Blog Posts

The Plot Thickens - Niedermayer & Hart

23/3/2018

I seem to have been telling my readers for ages that the follow-on story to Niedermayer & Hart was almost ready. I wasn’t fibbing, honest! I started the proofing and fact-checking process well over a year ago, but a lot has been happening for me and my family (in the most part, I’m pleased to say, good things) which has somehow managed to slow everything in the Odd Dog Press publishing department down to almost a standstill at times.

However, we did recently manage to produce a newly updated version of my wife Judith Johnson’s book Southborough War Memorial, which lists the two-hundred and fifty-five names on our local war memorial. The original book was printed in 2009 and has been out of print for a number of years, although we did produce a Kindle version in 2012. The revised book contains some photographs and information not previously seen, as several names have been added to the memorial since 2009. Naturally, being a local history book, it was never expected to appeal widely or to sell in vast numbers, yet it continues to sell steadily, and not just in our local community but also within its far wider diaspora. This book took Judith seven years to research in her spare moments and remains, in my view, a very fine achievement. So, hooray for Southborough War Memorial I say!

To return to the subject of Niedermayer & Hart; the second book in the trilogy is at its final proofing stage. Actually, I think that’s the first time I’ve ever mentioned a trilogy. I concluded N & H with the words The End because I didn’t want to promise a trilogy at the time (although it was always my intention), just in case the book didn’t go down very well. Fortunately, most of its readers seem to approve. A reviewer said this about N & H last week on Amazon UK:
“A real rip snorter of a page turner. I don't normally read anything other than Stephen King (I'm a bit of a King snob and generally find other Sci fi / horror authors don't quite meet the grade) but Johnson has written what I love to read. Looking forward to reading more of his books.”

The cover artwork for the new title (soon to be announced) is being prepared at the moment. I’ve seen the rough drawings and find it suitably unsettling. Like Niedermayer & Hart and my psychological thriller Roadrage, the new book will not only appear in a printed format but also as an ebook. Actually, we’re also planning to bring out a new printed version of Niedermayer & Hart, if not simultaneously, then shortly afterwards. This is mainly because stocks of the original are running low and it’ll be good to have both titles conforming to the same style. An actor friend recently commented that they thought N & H would make a highly compelling film or TV series. If that ever happened, it would of course be terrific, but in the meantime, I’ll just keep on writing! Meanwhile, if you do happen to have an original copy, hang onto it, as the first edition will most probably go out of print sometime this year.

Oooh yes, almost forgot! I’m planning to do a series of promotions/giveways etc. over the coming weeks, so WATCH THIS SPACE, as they say!

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The Shape of Water

4/3/2018

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The wife and I rarely make visits to the cinema these days, mainly because we don’t find very much that we consider worth watching, it’s quite common for us to have torn the film to shreds before reaching the car park. Our local cinema, despite the fact that it operates ‘eight screens of magic’, generally only shows the most commercially successful offerings. I read Marvel comics as a teenager, and watched the original Star Wars in my early twenties, but don’t want to see these stories endlessly re-packaged again and again, and have become a little weary, not to say wary, of any more feel-good movies (save me, please!). The current state of the movie industry is I think what happens when money dictates the rules to creativity - the loser is always originality. Nor do I like the way in which the film industry has cynically increased the violence and bad language (in my view, they’d probably disagree, but then they would) in films graded as suitable for younger audiences.

When The Shape of Water was released I was unusually eager to see it. I’ve watched a number of Guillermo del Toro movies, and although I can’t say I’ve adored every single one, I certainly found them absorbing and often thought-provoking. I hadn’t read any of the reviews when I saw The Shape of Water, and still haven’t, so the views stated here are entirely my own. I did know however that The Shape of Water cost very little money to make by movie standards - probably less than some movie stars pick-up for headlining on a picture. From the pre-release blurb about the film I was led to expect something along the lines of a fifties Sci Fi B movie, cross-pollinated with some art-house touches. Yes, all these elements are there, however for myself, and for aforementioned wife, what came across most loud and clear to us was the film’s allegorical voice. I very much doubt whether this will become a ‘must-see’ film in the Trump White House, for it is a tale deeply ingrained with liberality and liberal values.

The story is set in Baltimore in 1962, at the height of the Cold War, presumably at a time before it was necessary to ‘Make America Great Again’. The central character, Eliza, played by Sally Hawkins, works as a cleaner along with her friend, Zelda, played by Octavia Spencer, at some kind of secret military establishment. All the main characters in this movie are outsiders, outcasts even; Eliza is mute and Zelda is a down-trodden black woman; Eliza’s friend and neighbour, Giles, played by Richard Jenkins, is a lonely gay man. Eliza, we glean, has a fascination for water, and when an amphibious man, played by Doug Jones, is brought to the secret establishment where she and Zelda work as cleaners, she is immediately fascinated and starts to communicate with him through sign-language. There is a strongly subversive undertone in this movie, with its authority figures, a secret-service man Richard Strickland, played by Michael Shannon, and General Hoyt, played by Nick Searcy, shown to be corrupt, sadistic and decadent. These two share a powerful scene with some excellent dialogue about the quality of ‘decency’. Even the (normally) bad guy, a Russian agent posing as a research scientist, demonstrates more humanity and understanding than these bastions of the establishment.

