Ancestral home

Taking a pause from my jaunt to the west of Ireland to blog from a lovely little cafe in Galway city. This is either a brave new world web 3.0 isn't the digital age just grand kind of thing, or very, very sad.

Dr K and I were in Sligo town, the Land of My Fathers and Mothers. A lot of it is very inspiring, all rolling hills punctuated by the odd sweep of a cliff face. We visited Yeats' grave in the dramatic little chapel in Drumcliffe on a misty, wind swept day with flocks of swifts coming out of the steeple, swirling around our heads. And later traditional music in small, dark pubs of an evening. All very Irish Tourist Board approved.

The big disappointment is that apart from the scenery and the town's geared up for tourism, there is a brutal ugliness to the architecture to the west of Ireland. The landscape is scarred by new build McMansions and property developments, all built in the 10-15 years of the economic boom. I understand people have to live somewhere. But why, if you had a wad of cash to spend on a new home (and a lot of these are second homes from Dublin folk), would you pick an area of astonishing natural beauty, and build a home that could be indistinguishable from those in the soulless suburban hellholes of Essex or Bakersfield, CA?

So we've tried to avoid those places, going off the beaten track as much as possible. Dr K is a new driver, not yet passed his driver's test (you can drive in Ireland with a learners if someone else with a license is in the car). He, like many new drivers, follows the road rules to a T. Yesterday, we turned the corner of a back road and found a cow in front of us, blithely chewing its cud. Dr K slowed, applied the handbrake to see if it would move. It was a sort of Mexican stand-off, our car and the cow on an empty stretch of road. When the cow didn't move, he decided to overtake, signalling as he did so. Just so the cow should know.

Swifter, Higher, Stronger....skimpier

I was at the gym yesterday, forced to watch the Olympics because that is what was being shown on all the TVs in front of the cardio machines. It was rowing, a sport the UK - excuse me, 'Team GB' - is good at. So the commentary was insufferable, full of exhortations to yell at the TV screen to urge the coxless fours on. As I was thinking what kind of twit would do that, the pixie with the blond ponytail next to me on the treadmill started screaming 'come on, guys, come on!'

So I was getting fed up and was about to leave when they switched over to the women's beach volleyball. Suddenly I thought, well, perhaps I should take a little while to enjoy this acme of athletic competition, where sporting endeavour bridges the gap between cultures. I did watch for a bit, but ended up being annoyed at the fundamental dishonesty; the announcers were treating it like a normal sport, and not that the only reason it was on was that there were incredibly hot chicks in bikinis falling about in the sand.

The American broadcaster NBC is far worse - this slide show supposedly explains the rules of the game, but is there only to show some incredibly toned backsides. This is utterly gratuitous, yet, somehow when I look at it, the mind doesn't stay focused on the gender politics.

Since nobody cares about 95% of these sports, I want to hear announcers being more forthright about the sordid reasons we watch. Maybe Gabby Logan could say, "Here comes Usain Bolt in tight fitting Lycra - check out that package, ladies" or even "Welcome home, Gary Glitter - just in time for the 'women's' gymnastic finals, exclusively here on the BBC."

The Lace Reader

In a couple of months, I will be flown out to a secure, undisclosed location (OK, Salem, MA), to interview Brunonia Barry, the author of the this tome.

When I got the proof, my heart quailed. The Lace Reader. Doesn't make the pulse race, now does it? My spirits were lowered even further when I read the first page, which contains cryptic instructions for lace reading set down by the main character Towner's great-aunt Eva. I thought I would be subjected to a few hundred pages of How to Make an American Quilt-level guff. But thankfully, it is far more interesting than that.

Lace reading is predicting the future through lace patterns, and all the women in Towner's family can do it (and read minds): Eva, her estranged mother May, her twin sister Lyndley. The novel opens with Towner returning to Salem because Eva has drowned swimming in Salem harbour. The police can't prove anything but it seems not to have been an accident. Malevolently hovering around the periphery is Cal, Lyndley's adoptive father (he didn't adopt Towner, it's complicated). Cal, a former drunk who abused his wife and Lyndley and who may have killed Lyndley, has now turned to God and is the leader of a fundamental Christian cult who call themselves, wait for it, 'Calvinists.'

It is a deeply feminist book. The Calvinists are patriarchal and are played off against Towner's family (including her agoraphobic mother May who runs a home for abused women on an island in the harbour) and the modern day witches in Salem. In less deft hands, it could have been preachy. But Barry handles it with humour, which she manages to combine with page turning suspense, throwing in an ending that I did not see coming (turns out Vader is Luke's dad!).

I'm looking forward to meeting Barry, not least because she calls her blog The Bru-haha.

Edinburgh pics

Just a few shots from my iPhone of my trip to Edinburgh - have I mentioned I have an iPhone? Yes, I believe I have.

There's the Royal Mile hoachin' with tourists. The courtyard at the Pleasance. The view from the bridge at Dean Village near to where I used to live - the Water of Leith, according to the warning sign posted by the council was 'running in full spate.' Finally, that's me sampling a Rollover, advertised as the world's best hotdog. It wasn't.

The 1900 to Kings X

Chugging along back from Edinburgh on the east coast mainline train service - facing the opposite direction from the way the train is going which always makes me feel queasy. National Express's very slow wi-fi means it is taking ages for each page to load (and National Express must use a Swedish server - I was invited to 'Logga in med ditt Google-konto' just now). Might not be a bad thing; I can do useful things like read or write my novel rather than facebooking, watching the Tudors on the BBC iPlayer or, well, blogging.

