Tring Book Club - Birdsong and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

One of the reasons I joined a book club was to broaden my reading. Otherwise, I would never have read Birdsong. Although I did find most of it hard going, there was a lot to discuss at our next meeting. I was definitely in a minority of one when I caused some controversy about my serious reservations about the writing. After reading the introduction to The Bookseller of Kabul, and wished that I had not, I carefully avoided this novel's introduction. That may have been a mistake. It does say that the early section of France in 1910 was written with "a kind of period formality". And that in the sections during the fighting in France from 1916 to 1918, Sebastian Faulks wanted "to give an unstable feeling by various grammatical means". I thought that these devices made for a very poor read.

When I suggested that best writing came in the modern section (without these gimmicks), the general consensus was that this was the most trivial part of the book, and maybe it could have been left out altogether. But I rather liked a refreshing change from the horrors of the trenches. I cannot stand reading about horror, and this book detailed death, injury and pain in shocking detail, tedious and even boring in the long, repetitive and laborious descriptions of trench warfare. I did say that I am a great horror film fan, but have difficulty in reading it. Amanda (our course leader) suggested I may have too much imagination, and this may be true. But I did learn about the digging of tunnels, leading from the trenches to under the enemy's lines, where explosive charges would blow up in their faces.

I happened to particularly enjoy the modern section where Elizabeth finds someone to translate the code of our hero's diaries, where what he has written is wonderful and sad. And this research, together with revelations about the family history, will prove invaluable for generations to come.

Thank goodness for Mark Haddon. His The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is highly original, poignant and very funny, short and sharp, educational and enriching, well constructed and a jolly good read. I hardly ever read a book twice, but I was so glad that this book was chosen as I had the chance to enjoy again this wonderful book, having first read it in 2003. It is written in the first person by Christopher who is fifteen and has Asperger's Syndrome. Whilst he is brilliant at maths, his affliction is a source of severe difficulty for those around him. But inside the brain of this vulnerable teenager, we are constantly uplifted by his spirit, enthusiasm and optimism. He almost dismisses those incidents which plague his family, so we are never embarrassed for him.

It was so sweet when Christopher talks about getting to know someone by asking them to draw a plan of their house or what kind of car they drive. He cannot stand different foods touching on his plate ( as a boy, I always had my custard separate, and after, the main pudding). The second half of the book is the most amazing 24 hour adventure, a nerve jangling experience. This novel is essential reading for young and old alike.

My performance at Football - The Highlights

Even fewer than those on my posting about my cricketing highlights, probably because wearing glasses (no contact lenses in my youth) excluded me from even my form first team at St Clement Danes. Again, not for the want of trying, the amount of time I spent kicking a ball around with my brother John in the Mews behind Napier Road and Holland Park should have paid off, but commitment is nothing compared with an extreme lack of talent or muscle.

But out of the blue came one staggering success of sorts. At the beginning of my last year at Beaufort House Junior School in Fulham, I turned up for trials for the school team on the clay pitch of Norman Park, without any hope of coming close. But there was nobody who wanted to play in goal. After a couple of boys were tried, I was reluctantly press ganged into the keeper's position. A couple of suicidal dives at feet on the hard red surface, a bang on the nose resulting in one of frequent nose bleeds, and I was in the team. Mum knitted me a goalie's jumper and I was off to the (unusual) grass pitches of Hurlingham Park for our first game. The junior schools in Fulham had very good players in those days, so it was no surprise when I spent most of our first game picking the ball out of the net. We lost 5-2. I kept my place for the next match and this time had hardly anything to do as we won 4-0. The rest is a bit of a blur. We must have lost the next game as that was my last, and the end of my goalkeeping career for ever. Thank goodness.

I didn't play in goal for the cubs. Dad was the coach of the 37th Kensington Cub Pack and we met him at the shop on Saturday afternoons. We caught the bus to Hyde Park and walked across to Buck Hill where the pitch was marked out with poles carried on the bus. There were lots of games being played by a decent number of cub packs from all over Kensington.We had a pretty good team, and in my last year our last game became a decider for who came top of the league. We had hoped to play it on our favourite patch in the photo below. But the other side seemed more professional and we played on their pitch. There was quite a crowd that formed when word got round about the game's importance. We were down at half time, but came back strongly to win. A memorable victory.

My first grammar school of St Clement Danes was an all boys school with a yearly intake of 120 plus. Many boys selected this school as they were big on soccer. So never a chance of making even the house team. But three years later, we moved to Braintree and a new school. Mum would have preferred that I travelled on the bus to King Edward VIII in Chelmsford. But I chose the local mixed Braintree County High School, even though there was no room in the top form. Far fewer boys in my year, even fewer interested in football. In my first few weeks at the new school were the trials for the 1959/60 Under 15's. I played in my favourite deep lying midfield role, spraying long passes to the wings. And it was in this position that I made the team.

