Annals of the Book-Club - Mongolia (better late than never!)

Why-ever not Mongolia?

A few weeks before the last Book-Club event, the Booksters and I were haunting the club terrace, decanted into deck chairs, sipping Pimms, and wondering what topic to pick next.

After a while one can easily run out of subject matters - I should explain that in this book-club, we choose subjects, not books.  Back in our pioneer days, when one of our number chose a book, and the others were obliged to read it, life had not been quite so pleasant.  To be frank about it, unfortunate choices frequently lead to altercations.  Because we are all very different.  And some of my fellow club members are decidedly scurrilous in their literary tastes.

Discussing the finer points of the Necronomicon, or delving into the secret languages of gut bacteria, or even tackling the fluffier chapters of Barbara Cartland's Autobiography, can have a corrosive effect on the proceedings of even the most even-tempered bookinistas - and we are so not even-tempered.

So we decided that we would chose a topic, rather than a specific book, for our monthly meetings, and that everyone could pick a book that fit within that topic.  During the meeting everyone can discuss their book for half an hour or so, and that way we learn about lots of books we never knew anything about, and also don't fall out over having to read books we don't want to.

I note that while we were running with the one-book-for-all book-club model, some members used considerable deception and trickery to avoid reading an assigned book they didn't like, pleading ever more ludicrous reasons why they couldn't.  The Morrigan was particularly averse to any book I chose, and did this at least three times to my favourite volumes.  Not good Morrigan, very not good!

Anyway.  There we were, ruminating about the next topic, and suddenly someone opined, "Why-ever not Mongolia?"  We pretty much all agreed that Mongolia had no literary value, lacked recent history,  was touristically uninteresting, and probably imaginary.  "It'll be a challenge then," we were admonished.  "I don't even know where Mongolia is," complained Maddy.  "Alright, that's agreed then," I summed up the situation.  The Morrigan glowered.

At lunchtime of the Friday before the meeting, we all received an emergency luncheon invite from The Morrigan.  I wondered what excuse she would use this time to explain her lack of application to the Mongolian subject matter.....

"I can't possibly cope with reading the history of Genghis Khan," she opened the conversation.  We booed and hissed.  "There are other Mongolian-related books," I pointed out.  Everyone else looked pained.  "There so are not," said Joseph.  "There is nothing except history of the period between Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan."  Maddy agreed.  "A bookishly barren landscape, is Mongolia."

I smiled my most superior smile, and pulled out The Bloody White Baron, by James Palmer, a book which recounts the story of Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, who mixed things up a bit in Mongolia in the 1920s.  "What's that then?"  The Morrigan looked at the cover, which featured a portrait of the baron, surrounded by a profusion of skulls (the baron was a bloodthirsty maniac), read the blurb on the back, and dismissed the book out of hand.  "Even worse than Ghengis Khan," she pronounced.  "I have a better plan."

"That's all very well," said Joseph, "but I have spent ten hours I will never get back reading the history of women at the court of Genghis Khan, and I am neither willing nor able to read another book by tomorrow morning!"  "Ditto", added Maddy.  I just looked hurt.

"It takes ten and a half hours to fly to Mongolia," said The Morrigan.  "Here are the tickets.  I checked with your managers, you can all take Monday off.  We leave today after work, arrive early Saturday morning, and leave Monday evening.  Then we go straight back to work."  You see what I mean about using trickery to get out of reading things she doesn't want to?

We obviously all had to agree to spend a long weekend in Mongolia.  Why-ever not?

The Flight to Ulaan Baatar

Luckily I had a few hours to prepare before I had to be at the airport, and I spent it locating some reading matter that might come in handy during the holiday.  My fellow booklovers had brought their Mongolia-themed books along - having already read them, they were averse to forsaking them completely - and it was decided that each of us would have half an hour to introduce their chosen volume during the flight.  

Luckily the plane was practically empty, so our little group dominated the cabin, and none of the other passengers (dared to) complain.  The solitary steward, having completed the emergency drill, glazed over within minutes of our readings.

The Morrigan had a Lonely Planet Travel Guide, from which she read us some interesting statistics.  Maddy entertained us with ‘The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - How the daughters of Genghis Khan rescued his empire’ by Jack Weatherford, Joseph read us the introduction of  ‘Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection’ by John Man, and last went Blondie (who had missed the lunchtime meeting but came along anyway) and extrapolated from the blurb on the back of  'Women and the Making of the Mongol Empire' (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization) by Anne F Broadbridge.

I had decided to go last, knowing from bitter experience that my offerings did not always find favour.  I reasoned that by going last, having listened to everyone else reading from their books, I had earned the right to be listened to in my turn.  It was dark outside, and my fellow travelers had snuggled deep into their blankets, when I introduced my reading matter.  "In consideration of The Morrigan's aversion to my chosen book about von Ungern-Sternberg, I have brought along a few different articles of interest about Mongolia."  Before I settled into my task, I decided to go for a quick trip to the toilet.

When I returned, my friends looked incredibly sleepy, and upon closer inspection I noticed an empty tube of sleeping pills that had rolled under The Morrigan's seat.  Since I knew the way she operated, I surmised that she had utilised my toilet break to peruse my reading matter, shared her knowledge with the alarmed bookinistas, and suggested the sleeping pills as a way of avoiding my impending lecture.

Well, I wasn't that easily thwarted!  Whether they liked it or not, I had a captive audience, albeit asleep, and I was going to read them my chosen article.  Who knows, maybe they would absorb the subject matter in their sleep?  With an even, quiet voice, loud enough to be heard, but not loud enough to wake them, I started to read.  

"The lactic acid bacteria in traditionally fermented yak milk products.  In 64 samples of fermented yak milk, 216 strains of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) were identified.  They belonged to six genera and 17 different species.  The distribution of the isolates by genus was as follows:  Leuconostoc (40.8%), Lactobacillus (39.0%), Streptococcus(13.2%), Lactococcus (5.6%), Enterococcus (0.94%), and Weissella (0.46%)."

It took 45 minutes to complete the reading of the entire article, and no one awoke during the reading.  Satisfied with my labours, and full of future plans, I, too, went to sleep.

Adventures in Uulaan Bataar

We awoke shortly before landing.  Maddy looked vaguely suspicious, The Morrigan smug, Joseph thoughtful, and Blondie had a hangover.  We found out later that she had smuggled in a large bottle of gin, which she claimed was similar to having an emotional support animal.  I was nonchalant, and assumed an air of injured innocence - I am rather good at that, and it is quite necessary to be so, on rather too many occasions.

