The rat-eating railway of Forest Hill

Pneumatic trains were to the Victorians something like maglev trains are to us: a transport technology of the future that seemed destined to remain there. They even merited some light sarcasm from George Eliot, in the introduction to Felix Holt: The Radical:

"Posterity may be shot, like a bullet through a tube, by atmospheric pressure from Winchester to Newcastle: that is a fine result to have among our hopes; but the slow old-fashioned way of getting from one end of our country to the other is the better thing to have in the memory."

What I hadn't realised until the other day was that there was an actual pneumatic railway in London in the 1840s - and that I used to live on the route of it. According to The Phoenix Suburb: A South London Social History, by Alan R. Warwick, the London and Croydon Railway ran air-powered trains between West Croydon and Forest Hill from October 1845.

The service was smooth, and silent, and apparently capable of exceeding 60mph. It had three ornate architect-designed pumping stations: "the most beautiful things of their kind that have ever been erected in this country". It was also ahead of its time in the literal sense that, when it was built, the materials did not exist to make it work properly.

The trains drew their air power from a pipe between the tracks, connecting to it through a "longitudinal valve", which a few decades later would have been made from toughened rubber. In 1845, it was a leather flap lubricated and sealed with a mixture of wax and tallow.

This was all right except in summer, when the tallow melted and the leather became too floppy; in winter, when the tallow froze and the leather became too stiff; and in spring and autumn, when rain washed the tallow off altogether. Oh, and the tallow mixture was also delicious to rats, which would "invade the track nightly":

"When the pumps started up in the morning, rats would be sucked through the pipe into the pumping station. To combat this, the engine room men placed open sacks over the inlet, to catch the rats as they poured in."

Less than a year after the experiment began, the London and Croydon merged into another railway, and the new company turned off the pumps for good.

Spoilsports.

[The Phoenix Suburb: A South London Social History, by Alan R. Warwick, Blue Boar Press, 1976. Haven't finished it yet, but so far it is proper old-school local history, full of street names and semi-disclaimed sensational anecdotes. It's also magnificently provincial. "Whether a suburb is S.E. or S.W., or N. or E., or whatever," says the preface, "it represents a way of life." In this sentence, as best I can tell, "whatever" covers the entire world beyond the inner London postcode system.]

End-of-season's greetings

They will keep the feast in Stepney. The angel's wings are moved there; he wants to keep them, till there is another child in the house of the right size. He sees them going, shivering in their shroud of fine linen, and watches the Christmas star loaded on to a cart. Christophe asks, 'How would one work it, that savage machine that is all over points?'

He draws off one of the canvas sleeves, shows him the gilding. 'Jesus Maria,' the boy says. 'The star that guides us to Bethlehem. I thought it was an instrument of torture.'

From Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which having just finished it really does appear to be that good. Time is required, though, to certify the level of praise it has received, and time can be particularly hard on historical novels. As the main points of your new year emerge from under canvas, may they turn out to be decorations, rather than instruments of torture.

Parting shot

Stephen Glover was one of three journalists who founded the Independent, in 1986. He went on, in early 1990, to become the founding editor of the Independent on Sunday, from which post he was rapidly ousted amid cost-cutting and acrimony. This is from his description of the board meeting at which he ceased to be an executive director:

I arrived back in the boardroom and sat down. Marcus [Sieff, venerable chairman of Newspaper Publishing plc, the parent company of the two papers] had the air of a man brought in to settle a dispute which he did not really want to understand. He said that there had been a consensus that I should be asked to stay as a [non-executive] director, but there were conditions. In the first place, the arrangement would last for a year, and would be renewed only if the board and I wished it to be. I would get no emoluments (the annual fee for a non-executive director was £12,000) since I had received a year's salary on termination of my contract. So long as I remained as a non-executive director I could not write for any other newspapers, but if I wrote for the Independent or the Independent on Sunday I would not be paid. Finally, I would not be released from my undertaking not to sell any shares before March 31st 1992. That was it.

I was getting the impression that some members of the board were not deperately keen that I should become a non-executive director. Andreas [Whittam Smith, editor of the Independent and chief executive of Newspaper Publishing] was sitting to Marcus's right looking red-faced and ruminative. I imagined him at the board meeting, allowing its sillier members to build up this list of conditions, saying nothing when a word from him would have brought an end to all this foolishness.

