Puzzles

I am travelling for a few weeks and so may not be near the Internet for a while. As a result, posting on this blog may be fairly intermittent.

In the meantime, here are two clever people, (John Agar and Marcus Chown), talking on BBC Radio 3's Night Waves programme. I can barely understand what they're saying, but I think it should give anyone who listens plenty to think about for a very long time to come:

Battered Penguins XVIII

It has often struck me that friendship is a peculiarly haphazard thing. You don't usually make a conscious decision to become friends with someone - you just drift into it, without ever knowing exactly why you have become closely involved with this person and not that one (although in one instance I did know; I could in fact pinpoint the exact moment it happened, which was when I answered the telephone and mistook the voice of the person at the other end for the voice of someone I was really fond of. The warmth of my greeting to the actual caller, who I didn't particularly like, changed the whole tenor of our relationship and from there on in it seemed that I'd committed myself to a binding friendship).

I was thinking about all this while reading my latest battered penguin, because my best friend at boarding school was someone who rarely ever read novels - or indeed books of any kind - whereas I rarely had my nose out of some work of fiction or other, and yet she - this friend of mine who did not read - became briefly almost evangelical about a book by Joyce Cary.

It was called  The Horse's Mouth and she discovered  it one school holidays. When she came back to school, she claimed she'd already read it six times. She was batty about it. She even gave me my own copy.

I'm sorry to say though that I never actually read it. Apart from the fact that I have a stupid habit of avoiding things that people are extremely keen to recommend,  I thought my friend's excitement was less to do with that specific book than with the discovery of the pleasure of reading itself.

As a result, I had no previous experience of Joyce Cary's writing when I came to The Captive and the Free and only a vague, faintly negative feeling towards it, left over from being gushed at about it so much. Therefore it was a surprise to discover that it was a really terrific book.

In fact, it wasn't just a surprise; it was actually a revelation, particularly given the absurdly apologetic introduction my edition has been given by David Cecil, who explains that the novel was completed as Cary was dying, and therefore, "Though Cary managed to tell his tale to the end, we are aware that he has not succeeded in evolving the final form in which to present it."

I disagree. The novel gripped me instantly, despite being unlike the books I normally enjoy. Cary tells his story somehow theatrically. Rather than plunging his readers into a rich world they can feel almost part of, in the way that Dickens does in, say, Bleak House, Cary makes them feel like an audience watching a play with very vivid, striking characters.

There is Syson, an ex-soldier, turned clergyman, who sets himself in opposition to Preedy, a preacher and faith healer who is by turns a cynic, who knows that he has no power, and - when under the influence of '...that mysterious movement of feeling which he called power' when 'something flashed into him; something like those discoveries made by the pure contact of sense - a glimpse of the sea, of a ripe field, a scent from the ground, the noise of rain - known a thousand times before, which yet bring a shock of recognition' - someone genuinely convinced that he is capable of the extraordinary, (in other words, a mad man).

There is Hooper, a self-made newspaper man, with immense similarities, it seemed to me, to Murdoch - a man who hates the establishment and also loves it:

"He loved it for its dignity, its power, its romantic distinction, for all that it could do in giving him position and dignity and power; he hated it for its weakness, its slackness, its cant and meanness, its hatred of the original mind, of all that is enterprising and brave",

and who, when stuck in a board meeting which is trying to decide whether to allow pictures of girls on the front page of his newspaper says:

"'I'm all for your ideas ... for putting over something that matters, but you don't need to put it over in a pill. What's the whole problem of publicity? Breaking the crust, getting through to the chap inside. It's the same with everything, shaving soap or sermons, religion or razors. People have been so pounded with words from childhood that they go about in an armour as thick as a tank. To get at the man inside you've got to crack that crust or creep in through the ventilators. And one ventilator is always sex.'".

There are also intriguing incidental characters, particularly Joanna, an ugly, rich girl, with a complex relationship with her dying mother, (which Cary describes with great understanding), and Alice, who is a victim of - or at least strangely entangled with - Preedy.

The book grapples with the complex questions thrown up by the actions of Preedy, but its principal concern is the media and what it does to our understanding of reality. In this, it seems astoundingly contemporary for a book written in the 1950s.

Take the final scene as an example - in it, Hooper has a choice: he can splash a sensational photograph that, while appearing to express the essential reality of a situation, actually conveys almost nothing of its complicated truth, over his front page or suppress it:

"...he could hear the reporters in the Press telling the tale of the photograph of the year, suppressed ...And after all, wouldn't they be right? What did the Dispatch readers want, a piece of psychological analysis? A complicated story of mixed motives leaving them to make out their own judgements? It was crazy even to imagine it. No, there was only one story here - the poor little girl seduced and ruined ..."

