Paul Magrs's Blog, page 13

Autumn Reading 2019

Autumn reading 2019
Rachel, the Rabbi’s Wife by Silvia TennenbaumI picked this up years ago at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, on their cheap paperback rack outside. It was exactly what I imagined: a 1970s New York novel, about a dissatisfied Rabbi’s wife who longs for the city, a lover and to find her way as a sculptor. It’s racey and gossipy, and it read a bit like a female response to Philip Roth’s novels. Very easy to picture Bette Midler in a movie version, back in the day.
Spinning Tales by Brey WillowsA happy conversation with the author at the Bold Strokes tent during Manchester Pride this year led me to spending several days with this lovely other-world fantasy novel. The thing I love about urban fantasy is seeing the characters go through those thresholds between worlds, and the juxtaposition between modern day New York, for example, and the fairy tale worlds hidden away beyond the cottage at the top of the tower block in this novel. There are some lovely characters in this – some with a nice line in caustic humour.
My American by Stella GibbonsA reread of a favourite – a lesser known novel by the author ‘Cold Comfort Farm.’ This is about converging destinies – the poor orphan girl who grows up to write adventure stories for Boys’ comics who eventually runs into the young American boy who stole her heart when she was a kid. This is a wonderfully romantic novel, but like all of Gibbons’ work, it’s never sentimental. She takes us right to the heart of really good characters and makes them suffer quite a bit before the end. There’s some hair-raising gangster stuff in this one, too!
Coronation Street at War by Daran LittleBetween HV Kershaw’s classic 1960s novelisations and the current run of wartime sagas by Maggie Sullivan, there was a trilogy of Corrie novels published by Granada in the late 90s. This glimpse of the start of WW2 comes through the jaundiced eyes of battleaxe Ena Sharples, who watches all the inhabitants of the Street like a hawk. Elsie Tanner arrives and causes a ruckus amongst the men; there are air raids, punch ups and even poisonings. There’s an outrageously funny sub-plot about home-brewed beer. It’s a brilliantly sustained and entertaining pastiche: it feels like Tony Warren himself might have written it.
Ladybird 561 Series: Adventures in History by L. Du Garde PeachA chance encounter with Richard the Lion Heart on the bookcase in my mother in law’s spare room reminded me of this fantastic series from the 1950s-70s. These are wittier and more complex than anyone remembers. In just fifty pages – half of them beautifully painted by John Kenney – we are told incredible tales about the men and women who changed history and travelled immense distances across the globe, discovering new bits of it as they explored and conquered and mapped and traded. (Those blue-inked maps in the end papers are so evocative of rainy afternoons in long ago school rooms!) I spent happy hours again with Joan of Arc, Guy Fawkes, Napoleon, Marco Polo and the others – and discovered crucial moments in history I’d either clean forgot about, or never knew.
The Chocolate Lovers’ Club by Carole MatthewsAlways reliably funny and romantic – it’s like revisiting a little corner of the bookish world that’s always Carole’s. Her characters are people I feel like I know and I’ve met before. This is an ensemble piece, with four very different women struggling with their own problems and bonding together to help each other out – sometimes via the most elaborate and complicated schemes. There’s some pretty racey stuff in this one. The scene with the yoghurt and the granola, and the heroine finding her boyfriend serving breakfast in a most unexpected way is the absolute highlight of a very funny book.
The Ruby Slippers by Keir AlexanderAn old guy who runs a deli has a life that intertwines with a whole other bunch of New Yorkers, most notably his aunt, who has let herself go terribly. She is like a tramp, shambling through New York and getting herself run over during the St Patrick’s Day Parade. In her cluttered flat our heroes find a box containing the very shoes that Judy Garland wore in ‘The Wizard of Oz’, and these priceless symbols of hope and beauty propel all the characters into action as they race to take possession of them. It’s a beautiful book, I think. One that’s been waiting on my To Be Read Mountain for a few years. It’s the kind of book I want to buy as a present for my reader friends – the particular ones I know who will just get it, and get the fact that it’s a book about kindness, in the end.
Stuart Little by E B WhiteI love his other books so much, and I was put off by a movie that made me think this would be the story of a wise-cracking cartoon mouse. Oh, but it’s beautiful. And oddly shaped. But wonderful. And it veers around like a broken toy car… but it makes me want to read and reread it. What is it about White’s writing that does that to me? Everything seems to be throwaway, and almost fey. But I feel like he’s telling me something huge, whenever he’s drawing my attention. One for the reread pile, I think. Again, a book about people being just kind, and doing their best.
The Magic Faraway Tree: Adventure of the Goblin Dog by Enid BlytonHodder are doing a lovely job of repackaging Blyton’s fantasy stories – most notably her seasonal tales, grouped in volumes wonderfully illustrated by Mark Beech, who gives her a kind of Quentin Blake-ish spontaneity. This book is a tale of the Faraway Tree that never fitted with the original set, but has here been shoehorned in, and very welcome it is, too. It’s one of Enid’s hasty, ramshackle fantasies that roves breathlessly from set piece to set piece, never quite pausing long enough to figure out anything as dull as plot logic. There are some lovely moments here – my favourite being the cuckoo who lets them into his house inside the clock, and who has to pop out every hour to do his slightly irksome job. I love Blyton’s fantasy stories, and wish that Hodder would commission a series of Faraway Tree sequels by a modern author, just as they have done with the Secret Seven and Malory Towers. (Who might they choose, I wonder..?!)
The Queen of Wishful Thinking by Milly JohnsonRambunctious, chaotic Romantic Comedy – and it’s sheer pleasure to return to Milly’s world. We’re in North Yorkshire, where everyone seems to be trading in vintage goods and antiques, and where good and bad are clearly demarcated: villainous characters are quite easy to spot in their flashy clothes and spotless cars, swinging albino crocodile handbags. At the same time we get wonderful heroes who we love at first sight – slightly down-trodden, well-meaning, virtuous souls who can’t help falling in love with each other. There are some terrific fights in this novel, too. I do like a novelist who can bring me a lovely slanging match.
Me by Elton JohnThis is gossipy and camp and ridiculous. I never expected it to be as funny and as well-written, or for the ghost writer to really capture the flavour and manner of Elton John’s speech. We’ve all heard him interviewed and know how he sounds – and this book really is like being sat with him in some sumptuous kind of living room, decorated with all kind of gaudy tat… as he launches into telling you the most wonderful, spicy stories about some of the most famous people in the world. I adored this so much I ended up reading aloud some of the funniest bits to Jeremy. I love the fact that he clearly doesn’t give a hoot about making himself look a twat. He’s the least pretentious and – in a lovely, funny way – the most punky of all the rock stars we’ve ever had. And I howled when I heard he’d told Tina Turner to stick ‘Proud Mary’ up her arse.

