Absolutely!
TICTH toy manufacturers who put their merchandise in stupidly-shaped boxes, rendering them impossible to wrap neatly, Small Relatives for the delectation of.
Air France KLM can head straight to hell. First they fail to put my Dad's suitcase on the plane. They promise it next day. At 6pm on Christmas Eve when all the shops are closing, they announce it's been given to a parcel delivery service and won't arrive until the day after Christmas. Presents, wine and Christmas pudding were all inside (not to mention clothes, after it was too late to buy more).
We pretty much saved Christmas dinner, but they will be getting a very strongly worded letter.
I think words in death announcements are often cut to a minimum to save money.
Reminds me of a joke I heard years ago. An elderly gentleman died, and his widow being very frugal put an announcement in the local paper that simply said “Smith dead”. The editor of the paper called her and pointed out that the minimum payment was for five words, so she could extend the announcement if she wanted to at no extra cost. The final announcement read “Smith dead. Volvo for sale”
Fire, or at least uncontrolled manifestations of it.
Our local Baptist Church suffered their building being consumed by fire this morning. No injuries, and the volunteer fire service got the fire under control (and it was mercifully calm so it didn't spread), and nothing irreplaceable lost, but still a big shock to the congregation.
This winter's cold can go back to the hell from whence it came. While the entirity of the out-laws are whooping it up on the other side of the city, I am curled up in bed mainlining NSAIDs, decongestant and strepsils and generally feeling like I have bubonic plague. The guacamole production line has been in full swing for the last 14 hours or so. I haven't felt this ill since my now 19yo nephew gave us all norovirus at his christening - thankfully it is only my nose that is exploding at irregular intervals!
There is no way that I will be heading over to Essex tomorrow, or for some time yey - though judging by her response mum has something similar.
Given our building is insured for 4.5 million I think I would be at least ambivalent about it. I know a priest who prayed for a convenient landslide to come and wipeout their grade II listed Victorian pile.
One wonders if it was caused by an electrical fault, arson or a candle. Not that it matters.
Candles were confirmed extinguished, and likely culprits like electric heaters were turned off, so we'll just have to wait and see. If I were forced to speculate I'd be eyeing the kitchen appliances.
The whole building seems to have been gutted - the roof is gone, and likely the internal walls too, from what I could see from the road. The building will certainly not be usable for quite some time.
Given our building is insured for 4.5 million I think I would be at least ambivalent about it. I know a priest who prayed for a convenient landslide to come and wipeout their grade II listed Victorian pile.
One wonders if it was caused by an electrical fault, arson or a candle. Not that it matters.
Candles were confirmed extinguished, and likely culprits like electric heaters were turned off, so we'll just have to wait and see. If I were forced to speculate I'd be eyeing the kitchen appliances.
The whole building seems to have been gutted - the roof is gone, and likely the internal walls too, from what I could see from the road. The building will certainly not be usable for quite some time.
Point taken re ambivalence. If a fire gutted Our Place (and I know one should be careful what one wishes for), it would get rid of a great deal of useless Tat, and provide an opportunity for a reset...if only they could be persuaded to think outside the box for once...
In your case - and it's early days for the Baptist folk - is there at least a possibility of them sharing your building?
In your case - and it's early days for the Baptist folk - is there at least a possibility of them sharing your building?
It has been proposed before and they haven't been keen, and our building has its own problems (though, admittedly, currently having a roof is a definite point in its favour) and is due to be "disposed of" in the next year or so. If I had my way we would club together and build new something suitable on part of the 40 acres of Glebe land we own, but there is a small group with their heart set on getting our building into community ownership and continuing to use it.
In your case - and it's early days for the Baptist folk - is there at least a possibility of them sharing your building?
It has been proposed before and they haven't been keen, and our building has its own problems (though, admittedly, currently having a roof is a definite point in its favour) and is due to be "disposed of" in the next year or so. If I had my way we would club together and build new something suitable on part of the 40 acres of Glebe land we own, but there is a small group with their heart set on getting our building into community ownership and continuing to use it.
Understood. Hopefully, something mutually beneficial to church(es) and community will be the result.
