Mr Darcy's Diary - two for the price of two

Getting publicity for a book you have written is almost as hard as writing the thing or finding somebody to publish it. Unless you’re already famous for something else, or are so shamelessly self-publicising that you’re prepared to doorstep the PM naked or call your book BUY THIS BOOK IF YOU LIKED [insert names of at least three books that your book either resembles slightly or wants to resemble a whole lot more] finding a market for an unknown author is proverbially hard.

Which means we could all learn a thing or two from Maya Slater and Amanda Grange who have both written books called Mr Darcy’s Diary. What a brilliant piece of market-placement; find your eager readers first and then write just what they want to read! Perfect!

Why didn’t I think of that…?

Of course there will be Janeite purists out there who will not sully their lorgnettes or their chaises longues with anything which purports to represent Miss Austen’s characters but wasn’t actually written by her. They will eschew these books whilst looking down their noses at them, possibly holding a lacy handkerchief to their nostrils to keep out the whiff of literary larceny.
But those who could never resist Mr Darcy in a wet shirt will queue up to buy these books and are unlikely to be disappointed.

I have just read the pair for our book group which met to discuss them last night. It’s the first time we’ve attempted a ‘compare and contrast’ read but – for me at least – it was a great success. (And no, it wasn’t my idea. In fact, it wasn’t anybody’s idea really – one of our number chose the Maya Slater book having forgotten the author and, when it became clear there were two, we decided to read both as neither is overly long.)

We did wonder what trick of synchronicity had persuaded two authors to produce books of the same title in the same year – some copyright thing which has a lifespan of over a century and a half? – but, after consulting the inner pages, we worked out that it was simple geography – Ms Slater’s book was published in the UK, Ms Grange’s in the US.

Amanda Grange’s Mr Darcy’s Diary can be a bit disconcerting at times because it is SO VERY like Pride and Prejudice. In fact I checked up and some bits are just lifted straight from the pages of P&P, as when Darcy and Elizabeth are chatting/flirting/teasing each other. This version is the absolute flipside of Jane Austen’s book – there we mostly see things from Elizabeth’s viewpoint, in Amanda Grange’s book we see exactly the same events from Fitzwilliam’s point of view. And nothing else, apart from a little extension after the weddings which, even so, stops short of anything which might smack to Ms Austen of impropriety.

Not so Maya Slater’s book. This Mr Darcy is much more fully explored. We see much further behind his scenes and quite raunchy some of the scenes are too. His feather-spitting antipathy to George Wickham is more fully explained and explored as is his young life and the way in which he came to be so ‘ungentlemanlike’ in his pride. Maya Slater’s book gives us more of a feel for the life of a Regency gentleman and how he would have spent his time. She even invents a friendship for Darcy with Lord Byron who, despite his scandalousness, is presented as something of a sad figure.

I was delighted that both books are united in the extremely short shrift they give Caroline Bingley (don’t you just want to give her a resounding slap?) and both flesh out Anne de Burgh somewhat, which I enjoyed.

The working title of my current book is Rebecca Revisited. I’ve always assumed that no publisher would produce it under that title as the reading public would immediately think Daphne du Maurier but, in the light of Mr Darcy’s Diary, maybe I need to think again….

High Society

I’ve just finished Ben Elton’s High Society. It’s not about the social elite, it’s about – as Peter Paget, its central character says ‘a society in which people who are otherwise law-abiding criminalise themselves by buying and taking drugs’. Otherwise? Aren’t burglars law-abiding other than their tendency to break into people’s houses and take away things which don’t belong to them?

Once I’d started High Society, I asked the Ultimate Frisbee Freak (who’s almost 18 and therefore about to be allowed to vote for people who make this kind of decision) what he thought of the potential legalization of all illegal drugs. He thought it’d be stupid. Not only because there would be mass addiction amongst the young (‘Have you seen town on a Friday and Saturday night? And that’s just alcohol!) but also because he thinks it is naïve to assume that all the gangsters currently engaged in drug smuggling would just go away and take up crochet or working in call centres. They would, in his view, just find some other illegal and equally socially unpleasant way to earn a ton of money.

And he’s probably right. High Society portrays some very nasty criminals indeed. Pimps mostly, preying on illegal immigrants and homeless girls, who feed the young women drugs to keep them docile and – if not high - at least not entirely connected to the awful things that are happening to them and proceed to live off their immoral earnings. And the book leaves you in no doubt just how immoral these earnings are. (One of the things I consistently like about Ben Elton's books is that he can show you the seamiest side of life without ever losing his grip on your attention or allowing you to think that this is all just so grim that you don't want to read any more. His people and his plots are so engaging that however nitty the gritty gets you're always carried along.)

Interestingly, given that this is the group Ben Elton himself could be said to belong to, the book also shows the devastating effects drugs can have on those who are less socially deprived but just as addicted. Rich addicts in the book lose their sense of identity every bit as much as the drug-doped prostitutes, they just do it whilst wearing nice clothes and drinking champagne to wash down the shopping-trolleys’ worth of cocaine, ecstasy, crystal meth etc which they sniff, swallow and otherwise shovel into their protesting systems.

The moral heart of the book is Jessie, a Scottish teenager who becomes homeless after being abused by her stepfather and subsequently falls prey to the pimps. Her aspiration, expressed very vividly, is a room of her own whose door she can shut and within which her privacy – not to mention her body – will remain inviolate.

It echoes Virginia Woolf’s plea for a room of one’s own, though possibly for rather different reasons.

This extremely modest aspiration of Jessie's throws a spotlight on to the self-indulgent wastefulness of the lives lived by the book's smart set . They have so much more than a room of their own, but they don't know how to value it. They take drugs because they’re bored, because they’re aimless and because they can afford to. None of those things, the book makes it very clear, would change if it were made legal.

So, does Ben Elton come down on the side of legalisation or not? Well, all the most persuasive speeches in the book are in favour of it – in fact I can’t think of anybody actually speakng against- but a horrified little voice which comes from between the lines says ‘Are you mad? Look what drugs do to people!’ Text, as one of my lecturers from the old days would have said, and subtext.

I think, once his exams are over next summer and he’s a free man, I’m going to persuade the UFF to read High Society so he and I can argue some more about the drugs thing. Because whilst, as a police officer in the book says, we are obviously losing the war on drugs, I’m not sure I want to contemplate what making peace with them would look like.

I remember being very disturbed indeed, when I was the UFF’s age, by people’s willing consumption of soma in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; a whole society willingly complicit in its own oppression.

Legalising drugs and allowing the government to make shedloads of money out of taxing their sale seems to me to be teetering dangerously on the brink of a state-sponsored nation of doped-up junkies. Brave New Britain…

Research and Google

Hooray for Tim Berners-Lee because his invention - the internet - must be the best research tool ever for writers. Today, for instance, I was writing away, describing an ancient, sagging roof when I suddenly realised that I didn’t know whether it was sagging on to its beams or its rafters. Quick trip to Google-land and I knew more than I ever needed to about the difference.
It’s rafters, by the way.

