Journeying

Finished Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel this morning. I reread it in view of the fact we'll be using it as a text next year. Not a bad way of earning a living, say I. For some reason, probably because he's really good, I find de Botton very easy to read, and reading this particular text when actually travelling just added to the pleasure - and profit. De Botton, as always, has insightful things to say about his topic. Generally what he says has a quality of being quite obvious, except for the fact that I've never actually managed to think of it with his level of clarity. Our students are in for a treat - at least those with the wit to appreciate it are.

Gay Paree

First time in Paris for over twenty-five years and the museums go on strike.

But we got into the Louvre free! In the course of our visit we got to see four guys arrested (in the gallery with the Mona Lisa) presumably for picking pockets. And there was a demonstration by striking 'culture workers'. Eventful. Oh, and we got to see some art.

Listening In

Overheard at the shop at Old Trafford yesterday: You've got shinpads.

But dad, these are Manchester United shinpads!

Off to Paris later today. Wonder what kind of talk we'll be hearing there.

Worrying

Mum has always been a great one for mithering - even when I was quite a small child I was aware she considered herself as having more than enough to mither over, one of those many things being myself. As she grew older it became apparent that her worrying over little things had translated into a general debilitating sense of anxiety over life itself, but this was balanced against an essential feistiness of character that enabled her to fight back.

Now that's gone, Her short term memory is very poor, a problem magnified since the shingles struck a couple of months ago. As a result she worries all the time about what she might have forgot, which is useful since it ensures she gets all the basic things done. But it also means she always has something to worry about - even when we are there to assure her there is nothing to be troubled over. She knows she is mithering for no reason but, of course, that makes no difference as she forgets what she knows.

She's prone to say that we can't understand how she feels which is both true and not true. Certainly the absolute horror of never being able to not worry is, thankfully, beyond us. At least for now. (Though it is also true to say she has periods when she clearly feels at ease and relaxed, especially when lost in the tv.) But I think I'm enough like her to recognise the tendency to find things to worry about and I've had those moments, in the small, dark hours, of feeling that there is some massive problem unaccountably forgotten looming on the edge of consciousness.

All the more reason to be thankful for the gift of lucidity - while it lasts.

Caroling

Yesterday, worshipping at that great shrine to the gods of capitalism The Trafford Centre, we took the girls to see the latest version of A Christmas Carol. This was our third 3D movie this year - amazing when you consider we usually get to only one film in a year.

The problem any film version of the Carol presents is the great Alaister Sim - more particularly the wonderful version of the tale in which he played Scrooge. It would be truer to say, he was Scrooge. He captured the monstrous energy and fun of the wicked Scrooge and somehow made the transformation believable. Jim Carrey's cartoonish avatar is good to look at (though bearing a remarkable resemblance to old man Steptoe from Steptoe & Son) but achieved neither of those things. The usual anarchic Carrey-ish energy seems lost, everything feeling overly calculated.

I think Noi and the kids enjoyed it though. The mythic power of the original can't ever be completely lost whatever the quality of the version you're watching. And it looks beautiful, a bit like a high class pop-up book for children. Zemeckis stays reasonably true to the origiinal, except for a couple of gratuitous sort-of-chase sequences following the arrival of a nicely spooky Ghost of Christmas Future.

All in all, better than window-shopping in the endless corridors of the mall.

Monstrous

It's a measure of how readable Ackroyd's take on Frankenstein is that, in a period when it has been difficult for me to find the space for continuity of reading, the novel held my attention and, simply, gripped me, despite the fact I had to reluctantly keep putting it down. The monster is both entirely original and satisfyingly compelling.

Is it one of Ackroyd's best? In terms of sheer entertainment, certainly. And this is a quality it shares with the more recent novels, a kind of easy playfulness, as if Ackroyd is enjoying mucking around with literary history. (The whole Shelley set put in an appearance, Byron and Mary Shelley most memorably.) But it also had a depth and intensity the more recent stuff has lacked. The ending is particularly strong and satisfactory, for example. The only mild reservation I have lies in that 'mucking around' with historical facts that Ackroyd has indulged in recently. Shelley's first wife, Harriet, was not murdered, for example, as she is, memorably, in the novel. I'm not entirely sure why this bothers me, I am, after all, reading an avowed fiction not an historical account - but for some reason it does.

