marramgrass

Yesterday afternoon I paid £1.14 a litre to fill the petrol tank of my car. On a 55-litre fuel tank that takes me well past the sixty pound mark for a fill.

I’m not complaining about this because for now I know that we can afford it, but I also know that it’s a heavier problem for some.

I’ve been operating on the assumption that at least part of the reason for the hefty duty on fuel in the UK was an effort to discourage car use for environmental reasons. I may be wrong — the duty has been substantial for longer than the environment has really been on the radar, I think.

When we moved back to Northern Ireland (almost two years ago, now) we took what was for us a difficult decision. We bought a second car. This was a result of the nature of the work we both do: I move around a lot during the day, and not having to rely on public transport makes for less time spent traveling, plus I often am out and about in the evenings; my wife works on calls ‘from home’ and needs quick transport to the hospital to be immediately available; it’s impossible to co-ordinate these two factors.

That was our thinking, and most of the time I manage to convince myself that it’s not just an excuse. On occasion, though, I wonder if we’ve been seduced by a little taste of decadence, even if the second car only leaves the drive when we really need it to.

Sometime in the next few months, we’ll need to fill the oil tank for our central heating, too. That one I am a little concerned about. When it comes to it, though, we’ll rein in for a while and we’ll be able to pay the bill I fully expect to be in the region of £5-600. Again, we’re lucky (which is to say, privileged) — we’ll be able to do that. Others won’t.

What to do?

This is where I start to get a little uncomfortable, because ultimately I think it’s a cultural thing that is as much to do with me as anyone else, consuming everything.

I have convinced myself that we need two cars in our family, however uncomfortable I claim to be with that arrangement. We, a couple with no children yet, need a whole car each?

Maybe, for now, it’s true that we do. I still hope, though, that I’ll never stop asking myself that every time I look out at our drive and see them sitting there. When I stop, then I’ll need to worry.

I suppose that’s a solid principle: don’t get comfortable.

There’ve been a couple of films and a book lately that I intended to comment on. Here goes.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is what happens when a Respected Literary Author™ tries a little genre fiction. A fairly standard post-apocalyptic yarn, it’s been around for a couple of years and is currently being made into a film starring Aragorn. In a nutshell, America (the world?) is enduring the aftermath of an undetailed (nuclear?) disaster. Society has collapsed, survivors are eating each other, and a man and his young son are trekking across the country in an attempt to find a little safety and security.

The Road gathered very positive reviews, singing the praises of McCarthy’s handling of his fairly sci-fi premise and how he uses it to great effect to explore themes of civilization and fear of death, along with some deftly handled father-son relationship issues.

I wasn’t quite so impressed.

Yes, the book does all those things, but I suspect it gained from the reviewers not being too familiar with the genres in which McCarthy was squatting. Disaster-destroys-civilization has been a popular device over recent years, and lends itself well to this kind of philosophising — so it’s been done a lot, lately.

If you want a study of the end of civilization in all its fascinating horror, check out Max Brooks’ World War Z. I’d love to say that Brooks hasn’t got McCarthy’s touch with language, but actually I found his prose much more interesting and affecting. Sometimes The Road is too clever for its own good: yes, screwing around with punctuation may reflect the chaos and disorder of post-apocalyptic America, but it makes it damned hard to read. (Of course, ‘genre’ authors can be guilty of this, too. The phonetically written portions of Iain M. Banks’ Feersum Endjinn are as tiring to read as they must have been to write.)

Maybe I’ve got a chip on my shoulder that’s tempting me into a rant. Maybe not. I read a lot of SF and fantasy, but I read a lot of literary fiction, too. I have the fervour of an evangelist trying to convince the world of all the quality writing that exists in the ‘genres’. I just find it sad and a little elitist that when a well-known literary author tackles themes and ideas that have been done very well by genre authors, he gains far greater recognition than those genre folks.

Enough of that. On to a few films:

Iron Man has, I think, claimed the position of my favourite comic book adaptation. Robert Downey, Jr made a most excellent Tony Stark, and the whole thing was great fun.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall wasn’t so hot. It had one or two good laughs, but on the whole it’s best forgotten.

We watched Knocked Up a few weeks back. This was why I went to see Sarah Marshall, because this one was good. It’s the next stage of coming-of-age film after American Pie et al — what happens when the drunken sex leads to pregnancy? The humour may be low-brow, but the characters are surprisingly subtle and the whole thing is sweet and sensitive.

The Heartbreak Kid joins the list of the worst films I’ve ever seen.

Looking at that short list, it seems that I’ve mainly been consuming cinematic fluff recently. Ah. So be it; does you good, sometimes.

While I’m still slowly reading through NT Wright, in between I’m having great fun with a series of cheesy fantasy novels.

I think that’s me up to date with the reading and the watching I wanted to mention. Was it good for you?

