Unexpected Orwellian influence

Lately Cathy and I have been dining out in Wetherspoons pubs. It may be surprising but the company is very good at providing nutritional information and there are three different things on the menu that Cathy can eat while sticking to her medically recommended low fat diet. 

And there are Wetherspoons everywhere, so when we travel we know we can eat in one, which is why we end up in so many. 

However, when we visited the 'Spoons in Wolverhampton there was a surprise waiting for us. The Wetherspoons there is called 'The Moon Under Water' and it's named after... George Orwell's dream pub!

I wasn't 'specting that in a 'Spoons!

Silver plus one - celebrating with rock!

This year Cathy and I celebrated our wedding anniversary by seeing one of our favourite bands - Terrorvision - on our actual anniversary itself. It meant taking a trip to Wolverhampton but it was well worth it.

The gig was at KK's Steel Mill. It's a converted industrial building that's now a rock and metal venue and owned by a former member of metal band Judas Priest. It was a decent size, well laid out and the staff working there were absolutely lovely. 

The gig itself felt like a throwback to when we first started going to Terrorvision gigs back in the 90s (and before we were married!) Most of the setlist was from their first two albums - including My House and American TV. They also mixed in songs from their new album, We Are Not Robots, which we had received in the post last week and listened to a few times in preparation for the gig.

We Are Not Robots is Terrorvision's first album in 15 years and for me it feels like they recaptured their sound from 30 years ago. They have returned to what they do best - fast, guitar driven songs with catchy hooks in the choruses. 

As a band they have also literally grown. Three of the original members remain, but there were seven musicians on stage. Millie, who plays a lot of gigs with singer Tony Wright when he plays his own stuff, was on keyboards. They also had a trumpet player and a saxophonist who added some depth on several songs - especially on Pretend Best Friend. 

They did one song for the encore. It will come as no surprise to fans that they signed off with Oblivion. 

The merch guy said they don't know what the plans are yet for Terrorvision gigs next year, which implies their might be another tour. 2025 will mark the 30th anniversary of when Cathy and I first saw them live - at the old Newport Centre - and hopefully we can mark that anniversary by seeing them again. 

A "Corinthian" football weekend

This weekend I saw games featuring not one but two "Corinthian" teams!

Friday 13th - Cardiff Corinthians v Seven Sisters Onllwyn

My matchgoing companion, Paul, bailed on this Friday night game, which was probably just as well. It got chilly! I was glad I took my big coat. But despite the cold there was a lovely, brief sunset and after it the gibbous moon was an extra floodlight. 

Cardiff Corries look a decent outfit this year and were towards the top of the Ardal South West. The game was at Cwrt Yr Ala, home of Caerau Ely because the Corries' ground in Radyr is shared with the cricket team and it's still just about summer.

I saw Seven Sisters get walloped 6-0 by Cardiff Draconians last May. Either they were missing a few players in that game or they have had a rebuild, because this was a much better team tonight, marshalled from the back by a bossy, lanky goalie.

Corries started brightly with a chance in the first minute but then conceded on a break after just six minutes, a low shot from the edge of the area wrongfooting the Corries keeper. 

I hoped to see more goals because the combination of relentless 'home' team pressure and "Sevens" capacity to move the ball forward rapidly when they got possession felt like the perfect alchemy for goals, goals, goals.

Twas not to be though. Sevens defended resolutely through nine minutes of time added on, including pinball in the six yard box at 90+8. The ref blew for full time during another melee mere feet from the goal a few seconds later.

Final score: 0-1. Somehow.

I also saw a great trivia challenge scenario - have you ever seen a player shown a first yellow card and then get ordered to leave the field? Well it happened in this game. The reason is at the bottom of the post - see if you can work it out.   

Saturday 14th - Newport Corinthians v Caldicot Town

My mate Ben had told me he wasn't playing in this game as he had work commitments. But I still wanted to go. It was already my back up game after my original plan to visit South Gower fell through. And I wanted to get some pictures with the transporter bridge in the background! I'd seen the backdrop in several other people's photos and wanted to capture it myself.

This was a new ground for me and Paul. Newport Corries have a nice little clubhouse. There's memorabilia on the walls including stuff from the 60s just after the club was founded. They also have a nice new stand. 

