Don’t talk to strangers

I was sat in the work canteen, eating my lunch while reading a book about English habits. Specifically I was reading the section on how the English are reluctant to strike up conversations with strangers, except under certain special circumstances.

I put the book down so as to cut up my food and the man sat opposite me – an Englishman, no less – noticed the title of the book and started asking me about it. We chatted for some twenty minutes, comparing experiences as English expats and noting cultural differences. Maybe we’re exceptions to those rules to some extent, due to having spent prolonged periods abroad and having been contaminated with foreignness, but still, the irony of the timing couldn’t have been better.

Tagged

J tagged me in a Q&A meme. It’d be rude not to reply, no?

Where do you do most of your writing/blogging?

At work. There, I said it.

What books were your childhood favorites?

Hmmm. I know I read a lot as a child, but have a hard time recalling specific books. I can name plenty of kids books I liked, but a lot of them I read as an adult. I do seem to remember liking Nicholas Fisk‘s novels. And Roald Dahl, obviously. James and the Giant Peach is probably my favourite, but it has to be the edition I had which was illustrated by Nancy Burkert. Nowadays all you can find is the Quentin Blake version, and I can’t stand Quentin Blake.

Who is your favorite fictional character?
Pretty much anyone from the Gormenghast books. Amazing gallery of memorable grotesques.

What is your favorite time of day and why?

First thing in the morning. Preferably on a clear day. Quiet and untouched and full of promise.

Have you ever Googled yourself and been surprised at what you’ve found?

Who hasn’t googled themselves? But there were no surprises. My blog, my imdb profile, a couple of work-related things.

Who would play me in a movie of my life?

Easy. Billy Zane.

One material possession I could not live without?

Can’t really think of anything. If anything I’ve been getting less materialistic as I get older, and less interested in hanging on to things. In the proverbial fire I’d probably save the hard drive back-up with all my photos on it.

Have you ever been naked in public?
Do beaches count? If so, yes.

What is your dream car?

I don’t really dream about cars, to be honest. For me they’re purely functional, not objects of desire.

What/who/where was your first proper kiss?

Define “proper”. Emma Davidson at age four, but that was a fairly chaste, lips closed kind of thing. So then it was probably a lady at university whose face I remember but whose name escapes me. Dead romantic, me.

Cover star

Browsing through a bookshop in Brussels recently, I noticed a display publicising the latest novel by Amélie Nothomb. Nothing surprising there: she’s a popular, acclaimed and very prolific writer, and I’ve really enjoyed the three of her novels I’ve read so far.

No, what struck me about the books was that a photo of her is almost always on the cover. Look, here are three of her books that I own:

How many fiction writers are regularly featured on the covers of their books? You can get alternative covers, of course, but chances are that in any given bookshop you’ll see her face quite a lot. Now some of these books are to a greater or lesser degree autobiographical, so that makes some sense, as she’s the subject matter as well as the author. But even when that’s not the case, there she is, looking mysterious, or glamourous, or smirking at you, or all three.

Why doesn’t this happen more often? Should the writer disappear completely behind the mask of their work? I guess many writers are shy or solitary types who dread having their photograph taken, but surely that doesnt apply to all of them, and why shouldn’t those more confident about publicity and marketing be allowed to present themselves and their work in a more visible way? It’s seen as perfectly normal for musicians to feature on the packaging for their albums, after all. Now, you might say that singers tend to be easier on the eye than writers, but that’s not always the case. And even if it were, why should it be, and should it matter? It’s the content that interests me, not the attractiveness of the person who produced it.

Book vs. Phone

The man sat on the sun lounger by the side of the pool is reading a book. His female companion, in the adjacent sun lounger, is looking at her smartphone. I am in the pool.

I hear raised voices and turn towards them. The man is gesturing vigourously at his book, to the point where he’s repeatedly stabbing the pages with his finger as if to physically ram home his point. He speaks in a language I do not recognise. He becomes agitated and shoves the book towards the woman’s face, then waves dismissively at her phone. She replies in a soft, hurt voice, but he’s not listening and continues to rant for several minutes. He seems to be saying something along the lines of “Why are you playing with your stupid phone when you should be reading a good book like I am?”.

Hermit

“You never leave the house?”

“No, not for years. At a certain point I made precise calculations: if I leave the house to seek the company of an intelligent person, an honest person, I am confronted with, on average, the risk of meeting twelve thieves and seven imbeciles who are there, ready to inflict on me their opinions on humanity, the government, the municipal administration, Moravia…do you think it’s worth the bother?”

“I guess not, no”

Leonardo Sciascia, A ciascuno il suo (my translation)

Book shopping

When I left my old job a few weeks ago they had a whip ’round and gave me some Waterstone’s vouchers as a leaving gift. Today I finally managed to get ’round to popping into town to spend them. I’m currently on leave looking after my son, so I dropped him with my wife in her office. This meant that I didn’t have an enormous amount of time to spare (about an hour, including time to get to and from the shop), but fortunately I was prepared. I had a list in a note on my phone; a selection from my amazon wishlist, although I was also open to serendipity.

