A Pointed History

I’m no anthropologist, but it must surely be significant that in no language or culture on Earth does the phrase “As safe as a sharp thing” appear. Today, for the third time in my life, I’ve managed to do myself a noteworthy injury with a knife.

The first time it happened I must have been about ten or eleven, and suffused with that innocent spirit of scientific investigation that so often leads to significant personal injury, legal and financial liability, and wanton destruction of property. The question at the forefront of my mind on this occasion was: “What does the inside of a chewing-gum-filled gobstopper look like before you’ve sucked away the hard outer shell?” To find out, I took the gobstopper and set it in the palm of my hand. Then, in my other hand, I took my Swiss Army Knife. I opened out the main blade and, with ever-increasing force, dug it into the gobstopper. Unfortunately, chewing-gum being significantly less dense than the shell, and a concave surface less resistant than a convex one, the practical upshot of my investigation was not merely that I drove the knife through the sweet but also clean through my hand.

I don’t remember it being particularly painful until I actually looked at my hand and saw what appeared to be a white worm awash with blood in the middle of the wound. Horrified, and not knowing how a tendon was meant to look, I tugged on it. Now that was sore.

Alex Burton, trapped at last, while Opa stands by with a fire extinguisher and Jaako pokes him with a stick

The second time my experience with knives all went wrong was when I was in first year in Uni. The year before I had been working on the OM ship MV Logos II in Latin America, and when in Mexico I had bought, for what was only the equivalent of about £15, an excellent knife manufactured by Diablo. You can see it in the picture to the left: it is what is holding my friend Alex’s headband affixed to the ceiling (oh, the merry japes of the Aft Meeting Room crowd during drydock and refit! We weren’t hard up for entertainment, as you can tell). I am fairly scrupulous about keeping my knives sharp (a blunt knife being, as far as I’m concerned, something of a contradiction in terms) and my Diablo had, and still has, an edge you can shave with.

I know this to be true because I have done so. When I first came to Uni and St Columba’s I discovered one Sunday morning that not only had my electric razor broken but all my disposable ones were blunt. I had a cunning idea, and, like Baldrick’s, mine too turned out to be total pigswill. I took my knife in hand and shaved. All was going extremely well until, still not entirely awake, I yawned hugely and opened a correspondingly huge gash from my ear all the way down to my jaw.

The blood had mostly stopped flowing by the time I finished my 45-minute walk to church, where I arrived early for the music group practice. My appearance was sufficient to silence the band. “What on Earth happened to you?” Louis asked. “Oh,” I said, affecting a nonchalance I didn’t entirely feel, “Some idiot tried to get clever with a knife.” Looking into the shocked faces I confessed that the idiot in question was me, thus confirming a number of long-held prejudices about drummers in general, but the pain had mostly gone by that stage and I felt able to laugh about it. When the wound healed it did so cleanly, and now there is no scar to tell you what happened.

Sadly, I don’t think there will be any corresponding clean healing today, despite the precision with which I appear to have injured myself. Cutting an Italeri model soldier from his sprue, the scalpel blade rotated through 90 degrees in the handle, slipped off the sprue and plunged with clear homicidal intent into the tip of my thumb, which it proceeded to slice neatly in two. The knife was extremely sharp, and so the injury is surgically neat, painless, and took but a few minutes to bind together with steri-strips and surgical tape – although I am still mortified at the thought that I might just have got my ass kicked by a soldier seventy-two times smaller than me.

And now I have to get ready for DRIVE, a youth club at church where I am one of the leaders. I don’t know what the plan is for tonight or the coming weeks – that’s Tom’s responsibility – but my recommendation is that I be put in charge of Health and Safety.

I think I have many lessons I can impart.

Here it is: your moment of Zen:

1:72-scale Paratroopers on Starlingford, where they honed their modelmaker-disabling skills...

Bad Language

When I was in 2nd Form/Year Nine/7th Grade I was lucky enough to have a truly gifted English teacher. He did a couple of things for me when I was in his class that have proven helpful ever since. The first thing he did was to give me 20 out of 20 for a short story – the first time he had ever done so, and the first time I had ever received such a mark. Nowadays, when the novel’s going badly or I can’t seem to get traction on an argument in my thesis, one of the things that keeps me going, that instills some form of self-belief, is the knowledge that Mr Andrews once gave me perfect marks for a story that I wrote.

The other thing that has proven helpful over the years was his introduction to the idea that there is no such thing as bad language. “There are no bad words,” he said, “just their inappropriate use”. It took me ages to get my head around that, and then even longer to accept it, but now I think he was right. Words have weight, it is true, but it is weight we choose to give them.

Recently I have been watching on Youtube video compilations of American news programmes reporting the 9/11 attacks, as part of my PhD studies. One thing that I noticed as being common across the board was the language employed by all the commentators as they saw the planes strike the World Trade Centre, or later as they watched the buildings collapse. “Oh my goodness,” they kept saying. “Oh my goodness.”

This was bad language.

This was a massively inappropriate response to the events these people saw. If ever there was a spectacle that deserved forceful, unambiguous language, this was it. Instead we heard the anaemic pratings of television personalities linguistically castrated by a governing body that has decided all crude language – what my father, rather endearingly, refers to as ‘basic English’ – is wrong. And I’m sorry to all those possessed of delicate sensibilities, but it’s not. “Oh my goodness” is what you say when you’re halfway home from the supermarket and realise you’ve left a bag of groceries at the checkout. Witnessing the deaths of 2,993 people calls for more than that.

To reiterate, vehemence is not to be equated with inappropriateness. Ezekiel 23 is an extraordinary chapter of the Bible, in which God makes clear just how extraordinarily disgusted he has become with Israel. The language is appallingly crude, but it would take a brave idiot to criticise God for the tone of His message. Oh – here we go. Anyway, I remember having this discussion with my grandmother in Waterstones a couple of years ago. I had just bought The World’s Wife, a (brilliant) collection of poems by Carol Ann Duffy, and my Nana asked to see what it was that I had bought. She opened it, with what was perhaps absolute inevitability, at the poem ‘Delilah’, which includes these lines:

“he guided my fingers over the scar
over his heart,
a four-medal wound from the war -
but I cannot be gentle, or loving, or tender.
I have to be strong.
What is the cure?

