Weight Watching

“What does irascible mean?” asked the long-suffering wife yesterday evening. Twenty-four hours later I was able to give a fine example of irascibility – showing an evil streak of temper when at a quarter to eight there was no sign of any supper. Welcome to the world of diet! For the past nine days I have foregone bread and potatoes. More important I have foregone life’s essentials such as booze and crisps. I have eaten fruit and vegetables a-plenty and taken more exercise than usual. I’m half a stone lighter and pretty miserable about it all.

There are a number of side effects to the diet. I feel cold all the time and tired most of the time. My table manners have disappeared and whenever food is put in front of me I tend to wolf it down, somewhat like a large mongrel dog anxious to clean the plate quickly before another dog turns up to challenge for it.

Anyway the experts will say that I am doing it all wrong and that by cutting back so severely the régime will surely fail. However I am keeping up my intake of liquorice allsorts and I am trying to eat lots of things that are good for me. I actually quite like the Special K in the morning and have discovered thin rusk-things called Finn Crisp which are not unpleasant. Being hungry also makes one appreciate fruit and vegetables more, so maybe there is hope after all. By next week’s report I’m sure I’ll be back on the booze, but hopefully “in moderation” and proceeding towards the first of my targets (a measly sixteen-and-a-half stone) and the reward of a new laptop.

Holding my Manhood – In Cold Weather

Well, it is a poor photo of a ploughed field in Northern France. I took the photograph last Saturday during a cheerful but cold weekend visiting the frozen pipes at my dilapidated maison secondaire with the wife, and checking out an above-average turnout of wildlife (wild boar, deer, an owl and (strangely for France) an unshot pheasant). But before going on about ploughed fields in Northern France let me have a mini-rant about East Hampshire County Council or whichever local authority it was that spent over a quarter of a million quid last year on “renovating” the public loo in the middle of the main car park in Petersfield.

The old public convenience used to work fine but “improvements” had to be made. After all the council charges 70p per hour for the privilege of parking in the main car park and people who spend that sort of money deserve the most modern toilets with automatic lighting and (an innovation) a 20p charge for use of the Ladies. The work took months and months and months and temporary portaloos (honey-buckets to my American readers) were installed. Shortly before Christmas the result of all this disruption was unveiled – a public loo in the middle of a car park.

This morning I rumbled around the town doing my chores and with a chill wind blowing I suddenly felt an urgent need to have a piddle. Off to the new Gents to sort matters out - only to find the entire building surrounded by red tape (fittingly) and signs advising the public that the WCs were closed until further notice. Grrrr!

Now, let’s go back to the ploughed field in Northern France. There are an awful lot of ploughed fields in Northern France and many come with buckets of history attached to them. But to an Englishman this one is something special. Back on 25^th October 1415 it wasn’t as cold as it was on Saturday, but it was then a ploughed field apparently very muddy following lots of rain. There were rather more people about on that day. The photo is taken from just behind the position of the French line of battle at Agincourt. Facing the French were Henry V’s dysentery-ridden English and Welsh longbowmen (5,000) and fairly knackered foot soldiers and knights in armour (900). The exact size of Charles VI’s army will never be known, but it was probably around 30,000. In any event it was the sheer size of the French army which prevented manoeuvrability and contributed to the defeat, although the longbow undoubtedly won the day (up to 15,000 arrows airborne at any time – phew!).

Earlier in the day I had read several chapters of Juliet Barker’s excellent new account of the battle, Agincourt: The King, The Campaign, The Battle, and promptly drove off with the wife to revisit the battlefield and see the new tourist “centre” which has opened in Azincourt village. Oddly, despite being a beautiful, sunny afternoon (although very cold) and situated less than an hour’s drive from Calais, we were the only visitors to the “centre”, and certainly no-one else was remotely interested in the bleak old battlefield ringing in the imagination though it may be with the voices of Olivier and Branagh:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England, now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon St Crispin’s day.

More Good Intentions

Oddly unrelated events, occurrences, or whatever in the past week or so have all contributed to the formation of a new master plan for 2006:

The house has gone quiet. The daughter has moved into her new house in Portsmouth and I no longer have her tempting me down to the pub of an evening, nor is her boyfriend frying up calorific breakfasts. The only permanent residents are the cat, the wife, four bantams from next door (who seem to think that they own the place) and me.

The party season has come to an end. Christmas and New Year festivities are distant memories since during January we have celebrated birthdays of the wife, the daughter and the son. Following an excellent lunch on Friday (where a friend had me comparing the virtues of Italian and Portuguese wines for several happy hours) my diary has become alarmingly free of social, bibulous engagements.

At a rather gloomy meeting last week with a financial advisor I had to admit my real weight.

The (extremely good) blog of one of one of my ex-employees has disappeared. When I asked her why I could not find the site any more she told me that it had “gone private”. She is a singer with a band (in her spare time) and has had to close the blog to casual readers as she kept upsetting other band members with her views regarding their talents, looks, behaviour, etc, etc. Now to me a “subscribers only” blog isn’t a blog anymore. The fun of the thing is that you never quite know who is reading your words.

