Instead of cake there was cheese

 

What should you do when you have been doing excessive internet purchasing ? ... why build a cat castle with all the packaging of course. And the cat even plays on it.

So I came home from work today, watered my seedlings, got changed and rode to the gym, did gym stuff, went to the shop for dinner, rode home, stretched, made a pot of tea, sat down and opened my computer, saw a message from the library to say they had three books for me to collect, jumped back on my bike and rode to the library (which is in the same place as the gym, fortunately only a few minutes bike ride), rode home, poured my cup of tea and finally got to relax.

As usual I can't recall why I have most of the books on my request list, since the library has been shut since December, though they all sound great, especially Ocean Vuong, who's poetry I read not very recently.

So, books to read, knitting to do, plants to water, what more is there to enjoy in life?

I very much enjoyed this short story, 'The Irish Wedding' by Elizabeth McCraken; I was attracted by an interview with her because I read 'The Giant's House' and 'An exact replica of a figment of my imagination' back in 2014 and loved them both, and am sure I will love her new story collection. I also very much enjoyed, Because, the poem of the week in the Grauniad.

Stay safe. Be kind, Stay human. Read a story, or a poem.

Reliable people don't drink fruit juice

Usually I read books and suggest them to other people. Monkey has been reading 'The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared' by Jonas Jonasson for a couple of weeks, and has been telling me how crazy it is and that I have to read it. Sending her copy is apparently too complicated for her busy life so after work on Saturday I checked the catalogue and finding an available copy in Chorlton library I went to pick it up. I plonked myself on the sofa and started reading at about 3.30pm, and finished it about 12.30am on Sunday. It is crazy. My evening was punctuated by texting her with random quotes and updates on where I was in the story. I had intended to go to bed much earlier, but by the time I was thinking of doing so I was too far into the book to give up.

Allan, as it turns out, is not your average crotchety old geezer, and his reaction to the idea of a birthday party without vodka is utterly understandable. He sets off on an adventure, and as we discover, it's not his first; Allan has had quite an eventful life already. One part of the story follows the hundred year old Allan as he boards a bus with someone else's suitcase, meeting up along the way with Julius, Benny, Gunilla aka The Beauty, and Sonya the elephant. The other interspersed chapters tell us the rest of Allan's life story that led up to the day of the birthday party escape. He starts out just an ordinary kid who's dad ran off to join the communists (and gave him an intense dislike for politics) but he becomes a major player in international relations of the twentieth century. It was like some kind of comedy version of Any Human Heart, it is uses the same technique of integrating the character's life into real, well known historical events, although unlike Logan Mountstuart, who remains on the periphery, Allan takes on a much more proactive role. So he bounces round the world, rubbing shoulders with pretty much every major political figure of the century. He escapes almost certain death at least a dozen times, sometimes by talking his way out, sometimes by making himself useful, but mostly because he does good turns for people as he goes along ... and good karma always pays off. 

Allan is a lovely complex character. He is clever, resourceful and self-reliant. Allan is very much a people person, he makes friends easily wherever he goes, even though they frequently end up dead. He is ultimately reliable but also has his own agenda and won't allow himself to be used by stupid people. But in some ways you could see him as a bit of an idiot; he is very impulsive, acting 99% of the time without considering the consequences of his actions. He seems to like a quiet life, but unwittingly allows himself to be sucked in to all sorts of dangerous situations. His life philosophy, handed down from his mother seems to be 'que sera, sera', he doesn't have high expectation and just gets on with the disasters when they happen. The five years in a soviet labour camp just fly by with that attitude, and it's only the lack of vodka that really spurs him to risk an escape plan. Along with Einstein's illegitimate brother (not a real person) he blows up Vladivostok (possibly not a real event, but who knows) and ends up in North Korea, and only makes it back to civilization because of the occasion when he saved the life of Mao's wife Jiang Qing when she was in the hands of Soong May-ling (not a real event from what I can find). It is precisely his naive trust of human nature that both gets him in to, and out of, most of the sticky situations. And vodka of course. Vodka is a very useful tool. 