Seriously though, sorry to hear you've had the lurgy - it's a pain any time but more so when it deprives you of enjoyable things like feasting and drinking. I'd echo BF's recommendation of a nice WHISKY.
Very sorry to hear about Arethosemyfeet's Baptist friends' church too - I hope their insurance is in good standing.
The book I have just read. It's historical fiction, but lays claim to being high quality historical fiction. The blurb refers to the author "drawing on the documentary evidence of the time." The author talks of "reading between the lines."
It was very well written, and I enjoyed it, but my first thought on finishing it was to look up the family in the 1851 census. And from there a quick check of birth, marriage and death records showed that the only reason the author was "reading between the lines" was because he clearly couldn't be arsed to actually fact check and read the lines themselves. Which paint a completely different picture to the wild imaginings he conjured up "reading between the lines."
I seldom read historical fiction because I get irritated when I read something which I know from my history background to be inaccurate or not my interpretation of the events.
(Saying that, I just read David Grann’s The Wager and thoroughly enjoyed it despite it being a subject I wouldn’t usually choose, a shipwreck and mutiny. But I am reticent to call it historical fiction as it is retelling the journals of the sailors. But I also like Claire Gilbert’s I, Julian and that is very much fiction.)
I don't know why this is annoying me so much. Possibly because the people he is 're-imagining' were real, ordinary people. The youngest character in the book died IRL in 1930 and may well have living descendants. I would be incandescent if someone wrote fiction such as this about my forebears.
There's a line of commentary in the 'Afterword' saying that there is a 'single mention' in the original records of a 'married sister', but that the author believes this is a mistake as, if she existed, there would be more about her. And I thought 'Really? You think that minimal reference to a woman in 1857 means she didn't exist'? So I took a look and there she is - marriage record, seven children, census returns, newspaper obituary when she died. But her not existing feeds into the story, her existence doesn't. So the author decides she didn't, couldn't, exist.
If it were me I’d write to the publisher. After all the afterword is not part of the fiction, it is presented as factual information about the historical background.
I might as well name the book - it's Benbecula by (as stated on the front cover) Booker Shortlisted author Graeme MacRae Burnet.
Also from the Afterword I was struck by the fact that the family (in 1857) consisted of four siblings in their twenties, none of whom were married. This seems unusual for the time.
He's deduced from this that the family were odd, except that there were five siblings, not four, the eldest of whom was married, with three children (she went on to have seven in total) and the youngest was just 22, hardly an age at which aspersions of being 'unmarriageable' is fair. In fact two of the four subsequently married.
If you didn't know better, it would probably be an OK book - but you do know better, and therefore it's Tosh. Possibly also Twaddle. And maybe even Outrage.
The same can apply to other works which claim to be historically accurate. There is one (I can't recall the name of the book, or the author) which features the real-life railway and train service to the Brookwood Necropolis. It makes for a good story, but the details are so risibly Wrong as to make it unreadable to anyone with even a smidgin of correct 19thC railway practice.
I might as well name the book - it's Benbecula by (as stated on the front cover) Booker Shortlisted author Graeme MacRae Burnet.
Also from the Afterword I was struck by the fact that the family (in 1857) consisted of four siblings in their twenties, none of whom were married. This seems unusual for the time.
He's deduced from this that the family were odd, except that there were five siblings, not four, the eldest of whom was married, with three children (she went on to have seven in total) and the youngest was just 22, hardly an age at which aspersions of being 'unmarriageable' is fair. In fact two of the four subsequently married.
The author appears to be a chronic sufferer of Dunning-Kruger syndrome.
I think it is fine for an author to take that sort of information from a census and weave a fictional story from it without citing where the information came from. To suggest that this story is in anyway 'true' doesn't really seem on.
I think it is fine for an author to take that sort of information from a census and weave a fictional story from it without citing where the information came from. To suggest that this story is in anyway 'true' doesn't really seem on.
Yes, agreed.
I often enjoy re-reading the Brother Cadfael novels of Ellis Peters. AIUI, they are indeed based on known historical facts (the Anarchy, or Civil War, which occurred in England in the mid-12thC), with accurate references to the way in which a Benedictine Abbey of the time actually functioned.
