Wednesday 2 March
We're home again, after a month in the Canaries. The idea was to escape the English winter, but we timed it a bit wrong, because we have come home to freezing temperatures and an overnight snowfall. Fortunately there were only two or three inches of snow, and it's melting fast. But it certainly looks as though we should have stayed away for at least another week.
The weather in the Canaries was better, but not as perfect as it's supposed to be. For the first ten days of February there was a northerly wind coming down from Iceland. It was sunny most of the time, and pleasantly warm, but not hot enough for me to want to swim. Then there was a violent storm one night, and we hoped that this would signal a change in the weather. Indeed it did, but not in the way we hoped. Instead, we had the dreaded calima. This is an easterly wind that blows across from the Sahara bringing with it a huge amount of fine sand dust that completely blots out the sun, reduces visibility as though there was a thick mist and does no good at all to those of us with allergies or asthma. It is usually a hot wind, although it can occasionally be cold, and it lasts anywhere from two to ten days. This time it was a cold calima and it lasted three days, followed by another storm. After that, things picked up a bit and I was at last able to swim in the sea (water temperature was 21°C or 70°F, which feels cold but okay provided that it's hot and sunny when you get out of the water).
This was the fifth time that we have been to Gran Canaria, and there's not much new that I can say about it. We had a very restful, lazy time, read plenty of books and (despite the indifferent weather) gained an impressive tan to make our friends back home suitably jealous. I took very few pictures, and I haven't had time to process them yet. When I do, I'll post one or two of them here.
Saturday 5 March
A few random jottings from our month in Gran Canaria:
The little town of Mogán, where we stay, has changed a lot in the two years since we were last there. There is a major new tourist development in the barranco (valley), with a luxury hotel that has just recently opened, and a whole lot more building work still in progress. Unlike the rest of Gran Canaria, which is a concrete jungle of high rise hotels and tourist apartments, Mogán is being developed in a reasonably restrained and imaginative way, and the new buildings if anything improve the place. The beach, which previously consisted of a stretch of black volcanic sand with a stony area beyond, has been totally transformed by importing several thousand cubic metres of sand from the Sahara to form a long, sweeping, golden yellow beach. It will look better in the tourist brochures, and it's certainly more comfortable to walk barefoot on, but it has totally lost its character. I much preferred the beach the way it used to be.
The tourists come from all over Europe – Germans, British, Scandinavians, Irish, Spanish, a few French and Italians (hardly any Americans: I suppose they go to the Caribbean or Hawaii if they want subtropical islands). In previous years the Germans have outnumbered the rest, but this year there were many more British than Germans. It seems that the struggling German economy has hit their tourist trade, while the strong pound has made it much easier for the Brits to enjoy their island in the sun. The second week of February was half term week, and the beach was full of English families with small children, cute young dads busily building sandcastles while the little brats threw sand at each other. (We could never have afforded such half term holidays when our kids were that age. They would have been lucky to get an outing to the playground in the local park.)
I took even fewer photos than I thought I had done. The only ones worth reproducing are those showing the apartment where we stayed. It was right on the waterfront by the fishing harbour (the one with the yellow sunshade just to the left of the little bridge over the canal):
Here is Mary sitting in the garden under the coconut palm, enjoying the hibiscus and bougainvillea flowers:
And here's me in the same position, with a black cat on my knee:
The cat, one of several strays that live in the harbour area, adopted us more or less as soon as we moved in, evidently sensing that Mary has a soft spot for cats. Despite having no owners, the cats were very friendly, domesticated and well behaved. They obviously have the visitors well trained to look after them, and also the local restaurant owners who put out scraps for them each evening. This one expected us to feed her twice a day, and she spent most evenings curled up on Mary's lap.
The car that we rented for the month was a Renault Mégane, surely one of the ugliest cars ever made. It was a diesel model, very easy to drive, extremely economical 
(I didn't have to fill the tank once all month) and surprisingly powerful – it could accelerate uphill from a slow start in third gear without any trouble. But the styling is quite grotesquely unattractive. I should have taken a photo of it to emphasise its obscenely fat rear end, which doesn't show to full effect in this image (taken from a Renault web page). But I suppose it somehow sounds appropriate to be driving a Mégane in Mogán.
