Not quite what I was looking for

I wanted to root out another favourite piece of Philip Larkin for a 'Poetry Sunday' post today, but my Internet researches proved fruitless.

Well, not entirely fruitless. I did find this: Larkin's Joint, a rather charming-looking restaurant on the corner of Loleta Avenue and Colorado Boulevarde in Eagle Rock, California, offering "contemporary soul food".

Yes, food for the soul indeed, but not what I had in mind.

If I had any talent for parody, I would now dash off a very amusing short fantasia on the idea of Philip Larkin running a restaurant (of any kind - but a soul food restaurant?!); or indeed, on the idea of Philip Larkin enjoying a 'joint' of another sort. However, I have absolutely no such talent, so I'll leave this as a challenge for someone else to undertake.

A Sunday poem

I've mentioned Larkin a number of times before. He's probably my favourite 'modern' poet, and his most devastatingly bleak work, Aubade, ranks among my 'Top Ten' poems. Something on JES's blog (I can't now remember what) put me in mind of this one, Church Going, a few weeks back. For me, the special quality about Larkin is that even when, as here, he's being more straightforwardly observational or autobiographical (or witty or facetious), he conjures forth the most perfect, resonant phrases. They lodge in the mind so powerfully that, with some of his poems, I've felt as if I were half-way to having memorised them after reading them for the first time. Here, I think, the best of many fine expressions is: "someone will forever be surprising/A hunger in himself to be more serious." That could be another epitaph for me.

Church Going

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

The return of 'Poetry Sunday'

We haven't had one in a while, and I happened upon this in an anthology at a friend's house a few days ago. 'Fate' once again giving a little prod.

Larkin always seems to strike deep chords within me. And I hold him significantly  - if indirectly - responsible for the curiously meandering path my life has taken. Particularly avid readers may also recall the last time I mentioned him on here...

I believe a leading literary critic once described Larkin as "a gloomy bugger" - and I suppose that summation fits me rather too aptly as well.

Love Songs In Old Age

She kept her songs, they took so little space,

  The covers pleased her: 

One bleached from lying in a sunny place, 

One marked in circles by a vase of water, 

One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her, 

  And coloured, by her daughter - 

So they had waited, till, in widowhood,

She found them, looking for something else, and stood

Relearning how each frank submissive chord 

  Had ushered in 

Word after sprawling hyphenated word, 

And the unfailing sense of being young  

Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein 

That hidden freshness sung, 

That certainty of time laid up in store 

As when she played them first. But, even more, 

The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love, 

  Broke out, to show 

Its bright incipience sailing above, 

Still promising to solve, and satisfy, 

And set unchangeably in order. So 

  To pile them back, to cry, 

Was hard, without lamely admitting how 

It had not done so then, and could not now.

Philip Larkin  (1922-1985)

A Sunday poem

My passion for Larkin is well-known by now to regular visitors.  This is a particularly poignant one - evoking what is lost when a life is cut short.

The Explosion

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead.
In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,
Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark's eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins,
Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter,
Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun,
scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.

The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God's house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face -

Plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said, and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed -
Gold as on a coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,

One showing the eggs unbroken.


Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Dying in harness

I was reflecting the other day on my first career as a schoolmaster (nearly twenty years ago now: it seems another life, someone else's, not my own).  Much as I loved the job (or certain aspects of it, anyway), I was mightily relieved to have escaped it, when a spell of serious illness forced me to retire in my mid-twenties.

There's something insidiously comfortable about that lifestyle: the steady routines, the short working hours and long holidays, the sense of separateness - of being insulated - from the outside world; and the sense of mastery too, of having absolute dominion over your classes, absolute (well, nearly) freedom to do whatever you will with them - unsupervised and unchecked by anyone.

But there's a deadening inertia about it, too.  There's not much in the way of a career path - unless you want to take on major administrative duties (at the cost of reduced contact time with pupils) or pastoral responsibilities as a live-in housemaster in a boarding school.  It can be quite difficult to change schools.  And, after a while, you become so attuned to the characteristic eccentricities of the school and the staff you're currently working with that change begins to seem too effortful, too irksome a dislocation.