We travelled to away games by coach, and being part of this was the biggest thrill. We played a number of other mixed schools with some success. But when we played the second teams from Chelmsford and Colchester RGS, we were hammered. I think I lost my place towards the end of the season when replacements from the year below came into the reckoning. But it was great to have played most of the games. The photograph is the team that played Clacton County High School.

But no school teams after that, and the only time I remember playing after I left school were a couple of games for a George Wimpey side. We played on one of the many pitches on Wormwood Scrubs. I can remember the first game I played was on a very muddy surface. The ruts were so bad that the next game on a frozen surface was a joke. A bit like my ability at football.

Alana Levandoski, Anna Nalick, A Fine Frenzy, Emily Barker and Nell Brydon (plus Amy Macdonald and Brandi Carlile)

Five new additions to my female singer songwriter collection. Alana Levandoski's 2006 debut album Unsettled Down is mostly of the gentle rock songs I enjoy. I will definitely put her new recording Lions and Werewolves on my list for the future.

Anna Nalick is slightly more country and Wreck of the Day also from 2006 is fine.

Whilst A Fine Frenzy (which is actually Alison Sudol) is more rocky with Coldplay type chords, but gentler. I really enjoyed One Cell in the Sea and looking forward to her new album out in July.

Emily Barker and the Red Clay Halo is true folk in the Alison Krauss and Union Station class. I will have to listen to Despite The Snow a few more times before I pass judgement. (Second time round it's growing on me.)

No such problem with Nell Brydon's What Does It Take. Great songs with a bit of soul. I shall always remember listening to it the first time in the car on the way to the Almeida Theatre.

Amy Macdonald's new album A Curious Thing is every bit as good as her first. Real uptempo folk rock, with the occasional slower piece thrown in, that is perfect for my ears. The fourth track is a real blast. Love Love is a classic punk rock, just a little more sophisticated. Absolutely brilliant. I could never see her live for fear of a heart attack.

My third Brandi Carlile album, her latest, Give Up The Ghost is also excellent stuff. Two tracks stand out. Looking Out and Before It Breaks have been on repeat many times already. I have no idea which of her songs to pick for my 131. There are so many that I could choose. If she makes a best of compilation, it may be the best album of all time. But then there is Amy.

Measure For Measure

Another on my list of Shakespeare plays to see. I booked months ago for the Almeida production as it is only a very small theatre. And with (deserved) great reviews for Rory Kinnear and Anna Maxwell Martin, I was not disappointed.

I started off on a mild and sunny late Thursday afternoon to drive through north London and park on an Islington back road off Upper Street. It was a pretty busy place. It was the second time for me at the Almeida Theatre, having seen a superb production of Hedda Gabler there in 2005. My seat could not be better, eight rows back with a great, uninterrupted view of the stage. Measure For Measure was performed in modern dress and this worked really well.

Rory Kinnear was outstanding as the repressed nerd Angelo, who when presented with temporary rule, turns into a nasty authoritarian hypocrite. Anna Maxwell Martin is equally brilliant as his nemesis Isabella. The play is not really a comedy, but Lloyd Hutchinson as Lucio steals the show with a fabulous comic turn. The direction is top drawer and Michael Attenborough has brought a fresh and modern understanding to what has been described as a problem play.

There are many scenes with only a couple of actors on the stage, which works really well in such an intimate setting. And when the stage does get crowded, the scenery comes into it's own. A wall across the stage splits in two and each section revolves to give endless combinations. A street, a prison, an office of state, the city walls, this is just the best stage management you could see. At the end of one scene, the walls close slowly to a darkened stage while Juliet gradually disappears into the light at the back. Magical.

A Beautiful Week in April

The best week of the year so far started on Easter Monday. Sunny days became mild and then warm so by Friday temperatures reached 18C. So I was able to jet wash all the pavings (they seemed to come up better than last year when I was even contemplating their replacement), clear under the trees and finish the edges to the lawn. The advantages of retirement.

The lawns received their third cut, the treatment by Green Thumb seesms to have helped produce a better surface than the much criticised pitch at Wembley.

On Saturday afternoon we visited the National Trust property at Ascott outside Wing. Although it was still sunny, the breeze had turned to a cooler easterly, so we needed a jumper! The daffodils were still out, although just getting past their very best.

