Christmas Quiz

Guess where I've been from Wednesday till Saturday? We're looking for one place, but extra bonus points for any individual locations...

Nigella And Me: Tales Of Sex, Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll And Artichokes

I know it's silly, and childish, and bloggish, and inaccurate, and I know it's a game and the choice will be different in the morning — but how about a list of your ten favourite books? Books that have influenced you, delighted you, stunned and startled you, books that have changed your life in some way? They needn't necessarily be literary, or even well-written; they may be books which were important at a much earlier stage of your life and which you wouldn't want to read again. Or they could be books which are so totemic that you have them by your side at all times. I invite you to indulge me and play this game — those who don't comment regularly, or even at all, are very welcome too! I won't hold you to these lists, which should be spontaneously scribbled down off the top of your head. Though I think you may be surprised at how much such a list says about you. Well, here goes — this is mine. Not in any particular order:

1. Georges Duhamel The Life And Adventures Of Salavin

2. Colin Wilson The Outsider

3. Edward Thomas Poems

4. Rainer Maria Rilke Letters To A Young Poet

5. Alfred J. Brown Striding Through Yorkshire

6. Hermann Hesse Steppenwolf

7. Rebecca Solnit Wanderlust

8. John Hillaby Journey Through Britain

9. Iris Murdoch Under The Net

10. Krishnamurti The Penguin Krishnamurti Reader

See — it's easy, isn't it? That only took a minute. Why don't you have a go? 

Oh, and by the way, in case you're wondering about the title of this blog post... I only put it there to attract your attention...

Easter Quiz Answers

It's time for the solution to the Easter Fun And Frolics quiz. No one had the correct answer, but Danish Dog came nearest with two right. The false facts were: (6) I have a phobic fear of beetroot (actually I love the stuff!), (14) My middle name is Archibald (it's John) and (16) I renamed myself Robert after a sex change operation (!)

Just a few words about some of the other statements.

I used to work in publishing — which is the reason I met those well-known personalities.

My association with the Georgian State Dance Company was short and sweet. I was picked out as a stooge by a couple of the dancers (I was sitting end of row in the audience), and before I knew what was happening found myself on stage doing some Cossack-style dancing much to the amusement of the whole theatre and the acute embarrassment of my children.

You really don't want to know about (8), (9), (10), (15) and (17), I assure you. Please put them down to youthful excess, not to any ingrained character defect.

And as for the alligator — my wife approached one in the Florida Everglades, mistakenly believing it was a life-size plastic model (similar to the one we'd just seen at the start of the boardwalk). When it moved, her screams could be heard all the way from Flamingo to Miami.

(All images from Wikimedia Commons)

Easter Fun And Frolics

Recalling the other day my odd-one-out quiz from November 2009, I'm inspired to set another one — all in the spirit of holiday fun! I do hope you will participate. All you have to do is read these twenty-one facts about my life and decide which three (and only three) are false. The other eighteen are absolutely true, I assure you. It's easy! Isn't it?

1. I once had lunch with Cilla Black.

The Georgian State Dance Company

2. I have seen Bob Dylan more than thirty times.

3. I once danced with the Georgian State Dance Company on the stage of Northampton's Derngate Theatre to the great embarrassment of my children, who almost crawled under their seats.

4. Once when out walking the Cornish coastal path, I passed Jenny Agutter coming in the opposite direction.

5. I once stood within six feet of Lauren Bacall.

6. I have a phobic fear of beetroot — I can barely look at the stuff, let alone touch or eat it.

7. Jason Donovan once posed for a photograph in front of my wife — but she was so nervous she couldn't get the camera to work.

The flimsiest of nightclothes

8. I once woke up on a street bench in Frankfurt under the disapproving gaze of German bankers on their way to work.

9. On another occasion, I woke up in a hotel bed in Pau and found two strangers lying next to me in the flimsiest of nightclothes — a German banker and his wife, as it happens.

