Yes darling, even Stephen Fry can be boring

November 5, 2013freshlyworded 1 Comment

If there’s a game show, a documentary, a movie or television series featuring Stephen Fry I’m likely to watch it. He’s always immensely interesting, devilishly charming and gives off the aura of an incredibly knowledgeable and worldly man.

Which is why his autobiography “The Fry Chronicles” was such a disappointment and dare I say it, thoroughly boring in large parts.

Perhaps all the very best bits were either in his first chronicle “Moab was my washpot” and covering the first 20 years of his life, which I have not yet read (but have read good things about) – or in his yet to come third volume, likely to begin with his addiction to cocaine.

“The Fry Chronicles” ostensibly covers the years from his time at Cambridge to the success of the musical “Me and my girl” on Broadway, for which he revised the story and dialogue (otherwise known as ‘the book’).

I was expecting to learn something of the inner workings of Stephen Fry’s mind (what makes him tick), his battle with manic depression and various addictions, and where he gets his ideas from – all the elements that make up a good biography – but none of them get any fair treatment. His depression is considered not worthy of his readers, while his addictions to sugar, cigarettes and gadgets are only glossed over. The very last few section of the book – just a paragraph – come under the heading “C” – for cocaine. And then it ends.

It’s not just that he leaves out the juicy bits, but that much of the book is plodding and dull, especially as he narrates the steps he took to achieve success: writing and performing sketches for various Cambridge shows and revues, getting hired to write for Granada TV (now called ITV Granada), the BBC, his friendships with Emma Thomson, Ben Elton, Rowan Atkinson and of course, Hugh Laurie. It’s all either too gushing – or worse, apologetic (he’s especially sorry for having money and spending it on frivolous, expensive gadgets).

Now to be fair, there are some brilliant anecdotes, recollections and insights thrown in amongst “I did this….then I did that…then I met him…then the money starting rolling in” narration that goes on page after page.

One of the most intriguing is Fry’s recount of a visit by Alistair Cooke, the famous journalist and broadcaster and founder of the Cambridge Mummers, the university’s first theatre group open to both sexes. Fry invited Cooke as guest of honour to the 50th anniversary celebration of the Mummers.

Cooke (as remembered by Fry) tells of being on a walking tour through Germany in the 1930s with a friend and coming to a “perfect beer garden”. Later, while they enjoy their beverages, a stage is set up, chairs are laid out and soon the garden is full. An ambulance arrives, then a procession of open top Mercedes limousines. A small man gets out to address the crowd. He speaks. Women duly faint. After he finishes speaking, the little man walks down the aisle and his elbow barges against Cooke’s shoulder, who has leant out to see the intriguing man depart.

“Entschuldigen Sie, meine Herr” (Excuse me, sir”) the little man says to Cooke.

Cooke says in his speech:

“For some years afterwards, whenever he came on in the cinema newsreels as his fame spread, I would say to the girl next to me: “Hitler once apologised to me and called me sir.”

There are many other gems scattered throughout the book and some very funny lines my favourite being when Fry meets the actress Miriam Margoyles (now an Australian citizen) who introduced herself by saying:

“How do you do? I’m Mir…” She stopped and plucked at her tongue with her thumb and forefinger, “Miriam Margoyles. Sorry about that. I was licking my girlfriend out last night and I’ve still got some c-nt hairs in my mouth.”

Unless you’re a prude you’d have to agree that’s hilarious.

Sadly there is not enough of this in the book and too much apologising from Fry: for getting gigs when he thought he did not have the talent, when the money came rolling in and he spent, spent, spent; and for all the good fortune that came his way.

He’s either flattered by offers of work from famous people (Ben Elton, Rowan Atkinson etc) or flattering others and defending their reputations for brilliance, particularly Ben Elton for some reason.

He spends too much time gushing over the obviously incredibly talented Rowan Atkinson and Emma Thompson and not enough revealing his inner workings, his thoughts on the new wave of comedy that swept over Britain from the likes of Rick Mayall, Adrian Edmondsen and Alexei Sayle and too much timed worrying that no one will find his form of “sketch” comedy funny anymore.

Fry highlights all his privilege and wealth, continually apologizes for having it, and then goes on to describe scenes such as when he and Ben Elton visit some swanky private conservative club called “The Carlton” where the joke is on the old crusty Tory members (there’s a bust of Margaret Thatcher there) because they don’t know who they have let in. The thing is Fry appears more Tory than Labour.

Sadly, an utterly boring account of what has been a remarkable life.

Perhaps Stephen Fry should plead: General ignorance and have another go.

Child abduction and obsession: reviewing Ian McEwan’s “The Child in Time”

October 1, 2013October 1, 2013freshlyworded Leave a comment

Ian McEwan’s 1987 novel “The Child in Time” has as its central theme, the abduction of a three-year old child in broad daylight in a supermarket in suburban London in the 1980s.

Having a small child of my own, I picked up the book, read the back cover, and bought it, intrigued.

I think the premise in my mind was similar to what makes people slow down past traffic accidents – a glimpse of something horrifying and the reassurance that, it’s OK, it’s not happening to me. It’s why sadistic horror movies like Saw and Wolf Creek are so successful.

Quickly on in McEwan’s novel, we meet the central character, Steven Lewis, a successful children’s novelist living in a flat with his wife Julie, and their daughter Kate. One morning Steven lets Julie sleep in, while he and Kate dress warmly and walk to the supermarket to pick up groceries.

