Postcard from Norfolk - Market day

What’s your favourite bookshop? Probably the bookshop I buy most of my books from is Amazon. But that’s not really a shop, is it. The mental image I have of Amazon, the vast warehouse from the final scene of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ is probably hopelessly quaint; Amazon is probably a vast network of vast warehouses, based on the moon or something, or the Isle of Man, as that’s where most of the DVDs I order from Amazon come from.

I’m not a total luddite. I’m not, for instance, wholly against the idea of coffee in a bookshop. It’s good to be able to take a stack of books to your table, have a coffee, brows, decide which one you want and put the rest, now with coffee rings and biscotti crumbs evenly distributed among the pages, back on the shelves. The day some genius puts a wine bar in a bookshop, I’m there!

But for me a bookshop sells books. Calmly, efficiently and with the minimum of fuss. The problem is that a lot of big chains are about as soulful as supermarkets (which is where you can also buy books, in between buying dog food and tampons, you can slip the latest beach-read bonkbuster into your basket). A good bookshop needs some sort of indefinable charm.


Much has been written about the perfect bookshop, most of it by Terry Pratchett in the novel ‘Good Omens’, so I won’t repeat it here. I will add though that the perfect bookshop is well stocked, has lots of books in the windows which, together with high shelving, cuts out harmful UV and, er, light, leading to the feeling of the creation of a literary womb or cave. Any hermit taking up residence would at least have plenty to read. It will be run by an eccentric proprietor who will make favoured customers tea and offer them rich tea biscuits (never digestives, as these crumble too easily having been dunked). His hours will be erratic, his footware will be slippers.

Top three fictional bookshops? Black Books, Bernard Black proprietor, from the television programme of the same name. The Eloquent Page, the science fiction bookshop run by Uncle Rogi Remillard in the novels written by Julian May. And the bookshop in ‘Before Sunset’ where Ethan Hawke meets up with Julie Delpy again. Okay, that’s actually a real store (Shakespeare and Company, Paris), but in this case it’s fictional because hey, it’s in a film.

But it brings us on to real actual bookstores. Okay, top three. In third place, Toppings and Company in Ely. Toppings is probably the last place in this dimension to be selling books at their cover price. How do they get away with it? Well, many of the hardbacks are signed by the author and come sealed in little plastic bags with an attractive band wrapped round them proclaiming ‘signed first edition’. Not something you get at Asda or Amazon. In addition, it’s a shop of great physical charm. The staircase up to the first floor is steep and twisty, but worth the climb to access the books on mountaineering – handy in the fens. Having recently moved Mrs Rochester out, they’ve opened up the attic and you can now have a coffee (free, there’s no Costa or Starbucks up there) and read a book while looking out the attic window at the cathedral lantern. The state of semi-hypnosis that this generates results in you splashing full price on books and not resenting the hell out of it.

Okay, second favourite (previously favourite). The Brazen head bookshop in Bunham Market, Norfolk. Exactly what a proper second hand bookshop should be. Crammed with books and with an enthusiastic owner. The last time I was in there he had just acquired some new stock and was looking through it, he got very excited about a ‘Biobull’ – a Gaelic bible. I should have bought the thing there and then, despite not being able to understand a word. They make their faith like granite in areas where Gaelic is spoken and this appeared to me to be just the sort of religious artefact to take comfort from in a faith emergency or vampire attack.

But my new number one favourite bookshop? It’s not a shop at all, it’s a stall. The Wednesday market at Sheringham in Norfolk is host to stalls selling everything from screwdrivers to football team themed duvet covers. Also, there’s a book stall. It’s fantastic. The chap who own it has his books lying flat on some tables in fruit boxes (if ever you need to transport your library, these are the carriers of choice) and also – and here’s the genius part – stacked up in ‘shelves’ by halving the fruit boxes and stacking them one on top of the other.

The stall sells second hand books – everything from the latest beach read that’s been read once and still smells faintly of tanning lotion where it’s rested on a baking tummy somewhere along the shores of the Med all the way to old penguins that have obviously spent a lot of time travelling in the pockets of various chaps.

The sheer variety is breathtaking, you could become ridiculously well-read by visiting once a week with a fiver. And you leave with some paperbacks in a paper bag, a lot more cheerful than you arrived and usually with a surprise buy. Now that’s a shopping success and that’s a great book stall.

