One of the odd things I did over the years was the UK School Games, a multi-sport Olympics for school-children which travelled round the UK for a number of years. It started under Labour, was cut down and eventually abolished by the coalition mostly because it was a Labour initiative. There were a painful couple of years where the corporate sponsorship dried up, then it died a sad death.
In the meantime, it was a great opportunity for up-and-coming sports stars to represent their countries (England, Wales, Scotland and either NI or Ireland depending on whether the individual sport was cross-border or not) and experience the pressures and joys of a properly-organised event. I did a number of roles - welfare officer, team manager and a few other things. It always meant a few trips to different areas of these islands in the planning stages, wearing truly hideous polyester fr days on end, sleeplesss nights, sporting, emotional and physical trauma and triumphs, intense friendships and always good photo opportunities.
I might dig out some of the sporting shots later, but today it's just a few from Newcastle and Gateshead, where the 2011 Games were held. I'd never been there, and was stunned by the architectural grace of Newcastle, the geography of the twin cities and the brutal charms of Gateshead. I took these on the way to a meeting to check out venues a few months beforehand.
Detail from a hotel doorway
Classical-style ironwork
Demolition of the Gateshead car park Michael Caine throws someone off in Get Carter!
No ideological or aesthetic point to make today. I just like textures, small things and cats. These were in my mother's garden one day in 2010. The cat is the most recent of a long line of eccentric, charming feline murderers we acquired from the neighbouring farm once my cat-hating grandfather died. He used to like the beasts until one killed an entire roof-ful of sparrows in his garage in 1972. I can see his point, and cat-disdain was pretty much his only character flaw, so I'm willing to give him a pass. The cats had to share space with free-range guinea pigs, feral rabbits and chickens, as well as cope with my youngest sister treating them like dolls, pushing them around in a pram. They were very patient.
So: finally I add some cat content to social media.
I took these up by Coomasaharn Lake in Co. Kerry. Long a resort for tourists thanks to the Victorian railway network, Kerry has been seen as a romantic location: breathtaking mountains, sublime scenery, rural simplicity, a space away from the cares of cosmopolitan life. That's not changed - there's a floating population of Germans, British and various others on the West Coast (such as Donovan) who want to understand the place as standing in opposition to the values of industrial, globalised Western civilisation. A wetter Goa, perhaps.
This is, of course, nonsense. The landscape is as man-made and post-industrial as any other; the lives of those living there are as full of care and stress as any other place; romance and sublimity are privileged perspectives held by those who can turn up for a couple of weeks for leisure before returning to their normal lives.
Kerry is littered with abandoned cottages and smallholdings, as are many counties. The population of Ireland has still not recovered to pre-Famine levels, while the combination of hunger, imperialism, land ownership laws under the British, geology, capitalism and dreadful governments often meant that simply abandoning an unproductive farm and emigrating for a life of manual labour in England, the US or elsewhere was often the best option.
There's an ethical aspect to photography, and I do worry about the dissonance between the aesthetic attraction of decay and corruption and the stories they represent: ruin-porn, as it's known, could either be a voyeuristic replacement of the lives encapsulated with mere aesthetic effect, or a memorial to and recognition of those lives. I haven't quite settled on a view yet, but I do recommend Barthes's Camera Lucida and Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others.
I've always liked modernist and brutalist architecture for the starkness of the shadows they cast, especially when there's some contrast with the surroundings. These two were taken on the stairwell outside my old office on a snowy day in 2010 and under a bridge by my old flat. Early steps as I got the hang of using an SLR and using monochrome, but looking back, I'm still quite pleased with them. Click to enlarge.
In other news, I haven't mentioned what I'm reading to pass the time. Apart from PhD chapters, plagiarised undergrad essays and book drafts for an academic publisher, I've been reading Big Novels and Tom Gauld's Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, hisnew collection of cartoons from New Scientist. There are some on the space between good research and splashy research that could have been inspired by conversations at my workplace, while this one also reflects my life as a literary critic with a family.
I loved Dan Simmons' Hyperion, a space opera obsessed with the life and poetry of the short-lived poet Keats. I'd read one of the later novels in the sequence a few yeas back and thought it was OK, but the first one is epic, clever and genuinely profound. I've already mentioned Aidan Higgins' Langrishe, Go Down which is still in my mind. Jim Crace's Arcadia was very enjoyable too: a tale of masculine achievement and failure amidst the bustle of a city - richly symbolic but also an impressive piece of world-building and one with considerable sympathy for the lives of women in patriarchal societies. Now I'm 700 pages in to Trollope's The Prime Minister. I read a Trollope or two every year they're always huge and all-encompassing. This one has two plots: the travails of Prime Minister who (unlike his wife) is too honest, mentally fragile and intellectual to effectively wield power in a corrupted society and a coalition government, and the story of a woman who falls for the Wrong Man. Emily makes a mistake and clings resolutely to it for the sake of her honour; the Duke's wife, by contrast, blunders around for the best of motives and continually makes life difficult for her devoted but undemonstrative husband.