At the checkout, there is this ominous forbearer of disaster:

Stephen lifted the first items onto the belt. When he straightened he might have been conscious of a figure in a dark coat behind Kate.

And then, a little later:

The man with the dogfood was leaving. The checkout girl was already at work, the fingers of one hand flickering over the keypad while the other drew Stephen’s items towards her. As he took the salmon from his cart he looked down and winked at Kate. She copied him, but clumsily, wrinkling her nose and closing both eyes. He set the fish down and asked the girl for a shopping bag. She reached under a shelf and pulled one out. He took it and turned. Kate was gone.

Then follows the frantic searching down aisles. Calling out his daughter’s name. The police arrive. Stephen returns to his flat, alone, without his daughter, to tell his wife the terrible news.

At first it seemed a little far-fetched

Was is possible for a child to be abducted in such a manner, so swiftly, in a busy supermarket?

I had plans to write to Ian McEwan (or his publisher at least) to ask if this aspect of the novel was based in any way on real events.

But then, serendipitously, I came across a story about an experiment in London, where, under controlled circumstances, parents turn their attention away from their children in park for a just a few seconds, only for them to fall prey to a would-be paedophile.

There were nine children aged between five and 11 who were approached by a “stranger” who asked them to help him find his dog.

Seven, without hesitation and despite being warned about strangers, agreed to go with him, disappearing while their mothers’ attention was diverted by a telephone call.

Certainly the everyday, banal menace created in those supermarket scenes by McEwan – something he does so brilliantly – sends a cold shiver down your spine.

I expected the rest of the novel to be about a father trying to come to terms with the loss of his daughter and subsequent breakdown of his marriage. This is part of it, but McEwan turns the novel into a meditation on the idea of childhood, memory and parenthood.

Steven Lewis spends his days in stifling government-sponsored committees who are tasked with compiling a report on childcare and child-rearing. In the evenings, he sits alone in his flat drinking Scotch, thinking about Kate or his estranged wife, now living alone somewhere in the countryside.

There are strange dream-like sequences in a country pub, where he becomes the lost child looking in on his parents, many years in the past, as they come to terms with his own unplanned for conception.

His friend, Charles Darke, a junior minister in Thatcher’s government and the man who made him into a successful children’s author, gives up his plush home in London, the minor celebrity of political life and moves with his wife Thelma to a country estate, where he retreats into a child-like state, building a tree-house and making the woods his home.

There are the elements you expect in such a novel, such as Stephen going to a toy shop to buy a birthday present for his daughter, while he tries to convince himself that this is a healthy act. There is his constant fear of being away from his flat should Kate return and a disturbing episode where he decides that a child he sees in a school playground is his daughter, now much older.

Overall, I found it a strange, disjointed, stumbling and yet also bewitching novel, delving in and out of other people’s lives before returning to the story of Stephen Lewis and his quest to rejoin the world of the consciously living.

Christopher Hitchens, a close friend of Ian McEwan, called this book his “masterpiece”. I am not sure I agree.

I found I plodded along at times, not quite sure of the direction and the need for some of the diversions. But reflecting back, perhaps it deserves a second reading.

As with all McEwan’s books there are little gems here and there that touch on universal truths:

These lines struck me particularly poignantly. They are the thoughts of Stephen when visits his own parents and realises he only knows “outlines and details from stories” about their lives, but “nothing of how his parents met or what attracted them”:

Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full an intricate existence before you were born.

Reading Christopher Hitchens: A spanking from Margaret Thatcher and more profundity

August 10, 2013August 10, 2013freshlyworded Leave a comment

I’ve just finished reading “Hitch-22” – the memoirs of the late, great Christopher Hitchens.

Some (a fair portion) of his narrative, I found difficult to grasp fully or to follow the argument to its conclusion, with sentences and paragraphs full of literary and political allusions and references which would require, if I had the time, plenty of background reading on my part.

But yet still it is engrossing, filled with wonderful little moments such as when he tells the story of how Margaret Thatcher (he swears this actually happened) made him bend over and smacked him on the backside with a rolled up pamphlet after he dared to disagree with her at a gathering in Westminster, before she became prime minister.

Not one to ever concede an argument, most notably with a women he admired awfully (not the other way round), I think Hitchens took the spanking just so that he could recount this remarkable anecdote.

There’s plenty of wit, charm, irreverence and cheekinesss in his writing (I wrote about his tips for drinking in an earlier post), but also a great deal of solemnity and painful personal recollections.

There’s bittersweet recounts of his mother, Yvonne, who never revealed her Jewish roots to her husband, Hitch’s distant, but proud father – “the commander” – and who died in a suicide pact with her lover in a bare hotel room in Athens.

Hitchens writes about his need to spend time each year in unstable countries, how he accidentally wandered into a dangerous part of Afghanistan, how he nearly got shot in Northern Ireland, his student protests, his philosophical and literary bouts with Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Susan Sontag and Edward Said to name just a few.

He also has the humility and flexibility of mind (a trait which he says separates the open-minded from the “totalitarian principle”) to admit that he held a wrong view about a situation – most notably, his opposition to the first Gulf War – and armed with better information, he has changed it.

There’s also a wonderful, incredibly poignant story retold from a Vanity Fair article about a man Hitch never got to meet – Mark Daily, a young American soldier who volunteered to fight in Iraq after being inspired by the articles he read written by Hitchens arguing there was a moral case for war (to remove the psychopathic tyrant Saddam Hussein) and who was killed in combat.