It's not uncommon to find schoolteachers (particularly in the private sector) who have spent their entire working lives in the same school.  In fact, the deputy headmaster at the school where I taught had himself been educated there, and thus - apart from the brief interlude of university, which I gather he hadn't much enjoyed - he had spent his entire life in the same place.  I found that baffling and horrifying.  But I could see that - without a bold and decisive step, and perhaps a willingness to embrace a period of unemployment - this was a path that I myself was heading along.

For me, it was ultimately the routines - the very orderliness and predictability that some people find so reassuring - that started to make the job seem irksome to me.  The repetitive cycle of the timetable oppresses the soul, I found, makes you feel like a hamster on a wheel.  Each week is the same as the one before, and each term, and each year.

There's not even that much variety available to you in what you can teach (in English literature).  Shakespeare is, of course, compulsory for all; but the number of his plays which are at all accessible for children of 14 years old or so is really pretty small.  The longer, more complex works like Lear and Hamlet have to be reserved for advanced studies at 16+.  With the juniors you're stuck with Romeo & Juliet or Julius Caesar, and perhaps Macbeth or Othello; and maybe Henry V or Richard III for a history play, and As You Like It or The Taming Of The Shrew for a comedy.  And that's assuming that your school has sufficient copies of all of these, and that all available copies have not already been appropriated by your more senior colleagues; in practice, you may only have three or four to choose from - and you have to do two with each year group.  When 'The Scottish Play' came around for the third time in four years, I found myself thinking, "Not again!"  And I didn't want to be feeling like that about Shakespeare, going 'stale' on such great writing through enforced over-exposure.  And so I resolved to get out, after at most one more year.  (But, as Fate would have it, a near-death experience got me out of it rather sooner than that.)

Philip Larkin has a fine short poem, Schoolmaster, on the theme of spending a whole lifetime in such a narrow sphere, and how such an environment erodes your sense of identity, your independent will.  It closes with the chilling line:  He had dissolved.  (Like sugar in a cup of tea.)

Unfortunately, I can't find that one online.  But here's another good one.  Some online sources appear to attribute this to Larkin, but I'm pretty sure it's actually by Vernon Scannell.  The style and sensibility are very alike, though; I'm not completely confident in the identification.

Ageing Schoolmaster

And now another autumn morning finds me
With chalk dust on my sleeve and in my breath,
Preoccupied with vague, habitual speculation
On the huge inevitability of death.

Not wholly wretched, yet knowing absolutely
That I shall never reacquaint myself with joy,
I sniff the smell of ink and chalk and my mortality
And think of when I rolled, a gormless boy,

And rollicked round the playground of my hours,
And wonder when precisely tolled the bell
Which summoned me from summer liberties
And brought me to this chill autumnal cell

From which I gaze upon the April faces
That gleam before me, like apples ranged on shelves;
And yet I feel no pinch or prick of envy
Nor would I have them know their sentenced selves.

With careful effort I can separate the faces,
The dull, the clever, the various shapes and sizes;
But in the autumn shades I find I only
Brood upon death, who carries off all the prizes.

Vernon Scannell  (1922-2007)

Wanderlust

I think possibly one of the main formative influences on my life, although I never met him, was my maternal grandfather. He had separated from my grandmother years before I was born, and was subsequently ostracised by his family. I knew him only from the evocative stories my mother would sometimes tell about him. Apparently he dropped out of University, decided to work his way around the world on merchant ships, fetched up in Rio where he met and married my grandmother (working as a nanny, a young German refugee from the great post-WW1 depression), and then somehow blagged himself a job as the manager of a huge horse & cattle ranch in central Brazil.

Yes, my grandfather was a gaucho! And his leather over-trousers ('bombashers' they call them in those parts, apparently), gnarly with age, scoured and pitted from years of battling with thornbushes until they resembled Keith Richards's face, hung on the wall in our dining-room throughout my childhood, looking down on us as we ate, dominating my imagination at every meal. My mother and her sister were born in a town high in the Matto Grosso called Araçatuba - the name has always seemed exquisitely exotic to me, and I hanker to visit one day. Why on earth the family came back to England - on the eve of the War - I'll never understand.

So, growing up with dreams of riding the open range on a distant continent, it was never likely that I was going to settle down to a life of humdrum conformity in a bank or a law firm....

