Liadnan

Odd bit of spam today. Well, I thought it was spam and so did Gmail, but the curious thing was that it was well tailored: for a sort of Librarything/"books you might like" predictor coupled with amazon, sent to my livejournal email and not obfuscated in any way: the English was a little broken but not of the incoherent stream of drivel model. I dithered a bit before hitting delete (rather than unmarking as spam and then hitting delete - does that actually make a difference? I assume gmail's spamfilter learns, and if so that seemed almost... unfair. The really odd thing is that their "taster" book prediction was for something of which I actually am rather fond: Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. Outfit called nearsky.com, if anyone's interested, which whois tells me is, um, owned by an outfit which itself has an .ru domain. Hmm.

I have been arsing around with setting up a local mail server recently, for no particularly good reason other than that I was bored and felt I wanted to understand this stuff a bit more. (a Getmail/Dovecot IMAP /Postfix setup if anyone cares). In the course of doing that and also trying to set up a vpn client to log into work's machines I somehow managed to completely screw up everything that had anything to do with the internet at all: this came as no surprise as I have no real clue what I am doing (it doesn't really matter as I want to do a complete reinstall soon and everything is backed up to the nines). Rather more surprisingly I managed to figure out how I had managed to completely cock it all up and undo it fairly quickly. This pleases me.

In other news, or rather, other rhetorical questions, why does chaos break out in Lebanon every time I am on the brink of buying a flight there?

Being as I am in a mild fit of depression I decided to take my usual remedy of spanking the Blackwell's Account Card this morning: picked up various things, including the new Diana Wynne Jones, but also Byron Rogers On the trail of the last human cannonball a curious and fascinating book I heartily recommend. I don't know if Rogers still has his Sunday Telegraph column but in the days when I read it (Dad always insisted we take both the ST and the Observer "in the interests of balance", though as time went on his criticisms of both became more scathing; Murdoch papers never crossed the threshold, as anyone who ever met my father would pretty much assume as a matter of course) he was the best thing in the entire newspaper. It's just a collection of interviews with odd people, some of them notorious, some not, and pieces about places. To quote Rogers from the foreword:

[...] to walk through the mud of Agincourt with the weapons provided, [...] peer into the locked cabinets of the British Museum [... every sculpted erection of the ancient world...] attend one of Miss Cynthia Payne's remarkable orgies [...] walk the most familiar streets of all, those of a Western film town, in Spain, as well as the most unfamiliar, those of Tombstone, the real Western town, where nothing was as it should have been [...]

And more and more. I have yet to read about the one recording the revelation to "two OAPs that their mother, cranky old mum whom they thought had never been out of the town, had been Ethel le Neve and Dr Crippen's mistress." (A brief internet search tells me that Le Neve actually lived until 1967, which is remarkable, she must have been pushing 90.)

It's just a fabulous little collection of odd anecdota, brilliantly recorded by Rogers: reading them now I remember why on those Sunday afternoon's after lunch his was the one column I would invariably read.

Incidentally, a story not recorded by Byron Rogers but which I suspect he would like, from John Edwards in the current edition of the Soho Clarion (magazine of the Soho Society), in an article mainly about the retirement of Norman Balon from the Coach and Horses but remembering all the great Soho landlords of whom he was perhaps the last: "The Ship with Sydney (Jerry) Pratt, The Intrepid Fox with Gerry Mahon, The French with Gaston Berlemont and the Coach and Horses with Norman Balon".

[talking about being in The Ship, Jerry Pratt's pub, one lunchtime] At the other end of the bar sat Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole [...] getting argumentative about a newish actor's playing of a Shakespearian role and much heated f...ing and blinding was going on. Jerry could not tolerate bad language and asked the two great thesps to tone it down "for a lady could be present." Then through the door strode Elizabeth Taylor, be-minked and looking stunning, albeit somewhat flushed. She cornered Burton and screamed, "I've been waiting for you in that car for forty f...ing minutes." Jerry turned puce.

I can imagine Taylor swearing, but I find it difficult to envisage her in a pub. There's a good story about Gaston Berlemont and Francis Bacon in The French in the article too. All these stories, and things I hear from older people in my profession as well (usually involving El Vinos, or John Mortimer, or both), just make me think I was born too late.

That story reminds me of another recent story I read about Burton and Taylor meeting a party between marriages and flirting, Taylor's then husband desparately saying something on the lines of 'she's my wife now' and eventually asking Taylor to make a decision, whereupon she walked out with Burton. Irritatingly I can't remember where I read it: I suspect it was in the TLS or LRB but the much vaunted TLS Archive turns out to have an absysmal search engine on which I can't find anything, and it doesn't appear to be in the LRB either.

Apropos of something mildly different, Liberal England has an interesting post about the differences between the 1964 and 1970 editions of Ladybird's Peter and Jane (for those who don't know, very popular learning-to-read books in England at the time and, for all I know, still).

Good post from Moorish Girl on Qana. ItinerantSphinx on the whole situation as viewed from the perspective of one of the evacuated expatriates well worth reading as well.