It's a wonderful read, and there are no interminable hunting scenes for a change, but the anti-semitism is just pervasive. Ferdinand Lopez is The Wrong Man because he is probably foreign and has no family history. Trollope cleverly gets us on Lopez's side initially by putting the bigotry in the mouths of crusty old people who don't understand the modern world like Emily's father, who says that Ferdinand isn't a gentleman, doesn't sound English and may well be a 'swarthy son of Judah'. The rest of the plot is devoted to bringing us round to Mr Wharton's point of view by demonstrating that he's right. Though he may or may not be Jewish, Lopez is the son of a travelling salesman, he works in financial speculation (badly) and has no concepts of love, honour or honesty: all the tropes associated with Jews in the 19th-century. So it's one of those novels I admire for its technique and abhor for its attitudes.
I can't drive. The opportunity didn't present itself when I was a teenager, and the expense and inconvenience combined with an early environmental conscience to stop me learning later on. It would be useful to hire a car now and then, but I've got into my mid-forties without needing one, thanks to living in a country with good public transport, the occasional kindness of friends and my love of cycling. I do find some cars and their infrastructure visually appealing however (though the close up view I got when being hit by one last year was more visceral than aesthetic). These photos were taken within 200 metres of my old flat one evening in 2010, when I was playing with focus, slow shutter speeds and wide apertures. (Click on them to enlarge).
I used to have a flat right in the city centre: I could see my office from the bedroom window, and go from comatose to lecturing in 2 and a half minutes. It was so achingly hip that 400+ crimes were reported on my corner in a single calendar year, largely drink-related. An author would have collected years of material just by writing down the words that floated up to my window. 'Abigail, you slag. You should have had an abortion' was one. 'Don't be an arsehole sir. If I have to arrest you the paperwork is endless' was another.
So anyway, it was a lively place, and I'd occasionally stroll out for a wander with the camera, trying to capture the spirit of a city that's had good and bad times. Mostly bad, to be honest: de-industrialisation has hit it hard. I didn't just take pictures of decay and brutalism, but there was no shortage of such subjects.
Railway station carpark. I like its clean lines and will regret its eventual 'regeneration'.
I bought my first SLR in 2009 - a dinky little Nikon D40 which took lovely pictures but wasn't very flexible in terms of user control. Only when I bought a D7000 in 2012 (which I've stuck with) did I get something I could really play around with. The joy of the D40 was its small size - I could take it everywhere and use it unobtrusively without making people freeze into poses. These are just some random shots I took that year
In my mother's garden
Another of my unending series of fences and boundaries with the added bonus of some rust - taken on the way to Shutlingsloe, 'The Cheshire Matterhorn'.
Meet James and Neal - two of the little band of walkers and friends affectionately known as The Map Twats. Dan always had a map, it didn't always help, but we always found a pub in the end.
These shots are taken in Oslo, one of the few times I've done some proper tourism. I loved the city and Scandinavia in general, though the very friendly locals kept bemoaning how boring it was. We adored the style, the generous public spirit, the commitment to a relaxed, socialist collective way of life that manifested itself not in the shortages and queues beloved of rightwing provocateurs' definitions of socialism, but in a bright public realm, clean spaces, cycling and a palpable sense of the public good. The fact that it's all paid for by filthy oil revenues is not, however, to be forgotten. That said, Britain had oil money and used it to privatise everything in sight. That said, what I took from Norway and a brief trip to Denmark was a sense that post-imperial nations if imbued with a sense of modesty, can find a role. While Britain refuses to address its past, to accept its reduced role in the world, Denmark, Sweden and Norway have built if not ideal societies, highly enviable ones.
The above photo is from Oslo's city museum, a mock-up of a 1970s house which just seemed to suit my friends' louche style. The two below are from Oslo's gleaming new opera house, a stunning piece of architecture which quite literally invites the public to climb all over it, and which slides into the fjord like an iceberg, encapsulating awareness of its surroundings and a democratic approach to culture almost entirely lacking in the UK.
