Post-GOAT

 

With Charles III having to dust off his Welsh before fist-bumping with the boyos in Cardiff today, the BBC duly reminded us how many inhabitants of this small nation might have had misgivings about adopting this 'English' Prince all those years ago. 

Well, the King was indeed born in England (at Buck House no less) and is largely domiciled there, but he comes from a family of immigrants, being approx a quarter Greek, a quarter Scottish, and the rest a sort of Germano-Danish, teutonic chirmol. 

William, the new Prince of Wales, could more easily be stigmatised as 1/2— English, so if the Welsh are up for a good old moan, now might be the time. (Though they could wait for 3/4 English Prince George* to show up in due course.) 

I detect a potential conflict of interest looming in Qatar this winter.

* The first name of his Hanoverian ancestors is a bit of a smokescreen. 

Elizabeth II, the GOAT?

 

Gentlemen at Arms

As I suggested in the previous post, those who might imagine that what they have been witnessing in London this week is some sort of kooky fancy dress event are, at least partly, getting the wrong end of the stick. 

For rather than a costume worn over the skin, the pageantry unleashed by the death of Queen II is an at times a highly unusual glimpse under the skin...of the state, the undoubtedly strange fabric of British history, the public consciousness, etc. 

These things are more normally reflected back at us by the mainstream media and formal academic pronouncements, but the ceremony we are now witnessing provides an entirely different and (perhaps counter-intuitively) authentic form of national mediation. 

Much of it has been either new to me or stuff I had possibly not really paid attention to before.

Take these chaps: the Honourable Corps (formerly band) of Gentlemen at Arms with their swan-feather plumes. Just some old establishment dodderers kitted out by Gieves & Hawkes of Savile Row, you might conclude, yet their history and presentation is fascinating...

They were first established as the personal bodyguard of the monarch in 1509 (the same year SPS was founded) — in effect Henry VIIIs Praetorian Guard (or for Thronies, his Kingsguard). 

At first the band was made up of young cadets from noble families and although they now dress as cavalrymen, for most of the sixteenth century the Gentlemen were a dismounted unit armed with battle-axes. In the course of the Civil War they saved the life of the previous Charles, then Prince of Wales, at the Battle of Edgehill (1642). 

Their non-ceremonial functions continued in parallel until the 1840s, when they became permanently 'fixed' in the form of red-coated Dragoon Guards. 

Not long afterwards the Russians would have faced similarly-attired men on horses during the Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava. Frankly, it wasn't much of a charge, barely a trot, as the brigade had to attack uphill, and the whole action lasted ten minutes at most, but was generally more successful than that of Lucan's other brigade at the same battle a little later on.

Anyway, as the need for combat-readiness /taking a bullet for the boss was waived, the age-profile of the Gentlemen shifted to the current average of 52. 

Today the Corps consists of 27 Gentlemen plus 5 officers, one of whom is always the Government's Chief Whip in the House of Lords, so a sort of political Kommissar. 

Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, pioneer of the game of lawn tennis, served from 1870-1909. 

In the middle of the 19th century the sport finally made it out from the enclosed indoor courts of Real Tennis, thanks to the development of bouncy vulcanised rubber balls and the prevalence of under-utilised croquet lawns. 

The Major devised the modern scoring system and made a packet selling boxed sets of racquets and balls for between five and ten guineas. He called his new game Sphairistikè which, you will note, did not catch on to quite the same extent. 

He was inducted into the International Sphairistikè (tennis) Hall of Fame in 1997.

My Liege...

I've been LOLing away this week at some of the output on Twitter from the nitwits acting like they've just woken up in some terrifying, feudal dystopia. 

One British economist in particular only now seems to have shaken off the mind-fog and achieved awareness that he's spent the past six decades living in a constitutional monarchy with 1200 years of history behind it. 

In particular he has been getting his knickers in a twist about the term "Liege Lord", which cropped up amongst other medieval flourishes at St James's Palace the other morning. 

There are several points worth making here. 

If ever you have the misfortune to face the Coldstream Guards in battle they will not be wearing red coats and bearskin hats. Similarly the artillery that we have been sending to Ukraine was not carried there by horses mounted by men who looked ready to give Boney some hell. Most of us can cope with the distinction between actual and ceremonial. 

The useful continuity in our mode of government comes without uniform smoothness, reflecting the stream of national events that fashioned it. Call the UK system a Frankenstein's Monster if you must; it certainly appears to possess core parts and appendages that have come from different holes in the historical ground. 

Following the death of Elizabeth II, we have had fairly unusual opportunity to see "under the skin" of the state, and any weirdness thus manifested should not necessarily be terrifying. In as much as the late monarch was surely never a flesh-eating lizard in a skinsuit, neither is our system of government, nor semi-independent offshoots like the Corporation of London. 