The bells, the bells

There are, to be sure, certain benefits to living in a village. Chief among them is the sense of snobbery you can exhibit when you give your address and it conjures up an image of a hamlet with a pub, a post office and houses starting in the high-to-nosebleed-inducing price range.

The truth is likely to be somewhat different. These days, if you live in a village near a city, you most probably live in a ‘village’. Certainly, when I was growing up in the Wild West Midlands, villages were approached across open fields and they usually had a duck pond and inbreeding.

The duck pond is, I think, the measure of a true village. That or a horse trough – but only if full of water. If it’s full of flowers planted in an attempt to clinch third best runner up in the regional finals of ‘Britain in bloom’ then it’s not a horse trough, it’s just an impractical window box. A full horse trough can also take the place of a duck pond in a witch trial emergency. If you don’t know what I mean by witch trial emergency then you obviously live in a city, town or ‘village’ rather than a village.

I don’t live in a village, but I live pretty close to a ‘village’. In fact I walk into the village every morning and evening of the working week. It’s pretty easy to tell where the village begins and ends, it’s where the church and pubs are located, along with the houses designed for an age where malnutrition and rickets meant that five foot was a practical height for a ceiling. And I do pick up a little of village life. I see the same people every morning (but because this is England I don’t say hello,). If you bought one of the doll houses in the ‘village’ you would probably think that you were on a par with a proper village like they have in deepest Wales, only without the crushing sense of isolation and the hostility that would be shown towards incomers. Oh, and with better transport links and easy access to the airport so that you can go and visit your villa in another village in Croatia, where all that ethnic cleansing was just terrible but did open up some real bargains in the property market.

What you also get in a village is a church with a steeple. This means bells. Or it did.

It wasn’t until I heard the bells peeling a few Sundays ago that I realised they had not been ringing. Some sort of clapper issue, one assumes. Not so, apparently somebody had an injunction out against them.

An injunction. Against bells. In England.

What kind of execrable scum moves to a village and takes out an injunction against church bells? I’m assuming it’s an incomer because otherwise it’s somebody who suddenly has an objection, i.e. has gone mad. The church was there before the objector. What the hell were they expecting when they saw the steeple with the shutters in it?

This is on a par with people who move next door to pubs and then kick up a fuss about noise and dray-horses eating their flower beds.

Whoever it is (now the most reviled person in the area), I’m glad their petty injunction has been overturned and I’m doubly glad that this resulted in the bells peeling out for more than an hour on Sundays. I’d like to see some little Englander try that shit if it was a mineret and not a steeple they wanted to silence. Those Mohamaddens don’t fuck about when it comes to making their feelings known. Neither do campenologists, it would appear, as the warm weather means sleeping with windows open, meaning that I was able to hear, at half two in the morning the other night, the soft chime of the church bell striking the half hour. Good to know that even in the still watches of the night when the body is at its lowest ebb, there is a cheering chime that allows one to turn over, smile, and go back to a restful sleep.

Postcard from Paris - in a word...French

‘It’s all very French’ became the phrase of the weekend. French service culture was in service on the Eurostar when, asked if there was any more tagnetelle for lunch, the girl serving answered not with an apology and an offer of something else, but a gallic shrug and a ‘pufft’ noise that resulted from her blowing air, fascinatingly, apparently up her own ear. Service culture part the second was the way a French at the Musee d’Orsay slammed down his ‘fermee’ sign as we reched the front of the queue at the gift shop. Henceforth, if things were going wrong, or were trying, or were just a bit shit, they would be described as being ‘a bit French’.

I may one day go back to Paris, but it’s hard to envisage the circumstances. Possibly flying a Lancaster full of horse-shit, or if I want to visit 1985, which is where the city is mired. The food, the fashion and the metro were all probably cutting edge in 1985 but things have moved on. For the French, stepping onto the concourse at St Pancras must be like visiting one of those ‘house of the future’ pavilions at fairs, but for real.

London does better food, and better art, for a better price. If I paid 14 quid for a sandwich in London I’d expect to eat it sitting on the throne at Buckingham Palace.

