Review - the Junior Officers' Reading Club by Patrick Hennessey

Apparently guarding the Queen is very dull. You get dressed up in a posh uniform, walk from your barracks across the road to Buckingham Palace, shout a few orders and then stand around for a bit. Certainly the way that the author describes it makes you wonder if he, and all the tourists who go wild with excitement, pressing themselves up against the bars of the Palace like desperate refugees trying to get into the embassy compound when word has got out that the helicopter on the roof is the last one out of town, but with video cameras, were actually at the same ceremony? What it hints at is a certain emotional distance from the mundane aspects of real life that is something of a drawback, but ultimately the key to the success of this book.

Other authors may have caved to the temptation of poking fun at the mundane aspects of army life and in particular officer training, perhaps turning the polishing of a boot into a five page anecdote that culminates in the author desperately trying to scrub boot polish off of his groin while trying hard to not give the appearance of masturbating wildly. Not Patrick Hennessey. Army life is dull routine, officer training is dull and hard and very physically demanding. And then, hey, in the last term it's suddenly not so painful because you are in your early twenties and have been exercising every day for nine months - no wonder you're born again fit and able to run up a hill in Wales in the rain with the equivalent of a small village in your backpack. Army life and officer training is dull, then painful, then dull and painful, then painful and dull. This is conveyed excellently.

Some of the detail of army life is fun. Rehearsing for the changing of the guard in the wee small hours - I've been in the centre of London at three in the morning and the sight of a troop of guardsmen in dress uniform silently going through their paces is one of the less weird sights you can come across, believe me.

Also interesting is the focus on food. It's not the done thing to get pissed and then drive your tank or let rip with the GPMG and so active soldiers fixate on food the same way the civilians fixate on booze. Soldiers eat large helpings of cake as often as possible. What came as a surprise is just how much Haribo the British Army gets through. It was an incongruous image, some squaddie tipping back some sweets from a jolly packet with a grinning cartoon child on the front before letting rip and ventilating some child-raping, teacher-murdering Taliban shitbag.

And in the second half of the book there is ventilation aplenty. The dull routine that characterised the author's army career before Afghanistan in brutally shredded and the reader gets the payoff of Hennessey being able to give an unvarnished account of events. He brings the same honesty to the battlefield that he brought to polishing kit in the barracks and the result is one of the most compelling and, to be uncomfortably honest, exciting accounts of modern warfare I've ever read. Bullets fly, people die, women sigh. Okay, maybe not that last bit but bullets and indeed munitions of just about every type do fly, in all directions, often at once, and people do die. When it's the enemy that's good, when it's a British soldier that's bad. When it's a dog it's...WTF...dogs?

That's right, dogs. Terry use them to guard compounds and the best way to silence them is not with a juicy bone but instead a pistol round to the head. Other authors may have chosen to omit their regular dispatching of man's best friend to doggie heaven. Not Hennessey.

The reality of war is raw, traumatic and exhilarating. Raw in that it's never fun to be shot at, traumatic when comrades are lost or injured by enemy fire or cowardly bomb attacks and exhilarating because in comparison to fighting for twelve hours straight, being in firefights, calling down fire like the wrath of God on the enemy and, at the end of it all, still standing, you can stick heli-skiing right up your arse.

And the author knows the sort of figure he cuts, a grizzled veteran standing before unblooded troops, a figure of awe in faded fatigues and battered gear, like a car-boot action man, a figure to be respected and feared.

This is a compelling and immediate account not of men at war, or even of the British Army at war, but of one man at war. The battles are bloody, the stories about troops trying to deal with the return to normality afterwards are thought provoking and, this being a Brit, there is humour among all the blood, sand, horror and haribo.

Hennessey may come across as arrogant and unlikable in peace, but in war he unflinchingly accepts that it's his job to kill other men (and dogs), and he's unflinching in his descriptions of that experience. That's the book's saving grace and what makes it worth reading.

