Dear Father Christmas

I've moaned about this before, but the Mighty World Of Retail starts Christmas early. In our defence, a combination of postal strikes and far-flung relatives have caused the local customers to panic slightly about posting Christmas cards, so we now have a lot of them out. And advent calendars. Well, they start on the 1st of December, so there's my excuse. Oh, and obviously wrapping paper - those presents bound for New Zealand have to be seasonal. Oh, and books people might want to send like A Child's Christmas In Wales, yadda yadda yadda...

All in all, apart from not having Now That's What I Call Yuletide braying loudly in the background (we have no radio, no CD player, no speakers - not even on the PC - and the woman from the Performing Rights Society who rang to check didn't believe me, either), we have gone the way of all flesh and are now more or less 100% festive. I apologise. I also apologise for the microscopic specks of spectral green glitter on my face (thank you, Roger LaBorde stationery) that leap into vivid and scary life at certain angles but seem resistant to scrubbing. I am currently pretending I am a sparkly-faced Twilight-style vampirette, albeit one who was "turned" too old to stay young and glam for all eterniddeee.

In this scarily early spirit of festivity, I have composed my Christmas list (Mr Fishwife's favourite trick when asked what he would like for Christmas/birthdays is to reply vaguely "Oh, something nice.."). No excuses for me, here it is in all its magnificence. No hints.

1) This, to live in. I'd settle for a copy, built in a stately clearing of my choosing.

2) One of these. Alive, obviously, not in the form of a coat for some creepy oligarch's ho.

3) The Koh-I-Noor. 105 carats of pure bliss. I wouldn't wear it, far too big, but possibly I'd use it as a doorstop or something..

Go on, spoil me. And I honestly don't mind if I get two Koh-I-Noors. And I could always use the second St Pancras to keep my snow leopards in.

My Ears Were Not Made For This, an addendum...

"Hold on there, baby, while I hide the bicycle pump from thieves... mmmHHMMMMM..."

I had completely forgotten about this, but was reminded by Mr Fishwife yesterday: if you listen very carefully to Let's Get It On by Marvin Gaye, as it's starting fading out and he's crooning seductive words of LERVE to his lucky laydeee, there is DEFINITELY the sound of one of those parpy parpy clown bicycle horns. Seriously. Every time I hear it I imagine he's suggestively honking the horn on his Grifter as he parks it behind the garage and starts taking his cycle clips off. Thank you, Mr F, for actually making me laugh out loud.

My Ears Were Not Made For This

Currently, for some reason, I seem to be running on a very short fuse. Things that normally I would allow to wash over me are annoying me more than is strictly reasonable. And bizarrely a lot of them seem to be musical. There are too many songs out there that aren't trying hard enough. I'm aware this is very subjective so I apologise in advance if any of them is your personal favourite, but the tetch demands to be released...

1) Songs that fail to live up to the initial promise of the intro
Well, at the moment just the one: Sweet Child Of Mine by Guns and Roses. A sublime introduction that promises great things. And then, after a perfectly OK but not special set of verses and choruses, winds down to a dreary "we can't decide what to do with the end of this and are even singing about it... where do we go where do we go where do we go...". Poor effort all round, Mr Rose, must try harder.

2) Songs that are totally let down by an inappropriately jaunty bit
Here Comes The Night by Them/Van Morrison. What went wrong here? Excellent intro. Excellent chorus. And then the verse has a ridiculously misplaced Benny Hill oompah quality to it. Every time I hear it I want, in a Frankenstein way, to rip out the verses and replace them with something from the Doors.
Spirit Of Radio by Rush, and Jane by Jefferson Starship. What was wrong with those post-prog people?? Why couldn't they leave things alone and not meddle? These songs are the musical equivalent of a cake that has been iced, decorated, and then iced some more, and then soaked in rum, and then served in a lettuce basket with a smoked salmon garnish. Although when I say "smoked salmon garnish" I mean "startlingly embarrassing misguided reggae-style bridge". There's a point in the middle where you actually have the feeling that you're watching your father breakdance at a wedding. Dear God, somebody stop the horror.

