The Announcement You've All been waiting For - Ex Libris Piggy - An Advent Calendar

A habit I belatedly inherited from my dear father is to have several books on the go at once. This year I have decided to give it some formality and to read around three categories - the canonical (or in other words stuff I really ought to have read already); less exalted fiction (stuff I like); non-fiction. Now my discipline slips and at various times I have been reading multiple volumes from one category, however my efforts have been controlled enough to make this tripartite plan of attack the basis for this year's OG Advent Calendar. I will treat you to eight books from each category. I offer no favourites other than the final three doors of the calendar through which I will reveal the best of each type that I have read this year. All of the books can be found on the shelves of Casa Piggy - books do furnish a room.  

Out Of Ireland, Out Of Wales, Of England

I married my way into the Irish diaspora. It is a nice place to be. I was born into the Welsh diaspora and, despite the turmoil in Welsh rugby, that is also a nice place to inhabit. I am though English and there are aspects of that that concern me. Let me illustrate.

On Friday I took a journey to the doctors surgery I have used since the Groupie and I first married. We have moved three times since then but have never felt any urge to transfer to a surgery that occupies the same supposedly rarified area as Casa Piggy. The service I receive from my doctors is superb and I can say that they have played a central part in keeping me alive. The National Health Service at its best is a thing of wonder. 

My drive to the surgery (I had requested a PSA test and they had readily agreed - no symptoms but I am of the age) takes me through Kingstanding Circle, a place with tender memories for us because we lived round the corner when first married in a lovely little house that cost us the princely sum of £15000. The Circle has been ambush-swathed in Union Flags and Crosses of St. George. I am at heart a patriot but this sort of display has come to feel threatening and somehow indicative of division and rancour. I cannot tell you how sad this all makes me feel as I hunker down in my middle class redout. I feel vaguely estranged from my own homeland.

After my blood sample had been given and I had admitted that, yes, my blood pressure remains stubbornly a bit too high, I drove on down Short Heath Road and up Station Road to Erdington to see my aged mater familias. As I waited for the temporary lights on Station Road to change I observed a slattern coming out of a convenience store dressed in pyjamas and a seedy dressing gown. It was half-ten in the morning. It may be a little thing and I may be a terrible snob, but really is this what we have come to?

Back to Ireland and a question springs to mind. How can that sainted isle produce two such contrasting products as Mrs Brown's Boys (which I'm sorry but I have to say this, is pitiful) and Leonard and Hungry Paul, which in case you haven't seen it is delightful, a sort of Napoleon Dynamite meets Derry Girls.

I don't usually approve of early Christmas trees but tomorrow is a working day for our decorator in chief (the Groupie of course) and next Saturday will be a tad late, so our trees have gone up this weekend and this afternoon I will mount the step-ladder and put up the outside lights (for switching on tomorrow) - all is well, mostly all anyway.

That blood pressure thing - I have been out running on both days since my test.           

A Black Wednesday

When troubles come they come not single spies but in battalions. Well perhaps not battalions but certainly double spies last Wednesday. On that day I heard of the death of two men who profoundly influenced me. One was the best of a very good bunch at school and the other a university teacher (though this was only a minor specimen of his achievements) who was responsible for the start of this blog.

John G. Smith succeeded my father as Head of English at King Edward VI Aston. He took up post two terms before I arrived at the school in 1971 and stayed there until his retirement in 2002. In me he burnished the love of literature already encouraged by my father and his rough wisdom still patterns my thinking to this day. On top of that he was the greatest influence on my rugby both as a player and as a coach. The instinct to ruck rather than to maul was hammered home to me and from JGS I learned the desirability of educated roughness. A great man taken too soon although I am selfishly pleased that he lived long enough to know of my doctorate in English. I supect he found it balls-achingly funny and a proper expression of my pomposity.

Ian Marchant

And it was near the start of that journey to my PhD that Ian Marchant comes into the frame. He lectured/encouraged me in Life Writing in the second year of my second degree and if you go to the very first entry in this blog (27 January 2010) you will get the gist of what he instilled in us. He was novelist/author of critically accalimed non-fiction/broadcaster/scurrilous performer and an all-around good egg. He was only two years older than me but aeons ahead in wisdom.

God rest you both. 

Not Everything Is About Me

The Groupie (the wisest person I know) frequently advises me not to keep reading about Donald Trump - it only makes me angry. She has a point. America's very public psychosis feeds my own.