'Star Tales' and 'The Annual Years'

Author copies in today's post!
'Star Tales' is BBC Books' latest anthology of 13th Doctor stories - in which six authors present unseen adventures the Doctor has shared with 'historical celebrities'. Mine is all about Elvis and features appearances by three previous Doctors as well as the 13th!
'The Annual Years' is a second, augmented edition of my book looking at the history of the Dr Who Annual 1964-1984... and delving deeply into the weird sidestep universe created by the wonderful stories that its Manchester-based artists and writers dreamed up during those long-ago years... (It's available from www.obversebooks.co.uk)

My Ladybird Story

My Ladybird Story
When we were staying at my mother in law’s last month I picked up one of the books from the small bookcase in the guest room. Those books have been there for the twenty years I’ve been visiting. They’re a random selection, and from them I plucked a Ladybird Book. ‘Richard the Lion Heart’, part of their ‘Adventures from History’ series, written in 1965 by L. Du Garde Peach and illustrated by John Kenney.            Just the weight of the book in my hands, and the feel of that matte hardback cover was enough to instantly transport me back to childhood. The smell of the pages, the maps in the endpapers, the brightly coloured illustrations... I started reading and I sat still until I’d finished.            The chair at the end of the bed was a goldish green Lloyd Loom chair. Creaking wickerwork, perfectly built for a reading chair. I was away with the fairies… or rather, the knights and the Saracens and the kings of Europe. I was transported…            And, as I read about Richard’s travels to the Holy Land and then his fugitive life eluding capture, in disguise, across mainland Europe, I remembered that, when I was a kid of about five, I’d had my own Lloyd Loom reading chair, just like this one, placed in relation to a bookcase, just the same as this. And, in one of those dizzying rabbit holes of memory, I realised I’d once sat there reading about Richard the Lion Heart.             The chair and the bookcase had arrived together – from an aunty, I think, on my dad’s side. He had sanded down the bookcase and then he’d painted both chair and bookcase glossy white. They were standing on the bare boards of my bedroom, drying in the sun. My books – mostly Ladybirds and Noddy books – were waiting in piles to go into their new home. Stern warning from Alfie: ‘You have to wait till the paint is completely dried out before you can put the books on the shelves, otherwise you’ll damage the books and the paintwork.’            He left me to watch the paint dry. I read about Richard the Lion Heart, and the Gingerbread Boy and Beauty and the Beast. The paint – was it drying yet? I looked at my books, wondering whether I would put them in series order or random order, or organise them by the colours of their spines? Or maybe put them on the shelves in the order that I’d read them, and keep a special shelf for the books I was yet to read?             These plans were so exciting I couldn’t help getting ahead of myself and testing out the dryness of the paint with my fingertips. Maybe still a bit tacky? But I was longing to put my books in my own bookcase. My very first bookcase of my own. The top shelf had two sliding windows, have I said? And that meant the books on that shelf had to be special ones. Kept behind glass: that was pride of place. I decided that the ‘Well-Loved Tales’ would go on that shelf. My fairy tales. The Enormous Turnip, Chicken Licken, The Giant Pancake. My favourites would have to go there. If only the paint would dry faster, and I could put them all in and line them up… I could already picture how marvellous they would look in there, behind sliding glass panels…            *
I’d had my collection for as long as I could remember. My very first books had been these fairy tales. Possibly the Gingerbread Boy was the first. ‘Run run! As fast as you can…!’ And how, at the end, he was snapped up and gobbled up by the fox… no matter how many times you read the story, the tragic outcome was always the same. Oh, but the race to get there! The excitement of the chase! The very idea of being the Gingerbread Boy, running free from everyone and not giving a hoot!            