3) Songs that are just downright lazy and were phoned in by artists too complacent to care if their work was sub-standard or not
Do I need to say any more than All You Need Is Love by the Beatles? Combining a dirgey sub-Maharishi melody with the most offensive tuba-driven chorus, this resembles nothing so much as a badly-organised minibus singalong on a mental hospital's Chessington day out. Except the singers aren't even pretending they're enjoying themselves. The wah-wah-wawah-waaaah trombone on the chorus sounds like the incidental music from a Carry On film, where Charles Hawtrey has just put on a hat full of custard. Poor, poor, poor.

That's all for now. There'll be more. I haven't even started on the worrying tendency to try to make things youth-accessible by adding rap sections yet.

A brief rant

So the bookselling world rejoices in the extremely well-deserved Booker win of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. A marvellous and thoroughly absorbing read (as opposed to "absorbent" - Dan Brown's entire oeuvre springs to mind). And once again, a situation arises that any bookseller out there will be wearily familiar with. What, I ask the rest of you, would most people do on hearing that a book has been given a prize? Why, they may wish to buy it, or if not actually buy it, to pick it up and leaf through a few pages. So what do the publishers do, with distressing and lemming-like regularity, in the face of this sudden burst of publicity and interest? They re-issue the book with the words "Winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize" on the front cover. And while the book is being thus reissued, it is usually impossible to get copies. Which means that a good percentage of people who might otherwise have bought the book in a frenzy of literary good will, unable to get a copy right now this minute, may change their minds and not buy it at all. Seriously, has no publisher ever thought that it might be a good idea (and a huge financial saving) simply to print rolls of stickers saying "Winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize" and send them out to bookshops/distributors etc? I can't possibly be the only person who's had this idea...

Livin' La Vida Nigel

There's a time when you really have to take a deep breath and shout "SENSE OF PROPORTION" at yourself, preferably aloud so you worry that the neighbours might have heard; hopefully you are therefore less likely to do it again. It happened to me this morning, when I was vaguely considering making chicken soup for lunch and found, to my horror, no chicken stock in the freezer. Imagine that. Appalling. I was brought up with a very Nigel Slater "get the most out of a meal" ethic - you never throw a roast chicken carcass away without first having stripped all remaining meat off for sandwiches, and having boiled the bones for stock, which then ends up as peculiar unlabelled bags in the freezer. At one point there were six, which was fine. But evidently we have eaten a lot of soup recently, hence the shocking stock drought. Good God, am I going to have to use (gasp) Knorr????? Pause for deep zen breathing and a lie down.
The Slater ethic has now filled my freezer and half my fridge with suspiciously anonymous bowls of whatnot. I acquired a Sharpie recently (the finest indelible write-anywhere marker in the world, excellent for surreptitiously correcting spelling on laminated airplane instruction cards) but the problem is that being indelible it can't be, obviously, erased - so Tupperware boxes have multiple scribbled-out messages on them that read "apple sauce, NO, RATATOUILLE tomato soup 1994". Items are only readily identifiable when defrosted, and sometimes leftover beef stew doesn't add a great deal to a fruit cake. A nice woman came into the shop the other week and (this happens a lot in Barnes) said "Does anybody want a bag of windfalls? We've got too many." And like the freezer-stuffing fool I am, I took two. Some painful hours of peeling, coring and throwing away the bruised half of each apple ensued - I now have six bags of apple sauce in the freezer too. Would it have been so hard to say no?
I should really point out that none of this is the sign of great virtue - it's further proof of my insidious OCD. I so can't bear to throw food away that sometimes I even put things in the freezer in order to avoid putting them in the bin. A couple of weeks ago I bought what I stupidly thought was a bunch of chard at the rip-off farmers' market up the road - of course it turned out to be pak choi, which don't get me wrong is fine, but even Sainsbury's has it. I wanted chard, with cheese sauce. Having chopped it up, washed it, and even blanched it, I was forced to accept the inevitable - I now had a saucepan full of limp Chinese cabbage. So I froze it. It's still there, silently reproaching me. Maybe one day I'll get it out and do something faintly repulsive with it. I even labelled the bag "CHARD JUST DEFROST AND COOK WITH CHEESE SAUCE actually it might be pak choi". What am I hoping for? That it may just morph into chard through the power of positive thinking? Or that Mr Fishwife will throw it away when he can't fit some hot cross buns in the second drawer down? I need help. Or, failing that, a bigger freezer. It could be worse - Mantua Maker was staying the other week, and raving about the delights of the huge freezer she and Professor MM have acquired - "We needed a larger one because we're involved in this pork scheme with another couple" she said (I can only assume this isn't a Northern euphemism for swinging). At least nobody has tried to involve me and Mr Fishwife in a pork scheme.