Haven't yet crossed the border; this part of the trip first hugs the coast, the train skipping along on the top of cliffs and through tiny fishing villages. Then inland a bit, through farmland, with lots of sheep, cattle and the odd bit of wildlife. A flock of crows mobbing a bird of prey catches my interest.

Caught up with friends in Auld Reekie and 'did the festival' as much as I could. Since I have been away for so long I loved every minute of it and was not so fucked off at the air kissing theatre luvvies or embarrassed by the Americans who bark inanities to the locals like 'I'm Scottish, too. One sixteenth, on my mother's side, my great-great grandmother was from Carlisle."

I did see Gordon Brown chatting with Ian Rankin at the book festival. El Gordo is brainy, well read, an intellectual and absolutely screwed. He talks to people as if they are reasonable and as smart as he is. This is noble but misguided. He fielded questions from the crowd and one lady had a very tart comment about the Labour goverment meddling with everything in people's lives. He answered her by talking - for a long while - about the Calvinists in John Knox's Edinburgh. Now there was a group of people who meddled in people's lives! And I was thinking, you just don't get it, do you Gordon? This is not, even in the more cerebral setting of a book festival, what people want to hear their PM talking about.

A sort of homecoming

Shortly after lift off, the plane banks sharply, pinwheeling south to north. The large Glaswegian lassie sitting next to me takes the opportunity of the shift in gravity to lean over and ask me if I want to shag in the toilets. My ears are popping and the air conditioning is blasting. I'm not sure I've heard correctly. I say 'excuse me' and she repeats the question, slurring her words a bit more this time. I politely decline. She nods and smiles then nods off.

I had seen her with her pals, who looked like they had just had a heavy week in Tenerife or Ibizia, outside of security. Near the entrance there was a pile of discarded bottles and cans which people realised they couldn't take through, including a full Fosters. 'Gie's tha can, girls,' she said, downing it in a few greedy gulps. My kind of woman.

Outside Edinburgh airport, it is raining and cold and it feels so refreshing. My journey to Stansted began with getting stuck on the Central line just before Liverpool Street for about 15 sweaty and suffocating minutes.

In central Edinburgh, the festival is in full swing. My friends are talking about how busy town is, but I just smile - it is far less busy than even the most sedate days in the West End. Late at night, I look out of my room at my friend's flat, listening to the cars clumping over the cobblestones, watching the swollen Water of Leith rush by, the river lit by the yellow street lamps. There is only one brewery left inside the city - but you can still smell the malt and hops when the wind is right, like tonight - and it smells like home.

Geeking out

At long last I have fallen in love again. With my brand new iPhone. How did I ever live without this beautiful little device? It's after one on a school night yet I am up downloading stuff. I just installed this app which makes the phone sound like a light saber. It's so cool.

Dasvidania, tovarisch

I have a trump card whenever people start rolling out stories of famous writer spotting: I once saw Alexander Solzhenitsyn playing tennis.

It was the end of the 1980s. Bush Senior was still in the White House, we could fill up our cars for about $1 a gallon. Even though perestroika was breaking out all over Eastern Europe, Solzhenitsyn was still living in exile in a tiny town in the US state of Vermont.

I was at university at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst at the time. One October day, a few of us took the hour or so drive up north to visit a friend in Vermont. Also, frankly, to stock up on beer; Massachusetts had a drinking age of 21, in Vermont it was 18. After meeting the friend, he casually said, ‘Hey want to see Alexander Solzhenitsyn play tennis?’

A question I never thought I would be asked. But apparently the Nobel laureate was a keen player and was regularly seen at the town’s public courts. We duly went to the town centre and sure enough, there was the great man – bearded like a prophet, patrolling the baseline. He couldn’t move too nimbly, but his form was impeccable. Say what you will about the Soviet system, it instilled athletic discipline.

His death has meant that I might go back and try to reappraise his work. We were force fed his books in the high school – because the Commies were, you know, evil. Maybe they aren’t the turgid pieces of anti-Soviet propaganda that I remember them as.

In praise of Clark Rockefeller

I've been watching with some interest the case of 'Clark Rockefeller' and his abduction of his child, Reigh Mills 'Snooks' Boss following a court-supervised custody visit last week.

Obviously kidnapping children and lying to your wife about your identity for 12 years is, well, a trifle naughty. But I am fascinated by people who are able to make up their own past. On one level it is so bizarre but on another perfectly logical: don't like who you are? Why not pretend you are a scion of one America's richest oil and bank families?

In a way, it must be oh so liberating, to cast away whatever the accident of birth made you and remake yourself in your own image. I takes a bit of gallus as well, but it must be exhausting. Remembering your stories and keeping them straight must be exhausting (various reports say Rockefeller said he was an economist, physicist, mathematician and 'working top secret for the Pentagon'; police say he had at least 4 aliases).

One of my favourite novelists, Patrick O'Brian, writer of the Aubrey/Maturin stories, reinvented himself. He was born in England as Richard Russ, yet after WWII rid himself of his first wife and a dying spina bifida plagued child, concocting a phony patrician Irish-Catholic lineage, then married Countess Mary Tolstoy. The Maturin character in the books is a spy, and there are a number of passages about how he finds it difficult to constantly lie to everyone. Re-reading these bits with the knowledge of O'Brian's life adds a bit of poignancy.

I wonder how common this is? Obviously in today's retina scanning, ID card culture, it is far more difficult, but Mr Rockefeller shows that it isn't impossible. But how much do you have to hate your life, and yourself, to do it?