I don’t do spoilers, so I’ve said more than enough already. I liked this film and can honestly say that I enjoyed watching every frame of it. At a moment in time when the voice of reaction seems to be getting louder and society’s ‘outsiders’ are accorded little value, I am delighted to watch a film, albeit a fantasy, that favours difference and diversity. My previous blog was a review of Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny, who interviewed Franz Stangl in Dusseldorf prison shortly before his death; Stangl had been Kommandant of Treblinka, the Nazi death camp in Poland where approximately a milion ‘outsiders’ perished. As we came out of the cinema, Judith and I agreed that the Nazis would almost certainly have despised and banned this movie and labelled it decadent art.

So do please see it, if only to piss off a Nazi!

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Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny - From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder

1/3/2018

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This book, widely considered to be a classic, fully deserves this accolade in my view. However, it is difficult to use terms like classic or to write with any great enthusiasm about a book whose subject matter I wholly detest. Incidentally, it is possibly the only book, certainly the only book I recall, that I had to stop reading at bedtime, generally my main time for this daily practice, because it was giving me nightmares. I have little doubt that the author herself had the same reservations as the reader when she approached the subject matter, so it is with respect and admiration that I pen these words.

The facts about what the Nazis did, all of which can be obtained elsewhere, are not what makes reading this book so essential, nor is it some kind of horrific fascination in learning of the psychological profile of a man who oversaw the deaths of somewhere between 750,000 and 1,200,000 almost exclusively Jewish people (chilling when you think the estimated death toll - horrific whichever number is correct - might be out by nearly half a million!). Sereny doesn’t seem to be solely interested in Stangl’s psychology; I believe she was actually attempting to give us a glimpse, some insight, into the man’s soul. He initially trained as a weaver before joining the police force in his native Austria. There is some argument about whether as a policeman, Stangl was an ‘illegal Nazi’ - he himself always denied it, but his wife and colleagues seem to believe he was very likely a Nazi member before the Anschluss. There seems to have existed a powerful drive in Stangl, not only to be good and efficient at his job, but also to ‘be someone’. Were these the character traits the Nazis looked for when they sought to enlist the ‘right’ man, at first to be an administrator at Hartheim where the Nazis began killing those who were physically and mentally impaired, then Sobibor extermination camp, and finally to run what was essentially a human abbatoir at Treblinka? There is nothing to suggest that Stangl was a sadistic monster; there were a number of such types at Treblinka, as testified to by the very few slave prisoners who survived the camp, but there is no evidence to implicate Stangl in personal acts of cruelty; he was it seems a loyal husband and loving father. Yet, he was also the man in charge of this highly-efficient conveyor-belt that delivered death on a previously unprecedented scale.

It is hard to imagine the efficiency of the extermination programme. Every morning trains would roll into Treblinka station, which had been mocked-up to look like a real train station with flower boxes and a fake painted station clock with hands that never moved (Stangl’s idea) to lull the new arrivals into a sense of calm - they probably imagined upon seeing it, that nothing bad was going to happen to them, that they were simply going to be processed and then assigned some work. They were divided according to gender, asked to strip naked but told to keep their valuables and papers with them (again creating a false sense of security), they were then led into the ‘shower block’, where they were subsequently gassed with monoxide provided by diesel engines. The elderly and infirm were taken to the hospital - an entirely fake building complete with a red cross. Here they were ordered to strip, told to sit on a wall above a constantly burning pit, and shot. Two hours, and every single human being who had arrived on the morning transports was dead. Generally, by midday, all the killing was done, the remainder of the day was then dedicated to the disposal of corpses in open-air crematoria known as ‘roasts’. At least, this was the scenario for days delivering only western Jews to Treblinka; those arriving from the east in cattle trucks were herded viciously by sadistic guards who beat and whipped them into hysteria and ferociously drove them like animals through their final terror-stricken hours. One can only assume this difference in treatment was part of some sick Nazi ideology, whereby German Jews had, at the very least, been subjected to the improving influence of western civilisation, and were therefore far superior to those from the uncivilised east.

Franz Stangl, Kommandant of Treblinka, was, I believe, the only Nazi in charge of such an institution to be interviewed in this way. It therefore stands as a unique record. Sereny interviewed him for a total of seventy hours between April 2 and June 27, 1971, in Dusseldorf prison. He died only nineteen hours after her final interview. To the very last Stangl maintained, “My conscience is clear about what I did, myself ... I have never intentionally hurt anyone, myself.”

Sereny however, who was, after all, there in the room with Stangl, suggests that something had fundamentally changed in him during the course of the interviews:

For the first time, in all these many days, I had given him no help. There was no more time. He gripped the table with both hands as if he was holding on to it. “But I was there,” he said then, in a curiously dry tone of resignation. These few sentences had taken almost half an hour to pronounce. “So yes,” he said finally, very quietly, “In reality I share the guilt ... my guilt ... only now in these talks ... now that I have talked about it all for the first time ...” he stopped.

He had pronounced the words “my guilt”: but more than the words, the finality of it was in the sagging of his body, and on his face.