Bird's funfair is an integral feature of Puck Fair - it's been coming for about 75 years, setting up a couple of days before the official event and staying on for a few days after before moving on to the next big event. I've never been one for the rides (except for the Dodgems, the closest I get to driving a car), but I get a Lady from Shanghai or Brighton Rock-style thrill from fairgrounds.
The roving bands of feral teenagers, the family groups, the gaudiness of the neon, the smell of candy-floss and frying doughnuts, the self-contained, secretive and self-confident culture of the fair folk.
Fairgrounds are great for photography - hyperreal colours, the rides and the people. I've never dared take shots of the most distinctive group, the Traveller and Roma teens, but there's no shortage of other material. I go back to them every year and I have a better camera and more refined technique since these were taken in 2010, but they're not too bad.
I wouldn't normally take pictures of unknown children, but the lad on the left demanded I take his photo. As I did so, his sister came along and demanded she be included: if I didn't, she'd tell everyone I was 'a paedo'. She was clearly torn between wanting to be noticed and defensiveness, and I think this shot represents that, as well as picking up on those amazing blue eyes.
This second shot is an attempt at an original take on the traditional ride photograph. It's of a video monitor focussed on the part just as the riders take a precipitous drop. The light's garish, the expressions are a mix of terror and gravity taking effect, and the colours are like something out of a Cronenberg film or Aphex Twin's 'Come To Daddy' video. Nothing about it is technically good, but the effect encapsulates the artificiality of the full-on fairground experience.
One of my favourite things about English is the ease with which puns can be made, and one of my favourite things about Britain is its peoples' willingness to make the most dreadful puns in any situation. I have heard a pun during a funeral eulogy, and reader, I laughed. Paronomasia forms the basis of most of Radio Four's outfit too, so we should take a moment to remember Tim Brooke-Taylor, a master of the art who died a couple of days ago.
And where would Irish literature be without James Joyce's use of punning? 'After all, the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church was built on a pun', he told a friend, referring to Jesus's classic gag of calling Peter (petros) his 'rock'. So replete with puns are Ulysses and Finnegans Wake that his patron Harriet Weaver – who published him in the Egoist referred to them as 'your Wholesale Pun Factory' (it's obviously catching: her money came from the cotton industry and her name is prime example of nominative determinism). Puns come easily to colonised people – when an imposed language is sufficiently strange, subaltern cultures play around with its possibilities to subversive effect.
Puns are wonderful - they prove that structuralism is right and make you groan at the same time (just like my lecture on that subject). There is, of course, a long academic tradition of studying puns: Eleanor Cook's paper on punning in Wallace Steven and Elizabeth Bishop's poetry provoked a long-running discussion, for example.
Shop name puns are an art form, whatever you may have heard. I snap them whenever I can. My favourite (though I sadly don't have a picture) is in the Staffordshire town of Stone, where a canalside cottage has been turned into a hairdresser's shop. It is called, of course, Lock Keepers. If they cut hair as well as they pun, they deserve your custom once this is all over.
Anyway, this is a bike shop in Oxford. It's a tiny bit tortured but all the best puns are and it works.
Today's photos are from the middle day of my first visit to Ireland's Puck Fair in 2010, during which a wild mountain goat is enthroned on a tower over the town, a Queen is crowned and three days of revelry and business commence, attended by 50,000 people. Records of the fair go back to a charter over 450 years ago, and the whole goat business implies more ancient origins. It's a huge economic boost to Killorglin, and chance for tribes to meet - the diaspora, the Travellers and Roma (always glamorous in a way that nobody else could pull off), the farmers from the mountains who come down to buy and sell cattle (they always say prices are terrible, but huge wads of notes quietly change hands), tourists and hawkers. You can have your palm read by the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, buy this year's tat (decorated light-switch surrounds were in a couple of years ago, ranging from Manchester United to Disney characters and tractors).
I'm from a big, rural family. We've had a succession of semi-feral animals - rabbits, guinea pigs, cats and eventually chickens. They're mostly rescue hens plus the occasional cockerel, and they were free range until the public garden next to my mother's house claimed that the visitors didn't like their cream teas being half-inched by grounded fat beasts with the manners of seagulls. Now they have a large run in an orchard and as many worms as they can eat, and they can't terrorise the current cat any more.
Racist? The Rhode Island Reds and the Bantams won't mix. At all.
A couple of carvings today, from the famous Kilpeck church which we visited in Spring 2009. I'm lucky to have several friends who're interested in the hidden histories of these islands - the quirks, the curious, the history from below and the cultural, social and spiritual aspects that have been suppressed or forgotten. They can read a landscape, identify an obscured hill-fort, or lead us to the Piers Gaveston memorial or James Whale's birthplace more easily than any of us could tell you about some toff's slavery-funded mansion. Julian Cope is our guru!