I’ve been displaying signs of lack of fitness (much tiredness), and have been just a little too serious about my evening gin and tonic, and (shared) bottle of wine, and visit to the pub if the daughter is around.

I’d really like a new laptop. I’d also like to go skiing again. And I should really replace my car(s) with something more economical and sensible (and fun).

So as you have guessed I put all that information into a pot, stirred and simmered it, and out come a diet and self-improvement programme based on targets and motivated by being an absolutely public diet with weight losses and gains over the next few weeks published on this blog.

The starting weight (gulp) is seventeen-and-a-half stone (about the equivalent to two double decker buses)and the target weight is two stone less by Easter. Yes, I’ll be fifteen-and-a-half stone and no longer “mortally obese”, just “seriously obese” on Easter Sunday.

The reward system works as follows. When I reach my first target of sixteen-and-a-half-stone I can buy myself an inexpensive new laptop. My second target is the ‘late booking bargain’ skiing holiday and that gets awarded when I dip under sixteen stone (the sooner the better before the snow disappears). The final target of fifteen-and-a half-stone will be rewarded with a change of car – just before the new round of MOTs, insurance renewals and tax discs start again in May.

Financing the scheme will of course be simple. My renewed energy will mean that I’ll work harder and earn more money. Just in case that doesn’t work I have a foolproof plan told me by a friend from Seattle – simply bet everything I own on the Seattle Seahawks winning Superbowl in Detroit on February 5^th. With the price at 6-4 I think I may have the inexpensive new laptop covered.

And remember the results of the Ranting Nappa Diet will be charted publicly in this blog starting next week (by which time I’ll be able to see if a few nights of French food will help or hinder progress). I started yesterday and for those who are interested in the formula it is simply eat and drink less, exercise more. To kick-start matters I have temporarily renounced alcohol (and that includes gin), bread, potatoes and cheesey snacks (including nuts, crisps, Cheeselets, and Twiglets). My luxury (allowed) food is the odd liquorice allsort as they have a sort of F-Plan effect on me.

Book Review

I’ve finished (and enjoyed) Henning Mankell’s The Man Who Smiled. Dour Swedish police detective Kurt Wallandar shares striking similarities with Ian Rankin’s Rebus (drink problem, daughter, etc*.). Both writers have a keen sense of “place” and, to help us Brits understand what goes where in Sweden every Mankell book I have ever read seems to come with a map (in this case two). In the same way as tourists can now go an Inspector Rebus trail through Edinburgh (long pause at the “Ox” public house before St Leonard’s Police Station, etc.), so I’m sure you can now visit Wallandar’s Ystad. But while Rankin is pure Edinburgh, Mankell is a Swede who devotes a lot of his time to Africa, and this comes through in his books. They are very precisely written and the translations are always excellent. Recommended.

*No, this blog does not invite “comments”.

Lippy “In-Laws”

And so the sister is at last off on her honeymoon – six months and more after her wedding. She and the new brother-in-law have chosen to visit Australia but on the way have planned some rest and relaxation in Thailand. Lucky things.

Now the younger brother is something of an expert on Thailand and the numerous pleasures that can be purchased there. He has visited several times and always admits to feeling much better for the experience. He was keen to offer guidance (and some rather dubious names and addresses) to our new brother-in-law who declined the information and I understand that the conversation ended with the brother declaring “I’m sure that when I go to Thailand, I have a much more pleasurable time than you”, to which the brother-in-law quipped back “Maybe, but I don’t have to pay for the pleasure!”.

That aside I’m a little bewildered by the timing of the holiday. I mean the sister goes all the way to Australia and misses out completely on the Australian Open tennis at Melbourne. I’m sure that if England’s cricketers had been playing a Test series in Australia around this time, then the brother-in-law would have contrived to be in the right place at the right time.

Back in West Sussex it is the daughter’s birthday. She and her gentleman have finally ceased to be lodgers in our house having acquired a new property in Portsmouth and we have invited her round for a celebratory meal. The sister-in-law is also present and by way of pre-dinner entertainment the wife decides to check all of our blood pressures with her electronic machine. Now if there is one thing I am pretty good at it is blood pressure and when my turn comes I, of course, produce an exemplary reading. Congratulations are heaped on me by wife and daughter. After a lengthy pause the sister-in-law adds her comment “Of course your blood pressure is good. You never move. You’re just like a big sloth”.

Sunday Papers

A dull old Sunday. A day to skim through the papers and enjoy some finely written journalism, to pick up ideas (might Condoleeza Rice one day be President of the US?), and to educate myself in matters large and small.

I’m fed up with teasing articles about David Cameron and the word “wooding” (there shouldn’t be words in the English language that the Ranting Nappa cannot define). Thank heavens for the online Urban Dictionary which is the only place to offer a simple but badly punctuated definition: ‘To do a male or female up the anul – im bored of normal sex, I might do wooding to Jane tonight’. All very easy-to-follow but careful, my Mum is reading this blog. Anyway David Cameron is married to Samantha, not Jane.

