I like the sound of that

Short version:  go here, it’s great!

http://www.ambient-mixer.com/

What environment do readers like to read in?  Well, apparently there are a few requirements.  Adequate lighting, obviously, because anyone who has a book that illuminates itself should properly be briefly illuminated themselves, during their incineration as a witch.  A comfy chair, and by this I mean chair in its wider sense, which is something roughly the size of a sofa, with a footstool for raising feet (essential to avoid DVT during prolonged reading bouts) and a couple of blankets.  That’s the basics and I think we can all agree that it’s a contravention of your human rights not to have at least that.  Further research though has revealed certain specific acoustic requirements which, perhaps surprisingly, are as far from ‘sussssshhhhhh’ and silence as can be.

A gentle background murmur appears to be desirable, composed of three elements and muted by very particular acoustic countermeasures.

Firstly, rain pattering against the window. Not necessarily full on ‘oh my Christ is the lighthouse going over I’ve not seen a storm like this since 1806?’ rain, just enough rain to make you glad that you are a) inside and b) not required to water the garden tonight, freeing up essential reading time.

Secondly, a crackling fire.  That means a log fire.  Log fires crackle in a pleasing way.  Ever had a log fire?  Wonderful, log fires are more Bloke than punching a bull to death to save a baby from being gored.  You build the log fire, you light the log fire, you blow on the log fire, you poke the log fire, a lot, and you feed it logs.  You end the evening smelling pleasingly of wood smoke, like an upmarket ham.  Log fires are also excellent for developing and passing on Bloke Lore. Here’s a tip, always dry out the wood.  You may think ‘G&P, you massive arsehole, the wood will dry out on the fire, that’s one of the things fire is really good for’.  And you are right, but it will also mean you don’t get so much a pleasing crackle, more a succession of loud cracks that sound like the conclusion of a drug deal gone bad.  Not relaxing.

Thirdly, murmur.  Want total silence when you’re reading?  You do?  OK.  Go away, read ‘Salem’s Lot and come back and tell me you like to read in total silence.

(Waits).

You fouled yourself at the first unexpected noise, didn’t you?  No disgrace, but a gentle background hum of voices will assure you that you are not going to be devoured by vampires.

So, why is this not distracting?  Because it’s muted by the acoustic baffles that are thick curtains over the windows and, oh I don’t know, some sort of primitive arrangement of sound dampening produced by softening the lines of the walls by installing paper along them.  Bookshelves?  Well I guess that would work.

So, a desirable acoustic environment would appear to be a Common Room at Hogwarts, rather than the bus, train (sleeper trains excepted) or even the loo (say it ain’t so!).

So how can you take all this with you?  The answer to this, like so many questions about reading, cooking and porn, is found on the internet.  It would appear that people mix their own ambient environments to listen to whist reading.  And having dipped into a few, I have to confess to finding the entire thing wholly enchanting.

Upon initial listen, there are three favourites.  The ‘Gryffindor Common Room’, because why the hell not, ‘Storm on the Hogwarts Express’ because steam train, rain and well, steam train, and finally ‘Sherlock’s apartment’.  Point of order on the last one, Chandler, Monica et al lived in an ‘apartment’, Sherlock and John live in a flat, Holmes and Watson lived in Rooms.  But it’s so good, who cares.

Ambient soundscapes, they’re a thing. They were what made ‘Marathon’ such an immersive game and now they are like a 700 foot tall ice wall against the Shite Talkers and others who would pollute the audible environment when decent people just want to crack on with their reading on the train, bus or at the dinner table with their family.

Book Clubs

How ironic that what is for most a solitary occupation should give rise to social occasions in the form of the book club.

For most people, reading is a solitary occupation.  There are exceptions.  The bed time story between parent and child, the story time in school or library between CRB checked adult and children, or the public reading between author and crowd he wishes were younger, hipper and more attractive or she wishes were not so bloody condescending to women writers.

Of course there is always that moment when you see somebody else reading the same book as you on public transport and share either a nod, a knowing glance, or bodily fluids, depending on just how racy the book in question is., another delightful social convention the Kindle is killing off until they come up with one with a back screen that shows the cover of whatever you’re reading.

Certain books are exempt from the ‘Oh, you’re reading that too?’ moment.  These are Harry Potter books and anything by John Grisham.  The same goes for any book duplicated poolside or on the beach.  Any book from the Song of Ice and Fire cycle is actually fair game, especially if the other person is behind you in their reading, allowing you to sharply draw breath when they mention their favourite character.

