Fancy that!

Why is it that old newsprint, about to be discarded, makes one last burst at survival, and unfailingly provides unexpected diversion?

Here was Malcolm collecting paper around the house, recycling bin for the filling therewith.

Here comes the Times Literary Supplement of 31 August.

Tom Shippey reviewing Diana Wynne Jones, Reflections on the Magic of Writing.

Malcolmian Wombling stopped instantly. Reading mode was engaged.

The book is:

a collection of some thirty pieces written over the years by the late Diana Wynne Jones.

Shippey identifies:

The themes which run through the collection are autobiography, thoughts on how to write and how books originate … and thirdly, robust defences of the value of fantasy and the importance of writing for children.

Were Malcolm being sniffy (and he is), he would wonder why the third of those should ever need robust defences. Fantasy is an essential element in any proper upbringing:

Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourishèd?
Reply, reply.
Is it engendered in the eyes,
With gazing fed; and Fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies.
Let us all ring Fancy’s bell:
I’ll begin it, — Ding, dong, bell.

Put that into its context, Act III, scene ii, of The Merchant of Venice, and you have something very spooky indeed. That, too, is part of fantasy.

Half-way through his review Shippey opens a Cabinet of Dr Caligari:

Wynne Jones adds herself to the list of children’s authors — E.E.Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, Beatrix Potter — who had troubled early lives. She writes, “I think I write the kind of books I do because the world suddenly went mad when I was five years old”. Then, in August 1939, Diana and her sister were suddenly uprooted from London, driven to their grandparents’ home in Welsh-speaking Pontarddulais, and left to cope as best they could. It was not for long, for their mother came and fetched them back: not, it seems out of affection, but as a result of a blazing row with Aunt Muriel: “I see my relationship with my mother never recovered from this.” The children were soon packed off again, this time to Westmoreland, where they saw Arthur Ransome in a fury over the noise the children made — “He hated children” — and Diana’s sister Isobel was smacked by Beatrix Potter for swinging on her garden gate: “She hated children, too.”

Ah, sweet!

Quite how good this book is, Malcolm cannot authenticate. The reviewer seems to like it, and is convincing in his observations. It might be something worth seeking out. from a library, or watch for a second-hand copy perhaps: at £25 it looks hardly a steal (even Amazon want £17.50).

One final thought: whenever over the decades of teaching, Malcolm has come upon a well-balanced child, there tended to be an imagination at work, an ability to cross into worlds of fantasy, even a native delight in jokes and word-play. On the other hand, there are far too many warped minds, who — for one lack of reason or another — have been denied that fantasy. Sadly, too many of these minds are the victims of cults of one evil kind or another: the strict Moslem boy who rejected any kind of fiction on principle (someone else’s principle).

There are many good causes to scorn, even despise the verbose spoutings of Ms Rowling: religious wailing about Witchcraft! should never be one of them.

Avast!

Could there be a direct link between Plasticine, Robinson Crusoe and Old Possum?

Steve Connor may have hit on it for today’s Independent.

Perhaps without realising it, by connecting William Dampier (1651-1715) with the new Aardman film.

Somerset by toilets (anag.)

The answer is East Coker:

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

Dampier

William Dampier was baptised at East Coker (there’s the link!) on 5th September 1651. He had more than a basic education before William Helyar, his guardian, the sugar-baron and Lord of the Manor of East Coker, sent Dampier off to sea. After a voyage on an East Indiaman and service in the Third Dutch War, Dampier was consigned to Helyar’s Jamaican plantation. There Dampier came to punch-ups (something of a life-trait) with the manager; and upped-and-offed to work in the logwood trade (a source of purple dyes) along the Bay of Campeche, Mexico. This was a business run by the baymen, English privateers made unemployed after the Godolphin Treaty with Spain. And so, by short strides, Dampier joined the marauding buccaneers of Tortuga, raiding the Mosquito Coast and Panama.

The long way home

In 1686 he joined Captain Charles Swan’s The Cygnet. Swan went fruitlessly hunting the treasure of the Manila galleon; but Dampier claimed he was motived to see more of the Pacific. Six thousand miles on short rations later, Dampier had navigated The Cygnet to Guam. Understandably, his account of Guam and the Philippines is then frequently concerned with foods — breadfruit, banana, and plantain.