He writes of Daily:

“This is the boy who would not let others be bullied in school, who stuck up for his younger siblings, who was briefly a vegetarian and Green Party member because he couldn’t stand cruelty to animals or to the environment, a student who loudly defended Native American rights and who challenged a MySpace neo-Nazi in an online debate in which the swastika-displaying antagonist finally admitted that he needed to rethink things. If I give the impression of a slight nerd here I do an injustice. Everything that Mark wrote was imbued with a great spirit of humor and tough-mindedness.

Hitchens also writes lovingly that the country “lost an exceptional young citizen, whom I shall always wish I had had the chance to meet” who seemed to have “passed every test of young manhood, and to have been admired and loved and respected by old and young, male and female, family and friends”.

In this way, he shifts from strongly held ideological positions on religion, politics, war, the Middle East to tales of the people who shaped his life and gave him his richest experiences.

I came across a beautiful passage that made the hairs on the back of my neck bristle and really, really made me think and ponder the horror of it all.

Hitch writes about a survivor of the Rwandan genocide and the dangers of those who wish to wipe the slate clean – for a “tabula rasa” for their lives.

“I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda; and she said to me there was nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative who knew who she was.

“No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no simbling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce.

“All her birthdays, her exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships – gone.

“She went on living but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook.

“I think of this every time I think of the callow ambition to ‘make a new start’ or to be ‘born again’.

“Do those who talk this way truly wished for the slate to be wiped?

“Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction.

“You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a ‘clean sweep’?

The Christopher Hitchens guide to drinking (for the young) and artistically minded

August 2, 2013freshlyworded 3 Comments

Towards the end of the marvellous memoirs of the late journalist, thinker, philosopher and humanist Christopher Hitchens – Hitch-22 – there’s a little gem of a section where he dispenses some advice “for the young” on drinking.

Hitchens loved a drop or two and could by all accounts – including his own – handle his booze pretty well. He claimed to never miss a deadline or an appointment or class due to booze, though admits to being mildy tipsy once on the BBC (though no one, he says, noticed).

When writing at home he maintained a certain discipline when it came to drink.

He was partial to whiskey – “a decent slug of Mr Walker’s” – at about half-past midday cut with Perrier water and no ice, then at luncheon (not quite sure how soon this was after midday) “perhaps a bottle of red wine, not always more but never less”, no after dinner drinks but maybe a nightcap “depending on how the day went – though never brandy.

“Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland and can help provide…the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing,” says Hitchens with his brilliant wit, charm and self-deprecation.

But he maintains “he was never a piss artist”.

Here then, faithfully transcribed by yours truly are his “simple pieces of advice for the young” (and the artist I think) when it comes to drinking:

1. Don’t drink on empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food.

2. Don’t drink if you have the blues: it’s a junk cure. Drink when you are in a good mood.

3. Cheap booze is a false economy.

4. It’s not true that you shouldn’t drink alone: these can be the happiest glasses you ever drain.

5. Hangovers are another bad sign (as is watching the clock for the start-time to your next drink) and you should not expect to be believed if you take refuge in saying you can’t properly remember last night (If you really don’t remember, says Hitch, that’s an even worse sign).

6. Avoid all narcotics: these make you more boring rather than less and are not designed – as are the grape and the grain – to enliven company.

7. Be careful about up-grading too far to single malt Scotch: when you are voyaging in rough countries it won’t be easily available.

8. Never ever think about driving if you have taken a drop.

9. It’s much worse to see a woman drunk than a man. I don’t know quite know why this is true but it is.

10. Don’t ever be responsible for it.

A day in the life: a review of “In Every Face I Meet” by Justin Cartwright

June 10, 2013June 10, 2013freshlyworded Leave a comment

“In Every Face I Meet” is a 1995 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel by Justin Cartwright that takes place over the course of a single, pivotal London day in February 1990 in the life of melancholic forty-something business executive Anthony Northleach.

Northleach, a former talented rugby player (he once trialed for England ‘B’), works for a failing company (what it does is never quite revealed), convinced that the imminent release of Nelson Mandela will fundamentally shift the trajectory of the world, Britain and his own sense of existentialism.

Much of the novel is the inner monologue of Northleach – he recalls, with detailed wonder and awe, a brilliant try scored by English rugby captain Will Carling in a weekend drubbing of the French, he remembers pivotal moments from his childhood in the kingdom of Swaziland, he ponders his marriage, a passionate affair he once had, and his friendship with his best mate and fellow former rugby player Mike, whose life is spinning out of control.

The secondary storyline is that of Chanelle, a crack-addict and prostitute living in a council estate and her black boyfriend/pimp Jason – sporting a medallion of Nelson Mandela around his neck – living on the outer fringes of London society in the final vestiges of Thatcherism.

Without giving too much away, the two worlds – Northleach’s and Chanelle and Jason’s – are on course for a horrifying collision, but what the novel is really about is Northleach’s longing for the past and his disappointment with the present.

It seems that Cartwright has honed in on the second difficult period in an adult male’s life, (the first being adolescence with all its clumsy fumblings and urges) that period from about 40 onwards when there is cause to reflect and ask the question: “Have I lived a purposeful life?”

And if not, “Is there still time to find some meaning?”

Indeed, the character of Northleach must contain parts of Cartwright himself – who was born and schooled in South Africa, the son of a left-wing newspaper editor, and who wrote the book in London, when he was in his late forties.

