Erin Pizzey and the Streisand Effect

In the spirit of the many column inches written this week on the subject of lying about books you have read, I have to come clean and mention that while I own Andrew Marr's A History of Modern Britain I haven't actually read it yet. My excuse would have been that it needs a specific mood to start such a book. Well now I have a reason to read it if only for one single sentence - that and the fact that any current unsold stock has been recalled for pulping - Amazon resellers will be doing good business won't they? To avoid any need for you to read it I will just say that Arthur bruised his upper arm.

Why would anyone lie about having read nineteen-eighty-four? I can understand it about Ulysses having started it myself several times (and having waded through a good percentage of its stream of consciousness, while following a completely different one of my own) but nineteen-eighty-four drags you in from the beginning.

Full of Haddock and Other Stuff

Well the decision on what to read was made easily with the purchase of That’s Me In The Corner – the third book in Andrew Collins autobiographical collection. This was just as readable as the previous two though somehow the demands of having to earn a living seemed to take something away from the pure pleasure of the previous two books. The reason for wanting to write the first two was obvious – pure nostalgia and then I suppose the third book had to be written to complete things – to join up to now but somehow it seemed just a list of things that happened – very interesting things on important media but just events. Well it is finished and out of the way and we – or maybe just I - await Stephen Fry’s second volume of autobiography which is bound to be more than the sum of its words should it ever appear. I am sure I had heard he was writing it but maybe I was mistaken.

Not that you can tell but there was a small delay there while I purchased something online. I can actually reserve most books from our library online but these things are special. I have had a full set of Realworld CDs. Of course you must excuse the mercenary spirit within me that leads me to value style over content; all those 10 inch singles still in their shrink-wrap are no use to anyone now are they? Or this either :–

I learn from Balderdash and Piffle (presented by that nice Victoria Coren) that the symbol :- which I use all the time is known by printers as “The Dog’s B*****ks” which has slightly taken the edge of 20 years of using it in official documents. I did once have a manager who used several quite strong words in mixed company which shocked us until we realised from context that he didn’t actually know what they meant. Where is he now I wonder? And while on TV programmes – Andrew Marr’s second episode of the history of modern Britain did not disappoint. We learnt of unlikely affairs all while Andrew tried to save money for the BBC by going to Torquay in lieu of Jamaica to back up the story of Anthony Eden’s flight to Goldeneye after the debacle of Suez. I did try to spot my dad in the shots of British and French troops landing in Egypt but he managed to keep his head down. I will have to ask him about it someday. I did not realise that the whole affair was cooked up between Britain, France and Israel who attacked Egypt to provide an excuse for us to go in as peacekeepers. Now who would believe that we could get taken into a dangerous middle-eastern war on the back of a lie of such proportions today? Well my dad did his bit – in the Royal Engineers they taught him how to blow up bridges and then he came home and the Civil Engineers taught him how to build them up again. And he got a medal any everything. My devout cowardice obviously does not come from him.

Never in This Field of Cows …

Listening to V-At by Tarwater

Damn-near-perfect TV programme last night to go with this damn-near-perfect music from the Wiretapper CD. Music is V-At by Tarwater which has a certain indefinable magic that summons up all sorts of memories. Play loud in the car and have a great driving moment of quality.

The great TV was Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain which concentrated mostly on the politics of this fair land since the end of WWII. I was worried beforehand that it might be dusty and boring and indeed the review had said something along the lines of it just being Mr Marr talking to camera interspersed with archive. Well it was exactly that but with an authoritative and interesting delivery it raises AM up there with Kenneth Clark and Jacob Bronowski as a documenter of how things are. Now I am not clever enough to know whether the whole approach was different to anything I have seen before or whether I just do not generally know about the period covered in last night’s programme but it did seem to be packed with information that seemed fresh and unknown – of course the general big stuff was somewhere in my head but the juicy way it was presented made it seem new. My dad said he wasn’t going to bother watching because he had lived through it all – I hope he changed his mind. I’m not sure that the impressions of Churchill (the statesman – not the dog) were really necessary.

I’m fair whistling through Rendezvous With Rama – more than half-way through and with so much I remember still to come. What is interesting is that the gap between last reading it and now had wiped my brain clear of the memories of what I though the place looked like and so I am able to create a new picture. I also notice that I am much better at creating images from the descriptions. Actually I lied about all the old images having been wiped – what I mean is that they are so faded that my more-mature mind is able to overwrite them. The thing that strikes me about the various illustrations (the one on Wikipedia for example) is that they have far too much detail. The overwhelming impression in my head is of wide vistas of featureless grey material broken only by small islands of complexity rather than the fields and roads of the drawings. No one seems to want to illustrate the stairways down which the crew of Endeavour had to descend to reach the interior of Rama (and of course climb up again).