As long as they don't use monkeys

Reviewing books, there's a thankless task, no-one will like you for it. Authors will usually clench up and get all defensive, brooding and tending grudges in perpetuity. It's a small world, and most book reviewers are also authors, who usually only do it because they need the money. They really need the money. So they get dirty and the rest of us stay clean. Because we need someone to do it for us, as we can't always rely on word of mouth.

Our friends can't always do it for us. Often as not they have different tastes in books, or may not like books at all. They do incomprehensible things like riding horses or watching telly or surfing or getting married or playing video games. There's a line in a Turin Brakes song: '...my friends are all junkies / but they're still my friends...' It's like that. That saying: 'you can choose your friends but not your enemies': nonsense, it's much more the other way about. And why would you want to choose your friends, anyway? Might as well presume to choose your parents. Your friends happen and they happen to you and you think about them and sometimes you worry about them and you look forward to seeing them and you're happy when you do, usually, and that's how it is. Isn't it?

How did I get onto this subject? Book reviews. Thought I'd something more to say about that before I got distracted, but perhaps not.

I'm blaming Andrex

In office discourse one encounters an awful lot of cliches, which can be sectoral, or shared in common with many other workplaces of like character. This use of metaphor and similie seeks to ease the passage of the banal, but is as much likely to be a means of expressing belonging and accordance with one's fellow creatures in the burrow.

My own organisation has practically colonised use of the phrase 'Going Forward' (to describe activity taking place from a point somewhere around nowish to some time in the future). That term originated, in this incarnation, in football (or soccerball, or whatever you want to call it), to describe either the movement of the team in possession of the ball towards or into the opposing team's half of the field, or more specifically that of a player normally in a defensive position taking on a role that sees him moving beyond that position to some effect. Alien terms such as 'ballparks' and 'plates' (for 'stepping up to') occasionally creep in and are hereabouts considered vulgar among the sensitive - however this being an office there is a mix of both vulgar and sensitive and the former predominate.

The most distressing aspect of these cliches is that, like any language one is ambiently exposed to, there's such a temptation to use them. Best to invent your own, but after a lengthy afternoon of doing little but try the best I can manage is 'Squeezing the Puppy'. This refers generically to those actions or utterances that are difficult to resist but damaging when permitted: all the examples of this that come to mind are offensive so I shan't give them here. The term originates of course in the sensation of holding or supporting a puppy in one's ungloved hands.

This not to say that I'm in the habit of squeezing puppies. Anyone who has ever held a puppy in their bare hands will agree that ethically the squeezing thing is a high contrast, monochromatic concept. It is not morally nourishing. Sensual urges are one thing, squeezed puppies another. A young dog, cute, defenceless, possessed of large trusting eyes, downy fur and an unreliable bladder, may invite some excess of pressure between the palms, but go too far and the puppy stays squoze and and cannot be unsqueezed. It swiftly loses some of its functionality as a puppy, and ain't half as tempting to squeeze on future occasions.

Far better to squeeze all one's puppies figuratively, for instance by [deleted as offensive], or [that as well]. I don't think it will catch on as a cliche, nor, I hope, as a practice.

I love the smell of red Reuters screens in the morning

You know how sometimes you walk into a room and realise you've forgotten what you came in there for? And you think if you go back into the previous room you'll somehow remember, but usually you don't.

I think it's like that on the internet, and then you hit the back button on your browser and you can't see anything on the previous page that reminds you but you've lost everything you've typed in the process.

And this happens more often than it used to, back in real life. You wonder how many really good, or fun, or useful ideas you had that got forgotten between the bathroom and the kitchen and never came back.

Unless you somehow remember them when things have changed and you're too old and it's too late.

When you eat no-one else does But you always wonder why

One of my colleagues has taken to bringing in soup. He makes it himself, which is all terribly laudable, etc. But sometimes I'm just not out of the door quickly enough when I hear the microwave oven bell ping.

It's that great menu oxymoron, The Delicious Vegetarian Alternative. In trying to make an interesting dish out of ingredients that are all flora and no fauna, desperate measures have been resorted to. Odd and ill-advised combinations of spices have been applied. The resulting concoction suggests to the nose nothing like that which is to be eaten and very much akin to something that has already been eaten and wisely and swiftly rejected by the stomach of its consumer. Let me state this plainly. It smells like last night's vomit, captured in a bowl on egress and reheated on full power for 90 seconds.

(Title: Kirsty MacColl - Innocence)

'If it wasn't spring this would be just dandy. But - not bad anyway.'

"On this Sunday morning in May, this girl who later was to be the cause of a sensation in New York awoke much too early for her night before."

There's a point in 'BUtterfield 8', in fact the instant it's clear that Gloria will be boarding that boat, it's obvious what's going to happen. It doesn't have to happen, does it? But it's so horribly inevitable, not just for the story but the convention of all these stories. By accident and judgemental fate or by their own hand (penance) or another's.

It's not just the punitive element, perhaps something worse, that this always has to happen for the story to end.

John O'Hara seemed to me inconsistent in tone and prone to tangent, but I liked that, could relate. Flaws are good. I thought that he might be different.

I wonder how it works in the film.

People I worry about

Every relative, including those I don't like. Any of the colleagues I care about and several I like to think I don't. Blind people seen from the other side of the street. The Iranian guy at St Mary's. Someone with more luggage than they can comfortably handle. The girl in the donkey jacket and 101 Dalmatians pyjamas on the Piccadilly line last night. Celebrities gradually killing themselves. Anyone I've slept with. Those doing military service. Persons having difficulty breathing.

Victoria - Bow Church

On the bus earlier, flash memory of childhood as it took the sharp turn from Piccadilly into Stratton Street. It was the view from the front window that did it, reminding me of the illusion I enjoyed as a kid, sitting at the front of the bus but lower in my seat then than now, the cars coming in the other direction seeming to disappear beneath vehicle. I used to think: 'We're eating up the cars'. Of course now it was people, the 8s pulling left always take a few by surprise and now that I'm older I'm very slightly holding my breath and hoping no-one will go under, though they never do. It's as irrational as an infant thought.

.

A piece on the radio yesterday about the Bethnal Green tube station disaster. Reminded me of something I was told by an old bloke from Bermondsey, a colleague working past pension age. He said where he lived people weren't so bothered about the air raid siren and noise of planes overhead as they were about the anti-aircraft fire. Regardless of whether they hit anything, the artillery shells would fall back to earth as hot heavy shards of metal, capable of causing anything from injury to death. He said something like: 'You didn't want to get caught out in it!', as if it were a shower of rain.

Then much later I read a piece in the New Yorker archive, written by their correspondent in London during the Blitz. I think most of the columns were about shortages of dress material, but this one mentioned the Bethnal Green incident and ascribed the panic to fear of falling shell fragments.


No mention of the flak in yesterday's news item, but perhaps it's been forgotten.