations everywhere, try being the poor benighted shop-monkey who has to price them all. I speak from my dungeon of pain (actually the sunny, warm, south-facing back office) with a price gun in my hand (also a large latte and a scotch egg). It is only October the 11th, and I am half-buried in boxes of charideeee cards and slippery bundles of giftwrap.

Yes, there is a credit crunch on, a term that always makes me think of Kit-Kats (mmmm... Kit-Kats...), and I appreciate that people find it easier to start shopping for the festive season in October, thus spreading the financial load over two or three months. However, shouldn't we be crediting the great buying public with some intelligence? The Mighty Bookstore Chain I used to work for had a phase-by-phase military-style operation that would roll out in September. Phase 1 was called "Early Gifting", a phrase that actually makes me physically ill. CDs of Christmas music were played from the start of November, and by the time the doors shut on Christmas Eve, you were ready to commit homicide if you heard "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" again. Seasoned booksellers could be reduced to a twitching wreck by the repeated whispering of "Pa-rum-pa-pum-pum....".

Christmas happens at the same time every year, and I defy you to prove otherwise (Leap Years don't count). People are unlikely to be taken aback on December the 23rd; although some of us are surprised by our own lack of preparation, it's not as if we didn't know it was going to happen. Everybody knows money is tight, and will be planning their spending accordingly. So why insult everybody by reminding them, in late September even, that they may need to start buying presents? Share the love! Stop the madness! I recommend a ban on all mention of Christmas until the second week in December. Starting, obviously, from 5 minutes after I publish this post.

Cherry tomatoes in Minas Tirith??

2008-09-29T09:36:00.008+01:00

A quiet night in, and Mr Fishwife and I were mildly at a loss so, as you do, we went for The Previously Watched Old Faithful, Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King. The great thing about a film you have seen a million times (well, it's big! And the special effects are amazing! And Gollum's so real!) is that you can read a book at the same time, eat a plate of roast chicken off your lap, generally fail to pay attention at all, and still enjoy it, interrupted occasionally by Mr Fishwife's nerdy cries of "Frodo? At Osgiliath? Not in my copy of the book, oh no." and "Elves?? At Helm's Deep?? I think not!!". Unless, as I did, you look up at a dramatic moment and notice, for the first time, the fact that Denethor, Steward of Gondor, while curtly sending his less-favoured son to almost certain death, is eating a plate of cherry tomatoes.

So there we have it. Photographic evidence. Now it's not the fact of the cherry tomatoes themselves, although I personally think a mouthful of rare steak would have been more apposite, and blood oozing down his chin a better (if more obvious) cinematic counterpoint to the doomed battle in which Faramir finds himself, than a mouthful of tomato juice. My point, my big thing point, is that I am now unable to watch the film without wondering where in Gondor they have the poly-tunnels necessary for the successful cultivation of cherry tomatoes in such a mountainous and rocky habitat? And given the fairly merciless appearance of the terrain, couldn't better use be made of the land than frivolously market gardening? Wouldn't potatoes be a better bet? Nobody looks that rich in Minas Tirith - are the cherry tomatoes just a perk for the Stewards? In which case Aragorn returned to take up kingship not a moment too soon.

The Magic Number - and other nostalgia trips

2008-09-27T09:43:00.021+01:00

Foofing about on YouTube the other day, as one does, and I was amazed by how much stuff there is that isn't music videos (grammar). Thank god that out there somewhere are people as nerdy as me (but in a different way), joyfully uploading every crackly VHS tape of Blake's 7 or Button Moon (although try as I may, I can't find a clip of Avon snarling "Hit that button... NOW!!"), uploading their entire 1960s record collection, and having to illustrate it with a two and a half minute shot of the record sleeve or, odder still, the stereo equaliser, because items such as "You Don't Have To Be a Baby to Cry" by the Caravelles are too old to have a video. AAAAAAnyway - While searching for Kermit singing "It Isn't Easy Being Green", a truly sweet and poignant little hymn to self-acceptance that, even at the age of 5, made me want to hug him, I came across this...

...which took me right back to being a small child again. I grew up (till the age of 8, anyway) in Canada, and Sesame Street was the flat-out all-round best thing ever. This, people, is how I know my three times table, and even these days I still sing "3, 6, 9... 12, 15, 18..." when counting something in threes. I never had a problem with turning thirty because as far as I'm concerned, Thirty is the big strong scary one you wouldn't mess with.
I have no idea how they managed to be so educational without being obvious or preachy, because children know when they're getting a nasty spoonful of education in a sugar coating - somehow they just seemed to make it effortless and fun. I could still sing you the theme tune, although given that I've forgotten the second verse of "O Canada" that's probably just a sign of a selective memory rather than a highly-developed one.
Far more arcane, as childhood TV habits go, are the all-but-forgotten Kid Power, which I can still also sing the theme tune from, The Osmonds, which implanted forever in a geek pub-quiz way the names of all the Osmond brothers but for unknown reasons missed Marie out altogether, and The Jackson 5ive, similar, but in hindsight far creepier. What was with the cartoonising of pop bands in the 70s? Was it supposed to simultaneously render them more popular and less sexy? Thank god they never thought of doing that with Gary Glitter.
Thank you for reading! This episode of "Life Happens Between Books" was brought to you by the letter N and the number three. "Sunny day, chasin' the clouds away... on my way to where the air is sweet..."

"Interesting even if not true"

2008-09-22T11:36:00.019+01:00

Once again, a post about my heroes - here are three more. They are Northrop Frye, Luca Turin and Harold McGee. They are united by the fact that they write about things I love (respectively: fiction, perfume and cooking) without themselves being involved in the end product. That is to say, Northrop Frye has written many wonderful and thoroughly accessible books about the structure and theory of literature without actually writing a novel, Luca Turin has done the same for perfume and also engineered several synthetic components for perfume without actually creating a finished product, and Harold McGee was pretty much single-handedly responsible for the phenomenon that is "molecular gastronomy"by writing so clearly and interestingly about the science of cookery that it's only a miracle we're not all whipping up meat mousse and sugar caviar. And all this without ever owning a restaurant. When I first read his seminal (and breeze-block sized) On Food and Cooking I had to be forcibly restrained from discussing with bored strangers the difference between real coffee (a suspension), instant coffee (a solution) and tea (an infusion). It's the sign of a really great theoretician that they can write about something you love in as interesting and inspiring a way as the actual practitioners can (and often more so!). To paraphrase something Luca Turin says in The Secret of Scent, there are three kinds of theoretical writing: that which is boring if true (ie written solely for people doing a PhD in the subject), that which is interesting if true, and that which is interesting even if not true. Which in a nutshell sums up Things I Like Reading. And is another factor that unites them - the ability to find things interesting and fun.

Time after time after time

2008-09-11T14:06:00.010+01:00

(This one's not about perfume!)

