In writing a review of Sean Ashton's The Way to Work, I referenced Flann O’Brien’s third policeman’s exposition of his theory about bicycle mollycules. I had a vague recollection of seeing Eamon Morrissey on the television many years ago, performing monologues as The Brother, a regular character in O'Brien's 'Myles na gCopaleen' weekly column in the Irish Times.
So I summoned up The Brother on YouTube, and watched Morrissey’s recital of that paean to porter, 'A Pint of Plain', and his account of exciting times cow-punching in Ringsend with Slug Willard and Shorty Andrews (from the novel At Swim Two Birds rather than the newspaper column). I followed this up with his frankly sinister performance as the third policeman, expounding the atomic theory as it pertained to bicycles and horses.
This is one of the worst adaptations of an Agatha Christie story I have seen, certainly the worst of the Poirot series, which for much of its run was reasonably faithful to the text.
The original novel is not one of Christie’s best (a gang of international provocateurs in pursuit of a grand goal of world domination), sliding as it does up and down the thriller-mystery scale between Bulldog Drummond and Sax Rhomer. The adaptation, though, is on a par with the previous holder of the golden raspberry, At Bertram’s Hotel (again an ITV production, this time from a Miss Marple book), but for the opposite reason.
ABH was trash because it added a whole lot of unnecessary and occasionally bizarre details. TBF was as bad, but because it took out everything that might have constituted a storyline at all. There was no detecting to speak of, there was nothing left of the original plot except its unbelievability, and the invented motive was feeble. Hastings came all the way back from South America just to say “Good Lord!” or “We have to do something, Japp! And if you won’t, I will!” and then storm out, disappearing until the action, such as it was, was over and it was time for champers and smiles all around.
Living in the sticks on a smallholding, I am the proud owner of a vintage tractor. My notion of farming in 'the old days' is as it was in the days when Harrison the Ford was a shiny new state-of-the-art tractor straight off the 1970 production line. But 'old' is a moveable feast…
It was fascinating to watch a 1965 RTE television interview with Michael Fitzpatrick (b. 1858). Living in Maynooth at the time of the interview, he was originally from Clare, where he witnessed the notorious Bodyke Evictions, and knew a man who would not use a mechanical reaper and binder, preferring to pay workers for the job.
New Age shops have not, of course, gone away, but they are nonetheless always associated in my mind with a period of life when I was marginally (let us say) younger than I am now. Those heady days of striking out on one's own in a series of gradually less Withnail-and-I-esque bedsits or flat-shares, everything on the cheap. It was not that I haunted the New Age shops in those days, more that they always seemed to inhabit the same dingy shopping arcades where one went to find second-hand books and the 'alternative' or 'exotic' clothes, rickety furniture and artefacts that signalled entry into this new, independent phase.
Mark Valentine notes, in his nostalgic and informative blog post, that
it was a notable New Age shop, Gothic Image in Glastonbury, that introduced me to a sheaf of pagan, Celtic, antiquarian and alternative magazines: Pendragon, Caerdroia, Wood & Water, Sangraal and so on, opening up a world which reminded me of the fiction of Machen and Blackwood and Fortune.
Valentine was a far more serious bookworm of the weird and esoteric than I was at that stage; I did not pay much attention to the books in the shops that I came across and occasionally ventured into. Even so, I somehow doubt that they matched the quality or range of those found in Gothic Image.
there's a universe of much pulpier Gujarati books that have never been translated: action and adventure novels, crime thrillers, ghost stories, science fiction, and racy underworld revenge fantasies. The authors who work in these genres are some of the best-selling writers in the language, but their work has never been available to English readers before.
One of my persistent good intentions is to fish in non-Anglophone ponds and read more works in translation. And not just high-falutin' literature, either: so how could I resist making a small contribution to this project?
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