There are, of course, certain books that essentially are a public service announcement.  Don’t strike up a conversation with any woman reading ’50 shades of grey’ unless you really enjoy hearing about unhappy relationships.  If you see anyone reading ‘Catcher in the Rye’ they may not be a psycho, but can you really take that chance?  Oddly, anyone reading ‘American Psycho’ is probably normal, but would rather read than talk to you so is best left alone.

Where we read is in our own space, in our own head.  If we want company, we do the voices of the characters in our head while we read.  Mostly, we don’t.

On the one hand then, the very existence of book clubs is surprising.  Everyone actually getting organised enough to read the same book at the same time?  Amazing.  What’s more, that this should happen in England?  A place where usually nobody ventures a critical opinion about anything, unless it’s a tut!  Newspaper review supplements should change their star ratings to a tut/star rating system.  If a book is OK, it gets a star, if it’s amazing, it gets five stars.  But if it’s awful, it gets a tut, and if it’s really awful, it gets five tuts.

On the other hand, anyone who finishes a book immediately wants to tell people about it.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a novel, a travelogue or ‘Amazing Buns In Just Five Weeks’, give somebody a glass of white wine and a voulevont and they will spit damp crumbs at you in their enthusiasm to communicate just how good the latest Patricia Cornwall is.

Haven’t read it?

Doesn’t matter, it’s like a fucking abridged audiobook, you’ll get the potted plot in three minutes, followed by thirty minutes of just how relevant the book was to the reader.  Bonus material can include, but is not limited to, who should play what roles in any movie adaptation.

The book club formalises this process.  If it’s a crap club, then everyone talks books for five minutes before talking about soft furnishings.  If it’s a good one, then everyone maintains a veneer of respectability for about five minutes before acrimony occurs.

Because the English, when forced to read the same book, can have wildly different opinions, and that’s what makes book club so much fun.  That and alcohol (my book club meets in a pub).

And it is a great social occasion.  You get to try out new skills, like back-pedalling from the brink of social mortification after you open with ‘it was shit and anyone who liked it is a peado’, only to find yourself in a minority and secretly starting to wonder if the rest of the group are just a little bit thick, or peados.

No book club in your area?  Start one.  You get to choose the first book!  I recommend ‘American Psycho’.

Gentleman's relish

Jesus fucking Christ would you believe the amount of porn the is on the Internet? A year or so ago the population of Lego minifigs actually surpassed that of human beings. That is, the factory that turns out the colourful choking hazards churned out its seven billionth or something. The calculation did not take into account that, very much like human beings, minifigs have a finite lifespan. Unlike human beings, I imagine that a lot of them end their days in the intestinal tract of an infant, or canine, or infant canine. That's what porn has become like, there is now so much porn that one person could not hope to get through it all and remain hydrated in their lifetime.

And the variety is staggering. I'm told that web sites these days offer sub menus to cover every taste, some of which, and I like to think of myself as a man of the world, I have never heard of. Believe me, once you do hear about them, they tend to be something that you will never forget, no matter how much you want to. For instance, if you type 'pegging' into Google will you be rewarded with links and images about a) how to secure guy ropes, b) how to hang clothes on a washing line in such a manner that creasing will be minimised or c) something so bloody deviant that you think you'll have to bloody sandpaper yourself to ever feel clean again. Answer: c, and no, pegging does not involve sandpapering bollocks, that's an entirely different category.

Before the Internet, in a kinder, gentler age, porn was distributed in one of three ways. It was sold in newsagents. Hard core stuff was sold in sex shops. And children accessed it by finding discarded porn mags in hedges. Quite why porn was so freely available in hedges I'm not sure as I never imagined that browsing through a porn mag was an activity hat leant itself to being undertaken al fresco. Now I know that there's a category for that too.

The hedge dwelling discarder's mag of choice was 'Razzle'. There's probably an official advertising or publishing industry term to describe the demographic that it was aimed at, but let's just settle for 'downmarket' and leave it at that, although 'downmarket porn lovers' is probably a fairer, shoddier picture. Razzle did though, years before people started posting pictures of their girlfriend passed out drunk and naked on the web 'for a laugh' and lads' mags featured high street girls in their pants on the covers, blaze the trail with using very-much-not-models to fill its filthy pages in a section titled 'readers wives'.

