Feeding the Addiction

Just as I start panicking when reserve supplies of Tabasco sauce in the kitchen cupboard are down to one bottle, so I get nervous if I haven’t added to my small pile of unread second-hand books in more than a few days. Which is a roundabout way of saying I can feel a trawl coming on. I always try to keep an open mind when looking in second-hand book shops. That way, the books find me, and not vice-versa. I always pull out volumes whose titles aren’t on the spine or cover. Most of the time they disappoint, but just occasionally they pleasantly surprise. The test I apply, if a book is within my price range, is to ask myself if I will regret not buying it when I get home. Sometimes I say no, and kick myself later. The only thing then is to go back a.s.a.p. and hope it’s still there…

Theory and Practice

I’ve read quite a few books by former cricketers over the years, some good, some not so good, but this one from 2003 is far and away the best I've come across:

It’s the intelligent former England captain’s dry and often self-deprecating sense of humour that makes this such a good read. The day before England's group game against Pakistan in Karachi in the 1996 World Cup, self-styled supremo Raymond Illingworth, fretting about the Pakistan spinners, called a team meeting and demanded of the largely jaded gathering, ‘Who can pick Mushie [Mushtaq Ahmed]?’:

Out of the silence a lone hand, belonging to Dermot Reeve, offered itself. Reeve went on to espouse his theories about sweeping and reverse sweeping Mushtaq. The next day Mushtaq bowled Reeve a googly; Reeve advanced down the wicket, aimed a huge drive through extra-cover and was comprehensively bowled through the gate.

[England duly lost]

In fact, now I’ve got it down from the shelf and reminded myself just how good it is, I’m going to have to read it right through once again.

Newman's Theory of Relativity

An old school friend from the early 1970s put a frightening thought into my head yesterday. We have been reminiscing about some of our old teachers who were veterans of the Second World War, and who included a couple of Majors and a Colonel as I recall, and he pointed out that more time had passed since we knew them than between the end of the war and then. The point being that aging is a bit like the inverse square law in reverse, or something (it’s late, and my brain’s a bit befuddled). In other words, as you get older, the past gets closer. So we all end up looking back fondly on a time before we were even born! Well, I do, anyway…

Gold from the Forties

'Fishing is the opposite of war.' So wrote George Orwell in Coming up for Air (1939). Apropos of this, I found this treasure, called My River, by Wilfred Gavin Brown, in a second-hand book shop the other day...

No dust jacket, but I love the kingfisher. Published in 1947, it’s a ramble by the riverside, the author finding escape from wartime London by resuming his childhood hobby of coarse fishing on the rivers and streams of Surrey. He recalls sitting on his favourite stretch one evening, watching a duck fly overhead: ‘The peace was suddenly broken by a shattering roar, and from behind the dike of the reservoir three Spitfires zoomed over my head and also flew into the west, where the sun turned their wings to bronze. Beautiful birds of death, they seemed a symbol of the future when youth will increasingly search for beauty among the sun-tipped mountains of the clouds and the starlit, blue valleys of the skies, but it is to be hoped that the old, more familiar loveliness will not quite be forsaken – the loveliness of wood, hill, and quiet river.’ The line drawings by Reginald Lionel Knowles aren’t bad either…

And thanks to the internet, I won’t go to my grave wondering what the dust jacket looked like…

Musings of an Old Technophobe

Apologies for the absence, but I finally killed my laptop. Not this one, obviously, but my old one. It was something of a mercy killing, in that it had been on its last legs for some time – since I slammed my fist down on its keyboard a few months back, in fact, leaving it somewhat dented and temperamental. When not freezing, it developed the alarming opposite habit of sprouting duplicate windows faster than I could shut them down, until the screen looked like an infinite pack of cards. Then, the other day, its dust-clogged fan started whining like a Stuka in full nose-dive, at which I had the bright idea of getting the Hoover out and vacuuming it. This sorted out the whining problem, alright, and I had a few blissfully quiet operational minutes – until the damn thing overheated and shut itself down. Yep, I’d bust the fan for good. Perhaps giving it a good shake would get it going again. Nope. (Nor would banging it against the side of the desk.) It was now me against the machine – how much data could I retrieve in each ten-minutes-every-hour window between switching it on and it switching itself off and having to be left to cool down again? Not very much, it turned out. (No, I hadn’t backed everything up...) But finally I got there, and so off I went to the shops, and back I came with a brand-spanking new super-duper (budget) model. Which was great – except, bright spark that I am, I couldn’t work out how to access any files. Back at the shop the somewhat bemused assistant tactfully guided me in the direction of the ‘file explorer’ icon. ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘I wondered what that was.’ What an idiot…