I did the bulk of the research for Testament nine or ten years ago and you wouldn’t believe how much less information was on the net in those days. When I wanted to find out about medieval proofs of age, or the exact beliefs of the Lollards, I had to go and find a book which would tell me. And finding the relevant kind of books took AGES. Now, although every search will bring up a ton (probably actually would be a ton in reality if you printed it all out) of useless references, if you’re canny about the search terms you put in you can usually find some relevant stuff pretty quickly. And Google-hounds like me get ever so savvy about looking at a site or a page and working out within a couple of seconds whether it’s going to be any use or not. You can also quick-search the page you’ve come to for all your relevant search-terms using Ctrl-F and, if half of them aren’t there, bye-bye page.

As my current novel is set in the area I grew up in, I’ve discovered a lot of history I didn’t know when I lived there. My home town, Newcastle Emlyn, has a fantastic website as does the local history society, Hanes Emlyn. So I have not had to go to Aberystwyth University or any other University of Wales library, to trawl through their archives looking for information about, for instance, the Newcastle Emlyn workhouse. Everything I need is on the Hanes Emlyn site, including the name of the Master in the relevant period and census material for each decade of the workhouse’s eighty-odd-year history. Amazing!

Old maps, sadly, seem not to lend themselves to being scanned and put up on the internet and, during the writing of certain bits of this book, I have spent ludicrous tracts of time comparing place-names which occur in early nineteenth-century records with contemporary names and trying to work out whether they are referring to the same place. Sometimes, the places referred to seem to have vanished without trace; or place-names have changed their spelling, from an Anglicised version back to a more authentic Welsh rendition. At other times names have been used which don’t seem to relate to anything. The workhouse in question appears in a 1920s photograph, for instance, as Voelallt Castle which it never was!

I must confess, it was much easier writing a historical novel which was set in a city which has never existed. Salster, the city I invented for Testament, is situated roughly geographically where Canterbury is but bears little resemblance to historical Canterbury. (Though there are some similarities, I’ll be interested if those who read the book and know Canterbury well spot the references!)

I deliberately chose to write about a fictitious city so as not to give myself too hard a time with research. I knew I’d have enough to do finding out about the professions, religions, eating habits, dress etc etc of my characters’ world without having to place them somewhere which really existed. There are a lot of people out there who love it when authors get things wrong and delight in writing to them and saying ‘there wasn’t a White Horse lane in Oxford in 1352’ or ‘the church you mention in chapter 32 wasn’t built until half a century later’. I can do without that sort of hassle.

So why set the current book in a real time and place? Because I’ve always been fascinated by the Rebecca Riots – a sudden outbreak of nocturnal activity in my home area in the 1840s which mostly concentrated on destroying tollgates but which had some pretty interesting off-shoots. But that’s a post for another time…

The shelves, the shelves!

Being a bibliophile has one obvious drawback – unless you’re one of those ruthlessly minimalist people who gives away every book they buy once it’s read, you need a library. Most people – me included – do not live in a house capable of housing a library. Our books spill over into every room in the house bar the bathroom (too steamy otherwise shelves’d be in there before you could say rawlplug) even the downstairs loo has a small cache.

I’m not the most brilliant of DIY-ers. I’m more inclined to have a go than get it right but putting up shelves in an alcove where the dimensions are all over the place and none of the corners is a true right angle turned into a nightmare. The length of the shelves where they butted-up against the wall had to be 102 cm but, 20 cm further forward, at the front edge of the shelves they had to be 104 cm long. [This is all to imply that I can work in cm when, in fact, I automatically measure up by eye in inches, despite the fact that I was about eight years old when the UK avowedly ‘went metric’] Add to this discrepancy the fact that the angles weren’t the same on either side and that there was a chunk to be taken out of each shelf for central heating pipes and the stage was set for a lot of swearing, banging of recalcitrant planks and going up and down stepladders looking for spirit-levels, screwdrivers and my sense of proportion which seemed, sadly, to have got lost somewhere around shelf 3.

Thank goodness, whilst I was out giving the Ultimate Frisbee Freak a driving lesson, the Other Half (who had been out manning a Christmas fair stall) took over and quietly corrected some of my more obvious mistakes. Without her, shelves would not have been a feature of our life by Saturday evening. As it is, I think they look quite fetching.

So, the thing was done and we could finally bring out the books which have been languishing in a cupboard in our bedroom. A cupboard! Books! It’s a crime. It felt like locking up little birds…
As we rescued them I felt I wanted to re-read them all instantly. It was like greeting a load of old friends. Oh my goodness, is the Hovel in the Hills still letting the rain in? Brother Cadfael, how goes it in the infirmary? Joanne Harris – in the wonder of the novels I’d forgotten your short stories. Must read Jigs and Reels again.

But then there are the guilt-inducers. Still not read Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom despite the fact of his lovely face smiling benevolently from the spine. Don’t worry, he seems to be saying, I’m not going anywhere. Trouble is, I don’t need letting off the hook like that, he needs to chivvy me along. I mean, 751 pages is 751 pages when all’s said and done.
And Jim Crace’s Arcadia. I loved Quarantine but couldn’t quite get on with Arcadia. I need to have another go. Then Frank McCourt’s ‘Tis – got as far as about page 30 with this before something distracted me (probably a crime novel…) and I haven’t got back to it.

I know some disciplined souls don’t buy any new books until they’ve read all the ones they’ve got. (Probably the same people who then nobly give their books to Oxfam rather than hanging on to them like some second-cousin you’re quite fond of but aren’t sure what to do with and wouldn’t like to see go out into the night friendless…) I can’t be that disciplined. I have to be in a particular mood for different sorts of book, so they wait, patiently, sometimes on the tbr pile but often, if they’ve been there a while, they’re ‘moved sideways’ to a more permanent shelf.

If I was really organised I’d have a shelf dedicated accusingly to ‘books you haven’t read yet and should really get around to’. But a) I’m not that disciplined and b) I’m not really sure I want my shelves taking that tone with me!

Busy weekend...

Not much activity on the blog this weekend as we've been overwhelmed by DIY projects and doing lots of last-minute driving practice with the Ultimate Frisbee Freak who's taking his test this week...
More details about book-related DIY tomorrow.

Whose Point of View?

Today, in a rainy, windy Canterbury, I’ve been working on a really crucial scene in my new book. It’s one of those scenes that a book absolutely turns on. But, despite the fact that I’ve known it was coming since I started the book, it’s been excruciating to try and get into. Industrial quantities of tea has been consumed, much creative thinking has been done whilst ironing shirts has been (does anybody else think about their writing whilst ironing – seems to free something up in me…) and many false starts have fallen to the delete button.