After more than a minute he started again, a half-hearted attempt, in a dull voice. “My guilt,” he said, “is that I am still here. That is my guilt.”

Whilst I was reading this book, I attended the funeral of a friend, and couldn’t help imagining, as I looked at the fifty-odd people standing there at the graveside, that every morning at Treblinka, at least a hundred times that number had perished. The effort involved in disposing of that many corpses simply stuns my mental faculties. Yet, for me, it is not good enough to consign this episode to the past and to label those who took part as evil men with a heavy line drawn underneath; if we fail to let the mistakes of the past guide us, we shall forever be in danger of repeating them. When politicians start to whip up division and hatred; when corporate employees allow themselves to carry out the wishes of their boards of directors at the expense, life and livelihood of the poor and disenfranchised, or allow misinformation to masquerade as the truth; then we must all be very careful. Moral integrity, it seems, can so easily be compromised

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Every Vote Counts!

3/6/2017

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About thirty years back, I worked with a very nice South African actress who was roughly the same age as myself. When I told her that the house in the Welsh valleys I’d lived in until I was five only had a cold tap in the kitchen, our bath was a tin tub in front of the fire, and the toilet was at the bottom of the garden, she laughed. No matter how many times I assured her it was the truth, she refused to believe it; she clearly thought I was joking. My father was born in that house, and my grandfather, who lived with us, died there. He had pneumoconiosis because of his life working as a coal miner, which he began at the age of twelve. He died from a heart attack that was exacerbated by his inability to breathe very easily.

When you reflect on the lives of working-class folk from the past, they seem dominated by the monster of poverty and its impact on health. As a teenager, my friends and I roared with laughter at the Python sketch, “We were so poor we used to live in hole in t’ road ...”. And I always remember sniggering a little when my mother used to shake her head at ostentatious extravagance and wastefulness; she’d say “People today don’t know they’re born.” You see, to my generation, working-class poverty seemed like something from the distant past, and of no real relevance anymore. At school we learnt about the Tudors, Charles I and the Divine Right of Kings, William Pitt the younger, Disraeli and Gladstone; the only historical thing we needed to know about anywhere east of Calais was Napoleon. Nobody at school taught us about universal suffrage, the trade union movement and the establishment of a welfare state. As a consequence, those of us born in the post-war generation often took our lives for granted. We were protected from humiliating poverty by the welfare state, our health needs were taken care of, and everyone had a right to a free education up to and including university.

When I went to college in London, I received a grant from West Glamorgan Education Authority. In those days, 1974-6, homelesness didn’t appear to exist. You’d come across an occasional wino, but street-dwelling teenagers, ex-servicemen, and men and women, just like you and me, who’d fallen on hard times and ended up sleeping in doorways, were hard to find. This changed quite dramatically fairly soon after Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. These days, homelessness and rough-sleeping are a reality in every town and city, and as a society we seem largely, rather tragically, to have become inured to it. Thatcherism was based on the philosophy of Friedrich Hayek, which saw competition as the be all and end all; the great enemy of ‘Neo-Liberalism’ was high-taxation and over-regulation. Thatcher embraced Hayek’s beliefs with a religious zeal. She sold off our council houses and let us buy shares in our nationalised utilities and building societies; basically a few got to own what had previously been owned by all of us. This way of thinking has gone on, and seems to have contaminated political thought of every persuasion; alarm bells should have been ringing when Thatcher described Tony Blair as her greatest achievement.

The Conservatives in my experience have never lived up to what appears to be implied in their name. When I was a boy they dismantled our marvellously comprehensive railway network, which would have been so useful today given our environmental concerns regarding air-pollution, then when I was a young man I watched with horror as they wrecked our manufacturing industries. They decimated our coal industry, ruining whole communities because of their vicious ideology, but have continued to run our coal-fired power stations with coal largely mined overseas. I believe a large percentage of the coal burnt in British power stations today comes from Russia.

I believe that everyone alive today in Britain owes a debt of gratitude to the 1945 Attlee Labour government and the establishment of the welfare state as we know it. This great legacy has been seriously eroded by the Conservatives and by New Labour over the last forty years. If the Tories win this upcoming election, the NHS as we currently know it will cease to exist - they have plans to dismantle, package and parcel off bits of it to private investors; in fact, the fire-sale is already underway. If you don’t believe me take a look at the Naylor report. This video by Chris Holden about the Naylor report is very worthwhile - Theresa May Fully Supports the Naylor Report .

Austerity is part of Tory ideology: they were happy to bail out the banks to the tune of £850 Billion (our money!) because they said they were too big to fail, but the NHS, which has been underfunded for decades and requires an urgent cash injection of about £30 Billion, is too big to save. Take a look at how much of its GDP other countries spend on healthcare for their citizens: How Does NHS Spending Compare With Health Spending Internationally.

Take a look too at the introductory leaflet to the NHS which I placed at the top of this blog post. Its wording is beautifully sensitive, don’t you think? My great-aunt (born in 1887) who never had any money, was terrified of being so helplessly poor she’d have to rely on charity. In the 1970s she still used to speak of her fear of ending up in the workhouse. She always had a small amount of savings set aside to pay for her funeral expenses so she wouldn’t be a burden on her family. One of nine children, only four of whom survived to adulthood, her generation knew poverty, ill-health and the reality of early death, and they were rightly proud of the NHS.