A sensible piece by John Simpson in the Sunday Telegraph draws attention to the restrictions which the new Terrorism Bill will place on journalists (I thought we had a government that believed in the freedom of the press). But then there are examples of stupid, deceitful, manipulative journalism such as the fake arab sheikh (a News of the World reporter) who lured poor Sven-Goran Eriksson to the Burj-al-Arab hotel in Dubai in order to prise out some indiscretions. Also the Sun reporter who infiltrated Sandhurst to show the laxness of security protecting our royal princes (bless them). As a result of the journalist’s enterprise the Head of Sandhurst was all but fired (saved from John Reid’s wrath only by the intervention of Prince Charles).

I cannot but hide a smirk when I read about Waterstone’s poor Christmas trading results. Isn’t it obvious that giving away bestsellers at half price leads to margin reduction. Fine, blame it all on Tesco and Asda, but the supermarkets make their profits out of groceries, not books. They can afford to loss-lead on minority items like books and DVDs, traditional booksellers cannot. Amazon (the other target-for-blame) made huge losses for years while they built up market share and now, cleverly, rely on third-party traders like myself to provide a profitable and growing revenue stream.

And then there is poor Manchester United, poor hardly-done-by Cristiano Ronaldo, poor (foul-mouthed) Wayne Rooney and (most-of-all) poor Sir Alex Ferguson and his even fouler mouth…. so hardly done by. My heart bleeds.

Scottish Politicians, Back-Stabbing and Patriotism

It is somehow odd this weekend that the Fabian Society New Year conference has heard Gordon Brown demanding a “British Day”. I probably agree with him (so long as it doesn’t interfere with Armistice Day) and when I agree with Gordon Brown there’s definitely something wrong somewhere.

Listening to Gordon Brown one cannot but wonder why British politics is dominated by the Scots? They have their own strange National Assembly or Parliament which has extremely palatial premises in Edinburgh, yet Scottish politicians come down South in their droves to bicker and back-stab for high office at Westminster.

In the same way as Fettes-educated Blair is being “terminated” by Gordon Brown, so Charles Kennedy has fallen to the plotting of Sir “Ming” Campbell, if you don’t count the influence of Scotch whisky. It makes one concerned for the future of the yet-to-be-proven David Cameron? He sounds like a Scot and has the Glaswegian Dr Liam Fox (Shadow Defence Secretary) right there ready to stab him in the back. But is Cameron a true Scot? Oddly, and despite his name, he seems to be much more of a true Englishman with just a smattering of cosmopolitan outside blood.

There are few references in David Cameron’s biography to Scottish influences although it is interesting to note that he is a fifth cousin, twice removed to HM Queen Elizabeth II (bless her). Certainly he is related to the Marquess of Montrose, but also to the Earls of Denbigh and Carnavon. He is even a descendent of Frederick V, Elector of Palatine. His wife is (comfortingly) a decendent of both Charles II and Francesco I de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.

Dr Fox apart, Scottish back-stabbers in the Conservative Party could come in the form of the extraordinarily named Thomas Galloway Dunlop du Roy de Blicquy Galbraith, 2nd Baron Strathclyde, PC who leads the Tories in the House of Lords, or David Mundell, MP for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale & Tweeddale and Secretary of State for Scotland.

I suppose that, in the final analysis, the rampant Scots politicians do make today's House of Commons a more interesting place. John Major tried to entertain with his Edwina Currie fling, and Winston Churchill knew how to down a glass or two of brandy, but for pure, venomous skullduggery the Scots know how it is done.

This blog would be a poor one if it didn’t, however make mention of the Scottish MP who is most in the news this weekend, Dundonian George Galloway who is criticised for appearing on Celebrity Big Brother. Okay so he now represents Bethnal Green as a “Respect” member, but he will be more remembered as Member for Glasgow Hillhead (also associated with Tam Dalyell who beat Vincent Cable of Liberal Democrat fame in the 1970 election, the late Roy Jenkins who held the seat in the eighties, and Lord Strathclyde’s grandfather who held the seat in the fifties). It was when MP for Glasgow Hillhead that Galloway was challenged about expenses claimed on a War on Want conference in Mykonos, Greece. His ambiguous answer included the following statement: “I travelled to and spent lots of time with people in Greece, many of whom were women, some of whom were known carnally to me. I actually had sexual intercourse with some of the people in Greece”.

Freezing Balls

Just before Christmas I spotted a curious book in a friend’s house called Red Herrings and White Elephants by Albert Jack. Rather like the Guardian’s long-running Notes & Queries feature, it endeavours to explain the derivations of all sorts of commonly used expressions. For example bold as brass, cock and bull, currying favour and acid test.