The Cygnet cruised the South China Sea, before arriving as the first English ship to touch New Holland (Australia). Here Dampier was seriously disappointed by King Sound and the Great Sandy Desert. From there to the Nicobars, where Dampier left Swan’s crew, and amazingly reached Sumatra in an outrigger canoe. Despite a dose of dysentery Dampier then spent eighteen months travelling throughout south-east Asia, across modern Vietnam, the Malaysia, and back to India. He again joined the service of the East India Company (as a gunner in Sumatra) before returning to England as the first circumnavigator in a century, bringing with him “Prince Giolo”, a heavily-tatooed Indonesian (who would later expire of smallpox at Oxford).

Back to the day job

Having lost the income from displaying “Prince Giolo”, Dampier went back to sea as second mate on the Dove. The intention was to trade with the West Indies (with a bit of “salvage” on the side). The operation went awry when neither wages nor a letter-of-marque (a licence for privateering) transpired, and mutiny ensued. One of the ships in the flotilla was seized by the mutineers, and sailed off into piratical history as the Fancy under Captain Every (a.k.a. “Long Ben” Avery). Two years later, Every and his few remaining crew were the richest pirates ever, seriously inconveniencing English relations with the Great Mughal, and carrying large rewards on their heads. Two dozen pirates were captured: six of them brought back to London for trial, a final quaff at the Turk’s Head Inn, and a sad end at Execution Dock (Dampier gave evidence in their defence) — Every and his plunder discreetly disappears from the records.

Dampier had spent that interim working out his commitment on the Dove, but sued for back wages back in London. The Admiralty dismissed the case and accepted the ship’s owners argument that he had supported the mutiny.

Fame at last

Curiously that close shave with piracy made Dampier’s success. In 1697 he published his travelogue as A New Voyage Round the World, followed by an annex and “prequel”, Supplement of the New Voyage in 1699. These were duly translated into Dutch, French, and German.He became a celebrity, frequenting the likes of Hans Sloane, Pepys and Evelyn, and members of the Royal Society, receiving a sine-cure at the Customs House, and appearing as a regular expert witness at Board of Trade enquiries. His portrait by Thomas Murray (see top of this post and the National Portrait Gallery) was taken at this time.

HMS Roebuck

In 1699 Dampier was sent by the Admiralty to survey the “southern continent” as captain of what must count as the earliest officially-sponsored voyage of exploration. Unfortunately, Dampier confined himself to the north-west of Australia (thus missing the commercially-interesting bits) and New Guinea. The Roebuck‘s condition deteriorated and, in August 1701, sank at Ascension Island.

Dampier returned to England (again on an East Indiaman), with his botanical specimens (which still survive at Oxford University) to face a court-martial. Lieutenant George Fisher had berated his captain as a pirate and friend of mutineers. Dampier had been infuriated to the point of caning Fisher and clapping him in irons, and was found by the court to be unfit for command. The reputation of Dampier survived this, and he published A Voyage to New Holland in 1703.

Royal patronage and a failure

At the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession, Prince George (a Fellow of the Royal Society) presented Dampier to Queen Anne — both as right. George may have the odd American county of his name; but Charles II’s judgement was “I’ve tried him drunk, and I’ve tried him sober, and there’s nothing to the man.” This seems fairly proven in his judgement of Dampier.

As a consequence of the royal connection, Dampier was given command of a two-ship privateering expedition back in the Pacific, coastal raiding and further pursuit of that legendary Manila galleon. The other ship was Captain Charles Pickering in the Cinque-Ports (which had Alexander Selkirk as its sailing-master: bear this detail in mind).

Not much went aright on the voyage: the galleon went unencountered, the pickings were slight, and desertion and mutiny were rife. Dampier was imprisoned by the Spanish. When he returned to England in 1707 he was berated for all the offences that had characterised his time on the Roebuck, and he was in official bad odour as a bully and coward. He was later prosecuted for fraud by the heir to the ship’s owners.

Woodes Rogers

The merchants of Bristol lavishly financed a scheme of a local man, Woodes Rogers (abt. 1679-1732), who had conveniently married the daughter daughter of Admiral Sir William Whetstone, another Bristolian and the commander-in-chief of the West Indies. Two ships, the Duke and the Duchess were fitted out, and crewed by what Rogers called ‘Tinkers, Taylors, Hay-makers, Pedlers, Fiddlers etc.” The famous William Dampier was engaged as master of the Duke.