Would I go back? Not unless it was for an event. Other than that, the next time I want to see Paris is down the bomb-sight of a Lancaster full of horse-shit. Having said that, I could do a day. Just a day, wandering the streets at will. Because there is a lot to see here and, to be fair, the best stuff is free. The best sight is not to be found inside a museum, it’s the way the sunlight hits the golden tip of an angel atop a civil building. The most intense experience is not the aged cheese in a café, it’s two young lovers chewing each other’s faces off on the banks of the Seine.

But I think Paris is vanishing, if it’s not already vanished. The whole city has the feel of a theme park. The people conform so perfectly to stereotype that they appear to believe the hype of their own city. The sight of a man who considers himself hetrosexual roller-blading along with every indication of enjoyment is a sure sign of a culture in decline.

And food and wine? Where is the best place to try good French food? Not France. The problem is that while Paris has been ossifying in a miasma of bitterness and dog shit, the rest of the world has surpassed it in terms of cuisine. Also, I hate to break it to the French, but you can get their cheeses in British supermarkets. When you dine it’s an experience, it’s not just about the food. Great service can rescue mediocre food, but great food can’t rescue bad service. Best place for French food? Corsica. The people are friendly (everyone is armed, so everyone is polite) and the food far surpasses anything available in Paris because it all comes from the island. The Brits may have Pot Noodle, but we also have young, enthusiastic cooks who are not afraid to try new stuff. Possibly you’d get strung up for this in a Parisian café. Now, a British café, we’re not scared to try and in introduce salad. As a garnish.

Postcard from paris - the fisherman of the Louvre

Sunset at the Louvre. All day tourists have been displacing water in the fountains by tossing in coins. When I first saw the Fisherman of the Louvre I thought it simply somebody who was either drunk or warm, as he was wading in the fountains in the fading light with his trousers rolled up.


Soon though, I realised that what he was doing was retrieving coins from the ponds. Not all coins though, as there were still many left in his wake, glinting golden like the discarded scales of a mermaid. I presume that he was only plucking prizes of a certain denomination or above and, frankly, good luck to him. If somebody is stupid enough to toss a Euro in some water, then it’s eventual fate should be to bring good luck, if not to the caster then certainly to the Fisherman.

Postcard from Paris - the high cost of living

Paris is expensive. I mean really expensive. You know how we admire them because they go to a café or bar and make one coffee or a beer or a glass of wine last all afternoon, it’s because they can’t afford any more than a single cup. We were charged fourteen quid for a sandwich. Fourteen fucking quid! For a chicken sarnie! If it has been a dodo and panda sandwich served on a gold plate and I was eating it sat on the throne of France after being crowned emperor, maybe that sort of money would have made sense. Mind you, there were some crisps served with it.

It certainly explains the café culture, they’re not all talking about art, they’re eeking out a single glass of wine. It also explains the bread – it’s the only thing that Parisians can afford to eat in volume so it had better be good. And you’d better chew slowly.

Final proof of runaway prices? The male toilet at Guar de Nord. 1 Euro to use a urinal, 2 Euro for a proper toilet. One for a pee, two for a poo. Literally, number one and number two. What sort of warped, twisted sod actually prices relief by function? Christ alone knows what they charge for a swift bout of self-love or a homosexualist encounter.

The exception to the high costs and the crap service is the hop-on, hop off river-bus that operates from the Eiffel Tower up past Notre Dame. For twelve euros you get an all day pass and get to see the city from the river and it’s practical too. And there’s that great feeling you get hat travelling on a boat on a river is a little bit special. Okay, not as special as rowing yourself up an English river on a fine summer’s day with a large and well-stocked picnic basket in the rear of the boat and a couple of bottles of something cheeky already over the side chilling, but good all the same.

Postcard from Paris - myths to bust, myths to trust

There are many French stereotypes. The famous hatred of hygiene, the ability to surrender in a crisis, a love of wine and bread and a dislike of monarchy or bothering to be polite. There are particular Parisian stereotypes, many of which I was, as something of an amateur bigot, happy to indulge without knowing if they were true or not. So it was interesting to go fact hunting.

French waiters are rude.

Trust it. Friday night: after pitching up at a likely looking place and eventually ordering something that, even with my mangled and offensive French, is unlikely to be gibbon on toast, it’s time for dessert. Cheese please. With wine. Sancerre. The waiter’s face was a mixture of regret and disappointment and it later transpired that one is supposed to order red wine with cheese. Well, sorry about that mate. I was restrained from asking him if I had made the same mistake that german officers probably made, night after night, while his grandfather served them in this very café. I was further restrained from asking him why they had a) snubbed our Queen and b) killed our Princess? Finally I was refrained from reminding him that he can comment on what fucking wine I eat with my fucking cheese when he fucking pays for it.

