'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

It's not often I find myself wishing PG Wodehouse books had footnotes, but as I sat reading the first Blandings in the twilight of Stationer's Park, I found myself deeply puzzled. A young lady suggests to the protagonist that if he looks at the ads in the paper, he may find something more congenial than the job he hates. He looks, but is disappointed to find only a series of philanthropists, keen to share their fortunes. How is that a bad thing? Was this the 1915 equivalent of a Nigerian email scam?

I've already mentioned that, given the acclaim Alan Bleasdale's received as a social realist, I was surprised to find less moral ambiguity in his GBH than in Torchwood: Children of Earth. I'm now more than halfway through GBH and would further add that Torchwood was much more psychologically realistic in its portrayal of how power corrupts, and how the struggles of political entities destroy the little human lives caught between them. But what really astonished me was that Children of Earth also had significantly less Doctor Who fanw@nk than GBH, in whose fourth episode crucial scenes in a hotel take place against the background of a fan convention, with drunken Earth Reptiles and Cybermen cavorting around, and eventually a Dalek pulling Polly while chanting "FOR-NI-CATE'.
I'm still watching, mind. It may be a pantomime, but Robert Lindsay and Michael Palin are giving such performances that it still compels.

Even in this age of reunions and reissues, I never thought 2009 would find me writing about Angelica, not least because I was never that bothered about them in the first place. But lo and behold, the headliners at last night's 18 Carat Love Affair gig (not entirely convinced by the whole drummer-in-front-of-stage idea, though I appreciate their reasoning) were the Angelica singer's new band. Just her and a drummer, who had a bike basket on the front of his kit, and a harness thing with recorders in so he could blow and drum at the same time. At one stage she hit the drums too with what appeared to be a skipping rope. Yes, they were fairly twee, as it happens. If you wish to investigate further, they're called The Lovely Eggs.

On Monday, in a charity shop, for 99p (well, a quid since they had no pennies) I found a copy of the old Neil Gaiman-conceived shared-world anthology The Weerde: Book of the Ancients. Which has an early Charles Stross story* I fancied rereading, and which I also knew was worth rather more than a quid. This copy was further signed by one of the authors, Liz Holliday, "To Alison, with thanks".
Between the pages of the Stross story, I found an autumn leaf. On which, in silver ink, "To Jess, Happy Xmas, love from Alison".
Now I don't think I can bear for it to be passed on again. Which is why, among the careers closed to me, is that of eBay trader.

*Interesting to read something of his from 1993, before he could write about the internet and expect anyone to have a clue what he was talking about. Yet his 'Red, Hot & Dark' nicely prefigures the Laundry books, with its intersection of ancient horrors, bureaucracy and espionage. Some of the themes of 'The Missile Gap' are here too, in particular the idea of communism as another preconception about the world which can be shattered by alien contact.

Does anybody happen to have a copy of Children of the Revolution? It's one of those offbeat comedies the Australians do so well, featuring several of the usual suspects - Rachel Griffiths, Sam Neill, Geoffrey Rush - and concerning Stalin's secret son growing up in Cold War Australia. I taped it off TV a couple of weeks back and, watching it on Monday, was really getting into it when the tape cut out; further investigation showed that the film had been pushed back by (what else?) sportism.

I like Richmond. Not its slightly provincial clone high street, but once you get even a little off that, you get theatres and libraries and cheap but not nasty pubs around greens where the kids disporting themselves are all sufficiently middle-class not to be threatening, only endearingly Skins-esque, and where bluff old gents stomp past with their beards, pipes and fisherman's caps, looking for all the world like they could have helped Jerome K Jerome out of a spot of comic difficulty that very afternoon. Not perhaps the first place one would expect to find Philip Jeays playing, but if he hadn't been I wouldn't have been there, so can't complain, eh?

Am still attempting to process Mervyn Peake's Mr Pye. It's no kin to Gormenghast, that's for sure; it lacks the Dickensian squalor, the dustiness, the constriction. Nor does it seem to me a simple 'christian allegory', one popular assessment; I suppose for a time it is, but apart from anything else every 40 pages or so it seems to become a totally different story, and all this without leaving the strange, tiny and very real island of Sark. At one point it seemed to me like Iris Murdoch attempting to complete a book from an outline left by PG Wodehouse; later like one of the South American magic realists had taken a holiday to the Channel Islands. Strangest of all, for all its marriage of lightheartedness to the deep power of faith, not once did it remind me of GK Chesterton. Perhaps I should simply accept it as a good read from the days before the genre walls went up.

Taped Channel 4's Life After People on Monday, but that review was enough to convince me that I don't need to watch it. I'm reading The World Without Us at the moment, and as much as I find the idea of the post-human world both fascinating and soothing, I'm not sufficiently obsessed with it to watch one of those bad CGI pseudo-documentaries about it. Maybe the one being adapted from the book will be sufficiently well-done for me to make an exception. It's not like films can never manage the same elegiac sense of our exit; Children of Men did a pretty good job of it. Of course, on some level I'm not daydreaming about the world without all humans, so much as the world without all the ones who are just cluttering the place up; ideally there should still be enough unspecified tech and supplies for me and mine to be comfortable in between wandering around appreciating the quiet decay. In the meantime, even an empty street can have something of the same piquancy - witness Woodrow Phoenix's Rumble Strip*, a haunting, damning commentary on car culture in which the art consists entirely of pictures of empty roads and carparks, street furniture, lane markings - for these streets no longer welcome people, and like most monsters the automobiles work better as unseen menaces. Even out among the bustle, it sounds as though ghost bikes have something of the same eloquence of absence.