In the end I got three books I’d planned to (Partridge, Reynolds and Spufford), one for my wife for her book club (Andric) two I hadn’t planned on getting but already knew I was interested in (Roberts and Hochschild), and one last-second impulse purchase from the display next to the till.

Note that Waterstone’s is by far the most expensive place to buy English books in Brussels, so I walked out with fewer books than anticipated, but since they were essentially for free I can hardly complain too much. It was also a little weird to buy so many books in one go. I could afford to do this a lot more often in theory, but having a voucher makes me want to splurge and spend it all.

Now I just need to decide where in my ever-expanding To Read pile to put these. As I’ve just bought them I’m still excited about them, so it’s tempting to read them next, but is it fair that they jump the queue when there are so many other worthwhile tomes patiently waiting their turn on my shelves?

Drink your milk

“Then there was the matter of the milk, a drink I detested however it was served, and at whatever temperature. It made me gag. There was no allowance for such distastes in the home’s régime. This resulted in a great deal of time spent in the dining room, with its sour odours of curds and rotting dishcloths, long after meals had ended and the other children had been liberated to play outside. Matron sat at the head of the table, and I some way down, with the ghastly bluish pillar of milk in a glass in front of me. “Drink your milk”, she would repeat at intervals, in a voice made all the more threatening by its controlled softness. In the end, but only after more than token resistance, I did. “There now. Wasn’t that silly?” What was really silly was my slowness to realise that she didnt want to be there any more than I did. Once this dawned on me, I put it to the test by deliberately knocking over the glassful of milk. It spread widely, in the way that spilt liquid always does, and dripped from the table edge onto the bench. Equally rewarding was the displacement of the soft voice in favour of trembling anger. I was made to clear up the mess and say sorry. But the glass was not refilled and I was not kept in again.”

From “Sift”, a memoir of growing up in my home town of Exeter in the postwar years, written by the poet Lawrence Sail, who was my French teacher at school for four years.

When science fiction gets it wrong

I’m currently reading Ben Bova*’s novel Colony. Written in 1979, it’s set in the far-flung future of 2008, and features such developments as a permanent moon base, city-sized orbiting colony and a World Government. For the first 150 pages I was surprised at how little of the book seemed dated, considering the fact that it’s over 30 years old and set four years in the past.

And then I came across this:

“Home-sized computers and picture-telephones killed New York. With them, you could live wherever you wanted to and still communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere in the nation. Commuting died. Communications killed the big cities.”

Now it’s easy to sit here with the benefit of experience and hindsight and laugh at how inaccurate predictions in old SF novels turn out to be, but this, in an otherwise convincing story, struck me as a particularly poorly thought-out idea, as if the only reason people live in close proximity to one another is to facilitate business dealings. It’s common to over-estimate the societal changes technological progress can bring, and it seems amusingly naive to think that, while the invention of the telephone didn’t stop travelling, the invention of the “picture-telephone” would stop people wanting to live in cities.

 

*I bet he gives thanks every day that his surname begins with a ‘B’ and not a ‘D’.

A stroll and a browse

Saturday morning. I drop my daughters at their Italian cooking class and find myself with an hour and a half free. I head to a nearby café for a coffee, muffin and free wifi. I’m surrounded by laptoppers and breastfeeders, and I manage to concentrate on my book for about twenty minutes before conceding that I’m not in the mood. Besides, the sun has come out and I feel like wandering the streets for a while, so I turn a couple of corners to see what I can find. First up is a new Italian-New Zealander restaurant. I send the link to an italophile New Zealander friend and we agree to check it out as soon as feasible.

Around another corner, Ping Pong Antiques which, despite being closed, has a window display which provides plenty of entertainment, principally in the shape of this scorpion belt buckle. There’s also a silver horse head (which you can glimpse in the background of the shot below) and a leather-bound rotary telephone.

Moving on, I pass a cheese shop. Another fascinating window, especially the little conical cheeses. This isn’t really my favourite kind of cheese to eat, but it’s definitely the most visually interesting.

Although I can see why some people turn their noses up at something that looks this old and dirty and diseased.

Farther down the road is a large secondhand bookshop. I’d only been in once before, and only spent a few minutes on the ground floor, so I hadn’t realised quite how large it was. Nor had I realised that they had a café and a large English section upstairs.

With great effort I restrain myself and spend only twenty minutes browsing and buy only three novels. I think a return trip is inevitable, and sooner rather than later, if only so I can sit at one of these tables with my coffee and my purchases.

Later that day, while waiting for the Brusselicious tram, I spend a few moments scanning the Brussels skyline for curiosities.

Killing time in Brussels isn’t so difficult, if you know where to look…

Browsers

I love bookshops. I hate bookshops.

I love browsing, making discoveries, and simply taking pleasure in the knowledge that such a variety of interesting and beautiful books is available to me.

I hate seeing so many books I want to read and then thinking of the piles of books sitting on the shelves at home, waiting to be read, and then thinking of how little time I have to read.

Yesterday, at Cook & Book, as my daughter poked around the children’s section, I realised that there’s something else I love about bookshops: watching other people browse. Seeing other people (especially children) taking pleasure in browsing and reading.

A friend once said that one of her favourite sights was seeing someone smile as they read a book.