Connecting with Ms Nicks.

I think this is my all time favourite album cover, which admission will probably bring a monstrous regiment of women arriving in a fleet of coaches tomorrow armed with rusty razor blades.

By way of convenient deflection, I can report that a friend of mine from back in the 80s knew Mick Fleetwood's auntie. He did. She worked at the Social Security office in Liverpool, and by an odd coincidence, so did he.

OK, it's a tenuous connection four steps removed, but it's a connection.

Pondering the Alternate Identity.

You know, I sometimes think that if I’d been born French instead of English, I’d probably be considered almost normal. I’m not sure whether that’s a compliment to the French or not. I think I intended it to be, but I’m listening to music and have had only five hours sleep in the last thirty nine.

And I’ll tell you something else while I’m in the mood.

Some years ago I decided to learn French once and for all (I did a pretty good shrug, you know, so I thought it would be nice to have the words to go with it.) I watched a TV series called A Vous la France and was a model of diligence – even bought the accompanying book and did the exercises. One of the programmes was about giving directions, and d’you know what? I was walking along the road one day when a French lorry pulled up beside me. The driver didn’t speak, he just showed me a piece of paper and shrugged. The paper was a delivery note with an address on it.

Well, the shrug and the fact that the steering wheel was on the wrong side of the cab gave me the clue to the problem: here was a Frenchman who didn’t speak English and didn’t know where the Parkhouse Industrial Estate was. So I gave him directions, in French! He was so pleased he gave me a 200 pack of cigarettes. (They weren’t French, unfortunately, which was a shame because I was very partial to the occasional Gauloises.)

And then I forgot it all again.

Praising a System.

I had an email from Skype tonight, notifying me that I had a new voicemail message. Turned out it was from three days ago. Isn’t it heartening to find a rare example of a modern system that works so well?

The Town on a Very Small Hill.

I’ve started getting a visit from somebody in Mound, Minnesota. It’s an odd name for a town, isn’t it – Mound? If it was in West Virginia, I expect it would be called Slag Heap.

Anyway, you’re more than welcome, Mound. I’ve no doubt you’re a very lovely town. And what’s in a name anyway? I’m sure there must be lots of beautiful women called Ethel, for example.

Come to think of it, I knew a girl called Ethel at school – Ethel Onions. That’s a pretty odd name, too, but I’m sure she was probably very nice if you got to know her. I’m fairly sure it was she who threw up in class one day, a fact to which I was alerted by the piece of undigested Brussels sprout which rolled under my desk. As I recall, I declined to kick it away. I thought it was probably still warm.

Staying Awake with La Belle Parisienne.

The Da Vinci Code has finally taken off at chapter 9. Although Dan Brown’s populist prose continues to flow about as smoothly as lumpy porridge through a drinking straw, he’s now pulled the rabbit out of the hat: He’s introduced us to the beautiful French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu.

She must be beautiful because her burgundy hair falls unstyled to her shoulders (‘framing the warmth of her face,’ no less) which Langdon finds preferable to the ‘cookie-cutter blonde’ look of the Harvard preppies he’s been used to all his life.

More than that, she’s thirty two. Well, of course she is; I’ve been thirty two ever since I was seventeen. Thirty two is the perfect age. (I think I said that before.) And she wears a cream coloured, knee-length Irish (!) sweater over black leggings. He never says she’s slim, but she must be. Only slim women ever wear black leggings in populist literature. But the piece-de-resistance is irresistible:

She speaks impeccable English with an ‘Anglo-Franco’ accent.

OK, Dan, I’m hooked. Maybe now I can stop falling asleep in front of the fire while I’m reading your book (which I didn’t do tonight, notwithstanding the fact that I had precisely five hours sleep in bed last night, and spent the two and a half hours before lunch clearing pieces of fallen tree from a road drain and washing the car. The only thing I usually do before lunch is make the bed and drink coffee. You have your cryptologist to thank for that.)

Sophie’s final words to close chapter 9:

‘Do not react to this message. Just listen calmly. You are in danger right now. Follow my directions very closely.’

Mlle Neveu is taking over! I promise I won’t go to sleep…

Good One.

On the same theme:

This has to be one of the best YouTube comments ever. I found it on the Fleetwood Mac track Go Your Own Way:

‘Tabernack criss de tits.’