However, I do rather like the counter-balancing view of this Larkin poem - that maybe the impulse to travel, the rejection of a settled life, can be a little too smug and self-regarding... perhaps a conformity of a different kind? I don't think that is the case for me. I hope not. But I ask myself the question every year or two, just to try to reassure myself.

The imagery here reminds me of another powerful formative influence from my earliest childhood - the sea rat, a charismatic sailor-adventurer who briefly meets the heroes of The Wind In The Willows when they first set out on the road in their gypsy caravan (Toad's pre-motor car enthusiasm), and who tempts The Water Rat in particular to pursue such an exotic wandering life himself. I love that book to pieces, and try to re-read it every few years. There is a great tension in it between the allure of travel and the comfort of home. The 'Dulce Domum' chapter, where Mole finally returns home after his adventures, always used to make me cry - and probably still would! However, despite this sympathy with the affection for the familiarity of 'home', the call of 'the open road' always appealed to me more, both in reading the book as a child and in my life subsequently. Parents, beware - books can have a momentous impact on your children's development!

I sent this poem to all my friends back home when I left for China in 2002.

Poetry of Departures


Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off.
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
Its specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order.
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I'd go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren't so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Time's arrow reversed

I had meant to post this a few weeks back, but wasn't able to find it online.  I am indebted to occasional Froogville reader Nick (or perhaps a regular reader but infrequent commenter?) for passing it on to me.  It is one of my very favourite Larkin poems.

As Bad As A Mile

Watching the shied core
Striking the basket, skidding across the floor,
Shows less and less of luck, and more and more

Of failure spreading back up the arm
Earlier and earlier: the unraised hand calm,
The apple unbitten in the palm.

Philip Larkin  (1922-1985)

And - finally, after years of occasional fruitless searching - I've found this, Renaissance, an early film by Walerian Borowczyk (who would later become famous/notorious for quirky and macabre erotica like The Beast), dimly remembered from a festival of short animations I saw at the Phoenix cinema in Oxford while an undergraduate two dozen or more years ago. It is, I think, the best piece I've ever seen using the 'time goes backwards' device.

[It's posted by a user called The Motion Brigades, "dedicated to showcasing stop motion animation from the masters of the genre, with focus on rare and hard to find titles". I can see I'm going to be spending a lot of time noodling around their collection. I might have to have another 'Short Animation Festival' on here soon!]

And, well, I am hesitant to recommend this, since I absolutely loathe Coldplay, but ... it is another stunningly well executed example of this idea: the video for their song The Scientist, directed by Jamie Thraves.

[And do you remember this poem of my own on a similar theme - not following time backwards, but bringing it to a standstill, in the way that only a really good kiss can?]

More torments for the famous

I was browsing through a copy of Alan Bennett's Diaries in a bookshop last week, when I came upon an entry about W. B. Yeats. Bennett recorded that he had read somewhere that Yeats was once horrified to have been threatened with having to suffer a performance of his 'Wild Swans at Coole' sung by a massed choir of schoolchildren (it would appear that this performance never actually took place). Bennett wondered whether Philip Larkin had ever heard this story, whether it had prompted his own bitter joke that he expected one day after his death there would be a ceremonial recitation of his 'This Be The Verse' by 1,000 Girl Guides in the Royal Albert Hall.

Now that I'd like to see!

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

What are days for?

Music Mike, a fellow Beijing blogger with whom I have entered into frequent online correspondence over this past year, was kind enough to nominate me for a blog award last week (not for the vaguely artsy Froogville here, but for my more down-and-dirty 'drinking blog', Round-The-World Barstool Blues - which, coincidentally, turns six today). I felt I had to decline the honour, because, as I've noted before, I'm a bit down on the whole 'blog meme' thing; and, moreover, I really don't think there's anyone I could pass the award on to (the 'rules' demand that you extend the chain to ten new recipients!). Mike himself included nearly all the essential China blogs in his own nominations (and the few he missed are admirably covered in this fuller rundown from Danwei). Nearly all the other bloggers I used to read have hung up their spurs now (unplugged their keyboards?). It's Götterdämmerung time for blogging, I fear.