This provided a terrifying insight into the world of kitchens because, for some reason, the kitchen was the place of choice for the ladies to pose. Terribly unhygienic. There were three constants in the resulting snapshots. Harsh and unflattering lighting. That sort of flat, characterlessness that you get from Polaroid shots (this was in the days before digital photography and one hardly wanted to rock up at Boots to collect some explicit photographs and be smirked at by the oik behind the counter). And unattractive, bordering on scary, subject matter. In many cases where there had been 'tidying up' of hair down there, any trimming would of been better done taming the horrendous perms that often topped the model off.

Simply put, the 'readers wives' section was more horrific fascination material than erotic. An overweight housewife atop a kitchen counter legs akimbo is not, and never will be, erotic. Adding stockings does not help. Stockings do not automatically make something erotic. The sight of a shotgun wielding bank robber does not immediately fill anyone witnessing a bank raid with the urge to crack one off. Indeed, of anything likely to invoke gentleman's wilt, 'readers wives' would do the job. Maybe that's what the editors were thinking placing the feature half way through the magazine, instead of simply having a page adorned with the words 'enough skiving in the bogs, get back to work'.

Razzle has, I imagine, long gone and, until broadband reaches rural areas, so has accessing porn in hedges.

Kindling again

Apparently, women are reading erotica on their Kindles. This is, apparently, newsworthy. Newsworthy for a couple of reasons, firstly because it allows editors of tabloid newspapers to write about women reading erotica, and possibly use a saucy picture of a woman with a Kindle looking a bit flustered, and also because if the paper is owned by a group with a publishing arm, it allows them to plug a few of their filthier titles. Newsworthy also because any bloke reading it will be staggered that a woman can both own and operate a gadget, despite previously showing no aptitude for technology beyond the niche talent for bringing up the browsing history on your laptop, yet apparently still being incapable of fucking recording the footie when asked.

One wonders how this story ever surfaced at all, as one of the features of the Kindle is that nobody can tell what you are reading without looking at the screen. Possibly a Guardian journo was on a bus journey and noticed the woman next to him with a Kindle in one hand, furiously thrumming herself with the other, but more likely somebody checked out the on-line sales chart, wondered 'who the hell is reading this crap?', downloaded it and concluded 'women'.

This is a natural conclusion. Women read erotica and men read porn the same way that ladies glow and men perspire. If a bloke wants to read porn, he goes to the top shelf, not the book shelf. It has to be noted though that in recent years, the top shelf appears to have got rather prudish, with wrappers round the covers. This is despite the lower shelves awash with lads mags with covers featuring the sort of thing that requires artful captions to keep things even within stroking distance of decent.

So, people are reading things on their Kindle that, presumably, they would be embarrassed to read if it was in paperback form, although this has not stopped the publication of 'Fisty shades of shite' or whatever it's called now being published as a paperback, with a discreetly arty cover.

Possibly this is a reasonable fear. People do make judgements about other people based on what they are reading, in the same way that they make assumptions about them based on the contents of their shopping trolly (fifty cans of cat food and a microwave meal for one tells a sad story). In the past, it was a frequent occurrence on public transport to find somebody attractive right up until the point where they pulled out a copy of the Daily Mail and started reading with every sign of enjoyment. Now that everybody reads the Metro, you won't know that somebody is a Nazi until you start talking to them, although its a pretty safe assumption that if they are reading the Metro, they're an idiot. It's also a safe assumption that if you are English and on public transport, you won't be talking to anyone.

So the Kindle allows people to read books that they might otherwise think twice about reading in public. This applies not just to erotica, but for instance to far right literature. The bloke next to you could be smiling and nodding while he reads 'Mein Kamph' or whatever the hell it's called. Likewise, they could be reading the literature of the hard left, if Socialist Worker ever gets round to putting out a Kindle version.

And of course they could be reading children's books. This implies that there is some kind of shame in reading children's literature if you are a grown-up, a trend that was reinforced when Bloomsbury brought out editions of the Harry Potter books with different covers for adults. I didn't think there was any shame in reading the kids' edition, certainly not compared with the shame of paying an extra quid for the adult cover. I certainly know people who still have all their old Enid Blyton's and why shouldn't they while away a train journey reading about the famous five? Certainly better than reading the bloody Metro.