On a vaguely related point, while I was at parents' I retrieved my copy of Craig Murray's Murder in Samarkand (the order was sent there for reasons it would be too tedious to explain) and read it over the weekend. Fascinating: I've always been slightly sceptical about Murray, though I think he's clearly in the right more than in the wrong: though I still have a few quibbles I'm less doubtful about him than I was. The book is absorbing simply as an illustration of how the Foreign Office works these days (little different from how it has for the past 100 years so far as I can see, and not all of the change there has been is for the good) and utterly depressing in it's conclusions. I'll write more about it when I've digested it a little more.

I ought to be utterly shocked to learn that even with the example of Saddam Hussein (and others before him) staring them in the face, British and US foreign policy continues to be so moronic and short-sighted that it is considered an acceptable tradeoff to prop up a brutal totalitarian megalomaniac, with substantial amounts of taxpayers money as well as encouraging noises, for fear of Islamic fundamentalism. But I'm not.

Just saw that Studio Ghibli have an Earthsea film (fairly clearly an adaptation of The Farthest Shore) coming out this July. After the mini-series fiasco (which I admit I never felt the urge to see, but everyone I know who did was appalled) my immediate instinct is scepticism, but Studio Ghibli have a deservedly high reputation.

I awoke on Sunday morning just as I was about to fight a duel with Edward VIII (while still prince of wales) or just possibly his father. I consider this a shame, and have no idea whatsoever what he was doing on my mind. I almost never remember my dreams, so obviously something important was going on. (The duel was taking place, rather atypically, at sunset, in a place that seemed a cross between Hyde Park and the Embankment to which I had a pass for access. What? Anyway, would anyone ever have called out or been called out by the heir to the throne? Sayers has Wimsey claim he had been called out once or twice, so relying on her accuracy I'm assuming it isn't entirely anachronistic, but still...)

I was then convinced I needed to ring Frankie and arrange to meet for coffee later that day, fortunately I was no further than groping for my phone and bringing her number up on the address book when I realied that (a) I was actually on Jersey whereas she was in London, or possibly Edinburgh, and (b) it was 5.30 in the morning. She and K. would, I suspect, have been unamused.

Eventually my discombobulation passed and I spent most of the rest of the day, as the wind blew and the sun shone on the snow outside, sitting in bed being nostalgic about old photographs, trying to work on four works in progress, none of which achieved much progress during the day, but such is life. And reading Frances Stonor Saunders' Hawkwood, fascinating but I never felt I had much of a sense of the man. Best read of the weekend, however, goes without doubt to George MacDonald Fraser's hysterically funny The Pyrates, which I recommend to each and every one of you.

And then Lewis, the long-awaited Morse spin-off. Delighted to see that before the first advert break they had already cut down from Broad Street along the Radcliffe Square side of All Souls to somewhere, in a car. Which might be possible were they in Hot Pursuit (TM), as I think you could physically pass through to the High (?if you take down some bollards?) but not otherwise. All in all fun, but I don't know if it has the steam to go it alone: eventually they'd have to drop the sighs, glimpses of red Mark II Jaguars, visits to the pub, music prizes called Endeavour and cryptic crossword clues left in one of Morse's old files.

The sun is shining and though there's no cotton on Jersey, the wind is howling, and the temperature freezing, I'm in a remarkably good mood. Enjoy it while ye may.

Via Martin the "John Hopkins Test" for whether you are an alcoholic. Oh dear. There doesn't appear to be an option for "have you ever attempted to cure a crucifying hangover with a Bloody Mary? Did it work?" (Yes).

Lack of internet availability at home (which continues but may be sorted fairly soon) was the main cause of my hiatus, but I'm also going through a phase of feeling I don't have anything to write about. These six months stuck out in the Channel are something of a hiatus in my life generally, and that seems to be carrying over to here.

I don't mind it here most of the time, and there are some real benefits (I think I may hop over to St Malo this weekend), though most of them involve being outside and the weather stinks at the moment. I know now that I did choose the right side of the English legal profession for me though: being a solicitor is really not my forte.

And I've run out of books again, having finished A Feast for Crows in one sitting and also run out of Frankie's care package. Well, almost: I've returned to a re-read of The Once and Future King that I put to one side in August.

I seem to be watching almost no television at all: for the last three weeks it's only been Midsomer Murders and now Jericho (which I find tolerable but not that gripping) on a Sunday evening.

Spent Saturday wandering around Elizabeth Castle in light drizzle (accessible only by boat or, more usually, ex-army Duck at high tide: Jersey has one of the most ridiculously huge tidal flows in the world and imbeciles who don't know what they are doing often find themselves caught, on one notorious relatively recent occasion with horses, which they managed to persuade up a Martello tower). The castle is huge, mostly commissioned when Raleigh was governor (though it incorporates St Helier's alleged early medieval hermitage) but pretty much continuing in use and development up to and during the occupation. The Germans built it into their own ring of massive island fortifications, so you have the vaguely incongruous sight of a seventeenth century gateway next to a searchlight bunker, with sheep grazing on top. Actually this happened all over the island: the Napoleonic-era Martello towers and the medieval castle at Gorey were all re-fortified I think.

