LAZY DAYS AND EVEN MORE SUNDAYS

We have, I fear (and even if it was even possible), become even more lazy when it comes to weekends than even I had thought possible. To be honest, before a very late breakfast, I did spend some time reading, and reading an actual book (with paper and everything), which is kind of an unusual occurrence for me nowadays, but that was about as productive as it got.

Oh, we talked about doing a lot of things. We talked about attacking the clutter that’s still claiming more than it’s fair share of the floor-space in the living room, but by Monday morning it remained strangely unmoved. We talked about going through the stacks of accumulated Estate paperwork just to see what we no longer needed, but it remains untouched and gathering that tell-tale film of dust. I glanced out of the window upon a bright, shiny day and thought to myself that the garden might be in need of some attention, but that was all of the attention it got. There was even a vintage fair which we considered heading out to visit, but somehow we never actually made it out of the house.

The mountain of washing up did get done, but mostly because we ran out of clean bowls, and the recycling made the great leap for freedom from the draining board to the outside dustbin which might not appear to be much, but in context it feels like a great achievement.

We did also venture out on Sunday and buy some paint, fully intending to restart the decorating which was interrupted by events last October and which we’ve struggled to resume, but, apart from adding to the growing pile of paint purchases which seldom make it from the can to the wall, and calling in at the supermarket to get the weekly food supplies with which to stuff our couch-potato faces, little else was achieved in the way of actual progress.

On the plus side, last Saturday "Columbo" put away six, count 'em, six murderers during the course of our day, as played by Jackie Cooper, Ray Milland, Rip Torn, Oscar Werner, and a pair of Martin Landaus, so fictional justice from way back in the televisual past was, at the very least, served.

Meanwhile, and because absolutely nobody is asking, I thought I would tell you how the year's rewatch of "The Six Million Dollar Man" is going, not least because I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was going to work my way through at least some of it this year, and, as far as achievements are going, actually doing something that I say I will, even if its as utterly pointless as this, is turning out to feel like a victory of sorts.

Anyway, my viewing marathon staggers along at a couple of episodes a week crammed into the moments alone when it fills the time as a pastime which is far too excruciating to share, but I don't think that I'll get much further than season three (even though I fully expect my "completist" gene to kick in once I reach the end of the season) because, to be perfectly honest, I had started to find it all rather monotonous and predictable at about the halfway point of season two and only staggered through that because of the prospect of getting to the “Bionic Woman” episodes.

Incidentally, those episodes turned out to be far, far duller than I remembered from childhood and, horror of horrors, also turned out to involve Lee Majors actually singing. Well, sort of. God alone knows what the Bionic Woman actually saw in him, but if I were Steve Austin, I’d’ve been asking whether I could have some bionic replacement vocal chords installed if I was going to get up to that sort of caterwauling…

Meanwhile, Richard Anderson's mournful silences as he stared off towards the horizon each week in the cough and a spit role of OSI Boss Oscar Goldman, presumably wondering where his credibility and his career went were bad enough, but his plaintive cries of "Steve... Steve!!!" whenever his favourite celebrity agent (who occasionally nobody recognised if the plot demanded it) disobeyed an order, started to make him sound more like a spurned lover than the head of a “Top Secret” organisation about which everyone seemed to know.

Also getting tedious were the many and varied excuses to bring in blonde female characters who were invariably played by Farrah Fawcett-Majors (as was...). These seemed to occur quite regularly, with nobody pointing out the similarity in appearance of the plucky female astronaut to the plucky female TV journalist, but that’s telly for you.

After all if Bionic Doctor Rudy Wells can change his head on a regular basis without anybody commenting upon it, sometimes in the blink of an eye, then you start to get the impression that the makers of the programme thought even less of the viewers that the viewers did themselves.