He does love his TLA, FLAs or LOLAs, some pages read like a transcription of a particularly tense edition of 'Countdown'. It adds to the feeling of authenticity but has you flipping to the glossary at the back of the book because it's important not to confuse a FLA (a donkey) with an FMA (an assault helicopter) as this would derail the narrative somewhat.

FLA - Four Legged Animal
FLA - Four Letter Acronym
FMA - flying machine (armoured)
Terry - Terry Taliban, not a person but actually army slang. Then again, might be a real name of a really unfortunate sod.
GPMG - General Purpose Machine Gun
LOLA - just like cherry cola, also Lots Of Letters Acronym
TLA - Three Letter Acronym

Review - 'Mad World' by Paula Byrne

There was a time, in particular before World War One (AKA 'the Big Show'), when the aristocratic class ran the country. They went to the best schools, went to university and then proceeded smoothly to some position in Government until they arranged for their father to be killed in a hunting accident and took their seat in the House of Lords, looking forward to a succession of good dinners and putting a serious dent in the global supply of claret. Of course the War changed all that as the upper class were exposed as not fit to lead a conga line, never mind a charge at the enemy.

Reading 'Mad World', one is left with the profound impression that it's a wonder the aristocracy managed to stop buggering one another long enough to do anything at all. There's so much sodomy going on that it's a rare page that doesn't see somebody plunging into a chum with indecent haste before getting hammered and making a spectacularly bad marriage to a wife who turns increasingly ill tempered as she discovers that she is second in her husband's affection to the entire male staff of the household, including the grooms and the compost lad.

With all the men drinking and buggering the help, it's little wonder that the women get a little bitter and come over as somewhat brittle. At least that's the impression that one gets from the author. One also gets the distinct feeling that the author doesn't like any of the people she is writing about. This makes for an uncomfortable read, quite appropriate for a book largely about buggery.

There's not a lot to like in the characters described here. Fun in literature, in real life somebody who is bent on self destruction can be quite dull. What it did do very well was draw a very clear line between being a drunk and being an alcoholic. Drunks drink every day, cope with mammoth hangovers and manage to function in whatever pocket of society they find themselves in. Alcoholics drink to oblivion, which is where they end up, with skin like the sort of paper you unearth on an archaeological dig. However, both drunks and alcoholics make for dull company - the only people who find the company of drunks amusing are other drunks; it's difficult to deliver a witty bon mot when you're slurring your words, your sense of timing is all over the place and you're holding a kebab in one hand and a pint of stella in the other. These are not conditions to bandy witty conversation, these are conditions to drink two pints of water and take yourself off to bed and for Christ's sake don't make a pissed-up call to the ex. Reading about people getting drunk is less tedious because there was always the possibility, the book being set in the country, that there would be an amusing accident when some hooray tried to shag a steam powered threshing machine but that never happened and the only effect was that I ended up rather fancying a cocktail at eight in the morning as I read this on the train to work.

There is, at the heart of the book, a tragedy that is profound, and profoundly well described. It's the idea, the very idea, of unfulfilled promise. It is quite apparent that if one goes to Eton, those are the best days of your life. Everything else is a failure to fulfil your early promise. When you go to college you don't dazzle as well as you did at school, and then your career isn't the success that was expected when you were at college. Basically, unless you go straight from school to be the first man on Mars, you're a disappointment.

This is either a tragedy or, as I suspect, adult life.

It's also profoundly sad. Who is anyone to say that another has not fulfilled their promise until the lid is firmly screwed down on the box - and even then? What if they had kept that year they spent discovering a lost civilization in Iceland a secret? As for early promise - I'd say that anyone who stopped being ritually sodomised when they left school had actually made something of an improvement on their life - unless they like that sort of thing.

So the best days of your life are essentially being buggered by bigger boys until it's your turn to bugger boys. Ideal preparation for a career in government.

The aristocracy are portrayed as wild and brittle. Everyone's drunk, everyone's screwing one another, or others, everyone's either rich or festering in poverty and there is a constant merry go round of aristocracy staying with one another. This allows the bed-hopping, buggery and boozing that marked the era. Luckily everyone looks really well dressed and has sensible hair, and the veneer of respectability and glamour lends the whole of the proceedings a sort of louche charm.