"Well, thank you Marcus," I said. "Can I think about it for a day or two? I hadn't expected any conditions and I will need to think about them. Some of them don't matter, but I might want to write for other newspapers, and if Christopher Barton was allowed to sell his shares when he ceased being an executive director I don't see why I shouldn't be. Andreas, you said that you would recommend that I should be able to sell my shares."

"Yes," said Andreas, "but the mood of the meeting was that in the circumstances it would be better not to alter that undertaking."

"I see. Well, I would like a few days, if I may."

"Of course, take as long as you want," said Marcus generously. "I hope it will all work out."

As I walked down the stairs it occured to me that there was one condition that they had not thought of. They had not said I could not write a book.

From Paper Dreams (1993), the memoir that Glover's former colleagues failed to stop him writing. By this point in the penultimate chaper they would probably have regretted the omission. Paper Dreams is an entertaining book, vivid and witty and languidly readable, but is also an act of vengeance, chiefly against Whittam Smith, and a little too openly vengeful to be effective. The era it describes - when a newspaper could be an exciting start-up business capable of attracting £200m in City capital, and when the Independent could feel disappointed at selling a mere 300,000 - seems almost more remote than that in older Fleet Street memoirs.

The second lump of sugar

In our view, the effect of every policy must first be regarded from the standpoint of the workers of the Nation, and of the poorest and most helpless among them. The charwoman who lives in St Giles', the seamstress who is sweated in Whitechapel, the labourer who stands begging for work outside the docckyard gates in St George's-in-the-East ... The policy which annexes even an Empire, wins an immortal battle, raises this man or that to the Premiership, or sweeps the board at a general election, shall appear to us infamous, not glorious - evil, not good - a thing to weep over, not to acclaim, if it does nothing towards making the lives of these people brighter and happier. On the other hand, the policy will appear to us worthy of everlasting thanks, and of ineffaceable glory, that does no more than enable the charwoman to put two pieces of sugar in her cup instead of one, and that adds one farthing a day to the wage of the seamstress or labourer.

That is TP O'Connor, writing in the leader column of the first number of The Star, his popular London evening paper, in 1888. You can find it quoted in Matthew Engel's Tickle the Public, or wherever learned British journalists grow teary about their trade. I came across it again in The Last Chronicle of Bouverie Street, a 1963 book about the death in 1960 of the News Chronicle newspaper, and incidentally of the Star. While I knew some of the details of the Chronicle's demise - others were shocking; I may blog about them later - the Star's story came as more of a surprise.

At the time of its death, when it was rolled into the London Evening News for no more than the cost of its pension obligations and week-a-year redundancy payments to its staff, the Star had a circulation - and remember this was a London-only title - of about 700,000. In other words, it was selling 200,000 more copies daily than The London Paper now manages to give away. But in 1960, that was only enough to make it the second-best-selling evening paper in Britain. And it had been losing money consistently since 1956. The poorest and most helpless, while numerous enough to make for a substantial readership, were not a demographic attractive to advertisers.

The city and the country's biggest evening paper, it should be noted, was not the London Evening Standard, eventual sole survivor of this three-way fight, but the title into which the Star was merged, the Evening News. The Standard won out not because of sales but because it attracted the most affluent, advertising-friendly readers. In the end, raw numbers are not enough. That might be considered a parable for the age of the unique-user count.

The other thought the story brings to mind is prompted by O'Connor's leader - as a good a manifesto for intelligent populist journalism as anyone could hope for. Here's the thing. If the conventional media were swept away tomorrow, expert coverage and scandalmongering-shading-into-muckracking would probably continue without much interruption. There are bloggers and others for all of that. What it might take a while to rebuild is any organisation with a wide enough reportorial reach, and a deep enough attachment to a wide enough public, to keep an eye on that second lump of sugar.