There was a time when I would have been appalled at the idea of spending a month by the sea. My idea of a proper holiday involved activity, climbing mountains, exploring, going somewhere new each day. Of course, I still love my annual climbing holiday in Scotland better than anything. But I suppose it's a sign of advancing years that I have also come to appreciate these leisurely holidays in Mogán, with gentle walks in the barrancos and the sand dunes, swimming in the sea and reading on the beach. We both did a lot of reading, and in a future entry I'll review the books that I read.
Monday 7 March
Yesterday we went with a coach party from the University on an outing to Tyneside. The idea was to visit the Baltic contemporary arts centre and to go to a recital at the Sage concert hall. For Mary and me, the trip was quite nostalgic, taking us back to the city where we lived when we were first married. Tyneside has changed beyond all recognition since then. In the 1960s the river banks were lined with derelict warehouses. Newcastle, on the northern bank of the Tyne, was rundown and seedy, and Gateshead, across the river to the south, was even more of an eyesore. Now, the old commercial buildings are all gone or renovated, there are riverside parks and walkways, and as well as the Baltic and Sage centres there is the spectacular "winking eye" Millennium footbridge.
Our first stop was a very quick tour of the Baltic (an old flour mill converted into a modern art gallery). Neither of us has much enthusiasm for most of what passes as modern art, and we passed rapidly by a succession of "installations" which looked as though they had been tipped there by the refuse collection department. "Are we just complete philistines?" asked Mary as we sneered at a painting that looked like something a toddler might have scribbled on the wall. "That one looks like a picture of SpongeBob SquarePants," she commented about the next picture. "I think you just answered your own question, dear," I told her.
After lunch in the Baltic's cafe we walked over the Millennium bridge, enjoying the views up the river on a cold but bright sunny day and admiring the novel tilting mechanism that lifts the bridge for ships to pass under. Then we crossed back to the Gateshead side of the river and over to the Sage centre for the concert. This was a recital of Beethoven and Tippett quartets by the Lindsay quartet, one of their last concerts before they retire. I have CDs of the Lindsays playing all of the Beethoven quartets, and I'm sorry that they won't be performing any more. They are one of the top string quartets in the world, and their playing yesterday was as good as ever, with no sign that they are in any way past it. I guess they just want to quit while they're still ahead.
The Millennium bridge seen from the Gateshead side.
The Millennium bridge seen from the Newcastle side, with the Baltic centre framed in its arch. The ugly posts in the river mark the shipping lane, for use when the bridge is raised.
A view down into the well containing the pistons that operate the bridge's tilting mechanism.
The Sage centre seen from across the river. Under the building's sluglike outer skin are two separate concert halls with a large rehearsal room between them.
The view upriver from the top of the Baltic centre. The roof of the Sage centre echoes the curve of the Tyne bridge to its right. In the lower right corner you can see one of the hinges of the Millennium bridge. (The bright spot is a reflection of the camera's flash, which I haven't yet learned how to disable, from the window of the viewing area.)
Monday 14 March
I'm running behind with my journal entries (too many other things to do since we came home from Gran Canaria). I wanted to comment about a few things that happened in February, while we were away.
- The only English paper available where we were staying was the Daily Mail, a wretched right-wing rag with a sour and negative attitude towards everything it reports, most of which is "celebrity" gossip rather than actual news. It's a sobering thought that this dismal tabloid sells well over 2 million copies every day. On the day when the royal wedding was announced, the Mail devoted its first 21 pages to Charles and Camilla. Typical of its coverage was a banner headline across pages 2 and 3: "They must atone for all their sins." That made me laugh out loud. The most important news item during February was that Arthur Miller died. Ignoring the fact that Miller was the greatest playwright since (who? Ibsen? Chekhov? Shakespeare?), the Mail declared that his plays would soon be forgotten and that he would only be remembered for his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. I guess Miller's politics were too left-wing for the Mail to want him to be remembered. In the Mail's defence, I should add that it has a good section of crosswords, puzzles and cartoons, which helped us to while away the evenings in our apartment (where the only TV channels were from a German satellite).