In those days Dad was away doing police training, and it was just Mam and me at home. We lived in a small, boxed-shaped house on a brand new estate in Peterlee. It was a state-of-the-art New Town in County Durham: hilly and green, with trees and lakes and little box houses set out neatly on the hillsides. The town was a hymn to futuristic modernity and everything was poured concrete and smooth ramps and plate glass.             There was a little shop quite close to our house when I was about two years old. I’d go with Mam each day to fetch our groceries. She couldn’t afford it, but every time she took me to the shop she would buy me another of the Ladybird Books. With it being just the two of us, we had long hours to fill and she read to me every day and night. We went through Goldilocks and Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Rose Red… until every single illustration was imprinted on my mind forever. Every single expression on those faces. Every anguished look, every beaming grin. Princesses and curious animals and foodstuffs like porridge and pancakes and turnips that grew to incredible proportions – that’s what the world was all about, and these were the people in it. Also, very silly hens. And very wicked wolves.             I could read by the time I was three years old, and that was the result of Ladybird Books. Simple as that. When I started going to school at five they gently introduced everyone to the famous learning-to-read books about Peter and Jane, each volume getting a little bit more advanced, adding extra elements of vocabulary. But, thanks to Mam and the hours we’d spent with all those fairy tales, I was skipping well ahead of poor old dull Peter and Jane and their soppy suburban lives.             That’s how and why I was reading about Richard the Lion Heart in my Lloyd Loom chair at five years old, waiting for my new bookcase to be ready.             I don’t think I waited for it to be quite dry. I got carried away, putting all my books into their new home, keen to admire them. I think there was bother, later, when it turned out I’d made a mess of the new paintwork. Never mind. I’d had the most wonderful afternoon. My head was swimming with paint fumes and that particular excitement and giddiness that comes from absorbing age-old stories that are fresh to you.            Then, forty-five years later, sitting in another wickerwork chair, reading the same book… I was still utterly delighted by the details picked out by L. Du Garde Peach: Richard lying in a litter carried by his men, approaching Jerusalem. Bloody combat raging all around them… and here comes a messenger from his deadly enemy, Saladin… bringing a platter of fresh fruit, because he has heard that Richard is under the weather.How could I have failed to fall in love with stories like this?            Reading it again, all this time later, I love the way the author unfolds the legend and explains so clearly to us: some of these are details from the historical record, others are mythology that has sprung up over time. Other details come from historical novels, like those by Walter Scott. He sets out which bits are more reliable than others, but gives us all the delightful nuggets of story anyway. As he unfurls his tale, the writer is teaching us how history is recorded and compounded from various claims and accounts. As an adult reader, this delights me.            And starts me off, having a little look at Ebay. Finding out just how many ‘Adventures from History’ there were, published between the 1950s and 1970s. Setting me off building up a little collection… all over again. Parcels arrive in the following weeks. I’m being reunited with old friends, and I’m learning new things every day. I follow the routes marked out across the globe by Alexander the Great and Marco Polo. I marvel at the fact I hadn’t even realised that Ladybird carried on publishing ‘Well-Loved Tales’ after I’d grown and graduated to books for older kids. I look at the lists and feel almost betrayed and left out… and yet, I was the one who stopped collecting, wasn’t I? I was the one who gave my collection away, all that time ago…            But I was luckier than most. My sister is seventeen years younger than me and so, in the 1990s, when I was in my early twenties, I’d get to visit home and read to her at bedtime. She had her own collection of Ladybirds, which we all bought for her and read to her. Those 1990s ones were more lurid than those I remembered – there were lots of Disneys and cartoony tales. Though, at the same time, she still had the old, old ones that I’d grown up with. She still knew about giant pancakes and the three Billy Goats Gruff… and, of course, she knew all about the Gingerbread Boy.

