Staring at the Spectator

I'm heading home for a wedding in a couple of hours, so must rapidly eat, pack, and run. I didn't sleep at all last night, alas. So it goes. Managed a couple of hours this afternoon though.

So, some links. Nice to see that Neil Gaiman's won a well-deserved Hugo Award for the wonderful Coraline. I've bought that book three times, twice as gifts, and both times I've bought it to give to other people I've been startled on opening them to find that they were signed by Neil. Mine isn't. Maybe that's more rare.

There was an excellent article about Pat McCabe in The Guardian a few days ago. Check it out if you can. And of you haven't read it, go read The Butcher Boy. See the film too, while you're at it; I think it's Neil Jordan's best work.

A friend here alerted me earlier to an interesting piece about Tim Robbins and his views on freedom of speech. It's well worth a look, and I'm glad to see how he rightly observes that:

'Too often people abdicate their freedom in their minds and choose not to speak. But once you abdicate that freedom you may as well not have it'.

There's a correlative to that too: if you expect people to keep views you dislike to themselves, you don't really believe in freedom of speech yourself. Censorship doesn't have to be a formal thing.

Catholic Conspiracy?

Heinrich e-mailed me yesterday with a link to an article from The Spectator which makes some thoroughly ludicrous claims. I may as well pillage my reply to him to convey my response to the original absurd article. The indented quotes are from the article. I'm not putting quotation marks around my own words.

'This realm of England is an Empire ...governed by one Supreme Head and King.’ So proclaimed Thomas Cromwell in his most critical piece of legislation, the Act in Restraint of Appeals in 1533. By calling England an empire, he designated it a sovereign state, with a king who owed no submission to any other human ruler and who was invested with plenary power to give his people justice in all causes... the present Queen was reduced to vassal status under the terms of the Maastricht Treaty, which rendered her a European citizen and thereby subject to 'foreign princes and potentates'.

Um, really? That rather ignores the fact that even within England the status of the monarchy had transformed since Henry VIII's day... from an almost all-powerful monarchy to a constitutional one. At one point it ceased to exist, the English people having seen fit to decapitate their king. As for the Maastricht Treaty, one should note that the Queen signed that treaty willingly and on the advice of her Parliament; the ludicrous claim that she is a vassal of 'foreign princes and potentates' will not withstand any scrutiny.

The Pope’s recent demand that 'God' be featured in the emerging European constitution has been echoed by many leading Catholic politicians and bishops. While on the surface such a reference may offend only Europe’s atheist and humanist contingent, it must be observed that when the Vatican refers to God, she sees herself as God’s infallible vice-regent upon earth, the leading organ of divine expression; indeed, according to its publication Dominus Iesus (5 September 2000), as the only mediator in the salvation of God’s elect, insisting that all other Churches, including the Church of England, 'are not Churches in the proper sense'.

Nonsense again. The Pope did not demand that some mention of God be made in the draft of the constitution; he understandably wished that to happen, but the power to demand it was not his. What's more the Church does not see itself as the 'only mediator in the salvation of God's elect' except in a broader sense where the Church means all those who are baptised in Christ (CCC 836); the Catechism makes it quite clear that salvation is through Christ, and that he also does not necessarily deny those who disbelieve in him through no fault of their own.

To allege that the Church claimed that all other churches are not true churches is a blatant lie. The Orthodox churches are all recognised as true churches, and although the Church recently affirmed that Protestant churches are not to be regarded as not true churches, this is an almost entirely semantic point.


Because the Petrine commissions in Matthew, Luke, and John were all political... I see.

The Roman Church is founded on a political dogma claiming that the Pope is ‘supreme ruler of the world’; superior to all kings, prime ministers and presidents.

Really? And there was me thinking it was founded on Jesus' words: 'Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thous shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.' (Matt. 16. 17-19). Supreme ruler of the world my foot.

Such would be the fulfilment of a Sunday Telegraph article (21 July 1991) which stated: ‘Karol Wojtyla is calmly preparing to assume the mantle which he solemnly believes to be his Divine Right — that of new Holy Roman Emperor, reigning from the Urals to the Atlantic.’ The Catholic Church is achieving this through its political wings — the Christian Democrat and Christian Socialist parties — with the EU’s ‘Founding Fathers’ now reaping the ultimate reward: sainthood. The Pope has beatified Alcide De Gasperi, Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer for founding the Union ‘on Roman Catholic principles’. A supporter of their canonisation said it shows that Europe ‘was built upon a rock’, adding, ‘I think that the European Union is a design not only of human beings but of God.’ The very act of bestowing sainthoods on politicians is purposely designed to inculcate that European unification is God’s will, and that those who lead it govern by divine right.

Well, ignoring the surreal opening, it strikes me as significant that the journalist either does not know the difference between Beatification and Canonisation or is deliberately blurring the issue. So what if some people think that the EU is a divinely ordained project and its founders should be canonised? Is there any serious reason to believe that founders of the European project are likely subjects for canonisation? And who is this supporter of their canonisation? It strikes me as interesting that the journalist can only muster one unnamed advocate of their canonisation. Who is this guy? A bloke in a pub? That last sentence is particularly insidious, since it implies that the founders of the ECSC and EEC have indeed already been recognised as saints, which could hardly be further from the truth.

During the 1975 referendum campaign, Shirley Williams unambiguously associated the vision of Europe with Rome’s goal of assuming political and religious authority over the lives of all Europeans. She observed, ‘We will be joined to Europe, in which the Catholic religion will be the dominant faith and in which the application of the Catholic Social Doctrine will be a major factor in everyday political and economic life.'

