Ring of Kerry

We may sometimes think that the Irish are a bit bonkers, but they in turn must surely wonder at the eccentric behaviour of English tourists.

There we were last weekend, the wife and I and our little hire car, driving for miles and miles around the famous Ring of Kerry in the rain, the mist and the gloom. The weather was just awful, but we persisted - trying to see if we could spot the MacGillicuddy Reeks - Ireland's largest mountain range, and other landmarks for which this circular drive is so famous.

During a short break in the weather we did manage to spot the Ladies View (named apparently after Queen Victoria’s Ladies in Waiting) outside Killarney. Typically when I took the photo above I managed to miss the fine rainbow which had been there a moment beforehand.

At the westernmost point on the drive we diverted briefly and crossed the causeway to Valentia Island where we stopped at a tourist attraction called the "Skellig Experience". This exhibition (plus short film) celebrates the two small rocky islets, lashed by the Atlantic, about 10 kilometres from Valentia - although quite invisible in the ghastly weather. The larger of the two - Skellig Michael - is home to some 27,000 pairs of gannets and a lighthouse. It is also a UNESCO world heritage site, but not because of the gannets or the lighthouse. From 588 to 1222AD the place was inhabited by Irish monks. They created a stairway from the landing point up 200 metres to their stone “beehive” shelters which still survive today. For sheer, bloody-minded remoteness this is an extraordinary place to build a monastery, but as Lord Clark said "It was in places like Skellig Michael that Western Civilization was preserved." George Bernard Shaw described Skellig Michael as "an incredible, impossible, mad place. I tell you the thing does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in; it is part of our dream world." It was sad that we came all this way and failed to see it for ourselves.

For the rest of the "Ring", there was little to be said. I had wanted to take the wife for a jaunting car ride through the Lakes of Killarney, but the weather said no. Muckross House seemed to be closed, and for long periods we followed tourist coaches through interminable, narrow roads. I even failed to appreciate the golf course at Waterville where the older brother distinguished himself on the celebrated 18th hole.

Alternative Employment

With mail order bookselling deep in the doldrums it is time to consider other ways of earning a living.

Becoming a politician would be nice - £56,000 for six months ranting and politicizing, and massive expense allowances. But I’m really the wrong gender. The big jobs in politics tend to go to the girls. Tessa Jowell was given a throne to sit on at the Test Match in Mumbai this morning – and I bet she didn’t fly out economy class. Ruth Kelly has claimed so much in expenses this year that she has virtually covered the cost of her constituency home purchased in 2001 (on top of her £134,000 salary). I’d love the money, but would feel that I was being less than honest with the taxpayer.

Not being strong in anything that demands sporting prowess I don’t feel that I’d get very far as a professional footballer. My rugby playing days are also long passed. But what about becoming a referee? Now I have the judgmental integrity to do the job but the eyesight isn’t what it used to be. This impediment never seems to stop partially-sighted people getting jobs as line judges at Wimbledon, and certainly the efforts of referee Mike Dean at yesterday evening’s Fulham-Chelsea match indicate that it doesn’t matter if you (and the linesman) completely fail to see a Chelsea player’s misdemeanour prior to scoring a goal. Eleven angry Fulham players quickly jostled round Mr Dean to complain and stayed there until he reversed his decision to award a goal (no wonder there was a pitch invasion afterwards).

While watching the Six Nations rugby it was also interesting to note that a decision is never final. Repeated delays while TV replays are studied make one wonder if a referee can ever be qualified to award a try. The linesmen also behave strangely. In the old days when a linesman raised his flag to say the ball is out of play, then play stops and a lineout is awarded. On Saturday a linesman raised his flag, ran a few paces and, seeing that the errant player was running on to score a try, he then lowered it again – as if to say “maybe it was, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt”. I could do that.

Chef? Hairdresser? Car Wash Attendant? Traffic Warden? All too confusing. Maybe I’d better stick with books.

Square-Eyed and Crestfallen

The Rugby Six Nations “Super Saturday” was a bit much for me. Three consecutive, televised matches (all fairly closely fought and all ending with the wrong result) were too much of an emotional drain. Unlike the England vs. France match the previous weekend I had not taken the precaution of dosing myself with large quantities of Dorset bitter and Australian red before the first kick-off. Accordingly I lasted the full eighty-minutes-times-three without even the shortest nap and ended up tired, head-achey, depressed and fed up with TV.