For the protocols and ceremonials of our organic constitution necessarily possess parts that are visibly old as well as more newish, but that has never inferred that the entire system is incapable of modernity. 

Indeed, if there is one thing we are seeing in the contemporary world, it is how more apparently modern written constitutions can struggle to adapt to changing circumstances. 

And though the Privy Council is a more direct descendant of the Anglo-Saxon Witan than our new King himself is from Alfred the Great, that should not mean, as one commentator has suggested, that there ought to have been a free and open discussion on Charles's fitness to be King in St James's Palace on Saturday. The Proclamation was a formal expression, rather like the language that was used, of something more straightforward. An underlying smoothness beneath the symbolic lumpiness, if you like. 

If this were not the case, the contrasting iconography on display outside The Royal Exchange a couple of hours later would have had the potential to be awkwardly discordant. Yet once again, I remain safe in the knowledge that the Lord Mayor doesn't show up to work in that outfit every day, accompanied by Oliver's army.

So let us be done with the pageant paranoia. We are not living in Victoriaworld infiltrated by deferential droids impossible to distinguish from actual human beings. 

Perhaps the real problem here is modernity not antiquity. It has encouraged us to become anxious about any disconnect between appearance and reality and that in turn is leading us to be dismissive and occasionally shaken by history itself — for like the very best written stories, it shows rather than tells, forcing us into the grown up world of interpretation. 

Proper Charly

Very much looking forward to the tennis this afternoon. Right on time I have warmed to Carlos Alcaraz Garfia. 

Previously I found him rather disconcertingly similar in aspect to a certain kind of rebellious, regional teen familiar from Spanish cinema, neither quite on the right or the wrong side of the tracks and possessed of a large and noisy motorcycle. 

Then there was the matter of the slightly mob-like nature of his entourage. 

I cheered on his Italian opponent 'Pecador' in the quarters, and his American one in the semis, but along the way acquired a sense of his extraordinary resourcefulness and a combative style that is more than a mere update on that of Nadal. 

As for Ruud, for me he still retains an aura of Norwegian blandness which may yet dissipate. It is thrilling to see such a changing of the guard. One is almost inclined to toss one's bearskin in the air and shout "hip hip hooray". 

As for newly-crowned US Open champion Iga Swiatek, it's hard not to imagine that she might go on to accumulate more Slams than Serena and indeed, Margaret. The whole GOAT debate is still distorted by the way many of the past candidates either spent too much time in Australia or alternatively avoided it altogether. 

If the young Pole can turn up at the business end of the majors at least twice a year for the next decade, do-able I think, then that awkward old record should finally fall.

The Crimean Conundrum

Some will no doubt observe that I would say this, but it seems to me that an oversized proportion of the idiotic comments that crop up within today's public discourse* are delivered, with confidence, by people having a poor knowledge and understanding of history.  

170 years ago Britain went to war with Russia in the Crimea. The origins of this conflict are amongst the most deliciously complex in the modern era (more on that 'momentarily', as they say on American airplanes), but a key moment occurred in the lead up when the Tsar made a surprise and secretive visit to London and secured what he believed was a solid understanding with Queen Victoria**. 

This mis-apprehension was based on several significant mis-appraisals of how British government institutions (and the native media) actually operate. Alexander just assumed that the monarch had final say in foreign policy, rather like he did. 

Seeing simplicity where there is complexity is often a sure path to being perversely wrong. 

Some of the motivations for conflict in the 1850s appear recognisable from our own geopolitical milieu, yet they seem to have been accumulating and interacting in often strikingly unfamiliar ways. 

There was religion — Christianity split between its eastern and western denominations with some epic clerical brawls breaking out in the Holy Land, plus Islam, both established and Jihadi — commercial interests, large and small scale nationalism (conservative and radical), naval posturing, ethnic cleansing, strategic concerns about zones of influence and civilisational balance, deluded attempts to re-enact the semi-mythological past, distrust of the French, sympathy for the plight of the Poles, Pan-Slavism and Russophobia...to name but the most salient elements. 

Overall one could say it's an even bigger mélange than the one which would later take shape prior to 1914. 

History is to some extent always like this, yet sadly it will not stop people profering infantile one-dimensional explanations for major events. You will be aware of the kind of thing I mean. "Putin was provoked by NATO...The Iraq War was all about greed..." and so on.

And these mis-conceptions about how things start lead to problems later on when they apparently end. The over-simplistic idea that Germany alone had started WWI led to a post-armistice settlement which contributed to the next big morass of ruinous collisions in the 1930s.

History, just like physics, has its cats suspended in a state of confounding ambiguity. 