As for me, I shall stick with my 'Lads Book of Fun' from 1957, discreetly tucked inside a copy of 'Razzle'.

Kindling

When I was a kid, I used to watch 'Tomorrow's World'. This programme showcased inventions that would someday change the world, or at least your front room. For instance, Michael Rodd was the first, and only, man to spread jam on a CD to demonstrate that it did not impair performance. Everyone who subsequently bought CDs and discovered that a speck of dust could cause the CD to skip like a kid with ADD and a haribo habit concluded that maybe Michael would have been better off showcasing the weapons-grade laser that must have been used to read the preserve-smeared disc, as anything that could do that could probably shoot down an ICBM, a much better use for a laser than being used to bring forth the musical stylings of Dire Straits.

They also showed an electronic book. About the size of an etch-a-sketch, each book was on a micro-chip, which you slotted into place. The text displayed in red LED of the sort then popular with digital watches. This, we were told, was the future of reading. I agreed, I had read 'The Hitch Hikers' Guide To The Galaxy' and knew that electronic books were the way forward. It never went into production, possibly because of costs, probably because it was a bit of a shit idea.

Now, of course, it appears that just about everyone has an electronic book. Kindling used to be something you chopped or collected or, if a tourist on a cottage holiday, paid too much a bagful for, now it's a description of a popular pastime.

After years of waiting for an electronic book, the kindle is an enormous let-down. Its so...grey. The screen is grey, the plastic case is grey, the text is black (there's variety for you). This is not the sort of thing that Ford Prefect would tote around. There is nothing science fiction about the kindle, it's as exciting as an iron. And you know the big selling point for the kindle? You can read the screen in direct sunlight. Whoop de fucking do because, you know, you can't do that with a book, can you? The point of an electronic something is that it should be better than the non-electronic version. The computer is better than the abacus because you can't play 'angry birds' on an abacus.

An electric book needs to have two features to make it exciting. First, it should narrate books, in the voice of Claudia Winkleman. Second, you should be able to download books from the future.

Only these would overcome the tremendous drag factor of the many things that the kindle cannot do. It's shit at providing future fodder for second hand book shops, and if you are the sort of person who derives please from a well stocked bookshelf, a slab of plastic the colour of a dead sheep lying there does not have the same effect.

Worst of all is the lack of being able to annotate. I bloody hated French at school, each lesson an exercise in misery, until I opened what looked like an unremarkable exercise book, a battered hardback text book that had been through the hands of countless boys before me. This one though, was different. Some hero had, with a black biro and a tremendous surge of filthy imagination, annotated every illustration accompanying the stories of Jean, Xavier and Marie with illustrations and speech bubbles (in English) that turned even a simple trip to the bouloungerer into a pornographic festival of filth. When I turned the page to 'a visit to the stables' I had to work so hard at suppressing my laughter that I nearly ruptured something - nothing I've since seen on the internet has even come close.

Years later I was to encounter the artfully defaced book once again, this time flipping through the pages of Dickens to find that all of the illustrations had been re-captioned, with shocking and surprising results. If you want the formula for hilarity - it's using the word 'cockflicker' in the context of describing a picture of an earnest looking bloke in a top hat.

Try doing that on a kindle.

The Feast of Leftover

The period between Christmas and New Year is, perhaps, the most orphaned time of year. By which I mean it is perhaps the time of year with the least significance attached to it, it is merely a period that we pass through, on our way to time of resolutions and renewed gym memberships.

This is perhaps because this slack period does not have a name. It is not really Christmas, nor is it New Year.

More probably it is because it has not yet been the work of a memorable piece of fiction. Throughout the year seasons and seconds are celebrated, especially so at this time of the year, where the simple wave of a remote control could summon any of the three versions of ‘A Christmas Carol’ playing, leaving you to settle on Alistair Sym, Patrick Stewart or muppets as your Dickens vehicle of choice. Myself, I favour Bill Murray’s outstanding performance in ‘Scrooged’.

New Year finds favour with filmmakers, featuring prominently in everything from ‘Radio Days’ to ‘When Harry met Sally’.

Or maybe it’s just the mood. Everyone is bucolic and possibly melancholic. Or maybe they are back at work and so sullen. It’s been days now since anyone had anything approaching a normal meal, featuring vegetables, and one is usually still in the process of trying to get through the Christmas booze so that one can be temptation-free come New Year and the inevitable detox.