The Tories are busy dismantling our welfare state. They love to blame migrants, health tourists, and feckless layabouts who live on benefits, and now, obliquely, the old for our woes. Their propaganda consists largely of lies used to divide us. Our nurses who care for us in our health service have been forced in some cases to use food banks. Our young people and vulnerable families can’t afford to live in decent housing for a fair rent, while huge numbers of properties in London and other cities lie vacant because their overseas owners have bought them as investments. I know disabled people who have had their benefits cut or have been deemed fit to work when they clearly are not. This is the most destructive, reactionary government I have seen over my lifetime - perhaps this is because after forty years of Neo-Liberalism the icing on the cake has simply become so very frail.

The NHS is in crisis. Let’s not be the generation that allows this jewel to slip through our fingers. The banks were bailed out - let’s support our young people, provide for our disabled in a way that allows them to live with dignity, care for our elderly like any decent caring civilised society should, and let’s properly fund the NHS!

Please, think about what kind of society you want to live in. Help to save our NHS.

Make your vote count on 8 June!

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Buddy Reading The Shiralee by D'Arcy Niland

5/2/2017

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I’ve mentioned before how, together with a small bunch of reading enthusiasts discovered on Twitter, we take on a group read twice a year. This time we read The Shiralee by D’Arcy Niland. I vaguely recall having watched the 1957 film of the same name which starred Peter Finch on TV, probably sometime in the late Sixties, on one of those long drawn-out Sunday afternoons that always held a kind of dread back then, and seemed to colour everything a little bit grey - strange, because I love Sundays these days, and aim (not always successfully) to do as little as possible.

D’Arcy Niland was a writer dedicated to the great art of short-story writing, and during his relatively short life (1917-1967) he managed to produce over five hundred. He left school at fourteen to help support a large family, and seems to have lived a life as an itinerant worker in much the same way as Mac Macauley does in The Shiralee. He had been encouraged to write by the nuns at his school and he seems to have self-educated himself whilst on the road. He married New Zealander Ruth Park in 1942. She, like Niland, had done some journalism, and they decided they would try and pursue their ambition to write full-time. They had five children together and they both won various literary prizes to support their writing. In 1952 Niland was awarded £600 by the Commonwealth Literary fund to write a novel, and the result was The Shiralee (published 1955). It has never been out of print since and has been translated into many languages.

What did I think of The Shiralee? It is a very fine novel. Niland possessed a short-story writer’s eye for capturing detail that might otherwise pass as mundane or fleeting. It’s not a very thick book but what it lacks in size is made up for in weight. I laughed and wept and genuinely felt a little sad when I finished it, simply because there were no more pages to turn. Niland was a very good writer, as was Ruth Park, whose Harp in the South trilogy, set in the slums of Sydney and partly based on what they observed from living there, is equally worth reading.

Mac Macauley, the book’s main character, is walking the backroads of New South Wales, always on the look out for work, his four year old daughter Buster, the shiralee (burden) of the title, alongside or trailing behind. Macauley is hard and uncompromising, like the land and the life he has always known. He bumps into friends and enemies along the way but this is a story about a man and a child, about loyalty and love. The characters he meets are wonderful, rich, poignant, sometimes spiteful, occasionally violent, but most often surprisingly generous and kind-hearted. I think Tommy Goorianawa, Beauty Kelly, Luke and Bella Sweeney, Wigley, Sam Bywater and the wonderful Desmond have established themselves in my psyche just as firmly as Ham Peggotty, Yossarian or George and Lennie. This is an exceptionally good book, the writing is wonderful. I would go so far as to say that it’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read, and it will most certainly be making my Favourites shelf on Goodreads. I urge everyone to read it.

Thanks to my clever Twitter book club friends for suggesting another great book I would probably never have discovered without them! Having both read it, the wife and I are now very keen to trek up to London to see the Australian Impressionists exhibition.

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First Post 2017

4/1/2017

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The Bullshiteers (with a nod to Hans Holbein) - limited edition print by Tom Johnson

A friend sent me an email recently enquiring if I was okay because he noticed I hadn’t updated this blog in a while. The truth is that since 23 June, 2016, I’ve been feeling pretty discouraged, and for the first time in my life probably, I began to feel uncomfortable about my British identity. I had always enjoyed the feeling of connectedness to our friends in mainland Europe that EU membership brought us, along with the longest period of peace and cooperation between nation states in European history. The xenophobes and far-right may view the Battle of the Somme or the Battle of Britain (perhaps backed by the Dam Busters’ theme) as our finest examples of British nationhood; personally, whilst I don’t gainsay the brave sacrifice of those men and women, I ‘d personally opt for the abolition of slavery, the creation of the welfare state and the NHS.