Holiday Miscellany

Yes, this is the staggeringly photogenic village we stayed in for a week. Stunning, old-world charm, all that Guide Verte palaver. And, much to my surprise, at no point did we stumble across a Boden photo-shoot complete with toothily beaming blondes in casual slouchy moleskin trousers and jaunty Fair-Isle tanktop playing boules with toothless old men ("Amelia: My favourite colour is : The colour of my boyfriend's wallet!").
HOWEVER there are several drawbacks to the exquisite charms of a mediaeval village that the cautious traveller should know about. Firstly, I defy you to try manoeuvring any vehicle larger than a skateboard through those picturesque arches. I spent many a happy hour leaning out of the passenger side of our hired Renault Sardine-Tin tucking the wing-mirror in and yelling "You're fine... you're fine... seriously, you've got at least two inches here...". And this is a left-hand drive hire-car, so I'm feeling strangely empowered by sitting on the side I always think of (at home) as The Seat Of Power, and getting all bossy as a result. At one point as we went the giddyingly "wrong" way round a roundabout (yes, of course it was the right way for France, it just felt wrong) I said "Mind the kerb!" once too often, prompting Mr F to say (for the first time ever) "Oh please just leave me alone" in a tone of utter exhaustion.
Another drawback was the fact that, while it did indeed boast (yes, boast) two boulangeries, a butcher and a general store, all of these were MASSIVELY overpriced, because they were well aware that any and all visitors to their bijou hamlet were going to be not only well-heeled but also unable to get anywhere else in a hurry. We cheated our way round it by heading for the gigantic LeClerc supermarket every morning to stock up on reasonably priced loo-roll etc (I swear, around £1.25 in the supermarket, somewhere around £4 for four rolls of basic in the shop. For that price I'd want it hand-hemmed in lace by Belgian nuns).
I should point out we did, in fact, have a lovely time. Apart from the two days where it rained nearly horizontally, forcing us indoors off the sunny grapevine-bedecked terrace and into the tiny sitting-room, where the only TV channels were English (which in itself tells you a lot about the main holiday lets they do), and found ourselves watching "The Hairy Bikers Do Wales" or something similar. But apart from those two days of strangely deja-vu British-style cottage holiday-ness, it was fantastic. Our main concern (apart from the extraordinary muscularity of the Euro; HOW MUCH?????) was how to get through a bottle of Calvados in a week so as not to leave any behind or to make the concierge think we were alcoholics by leaving an empty bottle (we snuck it out and hid it in a bin).

Turn on, tune in, get tetchy

Technology is very unforgiving to the sizeable proportion of the population who can't afford to upgrade to a widescreen TV, or HD TV, or Blu-Ray, etc etc etc. I was watching something or other last night and realised, at a vital point in the plot where a RELEVANT PIECE OF INFORMATION was shown, I could only see the middle section because the picture was cut off at the sides. I got unreasonably grumpy about this, and actually found myself making "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" noises out loud - along the lines of "Well! They'd better not think I'm going to rush out and buy some vastly expensive piece of widescreen kit just because they're bullying me into it, oh no."... more or less what I was saying 15-20 years ago (my memory is hazy) about upgrading from vinyl/cassette to CD. However. It does have some diverting side-effects, such as the fact that the onscreen guide can't fit long programme titles side by side, so overlaps them. Curious hybrids we have sadly been unable to to watch include:

Real Housewives Of The Bill
Britain's Sexiest Newsnight
The X-Files: I Want To Meet The Fockers
Three Men And a Little Taxi Driver
I Know What You Did In Bruges
Slap Her, She's Being John Malkovitch
The Lion, The Witch, And Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Shrek (an all-star cast in that one!)