The coda to this is, of course, that the sancerre with the roqfort was bloody sublime and I oohed and ahhed in appreciation as the flavours mingled in almost pyrotechnic fashion on my palette. This was accompanied by the sound of the entire waiting staff grinding their teeth in impotent rage.

But the gold star for rudeness goes to the waiter at the pizza place who growled, as a welcome, ‘no visa, no card’. ‘Fuck off you french cunt’ I replied as I felled him with the sort of blow normally bestowed on mature hardwoods; ‘I’m trying to spend my way out of a recession and you’ll take my card and like it even if I have to bend you over and use your fat french arse as a swipe mechanism’. Actually, I’d just been to the ATM and was loaded with Euros, but if he had been telepathic, he’d of been fucking quaking.

The french are rude.

Trust it. There is no Parisian term for ‘excuse me’. Apparently.

Dog shit

Actually there’s not that much dog shit and I think I’ve worked out why. Stopping in a café off the Trocadero for a couple of beers, I was treated to the sight of a bloke bringing his dog into the café, being told he should sit on the pavement with it, finding no table, coming back and eventually having a table on the pavement located for him. The dog was up and down like a fiddler’s bitch and you could see the doggie resentment building, which will reach critical mass tonight when he craps all over the polished wooden floors of his apartment, after first eating chicken, leaving the bloke to combine his midnight piss with the sort of frictionless ballet that would get yield a perfect nine from the judges of an ice dance championship – were it not for the screams, flailing arms and eventual collapse backwards into a spreading pool of chien chit. So the dogs are shitting indoors.

Parisians, by the way, all have little dogs, this must add to their sense of inferiority. As they have already got a lot to be inferior about this is not a good thing. An Englishman’s typical dog is something that can either a) retrieve game from a marsh, b) defend his council house against rival crack dealers or c) defend his house against the sort of crack dealers who own dog b. This means that dog a has developed a soft mouth to make sure it doesn’t damage pheasant and dog c has developed the ability to operate a wire-guided missile. Dog b has developed the ability to savage its owner. But the Parisian lives in an apartment and so keeps a small dog in a small room, while the Englishman lives in a sprawling estate, even if it’s a sprawling council/mock-tudor housing estate, and keeps a reasonable sized dog.

Postcard from Paris - Obama

The Da Vinci Code is, of course, set in Paris and never has a single city had so many places made so famous by a single work. And never has a city appeared so ungrateful. One gets the feeling that the Parisians consider that the world should have known about the Louvre long before Chapter 1 of the book. By ‘the world’, they mean ‘Americans’.

Places take on a new significance when they are written about in fiction and, generally, readers like that. But there’s a tipping point if the fiction is too popular. Then the feeling becomes the same sort of resentment you feel when you see a review of your favourite ‘best kept secret’ café in a Sunday supplement. My theory is that people resent it when an author makes money writing about something familiar to them. By ‘people’, I mean ‘the French’.

Add this to the base state of resentment that is the resting state of the French and you have a perfect storm of people who resent the hell out of lots of people enjoying their city in print and then coming here to see it and spending their filthy foreign currency without really appreciating the city and all it has to offer, which is equal parts dog shit and rudeness.


Occasionally you see that the Brown effect has been embraced and that has resulted in many Euros pouring into the coffers of various churches as tourists visit and line up to take pictures of one another being menaced by Opal Dai monks or whatever not knowing that all they have to do to be menaced by clergy for free is to be small boys. You can just see the vicars of small parish churches with a fund raising thermometer constantly stuck at artic wishing that Dan Brown had set his last bestseller not in Paris but in a small Cotswold village. Maybe the Cream Tea Code will make it big boys.

There are many American tourists in Paris, possibly there to follow the Brown trail but more likely at this time of year to see whet it was their grandfather nearly got his arse shot off fighting for in WWII. On the whole it must be an interesting experience for them, not knowing if they might be related to the person now sneering at their choice of wine.