I also struggled with the award's demand to answer a batch of "What's your favourite...?" questions: favourite animal, colour, number, food, drink, flower, and... day of the week! (Only two of these inquiries would I have been able to come up with a straightforward answer to. Do I prefer Facebook or Twitter? Neither! [Although I concede that Twitter may have some utility, whereas Facebook is a pure social evil.] And do I prefer giving or receiving presents? Giving, naturally. Doesn't everyone?) I don't have one favourite anything. If I did nominate just one thing, it would only be a partial, misleading answer, a momentary, inconstant impulse; ask me again tomorrow and I'd say something completely different.

Whenever I try to do a 'favourite things' post, I always end up with a list - sometimes quite a long list; and that's only an illustrative sample rather than a comprehensive account of my tastes in the area. Over on my other blog, I started a series of 'Top Fives' a few years ago; even that format I find very difficult, much too limiting - I quite often find myself having to 'cheat' a little bit, throwing in one or two supplementary nominations... or I return to the topic after a little while with another list of five... and perhaps another, and another. 

What's my favourite food?? Where would I begin?! With a narrower frame of reference, like 'Favourite childhood comfort food' (baked beans on toast) or 'Favourite Beijing street food' (rou jia mo), I might have a chance of coming up with a single answer - but favourite food??!! No, the idea of having a single favourite something utterly baffles me.

And particularly for 'Favourite day of the week'. I might from time to time have enjoyed a particular day because of a regular activity associated with that day. For a long time in Beijing, Thursday was the best night of the week for me, because musician friends of mine in a couple of bands had long residencies at nearby music bars - Jianghu and Jiangjinjiu - on that night, and I'd go to hear them play almost every week. But all good things come to an end; Thursdays are nothing special to me any more. And there was never anything intrinsic to Thursday that made me like that day, only events that happened to take place on a Thursday.

More often, I think, people acquire negative associations with particular days; and preferred days may only seem better by contrast with these worse ones. Most people, I suspect would nominate a weekend day as their favourite, because of the freedom from work. That doesn't apply for me, though, because I am entirely freelance these days, and so quite often work just as much - or as little! - on the weekends as I do on any other day of the week.

In general, I find the mere idea of days oppressive, emphasising as it does the repetitive cycles not just of work but of our lives overall. My favourite days are those on which I have managed to lose awareness of what day of the week it is. That doesn't happen often enough.

All of which preamble was merely an excuse to post some more Larkin....

Days 

What are days for? 

Days are where we live. 

They come, they wake us 

Time and time over. 

They are to be happy in: 

Where can we live but days? 

Ah, solving that question 

Brings the priest and the doctor 

In their long coats 

Running over the fields.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Favourite posts from the 1st quarter of 2008

Pick of the Archive:
Favourite Posts, January-March 2008

1) List of the Month: Top 10 Dances You'd Like To See The Cebu Prison Inmates Perform - January 5th

Having discovered - slightly later than the rest of the world! - the astounding 'dancing Filipino prisoners' phenomenon, I offer up a list of requests for their next YouTube routine.

2) Chain of association - January 6th

A gloomy and depressive week produces a not-bad poem (quite possibly the only one I've written this year - what is wrong with me?!).

3) Some languages have music - January 10th

I kick off my wilfully provocative Why I Don't Learn Chinese series with this confession that I find the sound of the language severely unattractive.

4) Chinese people LOVE me! (14) - January 11th

I indulge in the obligatory ex-pat rant against the odious TV 'personality', Da Shan.

5) Rich and strange - 16th January

More bizarre discoveries from the Internet: novelty coffins from Ghana, and a Japanese artist who crafts exquisite sea creatures out of plastic bottles.

6) Belly rumbles, belly laughs - 18th January

Some choice bits of Chinglish from the new menu at my favourite local restaurant.

7) Wanderlust - 20th January

Some reflections on where the impulse to travel in me comes from - my 'black sheep' grandfather, The Wind In The Willows, and a favourite Larkin poem are cited as likely influences.

8) I WANT this book! - 21st January

I turn up a link to a list of 'weird book titles', including the irresistible 'How To Avoid Work'.

9) Chinese people LOVE me! (15) - 24th January

Some observations on who pays the bill, including an anecdote of one of my great romantic disasters. Another much commented-upon post.

10) A bon mot double whammy - 28th January

I can't resist a little riff on Voltaire - as consolation for my recent firing!