I don’t think the EU is perfect, but then, what political model is? The European Court of Human Rights is something to be admired, and we may well lose some of our workers’ rights by leaving. Of course, the right wing press has whinged on for years about Brussels red-tape, but it’s always easy to find fault. I certainly don’t share the UKIP leader’s disgust for the EU passport; in fact, I’m fairly sure I share none of Nigel Farage’s Little-England views. I find it extraordinary that this man, the product of a private education at Dulwich College, an ex commodities dealer, and proclaimed worshipper at the shrine of Margaret Thatcher, has somehow promoted himself as the crusading hero at the forefront of an anti-elitist battle to reassert the rights of the ordinary man (sorry, I should have inserted the word ‘decent’ - ‘ordinary, decent, man’ - which in the lexicon of the right wing seems to mean ‘xenophobic reactionary’). Farage is a man who has regularly demonstrated his utter contempt for the intellectual lightweightedness of his fellow UKIPers, so I am incredulous that he can actually embrace ‘ordinary people’ - at arms length perhaps, whilst wearing latex gloves and a nose-peg. But Farage didn’t pull off Brexit alone, although he’d like us to think he did; let’s give credit where credit is due, Boris Johnson was actually the campaign’s figurehead with Michael Gove at his right hand. When I consider this opportunistic pair, I can’t help thinking of Jabba the Hutt and his sidekick Salacious Crumb from Return of the Jedi. This unattractive twosome, so deserving of each other (as demonstrated by Gove’s subsequent stabbing of the Johnson back), once guaranteed their loyalty to David Cameron, now a former tenant of 10 Downing Street as a result of trusting them. They seemed prepared to sink to any level of vulgar populism during the debacle that was the referendum debate.

Shortly before standing down as Prime Minister, David Cameron claimed that he didn't regret holding the referendum because he was so completely committed to democracy. He blamed EU rules on immigration as the reason he lost - nothing whatever to do with any of his domestic policies, like his party’s failure to build enough decent homes for our people or the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. Apparently, he’d once joked at a meeting with EU leaders, when some had voiced caution about holding a referendum in the first place, “Don't worry, I'm a winner”. So, this pain we're all suffering could be seen as stemming from one man's arrogance. I daresay the Murdoch press or one or other of the big publishing houses will see him alright with a million or two as an advance on his memoirs. I now hear that our failed Prime Minister is being tipped for the top job at NATO. Mmmmm ...
2016 was a very odd year indeed. Does anyone recall the public vote In March called by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to suggest names for their new research ship? Overwhelming numbers voted for ‘Boaty McBoatface’ - 124,000 votes with its nearest rival polling just 34,000. However, it seems that ‘the will of the British people’ a phrase so often quoted at us by our politicians post-Brexit, could in this particular case be waived in favour of upholding our national dignity - the ship was subsequently named RRS David Attenborough (phew!). Yet, when it came to the most important referendum there has ever been (whose remit was always stated as advisory), less than 38% of the eligible voting population was enough to stand for the overwhelming will of the British people.

The thing that upset me most about Brexit was the lack of intelligent debate during the campaign, especially, if not solely, from its victors. However, the Leave camp did plumb depths which I personally have never witnessed before in a British electoral campaign. The Leave politicians all seem to have recently distanced themselves from their much-paraded claim “We send the EU 350 million a week - Let’s fund the NHS instead - Let’s take back control”. And no politician with any decency could have stood before that poster, as Farage did, of (brownish-skinned) migrants streaming across the Slovenian(?) border with the caption “Breaking Point - The EU has failed us all - we must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders.” Or what about Michael Gove’s derogatory remarks about the considered opinions of experts on the bad effects of leaving the EU?

It’s hard to gauge the Brexit referendum’s impact on that other big election of 2016, the US Presidential election of Donald Trump in November (or, is that the Precedential Election, Donald?); it was a double-whammy for Remain voters like myself. The victorious campaigns had many similarities: they were shockingly light on fact-based argument, didn’t shy away from making outlandish statements, were quick to berate the press as biased whenever it criticised them, and both campaigns were remarkably swift to identify, claim and draw to their hearts the large numbers of disenchanted voters on both sides of the pond who found themselves hurting and seeking someone to blame for their ills. What came to light shortly after the US election was the influence that the (presumably self-named) Alt-Right Breitbart News organisation exercised over both events. I had never even heard of Breitbart or of its executive chairman Stephen Bannon before; he’s the man now destined to become Donald Trump’s Chief Strategist at the White House. Yikes!

We are being told on both sides of the Atlantic that our real enemy is a global liberal elite. Across the water, Donald Trump’s cunning plan to ‘drain the swamp’ of Washington insiders is to backslide on a number of promises he made to his electors during his campaign and fill his White House team with lobbyists and insiders of the very worst kind. What strikes me as particularly scary is Trump and the Alt-Right’s lack of respect for democracy. One of the greatest vulnerabilities in democracy is a requirement on the part of those who partake in elections to conduct themselves with a certain level of decorum, honesty and fair-mindedness. Do you think Vladimir Putin (who may, or may not, have authorised a few computers to be hacked in order to help Donald win) really admires him, or does he think he’s a moron, like the three million majority of Americans who voted against him?