Well, Shirley may have said it, but that doesn't mean Shirley was right. In any case, her point was simply that the Catholic Social Doctrine was a good thing, and likely to be followed in some sense by a united Europe where the majority of citizens were Catholic.


It is hard to deny that our cultural roots are essentially religious

While the EU has adopted many symbols of nationhood [...] and is now moving towards the attributes of government [...], it follows that, since Europe has no unified demos, a 'deeper' cohesive force is necessary to hold the whole project together. When Cardinal Maria Martini of Milan addressed the European Parliament in 1997 in a symposium on Remembering the Origins of the Process of Integration, he identified this 'deeper' something — effectively a common state religion — reminding the Parliament that its true foundation was a religious one. He outlined the importance of a single faith (Catholicism), and emphasised that religions must not support nationalisms (i.e., the Church of England must not defend the English constitution), and Europe must recognise the 'primacy of the divine' (i.e., the primacy of the Pope). His address included demands for a new welfare state, in accordance with Roman Catholic social doctrine, and his contention that European integration was never about economic and monetary issues alone. He said, 'The Europe we must build is a Europe of the spirit.'

This interpretation says more about the journalist's paranoia than it does about Martini's vision. Cardinal Martini, incidentally, was long regarded as the most likely successor to John Paul II in Rome; he is an extraordinarily intelligent and wise man; his spirituality can be taken as read, I imagine.

Of course the true foundation of Europe is a religious one; it is our Christian heritage that gives us our common identity. Of course religions must not support nationalisms; the Thirty Years' War, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the collapse of Yugoslavia are horrific examples of what happens when they do; in any case, surely the Church of England's task is not to defend the English constitution, whatever that is, but to ensure the spiritual wellbeing of its members.

And it takes a frightening leap to assume that any time a member of the Catholic Church speaks of the 'the primacy of the divine' he or she is in fact speaking of 'the primacy of the Pope; I can not imagine any Catholic ever confusing the Pope with God.

Again, saying that Martini demanded a new welfare state is nonsense; his excellency may have wished for the establishment of such, but he hardly demanded it. I imagine that few Europeans, save perhaps some deluded Britons, would ever have claimed that European integration was solely about economic and monetary issues, and Martini is hardly alone in his desire for a 'Europe of the spirit'. After all, could the United States have been born or held together if it had strictly materialistic goals? On the contrary: there is a very potent 'America of the spirit' which has as its sacred scriptures the very doctrinal Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.


I'm not sure this chap understands Catholicism, the EU, or Medieval history...

When divinity rules, it is, of course, infallible. According to canon law, the Pope claims immunity from all moral and civil authority: 'The First See is judged by no one.'

Well, that is what Canon 1404 says, yes, but it's not quite as clear as that; for example should a Pope become a heretic he would automatically cease to be Pope. In any case, there's nothing there about infallibility. Papal infallibility only applies when the Pope's teaching is in accordance with the Church; it only applies to matters of doctrine, and serves merely to clarify matters about which there has been some dispute. There has only been one Papal declaration with this status in the last century.

This is precisely the spirit in which the EU governs, with the Court of Justice deeming that political criticism of its leaders is akin to the most extreme forms of blasphemy. It is therefore possible to suppress it without violating freedom of speech, affording the EU an undefined and seemingly unlimited power to restrict political criticism. Like the Papacy, the Court is supreme, accountable to no one, and the sole arbiter of citizens' 'rights'.

Really? You could have fooled me. I thought the Court operated like any supreme court, in accordance with laws made by the collective legislature and treaties agreed by the national legislatures. This would make it the interpreter of citizens' rights, not the arbiter of those rights.

Lord Shore, in his book Separate Ways, observed that the Commission acts precisely 'like a priestly caste — similar to what it must have been in pre-Reformation days, when the Bible was in Latin, not English; the Pope, his cardinals and bishops decided the content of canon law'

Paper tends not to refuse ink. I could equally write that 'David Irving observed that the Holocaust didn't happen,' but that wouldn't make it true for one moment. Leaving that aside, this is a ludicrous comparison. The Commission consists of twenty Commissioners, appointed by the national executives to form what is effectively the EU's cabinet; how this can be compared to an enormously diverse level of European society, which included friars, monks, parish priests, bishops, cardinals, and popes I can not imagine.


Raymond Crotty was a good man, but I think he was wrong on referendums...

Accordingly, any decision of the people which does not accord with the divine will has to be corrected. The very notion of ‘destiny’ is simply a euphemism for government by divine right, and this is the teleological explanation for three referendums in Denmark on the Treaty of Maastricht, two referendums in Ireland on the Treaty of Nice, and the suspension of democracy altogether in Belgium and Italy in order to ratify treaties or force through budgets. In each referendum, there is a ‘wrong’ and a ‘right’ outcome. It also accords with the EU’s sanctioning and funding of ‘acceptable’ political parties, i.e., those who ultimately accord with its own aims. When the United Kingdom votes no to the euro, the wrath of God will be poured out again and again until the people repent and accept their predestined fate.

There are valid points here about how referendums are not necessarily the best way of deciding whether countries should sign up to extremely subtle and complicated international treaties. Furthermore the legislative issues in Belgium and Italy are indeed troubling, but to fully understand them I think I'd need to be familiar with the constitutions of those two countries. I'm fairly sure that the author of this laughable piece is no more familiar with them than I am.

In any case, these criticisms have nothing to do with the Catholic Church. As for governing for divine right, weren't British monarchs still claiming that power a century after Henry VIII? I know the EU claims no such sanction, with a conscious decision being made to exclude any mention of God from the proposed constitution.


This chap seems to mistake subsidiarity for its opposite...