Something 'Borrowed'...

Lend a book to a friend and the chances are you either never see it again or it looks like they've been playing football with it when you finally get it back. Things are more complicated with siblings. I have had a long-running tug-of-war with my sister over the ownership of various books that are family heirlooms, including this one, an absolute gem from the 1960s that any Fleming fan should be ashamed not to have read (and a companion piece to New Maps of Hell, discussed in an earlier post):

It  proudly boasts her signature inside – yet has sat equally proudly on my bookshelves, not hers, for some years now. (Though I'm pretty sure there are more of my books on her shelves than there are hers on mine...  )

So Many Books, So Little Time

Every day, the list of books one would like to read grows longer. The latest addition to my own such list is Megan Shephard's The Madman's Daughter  (just published by Harper Voyager), the madman in question being H.G. Wells's Doctor Moreau. The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) is Wells's masterpiece, and stands alongside Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). If you haven't read any of them, do – ditto Moreau's Other Island (1980), Frankenstein Unbound (1973) and Dracula Unbound (1991), all by Brian Aldiss. Then read The Madman's Daughter and report back, because at the rate my list is growing I won't live long enough to read it myself.

No Helping Some People

Some people swallow just about any conspiracy theory, monster myth or ridiculous bit of pseudoscience they come across. Back in the 90s I worked with an otherwise very nice chap who had caught the Erich von Däniken bug and believed every word he wrote. I failed to convince him von Däniken was an insult to serious academics, so I pressed this nice little debunking volume on him (first published in 1976) and urged him to read it:

A week or so later he handed it back unopened. (Another nice little debunker, incidentally, is this one, first published in 1984:

And no, I don't suppose it's on sale at the Loch Ness visitor centre.)

'Finding Myself Up My Own Arse'

One of my pet hates is non-fiction that, whatever the purported subject matter, is actually all about the author's 'journey of discovery': in other words, all about the author. All authors are vain, but writing about oneself in the guise of something else is pure conceit. Judging from the number of such books published, though, they obviously sell, so what the hell do I know? (I can see the blurb now... 'In Finding the Weretiger, Patrick Newman tells the self-indulgent true story of how he bummed around Asia with his head up his arse looking for an elusive mancat – and instead found himself.' Something along those lines, anyway.)

A Glimpse of Old England

When I go fishing I have to make do with tea from a flask, hastily made while in my usual groggy early morning state. Things were obviously different for those who could afford servants in the old days...

The lady angler on the right in this photograph from 1900 is a study in concentration as she waits for a bite on the Darenth River – a chalk stream, and then a prime trout fishery for the well-heeled – near Dartford in Kent. But I wonder what the maid bringing a tray of refreshments on the left was thinking?

Nice of You to Tell Me

Charity shops are pretty depressing places, and trying to scan their grotty bookshelves over someone's shoulder – there's always someone in your way – can be pretty soul destroying, but every now and then you find a diamond among the dross and suddenly it all seems worthwhile. So it was that I recently found this little gem, first published in 1954:

It's the diary an Australian nurse secretly and very bravely kept while interned by the Japanese in Sumatra from 1942 until the end of the war. By the time her camp was liberated she weighed less than six stone. But, she survived. So many others didn't. A mile away was the men's camp. With the war lost, the Japanese announced that internees with husbands and fathers there could visit them. Excitedly they all got ready, women and children alike. Then the Japanese called out the names of all those who needn't bother... 

An Englishman's Home...

