Got to love the idea of Jane Austen’s Fight Club!   (hat tip to Stroppybird)

I once saw a very beautiful Japanese film in which those who died had to decide on the moment from their life they wished to become their eternity.  One such moment that I would give serious thought to happened this morning: we stood in the centre of a bridge over the Herengracht, the spring sunshine on our faces, our arms around each other’s waists, enjoying the beautiful houses on either side and laughing at a little white cloud going for a swim in the canal.

It says so much in a few words.

I am not spiritual and believe in no afterlife at all, but if there was one I think that spending eternity in one perfect moment would be a good one.   The difficulty is choosing that moment.  Far better, I think, if some omniscient being could choose it for you because I suspect that we don’t always realise what those perfect moments are while we are having them because we are so wrapped up in them.

This has been haunting me as I have wondered, if given this choice to make, which moment I would choose to live in for ever in an endless instant.  Doeas any of us really know ourselves enough to know when we were at our happiest?

I suspect that many people would think, perhaps, of something like their wedding day, or when their first child was born, but I wonder if they are too obvious, or the times we are supposed to be happiest.  But maybe they are too contrived, and perhaps it is the tiny, everyday, moments like that one on the Herengracht that would count.  Would it be better to live in a moment of joy or one of contentment?

1. No. Me neither.

It is very convenient for the writers that we have a war in Afghanistan so that the main characteristic of Watson as a Afghan war veteran can be plausibly kept, but they even went the extra bit and added the confusion about whether he was injured in the leg or shoulder – in the original stories Watson’s lodged Jezail bullet was quite mobile.

One very subtle reference to the original Study in Scarlet (apart from the title of course) was the chance meeting with Watson’s old colleague.  While talking in the park they appeared to be drinking coffee from cups with ‘Criterion’ written on them – Conan Doyle had the chance meeting happen in the bar of the Criterion theatre in London.

So. Plenty to keep the anoraks busy.

Martin Freeman was playing to his established strengths for a lot of the first episode, with his bemused looks and double-takes straight out of the Tim-from-the-Office catalogue, but in context they were all perfectly appropriate.  In addition, he showed some new strengths with the more serious scenes.

Benedict Cumberbatch was spot-on as the detective.  I had never heard of him before.  Looking at IMDb, he has been in lots of things, but nothing I have seen apart from the film Starter for 10.  He really has nailed the more sociopathic side of Holmes where he doesn’t bother to take anybody’s feelings into account unless he really makes an effort.  Maybe he is a little too likeable – Holmes has always been admirable rather than likeable – but he offsets that with his superb arrogance.

The central plot was a bit thin and unlikely, but dare we admit that so were many of the original stories?  Personally I always liked the stories for their atmosphere, for the contrast of characters (ascetic detective and hearty, womanising doctor) , and for the tour de force set pieces when Holmes explains some piece of deduction.

What is most surprising is how well the writers have taken those parts of modern life that should totally change the way Holmes works, and incorporated them while still keeping the spirit.  So Watson blogs instead of keeping a journal, Holmes has a website and checks the internet for weather to check out a theory, and everybody owning a mobile phone is made part of the plot instead of ruining it.  Even the smoking ban has played its part by turning a ‘three-pipe problem’ into a ‘three-patch problem’, which I particularly enjoyed.

Another little anorak detail:  the original Sherlock Holmes deduced that somebody was a drunk by the state of their pocket watch – scratches around the keyhole giving it away.  The 21st Century equivalent was deducing somebody had alcohol problems by the scratches around where they charged their mobile phone.

One other aspect of the Conan Doyle stories that I always liked was the way that the case was not always a murder, which I thought made it all a bit more plausible.  Most detective, no matter what out-of-the-way place they live can’t turn a corner without finding a body, but Holmes had the strange cases like the red-headed league or the speckled band.  OK, some of them might have ended up uncovering a murder or attempted murder, but at least it didn’t always start with a body.  I’m hoping that Sherlock will continue that tradition and that one of the other episodes is stiff-less.

What is going to be a polarising attribute of the show is the tricksy directing where  little captions pop up when somebody receives a text message, or to show what Homes is noticing, or the little flashbacks of his observations.  Guy Ritchie did somethign similar in his film.  Personally I like it, just as I liked it when Robert Rodriguez or David Fincher have made a point of letting their direction show, but I know many people prefer direction to be totally invisible.  The next episode has a different director, so it will be interesting to see if that continues.

On the whole I was thoroughly entertained by the programme, and Jayne was too.   A shame there are only two more episodes to look forward to, but surely a proper series will be commissioned on the strength of this?

I bet they didn’t forget to watch the new Sherlock programme on TV tonight…You have to love the modern world though.  Even ten years ago forgetting to watch a TV programme meant yo had missed it.  The TV channels were not in the habit of repeating every new show during the week after – they didn’t have all those subsidiary channels to do that.  You would be asking around work colleagues to see if anybody had recorded it.

Realising you had missed some new show could be a bit stressful; wondering if you would find some way to catch the first one before the second week, and if you couldn’t you had to decide whether to watch part two without having seen part one.  Now you just make a mental note to watch it on iPlayer on the PC or on the cable TV, or the inevitable repeat on BBC Three during the week.

Looks like th show has been well-received and I’m looking forward to seeing it tomorrow.  It will be a novelty to have a reason to leave the TV on after University Challenge.

But only after the list is extended to eleven items and a new number one is inserted to cover “should of” vs “should have”.