Going through customs, the officer attempted to flirt with Blondie, the most physically attractive member of our little group.  "So what are your plans?  Is there anything in particular you want to see while in Ulaan Bataar?  I can recommend the Toy Museum!"  Her answer puzzled both him and her.  "I should adore to see the Institute for Fermented Yak Butter," she said in a low, husky voice.

Luckily no one aside from me and Joseph heard her....

In the hotel we had a quick wash & brush, and then assembled at the breakfast buffet.  It was unremarkable, being of the sort one usually finds at international hotels, but was augmented by a few national specialties.  To my quiet satisfaction, everyone added some milk or cheese product to their breakfast tray.

The morning was spent touristing about on Chinggis Square, and lunch was obtained from a small local restaurant we discovered in a side street. The Mongolian food pyramid is top heavy with milk products (called white food), so it was quite natural that we all ate various combinations of mutton, cheese, and potatoes.  The tea afterwards was served with a liberal serving of milk (goat, not yak), and the alcoholic beverage Blondie tasted was called Airag and made of fermented horse milk.

We then repaired to the Feminist Club; I am an auxiliary member, of course, and it seemed an easy way to make some connections.  Ulaan Bataar is simply crawling with educated women - they far outnumber educated men.  In Mongolia, the boys take care of the animals while the girls are sent to school.  The unfortunate consequence of this is often that the women, no longer inured to certain unpleasant courtship rituals, remain men-less.  A number of them had formed the Feminist Club, which was part social scene and part special interest group.  They welcomed us with open arms, except for Joseph who had to sit outside in the garden and brood.  The club was ladies only.

However, his isolation did not last long.  Half a dozen club members decided to give us a taste of the town, and soon we all set off for a whirlwind tour of the beauties of Ulaan Bataar.  I am not going to give details, because we went around so quickly that I couldn't remember much, but let it suffice that there was more to see in the Mongolian capital than I had suspected.  The Morrigan took credit for everything, of course, and since she had both our return tickets and the credit card that subsidised us, we did not argue with her.

We finally sank into our bunk beds - The Morrigan had bought the cheapest room going, and it was a common one for all of us.  They all grumbled a little, but finally fell asleep.  I was mightily pleased to have them all in one space again, and decided to continue to read them excerpts of my Mongolian scientific articles (after they had dropped off).

"In another study carried out on the diversity of Mongolian traditional fermented dairy products using pyro-sequencing, it was found that there was a correlation between animal species and the genus Lactobacillus which was found to be the core foundation in Mongolian fermented milks. L. kefiranofaciens, L. helveticus, and L. delbrueckii were the predominant species sequenced using NGS for ethnic Khoormog, Airag, and Tarag fermented samples, respectively."

After I had finished reading them the article, I, too, went to sleep.

Sunday was overcast and rainy, so we decided to spend the day in the Toy Museum, followed by the Mongol Costumes Museum, The Memorial Museum of the Victims of Political Repression, and The Institute for Fermented Yak Butter.  I had expected greater resistance to this last choice, but it seemed that traipsing around town for two days straight had undermined their resistance.  Or perhaps my plan was working?  I was determined to continue my bed time readings that night.

Which I did.  "In a clinical study on this strain, it has been found that LCZ carried an ability to modulate the composition of fecal microbiota in both elderly and adult subjects. The strain exhibited growth-suppressive effect on pathogens such as Acinetobacter and Pseudomonas."

Monday morning was beautifully sunny and put us all in a wonderful mood - our last day in Mongolia had arrived!  The happy mood was unfortunately spoilt over breakfast, when The Morrigan overheard Blondie (the most susceptible member of our group) give a fellow European tourist a little talk on the benefits of fermented yak products.  She was using long words and liberally sprinkled her sermon with Latin words which The Morrigan suspected she did not understand, but which seemed strangely familiar to her.  "Randomized, double-blind clinical trials using L. plantarum showed that there was significant lowering of sepsis and lower respiratory tract infections among infants in rural India," she heard Blondie saying while slurping an extra large serving of Mare's yogurt.

Now The Morrigan, say of her what you will, has an active intellect and an incisive mind.  Her suspicion aroused, she looked around the breakfast table.  All members of the Bookclub were eating super-human sized portions of milk products - all non-Bookclub member tourists had given such products a wide berth, and were tucking into bacon and eggs, and similar western fare.  She glanced at her own plate, which was laden with cheese derived products, and at her glass, normally full of orange juice, now mysteriously full of double-distilled goats milk.  She then turned towards me, not just her face, but her entire body, and said in a cold hard threatening voice: " This is your doing, dastardly DB."

I shrieked and shivered inwardly, but admitted nothing.  "Whatever do you mean, is anything the matter?"  

But she just snorted.  Obviously she was on to me - would all my hard work be undone?

The Trip Home

Back on the plane Monday evening we were all rather tired after our eventful long weekend, especially I, since The Morrigan had forced me to swallow three sleeping pills or "remain in effing Mongolia 'till you rot!"  She had not forgiven me for having tried to brainwash her into liking microorganisms by nefarious means.

Soon we had all dropped off.  The last thing I heard, before losing consciousness, was the sonorous voice of Joseph, loud enough to be heard, but not loud enough to wake us, reading from an article I had entrusted to his care earlier that day, while The Morrigan was searching my bag and confiscated and burned all readable material she found.

"In human intestinal epithelium, the interaction between adjacent cells and cell-basement membranes form a crucial barrier that prevents the translocation of the microbes to the sub-epithelial layer. This adherence is governed by tight junction, gap junction, adherence junction, and desmosomes. The mechanistic role of probiotics reported in various studies associated with the strengthening of mucosal barrier function is mainly directed toward examining the ability of probiotic bacteria to prevent alterations in bridging proteins and ....."

Journal of the Plague Year 14 - Daydreams of a Realist

I can't believe I have not posted for 9 days!

It is this strange timeless existence we currently live, where hour blends into hour, and day into day, until it all becomes a blur and time loses all meaning.

I have become incredibly laid back, too.  Yesterday, for example, I was watching a Sherlock Holmes movie on Youtube, and instead of pausing it when the news came on at 22:00 I went right on watching the movie  Yes, you read this right.  Me, a news-addict if ever there was one, just shrugged my shoulders and remained in the 1940s.  After all, what is on the news these days?  Dead people, people who disobey the self isolation rules - ie future dead people.  I care no more.