- While we were away, the saga of our lost luggage came to a happy conclusion. (For the backstory, take a look here.) In January, American Airlines paid partial compensation for the delay to our luggage when we travelled to Honolulu, and I wrote to our travel insurance company asking for a further payment. Our original claim was for £267.75, of which American Airlines refunded £128.04, leaving a balance of £139.71. Our travel insurance policy has a limit of £100 for delayed baggage, and also requires that claims should be lodged within one month of the incident. Since I was applying nearly a year after the event, I wasn't really expecting anything from them, and in any case I only asked for their maximum amount of £100. But a few days after we left for Gran Canaria, a cheque arrived from the insurers for the full amount of £139.71. It's not as though this is a big enough sum to make a noticeable difference to our bank balance, but it made me really pleased that somewhere in the business world there are people who are prepared to be just a little bit generous. So here is a gratuitous, and grateful, plug for Crispin Speers, insurance brokers.
- Our holiday, and the time since our return, has been clouded by the serious illness of my good online friend Tim. Tim is the most remarkable person I have ever come across through the internet (or indeed in real life), as well as being one of the kindest and most caring people I know. While he was still a teenager he ran an IRC chatline #Gayteen as a resource for gay teenagers. He had an impressive academic record, getting a PhD in two years at the same time as holding down a demanding full time job. He was promoted to a senior position working for a policy institute in Washington DC (if you read about any kind of diplomatic progress anywhere in the middle east, you can be sure that the foundation for it is largely due to Tim's work). But he has had much more than his fair share of hardship. His father died when he was a teenager, and his mother a few years later. He has had to cope with diabetes and an aggressive form of MS. In January, he slipped and fell while getting out of a shower and was taken to hospital with a hairline skull fracture and injuries to his shoulder and wrist. While there he picked up a drug-resistant infection that left him with a very high fever and in a coma for about ten days. For a while it seemed that he might be brain-damaged. Since then he has begun to make a very slow recovery. His memory is gradually returning, but it looks as though he will be in hospital for a lot longer yet. His husband Rick has been looking after him and posting entries in Tim's journal, to keep his many friends updated on his condition. If I was a religious person I would be praying for both of them. As it is, they are very much in my thoughts, and I'm longing for the day when Tim is back in action again.
- I still mean to review the books that I read while on holiday. That will have to wait for another entry.
Monday 21 March
I had to mow the lawn today, for the first time this year. That's a sure sign that spring has officially arrived. I also had to lift a couple of inspection covers and clear a blocked drain, but you don't want to hear any more about that.
Apart from that, I have spent the past few days replacing one of the dining room doors. When the house was first built, this would have been a window, or perhaps a french door. The people who had the house before us built a large extension at the back of the house, and this became an internal doorway leading to the utility room and the kitchen. The extension was cleverly designed but atrociously badly constructed, with dodgy electrical wiring, uneven plaster and a leaky roof among other things. This door has everything wrong with it. It's ugly and it has a dangerously large glass panel (I'm always worried that hyperactive young Tom will run into it and cut himself to pieces). The thing that particularly irks me about the door is that it opens in the wrong direction. It's in a small recess formed by the original external wall, and it opens into the recess. That means that whenever anyone opens it a bit too energetically it hits against the reveal of the recess and wrenches itself off its hinges. I get tired of having to screw the hinges back on, using longer and longer screws, and this has become no longer an option.
What I have wanted to do, ever since we moved in to the house nearly 25 years ago, is to replace the door with one that opens out of the dining room instead of into it. But the new door would have to be a nonstandard width, and I have never succeeded in finding such a thing. Then a couple of weeks ago an internet search led me to Kershaws Doors in Bradford, only 15 miles from here. I drove over there, and they showed me a door that was the exact width I wanted. It was too high and it had no glass, just four wood panels. But they said they could cut it down to size by trimming the top and bottom, and they could replace a couple of the panels with patterned glass. I asked how long this would take, and they said I could pick it up later that afternoon if I wanted.
My next stroke of luck was that the local Homebase had a prepacked architrave set that was just the right dimensions for the frame for the new door to close against. It only took a couple of days to fit a set of hinges, latch and handles, and mount the new door in position. For a while we had two doors in the one doorway.