Such a destiny can be foisted upon recalcitrant nations only when they are weakened. The Roman principle of divide and rule is resurrected in the ‘Europe of Regions’ strategy, which encourages each ‘region’ of Europe to look directly to Brussels for policy and funding, bypassing national parliaments in the process. This is a recreation of a mediaeval Europe of small, ineffectual states which can be easily dominated.

Ah, the Roman principle of divide and rule, as practised so effectively by the British for centuries...

Anybody who thinks medieval Europe consisted of easily dominated ineffectual states need to go back to their history books. At times the papacy was at the mercy of these squabbling kingdoms and duchies. And many of the rulers of those states were in turn dominated by their own notional vassals. The 'Europe of the Regions' strategy, far from being a mechanism to allow Brussels to control Europe is instead a mechanism to develop the poorer parts of the Union while similutaneously empowering those whose voices have been supressed too long by national elites.

Subsidiarity was designed not to permit the tributaries to ‘claw back’ what may best be performed at a lower level, but to permit the infallible centre to decide what freedoms to grant the subsidiary levels. Whether it be termed federalism or centralism, ‘subsidiarity’ denotes the downward devolvement of certain powers for the practical outworking of the Supreme Power’s objectives.

What is this 'Protestant Ethos' of which you speak?
Leaving aside the ridiculous analogy with the Catholic hierarchical structure that preceded it - equally valid (or invalid) analogies could be made with the Roman Empire, any army you care to mention, or nowadays most businesses - this claim still looks flimsy. It might be slightly more credible if the journalist decided to support his broad and polemical claims with even a hint of evidence. Of course, that might be rather difficult.

A Catholic EU will inevitably result in the subjugation of Britain’s Protestant ethos to Roman Catholic social, political and religious teachings.

Well, I'm not sure what Britain's Protestant ethos is nowadays, seeing as Muslims and Hindus are making significant inroads into British life and many of Britain's Protestants are religious in name only; of Britain's Christian groups, Catholics may well be the largest single group now, at least in the sense that they practice their religion in far greater numbers than Anglicans, at any rate.

It's also worth remembering that the EU is not an exclusively Catholic organisation. Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and much of Germany have for centuries been predominantly Protestant, while the Orthodox Church holds sway in Greece. I'm quite curious about what the social and political teachings of the Catholic Church are, by the way. Note to self: find out more.

Under the constitution for Europe, the EU will have a Catholic Caesar presiding over the Protestant monarch.

Nonsense. Aside from the fact that the constitution hasn't been remotely finalised - it's still just a draft, albeit a very elaborate one - this histrionic statement displays a shocking inability to reason. It will almost certainly be the case that the EU President will have to have served as President or Prime Minister of his or her own country, and since Catholics are a minority in seven of the fifteen EU member states, there is no reason to automatically assume that the EU's President would be a Catholic.

Adrian Hilton is a former parliamentary candidate and author of The Principality and Power of Europe. He teaches Philosophy and Religious Studies. He is an approved candidate for the Conservative party.

Is he the best the Tories can muster to make their case? They're finished if he is. Incidentally, I wonder if he realises that his own party leader is a Catholic.

Right, I've a train to catch.

Agincourt and the 'V' Sign

Asleep just before six this morning; awake just before eight. This is demented. I'm not sure how I'm still moving. I appear to have reserves of stamina I have hitherto been unaware of.

 

A bird in the hand...

While examining the insides of my eyelids in the hours when even burglars sleep, I found my thoughts drifting to what may seem a rather unusual topic: the obscene 'V'-sign, traditionally used in Britain and Ireland instead of the middle-finger jerk, more common throughout the Western World.

There's a common belief that the 'V' gesture derives from 1415, when French knights at Agincourt had threatened to cut the first two fingers from the right hand of every captured English archer; the French were defeated, and supposedly the victorious English jeered and displayed their unmutilated hands.

It's an amusing story, and one which I keep being heard repeated as fact. I don't believe it for a minute.

Poppycock!

In the first place, I've never seen any evidence cited for the tale, and I have looked for it. Agincourt is exceptionally well-recorded by medieval chroniclers, yet not one medieval account of the battle records such behaviour by the English archers.

Apparently Jean Froissart is the only medieval chronicler of the Hundred Years' War who mentions the English making insulting hand gestures to their French adversaries. I haven't been able to find the reference within his work, unfortunately, but since he appears to have died a decade or so before Agincourt, I think it can be safely assumed that he did not describe the English archers jeering at the French after the battle. For what it's worth, he doesn't even appear to have recorded such a detail with reference to the battles of Crecy or Poitiers, accounts of which are readily available online.

Even assuming that Froissart does indeed record English archers at some point jeering at French prisoners by displaying their unmutilated hands, this should not be taken as conclusive proof that such a thing actually happened. Firstly, Froissart was a talented writer but a poor historian, and much of what he wrote should be treated with a rather liberal handful of salt. Secondly, the cause of such behaviour was a supposed French threat that they would deprive every archer of the fingers he needed to string his bow; there is no evidence for such a threat ever having been made, and in truth it seems rather implausible.

Medieval warfare, while horrific, operated in accordance with generally accepted norms, and prisoners were very rarely killed; instead, they were captured and held for ransom. This practise helped to fund European warmaking throughout the Middle Ages. An archer without his fingers would have been militarily worthless, and not worth buying back. It seems unlikely that the French ever threatened the English as they are reputed to have done.

Origins?

But, let's assume that Froissart does refer, in however oblique a way, to English archers having brandished their fingers in a 'V'-sign towards captured French troops in the Hundred Years War. And let's assume that he's right. Does this mean that the modern 'V'-sign is derived from such an obscure event?