I recently came across a description of of the Johnson premiership as “an unsustainable mass of painful paradoxes” and this struck me as a decent enough working description of the driving forces behind much of what we call world events. 

* Thanks to social media these are more obvious than ever, and owing to the death of Queen Elizabeth we have just experienced a bit of a squall. 

** The manner that these encounters have a consistent tendency to lead to a later gathering of misunderstandings, did not stop Peres and Arafat meeting in similar clandestine circumstances at my Aunty's house outside London. 

The Proclaimers

King Charles III's proclamation in front of around 200 pre-selected members of the Privy Council — it was immediately clear that none of the great and the good had anything better to do this morning, not even Boris — required one of those hit and miss 3am alarms for us. 

I subsequently conked out before the new King's emissaries effectively had to knock on the door of the City of London before repeating their announcement on the steps outside the Royal Exchange in the presence of a platoon of individuals dressed like the sort who might tend to have it in for a monarch called Charles. (Plus a bloke who appeared to have pinched Vladimir Putin' sable hat.) 

This part of the spectacle we caught up with later on via a Spanish media feed, and were amused with how the interpreter appeared to struggle with some of the old fashioned inglés on display. "Nuestra Graciosa Reina...". 

He also pulled up short when "whereas" was deployed atypically, in effect as a way of avoiding something we were always told to avoid at school — starting a sentence with 'Because...'

Wellington's equestrian statue in the location celebrates, appropriately enough, the bill he pushed through the Commons which allowed for the rebuilding of London Bridge. 

 

Tickler and Teazer

Today Belize has celebrated with parades and parties its defining Battle of St George's Caye (1798), the seventh and last time the settlers fought off an attempt by the Spanish crown to expel them from the Central American mainland. 

It went on for a week, with the enemy attempting to force their way through one of the main channels leading through the barrier reef alongside Montego Caye. 

The key moment occurred after 1pm on September 10 when a not-so-grand armada from the Yucatán commanded by Irish-born Don Arturo O'Neill Tirone lined up in the standard fashion  — at least until Nelson would change the rules 7 years later at Trafalgar — alongside the hastily-assembled fleet of the defenders, assisted by three British ships from Jamaica: Merlin, Teazer and Tickler. (There was also a schooner called Swinger.) 

The Superintendant of Belize, Lt Colonel Thomas Barrow, had been impatient to move the battle to the "land phase", but Merlin's commander John Moss spotted the opportunity to rout the Spanish at sea. 

Crucial decisions had also been taken in July, such as the arming of the loggers' slaves, many of whom appeared to have a handy understanding of West African ways of warfare, and not evacuating the settlement over-hastily. 

The British had long considered it a bit of a liability, its inhabitants too unruly to manage, and another 64 years would pass after the battle before Belize would formally join the Empire as British Honduras. 

Yet war between Britain and Spain was effectively ended for a while by the treaty of Versailles in 1783, which re-established the previously-agreed logging rights of the Baymen. (Though peacetime might not have pleased the buccaneers quite so much.)

New York explorer-lawyer John L. Stephens visited "Balize" in October 1839, then home to some 6000 people, and confessed that he "knew not whether to be shocked or amused" by the racial diversity evident at the higher end of society...

Before I had been an hour in Balize I learned that the great work of practical amalgamation, the subject of so much angry controversy in the States, had been going on quietly for generations; that colour was considered mere matter of taste. 

When I first came to Belize myself, I visited St George's Caye, then operating as a kind of Club Med facility for British service personnel, offering windsurfing and other entertainments. (The resort has since shifted into the private sector.)

In five days time Guatemala will celebrate its Independence Day, an event, it must be said, significantly facilitated by Admiral Lord Nelson's celebrated victory at Trafalgar, which left Spain's American colonies effectively cut off from the interference of their European masters, who found themselves suddenly bereft of a navy and thus a means of control and communication.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Amazon) — episodes one and a bit of two

I'm not about to go all Elon Musk on this show, yet neither am I fully invested at this stage. 

Other than cool, aloof Puerto Rican elf Arondir, the male elves do all seem to be variations of that immature minor public schoolboy from Men Behaving Badly. And there is something a bit boarding school about Galadriel here as well. 

As for Lenny Henry as a sort of proto-hobbit* complete with oddball Celtic intonation, it's all a bit CBBC for me. 

Given that Tolkein himself said that the Harfoots were a duskier kind of midget, why are only an (adult) smattering of these diminutive characters played by non-white Northern-Europeans and Antipodeans? 

From a colour-blind casting perspective**, that was surely a bit of a free pass...of the sort you don't get many of in the ersatz dark ages. 

Packing fantasy TV with thesps doing regional British and Irish accents — with the exception of the full Peaky Bloinders— which of course I'd have loved Sir Lenny to have insisted on — has become somewhat de rigeur in this genre. 