These shots are from Kilpeck, the Herefordshire (and once Welsh) village whose crowning glory is an ancient church festooned with strange and often charming carvings including a Sheela-na-Gig and a Green Man, the mysterious figures who appear on so many rural churches while appearing to be pagan in origin. Instead of them, I've chosen the dog and rabbit for their charming cartoonish appearance (the sheep is also delightful) and for contrast, one from my ongoing collection of threatening gravestones.
A couple today, seeing as it's a holiday, and they're both taken in the forbidden Outside.
This rural scene is a variation on a theme: I always take pictures of baths in fields, because they seem to be such a common motif in the UK and Ireland: I hope the same is true in other countries. Whether it reflects farmers' canny recycling or a generation move towards jacuzzis, pretty much every dairy or sheep farm has al fresco bathing facilities. The author and farmer Lloyd Jones once told me that 'proper' farms only produce two things in major quantities: 'shit and scrap metal', and I always look out for them (Mr Vogel is very funny; Y Dŵr (Water) is elegiac). Richard Mabey's The Unofficial Countrysidewas a revelation when I read it twenty years ago, and I've had an eye for the scruffy and marginal every since - that's where the magic happens, not on the pristine agricultural land that's actually little more than a 'green desert'. There's a huge range of bathroom suites to be found in various fields: this is an old steel bath somewhere near Church Stretton, and effort has been made to plumb it into the landscape.
The shots below are taken at Rás Mumhan (Tour de Munster/Tour of Munster) in 2011. I'm a keen cyclist myself – I like the speed, the ability to get out of your own familiar area quickly, the ratio between effort and fitness, the geeky technical details and the nicer side of cycling culture (proper cyclists don't care how slow or uncool you are, they say hello). I also love and hate professional cycling: I like the bikes, the routes, the inhuman distances they're expected to cover in a short space of time, the cosmopolitan nature of European cycling, the meandering commentary, especially Seán Kelly's pronunciation of 'classement', the local support, the crashes, the doomed solo breaks and occasional outburst of honourable behaviour I hate the sports-washing that sees various dictatorships and polluters sponsor teams, the one-eyed supporters and detractors, the drugs, the machine tactics and the commodification of a noble art by capitalism.
The Rás is a couple of rungs below the Tour de France - its competitors are a mix of high-performing amateurs, semi-pros, local heroes and stars of the future (such as Mark Cavendish, who didn't win), all forcing themselves round Ireland's most mountainous terrain. I'm not always in Killorglin when the Rás comes through town, but the start/finish line is the ideal place to catch the riders giving it their all on the uphill drag to the line. It should be going through town this weekend but like everything else, has fallen prey to the 'Rona, so here it is in all its glory.
There's nothing special about this photo at all. It's a hastily-taken and unposed snap which happens to date back to 2009 and a friend's 50th birthday party. The subjects are all friends and colleagues from my university.
I picked it because it illustrates so much about academic life, or at least my version of it, which should probably be 'academic' 'life'. Much like anyone's professional life, it involves entering a workplace with its own formal and informal rules, an established set of official and unofficial hierarchies, and people at every stage of their careers and intellectual journeys. Working long hours means that your colleagues (hopefully) become your friends, as frequent movement is common and quite a lot of us don't have children or relatives close by.
I've been at my place for 20 years or so now, which is very uncommon, and tells you a lot about my employability skills. It does mean that I've been to a lot of birthday parties, retirement dos and more than a few funerals, and they've all been memorable. Mike, in the central of this shot, is an expert in interwar political history, specialising in organisations such as the Youth Hostel Association and similar grass-roots bodies whose characters were contested and shaped by social forces. He's also an inveterate writer of letters to the Guardian, a deliberately terrible poet and a wicked mimic: no retirement celebration is complete without his unnerving impression of the VC, the subject of which kindly turns a blind eye to proceedings when he happens upon it). I could have written a few admiring lines about either of the other two and about pretty much any of my colleagues. We infuriate each other now and then, as must any group of people whose working and social lives are so closely entwined over a long period, but my friends have been the enduring joy of what we must laughingly describe as my career – I've learned more about teaching, research, negotiating institutional life and pretty much everything else than from any source.