11) Another job I am unlikely to be re-hired for.... - 28th January

Some encounters with staff of the state-run Xinhua News wire service leads me to indulge for once - rashly! - in a little bit of politics. Extensive comments on this one too!

12) It's a funny old world - 29th January

The bizarre novelty of a two-seater toilet prompts some reflections on the shortcomings of bathroom plumbing I have encountered in China.

13) An 'It's that time of year again' haiku - 1st February

The early onset of the protracted firework overkill that is Chinese New Year fills me with trepidation.

14) Self-destructive tendencies - 8th February

Following on from my topical haiku this day, I compile a list of the suicidal behaviours I have witnessed in connection with the setting off of fireworks in the last few days.

15) The wonder of YouTube - 10th February

My favourite YouTube discovery of the year: a young guy who does brilliant lip-syncs of his favourite rock songs (in this case, What's Up? by 4 Non-Blondes).

16) More 'meme' madness - 12th February

A selection of excerpts from the 123rd page of books I'd read recently - an intriguing exercise.

17) 10,000 Maniacs - 13th February

I commemorate the milestone of the blog's 10,000th recorded visitor with this great YouTube clip of the Canadian band 10,000 Maniacs - Natalie Merchant duetting with guest David Byrne on three songs at the end of their MTV Unplugged concert.

18) A romantic(?) haiku - 15th February

A true story - I am completely smitten with a woman I saw while I was out running around Houhai lake.

19) Mao The Mischievous - 15th February

Stranger than fiction - another true story (picked up from my blog-buddy, Jeremiah) about a bizarre digression during the landmark diplomatic talks between Mao and Kissinger in 1973.

20) Another double bon mot - 18th February

Another consolation for the loss of my job at the end of last year. This time I'm riffing on a favourite line from a favourite film.

21) More Chinglish highlights (illustrated!) - 23rd February

A winter break in the far northern city of Harbin produces some amusing photographs.

22) In search of El Dorado - 25th February

The quest for China's best DVD shop (check out also this list of the most common, quirkiest faults with pirated disks out here).

23) Doing The Lantern Festival right - 28th February

Harbin seems to do the Chinese New Year's festivities so much better than Beijing. Here are some photos.

24) A bon mot on 'art' - 3rd March

Probably my favourite bon mot discovery in a long, long time - from Dilbert creator, Scott Adams.

25) Roll call - 8th March

Subbing for a friend for a month in a series of University evening classes, I discover the worst collection of 'English names' ever chosen by a single group of Chinese students. Really. The worst EVER.

26) Because it doesn't get you anywhere... (Why I don't learn Chinese [3]) - 12th March

Observations on the limited utility (in everyday situations, at least) of being able to speak Mandarin.

27) Top overseas consultant to the Beijing Olympics - revealed! - 12th March

This roundup of recent news stories on Beijing's preparations for the Olympics is so alarming (so depressing!), I can only conclude that Dr Evil has replaced Steven Spielberg as the leading foreign adviser to the Organizing Committee.

28) My Fantasy Girlfriend - Elizabeth Russell - 15th March

One of my favourites in this series so far - incorporating an extended review of the film in which the character appears, the Bollywood classic Lagaan.

29) Inverted commas - the Chinese propaganda machine's deadliest weapon - 17th March

My comment on the Chinese governments unintentionally hilarious penchant for referring to everything they don't like as "so-called...... democracy, freedom, human rights, etc."

30) Don't sling mud - 20th March

Morose observations on the most common responses to the Tibetan troubles in the Chinese blogsphere, kicking off my occasional series of more politically slanted posts, Free Advice For The Chinese Leadership.

31) Un-banned! - 24th March

The lifting of the censorship block that's been imposed on my two blogs for most of this month reminds me of an anecdote from my early teaching days here, an illustration of the occasionally rather creative mangling of English that the Chinese can produce.

32) I just wish they'd make their f***ing minds up! - 30th March

My summary of the ways in which China's Internet censors have been trying to disrupt our lives over the past few weeks - and an impassioned request for them to STOP!

Favourite posts from the 3rd quarter of 2012

The highlights from my summer 'on the road'....