I have read “In Every Face I Meet” twice – once while travelling overseas in 2010 and now again, when it turned up in a crate of goods shipped over from South Africa.

What’s so enjoyable about reading the book is being inside Anthony Northleach’s head for one day of his life, following him from the office, where he muses about whether his dowdy secretary will ever make it to Thailand, then on the Tube into Soho for lunch in an Italian restaurant with Mike (bumping into Will Carling along the way) where he invites Mike to come with him on his odyssey to Cape Town and finally on his fateful drive home where he encounters Chanelle and Jason.

Northleach, despite his many failings, is immensely likeable with his sardonic political and philosophical commentary, and his honest reflectiveness.

He (and the novel itself) will particularly appeal to white South African-expats (be they in Britain, Australia or entrenched in any other “safe” country), nearing or past forty that still have a strong sense nostalgia for the old country, especially if you were there at the time Mandela was freed and the inkling of a utopian “Rainbow nation” first emerged.

Indeed, the book was a gift from a South African expat colleague and friend who raved about it and was right when he said I would find it immensely enjoyable to read.

Looking back to February 1990 when Mandela took his first steps to freedom, they do feel like halcyon days, filled with hope and the prospect of something new and fresh, but also scary and uncertain. We certainly lived through history in the making.

Reflecting back on my own life as I fast approach forty – there is much about Northleach’s longings and existential angst that resonates with me.

The enigma, the ego, the cult and the noble idealism of Julian Assange

June 6, 2013June 6, 2013freshlyworded Leave a comment

I finished reading “The Most Dangerous Man in the World” just as the trial of US soldier Bradley Manning began in Maryland.

“The Most Dangerous Man in the World” is a biography of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange written by ABC journalist Andrew Fowler.

It tells the story of how Assange went from being a teenage hacker in Melbourne to one the most influential and controversial figures in the world.

You could certainly not get too more different characters than Manning and Assange and yet both are now inextricably linked together by their idealism and bravery.

Bradley Manning is by all accounts, a shy, introverted, ultimately decent gay man, who somehow found himself thrust into the intelligence operations of the war in Iraq, and who is responsible for the biggest leak of classified military and diplomatic documents in history.

Assange, portrayed in Fowler’s book as an almost Robin Hood like character – stealing the secrets from the richest most powerful nation on earth to give to the world – but also with the touch of Keyser Soyze about him, able to manipulate politicians and journalists, a seducer of women and at times as secretive as the secret organisations he seeks to expose.

While Fowler clearly admires Assange for what he has achieved, he is no sycophant and leaves the reader to make up their own minds about the enigma and cult of Julian Assange.

How you view Assange and Manning depends on whether you believe governments have the right to keep secrets or whether you believe in the idea of a more transparent and open society.

I am one of those people who believe Julian Assange and Bradley Manning are heroes for revealing the many thousands of innocent civilian deaths at the hands of the US government and its allies, most graphically and famously revealed in the “Collateral Murder” leaked Apache helicopter video showing innocent Iraqis, including children, being killed by 30mm gunfire.

Fowler reveals how the actions of WikiLeaks have shifted events on the world stage. For example, tweets of a WikiLeaks story about the corrupt dictatorship of Tunisian leader Zine el Abidine Ben Ali lead to his overthrow and political exile.

“WikiLeaks was a brilliant example of what has been known for some time: the power of information from a legitimate source, disseminated via social networking systems, to threaten the power of a state and its institutions,” Fowler writes.

Similarly the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak as part of the Arab Spring after 30 years of an abusive reign (and with the support of the US government), was also spurred on by WikiLeaks documents showing his brutal methods of silencing opposition.

Still, there are those who call Julian Assange and Bradley Manning traitors and guilty of the highest form of treason for revealing highly classified military documents.

Indeed if Manning is found guilty of high treason (aiding the enemy) he faces spending the rest of life in jail while Assange – now under the protection of the Equadorian embassy in London – faces an uncertain future depending on what steps the US government and its intelligence agencies, supported by other countries including Australia, take to prosecute and silence him.

While the US Constitution’s first amendment enshrines free speech and freedom of the press, the US government has argued that 260,000 or so leaked documents WikiLeaks has on its servers, compromises its national security, puts its operatives at personal risk as well as endangers its relationships with other countries. In short they say it is high treason.

Equally, in the eyes of the current Labor Australian government, Assange is a criminal, despite having the support (according to Fowler’s book) of a large portion of the Australian public and which will be tested if Assange is able to run for a seat in the Australian Senate in September.

Assange is now firmly back in the spotlight with the Manning trial underway.

In a post on WikiLeaks, he says Manning is simply on trial for “telling the truth” and that the US has violated its own laws in its treatment of Manning, including that he has been locked up in a “cage” for 23 out of 24 hours, “deprived of his glasses, sleep, blankets and clothes, and prevented from exercising” and held since May 2010 while awaiting trial.

Assange appears to have won favour again with the New York Times, a newspaper that according to Fowler’s book both supported the work of WikiLeaks and Assange, but also despised him for his manner, his ego and his ability to play one media organisation against another to achieve his own aims and outcomes.

Assange has penned for the New York Times a savage review of a book called “The New Digital Age” written by Google executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt and head of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen in which he accuses Google of going from “an expression of independent Californian graduate student culture” to having “thrown its lot in with traditional Washington power elements, from the State Department to the National Security Agency”.