One's position in the social group imperceptibly changes - I've slipped from being the impoverished postgrad on whom the old lags lavished beer money to the one who occasionally does the lavishing, remembers the birthdays and perhaps even, once a year, says something of interest to the next generation. The social circle expands and contracts as people enter and leave, or interests and situations change - one of the toughest tests is when a friend becomes a manager and the formal relationships intervene. Sometimes there's little difference, sometimes it's a fraught process that takes years to process.
It's hard to recall the awe that I felt for the people in this shot and their generosity in welcoming me in back then. Awe has become deep respect, often hidden under badinage, but it still occasionally feels odd to provide comments on an illustrious friend's journal article for instance, or – as has occasionally happened though not to those pictured above – represent them as a union rep.
That's it really - just a snap to say 'aw, you guys'.
Today's shots are a couple from my first trip to Poland in 2009, and my first gig as a team manager for the England Tomorrow's Achiever's team - 35 or so teenagers whose results implied that they were challenging for selection to the England full team or the GB team.
It's memorable for so many things. Mostly the fear: I'm not a parent and was a very boring teenager, so working out how to entertain, support and corral dozens of high-spirited kids over the course of several days in a new country and with plenty of downtime was a real challenge. Some were homesick, some were boisterous, some hid injuries and eating disorders were not unknown. Some had friendship groups acquired from the competition circuit while others were on their own (and let's not even get on to my infamous rant about Fencing Parents And How To Murder Them). Quite a few were terrified of the scale and the level of Challenge Wratislavia, a major U-15 competition, while a select few, having done well in Britain, thought they'd ace it. Reader: they didn't, and it was a fraught but ultimately educational experience for us all.
I've been a lot of things in the fencing world: mediocre competitor, mediocre referee (up to World Cup level!), mediocre team manager, mediocre welfare officer, mediocre coach, mediocre roadie and much else beside, though those days are largely over. I gave up competing seriously once I started my PhD: training 4 nights a week and travelling to competitions was impossible on £6500 a year. Instead I turned to coaching and refereeing, gradually going further afield and taking on more responsibility. That trip to Poland was a corker. It started with a parent handing over her daughter and asking if she could sit next to me on the plane because she'd never flown before, was terrified and needed a reassuring presence. I smiled, faked it and didn't let on that I'd flown precisely once in my life, a flight which involved a faulty engine and a lightning strike and didn't persuade me of the need to ever repeat the experience. I still hate flying and only do it if there's absolutely no alternative.
Most of the time I really liked it - given a few days with a group of people you learn what they want, sometimes what they need, when to blunder gracelessly in and when to shut up. As a coach I learned that the very best fencer can get something out of a lesson from a very bad coach, and that sometimes less is more. Also that wandering aimlessly around with a camera and a couple of languages means you can steal techniques that make you look like the king of the world back in the fencing backwater that is the UK. Despite the massive problems I have with the fencing world, especially the way it's run here and its troubling demographic profile (to put it mildly), I enjoy the camaraderie of doing an odd sort of sport, and of the joys of volunteering in it. The backstage crew of technicians, armourers, referees and the like are usually quirky, clever, witty people who – once they've decided you're not a dick – form a travelling community of people who enjoy seeing each other in windowless sports halls week after week. It has its own vocabulary, its own rhythms, complaints and joys. I was astonished how quickly the 2012 Olympics became just another long competition, working with familiar faces and facing the same problems as heads of state wandered by (Putin was a particular pain in the backside) or gold medal winners celebrated while you were trying to repair a spool.
I've reined back my involvement recently - I train regularly and do a couple of competitions per year, but the increasing professionalisation of the bigger events and my own commitments means that I volunteer closer to home – a bit of refereeing (though I'm really too old-school for the contemporary version of foil) and lumping kit around, plus chairing the West Midlands committee. One thing I really appreciate is the total separation of my quotidian life from my fencing life. My friends and students couldn't imagine my fencing persona, nor are they interested. Likewise, the stresses and strains of daily life are irrelevant once you're in the salle or on the piste. Apart from the chap whose opening comment was 'Don't you recognise this tie? It's from Eton', you're judged only by your ability, whether that's in correctly clamping a wheelchair into its frame or spotting the correct use of counter-time. I always enjoyed working with youth teams, and especially liked the UK School Games, which was slowly murdered by the 2015 government for the crime of being a Labour invention. I even, god help me, coped with the 2 a.m. hotel room patrols.