He fucked me again
until he was sore,
then we both took a shower.”

Naturally, my grandmother tutted in that special way that older Christian women who are veritable pillars of respectability seem to develop. “I can’t say I approve of the language,” she said.[1]

I took the book from her and read the poem carefully. “What alternative would you suggest?” I asked.

“Well, if she must talk about…that sort of thing,” she said, with a pillar-of-respectability-significant-pause, “she should say ‘made love’.”

“No she shouldn’t,” I said flatly, partly because I’m not all that respectable, but mainly because I entirely disagreed with her. “When, a few lines earlier, Duffy is careful to write ‘I cannot be loving,’ she can’t then follow that with ‘and then we made love.’ Love is the thing completely missing from the poem. There’s lust, and physical attraction, but not affection or ‘gentleness’, as she puts it. You might not like the word she chooses to describe the act that results, but it’s not bad language – it’s entirely appropriate language.”

I’m not sure whether my argument carried the day or not, because at that moment my parents returned and the conversation ended. Nevertheless, I still think I’m right. Some language might but unpleasant or even offensive, but that doesn’t mean it’s unjustified.

While being affronted at the inadequacy of some language this week, I also managed to be hit with language of the opposite extreme: still inappropriate, but this time entirely too forceful for its own good.

The reason it’s particularly been an issue over the last week is because the last week has seen Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day. I care about these dates. I read a lot of history – particularly World War Two history, but a lot of other modern conflict history too – and I have, as a result, a relatively thorough understanding of the sacrifices made by various countries and their armed forces over the last 95 years. I know, for instance, that it is now more than forty years since Britain last had a year in which no soldiers were killed on active service.

I appreciate those sacrifices. But I am under no illusions as to the nature of those who made them. They were mostly ordinary men. They were relatively conscientious, they were volunteers (in the latter half of the century), they had no particular desire to kill or talent for killing, and what they wanted more than anything else was for the fighting to stop so that they could go home. They weren’t, by and large, heroes.

‘Hero’ is a word that has come in for more abuse in the last week than just about any other. But the problem is not limited to this week alone. Here is an extract from the introduction to Max Hastings‘ intriguing book ‘Warriors‘, which illustrates exactly what I’m talking about:

“It is welcome that popular perceptions of courage no longer embrace only, or even chiefly, achievement in battle. But it seems dismaying that the media, and thus the public, today blur the distinction between a victim, who suffers terrible experiences, and a hero. To any thoughtful person, a hero must be someone who consciously consents to risk or sacrifice his or her life for a higher purpose. The media, for instance, will describe a pilot who safely lands a crippled plane laden with passengers as ‘a hero’. A party trapped for hours in a cable car who return to terra firma without betraying visible moral collapse may well be dubbed heroic. In truth of course these people are merely passive victims of misfortune. If they behave well, they are doing so to save their own skins, and only incidentally those of other people. Anyone who has served in a theatre of war, even in a non-combatant capacity and even in as perfunctory an affair – from the Allied viewpoint – as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is likely to be described in any subsequent media report of a divorce, a car crash or a fatality as a ‘war hero’. This is a travesty. Such a word as ‘hero’ deserves to be cherished as carefully as any other endangered species.”

- Max Hastings, ‘Warriors’, (London, Harper Perennial, 2006), pp xviii-xix

Of course genuine heroes appear in wartime. One of the most cherished autographs I possess is that of Leonard Cheshire, who succeeded the famous Guy Gibson as commander of 617 Squadron, the ‘Dambusters‘. He won the Victoria Cross, and in the most exceptional manner: not for any single act of outstanding bravery, but for an extended period of sustained courage. He had by that stage flown 102 missions. To put that in perspective, one tour of duty in Bomber Command was 30 missions. The chance of surviving that tour was 10%. Your chance of surviving a subsequent tour was 5%. RAF bomber crews in World War Two had a worse survival rate than infantry officers in World War One. Cheshire’s VC citation reads, in part:

“In four years of fighting against the bitterest opposition he maintained a standard of outstanding personal achievement, his successful operations being the result of careful planning, brilliant execution and supreme contempt for danger – for example, on one occasion he flew his P-51 Mustang in slow ‘figures of eight’ above a target obscured by low cloud, to act as a bomb-aiming mark for his squadron. Cheshire displayed the courage and determination of an exceptional leader.”

That level of determination, courage, and stamina is wholly exceptional. It is almost unbelievable. Nor do I think  it is solely the province of wartime: there are people today in Britain who are alone, who are trying to look after their children as best they can and who do not know where the next meal is coming from. Such people live lives of quiet heroism, their desperate fortitude every bit as moving as tales of battlefield gallantry. That’s heroism. But nearer to home, it seems another hero has emerged this week.

And so from the sublime to the ridiculous. Scott Rennie, whatever else he might be, is not a hero. I am not wholly without sympathy for him, as I am sure he has endured much abuse over the last year, and no one who had the kind of experiences I had when I was younger could fail to sympathise with a man whose experience recently must have been desperately unpleasant. But that being said, I cannot believe that he was entirely ignorant of the situation he was bound to provoke, and nor can I equate unpleasantness endured with terror and mortal risk overcome.

When you kick over a hornets’ nest, of course you’re going to get stung. Taking it doesn’t make you a hero.

Here is, finally, your moment of Zen:

Black 5 'The Glasgow Highlander' waits for the off at Perdido Street Station

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[1] This is the woman who once gave me a copy of H. Norman Schwarzkopf’s autobiography with every expletive carefully excoriated with black biro, a labour of love and lunacy that must have taken hours of patient reading and defacing and perhaps even use of an unabridged dictionary, just to be sure she’d got them all.