Pick of the Archives:

Favourite Posts, July-September 2012

1)  Barbecue memories - 6th July 2012

The weekly haiku in the week of American Independence Day (for which I was, happily, in America this year) revives a recollection of campfire cooking during my summer holidays as a child.

2)  Books I could read again and again  -  7th July 2012

A selection of special favourites, most of them dating back to my childhood.

3)  The heart of a sniper  -  14th July 2012

A synopsis of a long short story I wrote years ago, in Canada - kicking off a new 'Discarded Story Ideas' series.

4)  My Fantasy Girlfriend: Esperanza Spalding  -  21st July 2012

The happiest discovery of this year's American trip was this utterly gorgeous and superlatively talented young jazz musician - instant swoon.

5)  Dying by inches  -  23rd July 2012

A rather long post, in which an extraordinary set of travails I suffer in trying to get my computer to work reminds me of one of my most unpleasant videogaming experiences, way back in my student days.

6)  An Olympic curmudge  -  27th July 2012

No, I am not a fan of the bloody Olympics!

7)  "Helpfulness", Chinese university style  -  2nd August 2012

I receive a quite astoundingly obtuse - nonsensical - reply from one of the former employers I'd canvassed for possible help in applying for a new Chinese visa. Extremely annoying, but also hilarious.

8)  Rejecting the 'modern'  -  4th August 2012

An epic curmudge, in which I spurn, um, almost every major technological innovation of the last thirty years. Luddite? Moi?!

9)  Bon mot for the week  -  6th August 2012

One of my own, on writing - and superhero stories.

10)  A crazy plan  -  10th August 2012

I have dreams of walking home from China to the UK along the ancient 'Silk Road'. Alas, there are certain practical problems with this.

11)  My Fantasy Girlfriend: Gillian Duxbury  -  11th August 2012

Being back in the UK stirs nostalgic memories of one of the very first crushes of my childhood, a popular English glamour model of the 1970s. I am delighted to discover that she still looks rather stunning today.

12)  The cone of silence  -  13th August 2012

I discover that while in China I seem to have picked up the useful knack of not listening to people.

13)  And another thing: coffee shops!  -  14th August 2012

I remember that I HATE the ubiquity of coffee shops in the modern world even more than I hate worthless new technology.

14)  The Chinese worker in action  -  28th August 2012

Ah, back in Beijing! And it's just as crazy as ever!! (A collection of similar stories soon followed.)

15)  It's science, dude  -  7th September 2012

A really cool video of an astronaut on the International Space Station playing with a big globule of water in zero-gravity.

16)  Advice to would-be writers:

Part 1  -  8th September 2012

Part 2  -  12th September 2012

A final word  -  19th September 2012

Does exactly what it says on the label.

17)  You have got to be kidding me  -  19th September 2012

I make some surprising and disturbing discoveries about trends in baby naming in the United States.

18)  My Fantasy Girlfriend: Suzanne Vega  -  15th September 2012

Three of my favourite songs from the whipsmart and very lovely singer-songwriter: Blood Makes Noise, Tired Of Sleeping, and the (rather too sadly appropriate to my unrequitable crush) I'll Never Be Your Maggie May.

19)  What are days for?  -  16th September 2012

An online questionnaire prompts some deep thoughts - and gives me an excuse to post a bit of Philip Larkin.

20)  Now you see him, now you don't  -  17th September 2012

Some facetious commentary on the recent disappearance of China's leader-designate Xi Jinping - how could I resist?

21)  Some languages have a word for it - or do they?  -  22nd September 2012

During a meander around some of the intriguing foreign words/concepts discussed on the Internet, I am disappointed to find out that so many of them are hoaxes. (I did a couple of follow-up posts to this on Barstool Blues, here and here.)

22)  Goals and objectives  -  23rd September 2012

I obsess about my weight... and announce a plan to lose some... well, a lot.

23)  Life mirrors art  -  28th September 2012

I am struck by the coincidence that hit Danish TV drama Borgen, which began in 2010, centres on an improbably foxy female Prime Minister who leads a liberal coalition... and a year or so later we find that the Danish government is a liberal coalition led by an improbably foxy female Prime Minister. What is it about the Danes??

24)  More favourite film posters  -  29th September 2012

Seven great films, eight great posters. I added a supplement here on some of the striking promotional artwork for Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.