These photos aren't particularly special - as I acquired a better eye and a better camera they improved, and I might share some with you later on. The challenges for fencing photography are that everyone looks the same in the full kit, that everything happens at ultra-high speed, and that flash is banned. I ended up compromising by using an f/1.2 50mm lens for the action shots and otherwise looking for the moments of triumph and disaster at which people display their personalities most obviously. I like these two shots though because they're not formal - in the first, three of the young epeeists go through their warm-up with such obvious enthusiasm, while the second one gives you a sense of the Wroclaw outskirts, taken from the coach. The city centre is a beautiful pastiche, a medieval heart rebuilt brick by brick after it was flattened during WW2, but the majority is as you see above: flat, cold and bare, especially during the winter. The two figures are local fencers on their way to the venue: it reminds me that while fencing is still sadly an elitist sport in much of the UK, it's a perfectly normal one for the people who live in those flats.
This one was taken on Carnedd Llywelyn in February 2009. Out with some friends escaping the industrial midlands and our lives for a day, we experienced all the weathers: burning sun, rain, thick fog (which cleared at one point to reveal that we were standing on a shelf of ice and snow projecting out from the quite high mountain), and we saw everything from weasels to eagles.
I always take pictures of fences and rust. Fences because their regularity gives interesting perspective and focal points to undulating landscapes, but also because I fundamentally reject the idea of delineating what should be public land (which in my view, is pretty much all of it - I'm a huge fan of the Kinder Scout Trespass and Benny Rothman). There's a long and proud tradition of socialist and Communist walking and cycling cultures, as my friend Mike Cunningham and others have established, and without their contribution the countryside would still be closed to most of us. Every time you hop a fence on Prince Charles's 54,000-acre country estate or destroy a trap set for birds of prey, you're channelling the spirit of these pioneers.
Aesthetically, I like rust because it's so textured and because it's a handy reminder of mortality and entropy. This photo is also slightly remarkable for me because I used flash, something I virtually never do, unless it's a bit of fill flash in strong sunlight. It works here because it gives such a strong contrast with the surroundings.
Also, rust gives me an opportunity to post one of my most beloved songs ever: Joan Baez's bittersweet reflection on the end of her relationship with Bob Dylan, 'Diamonds and Rust'. I notice with some horror that it was released the year I was born - 1975. Her voice is beautiful on this one, the tune is deeply moving and her lyrics turn ordinary words into poetry. I particularly like the slyness of 'speaking strictly for me we both could have died then and there'.
While we're under house arrest (and I'm away from my camera), I'll post a photo every so often from my collection. No particular reason for any of them. I just hope you like them. Some will be pretty ropy - I still feel like I'm learning what's possible.
This is from a winter's walk up the Stiperstones in Shropshire - the moment we realised that we weren't the first people to crawl into the shelter of a broken-down wall for a moment's respite. We were in fact sitting on an ex-sheep.
How are you all getting on? The gilded cage that is Vole Towers has not yet descended into the Ballardian anarchy of High-Rise or his under-rated later novel Millennium People, but I like to think that JG would have enjoyed a roasted dog's leg on the decking with me, nodding in appreciation at his own foresight.
Last week I talked about the British 'cosy catastrophe' subgenre and its more recent American offshoot, but Ballard's chilly work is much more grounded in the new turn in British SF from outer space to inner space (sadly I can't find a copy of his 1962 New Worlds essay 'Which Way To Inner Space?' to link): often urban, and always more interested in psychological and cultural reactions to social and technological change than in rockets and dilithium crystals. I'm struggling to remember whether Ballard sees any cause for optimism and coming up with nothing, so perhaps I shouldn't recommend his work right now, but the pictures of supermarket stampeded are very reminiscent of the shopping mall that becomes a prison, a cult cathedral and a consumerist utopia in suburban London in Kingdom Come. Think of it when you're wrestling the last jar of truffles from a tired nurse in M+S Food.
I gather the craze for dystopian reading and gaming is slightly subsiding. People have now read La Peste (in which the plague is an allegory for fascism) and watched Contagion and now want something more comforting so I've probably missed the window for recommending Connie Willis's Doomsday or Wiliam Owen Robert's astoundingly good postmodern novel Y Pla, translated from Welsh as Pestilence. If he was writing in English he'd be the darling of the literary press, by the way. Anyway, a few friends have been asking for comfort-reading recommendations. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster and the Psmith novels are perfect, as long as you ignore his shady WW2 behaviour and the endless shelves of golf humour he also wrote. If you're in the mood for Wodehouse-influenced silliness, Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide middle-class-Englishman-lost-in-spaceseries is perfect, and I've a soft spot for Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affairand its sequels.
One of my other addictions is re-tellings of and unofficial sequels to Jane Austen novels, occasioned by early exposure to Clueless, the Hollywood adaptation of Emma that set the bar very highly indeed.