At this stage I removed the old door and took it to the local tip, delighted to see the back of it. Then came the really tedious part – making good the holes in the frame where the hinges and catch of the old door had been, treating the knots in the pine with sealant, and painting the door and frame. I really don't like painting. It seems to take forever, especially when you have to do it three times (primer, undercoat and top coat) and sand it down to smooth it between coats. Then there's the problem of Mary's allergies. The smell of the primer was particularly volatile, and practically knocked her out. We decided that it would be too dangerous for her if I continued to use conventional paints, so we sent off for some odourless undercoat and gloss paint from Ecos. Their paints are incredibly expensive (plus a hefty charge for delivery, since there don't seem to be any local stockists). But they are genuinely non-toxic, and Mary had no ill effects from them. We'll have to use them for all our decorating in future. 
Their delivery service is impressively quick, in fact someone tried to deliver the cans the day after we ordered them. We were out at the time, so I had to drive over to the depot on an industrial estate across the far side of Leeds. When I got there it was obvious that the carton was damaged, and paint was leaking out. I could have refused to accept delivery, but I said I would take the package home, and ask for a replacement if there was any serious damage. In fact, the undercoat was fine, but the lid of the gloss had come off and the can was about half empty. I have asked them to replace it, but in the meantime there was enough paint left for me to be able to complete the job. The picture shows the new door in its final state (except that when the replacement paint arrives I'll probably give it another coat of gloss because the Ecos paint doesn't give quite such a dense coverage as good old-fashioned toxic paint).
Saturday 26 March
If I don't do the long-promised entry reviewing the books I read last month then I'll have forgotten them altogether.
I took four books to Gran Canaria, reckoning that I would be unlikely to read as much as one a week. In the event, the indifferent weather meant that I spent more time reading than I might have done, and I was halfway through the fourth book by the time we got home. I enjoyed all of them in their different ways. Here are a few comments on each of them, in the order in which I read them.
Bad Dirt, by Annie Proulx.
I think I have read everything that Annie Proulx has written. She is a great storyteller, with a wonderful gift for conveying the essence of a place. With the exception of The Shipping News, I think she is better as a writer of short stories rather than full length novels. I was disappointed in her previous book, That Old Ace in the Hole, which I thought was too thin on ideas and characters to sustain a 360 page book. Bad Dirt is her second book of short stories about Wyoming. The earlier collection, Close Range, included a marvellous story called Brokeback Mountain, about two cowboys and the relationship between them that was never fulfilled as it might have been. In my review of it here, I said "it may help you to understand why many gay men of my generation chose to live a straight married life." Brokeback Mountain is currently being filmed, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in the leading roles. There is a "teaser trailer" page about the movie here, with some interesting comments.
The stories in Bad Dirt are mostly about dying communities in the backwoods of Wyoming. Most of them are very entertaining, especially The Wamsutter Wolf, a wickedly funny and gruesome picture of trailer trash at its trashiest extreme. I wasn't so keen on a couple of the stories that involve fantasy. Annie Proulx is so good at down to earth concrete reality, she doesn't need to stray into magical realism.
The Master, by Colm Tóibín.
This book had rave reviews last year, and was runner-up for the Booker prize. I'm not surprised – I found it totally enthralling. It doesn't sound as though it would be so gripping. It's a fictionalised account of the life of Henry James and the background to his novels. There's not a great deal in the way of incident. The book moves in a slow and elegant style as befits the great author. But it is very convincing, holds one's attention throughout, and makes you feel that you have an insight into the mind of Henry James even if (like me) you have read hardly any of his work.
The main impression I was left with from this book is how ruthless a great artist has to be in his dedication to his work. Colm Tóibín shows how James essentially betrayed each of the three women who were closest to him (his sister and his two best friends) by abandoning them at the time when they most needed him, in order to concentrate on his writing. Yet the book is written in such a way that you don't want to condemn him for this, but to admire him for his singlemindedness. It's a very thoughtful book, and I think it was the most rewarding of the four.