10. In a fit of sexual jealousy I once smashed the window of a Parisian chambre de bonne with my bare fists.

11. Once upon a time my hair extended down beyond my shoulders, and I was so thin I could almost touch my backbone with my stomach.

12. I once drank wine with George Melly, Maureen Lipman and Anne Diamond in the same room.

13. I was once asked by Kenneth Williams why I wore a beard (I had a beard in my twenties) as it made me look so much older. He then confided that he fancied a good-looking Gibraltarian colleague of mine (clean-shaven, of course).

14. My middle name is Archibald.

A glass of urine

15. I once drank a pint of urine in the mistaken belief that it was water.

16. My birth name is Roberta, but I renamed myself Robert after a sex change operation in 1982.

17. In a posh restaurant in Rome I once stubbed out a cigarette in a bowl of freshly prepared tagliatelle alla panna to an audience of utterly bemused and rightly insulted Italian waiters.

18. In one of Manchester's top Chinese restaurants I once bit into a dim sum rather too eagerly. Its contents arced gracefully over the table, and came to rest all over the shirt and tie of my sales director host sitting opposite.

An American alligator

19. My wife's first cousin is the famous comedian and TV personality Rowland Rivron.

20. My sister-in-law's ex-boyfriend built Paul McCartney's house in Kent.

21. My wife was once nearly eaten by an alligator in Florida's Everglades National Park.

Here's wishing everyone a Happy Easter!

Getting-To-Know-You Quiz

Anyone for an end of year getting-to-know-you quiz, or are we all totally sick of games, quizzes, crossword puzzles, paper hats, mince pies, family arguments and all other things Christmassy by now? You must answer quickly, without too much reflection, and you must give one answer only - no hedging, or giving several alternatives etc! (Of course, it goes without saying that many of the answers will change every time we do the quiz.) 

1.  Best band/rock 'n' roll band?

2.  Favourite pop/rock/whatever single?

3.  Greatest classical composer?

4.  Best novel?

5.  Favourite poem?

6.  Greatest painting?

7.  Just one meal before you die - what would it be?

8.  Cats or dogs?

9.  Town or country?

10. Blogging or jogging?

11. If a famous contemporary or historical figure could accompany you on a long walk, whom would you like that person to be?

12. Favourite film?

13. If you could visit just one country you hadn't been to before, what would that country be?

14. Most sympathetic religion/philosophy of life?

15. Favourite city?

16. The dark wood or the airy hill?

17. Most compelling actor/actress?

18. Most memorable holiday?

19. Solitary walks or walks with a companion?

20. Christmas or Easter?

For what it's worth, my own answers are these:

1. The Rolling Stones 2. Big Yellow Taxi (Joni Mitchell) 3. Beethoven 4. The Rainbow (Lawrence) 5. The Prelude (Wordsworth) 6. Starry Night (Van Gogh) 7. Thai curry 8. Cats 9. Country 10. Blogging (are you serious?) 11. Krishnamurti 12. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Herzog) 13. India 14. Buddhism 15. Rome 16. The airy hill 17. Vanessa Redgrave (oh, please let me have Nastassja Kinski too!) 18. Rome over Christmas and the New Year - lovely and quiet! 19. Solitary walks 20. Easter (mainly because of the promise of Spring)     

October Teaser

With the 2010 Ryder Cup Competition having started today in Newport, Wales (don't say this blog isn't topical, though I think it's the only time I've referred to golf, as I'm just not interested in it!) - I wonder if anyone can tell me how this seemingly modest verse of poetry is related to my next post on the Cornish Coast Path?

How straight it flew, how long it flew,
It clear'd the rutty track
And soaring, disappeared from view
Beyond the bunker's back -
A glorious, sailing, bounding drive
That made me glad I was alive.

All the clues are there!

Summer Quiz

Anyone know what Ovid, DH Lawrence, Truman Capote, André Gide, Guy de Maupassant, Oscar Wilde, Alexander Dumas, Luigi Pirandello, John Steinbeck, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Paul Klee, Gustav Klimt, Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, Marcello Mastroianni, Gregory Peck, Ingmar Bergman, Frederico Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen have in common?