And, doubtless, many many more. (late addition: here are some of them)
Sleeping With Dirt
Churchill's Antiques Roadshow
Unseen Russia For God's Sake
Masterchef The Hairy Gary Rhodes
Holy Warriors: Richard The Disappearing
Oblivion: The Ten Biggest Hits Of The 90s
Liar Liar The Bachelor
I Now Pronounce You Chuck And The Breakfast Club

Unfortunately since the remote (or, as we and many millions of others call it, "the doofer") has pretty much ceased to work, we may be forced into buying a giant flat slab of LCD and hang it on the wall as if it's some kind of artwork. Sigh.

Dummies' Guide to the Booker longlist

(with grateful thanks to Mr Fishwife for his contributions)
So many books, so little time. I present here the easy crib notes for the vast quantity of (some of them also vast) books on this year's Booker longlist. Yes, I know it's the Man Booker really, but I hate calling it that, and I have actually been asked twice "Is there a Woman Booker prize too?". So don't bother reading them: amaze your friends and astound your colleagues with these nuggets of information*.

A S Byatt "The Children's Book" : Not many people know that A S Byatt was approached to continue Enid Blyton's much-loved Noddy series. This book is about Noddy and his desperate but hilarious attempts to find Big Ears's lost teaspoon! (warning: contains scenes of incest and sniper action).

J M Coetzee "Summertime": Reproduces faithfully the first school essay J M Coetzee (or "Johnny" as he was then) wrote about wot he done in the school holidays. Apparently his father's sandcastle-building skills weren't up to much, but the ice creams were delicious. He got an A-.

Adam Foulds "The Quickening Maze": Honestly, the faster you try to get out, the more lost you get. Just keep turning left.

Sarah Hall "How To Paint a Dead Man": It's a doddle. They don't fidget like live models do. Just make sure you keep the windows open and the central heating off.

Samantha Harvey "The Wilderness": Could really do with a pergola and some radical pruning to those brambles, otherwise fine. Maybe a water feature?

James Lever "Me Cheeta": Yu lose tu me at cards. I taik yur money.

Hilary Mantel "Wolf Hall": Hotly tipped to be this year's winner. The prequel to her spellbinding "Who Let The Wolves Out?"

Simon Mawer "The Glass Room": Lovely to look at, nice to hold, but if you break it, we say "sold"!

Ed O'Loughlin "Not Untrue And Not Unkind": true, and kind.

James Scudamore "Heliopolis": The renaming of Sun City has almost doubled its tourist income!

Colm Toibin "Brooklyn": Not a lot of people know that Brooklyn is a bit like Hoxton. Bit of a schlep on the Metro though. If I were you I'd stay in the Village.

William Trevor "Love And Summer": See above, for Coetzee. Billy Trevor was a little older, though, and as a result this touchingly ill-written account of wot he done on his summer holidays with next door's Dutch au pair contained language the teacher felt it better not to read aloud. He got a D.

Sarah Waters "The Little Stranger": "Darling? Darling? I thought all Saffy's party guests had gone home? Hmm? ...No, he says he's waiting for his mummy. Well we must have invited him, he's got a party bag and everything..."

*Disclaimer: some of the information contained in this post may be (wildly) inaccurate and is not for quotation or press distribution until a finished copy is issued.

Nuptials, saucy Restoration poetry, and the return of Gertie Blood.