Celery of the gods

In the middle of a Billy Bragg interview, an incident that sounds like a fully-formed Half Man Half Biscuit song:

I Keep Faith also boasts backing vocals by fellow Red Wedger Robert Wyatt, whose services he enlisted after running into him while buying rhubarb. Bragg was recording the album in Lincolnshire - "the rhubarb basket of England", he explains - and the women catering at the studio agreed to make rhubarb crumble and custard, which Bragg regards as "the pinnacle of desserts", only if he could find the fresh rhubarb. "Rhubarb," he adds as an aside, "is the celery of the gods." Off Bragg went to Louth market. "And as I was parking in the town square, who should be sitting there with his missus, on a bench smoking a cigar, but the grand old man himself, Robert Wyatt! Who I hadn't really seen since Red Wedge, and who welcomed me like a long-lost son." Bragg handed him a demo and invited him into the studio. "For a Stalinist," he smiles, "he really knows how to sing like an angel."

007, meet FAT32

"Give me a hostname and target directory, I'm in but I'm lost."

"One sec... try 'auto slash share slash fs slash scooby slash netapp slash user slash home slash malcolm slash uppercase-R slash catbert slash world-underscore-domination slash manifesto.'"

-- a spy seeks help in cracking a computer, in Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives

.

[The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross, 2003. Confident, stylish and accomplished mix of Cold War thriller, IT-desk humour and multidiminsional SF/horror. But it comes with a laudatory third-party preface, acknowledgements ahead of the text and a somewhat self-congratulatory author's afterword, a combination that in most genres - maybe this one, I don't have a strong sense of the local norms - would be counted on the smug side. Good job he's good, eh?]

Epigraph for an essay on regret

And what could be greater fun,
Once one has chosen and paid,
Than the inexpensive delight
Of a choice one might have made?

-- W.H. Auden, from A Permanent Way

The essay is, of course, unwritten. But it may be too early to regret that.

Sub-editors notice these things

Selected headlines from the Guardian's build up to the New Zealand-England Test series:

Time for Panesar to learn from Vettori

Time for Bell to turn elegant fifties into mighty tons

Time for England's batsmen to knuckle down

Time, in short, for the sort of performance that would make "Time for..." headlines redundant. Failing that, time for a new way of expressing disappointment.

Dances with vandals

Nicholoson Baker, it turns out, had an affair with Wikipedia - loving it, as you'd expect, for its dangers and eccentricities at least as much as for its merits:

This is a reference book that can suddenly go nasty on you. Who knows whether, when you look up Harvard's one-time warrior-president, James Bryant Conant, you're going to get a bland, evenhanded article about him, or whether the whole page will read (as it did for seventeen minutes on April 26, 2006): "HES A BIG STUPID HEAD." James Conant was, after all, in some important ways, a big stupid head. He was studiously anti-Semitic, a strong believer in wonder-weapons—a man who was quite as happy figuring out new ways to kill people as he was administering a great university. Without the kooks and the insulters and the spray-can taggers, Wikipedia would just be the most useful encyclopedia ever made. Instead it's a fast-paced game of paintball.

He became a passionate inclusionist, as you'd also expect, but with a profusion of detail that I, at least, couldn't make up:

I found press citations and argued for keeping the Jitterbug telephone, a large-keyed cell phone with a soft earpiece for elder callers; and Vladimir Narbut, a minor Russian Acmeist poet whose second book, Halleluia, was confiscated by the police; and Sara Mednick, a San Diego neuroscientist and author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life; and Pyro Boy, a minor celebrity who turns himself into a human firecracker on stage. I took up the cause of the Arifs, a Cyprio-Turkish crime family based in London (on LexisNexis I found that the Irish Daily Mirror called them "Britain's No. 1 Crime Family"); and Card Football, a pokerlike football simulation game; and Paul Karason, a suspender-wearing guy whose face turned blue from drinking colloidal silver; and Jim Cara, a guitar restorer and modem-using music collaborationist who badly injured his head in a ski-flying competition; and writer Owen King, son of Stephen King; and Whitley Neill Gin, flavored with South African botanicals; and Whirled News Tonight, a Chicago improv troupe; and Michelle Leonard, a European songwriter, co-writer of a recent glam hit called "Love Songs (They Kill Me)."