The most famous American tourist in the city this weekend was Barack Obama, President of the USA. I have developed a theory about why he stays in the Embassy and why his motocade drives so damned fast – he’s trying to get himself and Michelle away from Sarkoze and Carla. Because they are sex pests. One can just imagine the scene.

Sarkie: Zo, your wife, she is very bon, no?
BO: Er, yes, I think so.
S: And my wife, Carla, she is also very, very, bon. No?
BO: Sure, I guess.
S: So, maybe, after the talks, we four can…get together.
BO: Er, maybe.
S: Or maybe just me and Michelle.
BO: Er. (Horrible realization dawning that all he has heard about the French is true).
S: And you and Carla.
BO: Wow, is that the time…gotta go.

Which is why whenever you see Sarkozi and Obama in the same picture now they are so far apart the lighting conditions on them both are different and it looks like the thing has been crudely photoshopped.

Also why, in a few months time, this is going to happen:

Reporter: And it appears that there has been a total power failure at the White House, not a light is showing. How embarrassing that it should happen during the state visit of the President of France.

Inside:

Michelle: Barack honey, why are we sitting behind sofas in the dark with the emergency generators unplugged.
BO: Shush, they might hear you.
Sarkozi: (knocking at door) Heloooooooooooooo.

The situation is of course complicated because Barack would have ‘phoned other world leaders to find out if the same thing had happened to them only to be told by Tony Blair that at no time were any approaches made at any time for any kind of swapsies action with Cherie. Not even with the Eastern Bloc types.


The Obama roadshow or, more properly, motorcade, was spectacular. Cops on bikes, cops in cars, cops in helicopters, cops in boats. It certainly gave the police a chance to play with all of their toys and blow the Departmental budget in one glorious weekend. The centrepiece, ‘The Beast’ was preceded cops and followed by ambulances and fire engines. All this and the roads it was travelling on were closed. The traffic was chaotic as a result (?) but even with roads closed and the natural Parisian flair for truly appalling driving, the traffic chaos is nothing compared to Naples.

In all probability, of course, The Beast was empty and Obama was travelling by metro or on foot. He’s heard what happened to the last really famous person who travelled at high speed in Paris and he’s not taking any chances.

Postcard from Paris - beggars

‘Don’t talk to me about the French social model, the whole country’s in flames’. – Lord Mandleson.

They stand or kneel, or a combination of the two, twisted like a pretzel. Often with crutches, the collection cup a tin can, beaten on the pavement in a tattoo not to draw attention, like an echo of a church bell appealing for Christian charity, but because of some disability wracking their frame into a shuddering judder of limbs and fingers. It would seem impossible to ignore the beggars of Paris, to pass them by without some sort of expression of pity, an expression that sends some cents clattering into their cup (an empty cat food can, the chap I passed) but they are ignored by the Parisians.

I consider myself to be pretty adept at ignoring beggars. Living in London you quickly develop either my own trademark apologetic shrug and half smile (‘I would like to help you but, despite appearances, I am inexplicably devoid of change’) or a keen interest in the architecture of rooftops, guttering, pavements and manhole covers.

But ignoring a prostrate wretch? That’s just not on. I tossed in my coin and wished him ‘bon chance’.

Parisians are very good at ignoring things. Over the last couple of days I have developed the theory that they simply ignored the entire German occupation, which is probably why they get so tetchy when I asked a waiter if his grandfather served nazi officers in this very café during the war.

Postcard from Paris - getting there

Once, travel was synonymous with glamour. As soon as commercial passenger ships stopped carrying plague and slaves, they turned into floating international villages where a fellow could conduct a shipboard romance knowing that as soon as he got into port, and went back to using his real name, there was little chance of the scandal he created on board reaching friends, colleagues or his wife. Ocean travel as luxury stopped as soon as they stuck golf courses and waterslides on the back of the ship, turning it into a floating Butlins.

Air travel used to be glamorous. First we had the 747 where the posh folk actually went on the upper deck, then we had Concorde where the chavs were not even allowed on board. Now BA has stopped commissioning new airplanes with first class cabins and the French not bothering to brush their runways buggered Concorde.

Rail travel just keeps getting better. What started with a steam engine hilariously just this side of incredibly dangerous that ushered in a new age of killing a lot of people very quickly turned into the best way to travel, although you had to get your carriage romance over in short order, or spend a lot on buns in tea shops as in ‘Brief Encounter’. It was even, thanks to Agatha Christie, by far the most fashionable mode of transport to be murdered in.