So, sunny summer weddings. Are they great or what? Particularly when the bride (let us call her Steak, for she is a vegetarian) concludes her touching speech of love to her new husband with the words ".. and I can't wait to start my life with you and start having lots of pasty little ginger freaks." The groom (let us call him Kidney), a more or less dead ringer for Frankie Boyle (or either of the Proclaimers), did a "fair comment" kind of shrug. Could any love be greater? Not a dry eye in the Gladstone Library of the Liberal Club. My only quibble was with the three flights of giant stairs one had to navigate in either direction to have a cigarette - surely if I provided proof I voted Lib Dem I'd be allowed to light up under the vast oil painting of Winston "Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em" Churchill? Sadly (and, in fact, legally) no. Not even in the vast Edwardian grandeur of the Smoking Room.

How stately and gorgeous is that? Less so when you've been up and down it 100000 times because the lift is full of band equipment...

Highlights of the day (for me) included some random tourists approaching the bride on the lawn outside and asking if she'd take a picture, er, of them. "I'm a little busy right now", she said, as if the long sparkly white dress hadn't given it away. And the bride's sister-in-law saying "Yes, the hen weekend in Newcastle was great, except that Sir Bobby Davro had just died so all the football fans were in mourning"*.

My part in this excellent day was the reading of "The Good Morrow" by John Donne. Complicated not at all by my fear that I would blush in an unseemly way on reading the line "Suck'd we on country pleasures childishly?" - yes, I know, I know, we're all grownups, but frankly John Donne meant it to be a tad racy (as any student of Shakespeare kno, reference to "country pleasures" and "country matters" are generally intended to be a euphemism). Luckily I was so enthralled by the sheer loveliness of my own voice in the scholarly setting of the Gladstone Library that I failed to even clear my throat. Although I took the precaution of looking at Steak throughout (smiling radiantly yet tearfully like a proper bride), rather than Kidney, who would have gurned at me.

HOWEVER. All weddings have that moment where you bump into someone and realise you knew them years ago; in my case, while sneaking into an empty sideroom (trying to find a balcony rather than brave the stairs for the billionth time), who should I see gazing down at me from the wall but the lovely Lady Colin Campbell (aka Gertie Blood). She's been gracing my sidebar (as have Steak & Kidney) for over a year now, and I've got used to dropping into the National Gallery to say hello every now and then - but there she was.

Surely that has to be an excellent omen of something.

* Note for non-football fans - Sir Bobby Robson = recently deceased giant of British football, latterly much-loved manager of Newcastle United. Bobby Davro = mediocre TV impressionist. Non-deceased, non-giant, non-much-loved.

Targeted by psychopaths

I may have mentioned before how much I love the Internet. Maybe several times, who knows? There's a wonderful birthdayish feel about ordering things, paying for them, forgetting about them, and then a week or two later getting lots of presents in the post. However. I seem to have become the target, recently, for any and every pointless "homeware" catalogue the postie can shove through our letterbox. I wouldn't dream of suggesting that my address has been pimped out by somebody I actually subscribe to (Lakeland, I still love you!! Call me!!), so can only assume it was a one-night-stand (i.e. something I bought for Christmas from some company I'll never use again) who has stitched me up like this. I religiously tick every box that says "I do NOT wish to be contacted with exciting offers by your carefully-chosen partner companies thank you very much, now or ever", but there's obviously some loophole even the pathologically cautious like me have missed.
My most recent unsolicited arrival was the catalogue for Really Linda Barker, which seems to specialise in cast-iron rabbits and "wall art". As I flicked idly through it I realised that far from being an advertisement for Ms Barker's range of metalwork chinoiserie (well, it's all made in China), it's actually one gigantic cry for help. In her own words : "Looking back through my previous collections, I've noticed I have a growing obsession with hooks, and for some reason, chickens". Which, to the trained eye, says "STOP ME BEFORE I KILL AGAIN". It's a short and fatally easy step from an obsession with hooks and chickens to ending up like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, experimenting with livestock and wearing a waistcoat of badly-cured human skin. And why restrict this worry to the otherwise wholesome-looking Linda Barker? God knows what festers in the mind of Johnnie Boden. Why does he so keenly want to share his views on feather-stitch and patent leather with you? WHY????? Is he making himself a girl-suit like Buffalo Bill in Silence Of The Lambs???
Best not to ask really.

"Oh look, there's a daisy-chain of human hands in the rigging!"