Odd One Out: Hasty Conclusion

Oh, heck! If I carry on like this, with such a slow reveal, then it'll take until the end of next week! And I haven't got a lot of time, so...

3. True. But Keith Emerson never needed to worry. This was in the mid-1990s; a local band called Spitfire McGuire, quite big in North Notts for, well, a few months; had to quit 'cos I was finding it hard to get up for work on Monday mornings...

4. True. Durham Uni. Mid-1970s. Final year. Final day of final year. Traditional end of year show by non-returning undergraduates, soon to be graduates. Satirical verses read by yours truly on shiny toilet roll which unrolled more and more rapidly with each scabrous stanza...

5. True. Difficult now to recapture my state of mind at the time... But it's been lightly documented already on this blog...

6. True. The airport at Palma, Majorca, in the mid-1990s. The Ryanair queue. Surprisingly, Helen Mirren and Taylor Hackford, her film director partner and soon-to-be husband, were travelling bucket-shop. We recognized them. No one else did. Hackford scowled many times in our direction. Just leave us alone! Keep your eyes elsewhere! Mmm, my eyes may have strayed elsewhere, but the tips of my fingers evidently did not...

7. True. Publishing sales conference, Linda Barker, celebrity author, etc, etc.

8. True. Everyone seems to have passed their driving test 1st time round here... Course it was easier back then - when there was no written test...

9. FALSE!!! To those who thought otherwise... How could you? I mean, who do you think I am!!! Besides, my wife reads this rubbish. And she's the only one (the only wife, I mean...)

10. True. It's publishing again, celebrity author Michael Winner invites us to his posh house, champagne and another champagne (but not a 3rd, he's not that generous)... yawn... yawn...

11. True. Frankie Howerd. Pebble Mill At One. The BBC studios. I'm a shy and callow youth, alone with Frankie in his dressing room. Now, help me dear, shall I wear the pink shirt or the purple one? What a decision? I ask you? I help him choose. I couldn't help noticing that both shirt collars are dirty.

12. True. A CAMRA Real Ale 'Conference' at Aston University (I kid you not) in the 1970s. No one else from the book distributors would go - they were all ill or having babies or otherwise engaged, funnily enough - so it was left to me, the shy and callow greenhorn recruit. Luckily the audience was sparse, and mainly worse for wear. And there were some large, real-ale ladies there with suckling infants - honest! Fair put me off my regurgitated statistics.

Odd One Out: Not The Sunken Box/Drunken Boat

2. Shamefully true. OK, so let's set the scene. It's the early 70s. In Frankfurt-am-Main, West Germany. At a little progressive-jazz club called Sinkkasten on the corner of Mainstrasse. Steps lead steeply down to a smoky cavern with a low, vaulted roof. There's a small stage at one end, a bar stretching down the side, and lots of circular tables crammed into the remaining space. The tables are crowded with huge, foaming jugs of lager. Young people are packed in everywhere - sitting round the tables and cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the bar. There's the sweet, resinous reek of cannabis in the air.

On stage is the virtuosic, free-jazz pianist Keith Tippett and his wife Julie Driscoll. (I think she was playing percussion.) There may have been 1 or 2 other musicians with them - I can't recall. (Do you remember Julie's haunting, psychedelic version of Dylan's This Wheel's On Fire?) In the interval I chat to them at the bar. At some point in the 2nd half a girl from the audience - tall, beautiful, stoned - walks gracefully and purposively onto the stage and embraces Keith. It's a magical moment. A moment, we tell each other, we'll remember for ever. We? Well, that's me, my mate Nigel, his mate Chowcat, and Dodo and Fido and others we'd met just minutes or hours before.

The rest of the evening is patchy, unclear, evanescent in my memory. I know I looked half-heartedly for Nigel - who went missing towards midnight. (The cleaners found him comatose in the toilets the next morning.) And I woke up on a bench next to a tram stop - wallet thankfully intact but clothes in disarray and fake army great-coat missing - just as the Frankfurt bankers and equity traders, drug dealers and prostitutes were about to begin their daily business...