"The little boy grew up and added his own opinions to those he had acquired from his parents. Priests and politicians  were equally bad, Allan thought, and it didn't make the slightest difference if they were communists, fascists, capitalists or any other political persuasion. But he did agree with his father that reliable people didn't drink fruit juice. And he agreed with his mother that you had to make sure you behaved, even if you had drunk a bit more than was wise.
In practical terms, that meant that during the course of the river journey Allan had lost interest in helping Soong May-ling and her twenty drunken soldiers (in fact there were only nineteen left since one had fallen overboard and drowned). Nor did he want to be around when the soldiers raped the prisoner who was now locked up below deck, regardless of whether she was a communist or not, and of who her husband was.
...
Allan sat down with the guard and suggested that they should have a drink.
...
'Never try to out drink a Swede, unless you happen to be a Finn or at least a Russian.'
...
The bomb expert, Allan Karlsson, the mess boy Ah Ming, and the eternally grateful communist leader's wife, Jiang Qing, slipped away from the riverboat under cover of darkness and were soon in the mountains where Jiang Qing had already spent much time together with her husband's troops. The Tibetan nomads in the area knew her and the fugitives had no problems eating their fill even after the supplies carried by Ah Ming had run out. The Tibetans had good reason, or so they thought, for being on friendly terms with the People's Liberation Army. It was generally assumed that if the communists won the struggle for China, Tibet would immediately gain its independence." (p. 135-7)

I liked this quote because it sums up both Allan's attitude, and the attitude of the author. He helps other people just because they need it, without reservation or expectation of repayment. And then you get the not-so-subtle comment about the fate of Tibet, that shows the author tends to share Allan's approach to politics.

"The solution, said Allan, was often to down a bottle of vodka together and then look ahead. But now there was an unfortunate problem in that Benny was a teetotaller. Allan could, of course, look after Benny's share of the vodka, but he didn't think it would be quite the same thing.
'So a bottle of vodka would solve the Israel-Palestine conflict?' asked Bosse. 'That stretches all the way back to the Bible.'
'For that particular conflict you mention, it is not impossible that you would need more than one bottle,' Allan answered. 'But the principle is the same.' " (p.197)

In the other half of the tale there is a small gang of gangsters who want their suitcase back, and the police detective who is heading the hunt for the missing elderly gentleman (believed possibly an abductee, but then subsequently a murder suspect), all of whom are in hot pursuit of the newly formed tribe of miscreants; going on the run with an elephant is definitely something only the truly desperate would contemplate. 

Ok, I really don't want to give away anything else about plot, and anyway it's far to complicated to explain. From getting drunk with Harry Truman, to suggesting Stalin shave his moustache and comforting the very young Kim Jong Il Allan certainly has an eventful time of it. And so, as the story comes full circle, you can fully appreciate why he climbed out of the window at the prospect of a birthday party in an old people's home. Highly recommended.

Unbreakable cord

On the spur of the moment I went into town on Friday morning to a lunchtime poetry reading at the Central Library. It turned out to be a very brief affair so I wandered down to the lending library that had not been open when I visited for the beta test and I picked up three new books. I find that I don't browse the shelves very often these days; mostly I have something on reserve and I just go in, pick it up, and leave again, so it felt good to choose books more spontaneously.

'Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful' by Deborah Kay Davies won the Wales Book of the Year in 2009, and interestingly is published by Parthian, who also published 'Everything I found on the Beach' by Cynan Jones that I read last month. It is a collection of linked stories that follows the lives of two sisters, Grace and Tamar, through their childhood and adolescence and into adulthood. Because they are short stories there is no ongoing plot, they are incidents in the girls lives, sometimes about their relationship, sometimes concerning their separate existences. They feel on the surface quite mundane, about the kind of petty incidents and annoyances that fill everyone's lives, told with the minutiae that chime intimately with your own recollections of childhood. They are not tales of sunshine and childhood innocence; the parents and then a younger brother remain shadowy, almost irrelevant, features of their lives. And there are sinister undertones to many of the stories, beginning with Tamar's birth and her mother's utter detachment from her new baby and spiralling downwards from there. In this quote Grace has pushed Tamar out of a tree:

"She wasn't at the bottom of the tree. I searched the undergrowth and saw a scrap of gingham. I forced myself through the blackberry bushes and ivy. My arms and legs were stinging from the bramble thorns. She was still. Lying face down. One of her shoes was missing, her sock was hanging halfway off; her bare heel had a pearly sheen. Her hair was like a little crown standing out. Lying there like that, she looked like a different person. I had to turn her over. I did it with my foot. She made a sound as she rolled over onto her back - half a sigh, half my name, Grace. She had a sharp beech twig impaled in her blue, blue eye. I don't know how far it went inside. I don't think very far. Blood was pooling. There were some torn lime-green leaves on the twig. Her unhurt eye was moving. I think she was looking at me." (p.12. From 'The Point')

Tamar survives this incident, and another when she is lured away up the mountain by a stranger. The benign neglect of their parents does not make for wild abandon, but more weird insecurity, where they are forced together and so despise each other. From 'Fun and Games', it is the indifference that really strikes you:

