Yesterday marked Georgina’s first month. Yes, I know. Frightening.
A design blog I follow, Making It Lovely, decided to record her first child’s first year by taking a photo of her each month in the same outfit on the same background. Here’s Eleanor’s year.
I love this idea. It recreates digitally the photographic updates that used to be sent to distant relatives in my family. So I’m doing the same for Georgina, just for the first year. That means I had to decide on an outfit and a background.
The outfit is easy: red/white striped top and dungarees. It’s a combination I love and will be a wardrobe stable. My sister has sent me a photo of my niece in the same outfit, aged 1, way back in the late ’70s. The background choice was harder. In the end I’m doing two.
‘Baby Human’ is her on an American quilt custom made by Kelly Hale. I was gobsmacked by the work and love that’s gone into the quilt and daren’t use it as a day to day item. I was also delighted that Kelly had picked colours that suit the nursery kit.
‘Tartan’ is Georgina on a tartan travel rug/blanket. I found the rug about two years ago in Otto Retro and bought it instantly, despite the cost of a pristine 1960s wool blanket. It’s the exact same pattern as my own. The earliest photos of me are on my blanket, and I’ve carried it with me through bedsits, shared student houses and rented flats. Mine is worn totally through, as you might expect after nearly forty years of use, with a hole repaired with embroidery silk. I hope Georgina carries hers until it wears out too.
I’m going to dig out a photo of me on my blanket, but it’s behind a lot of boxes in the attic at the moment.
It’s a month since I was in a delivery room at the local hospital. I’d spent the previous three weeks watching the Tour de France on Eurosport, even getting namechecked for a tweet about cake. And I’d bought the bedside TV package when I was admitted to the RD&E. I have vague memories of the yellow jersey being surprisingly closely run on the Saturday, but there’d been a lot of gas/air and other confusions that day. On the Sunday I was very distracted what with the whole giving birth thing. But the TV was on in the background and the pelaton was looping around the Champs Elyssees. I’ve just checked and Mark Cavendish must have won whilst Georgina was snuggling on my chest. This will in no way be a formative experience for her.
In 1883, Krakatoa exploded. It wasn’t actually the biggest volcanic eruption ever recorded but it was the first to happen with something resembling modern media to report on it. Winchester explores not only the geophysics of Krakatoa – much of which has only come to be understood in the last fifty years – but the cultural, political and botanical impact of it. Why did it blow, and why is it so iconic?
There’s a lot to unpack here and the book looks at, amongst other topics: the colonial history of the East Indies; theories of geology including plate tectonics; Darwinism and the Wallace line; undersea telegraphs; Javan and Sumatran religious beliefs; and the touring circus whose elephant trainer tried to house her upset baby elephant in her hotel room (see screencap).
Is all of this relevent? Maybe not if you just want to know what happened. The short version is that the island of Krakatoa is thrown up by two tectonic plates meeting and sometimes the pressure explodes so violently the island is destroyed. When that happened in 1883, a massive tsunami hit the coasts of Java and Sumatra resulting in a horrific loss of life. But the short version doesn’t place you there.
By delving into all the different contexts of the explosion, Winchester recreates a sense of place, time and culture and enables you to empathise with the people who witnessed Krakatoa and understand why it still resonates today. He does this with charm, self-deprecation and without becoming bogged down in the science. You’re not entirely sure where a chapter is going at first, or how it connects, but by the end you’ve gained a real understanding of a complex historical event.
I was watching TV. I’m doing that a lot, being unable to do much else besides read or sew while I wait for this baby to get on with it. Too long on a PC chair and I get aches.
Anyway, I was watching TV when Séba hurried in and dropped a headless bird corpse on the rug. As I’m not allowed to touch such things at the moment, I couldn’t get it off him and identify it. But it was big, brown and speckled. And headless.
The Chap chased him back outside and reported hearing crunching from the shrubbery.
In a bookshop on the Champs Élysées last year there was a massive, wall-wide display of Tout Est Sous Contrôle by, according to the big signs, Doctor House. It turns out the French really love Hugh Laurie. Yes, this Hugh Laurie:
The sight of all those books didn’t make me pull The Gun Seller off my to be read shelf any quicker, I’m afraid. In the end it formed half of a thriller read along with Blood Hunt. Amusingly, both novels feature a former military type who uncovers a corporate conspiracy that has led to murder. The difference is in the tone.
Thomas Lang is a former Scots Guard Captain, now fallen on rather tight times. Someone offers him a lot of money to kill an American businessman. He declines but, thinking someone else has taken up the contract, he tries to warn the target and ends up being dragged into a global conspiracy by the military-industrial complex.
The conspiracy plot is fairly standard, involving various secretive government organisations, arms dealers, terrorists etc. Where The Gun Seller shines is in the details. One character is described as wearing a brown sensible jacket bought from the back pages of the Telegraph magazine. As well as making you laugh at the incongruity, it also provides a lovely character tell. An observation that British security guards would not stop strangers entering a government building “because it would be just too embarrassing” is both funny and sets up the difference between the British and American secret services.
The Gun Seller is in first person past tense, which means we know Lang will survive but also means there’s a strong narrative voice. It’s very hard to separate this from the ‘upper class twit of the year’ persona Laurie used to play on back in the day. Lang digresses, he rambles at moments when you really might expect him to be concentrating, and he generally reacts to unfairness. He’s heroic, without acting like a hero.
Despite the tense and voice, the situations Lang has to deal with are unpleasant and ugly so that you do actually worry that this charming chancer is not going to survive. That’s a really good trick to pull off.