Hence, I have decided to celebrate this time of year, which I christen The Feast of Leftover.

There are many reasons to be cheery during this period. The first is that cheeriness is not mandatory. The second is that one can lie on the sofa with one hand stirring a tin of Quality Street in the hope that there may be a toffee left among the wrappers, for hours, and not have this used as evidence in a speculative diagnosis of depression. The same goes for still sporting pyjamas and a dressing gown until well after lunch. Which brings us on to booze. It is acceptable, at this time of the year, to have a glass of port, or two, with a cheeky slice of fruit cake. On very few other occasions does such behaviour constitute ‘lunch’ but, on this occasion, one can get away with it.

Not that it is all sloth and inebriation. There are presents to be enjoyed, books to be read, high scores to be racked up and weapons and car upgrades to be unlocked.

Best of all, there is the Feast itself. If one is lucky enough to have surplus food one should also realise that it is a sin to throw away food. That is why this time of year features an unusually varied diet, as one seeks to use up all the food in the fridge before ‘normality’ returns. And it’s Christmas food too, leading one to question the wisdom of ordering so many picked walnuts. By which I mean any.

If you are excited by the prospect of having a cheese board for dinner, then this is the time of year to go for it.

The Feast of Leftover is also celebrated in our shops. This is the time of year to purchase your Christmas decorations and cards (tip: put them somewhere handy, not somewhere ‘safe’, so when you come to look for them in eleven months, there’s a chance you’ll actually be able to find the bloody things and not have to buy more), retail Christmas leftovers on sale at bargain prices or, actually, prices more suitable for what is a bit of plastic dipped in glitter. Tempting this year were the small artificial Christmas trees on sale for a couple of quid at a DIY store. I wanted to buy loads, take them home, set them up and then stomp through them pretending to be a giant, or recreate the Battle of Endor.

However you choose to celebrate this time of the year, be it with cheese, pickled walnuts or pickling your liver, may I wish you a very happy Feast of Leftover.

Now, having just seen a gap in the greetings card market, I’m off to fetch the card and crayons.

Postcard from Norfolk – Postcards and bookshops

Writing a postcard, by which I mean a real postcard rather than a self indulgent and self referential blog entry about how I such the salt off my chips before eating them, if something of an art. You have a small space in which to convey much, so there's a quandary; does one go for wit, or brevity, or both? Or does one attempt to condense a best selling travel book into the space allowed? Should one confine oneself to a weather report and, if so, how truthful should one be? Or should one simply go for something the postman will enjoy reading?

Longer than a tweet, shorter than a letter, the postcard is, along with the Christmas card, the analog version of Internet communication. Essentially, the modern craze for forwarding pictures of kittens in hats with captions heavy on the use of the letter zed is just a cheap and lazy modern incarnation of sending relatives a saucy seaside postcard.

Given the utter dominance of texting and the ability to send e mails and pictures from your smartphone,it's good that postcards continue to thrive as a edits of communication. This is, I think, because that are considered to be the same as Christmas or birthday cards, something that are sent as well as a text rather than instead of. Nothing conveys the message 'we are on holiday and you are not' like a card depicting a handful of picturesque cottages on the front and a message on the back about drinking lots of tea. I always make sure that I leave a red wine ring stain on the back of the card, I am actually thinking about having a special stamp made.

There are two approaches to postcard sending. The first is to buy a shedload on day one, go to the pub and get it all over with in one mail shot. This is environmentally sound, as it allows you to recycle the same remarks over and over to different people. The alternative is to go for the episodic approach, which means sending a postcard a day and developing a theme, such as a beer forecast, reviewing a different beach every day or, my favourite, explaining how you are developing a relationship with the pretty girl in the post card shop by buying one every day.

As much fun as sitting in the pub writing is, sitting in the pub reading is even more fun, which is why, despite it lacking a fish and chip shop, Burnham Market is fast becoming one of my favourite places to visit; one spends half an hour in the Brazen Head book shop, then repairs to the Hoste to flick through ones purchases, while drinking beer.

The second hand book shop is the home of the unexpected treat. Visiting today I picked up a Tom Wolfe book that I've never even heard of, and a NEL edition of 'Assignment in eternity'. I really do hope that you can tell a book by its cover because this one is a corker, showing a rocket blasting off from a city, in a bubble, on the moon! It is the perfect science fiction book cover. Who could resist?