All of which comes back to me as I contemplate, inter alia, five films recently watched. Four of them are American movies, one British. You  might not believe it but I do actually give it some thought before I put metaphotical pen to to virtual paper with these film commentaries. And recent cogitation has brought home the fact that any trace of decency in any film that analyses the human condition merely provokes me into observing either that Donald Trump should be made to watch it, or that he wouldn't get the point.

So here are those five films. First up is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a picture that has that ubiquitous Tennessee Williams atmosphere of strangulating heat. Has cinema ever deployed a more beautiful leading couple than Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman? They fight and tear at each other in the cage of their doomed marriage. Burl Ives plays the vile American patriarch with portly panache - I will resist the deployment of a Trump reference - oh no, I've done it already. In truth this film never fully escapes from its stage roots but it smolders nicely. 69/70. 

Burl Ives gives us another display as the vile patriarch in The Big Country. On this occasion he got an Oscar for his efforts. This film lives up to its name - it is big. The landscapes are big, the stars are big, the cinematography is big (Technirama), the fights are big. The humans almost fade to insignificance against the backdrops. It has pretensions to talk about the truth of Manifest Destiny and, given its age (made in 1958) it is probably making some heavy-handed points about the Cold War. Altogether glorious to look at. Its denouement suggests that bad men must die to allow civilisation to grow. Trump ... no too bloody obvious. 69/70. 

3.10 to Yuma (the 1957 original not the 2007 remake) is a taut Western notable for a superb performance of smooth menace by Gelnn Ford. Its ending is a surprising concession to decency in the midst of vicious singularity. [Insert Trump reference here]. 70/100. 

I will set the British film aside for now and instead turn to a very good American movie from a master of the medium that, for me, sits in the middle ranks of his oeuvre. Casino sees Martin Scorsese repeating much of the narrative technique of his (for me) masterpiece, Goodfellas. This time it is the Las Vegas casino industry of the mob-dominated 70s and 80s that comes under Scorsese's acute microscope. Joe Pesci, gives us his best Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro is compelling as the uber-clever gambler who becomes a casino boss but who finds himself undone by love and by the advance of the junk-bond ecnomy (a voodoo economy in which Trump crashed and burned but by the immoral rules of the game lived to fight on). However the star turn comes from Sharon Stone as de Niro's booze-addled nemesis. Great soundtrack as well - a recurrent element in Scorsese's films. 80/100.

I have bitter-sweet memories of a family holiday in Denmark. Sweet because I love my family and because I happened at that time to think (wrongly as things transpired) that I was at the peak of my powers as a businessman. At our coastal lodge I would rise early, go for a run, then swim in the sea before making myself some proper coffee and reading a management tome. Bitter because I returned to England and my professional life collapsed. That is s story for another day - or, perhaps better, a story never to be told. Denmark struck me as a peaceable country at ease with itself. Again I may be wrong. No matter, those memories were stirred by the modest British production, Denmark. Rafe Spall plays a down-at-heel Welshman who resolves that his best hope of a comfortable life is to earn himself a spot in Danish prison. From this unlikely conceit is spun a nicely beguiling redemption tale. 72/100. I'm pretty sure Trump wouldn't get it, but who am I to say.  

       

Tempus Fugit - And Takes Automotive Technology Along For The Ride

As you will know if you have been with me on this blog's meanderings for the past decade and a half, I own my Precious Jag - a beautiful Jaguar XK8 that spends most of its life sleeping idly in the garage. It may be a small and stupid thing but it is, for me, a piece of automotiive pornography. It is getting on for thirty years old and runs beautifully. 

Overgraduate with his Canyonero

But enough of such mild boastfulness because today I am saying goodbye to the more prosaic car that has been my main vehicle for eleven years. It is a Kia Sorento, it has done a shade under one hundred thousand miles and has been hardly any trouble. I shall miss it - the Canyonero as Daughters numbered One and Two and I dubbed it - you have to be a Simpsons devotee to get the reference.

 

Krusty with his Kia

 

And let me tell you how to measure automotive sophistication/progress. The Precious Jag has a CD player which I had to have specially fitted. Canyonero came with a CD player as standard and also has a bafflingly unreliable digital radio which I had to buy as an extra. Canyonero has been superseded by a Dacia Bigster (terrible name I know but a lot of car for the money) and that has an efficient digital radio and Android Autoplay so that I can listen to Spotify via my (also new as it happens) phone. No CD player in sight - so last century!

I like the new car  and here's a thing - it's a hybrid. Will that be defunct by the time I next change cars?