Why all this angst? Because I’ve had to decide whose point of view it’s going to be told in. As I think I’ve mentioned here before, the new book has three narrators. As each has a very different voice and outlook on the unfolding story, the decision as to who gets to tell this central scene is really important. Because they share the same story but their take on it is very different.

The book I’m reading at the moment – Ben Elton’s High Society – also has many narrators, but they’re all telling their own interweaving stories. Not sure whether that’s easier or more difficult but it looks easier from where I’m sitting.

High Society is about the legalisation of drugs. I’m fascinated by the way Ben Elton approaches the idea through the personal stories of an MP throwing the hat of his career into the legalisation-ring, a drug-addicted teenage prostitute with a history of abuse, a pop-star with all the substance abuses of a Pete Doherty and a policeman with a family to protect. I haven’t worked out yet where Elton stands on the subject of drug legalisation (just as it was difficult to work out his stance on film violence in Popcorn) as all his characters speak with such conviction from their various standpoints, but I’ll be interested to see how he navigates towards the end of the book and who tells which bits!

City Cycling and Richard's Famous Bicycle Book

I gather, from my perusal of the Crockatt and Powell archive, that Richard Ballantine has brought out a book called ‘City Cycling’. Is this the same Richard Ballantine who wrote Richard's Bicyle Book which the ex-h and I owned years and years ago when we were v. young, v. poor and cycled everywhere?

If so, hooray! and I must get a copy. Without RBB we would never have survived – we would not have been able to maintain our bikes and I would not have known how to cycle in London.
As it was, in those days, I could strip a bike down to its component washers and ball-bearings, dismantle (and re-mantle) a derailleur gear-set, break, clean and reassemble a chain (you need a special tool which, thanks to Ballantine and his BB, we did) and even mend a puncture without removing the wheel from the bike. This last skill saved me being late for lectures on many occasions and I vividly remember squatting on the pavement on Vauxhall bridge on one occasion, mending a puncture in ten minutes flat and getting to the Centre for the Disorders of Human Communication, part of City University in Islington, on time.

We were living in Southampton and, every day I arrived at Waterloo at roughly the same time as one of my classmates who lived in Petersfield, also in Hampshire. She got on the tube to Islington, I cycled (we were very broke, did I mention that?) and I was always there before her. What’s more I arrived feeling green, virtuous and - amazingly, given the industrial quantities of fumes I was breathing in - healthy. She arrived feeling grumpy and still not entirely awake.

Cycling in London is not for the faint hearted and was no different then. In fact, it was probably worse twenty years ago as the traffic congestion wasn’t quite so acute and the cars were able to go faster. It would have been very easy to be squeezed into the gutter on a daily basis and I think, without Ballantine’s advice, I might have been. But he was very firm about a bike’s place on the road. Ride ‘high side’ was his advice – ie well into the road, avoiding all the pavement-side obstacles - drain covers, potholes and pedestrians side-stepping into the road without looking. Behave like traffic – keep up a good speed and make cars respect you. And, if they disrespect you or try to push you around, give them the finger! An author, in a book, giving you permission - nay expressly telling you - to give somebody the finger! Heady stuff when you're young and callow.

He was, I recall, even more strident about cars that overtook bikes without giving sufficient space. Bang on the roof as they go past, he said, that’ll give them something to think about. I didn't dare – too scared of road rage or whatever we called it then - but I certainly did all the other stuff, including shouting and the finger.

But ‘behave like traffic’ also entailed not doing some of the stuff which routinely gives cyclists a bad name – weaving in and out of stationary cars, nipping on and off pavements, cycling down the inside of slow-moving traffic. Don’t do it, he warned, you’ll get hurt and you can’t expect them to give you space if you don’t show you’ve earned it.

All good advice. I cycled from Waterloo to Islington daily for two years and the most scary thing that happened to me was getting caught in rain full of Chernobyl fall-out. I never got hit, forced off the road or even nudged by a taxi.

Mind you I did make myself visible – I was lit like a Christmas tree and festooned like one too, though in fluorescent belts and strips rather than tinsel. From helmet to ankle-bands I was a walking advert for being seen on your bike. I had a heavy-duty, dynamo-charged halogen front light which lit up traffic signs and must have confused car drivers on the road from Eastleigh into Southampton (‘Why is that motorbike going so slowly?’) When I see cyclists in Canterbury cycling around with neither lights nor reflectors I routinely shout at them. ‘Get a light - nobody can see you!’

It probably scares the living daylights out of them but, then again, it might save their life.

I see what you mean...

Which sense would you be most reluctant to lose? For me, it would be sight, I think, though I have heard it said that losing your hearing makes you more socially isolated.

One of the three narrators of the book I'm working on at the moment, Deb, is deaf. Don’t ask me why. Also, don’t ask me why I’m choosing to have three narrators. There they were – thirteen-year-old triplets - just waiting when I started to plan the book. I may have thought it was their father’s story but, they implied, he’d be hopeless at telling it properly. They’d do it so much better.

They are the voices of my story: the boy, the bossy one and the deaf one. Here we are, they seemed to say, this is us.One of us just happens to be deaf.
I’ll let her explain that bit.

‘I am not just ‘hearing impaired’, I do not wear a hearing aid or have implants, I am profoundly deaf. I do not hear anything. I have no concept of what it would be like to hear, have no more concept of the condition than a person who has been blind from birth has of colour. People ask me if it is silent inside my head but that is a question that has no meaning. What is silence? What is noise? Obviously, I am aware that there is a physical sensation that I do not register and others do and that its absence represents silence but that is the beginning and end of my understanding.’

But there’s a problem with one of your characters deciding to be deaf. You have to learn about what it’s like to be deaf. I don’t have any friends or relations who can’t hear (beyond those who are getting on a bit but don’t want to admit that the reason they have the telly on at 100 decibels is not so that they can hear it in any room of the house…). I am a speech and language therapist (if you’re remotely interested in this you can find out more at my website in the Profile and Questions sections) so I do know some stuff but I’m still running to catch up with Deb. Books have started to arrive from Amazon with titles like ‘The Linguistics of British Sign Language’ and there are new forums on my webpage favourites list where I can lurk and learn or, if I’m feeling brave, ask newbie questions.

And, writing through the words of a deaf person makes you realise how much even our written language is based on speech. When I’m reporting things Deb has conveyed to others in British Sign Language (BSL) do I say ‘she said’ or ‘she signed’? It feels a bit pedantic always to go for ‘signed’ but the whole point is that Deb can’t say things. That’s one of the things which defines her life. And you don’t listen while somebody’s communicating in BSL, you watch. It’s fascinating how it changes the way you describe things. People can’t catch your attention by clearing their throat, they have to step into your line of sight, you don’t overhear conversations, you have to be told everything. And so on.