Success came early: off Tenerife the Duke took a Spanish cargo of wine and brandy. Rounding the Horn in a spectacular storm meant the Duke headed for shelter at Juan Fernandez. Three days later a party went ashore and were greeted by a man “clothed in goatskins”. This was aforesaid Alexander Selkirk, whom Captain Pickering had marooned there in November 1704. This story first appeared in Rogers’s A Cruising Voyage round the World (1712); and fictionalised by Defoe in Robinson Crusoe (1719).

Rogers succeeded where Dampier had failed. His voyage caused mayhem along the coasts of Peru and Chile, pillaging Guayaquil on the island of Puna and in December 1709 he took a Manila galleon, Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación off Baja California:

… after 16 months at sea, two tiny British frigates under the command of Captain Woodes Rogers had finally caught sight of one of the richest prizes afloat  -  the 500-ton Spanish galleon, the Encarnacion, on her way to Acapulco.

The Encarnacion was loaded down with bejewelled snuffboxes, pearls, rich tapestries and priceless china made for the Queen of Spain, as well as laced ivory fans, embroidered silk gowns, more than 1,000 pairs of silk stockings, chests of musk, tons of rare spices and other plunder valued at more than £1 million on the London market — equivalent to several hundred million pounds today. 

The only English casualty was Rogers himself, whose upper jaw was shot away. The far-larger, and prime target, Begonia was engaged on Christmas Day, 1709, but was too formidable for Roger’s small vessels. All told, Rogers pocketed £14,000 from his voyage, which arrived back at Erith in October 1711.

Dampier’s last days

Dampier’s share of Rogers’ loot would posthumously amount to some £1,500 (even though he himself felt he was entitled to considerably more). While Rogers went on to greater things, Dampier retired to live in St Stephens parish, London, both on his considerable fame as a three-times circumnavigator and on his sine-cure at the Customs House. In Gulliver’s Travels (which owed something to Dampier’s own experiences) Swift thought him an honest man, and a good sailor, but a little too positive in his own opinions.

He died in debt, to the tune of £677 17s. 1d.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

Pub-talk and legal parlance

When the rain came yesterday afternoon, Malcolm was emerging from the supermarket, laden. What to do? Silly question: turn right and, wind assisted, into the John Baird. Two pints of Fortyniner (yes: 4.9%) fortified the parts enough to struggle home.

What with Harvey‘s at the Hansom Cab on Friday, this was becoming something of a south-coast end to the week. As to that latter joint, follow Malcolm’s hot-link to John Walsh’s review for background, but trust not the views and comments therein: it’s a far, far better joint than than Walsh describes.

A Malcolmian aside

There’s this current vague (French, noun, female gender) for emphasising how many boozers are closing. And, yes, that’s sadly soundly-based.

The Irish Times is currently regaling us with an extended cri-de-coeur from Paul Cullen, under the title The pub loses its pulling power — as if any real pulling (apart from the subsequent interpersonal exchange of bodily fluids) has been going on in a land long devoted to top-pressure CO2 delivery.

Cullen rattles through the predictable:

Various reasons have been put forward for the collapse of the sector. For much of the past decade, publicans griped about the smoking ban and changes to drink-driving laws. Yet these changes took place some time ago — the smoking ban was introduced in 2004 and the first changes to drink-driving laws date back to the introduction of random breath-testing in 2003.

In the next paragraph Cullen hits a nerve through a quotation from Professor (of marketing) Mary Quinn:

“As people got richer and more sophisticated they weren’t prepared to sit in a dirty pub any more. Young people in particular wanted newer, brighter, more modern places to meet in.”

Which presumably explains why the pub-owners have a habit of ripping out old, authentic interiors to instal older ersatz ones.

So let’s address the problem from a different view-point. Why are some pubs (such as the Hansom Cab, and even the Baird) adapting and prospering, and why? In both those cases, along with the Nicholson’s houses, the Stag and The Bridge House, which all feature regularly in Malcolm’s life, and have been hat-tipped here, it’s because they have moved on from the days of the boozer. All are places where one can eat and drink — and drink good beers — in some comfort, the company of one’s nearest-and-dearest, without embarrassment. What if they tend to the trendy, to be dismissed as “gastropubs” or whatever? What if their prices permit decent facilities and amenities?