I had the pleasure during covid lockdown of rereading the Caedfael novels in correct order. I recommend this as there is a definite sequence of seasons and some secondary characters and events do flow from novel to novel.
I read them as they were written, one by one, waiting for the new one to come out and being delighted when I would discover it in the New Books section of the library.
I had the pleasure during covid lockdown of rereading the Caedfael novels in correct order. I recommend this as there is a definite sequence of seasons and some secondary characters and events do flow from novel to novel.
I would do that, but I'm missing a couple of the earliest ones, which I lent to someone about 30 years ago and didn't get back.
I had the pleasure during covid lockdown of rereading the Caedfael novels in correct order. I recommend this as there is a definite sequence of seasons and some secondary characters and events do flow from novel to novel.
I would do that, but I'm missing a couple of the earliest ones, which I lent to someone about 30 years ago and didn't get back.
Are they still in print?
Blackwell's website has some of them in stock, and the print date was 2021, so you might be in luck. Failing that there's always the second-hand book sites.
And from there a quick check of birth, marriage and death records showed that the only reason the author was "reading between the lines" was because he clearly couldn't be arsed to actually fact check and read the lines themselves.
I hate that. I don't have words to express how much I hate that.
I quite enjoy historical fiction, as a general principle, when it's well-researched, and contains characters doing things that people of their age and station might reasonably do in that time. But the thing you describe is just lying - and whether it's lying because of laziness, ignorance, stupidity, or whatever else doesn't really matter much.
You remind me of a trip to Huntington Library to consult a character book from 1628 for my dissertation. I was putting together a variorum edition of John Earles' Microcosmographie, and needed to consult copies of every manuscript and printed edition from the first hundred years. And there was a really bizarre printer's screw-up that happened in 1628 that made this particular copy truly one of a kind, and super important to anyone editing the book. So as I sat down with this ultra rare book in my hands, I marveled at the fact that someone was actually trusting ME with the thing--from the records, the least person to consult it was Famous Scholar X who did the edition from the 1700s.
Then I opened to the relevant page--and discovered that Famous Scholar had actually made penciled checkmarks (!) on the pages, one for each variant he found. And he must have had a liquid lunch or something, for he missed 50 % of the variants that were right there, obvious, in front of God and everybody...
They weren't above improving things in those days. I read an article about Shakespeare's editor which suggested he was possibly responsible for some of the more grandiloquent lines.
And Schliemann is suspected of primping the golden masks he found at Troy to make them more like his idea of ancient kings.
The book I have just read. It's historical fiction, but lays claim to being high quality historical fiction. The blurb refers to the author "drawing on the documentary evidence of the time." The author talks of "reading between the lines."
It was very well written, and I enjoyed it, but my first thought on finishing it was to look up the family in the 1851 census. And from there a quick check of birth, marriage and death records showed that the only reason the author was "reading between the lines" was because he clearly couldn't be arsed to actually fact check and read the lines themselves. Which paint a completely different picture to the wild imaginings he conjured up "reading between the lines."
I feel cheated.
I've had a similar experience reading a new biography of Muriel Spark describing her marriage to Oswald Spark and her time in what was then Southern Rhodesia in the late 1930s. I'm sympathetic to anyone trying to describe a place as obscure and complex as this British colony and I can see she read some Doris Lessing, but she didn't look at a map of southern Africa. This sentence made me want to throw the book across the room: '... geographically, it was bordered by the Zambezi to the north, the Limpopo to the south (‘that great grey-green, greasy Limpopo river,’ wrote Kipling, ‘all set about with fever-trees’), the Kalahari desert to the east, and to the west the mountains that divide the country from
Mozambique.'
Well, no. I grew up in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe on the Mozambique border, definitely in the east, not the west. And the Kalahari desert is really far away down south, far below the Limpopo in South Africa, certainly not to the east. Is she talking about the Namib desert to the west? But that's beyond Botswana. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
In fairness to the author, the novel is about a RL murder in 1857 and I can't fault his use of the legal documentation. Plus all the legal records are in English, but the RL family were monoglot Gaelic speakers (and I know this because language spoken was recorded in the 1891 census) so their statements are all translations of what they actually said. So some dubiety as to whether there really was a 'married sister' is fair enough, although fact-checking was an option!