I now have my own copy (courtesy of Santa Claus) and was pleasantly surprised by the number of expressions which have nautical derivations. Some are fairly obvious – three sheets to the wind, pass with flying colours and cut and run for example. Others are a little more obscure – to have someone over a barrel derives from the Middle Ages custom of draping someone who has drowned (or partly drowned) over a barrel in order to clear their lungs (or not); you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours is taken from the tradition of sailors having to flog their mates for wrongdoings; to flog a dead horse from the Horse Latitudes 30 degrees either side of the Equator (the lack of wind in those parts tended to stall the progress of the ship much to the delight of the crew, most of whom were paid by the day).

But the one that caught my eye particularly was freeze the balls off a brass monkey. The “brass monkey” being a tray made in brass and with indentations to hold cannon balls at on an 18^th century ship’s deck (brass being non-corrosive). The cannon balls would usually form the base of a pyramid; however the metallurgists among my readers will know that brass freezes more quickly than iron and will thus contract causing, in chilly weather, the balls to come off the “monkey” and clatter around the deck.

Profit of Doom

An email this morning from a large US book distributor alerted me to a timely new book called Jerusalem Countdown which will be released in the States in the next few days.

"We are on a countdown to crisis. The coming nuclear showdown with Iran is a certainty. The battle for Jerusalem has already begun. That war will affect every nation on Earth, including America, and will affect every person on Planet Earth." – So writes the author John Hagee, and sure enough on today’s BBC News there is a story about Iran breaking the international seals on a nuclear facility for “research” purposes.

Slightly perturbed by someone who out-rants me so emphatically, I find the subject-matter of the book too overwhelming to even contemplate. So I happily sidetrack the main issue by asking myself who is “best-selling author” John Hagee and where does he come from? Well, he’s the Pastor of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. This is a modest 5,000-seater of a place of worship and scores one star out of five in the ratings of charitable ministries in the US (five stars being more acceptable). Pastor Hagee also runs a non-profit-making television arm, Global Evangelism Television, which has a 50,000-square-foot multimedia studio broadcasting to 127 television stations and 82 radio stations across America.

It is fair to say that Pastor Hagee’s very high earnings (much higher than Billy Graham) have been questioned in the past. But he has answered his critics saying that as he works "80 hours a week" writing books, singing songs, meeting international dignitaries and answering the call to preach the word of God, "I deserve every dime I'm getting".

As well as the dimes Pastor Hagee gets the pension. Contributions are made to a retirement package for highly paid executives which the IRS calls a "rabbi trust”. The John Hagee Rabbi Trust includes a $2.1 million 7,969-acre ranch outside Brackettville, with five lodges, including a "main lodge" and a gun locker. It also includes a manager's house, a smokehouse, a skeet range and three barns.

Perhaps I should consider Evangelism as a future direction. I could rant from my pulpit, write the odd thought-provoking book, draw a fine remuneration, and retire to my skeet range to avoid the nuclear fallout.

Interesting and Curious Numbers

Here are a few which have recently caught my eye (each one worthy of a blog on its own):

0 – The number of goals scored in the most recent Arsenal – Manchester United match (also the number of winners of the EuroMillions jackpot in the past few weeks).

15 – The number of years it has taken Hilary Spurling to complete her two-volume biography of Matisse (short-listed for the 2006 Whitbread Book of the Year Award).

34 – The percentage of the UK Christmas retail market for leisure gifts and electrical items attributed to “online” sales (mostly Amazon). While Dixons and other High Street retailers continue to lose market share to online vendors there is an exceptional electronic product that doesn’t fare so well on Amazon – plasma TV screens.

62 – The number of wretched Liberal Democrat MPs wasting their time and the taxpayers money at Westminster.

90 – It was in the ninetieth minute that Leicester knocked Tottenham Hotspurs out of the FA Cup (on the same day that Nigel Clough’s wonderful, spirited Burton Albion team survived for over 90 minutes against Manchester United earning themselves a replay at Old Trafford).

6,500 – The number of Civil Servants currently employed by the ODPM (John Prescott’s Office of the Deputy Prime Minister).

20,930 – The number of blogs being posted each hour to one of the larger blog-sites (not this one).

76,144,000,000 – NHS expenditure budget (in pounds) 2005/2006.

1,130,000,000,000 – Current estimated level of consumer debt (in pounds) in the UK.

2006 Review of Books

As I finish books in 2006 (however dull, bad, cheap, pornographic, literary, highbrow, lowbrow) I’ll try and write a few lines of appreciation – or not.

Back Hander by John Francome (Headine £6.99)
Two out of ten! I’ve enjoyed all Dick Francis’s horse-racing thrillers and picked this up to see how well Francome compares (after all there are some 15 Francome books in print and many are described as bestsellers). The book is fairly well plotted but somehow it is neither well written, nor successfully edited.