Oh, and reliable and regular public transport certainly helps. Though austerity, and loss-leader supermarket alcohol pricing most certainly don’t.

Back to the main event

Malcolm, remember, is in the corner of the Baird, with his pint of Fortyniner. He could (and eventually does) get out the copy of the Times for the world according to Murdoch. First, though, some light relief.

This week’s Times Literary Supplement has a couple of decent, deserving pieces among the other stuff: now why was Malcolm caught by an Antony Scull review of Simon Baron Cohen on A new theory of human cruelty? What grabbed Malcolm more was Brian Vickers running the rule over Ian Donaldson’s Ben Jonson — A Life.

This one looks very tasty indeed. Currently Malcolm’s other bedside book is John Stubbs’s delightful and delighting Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War, now available in paperback. Despite the title, Stubbs takes a long run-up, and prefaces the deal with the seminal figure of Jonson. Stubbs is sufficiently tangential to appeal to Malcolm’s butterfly mind — he is as near to a reincarnation of old John Aubrey as one could wish.

Moving on from Vickers on Jonson, the TLS has a two-column scamper, in the tail-gunner slot, by Ferdy Mount on Ronald Blythe’s latest, At the Yeoman’s House. This is a matured and marinated treatment of the book: all the main reviews came in a couple of months since. Mount starts with this observation, from the particular to the general:

Ronald Blythe has not budged much. In eighty-nine years, he has moved only a few miles down the Stour valley, and he has never left his home on the Essex-Suffolk border for more than a month on end. Nor did his ancestors, a long line of Suffolk shepherds who took their surname from the River Blyth, which dawdles past the great windows of Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, into the estuary at Southwold. Rootedness on this scale may seem odd to us who like to feel footloose, but it comes naturally to our great country writers: Thomas Hardy and William Barnes in Dorset, Richard Jeffries in Wilts, and John Clare in Northants (though William Cobbett did get about a bit). They stand out from other writers, too, by coming from the labouring classes as often as not, the sons of stonemasons and farmers, and in youth often labourers themselves. They have now and then been joined at the plough by the sons of the professional classes, such as John Stewart Collis and Adrian Bell, but the native sons of the soil are somehow different.

The cover (as right) of Blythe’s “elegy in a harsh key” (nice one, Ferdy!) is a 1954 John Nash oil-painting, The Barn, Wormingford, almost certainly the view from the top-floor studio of Bottengoms Farm (back to Mount for this):

… the very old farmhouse Blythe has lived in ever since he inherited it from the painter John Nash, whom he nursed when he was dying … For centuries, Bottengoms was a farm with seventy ill-favoured acres, from which the yeoman, defined by Cobbett as “above a farmer and lower than a gentleman”, scratched a precarious living. Gradually the acres fell away into other hands. In the 1920s, what was left was sold for £1,820, in 1936 for £1,200, and in 1944 Captain John Nash, Official War Artist, snapped it up for only £700.

Mount (born 1939) sums up on Blythe’s meditation:

This is a production of old age, gentle but not soft, othe tough-minded and charitable. Blythe is a lay Reader in the Church of England and nearly became a priest, like William Barnes and George Crabbe and Gilbert White before him. Yet I find his unillusioned, lyrical tone curiously similar to those ruralists who were lifelong atheists, Thomas Hardy and Richard Jeffries. It is as though the unblinking countryman’s eye has no room for religion, one way or the other.

Are we wholly happy with “unillusioned”? What other descriptor would possibly work there? Du mot vrai! Anyway, when Ferdy Mount ploughs through today’s Sunday Times, he will find Minette Marrin arguing that the Church of England exists for those who need “religiosity”, but not demanding beliefs, in their lives:

A sense of the numinous, a longing for ceremony, a love of the religious punctuation of the year, a need for a regular time to examine one’s conscience, a passion for church music — these are all things that appeal to Anglican unbelievers such as me and to unbelievers of all traditions.

On which, Malcolm would nearly as happily drink to Ms Marrin as to the third baronet Mount of Wasing Place.

