Nicci French's Blog, page 10

Muphry's Law Revisited (Again)

I've written before about Muphry's Law, which states that if you write about misprints or mistakes, then there will be a misprint or mistake in your own work. If you thank someone for proofreading your book, there will be a proofreading mistake in the book. Of course, there is a stronger version of the law: if you thank someone for proofreading your book there will be a proofreading error in your thanks. I've just started reading Daisy Hay's enjoyable, deservedly well-reviewed Young Romantics. In the acknowledgments, Hay thanks Candia McWilliam 'who very kindly scrutinsed [sic] a set of proofs'. Of course, maybe, in a Nabokovian way, that misprint is a tribute to the effectiveness of McWilliam's scrutiny.

You Couldn't Make It up

I've been trying to decide which sort of book the Wikileaks case is like. The story of Julian Assange himself, as brilliantly told in The New Yorker by Raffi Khatchadourian, with its protagonist's exotic name and his unearthly appearance (like a replicant version of ); his itinerant education, self-taught to be a genius-level cryptographer; his helpers including an Icelandic MP dressed in a short black skirt and a 'black T shirt with skulls printed on it' and a Dutch 'activist, hacker and businessman' called Rop Gonggrijp; his 'end-point machines' maintained in an undisclosed location by 'exceptionally secretive engineers' with Wikileaks communications passing through a pipeline which 'is encrypted, and the traffic is kept anonymous by means of a modified version of the Tor network [whatever that is. SF], which sends Internet traffic through 'virtual tunnels' that are extremely private. Moreover, at any given time Wikileaks computers are feeding hundreds of thousands of fake submissions through these tunnels, obscuring the real documents'; this is just pure Thomas Pynchon. 

On the other hand, at least in this version, Assange's legal travails in Sweden are like the missing fourth Stieg Larsson novel. 

And on a third hand, the part of the story where Sarah Palin and William Kristol call for Assange to be hunted down like a dog, isn't really a book at all. It's more like a straight-to-video movie starring someone like or .

And as I write, Assange is about to appear before a British court. What kind of book is that going to be?

 

Fungal Roulette

Nicci: A couple of years ago, Nicholas Evans, author of The Horse Whisperer, ate some chanterelles in the Highlands that turned out not to be chanterelles; he is lucky to be alive today, since the mushrooms turned his organs to paté and destroyed his kidney entirely. He's been on dialysis ever since. We read a few days ago that he can no longer pee - why is this thought so wincingly horrible? You would have thought that his example would make us - both seasoned mushroom pickers since our childhoods, and fanatical hunters for cep and chanterelles in the forests of Sweden each summer - more cautious. But no.

A few days ago, Sean picked some mushoroms that were sprouting in slimy layered clumps from the base of a dead tree stump. These - he insisted - were honey fungus, deadly to shrubs and trees (hence this dead tree stump) but delicious to eat. They were pale-ish brown, flat topped, spindly-stemmed, slippery and smelling of the earth. We agreed that only Sean would eat them at first - the children need at least one parent. After 24 hours, he was fine, not even a twinge of cramp, so clearly the identification was correct.

Then, a few days we went for a walk in a nearby wood, where nightingales are supposed to sing in May, though we've never managed to hear them - perhaps because we don't really know what a nightingale sounds like. There we found some hedgehog mushrooms (we're sure this is what they were: they live up to their name) and took them home to cook and serve to friends. Again, no ill consequences.

And now, even closer to home, we've found some mushrooms in the garden. They are white-capped and bulbous when young, with pale creamy gills; as they grow older the caps open out and the gills turn browner. They have a faint smell of aniseed. So we've looked them up in our mushroom Bible (by Roger Philips) and identified them as either Agaricus excellens or Agaricus macrosporus. If anyone, looking at the photo here, thinks that they are actually Agaricus pilatianus (poisonous), they should know that we ate them for lunch today, so it's too late to warn us.

when is a stabbing not a murder?

When it's committed by a husband who's wife has nagged him. In today's Guardian, on pages 4-5, there's a double page spread on the terrible case of Mark Saunders, the barrister who, drunk and distressed and vulnerable, was shot dead by the police after a five-hour siege during which he fired his gun out of the window. The inquest jury ruled that he was lawfully killed, though it criticised the Met for their handling of the siege. 



OK, then on page 8, in the 'Courts' column there's an approximately 100-word PA report on the man who stabbed his partner of 30 years to death (once in the arm and twice in the chest). He was jailed for four years and eight months. It seems a very short sentence - but that's because it wasn't murder, but manslaughter. And why? Because he was provoked. His partner 'nagged' him. My outrage on reading this was somewhat undermined when I read that she had also broken his thumb and on several occasions laid into him with an ornamental poker, but nevertheless it seems to me that this case has too many echoes with numerous other cases. Husbands who are 'nagged' (that is always the word) can kill their wives. On the other hand, if wives are mistreated by their husbands, they can't get away with in the same way. Usually, men are stronger than women. If a woman wants to kill someone then they have to be premeditated about it. There are several accounts of severely abused women - like Sarah Thornfield in 1990 - who are convicted for murder, not manslaughter, precisely because their vulnerability means they have to be strategic and not simply lash out. 