My Favourite Pop Video

Take On Me by A-ha

There is almost a whole page in Ali Smith's the accidental that describes what happens in this video, and it reminded me how it has always been my favourite. Not for the song, which is quite ordinary, but how the video was so innovative when it came out in 1985. A combination of animation and live action, it took a long time to produce. As Ali Smith puts it, "The boy from the strip cartoon winks at her, then holds out his hand, right out of the picture into her world, and she takes it in her real hand and goes inside the cartoon world, and becomes an illustration like him etc etc". It is a brilliant short original silent movie with music. That must be why I just love the silent sequences in movies set to a great pop song. There will be over half a dozen in my "131 Songs".

When Will There Be Good News, The Naive and Sentimental Lover and the accidental

I very rarely read crime fiction. And never one with a detective like Rebus or Dalgleish. The last book of this sort was William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms which was OK. I picked When Will There Be Good News, despite being the next in the series of Jackson Brodie novels. Fortunately, he hardly appeared. Kate Atkinson is certainly a good writer. Her characterisation of the sixteen year old, world wise Reggie, Doctor Joanna Hunter and DCI Louise Monroe turns a standard thriller into something more humorous, real and intelligent. I have put another of her novels on my list.

After reading the wonderful A Most Wanted Man, I needed another fix of John Le Carre. Having enjoyed his last fifteen novels, I went back in time to his 1971 publication The Naive and Sentimental Lover. I have to admit, it was a bit of a struggle, not helped because halfway through I read the two novels for my book club. It was a complete departure from his spy stories that latterly have turned into modern day subterfuge. We follow the experiences of Aldo Cassidy, a rich and successful business man caught up in a relationship with the wild Shamus and his wife Helen. It is a very long book, almost as if Le Carre is practising writing the high quality prose of his later works. If it had been half the length, it could have been great.

One of the best books I have read for a long time is Ali Smith's the accidental. Yes, the title is all in lower case, and the gimmicks do not stop there. But I am a complete sucker for original presentation, and this book succeeds brilliantly in this respect, as well as being superbly written. One reviewer talks about "pyrotechnic prose". Take two extracts : "Michael = what? He looks like an Airfix model put together by a boy not concentrating properly, so a wing got stuck on a little crookedly, a wheel got superglued out of joint with the others; dull blobs of too much glue on it in all the wrong places." Then later down the very same page "Everybody at this table is in broken pieces which won't go together, pieces which are nothing to do with each other, like they all come from different jigsaws, all muddled together in one box by some assistant who couldn't care less in a charity shop or wherever the place is that jigsaws go to die. except jigsaws don't die." This is a novel about chance encounters, with many references to modern day culture (cinema, music, books etc). It is funny with many laugh out loud moments (unusual for me), sad and moving. There is even a reference one character's book club. "Eve was a member of a very nice book group in Islington, six or seven women and one rather beleaguered man". Sounds familiar?

Still Alive

Three weeks ago I went to the garden centre to find a new Dicentra as it seemed as though mine had died. A kind assistant told me that these plants were four weeks behind at the nursery and had yet to break the surface of the soil, and should come back in a few weeks time. A week ago mine at last appeared and is sprouting better than ever. It looks quite tropical at the moment and is one of the main spring flowering perennials.

In the winds of last autumn, the Clematis Montana came down, bringing most of the trellis with it. It was a massive job to cut down all the branches and slice up the old wooden trellis. I was left with a short stubby bit of dead wood. It looked like the end, and for a long time there was no sign of life. Then again last week, and thanks to the mild weather, a few shoots appeared. So it was alive after all. I now need to put up some proper support, some strands of wire between some screws anchored in the brickwork should do the trick.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Shutter Island and The Blind Side

The best film so far this year, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a terrific thriller. Set in the wild but beautiful Swedish landscape, and with subtitles, the main characters backstory slowly unfolds but there is never a dull moment. The story is dark and gripping, the acting is great, with Noomi Rapace superb as Salander. The direction, music and photography are top class. It is even educational, I will try wetting my hands next time I make meatballs.

You could see what Martin Scorsese was trying to do with Shutter Island. A 1950's setting for a homage to the scary B movies of the time. Unfortunately it was a bit of a mess. For example, the dialogue was straight out of that time, but the expensive production values made you think there should be more. It was good to look at to be sure, but the plot did not make for a two hour movie. The actors lead by Leonardo De Caprio did their best, but ultimately failed to pull the film out of the mire.

Cheesy, hammy, manipulative, gooey, soppy, all the things I like best in a lightweight drama, The Blind Side had it all. I just sat back and let the Hollywood machine mangle my emotions. It was good. Sandra Bullock did a great job, and possibly just about deserved her Oscar, except she did dominate the film too much. But the sequence when tiny SJ organises fitness training for his new huge brother is a joy. What's not to like?