Corries were ahead after 7 minutes although Paul and only realised that after about 15 minutes when we discovered it was Corries playing in blue and Caldicot in yellow rather than the other way round!

After the opening frenetic burst from the home team, Caldicot clawed their way back into the game and had turned it around to lead 2-1 at the break.

The second half was mainly Caldicot. They went 3-1 up before conceding to a diving header from a corner. They then went 4-2 up. 

However, the Caldicot left back was sent off for a second yellow with about 20 minutes to go. Caldicot missed a couple more chances to nab a fifth even though they were down to 10. But the momentum swung back towards the Corries.

Newport got a goal back with a point blank header that seemed to go through the Caldicot keeper. Then very late on a defensive mix up saw the ball squared to an unmarked Corries player right in front of an open goal. 4-4!

Caldicot had two more good chances to win it in injury time. But the whistle blew and a fabulous knockabout game of football came to an end. Well worth the trip across the Usk.

There was another unusual refereeing incident - the first time I've ever seen a physio sent off. It was the Corries physio who was shown a straight red, possibly for coming on to the pitch without permission. 

Trivia scenario 

Why was the player asked to leave the pitch after just a yellow card? He had been receiving treatment on the sideline and came on without being authorised by the referee. So he was booked and then told to go back off the pitch and only come back on when he was told to!

Kurt Vonnegut's 55 year-old commentary on the American Poor

In Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (published in 1969), there is a character called Howard W. Campbell Jr. He is an American traitor turned propagandist for the Nazis, operating like Lord Haw-Haw, during the second world war. 

There is a section of the book purportedly taken from an essay by Campbell about how American prisoners-of-war are so much worse in terms of behaviour than prisoners from other countries. Campbell wants to explain to his fellow Nazis why his countrymen are like this. 

It's an interesting take and I wondered how much of it might have been the author's own insights into the way American society functions. It definitely resonates with some of the political selfishness spilling out of the poorer parts of the USA in the past decade or so.

This is how Campbell explains things:

"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but it's people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but It might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters."

(Unlike Campbell, Kin Hubbard was a real person; an American cartoonist and humorist who died in 1930.)

And then a bit further on, some more of Campbell's words:

"Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue... Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those with no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times."

"Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love each other because they do not love themselves."

There are two things that have occurred to me reading this. The first is this seems to fit with the political rage of the MAGA movement that has been so prevalent in the past decade or so. Particularly the idolising (and idolatry) of Donald Trump, who has no redeeming features except that most American of virtues - the appearance of being rich. And why they rage against "socialist medicine" being "un-American", preferring to risk bankruptcy if they get cancer than seeing that affordable or free healthcare for all benefits everybody. 

The persistency with which the American poor vote against their own interests has been referred to as a mindset that they aren't poor, they are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and one day the money truck will stop at their house and they don't want to be made to share. 

It also explains why American religious identity has had such a garish obsession with wealth. To the best of my knowledge, America has never spawned its own ascetic movement. The Amish, the Shakers and the Quakers were all imports from the Old World. America's gifts to Christianity are the Prosperity Gospel wealth-and-health movement with private jet evangelists, and Mormonism which literally promises it's most faithful adherents that they will each rule their own planet one day.

The second thing that occurred to me is that Vonnegut deliberately puts these un-American heresies into the mouth of a traitor because there would be no way to have a true American think these terrible things. And yet, these observations are so acute, it doesn't seem that he is just giving his character stuff to say. There is a ring of truth to these condemnatory words, which is maybe why he needs to distance himself from them. 

And 55 years after the book was published, the words still ring true. 

Books of the Month - three pieces of speculative fiction

I have been bitten by the reading bug lately and this is the second book of the month post in a row featuring three novels. This time all three are speculative fiction (as discussed previously). 

I'm going to review them in the order I read them. The first book was another pick up from TK Maxx. 

The Power - Naomi Alderman

This book was published in 2016 and imagines what would happen if women suddenly developed the power to conduct electricity (the Power), establishing them as the dominant gender. It's framed through being written as a fictionalised history written by a man in a future civilisation, 5,000 years hence. Throughout the books are drawings of archaeological discoveries dating from the time period being written about.

