Chimp and wolf

So Me Cheeta has garnered most of the Booker longlist headlines, which I think is no bad thing. The prize has shown an increasing commercial nous since Ion Trewin took over as administrator; throwing a curve ball like this into the mix in order to make people who usually wouldn't give a rat's ass about literature notice is just good PR. Like Child 44 last year, Me Cheeta has no chance of winning, or even getting on to the short list, but it has generated so much extra coverage (if only because sub-editors could write headlines like 'Chimp can be Booker top banana').

I have not read all the books on the list, but I would be surprised if any are better than Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. It is simply one of the best books I have read in quite some time, a wholly realised depiction of the Tudor court, focusing on Thomas Cromwell and his rise to power. I read it quite quickly, the re-read it two times in a row, because I just did not want to leave it.

Many historians seem to portray Cromwell - the man who paved the way for the break with Rome in order for Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn to marry - as corrupt or utterly ruthless. In literature, of course, he is the baddie who hounds Thomas More to his death in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. Mantel goes some way to rescuing Cromwell reputation. Her Cromwell is brilliant and utterly compelling; a brewer's son (his low birth is often remarked upon by nobles), linguist, warrior, statesman, lawyer who is "at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury." Cromwell's humour contrasts with More's priggishness, hypocrisy and fundamentalism.

Death haunts this book. There is the fragility of simple daily life of the early modern period (Cromwell's wife and daughter are carried away in a day by the plague-like "sweating sickness") and the brutal, dangerous realpolitik at that fat bully-boy Henry VIII's court, where the axe or the stake were the end for so many. There is a poignancy that we know the main character will eventually go the way of More.

But Mantel's greatest achievement is to make an era which has been gone over time and again seem fresh and new. She has obviously done her research, but she wears it lightly, perhaps helped by her use of modernish dialogue.

East ender

I've crossed Old Man Thames by foiling the border guards at Tower Bridge and have moved into my new flat in Shoreditch, East London. "Trendy Shoreditch" I say to everyone as if that was the full name, though I'm not sure if the trendiest have moved further afield to Dalston, London Fields or somewhere else. Still, there is an abundance of directional hair cuts, tragically hip clothes and 2kool4skool fashion victims who have obviously not seen Nathan Barley.

Yes, many of the folk are walking clichés, but I love living here, I must admit. There is art and creativity everywhere, some of it having been spray painted on my building in the week or so since I have moved in:




But in just this week, I have fallen in with a group of filmmakers (your ExPat's first long dormant love is filmmaking), have been introduced to a new writers' group and, well, drank a lot of tequila and ended up falling asleep with sombrero on (it ain't all arty-farty).

Shameless plug

The new Writers' & Artists' Yearbook is out, the essential tome for all publishers, writers and aspiring writers out there. I urge you all to get a copy. Particularly useful this year is the insightful guide to the book trade, beginning on pg 316, by, er, me.

That's it for us, boys

The news today that scientists at the University of Newcastle and NorthEast England Stem Cell Institute have created human sperm in the laboratory will, if anything, lead to much religious and gender-role hand wringing in the press. It had me immediately thinking of a dystopian future where men, redundant of their only true biological purpose, are treated as second-class citizens and subjugated as sex slaves by a repressive matriarchy. Of course, that is one of my long-held fantasies, so fingers crossed.

It did lead to a rather fruity exchange on Radio 4's Today Programme which brought out my adolescent giggling inner-Beavis ("heh, heh, heh... he said sperm"). To be fair, presenter Evan Davis was not exactly taking it all that seriously, either. Asking another scientist whether the Newcastle team had actually created viable sperm, the scientist was unsure. "I've been looking at sperm under the microscope for every day of the last 20 years..." he began. "Well, somebody has to," interrupted Davis.

Seriously, the punditocracy's poring over the issue will be completely justified as it does raise a number of weighty issues. One, which rarely gets addressed, however, is why we need all this reproductive science in the first place. Last time I checked, the world's population was teetering on the unsustainable. Surely, there are enough babies to go around for barren middle class Westerners. Madonna and Angelina's much-derided third world baby shopping sprees are not so sinister after all; maybe it is much more responsible to get a child from Africa that to concoct it in an IVF clinic.

Boom boom

I worked out that Saturday was my 10th of the last 11 Independence Days that I have celebrated outside the the US of A. Or rather not celebrated; some years, particularly when I had to work, the day just passed me by. I did have a BBQ this year with some other ex-pats, a number of them working some vague jobs in the embassy that probably involves spiriting people away to Gitmo in the dead of the night, who kept complaining in their twangy Southern voices how shit living abroad was. Well, Cletus, get your ass back to the States, then.

Being a former East Coast liberal (East Coast former, not liberal former), the holiday wasn't really for me in the way that Christmas isn't really for the adults. As kids enjoy the Yuletide more, the 4th of July is more for guys named Jim Bob who drive pick-ups with gun racks and get misty-eyed belting out the opening words of The Star Spangled Banner.

Still, I did enjoy the Fourth as a kid, because it was the one time of year in fireworks-prohibited Massachusetts when we could readily get our hands on some ordnance. The names of those fireworks still trigger some sort of illicit giddiness, and I can practically smell the cordite: Roman candles, quarter milers, cherry bombs. A favourite was Chinese hoppers, the size of a AAA battery, which shot a jet of flame out of a hole on the side when lit, causing them to spin and bounce merrily. We used to throw them at each other. What larks!

But, ultimately what appealed most was the pure destructive power of the M-80, which was a quarter stick of dynamite. My brother and I used to tape four together and giggle "Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?" whenever we blew something up. We did once attach 20 M80s together, ringing them around Mr Arroyo's abandoned shed. I do remember thinking as we watched the fire department hose down the wreckage of the burning shed a little later from our hiding place in the woods, that maybe, just maybe, a fireworks ban is a good idea.