There’s also the whole issue of how Deb tells the reader what people are saying to her in BSL. It’s a language entirely unlike English – it has a totally different word order, uses the area in space where you make the sign to denote tense, and is sometimes able to convey concepts which in English would be whole phrases in just one portmanteau sign. So, should I attempt to convey any of that difference when Deb is reporting BSL conversations, or is it easier to just cop out and get her to ‘translate’ into English for the benefit of her readers? At the moment I’m translating but maybe I’m wrong to do that. Maybe that misrepresents the experience of using BSL too much.

Any thoughts?

Titles and what they tell us

I’ve been thinking about titles today. I know we’re told not to judge a book by its cover but, given that most of us see books spine-on in bookshops what we’re most likely to judge a book by is its title. (I’m on a mission to eschew the ‘buy me I’m on a table by the door’ books at the moment in the hope that the trend will catch on and, by January 4th, everybody will be scouring the shelves for books there are only one or two of, exclaiming delightedly ‘Oh, not in a promotion, an as yet undiscovered gem!’ and suchlike).

So, there are all those quirky titles at the moment that simulaneously do and don’t tell you what the book is actually about. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (fantastically original website – do visit if you’re a website conoisseur) A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, etc.

Then there are the titles which basically tell you ‘I’m a thriller’ – Lockdown, Snapshut – that kind of word. You’d never mistake ‘The Tenderness of Wolves’ for a thriller – not if you were going by the title. Mind you, I’m not sure what you would mistake it for if you were going by the title alone. A revisionist view of the lupine species? The texture of meat you never thought you’d eat? (Don’t let this gentle mocking mislead you – I really liked the book and think Stef Penney has done an amazing job writing so convincincly about somewhere she’s never been. They always say ‘write about what you know’ but, come on people, we’re novelists, we’re good at imagining stuff!)

Then there are the titles which tell you you’re into chick-lit territory. (That is if you hadn’t spotted that the cover is pink and covered in shoes, lipsticks or some other supposedly ironic symbol of post-feminist femininity.) I’ve just enjoyed Getting Rid of Matthew, for instance. Now, you’d think that with a title like that you might be forgiven for thinking that the central character would be in the business of offing the said Matthew. No. Nobody who reads crime fiction would think that. Seriously, nobody. No crime fiction tells you who’s getting murdered, even if it happens on the first page. Kill Bill is not a novel, be quiet.
Crime titles are always much more allusive and often adopt the The Adjective Noun pattern - The Scold’s Bridle – or just Adjective Noun – Cross Bones - or even Verb Adjective – Cut Short (actually maybe that’s an adjectival phrase…can the Grammar Police help?)

At the moment, I’m reading Sepulchre by Kate Mosse. Sepulchre’s an interesting name for a book. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines it as

a stone tomb or monument in which a dead person is laid or buried.

Would you call a book Tomb? Or Grave? You just might call it Monument. Somehow polysyllabic names are much more interesting and attractive than monosyllables. Tomb would definitely indicate horror and would probably have a definite article before it. You can see it now – The Tomb. By Stephen King.
Actually, I’ve just checked. There is a novel called The Tomb but it’s not by SK – it’s by a guy called F. Paul Wilson and is the first volume in a series of Repairman Jack books. OK, Repairman Jack sounds ultra-sinister. Unless he was the star of a kids’ animation in which case he’d look like a cross between Fireman Sam and Bob the Builder.

Actually, Sepulchre isn’t an odd name for the book once you get into it and meet the eponymous construction. It’s basically doing the same job as Labyrinth did on the cover of Mosse’s earlier bestseller. In fact, Labyrinth and Sepulchre share more than you’d think. They’re both one-word titles describing a physical structure. So far so obvious. But they’re both also three syllables long and share the same stress-pattern (spot the Speech and Language Therapist….) DAH-dah-dah. It’s a dactyl. As in 'Merrily, merrily shall I live now'. It gets it punch in there early and then trips off the tongue quite sweetly.

My novel, Testament, could be the third in the trilogy, in terms of word-structure.

Testament was a title a long time in the deciding. All the way through the novel’s long gestation and birth (see my website for just how long this took!) it was called Toby. And, like Labyrinth and Sepulchre, once you’ve got into the book you know why. The name ties together both halves strands of the book – the fourteenth century strand and the contemporary strand. It’s a good and fitting title. But only when you’ve read the book. Nobody, one of my ‘focus group’ (ahem, my friends) assured me in the nicest possible way, is going to pick up a book called Toby. It’s just not a title which does anything.

My editor, Will, agreed. So we went through various options. Favourite for a while was 'The Master Mason’s Son' – but that’s only half of the book. I quite favoured 'Steadfast Like the Crane'but, like 'Toby', you have to have read the book to get it and people might think crane as in building machine rather than crane as in long-necked bird. There, see, you did.

So, Testament it is. I think we’re going for the Labyrinth/Sepulchre market because, like those two, it’s a split time novel. Except, as I put it to the manager at a local bookshop the other day ‘don’t think France and the twelfth century (Labyrinth), think England and the fourteenth. Not grails and trails, colleges and statues.’
You should be in marketing’ he told me.

Blast! I quite wanted to be in novel-writing.

Blog Tag

OK, I have been ‘tagged’ by another blogger. This means that, if I am going to play by the rules I have to:

1. Link to the person that tagged me and post the rules on my blog.

2. Share seven random or weird things about myself.

3. Tag seven random people at the end of my blog.

4. Let each person know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

So, I’m OK on number one because the person who tagged me is already linked to my blog on ‘My Favourite blogs’ so tick that one. And I’m posting the rules here, so tick number two.

I don’t mind sharing severn random or slightly weird things about myself, so here we go:

Random fact No 1 – ‘Alis’ isn’t a Welsh variant as people logically assume (given that’s where I come from) I was just christened Alison and don’t like it as much.

RF No 2 - Hawkins Bizarre is a pun on the toy shop Hawkin’s Bazaar, thought up by my Other Half when the name I wanted for my blog – Peoplewatcher – already proved to have been taken in all its many permutations. Given the strapline about 'strange but interesting' it seemed appropriate.

Slightly weird thing No 1 - I have a thing about rucksacks. (‘A thing?’ I can already hear my family crying, ‘You’re obsessed, woman. Obsessed! You can’t pass Black’s without your tongue hanging out! It’s a rucksack fetish!’) I possess about a dozen, ranging from a handbag sized one to the full 65 litre hike-around-the-world thing.
I think they will definitely have to come in for a blog of their own at some stage.

SWT No 2 – I have a very weak form of synaesthesia which means that I see the days of the week as colours. Monday = bluey-grey, Tuesday = liverish purple/brown, Wednesday = Sherwood green, Thursday = dark green, Friday = brown, Saturday = yellow, Sunday = white. Occasional words have vague shapes associated with them (eg ‘group’ = spherical) but these only come up occasionally. I wish I were more synaesthetic, it would bring in a whole new dimension to the way I think about words.