On the other hand, the arrival of a book last week caused a considerable stir in the DB Dominion.

A long longtime ago, and far far away, there was in the city of Portland, in the state of Oregon, an amazing bookshop called Powell's.  Nowadays of course everyone knows about Powell's, City of Books, biggest bookstore in the galaxy.  But back then it was just a great bookstore downtown Portland, and I visited it as often as finances permitted.  I was then the sort of person who, when faced with a choice between having dinner and buying a book, always chose hunger and erudition.  Kept me thin, too!

I had a little routine back then.  I would arrive at Powell's just before lunch time, when everyone else left the store to re-dedicate themselves to the vulgar pleasures of the restaurant trade - yes, vulgar, and please don't interrupt!  To repeat, I would enter the emptying shop and first go to the cookery section.  Let me tell you, they had a huge cookery section!  I couldn't afford any of the books, of course, them being new and all.  And even if I could have afforded them, I certainly could not have afforded to buy the ingredients expensive cookery books demand!  I did buy a book there once, called "How to eat well on a dollar a day and live to talk about it", and it was a wowzer!  Written by a local student and well worth the 50 cents it cost me.

After the cookery section I would scout out the humour section, where I occasionally managed to unearth a cheap and cheerful pamphlet - "A Guide for Indoor Birdwatchers" comes to mind.  I particularly liked the chapter on How to get rid of him - 'him' referred to a husband.  I was unhappily married at the time, and always eager to pick up helpful hints.  Unfortunately I didn't own a revolver, so had to get a divorce instead - much less dramatic, of course.  The 'indirect method' describes how you shoot over your shoulder using a mirror - wonderful stuff!

After that I would meander into the tall dusty stacks somewhere in the Bowels of Powell's and immerse myself in the foreign language section.  What, I hear you cry, no books on science, on social science, on Bellestristic?  Belletristic is bunk, and the other stuff I could get for free from the university library - and what did I say about being interrupted?  Anyway, science books are out of date as soon as they are published, so I very rarely bought them back then.  I occasionally buy them nowadays, because I am too lazy to get them from the public library (plus their more popular books smell funny!), and the Bodleyan isn't a lending library.

Anyway.  So one days I was perusing the second hand foreign language section of Powell's - why the second hand foreign language section?  Well, firstly because there weren't any new foreign books available in Portland in those days (you couldn't even buy Der Spiegel at the newsagents!), except those irritatingly educational ones (Goethe, Einstein, Zuckmayer) that no one in their right mind reads, except to impress their colleagues - what do you mean, you actually like the German classics?  Stop interrupting me, who is telling this story, you or I?

Where was I?  Oh yes, I was nosing around in the foreign language section of Powell's, sub-section German.  I tended to buy the old ones, because they were usually dirt cheap.  Because, and I will tell you this because it is still true and no one else will ever tell you this, basically because they either don't know (if they aren't German) or won't tell because they want to continue to benefit from the situation (if they are German), because - Fraktur.  Fraktur is the name of the old German script that was used prior to WWII.  It became associated with the Nazis, so was abandoned after WWII.

Because Fraktur is different from the regular script used nowadays (Latin), people take one look at it and move on to another book.  The fact is, it is very simple to read Fraktur. I taught myself when I was small, just by reading the old books I found in my parent's book cupboard, so don't let it stop you from buying a book that interests you.  But because so few people can read Fraktur, the books are usually very cheap.  And back in those days, if a book was cheap I would buy it!

The book that arrived last week was called "Tagtraeume eines Realisten" - Daydreams of a realist,from the early 20th century.  I read it and was utterly fascinated.  So fascinated that I talked about it to someone from Austria, who could read Fraktur, and lend it to her.  And that horrible, despicable, utterly repugnant individual ran off with the book!!!!!!!  May she die a thousand deaths, and suffer even more after that - there is no punishment too great for a book thief.  I do exempt from this the impoverished book lover who is so devoted to a choice volume that s/he steals it from a library - that is not theft, but self defense.

So there I was without my favourite book.  I suffered, I agonised, I tried to buy another copy.  And sadly, no other copy was to be had, even in the greatest book shop in the Galaxy.  The pain grew duller over time, but never really left me.

Back in Europe I continued my search, not helped by my inability to remember the name of the author - I have a terrible memory for names.  I even got my niece, who works in a book shop and is a professional book buyer, to search for the elusive volume, but she, too, drew nothing but blanks.

I brooded over this for decades.  Why couldn't I find the book?  Had it been such a small edition that only a few hundred books had ever been printed, which then all perished in the fires of WWII?  Were all owners so attached to their copies that they refused to let them go, and insisted to be buried with them instead of leaving them to their heirs, who could flog them to the nearest antiquarian book seller?  Or, and this possibility had a morbid fascination for me, had all the copies been eaten by bookworms, attracted by the cheap type of paper that was often used for books in the harsh years after WWI?

A few weeks ago, working short hours, and limited in my activities to the sphere of the Little House, my under-occupied mind went into overdrive.  I was sitting right here, where I am sitting now, in front of my laptop, when inspiration struck - I translated the title into English and began to search for it.

Blank after blank after blank - I found nothing, nada, zero, rien du tout.

But ....

When I repeated the search again, I mis-typed 'daydream'.  It was late, you understand, and I was exhausted and aggravated.  This can happen, even to the best of us - like me.

The search engine, unable to make sense of the word I had types, suggested alternatives - and one alternative was 'fantasies'.  Click clack ping pong dibbedy-dong went my little grey cells, and then, fuelled by an intellectual arrogance rarely experienced - by me, anyway - I typed "Phantasien eines Realisten" - and hit pay dirt!

Yes, dear readers, I had forgotten not only the name of the author, but also the title of the book!

The book, it turned out, was not all that rare.  It had been written by Josef Popper-Lynkeus, an Austrian writer, engineer, and inventor, and uncle of Karl Popper, the philosopher.  He was born in 1838 and died in 1921.  He was also a social reformer - Wikipedia has this to say about it:

Popper-Lynkeus designed his own social system, which ensures that all individuals are provided with goods of primary necessity, and explains it in a series of works beginning from The Right to Live and the Duty to Die (1878) and ending with The Universal Civil Service as a Solution of a Social Problem (1912).