Mind you, in those “pre-internet” “Pre-VHS” days, people just didn’t watch this kind of telly in the same way that we do now, and weren’t able to nit-pick and dissect every episode as it was actually airing, so maybe nobody noticed. Funnily enough, I appear to have reached the point where I started watching them when I was a kid, because I had very distinct memories of the episode “The Blue Flash” when I got to it, and (although he isn’t in that particular edition) I remember very clear memories of thinking at about that time that Dr Wells had been a different person a few weeks earlier, but, in those “Pre-Google” (other search engines, etc…) days, I had no way of proving it…

And so the rewatch reluctantly plods along more out of obligation than from any pleasure it now is giving. The "light comedy" episodes can be a little bit cringeworthy, but remain slightly interesting when you can spot within them the roots of other "much-loved" seventies shows like "The Dukes of Hazzard" but, in general, those editions are better than the sub-James Bond antics of the cold-war spy tales, or anything involving villainy in the vicinity of car racing, horse racing or boxing.

Actually most series seem to touch upon those particularly tedious areas as plot ideas from time to time, and they're always so dreadful that I've learned by now to switch over immediately a racetrack or gym appears...

Still, Lee Majors seems to be quite good with kids, and experimenting with his facial hair options, and, in terms of mid-seventies adventure hokum, it's passable enough, and as a bit of nostalgia about a hilarious looking era of huge cars, cheap petrol, and villains in loud sports jackets, kipper ties, and greasy combovers, or wearing housecoats to match the décor of their motel room, it really couldn't be beaten.

Of course, I do miss that sort of villain on TV. Nowadays they all look like those shaven-headed, tattooed, leather-jacketed loons that you hope won’t catch your eye in the pub, and, quite frankly, a bit of variety wouldn’t go amiss in the world of villain fashions.

Where are the fluffy white cats and the Nehru jackets…?

Meanwhile, back on “Sixie”, more amusement can be had in spotting the more obvious stuntmen, especially when filmed in “super slo-mo” just in case you hadn’t noticed that they weren’t actually Lee Majors himself, although he presumably got on quite well with “Unknown Stuntmen” given that for his career "The Fall Guy" beckons...

Oh, before I forget… That book that I mentioned I was reading...? (Still… because unfortunately I’m reading far less than I used to…)

That’s "Screen Burn" by Charlie Brooker.

Charlie's a very talented wordsmith. In fact, perhaps he’s rather too talented. His writing is impressive enough to make my own feel so utterly inadequate that I might just feel like stopping doing it altogether for at least six months and trying to teach myself how to write this sort of nonsense properly. Meanwhile, if I continue to read his words, I might just learn how to be far more cutting about the TV shows I'm watching...

READING TIME

Time, I think, to cease all my prattling and go away and do some reading instead. The piles of books about the place in need of reading are starting to get both ridiculous in quantity and neglected and dust covered by the lack of attention being paid to them.

Somehow, I feel, all of this acquiring of more books just really has to stop. I occasionally try to convince myself that I’m not allowed to get another one until I’ve finished one, a kind of “one-for-one deal” if you like, but then I discover that I’m weak and feeble and I put down my coin and pick up yet another volume that I’m really interested in reading, add it to the pile and ignore it, safe in the knowledge that because I now have it, I can read it any time I like, so I don’t actually have to read it now.

Even the essentially trashy options offered by the average supermarket can still suck me in when I spot something that looks a bit “interesting” or that the latest release of a thriller series is just out in paperback and is available at the ridiculously low prices they offer.

But then, even reading an article or venturing into an online “chat room” isn’t safe, as references will be made to books that I haven’t previously heard of and I will go looking for them, add them to my personal “wish list” and then constantly check the price to see if it has dropped enough for me to justify the acquisition of it.

Then I order it anyway.

Fear and loathing of the possibilities of the dreaded “This title is no longer available” or simply, as it used to be called, being “out of print”, can fill me with such a twitching potential horror of having missed the boat and years of trudging pointlessly around book fairs and second-hand shops on the “off-chance” I might spot a copy, that my resistance will simply crumble away to dust.

Well it’s either that or paying over the odds at specialist retailers or the more insidious nastiness of ebay and its fretful bidding wars. Usually, in the past, if I did succumb to such folly, I would spot the very volume I had sought in a charity shop for under a quid within days of paying over the odds, such is the ironic life of the avid collector of specific titles.

Of course, the other way around it is never true. You will never just happen upon the volume you seek before the whole rigmarole of being fleeced has occurred. Oh no! That kind of luck or my discovery of a genuine bargain is about as likely as me deciding that I might like to watch an Olympic event (which I don’t, by the way...), only to discover that someone has randomly posted me the very tickets I needed.