The framing includes advice from an editor that it seems far-fetched that men were ever the dominant sex. There's also a rather patronising suggestion that the fictional author considers publishing it under a female name to avoid it being categorised as women's literature. I wondered if the real author had been on the receiving end of similar sentiments.

The book follows several female characters who either develop the Power of have it awakened in them. All the characters are in some way oppressed, abused or overshadowed by men, and the Power enables them to break free. There is also one male character who is chronicling the impact the Power has on various societies and it's really through his eyes that the shift becomes noticeable, as he finds it increasingly unsafe to be in the presence of women.

I was interested in the development of a women-centred and led religion, evolving rapidly out of Catholicism, which echoed the growth of populist movements in organised religions that sometimes outflank the established ecclesiastical structures. It felt believable to me, because new religious movements can take root and spread very quickly - and would be much more robust if they were linked to a sudden societal change like the emergence of the Power. There is, however, a natural explanation for the sudden emergence of the Power, although details are kept to a minimum. 

There's a bit of gore and violent vignettes, including some sexual violence. There are some loose threads that are left frayed at the end of the book. But overall, there are plenty of points that made me think about gender politics, and the reversal of power dynamics was sometimes amusing, sometimes frightening. The unwillingness of the female editor in 5,000 years time to accept the idea that women aren't just naturally aggressive, for example, made me smile. 

Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut

I bought this book in a deal at HMV because I had never read it and it appears on most lists of classic books one should read. I knew it was about the wartime firebombing of Dresden. I assumed it would be a straight up war book. I was wrong. 

This is the second Kurt Vonnegut book that I've read. A few years back I read Breakfast of Champions. I didn't like that much, and, truthfully, although I can see why this is considered a classic novel, I didn't like this book much either. I think it's just that I don't get on with Vonnegut's style. 

Having said that there are moments and throwaway lines in this book that are almost instantly memorable. There is a very early comment that foreshadows the destruction to come when the narrator says that Dresden post-war must have "tons of human bone meal in the ground". 

There is another cynically comical comment about a woman who "Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops." With lines like that, I feel I really should have liked the book more!

The main character in the book is called Billy Pilgrim. The plot device is that he has been abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. He now experiences all of time all at once, which is a side-effect of travelling on a flying saucer. So his recollections of the war, being captured, being incarcerated in a converted abattoir (Slaughterhouse Five) that ironically protects him from the firebombing, and being involved in the grim clean up operation in Dresden afterwards, are mixed up with his life after the war, his family, his capture by aliens and subsequent captivity in a zoo amusing Tralfamadorians, and so on. 

I think it was that fantastical aspect that I found difficult. On reflection, it did distract from the absolute horror of what happened in Dresden. The vivid description of pulling bodies from the rubble afterwards ('opening up a corpse mine') and there being too many dead people to deal with other than incinerate them perhaps needed leavening with the alien abduction and Billy's happier post-war experiences. 

It might all be meant to indicate that Billy has gone mad as a result of his wartime experiences. But it's played with a straight bat - although, I guess, madness seems real to the person experiencing it. It may just be that it's Vonnegut's way of processing what he witnessed in Dresden and he needs to make this fantastical to deal with the fact that the worst bits of the story actually happened. 

There was some interesting commentary on the American poor, which I will save for another post. And the idea of experiencing time in a concurrent way rather than as causal consecutive moments felt very up to date - covering similar ground to some of the chapters in Existential Physics, which was my Book of the Month back in June. Not bad, considering Vonnegut published this in 1969.

The Boys from Brazil - Ira Levin

The other book in the HMV deal, and the second book by Ira Levin I have read this year. I reviewed The Stepford Wives last month. As with Stepford, I knew the basic premise of this story - Nazis in South America have perfected cloning and are seeking to restore the Third Reich.

What I didn't expect - the same as with Stepford - was to get quite so gripped by the story. The slow reveal of what is going on happens for both the main character, ageing Nazi-hunter Yakov Liebermann, and for the reader. The scene where Liebermann encounters his second teenaged clone was incredibly well done, and I really got a sense of the world slipping sideways for the character as he tried to process what he was seeing. 