Why I like to kill my friends on a semi-regular basis

Hello again, everyone, and apologies for the long spell incommunicado. Numerous events have eventuated, including a weekend spent in Berlin, home of more leather-boot shops than you could shake any reasonable length of stick at, and also home to a world-class zoo which had two month-old baby jaguars (any women reading this, you may now go ‘Aww’, though I insist you do so only in the privacy of the inside of your own head). But I’m back, and I’m back to the daily grind, and part of that grind includes writing the current novel.

I raise this with slight triumphalism, because in this last week I have managed to break the 60,000-word mark. Every time I manage to change the first integer of a five-digit number it’s a big thing for me, because by-and-large it means I have managed to complete another chapter. Those of you possessed of more than usual cunning will have worked out that this means that my chapters tend to average 10,000 words each. Well done: you may have a sweetie.

10,000 words is quite a lot. 10,000 words is equivalent to a Masters dissertation, although 10,000 words of fiction is considerably easier to write, because fiction doesn’t require anally-retentive levels of footnoting every two sentences.  Even so, the effort involved is considerable, partly because on one hand I’m trying to drive the story forward in a relatively determined manner, while on the other everything I write has to agree with everything that has preceeded it in the narrative thus far.

That gets tricky when the narrative is as long as mine (these 60,000 words push me over the half million in total). One of the reasons why big stories are difficult to tell is that sustaining a concept over such a long trajectory isn’t easy. Ideas have a natural tendancy to change and evolve, so you need to keep a very firm grip on them right from the beginning. That can be a simple as making sure the names of the protagonists retain the same spelling throughout or as difficult as creating character motivations that have room to be fleshed out over the story arc while remaining internally consistant. And, again, scale is a complicating factor. In a file simply entitled ‘Ships’ on my hard-drive there are the names of all the vessels that have, or that could, appear in the story. There are more than 1,000 of them. The same goes for named characters. There are more than 300 of them.

300+ is a lot. It’s so many, in fact, that actually just thinking of names for them all becomes something of a trial, and I have to delve into my book of baby names and the phonebook in order to make them up. Or, alternatively, I can simply lift them wholesale from my friends.

There are people walking around an entirely fictional universe who I nevertheless run a real risk of bumping into in the street. Sometimes I take the name but not the character: in the universe of the Fulcrum War, for instance, President Alex Burton is quite the baddie, whereas in real life my friend Alex Burton is a thoroughly good egg. That’s a simple name theft. Sometimes I take physical characteristics and put them under a new name and give them a new attitude: there’s a character called Dana Greer who, in my head at least, looks like my friend Diane.  Or I tweak names and attitudes but have them still recognisable: Dave Wark became Dave Warrick. Susan Rendel (as she was then: she has subsequently married and changed her name) became Susan Rondahl. But there is a danger in doing this, and it is not merely that someone might get offended by what you’ve written. The danger is that characters develop a mind of their own. ‘Susan Rondahl’ was written in primarily as a one-scene joke to amuse Susan Rendel, with whom I worked at the time, but ‘Susan Rondahl’ swiftly took over that initial chapter and now she is arguably the primary female protagonist of the entire thing.

So much for authorial control.

If a character begins to get too wilful, of course, I do have ultimate recourse to the final authorial Big Stick: charactercide. I can kill my characters. I can do so for many reasons, not least of which is if it seems like a good idea at the time. But there are a couple of reasons why doing this is a wrench. First of all, you’re dispensing with an asset. Characters enable you to do things with narratives:by definition, they propel the plot (I can’t think of any books that have characters who impinge on the plot in no way whatsoever). Removing a character removes a tool which facilitates that propulsion, and so moving forward becomes more difficult. Secondly, when you’ve gone to the trouble of including your friend in a story it becomes particularly painful and problematic to tell them that actually they just came to a Bad End. Unless you have a grievance, in which case it offers a peculiarly therapeutic resolution to the whole affair (and yes, I have done that too). I must admit to feeling fortunate, in that no one thus gotten rid of has told me they felt aggrieved at the treatment dealt out to their namesakes. Some have even encouraged it, requesting heroic or, as their temperament leads them, spectacular deaths.

It’s on my mind particularly this week because I am about to kill off another friend. His death will occur at the end of a chapter (the 10,000 word thing is only a rough guideline, so although I already have 60,000 words this will be the end of chapter 6, ‘PURITY’) and it’s a slightly unusual one in that it’s the death of a friend whose name and character and occupation I have sequestered for my own devious ends. His demise is, therfore, both heroic and spectacular. It seems only fair. Although I’m not sure how enthused his wife will be when she finds out what I’ve done to her man.

Using friends’ names and characters in this way is a slight cheat for me as an author as well, and not just in terms of not having to think of new names. It’s a short-cut to emotional involvement. I care what happens to these fictional constructs because some part of them is based upon people about whom I care in real life. So for that reason, I like to put them in dangerous circumstances. I want them to pull through, and hopefully that sense of engagement will rub off on the reader because of how I write the characters and the humanity I give them or observe in them. But sometimes putting them in harm’s way leads to harm befalling them, and sometimes even I, the author, have no idea who will survive and who won’t.

It keeps me on my toes. It keeps the readers on their toes. And it keeps my friends worried. What more could any reasonable man ask for?

Today’s Zen is another, brand-new Starlingford video: some of better pictures collated and accompanied by one of my favourite songs. Enjoy!

BNP 0: Godwin’s Law 1

Another day, another unpleasantness on the sole of my metaphorical shoe. Once again Nick Griffin has rolled up and pitched his wagons in a minefield, and sadly none of the ensuing shrapnel has even so much as dented his pride. Shame.

Nick Griffin is a fully-rigged ocean-going horror, but he seems inexorable. This most recent controversy is not before time, and (obviously) I agree with the people who are speaking out against him, but it remains to be seen what lasting impact it will have. In a nutshell, the situation is this: concerned with the attempted association with Armed Forces veterans by the racist, neo-fascist British National Party (that link goes to their homepage and might therefore be NSFW), a group of retired Forces officers led by former Heads of the Army General Sir Mike Jackson and General Sir Richard Dannatt sent a letter to the Times calling on the BNP in general, and Nick Griffin in particular, to “cease and desist” their attempts to associate with veterans’ charities.