In lieu of a postcard

"And the city is situated on hills; you are hurrying along somewhere and all at once beneath your feet you have a deep green chasm with a fine river below; you are taking a walk and all of a sudden there is another street located on a bridge above your head, as at Genoa; you are taking a walk, and you reach a perfectly circular open space, as at Paris. The whole time there is something for you to be surprised at." - Karel Capek on the wonders of wandering around Edinburgh, in Letters from England.

[Letters from England, by Karel Capek, translated by Paul Selver, London, 1925. The Czech satirist holidays, sending home faux-naive doodles and matching comic prose. The first few chapters, in which he is beaten about the head by London, are much the best; they show a near-Swiftian skill with lists.]

Additional note, in the event of this blog having a Scottish reader: Yes, he is aware that your country is not part of England; no, I don't know why he chooses not to reflect this in his overall title. The translator sounds potentially English; why don't you blame him?

The war on cliche-cliche

Here is the opening of Christopher Ricks's essay on "Cliche" in State of the Language (1980), a fat volume with many surprising authors (Enoch Powell! Angela Carter! Randolph Quirk! Something for everyone!) that I bought purely for the pleasure of this quote:

The only way to speak of a cliche is with a cliche. So even the best writers against cliches are awkwardly placed. When Eric Partridge amassed his Dictionary of Cliches in 1940 (1978 saw its fifth edition), his introduction had no choice but to use the usual cliches for cliches. Yet what, as a metaphor, could be more hackneyed than hackneyed, more outworn than outworn, more tattered than tattered? Is there any point left to - or in or on - saying of a cliche that its "original point has been blunted"? Hasn't this too become blunted? A cliche is "a phrase 'on tap' as it were" - but, as it is, is Partridge's "as it were" anything more than a cool pretence that when, for his purposes, he uses the cliche on tap it's oh so different from the usual bad habit of having those two words on tap? His indictment of "fly-blown phrases" has no buzz of insect wings, no weight of carrion.

Even George Orwell (whom William Empson, with an audacious compacting of cliches, called the eagle eye with the flat feet) - even Orwell had to use the cliche-cliches (hackneyed, outworn), and could say, "There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could be similarly got rid of if people would interest themselves in the job," without apparently being interested himself in whether fly-blown wasn't itself one of those metaphors which could be got rid of.

Ricks goes on to argue that writers can make intelligent, meaning-reviving use of cliche, quoting examples from Geoffrey Hill and, inevitably, Bob Dylan. "Cliches invite you not to think - but you may always decline the invitation, and what could better invite a thinking man to think?" I can't think of a better invitation, if you regularly wax sarcastic about writing, to think harder about the terms you use to do it.

[State of the Language, edited by Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, California, 1980. You want this one, not the disappointing Faber-published sequel dated 1990. I bought my copy from the revived Skoob, now buried under the Brunswick Centre. Presumably a more prominent space would detract from the parade of expensive chain stores that make good, in a bad way, on the centre's claim to be "a high street for Bloomsbury". No matter: the basement shop has a decent amount of space, the lighting's good enough that you don't much miss the windows, the range of books is as wonderful as ever and there's now an official Skoob Glob. And they have a second copy of State of the Language (1980), if you're interested...]

Annals of accurate praise

"Nuttall as a writer appears as a gentle, donnish figure, prepared to quote a good student essay in support of a case; constantly, in a Platonic way, citing past and present agreements with friends and colleagues. He reacts also, in a way that is sometimes baffling or opaque, to his own earlier writings and earlier opinions. He inhabits a world of sweet reason, and is good company. He can hear, and make you hear, the mystery of Bertram, in All's Well, fearing 'the dark house, and the detested wife'." - A.S. Byatt, towards the end of a rather prickly review of Shakespeare the Thinker,
captures something of the pleasure of reading Tony Nuttall, and of being taught by him. (For an excellent appreciation on the second point, visit a friend of mine here.

Modernists upmashed

Language Hat has come up with a splendid trick. All together now: "For a long time stately, plump Buck Mulligan used to go to bed early..."

The cycle of life

"In the beginning was the review copy, and a man received it from the publisher. Then he wrote a review. Then he wrote a book which the publisher accepted and sent on to someone else as a review copy. The man who received it did likewise. This is how modern literature came into being." - Karl Kraus, as translated by Harry Zohn in Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths.

One of the revolutionary things about the internet, of course, is that it allows you to write the review without first receiving the review copy. We must wait to see the consequences for the rest of the cycle.