Odd One Out: Not Kenneth Williams

Well, it's time to reveal all...

1. True. I used to work in publishing, and occasionally had to shepherd round celebrity authors on publicity tours. The publisher I was working for at the time, J. M. Dent, had published 3 witty, autobiographical books by Kenneth Williams - Acid Drops, Back Drops and Just Williams, all bestsellers - and he was much in demand for bookshop signings, and radio and TV appearances.

One particular morning I had to meet him and Liz Newlands, Dent's publicity director, at the Grand Hotel in Birmingham and take him to BRMB Radio and the BBC Pebble Mill studios for interviews, then on to Hudson's bookshop in the city centre for a book signing. Before we left, we had coffee in the lounge and attempted The Times crossword - which I believe Williams did regularly.

Whenever I met him - which I did several times - I was struck by what a lonely and neurotic figure he was. Before a group of people, in front of an audience, he would effortlessly turn on the charm and put on his act, captivating us all with his stock repertoire of anecdotes and funny voices. But one-to-one he could seem rather serious and depressed (like a lot of comedians). I think Williams saw himself as much more than just a comic, an entertainer and a funny man. He was quite erudite and well read, and had intellectual pretensions. Though how comfortable he would have felt amongst a group of high-minded, academic intellectuals I'm not sure.

Whenever he saw me I always felt he was mildly disappointed, as really he only had eyes for Ernie, a muscular, swarthy Gibraltarian publisher's rep from the south-east. He overdosed on barbiturates on 15 April 1988. His diaries later revealed a conflicted and self-tormenting character, mulling on feelings of underachievement, and struggling to reconcile Christianity with his own homosexuality.

Odd One Out

Entertained and inspired by Rachel Fox's and Dominic Rivron's recent blogofrolics, I thought I'd risk 3 being too much of a crowd and jump on the bandwagon myself. The game is this: guess which one of the following statements about myself is untrue. Go on, have a go! It's obvious! Isn't it?

1. I once helped Kenneth Williams do The Times crossword.

2. Once I woke up half-clothed on a street bench in the middle of the Frankfurt morning rush hour without any clear recollection of how I'd got there.

3. I used to be a keyboard player in a rock and roll band.

4. Totally inebriated, I've read a self-penned poem written on a shiny-paper toilet roll in front of various eminent university lecturers, professors and academics.

5. I had a complete blog-breakdown for several weeks when I imagined all the blogs I was reading held secret, malign messages.

6. I once touched the hairs on the back of Helen Mirren's neck.

7. I once bored Linda Barker half to death by telling her in minute detail how I'd decorated my kids' bedrooms.

8. I passed my driving test first time.

9. I have another wife in South America.

10. I once accepted Michael Winner's offer of another glass of champagne.

11. I have helped Frankie Howerd get dressed.

12. On one occasion I had to give a talk about Book Distribution without notes and without knowing anything at all about the subject in a lecture theatre full of drunk people and breastfeeding women.

Sometimes I think this blogging thing brings out the worst in us... ;)

Guess Where?

Guess where I've been these last few weeks?

Double-click to enlarge photos.

End Of Year Quiz

Since all the newspapers are awash with end of year quizzes at the moment (that Art Quiz in The Sunday Times the other day was well nigh impossible!), I thought I'd ask a question myself. With the death of Harold Pinter fresh in our minds, how about this one:

What has Pinter morphologically in common with Kafka, Brecht, Shakespeare, Dickens and Byron?

No? Then find the answer in my Mad, Bad And Dangerous post!

Quiz Time

...continued...

The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway line to Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass. The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon's stagnant light. Just beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black headstocks of Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the sky, and the winding-engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners were being turned up.

Anyone know why this fine opening paragraph of descriptive writing has such literary-historical importance? The clues are all there!

(The photo is credited to Garth Newton at http://www.ilkcam.com/ and reproduced under a Creative Commons License.)

...to be continued...