Some men with a big yellow digger turned up the other day to demolish the 1930s house across the road. From my desk I had a grandstand view, and I was just thinking 'I must get myself one of those' while wondering idly how long the job would take when the operator no more than nudged one corner of the building, just below the roof, and the whole edifice collapsed in a sorry heap like a brick soufflé. What's worrying is that my own house is virtually the condemned one's twin. I'll have to go gently with the hammer next time I hang a picture.

Pretty Much Irreplaceable

The house is on fire, I've rescued my cats and fishing tackle, and there's just enough time to grab one book off the shelves before my entire library goes up in flames. But which one? (No, not my own...) Here it is:

Doesn't look much, does it? Indeed, it's a pretty grotty 1980 Charter, New York paperback. But since I first found it in a second-hand book shop in the mid-1980s, A Rude Awakening has remained my favourite book, and Aldiss my favourite author. First published in 1978, it is the third in the semi-autobiographical 'Horatio Stubbs' trilogy – after The Hand-Reared Boy (1970) and A Soldier Erect (1971) – and sees Aldiss at the very peak of his powers. The setting is Sumatra in 1946. Stubbs is a squaddie, a veteran of the Burma campaign with only days to go before he returns to Blighty. He determines to marry his Chinese girlfriend and take her with him, but events conspire against him. In a particularly memorable passage, he finds himself powerless to save a Dutch friend from summary execution by Indonesian freedom fighters. The game is up for Stubbs, and for the British out East.

I Must Get Out More

Sometimes I go to Google Maps, zoom in on satellite view to Crowland Bridge on the wide River Welland in the heart of the Lincolnshire fens, switch to street view, then ride with the cameraman along the riverside road. Sometimes I go upstream, along what was once the golden stretch to draw for those elusive bream in the big matches of the 1960s and 70s – we're talking up to 1,500 entrants here – and try to work out where the famous 'Willows' swim was, the landmark far bank tree having long since been cut down. And sometimes I head downstream, towards Spalding, until the road leaves the river around Four Mile Bar. Up or down, the banks are deserted, as they have been for years, the days of big river match fishing, like the willow, being long gone now. But either way, first off I always zoom right in on the stone memorial to match fishing legend Ivan Marks, the undisputed 'King of the Welland,' placed by the bridge following his death in 2004 – as if somehow it might have changed since the last time I viewed it.

The Best by Test

A few years back I went through a phase of collecting first editions of some of my favourite books, but pretty soon I realized this wasn't really for me. For one thing, later editions are often better. Take Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. I am lucky enough to own a reasonable condition UK first edition (Jonathan Cape, 1952), given to me one Christmas, with extraordinary generosity, by a dear old friend after I spotted it lurking on their bookshelves and pointed it out to them with none too subtle admiration:

Now, I'm very happy to own it, and I do like the cover, which is much jazzier than the US first edition (Scribners, 1952), but I was just as thrilled to find a 1953 Reprint Society edition for a few pence at a village fête one summer, even though it had long since lost its dust jacket, because this edition is full of the most wonderful illustrations, some by Raymond Sheppard...

and some by C. F. [Charles Frederick] Tunnicliffe, like this one (a colour-tinted variant of which actually featured on the missing dust jacket)...

When I think about it, though - and this is the other reason collecting first editions isn't really for me - my all-time favourite copy of The Old Man and the Sea, one long since passed on to my son, is the cheap, nondescript, 'worthless' paperback edition I bought many years ago when I first got into Hemingway, the one that gave me the priceless pleasure of reading this marvellous little book for the first ever time.

Who Reads This Rubbish?

An old friend pestered me repeatedly for a free copy of Weretiger until finally I caved in, even though one of his proudest boasts is that he's never read a book in his life. "I promise you, Pat, if it's the only book I read this side of the grave, I will read it," he said in all earnestness. That was before Christmas. He hasn't looked at it yet, and I don't expect he ever will. Meanwhile a very close family member, bless him, proudly bought a copy as soon as it came out, though I had told him I would send him one. Six weeks later I couldn't wait any longer and asked him what he thought. "I've got as far as the acknowledgements," he replied in all seriousness. I haven't bothered asking again, though really, I shouldn't grumble – he did pay for it, after all.