The signs are perhaps more promising in episode two. Maybe the trouble is that this is not quite what I was expecting. GOT has become a sort of formula that can repeated to greater or lesser effect. There is something more explorative and experimental going on here and I suspect I may become more attuned to it later on in the series. 

Location-wise, NZ will always trump Ulster, Malta, Croatia...and Watford, yet still needs to be used judiciously. 

* Hobbitid? 

** A total minefield, of course. GOT has developed a sort of cultural-historical-geographical rationale for race, whereby Dornish men look like one type of Formula One driver and the Targeryans look like the other, Finnish kind, the ones that struggle not to come across as automata in press conferences. 

When it is done well, one simply does not notice. Thus I would not notice an African American soprano singing the role of Brünnhilde in the Ring Cycle, but I might scratch my head if an aboriginal Australian were cast to play Harold Bluetooth in a historical drama...unless of course the production took other significant steps to make that casting decision appear relevant and thereby less notice-able within the overall approach. The casting of Dev Patel as Sir Gaarr-w'n in The Green Knight was masterful in that sense. 

Dare one say that some of the younger Harfoots here are in partial 'blackface'?

Fall (2022)

One's feelings about this movie will tend to depend on where one sits on the Schadenfreude/Vertigo axis. 

Every minute tended to remind me that most of the visitors one came across in Antigua used to be fairly serious people — individuals who turned up here to learn Spanish, to volunteer on local projects, to open a small business (of the more serious sort) and so on. 

Nowadays there would appear to be a greater predominance of un-serious types who just want to log a pic of themselves standing on one live volcano with another puffing away in the background. 

Others are seemingly content to make do with the "sensation of being alive" served up by standing on a wooden open palm protruding over a precipice. (Just as long as the accident waiting to happen is recorded for posterity.) 

Anyway, the lesson here for "like-whores" is that should you have a spectacularly dumb selfie project in mind, pre-alert some more serious folk as to your whereabouts and likely need for an expensive rescue. 

Selfieeeeeee! 

 

House of The Dragon (HBO) — episode one

I cannot recall in which order Shakespeare's history plays were released, but let's assume that there was an underlying sequel/prequel/reboot logic to it all. And that different quantities of money might have been splurged on different parts of different Kings. 

On various levels House of the Dragon possibly harks to a play the Bard never wrote: Young Lear. 

Anyway, the trick with the telling of history, even ersatz history, is to get us to care about every chunk of it in its own terms, regardless of what we know about what happened later. 

Few Englishmen fail to be roused by the antics of possibly our greatest ever monarch — Prince Hal/Henry V — even though we know how his project stalled with his untimely death and how his son, possibly our worst ever monarch, assumed the mantle.

This first episode of Thrones 2, derived from George R.R. Martin's novel Fire & Blood, deserves a mixed report. At the beginning it feels like watching a tribute act (with some Woke accretions) but then the joust and the ill-fated labours commence. We feel that budget turbo. 

If the makers understand, unlike their predecessors, that the tournament was a twisted microcosm of actual medieval battle c1400, then the extra monies could result in great things. It's a shame though that many of the Sers, Daemon in particular, appear to be wearing plastic armour of the sort I donned as a child. 

The Targaryen duty of dynastic whispers did come over as a little like Henry IV warning Hal of Bosworth field, or perhaps even of the schism with Rome. 

How strange that after arriving on the scene as the ultimate goody, Matt Smith has seemingly since been type-cast as a sociopath. 

Oh, how I long to binge. A friend suggested that all I need to do is wait for the season to conclude.With S4 of Westworld I found myself bingeing until I caught up and then frustratingly stuck back in the weekly cycle. 

Honor Society (2022)

The only review I read before we watched this one went something like this: a thrillingly dark and of the moment small town, high school drama which satirises the acquisition of credentials for a 'prestige' American education and then switches destination after a surprising and not-unnerving swerve at the end of the penultimate act, and ultimately doesn't quite land as intended. 

This is more or less the opposite of our own experience. In the first hour all I could do was name-check the superior titles from the canon apparently being referenced — Clueless, Election, American Pyscho — and the small screen's Fleabag too, but then the quality gap started to shrink noticeably and we found the landing both competent and even quite uplifting in its residual darkness. 

Whereas I'd been thinking that Angourice Rice was being mis or perhaps over-used in the first period — to her own detriment  — this movie ended up looking like a significant platform for greater things. (Though one recalls that the leads of the above-mentioned films were never really any better afterwards.) 

She was very good as Mare's daughter in Easttown and as V had only recently tuned into the hotness of Ryan Gosling and insisted on  full retrospective, we recently found a younger version of Rice showing considerable promise in The Nice Guys (2016).