According to Popper-Lynkeus, society has a duty to provide its members with goods of prime necessity – food, clothes, and housing – and also with the services of prime necessity – public health care, upbringing, and education. However, every healthy society member in the framework of labor service would participate in activities that do not require higher or secondary special education and that are related to the creation of material foundations of national economy (e.g. mining, forest exploitation, farm work, construction work). He or she would also be engaged in the manufacturing of goods and providing basic services.

etc etc

Admirable sentiments, I am sure you will agree, and while I knew nothing about Popper-Lynkeus at all when I read his book Fantasies of a Realist, I am pleased to discover that I had not wasted my admiration on someone unworthy.

And the best thing?

I can now use the title Daydreams of a Realist for my own writings, without anyone accusing me of intellectual theft!

Thanks for not interrupting!

Bookish delights ...

A good spot for a little literary criticism ...

Just in case you wondered, the book club is still going strong.  We meet regularly - monthly is the ideal, but this can't always be arranged - and discuss a chosen volume.  We cover quite a range of subjects, and have graduated from short books to lengthy tomes.  Next time's read is 'The Year of the Runaways' by Sunjeev Sahota, a cool 468 pages.  Bad pages, apparently.  "You are going to hate this one," opined C, who chose it.  Well, with my kind of bus journeys I can get that done in a week or less!  And I am due to choose the next one - hehehehe!!!  I cackle, rubbing hands with glee. 

There is an interesting little volume that describes the ordeal of a few heroic bacteria who got lost in a chemistry lab.  Or perhaps the delightfully perverted "Unnatural Selection" by Daniel Evan Weiss.  It has one review in Amazon by a delighted customer: "I first read this book about 30 years ago. Why is it out of print? It is so politically incorrect that it should be required reading today. Indeed, I imagine bookstores would be picketed if this were sold today."

Then there is The Case of Mr Crump by Ludwig Lewisohn, or Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, or even Tea and Tranquillisers by Diane Harpwood.

I will not sink as low as The Annals of the Indoor Birdwatchers Society, though.

Good views

Flowers and things

Pesky pigeon getting free drinks from the fountain

Demonstration abut Armenia on the walk home!?!?!

Apparently this chin-high bench thing is for porters - they can let their rucksacks (or whatever) rest on the bench while they take a little break.  Never seen one of those!

Literary Exploits ....

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss/262-6126100-2138302?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=db+lenck

Yes, I have finally pulled myself together and self published my magnum opus on Kindle Amazon!

Between Christmas and New Year I had a bit of time, and decided to get this baby ready to meet the world.

There where a few issues about formatting, and a nasty bout of flu delayed the project further, but today I finally received the 'your paperback version is published' e-mail from Kindle Direct Publishing.

The on-the-Kindle version was easier.  My only gripe is that the Kindle version has moved the footnotes from the bottom of the page to the end of the book, but that is only a minor annoyance.

I am just thrilled that I have finally put the book out there.

If you are interested, here is a quick synopsis:

"When several high ranking demons decide to refurbish Hell as a nice surprise for their absent boss Lucifer, the apprentice demon Sophia is appalled. As Jehova’s goddaughter, she simply cannot stand idly by while her fellow demons defraud the financial community of the City of London to pay for their improvements.

So while Agrat, the manager of the project, and her team fleece wealthy individuals for start-up capital, and their unscrupulous pet-banker Gingrich Fleabrunckle organises a syndicated loan from the financial community, Sophia accepts a position as management trainee in one of the more venerable institutions of the City. Although her unorthodox business methods almost blow her cover, she manages to remain incognito and is soon joined by the 300-year old mythical Lady of Threadneedle Street, the mighty rodent-catcher Mr Mouser, and the self-appointed priest of Mithras and plant psychologist Mithradates Devadorje, in her efforts to sabotage her fellow demons’ designs.

As the action moves from London to Greenland and Mongolia, we encounter Arnapak, an octogenarian shaman who is searching for the lost soul of her great-granddaughter and confronts the evil sorcerer and Fleabrunckle-friend Florimonde, the Emerald Maiden who traps unwary humans in her Dream-Stone realm and vacillates in her loyalty between Agrat and Sophia’s employer Governor Pinchbeck, and the ancient Inuit Goddess Takanakapsaluk, who lives on the bottom of the sea and hates humanity.

After many hectic adventures and innumerable unexpected plot-twists, the story reaches its finale when both sides invest all their power in two mighty musicians, who battle for the final victory in the icy waste of Greenland."

So there it is folks.  The book is 189 pages long, but densely written - most writers would make an entire book out of a few of my chapters, but I don't like long-winded purple prose ....

I paste the link above, or you can just type 'DB Lenck' into the Amazon search bar and you will be guided to my book.

I now feel quite elated, and motivated to work on some of the other books I have on the go:

• The Magic Oxen of Doom - set in Oxford Colleges

• A Slate Roof - Adventures in my Little House

• The Glidermen of La Bourboule - incorporates the Tiny Visitors, and even stranger things

• Madame Dubois and Chat-Cherie - basically about Hermes scarves ....

So you see I haven't just been lazy  -  more blog posts soon, I hope.

George R R Martin and gratuitous depictions of sexual violence

I have been sick with the winter vomiting bug for over a week, and was unable to do much except listening to the radio in a half-hearted sort of way, in between toilet and tea breaks.

Getting tired of the never ending reports of human folly that is the news, I decided to listen instead to an audio book.  I have been meaning to read A Song Of Ice And Fire by George RR Martin for quite a while now - I bought all the books two years ago but didn't get further than the middle of book 2 - but since I was in no condition to do any reading, I thought listening to the audio reading on Youtube would be a good alternative to get through the exceedingly long volumes.

I drifted in and out of sleep, with murders, rapes, and machinations going on in the background, and if things got too gory, I was too exhausted to turn off the irritating voice, as I would have done while fully conscious.

After hour upon hour of this faux-medieval rambling, and heaven knows how many scenes of carnage, I am genuinely pleased to be out and about again, cured (hopefully) of both the norovirus and my interest in A Song of Ice And Fire.  It is the countless rape scenes that really turned me off.  Mr Martin defends them, saying that that's just the way the Middle Ages were, and since his books are based on the Middle Ages in a loose sort of way, he had to include plenty of rapes.

Let's examine this claim.