They range from wonderful to awful, and sometimes it's the most well-known authors who produce the worst books. PD James's Death Comes To Pemberley is particularly dreadful: it's as if this very accomplished author has a grudge against Austen and indeed the Austrian sentence. Also mentioned in despatches for horror despite my admiration for her other work: Curtis Sittenfeld's Eligible. In the Good column are a mix of call-out novels defending minor or uncherished characters and out-and-out gleeful trash. Jo Baker's excellent Longbournis much more high-minded: Pride and Prejudice from the servants' perspective. It's just a good, thoughtful novel. For cheaper thrills, Seth Grahame-Smith's exploitation-thriller Pride and Prejudice with Zombies displayed more understanding of Austen's writing style than Death Comes To Pemberley and is a hoot (just skip the film and the various attempts to extend the franchise). Similarly Arielle Eckstut's Pride and Promiscuity: the Lost Sex Scenesof Jane Austenfills in Austen's narrative gaps in eye-opening fashion and with tongue firmly in…cheek. Lady Catherine would send no compliments to her mother.
Instead of watching the dreadful ITV attempt to finish Sanditon, try Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe detective thriller based on it, The Price of Butcher's Meat. Apparently Hill liked to pastiche other authors' work in this series. I haven't read any more but this one really works. I'm also a fan with some reservations of the vlog The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. There's also a recent retelling centring on Lydia Bennet which I enjoyed a lot but I can't remember its name. If you're more of a Northanger Abbey type, you can now get all the 'horrid novels' Isabella Thorpe presses on Catherine Morland: for years it was thought that Austen made them up, but copies of the actual texts started appearing in the early twentieth-century so Regina Roche's Clermont,Lathom's The Midnight Bell, Kahlert's The Necromancer, or the Tale of the Black Forest,Eliza Parsons' The Mysterious Warning and The Castle of Wolfenbach, Grosse's Horrid Mysteriesand Sleath's The Orphan of the Rhine will pass away the hours beautifully. For someone who inhaled Ann Radcliffe's superior Gothic thrillers while a students, this is manna. If you're a Regency type of person, I also can't recommend Maria Edgeworth's novels highly enough, from the social comedy of Castle Rackrent to Belinda.
Crowley's Little, Big, which I've just finished, is one of the most magical, layered novels I've read in a long time - an amalgam of mythology, fantasy, Shakespeare and much more beside, shaped with the most delicate of touches. It reminded me - not just for its mash-up of Americana, Shakespeare and magical realism, of Chris Adrian's San Francisco retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Great Night. I haven't yet got round to his The Children's Hospital (Adrian is also a paediatrician) but I'm looking forward to it. For comic legal thrillers, I'm grateful to my friend Gaby for recommending Sarah Caudwell's Thus Was Adonis Murdered and its sequels - witty, arch, packed with in-jokes and with decent plots and some stylistic quirks. It's just a shame Caudwell wrote so few before she died. For big enveloping novels, go for Kate Atkinson or Byatt's Possession, a sweeping and very knowing return to the Big Victorian Novel with plenty of twists. Or if you're in the mood for eccentric families, I Capture The Castlecan't be beaten: a seemingly slight novel which sneaks up on your emotions.
For something a bit more demanding, try Aidan Higgins' 1962 modernist Irish masterpiece Langrishe, Go Down. I picked it up after many years, triggered by seeing someone on Twitter getting a PhD on his work. If you've read JG Farrell's later Troubles, you'll know the territory: the fading away of the Ascendancy, maundering away in their crepuscular Big Houses and learning (or not) how to cope with a social structure turned on its head. Higgins' novel uses a gentle stream of consciousness technique to explore the lives of three sisters trapped with each other and going nowhere. The opening pages, depicting Helen Langrishe struggling to cope with the sweaty, smelly hot confines of a bus on the way back to Kildare was presumably meant to convey her discomfort with the hoi polloi but reads very differently in a time of 'social distancing'. There's so much richness to this novel, but one motif that keeps cropping up is distorted vision: mirrors, windows, reflections, peeping and spying recur again and again. I haven't yet seen the film, but it was scripted by Pinter and starred Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons, so it's probably worth catching.
Talking of being trapped with people, one thing I've noticed while watching TV (mostly old Doctor Who and Channel 4's 2002 The Book Group(I'm missing awkward discussions with strangers about books, seeing as the university is closed) is quite how much hugging goes on, no doubt an American habit imported with the talkies. All these pre-'Rona people can't keep their hands off each other, pawing and stroking and caressing. I'm firmly of the view that an affectionate handshake at Christmas between close relatives should quite sufficient for anyone, and I trust that recent events will see a return to the brief bow/curtsey as the height of physical expression. If anyone tries to hug me in future they'll feel the point of my rapier in their gizzards.
