Books

I thought I should take five minutes and write about the books I have been reading recently. What I have enjoyed and...well I was going to say what I haven't. But the truth is I am really sort of past the days when I plow onto the bitter end of a book I am not enjoying any longer.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher - Kate Summerscale

I am going to immediately break the rule I just set myself immediately. I didn't really enjoy this book. It came with some really good recommendations from people who I respect. But I just felt it never really got going. It involves the horrible murder of a toddler and looks at the work of the new breed of detectives and the social mileu in which they operated.

It was one of those books which made me feel a little bit of an intellectual weakling. Because there was clearly something in it which I was missing. I just wanted to know who killed the kid and if the author could shove a good twist in there all the better. It just left me unsatisfied.

The Unbearable Lightness of Scones - Alexander McAll  Smith

This is the fourth ofr fifth book in Alexander McAll Smith's book about the residents and former residents of 44 Scotland Street. These books are enjoyable and undemanding. I mean that entirely as a compliment. I was rather pleased that in this book he has dropped Pat, who I thought the dullest of the characters and that the narcissist Bruce is finally havig some personal growth as a human and is becoming likeable. Even if it means I now have to miss the most enjoyble chapters on him being delusional about his place in the world.

My only gripe is that with each book Mr. Smith is complaining a bot more about the thuggery of basic day to day life. the courseness and how people are with one another. I think there is truth to what he says. I could just do without being reminded of it every fifth chapter. But I think with all the pleasure he has given me with the residents of Scotland Street, Mma Ramotswe and Isabel Dalhouse he has earned the right to his gripes.

Meltdown - Ben Elton

Now this was a book I really enjoyed. I used to love Ben Elton. I got his first book autographed at Hudsons in Birmingham. However since then there was a parting of the ways as I realised that his first books were not that well written. then there were the musicals and I rather began to dislike him.

However throughout this time my mom continued to buy his books for me at birthdays. I did little with them. Then while at a loose end for a book to read I read High Society and really enjoyed it. Then I slowly went through his back catalogue and realised how much better he had become at writing. He had ditched the long extensions of his stand up routine and concentarted more on telling a story. And he is quite the storyteller.

Meltdown is the story of a group of peopl who caught the wave of money that appeared from nowhere, and went back there eventually. They are by and large a pretty dislikeable bunch. And there is a certain ammount of schadenfreude when it all goes tits up in the collapse. Except that is for the main character Jimmy who is clearly a man who knows he has been very lucky and excepts his downfall with humility. Its a very prescient book which captures the jolt to that generation of go-getters perfectly. But most of all it is a rollicking good story.

Engleby - Sebastien Faulks

I loved this book. Its about a psychopath and how he is made by his experiences. It chronicles his life in first person narration. How he is plucked from Comprehensive school and shoved into a private school where he is systematically bullied for several years until it is his turn to become the bully in his final year. I won't state what he goes on to do.

What is fantastic about the book is in the final chapters (once he is caught) and we get to hear him talk about his crimes. It perfectly captures the mind of a psychopath. Or at least it captures what I imagine to be the lack of empathy and narcissism that you would find in such a person. Anyway it is just brilliant.

Benefit Cheats

I couldn't think of anything to write yesterday and then helpfully Mr. Cameron pops up and gives me something to put pen to paper for. The issue of cracking down on benefit cheats.

Now I am going to be charitable and say maybe the conservative Government have come up with something that will work. However history suggests that it will not. What all these crackdowns do is put off and catch the people in the middle. Not those who do not claim, not those who really are cheats. It catches the people who have genuine needs but are not as brazen as the actual cheats.

Its all very well stating the case firmly that people should work. We all know that. But the truth is in my job I have been to families where we are now in the third generation of people who have never worked. Not only does nobody in their family work but nobody else they know does. How do you start in a situation like that ? I don't know.

My suspicion is that what we actually do is pay these families just enough to live on so they will not cause too much of a nuisance to the rest of us. Pay them too little and the crime rate goes up and social workers and other people can't deal with the people they really need to help because they are too busy with the chaos they cause.

The benefits system was meant as a safety net and to a certain extent it still does that job but for some it has become a cultural lifestyle they are unwilling or unable to escape. A depressing post but there you are. We have an agreement and it more or less works, even if it doesn't. Take your money and stop bothering us.

Nowt

I genuinely have nothing to say this week other than I saw Inception and The A-Team which was a fun film and I have a bit of gum ache.

There is something pretty major going on in my life but I cannot talk about it at the moment so I will spill in due course.

Toy Story 3

Since my daughter came along I have seen some real stinker movies. Space Chimps 2 stands out as does Underdog which I managed to dislike even when it had Patrick 'Puddy' Warburton in it. Then there are Pixar films and then there are Toy Story films.

I loved the first two but this one takes me into a whole new level of the stratosphere in admiration. It is so perfectly pitched it seriously makes me want to cry. Not because it is sad or touching. It is definitely touching. There is a scene where all the characters hold hads which...I genuinely think is about as perfect as cinema can get. And I include the heavyweights in that like John Wayne walking out the shack at the end of The Searchers or Michael Corleone discovering Fredo's betrayal in that assertion.

There's little else to say. Just if you haven't seen it, what in all of holy hell are you waiting for. Go now. Seriously look up the times and go. NOW !!!

Moving Day

The reason these posts are late is that i have moved house. Its a bloody slog and I hate it. but it is nice to be in a new house with all that entails, fresh beginnings etc.

We are currently shifting the last set of boxes from our old garage whicgh are no doubt destined to rest in this garage for the next four or five years till we move again. Garage refugees, the clutter equivalent of the Littlest Hobo. Talking of which...



Any excuse

Stoopid People

Part of the government's new policing policy involves the election of police commisioners. The idea is, I imagine, to allow people to hold police commisioners to account for what they see as the shortcomings of the way Law and Order are dealt with in the area.

There is a big flaw in this argument and it is one that not many people want to face up to and that is that people are arseholes of the first order. An individual person is fine. Put a group of persons together and you have an idiot. We have known this for many years, Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds was published in 1841. It documented through several examples how people bandied together become an irrational mob. My favourite quote of the book is 'Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one'

What happens when you have such a mob electing somebody to office to deal with crime ? Do you think it is possible that anybody who will be prepared to stand on a public platform and try to defend rational policing that actually reduces crime. Of course not. We are going to have people competing to be the most populist. So we will have more irrational policing like putting policemen on the beat when it has been proved beyond measure how ineffective this is. We will have them promising to further criminalise young people and bring them into the criminal justice system when it has beeen proven that if that is where you place young people that is where they remain.

Having said that if they can lock up the little shit who stole my I-Pod and Sat Nav from my car two years ago then they'll get my vote.

Oh and talking of stupid people if you haven't heard this you've missed a treat