Chemistry

A nicely pitched moment of joy among the horrors of Nicola Monaghan's tale of drugs and suffocated lives on a Nottingham estate, The Killing Jar, made better by a bathetic conclusion:

The sun rose, casting more blood and pus into the mucky air up around the clouds. I grinned my head off. It were beautiful, I knew that. I was at least using the word proper then. Jon was gorgeous, lit by the yellows and reds and what was left of the moon. We laid there, and birds started to sing, and we could see the grass was green again, and that our jeans were blue, not black. I hadn't noticed before that instant that everything was black and grey and mud brown at night, even once your eyes got used to the dark and you could see.

'Happiness is cheap in the East Midlands, Kez, me duck,' said Jon. I looked up and saw the sun, a broken yolk in the egg-white sky. He was right. Two quid wholesale, them pills'd cost us, and here we were laying on the grass and in love with the light.

I was eighteen years old and I was invincible. That morning everything was amazing. The light, my brother, everything. Ecstasy does exactly what it says on the packet.

[The Killing Jar, by Nicola Monaghan, 2006. The education of a heroin addict's daughter, with enough shocks to fill two misery memoirs and make a talkshow from the leftovers; drug-dealing in the playground aged ten is towards the nicer end of the spectrum. It is lifted from mundane sensationalism by the precision with which it recreates its setting (Broxtowe estate, 1980s and early 90s, with outings to Skegness and the clubs of Hockley) and the voice of its narrator. Kerrie-Ann Hill speaks in a Nottingham dialect that has the music right as well as the words, presents her experiences coolly, as nothing that out of the ordinary, and goes nowhere near self-pity; characters who look on her as a victim, manipulated or available for manipulation, have a low survival rate. Clever observational writing shores up the impression of her as someone sharp enough to survive in dangerous circumstances, and buys credibility for more flowery passages like the one quoted.]

Comedy of despair

You drag yourself out of the desert desperate for water, and the barman is busy. But this is not a romantic world. There's not enough Santa Claus to go round. Everyone treats each other with disdain. No one is indispensable. There are mothers of twins who have trouble getting the buggy in and out of shops. Who cares for these? There are people, our contemporaries, lost in libraries through the malice of evil librarians. Who loves these? We are all labouring under a lack of love, a bad situation for human beings. This situation is even bad for CATS.

The biggest threats to life now are leaky radiators, superglue and pre-cooked chicken. When people were dying all over the place (Schubert died just three months after declaring himself healthy), they lived with gusto. They did not waste a brushstroke because they feared death. But now people only die from their own or their doctor's negligence. Convinced of immortality, we're troubled by boredom, an inordinate sense of history and our own fecundity.

Animals have a much harder time of it. The world doesn't owe them a living. But at least they haven't forgotten what it's all about: you, the earth, the sky. Even trees know this.

- Lucy Ellmann, Varying Degrees of Hopelessness

[Varying Degrees of Hopelessness, by Lucy Ellmann, 1991. Love (and the lack of) and sex (and the lack of) at a funhouse-mirror version of the Courtauld Institute in the late 1980s. Talked of as a precursor to the chick-lit boom. Which, in the comic examination of single twenty-and-thirtysomething female lives, it probably is. But it's a hell of a lot odder than that: the anti-naturalism and the brevity, the madly individualistic style, the intensity that is sometimes a deadpan joke and sometimes not, the worrying at the facts of sickness and death - these could be descended from early Beckett. Which is not to accuse Lucy Ellmann of ever writing like anyone else.]

Rules? What rules?

If you have a goodish memory and you are planning to read China Mieville's Un Lun Dun, you may wish to skip this post. The bit I want to quote is from near the end and the book is extremely plotty. I have redacted some especially spoilerish sentences in the middle of the quote, even at the cost of rather spoiling its effect, but you should consider yourself warned.

The reason I so want to quote it is that it takes aim at a piety of children's fantasy that used to annoy the hell out of me back when I was in the target age-group: the touching final scene where the hero or heroine is informed that, because they have successfully completed their heavily symbolic rite of passage, they must leave the world of the imagination behind, with the compensatory promise of returning to it after death (if this is a Christian-apologetic fantasy) or having lots of sex (if it's a hippy-liberal one).