I'm re-reading the strange and deeply wonderful "Time And Again" by Jack Finney, whose take on time travel is this: if you put somebody into the clothes of, for example, 1890, in a room authentically furnished and gas-lit as it would have been in 1890, with a view that is exactly what one would have seen in 1890, then a combination of self-hypnosis and "spirit of place" will send them back to 1890. When they get up from the chair they are sitting in and walk out of the front door, they will indeed be back in 1890. Or 1410, or 1972, or whatever date they're trying to get to.

I love this idea - after all, when are you ever going to be able to disprove it? You may be in a National Trust property where a Tudor bedroom has been lovingly recreated, but how likely is it that you'll be alone, wearing Tudor clothes and not seeing a National Trust van or gift shop outside the window?

I had lunch with my family last week, and was reminded once again that my grandmother and I share the same (somewhat naive) view, which is "Isn't it great that science hasn't yet disproved everything?" (ie ghosts, the afterlife, some form of deity, etc) - my stepdad, on the other hand, is a fervently rational atheist and was just starting to (mildly) use words like "twaddle" when I reminded him that of course he would say that, because he's an Aquarius.

Perfume again

2008-09-04T15:51:00.008+01:00

Just received in the morning post a REVIEW COPY, I'll say that again because I'm so delighted with it, A REVIEW COPY, which means FREE, FREE, FREE, AND I DIDN'T PAY FOR IT, of a book I have been wanting to get my hands on since I saw it reviewed in the paper last weekend: "Perfumes - the guide" by the patron saint of scents and potions Luca Turin. I just realised that I'm so excited that that was all one sentence, so here is another full stop for you. Breathe deeply, my lovelies.
The book itself is a collection of reviews of over 1500 perfumes, from the sublime to the ridiculous, and while it's handy for a little pat on the back (Mitsouko, one of my lifelong favourites, gets five stars and "the best fragrance ever"), it is also completely unputdownable for the all-round brilliance of the bad reviews. A perfume I won't name (people have been sued for less) gets this : "A chemical white floral so disastrously vile words nearly desert me. If this were a shampoo offered with your first shower after sleeping rough for two months in Nouakchott, you'd opt to keep the lice." Another, more concise: "Teensy-weensy cutesy-pie floral of the worst vintage" and, finally, pithy and to the point: "Death by jasmine".
It also poses the big questions that keep us all awake at night, such as "What is chypre without oakmoss?" and "Since the restriction of benzyl salicylates, have floral perfumes been the same?". I honestly don't know how I've lived without this book for so long. I apologise to all non-scentophiles for the single note of this post and will post on a more general note next time. I leave you with the masterful review for Coty Miss Sixty : "Ideal if you intend to be a Miss at sixty".

Herewith Mitsouko. A treasure.

Gilding The Lily

2008-08-28T12:48:00.009+01:00

If you love a book, NEVER NEVER go and see the film thereof (apart from "Hellboy", which was a class act). We've all been there - the extraordinary disappointment of seeing your favourite character played by Tom Cruise (or, worse, Val Kilmer, a man who looks like somebody drew a face on a balloon and then blew it up slightly too much), the dreadful soundtrack, the hamfisted casting, entire story arcs left out. I completely understand that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with altering a book to fit what some ponytailed suit thinks would be nice (and shoehorn some sex/car chases etc into a plot otherwise devoid of them), but in that case why say "Based on the novel by.." ?? Why not just totally rewrite it and call it something else - and in the process get the credit for a whole new and original plot? I only say this because I went to see "Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day" last night. Ho hum, I say to you, ho bleeding hum. And in fact quite the reverse argument applies to this one. Far from being a complex work gutted for the screen, the book was a frothy little nothing of a plot, a really good holiday read, and I have to say I could see it being a very sweet Sunday night feelgood kind of thing. So when I saw that it had Frances McDormand in it my heart sank slightly - not because I don't like her, because I really really do, but because she's decidedly not an insubstantial frothy kind of actress. And lo, lo and behold - suddenly the film was rife with foreboding, and I use the phrase advisedly (mostly because it sounds good); bomber planes flying overhead, air-raid drills, gasmasks in shop windows, characters saying sadly to each other "They don't remember the last war, do they..", all sorts of things that were never in the book - HELLOOO, I wanted to shout at the screen, the whole point of this book (written as it was in 1938) was to stop people thinking about the outbreak of war, and give them a frilly piece of frippery to take the nasty taste away. And as such, perfectly suited to our rather uncertain times, non?

I attach for your delectation a picture of Amy Adams, because she really was the only one who was perfectly cast and, bless her, she's another ginger. And Lee Pace, because when he appeared on screen we all cheered up immensely.

Enraged marine gastropods

2008-08-12T09:42:00.007+01:00

One of the great joys of a bookshop, as opposed to buying books on t'internet, is that you can have a bit of a trial flick before you commit. Obviously I'm talking about brand-new, un-road-tested, speculative buying, rather than re-acquiring old loves that you lent foolishly to a friend, and which promptly went out of print shortly after the friend went off round the world with no mobile phone. I know, I know, a certain online book site allows you to "see inside!!" but when you buy a book there are many factors that affect your choice. Everybody in the book trade will tell you most people do judge a book by its cover - as anyone knows who has bought a copy of "Pride and Prejudice" with a nice 19th century watercolour on the jacket as opposed to a BBC publicity shot of Colin Firth in a wet shirt. I personally never buy the film tie-in edition of anything - do you really want people to think you're reading a novel by Hugh Grant? Some people like a nice high gloss finish on a paperback cover, some like that rather subtle buffed matt finish we're seeing more and more of these days (and is a right sod, because it's actually almost frictionless and if you pick up a pile of 5 or 6 of them, they fly in all directions like a school of bars of soap). Hardbacks are generally considered a treat, or for presents, or for the diehard nailbiting author-junkie who can't wait for the paperback - I personally hate them because they cost at least three times as much as a paperback for the same amount of print, and when you're reading in bed they leave a nasty red three-cornered dent in your knee.

HOWEVER to my main point. When you're considering buying a book, the "see inside!!" feature is near enough useless, as it doesn't tell you anything about size of print, or more importantly font - I went through a phase in my late teens of only reading Picador books because after reading two or three that I loved, I found I had a Pavlovian response to the font they habitually used and would have read the Yellow Pages if they'd been printed in it. And most important of all - the sample paragraph. I like a cursory flick through a book. Nothing so crass as reading the last page; after all a book is a journey to another world, and would you start a holiday by already anticipating your sweaty return trek through Heathrow baggage claim at 7am? A quick glance will tell you a lot about a book, however, in much the same way as a travel guide will whet your appetite for your eventual destination. A friend lent me a novel the other day that I had heard nothing but good reviews of, and I was quite looking forward to giving it a go. It was an American import, and I have to say the Americans are streets ahead of us in cover design, and the cover was that lovely soft matt finish I hate at work but love in my hands (although interestingly American paperback covers tend to curl really badly - excellent cover design but cheaper laminate?).