Not remotely.

There are no known illustrations of the 'V'-sign that predate 1913, when it appears in photographs. There also appear to be no literary references of the sign from before that date. There is no evidence to indicate any continuity in what may possibly have been a once-off jeering gesture in the Fourteenth Century and an obscene gesture which we have our first clear evidence for in the early Twentieth Century. Almost six centuries lie between the two pieces of evidence. To claim that there is a definite link would be ludicrous.

So where does the sign come from? Desmond Morris, in Peoplewatching, lists five possible origins, two of which look plausible.

One is that it is a modification of an insulting 'V'-sign once common in the Middle East, where the two forked fingers are jerked upwards against the gesturer's nose; this sign could easily have been adopted and corrupted by British troops who then brought it home.

Alternatively, it could be a looser version, possibly even an amplification, of an insulting gesture which existed in Britain before the Second World War. Back then, Britons would sometimes use a gesture almost identical to the middle-finger insult, but would reinforce that finger, effectively thickening it, by pressing the index finger against it. Over time, the fingers could have separated; if this is indeed what happened, the process had begun some time before 1913, which is the first case we know of the 'V'-sign being used.

There's no need to make up stupid national myths about this peculiarly British insult dating back to Agincourt.

60 of the Best

Sturgeon's Law states that '90 % of everything is crud'. This rule applies to comics no less than it does to any other medium, which the unfortunate variation that in comics only the crud is easily visbile.

I'd suggest that any bookshop considering having a graphic novel collection should begin with the following. This isn't an exhaustive list, mind. I'm sure I've forgotten some stuff, and other things I'd like to put here have been reluctantly left out. If anyone's interested, I'll explain what, and why...

Kyle Baker: The Cowboy Wally Show, Why I Hate Saturn, You Are Here, and I Die At Midnight. While Cowboy Wally is a rather light comic satire on American entertainment, and Midnight is a hilarious romp through New York on the night of 31 December 1999, Saturn and You Are Here are more substantial fare. Towards the end, Saturn does rather genuflect to the conventions of 1980s comics, but in general it is a sparkling and mature piece of work, a comic which I have always gladly pressed on people who don't read comics - they're usually grateful.

You Are Here is the most complete of Baker's works; it's not great art by any means, but it could comfortably stand with the best of popular entertainment in any other medium nowadays.

Raymond Briggs: When The Wind Blows and Ethel and Ernest. Perhaps best known for The Snowman, adapted for television with Aled Jones singing, Briggs somehow has never been regarded as a comic creator, but how can he really be seen as anything else? He writes and draws beautiful comic strips, all of which are marked by a distinct tenderness, both in Briggs's draughtsmanship and in his approach to the characters.

Ethel and Ernest is a sad, gentle, heartwarming, and funny account of how Briggs's parent met, married, lived, and died; it's a truly beautiful work. When the Wind Blows, written back in the 1980s when Cold War paranoia was at its height, tells the story of a middle-aged English couple, clearly modelled on Briggs's own parents, who attempt to cope with the nightmarish reality of a nuclear attack. It's a warm and funny, yet ultimately heartbreaking and terrifying work. I can't commend it enough.

Eddie Campbell: Alec: How To Be An Artist. Scottish Campbell here uses his fictional alter-ego Alec in a straight piece of autobiography that explores the world of British alternative comics in the 1980s and 1990s. It's not just well told slices of life; rather it is about living, and about living with art. Marvellous stuff.

Daniel Clowes: Ghostworld and Caricature. I'm not very familiar with Clowes's work, but having read these I'm very tempted to explore his stuff in much greater detail. Ghostworld is a graceful and solemn piece of adolecent fiction, a sad yet drily witty study in how friends grow apart. Caricature is a collection of short stories; the title story is one of the most painfully honest works I've ever come across in any medium.

Will Eisner: The Spirit Casebook, A Contract With God, A Life Force, The Dreamer, and To The Heart Of The Storm. Described by some as the 'Eisenstein of comics', Will Eisner is one of the true fathers of the medium. Referring to Eisner's work on The Spirit, Harlan Ellison described Eisner as 'the O. Henry of comic books'. Back in the thirties and fourties, when working on The Spirit in a style heavily inspired by German expressionist cinema and developing the visual language that American comics would rely on, Eisner was convinced that comics had an enormous amount of untapped potential, that they could be a valid artistic medium.

Years later, with A Contract With God, Eisner created what is widely regarded as the first graphic novel; in truth Contract is a collection of short stories, but Eisner was certainly getting there, and with A Life Force he finally struck gold, telling the story, as with Contract, of struggling Jewish families in the New York of his childhood. The Dreamer and To The Heart Of The Storm are more autographical, with The Dreamer telling the story of Eisner's breaking into comics, and Heart Of The Storm looking at his experiences with antisemitism in America on the eve of World War Two.

Though not itself a comic, Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art was the first real attempt by a practicing comic creator to analyse the mechanics of the medium. It's well worth a look.

Neil Gaiman: Violent Cases, Signal to Noise, Mr Punch, and The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish. Gaiman is almost certainly the most well-known comics creator in the English-speaking world nowadays, the author of the multiple-award winning Sandman series, co-author of Good Omens with Terry Pratchett, creator of BBC's Neverwhere series, author of the chilling children's fantasy Coraline and of the New York Times bestseller American Gods, and currently moving into film-making...