The is strong stuff. Seriously strong. Something no-one in the mainstream media seem to have picked up on is the particular import of that phrase “cease and desist”. In the mouth of a military officer, that phrase has roughly the same meaning and threat-level as Dirty Harry, .44 Magnum in hand, saying “Go ahead. Make my day.”

The Generals are not alone. Youtube now hosts two videos, one by Andy McNab, at one stage the highest-decorated serving soldier in the British Army, and another by Simon Weston, survivor of the Sir Galahad fire in the Falklands War, both condemning the BNP. The letter and videos are part of “a campaign against racism and extremism” run by the group Nothing British, who are titling the effort ‘Operation Stolen Valour’.

Nick Griffin is not a smart man by any means, but he has responded with genuinely startling stupidity. In a staggeringly misjudged statement published on the BNP’s website but widely reported elsewhere, he has accused the generals of being no better than, if not actively identical to, Nazi war criminals hanged at Nuremburg in 1945/6.

The internet doesn’t have many rules, but one that has gained a great deal of traction, perhaps even to the extent of general acceptance, is that the first person in an online debate to invoke the Nazis loses the argument by default. This is a now-accepted, modified version of Godwin’s Law, which in its original incarnation stated that “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1” (there are other arcana surrounding the law: Google ‘Quirk’s Exception’ if you don’t believe me).

Nick Griffin, assuming he doesn’t reload and take aim at his other foot, will be on Question Time tomorrow night. I will be watching with interest. I think he should be given the forum he craves. After all, how are we going to take him apart unless we put him in the arena and sic the wolves on him?

As the “cease and desist” generals might put it: “Ready, aim…”

Time for Zen, to remind us who we ought to support in this debate:

A British Sherman Firefly, of 2nd Polish Armoured Brigade, advances along a country lane on Starlingford in late 1944

Spewing Filth

Last week saw two extraordinary stories in the papers (or not, as the case may be), both linked by a couple of common themes: filth, and Twitter.

As you will know if you read this blog regularly, I have written before about the importance of free speech, and I have been watching with interest over the last year or so as Private Eye has been increasingly drawing attention to the use of super-injunctions brought against the press. Super-injunctions, if you haven’t somehow come across the term, are like normal injunctions but they’ve changed their clothing in a phonebox and now wear their underpants on the outside. Actually, if a normal injunction prevents a paper from reporting a story, a super-injunction prevents the paper even from mentioning that there was a story in the first place. It was designed to protect individuals, but lately corporations have been trying it on for size.

Such was the case recently with Trafigura. Now, I have to be a bit careful here with what I allege – particularly since I’ve just linked to the company’s own website – but I can explain the situation thus. A ship, the Probo Koala, leased by Trafigura, took a hundred tons of toxic waste to the Ivory Coast where a local subcontractor dumped it at sea instead of properly processing it. Trafigura maintains that the large number of people who subsequently became ill after apparent contact with the hazardous material, and indeed the 15 deaths that occurred after exposure, are coincidental, nothing to do with the waste, nothing to do with Trafigura, and are in fact so far removed from the company that the €152 million that they paid in compensation had, in some metaphysical way, nothing whatsoever to do with the circumstances that prompted the payment. However, when the Guardian newspaper obtained evidence that seemed to suggest corporate wrongdoing, the so-called ‘Minton Report‘, a super-injunction was imposed, banning the paper from mentioning the report or indeed the injunction. (The law firm representing Trafigura, incidentally, are Carter-Ruck, known of old to Private Eye readers as something else that sounds not dissimilar, and apparent real-life counterparts to LA-based law firm Wolfram & Hart).

Now this is where it gets interesting. Paul Farrelly, MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme and former journalist himself, raised the issue in the House of Commons, asking the Secretary of State for Justice “what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.”

Once Farrelly did that, the information was out in the open as – and this is important – a matter of public record, as any publishing organ is constitutionally protected if it chooses to publish what goes on in the Houses of Parliament. So when the Guardian contacted Carter-Ruck and told them this, the law firm had no choice but to…err…contest the idea and warn the paper that if it published it would be in contempt of court and could face sequestration of its assets.

The Guardian responded with a front page story about the prevention of publication of parliamentary proceedings, but wasn’t sure that it could do more than that, as the legal waters were sufficiently muddied to have their own lawyer, a QC, unsure of the territory. Private Eye took a more robust ‘publish and be damned’ approach, and did so, though the way was led by political blogger Paul Staines, writer of the Guido Fawkes blog. Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, also tossed a snowball down the mountainside by tweeting “Now Guardian prevented from reporting parliament for unreportable reasons. Did John Wilkes live in vain?”

Twitter limbered up, girded its loins and went for it. By midday the next day (last Tuesday), ‘Trafigura’ was one of the most popular search terms on Twitter, and there was absolutely nothing they or Carter-Ruck could do about it. Within an hour the law firm had surrendered, and the Guardian reported the question, the injunction and the Minton Report.

This is why I like the internet.

Bizarrely, it wasn’t the last time last week that Twitter attacked those spreading vile muck around the world. As you will know, I have a deep-seated detestation of those who would, either with venal ignorance or malicious aforethought, denigrate those different to themselves. Again, I have written about this before, but recently my attention was drawn to perhaps the single most hateful article I have ever read online.

This hideous abortion of a column made me angrier than just about anything else I have ever read. In fact my mood took me past the talus and scree of anger, up through the crevasses of wrath and left me standing on the barren, icy plains of pure glacial fury. For those of you who haven’t clicked the link, or are perhaps wisely waiting for me to explain what it is before you go there, a columnist for the Daily Mail called Jan Moir has written an article about Stephen Gately’s death. She explains, on the basis of her no doubt world-renowned forensic expertise (she is a restaurant critic, after all), that the coroner’s report is wrong and that Gately’s death was not natural. She equates his death with the breaking of a teacup in a cottage on holiday. She raises the dread word ‘cannabis’ and leaves it hanging there as though it meant something. She manages to link the death to that of Kevin McGee, Matt Lucas’s partner. And the common thread throughout the article is that Gately died because he was gay. According to Jan Moir, her with the face like a slapped haddock, homosexuality is now fatal. It’s a deathstyle choice (as is celebrity – she begins the article, after all, with a list of ‘famous people likely to meet a bad end’).