The first book I completed in 2017, which I sincerely hope doesn’t demonstrate any kind of prescience on my part, was The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J Evans. It charts the forces at work in Germany from the end of the Bismarck era, through the Wilhelmine period which led up to the end of WWI, then on through the years of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis from fringe group to power. I always believed Hitler was elected Reich Chancellor by popular vote. This wasn’t the case; he was installed as Chancellor through a deal with some right-wing politicians who were under the woeful misapprehension that they would easily be able to control him. They couldn’t have been more mistaken. The Nazis, who possessed no respect for democracy whatever, never won an election by fair means, and once they’d achieved power, they quickly suppressed (often by killing) any opposition. Perhaps the most shocking thing about the way they seized and held onto power is the speed with which they managed to silence any opposition - within just weeks of assuming power they had established the notorious Dachau concentration camp along with several others to detain their political opponents. This is the first book in a trilogy by Evans about the Third Reich which was clearly written with the layman in mind. It is beautifully accessible in its writing and Evans’ scholarship gives a superb overview of this terrible period in European history.

In light of our Brexit referendum and the US elections, the banal rhetoric, the racist slurs, blatant lies, these words seemed even more chilling words whilst reading The Coming of the Third Reich:

"All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be ... The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but the power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan."

Adolf Hitler, My Struggle (Mein Kampf)

Can’t allow Hitler the final word on my blog.

I wish all lovers of freedom and democracy, however they may have chosen to vote, a happy, healthy and prosperous 2017!

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Austria Again!

7/10/2016

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A few weeks back we returned from our summer holiday. We’ve picked the Austrian Tyrol five times over the past seven years. I assure you we are capable of imagining other destinations, yet the Tyrol remains an absolute dead cert for us, ticking all the boxes for two people inclined to overwork themselves. Sometimes, we’re not aware of how exhausted we are until we arrive and find ourselves taking extended afterrnoon naps over the first few days.

“Blimey,” one of us remarks, “didn’t realise I was this tired!”

The scenery is breathtaking, and taking a cable-car to the nearest mountain-top never fails to excite us - we’re easily pleased. This time we stayed for our first time at the relaxed and charming, family-run Schneeberger Hotel in Niederau, literally five minutes away from the Markbachjoch lift station. Every summer tourist is presented with a Wildschonau Valley Card which offers unlimited travel on two lifts, daily swimming at the local heated outdoor pool and entrance to the local museum - all free! Our main pastime is of course the daily walking; generally we start off with a few easy ones before tackling the mountain hikes. We always nip into the local tourist office when we first arrive and buy a copy of the best map available - an invaluable purchase if you mean to do any serious walking. Even so, map or no, we still seem to go wrong at least once or twice; this experience has been known to produce some exasperated sighs and even the odd bad word, especially when you realise the last 200m downhill descent you’ve been finding such an incredible doddle was completely wrong and you now need to entirely retrace your steps back uphill.

If your idea of a summer vacation includes wearing a pair of slingback heels (I’m thinking of the ladies here, please don’t imagine me shod in this way!), then you should probably avoid this destination. However, that’s not to say the holiday’s only fit for serious mountain hikers; not at all, there are good paths and walks for all ages, every fitness level and ability; even so, if you’re planning a walk, a pair of walking-boots, a hat, a rucksack containing waterproofs, something to eat, some sun-cream and a water bottle are all advisable - the weather can change very quickly in the mountains.

We generally avoid large towns, however, on this occasion we did a lovely round-trip walk from Niederau through woodland to Worgl. We bought some lunch in Worgl and became a tad overjoyed on spotting a C&A store; these have been long extinct in Britain and our excitement probably only serves to give away our age. I remember my mother taking me to Swansea C&A in the mid-sixties to buy my first off-the-peg suit for chapel. For old times’ sake I bought a linen shirt and a new pair of shorts, and Judith got herself some t-shirts.

The coffee, even when served at a hutte on the top of a mountain, is almost invariably good; we did however get an expensive cup of instant (surely a work of the Devil?) at one alm that we had instinctively wondered about before entering - the place was scruffy and seemed a bit grubby - so very untypical for sparkly-clean-in- every-way-Austria; we should have trusted our instincts, but let’s face it, a two-week holiday where the only bad experience is one lousy cup of coffee has to be a winner.

Apart from the walking, there was of course always time for daily reading. I happily devoured Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (see review in previous blog),The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri, Oh Pioneer by Willa Cather and The Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis - all different but all great reads and definitely recommended.

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Their Eyes Were Watching God

3/9/2016

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This book was chosen for the buddy read I take part in with some pals discovered on Twitter a few years back. We don’t exert any pressure on each other to complete the read within a set time period, although we always have an agreed kick-off date. There are no rules, and so far we’ve read books by writers previously unknown to us (certainly unread). What generally happens is that someone suggests a book and the others either agree with the choice or raise an objection - we’re all pretty amenable and accommodating, I suspect, because this establishing the next book phase usually only requires a few short tweets - so, If you’re the Genghis Khan type, inclined to dominate your sewing circle, please don’t consider joining our little reading group - otherwise, everyone’s welcome! The reason why I have so far enjoyed this twice-yearly interaction so much is because of the way it has introduced me to literature I might not have found otherwise.