Even the momentary weakness of cracking and putting in an online order is fraught with danger and traps for the unwary. “Helpful” labels along the lines of “People who bought that also bought this” can open up a vast range of previously unheard-of volumes of a similar hue which can get so very easily clicked on and added to either the shopping basket (if I’m feeling outrageously weak) or the “wish list” (if I’m having a moment of being made of sterner stuff).

The difficulty, of course, is actually finding the time to do any actual reading. Now that I seem to have committed myself, for good or ill, to writing these regular outpourings of nonsense, those few moments in which I cracked open the smooth pages of a virgin paperback are reduced for me. This particular bit of nonsense which you are now reading was mostly knocked out (apart from the later judicious editing) in a half hour period at a time on a Monday morning before even the milkman had got up, which used to be the insomniac’s witching hour when I would either get up and read or catch up on the backlog of telly.

Happily, at least, the distractions of telly are far fewer these days and I seem to have actually watched just about everything that was ever worth watching via the medium of the “shiny disc” and nothing new that is being produced looks as if it will entice me back in quite the same way.

Equally, those other moments when I used to wait for the clock to tick around to the “official” start of the working day in which I used to devour both literature and fact-based reading is now spent sitting in traffic and swearing at it under my breath in a creative deluge that might have once made even the most radical of authors blush.

So maybe it really is time to pack away my writing head and blow the dust off my reading head instead...

Now, where should I start...?

THE BEST DARNED THING YOU’VE NEVER READ

The 'finished reading' stacks (part 1)

This is a house of books. They’re everywhere you look, some neatly placed on bookshelves, others piled up in various parts of the place, either waiting to be read or having been read and waiting to find a more suitable home. Perhaps, if the house started to fall down, the books might make a suitable alternative shelter, although the rain would probably ruin them, of course, so I’d never allow that. Maybe it’s the books that are holding the place up? I will take a book down off a shelf later on, if I’m feeling brave enough, and if I’m still here tomorrow, then you’ll know.

I sometimes see the houses of ‘ordinary people’ being interviewed on television and there isn’t a book in sight and it confuses me. Some might ask me how I live with all these books, but I will counter that I don’t understand how anyone can live without them. Other times, I watch shows about how to sell your house and am told that one of the things likely to turn off any potential buyer is having a load of books on display. They scream ‘clutter’, apparently, unless of course they just say that you’re trying to tell the whole world how ‘clever’ you think you are, which is, apparently, just another way to alienate everybody. How me owning books ever became transformed into my attempt to put people down and somehow ‘diminish’ them is a complete mystery to me. Maybe I should look up the reasons, but I haven’t got a book about that. Never-the-less, this modern world can sometimes seem to be turning into a very strange place.

I can see some of them now, all around me, stacked up on pretty much every surface. All those books that I’ve been told I should really read by someone who already has, so I went out and got a copy, and all those other ones I really just fancied reading, bought, and then haven’t quite got around to yet…

Just from here I can see a copy of a book of three Martin Crimp plays I was lent several years ago and which I definitely know I’ve read two of the plays out of. Beneath it is Barack Obama’s “Dreams from my Father” which I’ve definitely already heard on the audiobook CD someone lent us once, which is why I decided to go out and buy my own copy. Underneath that in the pile are two books t’beloved told me that I really should read, “The Lucifer Effect” and “Scenes from a Revolution”, and holding them up is a book I really fancied and ordered off the internet which is about the British Empire and called “Outposts” and beneath that at the bottom of that pile is the Dylan Thomas Omnibus that I blagged off my mother when she’d finished with it after they talked about it in her literature group a few years ago.