Towards the bottom of the second pint …

… Malcolm reached the back page of the TLS, and the weekly miscellany. This week’s was a trifle disappointing — a long snarl at copyright-cuddling by the James Joyce Foundation (as if we needed to be told), then a nip on the ankles of “St” Jeanette Winterson. In between there is a bit of uplift, delicately balanced on passing wind about Lawtalk: The unknown stories behind familiar legal expressions.

It starts like this:

Heard the one about the dying man who insisted on studying to be a lawyer? After a great deal of trouble to his family, he qualified just in time. As he received his degree, a a relative aced the question: Why? “One less lawyer”, said the man as he expired.

The rest of this three-paragraph scamper covers the origin of

• The law is an ass

Yes, Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist, but “an obscure seventeen-century play called Revenge for Honour“. Not only “obscure”, though it merits a wikipedia entry and it was attributed to George Chapman: The Review of English Studies, as far back as 1935, reckoned this was a “worthless play”, but noticed it borrowed from Othello.

• with all deliberate speed

Famously, or infamously, from Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter’s draft for the 1954 Supreme Court judgement on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Yet, the term appears in Walter Scott’s Rob Roy. The TLS doesn’t help much here, but Malcolm can assure all and sundry that a visit to Chapter Nineteenth, in volume two, will locate this:

The Bailie … was obviously relieved from his impending fears of ridicule, when I told him it was my father’s intention to leave Glasgow almost immediately. Indeed he had now no motive for remaining, since the most valuable part of the papers carried off by Rashleigh had been recovered. For that portion which he had converted into cash and expended in his own or on political intrigues, there was no mode of recovering it but by a suit at law, which was forthwith commenced, and proceeded, as our law-agents assured us, with all deliberate speed.

That neatly exemplifies the ironic ambiguity which must also have been in Frankfurter’s mind, in 1954.

• blackmail

Oddly, both Lawtalk and the TLS assume that this is also from Rob Roy, though the TLS adds:

The same novel popularised “blackmail”, though the practice is as old as shame itself.

Malcolm cocks a wry eye at the MS Word “z” in what was once, back in the eighteenth century again, and derived from the French populariser (though the OED is happy with “popular adj. and n.  and -ize suffix“). Yet, there’s more to this than meets the eye. The exact use of blackmail is in the Editor’s Introduction to the Waverley edition of Rob Roy:

At Tullibody Scott had met, in 1793, a gentleman who once visited Rob, and arranged to pay him blackmail.

Do the TLS, and the authors of Lawtalk recognise that “blackmail” originally meant something very different from its modern context? The original meaning was a tribute extorted by the Border revers, and nearer in meaning to “protection money”. This is the sense in Rob Roy.

• jailbait

The TLS gloss here is:

We have the Chicago author James T. Farrell to thank for the evocative “jailbait”, over which the authors of Lawtalk lay down the law: “The term is best used sparingly: if intended or perceived as a slur upon the character of a girl it is offensive”.

 In point of strict accuracy, Farrell used it as two separate words (in Calico Shoes, from 1934):

She’s not hard on the eyes but she’s jail bait.

 By the time it has crossed the Atlantic, it has become hyphenated, as in John Braine’s Room at the Top from 1957:

I’m not interested in little girls. Particularly not in jail-bait like that one.

Quite when it became a single word is another question. For sure it was previous to Jonathan “Jonny” Spelman having his cabinet minister mother rush to the High Court to seek that injunction on his behalf.

The cause behind the injunction is still a mystery (it seems), but speculation includes the ill-advised posting to Facebook, as right, but now (it also seems) taken down. It does help to have a millionaire mother in a public office: such courtesies are rarely extended to lesser beings.

• play the race card

The TLS properly notes that this one has different meanings here and in the States:

British politicians in the 1960s who spoke about immigration were accused of playing the race card, but the proper use applies to a person under duress invoking the spectre of discrimination as a trump card — you’re only doing this because I’m black/ Chinese, etc.

Ho hum.

That’s a sanitized version of what Malcolm recalls of “British politicians in the 1960s”.  It went a bit further than accusations. Whether or not Peter Griffiths, fighting the Smethwick constituency in the 1964 General Election personally endorsed “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour” (as the many posters said, but almost entirely in that one constituency) is immaterial, it worked.

Home, James, and don’t spare the sauces

You may recall we began this phantasmagoria with Malcolm taking refuge from the rain.