Marchioness

Last Friday I read an article commemorating the 33rd anniversary of the Marchioness disaster in which a Thames pleasure boat situated between Southwark and Canon Street Railway bridges was struck from behind by the dredger Bowbelle and sank, resulting in the deaths of 51 of the 130 people on board. 

It has always seemed like one of the tentpole London disasters during the first half of my life. Others of note include the Moorgate Tube crash, the King's Cross escalator fire and Battersea Park funfair rollercoaster collapse. 

And I have always had a sense, as I do with those others, that it impacted on me as a real time, headline news item. 

Yet it cannot have done, because on August 20 1989 I was here. 

By here I mean either Guatemala, up in the Petén forest, or just over the border in the more jungly bits of Chiapas. And my access to news coverage of a parochially British nature would have been extremely limited at the time. 

So somehow I have retrofitted this calamity neatly into my own timeline. Perhaps my interest in it waxed a couple of years later when V and I moved into a home beside the Thames and these party cruisers became a regular part of our vicarious domestic nightlife. 

I now look back on my 22-year-old self and wonder at how he coped in this information-scarce environment for months on end. Being less concerned with the bla bla bla of the outside world strikes me as a kind of freedom now, yet only a couple of years later my own first connection to the interwebs undoubtedly also appeared liberating. 

Whenever within a significant settlement in Central America like a town I tended to check in. This could involve a call home on a regular schedule. 

In Antigua this was still problematic as the Guatel office — now housing Claro on the edge of the parque central — was bedlam. Around the small internal patio garden there were rows of clunky callboxes, but their use required time, effort and quite a lot of local currency. I was fortunate to have some friends in the capital who owned a fashion store in Zona 1 complete with a landline which could be more easily used for this purpose, and so I found myself making that trip almost weekly. 

I also had a friend in Antigua — a retired engineer from Aberdeen named James Stewart — who embarked on a similar journey to the UK embassy to collect a week's worth of copies of the Times, which he then devoured over breakfast at the Hotel Antigua. 

James struck me at the time as an archetypal exile who made rather infrequent trips back to the home country only to return with lurid tales of how everything had gone to the dogs there. I was convinced I would never turn out that way, and then I did. 

I can't recall if the International Herald Tribune was on sale in Antigua at that time. British newspapers were of course not even available on the one-day-late schedule I recall from my childhood summers in Spain. (It was a weird way to follow major international events like the Olympics, at least from a non-Spanish perspective, but the risk of spoilers was fairly low.) 

Two very major global moments did occur during my second period in Antigua (September-December '89) — the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Loma Prieta quake near Oakland California, both of which I became aware of in near real time: the former via the Guatemalan news coverage in the home in which I then resided on Calle Chipilapa (shared at that time with a German called Yoyo and his girlfriend, both transfixed by this development). And the latter, a few days earlier, on the TV perched on a shelf above the bar at Mistral which tended to remain tuned in to CNN all day. 

This locale of legend was situated roughly opposite Doña Luisa X. and was really the only gathering spot for foreigners in this city at the time. 

Until Al Qaeda formed, this was my earliest experience of being part of a line of the collectively dumbstruck staring at a screen. 

So long Multiverse...

Multiple universes exist in order to give us the sense that we have a sensible explanation, when in fact, we don't. 

I never thought I'd hear myself saying that, but Carlo Rovelli has successfully undermined my two decades-long 'faith' in this approach to quantum 'interference'*, and inside the pages of Helgoland I have witnessed Occam's Razor being used to splice up the Multiverse, mysteriously, into one piece. 

I'm presently immersed in the second half of this profound little book, where the author turns to entanglement, clearly neither the end result of signals travelling faster than we can currently allow, or some sort of prior agreement. Rovelli suggests, in a way I am yet to fully digest, that any correlation between two apparently distinct objects exists only in relation to a third. 

I have always loved the way that he implies more than he actually says, but once he deploys the term 'information' he becomes guilty of a sin many theoreticians in his field apparently succumb to. 

What he says is that the notorious cat is only dead or alive (in fact sleeping, as he compassionately tempers the metaphor) from its own POV. What he implies is that the properties of all matter are relative and so an isolated object not interacting with anything else (as opposed to the complex system we know all cats to be) has no reality per se. Everything perceivable is part of a web of interactions. 

I have long been fond of saying that there is no such thing as nothing, but Rovelli reveals that a thing on its own is no thing at all. 

Rovelli is a master of metaphor — not just the stand-alone clever comparison sort, but the kind which connects an idea to a useful network of concepts. Beyond his obvious cultural repleteness, it is surely this what makes him the most interesting (and useful) contemporary science writer for specialists well beyond the frontiers of his own expertise.