The article reveals Assange to be a gifted writer, highly articulate and persuasive. He would make an excellent analytical journalist.

Assange accuses Google of acting like an imperialist power, enforcing its digital views on life and business on the world, whether they want it or not. Google, according to Assange, has become a political animal with sinister overtones.

Google’s world vision, he says “heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism” – the antithesis of the goals of WikiLeaks, which are a more transparent government but with the privacy of its citizens safeguarded.

It is hard to distinguish between WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

Though there is a team of people behind WikiLeaks from donors to programmers to activists, Assange is its driving force, its voice and spokesperson.

Fowler’s book reveals Assange to be a difficult person to work with; starting out as a charmer and drawing like-minded people to his noble pursuit of truth like German technology activist Daniel Domscheit Berg and Icelandic politician and activist Birgitta Jónsdóttir and then putting them offsides by unpredictable and secretive behaviour, a hidden agenda and making decisions without consulting with them.

WikiLeaks is the Julian Assange show.

Holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London , Assange recently gave an interview to Sydney University politics professor John Keane for The Conversation academic website.

Keane’s interview is more sycophantic then Fowler’s book, but we do get a glimpse of a man who while complaining of the boredom of his “cell” clearly revels in his role as spokesperson for “truth” and appears likeable, still idealistic, but also in the end a realist when it comes to his present situation.

“True democracy is the resistance of people armed with truth against lies,” Assange tells Keane.

In an editorial ahead of the Bradley Manning trial on WikiLeaks, Assange asserts that the dice are already loaded against the soldier, describing it as a “show trial” where “24 prosecution witnesses will give secret testimony in closed session”.

“This is not justice; never could this be justice.” Assange writes.

“Bradley Manning is accused of being a whistleblower, a good man, who cared for others and who followed higher orders. Bradley Manning is effectively accused of conspiracy to commit journalism.”

In the end its does not matter whether you like Julian Assange or not – Fowler’s book lets readers make up their own mind.

What is important are his ideals, which are decidedly noble and good.

“In the end it is not Bradley Manning who is on trial. His trial ended long ago. The defendant now, and for the next 12 weeks, is the United States. A runaway military, whose misdeeds have been laid bare, and a secretive government at war with the public. They sit in the docks. We are called to serve as jurists. We must not turn away,” writes Assange with masterful elegance.

Between the two Ireland’s of McCourt and McCartney, my own proud ‘Oirish’ roots

May 21, 2013May 23, 2013freshlyworded Leave a comment

There can surely be two no more disparate accounts of Ireland than Pete McCarthy’s meandering travelogue ‘McCarthy’s Bar’ and Frank McCourt’s classic memoir of a miserable childhood, ‘Angela’s Ashes’.

I read both books one after the other.

‘Angela’s Ashes’ won Frank McCourt the Pulitzer Prize while ‘McCarthy’s Bar’ won Peter McCarthy – already a successful television host of travel programs – a legion of new fans.

Both made me laugh out loud as I read them on the train into work (as well as feel cringeful, sad and nostalgic).

They made me want to undertake my own Irish adventure, a place I have visited only once.

It was in 1990, when I was just 16 and Germany had won the World Cup (I remember a hand-written sign at Heathrow as we disembarked: Germany 1 – Argentina 0) when my family went there as part of a three-week UK and Ireland holiday.

We visited my Great Aunt Bertha and her husband, my Great Uncle Jack Weingreen, the only relative I know who gets a mention on Wikipedia.

It’s a short entry, but I am proud of it nonetheless:

Professor Jacob Weingreen (c. 1907 – April 11, 1995) was a professor of Hebrew in Trinity College, Dublin – School of religion and theology between 1939 and 1979. He excavated in Samaria and maintained contact with archaeologists who donated pieces to the Weingreen museum which was named after him. Professor Weingreen was the author of the Hebrew grammar textbook that is still recognized as the standard teaching work on the subject.

His wife Bertha, doesn’t get a mention in Wikipedia, but you’ll find information about her to if you look online:

The Holocaust Education Trust of Ireland writes:

Bertha came from South Africa where she taught English and Drama at a training college for ‘coloured’ teachers. In 1945, Jack and Bertha joined the Jewish Relief Unit which cared for the remnants of European Jewry who had survived the Nazi concentration camps. Bertha was Chief Welfare Officer responsible for all Jewish DPs (Displaced Persons) in the British Zone, and was stationed at the former military barracks at Bergen-Belsen.

This is a picture of them taken presumably just after the war. (They returned to Dublin in 1947)

Reading Angela’s Ashes and McCarthy’s Bar, stirred up memories of our family visit to Ireland to see Jack and Bertha, when both were in their eighties and in the twilight years of their lives.

Ireland felt poor in 1990, but not as poor as it did for Frank McCourt.

Most of Angela’s Ashes (published 1996) is set in the poorest backwater lanes of Limerick, where the McCourt family lived in a squalid two-storey hovel in the 1940s. In winter, the ground floor would flood, so the family lived upstairs, which they called ‘Italy’ with a fireplace that kept them warm, surviving on fried bread and tea.

In ‘McCarthy’s Bar’ (published in 2000) Pete McCarthy journeys around Ireland in a beat-up blue Volvo he nicknames ‘The Tank’ observing the eighth rule of travel: ‘Never pass a bar that has your name on it’ while he ponders his identity (over a Guinness). With an Irish mother but an English father and memories of family holidays in Drimoleague, in county Cork, he tries to understand his strong sense of Irishness and whether he claim membership of the Irish race.