Two pints later the wind was still strong, but the worst of the wet had passed over. So Malcolm returned his glass (a habit stemming from birth over a bar), rolled up his various newspapers, picked up the shopping, and headed off.

It all took rather less time than the development of this extended posting.

In the beginning …

In the attic are those early Joan Baez LPs Malcolm bought — and now going on half-a-century old.

And here is Songbird, issued just this year, and Malcolm’s music to blog by, this grey, wet, London day.

First impressions: how many times can that image of Joanie, hunkered down, be recycled? It’s already there on Queen of Folk Music and How Sweet the Sound.

Second impression: move on folks, there’s nothin’ new here to hear. This Songbird amounts to the thirteen tracks of that original 1960 Joan Baez album, along with ten tracks (the first nine and the last) from the unauthorized (and suppressed) Folk Singers ‘Round Harvard Square.

And yet, not so fast!

We know every strum, every held note. And each second is as rich, as ripe, as listenable as it was so, so long ago. Thanks to the wonders of digital recording, no scratches, no hiss, no jumps.

Malcolm wouldn’t change a note.

We have aged, but this Joanie is still just eighteen.

A new near-favourite: Rake And Rambling Boy, but top of the heap, as always, Mary Hamilton — a straight rendering of Child Ballad 173:

Last nicht there was four Maries,
The nicht there’ll be but three;
There was Marie Seton, and Marie Beton,
And Marie Carmichael, and me.

So no reason, no justification, no gloss, no explanation (though, as always, Malcolm is up for the exegesis), but just for the sheer tear-jerking hell and wonder of it (and not because this image is obviously from that same phot0-shoot):

_____________

Footnote:

Until this moment of recognition, Maclom had been blind and deaf and brass-ignorant to the link to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, despite having recommended and even taught the text:

Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please–it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought.

Rolling the yule log

It’s that time again: the seasonal book lists, “best books of 2010″, “what we read this year”.

So, immediately after signing off that previous post:

Some pretensions to literacy: just like Malcolm

the reality came back to haunt him.

He picked up the current issue of the Times Literary Supplement and started through its Books of the Year (just don’t forget those authoritative capitals). Some sixty-five eminent bods (it says here, and seems to tally), over seven pages, expiate on what turned each one on. There is repetition:

I very much enjoyed and admired Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes (Chatto)

says A.S.Byatt. Jonathan Bate is more effusive:

Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes (Chatto) is a beautiful piece of writing, mixing family memoir, cultural history, travel narrative and nuanced observation of miniature curiosities (his inherited collection of netsuke) in a style suggestive of Sebald without the gloom.

Among others, Michael Howard (no, not the political one) joins in and goes overboard for this as:

the book, not of the year, but of the decade.

Harrumph! Anyone for navel-gazing, however nuanced, and suspenders for Japanese pouches?

What really gave Malcolm the glooms, Sebaldian or not, was his growing recognition of seemingly how little he had read of such recent worth. He had missed out, among others, on Felipe Fernández-Armemesto’s choice:

the chef Fabio Picchi’s Senza vizi e senza sprechi (Monddadori) — a culinary memoir that makes most British celebrity cooks look like idiots.

Funny that: Malcolm hadn’t realised it needed Italian comparisons to demonstrate so self-evident a truism. Indeed, Malcolm had reached D for Richard Davenport-Hynes and F for Roy Foster before he found points of recognition.

Davenport-Hynes is boosting Graham Robb’s Parisians: An adventure history of Paris. Now, in Maclolm’s ‘umble opinion that really is a juicy read. It’s not just the information and the opinion it provides, there’s the entertainment value on top — delicious pastiche of literary periods and forms. It’s already out in paperback, and deserves to sell in truckloads.

Foster starts where he is best, on the island:

A disastrous year for the Irish economy, but a very good one for Irish poetry. Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain (Faber) was dazzling: full of three-word lines that light up like a flick of a switch, conveying a haunting preoccupation with the borderlands between this world and the next.