Will somebody tell me what it means, please. It's cracking me up.

Time for bed.

Life and Mary Davies.

OK, I’m in the groove now. I just listened to another YouTube track that took me back a bit.

Once upon a time I was seventeen. So was Mary Davies. We were sort of an item, you know? – in the way that 17-year-olds are wont to be. She was from the bad side of the tracks, I was from the good, which probably explains why I believed her when she said she could only see me on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays because she was washing her hair the other nights.

Are you giggling yet?

Eventually, a friend of hers told me the truth of the matter. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays she was seeing somebody else, and on Sundays she went out with the biker guys from the local pub. I didn’t see her for about six months after that. (I did, however, wonder when she found the time to wash her hair.)

But then she called me and asked if we could go out again, so we did. We went for a drive and called in at a pub on the way back. She had two vodka and tonics, then fell asleep in the car. I took her home and never saw her again.

The End.

Isn’t life a hoot?

Swinging States.

I continue to be enthralled by the comments I find on YouTube.

I looked up an old soppy song that holds fond memories, just for old times’ sake, and found the following two comments:

‘…real music died around 97 early 98.’

Well, that’s a bit of a generalisation if you like.

‘The songs from the past, when men and women actually loved each other.’

Actually? Love is dead; it’s official.

But then I came across a third, which I quote verbatim with the upper case letters missing. It makes it all the more poignant.

‘i miss my wife. she passed away on June 25^th, 2013, breast cancer.’

The sudden escalation from ridiculously unreal to achingly real brings you close to the surreal. Having scoffed at a couple of idiots, now you want to weep for a poor guy in mourning. You do. The tapestry of life is a mysterious thing which loves to push you into contrasting modes of perception that sometimes leave you staggering.

Blowy Blighty.

We had a nice little storm over our sceptered isle today. News reports said that gusts reached nearly 100mph in some parts of the country, although I don’t think we had it quite that bad this far south.

The garden furniture and wheelie bins were scattered all over the shop, though, and at one point I saw a pane of glass fly past my office window and heard it smash on the path. That’s the third pane the greenhouse has lost this year. The birds were inconvenienced, too, because their favourite feeding place is the top of the compost bin, and the lid kept getting blown off. Fortunately, the storm abated sufficiently to allow feeding to recommence about an hour before birdie bed time.

The most worrisome part was hearing large bits of arboreal debris hitting the living room window with a succession of very loud bangs, but it survived. And the two short power cuts were brilliantly timed, one coming at lunchtime when I had food in the microwave, and the other about two hours later while I was working on a spreadsheet. Typical, eh? As luck would have it, the food was just about cooked and I’m an obsessive presser of ctrl-s while I’m working on spreadsheets. Oh, and one of the bird feeders was down when I went to collect it at dusk. I’ll have to sort that out tomorrow.

And this sort of thing is very educational, because it helps you realise just how awful it must be living in a place where they have hurricanes as a matter of course. I doubt they worry very much about wheelie bins or bird feeders.

A Down on Dan Brown.

I read the first four chapters of The Da Vinci Code tonight. So far, I’m even less impressed with the book than I was with the film.

Frankly, Dan Brown doesn’t strike me as being much of a writer. I think the kindest word I could use for his prose style would be ‘utilitarian.’ His use of pronouns is inconsistent and confused, he makes allusions which he then has to go on and explain – which is a sure sign of writing for the lowest common denominator – and his protagonist has the plastic qualities of a penny dreadful hero. He talks of the car travelling south and turning left to head west, and the whole thing is padded out with irrelevant detail. It’s hard going for somebody with a taste for the finer potential of language and the subtle nuances of communication. There's an irritating  gauchness and immaturity about it. Compared with the elegance of a Charlotte Bronte or the engaging idiosyncrasy of a Flann O’Brien, Dan Brown’s style has all the appeal of a piece of musty sackcloth you might find lying on the verge where somebody threw it out of a car window six months ago.

It’s obvious that he knows how to be a commercially successful author, however, which is maybe why he’s a professor of creative writing. Ironic, but there you are. And as Mrs Thatcher said: ‘There is no such thing as quality literature. There are books that sell and books that don’t.’

I will persevere as ever – just for the plot, you understand. I suppose one dimension is better than none.