Firstly, the "Middle Ages"lasted about 1,000 years - roughly, the period between the end of the Roman Empire in the West and the Renaissance (500 to 1500 AD).  The position of women, as well as other aspects of social life, was not the same throughout this time.  Sometimes women had significant rights, sometimes very few.  Also, the area included in the Middle Ages is huge - all of Europe and the Middle East - and was composed of hundreds of different cultures, which differed widely in the way women were treated.  Surely, if Martin really is the feminist he claims to be, he could have created a fantasy country were women were treated with consideration, and were not sexually mistreated on a regular basis?

Secondly, sexual violence against women in the Middle Ages was nowhere as prevalent as in Martin's novel.    To quote the Mary Sue Blog:

"For women in Martin’s novels and the HBO show, sexual violence is a constant specter, with rape an everyday threat for many of the female characters. No doubt such violence existed in the Middle Ages, historians say, but women had some protections. Muslim armies rarely raped conquered populations, because rape was an unforgivable crime in Islam, [Kelly DeVries, a medieval historian at Loyola University Maryland] said. Christian armies had slightly less-stringent religious prohibitions, but women were more protected than commonly depicted in popular culture, he said. The uptick in sexual brutality actually occurred after the Middle Ages, during the Wars of Religion kicked off by the Protestant Reformation, he said. In those conflicts, opposing sides saw each other as heretics and thus felt free to commit brutalities."

https://www.themarysue.com/grrm-dragons-vs-sexual-violence-against-women-in-fantasy/

Thirdly, even if we were to grant that sexual violence was prevalent and needed to be depicted, did it have to be depicted in such a detailed way?  Having listened to what seems to be hundreds of rape scenes within a week, I am left with the impression that most of them are gratuitous, over-described, and intended to titillate.  When this is considered together with the way women are discussed in other contexts in this novel - for example, every woman who is introduced has her breasts described in detail - I have to conclude that Martin's fantasy world thinks of women in a completely sexualised way.  As though that's all we are good for.  Is that really how men think of women?  Are they really all as disgusting as all that?

I remember some time ago there was this statement doing the rounds that men thought of sex every 7 seconds.  I found this rather puzzling - how could a man ever focus on anything else, if he thought about sex every 7 seconds?  Even to read a longish paragraph in this blog you need to concentrate for longer than 7 seconds.  If men really stopped whatever they were doing every 7 seconds to think about sex they would never get anything done!  I asked several male friends about this, and they said something like, "Well, I think of sex every 7 seconds whenever I am not doing anything else."  And how often was that?  "Well, I am pretty busy most of the time ....."  That's what I thought - a few times a day, maybe, less during times of stress, advancing age, illness, etc.

I know it is hard to admit this in the context of our oversexualised popular culture, but most of us are not as motivated by sex as the advertisers would like us to believe.  We've got a lot of other stuff going on, you know .....

If men were really as disgustingly destructive as depicted in Martin's novel, humanity would never have survived.  Societies with high levels of violence against women tend to have a low reproductive rate - as for example the Yanomamoe described by Napoleon Chagnon.  Every animal species protects the breeding females to ensure survival.  Humans have few offspring, and without modern sanitation and medicine, death in childbirth is common, and infant mortality high.  Add violence against women into this mix and few children will be born and grow to maturity.  Violence, including sexual violence, could not have been the norm in human history - our species would never have survived it.  It is curious how many writers would like to make us believe otherwise.

Fourthly, if Martin was really interested in depicting sexual violence 'as it really was', why is it only the women who get raped?  Surely he knows that men, too, got raped, on a regular basis?  Or is this something he would rather not burden his male readers with?

To be sure Martin mentions male rape here and there, but only in throw away half sentences; he does not lovingly dwell on details, as he does with the female rape scenes.  And more often than not there is the insinuation that the male victim was a wimp, like the healer who was 'treated like a maiden' by Victarion Greyjoy's men.

How would the young men who are the main consumers of fantasy fiction react if:

(1)  Vargo Hoat and his gang had buggered beautiful Jaime Lannister to within an inch of his life, leaving him with a permanently damaged rectum, unable to sit or walk properly, instead of cut off his hand?

(2)  The Mountain Clegane had brutally raped noble Prince Rhaegar Targaryen until he bled to death?

(3)  King Stannis was buggered with the hilt of his own sword by Brienne, instead of beheaded? (only in the TV version, as far as is currently known)

(4)  Eddard Stark were forced to participate in perverted sex games by Cersei Lannister, then stripped naked and paraded publicly around King's Landing, and finally sold to a brothel keeper of Astapor as a sex slave?

I could go on, but you get my point.  I don't think Martin's male readers would like to read that sort of thing.  Women don't like to read that sort of thing, either, Mr Martin.

For information about male rape - which is very hard to come by, incidentally - see this article from The Guardian, 17 July 2011:

"It's not just in East Africa that these stories remain unheard. One of the few academics to have looked into the issue in any detail is Lara Stemple, of the University of California's Health and Human Rights Law Project. Her study Male Rape and Human Rights notes incidents of male sexual violence as a weapon of wartime or political aggression in countries such as Chile, Greece, Croatia, Iran, Kuwait, the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. Twenty-one per cent of Sri Lankan males who were seen at a London torture treatment centre reported sexual abuse while in detention. In El Salvador, 76% of male political prisoners surveyed in the 1980s described at least one incidence of sexual torture. A study of 6,000 concentration-camp inmates in Sarajevo found that 80% of men reported having been raped."    

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-men

Men get regularly raped in the UK, too.  See the Telegraph article of 25 May 2015 on the subject:  

"Police crime figures for 2014 in England & Wales show there were 38,134 incidents of rape or sexual assault of a woman and 3,580 against men. Yet due to the shame and stigma surrounding perhaps the darkest male taboo of all, Survivors UK believe only 2-3 per cent of men report their rapes (official figures for women are 10-12 per cent reporting) meaning many thousands of men are suffering in silence. Furthermore, there are an estimated 1.5 million adult male survivors of childhood sexual abuse in the UK – abuse against boys accounts for around 70 per cent of cases."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11587324/Why-doesnt-society-care-about-male-rape.html

I really wish male rape was more in the news, so that people realise that this isn't just a women's issue, and take it more seriously.  It puzzles me that so many men - including the author of A Song Of Ice And Fire - seem to think it is OK to constantly depict / read depictions of acts of sexual aggression against women. How would they feel if the sexual aggression depicted was against men?  Men they identified with, their heroes?

Is the silence about male rape victims, and the emphasis on female victims, simply a way to protect the male ego, to suggest that males are safe and females are not, and that the more 'male' a man is the safer he is from this sort of victimisation - and surely, lewd jokes and misogyny in general are an excellent way to showcase that one is truly a man?