*For the record, another fine 'graphic novel' which is clearly not a novel.

I've been, if not quite back to the old house, then just over the wall for it - back outside Southwell with the Southwell crew, and if the route there has changed a bit (with junctions fresh from Mega City One), and if Nottingham's changed a bit (they now have a pub called The Canal House which actually has the canal running into the pub), and if we've all changed a bit (sensible hair, careers or just extra lines), it still felt like we were just a whisker away from our past, almost close enough to touch our old selves. Although, we always used to say that only abstract nouns got broken at those parties, whereas this time poor vivid_blue somehow contrived to both break *and* dislocate her ankle, something I hadn't even believed to be possible. Ouch. But aside from that, a splendid trip, a fine wedding (with me on Nick Cave duties again), and a lovely house (Bag End for the 21st century, with ducks). Plus such other incidental delights as rabbits, butterflies, being twice taken for a third Hewings brother (like the third Summers brother, but with fringes instead of energy blasts), discovering I'm actually better (rather, less awful) at Grand Theft Auto when I'm asleep, and accepting that Scott Pilgrim totally justifies the hype. Oh, and the temporary terror of the street where both sides were even numbers - and the same even numbers at that,

It seems far further from here to Thursday than it does to those old parties, but yes, I went to see Paris Motel. The Good Ship wasn't quite as suited to their ghosts-across-the-delta sound as the Borderline, and I kept headbutting the fixtures by mistake, but they're still wonderful. The band, I mean, not the fixtures - those were moderately painful.

Will Ferrell has already got the film rights to King Dork by Frank Portman, and I can totally see why; it's hilarious. Think along the lines of Napoleon Dynamite but with more rock'n'roll plus a detective story of sorts. I don't usually go much for American teen novels, but I was laughing my head off at this one - which is very handy on long train journeys vis-a-vis keeping the seat next to you empty, so it was ideal for the trip.

edit: I really want to write about the tent - specifically the bit where we thought it was inside out, disassembled it, reassembled it inside out, and realised we'd had it right the first time after all - but Jerome K Jerome handles that material so much better. Which itself reminds me, Ogden Nash edited a Wodehouse anthology - who knew?

It is at once testament to the genius of PG Wodehouse, and slightly annoying, that even his golf stories are worth reading. I spend most of them baffled as to what is actually meant to be happening, and it would be so much easier if I could just skip that section of his work - but if I did, I would miss lines like: "Attila the Hun might have broken off his engagement to her, but nobody except Attila the Hun, and he only on one of his best mornings."

"One of our goals is to improve the atmosphere of the IWC, which has become one of confrontation, and to improve dialogue," says Japan, as part of its efforts to officially resume commercial whaling (the mendacious 'scientific' programme they already have is apparently insufficient). Of late the West has proven terribly susceptible to this sort of talk, as in the widespread and muddled belief that we must above all things be tolerant for its own sake, even when that involves tolerating poisonous intolerance from others. Compromise and communication are not intrinsic goods; certainly there are conflicts born of misunderstanding, where dialogue and compromise can help, but there are others born simply of an irreconcilable conflict of interests - see also Iran, which Ahmadinejad claims is "trying to find ways to love people" while it engages in Holocaust denial conferences and plays a game of nuclear brinkmanship. Whether he's being devious, or speaking sincerely from his own foul perspective, is pretty much academic; in any dealings with him, or with the whalers, compromise is the Devil talking.
The tragedy being, of course, that on the other hand we don't seem to have the capability (much less the will) to stop either of them by force.

I'm not especially bothered that no 'big names' are in the running for the Chair of the BBC Trust - it's a new job, so why shouldn't a new face rather than an established player be right for it? What does appal me is that "The list of 23 [candidates] is believed to include [...], improbably, John Beyer - the successor to Mary Whitehouse as head of broadcasting standards lobbyists Mediawatch."
The only context in which such a name should be associated with the job is within one of the questions on the entrance interview:
Q: One of the heirs to the accursed mantle of Mary Whitehouse, long may her shade be molested by jackals, bleats priggishly that you are showing programmes about something other than the wonders of the fifties and family values. Do you:
a) Keep it puerile, announcing at a press conference that he doesn't like programmes about sex because he is a sad, lonely virgin who can't get it up, and also smells, IDST?
b) Hire a private investigator to dig up any and all dirt on him?
c) Get one of the IT department to remotely download kiddyfiddling images onto his computer, then anonymously tip off the police?
d) Cut the subtlety and just have the prick taken out?

Billy the Sink's Stray Toasters is a Hell of a comic, in all senses of the word. He's always been a remarkable artist with a particular gift for capturing fractured minds, decaying cities and feverishly twisted sexuality, but when he's writing too this gets turned up to 11, because now the story is nothing but his strengths. Which could make for a lazy, comfort zone piece of work, except that he seems also to have delved even further into the dark, keen to explore every nuance of his specialties. Like his pupil and now peer Dave McKean's Cages, this is one of those happy examples of an artist turning writer and showing a gift for that too - but alas, like Cages it also seems to be a one-off.