Mellow Orange

I've just had this text message from my mobile phone network:
'Hi from Orange [they always say that - I wish they wouldn't].
We've updated out terms to reflect we're now part of Everything Everywhere.
There's no change to your service/pricing.'
Eh? Everything Everywhere? Puts me in in mind of an old Donovan song. All together now...
'Happiness runs in a circular motion.
Thought is like a little boat upon the seas.
Everybody is a part of everything anyway...'
Takes you back.

Los Pepinos Inocentes

Cucumbers. They're everywhere. Every time I make the mistake of turning on the television news, there's ever more extravagant footage of alleged Spanish farmers dumping ever more prodigious quantities of cucumbers. This is by way of illustrating the story of how the Germans spectacularly fouled up over their e-Coli outbreak, unfairly pointing the finger - or the cucumber - at the Spanish. At first the news showed us what looked suspiciously like stock footage of a single peasant chucking misshapen cucumbers into a large skip - these cucumbers were probably already doomed under those laudable EU guidelines that protect a grateful citizenry from misshapen vegetables (which are actually better for you and tend to taste nicer too). Now, though, the cucumber disposal is on a truly heroic scale, with small armies of sturdy peasants pitching in, hurling tonnes (as they say in the EU) of blameless cucumbers into ever more gigantic receptacles. What fate awaits these hapless vegetables? I hope they will be put to good use. Perhaps they could be sent to Laputa, where the Projectors could extract sunbeams from them - a project which, according to this fascinating analysis, might actually have some slight basis in science...

At Flores in the Azores...

Richard Grenville, the Elizabethan adventurer, explorer and naval hero, was born on this day in 1542. A fearless fighter, who famously took on 53 Spanish warships with his sole galleon the Revenge, Grenville was also an enthusiastic carouser, whose party piece was to chew up his glass after a few drinks, with much blood but apparently no lasting harm done - and he once, as a law student, ran a fellow through on the Strand and left him to die (he was acquitted). Grenville was, in fact, just the kind of mad bastard you want on your side in a scrap. The Revenge incident was the subject of Tennyson's most stirring narrative poem...
This was one of the poems my father delighted in reciting, often while shaving in the morning (how I envy him his powers of recall; mine are long gone). I enjoyed it as a boy, but naturally, when I grew into a young smartarse, I despised such risible stuff. Reading it now, though, it strikes me as a quite wonderful example of its kind, full of fine sonorous lines (that Tennysonian music never fails), setting the scene, building the tension and describing the climactic action and its aftermath with masterful skill. The sturdy anti-Spanish patriotism might be laid on a little heavily, but Tennyson, the great lyric poet, could also, when the occasion demanded, tell a tale to stir the blood.

Dash It All

All over the London Underground at the moment there's a poster advertising Kindle by teasing us with the first page of Ordinary Thunderstorms, a thriller by William Boyd. No doubt it's intended to make us all think, 'I say - what a perfectly spiffing new way to read a book! I must buy one right now'... On me, however, it has rather the opposite effect, confirming my prejudice against e-books. It's not so much the content of this sample page - though the chances of my reading a William Boyd thriller about a climatologist called Adam Kindred are slim indeed - but rather the look of it, to be precise the punctuation. Here's how the first sentence begins:
'Let us start with the river-all things begin there...'
Yes, where a fine airy dash should be, there's a meagre hyphen linking two words as if they were indeed hyphenated. The first time I saw it, I actually had to read the sentence twice to make sense of it; with dashes it would have been crystal clear. The use of unspaced hyphens for dashes fuddles the meaning as well as producing ugly airless text. Is this strange mispunctuation universal on Kindle I wonder? If so, I can't imagine what it would be like to read, say, Keats's letters, or Laurence Sterne's novels. Perhaps a Kindle reader could enlighten me...

The Price of Everything

'Monetising the environment' - putting a money value on all those things around us that we tend to think of as thrown in free with the Life on Earth package - is all the rage just now. Presumably its proponents are working on the principle that money is the only language those who run the show understand, so they will only value the environment if they see £££ signs in front of their eyes. Living (and, come to that, working) where I do, with so many green open spaces close at hand, I reckon I must be coining it... But is this monetisation just a gimmick, a silly exercise, or something worse? What worries me is that as soon as you've put a monetary value on anything you've potentially put a tax value on it too. How long before we'll be paying extra taxes for the 'privilege' of living near a patch of green?

Penelope Fitzgerald at the Booker Dinner

In 1979, Penelope Fitzgerald won the Booker Prize for Offshore. She wrote about it thus to Francis King:
'In the stories I used to read when I was a little girl cab-horses used to win the National and everyone seemed to cheer, but you can't expect that in real life, and I know I was an outsider - however Asa Briggs explained to me that they'd ruled out novels evidently written with one eye on the film rights as they'd been looking for le roman pur, and I (naturally) agreed with him. - When I got to the Book Programme, soaking wet because I'd had to be photographed on a bale of rope on the Embankment, R. Robinson [Robert Robinson, the urbane/irascible TV and radio presenter] was in a very bad temper and complained to his programme executive, 'who are these people, you promised me they were going to be the losers'. - I couldn't help enjoying the dinner, though the Evening Standard man told me frankly that they'd all written their pieces about Naipaul and felt they were free to get drunk, wh: he certainly was; I did notice the Spectator Man, but thought he was perhaps dead [Peter Ackroyd possibly?]. Even so I had a lot of happy moments, and the best was when the editor of the Financial Times, who was at my table, looked at the cheque and said to the Booker McC Chairman 'Hmph, I see you've changed your chief cashier.' Both their faces were alight with interest. - I'm afraid Booker McC rather wish they'd decided to patronise show-jumping, or snooker - the novelists are so difficult and odd, not appreciating their surprise announcements and little treats.'
Fitzgerald's previous novel, The Bookshop, had been shortlisted for the Booker, but her then publisher Colin Haycraft not only ducked out of attending the dinner (claiming, bizarrely, that he didn't have a dinner suit) but also foolishly 'let her go' as he reckoned he had enough slim elegant novels by slim elegant lady novelists on his hands. At the time that Offshore won, she was embroiled in attempting to write a biography of L.P. Hartley, though much hampered by Lord David Cecil and increasingly appalled by what she was discovering about LPH. In the end, she had become so fond of Hartley's sister that she felt unable to publish. For a great writer, Fitzgerald, as is clear from her letters, was a quite extraordinarily fine person - good-humoured, self-deprecating, thoroughly nice, even loveable. Of how many writers can one say that?

One Painted Lady

The first day of June - and my first Painted Lady! It was a brilliant sunny morning as I made my way to the station, and there she was - a bright sleek specimen, basking in all her tawny-black-and-white glory on a clipped suburban lawn. Will it be another Painted Lady Summer like 2009? It seems not - if it was, they'd be everywhere by now. One Painted Lady doesn't make a summer - but it does make a difference.