I daresay, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (published 1937), is a prime example of a book I would never have experienced without the gentle encouragement of this group. The novel is related through a Southern Black dialect by an anonoymous narrator, telling the story of its main protagonist, Janie. The narrative takes place over approximately twenty-five years and describes Janie’s marriages with three different men. The first two relationships leave her unfulfilled, but she finds true love and a sense of spiritual enlightenment as an individual through the third marriage. The book was out of print for some years and was for a time condemned for its lack of political comment. It’s true, the book has no particular moral or political agenda, nor does it make any strong statement about race, although it certainly touches on race issues; it does however powerfully depict the struggle of the protagonist as an individual to inhabit her own voice. I have never read another novel that is anything remotely like Their Eyes Were Watching God, and in this respect it is unique. The book does however have some flaws, and a number of passages that I felt might have read so much better had they been whittled down - the mule dialogue for instance. The book does however contain some wonderfully poetic images that managed to fill my head with pictures as I read.

The years took all the fight out of Janie’s face. For a while she thought it was gone from her soul. No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods - come and gone with the sun. She got nothing from Jody except what money could buy, and she was giving away what she didn’t value.

Unique. Poetic. Definitely worth reading.

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Book Catch-Up

27/7/2016

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Like at least half the population of the UK I was really thrown by the Brexit result. I planned to write a piece about it, perhaps I shall, but at the moment my feelings surrounding the whole referendum thing are still too raw, and this blog was never meant to become a rant platform or an opportunity for spitting vitriol. The first weekend after the vote I wrote this on Facebook, which basically sums up the way I felt at the time:

“No point feeling depressed any longer about Brexit. Happily readjusting to living back in the 1970s. Looking forward to a nice prawn cocktail followed by a Vesta Beef curry and then we're planning to settle down to an episode of Love Thy Neighbour with Jack Smethurst and Rudolph Walker. Laugh!”

As for David Cameron and his cowardly resignation after recklessly allowing the referendum to happen in the first place, I feel angry still. I felt somewhat sickened when his sycophantic Tory chums described his arrogant foolishness as ‘a brave decision’ and talked of the great courage he’d shown as their leader ... grrrr!

But I’m not going to talk Brexit ... well, not anymore. I’ve read a number of very good books over this period, so here’s a brief appraisal of them:

My Ántonia - by Willa Cather

This is a powerfully evocative novel about home, love and friendship by a wonderful writer. It is written from the perspective of the book’s sympathetic narrator, Jim Burden, who at the age of nine arrives at his grandparents’ farm in Black Hawk, Nebraska, and becomes smitten by the ‘force of nature’ that is Ántonia from the first moment he sets eyes upon her. The book is far more than just a love story though. The characterisations are richly satisfying and it left me with a powerful sense of place and time. Cather helps the reader understand, through her straightforward but nearly perfect prose, the strains, hopes and dreams of the immigrant settlers who inhabit her landscape, and gives us an insight into the fears and old oppressions they are fleeing from. This is one of those rare books that once reaching its end you could happily return to the beginning and start over. Excellent.

The Winter of Our Discontent - by John Steinbeck

This was Steinbeck’s last novel - not however his final book. It has been sadly overlooked possibly because it received some very mixed reactions at the time of publication. Don’t let this put you off. This is a very finely-crafted work, which seems particularly appropriate at this moment in time after the greed demonstrated by banks, corporations and individuals in recent years. Steinbeck makes a small East Coast town his backdrop for the moral dilemma that grocery clerk Ethan Hawley faces in this story. It is a morality tale. The writing is first rate. Definitely amongst my favourite Steinbeck novels and seriously underrated. Recommended.

The Road to Nab End - by William Woodruff

Autobiographical account of a childhood spent in Blackburn, a Lancashire cotton- weaving town in the early twentieth century. Woodruff never writes sentimentally about the terrible hardships these working-class people faced throughout the depression years. Unusually for an autobiography I found it utterly compulsive reading. It is the first of two parts and I definitely mean to read its sequel . A very fine slice of social history without the lecture; a masterfully-written account of an impoverished childhood. Superb.

When the Women Come out to Dance - by Elmore Leonard

These short stories are deliciously entertaining, great characterisations, lean prose, not a word out of place. Great fun to read.

No Name - by Wilkie Collins

This was considered pretty scandalous in its day because it deals with the subject of illegitimacy. It tells the story of Magdalene and Norah Vanstone, who are disinherited because of the sudden deaths of their parents. The family money which was intended to be shared between them goes to a miserly cousin who treats them with utter contempt. The sisters have very different personalities: Norah humbly accepts her lot in life and seeks work as a governess; Magdalene (the name’s a bit of a give-away - but this is nineteenth century literature!) seeks to regain her family fortune.

If you’ve read any Wilkie Collins before, you can expect a great cast of characters: misers, wicked housekeepers, scoundrels with a heart of gold and naval men with hearts of oak. It’s great stuff!

So, there you have it - everything I’ve read since I last posted a blog.

On 1 August I’m taking part in a summer buddy read with some chums I discovered on Twitter. Anyone can join in. We do two books a year. The current choice is Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Basically all you have to do is get a copy and start reading on that date; no time limit, write a blog or leave a review and get in touch. It’s fun!

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The Wettest Holiday Ever!

9/6/2016

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In 1960 we looked like this

Holiday time approacheth ...