It also prompted something of a revelation - I like books more than I like reading. Peering over the shoulders of people on the train I have been very impressed by the kindle e book reader. The screen can be read in direct sunlight and it is pleasingly small and looks comfortable to hold. If I liked readying, I would have one and download books to it at a reasonable price. But I like books. A book is an artefact, not a stream of electrons. Maybe I am a showing my age but surely anyone who has written a book dreams of it one day appearing in print rather than on screen.

More than that though, will there be a second hand market for e books? Even if there is, even if we end up with an on line store curated by some caring individual who groups the books in a manner conducive to e browsing that leads one to unexpected treasures, it's unlikely that inside the front cover will be somebody's name and age, or, my favourite, a slip of paper explaining that this copy of 'A Pilgrim's Progress' was awarded to somebody as a prize for growing the largest marrow in the school garden.

Kindle readers lack charm (the device, not the people). Worst of all, they lack covers - I like rockets, science fiction and cities in bubbles and I don't want to be deprived of looking at a dramatic depiction of same before opening up the book to continue the adventure.

Stuff

I read recently that some supermarket is going to start 'offering' (that is, charging for) a dating service whereby they set you up with a potential partner based on the contents of your respective baskets.

Personally I don't think it's the greatest idea in the world to match people with similar purchasing habits, as nothing puts a strain on a relationship quite like the bitter resentment that stems from your partner eating the last bag of quavers, while people who buy quorn should simply not be allowed to breed.

At the value end of the dating service, it's probably nothing more sophisticated than making sure that people who bulk-buy marmite are not matched with those who do not, while, supermarkets being supermarkets, there's probably a luxury end where blokes can not only be set up with women, but can be informed when they are likely to be ovulating and so time their approach to coincide with a time their prospective partner is craving sperm and hence not too picky.

Of course the idea is not new, people have been checking each other out at the check out for years. Indeed it’s quite acceptable to load your basket with the sort of stuff that would make you attractive to the opposite sex, like the keys to your villa in Italy and plenty of single portion ready meals. Try to avoid a dozen cans of cheap, super-strength cider and a DVD featuring Jeremy Clarkson though.

The service is predicated on the assumption that we are defined by what we consume and, certainly, our stuff gives a clue as to our personality. For instance, if a bloke has shelves full of action figures still in their boxes, he’s likely to be a reasonable sort and the body parts in his freezer will be neatly stacked. However, if a young woman has shelves full of My Little Pony, out of their boxes and showing clear signs of grooming, run! Use the window, not the door, it’s quicker. Never mind the drop, just do it man!

Men have, of course, been storing their tat off-site in bespoke stuff-deposit structures for many years and a glimpse into a chap’s shed is truly a glimpse into his soul, except with more homebrew and well-thumbed porn. That people now have so much stuff they don’t have a place for it all and have spent so much on it they can’t afford to move to a bigger home has not gone unnoticed by business, hence those self-storage places that have sprung up round the country, allowing couples who are moving in together a place to hide, sorry to store all his hideous furniture and framed movie posters until she can eBay the lot or simply torch the place.

By the way, if a female colleague mentions in passing that she is moving at the weekend and putting some of her stuff in storage, remarking that it’ll transform the inside of the storage unit into something resembling a typical female’s front room, don’t on Monday morning ask her if she had a hard time stuffing her ladycave at the weekend. The resulting tribunal won’t result in you being sacked, but you will be tagged as ‘insensitive’ by HR. Like I care.

I’ve always thought that if my personality was wiped as the result of some medical experiment gone wrong, conspiracy or, more likely, trying to fork a muffin out of the toaster while wearing a hat made of tin-foil, I could construct it by re-reading all the books I own, being in the lucky position of not having an original thought in my head and having cobbled together what passes for a personality from a collection of fiction and the odd reference book about cheese. Umberto Eco wrote about this process in ‘The mysterious flame of Queen Loana’ so it turns out that even that idea’s not original. I mean, I thought of it first, but just because he wrote it down he gets all the credit.

But he didn’t take it to its logical conclusion, just like putting fresh fruit in your shopping basket because you know nobody wholesome is going to strike up a conversation with you if it contained your actual dietary staples of pot noodle and mars bars, you could load your reading matter to tailor your reconstructed personality to something, well, a little less freakish.