I suspect that I will have more to say here later about this "radical interdependence of things”. 

* Imprinted on my mind after a reading of David Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality had pushed the notion that parallel realities are a necessary consequence of our observations of the uncanny behaviour of photons. 

Top Gun Maverick

At around the midpoint, when my mind was still reeling from all the aspects of plot and character that made no sense at all* the poignant figure of Iceman Kilmer typed "Let it go..." on his appropriately 80s home PC setup, and I did. 

In spite of all the pickable nits, perhaps even because of them, this movie is close to perfect. 

While it riffs on some of its precursor's most famous tropes, notably the cheesy dialogue and homoeroticism*, Joseph Kosinki takes things down a notch or two from his own predecessor Tony Scott's relative clumsiness in these regards. 

For the record, Maverick's jacket always had the flag of Taiwan on the back. All that has changed is that 36 years later China is in a position to throw a bigger hissy fit over it. 

I experienced the original within a raucous posse of my peers in the Cambridge Arts Cinema in 1986. I have a feeling I had already seen it at least once at the time, but couldn't swear to it; but anyway, that particular viewing was immensely more immersive. 

I now wonder if a fabulous piece of entertainment such as this would ever been green-lighted were it not for our collective nostalgia for the expansive mood of the 'prequel' and the longevity of Tom's A-listedness. There will surely always be a market for premium, escapist, silliness, but perhaps we are running out of the stars to front it up. 

Although we have a projector at home, I now regret having passed up the chance to see this flick in Campeche a couple of months ago, but it was my last night there and I was feeling listless, so I literally rain-checked.

* That Jennifer Connelly was shooting Labyrinth when Tom Cruise started training on F-14s somehow felt a bit euuuuuuuu. Yet, as with everything here, she significantly exceeded Kelly McGillis as competent woman with nice car. Yacht too. Maybe I should open a bar in San Diego. 

* Arguably the 'gayest' bits of this film occur when Tom and Rooster share a superannuated fighter for one last dogfight towards the end, and then beyond that, back on the carrier. 

Members of the club...

In the late 70s my journey home — Hammersmith bridge, No9 bus, followed by a meander through the mewses leading south from St George’s Hospital to the rear entrance of St Peters Eaton Square (later firebombed by a bellend convinced it had to be a Catholic institution), almost unfailingly delivering me to our front door within a narrow ten minute window, 17:00-17:10, verified by the church clock — in effect our kitchen clock from the other side of Hobart Place — concluded with teatime: a cup of tea in a china cup and two, or perhaps three, of these…

ç

St Peter's

St George's Hospital

No9

Update: my cousin Steph has reminded me how yum the purple version of the Club also was, with its pieces of 'fruit'. And an old friend in Aus has shared an admission, that she too liked to scrape the chocolate off with her teeth to reveal the biscuit skeleton below, something I was won to do with Maltesers too, occasionally. 

Last Summer In the City by Gianfranco Calligarich

Warm brioche at dawn is about as close as this cult novel gets to 'feel good'. And there's not a Vespa in sight. 

A croissant from San Martín an adequate surrogate here...

It offers an account of a year in the Italian capital from Leo Gazzara, a just-turned-30, would-be journalist nibbling around the crusts of more established and glamorous Roman lifestyles. 

Since its publication in 1973, it has struggled to find a lasting mass take-up beyond the literati. There are several reasons one could suggest for this, not least the fact that it ultimately reads rather like an extended suicide note. 

The novel was published at a moment of transition between Italy's 60s boom and the anni di piombo of the following decade and has tended to vanish and then reappear whenever its abrasive characters have seemed more befitting to the moment. This English translation has been released at a time when we refer to this age-group and its traits as Millennial. 

English readers are tempted with blurb noting comparisons to The Catcher in the Rye, Fellini's La Dolce Vita and occasionally also The Sun Also Rises. 

While Hemingway's avatars are lost because of the war, Houellebecq's because their parents were hippies, for or Leo and his friends, feeling this way is almost a side-effect of life in the Eternal City. 

Leo is an impecunious outsider, yet Rome has seemingly offered him an infusion of virtual blue blood; a loaned sensed of self-worth loaded with a painful malaise — a nostalgia for things one never really had, resulting in the sense of being an avanzo, a remnant, leading a life consisting of leftovers. 

He exemplifies an Italian type: the sfigato, here a person dangerously detached, drifting along the edge of an existential precipice. 

It's not hard to see why the novel has been cherished by intellectuals. Leo is a witty and perceptive observer of his environment. A little less so however of the people around him, to the extent that many readers may fail to care all that much. 