These four books are all illustrated by Gaiman's long-time collaborator Dave McKean, whose other projects with Gaiman include the astounding 'Hold Me' issue of Hellblazer, the Black Orchid mini-series, and every Sandman cover. Violent Cases is an intriguing tale about childhood and the tricks that memory can play on us; Signal to Noise considers the last days of a dying film-maker and the film he would have made if he could; and Mr Punch is a thematic sequel to Violent Cases, regarded by Gaiman as his finest work in comics.

Goldfish is a children's book, so perhaps should not be included on this list, but it's clearly a comic, and like the works of Maurice Sendak it is a true gem, a book that can and should be read with delight by anybody.

Larry Gonick: The Cartoon History of the Universe. So far, three volumes of this hilarious yet surprisingly accurate history of the world are available. Gonick's work, while it will hardly become a standard reference-piece, is nevertheless as accessible a global history as is readily available. Perhaps more importantly, it hints the potential of this largely untapped genre of comics...

Hermann Huppen: Rodrigo. Hermann, as he styles himself, is an extraordinarily gifted artist, hailed by his fellows as a master. His work includes two long series, the medieval drama The Towers of Bois Maury and the post-apocalyptic Jeremiah, as well as numerous books which stand alone. Rodrigo is set in Reconquista Spain and is linked with the Bois Maury stories; the book is a true thing of beauty, and is as fine a piece of historical fiction as you could ever come across.

Jason Lutes: Jar of Fools and Berlin 1: City of Stones. Scott McCloud has long hailed Lutes as one of the rising stars of the medium, and has been singing the praises of Jar of Fools to anyone who would listen. Breaking so many of the 'rules' of the medium, Lutes relentlessly experiments in his story of a retired conjurer, a sad meditation on memory and loss. If Jar of Fools showed promise, then the first part of the Berlin trilogy demonstrates just how talented Lutes is. Set in Weimar Berlin, around 1929, Lutes's historical drama may be the most interesting comic being published nowadays.

Dave Mazzuchelli: City of Glass. Paul Auster's City of Glassis a masterwork in its own right, but Mazzuchelli and Paul Karasik have transformed it into an extraordinary expressionist comic. It's rare that anything can be successfully transferred from one medium to another, but Mazzuchelli and Karasik have managed it with style. Mazzuchelli, incidentally, illustrated Miller's Batman: Year One; it's worth comparing the two to see how his artistic sensibilities have transformed over the years.

Lorenzo Mattotti: Fires. Beautifully illustrated with expressionistic chalk drawings, Fires is a dazzling work, tranquil yet mysterious, and one of the most popular European graphic novels.

Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics. The author of Zot! and The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln, McCloud is the medium's great explainer, and the true heir to Will Eisner. Understanding Comics occasionally gets bogged down in trying to justify the medium's existence, but on balance is an extraordinary analysis of how comics work, and how comics can work; the fact that McCloud uses the comic form in this largely technical analysis proves so many of his points in spectacular fashion. Reinventing Comics is not as strong, but is well worth a look as McCloud considers where comics have been and where they might go...

Dave McKean: Cages. McKean is probably best known for his work with Neil Gaiman, but Cages proved that he is not simply an illustrator of other people's visions. An extraordinary work about creativity and control, Cages tells the story of an artist, a writer, and a musician living in an apartment block and frequenting a nearby club; if ever a comic could be classed as 'magic realism' this is it.

Frank Miller: Ronin, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, Sin City, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, and 300. Everything Miller does is hard-boiled. If you like hard-boiled fiction, you'll like Miller. It's as simple as that. Relentlessly experimental, Ronin takes its cue from the work of Moebius and from Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima's samurai masterwork Lone Wolf and Cub, but in truth really only hints at what was to come.

Dark Knight has probably been the most influential comic, for good or ill, of the last twenty years. So many of today's professionals were inspired to enter the field after reading it; that's understandable, as it's a truly explosive book, which should have dealt a bodyblow to the entire superhero genre. Year One is technically a better work, with genuinely elegant art by Dave Mazzuchelli, and is basically Miller riffing on Raymond Chandler. There's a strong case to me made that it's the single best superhero comic ever, though that case does rather require you to argue that Watchmen isn't really a superhero comic.

The first two Sin City books saw Miller abandoning the trappings of superhero comics to do the kind of comics he clearly wants to do, but in a far darker style than before. Sin City gives new meaning to the word noir. And 300? This is Miller stretching his wings again, attempting historical fiction in his account of the doomed Spartan defence of Thermopylae. Historically, it's not the best, but it's an inventive piece of work, showing how an artist can grow, gloriously coloured by Miller's long-time partner Lynn Varley.

Pete Milligan: Skin and Rogan Gosh. Milligan may be best remembered as writer of 2000 AD's gripping future war epic Bad Company, but his finest work has been with the insanely gifted Brendan McCarthy. Skin was originally commissioned by Fleetway for Crisis but at the last moment declined to publish it. Telling the apparently unlikely story of a Thalidomide skinhead it was a beautifully drawn, brutally honest yet deeply sensitive piece of work. It deserves to be kept in print. Rogan Gosh initially saw the light of day in Fleetway's ill-fated Revolver magazine. Almost defying description, it was a hallucinogenic romp through space, time, and Indian curry houses, and almost certainly one of the finest comics of 1990.

Moebius: Arzach and The Airtight Garage. Moebius was long a popular illustrator of western comics under his real name of Jean Giraud, but in the 1970s he spread his wings a little. Arzach was the result, an elaborately drawn, exotic, near-wordless comic which simply invited the reader to watch and reflect on the strange figure of Arzach flying through an almost Freudian dreamscape. It sent shockwaves through the European comics scene when it was first published. Derived at some level from the works of Michael Moorcock, like Talbot's Luther Arkwright, The Airtight Garage is perhaps a more acquired taste. It's a largely improvised work, careering chaotically through parallel universes, which allows Moebius an unfettered opportunity to spontaneously project his feverish imagination onto the page.

