Obiter Dicta

Tuesday, December 20th

I said I would write something of my books of the year.

            I haven’t read a great deal of new fiction this year but what I have read I’ve enjoyed. By and large. The stand-out novel for me was Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. Funny, insightful, provoking, reflective – everything that a good, thoughtful piece of writing should be. The flawed narrator device rarely worked better. And the main female character, Veronica, is beautifully portrayed. She initially annoyed me as, say Miriam in Sons and Lovers annoys me, or Mildred does in Of Human Bondage. But the denouement had me turning back and reading the whole damn thing right through again, so that I could look at Veronica in a completely different, ie, not phallocentric, way. Brilliant.

            I wasn’t surprised that it won the Booker. I read two more of the short list for that: The Sisters Brothers and Pigeon English. I liked both of them well enough but neither over much. The Sisters Brothers starts off well but ended up, to me, like an overlong spaghetti Western. I liked the adolescent characters of Pigeon English and the ending. But it dragged on a tad for me. It could have been done with being 5000 words less. Or fewer. Or both. Similarly, earlier in the year I read Bed, the first novel by journalist David Whitehouse. It’s about a young man who gets so fat, he can’t leave his bed. Simple idea and beautifully done. But I felt it could have been shorter. Clever idea, though, and an engaging style.

            I read three big literary biographies this year, two of which are Edith Sitwell by Richard Greene, and GK Chesterton by Ian Ker. (If I ruled the world, the name Kerr would always have two R’s. On pain of execution.) Both made me turn to writers I had either read very little of (Chesterton) or had read and found not especially to my taste (Sitwell.) The Sitwell biography is, by a league and a length, the more readable of the two, and I grew to like Edith very much. I re-read the Collected Poems and found a great deal that I now enthuse over – especially among her later poems. ‘Still Falls the Rain’ is astonishingly good. The poems for the atomic age – ‘Dirge for the New Sunrise’; The Shadow of Cain’ and ‘The Canticle of the Rose’ are almost equally powerful. But I found delights in the earlier, more mannered, work too, among the ‘Bucolic Comedies’ and ‘Façade’, although reading too much of these at one sitting is like being force-fed Parma Violets. Parts of ‘Gold Coast Customs’ are worthy too.

            Chesterton is a writer I have only skimmed. The Man Who was Thursday and some of the Father Brown stories to be precise. His writing is not much to my taste, although there are felicities abounding in Thursday. This biography is hard going sometimes, with a tendency to the windy and the wordy. There were long passages I just ignored. But Chesterton turned out to be a person I liked immensely – although I have little in common with him – and I will read more of his work. Hopefully, more of his essays and journalism. (The last writer I grew to like via his biography, like that, was Sir Walter Scott.)

            But the big lit biog this year was the new one of James Joyce by Gordon Bowker. Not the massively detailed labour of love that the old Ellmann biography was, this one at least has some new slants on the great man’s life and I devoured it in a week. I will reread Ulysses in its entirety yet again in the New Year. But first I will read Finnegans Wake in its entirety again. I’ve done it once before, in the centenary year of his birth. But its time to walk the multiverse of genius again.

            In poetry, the only book I remember buying is The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy. As I’ve said elsewhere, this poet is the finest stylist writing in English just now. Better even than the great Heaney, and that’s saying something. The fact that she’s Scottish, female, gay and the Poet Laureate just fill me with delight. And so does the collection. The poem about the death of the last survivor of World War I, ‘Last Post’, is stunning.

            And my book of the year is the scintillatingly brilliant How To Be a Woman by the journalist Caitlin Moran. It’s sparky and sassy, extremely funny, heartbreaking and perceptive. And, along the way, it reminds us of the importance of feminism, of how we should never lose sight of its aims, even as we celebrate its successes. One of the few books ever that I wish I’d written. Although I never could have. Read it and see.

Women are the other half of the sky…

Okay. That’s it. No more dicta, obiter or otherwise, before New Year. Apparently, I have all sorts of media interviews and photoshoots lined up to coincide with the launch of The Locked Ward between then and now. I will tell of you of them anon.

Till then, my friend, think of the world…

Obiter Dicta

Wednesday, December 14^th.

This week, I think I’ll write about my favourite reads of the year. Every other bugger seems to be doing it, including that female writer I’ve unfollowed from Twitter because … well, just let’s say ‘because’, and charitably leave it at that.

No, I won’t. I’ll do that next week.  I want to talk about Dentists. Yes. Dentists. Twice within five days since last I blogged, I have found myself upside down in a dentists’ chair – the same one, actually – for ridiculously long periods of time while a (very genial) dentist dug about in the root canals of two of my teeth. I did not enjoy it. Not the first experience, which lasted an hour and a half. And not the second, which lasted a mere hour and five minutes. To be positioned like that, as if I were a shell aimed at the domain of Dental Caries, for that length of time, is not natural to me. The first dose required three injections – one a block injection right at the join of my jaws. I swear to God, I thought the needle was coming out of my ear. And I was deaf for a day and a half. The second bout only required two jags, both in the front of my lower gum. That’s fun, too! Numb nose and lip. Snot trickling undetected. That’s a good look.