Madersfield Court is described well. I've actually been there and loved the house and gardens - any house that comes with its own moat sends a certain message, which is usually: 'stay that side of the water while I reload my blunderbuss'. The gardens are stunning and contain a pet cemetery. This is what we expect from the aristocracy - beat the servants but honour your Labrador.

It's a fascinating insight into the life, as was lived then, of the aristocracy. And you kind of get the feeling that apart from trading up from opium to coke, the lives of the rich are pretty much the same now, except with less moats. At the same time, one could see the same drama of family disgrace, heavy drinking, infidelity and bad behaviour as being played out on any sink estate in the country. If you drinking your breakfast of car-boot vodka from a bottle, it's squalid, if you get your butler to decant your breakfast Champaign into jugs, it's glamorous.

This book then, is something of a paradox. I found it interesting and certainly ended up thanking my lucky stars that I didn't go to public school and hence can still walk without waddling. But there was an undercurrent not quite of disapproval but almost of disapproving envy, and a lack of empathy from the author, so while the book was interesting, it wasn't enjoyable and it's not a book I would recommend to others - though I would like to discuss it with others that read it - because I'm not sure that buggery and alcohol is everybody's cup of tea.

The wild side

A subject described by a colleague of mine, as I ranted, as ‘sooooooo Sunday supplement’. But I’ll post it on a Friday anyway.

Putting ‘wild’ in front of something does not automatically raise it into the realms of peril and adventure. This is particularly true of swimming and camping.

Swimming is great, but can be somewhat hectic at half-term, where lots of excited children in the water basically results in you swimming in child soup. As alternative to breaststroking through a cocktail of chlorine and pee, how about using a natural pool? Possibly a limpid one in a glade. That, or the river or a lake or the sea.

When did swimming out doors, which er, most people do when on holiday, become ‘wild swimming’? Surely ‘wild swimming’ is when one pitches over the side of the boat into the rapids or when somebody on the beach screams for your attention and utters the sentence no bather ever wants to hear ‘don’t look behind you…just swim!’

It’s like ‘wild camping’ – it’s a tent, in a field – it’s not wild camping…it’s camping! Just camping and only camping. What the hell do you expect camping to entail…pitching a tent indoors? That’s not a camping site, it’s the shop floor at Millets!

Wild camping should include at least the following elements: an extinction level weather event, an animal attack repelled with a shovel, scenery containing at least one precipice and last but not least, a sing-song.

Rich Hall - cultural commentator

Do we need a successor to Charlie Brooker now that he is happy and has lost his edge? I nominate Rich Hall as the emerging force in cultural commentary. If you get a chance to see his ‘Deep South’ documentary, it’s worth a watch. Mostly a straightforward, but good, handling of the way that literature and cinema have portrayed the Southern USA, there is one marvellous scene where, standing in a cotton field, he loudly disclaims about the evils of the movie-bipocs ‘Ray’ and ‘Walk the line’, explaining that Jamie Foxx received an academy award while Wakeeeeemmm (whatever) Phoenix was only nominated because ‘Jamie Foxx made a slightly better job of raping the corpse of Ray Charles than Wakeem Phoenix did of raping the corpse of Johnny Cash.

As I sat there open mouthed he then vented spleen about the sort of person who needs a movie to help them find great music, the implication clearly stated that if you didn’t know about Johnny Cash before you saw this film, you’re an idiot.

I can’t do the rant justice – I’d have to invent a new font called ‘bile’, and print it out on a printer loaded with vitriol rather than ink onto a sheet of flame.

The rant ends with his shouting ‘f**k you!’ into camera, addressing anyone and everyone without a Johnny Cash record in their collection.

Almost as good is his analysis of Hillbilly culture – a hillbilly is somebody who holds a grudge, resists outside interference and brews his own hooch. Another term might be ‘Scotsman’.