RF No 3 – I am afraid of the dark. Seriously. Have to have v. thin curtains or, if it’s horribly dark outside, like when on holiday in the countryside, leave the landing light on. Sign of too much imagination...

SWT No 3 – When I was a teenager I used to want to be a shepherd. Though I abandoned that when I developed a social conscience at university, it probably showed more insight into the kind of profession which would suit me (solitary, few time-pressure demands, lots of control over my own work, having to be resourceful) than I showed in ending up in the health service where I was constantly at people’s beck and call and had very little control over my own working life. Tchah!!

RF No 4 (or maybe it’s SWT No 4 depending on your view of the subject) I used to be a HUGE Waltons fan. Recently got really into Brothers and Sisters on Channel 4 with The Ultimate Frisbee Freak and The Bassist and, though Bs&Ss was a different kettle of fish to the Ws it had a similar attraction for me. Did I want to be one of a large family? Strangely, absolutely not!

OK, there’s my seven weird or random facts. I’m not sure I want to tag anybody else because I don’t want them to have to link me if they don’t want to.
I know, I’m a wimp…

What does everybody else think of tagging? Is it a good way to join the dots in the blogosphere or is it a bit like a chain letter?

All thoughts gratefully received.

The Golden Compass, Crossover Novels and Harry Potter

I had great fun yesterday following a link provided by dovegreyreader to the promo-website for The Golden Compass, the film of Philip Pullman’s book Northern Lights. I identified my daemon (a tiger called Alephon which I thought was very lovely) and watched the trailer for the film which looks AMAZING but then trailers always make films look amazing, frequently showing you the best bits of the film and leaving nothing else. Seen the trailer, don’t need to see the film.
Except I do want to see this film, in the same way that I wanted to see the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, all of which were, I thought, fab.

I liked Northern Lights. Good book, worthy crossover to an adult readership. I liked the second in the trilogy - the Subtle Knife - a lot less and the final book - The Amber Spyglass - not at all. In my opinion the Amber Spyglass wasn’t really a crossover book because he’d stopped writing for children and written a book for adults which just happened to be about children. Too dark, too metaphysical – and that ending…

I felt the same about William Nicholson’s Wind on Fire trilogy. I really rated The Wind Singer – a really good, thought-provoking book which both adults and children really liked. Slaves of the Mastery was almost as good but in Firesong, I felt he got way too interested in ideas about the relationship between human beings and matter and the fact that – for example – solid objects aren’t really solid if you imagine all the spaces in their atoms. Hence the scene where a wooden table-top is stirred like custard. It all got a bit too rareified and neither the Ultimate Frisbee Freak nor the Bassist – who were both, by then, teenagers – finished reading it.

So, do crossovers always end up being written more for the lucrative adult market than for the children’s market they were originally aimed at? Dunno mate, but there’s one gigantic NO out there and that’s Harry Potter. [Reading through this, I realised I hadn't put a link in - that's how well-known Harry Potter is - everybody knows about the books even if they haven't read them!] I don’t think Rowling’s approach to her subject matter changed throughout the seven books and, although Harry and the others grow up, I think there’s still enough in there to ensure that they would never be picked up and assumed to be adult books. Joanna Rowling restrains herself admirably from letting adults give ‘let me tell you what the world is really like’ speeches and doggedly and brilliantly allows us to see everything through the viewpoint of the main characters who are not adults but children, then adolescents, despite the fact that witches and wizards come of age at seventeen.

I think this is one of the things I admire most about J K Rowling. She never stopped letting the books and the characters speak for themselves. She didn’t think ‘crikey, I’m a publishing phenomenon, I can say anything I like in these books now and people will buy them and read it.’ Given the subject matter of the HP series, she could have got totally up herself about the whole allegorical possibilities of good vs evil in our 21st century world, but she didn’t. She remained true to the vision.

Which is why, for me, brilliant as Northern Lights and The Wind Singer are, the Harry Potter books will always be THE crossover novels for me.

The Golden Compass is an excellent website though. Go and see what your daemon is… go on, I dare you!

Jane Austen and the Missing War

When I was studying Jane Austen for ‘A’ Level, I remember reading some crass comment which criticised her for not reflecting any of the ‘big picture’ concerns of her time. From Austen’s novels, this person sniffily concluded, you would never have guessed that Britain was at war at the time.
Which seems to me pretty much like saying that Father Christmas doesn’t work on his tan enough.

Well, possibly ‘twas ever thus because you can look in vain for any mention of the current conflict in the Gulf in most novels published since we went to war in Iraq. Maybe, as with Jane Austen, authors fight shy of mentioning it because they don’t feel qualified to do so. Maybe it’s a case of 'out of sight out of mind', it’s a war that’s happening far away in another country, despite daily news updates on pretty much any medium you care to mention. It doesn’t actually impact much on us, here in Britain. In fact, it probably impacts less on us than the Napoleonic wars did on Jane Austen’s contemporaries. Think of her novels – half the men seem to be in the army and if there were no officers, who would all the silly women simper at?

Minette Walters’ recent novels have bucked this ignore-the-war trend. Both The Devil’s Feather and The Chameleon’s Shadow bring the effects of war right into lives lived here in England. And not just war in the Gulf. The Devil’s Feather concerns itself with current continental African conflicts as well as those in Iraq and the continuing effects of war on men who served in the Falklands comes up in the Chameleon’s Shadow. Chalky, a homeless Falklands veteran, provokes all sorts of unpleasant thoughts in the mind of the Chameleon’s main character, Charles Acland, recently invalided out of the army himself.

In both The Devil’s Feather and Tthe Chameleon’s Shadow, war both damages and attracts the damaged to it and the incursion of the brutality and damage of war into apparently ‘normal’ life back home is one of the fascinating things about the books.

The effects of the past – whether it be war or damaging family dynamics – is a theme which runs deep in all Walters’s books. And, when you know her back-catalogue it’s hard to read ‘The Chameleon’s Shadow’ and not feel a suspicion that Charles Acland will turn out to have been a very damaged personality before he was blown up by an Iraqui roadside bomb.

His anti-social personality – pre-existent or not - doesn’t necessarily mean he is a sociopath, or that he is responsible for a series of apparently homophobic murders. Or does it?
Walters teases us right to the end - is he guilty or isn’t he - asking us to search our souls and see if we would exonerate Charles of responsibility for his actions, given what has been done to him. Has his responsibility been diminished? If so, what diminished it, war or childhood? And would one provide more excuse for the commission of murder than the other?

Discuss.