That’s brilliant, Jan. The article is poorly written, poorly researched, poorly opined, and please, please, please just go away and never write anything again. Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer-prize -winning movie critic, once wrote a review of the film ‘Wolf Creek‘ in which he said “it made me want to vomit and cry at the same time”. Jan Moir has achieved something similar with me.

I am not alone in feeling this way. Once again, Twitter came out fighting, led by Stephen Fry and Derren Brown (Fry managing the magnificently dismissive “I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathesome and inhumane.”) The marvellous twitterers between them managed to reduce Moir’s name to – at the very best – only the most disgusting constituent part of mud, and, somewhat taken aback, Moir responded with a statement in which she concluded “In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.”

She’s right, and I for one protest the idea that the article “has homophobic or bigoted undertones”. They are, if anything, OVERtones, neon-tones, This-is-the-whole-bloody-focus-of-my-article -tones. There’s nothing shy or retiring about them. Changing the title of the article from its original “Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death” to the current “a strange, troubling and lonely death” doesn’t disguise this.

The ‘internet campaign’ wasn’t orchestrated, it was spontaneous, and it was deeply-enough felt that the PCC website crashed for several hours on the basis of the sheer number of complaints it received (at the last count, 25,000. Not that it’ll do any good – the editor of the Daily Mail Mail is Paul Dacre, and the Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission is…Paul Dacre).

Charlie Brooker wrote an extremely good article about the situation, managing a coherency where most others were left frothing at the mouth.

Oh well. A triumph for legitimate outrage, this week, but it hasn’t half been tiring trying to keep up…

I think it’s appropriate, therefore, to conclude with some vegetable Zen:

All the peace fiddling with one's brassicas can produce.

Top 10… Cars On Screen

Some things are so obvious as to need no explanation. It is, for example, perfectly clear that Famke Jannsen is the most beautiful woman on the planet, and I have the (signed) photograph to prove it. (I mention this mainly to please you, Impertinent Googler, rather than you, Dear Constant Reader). The photograph in question is this one (and with this, IG, you can go away again):

The unsigned version

Right. Now that that’s dealt with (although just you watch my blog stats skyrocket) I can get to what it was I actually wanted to talk about, which was ‘Cars on Screen’. This is a contentious issue. I make no bones about it. Some of you, I’m sure, are going to disagree with my list. If so, well…that’s just too bad. These are some of the very finest examples of automotive coolness to be seen anywhere, and you’ll just have to flame me later. With that in mind, let’s get things rolling…

#10: 1971 Plymouth Valiant

It’s not the most powerful car on the list. It’s not the prettiest car on the list. It’s not the coolest car on the list (well, duh) and it’s not the fastest car on the list – but it just might be the most courageous car on the list. This 4-door family saloon was the unsung hero of Steven Spielberg’s film ‘Duel‘, where Dennis Weaver used it to flee his pursuer, a literal ‘monster truck’. At the end of the film, the car careered into the lorry, destroying itself…but blinding the lorry driver for a few vital seconds until escape from the cliff-edge was impossible and he plummeted over the side. Kudos to the car for that.

Besides, look at that nose, reminiscent of a ‘69 Charger… remember, this was Mom’s car, not an action hero’s. I can’t decide whether there’s a history in American films of using regular cars in extraordinary roles to suggest the triumph of the everyman; or if there’s a history of American car manufacturers designing extraordinary cars for ordinary situations as part of a marketing campaign. It’s the chicken or the egg query of automotive pop culture…

#9: 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T

In some respects the ultimate counter-culture car, the 1970 Dodge Challenger became so as the star of the very trippy and deeply weird anti-establishment chase movie ‘Vanishing Point‘. The big brother of the Dodge Charger, the Challenger was designed to be more comfortable, although apparently this is not the case when you plough into a couple of bulldozers at a hundred miles an hour. Perhaps the car should have survived – Quentin Tarantino certainly thought so, as a white 1970 Dodge Challenger became the hero of the otherwise-woeful ‘Deathproof’. Although the two movies don’t feature exactly the same model of car, the two Challengers do have the same license plate.

Whether you just have to make it to ‘Frisco, or you just have to get off the hood because you’re being chased by a maniac in a ‘69 Charger, clearly, the Dodge Challenger is the answer to all your vehicular requirements.

#8: 1977 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am

When I was seven I saw what I then thought was the single greatest movie ever made: ‘Smokey and the Bandit’. I was too young to realise that I was essentially watching the most expensive, most sustained commercial Coors Light Beer ever made: I just loved the car with the missing roof and the painting on the bonnet, the one whose speed was determined by the amount of money thrown towards it (a scene I didn’t understand for several years). The car itself didn’t wow me, exactly, but I loved the idea that it was essentially good-humoured anarchy on wheels. As such, I find it very difficult to forgive the two sequels, just as I find it equally difficult to ignore the darker cast given to the car by (again) Quentin Tarantino, who has The Bride drive it in volume 2 of Kill Bill. This car represented good fun, unlike the other famous TV Trans Am, which doesn’t make it onto this list: Knight Rider’ s K.I.T.T. Can you imagine being nagged incessantly by nothing more than a glorified and sentient satnav? Stick with the Bandit. Not even Hasselhoff could get away with that ‘tache. Instead, stick to the backroads, roar off in a cloud of dust, keep up the chatter on the CB and play hide-and-seek with the local law enforcement. Trust me, it’s much more fun.