I opened it, I had a flick, and the phrase "angry red whelks ran across his back" sprang out at me. What can I say? There's no way I can read it now. What should have been a nailbitingly dramatic scene about priestly abuse became a positive fiesta of grumpy seafood.

Personal Gods - a rogues' gallery of deities I quite like.

2008-08-07T11:18:00.025+01:00

Fortuna, goddess of, unsurprisingly, fortune. Known aliases include "Lady Luck"; aspersions are cast on her fickleness (qv O Fortuna by Carl Orff, staple soundtrack to horror films and aftershave ads). Famous for not often being a lady, and maybe not having been a lady to begin with (qv Guys and Dolls). You can do what you like to please her, but you'll never know if your luck was favourable because she liked the cut of your jib, or not. Unpredictable. The only thing you can guarantee is that there are no guarantees. To paraphrase what Pascal said of God, it's best to worship her, because if she exists you're covered, and if she doesn't, you've lost nothing. Aptly enough, even worshipping her is a gamble.

Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel. Bear with me a little on this one if I tell you his main alias is Lucifer. Worshipped pretty much exclusively by the Yezidi, a tiny ethnic Kurdish minority in Iraq. They believe that God made man and told the angels to bow down to him, which they duly did, but Melek Taus refused, saying that surely the angels were the finest of God's creations and shouldn't bow down to a creature made of mud. So far, so Biblical. The Yezidi reckon, however, that at this point rather than casting him out for insubordination, God said "Well done, that was exactly the answer I was looking for, and unlike all these yes-men you alone have the pride to recognise that you are my most beautiful creation..." and other encouraging noises. God then disappeared to create other universes, leaving Melek Taus, the Devil, in charge of this one. Given the extraordinary persecution the Yezidi have suffered over the years, that sounds about right.

Legba Atibon, voodoo god (or loa) of the crossroads. He represents humility, comprehension, and the ability to see and appreciate the potential in others, which in itself facilitates communication. Definitely the god of the internet and libraries - and of any conversation or exchange of information. How could you not worship him? The kindest and most affectionately-regarded of the loa, he has relatively simple tastes for a god, and rather than demanding expensive tribute and sacrifices is happy with a cup of coffee and some tobacco. So also the god of booksellers then...

Why I Love The Internet

2008-08-06T16:00:00.014+01:00

It's all been said before, and by people far more clued-up and techno-geeky than me, but I LOVE THE INTERNET. Damn, but it's a boon to mankind. I speak as one to whom the phrase "knowledge is power" is not just a phrase but a way of life, and I literally cannot imagine how I used to live before I had this wealth of facts at my fingertips. I will give you but two of the million examples of this :

1) Recently, in France, on a fairly remote country road, my friend's car had a minor wobble. She has a Honda, and a small but doom-laden amber warning light started flashing on the dashboard. It was in some peculiar shape we couldn't work out (I thought all cars were idiot-proof these days???). Mr Fishwife, who fancies himself as Jeremy Clarkson (thankfully without the paunch and the perm), made all sorts of manly noises, but admitted defeat when all four of us decided the only shape it remotely resembled was maybe a gastro-intestinal tract, or a kohlrabi, neither of which play a huge part in the functionings of a Honda. THANK GOD FOR THE INTERNET - which she could access via her iPhone - where we found not only the Honda homepage (it was a warning light for "the engine", helpfully unspecific there) but also the phone number for her Honda Garage, who made reassuring noises and booked her in for a check-up when she got back. All we needed to know was that it was safe to keep driving the car with the dash warning still flashing, and lo we were duly reassured. And stopped for more ice cream rather than racing home before the kohlrabi exploded.

2) I had lunch a few days ago with my 95-year-old grandmother (not the dead alcoholic one, the living Swiss one) - I won't use the phrase "marvellous for her age", although she is, because what does that mean? Why is it surprising to be marvellous over a certain age? She forgets things a lot - but then when I think about it, she always has. And when I think about it, so do I. However, get her onto something that doesn't involve what she's doing next Tuesday week, and you're away. We had a long chat about the etymological derivation of the words "discreet" and "discrete", and then she said to me "What's the rest of that poem, you must know, it, something about "pense à Andromaque", or is it Andromache?" ... How sweet of her to have thought I must know it, which I didn't. So I Googled it. It's from "La Cygne", by Baudelaire. Which I printed out and am posting to her. God bless the internet.

Everything is there in fabulous cyberspace, it's just knowing how to find it - I couldn't for the life of me remember where the lyric "trying hard to recreate what had yet to be created" came from, and Googling a line of text is so much easier if you slap quotation marks around it, and was it worth the effort to find out it came from "What A Fool Believes" by crooning falsetto Santa-clone Michael MacDonald? Yes it was. Watching a film and can't remember what you've seen the tall girl in? Internet. That hotel you stayed in 5 years ago and can't remember the name? Internet. It'll never replace the dictionary for settling a potentially fatal Scrabble row, or Brewer's Phrase And Fable for the collective noun for crows, but it's up there in my pantheon of gods. I'm often thankful I only use it for reference, email and blogging, and not something more time-consuming like those vast online role-playing universes, but there's always time...

Room Lovely (with apologies to Stephen Fry)

2008-08-05T09:23:00.016+01:00

Watching a very old repeat of "Room 101" last night - most of the time the things the guests choose strike a chord (thongs, lateness, lads' mags, Anne Robinson etc), but of course Stephen Fry went one better, picking "Room 101" itself as one of his choices. His argument (or one of them) was that there is something fundamentally depressing about sitting around discussing what you hate (I personally can't get enough of it, but I am a lesser mortal). Another point he made was that there is nothing more destructive to the human spirit than looking at the, in the main, grotesque mess we have made of the world and realising we are part of a species that makes things ugly wherever it goes - although I think he made that point in connection with the Limited Edition Collectable Plates to be found in Sunday colour supplements ("White Wolf's Spirit Brother", "Adela's First Ball", "Waiting For Santa" etc etc). Aaaaaaaaaanyway - he suggested a TV programme called "Room Lovely", although I would recommend fancying up the name a bit, in which guests talk about what they find wonderful and indispensible about the world. I attach above a little collage of things that make me happy. Sadly I won't be including a picture of Mr Fishwife as he is in fact either a hugely famous film star or a high-profile wanted criminal, take your pick - can't remember which excuse he'd prefer, although what it boils down to is that he's read too many articles about identity fraud and is convinced it will happen to him. Tchuh, Virgos.

Those of you who read this by subscription (you know who you are, Ma) will have to look at this actual page to see the pictures...!

Escapism from the midsummer heat.