There may be luxury trains like the Orient Express and the Blue Train, there may be faster trains like the Bullet Train in Japan (but who the hell wants to get to work that quickly), but the apogee of train travel must be the Eurostar, simply because if the Brits and the French can work together, it’s the eight wonder of the world.

Best of all, is St Pancras International and the new high speed link out of London, a station so effortlessly cool that it has the longest champagne bar in the world and a collection of amateur artists sketching the canopy badly. The centre of the city to the Dartford crossing in twenty minutes is spectacular, only teleportation would be quicker. Buy the right ticket and you get food and drink served at your table. It’s civilized, which sounds as if that should be the least you can expect but, if you’ve traveled recently, you’ll know that in certain cases ‘civilized’ is setting the bar pretty high.

A word of warning though, you may find yourself sitting next to French people. Being offensively French. By which I mean the chap had the sort of facial hair that I thought was only now encountered in sit coms and French language school text books. And porn films. Bad ones. From eastern Europe.

And you can take a Swiss Army Knife on the Eurostar. Try getting away with that on an airplane, where they have a girly strop if you try and sneak on some hand lotion. This means that should some mad mullah try and take control of the dining car or similar outrage, not only would be shortly resemble a pincushion but it’s a certainty that some wag would wade in with the corkscrew or bottle opener as well as the knife blade.

Eurostar also meant that I could start the afternoon at the private view of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. This means that the galleries are no less crowded, but they are at least crowded with the sort of people who have forked over money for annual membership as a friend of the RA. It also means there is a champagne bar, meaning that art appreciation is enhanced by a few glasses of fizz, enough to strip away enough of the higher intellectual functions to appreciate the works on an emotional level, and remove enough inhibition to either mutter ‘what a lot of tut’ when looking at the latest Emin or, God forbid, even speak to fellow gallery goers. Stand out works this year were a post-card sent from a sculptor who had his work refused and a fine impressionist style painting of Venice.

Surely the next step in the development of the train is the Euro sleeper. Fall into bed in London and wake up in Italy or some other far flung point, probably with a medium to high class hooker in your cabin, the choice is yours.

One and Other

If you live in the city, you’re surrounded by statues. Look around you, at the angels and the dragons, at the lions and the unicorns. Clinging onto the corners of buildings, adorning arches, winding sinuously around pillars and porticos, so much part of the architecture that we no more notice them than we would a door or window. No wonder they look down on us.

If you live in the countryside, even the smallest hamlet, then you surround, rather than are surrounded by, statues. Don’t believe me? Go to the church, every village has one. There in the guttering, that chap with the spout in his mouth? On there, right up in the vault of the ceiling, a carving of the priest who underpaid the masons, with his cock up the bishop’s arse or something. Medieval masons may have been master craftsman, but their sense of humour was anything but subtle.


Any town will have a statue of some worthy, normally standing on a plinth, normally looking constipated, which is as close as a sculptor can get to ‘noble’ if he’s not Michelangelo. Still, even if the statue is constipated, the pigeons normally are not.

The Victorians loved a statue. Usually of Queen Victoria. Under the Victorians, Civic Art made its mark on the landscape of Britain, well, on the landscape of its market squares anyway. Like the Romans before them, what the rich and powerful really thought would enhance any spot was a bloody big statue of themselves. This is why there are so many statues of men with beards looking constipated, often pointing at things just out of frame, like bronze or marble catalogue models.

The other way to be commemorated was to die heroically in the service of your country, hopefully leaving behind a country named after you, or the Monarch of the time, and a kill ratio of 1,000 natives to one Englishman.

Times changed and as this century progressed statues of people faded from fashion as abstract sculpture became the civic art of choice. This was for two main reasons. The first was that instead of one person making the decision about the funding and erection (snigger) of a statue of, usually, himself, town councils were now responsible. A body of men and women who didn’t even like one another, let along unify in their admiration of somebody long enough to have them cast in bronze. The second reason was that in the late half of the twentieth century, the abstract embodiment of ideas was popular, especially if that idea was ‘ugliness’ and ‘cheapness’.