Because the book was published in 1976, the science behind cloning has to be explained - even the word 'clone' has to be explained. I suspect this was cutting edge knowledge at the time of publication - but I was intrigued by how even then there was speculation that some governments had already been cloning larger mammals and maybe even humans. I remember the fuss in the late 1990s about Dolly the Sheep who was announced as the first sheep to be successfully cloned. So it was interesting to read characters speculating about it twenty years earlier. 

It's a short book that concludes with a discussion about the morality of killing children that might grow up to be evil. Liebermann and his anti-Nazi allies have to hope that the boys from Brazil defy their genetic heritage. The ultimate ending of the experiment is left ambiguous as to what might happen, which I quite liked for the ending. 

Limited edition Snack of the Month - cinnamon bun Flipz

This is the second time Flipz coated pretzels have featured as a Snack of the Month on my blog. Previously I reviewed a Christmassy gingerbread edition. 

This edition is quite similar. They are very sweet and vaguely taste of cinnamon similar to how the gingerbread ones were very sweet and vaguely tasted of ginger. Cathy wrinkled her nose up at the smell because it was too sweet. 

So, if you don't like sweet things, don't buy Flipz! I, however, do like sweet things. I'm not going to eat too many of these at a time though. 

Here's a photo showing the coating to pretzel biscuit coating. A thicker coating would be too sweet even for me.

Overall, I like the combination of sweetness and crunch in these snacks. They could do with more cinnamon. But then most cinnamon flavoured things do!

Space Marine squad

Last week Cathy came back from town with a gift for me - issue 1 of a new Games Workshop "Warhammer 40,000" partwork that included a couple of models to build. 

I have a habit of buying the cheap first issue of these partworks. The subsequent issues are always more expensive and they mount up way too fast. But the first issues are decent value. This one came with a Space Marine captain and a big monster called a Tyranid for him to fight. 

Its an impressive figure. He has a sweeping cloak and is set on a moulded base.

Combined with the other Space Marines I've acquired (mainly from other partworks), I've got the makings of a little squad.

Now the big question is, what colours do I paint them? Do I create my own 'chapter' or go for a more traditional colour scheme?

The Tyranid meanwhile has joined my pile of shame...

Monthly round up - August 2024

August was another busy month. (They are all busy months!) Although most of the world was on holiday, I was working throughout. However my work included an afternoon in an 'Escape Room' - the first time I'd ever been to one. The good news is I escaped, along with my team of young people who are part of the programme I work on. 

I've blogged some of the really big highlights of the month already - like seeing Billy Joel at the Principality Stadium, and a trip to Huddersfield to watch a football match. And I've also blogged about cinema trips to see two wildly different films: Harold and the Purple Crayon and Alien: Romulus. But there have been plenty of things I haven't blogged about yet. On one of the cinema trips I met Beetlejuice!

I was very pleased to make it to the Keep Grangetown Tidy litter pick this month. It was on a sunny Saturday morning. I collected a couple of bags of trash, but nothing particularly interesting. The following morning the Cardiff Rivers Group were holding another litter pick - this time at Grangemoor Park near our house. So I went to that too. I set a new record for a plastic water bottle retrieved from a hedge - an 18.5 litre job that looked like it had come off a water cooler!

Cathy and I did something slightly out of the usual in the middle of the month. We were witnesses at a wedding. Neither of us had been wedding witnesses before. It was for a couple who wanted to surprise all their friends and family and put an appeal out on Reddit for witnesses. As the registry office is now very conveniently close to our house I offered our services and they picked us to be there. It took about 45 minutes in total (including travel to the registry office and back) and it was really lovely to be able to help them get hitched. 

Besides meeting strangers from the internet, we have been fortunate to meet up with quite a few friends and family during the month. We met Steve and Mary in Chepstow one weekend.

And Connor was in town so I was able to hang out with him down the Bay one evening. 

And we met our friends the Woottens in Thompson Park. Here's Anna as Queen of the Stump!

Football-wise, I went to 9 matches. There were two new grounds, the aforementioned Huddersfield and a more local team, Undy Athletic. I went with Steve to Undy to watch them play Caldicot Town. Our friend Ben was playing for Caldicot and we got a selfie with him after the game. He's grinning because they won 3-1. 

Here's my running total on Futbology for the season so far. The very first game of the season, Barry's 9-0 drubbing in a friendly, is still the highest scoreline of the season. It's likely to stay that way!