Why the past tense (“was dazzling”), Roy? Later on in this catalogue of wonders, Bernard O’Donoghue also gives Famous Shamus a nod. Somewhere between those two, G for Peter Green devotes his three paragraphs to Donna Leon and Commissario Brunetti’s latest Venetian outing (number nineteen, and Malcolm has every one, in sequence, on a garret shelf) in A Question of Belief. Amid all this pretentiousness and log-rolling, Green comes on like a boy scout’s simple good deed in an affected world:

… the stench of the canals in a broiling August carries its miasma of judicial corruption, homophobia (leading to murder), and red tape. Smooth-talking astrologers prey on elderly ladies. While his delightful family cools off on an Alpine vacation, Brunetti himself (reading Marcus Aurelius) is recalled to sweat out the murder investigation and what lies beneath its surface. Leon’s unique mixture of sadly cynical realpolitik and heartfelt moral compassion has never been shown to better effect. She is a truly fine novelist, period, and should be acclaimed as such.

Cheers to that, says Malcolm.

Leon’s spring annual is a treat to be anticipated. Malcolm will have it on pre-order.

Fiction seems in small regard among the stratospheric literati, with an exception for Peter Carey (that regular Booker-listee). Do these great minds at the TES not take time off for faux-simple joys such as Leon? If so, they might then extend to the likes of Philip Kerr and his Bernie Gunther in their diet. Why (excluding the obvious objection of being “popular”), as far as Malcolm can see, did le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor or C.J.Sansom’s Heartstone not make someone’s list?

Clearly, Malcolm knows little about art, but he knows what he likes.

Thrillers, ‘teccies and others

I’ve Wallendered early, Wallendered late …

In the early hours Malcolm laid down his completed third Henning Mankell.

The usual process is:

• Malcolm’s picks up a paperback through one of those Three-for-two offers,
• likes it,
• then has to reprise to the start of the series.

This time he deliberately went from the start. And also liked it.

Malcolm had heard so many raves about the Wallender series, he wondered what he was missing. He admits he is still not quite sure: a minor police official from the bottom right-hand rural corner of Sweden who somehow is sequentially involved in world events? Hmmm. Yet, they are well-constructed, well-translated, and well worth the effort. And half-a-dozen to go.

Nice.

There’s also Parot

This one did start with an impulsive buy, The Châtelet Apprentice. As far as Malcolm can grasp, Jean-François Parot started as an academic historian, segued into the French diplomatic corps after his military service (which could, just, imply what branch of “military service” was involved), and now gilds his pension pot by inventing the doings of Commissaire Nicolas Le Floch in the paris of the last decades of the ancien régime.

Le Floch is now into his second season as a TV adaptation on France2.

Others will like or loath the series: some of the translation feels, to Malcolm, a trifle clunky. However, they work, and Malcolm has waltzed through the first three of the series without serious derailment.

The UK publisher, Gallic Books, is doing a decent job bringing contemporary French writing to the Anglophone readership. Look at the reverse of the title page, among the bibliographic information, and one finds the logo of République Française below this:

This book is supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of the Burgess programme run by the Cultural Department of the French Embassy in London.

Malcolm raised a wry eyebrow at that. A diplomat (who might have ties with the “dark side”)? A government subsidy? A mysterious “programme”? What’s going on? It seems no more than direct funding to publishers to assist with translation costs. So, hey ho!

And now for Shardlake

The reviews promise Heartstone to be a worthy addition  to C.J.Sansom’s magnificent series of Tudor thrillers. Malcolm had it on pre-order from Amazon, to find it was nigh-on a kilogram of nicely-produced door-stopper, effectively at half-price, and postage-free.

As an aside: there’s a cross-reference there. Some time back it was announced that Ken Branagh would portray Shardlake for a television series. Then we got Branagh as Wallander. Good and rightly celebrated as that BBC1 series was (and derives directly from the Henning novels), BBC4 run the Swedish TV4 series (which is much more “as inspired by”), sub-titled. With Krister Henriksson in the eponymous rôle, to good effect, and very much to Malcolm’s liking.

The guilt pile

These indulgences mean that the bed-side and desk-side unread stacks grow ever steeper. Two in particular glare at Malcolm:

• Giles Milton’s Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922.

Apart from  the rave reviews, and the habit of reading anything by Milton, Malcolm was fired to read this as an adjunct to understanding the background of Alan Furst’s latest, Spies of the Balkans. The context there is primarily the imminence of World War and the Nazis coming to Salonika, but the aftershocks of the Greek-Turkish war rumble on.