2008-07-28T12:20:00.013+01:00

There are times when you really want nothing more than to climb into a whole different world for a while and get away from your normal life. OBVIOUSLY books are the answer - every book on your bookshelf is a door which opens somewhere else. I always thought the perfect analogy was the Wood Between The Worlds in The Magician's Nephew; a forest full of pools which, jumped into, take you to another world a million miles and years away. It also has to be fiction - I love my comics, and there are superb series I read over and over again (Sandman and The Invisibles for starters) but written prose has the advantage that your mind provides the faces and places, which is all part of the self-hypnosis of escapism. Being greedy, and (as I may have mentioned) an addict, sometimes one book isn't enough and I need a trilogy (His Dark Materials re-reads very well, especially now there are Lyra's Oxford and Once Upon A Time In The North to flesh it out, and Lewis's The Cosmic Trilogy). Worse, sometimes I need more, a bigger series, although by the time a series gets that large the pickings are lean. I have to leave a sizeable gap between re-reads of The Chronicles Of Narnia and The Dark Tower as I know them too well. Occasionally I toy with the woefully underappreciated Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard, whose drossy TV adaptation ruined it. I did read the entire Niccolo series by Dorothy Dunnett - mock me as a tweedy old bat if you want (it'd be inaccurate, for a start, on at least two counts, and the "old" is debatable too) but it managed to be historically accurate, fascinatingly detailed, and gripping. Also the joy of it being a series meant that, like The Sopranos, a small and seemingly unimportant story line that seemed to peter out in book 2 became a major plot point in book 4. Not sure why the Renaissance appealed more than the Napoleonic wars... but there it is. Also it had far more in the way of female characters (the book series, not the Renaissance). I keep being recommended the Patrick O'Brian series, which would keep me going for a fair while, but I have to admit that two things put me off - one is the relentless blokedom they seem to encourage (war, ships, all-male camaraderie, rum, Napoleon, etc) and the other is Russell Crowe. I apologise to any fans thereof (therewhom?) but if I'm going to invest time and imaginative energy on a whole new world I don't want to be tripping through it hand-in-hand with a tiny-eyed soap-dodger with anger management issues. But let other pens dwell etc etc. So there we have it - I need some large-scale escapism. Please don't suggest Proust or Anthony Powell - otherwise I'm open to suggestions. Hurry before I melt...

An Ethical Diversion

2008-07-21T14:49:00.005+01:00

I may have expressed my pathological love for the unparallelled genius of Nabokov before (hey, who hasn't?) so I can only describe what follows as deeply subjective...
I recently read that an unpublished novel (that he emphatically wanted destroyed) is to be published by his son. Hmmm, a tricky ethical question. I can't think of anything I want more, under normal circumstances, than a new novel by an author I love - especially if I was no longer expecting them to write one. When an author dies, Robertson Davies as a prime example, your first thought (because readers are addicts, and their first thought is always of their addiction) is "Oh no! No more new things to read!" and then, belatedly and guiltily, "How awful for their family, of course..." HOWEVER, and this is a big however, the finest authors are their own harshest critics, and Nabokov more than most; one can only assume if he wanted it destroyed he didn't feel it was of a quality worth publishing. On the other hand, a second-rate Nabokov would still be a million times better than a million other authors at their best. As always, the addiction wins out and, unable to boycott it on principle, I know I'll be the first in the queue to read it. The only consolation is that if it does turn out to be less good than the books published in his lifetime, I can tell myself he knew that would be the case...

Short one - it is, after all, Saturday...

2008-07-19T16:56:00.004+01:00

Recently, admittedly under the influence of Day Nurse (the pathetically puny little sister of La Fée Verte) misread the word "price" as "prince"... which resulted in the interesting phrase "What's that got to do with the prince of fish??" - Herewith I give you, ladies and gentlemen, the prince of fish. Not Mr Fishwife, although he quite fancies a trident for posing round the beach bars with on holiday.

The Green Fairy

2008-07-17T11:10:00.006+01:00

Of course I have developed a nasty cold immediately after returning from a week off. It's one of those ones that yo-yos from your nose to your throat, then back again, so one day you're sneezing wetly all over your distressed colleagues and the next you're hacking away like a faulty cement-mixer. I should point out here that despite my relatively sedentary lifestyle, hatred of exercise, ineptitude for sports and generally unhealthy demeanour (I cite once again the smoking, and the fact that it's only Thursday and I am mildly hungover), I am very rarely ill. It is one of the unexplained joys of my life that not only is this the case, but also that the resolutely fit, healthy, nonsmoking, gym-member Mr Fishwife is a martyr to every sneeze and stomach bug going. Life is a strange and wonderful thing, n'est-ce pas? AAAAAAnyway - so here I am, bunged and raspy, and while I could kid myself I sound throaty and alluring like Lauren Bacall, the truth is I sound more like someone failing to start a chainsaw in a steel wheelie-bin.

Hence the illustration - the wonder that is Night Nurse. Let those boozehound saddos of the Belle Epoque rave about absinthe, the one true path is L’Infirmière Verte. I took a hefty slug last night before going to bed and slept like a hibernating grizzly. Admittedly I still haven't fully woken up yet, and am expecting to do so just before bedtime tonight, thus starting the whole sorry saga off again, but who cares...

Normal Service, or nearest offer.

2008-07-14T14:56:00.005+01:00

I'm probably the only person I know who comes back from any holiday actually paler than before I went. I could offer all sorts of explanations (mostly, and correctly, to do with my lavish use of factor 1000 sunscreen) but I prefer to think of it as an "anti-tan" - the hotter the place I go to, the more the sun bleaches me. Possibly, by my own argument, if I spent a week or two in the Arctic Circle over winter I might develop a tan. Stranger things have happened.
Not hugely pale this time, as most of my sun exposure took place in northern France (see sidebar ONE MORE TIME before I take it down with a sigh of regret) and was just a fleeting but celebratory weekend's worth before returning to rainy Blighty. After which I spent a blissful week doing precisely nil, apart from visiting family and reading books* and stuffing my face with the food we had brought back from Rouen**. Am now back at work - and will write something worth reading in a day or two.

* "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson - a housebrick of a Swedish crime thriller but very, very worth reading. Dark, complex, and scary.
"When Will There Be Good News" by Kate Atkinson - one of the perks of working in a bookshop is the availability of proof copies. This is a sequel to her two previous Jackson Brodie novels and worth waiting for.
"Ten-Second Staircase" by Christopher Fowler - I got cross with him a few years ago for rewriting his mad lunatic-genius novel "Darkest Day" (now unavailable) into a rather more ho-hum format to fit the Waterstones-friendly crime series cliché- but this was original, and a goodie.

**walnut bread, garlic sausage, smoked sausage, goat's cheese, ham, duck confit, brief pause while I let belt out a notch or two, Roquefort, purée de marrons, unsalted butter, further brief pause while I lie down.

Copycat meme.. damn, I'm idle.