On Friday afternoon I had the rare but enjoyable experience of being in the car when Radio 4 were broadcasting their Afternoon Play. The piece, Forty Three, Fifty Nine — Yara, was a great listen, well-written and well-acted. Nothing terribly deep, but a nice, tight bit of drama.

An occasional series of dramas inspired by real events, in which the story is contained within a continuous 43 minutes 59 seconds.

City worker Grant, a compulsive talker, knocks over a young woman, apparently on the run from a sex trafficking ring. He offers her a lift, but as their progress through London is halted by traffic grid-lock, he discovers she is not what she seems - and that he is centre-stage in an unfolding catastrophe in which many will die if he doesn’t act decisively.

If you get a chance, catch it on the BBC iPlayer. It’ll be available until Friday afternoon (the BBC’s web services would be so much better without that annoying expiry of content).

I’ve come to the end of the middle section of Wright’s book, and while there are a couple of points he makes that may be fairly controversial to some (or many), I think he has largely brought me with him. The problem is that when he writes about what happens immediately after death (in a chapter simply titled “Purgatory, paradise, hell”) — as he really has to, however tempting it might be to skip on by — Wright is addressing questions where we really don’t have much in the way of Scriptural witness to go on, and where tradition is mind-bogglingly difficult to sort through. However, he plainly recognises this fact, offering attempts at understanding rather than suggesting prescriptions.

Following on from this, the final movement of the book is where the author begins to answer the simple question of, in his own words, “so what?”

Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, p204:

The point of this final section of the book is that a proper grasp of the (surprising) future hope which is held out to us in jesus Christ leads directly and, to many people, equally surprisingly, to a vision of the present hope which is the basis of all Christian mission. To hope for a better future in this world — for the poor, the sick, the lonely and depressed, for the slaves, the refugees, the hungry and homeless, for the abused, the paranoid, the downtrodden and despairing, and in fact for the whole wide, wonderful and wounded world — is not something else, something extra, something tacked on to ‘the gospel’ as an afterthought. And to work for that intermediate hope, the surprising hope that comes forward from God’s ultimate future into God’s urgent present, is not a distraction from the task of ‘mission’ and ‘evangelism’ in the present. It is a central, essential, vital and life-giving part of it. Mostly, Jesus himself got a hearing from his contemporaries because of what he was doing. They saw him ’saving’ people from sickness and death, and they heard him talk about a ’salvation’, the message for which they had longed, which would go beyond the immediate into the ultimate future. But the two were not unrelated, the present one a mere ‘visual aid’ of the future one, or a trick to gain people’s attention. The whole point of what Jesus was up to was that he was doing, close up, in the present, what he was promising long-term, in the future.

There are a number of phrases in that portion (and the chapter it’s taken from) that I was tempted to highlight, but then I realised that I’d end up emphasising all but a few words. In so many of the conversations I have, day by day and week by week, this is what I’m trying to say. I’m now keen to see where Wright ends up…

The Telegraph’s 50 best cult books, following the example of Random Piercings. Please do join in.

The rules: books you’ve read in bold and books you started but never quite finished in italics.

• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
• The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)
• A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
• Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
• The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
• The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
• The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
• The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
• Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968)
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
• Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
• The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
• Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950)
• The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
• Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
• Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
• The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
• The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)
• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
• Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)
• The Magus by John Fowles (1966)
• Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
• The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
• No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
• On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
• The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
• The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
• The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
• The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
• The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
• The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
• Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
• The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
• The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968)
• Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig(1974)

I could have added a third category, of the books I plan to read when I come across them.

A number of years ago, the wife of a local farmer died in an accident on the level crossing beside a cottage where we sometimes holiday. There follows my revision of a short piece I wrote that summer while we were staying in the cottage.
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There are probably many worse ways to spend late-afternoon on May Day
than being punted up and down the Cam with your brother-in-law doing
all the hard work.

It took some convincing to get me on to the river, and when I was
there I stayed firmly sitting down, but it was great fun.

The photo above shows something I never thought I’d see. There were
three punt-loads of men in maroon and orange, often crashing into the
bank and each other. It looked like they were having as much fun as we
were.

Maybe next time I’ll work up the nerve to have a go with the pole, if
I decide I can trust my balance enough.

I’m experimenting with using Flickr to post photos directly to my blog
from my phone. You could call this one a test.

During the week my wife tried her hand at making a pavlova. It was so
good she is reprising her masterpiece for our hosts (and me!). This is
a good thing.

There are few things that will make me go all girly like puppies or kittens. It’s the way I’m wired, and I make no apologies.

One of my in-laws’ Irish Water Spaniels birthed a small litter earlier this week. For scale, the first image features my wife’s hands which are smaller than mine in the second image.

Altogether, now: “awww.”

Being only a few days old, their eyes are still closed and it will be a fair while before they can stand. They swim around on their bellies just like the little brown and furry tadpoles they resemble.