I’ve Lost My Copy of The Third Policeman

Pretentious Listening of the day – Lloyd Cole and the Commotions - 1984-1989



I haven’t actually lost The Third Policeman – I gave it to someone in Bali who requested some English reading matter for his daughter. I had a choice between giving him Lake Wobegon Days, A Very Peculiar Practice or The old Flan O’Brien book. The Balinese guy was a Catholic and Lake Wobegon Days had a long section poking gentle fun at religion – a sort of laid-back tribute to Martin Luther complete with nailing of grievances to a door, I decided that it might strike the wrong note. I was not sure of being able to get another copy of A Very Peculiar Practice so that was out. I wonder what his daughter made of The Third Policeman? It is not for the casual reader – more for the masochistic pedant who loves books with more footnotes than main text.

It is cold this morning. The drive, accompanied by Holst and Pallestrina via the gentle medium of Morning on 3 was strange. The flat bits on the motorway looked like B&W pictures with a hint of sepia along the horizon. There was fog though it cleared leaving a layer of wispy clouds about 20 metres up which, speeding under in the car, gave the impression of high cloud moving unfeasibly fast, like the speeded-up landscape shots that all trendy documentaries seem to use as their Cliché-de-Jour. The Lancashire lowlands were fog-bound leaving Winter Hill looking like an island. Simon Armitage wrote a poem about living in the top of a transmitter after some sort of disaster leaves him as the last human. He still locks the door at night. I cannot remember if the transmitter is supposed to be the one on Winter Hill but it is the one I see when I read the poem. I once trailed up to the transmitter site from the car park, and took a photo of one of the cables which secures the mast to the ground. I seem to remember that you could go right up to the wire and bash it which I am sure I would have done if only to see if it made a note. In The Fountains Of Paradise (a book crying out for a film to be made of it), which describes the construction of a massive elevator linking the ground to synchronous orbit, there is mention of bashing the construction cables which link the satellite to the ground in order to produce a note.

I have run out of time.