Alan Moore: The Ballad of Halo Jones, V for Vendetta, Watchmen, A Small Killing, and From Hell. Alan Moore is almost certainly the finest writer ever to have worked in comics. These are but a small selection of his works. Halo Jones is to this day widely regarded as the finest strip ever to have graced the pages of Britain's 2000 AD; illustrated by Ian Gibson - picked because 'he draws good women' -- it's a science fiction tale with a difference, telling the story of an ordinary girl who goes shopping, works as a hostess on a cruise ship, and eventually gets drafted. It's an enduring loss to British comics that Moore never wrote more than three acts of Halo's 'Ballad', but in truth we should be glad to have this.

V took Moore years to complete, and would probably be met with editorial censorship today. Set in a fascist future Britain, V tells the story of an anarchist terrorist and his attempt to tear the whole system down; it is in many ways perhaps Moore's most thought provoking work, with Dave Lloyd's chiaroscuro artwork giving the work an unforgettable sense of menace. Spectacularly colourful, the Oscar Zarate-illustrated A Small Killing is a meditation on deception, loss, and how we betray ourselves. It is perhaps Moore's most underrated work.

Watchmen and From Hell vie for the title of Moore's masterwork. If Miller's Dark Knight should have been the brass-band funeral of the superhero genre, Watchmen was the autopsy. Illustrated with compelling realism and detail by Dave Gibbons, Watchmen is a symbol-drenched structuralist masterpiece, using all manner of unusual narrative devices to analyse among other things why superheroes appeal to us, and why, in many ways, they shouldn't. The autopsy analogy is Moore's own, and one he also used for From Hell, which he described as a post-mortem of an historical event, using fiction as the scalpel. If you've seen the film of From Hell, blot it from your memories. Moore picked Eddie Campbell as his artist as he knew that Campbell wouldn't sensationalise the horror of the Jack the Ripper murders, yet the film was deeply melodramatic. The book is a convoluted investigation of the horrific events in the 1880s that in Moore's view effectively gave birth to the Twentieth Century. I think it goes a lot further than Watchmen and may be the medium's supreme achievement to date.

Keiji Nakazawa: Barefoot Gen and Barefoot Gen: The Day After. Nakazawa was one of those who survived the bombing of Hiroshima. In Barefoot Gen he tells the story of the bombing from the viewpoint of the Japanese victims. His crude style serves to aid the storytelling, which is urgent, honest, and devoid of sentimentality. This may be one of the most important stories ever told in this medium.

Alex Ross: Marvels and Kingdom Come. I'm reluctant to include any superhero work in this list, Miller and Moore's work notwithstanding, but the two seminal 1990s comics illustrated by Alex Ross seem to demand inclusion. Kurt Busiek's Marvels sought to retell the history of the rise of Marvel Comics's superheroes from the viewpoint of an ordinary person. The conceit was interesting, and the comic was well-written, but what awed readers was Alex Ross's extraordinary realistic painted artwork, with nearly every picture based on an old Kirby or Ditko drawing but transformed through the use of models. Ross based the appearance of his characters on people he knew or famous actors, with Timothy Dalton as a rather convincing Tony Stark and Patrick Stewart playing Charles Xavier some years before he did so on screen.

Mark Waid's Kingdom Come was a more epic work, following in the footsteps of Miller's Dark Knight by attempting to bring time to Superman, the Batman, Wonder Woman and so many other heroes. Without the Kirby bases the work lacked the energy of Marvels, but it was nevertheless an impressive piece of work, and in truth it is hard to imagine a better middle-aged Batman than Gregory Peck!

P. Craig Russell: Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book Stories, Stormbringer, and The Ring of the Nibelungen. Russell's extraordinarily beautiful artwork is highly stylised and decorative, harking back to the PreRaphaelites. He earns his money from doing commercial work, and then commits his time to doing his real work. A lover of opera, Russell has adapted many, with The Ring being his highpoint. Jungle Book and Stormbringer are flawless demonstrations of how to adapt prose to comics, with Moorcock's Stormbringer being prefaced by an excellent adaptation of Neil Gaiman's poignant and semi-autobiographical tale 'One Life Furnished In Early Moorcock.

Joe Sacco: Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde. Sacco is a journalist who has spent several months in the occupied territories and Gorazde in Yugoslavia during the civil war there. He has recorded his experiences in these two deeply indignant and important books, both of which are horrific, yet profoundly life-affirming.

Erich Shanower: Age of Bronze 1: A Thousand Ships. Shanower has set himself a seemingly impossible task. He's trying to tie together all the legends relating to the Trojan War in a coherent way, yet leaving out the gods as if to make it historically plausible. On the basis of what he's published so far - and in the comic he hasn't quite got to the sacrifice of Iphigenia - he's done a remarkable job. So far only the first book of a projected seven is available, but it's very promising.

Art Spiegelman: Maus and Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began. Speigelman was for a time the editor of the New Yorker and an avant garde cartoonist. His parents had both survived Auschwitz, and in these books he attempted to tell the story of his parents' experiences in the Holocaust, how this had affected them later in life, and the repercussions of this for his own relations with them. Drawn with a fountain pen in a deceptively simple style, the comic uses to great effect the oddly cartoonish conceit of portraying the Jews as mice and Germans as cats in order to reinforce the bloody tribal nationalism of the twentieth century.