Limits

Much to celebrate here - Noi's birthday last Wednesday and cousin John's today. We bought him Ackroyd's London on the grounds that anything I enjoy so much has to appeal to others. Am now close to finishing The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, but need to get to the end to decide if it's just very good or one of his best.

Still battling with the multiplicity of choice here with regard to things I like. Successfully resisted a set of DVDs of the BBC's magnificent I, Claudius, not so much because of damage to the pocket - the set was pretty cheap - but because I couldn't imagine finding time to watch a series of which I have extremely vivid recall anyway.

More Profusion

We took John and Maureen out to dinner last night, to the Wagon and Horses at Mottram, and enjoyed a big meal in every sense. Huge portions for all. The girls only had three side dishes between them - being picky eaters they didn't fancy any of the main courses - and they still had food to spare. The fish and chips was an epic in itself.

And then there's the car we hired - a pretty large Vauxhall Insignia. We needed something big for all our luggage. The dashboard has so many odd little buttons to push my mind is overly boggled. I just point and drive. I suppose too much of everything is better than too little, but we seem to be well beyond sensible limits in some respects.

Profusion

Wrote this yesterday, but couldn't manage to get on-line, so here it is now:

Wednesday 2 December

Went down to central Manchester yesterday for the first time on this visit and was struck, as I always am here, by the sheer volume of stuff that is easily available and the attendant havoc played on my attempts at pursuing the War on Capitalism. The big HMV store opposite the Arndale Centre is a shadow of what it used to be (in the days before downloading) but it still offers some highly tempting goodies (in terms of music CDs), enough to play havoc with hand luggage requirements and my bank account. Manfully resisted most temptations though. I must say, I don’t really have a problem not buying from the astonishing range of DVDs available – we haven’t viewed all the ones we brought back last year yet. The number of television series available here, both U.S. and U.K. is staggering and makes me wonder who can find the time to watch them all. It’s being so overwhelmed that curiously takes away whatever appetite I might have for this stuff.

Another problem area is the Waterstones Bookshop on Deansgate. This hasn’t suffered any decline I can see in terms of the competition from the on-line purchase of books and e-books (I’m getting more and more intrigued by what I read about the Kindle); if anything the poetry section – the measure of any bookshop – is better than ever. I had serious difficulty in ensuring I didn’t decide that some twenty books there alone simply had to be bought.

And then at Mum’s, in the evening, we caught an episode, a repeat I assume, of one of those brilliant BBC plus David Attenborough documentaries from a series called simply Life. It was about what goes on in the oceans and there was nothing simple about life down there. Several moments were so stunning you couldn’t help but wonder if it had been faked using that clever CGI technology (is that the right acronym?) at the behest of some incredibly and dubiously imaginative designer. But no, it’s the real thing and generously available to us before we wreck the world. The bit with the massive fried egg jellyfish making a meal of a shoal of smaller jellyfish managed to be both utterly gruesome and compellingly beautiful at one and the same time.

In A New Place

My hopes of getting on-line here in Manchester have materialized. We are temporarily cosily resident at John and Jeanette’s house – sleeping in Sam’s bedroom – and I’m able to link to John’s broadband by one of those miracles of modern technology we manage to take utterly for granted once we’ve experienced it for a month or so. Well, not so much take for granted as regard as some kind of birthright.

The flight over was memorable, for myself, for two features: I forgot my denim jacket, referred to by Fifi & Fafa as my Westlife jacket, for reasons known only to themselves, which meant I appeared somewhat under-dressed at Manchester Airport, for the last days of November. And I thoroughly enjoyed The Simpsons Movie, which I saw in its entirety for the first time. The only problem lay in having to stifle my laughter in order to avoid irritating my fellow-travellers.

Since then the days have been, as they say, packed. And cold. Very cold.