Book signings

OK, today I feel like a real published writer – I’ve had my first signing gig confirmed. It’s at Heffer’s in Cambridge on the 10th of January, almost a week after Testament is published.
Sophie, MNW’s publicist has arranged for myself and two other MNW writers – Aliya Whiteley and Faye L. Booth – to meet the Heffer’s reading group for lunch and then sign some books. I say all this as if it’s an everyday thing but, clearly, it’s not. I get excited when I go to get a book signed by somebody so quite what I’m going to be like when I’m the one doing the signing, is anybody’s guess.

The last signing I went to was a Waterstone’s evening event at which the author spoke about his book and then stayed around afterwards chatting and signing. The author in question – Daniel Tammet - has Asperger’s Syndrome. He is also a mathematical savant and holds the European record for reciting pi to 22,514 decimal places. Committing this many digits to memory took him three months and reciting them took 5 hours and 9 minutes.
The thought of being able simply to read that many digits without error would be next to impossible for me (I hate numbers) and I have to stand back in simple awe at the thought of Daniel’s achievement.

One of the reasons he managed to do it is that he has synaesthesia – ie his brain processes information in terms of more than one sense at a time. His book is called Born on a Blue Day and Daniel begins his memoir with the words

‘I was born on 31 January 1979 – a Wednesday. I know it was a Wednesday, because the date is blue in my mind and Wednesdays are always blue, like the number nine or the sound of loud voices arguing.’

For Daniel, as a synaesthete, the thousands of numbers he recited to break the European record were like a landscape in his mind:

‘..as I recited I could feel myself becoming absorbed within the visual flow of colours and shapes, textures and motion, until I was surrounded by my numerical landscapes.’

Daniel was, in some sense, travelling through a country filled with numbers, a country he had travelled through numous times in the three months which he spent learning the twenty two and a half thousand digits and – in a way I find it almost impossible even to imagine– he was revisiting this landscape as he reeled off the numbers.

But for me, Daniel’s feat of memory is even more remarkable because of his Asperger’s syndrome. He did not sit in a room all by himself, watched by a monitor whilst he broke the European record. He did it for a charity – The National Society for Epilepsy – in public, with people wandering in and out of the hall the organisation was using for the event throughout the five hours of his recitation. Most people with Asperger’s syndrome dislike being watched and Daniel is no exception:

‘Though I had worried most of all about reciting pi in front of so mnay people, in the end I almost did not notice them as all of my thoughts were absorbed in the rhythmic and continuous flow of numbers.’

But he voluntarily put himself on the line for the charity and because, as Born on a Blue Day demonstrates chapter after chapter, Daniel Tammet has never let the fact that he has Asperger’s syndrome stop him from setting himself challenges (like learning Icelandic in a week and then going on national television to be interviewed in that language) and overcoming them.

He is clearly and amazing man and Born on a Blue Day is a moving and extremely readable book.

Straw bale houses and a fornicators' charter

Research – for me it’s one of the most fun bits of the writing life, getting to find out about stuff you wouldn’t otherwise come across. Today, I have been looking into buildings made of straw bales and the ‘New’ Poor Law of 1834.

I’ve come across some lovely buildings, not least this one in West Wales, not far from where my current book is set. It is a dream harboured very dearly by the Other Half and I that we might, one day, be able to build our own house and, I must say, straw bales look as if they might be a strong candidate for our material. Incredibly green in all respects and producing highly original looking buildings which people like Amazonails and Chug at Strawbale building will help you build yourself, what’s not to like?

Judging from the websites Google pointed me to today, there is a spate of this kind of building breaking out in my home area of West Wales but I’m not sure that the climate is going to draw me back there, however many like-minded people the green hills might be harbouring. I need more sunshine than that. Or at least less rain.

I’m not a huge fan of the straight line in architecture – I love old buildings whose roofs have sagged until they take on the shape of the ‘in the round’ rafters beneath, and walls which have settled and ‘skirted’ down on the ground on which they sit. The house I was brought up in, being almost four hundred years old, did not have a true right-angle in the place which made wallpapering a nightmare but added to the visual charm of the place. Strawbale building (or s/b as I’m going to have to get used to calling it if I aspire to move in these circles) looks like providing the ultimate non-rectilinear building. One of the lovely things you can do is shape your bales with a hedge-cutter so you can round off edges and cut away window recesses.
Definitely a thought to keep on the front-burner, and not just for the book, where there will definitely be one.

And the Poor Law of 1834? Well, deeply fascinating to someone as interested in social history as me. The New Poor Law was the infamous one which turned the relief of the impecunious from a charitable duty of the parish (usually done in kind) to a statutory duty of the Union – ie a number of parishes combined – via the dreaded workhouse. Following implementation of the Act, people had to pay parish rates to fund the workhouse and couldn’t give people clothing or food in discharge of their charitable duty any more. No wonder workhouses were hated – you couldn’t be ‘relieved’ in your own home and you couldn’t relieve people directly, you had to hand over your cash (which you probably had little enough of if you were working class) to a faceless bureaucracy which relieved them for you.
And yet… in the area and time I’m dealing with – West Wales in the 1840s - the elderly people whose poverty was relieved by sending them into the workhouse felt that they were more generously dealt with than under the old system, where some quid pro quo was expected from the impecunious by the parish.

But, for me, the worst thing about this poor law was the way it dealt with unmarried mothers. Prior to 1834 if a pregnant girl swore on oath as to the paternity of her child, the man responsible could be committed by a magistrate until he either paid up to support the child or appeared before a quarter sessions to dispute paternity. Under the new law, the poor girls were out on their own. The report of Edwin Chadwick, upon which the law was mostly based, stated that ‘a bastard will be what Providence appears to have ordained that it should be, a burden on its mother, and where she cannot maintain it on her parents.’ From then on, as you can imagine, errant fathers mostly escaped scot-free. It was a fornicators’ charter. There’ll be one of those in the book, too. And I'm not talking about a charter.

Grammar Rant

Stuck in a Book’s blog today was about grammar. He’s a fan of accuracy and so one of his friends has started making references to the Grammar Police... Hmmm… and he seemed such a nice boy.

Grammar is one of those subjects which, as an English graduate, daily practitioner for many years of a profession involving the nitty gritty of language (speech and language therapy) and, now, as a writer, intrigues, fascinates and irritates me.

It intrigues me because of what you can do with it. The wonder of English with its delicate nuances – the subtle difference between ‘I would have been thinking’ and ‘I would have thought’ or ‘their misreading’ and ‘they’re misreading’.

It fascinates me because, as a working language, it has been given such a hard time by what you might call professional language people. All those eighteenth century grammarians, for instance, who thought English was only acceptable as a serious language insofar as it accorded with the rules of Latin. Well - hello Messers Grammarian! - English is a long way from Latin. It is an uninflected language for a start – we do not add bits to the root verb, as Latin does (amo, amas, amat), we use pronouns and auxilliaries (I love, you love, he, she or it loves – ok, we add ‘s’ to the third person singular. It’s an anachronism, live with it.).