And that’s just one pile, a pile in fact that I keep meaning to return to (it stood at the bedside for quite some time before being relocated) if it wasn’t for the fact that every time I think about it, there’s another newer, fresher book that comes along to catch my eye and tempt me. I know for a fact that downstairs “The Book of the Moon” which I bought last week is my latest current reading and I’m just halfway through the first section, whilst Alan Coren’s “69 for 1” is literally on the brink of moving into the ‘finished reading’ stacks, before I make another attempt to carry on (for my third time of trying) with reading the latest volume of Clive James’ “Unreliable Memoirs” which is proving a beast to clamber through the first chapter of. But then, the latest paperback volume of “The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency” series has already been consumed by the beloved and now sits there in the living room just daring me to pick it up, so I’ll probably read that first, and I know the latest Mark Billingham is out in paperback any day now…

Then there are the gift books that are sitting in the Christmas present pile, which has merged with the latest birthday present pile and the selection from the previous Christmas. Lovely, beautiful volumes bought with thought and care and a knowledge of my passion for things historical, scientific or entertainment based and yet which remain unread, and of course there are a certain number of other volumes I’ve acquired for myself over the last couple of years just because my finger was hovering over that oh-so-tempting “One Click Ordering” button that catches my eye during the occasional lonely lunch break which are craving my attention.

What about all the books that I’ve been told about and not yet acquired…? Or all those guide books we bought on holiday…? And the further ones we got when we got back because we’d become interested in all the things we’d been exposed to whilst there…?

And there is a whole stack of reference books I’ve asked for and been given or acquired by other means whenever my latest obsession overtook me. A few years ago I was working on a play about the First World War and bought a stack of books about that, which led to a parallel interest in the Second World War and how it seemed to be an inevitable consequence of the first and so more reading needed to be done. Meanwhile, the anniversary of the moon landings came and went in 2009 and I got hugely interested in all things NASA related which led to a fascination with the planets in general which became a thirst for knowledge of geology and then the whole history of the Earth which transformed into both an interest in the weather and in paleontology and all of these topics have a wide range of reference materials some of which I have acquired just to get a bit of background knowledge and few of which I actually ever seem to get around to actually sitting down and damn well reading!!!

I really should just buy a book, read it, then go and buy another one, but, oh no, now they’re piling up to the point where, if I’m really lucky and manage to keep the heart pumping for another thirty years, there probably wouldn’t be enough time to read the books I’ve already got, not to mention the ones that I’m likely to want to get during that thirty years, especially as there’s still a fair few of those season box sets on shiny disc still wrapped in cellophane and waiting for us to find the 22 or so hours it’ll take to consume each of them, and I haven’t even mentioned the chunky thrillers I bought cheap in the remainder bookstore a couple of years ago…

When I was younger, it didn’t matter. I always felt there’d be plenty of time, I could put a book on the pile knowing that I would probably get around to it one day. “Yours to own forever on video” meant I’d be able to watch my favourite films as many times as I jolly well liked. Now most of them get viewed once because I’ve got a sense of having no time to waste (and there’s always something else to watch anyway), especially as I now want to fit in all the writing of my own words instead of sitting down and reading everyone else’s. But then, when I can never seem to find any actual time to do any reading any more, how can I expect anyone else to either? This does rather negate the point of actually producing them, but I persevere. I think it was John Humphrys who once said that one of the things he’d learnt as he got older was the wisdom to be able to leave a book unfinished if it really wasn’t interesting him enough, and I suppose the rule is true for all other forms of the written word.

There’s a whole megagoogolplex (or something) of words pouring out of us all every day, in newspapers, books, magazines and even little places like this, and nobody has the time to actually sit down and read the blooming things. Maybe if our silicon culture manages not to corrode and corrupt, just a few of all those words will remain for future, wiser generations to pore over and decipher and wonder at what we were all wittering on about. I even read some of my own witterings back to myself the other evening and didn’t find it all to be complete nonsense. Even if I do say it myself, there’s some pretty reasonable stuff in here, some of it that’s barely been glanced at if you look at the numbers, but then that should come as no real shock to me any more. Even so, I quite surprised myself, to be honest, when I discovered that I've been known to talk some sense occasionally. They don’t know what they’re missing out on (he muttered with a kind of ironic half-smile...). This might very well not be the best darned thing they’ve never read, but I’m doing the best I can…

A DICKENS OF A TALE

“A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens is one of my favourite books and is for me possibly one of the finest things ever written in the English language. It is a book that I can constantly return to, and I always find it has something new to say about the human condition each time I do.