Anyway, well done France and Ireland, but what do we do about England? Oddly today's Sunday Times (Jeremy Guscott) and the Sunday Telegraph (Paul Ackford) agree that Andy Robinson must stay on for next year’s World Cup, but that he must change his coaching staff - particularly for the backs. Guscott named eight or nine uncapped players with great potential who might be considered, although Robinson is not known as a risk-taker. Ackford picked his dream team from all the Six Nations teams and there wasn’t an Englishman in sight. The New Zealander Sean Fitzpatrick (in the Sunday Times) described England as “one of the dullest teams on the planet, not just in its style of play but when it comes to applying a bit of grey matter when it counts”. Stern stuff, but on reflection is it not so far from the truth? Let’s hope for better stuff next year.

Next weekend we’re off to Ireland to see if the Emerald Isle is still celebrating threefold – the Triple Crown, St Patrick’s Day and a hugely successful Cheltenham. I’ve no doubt that there will be plenty of smiling faces over there and maybe, just maybe the weather will warm up a bit.

Scientific Evidence

I don’t intend to cause my readers distresss when posting these blogs but just occasionally I cross someone’s nerve. An example was the day I mentioned a book called Red Herrings and White Elephants. I had been entertained by the author’s explanation of “freeze the balls off a brass monkey” (having to do apparently with brass trays to hold cannon balls on ships in the Napoleonic Wars). Now I didn’t mean to upset the metallurgists amongst my few readers (I didn’t realise that such people read blogs) but there ensued a chorus of “Balderdash” and “Piffle” and “How could you have be so stupid as to actually believe such patent nonsense!”. The metallurgists in refuting the explanation still couldn’t explain the derivation of “freeze the balls off a brass monkey” and nor, it seems, can anyone else.

Not to make the same mistake twice I have now acquired a new trivia book with undoubted pedigree for scientific accuracy – Does Anything Eat Wasps?* – a collection of questions and answers from the “Last Word” column in the New Scientist. Now I’m the last person to understand the physics of it all but I did enjoy the answers to the question whether or not you can safely drop a cat from any height and it will survive (because its terminal velocity is lower than the speed, etc., etc.). A survey has been carried out on injuries to cats who have fallen from varying heights and the conclusion is that if the cat falls from a building less than seven storeys high it should live; if the cat falls from a height in excess of seven storeys it should live; but if the cat falls from the seventh storey (no higher, no lower) it is statistically likely to perish. Falling onto concrete is not to be particularly recommended, and cats can survive falling from the 32nd floor of a building. (Sources: Papers published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medicine Association and Nature).

Since reading this piece (and laughing out loud at it) I have been getting some very strange looks from our ancient cat.

* Bears, frogs and fish (to name a few) eat wasps.

Waiting for Weight Loss

Okay, so I lost the script (for a couple of days).

Three weeks of dieting without any real progress (apart from my initial one-and-a-quarter stone loss) meant that drastic action was required and this took the form of Sunday lunch at the local.

Two pints of Palmers bitter instead of a starter, then the Roast Beef of Old England with all the trimmings – Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, carrots, cauliflower, parsnip, boiled potato, horseradish sauce and a bottle of Australian red wine.

Wonderful!

And then, by way of a finale, there was a generous helping of treacle tart and custard. It all makes you proud to be English as well as providing a suitable anaesthetic for the agony of the morning’s cricket (effectively losing the test match in Mohali) and then the afternoon’s rugby international in Paris. How content I was, snoring through England’s 31-6 thrashing by the French.

But now it’s back to work on the waistline.

It’s All in the Name (or Hanging Upside Down)

The annual Diagram Prize for the Oddest New Book Title has been awarded this year to the US publishers Red Wheel for People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Innocent Bystanders and What To Do About It by Gary Leon Hill. The title is so curious that the book has already achieved global sales of over 15,000 copies. Bit of a shame really as I had high hopes for a recent computer book published by Syngress Media and entitled Nessus, Snort, and Ethereal Power Tools which is a fine dissertation on aspects of Open Source security and obtainable (sometimes) through my illustrious organization. Fortunately however I didn’t have a bet on the Diagram Prize this year.

Talking about names it isn’t just the book title that can arouse curiosity. Sometimes the name of the author is enough to catch the eye of the casual browser. In recent weeks a book called The Traveller has been steadily climbing the mass market paperback charts. The hype is there – “International Bestseller – the new Da Vinci Code” – the publishers have given the book its own website www.traveler-book.com and so far it has reached number 17 in the mass market fiction charts. The author is John Twelve Hawks. Isn’t that brilliant? Why weren’t my children given memorable middle names like “Twenty-Eight” or “Sixty-Two”?

And talking about the Da Vinci Code I am getting great pleasure from reports of the plagiarism court case which is taking place in the High Court. My Mum has got around to reading Dan Brown’s bestseller and finds the plot badly constructed and the actual writing rather poor. She does come from a hard school of publishing however (Jonathan Cape in the company’s formative years). What fascinates me about the court case is the insight it gives into a best-selling author’s torment while writing.

