January 31st - February 6th 2005
Sunday Unacceptable
Saturday Outsold
Friday Womanless world
Thursday Set them free
Wednesday Badgered
Tuesday Total pants
Monday Fagged out
Sunday 6th February 2005
Incessant chattering; calling out...and answering back; inattention; lateness; leaving the premises without permission; flouting uniform or dress codes; and causing a nuisance to other(s)
You know you're truly turning into a grumpy old man when Ruth Kelly's description of unacceptable classroom behaviour reminds you of nothing so much as an average night at the office...
Saturday 5th February 2005
Tip of the hat to Boyd Tonkin at the Independent for noticing that last week's number one single (21,262 copies at £4.99) was outsold by last week's 3rd best selling paperback (24,704 at £9.99).
(Even better: the novel was a trade paperback, and not written by Dan Brown).
Friday 4th February 2005
I appreciate that yesterday's entry may seem a little literary for some tastes (or, failing that, just too damn long).
So, by way, of lagniappe, here's something I forgot to include: a mysterious volume that came to light during my extended bout of book-clearing.
This one, trust me, I kept:
Thursday 3rd February 2005
"Books are my servants, " cried Karl Marx, and I like to imagine another weighty volume flying across the room as he says so, thumping heavily against a door behind which, no doubt, some huddled servitor nurses thoughts of his or her own.
I don't know which book I read that in, but I know where it will be: gathering dust on the shelves of my Country Home, along with a thousand other pre-loved tracts and oposcules that I deserted when I moved to London a decade or so ago.
I guess I buy slightly more than two books a week on average, mostly fiction; most of them get read, sooner or later. But, whilst I have no truck with the idea that simply printing a thought earns it automatic reverence, I rank printed matter somewhat higher than Marx: more than a servant, less than a friend - somewhere around the casual shag?
Which does tend to raise problems once the short (but hopefully intense) relationship is over.
For those few, those very few, exceptions that inspire both awe and devotion, the mode of veneration is obvious: you isolate them on a very high shelf, stroke their spines, and promise to return, very very soon.
Equally scarce, at least for me, are those tomes so tedious, so tendentious or so simply terrible that they merit an instant binning. (And I speak as one who couldn't even quite bring himself to throw out The Da Vinci Code, purely because of its historical interest.)
Mostly, these days, I try to pass books on.
David gets first pick of the Good Reads - though, like most of us, he has his blind spots: nothing magisterial, nothing set prior to 1930, nothing with a frock or a rocket on the front. Lately, I've found three co-workers who will happily take on my Thrillers, my SciFi, my Historical Novels off my hands. And Booker/Whitbread fodder is always easy to dispose of.
So when my (still-ongoing!) house-cleaning crusade brought me, last week, face up against the stack of 500 or so paper slates and bricks colonising one corner of my bedroom, some immediate categories defined themselves.
As I lovingly wiped the grime from their faces - dust so thick that you could not only write, but sculpt, your name in it - I divided my book mountain into three smaller mounds: Yes, No and Maybe.
The Yes pile included everything I'd loved so much I could never be parted from [things like Infinite Jest, Citizens, King of the City, The Motion of Light in Water] and quite a few, invariably weighty, works that I just know I'll love once I get round to finally reading them [Distinction, Worldly Goods, Giles Goat-Boy].
Given that I still harbour the romantic fantasy that one day someone will - as I once did - fall in love as they peruse my bookshelves whilst I make them coffee prior to shagging them senseless, I hefted most of the Yes pile onto the scant shelf-space in my living room, adding a few only slightly less-loved but abstractly admirable titles [Samuel Pepys, Bruce Sterling, Kim Stanley Robinson] to make up the numbers.
The Maybe pile was by far the largest, mostly comprising stuff that failed to grip me the first time I brought it home [Harry Kunzru, Gitta Sereney, Naomi Klein], though I also made an exception for runs of novels by authors whose work I'd enjoyed enough to go in search of the entire opus [Ian Rankin, Carl Hiaasen, James Lee Burke].
These, 200 or so, are now stored in an innovative, if slightly eccentric, unit built from two metal bread-trays and numerous strips of stout cardboard installed close by my bed. (Have you seen the price of even the simplest bookshelves?!)
The criterion for the No pile defined itself very simply. "Is there any chance that I will ever want to read this again (or, indeed, ever)?"
A surprisingly high proportion of these were well-reviewed [Easter, deadkidsongs, Zanzibar] but failed to click with me. The Life of Pi narrowly escaped inclusion. Half a dozen or so inspired the immediate answer "NonoNO!" and these I bravely consigned directly to the rubbish chute: flutter, flutter, bonggg, dead book.
Once I'd weeded out the refusées that could safely be passed on to other people - and those three piles sit handy in the hall, ready to be smuggled into work a tome or two at a time - I was left with about 60 books that I respected but didn't want to keep. What to do? What to do?
I tried, I really tried, to convince myself that if I put them out, en masse, with the weekly recycling crate they would eventually filter their way into eager hands. But I've seen the guys that come to fetch those crates: they're big buggers (they need to be to haul away the amount of paper I put out for them each week), and I couldn't quite see them discovering something and crying out to their colleagues, "'Ere, 'Arry! Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, your missus would really like that."
I looked at bookcrossing.com, but couldn't face the fag of individually labelling each book that I let go, let alone trying to get myself interested enough to log on and see if it had its way to New Zealand yet. (Don't these people have friends to give their books to?)
And so, in the end, I'm left with a couple of piles, tucked away behind the bedroom door. Each time I head for the tube into work, I try to remember to take at least one with me, and then try to remember to discreetly leave it on an empty seat, lumbering south to New Cross Gate and who knows where thereafter.
So far, I must say, they've shown a distressing tendency to cling; all too often I get home at the end of my shift to find the proto-orphan still cowering in my coat pocket, hoping to trigger some residual affection, trying to disguise itself as a pamphlet.
But I am made of sterner stuff. Into the world they must go. And if literacy rates start to bloom along the East London line, you'll know who to thank.
Wednesday 2nd February 2005
A lesbian model who shunned the advances of her female boss was awarded £1,000 compensation by an employment tribunal yesterday....Becky Hough, the company's photographic manager, had knocked on Miss Walker's hotel room door in the early hours of the morning, saying she was not tired and wanted to chat, the hearing in central London was told...
Her lawyer said: "This is a classic case of sexual harassment, someone who is looking for an advantage by using their power and tempting the person with a carrot."
Tuesday 1st February 2005
No, men don't do lingerie, and - David Beckham aside - we don't do thongs. However, we do do underpants, and British males spend on average £15 a year on them. That much, hmm: what a fastidious lot you are on your side of the Irish Sea.
I happen to know how much I spent on underwear last year: nothing whatever,matching precisely the expenditure of the year before. As a matter of principle, I think that the life expectancy of a pair of underpants should be about a decade or so.
The decisive factor in such matters is a failure of either elastic or of retentivity: in which case they go into the cleaning basket and spend another 10 glorious years shining shoes.
Thanks Kevin - but that's slightly too much information.
Monday 31st January 2005
Translation: the Surgeon General
has determined that smoking
causes dyslexia
......previous week