Twenty Years since The Blue Angel!

Twenty years exactly since The Blue Angel was published. Probably the most wild and experimental I ever got away with being within Dr Who fiction. It was a joy to write, with scenes happening in all kinds of different dimensions - and Darlington. Cameo appearances, seances, spaceships, shopping centres, meditations on story telling, questionnaires and Iris Wildthyme at her most maddening. I remember it coming out and getting an immediate reaction - joyful from some, puzzled fury from others who expected every book to be straightforward. Happy times..!

Terrance Dicks

Terrance Dicks was always there.
He was a whole half of the D-section in Newton Aycliffe library, that boxlike plywood prefab construction at one end of our concrete town centre. Those WH Allen hardbacks with white spines were the stuff of dreams and feverish late night re-readings by torchlight. For me, Terrance Dicks’ books are more 70s Who than the TV episodes are. They hold up better in retrospect, I think. It’s a whole, perfect era of Who which begins, for my money, with that splendid ‘Auton Invasion’, which somehow manages to impart the true terror of the Autons and the panic they would cause. And it makes the Doctor new to us, too: this brand new Doctor, irascibly uncomfortable in his new home on Earth.
Dicks writes so well about the Third Doctor being stuck on Earth. We really believe in his fury when, years later, in ‘The Eight Doctors’ the Eighth Doctor pays an unexpected visit and almost gets clouted unconscious and his TARDIS nicked by the velvet-clad fop.
If we follow Dicks’ Target Doctor Who story it’s one of being trapped on Earth, building a haphazard family, having adventures in pre-punk England… and finally earning freedom again (by engaging in ‘the most extraordinary adventure in his very long life’)… but as he gains his freedom, he loses that family of his, bit by bit… and eventually his own self – in the cobwebby catacombs of Metebelis Three. It’s a story of having to turn into someone even more cantankerous and wayward… and shooting off into space again… into ramshackle voyages into space and time… gradually severing the ties with Earth – losing Jo, Mike, Harry, then Sarah, Benton and the Brig… becoming a lonely wanderer whose adventures happen on a cosmic scale. And, though he did novelise later tales – I think that’s the furthest end of the Dicks era. The end of the Seventies, with the Doctor in a new, hip, space-family of intellectuals – a clever dog, a clever lady companion. They trip about the cosmos, wryly amused by it all. Where once the Doctor and his UNIT chums got stuck into adventures… now the Doctor, Romana and K9 slide effortlessly through life on charm.
I think his books, put together, form a lovely complete story about the Doctor’s life – lucidly told and highly influential to readers such as myself. A story about a Doctor who begins as a cross, mysterious stranger – and ends up, still a stranger, but one who’s learned to take life less seriously. Who can’t see the benefit of getting all hot and bothered. Who would rather laugh his enemy into oblivion than blow him into smithereens.
I read these books again and again. But I would read other things as well. I branched out at first by reading other books by Terrance Dicks. And here I must put in a word for those two other series he wrote for WH Allen and Target. I’ve collected them up again in recent years and reread them with great enjoyment.
There’s his ‘Star Quest’ series, about three young humans taken off into space to become affiliates of a great galactic Federation at war with an evil empire. And, even less well known, there is his glorious series of five books about five kids involved with fighting monsters. In this series, he runs through new, late 70s iterations of the Universal movie monsters. It’s a fantastic YA series and surely needs reprinting. My favourite is the riff on Frankenstein, ‘Marvin’s Monster.’ It contains a scene that must be one of my favourites he ever wrote: an update of the monster meeting the blind man from the old movie. In Terrance Dicks’ version the school project monster rampages through the streets of the shabby little town, and wanders into an Asian grocery where he meets the elderly blind man sitting at the counter, who helps him patch up his wounds with corner shop first aid supplies.
It’s a scene of great compassion and all to do with humanizing monsters. Something which all of Dicks’ books try to do, I think.