I also felt, growing up, that I could claim some part of Ireland for myself and recall often wearing a T-shirt with words emblazoned in emerald-green on the front: “I have Irish roots”, the letters decorated with leaves and roots and somewhere, I imagine, a four-leaf clover.

I loved telling anyone who would listen, that my Great Uncle Jack Weingreen wrote the definitive text-book on Hebrew Grammar. In fact, we had a copy of the textbook at home, should anyone question the legitimacy of my claims. Ironically, I was terrible at Hebrew at school, despite five years of conjugations and the implorings of my Israeli hebrew teachers, I can only remember a phrase or two.

In 1946, while Bertha and Jack were helping holocaust survivors rebuild their lives after the horrors of the war, Frank McCourt, aged just 16, was working as a delivery boy at Easons, delivering newspapers and magazines around Limerick. He’d survived a bout of diphtheria that almost claimed his life, an extreme case of conjunctivitis that almost took his eye sight, an alcoholic father who drank what little money they had before disappearing to England, the loss of three siblings and the shame of watching his mother beg for food to keep her children from starving. A few years later he would set sail for America and begin a new life, before writing his memoirs many years later.

When we visited Jack and Bertha at their home in Dublin, they were old, but charming and kind. Jack I remember as an older version of the army photo: a stooped, small, man with a moustache and glasses, always in a tie and tweed jacket who made us soup with kneidelach (dumplings). He smoked a pipe and snorted a lot, which made all of us laugh uncontrollably.

My memories of Bertha are less clear, though I remember large kind eyes.

We slept on the floor of their cluttered house, filled with the things they had accumulated from lives lived to the full. They had a long, rambling garden, grown wild and unruly. It had once, according to my grandmother Nella (Bertha’s sister) been a stunning, colourful garden that had won prizes and been featured in magazines.

We visited Trinity college with Uncle Jack, who proudly showed us round his alma mater and I remember eating a distinctly awful and drap lunch in a gloomy cafeteria.

In 1990 Ireland felt poor. The emergence of the “Celtic” tiger economy of Pete McCarthy’s travelogue (where Singapore noodles cost more than “in a Chinese shop off Leicester Square”) was five years away. I remember we visiting a friend of my mother’s, who lived in a very rundown house with bicycles and other things scattered in an overgrown backyard.

There are, it turns out, a lot of bars in Ireland called ‘McCarthy’s Bar’ and Pete McCarthy duly spends much of the book in pubs all across Ireland drinking Guinness and whiskey with the locals (some of whom are German and English expats) often accompanied by a toasted ham and cheese sandwich, reading excerpts from a 19th century travel journal – Irish Sketches – by William Makepeace Thackeray and pondering his identity with long-lost friends and relatives, drunks, bar tenders and tourists.

He travels through Ireland describing mountains of “biblical ruggedness” where bearded men “play harps”, remote islands reached by rickety cable cars, fields of green divided by stone walls where farm animals graze. He visits ancient standing stones and ruined medieval churches and abbeys, uncovers the tourist trappings in overpriced Killarney bed and breakfasts, shares a pint with Jimi Hendrix’s semi-retired bass guitarist Noel Redding, but doesn’t run into U2 guitarist ‘The Edge in Cong.

Finally he finds himself after countless adventures and misadventures in Lough Dergh in County Donegal, where he undertakes the 1,000 year old Christian pilgrimage, a three-day marathon of praying, walking, fasting and circling.

My own family Irish adventure culminated in an “Oirish” castle, where we stayed for a few days courtesy of a ‘Timeshare’ swap and which would have amused Pete McCarthy. It had an indoor swimming pool and the towers and crenallations of a castle, but that is all I remember.

It is the kind of holiday Frank McCourt could only have dreamed of. For the McCourt’s Christmas meant Frank going out with his brother Malachy in their threadbare clothes in the freezing Irish winter to hunt for coal discarded on the road so they could have enough fuel to start a fire and enjoy a Christmas dinner of boiled pig’s head and floury potatoes and tea.

My Great Uncle Jack and Aunt Bertha played an active role in Irish academic life and Dublin’s small jewish community for almost fifty years. Jack died in 1995 and Berth in 1999.

Our family holiday is my only memories of them.

Frank McCourt and Pete McCarthy have also both departed, both sadly from cancer. Peter McCarthy died in 2004, aged just 53 and Frank McCourt at 78 in 2008.

Their paths crossed briefly in 1998, while Frank McCourt was touring the world to promote Angela’s Ashes and while Pete McCarthy was travelling around Ireland in his blue Volvo on his own personal pilgrimage of identity.

It was a chance meeting.

McCarthy gave a ride to a Canadian hitch-hiker who said she was going to Castlebar in County Mayo to a “library to listen to a writer”. It turned out to be Frank McCourt.

McCarthy describes Frank McCourt as wearing s a blue jacket, red shirt and looking much younger than his sixty-nine years. He plucks up the courage to ask McCourt a question.

“Where do you feel you belong?” McCarthy asks.

“New York” Frank McCourt replies.

But before McCarthy can ask him if its possible to “truly belong in a land where you’ve never actually live” the talk is over.

Later, while Peter McCarthy is eating a very good and cheap meal of Singaporean noodles (the bill comes to a reasonable £12), Frank McCourt walks past the window.

