It's hard to be a blogger in this town when your main competition is the supernaturally prolific Webby. It's been even harder to muster enthusiasm in a week of rotten developments at work and the death of Paul the Octopus.
But I refuse to let imminent poverty and a zeitgeist-surfing cephalopod stand in the way of goodness and joy. Because it's not all bad.
Take books, for example. In recent years I had almost totally stopped reading fiction, le Carré spy stuff aside. I thought it was a sign that my decaying brain no longer had the capacity for anything requiring the slightest imaginative leap, and I consoled myself with an inexplicable fetish for Victoriana (biographies of Houdini and the Elephant Man, for example). But in recent months, sparked by David Nicholls's superb One Day (see previous tear-drenched posts), I've been insatiable.
On the recommendation of a wise friend I chewed through the enormous A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz. Now, if you possess the lazy assumption that there is a great novel in you waiting to emerge, but as yet shyly reticient about doing so, you read books like One Day or a Hornby and think "Ha. I could do that. It's just references to everyday feelings and cultural touchpoints everyone can relate to told in an amiably comedic tone. This weekend I'm going to start writing one of these and I'll be on Simon Mayo's Book Club by Christmas". You think this because a) you are a complacent, tragically misguided twat and b) because these books to give every impression of simplicity whilst actually being crafted masterfully. A Fraction of the Whole is not like that. The plot's all over the place, it drags in the last third and the two main characters don't have voices distinct enough from one another. But every page has some utterly mad, funny, original bit of comic writing or a wonky viewpoint so unique you are left in no doubt that you could ever have written it. I assume that Steve Toltz is completely deranged, and I've no idea how he's got anything left in the tank to produce anything else, but it's worth the slog over 700 pages or so.
And from one brick to another - I'm now ploughing through Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, like every other Guardian-reading tube jockey was a year ago. It's brilliant, obviously, although it's a damning insight into how little I know about history (embarrassing given that I have a history degree). I'm spending a lot of time flicking back to the cast of characters and wondering why everyone had to be called Thomas. Gareths are extremely sparse, strangely. Maybe that was more popular among the Stuart nobles.
And, having put my brick to one side to type this, I'm also keeping an eye on the film of The Witches. It's brilliant. I first saw it at a tender age when staying with my parents in a grand old hotel in Scotland. They packed me and my brother off to some kid's cinema night designed to give long-suffering oldies respite from our piping whinges ("But I don't LIKE onions, Mummy!"), and they showed it then. It had a serious impact, given that it was set in exactly the same kind of hotel as the one we were staying in. I kept a keen eye on the lady guests from that point on, ever-alert in case they tried to turn me into a mouse.
Oh dear. It's just finished, and I'd forgotten how much of a cop-out the ending was compared to Roald Dahl's brilliantly bleak better-to-be-a-mouse-and-die-soon-like-grandma philosophy. In tribute to the filmmakers, I will also end something badly - this post. Toodle pip.
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