There used to be rumours about Dick Francis and his writing. It was said that his wife was the clever one who crafted the fast-flowing narratives from Dick’s ideas and first drafts. But it was only ever rumour. Although the covers proudly proclaim Francome as sole author of the Back Hander, the copyright page tells a slightly different story – Copyright © 2004 John Francome and Mike Bailey. So who is this Mike Bailey, not a ghostwriter surely? If so, he's not a master of his craft. Whatever the answer the book took me an age (and considerable determination) to finish and I’m not rushing out to buy other Francome thrillers.

Lyme Regis - A Fowles Place

It was the wife’s birthday on Friday and we celebrated by spending a couple of nights in a very pleasant Dorset hotel in Beaminster (Emminster to those of my readers who only know Dorset through Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles). After breakfast on Saturday morning we went for a drive and our first stop was Lyme Regis (pictured above), a town we had visited at least twice before - as has almost everyone else – but on neither occasion had we liked the place very much.

Lyme Regis fair fizzes with literary history. Macaulay described it as “a small knot of narrow alleys lying on a coast wild, rocky and beaten by a stormy sea”. Jane Austen is credited as having composed Persuasion there (whatever “composed” means) and wrote of “the principal street almost hurrying into the water”. Beatrix Potter wrote and drew some of Little Pig Robinson when staying in Lyme Regis; Henry Fielding got into an amorous scrape with a merchant’s daughter here and, of course, the town is associated in recent decades with the book and film of The French Lieutenant’s Woman and its writer John Fowles who spent most of his life there.

It should be a wonderful corner of England, alive with its past and present, but somehow everyone in the town seems to be pretty miserable. The Italian restaurant bids its customers a Happy Christmas and promises to re-open at the end of March. The Lyme Regis Woolworths seems to be trading alright but no-one within is smiling; one of the two bookshops is trying vainly to sell an original French Lieutenant’s Woman film poster for £125, the other has an interesting book about Lieutenant John Lapenotiere and the schooner HMS Pickle (Lapenotiere was the man who brought news of the great victory at Trafalgar – and Nelson’s death – from Falmouth to London) but at £15 for a slender volume it seemed too much for my post-Christmas pocket and, being an avaricious bookseller myself, I should be able to find a copy cheaper.

Co-incidentally the weekend papers include reviews of John Fowles: The Journals, Volume 2. D J Taylor writing in the Sunday Times describes Fowles as a whinger on a heroic scale (totally surpassing any ranting you may find in this particular blog). Fowles seems not to have a kind word for anyone or anything. Amongst those who come in for grumpy condemnation are Michael Caine and Twiggy, all reviewers, his local pub, Salman Rushdie and A.N. Wilson, his publishers and Raquel Welch. Taylor concludes that the main reason for Fowles’ inner malaise can be identified as being the dreadful effect of a man having too little to do and too much time to do it.

No chance of this blog-writer being caught out in that way, methinks.

Time to Importune Someone

The Daily Telegraph crossword clue ran as follows: “Persistently demanding various permutation (11)”. Now the younger brother would simply snort that Telegraph crosswords are too damned easy and if you cannot figure out the answer (importunate) in less than ten seconds you must be really stupid.

The trouble is that “importunate” is not one of the words I have used in the past twelve months, not in conversation, not in my blog-writing, nor anywhere else. If someone had told me yesterday to “stop being so importunate…” I’m not sure if I would have treated the remark as an insult or a compliment. I hereby resolve to make “importunate” one of my words of 2006.

Obviously the word means persistently demanding, and when I come to think about it I have read William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise:

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice that my murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.

A little google-tapping reveals a splendid painting by William Holman Hunt called “The Importunate Neighbour” (1895 and property of National Gallery of Victoria) showing the said neighbour beating endlessly on a door. There is also a nice quote in one dictionary definition ‘the appealing and frightened look worn by an injured dog; she holds out her hand for money, importunate, insistent; a pleading note in her voice’.

I’m sure that I can tell the credit control departments of one or two of my suppliers to “stop being so importunate…”. Inland Revenue might also get hit with the word. But I’ll be careful using the word around members of my family. They may have read this blog and know what the word means.

Sudden Prayers Make God Jump*

I have to admit (rather shamefully) that I did not go to church over Christmas, or since. The intention was half there on Christmas Eve but, filled with a superb beef casserole, preceded by a gin and tonic (or two), accompanied by a decent red wine (or two), and followed by a pint (or two) of Palmers Bitter at the local pub, I reckoned that I would probably present a less-than-dignified version of myself – both at the 11.30pm Carol Service and at the ensuing 8.00am BCP communion service on Christmas morning. By the time that the morning Eucharist was underway at 10.30am, so was my breakfast, and that was really my last chance.

Full of remorse I have determined to surprise the Rector in 2006. In a similar vein to my already declared intention to blog more, so shall I pray more. I’ll pray for my family, for world peace, for personal success and well-being, and (to the discomfort of the republican-minded Rector) for the Royal Family, and our proud nation. I’ll also be more patriotic and treasure the Nelson plate given to me for Christmas by my mother, and I’ll look forward to the 2006 Last Night of the Proms, as well as England beating the Pakistanis in next summer’s Test series. The last item will probably feature in my prayers repeatedly, but I won’t hold it against anyone if Messrs. Mohammad Yousuf, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Shoaib Akhtar and their team-mates produce some rather sublime cricket.