A dream within a dream: a return to an appreciation of poetry

April 25, 2013April 26, 2013freshlyworded Leave a comment

I’ve rediscovered the pleasure of poetry.

So this is how it happened.

A couple of nights ago, I was in bed. My wife was perusing a book on child rearing and I was lying back with my head on my pillow.

There’s a stack of books on my side of the bed – from a shipment I had in storage in South Africa and only recently unpacked.

I picked up a handful of books from the floor and rummaged through them.

I came across: “The Penguin Book of American Verse” edited by Geoffrey Moore, a book from my days studying English literature at the University of the Witwatersrand (or ‘Wits’ as it more commonly known back home).

And I found myself skimming through, reading a few lines from poems here and there.

Some I remembered from my uni poetry courses: the wonderfully cynical “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost and the inventive and disturbing poem about war “My sweet old etcetera” by E.E. Cummings.

And then I come across a poem by Edgar Allen Poe ( who is best known for his short stories of horror and the macabre) called “A Dream within a Dream” and I found myself reading it and re-reading it and later reading it to my wife aloud.

In my mind, the poem is about the loss of memory as we grow old so that we question what is real and what is not, what we actually experienced and what perhaps we only imagined or dreamed so that our past may feel very much like “a dream within a dream”.

It made me think about those things we forgot as time passes and our faculties decline – people, places, things that happened to us in childhood or adolescence.

It also made me think of those moments when a memory, buried deep in our subconsciousness awakens, triggered by some random present day event and we find ourselves saying things like:

“I complete forgot about him or her. What happened to them?”

Given that this poem was published in the year of Poe’s death (1849) when he may have been contemplating the days forgotten from his past, it has for me added poignancy.

Enjoy this haunting 24 line poem – it’s short, so give it a try.

(I have reproduced without the kind permission of the long-deceased Mr Poe. I hope he does not mind.)

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe (1809 to 1849)

“Innocent Blood” by P.D. James: a perfectly-told tale of revenge and redemption

April 18, 2013freshlyworded Leave a comment

“Innocent Blood” is a London crime novel by the grand dame of British detective fiction Phyllis Dorothy James, or as she is better known, P.D. James.

The words on the back cover of my paperback edition (picked up in a second-hand bookshop in Alexandra, New Zealand) says it could be read “as a mainstream novel and a considerable one”.

“As a crime novel it is a peak of the art,” the back cover goes on to say, a little awkwardly.

This is high praise, but it is richly deserved, because this is a fine book, demonstrating P.D. James’s complete command of the English language and why she has rightly been called the ‘Charles Dickens’ of crime fiction.

The plot of “Innocent Blood” is quite simple, yet unconventional for a crime novel since both the murderer and the ‘murderer-to-be’ are known to the reader early on and instead of being mysteries that must be solved, are devices to explore the lives and motivations of the two key characters.

And yet there are still some very surprising twists and an unexpected ending.

The rape and murder of a child 10 years ago brings the two lead characters together.

First there is Philippa Palfry, adopted at a young age by upper class academic Maurice Palfry, who finds out, after she turns 18, who her real mother is – a child murderer called Mary Ducton

Mary Ducton is soon to be released from prison after serving a 10 year sentence for the murder.

Philippa is an intelligent, somewhat cunning and striking looking young woman with golden hair and high cheek bones, who has aspirations to be a writer.

She is determined to know her real mother – her only true family – even after she finds out the truth of her awful past.

Rather than have a holiday in Europe before beginning her studies at Cambridge, as had been her original plan, she finds a short-let flat in London to live with her mother for a few months so they can get acquainted.

Then there is the story of Norman Scase, father of the child murdered by Mary Ducton. He is a plain, small. methodical man, who has lived an unremarkable life as a bookkeeper. He quits his job once he knows that Mary Ducton is to be released from prison in order to fulfil a promise made to his dying wife that he will kill the woman who murdered their daughter.

The novel explores Philippa’s relationship with her mother as well as her ties to her adopted father and his unhappy second wife. It follows Norman Scase as he carefully and with a steely resolve, plans the murder of Mary Ducton, while also delving into his unhappy childhood as an “ugly” child in Brighton.

The action takes place over about two months in London in the summer.

P.D. James is an unusual crime writer in the sense that while the plot-lines are very strong, she takes detours in the storytelling to focus on small details such as a minor character’s motivation and past history and rich descriptions of buildings and places: the London underground clogged with people, a bad meal eaten by Philippa in a restaurant on Edgeware Road.

In this way she creates a living, breathing world that the reader can disappear into.

The writing is meticulous, beautifully crafted and rich in detail.

A short extract demonstrates P.D. James ability to describe a scene and unsettle the reader.

One day, by accident, before Norman Scase has exacted his revenge on Mary Ducton, he comes across Philippa and her mother, “the murderess” while taking a blind woman he has met to the park:

“It was then that Philippa saw the man. He had come up the sloping path from the lake, a small, spectacled, grey-haired man… His glance fell on her, their eyes met and instinctively, and out of the lazy pleasure of the moment, she smiled at him. The result was extraordinary. He stood transfixed, eyes widened, in what seemed a second of incredulous terror. Then he turned abruptly away…Philippa laughed aloud. He was a plain, ordinary man, not repulsive and surely not so plain that no woman before had ever spontaneously smiled at him.

The novel is awash with these beautifully observed moments. Journeys on the London Underground. The tourist crowds at Oxford Circus. The stalls at a London market opening in the morning.