When will we realise that violence isn't something that men to do women, but something that some human beings do to other human beings, and that we should all unite against the perpetrators, if only because we are all potential victims, and because no one is safe?

I do grant Mr Martin this - his novel shows that everyone, no matter how strong, powerful, rich, beautiful, virtuous, ruthless, manipulative, etc etc, someone is, everyone can be victimised (though in gender specific ways).

And judging by the recent news items on the radio, every profession, class, gender, social group, category of family member, nationality, age, etc etc, contains predators who will try to victimise those who are decent or innocent enough not to expect that sort of thing from them.

Alone there is no safety for anyone, but together we can protect one another.

"The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives."


For more information on male rape victims, try this Wikipedia link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_males

For more information on the accuracy of Game of Thrones depiction of the Middle Ages:

https://www.livescience.com/44599-medieval-reality-game-of-thrones.html

    

Annals of the Book-club: Organ donors and Internet shaming

Recently we held another meeting of the Book-club at the Club.  It was our fourth meeting; there had been another one a month ago, but I didn't feel up to writing a post about it.  Wracked by guilt, I am doing both books in one post, so you can't say I neglect you completely!

Never let me go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Being blunt about it, this is one of the most boring books I have ever read, almost as bad as 'Mr Bottesby does something', which latter book is so boring that it seems to have bored itself out of existence (I gave my copy away about ten years ago, in case you want to borrow it to fight your insomnia).

Ishiguro seems to have a pathological need to be so subtle as to be soporific.  I initially had high hopes for this book, since I am very interested in organ transplants (totally against them) and was up for an intelligent, unusual take on the subject matter.  Now I can take boring books; I even read Jane Austin's Emma, a long time ago, before there was an internet and one relied more on making one's own entertainment.  What I can't forgive so easily is taking a really good idea and then boring it into extinction.

The characters are wholly unsympathetic - by the time I was half-way through the story I no longer cared even vaguely about what would happened to them.  They are like card board cut-outs of real people, bloodless, non-human, unbelievable as people.

The story is badly told.  Ishiguro indulges himself by hinting, suggesting, and carelessly dropping clues which may or may not turn out to be relevant.  He plays hide and seek with the reader, which would be just about bearable if it lead up to a towering finale.  But it actually leads to a pathetic little whimper of an ending, where the characters accept their fate demurely without any creditable attempt to avoid it.  Even the love story, supposedly so important, fizzles out even before the male partner makes his last donation (ie gets killed off for his vital organs).

The basic premises of the story are preposterous.  If humanity really decided to breed clones so we could use their organs for transplants, we would not give them 25 years of a good life first.  We would not educate them, encourage them to produce art work, write essays, live on a farm, etc etc.  We would genetically engineer them to have tiny brains so they couldn't rebel and wouldn't realise what we were doing to them, and we would kill them as soon as they were adult - latest by age 18.  Also, we would not take one organ, then take care of them in hospital, then a few months or years later take the second organ, and so on until they died because they lost too many organs.  We would take all the organs at once and get it over with.

Another criticism is that the story is badly structured.  Having wasted the first nine tenth of the book meandering aimlessly through the irrelevant memories of insignificant characters, Ihiguro suddenly realises that the book needs to be finished, and introduces one big hat from which he pulls all the rabbits he needs to finish off the story.

Having said all that, the book club did have an excellent discussion about the book, and also about organ transplants.  I was in a solid majority of one - everyone else disagreed with me, but I knew I was right!

So you've been publicly shamed, by Jon Ronson

This was a very different book!  Written by a journalist in  a lively, informative way, there was lots of interesting information about the evil underbelly of the internet, most of which I had little idea existed.

The way public internet shaming works is that someone makes a relatively innocent comment on Facebook or Twitter, and someone else considers the comment to be massively offensive and shares it amongst the more idle sections of the internet community, who have nothing better to do than to pass derogatory comments on others, and create what I believe is called a 'Shit-Storm'.

An unedifying spectacle ensues, where people with more bile than brain attack the hapless original comments-poster from a swiftly assumed morally superior position, which gets just as swiftly undermined by the out of all proportional viciousness of the critics' comments.  I mean, seriously, threatening to rape someone for having posted a picture considered offensive to veterans?  How these people can claim an attitude of moral superiority after attacking anyone in such a way is beyond me.

And it doesn't stop at making threatening comments!  People's home and work addresses and private telephone numbers are published, and some unfortunate comments posters lose their jobs and livelihoods because of some relatively minor missteps.

Of course all this should not really have shocked or surprised me, given the vitriol and barbaric threats that for example female politicians - Hillary Clinton, anyone? - have to endure just for daring to presume a position in public life.

Reading the book - which I can highly recommend - made me feel glad that I never activated the comments function on my blog!

We had an excellent discussion about this book, too!

I am not really doing it justice here, that's what happens when one does a blogpost ten days after the event!  The book is not just about internet shaming, but also covers cases where someone embellished a story to make it look better in a book and got caught, cases where sexual peccadilloes were discovered and slavered over by the gutter press, and delves into the psychological reasons of both the misbehaving victims of shaming and the self-righteous shamers themselves.

Suffice it to say that this is an informative, entertaining, well written, and very thought provoking book, which I will continue to recommend to others.

Annals of the Book-Club: Down and Out in Paris and London

Today the 'Book-Club at the Club' met again, to discuss George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London.  This time there were only four of us, but the meeting was nevertheless a lively one.

As before, I gained lots of new insights into a book I had read several times before, which just shows the benefits of having a Book-Club, especially one populated by contrary independently minded individuals who always disagree with me - the only way to learn something new, of course.

The book is divided into two parts, where the author is 'down and out' first in Paris and then in London.  The Paris experience is described quite differently; Orwell focuses on the characters he meets, whereas in London he focuses on the mechanics of the experience of the 'tramps' he encounters.  In Paris, his experience is that of a poor man who has a grueling job, and is too tired to worry about the future.  In London, he is unemployed and describes the experience of wandering from one charitable institution to another, always in search of free lodging and 'tea and two slices', and trying to avoid having to give too much in return by way of praying and humbling himself.

While in Paris the author is a member of a group of individuals who are in a similar situation, in London it is obvious that he is only doing this for a short time - for one month, to be exact, until a promised job materialises.  In London he is the observer, the journalist, and not really part of the tramps he claims to be one of.  Consequently the atmosphere in the two parts of the book is quite different.

