I mean, it’s the Eurovision Song Contest, not the Eurovision Dance and Dramatic Staging Contest.
Maybe I should listen to it on the Radio.
I sometimes think, with Eurovision, they should have to perform standing on a plain stage, with no fancy stuff. I mean Greece, tonight!
📚Books 2026, 12: Just One Damned Thing After Another, by Jodi Taylor
I’m not sure where I heard of this. It’s on a list of possible books to read I’ve had knocking around for a few years. I thought it originally came from one of those lists in The Guardian, ‘Books to Read This Summer’, or similar. But I can’t find any reference to it on the site now.
And it would be kind of strange to read about this in The Guardian, because it’s not very professional.
The problem is, it feels like it needs a major editing pass. It’s kind of disjointed. There are inconsistencies of tone, and confusion (in the reader) about how much time has passed. After what feels like quite a short time in the main character’s experiences, we learn five years have passed, for example.
The idea is good, and it does succeed in being a page turner. It wound the tension very high, especially at one point. It’s about time-travelling historians. An academic institute where they do historical research by time travel.
Which is a fine idea, but surely the first question anyone asks when they discover time travel is possible is, ‘To the future?’ So if you’re not going to travel forward you need some mechanism or rule as to why that’s not possible. Our characters here don’t even think about the future. Except (spoiler ahead) when one character reveals he’s from the future.
Later on there’s a mission to Mars planned, but that has nothing to do with our characters, except when one threatens to leave and join the space programme. Other than that we hear nothing of the world outside St Mary’s, the research institute that gives this series (because of course) its title.
It turns out it began as a self-published novel, and was successful enough that the series was picked up by a mainstream publishing house, which is the dream. From reviews and comments on GoodReads and elsewhere I hear the writing gets better in the later books. I suspect that is at least partly because of professional editors. Still, we learn our craft and hopefully improve oner time, whatever we do.
Overall I enjoyed this book, though I’m not sure I would recommend it, and I don’t think I’ll bother with the sequels. Interesting, though.
How did I not know till today that the vocals on Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’ are by Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins?
📚 Books 2026, 11: Bright LIghts Big City, by Jay McInerney
I feel that title should have a comma.
I heard Jay McInerney interview on The Booking Club podcast , and it intrigued me enough to make me want to read this. Then, as I suggested a couple of days ago, I wondered why I hadn’t read it years ago..
The second-person, present-tense viewpoint quickly becomes transparent, and is never annoying.
It’s a cocaine-fuelled fever dream. Over a few days and 150 or so pages our unnamed (I think) protagonist loses his job through general fucked-up-ness, tells us the story of how his wife left his wife left him, and of the death of his mother. Which seems to be main trigger for his fall. This is a telling quote:
You kept waiting for the onset of grief.You are beginning to suspect it arrive nine months later, disguised as your response to Amanda’s departure.
All of which makes it sound dark and tragic. But it’s not. It’s really funny most of the time, and a compelling narrative beautifully written all the time. Overall I enjoyed being in the narrator’s head — or him being in mine, or however you’d put it.
The security at this rally says something about the state of Britain today: metal detectors, bag searches… the police are being lovely, though.
Off into Central London for the rally against antisemitism.
Watched Funeral in Berlin 🎥 last weekend.
After enjoying The Ipcress File a year ago (where does the time go?) it was good to see more of what Harry Palmer was up to back in the Cold War.
In this he’s sent on a slightly confusing mission to West Berlin — and, inevitably, into the East — to get out a high-ranking Russion officer who wants to defect.
Or at least, that’s what he’s told. Betrayals and double-crossings ensue. It’s not as good — and somehow, strangely, not as sixties — as the first one, but Michael Caine is great, and it’s fun enough.
There is a petition to parliament asking for UK civil service software to be made open source by default. This comes after (and at least partly in response to) a move by the NHS to make the opposite move: to make all their existing open-source repositories closed-source.
Please sign it here if you can. Publicly funded software should be available for the public to see and use. And open-source software is more secure and helps free us from US tech giants.
