I Hate Arthur C Clarke

He wrote the book and the screenplay of 2001: A Space Odyssey. He came up with the idea of geostationary satellites, which revolutionised communication, television broadcasting and weather forecasting across the world. He has a type of orbit named after him. He has a species of dinosaur named after him. He has an asteroid named after him. And he was responsible for a disastrous misunderstanding in 1983 which resulted in me standing in front of my entire class at school and crying like a girl. And I’m not a girl.

By far my favourite book in those days was Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World, not a single word of which I understood. But it had pictures of crystal skulls and real actual ghosts and monsters, which was good enough for me. And what’s more, because it was a book for adults rather than 8-year-old children, and it had been on TV, it was Definitely All True.

As with so many other things in my life back then, I wasn’t content keeping this to myself. The world had to know. So I took my tattered copy of the book in to school one day and told Mrs Paisley the deal – ghosts and monsters and stuff are real and it’s Definitely All True and it’s in this book and everyone should know. To my absolute delight, she agreed, and arranged an impromptu reading in the library. I remember my excitement at the prospect of having my book leant the unquestionable authority of being read to us by Mrs Paisley.

But then disaster struck. As everyone was getting settled on the floor around Mrs Paisley’s chair, she gave me back my book and said “here you go, remember to read it loud enough that Samantha and Suzanne at the back can hear”. Then, turning to my classmates “now everyone, Andrew has brought in a book that he would like to read to you all, so be nice and quiet and when I come back we can talk about what you all thought”. The blood drained from my face and my ears started ringing.

“Me read it out to them? What the hell are you talking about? I can’t do that, I don’t even know what any of these words mean and the sentences go on forever! Are you insane?”

...was what I wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead I turned slowly to the sea of expectant faces, looked down at what was now my least favourite book in the world, and tried to read some of the stuff that wasn’t the pictures.

I remember very clearly that it had fallen open at the chapter about sea monsters, and I gave the first sentence my best shot. On the third attempt, however, I caught sight of my friend Geoff, who was sitting in the front row and pulling faces at me. So I decided the best course of action would be to set the book aside for the time being, tell Geoff that he was in Big Trouble when Mrs Paisley got back, and then burst into tears.

I still have the book somewhere, and I still haven’t read it. It has caused enough trouble already.

Vampires, Castles and Cocktail Parties.

I recently finished reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Loved the first half, where not a great deal happened but it was creepy and there was a sense of impending doom. Wasn’t too fussed about the 3rd quarter where nothing really happened and the doom seems to stop impending. And then really didn’t think much of the last quarter, when everyone spends the whole time congratulating each other on their bravery, their manners, their fastidiousness, and proclaiming their love for one another. And then they find and kill the Count literally in the final 2 pages. I can’t help but feel that Stoker ran out of story at about page 200 but had promised himself it would be 400 pages long.

One of the places thought to have inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula, and certainly an evocative location in its own right is Slains Castle, a few miles north of my home town of Aberdeen. Stoker spent time here as a guest before starting the novel, and few places have made such an immediate and lasting impression on me – The bleakness of the setting, the precipitous cliffs and the hollow sadness of the building itself. Even though it dates back to the 16th Century the more recent work left it looking like a late 19th early 20th Century stately home, and the ruination always seemed to carry echoes of week-long cocktail parties and late-night music – The chatter of guests dancing into the darkness of the First World War and everything that would mean for their way of life (the owners had to leave and remove the roof to avoid taxes by the mid-1920s). The ruins themselves won’t carry this sense of melancholy for long though, as the site is braced for redevelopment, the nature of which I dread to imagine. I love the place.

Slains castle in its heyday:

...and today:

Death, maps and books

I have spent the past year or so watching more costume dramas than is probably healthy, and yet healthy is exactly how it has made me feel. All these depictions of 18th and 19th Century England have served to emphasise what an absolute pain in the backside it must have been living in an age when people died at the drop of a hat.

Today, if we go two or three weeks without hearing from a particular friend, the worst we are likely to assume is that they have lost their phone or are busy with work. 150 years ago there was a very real possibility that it would be because they were dead. People died all the time.

And of everything. They died of colds. They died of fright. They died of toothache. They died of headaches. They died of broken hearts. It must have made it hard to make plans, and I would imagine the phrase "if I’m still alive" was used a great deal more than it is nowadays.

I write this having just returned from the British Library’s Magnificent Maps exhibition, which was predictably ace. There were more women there than I had expected, as I’d always presumed maps to be a peculiarly male interest, in the same way that directions and preferable routes from A to B via C are a default conversation topic for all men struggling for common ground, so to speak. I went on my own because I had presumed nobody else in their right mind would have fancied it, but it now turns out that there would have been several candidates had I only had the strength of my convictions. Mind you, if I’d gone with someone else I wouldn’t have felt as comfortable spending half an hour playing with the big magnifying glasses they had for enlarging the computerised copies.

Yesterday was a victory for second-hand bookshops over common sense, as I bought the following:

A history of the American Civil War by Shelby Foote,

A Short History of Africa by Roland Oliver

Martin Amis’ the Moronic Inferno,

Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World about the SF earthquake of 1906,

I Shall Bear Wintness a jewish memoir of nazi Germany by Victor Klemperer

Sebag Montefiore’s gimungous biography of Stalin,

For Love and Courage, a collection of First World War correspondence from the front,

Collected stories by M.R. James,

and something called Within the Context of No Context by George Trow, which looked amusing.

And all that because we happened to “pop in on our way past” a small bookshop with 5 minutes to kill on our way to afternoon tea. I don’t know where we’ll shelve them, and I’ll be lucky if I’ve read that lot before Christmas. On the plus side, at least the 21st Century has given me a decent chance of living that long.