2008-07-03T12:41:00.003+01:00

Just about to go on holiday (see sidebar and loathe me insanely). My mind is so occupied with this that I have been unable to come up with a post for today. Here is a meme I have nicked unashamedly off Reluctant Blogger and Rol. I apologise for the paucity of my ideas and will blog fulsomely when I get back...

1) What were you doing 10 years ago?
I was working for Air France. I had IBS and had failed to connect it to the fact that my job was simultaneously tedious and stressful. I loved my colleagues, I loved (LOVED) the cheap/free air travel, but I was definitely heading for the door.

2) Name 5 things on your to-do list today
Get some dinner stuff in on the way home. Pack. Remember to dig out the automatic cat feeder. Find/pack my passport. Don't forget sun-cream this time!

3) Name 5 things you would do if you became a billionaire
Pay off the mortgages of all my friends/family.
Buy all sites that Tesco's/Sainsbury's would consider developing and rent them cheaply to small local businesses.
Endow a school for affordable hit-men.
Replace everything in my wardrobe with the same thing in cashmere.
Buy Lindisfarne Castle and live in it.

4) Name 5 places you have lived
Montreal, Oxford, Durham, Avignon, London. All, coincidentally, cities on rivers. Couldn't live anywhere dry now.

5) Name 5 of your bad habits
Nail-biting.
Smoking.
Not knowing that that really WAS one glass too many.
Laziness.
Being a truly crap (lazy, sporadic, uncommunicative) correspondent.

6) name 5 jobs you've had
Hotel maid (Avignon)
Barmaid (everywhere)
Hearing-aid mender (London)
Concorde charter agent (London)
Bookseller (best move I ever made).

7) How did you come up with the title of your blog?
I fel it sums up, in one sentence, the general tone of la vie chez Fishwife.

Home chemistry

2008-06-30T12:15:00.006+01:00

Went to a party at the weekend which was the best kind of birthday party - like being 6 again but with a free bar. Balloons, dancing, food, cake, and nobody cried, wet themselves or had to be taken home early, although Mr Fishwife woke up with a stiff shoulder after strutting his stuff rather too energetically with the birthday girl. Hurrah. Getting a taxi from central London after midnight is no easy feat at the best of times, and made harder if there are five of you and a large bunch of helium-filled balloons - the trick is to look as sensible and sober as possible. As we duly did. A brief digression on the subject of helium - it is non-toxic, odourless, flavourless, has no narcotic effects, and according to Wikipedia The voice of a person who has inhaled helium temporarily sounds high-pitched. This is because the speed of sound in helium is nearly three times the speed of sound in air. Apply this scientific principle to a 14-stone football-playing baritone singing "Lovin' You" by Minnie Riperton and you'll wonder why you ever gave up Chemistry O-Level. A fine, fine way to spend the small hours of a Saturday/Sunday. If we'd had some liquid nitrogen to freeze grapes with we'd have been in heaven.

Bad books. Bad, BAD books.

2008-06-23T14:45:00.010+01:00

In one of the Sundays they had a feature (notice I'm not naming either the paper - Murdoch!!! - or the writer - career misogynist!!) about books that made you see red. I had this idea way back in my previous job, maybe a nicely arranged display of "Our Least Favourite Books", but was told by my manager that there was no way Head Office would allow it.. No surprise really. What was interesting about the whole exercise, though, was the fact that pretty much all the stuff the (literary) contributors hated was in the genre of .. any guesses? Oh yes, our old friend "literary fiction" (rabbit ears back atcha, Rol). While I can see that it's possible to get worked up over the fact that someone other than oneself/one's husband/one's best friend won the Booker, or that some Old Dead Guy is lauded as a great figure of the literary world and you secretly have a chip about him because he's posh/common/gay/rich/a man, I have to say that most of the worst books I've ever read have been bad because they were just badly-written. Or unimaginative. Or, in the case of childrens' books, a downright exercise in cynical money-grabbing, like the Rainbow Fairies series - there are 60-odd of them so far, with many many more in the offing, and they work on the publishing principle that little girls will buy ANYTHING, regardless of tissue-thin plot, as long as it's pink and/or sparkly, and the title contains the words "Fairy", "Ballet" or "Unicorn". In fact there's a new (non-Rainbow Fairy) series that has all three - a fairy ballet school with talking pets, including a unicorn (and the cover's glittery!!!!). Now that makes me see red. But after my last post about literary snobbery I should just point out that none of this means I think children should be shackled to Dickens from an early age - after all, if you don't read crap you'll never learn to enjoy the good stuff...!

Herewith, anyway, my very least favourite book. I wasted 3 hours of my life speed-reading it. It is (drumroll) "Magic" by Tami Hoag. I like a bit of supernatural crime - Phil Rickman, John Connolly, and the grandfather of them all Charles Williams* - so I picked this up, foolishly thinking it might be worth a try. FOOLISHLY I tells ya. It was the worst combination of the worst possible elements - a Scooby Doo level of crime, a romance where they hate each other but just, y'know, kinda can't stop thinking about each other, and a ghost story where the author, evidently someone who's never been nearer England than an atlas, inserts an "adorable" 1920s ghost called (if I remember correctly) Archibald Wimsey, who refers anachronistically to Oxfam, and was the least cute "cute" character I've ever read. The veritable JarJar Binks of fiction. This, to quote someone sensible, is not a book to be lightly laid aside. It is to be hurled with great force.

*Charles Williams - a member of the Inklings, the same literary set as Tolkien and C S Lewis, and the least read nowadays. He wrote strange, lovely, metaphysical novels, the best-known of which was "Many Dimensions", a nearly-crime novel about the 20th century discovery, subsequent theft, and recovery of the Stone of Solomon (or Philosopher's Stone). Truly great writing, deeply questioning, and if you find a copy of any of his novels on abebooks or amazon, snap 'em up.

Fear of the Nerd Ghetto

2008-06-19T10:30:00.008+01:00

"I'm looking for a copy of The Hobbit, please." "It's in the Science Fiction section under T." "Science Fiction?? Why on earth would you put Tolkien under Science Fiction???" ... To which the obvious answer is, wearily, where else is there? One could argue that he (and HG Wells, and Jules Verne) invented the genre of science fiction/fantasy. It is possible for a book to be, technically, science fiction, and yet, simultaneously, a work of litrachoor. Great science fiction works masquerading as "acceptable" literature include 1984, The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis's Cosmic Trilogy, the Gormenghast trilogy, and many books by Margaret Atwood, J G Ballard, Nabokov, Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, yadda yadda yadda. I've had to argue the case for the prize-winners Persepolis and Maus being "worth reading", despite being graphic novels. "Literary Fiction" is my least favourite publisher-invented category, the implication being that any other kind of fiction is somehow less worth reading, or only as "a holiday read". People often ask for a recommendation for something to read, or for a book group, adding hastily "Literary fiction, you know, something good." I have always believed that you have to have everything in your literary diet; how can you judge what's trash unless you've read it? How can you appreciate the marvellousness of Jane Austen without having read Georgette Heyer (far lower brow but actually historically spot-on and immensely good fun)? How can you spot the unashamedly enormous chunks of dialogue and plot Jilly Cooper* has plagiarised wholesale without having read Alison Lurie's Love and Friendship, Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair, Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado, or Cyra McFadden's fabulously funny The Serial? And some of the greatest and most enjoyable pieces of potboiler have survived multiple reprintings - Gone With The Wind, for instance. I can't think of anything more enjoyable for a book group than the 1956 bonkbuster Peyton Place - after all, it has a fabulously racy plot and, these days, it's a very interesting insight into the way small towns in the 50s reacted to issues of adultery, illegitimacy, abortion etc. Any takers? ...