📚 You are reading Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney. You are finding it hilarious. This book was published when you were 20: why have you not read it till now?
I used to wonder if the Greens had any policies other than the environment. Now I see they have no policies at all. Not even the environment. (Based on literature I’ve seen for the local elections, and the fact they’re still opposed to nuclear power.)
And some of them are showing distinctly worrying tendencies. OK, antisemitism, I mean antisemitism.
Not a policy, sure. But it feels like they’ve been taken over.
Voting day today, for most of us in the UK. All those local councils and mayors aren’t going to elect themselves (luckily).
Vote for the ones who are going to make sure the bins get collected, the schools are good, social housing gets built… OK, Labour, I mean vote Labour.
📚 Books 2026, 10: The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle
I had read a lot of Sherlock Holmes, but none of Doyle’s other work; including none of the Professor Challenger stories. There aren’t nearly as many as there are Holmes stories, so it’s less of a challenge (ha) to do so. I was in a second-hand bookshop a few weeks back, in an unfamiliar town — let’s not be coy, it was Taunton — and I was there so long, going, ‘So many books, so little time,’ that I felt I had to buy something: it would be impolite not to.
And just as I was preparing to leave, I saw a collected Professor Challenger volume, and here we are. I’m treating the individual novels in it as separate novels, since they are, and will write about them here individually.
So to The Lost World . A tale of adventurers finding a fabled land where dinosaurs still live, even in the 20th century. In this case it’s on an inaccessible plateau in South America, not underground, for example.
In fact, this is the motherlode for all those kind of stories, predating Edgar Rice Burroughs and everyone else.
It’s presented as a work by a journalist, Edward Malone, a young man seeking both to please his editors, and (seemingly more importantly at first) to charm his beloved, one Gladys, who says she’s attracted to the adventurous type of man.
Challenger claims to have seen evidence of the prehistoric creatures' existence; his brother scientists don’t believe him; the Zoological Institute commissions an expedition to confirm or deny. Young Malone volunteers/is volunteered to go along and report back.
Stuff happens. Dinosaurs are found. Ape-men fought. An impossible fecundity of life exists on a twenty-by-thirty mile plateau, isolated from the rainforest and Amazon below it. (A question comes to mind: why wouldn’t the pterodactyls fly down from the plateau to the jungle? At least sometimes?)
It’s lots of fun, if very full of the idea that the white European (or really, British) man is the most highly evolved entity on the planet. It is, of course, of its time.
Crucial Track for 03 May 2026: (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais" by The Clash
"(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais" by The Clash
The prompt:
Share a song you love that has parentheses (in the title).
It's been a while since I wrote a Crucial Tracks entry, but when I saw John Philpin's post with this bracket-based prompt, how could I not write about one of my favourite Clash songs?
The strange thing about the title is, given the parenthetical structure, we should call it 'In Hammersmith Palais' for short — you can always drop the parenthetical, right? — but in fact everyone always calls it 'White Man' for short.
It famously tells the story of Joe Strummer going to a reggae show at the titular venue, and realising he was the only white person there. And about punks and other groups and how they did or might behave. The near-closing couplet seems worryingly relevant again at the moment:
If Adolf Hitler flew in today
They'd send a limousine anyway
Also I don't know how this will appear either on Crucial Tracks itself or on my blog, but what the hell is the image that's appearing alongside the track where I've selected it? Very strange. I've screengrabbed it and added it to the post, but I've no idea where it'll appear.
Anyway, one of my all time favourite songs, with or with the brackets/parentheses.
Must be time to link to Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files again. The latest episode had me laughing aloud many times, both from Nick’s answers and his questioners' questions.
I suspect this StoryGraph review of the book I just posted my own thoughts on captures what’s going on:
… a character who has agency but really doesn’t, which subverts the western idea of conflict that pivots around a main character always having to make the choice, do the thing, that runs the story. Here, no matter what Matt Kim does, the world affects him, does whatever it wants to him. Disappear him even. The ‘looseness’ of the story, as in, ‘I don’t get this book’, is imo holding up eastern cultural expectations of writing …