#7: 1968 Ford Mustang 390 CID Fastback

Yes, I know that in THAT car chase they had to rein in the Dodge Charger, because it kept getting away; yes, I know that in that car chase Steve McQueen’s tyre-smoking antics weren’t entirely planned, nor was the Charger’s running into the camera; yes, I know that Mustang’s engine had to be extensively modified to increase the power output and that the Charger  somehow manages to lose a total of 6 hubcaps… but ‘Bullitt’ provides THE definitive movie car chase, and the Highland Green Mustang is, clearly, the star therof. It’s a cool car. It just is. And being driven by Steve McQueen made its coolness probably eternally unassailable. Filmed at full speed, with no soundtrack other than the tyres and the engine, this thing roared round San Francisco and into a well-deserved place in movie history.

#6: 1969 Dodge Charger ‘General Lee’

If you wanted a car that you had to enter via the windows (preferably after sliding over the hood), waved on by a girl in the shortest shorts history has ever seen, and which seemed to spend more time in the air than it ever did on the ground, well, there’s no choice: it has to be the General Lee. Less well known is the fact that General Lee is based on a real car, a 1958 Chrysler 300D used by a real bootlegger and named ‘Traveler’ – the name of General Robert E. Lee’s horse. Oh, and another fun fact: ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ used up no less than 256 ‘68 and ‘69 Chargers, much to the chagrin of classic car enthusiasts today. In fact so many cars were used for the series that by the end they were resorting to scale models. Even so, the General Lee – possibly the least-conspicuous criminal car ever built – stands out as a firm favourite. How did that horn go again?

#5: 1963 Aston Martin DB5

Well, let’s see: James Bond’s vehicle of choice comes fully stocked with twin machine guns, bulletproof glass, a retractable armour shield, oil slick dispensers, tyre-shredding hubcaps, revolving number plates, a champagne cooler, smokescreen generators, extending bumpers for ramming, and finally, who could forget the passenger-side ejector seat? The car, unlike most of the others on this list, suggests elegance rather than brute force. Mind you, you’d have to be out of your mind to make rude gestures at the driver… And you’d then have to drive awfully fast to escape him, as the standard DB5 was capable of 145mph. Though you would have to be insane to attempt driving it at that kind of speed, as the car’s brakes started life as milk-bottle tops. If you think you might just buy one, expect to have to pay a further £10,000  getting it up to a standard whereby it can be driven as it ought and deserves to be driven. Also, if you’re wealthy enough to be thinking seriously about buying one, will you be my friend?

#4: The Batmobile (Keaton Era)

There have been numerous Batmobiles over the years, but this is the best. Less camp than the TV version or the Schumacher monstrosities (*shudder*); less military-industrial complex than the Tumbler of Nolan’s two recent films: Tim Burton’s batmobile strock the perfect balance. Made from two Chevy Impala chasses and fitted with a 5.7 litre V8, it could actually go like stink – although that isn’t my favourite factoid about this machine. No, that honour goes to the fact that at least one was built with a real jet engine. Admittedly it was so thirsty that it drained the fuel tank in 15 seconds, which isn’t ideal, but the idea was basically good. They even went so far as to make all the gadgets actually work, with the exception of the shield mechanism, because that kind of solid-state science is still quite far off. But this is probably the meanest machine on the list, and I love it.

#3: 1967 Chevrolet Impala

Close all the doors, break out the salt and lock up your daughters: the Winchester boys are in town. Apparently Eric Kripke, the creator of ‘Supernatural’ was originally going to use a ‘65 Mustang for the show, but he was talked out of it by a neighbour who explained that with the Impala “you could hide a body in the trunk”. Good thinking that man. While they have used it for that purpose (chalk up a hex on the  dusty black paintwork and you’ve got yourself an excellent demon trap), what the trunk mostly contains is about the most impressive armoury you’re likely to see outside of Camp Victory. Who’d've thought ghosts could be so vulnerable to 12-gauge shotguns? Or a Colt…? This is a car elevated from ‘meanness’ to ‘bad-ass’, and the rumble of that V8 means it’s time for the baddies to start quaking in their boots. Or hoofs. Whatever.

#2: 1983 GMC G-15 Vandura

“In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire… The A-Team.”

Sure, the van handled like a pig; sure, the 0-60 time required a long weekend; sure, everybody gets the colour scheme wrong (it’s not, as you can see, all-over black, but is instead black and gunmetal-grey): but who cares? When the A-Team came to town, they did so in style. They might have been the worst shots in the entire universe, but they always had a plan. And then a different one would come together and it would all be alright. Yay!

And finally…

#1: DeLorean DMC-12

Not only the coolest car on the list but also the fastest (relatively speaking), this is Northern Ireland’s only supercar. Well, I say ’supercar’ – the speedometer only went up to 85mph. Which means finding out exactly when you were likely to hit the magic number of 88mph could be problematic… With its stainless steel body, gullwing doors, and digital displays, the DeLorean still seems futuristic, whether or not you opt for the flux capacitor upgrade, hover conversion, or Mr Fusion power supply. And if it all goes really badly wrong, converting it for use on the railways is not impossible…

I’m from Northern Ireland. Someday I too will be Doc Brown(e). I think I ought to get a DeLorean…

And finally (genuinely, this time), a little piece of cinema magic. Enjoy!

Bringin’ The Boogie #3

Hello Dear Readers! – and once again, it is that time of the month when I bring you great tunes, courtesy of Youtube.

This month, I thought what I might do is bring you some tunes that remind me, or that I have used, with regard to my Fulcrum War books. Those of you who are still confused as to what I mean by this can use the headed pages that provide ‘back-cover blurb’ on the three books in question found above: everybody else, let’s start with Ghost Among Thieves…

The book begins with an act of sabotage on a ship isolated and alone: as such, I found this to be the perfect soundtrack to that event:

At the novel’s conclusion, I knew that both sides, no matter what defeats and reversals of fortune they had suffered, would continue to fight. I was also thinking about Paul Ray, the principal architect of revolution, and I knew that in him the Confederates had found a figurehead big enough and strong enough for the role of leader they placed upon him. So what could be better than this?