And further, I'd like to know why the word 'nag' is never applied to men. We don't read about nagging husbands, Is it only women who nag? (Only reply to that if your answer's NO.)

Seasons of mist and mashed potatoes

Nicci:



Today, it is autumn, grey and damp, with soggy yellow leaves on the grass, blackberries in the lanes, a smell of woodsmoke and mushrooms in the air. Time for game pies, rice pudding and open fires, night drawing in, mornings cold and dark - hard to get out of bed and lovely to climb back in (with a hot water bottle). But I have just come back from a four-day trip, driving my parents to the south of France for their holiday. In Provence it was a bright and windy blue. I walked along the Canal du Midi, under the roomy dapple-trunked plane trees, and holiday boats drifted past, the people on board in shorts and tee-shirts, drinking wine on deck at midday. In Nimes, we visited the spectacular amphitheatre. It is on a vast scale, the walls as thick as houses, and the sanded arena where gladiators spilt their blood empty and huge. Tourists at the top were tiny silhouettes against the sharp sky. ice-cream and sun-cream sort of weather, sitting-in-squares sort of weather. But I'm glad to be back here in Suffolk, under its lowering skies, smelling rain. For all the melancholy of autumn, it's a glorious season. And I'm ordering bulbs, ready for the spring.

Interview

There's an interview with us in the Guardian - with, as a bonus, a rather strange photograph. (Not the strangest. We were once photographed in bed together but fortunately I don't think that's available online.)

Factoid Corner

There's a nice letter in this week's TLS. Martin Rose praises a recent book review by David Attenborough but points out that a 'Ghanaian proverb' ("It is unwise to rub bottoms with a pocupine") is not a Ghanaian proverb at all but the winner of a New Statesman competition for inventing fake proverbs. Attenborough has form. In the most recent of John Julius Norwich's anthologies, Still More Christmas Crackers, Norwich thanks Attenborough for contributing the famous speech by Chief Seattle in which he proclaims that the land doesn't belong to any person. If either Norwich or Attenborough had consulted my favourite urban legends website, they would have discovered that the quote is not by Chief Seattle in the 19th century but by a screenwriter in 1971.

A couple of weeks ago, when asked for his favourite example of a scientist in fiction, Attenborough simply replied: 'I don't read fiction.' Yes, he does.

Best Supporting Actors

I've always loved supporting actors. The best of them can steal a film entirely: Dorothy Malone seducing Humphrey Bogart in a bookshop in The Big Sleep (the sexiest scene in the entire history of the cinema: fact), Dennis Hopper taunting the men who are about to kill him in True Romance (the best scene Quentin Tarantino ever wrote?).

died last week. You won't have heard of him. He played the elegant member of the team of conmen in The Sting. He gets to deliver one of the film's best lines, one that was used in the trailer, and I can quote it from memory. One of the team warns him (talking of the Paul Newman character): 'If this thing blows up, I can't do you no good downtown. Gondorf's federal now.' To which Gould's character, Kid Twist, replies: 'Dukie, if this thing blows up, the feds will be the least of our problems.'

Apart from The Sting, Gould did lots and lots of TV, but I'd swap that scene, that line, for Warren Beatty's whole career (well, perhaps McCabe and Mrs Miller excepted).

 

What, us sour? Irritable?

There's a rum old sentence in David Denby's movie review in this week's New Yorker. He's dealing with the new Woody Allen: 'In this movie, as in "Match Point" and "Cassandra's Dream," a certain London sourness and irritability takes over.'

Is that how they see us? Does it apply everywhere? To Leytonstone? Merton Park? We were in Golder's Hill Park this week on a spectacular autumn morning and sourness and irritability seemed in short supply. Perhaps we don't notice it, the way fish don't notice water. We're just all swimming in sourness and irritability. 

And if anyone sees that David Denby, just tell him to sod off back to American and stay there.

PS There's also a lesson. When you go to a new place and stay there you get a very strong, instant impression of what it's like. And it's almost entirely deceptive.

 

Who knows?

Someone said: 'It's know what we don't know that harms us. It's what we know that isn't so.' Who said it? I don't know. But I'm gradually learning, bit by bit, factoid by factoid, that everything I 'know' isn't actually true. For example, one of the only 'facts' about business I know is Gillette's strategy of virtually giving away the razor but then charging a fortune for the blades. But John Naughton has just sent me a link to an article which convincingly argues that this isn't really true. Regrettably, like almost everything we think we know - or, rather, I think I know - the truth is a bit more complicated. And it's a story I can't tell any more. Sigh. Thanks, John.

PS I've just googled it. The real saying is: 'It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.' And Mark Twain said it. Of course, he did. Mark Twain said everything.