We discussed for a while the reason for this difference; was it that his experience had simply been different in the two cities, or was it because the book was addressed to an English audience, who he wished to convince to treat the tramps they encountered in a more compassionate manner?

The book is one of the author's first, and we wondered to what extent the style and content were deliberate, or simply the result of inexperience.  Personally I found the book more convincing than some of Orwell's later ones, like 1984 or Animal Farm; it seemed less polished, less designed to elicit a particular reaction from the reader, and precisely for that reason did not encounter my usual instinctive opposition to it.

Another interesting discussion we had was about the author's antisemitism (or not).  Personally I did not notice it, perhaps because I interpreted the passages where a character behaved in an antisemitic way as expressing the views of that character, rather than the author's, and I took against the character who expressed it, not the author.  I thought that the Russians described in the book, like Boris, and the restaurateur who swindled the author, were characterised as being worse than the Jews.  My fellow book fanciers, on the other hand, thought that the Russians had been described with a sort of amused tolerance, as though the author, despite being the victim of their misdeeds, secretly admired and approved of them.  

So the difference between my fellow biblioholics and myself seemed to be, that I considered what the characters in the book did, and judged them accordingly, whereas the others focused on what they considered the author's judgement of the characters to be.  It may well be that I simply don't notice this sort of antisemitism any more, because most of the books I read are from the period between 1850 and 1950, and antisemitism is rife in many of those books, so perhaps I skip across such incidents without much notice.  

In Paris the author worked as a 'plongeur', a sort of dishwasher and general dogsbody, and the stories he relates about cooks licking the food before it is served, the filth and grime and bugs and rats, are enough to destroy anyone's appetite.  Orwell asserts, probably truthfully, that it is far easier to get a good meal in a private house, and cheaper, too, than in a restaurant.  I rather hope that nowadays restaurants are more hygienic, but I have read similar accounts about prevailing practices in certain fast food 'restaurants' of the current era, so am not entirely convinced!

While the work in Paris was hard and the poor worked incredibly long hours (17 hours a day on occasion) they are not described as completely downtrodden and dissatisfied with their lot; as Orwell points out, if you work as hard as they did, there is no mental energy left for worrying about the future, or indeed, any sort of rebellion.  I have read other books about this period in Paris and I think the author may have been a bit too soft on Paris, and definitely not as critical as he was about London.

The author makes the point that most of the low level work he encountered could have been done much more efficiently, but that the upper classes preferred to keep the long hours for the lower classes, to keep them out of mischief and prevent revolutions.  This is an interesting point; while I don't believe that as much of the work was superfluous as Orwell claims (plates need to be washed, after all, and food cooked), I do agree that keeping the people busy goes a long way towards preventing them from noticing their exploited state and doing something about it.  One could make a similar point about today's exploited masses, who are kept occupied not by 17 hour long working days, but by mass consumption designed to keep them in wage-slave servitude, and cheap entertainment which numbs the brain and tries to stamp out independent thinking.

Orwell's book is quite short, and purports to be simply a personal experience, rather than a sociological study.  This is not quite true, as Orwell's biographers readily document.  At the same time as Down and Out in Paris and London, I also read 'The Classic Slum' by Robert Roberts, which is a study of the slum in Salford at Edwardian times, and considerably longer and more in depth.  

Orwell's book was published in 1933, so relatively late - to put it into context, 1933 was the year Hitler came to power in Germany.  When I read the book for the first time, I somehow assumed it was from around 1900, and I was surprised when I noticed, at my current reading, that it was set between the two world wars.  That time is endlessly interesting to me, partly because of all the changes that happened then, partly because I know about it so some extent from my elders, who lived through it.

So many of the authors who wrote about this time are now all but forgotten by the general reading public, especially the German ones.  But I have a little collection of them, and they well repay the time spend on reading them.  Jakob Wassermann, Hans Fallada, Stefan Zweig, Lion Feuchtwanger, Erich Kaestner, Erich Maria Remarque, Arthur Schnitzler, and Erich Muehsam - I love them all.

Musings on St Valentine's Day - Different Kinds of Love

The essence of cool sophistication - Book Club at the Club

Vol Amoureux des Azures by Toutsy

La Femme de Gilles versus Vol Amoureux des Azures

In a desperate attempt to catch up on my blog-posts, I have decided to shoehorn two subjects into one:  My annual St Valentine's Day scarf & musings, and my reflections on a book we read during a session of the recently established Book-club I happen to have co-founded.

The Scarf-of-the-day is Vol amoureux des azures, one of the most delightfully romantic scarves ever composed by Toutsy aka Laurence Bourthoumieux for Hermes.  It is possibly my most femininely romantic scarf, and I rarely wear it, being by nature more practical than conventionally feminine (a 'Virago', as defined by Florence King).  Nevertheless I treasure it, and have had my moments in it ....

The scarf to me is about love of the sort that Hollywood glamourises, and that ends at the altar, with a bit of luck.  It is about love that is like a butterfly, that flirts and flightily dances from flower to flower, taking a sip of nectar here and leaving a light dusting of pollen there, the love of which Germans have said, Himmelhoch jauchzend, zu Tode betruebt, gluecklich allein ist die Seele die liebt (roughly, Joyously happy, grieved on to death, happy alone is the soul that's in love).  The French refer to the same as 'Etoiles dans les yeux' (having stars in one's eyes, ie being blind with love).

St Valentine's Day is of course all about this sort of love, and I have discussed it on previous occasions.

But today I shall cover another sort of love, the sort that starts - hopefully! - when the wedding is over and the guests have gone home, and the newly minted couple look at each other a little forlornly, wondering where to take things from here.

La Femme de Gilles by Madeleine Bourdouxhe is the first book we chose for our book club, and although it is barely 150 pages long, we managed to talk about it for almost three hours.  I first read this book in the 1990s, and have re-read it on numerous occasions, but still I learned new and interesting things about it from my fellow book clubbers, which surely shows how very unusual and thought provoking it is.

The story is set amongst the working classes in Belgium, and was first published in 1937.  It was then forgotten, and re-published in the 1990s, when it fell into my hands and got stuck there ever since.

The book tells the story of a worker's wife who is deeply in love with her husband, and they are very happy together, until her younger sister, a flighty thoughtless creature, decides it would be good fun to start a dalliance with her brother-in-law.