All that has now changed. Somehow, statues of people have become popular again. More than that, they are recognised as important. It probably started with Anthony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’ when, as a nation, we took one look at something that we were supposed to resent the hell out of and…fell in love. The Angel of the North is probably the most instantly recognisable landmark in Britain after the London Eye, Stonehenge and Big Ben. It will probably remain so until the Kelpie Heads in Scotland are finished off.

Trafalgar Square has some excellent statues. There are the Landseer lions, which are staggeringly beautiful and there’s Nelson himself, of course. Then there’s the fourth plinth. I think it’s a monument to Britishness itself that the fourth plinth has remained vacant, because nobody can agree what to put on it. It took the visionary Mayor of London ken Livingstone to decide to have many temporary exhibits on it instead of a single statue (although one of Ken’s not a bad idea).


By far the finest piece of work to inhabit the plinth to date was the statue of Alison Lapper. It had everything, it was beautiful, with curves like a Henry Moore, it was modern, yet perfectly at one with the rest of the statues on the square, especially at one with Nelson because both were statues of disabled people. It was also possibly the most serene piece of sculpture I’ve ever seen.

For the next 100 days the fourth plinth is occupied by a different person every hour. This is Anthony Gormley’s ‘One and Other’ project, where people drawn from a lottery can stand on the plinth for an hour and do, almost anything really, as long as it’s not illegal (bets on whether we go a week before the first proposal?).

It’s not the first time that ordinary people have been used to create art and it won’t be the last but it is the most important. This is happening right in the centre of Trafalgar Square and will live on in, well, how many tourist images? Millions?

It turns the statue into the statme. People will get on that plinth and if they have something to say they will say it, and if they don’t, well, that’s okay, most statues don’t say much.

The chap I saw seemed to be shouting about something, in full Town Crier’s rig. I don’t know what he was shouting about, I didn’t unplug my iPod (best of ELO, very good) and that, I think, is what it’s all about. As soon as a piece of art goes on display it no longer belongs to the artist, it belongs to whoever is looking at it. The artist may be trying to say something but if the viewer wants to misinterpret it, that’s their prerogative. Which is why you may have people going up there to make a point about worthy causes, but the judgement will be made about their hair or why somebody carrying a little bit too much weight would choose to wear that outfit. Think the human race is not that shallow? Somewhere out there I’m sure ‘Plinthwatch’ has started and I’m also sure that ‘Plinthbabes.com’ has already been registered.

Review - Nor Crystal Tears

This is the sort of book you don’t so much read as devour, lying on the sofa and taking only occasional breaks to recharge with salty corn based snacks, or hot and cold beverages (got to keep those fluids up), remembering to shift position occasionally to prevent chaffing, all the while studiously ignoring that pile of ironing, or that mound of dirty dishes, or that you should have picked up your kid from school three hours ago….oh no! It’s compelling stuff, at one point near the climax of the book, I think my heart rate picked up with excitement! Either that or all the snacks and tea were having a profound physiological effect.

As an infant, Ryo feels a restlessness that is unusual in his family and his society. This is something of a problem for him, as his society is formal and ordered and expects their citizens, on reaching maturity, to choose a job and stick to it. Ryo chooses forestry management and, to be fair, he’s good at it, but there’s still something restless about him and when that turns to recklessness, this presents him with problems.

Problems for him, but delight for the reader. Contented characters may have their place in fiction, but it’s usually just to be shaken out of their contentment. Likewise, hermits who like in caves may have their place (usually, a cave) but reading two hundred pages about a bloke watching his toenails grow is not the stuff of good science fiction. And ‘Nor Crystal Tears’ is good science fiction.

The start of the book is dedicated to describing Ryo’s life and his family and his development from infant to adult. We learn a lot about his society and its customs. The story is set in the future and on an alien planet, so Ryo’s society is quite different.

The plot revolves around what happens on first encounter with aliens. It does an excellent job of describing just how strange, how very different an alien race really could be. More importantly, it throws up what the reaction would be if the alien race, in appearance anyway, were like something from our nightmares, not in an imaginary creature sort of way but rather tapping into our primal fears by resembling something that used to lurk in the darkness.

Not that this is an actual first first encounter, Ryo’s people have faster-than-light space travel and so have made contact with other alien races; the problem is that the only intelligent alien race they have contacted already turn out to be aggressive, war-like and thoroughly nasty. So Ryo and his people are on guard against any further space going nasties and this suspicion, that a new species may turn out to be another gang of thugs with guns and rockets; or even worse that they form an alliance with the enemy, is a frequent fear expressed by the characters.