And it irritates me. Because people mistake the point of grammar. Let me say this loud and clear. Grammar is not the same as good style. It is not to make things sound nice, to roll off the tongue sweetly. Grammar is there to make things clear and unambiguous.
Take all that huffing and puffing about prepositions at the end of sentences. It’s something you’re not supposed to go along with. But I can do no better than quote Winston Churchill – ‘that is the kind of pedantry up with which I will not put.’ Am I supposed to say ‘It’s something along with which you are not supposed to go?’ For goodness sake!

The fact is, a lot of what people claim is good grammar is actually pedantry. For instance, the ‘rule’ which says you shouldn’t separate the two bits of an intransitive verb – ie don’t say ‘to boldly go’ but say ‘to go boldly’. Why aren’t you supposed to separate these two? Because it leads to a lack of clarity? No, because some twerp of an eighteenth century Latinate grammarian had a bee in his bonnet about the way it sounded and decided that it couldn’t be allowed.

Grammar should be there to make our communications unambiguous. To ensure that we don’t stand about saying things like ‘did you mean she did it or you did it?’ As it stands at the moment, grammar seems to be ignored as a concept by one section of the population (the half which doesn’t know what an apostrophe is supposed to be for) and endlessly banged on about by another (the section which insists on ‘It is I’ when they are on the phone instead of ‘it’s me’.
Why is ‘it is I’ better according to them? Because it’s the right case. ‘I’ is the subject of the sentence (which could be written ‘It is I who am speaking’) not the object. Though I think an equally persuasive argument could be made out that you are the object of the sentence – you could re-write it ‘It is me that you are speaking to’…

But, apply the one and only rule of grammar – does it make things clearer? No. You just irritate the hell out of people like me if you insist on saying it. Because, basically, English does not need cases any more. Once upon a time, when we were turning from Anglo Saxon via Middle English into Modern English, we may have done. Anglo Saxon was an inflected language in which there was a considerable difference between ‘me’ and ‘I’ – only by using the right one could the person listening to you tell whether you were the doer of the action or the person unto whom (whom? – another case fright) the action was being done. But you don’t need that distinction in modern English – it’s obvious from the verbal context – word order and the use of verbs do not allow for I/me ambiguity. Or we/us. I mean, take the phrase ‘what are you saying to we?’ which would be perfectly acceptable in some world versions of English. We don’t like it because British English doesn’t phrase it that way – we use ‘us’ in that context, not ‘we’. But does it make a difference to the meaning? No.

My Mum has a habit of grinding her teeth if any of us say (as my children’s generation constantly does, and I find myself dropping into) ‘me and so and so went…’ instead of ‘so and so and I went..’. She just hates it. Why? Because, as the rule says, you wouldn’t say ‘me went’ so you don’t say ‘me and so and so went’ and you don’t put yourself first because that’s discourteous. Hence you end up with ‘so and so and I’ And it sounds nicer, even I have to admit that. But then that’s probably because when I used that version, I didn’t get disapproved of – it has pleasanter associations.

So, are we supposed to ignore apostrophe misuse?
I say it loud and proud. Yes! Unless it makes things unclear. But when you see ‘potato’s’ in the greengrocer’s you’d be a very unreasonable person if you thought ‘potato’s what?’

The point is, what something looks like in writing is almost irrelevant to how it sounds when we speak and, believe it or not, O literate nation, grammar arises from the spoken word. People can misspell or misuse ‘their’ ‘there’ and ‘they’re’ in written communications because there will be no misunderstanding! Contextually, you will know what the person means. You may be irritated. You may think the person writing is an illiterate cretin. But you will not be confused. Why? Because languages only allow homophones (words which sound the same but mean different things) to remain if they don’t cause confusion. The minute confusion arises, one of them will begin to be pronounced differently or dropped altogether. Written communication is different. We can see they’re different and so we don’t need to use context to work out which one of them the writer means. Until they use the grammatically wrong one.

So, do I have no grammar pride? No, not really. English is an evolving language. Soon, apostrophes will become irrelevant; infer will mean the same as imply and nobody will say ‘secretary’ in any other way than ‘sekitry’.

New words will emerge, new grammatical constructions to express new concepts, new relationships, new ways of thinking. Because otherwise, brethren, we would all still be speaking like G. Chaucer Esq. and I don’t know the last time you checked out the Canterbury Tales in the original but we SO don’t speak like that any more, innit?

The Birthday Books

This is the birthday book-haul – all except for Maya Slater’s Mr Darcy’s Diary which we are reading for book group this month along with another book of the same name by Amanda Grange.

And very pleased I am with my bibliophilic stash , too. Since taking this picture over the weekend, The Chameleon’s Shadow has already been polished off (great characters, totally didn’t see the end coming) and Sepulchre is now underway. Except, I can’t read it in bed as it’s too heavy, so David Baldacci’s Absolute Power is still going strong at night (had to leave DB on one side in favour of Minette for a day or two) and Sepulchre is the new lightbox book. As that means it sits on the kitchen table it’s also the making a cup of tea book, the wandering through to sort the washing out book and the oh dear I appear to be in the kitchen reading Sepulchre again book…

Scott Pack (who appears to share my birthday, lucky him) had an interesting thing on his blog today about the possible end of hardback fiction and I, both as writer and reader would be glad of same. I don’t usually buy books in hardback, too expensive. But Ms Walters is an exception – I must have hers as soon as a new one comes out. Terry Pratchett and the Other Half, ditto. And, though I probably would have waited for Sepulchre in paperback, somebody else was kind enough to buy it for me in hardback. And Peter Ho Davies's The Welsh Girl? Well, I was sufficiently intrigued by Dovegrayreader’s review when she was doing her Bookerthon to buy it. And who knows, it may not appear in paperback…

One thing which did occur to me when spending my book tokens was the disparity of advertising on the hardbacks. Ms Mosse seems to me to have been guaranteed massive sales of Sepulchre given that Labyrinth sold over a million copies in paperback, so why did her publisher feel it necessary to buy her such a lot of prominent shelf-space in Waterstones? It seems to me that this would be better given over to authors like Peter Ho Davies (and me, come January) whose careers need to be launched and whose lovely books need to be given publicity. But there he was, tucked away in Fiction under D. And I bought the only copy. I hope they’ll replace it.

The sick-list

Blogging about reading when unwell yesterday reminded me that, when I was in my teens, I had a particular book which I always went back to when I was ill in bed. It became a ritual that I would read it before I got stuck into anything else. And, as I was rarely ill for more than a day (tendency to rude health in our farming family) I often ended up reading no more than this one book.
This is it, The Outsiders, by S E Hinton.