The next book, The Passage of Daemons, features a strategic biological attack. There is one song that I simply could not get out of my head in relation to this (and, in fact, a couple of the lyrics made it into the manuscript), partly because it is used to spectacular effect at the beginning of the TV miniseries of Stephen King’s epic The Stand, and partly because it’s just so damn spooky in its own right:

As the third book is still very much a work in progress (it is only about one fifth complete at this stage) it would give too much away to include any of the music going through my head in relation to it, so instead here are a couple of songs that always come to mind when I think about Paul Ray, the ‘hero’. The first song is by Zero 7, a truly wonderful and laid-back outfit. This is my favourite of their tracks. It comes from their album ‘The Garden’ and it comes to mind because of a fantastic line halfway through, which describes Paul to a T: “Wearing smiles like Colt .45s”.

Finally, if this doesn’t sum up Paul, nothing will: a genuine, kick-ass, double-fistin’ lazy-grinnin’ rock classic:

Addiction #273

The acknowledgement of one’s addictions is traditionally the first step toward recovery from them, and so it is that I must confess to one now. It’s an unusual one, but I trust there are enough fellow sufferers amongst those who regularly read this blog to ensure that I do not feel solely so encumbered; I think I am not alone.

I try very hard to resist succumbing. I do. I hurry past the shops and stalls of temptation with eyes downcast and face turned away. But something akin to magnetism or gravity drags my unwilling gaze round to the window display and then it is very unusual for me to escape unscathed.

As with so many addictions, I believe mine to be genetic. Specifically, I blame my father. If he hadn’t become a civil servant, an administrator, who knows? maybe I could have been left happily to my own devices without being ensnared by traders flouting their wares.

I gave in again this weekend. I tried to help myself but could not. It was right there, right in front of me, and the little portion of my brain that remained me could do nothing but sit back and watch aghast as once again I fuelled my addiction.

And what is it, you ask, that so devastatingly delights me? Since the closure of Toymaster with its model railway section (“Gavin’s Crack Den”, as my friends called it) there is no model shop in Aberdeen, so it can’t be that; I have been very good about avoiding Forbidden Planet recently, so it’s not that either; there are no DVDs currently in the chart (other than season 4 of Supernatural, but it’s just too expensive at the moment) that tempt me, so nor is it that…so what is it?

And the answer, tragically enough, is that I am a stationery fetishist.

Come Hither, My Pretties

I love notebooks, writing paper, propelling pencils, wet-ink pens… all of them sing to me in happy tones that they are just what I need to record for posterity the magnificence of my brilliance. They are a sensual pleasure – the act of writing, even if it’s utter nonsense, with a nice pen on heavy paper is one from which I derive a great deal of guilty bliss.

Bizarrely, the two most expensive books I own have nothing to do with any author but me. The first is the original first-draft printout of ‘Ghost Among Thieves‘, which I had to get printed in a print-shop in Guaymas, Mexico, at a price that – once I realised how many sheets of paper were involved with the undertaking – physically drove the breath from my body. The other is an entirely blank notebook that I got in Venice. It is hardback, with handmade paper and a handmade leather binding. It is a beautiful object but I’m now frightened to use it, firstly because I’m not sure what content I could put into it that would match the cover and secondly because I’m terrified to mar it with spelling errors. It is a cruel trepidation indeed.

I have other notebooks too, from a variety of art stores, art museums (the gift shops therein are very good for stationery with pretensions of grandeur), dedicated stationery shops – even WH Smith on occasion has worthwhile notebooks. Some of them I use quite deliberately. I have a number of hardback notebooks – I have pulled them out and they are sitting in front of me now – that I used for poetry. I have written poetry for years, won prizes for and even published some of the stuff, and though I won’t embarass either you or me by posting any here it is interesting to see the extent to which it completely dominates my notebooks. One of the things that I did (and had forgotten I did, until just now) was to name and date the books, so that I can work out where and when the poems come from. (I write poems on the laptop – it’s far easier to edit and tighten them that way – but I like to hand-write them into books afterwards). So I have before me five books of poems (so there’s probably nearer to 1,000 than 500 in there) that take me from 2002 (with some of the better school-era ones included) all the way to 2007/8, which was when I  seemed to run out of things to say, at least in poetic form.

Then there’s a soft leather-covered book that seems to be a form of occasional journal (and has clearly fallen out of favour, since the last entry is dated 25/08/2007), and a very old hardbacked school notebook (I think orignally from 1st Form Geography) from which all the geography has been torn and the remaining pages used for Ideas. The capital letter is justified: this book contains the very very first mention of Paul Ray and the story that would eventually be told in the Fulcrum War trilogy. I have a small notebook – it fits very neatly into, for example, a breast pocket – that looks like the Penguin edition of ‘1984‘ (a book for which I have particular affection, as that’s when I was born) that I use for spur-of-the-moment-ideas and the recording of important pieces of information. Finally, the book I bought this weekend was another soft-leather type, with very old-looking, very battered black leather covers – it looks like a prop from Buffy or Supernatural – that I am going to use for my Screwtape letters. It has exactly the right kind of ambiance (he said, justifying furiously).

So tell me – are there any fellow-sufferers out there?

Because in the meantime, I have some writing to do…

Today’s Zen:

Rebuilt Bulleid Pacific 'Plymouth' simmers in the industrial yard for reasons known only to her driver...

The Limits of my Tolerance

I have been giving this some thought, and I would like to introduce all of you to an aesthetic principle I think I have discovered. Certainly, the name I have chosen to give it is my own: I like to think of it as ‘Literary Rubbernecking‘.

There are a number of excellent authors writing at the minute. China Mieville (I know I keep banging on about him, but he’s the best current writer I can think of) leads the field, but Terry Pratchett and Robert Harris both have new books coming out in November, to which I am eagerly looking forward; Neal Stephenson is working away at something (I know not what, but I’m already enthusing); the concluding part of Peter F. Hamilton’s Void trilogy comes out sometime next year; Douglas Adams’s hard-to-find ‘Last Chance to See’ is being reprinted next month to cash in on Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine’s BBC series based on it…

And yet beside one name, one monstrous carbuncle on the literary landscape, these luminati pale into insignificance. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, Dan Brown has seen fit to loose upon an unsuspecting populace the full horror of ‘The Lost Symbol’.