I was once editor of a journal, and the price I pay for this is that I can't help reading a book with a proofreader's eye. Even if I'm trying to concentrate on what the author is saying, I can't help noticing typos and grammatical mistakes. Particularly in a literary book like this, it really jars to see mistakes that an editor should have corrected. I noticed ten such errors in The Master, including one that appears twice (page numbers are from the Picador paperback edition):
(page 79) "He sent his book on the matter to those in England whom he thought might initiate a debate."
(page 197) "... people whom I don't think ever knew Constance claim to miss her."
In both cases, "whom" should be "who". In the first example, it is the subject of the verb "might initiate" and in the second example it is the subject of the verb "knew".
In fact, there's another mistake that also occurs twice, in almost identical sentences:
(page 19) "He could not give into his own horrible urge to be alone in the darkness ..."
(page 347) "... he seemed ready to give into the darkness."
There are times when "into" is a single word, and others when it has to be written as "in to". In these examples, "give in to" has to be three separate words in order to make any kind of sense. There really is no excuse for such sloppy editing in a book like this.
I seem to have got sidetracked into (one word!) a little grammatical rant, and I have written enough for one entry. I'll come back to the other two books next time.
Monday 28 March
[Book reviews, continued.]
A Dead Man in Deptford, by Anthony Burgess.
Like The Master, this is a fictionalised account of the life of a great author, in this case Christopher Marlowe. The style is very different, however. Colm Tóibín's book is all nineteenth century elegance and sophistication, but Marlowe lived in the sixteenth century. Anthony Burgess pulls no punches in recreating vividly the rough, crude world in which Marlowe lived. I have read a couple of biographies of Marlowe, and as far as I can tell Burgess follows the known facts of his life pretty closely. He allows himself a bit of imaginative licence, for example in describing a fairly steamy sexual relationship between Marlowe and his patron Thomas Walsingham. I don't think there is much historical justification for this, but it certainly makes for entertaining reading.
The one place where Burgess's story fails to sound convincing is at the end of the book, in his account of the mysterious incident in which Marlowe was supposedly murdered at a house in Deptford. Many people, including me, are convinced that this "murder" was actually staged by Marlowe's friends in order to save him from the notorious Court of Star Chamber. Marlowe had been summoned to appear before this court the following day, and would undoubtedly have faced torture there, as his friend and fellow playwright Thomas Kyd had already done. I believe that Marlowe escaped into exile and continued to write under a pseudonym. But that's another story.
An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears.
I bought this book second-hand for a few pence at a charity sale last year, without any real intention of reading it, and I took it to Gran Canaria as back-up reading material in case the previous three books were insufficient. In the event, I read most of this long book (nearly 700 pages) while on holiday and on the flight home, and I finished it soon after. It is a historical mystery story, set in seventeenth century Oxford, with a cast consisting partly of real people and partly of fictional characters, though the story itself is entirely fictional. It consists of four separate and contradictory eye-witness accounts of the events surrounding the murder of an Oxford don, leaving the reader to sort out who is telling the truth and why the others are lying. One of the four "authors" is the real-life mathematician John Wallis, who is depicted as having a barely controlled lust for young men (but that's more or less incidental to the main plot). A "fingerpost", in case you're wondering, is the seventeenth-century equivalent of a "smoking gun" – an irrefutable piece of evidence pointing towards a culprit.
I really enjoyed this book, as I did with all my holiday reading. But An Instance of the Fingerpost is another badly edited book, with almost as many grammatical solecisms as The Master, including at least five cases of "whom" being used when it should be "who". I know some people think that sort of criticism is just pernickety, and that so long as you can be understood it doesn't matter whether you use correct grammar. Of course that's fine in ordinary conversation, but I think it's important that printed books should have higher standards. Language is the most powerful and effective tool ever invented. The English language in particular has a huge vocabulary and an intricate syntax that can express the most delicate shades of meaning. If it is misused then it is no longer so effective. It's like using a finely honed axe for breaking rocks: sure, it'll do the job, but it will leave you with a blunt and chipped blade that can no longer be used when a really sharp edge is required.
Strangely enough, A Dead Man in Deptford and An Instance of the Fingerpost are both published by Vintage paperbacks. Yet one of them is immaculately edited, and the other is riddled with errors. In the end, it's the author who has to take responsibility for his work, and I suspect that Anthony Burgess supervised his publication more carefully than Iain Pears.
