Books of the Year

What I've read in 2023. As ever, it's an eclectic collection, largely based on films I've seen and then sought out the book or short story that they're based on.

A Laodicean/The Hand of Ethelberta/Desperate Remedies by Thomas Hardy 

I  completed my reading of Hardy's prose works with three of his minor, and least regarded, novels.

A Laodicean, a novel about the clash between modernity and tradition, has a remarkably similar opening to Franz Kafka's The Castle (a young surveyor walking down a country road at night, lost and looking for the village inn he is to stop at, before unexpectedly coming upon the castle where he has been hired to work).

Silas Marner by George Eliot

Maybe not quite up there with her major novels, but a thought provoking story nonetheless, set in her familiar Midlands countryside.

Tom Jones/Joseph Andrews/Shamela by Henry Fielding 

The first two are picaresque novels about young men making their way in the world, and getting into scapes as they travel round the country, and the last is Fielding's spoof of Samuel Richardson's best-selling epistolary novel Pamela.

Pamela by Samuel Richardson/Anti-Pamela by Eliza Haywood 

Having read the spoof, I moved on to the original, and then another parody of it.

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

A novel about the cultural limitations of a small Midwestern town before and during World War I, based on the one where Lewis grew up, with echoes of the small town Minnesota-set Lake Wobegon Days stories that I read as a teenager (there's also another very Kafkaesque scene in it, when a country doctor sets out on a winter night in a horse drawn carriage to visit a dying patient on an outlying farm).

Crabwalk by Günter Grass 

The quality of Grass's literary output definitely declined in his final decades, but I enjoyed this 2002 work about the sinking of a Nazi recreation ship packed with refugees by a Soviet submarine in the Baltic towards the end of World War II, mostly because it features characters from his earlier Danzig Trilogy, The Tin Drum , Cat and Mouse and Dog Years, which propelled him to fame.

A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean 

The novella on which the Hollywood film was based, it centres on the relationship between two brothers and their flyfishing father in early twentieth century Montana.

Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

I continued my out of sequence reading of Trollope's Barchester Chronicles with this entertaining tale about the political and clerical machinations around the appointment of a new bishop in a West Country cathedral city.

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster

A 1909 sci-fi short story about a future world whose inhabitants live in isolated pods which is an eerily prescient description of the Zoom age ("the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her.").

Tomorrow by William Faulkner

A short story set in Faulkner's fictional Yokanapatawpha County, like Daphne du Maurier's Don't Look Now this is a good example of how you can turn ten pages of text into a two hour film (in this case, a stark black and white 1972 one starring Robert Duvall).

In the Heat of the Night by John Ball

Like the film, this features a black detective passing through a small Southern town, but there are some major plot differences between the novel and the the screenplay.

Big Fish by Daniel Wallace

A fantastical tale about a larger than life Alabama salesman, later played on film by Albert Finney.

Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus by Frederik Pohl

Another sci-fi short story, from the fifties, about a future society where the Christmas shopping rush starts in September!

The Greatest Gift by Philip Van Doren Stern

Rounding off the reading year, a festive short story which formed the basis of the classic Christmas film It's A Wonderful Life.

RIP El Tel

The former England football manager Terry Venables, who died this weekend aged 80, belonged to the same generation as the players who won the World Cup at Wembley in 1966, although unlike them he only picked up two caps for the national side he would go on to lead, from the also Dagenham-born Alf Ramsey, whose achievement against Germany he came close to emulating on the same ground thirty years later at Euro '96.

Despite something of a Flash Harry image, including owning a West End nightclub where he entertained fellow footballers and showbiz friends, and occasionally sang himself, but was ultimately forced to sell because of financial problems, players he managed for club and country have spoken highly of his tactical nous and how much they learnt from him, both through his insights into the game and man management skills, and the business issues that led him into trouble with the FA, Spurs chairman Alan Sugar and Companies House seem like small beer compared to the nefarious state actors and other dodgy characters who have since become involved with top flight football.

It's hard to imagine an English manager now being appointed by a top European club as Venables was by Barcelona in the mid eighties (Bobby Robson and Howard Kendall also managed Spanish sides in that and the following decade), or indeed one of the big six Premier League clubs doing so, rather than looking to one of the younger continental or South American coaches directly or indirectly influenced by that trio. His tenure as England manager in the mid nineties also came towards the end of the long spell when that job automatically went to an Englishman, and was followed by his coaching Australia, an indication of how international the sport he had earned a living from since signing with Chelsea as a fifteen year old apprentice straight from school had become.

Resurrection of the Boddies

I went into town last night for the launch of a new CAMRA book, Manchester's Best Beer Pubs and Bars, at Café Beermoth. I bought a copy while I was there and am looking forward to perusing it.

The other draw was a beer brewed specially for the event by Runaway, Manchester Best, based on a seventies recipe for Boddingtons Bitter.

I drank Boddingtons, and the similar Chester's Bitter, as a teenager in the late eighties. Book and Bailey wrote here about a distinctive Manchester sub-style of very pale and dry, well-hopped beers, which Marble's Manchester Bitter is another attempt at recreating. There was also a beer from Blackjack on the bar last night which fitted the description as well.