But looking at reviews online, people seem to be reading this as more factual than it was. I can't read the TLS review as it's behind a paywall but it's headed 'Savage Scotland.'
The opening lines of the novel (written by drunken and disturbed unreliable narrator Malcolm) say My name is Malcolm MacPhee. If you are wondering why it falls to me to tell this tale, it is for no other reason than this - I am the only one left.
He must have been pretty drunk to have thought that as the 1861 census shows two sisters, a brother, two nieces and a nephew living close by.
Then by the end of the novel a drunken Malcolm muses They wish to rid Liniclate of the last of the MacPhees for I am a blight on the parish.
He's not the last of the MacPhees! There are MacPhees in Liniclate in every census up to the last published census in 1921! His brother John raised a family of nine wee MacPhees there. Malcolm himself went on to marry and raise a family there.
The quality of the writing is great; it's an engrossing novel.
Comments
TICTH toy manufacturers who put their merchandise in stupidly-shaped boxes, rendering them impossible to wrap neatly, Small Relatives for the delectation of.
We pretty much saved Christmas dinner, but they will be getting a very strongly worded letter.
Priceless!
Our local Baptist Church suffered their building being consumed by fire this morning. No injuries, and the volunteer fire service got the fire under control (and it was mercifully calm so it didn't spread), and nothing irreplaceable lost, but still a big shock to the congregation.
Presumably the building is no longer usable, until repairs are carried out?
There is no way that I will be heading over to Essex tomorrow, or for some time yey - though judging by her response mum has something similar.
IANAD, but WHISKY might help...
Given our building is insured for 4.5 million I think I would be at least ambivalent about it. I know a priest who prayed for a convenient landslide to come and wipeout their grade II listed Victorian pile.
Candles were confirmed extinguished, and likely culprits like electric heaters were turned off, so we'll just have to wait and see. If I were forced to speculate I'd be eyeing the kitchen appliances.
The whole building seems to have been gutted - the roof is gone, and likely the internal walls too, from what I could see from the road. The building will certainly not be usable for quite some time.
Once SWMBO returns, a large stiff one before bedtime is definitely on the cards.
I'm guessing that you're feeling better...
Point taken re ambivalence. If a fire gutted Our Place (and I know one should be careful what one wishes for), it would get rid of a great deal of useless Tat, and provide an opportunity for a reset...if only they could be persuaded to think outside the box for once...
In your case - and it's early days for the Baptist folk - is there at least a possibility of them sharing your building?
It has been proposed before and they haven't been keen, and our building has its own problems (though, admittedly, currently having a roof is a definite point in its favour) and is due to be "disposed of" in the next year or so. If I had my way we would club together and build new something suitable on part of the 40 acres of Glebe land we own, but there is a small group with their heart set on getting our building into community ownership and continuing to use it.
Luckily the afflicted parts are largely above the waist, whereas my sense of humour is very firmly below tbe waist and thus little affected.
Understood. Hopefully, something mutually beneficial to church(es) and community will be the result.
Seriously though, sorry to hear you've had the lurgy - it's a pain any time but more so when it deprives you of enjoyable things like feasting and drinking. I'd echo BF's recommendation of a nice WHISKY.
Very sorry to hear about Arethosemyfeet's Baptist friends' church too - I hope their insurance is in good standing.
The Knotweed has appeared bringing much welcomed leftovers, and a hot toddy is looming.
Is the last part of that sentence in code?
I'll get me oily and me sou'wester...
It was very well written, and I enjoyed it, but my first thought on finishing it was to look up the family in the 1851 census. And from there a quick check of birth, marriage and death records showed that the only reason the author was "reading between the lines" was because he clearly couldn't be arsed to actually fact check and read the lines themselves. Which paint a completely different picture to the wild imaginings he conjured up "reading between the lines."
I feel cheated.
(Saying that, I just read David Grann’s The Wager and thoroughly enjoyed it despite it being a subject I wouldn’t usually choose, a shipwreck and mutiny. But I am reticent to call it historical fiction as it is retelling the journals of the sailors. But I also like Claire Gilbert’s I, Julian and that is very much fiction.)