And the place to start if your teenage diaries. That’s why I’m currently bidding on eBay for a blank Letts diary for my teen years. I’ll then be able to substitute this for my actual diary and convince myself that I was in fact a stylish, confident and happy teen, rather than the shambling collection of grease and neuroses that was actually the case. Hence, for instance, replacing this not untypical entry: ‘Saw [redacted] playing netball today. Made me feel funny. Went home, touched myself. Watched ‘Allo ‘Allo. Went to bed.’ with the rather more erudite ‘Saw [redacted] playing netball. She is beauty poise and elegance and my heart swells with yearning, a divine ache every time I see her. Went home, masturbated to the point of dehydration, watched ‘Allo ‘Allo. Went to bed’.

Big Society and Dystopia repost

Growing up, those twin essential devices from stopping healthy developmental play in the fresh air; foxed-to-the-point-of-badgered library books and terrifying BBC children’s drama, provided essential preparation for what to expect from the dystopian future.

If you read the books of John Christopher, dystopia came in the form of some sort of disaster that set technology levels back to those of the dark ages (alien invasion, mankind tinkering with nature, everyone on the planet simultaneously joining Civil War re-enactment societies, that sort of thing), while the BBC’s Bleak Future was essentially far muddier then the present, being a place where the appearance of a steam engine was greeted with exactly the sort of slack-jawed mixture of fear and awe currently on the faces of the kiddies being traumatised by this tea-time apocalyptic drama, filmed in the West Midlands to save money.

The drama conveyed to kiddies with some style that when they grew up there would be more chance of them being a subsistence farmer than a spaceman* and, most brutally of all, ‘Angel Delight’ would no longer existed.

What was never predicted (along with mobile ‘phone ring tones so irritating it makes you wonder if perhaps the plot of some of these stories: that advanced technology is jealously guarded by a social elite or at least people with taste, is not in fact a good idea) was the solution proposed by politicians to head off a future where the fabric of society is as ragged as a pair of Primark pants after a boil wash: the Big Society.

The Big Society is not, as you might think, Brobdingnag, but rather a model for the future of community services. Essentially funding is slashed for supporting council services and the people who rely on those services are told to ‘get on with it’, much in the way the same phrase is used when you are locked in your study with a bottle of scotch and a service revolver after you have lost a rather important battle or, worse still, committed social suicide by tonguing an unsuitable minor royal.

The Big Society suffered a set-back this week when Liverpool Council announced that they didn’t want to be considered part of the pilot for an idea thought up by posh boys, but instead were quite content to continue to be considered as a city of lovable rogues, chirpy female flatmates or, of course, lesbian patio-layers (might be getting that last one a bit confused).

A ‘pilot’ by the way is where you don't have enough confidence to roll out an ill-conceived scheme nationally and so do it in a few backwater areas. So, when it bombs like a fat kid jumping into a swimming pool, you can explain that either the idea needs work or the bloody yokels in charge of the pilot couldn't be trusted to run a car boot stall, never mind a complex social experiment and anyway, next time the posters will be better).

The gist of the Big Society is that English people, who by tradition would all like to live in castles with moats far from any neighbours and by practice only really talk to their neighbours if they are caught dumping their garden waste over the fence, are supposed to take a community approach and look after things like keeping the streets tidy and, no doubt when the cuts to public services really start to bite, other jobs currently undertaken by trained professionals including; maintaining parks (we can graze our sheep on them when we're all reduced to subsistence farming), health care (who needs doctors now we have the internet - what's easier, seven years at medical school or Googling 'tickly cough'?), or air traffic control.

What certainly won’t be needed are civic poo scoopers. This is thanks to the invention of the doggie bag. Certainly not to be confused with a device used to transport expensive leftovers from a restaurant (itself an alien concept to anyone brought up to believe that not scraping the plate at the Berni Inn until the last morsel of food, and quite a lot of the pattern, was removed was a sin), but a bag full of Scoobie Poo. Thanks to resilient, hole-free (and that’s important), plastic bags, owners of defecating hounds can now swoop with the speed of a cockle-picker racing the tide and simultaneously bag the unthinkable and make a mental note to stop feeding Fido leftover masala.

*Ironically, this is true, if by subsistence level farmer you mean owner of a boutique farm in the Cotswolds producing some sort of organic cheese and pork scratching smoothie concoction that is perversely popular in Japan, sells for a fortune at farmers’ markets and has just been picked up for national distribution by Waitrose.

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.