Nothing could have been further away from my farming childhood than this, the story of American teenage gangs and a divided city in which the young of the social underclass – the greasers – stick together for protection, while the young, upper class ‘socs’ (short for socials) stick together because they think everybody else is beneath them. And yet I loved it. The character through whom the story is told – Ponyboy Curtis – is such a real character I felt I was taking part in the tragic events of his family and his world. When I reached the part where his friend Johnny dies (last words ‘I’m just gonna miss you guys’ – see, I can still remember them even though it’s over twenty years since I read the book!) I always cried. Maybe that’s why it was my sick-book. I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself and sympathising with Ponyboy and his friends did the trick.

Does anybody else have books they come back to and read again and again in particular circumstances?

Sick-bed reading and thrillers that really thrill

No post yesterday as I was unwell. Pause for sympathy. Thank you.

The Other Half knew I really wasn’t well when she got home and saw that the laptop hadn’t been switched on all day. Never mind not posting a blog, I hadn’t even read any of the blogs I am addicted to. Still, it was nice to have a double dose this morning.

I spent nearly all day reading Val McDermid’s The Distant Echo and a very satisfying day it was too, curled up on the settee under a blanket with Ms McDermid and her characters. The ending was satisfyingly climactic but also – given the work that had been done in shaping plot around characters – very believable. And you could have worked out who dunnit before the end, I just didn't. I blame being unwell...

A very recommendable read.

Then, I started David Baldacci’s Absolute Power. Mr Baldacci seems to be everywhere at the moment. He arrived in our house when the OH came home with Absolute Power which she had nipped out and bought one lunchtime as she had nothing to read with her sarnies. He’s also featured on Scott Pack’s blog Me and My Big Mouth and today on Dovegrayreader Scribbles. So…

Thrillers for me fall into two classes – the adventure kind (Tom Clancy et al, plot-driven, starring strong-jawed heroes who can’t be killed, women either hotly fanciable or don’t even go there) and the more thinking kind (populated by real people who feel things even (do I mean especially?) when they kill others and who are shaped and changed by events rather than just confronting them). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticising Mr Clancy and writers like him, what they do they do supremely well - look at the sales figures – and I have page-turned with the best of them when in the mood. But for a book to really grab me I have to be able to relate to the characters and what they feel; I have to be swept up with them but also by them into the events they take part in, not sit passively watching, knowing that it will all come right in the end, at least for the strong-jawed hero.

I don’t know how Absolute Power is going to turn out but its characters have got me hooked already and I’m less than a quarter of the way through. And Mr Baldacci toys with his reader and with conventions very nicely. For instance, the first character we meet at the beginning of the book is a burglar. Often with this kind of set up on page one you know that this character is destined to die by about page twenty-five just to illustrate how ruthless one of the main protagonists is. Not so here, though we do see, through the eyes of said burglar, just how nasty the book’s fictitious President of the United States is.

Gradually, it becomes clear how this burglar is related to others – probably destined to be more major players – in the book. Given that one of these is a lawyer, when the burglar realises that he needs legal advice we suspect that an introduction to his old friend is being set up for us, and that he is going to unburden himself about the Presidential goings-on that he has witnessed. But no, that rug of assumption is pulled out from under us again; the burglar is making his will and goes to see a bottom-end attorney, worlds away from the high-finance corporate law his friend practises.

In fiction, I like it when I’m wrong. It makes me think I’m dealing with somebody cleverer than me, which makes the whole act of reading even more pleasurable than usual.

Good start, Mr Baldacci.

Happy Birthday to the Bassist!

It’s the Bassist’s birthday – sixteen today! To be honest, it feels as if the poor chap’s been sixteen for ages. He is tall and dark with a beautiful baritone voice and feels as much of a man to me as his seventeen-year-old brother does. I suspect that this is because, ever since he was a tiny boy he has run to keep up with his big brother. When they were pre-schoolers, people often took them for twins, despite the 21-month age difference.

I have to say that the twin-mistake was attributable as much to the big-brotherliness of the Ultimate Frisbee Freak as to the Bassist’s precocity. Virtually the first thing I remember the UFF saying about his new little sib was ‘Baby crying! Pick him up, cuddle him, make him happy again!’ And this has been pretty much the attitude ever since. They are inseparable, play in bands together (the UFF on lead guitar, I hope I don’t have to tell you what the Bassist plays), play for Kent Open ultimate frisbee team together and are, generally speaking, lost without each other when one goes away.

So, happy birthday to The Bassist! Thanks for sixteen years of motherly pride. I feel - I’m glad to say - a lot more comfortable today than I did sixteen years ago when I was at the stage of sitting down very gingerly…

By the way, the B was born in a birthing pool, water-births being very much the thing then. He loves a bath to this day!

Murder by Numbers, Murder by Boredom?

Murder By Numbers. Put it in the DVD player and realised, as the opening pre-credit scenes rolled, that we’d seen it before. Pshah!! I am a twit.

But the fact that I remembered it as soon as it started playing speaks volumes. My memory is so rubbish that I’m often to be heard saying, at the end of a film, ‘haven’t we seen that before?’ The Bassist and the Ultimate Frisbee Freak find it hilarious that neither I nor the Other Half are reliable in our memory of films we’ve seen. For instance:
‘You know that film – the one with Will Ferrell as a racing driver?‘
‘No, never seen it. You must have seen it at Dad’s.’
‘No, we saw it with you.’
‘No, you can’t have done. I’ve never seen a film where Will Ferrell is a racing driver.’
Other half is appealed to by both sides and confirms that the boys are right, we have seen it. But, when the plot is described to me I have no memory – not even a little tiny snippet – of ever having seen this film. When something finally rings the tiniest of tiny bells I ask a question, only to be told, with slightly irritated disbelief, that ‘No, Mum, you’re thinking of Cars!’
Cars is an animated movie. For little children.
Oh dear.

Anyway, Murder by Numbers. The point is that I did remember pretty much everything about this film because it was so good. I’ll confess now that I will watch anything with Sandra Bullock in it because I think she’s brilliant. And yes, that does include the Miss Congeniality films. But only once.

The main thrust of Murder by Numbers is that two bored, intelligent but amoral teenagers commit The Perfect Murder. It is then Sandra Bullock’s job as homicide detective to nab them for it.

But the underlying psychology of this is never explored. Why do they do it? Yes, they’re bored and it’s a challenge, but that’s not enough surely?
Is it really just as simple as that old saying ‘The Devil makes work for idle hands to do’? The boys are portrayed as having indulgent but emotionally uninvolved parents. So, blame the parents?
Does that mean that the Bassist and the Ultimate Frisbee Freak be inclined to go round offing people if they weren’t busy respectively trying to learn everything that Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers has ever done and attempting to get in to the GB Junior UF team? (This latter ambition currently sees the UFF getting up at 6.30 every morning to go for a run. If I did that my body would go on strike. But he’s young I suppose… And a morning person by nature.)

I somehow can’t imagine them being so bored and unchallenged that they would take to plotting perfect crimes. But what do I know?
I’m only their mother.