That's Me Put in My Place

In 1960, in New Maps of Hell, Kingsley Amis took a characteristically wry look at the Science Fiction scene. It is a little treasure well worth searching for (if a somewhat hastily researched one), and in a nod to Amis in the early 1970s old friends and collaborators Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison put together Hell's Cartographers (1975), which gives some fascinating insights into the professional lives and working practices of a number of top SF writers of the time:

As always, Harry Harrison, who sadly died last year, is particularly good value, recalling his mother-in-law once putting her head round the door while he was trying to write and saying, "Harry, since you aren't doing anything, would you go to the store for me?" He also writes, "When people ask me 'how is the book coming?' I can respond only by blinking a glassy eye and muttering 'which one?'" I was thinking about this the other day, while helping a friend on a gardening job (writers like me must take whatever work they can get). I've been researching a couple of ideas for another book lately, plus he often asks about Weretiger sales – I think he expects them to hit the million mark any day now – so when he said, "How's the book going?" I felt fully justified in stealing Harrison's line. Back home that evening a family friend rang. "Hi Pat, I was wondering if you could do a few hours weeding for me. Loved your book, by the way..."

Patent Pending

Yesterday afternoon my dearly beloved announced that she was going to make one of her famous carrot cakes. Now I ought to make clear at this juncture that Anna is a bona fide cordon bleu cook, albeit one with her own  take on recipes. Anyway, there was the usual flurry of pots and pans, and pretty soon the cake was in the oven. A while later there was a loud thud as she upended the tin and the very solid contents hit the cooling rack with all the grace of a house brick. This, I thought, does not bode well at all. When the brick had cooled sufficiently, she sawed herself a thin slice and took a tentative bite. "Oh dear," she said, "Something seems to have gone wrong. It doesn't taste right at all. Would you like to try some?" Declining her kind offer, I turned my attentions back to the fire I was trying to get going in the grate, from which only the merest  whisper of smoke was emanating. Moments later came the second loud thud of the day as Anna unceremoniously bunged her cake brick on top of the smouldering wood. I was just about to remonstrate when I saw a slip of flame curl out from underneath the base of her offering. Two hours later it was still burning nicely. I think she may have inadvertently invented a new form of solid fuel.

Says It All, Really

On a day when the selfish and greedy wail and gnash their teeth over the death of a woman with a heart of stone, I'd like to address the more important issue of evocative book titles. Take this one from 1927, by Hubert Banner - Romantic Java. Not bad, is it? You don't even have to open it to know it won't let you down. The 1940s and 50s saw a glut of books about daring wartime escapades with some wonderfully stirring titles: Beyond the Chindwin (1945), The Jungle is Neutral (1949), Boldness Be My Friend (1953), They Fought Alone (1958). Great stuff to have on your shelves when you're a hopeless old nostalgic like me. A shortlist of my all-time favourite book titles would have to include Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1890) – so much yearning expressed in just one word – Hugh Clifford's homage to old Malaya The Further Side of Silence (1916), Philip Woodruff/Mason's novel of colonial India The Wild Sweet Witch (1947), Arthur Mizener's biography of Scott Fitzgerald The Far Side of Paradise (1951), and Howard Fast's zany SF short-story collection The General Zapped an Angel (1969). But top of the list, I think, would be a 1941 title that I'm fairly certain the late leaderene never got around to reading...

Silly Billy

In January 2009, police in Kwara State in Nigeria astounded local journalists by solemnly parading before them, as the chief suspect in the attempted theft of a Mazda car ... a goat - one handed in to them by a gang of vigilantes who claimed it was a actually a man who turned himself into the animal after they caught him trying to steal the vehicle. The police eventually decided not to charge the goat, instead sensibly cashing in on its celebrity status by selling it for 300 Nigerian dollars. And if you don't believe me, see

http://www.nairaland.com/222961/police-parade-goat-robbery-suspect

and

http://www.nairaland.com/228917/mysterious-kwara-goat-sold-300

Shot Down in Flames

It never ceases to annoy me how many 'new' non-fiction titles there are on the same old subjects. Obviously, publishers like to play it safe, knowing what sells, but too many such books are simply derivative hackwork. Granted, occasionally someone has something genuinely new to say, has a fresh angle, or is a real expert. If I could restore a Spitfire to full working order, for instance, I'd expect the right publisher to take me seriously if I proposed a 'How To' guide. But I know for sure what would happen were I to wake up one morning and think, "I know, I'll write a book telling the remarkable true story of how an amazing plane called the Spitfire won the Battle of Britain against all odds," then were to send off a proposal along those lines...