Actually, my even being at the dentist’s for such long, unpleasant treatments represents a major step in bravery for me. I go now to the dentist every six months. And I put up with what he has to do. And it only took me something like 50 years to get to this stage. The problem was that my first experience of dental treatment as a child came when I had toothache and had to have a toothy peg yanked oot. Ay me, pain ever, forever!

And the reason for that, of course, was – sweeties.

From the age of three, I ate sugary, sticky, glutinous gunk that stuck to my teeth as I chewed or sooked or slurped it. It rotted holes in my teeth even as I crunched. You could peel the enamel off some teeth like strips of sellotape. Fizzers? Spangles? Ping! Another hole. Refreshers. Love Hearts. And again, a ping and a hole. These were hard sweets that you either sucked until they softened, and your teeth softened along with them, or you crunched them and splinters of teeth flew everywhere.

Chewy sweeties were a favourite of many children – Black Jacks, Mojos and Chewing Nuts for example. Beech Nut chewing gum, a sliver of cahootchie inside a gleaming white shell like the stuff they used to make sinks, was dispensed from vending machines on street corners for a penny a time. These could extract a filling or a milk tooth with astonishing ease. I think Chewing Nuts were actually the nuts from tractor wheels, covered in chocolate.  Caries in a glossy wrapper. Some days my teeth twanged like banjo strings.

Smarties provided a cornucopia of multi-coloured tooth-rot. I liked Lucky Bags – and the many variations on the theme, like Jamboree Bags and Skiffle Bags – in each of which you got a handful of Dolly Mixtures, Fizzers, chews and Midget Gems, a tooth-cracking lolly and a gewgaw. A trinket. Some trashy little toy that you immediately lost. Or swallowed. But most of all, I subsisted on Lemfizz Cubes and Creamola Foam. Lemfizz Cubes were slabs of fizzy, sugary, crumbly material that you were supposed to make drinks with, but which we all just sooked. Extremely effervescent and probably packed with the 50’s equivalent of E numbers, they were ultra sweet and as addictive as horse. They were like those lurid cubes you see scattered in urinals to neutralise the stink. (I suppose, never having tried them). Creamola Foam was a powder or, more accurately, crystals that you stirred into cold water and made a sparkling, sweet drink that often shot up the back of your throat and crackled in your sinuses. It came in a tin, the lid of which had to be jemmied off with a teaspoon, and was concocted of these ingredients: sugar, fruit acids, sodium bicarbonate, gum acacia, saccharin, saponin, flavouring and colour. Saponin is a soap derivative that made the drink froth. Gum acacia is another name for gum arabic, a stabiliser (now with its own E-number, 414) that is also used in ink, shoe polish and the lickable adhesive on postage stamps. Sodium bicarbonate made it fizz. It can neutralise battery acid and is used in septic tanks to control bacteria. It kills fleas. Sugar AND saccharin, not to mention unspecified flavouring and colouring. Yum yum! No wonder we ran into the furniture and bit folk on the ankles.

But the best, the unsurpassed and pre-eminent superlative, as recommended by the British Dentists Association, was Puff Candy. This was essentially a rich toffee mixture of golden syrup, butter and sugar which had added to it, as it bubbled, a few shovelfuls of bicarbonate of soda, which made it fluff up ferociously. When cooled, it had the texture of cinders from the fire. You could buy it plain or covered in thick cooking chocolate. It crumbled in the mouth but stuck to the teeth like molten tar. You had to pick it off with a four-inch nail.

My first visit to the dentist came about now. After several years of Puff Candy and Lem-Fizz cubes, I had a stump of tooth rotting away in the front of my top gum that stubbornly refused to fall out, unlike my other front teeth.  (Photographs of me at this time show me to be simpering like a namby pamby, for the simple reason that I could not smile without revealing to the world my missing teeth. So I smiled without opening my mouth. I looked like a simpleton.) The dentist pulled it out. It was an extremely fraught experience  - for the dentist as well as for me.

I managed to sit in the chair, after much persuasion and amid plenty of apprehensive sniffling. The smell of the surgery was enough to set me off. There was a range of sterilised metal implements on a tray, looking like hooks, corkscrews, spanners, wrenches, things for cracking lobster claws and things for taking stones out of horses’ hooves. Mr. Steel the dentist managed to separate my lips, which had been stuck together with a suck like an octopus’s tentacles, and insert his finger into my mouth. I snivelled the more. He introduced a new item to my mouth, a little mirror on a stick. I arched my back like a cat and whined like a buzz-saw going through a knotty plank. The only reason I didn’t scream was because my mouth was full of finger and mirror. He tapped the stump with the mirror and I thought the top of my head had come off and was rattling on the floor like a hubcap. Now I screamed, sufficient to curdle the blood of any other patients in the waiting room.

“We’ll just have to go for it,” Mr. Steel told my father.