Stop the Coup!

STOP THE COUP!!
We were at the amazing rally in the middle of Manchester today. I was drawing in Albert Square... and the next thing I knew... there was Jeremy, up on the platform, spontaneously, in the middle of thousands... with a megaphone, giving a speech about inclusion, fairness, respect and democracy... and the crowd were going wild. It was hilarious - and I was so proud.

Manchester Pride 2019

I didn't do so much drawing at Manchester Pride this year, but I like the few pictures I did.

Summer Reading 2019

Summer Reading 2019
It’s not quite over yet… but my summer reading has looked like this:

DAZZLE.My first Judith Krantz. Coincidentally on the weekend that she died. I’d dipped into these glitzy melodramas as a kid and this June thoroughly enjoyed a nostalgic return to the overblown 1980s. Rich people shagging and fretting and taking a long time about it. The whole book is puffed out and backcombed like the biggest hair in the world and frozen in time with noxious hairspray.

THE HOUSE ACROSS THE STREETLesley Pearse’s 1950’s-set domestic thriller, with a nice mystery chucked in. Arson, attempted murder, crazy mothers, wrongly-accused fathers, evil wife beaters and a plucky heroine in peril. I really like these small scale period Gothics.

OZI read the first four Oz books by L Frank Baum. The first had more detail, texture and fun than I remembered. The second had less story than I remembered, but it had the best characters. (But why do they dismantle the Gump? He’s my favourite. Much of Oz is about lifeless objects and inert substances being granted life. The flying Gump with his moose’s head, plump cushions and palm leaf wings is the most wonderfully exotic of all the Oz characters and yet he doesn’t get to stay as an integral being. He’s lovably dour and I wish he played a bigger part.)
The third book was the one where I stopped as a kid because in the 1980s its cover was too girly to be seen with in a town like ours. It turns out to be one of the best, though. The whole Nome King plot to do with friends disguised as ornaments is terrific and satisfying. Book four is set underground with people made out of vegetables, and it even feels damp and squelchy compared with the others. I seem to prefer the glum and grouchy characters in Oz – that talking chicken is a hoot.
I bought a beautiful lilac and green boxed set of fifteen Oz’s and I’ll return to them gladly.


GEF!Christopher Joiffe’s book is meticulous as non-fic sagas about ghostly mongooses get. I felt a bit hampered by the wealth of detail, though, and missed the sheer creepiness I always got reading the very brief account of the Isle of Man’s most famous phantom in the Usborne Book of Ghosts circa 1978. This volume is still invaluable, though.



A BOY’S OWN STORYA reread of Edmund White’s classic, after twenty-nine years. It was even better than I remembered. What a callous character! What delicious descriptions of sleazy, subaqueous bars on snowy city days. And how accurate he is about all the dodgy alliances and dalliances made during adolesence.


THE TEASHOP GIRLSElaine Everest’s first book in a wartime Saga set on the south coast. Three entwined lives; shameful secrets, spies in guesthouses, bombs dropping, romantic interludes, Dunkirk spirit and dainty teas. Lovely.


THE LIBRARY CATAlex Howard’s book, which I picked up last year at the Edinburgh Book Festival, and it waited on our mantelpiece a full year before finding its moment. A literary joke and a philosophical game – all set within the very familiar streets of Edinburgh. I loved spending time with his chatty, erudite and complex moggy.