Memories of childhood are notoriously imprecise, but certain things, whether entirely accurate or not, somehow lodge themselves in the brain and refuse to budge. One such recollection is a family holiday to the Welsh seaside town of Porthcawl during what must have been the summer of 1960, when I was five/six. Porthcawl was considered the holiday mecca for us Valleys folk; in fact, it was impossible to visit the place without bumping into someone you knew from home - no place then to fly off to for an illicit weekend liaison, not that such thoughts would have had any place in my innocent mind back then; any fantasies I entertained were wholly confined to fighting injustice and righting wrongs like my heroes the Lone Ranger and his ever-faithful Indian companion Tonto.

Wales, a mountainous place with a large coastline, is famed for its rain. I’ve heard it rumoured that some of our sheep, if not a few of the locals in some rural parts, are web-footed. Back in the Porthcawl summer of 1960 a natural proclivity for an amphibious lifestyle would have come in useful. I wouldn’t entirely trust my own memory here; my parents however always maintained that over a two-week holiday we did experience fourteen days of almost non-stop rain. The first week we boarded with a lovely lady called Mrs Jones (the names of both saints and sinners were always faithfully recorded by my late mother); the second week, we suffered the misfortune of lodging with a Mrs Martin. Mrs Martin was a widowed lady who quite evidently detested children, which naturally didn’t bode too well for my brother and me. Even my father, normally big-hearted, found his good nature put to the test by this woman; Mrs Martin was more strict Victorian governess than welcoming hostess, and to top it all, she was a rotten cook to boot - this is probably what riled Dad the most! I think Dad regarded a bad cook as a work of the Devil (well, not far off!). I recall him, after one of numerous inedible meals, gruffly muttering to my mother that perhaps the late Mr Martin had gone to his heavenly reward after consuming one of his wife’s dinners.

Mrs Martin’s guest house truly was cold and unwelcoming. In those days, families like us who lived on modest incomes purchased their own food and had it cooked for them by their hostess. I’ve no idea what this practice was called, eventually it was of course succeeded by B&B and half-board. I have a feeling it may have been called something a bit misleading like ”All found”. So, our domestic situation only made matters worse; outside it continued to rain and inside the guest house we were subjected to Mrs M’s culinary abuse and sneering dislike of children. One evening, shortly before the evening meal, Mrs Martin accused my brother and myself of vomiting over her bathroom and leaving it in a terrible mess. She was very condemnatory and quite scary in her manner I recall. My mother, like all good mothers, would not stand for her ‘chicks’ to be maligned thus, “I can assure you, Mrs Martin, that It wasn’t either of my boys!” she protested. “Who on earth was it, then?” sneered the awful Mrs M, “I don’t know,” replied Mam on the verge of tears, “But it wasn’t either of my boys!” At the same moment as Mrs Martin scoffed scornfully at this, a plaintive voice called down from the landing upstairs, “It was me!” a frail male voice called out. The Joneses were a kindly, elderly couple from the Rhondda who were the only other paying guests in the house. “I’m very sorry, it wasn’t the boys, I was taken ill and I was about to clean up the mess!” Mrs Martin looked appropriately shamefaced as she shuffled away from my mother who was standing guard over her boys, proud and victorious. As far as my brother Ian (seven years older than myself) was concerned, the confrontation was the final straw. The next morning he caught the bus back to my grandparents’ house. I don’t recall him coming on a family holiday again - Mrs Martin had been the line in the sand for him!

I don’t think I gave my swimming trunks an airing at any time over that holiday, but I did manage a few paddles in the odd rock pool between cloudbursts. One evening we went to see the variety show at The Grand Pavilion. I remember Dad particularly enjoyed the comedian, and was still telling a joke he heard that night about a family of rabbits thirty years later. The local cinema had only one offering as I recall, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in the 1958 Hammer version of Dracula. It had an X certificate (i.e. eighteen and over!) so no good for me, in fact I recall my hair standing on end just looking at the black and white stills that were displayed in a glass case outside the cinema. The large shelter on the promenade with its multiple rows of benches was filled to capacity every day. Each day we did the same circuit of shops around the town - Woolworths was by far the best, of course, and hours were spent browsing its aisles. Every day we’d have a Fulgoni’s ice-cream cone or two; we’d generally escape the rain mid-morning and mid-afternoon by going to a cafe to have cups of tea for the grown ups and a glass of pop or a milk shake for us. Sometimes, to avoid Mrs Martin’s meals we’d have faggots and peas from the stall in Coney Beach (to allay the concerns of American readers here, faggots are a ball of minced lamb and offal, traditionally served with mushy peas) or Mam’s lifelong favourite, fish and chips. I think the putting green, a traditional holiday pursuit, and still surviving in Porthcawl to this day, was waterlogged and closed up those weeks, I certainly don’t recall us playing. But not all was lost, on the last night of the holiday I was taken to the fair and allowed to go on half a dozen rides and to spend any pocket money my grandparents had pressed into my hand before leaving.

One of the best things I remember was going out one evening after dark when it was high tide and dodging the waves that surged into the air like a blowing whale and left its spume washing across the promenade.

Here is Another Porthcawl story

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