Werebeast Erotica, Anyone?

I see that Alara Branwen, author of such essential little ebooks as Banging the Werebear and Gangbang of the Werewolves, has written another mighty tome - all 28 pages of it - called ... wait for it ... With the Weretiger. (Yes, I've been 'egosurfing' again.) Come on, Alara, surely you could have thought of a better title than that?! (No, I can't think of one either.)

Reluctant Congregation

In 1906, Methodist missionary Archibald McMillan - seen here with a man-eating leopard he has just shot dead - recalled passing through a remote aboriginal village in central India one time in the 1890s and telling the headman he would come back the following day, sing some hymns and give the villagers the Good News. "To my surprise," he wrote,"on arriving [the next morning] I found the place deserted, the entire population having fled into the jungle!"

California Dreaming

I've only ever really been interested in the past (which is probably why I'm so hopeless at such mundane matters as earning a living). History to me means the untold stories of ordinary people. When I see old film footage, for instance, my eye is always drawn to passers-by, people in the background, faces in the crowd. I'll be watching an episode of The Rockford Files, say, and in the distance - too far away for them to be an extra - there'll be someone strolling along the beach of Paradise Cove. Who were they, I'll wonder, what did they do, and what became of them? But above all I'll be thinking, 'How I wish that was me!'

Order, Order!

I hate books. I've come to this startling realization after yet another failed attempt to organize my bookshelves. Just when I think, say, I've got all my Hemingways (books by and about) lined up together, I find a rogue volume that's ever so slightly too tall to fit, so it has to go on another, taller shelf. (Warning - crap doodle follows...)

The end result is I can never find anything (a problem compounded by varifocals - fellow wearers will understand). The thing with bookshelves is, you want as many as possible, but you have to make do with fewer, taller ones just so you can accommodate the occasional outsize volumes that some antisocial publishers will insist on publishing. (As for books that also stick out over the edges of shelves, don't get me started.) Paper comes in standard sizes, so why can't books? 

Carpe Diem?

Frederick Hicks, a Forest Officer in India, kept a diary. His entry for 15 March 1887? “Camp Sark—shot 2 tigers before breakfast.”

In Mysore in 1872, when aged 24, famed elephant-catcher George Sanderson once shot three leopards and a wild cat before breakfast. As he recalled: “We had had a capital morning’s sport. The arrangement had been perfect; the shooting had been—ahem! I will leave my readers to judge; nothing, even to the cat, had escaped us; and all this before ten o’clock!”

Personally, I'm not at my best first thing in the morning.

One in the Eye

I rather like the idea of getting your own back on someone simply by sticking pins in a doll:

Trouble is, such sympathetic magic (or any other kind of magic, for that matter) only works - through the very great power of suggestion - on people who genuinely fear it, and almost by definition that means the poor and downtrodden, not the rich and powerful. What we need, then, is some means of mass hypnosis whereby we can convince the bastards who actually deserve to be shafted that witchcraft really works. Then the rest of us can all go to bed happy for once.

Changing tack, as someone with an unhealthy interest in both fishing and tigers, this caught my eye while I was trawling the sewernet for something else last night:

According to the blurb at http://www.panmacmillan.com.au/display_title.asp?ISBN=9781742610832&Author=Maguire,%20Emily

it is "set among the louche world of Hanoi's expatriate community" and is all about "a woman struggling with the morality of finding peace in a war-haunted city, personal fulfilment in the midst of poverty and sexual joy with a vulnerable youth."

Not what it says on the tin, then.