Half an hour later, the probation officer found his 27-year-old charge sitting at a desktop computer frantically hacking away at the hard drive with a knife, and then a tin opener. “I’m trying to reformat the hard drive,” Venables said, explaining that he wanted to delete personal details.

He has obviously been working in IT tech support.  We always use the knife and tin opener approach instead of the old, unreliable FORMAT C: which ‘civilians’ use.

It turns out that it wasn’t even his own dog!  The man must be as brave as he is perverted – I wouldn’t even trust a stragne dog not to bite my hand.  The crowning glory of the story has to be the quote at the end:

A spokesman for English Heritage said: “This was a very rare incident”.

No kidding!  I can’t imagine them saying “I don’t know what the world is coming to, that’s the third one this week.”  Surely ‘rare’ is a bit of an understatement.

As for the flasher-by-proxy in Lewes… There is an obvious way to track down the culprit, but I doubt there will be many volunteers for that line of door-to-door enquiries!  Or indeed many volunteers to take part in the identity parade if any suspect is arrested.

The programme includes Diego Garcian food, Sega songs and music, Afro Caribbean music, gospel, film projections, fashion show, keepy uppies.

There will be stalls for different cuisines, African crafts, fishing, souvenirs and stalls for local and national organisations and charities.

Not only does it sound like fun, but it will be good to go along and show some support for the town’s growing Chagossian community.   We may not be able to reverse the terrible injustice done to them on our behalf but at least we can go along, make them feel welcome, and investigate this new facet to the town’s culture.

It runs from 1000 to 1600 on Sunday. Worth going just to find out what the ‘fishing’ means. And for the keepy uppies.

I enjoyed it on a couple of levels. Apart from the story, there was a more personal level of enjoyment which was an element of nostalgia.   Molly ans Simon, the two main characters, met while at Goldsmiths which was just up the road from where I lived for quite a few years, so parts of the book were set in my old manor, even to the extent of an actual street name ringing a bell.So I was already reading with one part of my mind comparing the descriptions of being young and living in London, but then there was the aspect of Simon’s sexual preferences.  Basically he is gay but has a thing for straight men and gets turned off by other gay men.  It sounds implausible, but when I lived in London one of our friends – well more a friend of a friend – had similar tastes and often told us tales of seducing soldiers from the London barracks and shared the secret of his tactics with us,¹  so I had some sort of real-life template for the character.  I reckon it made the whole thing more believable for me than it might otherwise have been.

Anyway, here is what I wrote:

I am always a little bit wary of celebrity novels, especially those written by comedians who have been on TV a lot, in case they turn out to be weak books sold purely on name recognition.  It is an irrational worry really as I have previously enjoyed novels by Sean Hughes, Eric Morecambe, Alexie Sayle, Ben Elton, Mark Gattiss and Stephen Fry but I can’t shake it. With this book the worries disappeared within the first couple of pages.

There is not a lot of depth to it, although that is fitting as the two main characters are pretty shallow people, sometimes the plot leaps forward a little too quickly, and it certainly ends far too suddenly, but for all that it is a good read. For most of the book I was in a rush to find out what happened next and at least liked the characters enough to be wanting everything to turn out OK for them.

As you would expect from a comedian, there are quite a few laughs in the book, more from lines that characters come up with than from descriptions or situations, but there are some darkly surreal situations too.  I like the way that Clary threw in a few false turns too, where it looks like the story is heading towards a particular place and just as you are pre-emptively yawning at the predictability of it the story goes somewhere else instead.

I read this on the sofa between World Cup games, but I reckon it would have made a good holiday book. By the end of it I decided that I will probably track down his previous books at some point, although I know they won’t give me what I really want, which is to know more about the enigmatic and creepy Lilia Delvard from this story.

Watch out for: Clary ‘doing a Martin Amis’ and putting himself into the book, albeit as an ‘off-stage’ character.

1. it involved very specific videos

I have to start by laying my cards on the table and saying that I have been a fan of David Nobbs since I was a teenager, and read the first Reggie Perrin book. I have ten of his novels on my shelves so I had high hopes when I picked this book up to read it, and was not disappointed; this is one of his best.

There is a crossover between Nobbs’ novels and his TV writing with some books adapted for TV, and other being novelisations of TV shows or at least written in parallel, and his writing style does lend itself to the small screen, making him extremely accessible.

But accessible does not mean bland or shallow. Behind the effortless humour there are some big topics and serious points.  For example, in this book the subject of religious faith is a major thread of the plot.

All of Nobbs’ usual stylistic flourishes are present and correct, including the subtle repetition of otherwise trivial details to make them funny, and the reiteration of particular events of circumstances with slight changes to highlight changes over time.

Many of Nobbs’ books lend themselves to sequels, which duly appear, but this is very much a self-contained story, taking place over an extended period.  It is about two young lovers who run away for a few nights in London, are forced apart by family and circumstances, and spend the subsequent decades trying to re-connect. Along the way themes like religion, alcoholism and bereavement are all encountered and treated very sensitively  without diminishing the overall good humour of the book.

Given the author’s history and reputation in TV sit-coms, an interesting strand of the book is the acting career of one of the main characters, who finds herself involved in increasingly dire comedies after starting with shakespearian ambitions. I did find myself wondering if the passages concerning the TV shows were satire, documentary or just a bit of fun at the expense of the television industry.

The key lesson learned from this book: taxidermists do not stuff.