THE HOLIDAYTM Logan’s very slick commercial thriller. Three achingly middle class families share a dream villa in the south of France. Everyone has secrets itching to be out and quandaries rubbing at their peeling skin. It’s all about the clues that we nowadays carry about on our phones and in our devices. Wounding revelations are just a touch away. These machines hold the keys to our unconscious desires and they’re great fodder for a summertime thriller.


THE TRUTHS AND TRIUMPHS OF GRACE ATHERTONAnstey Harris’s novel feels overblown and silly at the start. I felt like I was going to struggle to care for a neurotic cello-restorer, her snarky assistant and the awful Frenchman she’s carrying on with. They were bloody irritating for a while but then something clicked and I enjoyed it for what it is: a continental romance with a bit of interesting stuff about music. It’s slightly pretentious in places, but it has a likable warmth to it, and the characters are memorable by the end.


THE GIRL AT THE WINDOWA very bookish Gothic tale from Rowan Coleman. If the idea of a lost Bronte novel gets you excited, and if a paper trail of letters hidden in the fabric of a house on the moors is the kind of thing you love (it is) – then this doesn’t disappoint. It’s a quick and exciting read, for all the themes and material it deals with. There’s a lot of fraught back-story here: the widowed heroine and the troubled son, the father lost in the Amazon, the crazy billionaire bibliophile in his glass castle, the grumpy granny, the ghostly Brontes themselves – as well as a seventeenth century servant girl and her battered phantom baby! This is a great palimpsest of women’s stories and the layers are deftly assembled and revealed. The pace is terrific and the atmosphere is as darkly brooding as it ought to be. She writes very well about light, I think.

LILYRR Walters’ 1980s horror about a femme fatale who sweeps into a trendy apartment block in Florida, and causes a ruckus wherever she goes. Lily is a sculptor who creates bizarre statues, becomes everyone’s erotic fantasy, eats the life force of every baby in the vicinity, and transforms herself into hellish creatures every time there’s a tropical storm. Naturally she’s a demon from antiquity that only a perplexed young librarian can defeat in mortal combat.


PERFECT FREEDOMAnother vintage paperback that’s been waiting for years amongst my Beach House Books. Back to the early 1980s for Gordon Merrick’s novel and a kind of gay writing that feels hampered by demented self-loathing and a carefree intensity that soon becomes completely addictive. Utterly graphic and chockablock with all kinds of gay sex, it’s a scorching read set in 1930s St Tropez and Greece. All the characters – whether sailors, Nazis, painters, dancers or idle socialites - will drive you crackers with their horrid self-absorbtion. You’ll hear about everything they think with their tiny minds and do with their colossal male members, but you won’t want to miss a second of it.


UNA STUBBS’ FAIRY TALESAgain, the 1980s coughs up an obscure gem. The actress rewrites famous stories in a breezy, chatty, funny style in order to encourage people to read them out loud. The Gram Corbett drawings have something suitably New Romancey about them and I like Una’s irreverent takes on well-known tales. She bends them out of shape, brings in new backstories, and gives them slangy, witty dialogue. In a lifetime of loving fairy tales, I’d have appreciated finding these back in the day, and wish they were still in print to buy as presents today.
I realise I spend quite a lot of my reading time thinking this: who could this book be a present for..? I know just the person who would love this…  
Hopefully that makes all the gloriously solitary hours I spend reading a bit less selfish…?

Levenshulme Pride 2019

So proud of Jeremy - organising Levenshulme Pride for the third year in a row. He's worked his socks off on this every day for the last few weeks and months. It's 16th-18th of August, with events in 26 venues - and everything is free!
My own small contribution is helping out with the artwork for the brochure and the map!
Also, our Gay Men's Writing Group - Fambles - will be celebrating our first anniversary with a reading at the Klondyke Club at 6pm, Sunday 18th August, as part of Levy Pride. 

Thoughts on Bullies, Braggards and Buffoons

I know loads of people who are really, really good at what they do. Many have been overworked or bullied or they've burned out while doing the thing they are great at. Others haven't even been given a chance to get into their chosen fields.
From my own experience I know that the people who most often do really well in this idiotic world are buffoonish, bullying, talentless braggards who've coasted by on flummery and show. And often they're posh as well. I'm really fed up with that sort. And that's all I have to say about that today.