I am an intrepid sort, holding my own safety of no account when it comes to reporting the truth, and it was on the basis of this that I bought the book yesterday afternoon and read it in its not-inconsiderable entirity last night.

Which brings me back to literary rubbernecking. Rubbernecking, as you will know, is the term applied to the activity of slowing down when one passes a car crash or other disaster in order to afford oneself as good a view as possible. It’s an unpleasant thing. It speaks to the very basest aspects of our natures. It is curiosity at its meanest, most perverse, and least edifying. There is literally no defence whatsoever that can be mounted for it.

Reading ‘The Lost Symbol’ is like doing that to a book.

Let me be entirely and perfectly clear. This book is a trainwreck of unimaginable proportions. Stephen Fry referred to the preceeding volume, ‘The Da Vinci Code’, as ‘botty-dribble’: one dreads to think of the cloacal reference points one would need in order to adequately sum up this appalling piece of drivel. “Excremental, my dear Watson,” doesn’t even come close.

As someone who reads and evaluates literature on its merits, whatever they might be, this book reaches in and kills me where I live. There are sudden lapses into italicisation to indicate characters’ internal monologues (in itself an odd concept in a novel where the very pages of the book are thicker than the characters’ motivations); too often, the question “What?” is followed not merely by a question mark but an exclamation mark as well; lectures are crow-barred into the narrative in a manner reminiscent of trying to shoehorn a hippo into a tutu (invariably, these lectures are given to Ivy League students who literally gasp or utter cries of astonishment at every not-exactly-earth-shattering revelation in the field of semiotics. This makes me think that either one of two things must be true. Either Ivy League students are ridiculously ill-informed about the world and its history, and are susceptible to mild mass hysteria in a classroom environment; or Dan Brown is actually a frustrated academic with a rich internal fantasy life). There are other, little niggling factual errors that worry away at one’s best efforts to suspend one’s disbelief with the imaginative equivalent of a cat’s cradle of eight-inch mooring lines. The baddie, a black magician called Mal’akh, explains that his name is that of the demon Moloch, whereas anyone who knows any Hebrew will tell you that Malak is the word for a messenger or ‘angel’; the UH-60 helicopter that has a pivotal role to play at the end of the novel, when one of its skids collides with something, doesn’t actually have skids but instead is wheeled; when Mal’akh fools one of the characters by giving his name as ‘Dr. Christopher Abaddon’, Prof. Langdon immediately knows something is wrong but doesn’t explain how he knows (the answer, if you’re wondering, is that ‘Abaddon’ is the name given to one of the two destroying angels in the book of Revelation, the other being ‘Apollyon’)…the list goes on and on. And on. And on. And on. And on.

Anyway, here is the plot, such as it is: Professor Robert Langdon, international celebrity after the events of ‘Angels & Demons’ and ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and lecturer in Symbology at Harvard (to a lot of excitable, incredulous and basically thick students who apparently don’t know the meaning of the word ’semiotics’), is summoned to Washington by his friend and mentor, Peter Solomon. Solomon, we are told many many times, is humble. We don’t ever see him being humble, but Brown makes the point so often we can’t fail to take it on board. Even Solomon’s eyes are humble. All that humility is to no avail, however, as he has been kidnapped and had his right hand amputated. It is left in the middle of the Capitol building. Langdon must try to find the rest of his friend, all the while trying to determine Mal’akh’s ultimate goal, decoding the secret of the Masons that lies at the heart of Washington (and let me tell you, when you finally find out what it was, it is a shock. Because you were expecting something scandalous, something interesting, something hardcore, and it is none of these things. It’s such an anticlimax that I thought the unusually large number of blank pages left at the back of the hardcover must have been put there by Brown for readers to write their own, better endings. It would not be difficult) and prevent a national security crisis with the CIA hounding him and Dr Katherine Solomon fulfilling the now-obligatory role of scientific crumpet.

This book is (fractionally) better-written than ‘The Da Vinci Code’, but it entirely lacks the frantic pacing of the other two Langdon novels that made them fun or even tolerable. As a result it is much too insipid a follow up. The themes of the novel are essentially the same as his others – religion is bad but the idea of God is good, so start looking, this time inside yourself – while the characters are the same ludicrous mix of grotesqueries we have come to expect from someone who seems to believe the normal world to be nothing more than a thin veneer laid over something much more akin to a perpetual Halloween.

So, I’ve read it. I finished it, gratefully, at 3 in the morning. I will not be picking it up again in the near future. You shouldn’t either. You have no need. Peering between the covers is nothing more, in the end, than craning your head out the car window to see if there’s anyone still left inside the car totalled at the side of the motorway.

Today’s Zen;

'Dutch' Class 37 "British Steel Hunterston" on a long train of 7-plank coal wagons, powering through the empty marshalling yards at Clonsallagh

Marching to the beat of an altogether different drummer…

I am, as you may or may not be aware, a drummer. I am different from many drummers, inasmuch as I can count higher than 4, and in fact not only can I read music, I can read English. But I am not wholly different, and as such the greatest of my drumming heroes is not Steve Smith or Dave Weckl or even John ‘Bonzo’ Bonham: it is, as is the case with almost all drummers, Animal.

With that in mind, here are five of the best ‘Animal’ moments. He doesn’t even have to drum in all of them.

#5: Animal ‘negotiates’ with Dudley Moore

#4: Animal’s Drum Battle with Buddy Rich

#3: Animal sings ‘Danny Boy’

#2: Animal Achieves Transcendence

And now, folks, the single finest moment Animal ever enjoyed on the muppets, in which he met ‘his kind of woman’ (and mine too, if it comes to that), Rita Moreno…

#1: Animal plays ‘Fever’

Your Zen for today:

An LNER K3 comes through Perdido Street Station at the head of a long van train