Hemingway's posse in the Basque Country are also unlikeable, but the first time I read Jake's narrative I shared his obsession with Lady Brett in a manner that was unrepeated here with Arianna. Leo informs us of her beauty, but his broader descriptions render her rather irritating.

Westworld S4

A few thoughts on the now-concluded fourth season of Westworld. 

"Clever" shows appear to have an innate tendency to become soap operas in disguise, with writers spinning out ever more absurd plot developments as an excuse for feeding the audience's fixation with the individual characters and their interactions. This is what marked the decline of Killing Eve and something similar has undoubtedly been happening here. 

There have been some big ideas in S4, but their presentation has been predominantly wooly.  I was often reminded of the words of John Ruskin: "It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated". 

And the trouble here has often been that Westworld is simple when it needs to be complicated (NYC, actually a small part of NYC, standing in for the entire world) and vice versa. There has long been a need for some conceptual condensation. 

I reached a similar stage in my viewing of Lost, when I realised that too many of the loose ends were loose screws and lost faith that even the writers were an omniscient presence in their own world. 

Perhaps the three follow-up seasons have suffered from a failure to fully exploit the original theme park conceit inherited from Michael Crichton. Audiences then drooped, seasons shrunk and we have ended up with characters suddenly able to traverse significant distances in the blink of an eye, a phenomenon familiar from late-stage Game of Thrones. 

Allowing characters from a constrained scenario to wander freely around the world is akin to the phenomenon of British sitcom characters dispatched on holidays abroad. 

Nobody is yet sure if there will be a fifth season, except perhaps Ed Harris who has claimed that filming is about to start and that it will be the last. It's hard however to see how the one that just ended could not be the last for Ed's William.  

Slow Horses (Apple TV)

Practically everyone has been raving about Mick Herron's Slough House series since Slow Horses was first published a decade ago. 

In a recent edition of the New Statesman John Gray went to far as to suggest that Herron is a superior writer to the late John Le Carré. (Hmmm...)

Mick Jagger is reportedly such a big fan that he absolutely insisted on doing the vocals for the customised theme song. Like everything on Apple's first 6-part adaptation, it's kind of wonderful...

I read the book two or three years ago and really enjoyed it, but somehow didn't feel the immediate need to press on with these characters. Yet now I have enjoyed the show considerably more and have been trying to pinpoint precisely why. 

Actually seeing areas of London I know so well counts for something, especially when given this kind of atmospheric overlay. 

But in the end, perhaps it all comes down to Gary Oldman. There's humour in the books, but his take on Lamb is utterly hilarious and on-the-nose. A well written gag still requires delivery, and maybe I hadn't been delivering them all that well inside my head. And Oldman is the standout example of near perfect casting across the board. 

Given the way that Killing Eve became a sort of self-satire, where the writers lost all track of the bigger stakes, this is a welcome addition to the small screen genre. And Ho is surely the best pissing from inside out dweeb yet incorporated in this kind of series. And he reminds me of several colleagues from the 90s. 

I'm now into Dead Lions, applying the TV makeover in my head. We only have until November before Oldman and co return with their own delivery. 

Imaginary Balance

US media such as NBC were referring to Rushdie last night as "the controversial author" — controversial, like someone whose views are outside the mainstream...rather dodgy. 

Controversial, perhaps then to the same extent as the American "stand up" comedian who has just had his show cancelled at The Edinburgh Fringe. 

You can read the report on the BBC News website and end up none the wiser about the severity of dodginess involved. It's beyond the pale, yet the Beeb won't, for example, tell you that he flashed his dick at the audience or that he referred to Rishi Sunak as a Paki. 

And in between the shock factor of the intermittent stabby, shooty attacks, this is one of the main problems that free speech faces today: a self-censoring panic about causing offence, even in the business of reporting the verifiably offensive. 

Salman meanwhile, is an apostate, a committed atheist with long-standing and firm convictions. And JK Rowling is a children's author who advocates for fact over ideology. Yet both can end up in mortal danger, at the very least culturally-tagged as "controversial", because we are afraid of pissing off the organised dickheads. 

As Slavoj Žižek explains in his new book, all would-be 'free' speech is now emitted into a space patrolled by a newish species of listener...

“The basic characteristic of today’s subjectivity is the weird combination of the free subject who experiences himself as ultimately responsible for his fate and the subject who grounds the authority of his speech on his status of a victim of circumstances beyond his control... The notion of subject as a victim involves the extreme narcissistic perspective: every encounter with the Other appears as a potential threat to the subject’s precarious imaginary balance."

 

Prey (2022)

 

Even before we sat down to watch this I could hear the tap tap tap of a  zombified franchise banging its head against the window. What was this exactly — prequel, sequel, reboot..?

