YouTube - Breathless

A Year Today

It's my wedding anniversary this weekend. A year ago today Sam and I were motoring over the border into Wales with our best suits in cellophane and butterflies in our tummies. It was a lovely weekend. We stayed in a gorgeous country house hotel overlooking the exquisite 10th century church of St Andrews where we were married. This is the view (bathed in sunlight and birdsong) which greeted us when we woke that morning. The guys and myself treated Sam to a rendition of Nick Cave's "Breathless" after the service. See it on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQDMZMjAhG0

Astral Weeks

My towpath travails are being augmented this week by the amazing sixties masterpiece Astral Weeks by Van Morrison. It is a quite indescribable mix of celtic folk, baggy-assed sixties jazz and white soul and it has made the canal bank vibrate beneath my cycle with colour and rhythym this week. We are featuring it on our show, The Classic Albums Podcast this issue, along with Oasis' execrable Definitelly Maybe.

Wordsworth's "Exquisite" Sister

Despite being very happily married I am finding myself falling for another woman. Mercifully she is long dead, but I have been reading the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, the sister and lifelong companion of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth. They are wonderful pieces of writing, less so the Alfoxden Journal of 1798, but the Grasmere Journal, written between 1800 and 1803 when Dorothy was in her early thirties and living with William at Dove Cottage (above, today) are remarkable, an understated poetic joy written by an individual, loveable young woman. What a sad loss that she never married (not that one must marry, but that she never knew the sustenance of reciprocal erotic love). Her favourite word seems to be "soft" but others spoke of her "wild eyes", a living example of Cathy, perhaps.

This sentence is not true.

Wow. Last night I finished Ishiguro's pretty much undisputed masterpiece, The Remains of the Day, which many will know through the excellent film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. It is an exquisite novel with once more, as ever with Ishiguro, a deluded, unreliable narrator in Stevens, an ageing Butler looking back over his life, who lies to himself and in the process lies to the reader. The construction of the novel is excellent, its dialogue diamond hard and honed to crystalline perfection and the gradual dawning of the truth, romantic or political, is absolutely devestating. I have read 5 out of Ishiguro's 6 novels so far (4 this year) and although they are all subtle, high quality works, this is without a shadow of a doubt his finest achievement: a meditation on class, love, free will and dignity that will make you question your own motives and make you make the most of the remains of your day.

Welcome Joe

This is me and my newborn son Joe. He's the most perfect thing I have ever seen.

A Pale View of Hills

I got this for my birthday (35 last week!) and finished it in the wee small hours last night. I love Ishiguro's work. His central idea is that his narrators lie - through their teeth - and do such a good job of it that it is easy to read a story and wonder where the story is. This creepy and compelling book concerns a middle-aged Japanese woman living in England who is ostensibly recovering from the suicide of her daughter. Her memories take her back to the hot summer of 1946 when Japan was recovering from the fallout of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. All the trauma, shell-shock and horror is subsumed into an icy narrative where lies, self-delusion and even hallucination draw a veil over confusing and terrible events. Ishiguro is a brave and original writer and I adored this book.