Dan Brown started writing when he read a Sidney Sheldon thriller and thought “I can do better than that”. He claims that, like a musician, writing is something that must be practiced continuously and thus he writes seven-days-a-week. Physical fitness and stamina play a part (writing starts at 4.00am each day, and after each hour he does some press-ups and other exercises). On occasion he hangs upside-down using “suspension boots” to clear his brain or something. Maybe by hanging upside-down myself I’ll become a better blogger, but I’ll have to clear it with the wife first, otherwise I might experience difficulties reverting to the normal vertical standing position

London Book Fair

Like farmers coming to London for the annual Dairy Show, we booksellers make an annual pilgrimage to the London Book Fair which this year was held at the rather bleak new Excel centre in Docklands. The major publishers have impressive displays of their wares but, increasingly, this show is not for booksellers, but for the marketing of rights in books. Sure there were plenty of booksellers around and about (coaches had been organised to bring them in from the shires), but we're a dying breed as more and more book sales are channelled through Amazon and the supermarkets. Even Borders have announced awful trading figures in the UK and it is said that every bookshop in Britain has a "For Sale" sign outside.

And like a farmer up in town for a Dairy Show I tramped the acres of exhibits with mud still on my feet from an invigorating walk earlier in the day. All I was looking for was "novelty", new ideas which might bring fortune to my ailing business. There wasn't much to get excited about though. An Irish entrepreneur had brought along a smart vending machine for the top-selling paperbacks - the perfect twenty-four hour bookshop with low staffing overheads. An impressive stand from Cardoza - the "largest gaming and gambling publisher in the world" was doing business with instruction manuals on Texas Hold'em Poker tactics.


Google had an impressive display and were mounting a charm offensive to try and silence critics of their Google Book Search mission (where the Google searcher is actually searching every page of every book ever published). Whether or not their efforts will be rewarded is entirely up to the publishing community, but it is a brave initiative.

To cheer myself up I listened to a doomsday presentation given by Tim Renner, former CEO of Universal Music in Germany. His theme was "lessons booksellers and publishers can learn about the digitisation of content in the music industry", and lesson one was that an explosion in downloading of book content will certainly occur within the next eighteen months. Happily, if the music industry is anything to go by, the book publishing industry shouldn't lose more than half of their annual revenues and there will still be room for good, well-produced, physical books in the world after the book-equivalents of Napster and the iPod have taken their toll.

Ah well!

A Word about Uncles and Aunts

Now when I talk about my family there is a risk of my coming over all HMS Pinafore –

“I am the monarch of the sea,
The ruler of the Queen's Navee,
Whose praise Great Britain loudly chants.”

“And we are his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts!”

Okay so I have only the one sister, but throughout my near-on sixty years I have enjoyed the company and friendship of a splendid assortment of cousins, and some formidable aunts (and uncles, too). Sadly with the passing of Aunt Ruth last week (sometimes referred to as Great Aunt Chelmsford) my brothers and sister and I no longer have any aunts (or uncles) and one cannot but feel that some sort of intangible prop has been taken from our lives. Here are a few poorly phrased memories of some of those wonderful people.

My father was the youngest of six children – three girls, three boys. Of these one of his sisters (Freda) died young and his eldest brother, Leslie, went to New Zealand and I have no recollection of him. This left my Uncle John who was always regarded as the “senior member” of the family. He was a very successful businessman and impressed his nephew enormously with a taste for large, expensive cars (both British and American). In his later years we got to know him better and thoroughly approved his quick-witted incisiveness and the gourmet fare offered to his pet animals.

My Aunt Jane was closest in age to my Father and often surprised us by referring to Dad as “Timmy” – a pet nickname which only she ever used. Jane painted for a hobby and her “pheasants” were well known in the family. Then there was Auntie Dickie a marvellous personality who lived in an elegant flat in South Kensington surrounded by exquisite oriental antiques. Dickie was a constant and brave traveller, preferring to holiday in Skopje or Sarajevo than France or Spain. She would have been saddened by the death last month of the wrestler Jackie Pallo as she was occasionally to be found in the boxes of the Royal Albert Hall in the 1960s enjoying watching wrestling bouts with her friends.

My mother had two older sisters, both towering personalities. Mary (Great Aunt Haslemere or “Zia”) was the oldest and married Robert Lochner, the man credited with inventing Mulberry Harbour (in his bath). A sparkling personality with a keen sense of fun, Mary was elected a County Councillor for West Sussex, a post she held for many years, and was later made Deputy Lord Lieutenant of the county. My mother’s second sister Ruth, who died last week, was another commanding personality. The words that come to mind are “razor-sharp”, “hugely kind and generous”, “great sense of humour”. Bed-ridden for the last few years of her life, she was enormously brave and more than anything else “whole-hearted”. She will be sorely missed. They will all be sorely missed.