Anyway, that's enough from me for one day. I'm off for my state-approved constitutional. Look after yourselves.
Looking around me, this seems to be the order of the day - here's Johann Schütz's version of the popular classical theme:
I've heard it mistranslated as 'And I am in Arcadia' and thought of as a joyful scene or perspective, but it's actually 'Even in Arcadia, I am there' – the tomb in the background suggests that 'I' is Death. Looking around me, the sun shining, people in shorts going for careful walks, barbecue smoke drifting in, many of us seem to have made this slightly tense accommodation with death in springtime. We should be admiring lambs and daffodils (and we are): death is a wintry spectre. Yet here we are, weirdly enduring a sort of holiday with mortality.
It's not an unknown approach. The 1950s and 60s saw the rise in Britain of the Cosy Catastrophe novel, perhaps most famously encapsulated by John Wyndham in The Day of the Triffids and other works. Something terrible causes mass death and total social and governmental collapse, but a small group of sensible people – usually led by a resourceful gentleman and an emotionally-grounded woman he rescues – use their skills to head off somewhere defensible to rebuild, making hard choices along the way but assured of success.
Ironically, like all apocalyptic texts, it's the kind of book that can only be produced by a sophisticated urban population and a pretty smug minority within it which needs the tang of disaster to enliven a comfortable existence. I don't know whether it's any less healthy than the more popular genre of disaster fiction, in which there's only temporary or no hope of survival - eco-catastrophe is huge in young adult fiction at the moment. There's a debate about whether such literature spurs people to action or persuades them that there's nothin we can do other than settle in for the ride, and I'm undecided, Walden is probably why I've never driven a car, hardly ever fly and don't have children (though my face and personality may also have had some bearing on the latter). Thoreau certainly had a cold-eyed view of catastrophe: castigating those who couldn't enjoy walking on a beach littered with the bodies of shipwrecked Irish refugees, he asserted that 'it acquired thus a rarer and sublimer beauty still' with death so close.
People are currently playing Pandemic and watching disaster movies, but once the death toll mounts I suspect we'll increasingly be turning to Mary Poppins and Friends re-runs. I'm currently watching old series of Doctor Who as an antidote to the news. Like many people, I'm also making light of the situation - slightly enjoying making do with less access to ingredients, enjoying the empty roads for cycling, feeling slightly pleased with myself at adapting to changed working conditions fairly well, coming up with witty quips on Twitter and the like, but such cheerfulness depends on the unspoken assumption that it will all be over soon, and that I won't be closely impacted. In the meantime, lots of friends and family have lost their incomes, contracted the disease (mildly, thankfully) and are in far worse conditions than me. Finding any pleasure in all this is – to use a dreadful phrase – a mark of privilege of which nobody should be proud.
That's not to say we shouldn't make the best of it, while looking out for others. As well as the Who marathon, I'm still reading. The last of the Green Knowe series was a suitable ending to a magnificent children's series. Following Beckett's account of the decline of the CPGB, I also read Geoff Andrews official history of the last 30 years of the Party, End Games and New Times, which I heartily recommend. For a revolutionary organisation, the CP was deeply conservative and really struggled - in interesting ways - with the 60s and the Youthquake. Sometimes it or factions within it got things badly wrong (long hair and The Beatles = bad), sometimes surprisingly right, often in ways nobody noticed despite the party's influence in old-style mass political organisation. Right now I'm eking out John Crowley's long, so-far wonderful and almost indescribable low fantasy novel Little, Bigin which an odd, rural family on the edge of faerie negotiate identity and destiny in a space slightly apart from but not unaffected by (or opposed to) galloping American modernity. If anything it slightly resembles Gormenghast but without the poisonous atmosphere, but it's far less cartoon-like - the characterisation has real complexity and depth, and there isn't a magic sword to be seen.
If you're in the mood for a really evocative account of life under the looming threat of catastrophe though, I can't recommend Comet in Moominlandhighly enough.
“Moomintroll thought how frightened the earth must be feeling with that great ball of fire coming nearer and nearer to her. Then he thought about how much he loved everything; the forest and the sea, the rain and the wind, the sunshine, the grass and the moss, and how impossible it would be to live without them all, and this made him feel very sad.”
Hope you're all OK out there. We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when…