*My friend the Ayatollah (once spiritual leader of millions of book club members when he headed up BCA’s Literary Guild) drew my attention to the rather nice line “Sudden Prayers Make God Jump”. It makes a good bumper sticker, a poster, and in 2002 an album released by Jonesy.

One More Resolution

Keeping half an eye on the New Years Day daytime movie (Gone With the Wind) I saw a shot of a sundial inscribed as follows:

DO NOT SQUANDER TIME …THAT IS THE STUFF LIFE IS MADE OF

It sounds great and I have already adopted it as my motto for the year. However I'm not quite certain as to what it means or implies. Less sleeping maybe; less time spent on Sudoku puzzles (oops, I vowed never to blog about them again); less time eating and drinking, or in the pub?

Nah! It means using time to better effect. See more of my friends and family, but not too much more; sleep more deeply; do Sudoku puzzles faster; take food and drink more seriously; and if I've finished work early, then scarper off promptly and make the pub by opening time.

2006 and All That...

The French take New Year’s Eve very seriously. The food shops do a roaring business, especially the patisseries which offload huge quantities of creamy, chocolate log things with gold crowns on top. Surprisingly however French TV on New Year’s Eve is as awful as ours with can-can dancers and people in fancy dress. Bah, humbug!

BBC Prime (the general entertainment English language channel piped down the French satellite system) had a fairly good idea nonetheless. They replayed the very rousing 2005 Last Night of the Proms which kept the wife and I awake through both French and English (one hour later) New Years. The only difficulty was that the wife (reinforced by quantities of cherry brandy) tried vainly to out-sing the BBC chorus. Those of my readers who have heard the wife sing will know that her voice is one to bring the house down (literally).

And so to my resolutions for 2006:

First I intend to blog more frequently. My outpourings have been a little sporadic in recent months, so I am setting myself a target of 100 in the year. Not unreasonable when you think that some bloggers to do it three times a day (careful now, this could get silly).

Secondly I must reduce my waistline. Santa Claus has given me a rather odd contraption that you grip in both hands while digital figures (rather like a blood pressure machine) whirr away. After 60 seconds I have to hand the contraption to the daughter’s boyfriend who is the only member of our household smart enough to follow the instructions. He then adds in my height, my weight (yes, I lied), and after some careful analysis of the figures declares that I’m “obese”. Oddly almost everyone who has ever tried this thing gets the same answer, but I am going to pack the contraption away, eat less, drink less and take some exercise. Then in a few months I’ll try it again and see if I can achieve something less than “obese”.

Thirdly I want to do less work and, by doing so, make more money. It has often occurred to me that the harder I work the more money I seem to lose. So a more relaxed approach to 2006 should find me measurably better off. A round of golf, anyone?

Living with the Weather

In principle at least it was a good idea. We could get away from all the fun of the post-Christmas sales and have a few days of peace and quiet in France. Roaring log fires, a book or two, warmth and creature comforts including a bottle or two of wine, and a glass or two of port to accompany the remains of the Christmas stilton; even an invigorating cycle ride to the boulanger to collect the obligatory baguette each morning. Happiness!

At the cold and snowy Eurotunnel terminus on Thursday afternoon we realized that quite a number of people had the same sort of idea, and there was a delay while the inevitable backlog was cleared and cars with the letter “H” were allowed to embark.

There didn’t seem to be so much snow around when we eventually arrived in France, but as we neared our village we found that there was in fact sufficient snow and ice to make the surrounding hills (and the driveway to our “maison secondaire”) quite treacherous.

No matter we arrived safely. The house was still standing but quite chilly in the sub-zero temperatures. More so in that, during our four or five week’s absence the house had run out of central heating oil. The wife (particularly with her Scottish blood) and I are made of stern stuff and we knew that this presented only a small problem. You don’t have to have baths brimming with hot water, and steaming radiators in order to survive, and anyway we were able to negotiate a delivery of oil for the following morning.

Friday morning dawned with a furious red sky, enough to have the wife clamber out of bed to inspect it and say that she had never seen such a thing. Sure enough, we were in for quite a day of meteorological surprises. But first (and happily) the oil man arrived with a thousand litres of fioul. “Une heure” he told us to wait before we could restart the boiler. During that hour-long wait the wind started to howl and snow gusted down; I couldn’t get the laptop to work and we seemed to be losing TV reception because of the extreme conditions. Then, with ten minutes to go before restarting the boiler, we had a total power cut. So no heat (apart from one gas fire and one log fire), not enough natural daylight to read by, no hot water, and snow beginning to drift in our driveway. We had a torch or two, candles and plenty of food and drink, sufficient logs to last a few days before we started to burn the furniture, and the car didn’t look a good bet at all.