Bryan Talbot: The Tale of One Bad Rat, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, and Heart of Empire. Preston-based Talbot made his name with Luther Arkwright, a dark exploration of imperialism in an alternative 1980s Britain; it was a highly experimental work in which Talbot utilised narrative techniques inspired by such film makers as Nicholas Roeg and Sam Peckinpah. The sequel, Heart of Empire, is more straightforward in execution, but none the weaker for it. One Bad Rat is Talbot's most important work, the tale of a teenage girl, abused by her father and obsessed with the work of Beatrix Potter, who runs away from home. It is almost impossible to imagine a more compelling and accurate represtentation of the effects of sexual abuse, and yet the story is ultimately a hopeful one.

John Wagner: Button Man and Judge Dredd: America. Wagner has long been an underrated author, widely regarded as a mere journeyman professional. Judge Dredd is Wagner's best-known creation, and America is undoubtedly Dredd's finest hour, a dark dystopian tale demonstrating how Wagner's hero is but marginally better than those he wars against. There can be no democracy in Dredd's world, a world where 'Justice has a price. That price is freedom.'

Button Man could comfortably stand with the best of Hollywood's offerings, high-class popular entertainment with a message. It tells the tale of modern day gladiators, former soldiers who take part in 'The Game', a game with their very lives at stake, and where their 'owners' wager phenomenal amounts. It's not high art, but it's a story drenched with the reality of death, well-written by Wagner and beautifully drawn in an almost photorealist style by Arthur Ransom.

Chris Ware: Jimmy Corrigan, or, The Smartest Kid on Earth. I'm only reading it now, but it's already taken my breath away. It won the Guardian First Novel award... surely that should tempt anyone.

And once that core of stand-alone books has been assembled, the next step would be to expand to take in Cerebus, Love and Rockets, Sandman, Preacher, Invisibles, Bones, and other series, as well as newspaper strips such as Krazy Kat, Little Nemo in Slumberland, Peanuts, and Calvin and Hobbes.

But still. Sixty books would be a good start.

Today being the Feast of Saint Joseph the Worker

My first job, aside from voluntary work, was at the Carroll's Irish Open, a golf tournament. A friend's sister was working with the PGA at the time, and managed to get the two of us four days' work. It mainly involved sitting in a wooden huts at Portmarnock Golf Course, occasionally receiving a message on a walky-talky and then changing the names and scores on the leaderboards we were operating.

I developed a pathological hatred for golf through that. Edgar Rice Burroughs was right when he called it a mental disorder.

That was in 1990, just after I'd done my Inter Cert, and while Ireland were playing in their first ever World Cup. If you haven't read Roddy Doyle's 'The Van', pick it up to get a sense of that wonderfully exciting summer in Ireland. If you must, watch the film. We were a great country for celebrating draws. We managed four of them in a row, making it through to the quarter finals after beating Romania on penalties and with only two real goals to our credit. My friend's other sister got married on the day that Ireland was finally knocked out by Italy. Another friend and I went out to Killiney in the evening for the wedding reception and watched the match there in the Killiney Court.

A few weeks later I got another summer job, through a friend of my Mum. It was in a supermarket about half an hour's walk away. I worked in the storeroom and went on deliveries with the owner's father-in-law, who told me stories about Dublin when he was young, and about Brendan Behan and Phil Lynott.

'The people round here are lovely,' he'd say. 'Good people. They'd rob the dye out of your hair, mind, but they're good people.'

After a few months, due to falling business, I had to be let go. Last in, first out. The shop itself closed a year or so later, having operated on a skeleton staff in the meantime. I later heard that the assistant manager had been helping herself to the takings in some way, hurting the business immeasurably. It was a hard area to run a business in anyway. At the time it had somewhere between 75 and 80 per cent unemployment.

Nearly a dozen years of service...
The following summer, at the ripe old age of sixteen, I needed to get a job again, and this time decided to try a large pub ten minutes' walk from me. As it happens, a friend's brother worked there as a part-time barman, and my friend was doing a bit of work in the storeroom. A friend of my Mum's was a regular there, and she said that I should talk to Joe, the head barman, so I set out one morning to see was he about, and whether there was any work going.

When I got there my friend was sweeping the carpark. I stopped to talk to him for a second, and he looked around, clearly worried.

'I can't stop. If a fat, baldy bastard comes out and sees me not working, I'm dead.'

'Oh, okay, no worries. I was just wondering whether you know if Joe's working, and where I'd find him.'

'He's working all right. That's who I'm worried about. He's probably in the Bar.'

There wasn't any work going, and there was a long line of other teenagers lined up hoping for jobs too, so I went home, a little dispirited. There weren't many jobs then, you see. The country had an unemployment rate pretty close to 20 per cent, and it was only that low because so many people had emigrated.

Three weeks later I went back, and this time there was a space on the roster. Joe said he'd sort out my hours and then give me a call.

He rang a couple of hours later, and I came back. I was introduced to a barman who'd been there for years, and to Ken and Karl, two fairly new barmen. He sat me down in the 'confessional box', a small nook at one end of the bar, showed me my roster, and explained my job; it was pretty simple, walking round the floor keeping the tables clean and taking orders from customers, ordering them from the bar, and bringing them over to the customers.

I later heard that two of the barstaff had a bet going that I wouldn't last the week. I lasted quite a bit longer than that.

I thought that it would simply be a summer job, but it became so much more than that. I worked there until February, and returned the following June, once I'd finished my Leaving Cert. For some reason I hadn't thought that I'd be taken back, but I met Joe after Mass one morning in the spring and he grinned and said he'd be keeping a place for me.