Also from the Afterword I was struck by the fact that the family (in 1857) consisted of four siblings in their twenties, none of whom were married. This seems unusual for the time.
He's deduced from this that the family were odd, except that there were five siblings, not four, the eldest of whom was married, with three children (she went on to have seven in total) and the youngest was just 22, hardly an age at which aspersions of being 'unmarriageable' is fair. In fact two of the four subsequently married.
If you didn't know better, it would probably be an OK book - but you do know better, and therefore it's Tosh. Possibly also Twaddle. And maybe even Outrage.
The same can apply to other works which claim to be historically accurate. There is one (I can't recall the name of the book, or the author) which features the real-life railway and train service to the Brookwood Necropolis. It makes for a good story, but the details are so risibly Wrong as to make it unreadable to anyone with even a smidgin of correct 19thC railway practice.
There were never any trams in central London, apart from the Embankment and Kingston Tunnel.
Kingsway Tunnel (or Subway), but yes, you're right.
...or even the Kingsway tunnel. But yes, the West End was a tram-free zone.
The author appears to be a chronic sufferer of Dunning-Kruger syndrome.
I meant that! AFAIK there are no tunnels in Kingston (Surrey, that is).
Yes, agreed.
I often enjoy re-reading the Brother Cadfael novels of Ellis Peters. AIUI, they are indeed based on known historical facts (the Anarchy, or Civil War, which occurred in England in the mid-12thC), with accurate references to the way in which a Benedictine Abbey of the time actually functioned.
I would do that, but I'm missing a couple of the earliest ones, which I lent to someone about 30 years ago and didn't get back.
Are they still in print?
Blackwell's website has some of them in stock, and the print date was 2021, so you might be in luck. Failing that there's always the second-hand book sites.
I hate that. I don't have words to express how much I hate that.
I quite enjoy historical fiction, as a general principle, when it's well-researched, and contains characters doing things that people of their age and station might reasonably do in that time. But the thing you describe is just lying - and whether it's lying because of laziness, ignorance, stupidity, or whatever else doesn't really matter much.
Then I opened to the relevant page--and discovered that Famous Scholar had actually made penciled checkmarks (!) on the pages, one for each variant he found. And he must have had a liquid lunch or something, for he missed 50 % of the variants that were right there, obvious, in front of God and everybody...
My opinion of Famous Scholar has never recovered.
And Schliemann is suspected of primping the golden masks he found at Troy to make them more like his idea of ancient kings.
I've had a similar experience reading a new biography of Muriel Spark describing her marriage to Oswald Spark and her time in what was then Southern Rhodesia in the late 1930s. I'm sympathetic to anyone trying to describe a place as obscure and complex as this British colony and I can see she read some Doris Lessing, but she didn't look at a map of southern Africa. This sentence made me want to throw the book across the room: '... geographically, it was bordered by the Zambezi to the north, the Limpopo to the south (‘that great grey-green, greasy Limpopo river,’ wrote Kipling, ‘all set about with fever-trees’), the Kalahari desert to the east, and to the west the mountains that divide the country from
Mozambique.'
Well, no. I grew up in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe on the Mozambique border, definitely in the east, not the west. And the Kalahari desert is really far away down south, far below the Limpopo in South Africa, certainly not to the east. Is she talking about the Namib desert to the west? But that's beyond Botswana. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
But looking at reviews online, people seem to be reading this as more factual than it was. I can't read the TLS review as it's behind a paywall but it's headed 'Savage Scotland.'
The opening lines of the novel (written by drunken and disturbed unreliable narrator Malcolm) say My name is Malcolm MacPhee. If you are wondering why it falls to me to tell this tale, it is for no other reason than this - I am the only one left.
He must have been pretty drunk to have thought that as the 1861 census shows two sisters, a brother, two nieces and a nephew living close by.
Then by the end of the novel a drunken Malcolm muses They wish to rid Liniclate of the last of the MacPhees for I am a blight on the parish.
He's not the last of the MacPhees! There are MacPhees in Liniclate in every census up to the last published census in 1921! His brother John raised a family of nine wee MacPhees there. Malcolm himself went on to marry and raise a family there.
The quality of the writing is great; it's an engrossing novel.