Three hours later we had electricity back and, after some anxious moments, a working boiler and a return (inside the house) to near normality. Soon afterwards the snow changed to rain, the main effect of which was to turn the graveled area outside our house into a skating rink. Last night enough rain poured down to melt most of the remaining snow and ice and we look forward to finding the area beset by flooding in the near future.

However as I sit typing away on a now-functioning laptop in a warm house, with the sun unexpectedly streaming through the window, it gives me a moment to reflect on the whimsical way our weather system works and, generally, how poorly equipped we are to deal with real periods of extreme weather. Certainly we had logs and candles, working gas cylinders and a good torch. But batteries run down (as do gas cylinders and food supplies). We had taken the precaution of bringing the car battery charger from England, but that is not much use if you have no mains electricity. I think I’ll review our stocks of logs, food and batteries, and maybe I’ll buy a generator on E-Bay which I’ll tow around behind my car wherever I go.

Temperance or Temperate?

It was Saturday; it was cold, but the sun shone brightly and nowhere more than at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. The wife and I were on a pre-Christmas outing with friends who were sensible enough to insist that we had a look at Dale Chihuly's extraordinary glass sculptures. There must be more than a thousand of them and they pervade every corner of the gardens and greenhouses, bringing great swathes of colour and brilliance to complement rather than detract from extraordinary plants and stunning architecture. Although the Chihuly exhibits have been in place since May, there is a Christmas feel to them with cascades of colourful glass balloons in the Temperate House, and an extraordinary "Sun" in the Princess of Wales Conservatory. I urge my readers to have a look before the exhibits are all removed in mid-January.


Chihuly is a prolific artist. Exhibitions of his glasswork fan out around the world from his home workshops in Seattle and Tacoma. Currently he is exhibiting at Kew and simultaneously (in similar vein) at the Fairchild Botanic Gardens, Coral Gables, Florida. There are further showings of his work right now in galleries in Toronto, Boca Raton, Bellevue, Orlando Florida, and Kalamazoo Michigan. His 2006 schedule includes more Botanic Gardens (in Missouri) and more galleries all over the USA. He is piratical in appearance (he lost an eye in a road accident when driving in the UK to visit the artist Peter Blake) and wears a black eyepatch.

But back in Kew it is not only the plants and glass sculpture that evoke Christmas. A temporary ice rink is in place and, viewed from the gallery of the Temperate House you catch a glimpse of Lowry-esque matchstick figures on skates.


And, particularly memorable, is the Thames skiff overflowing with a profusion of coloured glass, yet almost concealed from view in a quiet corner of the Palm House pond.


The only difficulty in an otherwise perfect day was that the Ranting Nappa had appointed himself "Nominated Driver" for the journey back to the distant South. Dinner isn't quite the same on a Saturday night when is behaving oneself from a temperance point-of-view. Still, next time I'll pilot a Thames skiff instead of driving a car!

Secondary Retailing; Ant and Dec

Okay, second things first. The Daily Telegraph really has taken over from The Times as the bastion of crusty-establishment Olde England. In keeping with their interest in all matters Tory the paper lauded Carol Thatcher on her victory on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here show. The Telegraph report by James Burleigh and Hugh Davies (it takes two to write up a world event of this magnitude) included the following piece of impenetrable journalistic pomposity:

“Speaking afterwards to the programme’s presenters, Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, Thatcher described her ordeal ….”

I’m surprised that they didn’t refer to the presenters as Mister Anthony McPartlin and Mister Declan Donnelly.

It is interesting to hear that manufacturers are getting extremely uppity about secondary retailing (where one shopkeeper buys off another, rather than following his regular lines of supply). A recent survey has shown that nearly forty per cent of small traders buy part of their stock from supermarkets rather than the more traditional cash-and-carry outlets. At the insistence of their suppliers the supermarkets are promising to try and stop serving secondary retailers such as these.

But why, oh why, for Heaven’s sake? I, like most booksellers, have purchased multiple copies of Harry Potter books from Asda at their loss-leading prices in the past. I’ve then sold them on at a better margin than I would have if I had bought them from a wholesaler. Why not? It’s straightforward trading. If Sainsbury sell bottles of Baileys for four pounds below the cash-and-carry price, then good luck to them. But why should they have to refuse to sell them to the owner of the corner shop who can then sell them to the public at a more competitive price.

If manufacturers really want a Great Britain where the public are encouraged to purchase their goods exclusively from the four or five major supermarket chains, then fine. I’m off. Surely there must be some law to stop restrictive practices and discrimination in retailing. I can understand a sign in a supermarket saying “SPECIAL TODAY - 50% OFF - LIMITED TO ONE PER CUSTOMER ONLY”. But for trade associations to go and actively seek legislation to outlaw secondary retailing? Bah, humbug!