"After lunch there's a silent, intense struggle to get into her sister's room. Grace, reading aloud, rests her entire body weight against the door while Tamar pushes and grunts from outside. When, suddenly, Grace walks away, Tamar tumbles in and crashes against the bedside table. She hurts her knee, but that doesn't matter. She's there. Climbing onto her sister's bedroom windowsill, she drums with bare feet against the chest of drawers. Stop that, Grace says, without interest, still reading as she does her skirt up. Why don't you go for one of your long walks and never come back? Go and play with a brick, you'd like that. Tamar feels she should continue. Go and kick your own stuff, Grace says. Or I'll kick you. Hard. She picks up her brush and begins to listlessly sort out her hair, still reading." (p.39-40)

The childhood they share leads inevitably to a sense of dislocation and isolation from others: Tamar's stories become futile attempts to find connection while Grace falls inevitably into a marriage with yet another shadowy person:

"Grace is walking down the aisle. Her sister is her bridesmaid. Earlier she had sat on the bench against the pine trees in her wedding dress and waited for her family to be ready. Tamar had come out and sat with her, both of them in their long dresses. Tamar read a magazine. Neither had spoken; they'd just waited. Through the smell of pine Grace could sense her own perfume rising from inside the neck of her dress as her body warmed. She thought about its glowing colour and the facets of light in the darkened bedroom, about the layers of chiffon spread out on the bed. Grace feels she has turned her back on many things. This is the day Grace is getting married, she told the morning garden as she walked towards the beckoning asparagus fern. What she really meant was, Grace is getting away, never coming back. No one else came out to see Grace in the garden. They had stayed inside the house. To Grace her family all looked like more beautiful replicas of themselves. When she kissed them at breakfast, they felt unyielding, chilly." (p.95-6. From 'Negligee')

What I admired was how she manages to get words on the page to describe what would be a momentary flash of memory. This one, from 'Wood', seems to sums up their whole childhood:

"She remembers the liver days when she was a child. The backs of her bare legs stuck to the plastic kitchen seat as she tried to cut offal into small grey triangles. She remembers slipping them through her lips. The liver crumbled like sour dust in her mouth. She smiles as she thinks about Grace retching like a fussy cat, tears flying from her eyes. Both of them getting sent to their rooms again. She remembers the precious one slurping up his soup and soft, floury rolls. Suddenly she wants to eat thin slices of cucumber and ripe tomato; maybe cold smoked fish and wobbly mayonnaise. The odour of the next door's food is the colour of gravy. She looks around for another table." (p.129-30)

The bond between siblings, I assume it is something the same for brothers, is a very subtle thing. You share things with them that you cannot compare to friendship, so there is no surprise when the final story finds the two of them in a cafe, Tamar reciting a recurring dream of a baby being born:

"We are both crying silently. I look around; several people are staring at us. The first waiter who served Tamar is walking towards our table, his eyes fixed almost hungrily on her face. I turn to look back at her. She obviously has no interest in our surroundings. She will not let me go. In the dream you tell me we have to cut the cord, she says. She squeezes me even harder, the now brown of her eyes glittering with tears. But you see, she says, shaking my clasped hands, this cord, we can never break it, can we?" (p.142. From 'Cords')

Beta Testing the Central Library

I have been to town this morning to help beta test the facilities at the about-to-be-reopened Manchester Central Library. The official opening day is Saturday 22nd March 2014, and we were specifically asked not to "spoil the surprise", so this will be the most unrevealing post I could possibly manage. 

On the top floor there are lots of books on shelves:

Then there is another floor with even more books on shelves:

There are lots of computers:

While there are lots a lovely new plush 'designer' chairs I loved the fact that they still had these old ones in the reading room, these are definitely more conducive to serious study:

and the computer terminals have not completely replaced the old filing system:

I explored each floor, played with the moving bookshelves, tested the toilets, tinkered with the archive displays, logged on to a computer and dutifully asked the librarians some questions to check their helpfulness. I was disappointed to find that the 'lending library' section was not open yet and will be housed in the Town Hall Extension. 

Then I sat on one of the plush new chairs and did the Guardian Sudoku.

Many years ago when the children were young we took a trip to the Central Library, but I confess it was not for the books. The legendary reading room has an interesting acoustic quality that causes sounds to reverberate in a particular way, so we went in to experience the phenomenon: if you drop a book the sound travels around the room and back very dramatically. I experienced another aspect of this today: a group of people were listening to a man talking when I went in, even standing quite close I could not make out what he was saying, but as I walked around to the opposite side of the circle I heard his voice coming from the dome above me, as clear as if I was standing next to him, and even the whispered conversation of two women was bounced to the ceiling and back down to me. So, a word of warning, be careful what you say in the reading room, you never know who might be listening.