Just how tentative first contact can be is handled brilliantly here, it manages to convey how the unexpected and unknown is met, not just on a galactic scale, but in a way that is very much based on what would happen if a ‘different’ family moved into the neighborhood, which is essentially what happens here. It just so happens that the neighborhood in question is the spiral arm of the galaxy.

There’s plenty to keep the hard core sci-fi fan happy here; space ships, ray guns, aliens, odd transports and of course the gadgets or tools that you really hope somebody will invent soon because they sound so cool.

But the real charm comes from Ryo being a Thranx, an insect like being from the planet Willow-wane and the ‘aliens’ encountered being humans.

It’s a great idea and is dealt with, and sustained, very well. But there’s much more to the novel than this neat twist. Ryo is a very likable character and very human – more so than some of the ‘aliens’ he encounters. And a character with humanity, more than the ray guns and the space ships, is what makes good science fiction – we explore the galaxy through his eyes, even if they are multi-faceted and can never shed tears of water, nor crystal.

Review - Sentenced to Prism

There is no doubt that a good suit makes a chap feel good about himself, about the world at large and about his tailor. There’s nothing quite like a decent pin-stripe to make one feel a little taller, a decent whalebone-reinforced waistcoat to make one feel a little trimmer and a generous helping of space under the armpit to make one feel like one can keep one’s Glock safe and snug but ready for action (with fifteen in the mag and one up the spout) without – and this IS important – ruining the line of the suit.

Put it this way. Think of a suit. If you unconsciously put the word ‘shell’ in front of the term, believe me, the rest of this review is not for you.

Clothes make the man. In this case, a suit (or suits) make man an explorer, or a swimmer, or hiker, or runner, or whatever, it’s like the ultimate dressing up box. In this tale of the Thranx Commonwealth, Alan Dean Foster introduces us to a fascinating concept, a society that has evolved to the point where they wear specialized computerized hi-tech suits in everyday life.

There’s no doubt at all that a well cut suit makes one feel quite the thing. It’s so useful for the cut of a suit to add an extra inch across the shoulders for instance, or maybe flatter by holding that stomach in a bit more than nature is doing these days.

To say nothing of the material, a good tweed suit, for instance, should be able to protect the wearer from anything ranging from a roll in the gorse up to a fairly small yield tactical nuclear blast. A rather well cut dark wool suit gives the appearance of being in control, possibly of the finances of a major merchant bank, or the plans of an evil dictator to take over the world with secret nuclear arsenal, depending on how evil you feel up to being. A shell suit has its place too. And that place is on a bonfire.

Or you may wear a diving suit, or a dinner suit, as your profession or perversion dictates. Suits are important, they are all around us and they are becoming more prevalent every day. Uniforms are turning into suits. Don’t wear a uniform? If you are between fifteen and twenty five and wear a pair of jeans and a tee shirt, you wear a uniform. If you are over the age of thirty and wear cargo shorts and a polo then you a) should know better and b) see (a) but c) mainly, you wear a uniform. And you should know better. Okay, so imagine a suit with a computer and a food dispenser in it. Most of us currently describe such suits as ‘home’ (and this point is picked up on) but the human/snail hybrid, without the slime and antenna thingies is well explored here. If you could get your food, entertainment and conversation through a suit, what sort of civilization would that be?

Obviously, a one that likes their suits, imagine having a telly and a sofa with you all the time! But this novel also addresses what happens when you lose that comfort.

The suits in this novel house exoskeletons and computers that verge on artificial intelligence. It’s made clear that this has had an effect on society, from people feeling naked even when clothed, but without the suits that go over their cloths, to comparisons of the suits as mobile homes. But without the trailer trash connotations.

So what happens when your state of the art environmental suit that you rely on to keep you alive on a totally alien planet, where the life forms are not even carbon based, fails? That’s the point of the tale. A man reconnects with his own body, with his survival instinct and with some very, very strange alien life forms.

There’s an awful lot going on in this book, of which suits and mankind’s reliance on technology (and a certain type of technology at that) is just a part. What it also offers if an outstanding exploration of just how alien alien contact could be.