Mieville's heroine, perhaps because she is small and dark and round-faced and would have been a comic sidekick if destiny had had its way, has an answer:

'The stuff that happened here,' Deeba said, 'I'll never forget. What we did. I'll never forget you. Any of you.' She paused, looked at each of them in turn.

'And part of the reason I won't forget you,' she said, 'is cos I'll be back all the time.'

***

Mortar and the Propheseers - the Suggesters - looked up, startled.

'Come on,' she said, smiling. 'What are you even talking about, Mortar? It's easy to get from London to here [...] People are always going between, and you don't see either universe collapsing, do you?

'You just think it's hard to go between the two cos you've always thought it must be. You're just saying that cos you sort of think you should.'

Deeba's friends stared at her and at each other. 'She has a point,' Mortar said eventually.

[Un Lun Dun, by China Mieville, 2007. Systematic dismantling of the cliches of the children's quest novel, funny but with serious intent, characterisation and narrative drive, set in an alternate London that entails particular thanks to Neil Gaiman in the acknowledgments. It compelled me to read it in a sitting, which is not considerate behaviour in a 500-page book, even one with relatively large print, but is impressive. Author's own illustrations.]

Lanchester on copyright

John Lanchester's long article on copyright for this Saturday's Guardian Review was based on a commendably clear and simple principle: that the purpose of the copyright system is to ensure John Lanchester a living. To that end, besides a slinky version of the usual attack on Disney and some personal remarks about the difficulties created by the need for clearance on obscure works, he has two suggestions:

One is that the period of copyright control does not need to be the same as the period during which an artist can earn royalties. I worked for a short while at Penguin in the early 1990s, during which Joyce and Woolf both briefly came out of copyright (on January 1 1992) and sales in their work zoomed upwards, as publishers came out with competing editions - in the case of the one book for which Penguin already had a licence, Ulysses, sales went up (and there were five other editions on the market). As a result of having seen that at first hand, I think that, 50 years after an author's death, anyone should be able to publish a book or record a piece of music or put on a play, as long as they pay a royalty. This would increase general levels of cultural creativity and still allow revenue, but not control, to artists' descendants. We could even have some fun with Mickey Mouse...

The other suggestion is that artists should be guaranteed, by law, a percentage of the revenue from the sale of their work. At the moment, the big retailers squeeze the publishers, who in turn squeeze the talent, so that it is common for as little as 5% of the purchase price of a book, say - though it's not just books - to reach the writer. That's 95% of the money going to someone other than the creator: does that seem right? My experience of asking people about this suggests, very unscientifically, that most people aren't aware that three-for-twos and dramatically reduced prices mean that the writer is earning a smaller royalty per copy.

The suggestions cut against the prevailing legal tendency to make intellectual property behave more like other sorts of property - cutting against that is fine by me - but they also cut against each other. What percentage of the royalties from Family Romance would go, by law, to the author of the anonymous poem that can be quoted only in its English edition?

The risk of reproducing potentially copyright material, as I (poorly) understand it, isn't just that the author's grandchild can decide to have your book pulped; it's that they can present you with a bill of unpredictable and possibly profit-destroying size. To make the first suggestion work in a way that made use of orphan works easier, you'd have to set some kind of standard rate, and then set up an agency to distribute the cash, adjudicate on claims, and - if you believe that the owners of un-orphaned works should be able to demand more than agency rate - decide who's an orphan and who isn't.

Then once someone's successfully claimed the cash for an orphan work, it has presumably ceased to be an orphan. Can they negotiate a higher fee for the next edition? Or stop it coming out at all?

I'd like these kinds of tweaks to work - at the least the first one, if it worked, might have a relatively high chance of happening. But copyright is almost certainly more broken than that.

Skyline questions

Those who complain that the scale of the Westminster skyline has been outraged by the high-rise interlopers ignore the fact that cold measurements or even hotly angry ones are not everything - not necessarily anything much. What could dwarf that marvellous monster the Victoria tower, but something of its own kind?