I have read a number of interviews with P.D. James, and in them she emphasises the importance of a good plot and story. Often, she says, working out the plot of her novels will take longer than writing them. She also says that she always writes with the reader in mind and so does not wish to disappoint.

And she certainly does not with “Innocent Blood”.

The book, published in 1980 was a huge commercial success and made her a wealthy woman.

She later received a peerage in the House of Lords and became known by the imposing title of the Baroness James of Holland Park.

She has won over a dozen literary awards for her crime fiction, most of which is in the traditional style of the detective novel (her protagonist is an unorthodox detective called Adam Dagleish) and many of her books have been adapted for television – though not Innocent Blood – it would make an exceptional movie.

Despite the success, wealth and title she has obtained, P.D. James reveal herself to be a delightfully down-to-earth women who in one newspaper interview professed her love of discovering things and learning new facts.

She once told a journalist she re-read a book of hers before a lecture (she does not normally re-read her books) only to discover, to her amusement, the murderer wasn’t whom she thought it would be.

If you are looking for an unconventional, exceptionally good crime novel, then “Innocent Blood” should be top of your pile.

“Chin, chin Monty”: remembering “Withnail and I” star Richard Griffiths

March 31, 2013April 1, 2013freshlyworded 4 Comments

“My boys” – Richard Griffiths (left) as “Uncle Monty” with “Withnail” (Richard E. Grant) and “I” (Paul McGann) in “Withnail and I”

“Monty you terrible c-nt. what are you doing prowling round in the middle of the f-cking night?”

So says “Withnail” (Richard E. Grant) upon discovering his rotund, gay, impeccably posh “Uncle Monty” (Richard Griffiths) is the prowler he and “I” (Paul McGann) are so terrified of as they huddle in a room in their freezing cottage in the English countryside.

For me and I imagine for many of his fans, Richard Griffiths, the English actor who so sadly passed away this weekend will always be remembered as “Uncle Monty” in the cult 1986 comedy “Withnail and I” directed by Bruce Robinson.

For others, he will be remembered as uncle Vernon Dursley in the Harry Potter films or as the eccentric, but groping and doomed school teacher in the Alan Bennett play, The History Boys.

Living in London at the time, I was fortunate to score free tickets to see the very first performance of The History Boys in 2004 and Richard Griffiths in the lead role.

He was wonderful, and there certainly was an Uncle Monty-like dimension to his character, that of a gay man who can’t hold back his proclivities – (though Uncle Monty preferred tweed and tailored suits and would never have been seen in Hector’s riding-gear leathers.)

The obituaries have been generous and glowing.

Apart from having a short temper, Griffiths is described as lovable, generous, warm and down to earth and someone , who, with out the assistance of good looks or privilege (he grew up in a coal mining town in North Yorkshire and both his parents were deaf) forged a highly successful career as an English character actor who in the words of Guardian writer Lyn Gardner brought “sheer delicacy”to his roles.

All pay tribute to his greatest comic creation, that of Uncle Monty, and so they should.

Upon learning of his death, I pulled out my copy of “With Nails” the film diaries of his “Withnail and I” co-star Richard E. Grant and read what he wrote upon meeting Richard Griffiths for the first time.

Not surprisingly, Griffiths sounds a lot like Uncle Monty; perhaps he was getting into character:

Grant writes:

“Richard Griffiths arrives in the evening, roasted and in agony from too much sun in Tuscany, which doesn’t stop him enjoying five courses, cigs, vino and tales of Thespia. His larger than life avuncularity comes as a great relief for we have been so wound up rehearsing that it was beginning to feel as if we were the only characters in this lark.”

While it would be unfair to say Griffiths had all the best lines in the movie, he certainly got some of the most memorable ones and fans of the movie will no doubt be able to recite many of them verbatim:

Lines like (while discussing the growing of vegetables):

“I happen to think the cauliflower more beautiful than the rose”

…which then turns into a hilarious phallic joke when Monty professes his love of a certain root vegetable:

“There is you’ll agree a certain je ne ses quoi oh so very special about a firm young carrot.”

My favourite line is probably, this tender-hearted utterance, when explaining why he can never touch uncooked meat:

“As a youth, I used to weep in butcher shops.”

Griffiths played Uncle Monty with sheer brilliance, portraying him as an eccentric, lonesome gay man with Thespian aspirations to “tread the boards” and fond of delivering soliloquys about his boyhood “friend” Wrigglesworth,with whom he would ride off into the countryside and when night fell,”find some old barn and fall asleep with the sweet perfume of hay on our lips” and “the sounds of nature sighing by our side”.

While “Withnail and I” is a comedy, it is very much a melancholic comedy, with Griffiths as the love-sore, randy and lonesome Uncle Monty, who will “never play the Dane (Hamlet)”.

For those who have not seen it, it’s the story about two out of work actors – “Withnail” (Richard E. Grant) and “I” (Paul McGann) living in London at the end of the 1960s who go on holiday “by mistake” courtesy of Uncle Monty’s cottage in the countryside to escape the misery and cold of their Camden Town flat.

The holiday quickly unravels, filled with misadventure, randy bulls, English tea rooms, copious amounts of alcohol, and a procession of bizarre characters (some even more eccentric than Uncle Monty).

Neither “Withnail” nor “I” expect Uncle Monty to pay them a visit and pursue the horror-filled “I” with a buggery-induced belligerence that culminates in those hilarious, lines delivered by Griffiths (and quoted in almost every obituary I have read of him):