Such, I suspect is the routine reasoning today and every day in editors' meetings in tabloid offices the world over

So, having read Cary's The Captive and the Free, I realise my friend may have actually been right to be excited about the novel by him that she loved. I'm going to go now and find that copy she gave me - I know it's somewhere in our bookshelves (nothing ever gets thrown out in this house, least of all books) - and read it from cover to cover after all these years.

Nostalgia Ain't What It Used to Be

As predicted yesterday, I eventually managed to persuade myself that I'd had a lovely time wading about in the rain. Which was why I ventured forth again this morning. No-one else was mad enough to be out, apart from some kangaroos, who had no choice in the matter:

It was worth it though for, at the top of the mountain, I was rewarded with what many people consider the best view of Canberra that anyone could ever ask for:

Wet, Wet, Wet

Finally cabin fever hit this morning and so, in a brief interlude between major downpours, I put on my raincoat - the last vestige of the expensive mound of Outward Bound equipment we had to invest in during the children's schooldays - and headed out into the soggy world.

Before I left the house, I put up the hood of the leftover raincoat. It is such a deep hood that it felt almost like being inside my own portable tent, complete with the ever present sound track to any camping I have misguidedly done - the steady pattering of rain.

No-one else was about except a solitary lycra-clad cyclist turning the corner ahead of me in a spray of mist and water - either a two-wheeling zealot or a frog, I'm guessing.

And, speaking of frogs, reports of their imminent annihilation from environmental catastrophe seem to be exaggerated, judging by the racket coming from the creek I crossed on my stroll. While the noise the local frogs were making lacked the syrupy melodiousness of Macartney's frog composition:

it certainly seemed to be evidence that there are quite a lot of them still surviving and in good voice.

But onwards and upwards I went, tramping along the muddy path toward the summit. And, just as I reached the point in the walk that I think of as Bahrain - that is, the exact midway mark on the journey, (in the case of Bahrain, the journey is the one from Australia to Europe) - the point where you realise that, however much you might regret having set out, going backwards or onwards will be equally long and tedious a trip - the deluge really got going again. Simultaneously, I discovered that my shoes were totally unwaterproof, which meant that the during the remainder of the walk I was never without the impression that I had  two cold, wet sponges strapped onto my feet.

But never mind. There were other creatures apparently feeling even worse than me. In the trees ahead, I spotted a bunch of galahs, crouching on a branch and shivering. A couple of them began squawking miserably to each other as I drew nearer. The noise of their conversation was muffled by my hood and I'm not fluent in galah at the best of times. However, I had the impression that one of them was expressing regret at having done quite so much radical moulting while the other was muttering about building a nest with a corrugated iron roof.

Most of the other birds normally present in the bush appeared to have scarpered - into hollow trees or ingenious bower bird nests presumably - except for a couple of crimson rosellas sheltering in the bushes outside my house when I arrived back at the end of my swim - I mean walk. Until I saw them I'd imagined that only London pigeons could mimic that hands in pockets, shoulders hunched posture that Andy Capp perfected:

but these rosellas were doing a pretty good impersonation too.

So was it worth it? Yes, it was - mainly for that wonderful moment when I opened the front door and stepped back into the dry, sheltered world of my house. Now, in the warmth again, I can begin to gild the  experience with nostalgia. Soon I'll even believe I enjoyed it.

Marriage Guidance

Since last Christmas, my neighbour has, after a lot of screaming and shouting, removed herself from her earlier relationship and shacked up with a new bloke. This bloke has about the same number of tattoos as - and a similarly limited vocabulary to that of - his predecessor (and the two before that). He also shares with them the noisy way in which he starts each day.

Around 10 or 11 each morning, he gets up and goes into the bathroom. There he spends 5 or 10 minutes, making a very loud sound - loud enough that I can hear it easily from the room I sometimes, always ironically, refer to as my study - that suggests he is slowly and painfully coughing up his lungs.

I don't know whether my neighbour picks her lovers precisely because she appreciates this odd variant on a dawn chorus, but, if I were her mother, I think I'd suggest she looked for other, more wholesome qualities in a man

Have You Got the Shopping Bug?

My younger daughter dug this up from some distant crevice of the internet. I think its funniest line is the one I've chosen to head this post with, although the one about Belconnen was a close runner-up:

For Those Who Have Worshipped at the Altar of the Lion King

There was quite a long period in the life of our family when the Lion King loomed large in almost everything we did. As a result, I was particularly amused by this part of an unexpectedly hilarious programme on BBC radio, (it billed itself as being the ravings of a man called Thom Tuck, who has not only watched almost all the Disney films that went straight to DVD but somehow related them to the events of his love life - not a promising concept, I grant you, but it turned out to be very funny - grab it, if it's still available on the BBC podcast page):