When Barry reared his Neo-Gothic palace against the Abbey, the traditional ruler of the Westminster skies for so many centuries, that was true audacity. Both survive as mighty presences, the real abbey and that newer Nightmare Abbey of genius, ruling the scene unmoved by the lofty impotent giants surrounding it. Nothing much counts for much, or intrudes much. The Festival Hall complex, so alluring by night, fades by day into a range of concrete barns: almost a modern agricultural aspect, a Harvest Festival Hall. Next to it the vast inert face of the Shell building expresses total absence. But Wren's surviving churches, however small, refuse to be extinguished. They ignore monsters; they spike the scene like exlamation marks, commanding attention. And wherever you happen to be sailing or driving or walking, whether you are as near as Southwark or as far as Greenwich, St Paul's pops up all over the skyline like a floating bubble nobody can burst. If it had been anchored in a vista, as its creator intended, that dome would never have had the same capricious and buoyant appeal.

- Norman Shrapnel, A View of the Thames

This is 1977, and Norman Shrapnel assumes his readers will be "on the side of sensible planning", "the most careful and tenacious of co-ordinated schemes". The world that he is gently writing against was already disappearing, but he isn't to know that.

In 2007, those bubblings-up of St Paul's are "protected vistas" - we need planning to protect the appearance of serendipity. I'm not sure what the moral is, except that conventional wisdom is more fluid than it can sometimes seem. We go on making mistakes, but not always the same ones.

[A view of the Thames, by Norman Shrapnel, London, 1977. Late-career ruminations by a former parliamentary sketchwriter of the Guardian, in a lovely version of the paper's old C.E Montague-derived heightened colloquial style. Less deep-thinking than the creaminess of the prose would suggest, but it gives a nice picture of the docklands between death and redevelopment, and an engaging selection of the river's urban myths. The picture, incidentally, is the City seen from the ramp down to the debating chamber in City Hall; the pre-20th-century element seems pretty effectively expunged from that particular vista.]

Reading, cooking, thinking, cooking

What remains, for a couple of days, the current New Yorker contains a characteristically elegant thing by Adam Gopnik on recipes in novels. It has some lovely solipsistic digressions:

A devotion to shell beans, I have noticed, divides even amateur cooks from non-cooks more absolutely than any other food, and they are, into the bargain, a perfect model of writing. Like sentences, shell beans are a great deal more trouble to produce than anyone who isn’t producing them knows.

But its central argument seems to me flawed. Gopnik's case is that many modern novels have their characters cook at length "to represent the background of thought", in the way that (his examples) walking is used in many Victorian novels, or driving in John Updike. He thinks this is a swizz, because...

...the act of cooking is an escape from consciousness - the nearest thing that the non-spiritual modern man and woman have to Zen meditation; its effect is to reduce us to a state of absolute awareness, where we are here now of necessity. You can’t cook with the news on and still listen to it, any more than you can write with the news on and still listen to it. You can cook with music, or talk radio, on, and drift in and out. What you can’t do is think and cook, because cooking takes the place of thought.

He demonstrates by cooking recipes from several contemporary novels, reserving his politest and deadliest scorn for Henry Perowne "idly" cooking a fish stew in Ian McEwan's Saturday: "You can’t idly make a bouillabaisse while you brood on modern life any more than you can idly make a cassoulet; these are nerve-wracking concoctions."

Probably true. But it's not true, in this bad cook's view, that all cookery demands a disengagement from thought; and even if it was, cooking from fictional recipes would be a particularly faulty way to show it. Ruminating characters tend to be making something they cook routinely, for themselves or a forgiving family audience; Adam Gopnik is trying out new recipes for the benefit, going by one aside, of a "gang".

I can't cook something that I have to think about and think about something else - an audience and a recipe are the two things most likely to push a dish into this category - but if I'm cooking one of the half-dozen things I can do by heart, for myself or for friends with time on their hands, and I'm not at one of a few critical moments, then the process can open up some marvellous space for thought. The best description of the condition is by Primo Levi, in The Periodic Table, when he explains why he finds the process of distillation beautiful:

First of all, because it is a slow, philosophic, and silent occupation, which keeps you busy but gives you time to think of other things, somewhat like riding a bike.

He is engaged, you'll notice, in what amounts to a particularly precise and formalised version of cooking. And he's right about cycling, too.