Manchester Best has been distributed to the free trade in the area, so should be available on the bar of some of the city's many good pubs that are featured in the book soon.

I also popped into a couple of pubs that have opened in the last few weeks, the Victoria Tap at the railway station of that name and Pomona Island's new place in the city centre North Westward Ho, and was impressed both by their retro feel and reasonable prices for their locations.

RIP HS2

In a widely trailed announcement, the Prime Minister yesterday confirmed in his speech at the Conservative conference in Manchester (in a former railway station no less) the scrapping of the Northern leg of the HS2 high speed rail line between Birmingham and Manchester.

I wrote here about the pros and cons, and likely future, of HS2, but still feel a sense of embarrassment, both at Britain lagging behind Western Europe on high speed rail and what the project will now end up as, an expensive, relatively short, and no doubt underused, section of track between Birmingham and London. So why are the Tories ripping up the scheme now?

Sunak clearly wasn't a fan of the Johnsonite rhetoric about levelling up the North when he was Chancellor, and probably doesn't see any need to develop the economy outside the South East, especially if it means increasing public spending. He may even think that he can get away with it politically amongst Northern "red wall" Tory voters (the eastern arm of the initially planned "Y" to Leeds had already been abandoned), or maybe he's just written them, and his hopes of winning next year's election, off and is now spending what time he has left in office killing off things he doesn't like, and which Labour seems ambiguous about reversing (as on so much else).

Cashing in on a crisis

Self-styled man of the people Nigel Farage was in Downing Street last week, along with colleagues from the right-wing TV channel GB News, to hand in a petition demanding that businesses continue to accept payment in cash, a bit of a contrast to his last battle over money, his clash with private bank Coutts after it closed his account for having insufficient funds in it.

I agree in principle that people should have the choice between using cards and cash, but very rarely use the latter myself now (although I always carry a small amount for emergencies which has come in handy a couple of times in the last few weeks, in a chip shop whose machine wasn't working and a pub where I ordered a pint before being told that there was a minimum amount for card transactions).

I also understand however why some, especially small, businesses now prefer not to handle cash. The argument is sometimes made that card companies charging commission means that they don't get the full amount tendered by the customer, but banks also levy fees for paying in large amounts of cash and there are also security issues both with keeping banknotes on the premises and taking them to a branch (if you can still find one open: that and the availability of free ATMs, particularly in rural areas, would seem to be the biggest threat to continued use of cash).

The move towards a cashless economy is often linked to the social distancing rules introduced at the start of the Covid pandemic, but I think it began at least a couple of years before that. The widespread acceptance of contactless payments in pubs, shops and on public transport made it much easier to complete transactions by card (albeit harder to keep track of what you were spending) and was therefore becoming the preferred method for many even before the virus struck.

I'm not convinced that cash will ever completely disappear or cease to be legal tender, but it may soon seem as anachronistic a means of payment as writing a cheque or buying a postal order is now.

A Bottle Full of Rye

I drank and enjoyed a bottle of rye IPA from the Kinnegar Brewery in Letterkenny yesterday, one of a couple that my brother in law kindly brought back from Ireland for me the other week.

I hadn't drunk this style of beer before, but its colour and spicy taste reminded me a lot of the darker wheat beers (Dunkelweizen) that you get in Bavaria (some of which, Roggenbier, also contain a large proportion of rye in their grists) .

The now defunct King and Barnes in Horsham, Sussex, once brewed a brown ale with rye; in Russia, they drink kvass, a beer made by soaking and fermenting rye bread; and in Finland, sahti, a farmhouse ale brewed with rye and other grains before being flavoured with juniper berries. All ones to look out for in future, I thought wryly...

A saunter round the Northern Quarter

I did a bit of a mini crawl around the Northern Quarter of Manchester city centre the other afternoon, checking out a few pubs I hadn't been to for several years.

I popped first into the Unicorn on Church Street, where Manchester Jazz Society met in the upstairs function room on Thursday nights until the summer of 2019. I'd heard it'd gone a bit rough since, and sure enough there was a guy fitting a security door to the side entrance and the new landlady was manhandling a barred customer into the street from the main one. The serving hatch at the bottom of the stairs has been shut off, depriving it of its unusual island bar, and Draught Bass replaced with Doom Bar. Thankfully the Hare and Hounds round the corner on Shudehill was just the same: old boys watching the afternoon racing on TV with pints of cheap, well kept Holt's Bitter. 

I was aiming for the launch of a new beer, Blackjack Best Bitter served from oak casks, at their sole tied house, the Smithfield Market Tavern on Swan Street. As usual I was early so had a quick look inside the Mackie Mayor food hall next door and peered through the windows of the now keg-only Wheatsheaf round the corner. It was still a couple of minutes before the official start time of five o'clock when I arrived at the Smithfield, but the barman kindly turned round the pump-clip and served me the first pint of the new beer. The wood certainly gave it a different character, a sort of pithy leanness that I found quite appealing.

I called at the Crown and Kettle at the bottom of Oldham Road and Port Street Beer House on the way back to Piccadilly station, sitting on the benches outside the latter with a pint of very pale and bitter Five Points XPA as the sun sank over the Rochdale Canal, which rounded off an enjoyable afternoon nicely.