* Just realised I got that analogy the wrong way round and inadvertently compared Jilly Cooper to Jane Austen. Probably a first in the world of fiction. What I meant was - while enjoying the very lightweight charms of Ms Cooper, spare a thought for the considerably greater talents of Lurie, Dundy, McFadden and particularly the excellent Tey...

Sorry But I'm Very Excited

2008-06-17T10:50:00.005+01:00

The great thing about BookShopWorld is that publishers are quite keen to promote their wares, and invite you to all manner of events. These range from the humble stand-up pint with a first-time author (Cheesey Wotsits and Twiglets provided) - which is always a huge laugh because they're just as much in it for the free beer as you are - to the swanky invitation-only do for the established literary lion, which means you don't steal the cutlery or drink too much and pass out in your soup. These latter ones are rare though - the last time I went to one was about 5 years ago. They were promoting not one but three authors, so they rotated them throughout the dinner. Cool for us, indigestion ahoy for the authors... I sat opposite Howard Jacobson (who was totally charming - we discussed Esther Williams and salt beef), Rose Tremain (we were both quite drunk so I don't remember what we talked about but she was really nice), and a very young author/academic whose name I won't mention because he was a total arrogant arse and I'm too poor to get sued; I was delighted when we had to return his novel because it hadn't sold. And had frankly appalling reviews. Here I will just bung in a load of foreign words like hubris, schadenfreude, and poseur.
AAAAAAAAAAnyway - got my five-yearly glam invite the other week and am very excited - JOHN LE CARRE, whom I love, at THE IVY, a place I am unlikely ever to visit or eat at in normal circumstances unless I start dating AA Gill, a thought that fills me with fear and loathing. I'm so excited I will probably do what I did when I met PJ O'Rourke, which is blush, clam up, and find myself unable to speak. Although I am practising pithy phrases like "The swallows fly north over Moscow" and "Pass the salt or I will report you to Head of Ops".

The Sickness that is "Having To Be Right"

2008-06-13T10:25:00.006+01:00

I'd be the first to admit that I'm not perfect (blushes modestly as roars of 'Shame, shame' erupt from her adoring peons) - and one of my worst habits is having to be right. All the time, about everything, no matter how petty. Watching "Blade Runner" with Mr Fishwife the other week - Director's Cut, natch - and in some hangover-befuddled state I managed to convince myself that the glam stripper/assassin replicant Zhora ("talk about Beauty and the Beast - she's both!") was played by the similarly cold-eyed ice queen who now plays the mother/grandmother in "Two and a Half Men". Yes, I know, improbable to the point of stupidity, but in my defence I didn't have my glasses on (again). AND the film is more or less 20 years old. I thought I accepted my defeat gracefully but last night, while watching "Heroes" (oh it's all high culture chez Fishwife) I found myself pointing at the television screaming "HER HER THAT'S ZHORA I SWEAR" and was unable to let it drop until a, by now, quite grumpy Mr Fishwife had fired up the laptop and spent 10 minutes trawling Wikipedia for "List Of Heroes Characters". And proved me, exhausted but vindicated, right.

I attach below, as further proof that I can't let it lie, pictures of the two actresses to back me up.

I mean they might not be sisters, but they could at the very least be related.

Shut up any time now? You betcha.

The Post That Vanished... spooky...!

2008-06-12T12:13:00.000+01:00

Competitive parents beware
The concept of "reading age" is a funny thing. Those with children will be familiar with it, those who work in bookshops too - at some unspecified point in the school year it appears that somebody in authority Decrees what a child's reading age is (for the uninitiated - not remotely dependent on chronological age!) and suggests that they read accordingly. Which is fine - some kids read better and faster at earlier ages than others. In practice, however, it becomes another cause of panic for the parents - is he reading "the right age" of books? A nervous parent came in and asked for teenage books for her 9 year old, as he had recently been assessed as having a 14-yr-old reading age. It was totally in vain to tell her that most teenage books these days are entirely concerned with Issues that 9 year olds may be uncomfortable with, i.e. drugs, sex, people-trafficking, ASBOs, unwanted pregnancy, knives, mugging, and all the other joyful trappings of an ordinary teenager's life. "Oh, but he's terribly intelligent." she said, entirely missing the point, waving aside our protests and buying the poor child a copy of "American Psycho"... well, obviously not "American Psycho", but why even go on? Somewhere out there in Southwest London is a bewildered 9-year-old who will henceforth be terrified of girls, drugs, psychopaths, going outside at any time of day whatever, etc etc..
Political satire, ooh controversial
I was sitting in a friend's garden yesterday with various other people, some of whom genuinely had the day off, at least two of whom were "working from home" - ie feet up on a deckchair with laptop on. At one point my friend Eamo had to call his IT department to speak to someone called Osama about his inability to get email - whether he admitted he was trying to get emails while sitting in someone else's garden is a moot point. I only mention this because there is something profoundly ironic and unintentionally funny about someone on the phone saying "Can I speak to Osama please? .. Oh, he's not there... Do you know where he is?"

A quick thought on downright inept parenting

2008-06-09T12:51:00.003+01:00

I have a friend who swears blind she was at school with a boy called Hugh Janus. I mean, really, at what stage did his parents not notice this was going to cause him problems in later life? Did his father not lean on the mantelpiece, his firstborn tucked burping over his shoulder, saying meditatively "Prime Minister Janus... H. A Janus QC... Dr Hugh Jan-.. oh bugger."
This is a very quick post (mmeh, Monday) - but I will just leave you with the thought that even the apparently beautiful and privileged can screw up on a spectacular scale where kids' names are concerned - did nobody think to point out to the glowingly attractive celeb couple that is Brangelina the appalling and unfortunate spoonerism in their daughter's name - Shiloh Pitt?

PS really ...Just also remembered the case in "Freakonomics" of the woman who called her daughter "Shithead", to be pronounced "ShuhTeed" - a minute's awed and almost admiring silence for sheer parental abuse there. And MantuaMaker's just reminded me of the boy called Nicholas Bott her brother was at school with..

Man-crushes - a disturbing new metrosexual trend? Or just that warm feeling you had about the captain of the first XI all over again?

