* Jenny Colgan’s Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery is published by Sphere.
Augustus Carp, Esq by Henry Howarth BashfordChosen by Philip Ardagh
Although I’m a huge fan of PG Wodehouse in general and his Blandings stories in particular, and although Clive James’s series of unreliable memoirs has caused me to snort out loud in public, and after having weighed up Max Beerbohm’s Seven Men and Two Others, I’ve gone for Augustus Carp Esq, by Himself.
Subtitled “Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man”, and first published in 1924, it begins: “It is customary, I have noticed, in publishing an autobiography to preface it with some sort of apology. But there are times, and surely the present is one of them, when to do so is manifestly unnecessary.” Though written by Dr Henry Howarth Bashford – later Sir Henry, physician to George VI – his name did not appear in the book in his lifetime.
Carp’s nearest relative must be Pooter from Diary of a Nobody but, for me, Carp, the character and the book, surpasses Pooter and the better known classic. Here is a Sunday school superintendent, churchwarden and self-appointed president of a piety league, who religiously highlights the faults in others while constantly trying to pursue his own advancement through “good deeds”. (When falling out with those at the church of St James the Lesser, he joins the congregation of St James the Lesser Still.)
When tricked into believing that port is “a species of fruit squash imported from Portugal and known as Portugalade” he gets terrible “port-poisoning”. It all ends in tears, one of which lands on his employer, causing him to apologise –not to his employer “but to the moisture”. Why? “Because by apologising to the moisture, I was conveying to Mr Chrysostom, in the most trenchant way possible, my own opinion of his character.” Carp is, quite simply, a very British comic masterpiece.
Calm, with greying hair, Topping has a reassuringly confident air about his work despite the fact he has to deal with tonnes of nuclear waste and old oxide fuel whose exact composition and location is unknown. “The trouble is there is no one left at Sellafield to tell us where things were put down there. The stuff in the pond has been down there for 50 years,” says Topping.
Nuclear opponents have less complimentary views about what goes on at Sellafield, of course. The place is “a slow-motion Chernobyl”, according to campaigners from Greenpeace, a group which has a reputation for never missing out on the catchy phrase.
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)We are tracking closely tropical storm Dorian as it heads, as usual, to Puerto Rico. FEMA and all others are ready, and will do a great job. When they do, let them know it, and give them a big Thank You – Not like last time. That includes from the incompetent Mayor of San Juan!
* Lissa Evans’s Crooked Heart is published by Black Swan.
The Best of Myles by Brian O’NolanChosen by Ian Martin
Which Brian O’Nolan was funnier – novelist “Flann O’Brien” or columnist “Myles na gCopaleen”? Both were madly futuristic. At Swim-Two-Birds, his masterpiece, has characters conspiring against their author, erupting into the baffled real world as if in some weird Charlie Kaufman movie. The Third Policeman, with its proposition that people and their bicycles are exchanging molecules, one slowly becoming the other, now feels like something the mainstream media might be hiding from conspiracy theorists. However, The Best of Myles, an anthology of satirical columns he wrote for the Irish Times, has been a lighthouse for me since the early 70s, and loba negra descargar gratis remains the funniest book I’ve ever read. With swaggering confidence, O’Nolan invents a parallel-reality Dublin in 1940 and then riffs for 26 years, until he dies. It’s a four-dimensional tour de force. There are “regulars”: The Brother, a monstrous chancer; Keats and Chapman, literary dandies with a weakness for puns; and the Plain People of Ireland, a sort of unreliable chorus. It’s a world both banal and absurd, where rogue ventriloquist theatre escorts – and intoxicating ice-cream – cause mayhem. One bloke spends all day cracking a fiendish newspaper crossword just to stroll into a bar in the evening and help an astonished acquaintance “solve” it. This book is a masterclass in how to defy a boring world with mischief.
The challenge is to build a stronger and happier society. What we do to intervene between conception and age two is all about building the emotional capacity of an infant. What we do after the age of two is mostly to undo damage done previously.
It ought to be natural to form that secure bond. But post-natal depression, problems with conception or the birth experience, domestic violence and issues of poverty can all get in the way. And one of the biggest obstacles to forming that secure bond is when Mum didn’t have a secure relationship with her own mother. This truly is a cycle of deprivation that is passed down through generations.