I went for it, all right. I was up and out of that chair like a ground-to-air coward. He caught me by the slack of the arse and drew me back, providing for a few seconds of cartoon-like running on the spot for the young Yours Truly. Then my father lifted me up and replaced me in the chair. And then Mr. Steel went for it.

With the dentist’s knee on my chest and my father’s arm round my head from behind the chair, Steel got the pliers into my gob and performed the butchery required - with no anaesthetic. Not that I would have countenanced for a second the introduction of a jag into the equation. He ripped the offending remnant of tooth from my gum and dropped it in a wee dish by the side of the chair. Then he stuck a swab in my gob which served two purposes: it staunched the flow of blood; and it shut me up. My self-pitying whinge did not rise above a low-level moan for the rest of the day.

I did not learn my lesson, though, I am obliged to say.

After this agonising first experience, I still only attended the School Dentist when I was climbing the walls with pain, thereby compounding the problem. The School Dentist was a very quiet and charming man called Mr. White. He soon came to dread my visits to his surgery as much as I did. While not quite as bad as I had been, as an adolescent I still tried to drive the back of my head into the headrest of the chair whenever he attempted to examine my wrecked gob. I still gave a sharp intake of breath every time he touched a tooth with a finger. And I still wrapped my hands around the arms of the chair when he started to drill. Curiously, having a jag of anaesthetic has never been a problem for me. Unlike my father, who always said he hated the injection but, after it took, the dentist could saw his bloody head off if he wanted. I did not mind the needle a bit. And even when my face was completely numb, from just below my nose to the knot on my school tie, I jerked and flinched and writhed about the seat like a snake. I paid maybe half a dozen visits to Mr. White over my high-school career and even I noticed how his smile grew a little frostier and his tremor a little more pronounced with each visit.

Teeth, eh! Whae’d have them!

My favourite reads of then year next time.

Rest you merry till then.

Obiter Dicta

Tuesday December 6^th

No point in continuing to avoid it; it’s becoming impossible, anyway. Bloody Christmas again. King Herod is a much misunderstood man. He had a lot of good ideas going at one stage. Made the camels run on time, and all that. If he’d got his way, I wouldn’t have to put up with shops playing twee CDs of carols and Christmas songs. Or  seasonal delights like Strictly Come Dancing and the X factor.  Or jolly red-faced farts being plump-full of good will to all men.

What I hate about it, what I really utterly LOATHE about it, is the fact that you don’t have a choice. For those such as I, who are basically shrinking violets, who are not in the least Hail-Fellow-Well-Met (more Well-Fellow-Piss-Off-And-Leave-Me-In-Peace), who could just about tolerate all this spurious religious jollity if it were only for the three days of Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, but who are obliged to tolerate it from an earlier date in the calendar with each passing year (this year Advent started after the cricket season finishe there should be a Not the Christmas Holiday. A Massacre of the Innocents Holiday or something. 

Is there any foodstuff in the world more bland and tasteless than turkey? Why the hell are we expected to consume this crap on Christmas Day? I’ll tell you this, boy: when Bob Cratchit’s family in Camden Town were sent the biggest turkey in the shop, I’m willing to wager that Mrs. Cratchit, in her twice-turned gown but brave in ribbons, took one look at it and told the poulterer’s boy to shove it where the sun don’t shine, and bring her a top goose,  something with a bit of a tang to it, toot de sweet - and the tooter de sweeter. Then she shut the door and, when Bob asked her who she’d been speaking to, said, “That old bastard Scrooge sent us a turkey. Time you were handing in your notice Bob and putting our names down for the work’us.”

Why, in God’s name, turkey? Why not Shepherds Pie? Altogether more appropriate. Or Straw in a Manger? Ox and Ass Goulash. Donkey Escalope.

But of all the teeth-grindingly awful conventions associated with the Season to be Jolly, fala-lala-la, nothing for me beats THE SECRET SANTA. It is now a ‘western Christmas tradition’ according to Wikipedia. A very recent ‘tradition’, unless I am mistaken. I first came across it in my teaching days when a gung-ho, jolly-hockeysticks sort of female teacher suggested we participate in this Roedean idea of fun as a staff. I sneered so much, I had to pull my top lip out of my left ear. Then, when I was a psychiatric orderly, the staff on the ward did it too.

I didn’t. Not then. Not before. Not ever. I never once participated in this wooflingly vapid exercise. I don’t want a cheap piece of tat that some numbskull thinks is what I would like for a fiver. Or that the same numbskull thinks is a ‘joke’ present for a man like me.  I mean it. There’s little I want or need, from the people who count; those I love. Spare me the strainings of the costive sense of humour of some halfwit…ach.

You get the point.

On another tack entirely, I got my authorial copies of my book yesterday – a box of nice spanking new first-edition copies of The Locked Ward, all nicely hardbacked and with a jacket bearing my mugshot and a real ISBN number and everything. I’ve got them all stood up on the shelf behind the bed. Makes the bedroom look like a Locked Ward bookshop. Now, there’s a Christmas present right up my alley.

Here’s to the next time.

Oh, and – rest you merry.