• Giles MacDonogh’s After the Reich

Here again is a bit of history that Malcolm feels he has neglected. Of course there are specific texts on his shelves on the Nuremberg trials, the Berlin Airlift and the like. The Attlee government has repeatedly been anatomized in every detail, and Alan Bullock’s huge biography of Ernest Bevin traces in inordinate detail post-war British foreign policy. The MacDonogh ought to give an overview.

All of that pushes a second assault on Wolf Hall further down the priorities.

Meanwhile …

The Oxfam Bookshop in Muswell Hill is conveniently near the bus stop and stragegically placed between the post office and the local source of real ale at the John Baird. So yesterday added two more:

Graham Davis: The Irish in Britain, 1815-1914;

Robert Hutchinson: Elizabeth’s Spy Master.

It may never end this side of the final trip to the Crem. Let it be so.

Signs of the times

1. The premises vacated by Borders (for example, those at Brent Cross, North London) remain unoccupied.

2. Barnes & Noble, that intellectual staple of Malcolm’s visits to Manhattan and elsewhere across the great U.S. of A, is up for sale.

3. The books Malcolm ordered from Amazon, on Wednesday, on free 5-day post and packing, arrived this morning.

Thanks, but no thanks

Pang! The semi-spam drops into the mailbox.

Another offer from Amazon, carefully matched by computer to Malcolm’s previous browsing habits.

Hello! This one, for once, might be interesting!

Traditional folk music on CD

A quick click to open reveals the hideous truth.

First item in this choice selection:

To quote the perspicacious Bugs Bunny:

‘E don’t know me very well.

Amazon continues to amaze …

… not necessarily for the right reasons.

Last week Malcolm had a problem. His aged Canon i560 was distinctly (and its amber tracer warning-light literally) on the blink. It’s been a good servant over some long time, and was now obviously ready for the great recycling that comes to us all.

The HP LaserJet works on happily; but

• it’s due for the cassette;
• it will not work on the house wi-fi network; and
• it doesn’t do colour.

So, a new quality ink-jet was the recipe.

After scrutiny of the reviews, Malcolm took a yearning for the Pixma ip4700.

And so we reach the complication.

Even allowing for VAT and the rest, UK (and, indeed, European) pricing is out-of-kilter with the discounts available in the US. Sometimes by a factor of 80% plus.

A quick scurry round the on-line UK suppliers picked up a range of prices between the mid-80s and the round ton of pounds sterling. PCWorld seemed the best, but there was only one unit available across the whole of London. And that (in the depths of Sarf Lunnun) was soon gone. Meanwhile, Amazon priced the ip4700 at £125, but semingly not in stock. Ummm …

Having slept on the problem, Malcolm had another go. Hello: it’s now available on Amazon, but priced at £99 and pence. Still nothing on PCWorld; and all the rest are in the nineties or more. Another day, another dollar. What’s this? Amazon are now pricing at £87! Shall he? Will he? Can he?

In the time it took to hesitate, and have a cup of tea, Amazon had repented of its moderation: the price was again back over the £90 mark.

On Thursday, for a brief moment, the price dropped to £86. Do Amazon track an individual IP-address, and price accordingly? They certainly tailor their “suggestions” not just to past purchases, but to recent browsing activity. At £86-odd, the check-out button was pressed, and the order made.

Malcolm, a skinflint, was not prepared to pay the extra for the express mdelivery, and settled for the five-day free one. Suddenly, to his surprise, that put possible delivery into next week.

Then, late on Friday, the email confirmed the order had been despatched. Today, Tuesday morning, quite early, as the snowflakes flew, it arrived.

The most time-consuming parts of installation were unpacking and using the enclosed CD-ROM to add the drivers. Later, when Malcolm’s machine had “seen” the printer instantly, through Concierge,  on the Airport Express, he invited the Lady in his Life to access it: this time downloading drivers automatically via System Preferences. This was a matter of moments, obviously far more efficient than the extended process of downloading from the CD.

Another, so far, satisfactory experience.

Credit where it’s due:

• to Canon for a solid, capable product (if modelled on the intimidating Darth Vader principle);
• Amazon for an efficient service (if somewhat confusing with prices); and
• Apple for getting the hand-shaking connection and networking off to a tee (with no reservations whatsoever).