2008-06-06T13:44:00.008+01:00

Gay men may, with a snort of disgust, look away here - I am speaking of the interesting concept of the man-crush. It is a purely heterosexual phenomenon, in fact the more aggressively heterosexual the man the more likely he is to have one. I remember standing in a kitchen at a party once, ages ago, having a long conversation with three men (one of them Mr Fishwife) about "men's men" - ie Oliver Reed, Henry Cooper, Jack Nicholson etc. The only way any of them could explain it was "Oh, you know... a real bloke. The kind of man you'd buy WD40 for. Or cigars. " Interestingly enough, one of those men is today a woman (not Mr Fishwife) (or me!). But I digress. Over the intervening years I've noticed the way men get a little bit squirmy and coy when discussing men they have a secret man-crush on - try saying "Johnny Wilkinson" to any man you know and watch him blush and simper like a teenage girl. I attach below a list of men it appears to be OK to have a man-crush on - please feel free to suggest ones I may have forgotten...

Frank Sinatra , but not Dean Martin (too wefty)

Jeremy Clarkson and James May, but not Richard Hammond (boy band-tastic)

Almost any rugby player except Sebastien Chabal (just too big)

George Best, anyone from the 1966 World Cup squad and Gazza, but very few other football players (in fact, having a man-crush on Freddie Ljungberg is pretty much proof that you're on the other bus. It's not a man-crush, it's a crush-crush.)

Tony Soprano and all Corleones except Sonny (perms are bad, mmkay?)

Terry Wogan (he's earned it, the poor man, after all those years failing to get a decent drink at the Eurovision Song Contest)

Gordon Ramsay, Heston Blumenthal, and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall but not Gary Rhodes (that hair!) or Anthony Worrall Thompson (he leers like a drunk uncle).

Comedians are pretty much all OK except for Russell Brand (looks too much like that Goth girl you snogged once at a party)

Actors - now there's a wide open field. The very fact of being an actor is less manly than being, say, a brickie or a soldier, but here are a few that seem to have it all (and I'm only going for British/Irish and Alive or there are far too many!) : Peter O'Toole (last of the great drinkers), Sean Connery, Daniel Craig, Clive Owen, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone, Gary Oldman, Tim Roth, Bill Nighy (king of the sneer)..

Perfume - the story of a murderous overdraft

2008-06-05T10:18:00.010+01:00

I have to admit to being completely obsessed with perfume. In excess, it is a ruinously expensive habit but since I don't have an addiction to (illegal) drugs or (expensive) shoes, I can just about support it. Books don't count as an addiction, more as a necessity, and since I'm lucky enough to work in a place where they are at best free and at worst subsidised, I don't even include them as an expense. I have a wardrobe at home and at last count two of its shelves and one of its drawers were full of perfume bottles, meaning that the less important stuff (clothes) ends up crammed into a separate drawer and permanently in need of an iron. They subdivide into: summer and winter, daytime and nighttime, work and weekend, serious and tarty, and the immensely important Perfume That Makes You Feel Good/Clean/Fresh When Hungover*. I completely understand people who have one perfume and always wear the same thing, because it's the whole Proustian madeleine syndrome of "Ah yes a fugitive waft of L'Air Du Temps will always remind me of Kate" etc etc - and it fixes people in your olfactory memory. I can't do it, though, as I all too frequently find myself getting bored with whatever I'm wearing and have to wear something else. Usually other peoples' perfume is out of bounds, and I have had bouts of terrible guilt about this, i.e. the time I "stole" Mitsouko off my friend Catherine (not the actual bottle, just the wearing of it) - is it a sin on a par with actually stealing something real? Or wearing the same dress to a party? Which may be why I end up wearing more and more obscure perfumes**. My favourite pilgrimage, and I can't use this word too strongly, is every couple of weeks to the perfume hall at Liberty's. Selfridge's is too vast and has too much unnecessary tat (celebrity perfumes for those who want to smell like Paris Hilton - which is what exactly? Spilt booze and some bloke's aftershave with a base-note of grubby $100 bills??) - and Harrod's is a no-no as I won't willingly put a penny into the Phony Pharoah's pocket. Liberty's is my Mecca, my Garden of Eden, my Narnia. They have scents and potions you will, trust me, never even have heard of. I may have mentioned that I'm a smoker, and in a way this may be a blessing, as my sense of smell is already as keen as a bloodhound's, and if I hadn't dulled it to an acceptable level I would probably pass out in a swooning ecstasy on crossing the threshold.

*Clarins' "Eau Dynamisante", Penhaligon's "Bluebell", Philosophy's "Pure Grace", Annick Goutal's "Eau Du Sud"

** Ineke's "Evening Edged In Gold", Comme Des Garcons's "Rhubarb", Saira Schwarz's "Lucid Agony", Demeter's "Lavender Martini"

Yes, there really is a perfume called Lucid Agony.

Thoughts on a forthcoming theatre trip.

2008-06-02T15:13:00.003+01:00

I always, always pretend it's CULTURE that lies behind my stupid quarterly outings of reckless and frankly ill-advised binge-drinking; the premise is that we meet for lunch, we go to The Theatre where we are nourished by Art, then we go for a civilised meal afterwards and discuss, as only the recently culturally enlightened can do, the weighty issues of Drama and Its Place In Society.
Sadly, in practice, what always happens is the following: meet for lunch, have something irrelevant compared to the bottle of wine each we consume. Go to theatre (it's always the same 5 of us so we can't even pretend we thought it would turn out any differently). Go see something light but with artistic merit (last time, "Glengarry Glen Ross", this time "The Deep Blue Sea"). Drink more at the interval. Come out going "Hmmmm not sure about that second act". Get lashed in some overpriced central London watering hole between end-of-matinee and start-of-dinner. Lurch ungracefully into restaurant going "Toldja, dinn I tell ya, shoulderv gone to see that new Indiana Jones film". Get, oh GOD, so very very much drunker. Spend Sunday crying gently into a large box of tissues while watching "Ratatouille" in pyjamas, frankly unable to remember much about the play, which to be fair simply existed as a time-filling ruse to stop us getting paralytic before 4pm anyway. I think it was about estate agents. I think the next one has Greta Scacchi in it. Since I will almost certainly forget my glasses, it may well have Alice Cooper and the Krankies in it, I will never be entirely sure.

Punters.

2008-05-27T16:39:00.004+01:00

The wonderful world of the non sequitur (an occasional series)
And this is only in the last 4 days...
-"Would you like a bag?" - "No thanks, I'm paying by card"
-"No, it wasn't a hardback, it was orange."
-"I'd love that card in the window with the kitten." - "What, this one?" - "Yes, the one with the frog."
-"It was by that Japanese author - oh, I know, Martin Amis."
And my personal favourite, heard on a tannoy in a russian accent on Eurovision Day, appropriately enough... "There is good service running on all London Underground line. District is good, Piccadilly is good. For detail of essential work over Bank Holiday Weekend, please to inspect the poofters on display at the station entrance".
OK, I know, not a non-seq, unless London Underground actually does have an exhibition of homosexual gentlemen in selected ticket halls (and why not? Ours are the finest in Europe!) but my best recent Freudian mis-hearing.