So far so humdrum.  What makes the story different is the reaction of the wife, Elise.  She is, in my opinion, a true heroine, and it grieves me, to this day, that her efforts were not rewarded as they should have been.  She does not fight, argue, throw temper tantrums, or cheat on her husband in return - she continues to be kind and friendly and helpful to her husband and even her sister.  In the end, when everyone turns against her, she still quietly, determinedly, follows the path she had adopted.

I have re-written the end of this book a dozen times in my mind.  It upsets and angers me, that this woman who behaves in such a decent, adult way gets treated so badly by everyone, and in the end, when she has almost won, realises that she has given all she had, and has spent all her strength.  Haven given all she had, she had none left for herself, and she died.

Elise has a strength of character that is rare, and mainly found in fairy-tales and heroic sagas.  Most of us give our love judiciously, in bite-sized little pieces, carefully safeguarding our hearts, making sure that we cannot be destroyed when the subject of our love turns on us.  But Elise gave with both hands, and held nothing back, until she had spent herself, and was no more what she had always been, and always wanted to be - the Wife of Gilles.

OK, so maybe I have been brainwashed by American Hollywood tear-jerking movies, but I demand a happy ending for this woman!  She clearly deserved better, and although her hapless husband was scarcely worthy of her devotion, she loved and wanted the guy, and if I had written the book that's what she would have had, and they would have lived happily ever after.

'Till the start of WWII, I guess.  Happy ending are so hard to come by ...

This reminds me of a sentiment once expressed by Karl May, when he was criticized for his happy, unrealistic stories.  He said that life was bad enough, and in his stories at least he wasn't going to let the bad guy win.

Hear Hear, I say, and a Happy St Valentine's Day!

Bohemian Book Binge

Daunt - classy but pricey

So I know I haven't done any posts since I came back from la Bourboule.  Life is hectic, things have to be achieved, and stuff keeps on happening.  Still, I am hanging in there, and to celebrate October and Office-Togetherness, I organised another epic social event that took place last Saturday: The first ever

Bohemian Book Binge!

Basically, it involved haunting a wide range of bookshops on a likely Saturday, punctuated by frequent culinary interludes and the odd pint.  A word to the wise:  don't get drunk the night before, as some of my fellow bibliophiles did; it may crimp the pleasure and result in a shortened book-crawl.

We kept things fairly informal, and people joined the group as and when (they managed to extricate themselves from their bedclothes).  The more dependable of my triplets and I gathered for breakfast at my favourite Pain Quotidian, and then walked down to Daunt in Marylebone High Street, where we were met quickly by Cool Dude and, much later, by the less dependable triplet.

Daunt is very impressive, it looks more like an old college library than a bookshop, and specialises in travel guides and books set in foreign climes, as far as I could make out.  I bought a book called 'Shamans, Lamas, and Evangelicals' by CR Bawden; it is the story of a couple of English missionaries in Sibiria and was considered the coolest book any of us bought during the day.

Daunt again - notice the overhead gallery?

Up on the gallery, at a risky angle

After Daunt we drifted towards the Book Barge Word on the Water, by taking the underground from Baker Street to King's Cross and walking down to Granary Square.  Only a few photos, since I covered this bookshop in a previous post.  Everyone loved it, of course - how could one not?

http://dblenck.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/legal-irritations-floating-literature.html

Walking towards the Book Barge

Brilliant book browsing picture taken by the third triplet

Having exhausted the possibilities of the Book Barge, we drifted a few yards downriver and installed ourselves outside a restaurant, intent on refreshments, and to allow the last member of the Librocubicultarists, the Almost Triplet, to catch up with us.  What do you mean, you don't know this word?

We had wonderful weather, sunny and just warm enough to be able to sit outside.  We spent a very pleasant hour or so eating, drinking, and discussing each others' book purchases.

Lunch venue at Granary Square

After that we hit the road again, and walked, past St Pancras ...

... and King's Cross ...

.... to Scook Books.

That's Books spelled backwards, by the way

Scoob Books in Russel Square is a delicious jumble of old books, some expensive, most affordable, with a huge number of volumes.  Later on over tea this was voted our favourite bookshop of the book crawl, and it was with real regret that we left it again to walk towards out next destination.

Scoob

The last of Scoob

The next - and as it turned out - last bookshop we went to was Henry Pordes in Charing Cross.  It was rather full, and I forgot to take any photos.  It has both very old books and modern art volumes, both very beautiful, inter alia.

For photos, click this link:  https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=henry+pordes+books&biw=1093&bih=510&tbm=isch&imgil=ZOn4C4awNdYuhM%253BAAAAAAAAAAABAM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.henrypordesbooks.com%25252F&source=iu&pf=m&fir=ZOn4C4awNdYuhM%252CAAAAAAAAAAABAM%252C_&usg=__gRpu7qxRMsAUemyHJcuwsMEvZ7Y%3D&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwjy_K2czfbPAhUGBBoKHUOzAbYQuqIBCG0wDQ&dpr=1.25&imgrc=6EVPOKay7o_uQM#imgrc=6EVPOKay7o_uQM%3A

Next on the list was Any Amount of Books, also in Charing Cross Road, but by now we were flagging, and instead of tumbling head first into this legendary den of foliofanciers we ended up in a sort of pub/cocktail bar.

We asked for tea, and received cups in various sizes with mismatched saucers, and two of us received no saucers at all, because 'they were out'.  But since we were rather tired, we accepted this ill-assorted crockery, solemnly dunked our tea-bags into the hot water supplied and fatalistically hoped to extract some teaishness from them.

Thus we wiled away at least an hour.  We only left because the Almost Triplet conceived a sudden desire for a 'cream bun'.  So we scoured the environs for evidence of cream buns, and scaled the peaks of joy and dark disappointment in several shops, which from the outside looked like cream-bun-shops but upon closer inspection turned out to be purveyors of pizzas and miscellaneous
savouries.  Eventually we gave up, and the Almost Triplet made do with some Maltesers - a sad reflection on these post-Brexit times, I feel.

Having another hour to fill in, we wandered around aimlessly, finally seeking refuge in reasonably empty pub, to discuss politics and our next Book Binge.  I also took a few more bad photos - when will I learn not to take night time pictures?

The day finished as it started - two triplets in North Audley Street, eating and drinking and tripping linguistically through the tulips of modern life.

A thoroughly enjoyable day, I do declare!

Big Ben

Notre Dame?

Are you fooled?