And during the first twenty minutes or so my misgivings were accumulating: I know how this extraterrestrial beastie looks and behaves, so spare me the piecemeal reveal lark. Why do the northern great plains indigenes emit at most a single phrase in Comanche before collapsing into modern highschooler English?* And are they really going with the whole high tech bully roughs up the Native Americans vibe? 

And then a horde — an 'orde? — of expendable, unreconstructed Frogs arrives, and from that point onwards, things start to get rather good. It's as if the production, having accepted its limitations, suddenly and rather thrillingly escapes them. 

Other iconic alien nasties have been subjected to 'updates' which haven't quite worked, or stuck (viz Daleks) but this one has been conducted with both smarts and sensitivity. 

The movie sheds its early televisual quality to become one of the better Predator outings and one that works as a standalone, and almost certainly as a career stepping stone for Amber Midthunder. 

And at the end I found myself doing something I would never have imagined myself doing during those early scenes — looking up books on the history of the Comanche Nation on Amazon. 

* There is, apparently, a Comanche-only version, which I would rather have seen. 

No soy codo, pero...

I've been suffering somewhat from tennis elbow for the past couple of months. All the more disappointing given the fact that I haven't played tennis, proper, for years. 

V and I often turned out on our local hard courts three or four times a week during the shortish British summers. 

But then just over a decade ago she suffered a fall from a reasonable altitude, landing very hard on her shoulder, and although we did try to go back out with our racquets, it was soon clear that her service was but a shadow of its former self and the competitive element of our matches was gone for good. 

This was especially traumatic for her as she had always been extremely sporty — Guatemalan national fencing champion and so on — and had worked her way back from an ugly knee injury which occurred just before we met, but as we all now know, unresolve-able chronic conditions begin at 40. 

And La Antigua has some lovely clay courts comparable with those we enjoyed playing on over on the mucky red continent in the late 90s. 

In my youth I never seemed to get how easily athletes come a-cropper. Years and years of football, rugby, cricket, tennis, badminton, soft ball, squash, real-tennis, swimming, diving and not a niggle. (Though V and I are on the same page on the unnecessary wrist pain of volleyball.)

But then in my thirties I made a lunge on the tennis court at Cascades against an awkward Aussie opponent and landed clumsily on an outstretched leg, which left me with a form of sciatica for weeks. 

I recall that my father suffered quite alarmingly from tennis elbow for an extended period of my childhood — in his case more properly golf elbow — and had it treated with hydrocortisone injections, but that is not my way.

Luckily I have discovered a handy Argie-manufuactured med called Reversal Flex here in Guatemala, which is extremely effective at targeting this sort of discomfort. Over the counter, but ought not to be, of course. 

Albañiles in LAG tend to rave about Vitaflenaco for back pain and other forms of inflammation, and I have experimented, but this is a painkiller one should avoid if at all possible. 

In my case the garden shears can take the lion's share of the blame for my codo condition — there are times of year when I insist on manually mowing the lawn, and last June was one of those. 

About eight years ago I had some fairly serious knee ligament trouble myself, which was settled almost overnight by a dose of electronic acupuncture in Pangbourne, but I doubt similar miracles can easily be accessed here in LAG. 

In the last couple of years in London we used to play badminton regularly at the weekends with some friends near Stamford Bridge (Chelsea FC i.e. deepest Fulham) and we still occasionally indulge in the same in our garden, as it seems feasible, even for the decrepit, and always generates some amusing canine mayhem. 

Perhaps the best part of our tennis championships in Wapping were the pints at the Prospect of Whitby afterwards. The lesson here is that one's compound experiences may start to fall apart as the years go by, but one is not necessarily left with the spotty bananas at the bottom of the bowl. 

Not Okay (2022)

Zoey Deutch is so very good in this just-about-okay film, I ended up vicariously regretting her choice of being in it. 

We've only recently seen her in The Outfit, an obvious step up (and coincidentally, there too paired against a dickwad love interest played by Dylan O'Brien). Maybe she signed both dotted lines around the same time? 

The trouble is that she makes a character set up to be unlikeable, vaguely likeable. Writer-director Quinn Shepherd has tried to offset this problem by introducing a woke paragon in the form of school shooting victim Rowan, but this then breaks what I see as the golden rule of satire — nobody in the story can be excused from ridicule. 

The screenplay makes some questionable choices in terms of believability and good taste. It ought to have danced in step with the zeitgeist, yet often felt clumsily off beat. 

The more revealing dramas about social media tend to be projections — e.g. Black Mirror — rather than attempts to whack the highly mobile mole in the moment. 

The characters that share the office with Danni at 'Depravity' are perhaps the movie's biggest fail, especially a young man with South-Asian roots and a couple of unnecessarily nasty LGBT roles.