South Coast Pantomime Season

I have to agree with the BBCs Alan Hansen that “Pantomime season has started and there's none better than down on the South Coast”. With a cast of characters that includes Harry Redknapp, Dave “Harry” Bassett and Dennis Wise (playing Buttons), the Portsmouth-Southampton managership fiasco is as good as any TV soap opera ever gets.

We have Milan Mandaric and Rupert Lowe playing the Ugly Sisters (Mandaric’s gargoyle-like facial features require no additional make-up at all). There are also no less than two Cinderellas in Sir Clive Woodward (who better to bring a breath of fresh air to Southampton?) and Lawrie Sanchez (surely the obvious choice to manage poor old Portsmouth). Another of my favourite managers – Neil Warnock of Sheffield United – has already played his cameo role and returned home (what a sensible man).

Quite how Harry Redknapp got himself into such a muddle defies belief; and involving two clubs whose hatred of one another makes Arsenal-Spurs and Norwich-Ipswich rivalries look like mild spats amongst friends. Not even Liverpool-Everton, or the two Manchesters, or the two Sheffields can match the pure, passionate detestation that these teams feel for each other.

My guess is that by this time next year Mr Redknapp will be managing some team far, far away from the South Coast. Portsmouth will be relegated from the Premiership and will be scrapping with Southampton in the Championship relegation zone.

Pity the players! Pity the fans!

Blog 101 – Big Brother is Watching

You never know who is reading ones blog output, but receiving emails to mark the one hundredth (see passim) means that there are people out there in the ether keeping an eye on events. And so onwards to the one hundred and first in the series. 101 is of course the first three figure number to be palindromic. England beat Australia in a one-day international at Edgbaston by 101 runs in June 1977 (J.K.Lever four wickets for 29 runs as the Australians slumped to 70 all out; not out batsman J.K.Lever 27). How we enjoyed that day!

Although I’ve watched the TV programme Room 101 on many occasions, the derivation of “Room 101” has eluded me. Had you asked me thirty or forty years ago I would have pinned it down instantly, but it has somehow fogged over in the mists of time. Disgraceful, really, for a person who has spent his life in bookselling and publishing, and who played a role in marketing at Penguin Books in the mid-eighties.

What better use of my one hundredth and first blog to put my mind straight and to recall Chapter 5 of George Orwell’s 1984:

'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.'

The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O'Brien was standing Winston could not see what the thing was.

Oh, rats, I’ve probably contravened every law of copyright in not asking the Orwell estate for permission to copy that. George Orwell in turn apparently got the notion for Room 101 from a conference room at Broadcasting House in which he sat through interminably boring meetings when he worked there in the early 1940s.

For the more scientific of my readers I would point out atomic number 101 - a radioactive transuranic element synthesized by bombarding einsteinium with alpha particles (seriously). The 101ers were a pub rock band in the 1970s (notable for giving Joe Strummer – later of The Clash – his first signing). The 101^st Airborne Division of the US Air Force (the Screaming Eagles) is currently serving in Iraq. At the time of the Normandy landings we could have done without the Schwere SS-Panzer-Abteilung 101 – the crack SS-Waffen armoured unit, and so on, and so on.

Premium Numbers

Of course no-one will admit responsibility but some outlandish charges have been showing up on our phone bill - charges for calls to “premium numbers” for TV programmes. Now, being a belligerent old curmudgeon, I don’t “do” premium numbers, not even the ones that connect you to charming young ladies for a bit of chat on suitably saucy subjects. The wife doesn’t “do” them either, nor the daughter nor her boyfriend, nor even the cat. So who and why?

Yesterday evening was a typical Saturday night for TV addicts like ourselves. An hour of Strictly Ballroom during which neither the wife or I had enough interest to phone our support for Darren Gough, or Colin Jackson, or anyone else. Had the daughter been in the house, she might have sent a surreptitious text message vote for “Goughy” via her own mobile, but she and her boyfriend were safely aboard a USA-bound flight to catch a little pre-Christmas skiing.

After Strictly Ballroom there was The X Factor. Now I was as pleased as the next man that the wonderful Brenda made it through to the next round, but I didn’t vote for her. The wife assures me that Journey South will win it, and she is sufficiently certain about it that she assures me there is no need to vote. Over two million people apparently did vote however.

The came I’m a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here. This was notable for Carol Thatcher’s effortless handling of snakes, rats and spiders, as much as for her nonchalant farting (I wonder if her mother released wind during her meetings with the French President?). But we weren’t going to phone support for Carol or anyone else. There was a dodgy moment when we lay in bed half watching the I’m a Celebrity Live follow-up programme which mostly consists of fly-on-the-wall camera shots of goings on in the camp. At the foot of the screen a phone-in “guess-the-number” game plays continuously and, alarmingly, the wife quickly worked out the correct answer. Even then she showed admirable restraint and left the phone alone.

Maybe we should have gone to France for the weekend to avoid all this phone-in nonsense. We would have been just in time for the French “Téléfon” charity appeal.

Footnote: For those readers who are interested this is the Ranting Nappa's one hundredth blog. They don't get any better do they?