Ho hum. Not dead yet, just resting.

ETA: Anne Rice finds God. We will all now pause for boggling. (Link via Katy.)

And while I'm doing links: new Robin Hood. One hopes the last line is a joke. I'm not entirely clear whether "The series will follow ITV's hit 1980s series Robin of Sherwood" (all pause to hum "The Hooded Man") means it will specifically refer back to that (I have a feeling the rights are tied up in an insolvency somehow) or something more general.

But I am interweb impoverished until I manage to make either dialup (and indeed my home land line) or my wireless card work properly. Proper posting will therefore remain on hiatus.

So far I'm actually, somewhat to my surprise, managing to keep to my plan to become vaguely fit: cycling into work every day (and, um, into a wall this morning while trying to work out why my bike was so reluctant to be in fifth gear, but these things happen) and going for a swim most mornings before that (there's an outdoor heated pool at the place I'm staying) once the first plane of the morning has woken me up (downside to the place I'm living: the end of the airport runway is approximately ten feet away from my window). Riding in takes me about 20 minutes, half of it downhill and half along the coast path (Jersey seems pretty good for cycle paths separated from the roads). Going home is a different matter: It's a big hill... I've also, in a fit of enthusiasm, booked myself fencing lessons and riding lessons. We shall see...

On the other hand, I have nothing to read except for the things I already took to Greece and read there. I've already re-read The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and River of Gods. Still, I'm back in London this weekend and early next week for a trial, so I forsee myself bringing back a large and heavy bag.

Bit too late to comment on the cricket save to say hurrah, obviously.

I had lots to say about the first episodes of the new series of Spooks but I've forgotten. Amused to notice a reference to Corpus Christi being noted for classics. Interesting to see the political nuances, particularly re attitudes to current US policy, the fictional version thereof clearly being not too different from the real one.

Well, that was dull, wasn't it?

The First Night of the Proms I mean. Yes, I believe some book or other was launched last night. No, I haven't bought a copy, and probably won't for a week or two. In any case I won't be reading anything else until I've finished Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind, lent to me by the inimitable Eurotrash*. Like her I'd had a certain amount of scepticism, but so far it's brilliant.

Yes, I have deliberately read properly spoiler-warned posts. Heigh ho.

But I digress. Gorgeous evening at the Albert Hall but sadly not a staggeringly good concert, either in programme or performance terms. I probably wouldn't have gone had it not been the First Night. BBC SO under Sir Roger "at least I'm not Slatkin" Norrington: Berlioz overture The Corsair: yeah, whatever; Mendelssohn Violin Concerto (Janice Jansen): started off ok, went via "quite good" and "mediocre" to "actually quite bad" -not entirely her fault, the balance was badly off for one thing; rambling sentimental speech by Norrington about last Thursday -speeches, other than on the Last Night, are very rare at the Proms; Elgar overture Cockaigne ("about London and Londonders of course", says Norrington, "no, that's Cockaigne with a 'g' ha ha"): a solid performance; Tippett, A Child of Our Time (BBC Symphony Chorus, Indra Thomas, Christine Rice, Ian Bostridge, Sir Willard White): mixed, this one. I love the piece and haven't heard it performed often: thought the chorus did their usual sterling work, and Sir Willard on top form as ever, but the female soloists were a bit dodgy and Bostridge was, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, "not quite right", and also has silly hair. And all in all it seemed an odd programme to put together, particularly for the First Night, which ought to be an Event.

Still, early days yet, so far as the season is concerned. Failed to crash the BBC party this year though, which was the main disappointment.

*who's a brilliant cook and can still drink me under the table, incidentally.

I have a general policy of not doing these things, still, rules are meant to be broken and Hypatia asked. And since, having given up trying to work at home because of the moronic vandal with the chain saw outside, I find myself banished to the desk-less greenhouse on the roof of our building because my office is being painted, I might as well:-

1) Total number of books owned: Somewhere in the region of 5000 I believe.

.. and then he drinks another gin drink. And then another gin drink. And then another gin drink. And then starts feeling miserable about Everything.

Has anyone ever investigated precisely how it is that Gin does this?

But doesn't have a hangover and spends the next evening on 12 star Metaxa, a wonderful intoxicant that should be more widely appreciated.

In other news, via John and Belle the depressing proof that Bono is still kind of a cock. Depressing because I'd kind of rediscovered (old) U2 recently. Now I'm reminded how exactly he managed to reach quite so far up my nose.

Ah well.

Ian McDonald has a livejournal. And pretty much all of you who might be interested in this already knew this, and had subscribed. Can you explain why, precisely, no one saw fit to tell me?

And there's a new Lindsey Davis. I managed to stick to my moratorium, but my suspicion, that Greece was pretty much the only bit of Vespasian's empire she hadn't touched yet and was therefore the likely new Abroad setting, has proved correct.