Not Based On A True Story!

2008-05-20T14:16:00.007+01:00

I've just been re-reading the fabulous (quite literally) "The Uses Of Enchantment" by Bruno Bettelheim. He was a child psychologist who believed that fairy tales (and myths, and legends etc) were a way for children to understand early traumas, or to describe their fears and view of their lives. His theory, boiled down, was: everybody has a favourite story, and the substance of the story can be a key to how the person views their own life and situation. Little Red Riding Hood appeals to women who feel they're in danger from real-life "wolves", Cinderella to those who know deep down that a handsome prince will see through their rags and recognise them for the princess they are, Jack The Giant-Killer to men who feel powerless before a bullying father, an aggessive boss, or any situation they feel dwarfed by. Etcetera, etcetera (as Yul Brynner so rightly said). When you start thinking about it, you have one too. It may not be a fairy tale, it may be a film plot ("Oh my GOD we're just like Harry and Sally"). There's something very comforting about this theory though - it makes me feel not only that millions of other people have similar hang-ups to ones' own, but also that people were having the same hang-ups hundreds of years ago. Mine is "Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady" - which answers the question "What do women want?" ...

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

2008-05-19T10:02:00.005+01:00

The rapid encroachment of old age is never fun, apart from being able to say "I was doing that before you were born!" to younger siblings/cousins. My personal demon is the failing eyesight, which is a sod because while for most people it's the close-up vision that goes, for me it's distance. I have glasses, and wear them to watch TV and films etc, but there never seems any point in wearing them to work as everything is within 10ft of my eyes. The fact that they make me look like a nerdier and older version of myself doesn't help. I know I'm a nerd, you know I'm a nerd, but there seems little point in advertising the fact to complete strangers, especially if within 10 feet of me I am unable to see them as they're too close for my glasses. I know which bus to get on because it becomes legible when it's near enough to flag down. I am familiar enough with the stock in the shop to say "Oh yes the David Mitchell, it's that mauve and blue one there". HOWEVER at the weekend, walking sedately round a park with Mr Fishwife and my mother, I spent several minutes trying to work out what the striking exotic orange blooms at the edge of the lake were, before being informed that they were the feet of a dead duck lying on its back in the shallows.

Reading Age - bah, humbug

2008-05-15T14:24:00.013+01:00

Competitive parents beware
The concept of "reading age" is a funny thing. Those with children will be familiar with it, those who work in bookshops too - at some unspecified point in the school year it appears that somebody in authority Decrees what a child's reading age is (for the uninitiated - not remotely dependent on chronological age!) and suggests that they read accordingly. Which is fine - some kids read better and faster at earlier ages than others. In practice, however, it becomes another cause of panic for the parents - is he reading "the right age" of books? A nervous parent came in and asked for teenage books for her 9 year old, as he had recently been assessed as having a 14-yr-old reading age. It was totally in vain to tell her that most teenage books these days are entirely concerned with Issues that 9 year olds may be uncomfortable with, i.e. drugs, sex, people-trafficking, ASBOs, unwanted pregnancy, knives, mugging, and all the other joyful trappings of an ordinary teenager's life. "Oh, but he's terribly intelligent." she said, entirely missing the point, waving aside our protests and buying the poor child a copy of "American Psycho"... well, obviously not "American Psycho", but why even go on? Somewhere out there in Southwest London is a bewildered 9-year-old who will henceforth be terrified of girls, drugs, psychopaths, going outside at any time of day whatever, etc etc..

Political satire, ooh controversial
I was sitting in a friend's garden yesterday with various other people, some of whom genuinely had the day off, at least two of whom were "working from home" - ie feet up on a deckchair with laptop on. At one point my friend Eamo had to call his IT department to speak to someone called Osama about his inability to get email - whether he admitted he was trying to get emails while sitting in someone else's garden is a moot point. I only mention this because there is something profoundly ironic and unintentionally funny about someone on the phone saying "Can I speak to Osama please? .. Oh, he's not there... Do you know where he is?"

The power of suggestion

2008-05-15T10:30:00.003+01:00

Just reading a book of ghost stories by E Nesbit (for grownups, not children) - full of moments where a character leans forward from his fireside armchair, takes his pipe out of his mouth, and says "Great Scott, Langley, haven't you heard? It can't have been Edwards you spoke to - he's been dead since last week!". I love that kind of thing (M R James is another deeply fabulous and creepy example). I know H P Lovecraft is supposed to be the daddy but I can't take seriously stories that end with a full paragraph in italics ("and as it drew closer, its tentacles waving blindly, I could barely prevent myself from screaming in HORROR as the ghastly THING crept from the bowels of Great Cthulhu..."). Rather like the difference between films of the eerily suggested (Hitchcock, for example, or "The Others") and the slasher-porn likes of "Saw IV". Obviously I'm aware that what with my equally lavish use of capitals and italics I can hardly diss Lovecraft but there you go.
Absolutely chucking it down today - well, we've had the requisite 4 days in May that constitutes a British summer, and as always I am incorrectly dressed. For the last couple of sundrenched days I warily went to work in a coat (which I always ended up dragging home, purple-faced and drenched in sweat) and sneakers (my ankles were swollen like a couple of butternut squash). Yesterday I daringly wore flipflops, and as a result am so abraded between my toes that I'm hobbling like the little mermaid. Today - sneakers, light cardigan, no coat... and it's hosing it down like a carwash. I am resigned to always wearing the wrong clothes but this is getting silly. Tomorrow I shall wear a ballgown, wellies, a pith helmet and longjohns. With SPF 50 and one of those silver-foil hypothermia blankets.

On a far less serious note....

2008-05-13T16:26:00.003+01:00

I have seen the face of God, and its name is "Apple And Rhubarb Juice". Remember I told you this when you're casting about for a nice cold drink this summer. It was made from Bramleys, too. I may cry with happiness. Apple and rhubarb, beloved reader, apple and rhubarb. One more time - apple and rhubarb. There may be a pop quiz later on my new favourite drink, so be prepared. Oh - and I heard a really juicy piece of historical gossip about Brian Clough today, but I can't tell you, so ner. It had nothing to do with apple and rhubarb juice though.

On a more serious note...

2008-05-13T15:25:00.004+01:00

Ok, it goes without saying that the Daily Mail are a sad red-top pretending to be a broadsheet (I once joined a Facebook group called "If I See Someone Reading The Daily Mail I Assume They're A Bit Thick"). I had a friend once whose sister was a journalist, and worked for them briefly - and left because they kept trying to make her do stuff like this. Although to be fair she also left because she was a genuinely talented journalist...