I will, however, admit a fondness for the “pre-transformed” version of Scrooge, not because I think he’s a better person beforehand, but just because I can relate to the lonely old devil a bit more when he seems more fallible and more human. It’s a brilliantly well-observed characterisation which has much to say about what it is to be human. It’s very easy for those of us who feel awkward in social situations to get forgotten about of left behind by a world that’s too busy enjoying its own fun, and it becomes quite understandable how that might transform a reasonable young fellow (as young Scrooge undoubtedly is seen to be) into an embittered, cynical loner. The “post-transformation” version, however, seems to be the sort of avuncular enthusiast that I would go out of my way avoid at parties.

If I ever went to parties, that is…

But I suppose to think that is to probably miss the point, and as a tale of redemption and the possibilities of change, it really is hard to think of a story to beat it. As a story it can make me weep buckets and leave me full of joy and hope, sometimes on the very same page, and I genuinely do think it’s a masterpiece. I’m never sure whether the things that move me the most are the ones that resonate with others. I find the scenes where Scrooge abandons his youthful love truly heartbreaking, and a lot of the scenes at old Fezziwigs still bring a lump to the throat, and any number of the beastly visions of the future not-to-be fill me with a raging loathing of the things people do which I suspect was not really the desired effect.

The moments that most move me are of course the ones that most resonate with my own experiences, I suppose, but that’s the beauty of a great work like this. Different things will read in different ways at different times of your life. I read recently that some people believe  that it is the most frightful, horrible figures are often the most sentimental, so maybe I might have to accept the possibility that I am just a horrible person. If that is true, will three Ghosts visit me one night and save me from myself, or am I doomed to a life of misery followed by an eternity of torment? Perhaps that’s what Dickens wanted us to do: examine our own lives through the eyes of Ebenezer Scrooge and wonder if we too could be found to come up short.

In school, the audience was unfortunate enough to suffer my most ham-filled performance of one Jacob Marley in our very own adaptation of the tale, whilst weighed down by a couple of hundredweight of was probably old ship’s chains (no health and safety issues in those days) and so his lines in the book always resonate and seem terribly familiar (“Ask me who I was, Ebenezer…” etc.) and I still feel a lot of empathy for old Marley even today as he only gets to see the folly of his ways when it is too late for him.

My favourite adaptation remains the Patrick Stewart version and every Christmas I do try to find the time to sit down and revel in it (this year, alas there was simply no time or opportunity for this due to my constant need to visit the hospital. My other “traditional” viewings “It’s a Wonderful Life” and The Avengers: “Too Many Christmas Trees” have also sadly had to remain in their sleeves this time around.) although the sequences with “Ding Dong!” Mr. Topper are now a running gag in our household and that particular Tiny Tim does, quite frankly, deserve everything that he ultimately doesn’t get.

On the page, Tiny Tim can seem a tragic figure, but sadly, whenever he’s cast in film productions, they always seem to pick the most annoying little actor they can find, and I usually find the portrayal of him so very nauseating that, in most film versions, I am quite happy to see the back of the little b****r…

I suspect that this is not the Director’s desired intention.

My empathies and sympathies always lie with the family who suffer his loss rather than the loss itself, and Bob Cratchit’s now legendary toast to “the founder of the feast” always, always manages to restore any faith in human nature that later scenes manage to diminish.

Those later scenes, where people gather together and rejoice in the passing of another human being, no matter how loathsome his reputation, really disturb me, which is why I think you can keep the musical “Scrooge”. I am forever appalled by the musical number where those b****rds all dance around and upon the coffin singing “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me” whilst the body of old Ebenezer lurks within. I know it’s for comic effect, but I really do find it all rather distasteful, possibly because, no matter what you may think of them, speaking ill of the dead just seems plain wrong. Maybe I just missed the point there, but then musicals have always been a strangely bewildering form of drama to me.

Ah well, I suppose that it’s just evidence of what a very fine story it is, if it can be adapted into so many forms and remain popular. For me, though, the original book remains the best, and I do try to sit down most years and give it a read. If you never have, or think that it’s just “old hat” or over familiar from all the various versions you have seen, I suggest you give it a whirl, because it is, quite frankly brilliant.


The book pictured is my 1950 edition which is the version I always prefer to read from despite there being other versions around the house. It's now over 60 years old and so I suppose is something of a minor antique, but then, well, aren't we all?