I stayed from that June without a break for years on end, though I hardly planned to. In October I started University, studying Commerce, but hated it -- I was too young, really, having just turned seventeen -- and left, reapplying for an Arts degree the following year. The next eight months or so were divided between reading, drawing, painting, and working on the floor and in the stores in the Granite. I stayed through my whole undergraduate degree, working five nights a week including all day on Sundays.

As far as I was concerned, that was what I did. I was a loungeboy -- and later a barman -- who happened to go to college, not a student who did barwork, and in truth it was working in the pub that made everything else possible for me.

Even after my first degree I never cut my ties with the Granite, working there through whatever holidays I had from college while I was doing my master's, and even when I became a teacher... with no teaching available in the holidays it made sense. Whenever I came home from Manchester for weekends last year I invariably did a day or a night in the Granite. It paid for the trip, and kept me rooted.

Along the way I've got to know so many great people, most of whom, sadly, I'm no longer in touch with, but I'm glad they've touched my life at some point...

The list goes on forever. The current batch are pretty good. I like going back there.

A Kilkennyman in Dublin

Joe left the in the summer of 1994, having worked there for something like 22 years. The Barmen's Strike was taking place as the World Cup began, with all of Dublin's barmen being out. Joe felt terribly torn by the strike, feeling that by striking he was being disloyal to the Towey's, who'd employed him for so long, yet refusing to even consider going in as that would mean being disloyal to his fellow barmen. Joe had been a loyal union man all his life.

In truth, he should really have retired some time earlier, since he'd turned 65 a year and a half earlier and we'd held a huge surprise party for him in what was then the Cabaret Lounge. That was the first time since my childhood I ever danced, oddly enough, Grace Flynn dragging me up onto the dancefloor to the frankly appalling strain's of Undercover's version of 'Baker Street'.

As a gift to say thanks from the floorstaff, we presented him with a mirror, upon which was sandblasted a cartoon I'd drawn; Joe'd been in stitches when one of the younger barmen had shown him the original sketch I'd done on a scrap of paper I'd written orders on. The mirror still hangs in the 'confessional box' where Joe sat me down back in the summer of 1991 to tell me what I'd be doing.

Kevin, the then owner's son, gave a little speech about how important Joe was to the Granite, and how many people could honestly say how he'd given them in his own rather distinctive way a start in life.

'Distinctive' would have been an understatement. Joe was on the surface irrascible, rude, and brash - the kind of person who'd never suffer fools gladly. But underneath that, he was quietly religious, incredibly gentle and deeply loyal, one of the best people I have ever had the privilege of knowing.

That's not to say that I wasn't scared of him... we lived in terror of having to ask for a night off.

'Why do you want the night off?'
'Well, it's my friend's birthday and-'
'No! You'll just be drinking! You're too young to be doing that.'

There are times nowadays when I wish more employers took that line with their teenage staff.

A confirmed Pioneer, he had serious issues with us drinking. It used to be said that working in pubs turns people into alcoholics or teetotallers. Joe was proof of the latter.

I'll never forget him calling my house at half nine one March morning in 1993 to drag me into work. It had been the 21st birthday of one of the barmen the previous night (definitely not one of my finer moments --another story) and I was feeling absolutely atrocious, too ill even to get to the phone to refuse to come in. I mumbled to my dad to say, yes, I'd be in, and after about an hour crawled out of bed and painfully made my way up the road.

He was standing imperiously in the bar doorway waiting for me.

'Where were you?' he bellowed, seeing me about thirty yards off.
I didn't reply, just stumbled on.
'Oh,' he grinned wryly, 'out buying sickness with the rest of them.'

It wasn't wise to be less than alert when working - I remember him throwing spoons at staff in their more indolent moments, roaring 'Stir yourself!' -- and one lad was terrified for weeks after being caught dossing about for perhaps his first time ever there.

It wasn't just the staff who he'd terrorise, though. At one stage we had a course on customer care, and some 'expert' called Oliver came to advise us on what to do. Oliver thought Joe's techniques were a bit old-fashioned. I'm not sure what exactly convinced him of that.

It could have been the day that one youngish lad came in to complain over Joe having knocked a pint of Guinness over him the previous day.

'Joe Hanrahan,' he had said, 'You made a show of me in front of my friends yesterday, when you spilled that pint and ruined me good trousers.'
Joe leaned across the counter, resting his heavy Kilkenny forearm upon it, and grinned.
'Son,' he said, 'there're two things wrong with what you just said. First, whoever said you had friends? Second... you've never had a good pair of trousers.'

Although he left back in 1994 I used to see him all the time, since his house was near mine and he was good friends with mechanic who worked from his own garage down the lane behind my house. Even lately, despite my being twenty-seven, Joe would still address me fondly as 'Young Daly', and ask after me and mine.

He died last night. Too many years working in pubs had destroyed his lungs, though he didn't smoke himself.

I'll miss him.

A Welsh Week

I fear I have slacked somewhat, having been back in Manchester for almost thirty-six hours without typing anything new here. It's not as if I haven't been online or anything.

Wee Welsh, or Tiny Taffies

It would appear that the Welsh are, in the main, a rather short race. That may not be a particularly profound observation, but it struck me twice while I was there.

The first occasion was at Mass with Dad on Easter Sunday, when it dawned upon me that I was the tallest person in the congregation. Being a resolutely average five foot ten inches, I could be considered tall in very few gatherings. The Mass, while I'm on the subject, was a pretty haphazard affair. The boney and rather jovial priest had candles given out to all those present, and seemed to sing at random throughout the ceremony. This sort of thing annoys me. I tend to think that if you're going to have rituals then go the whole hog and have a full-blown Latin Mass. If, on the other hand, you're going to trim away whatever's unnecessary, then do so, but do it properly. This Vatican One-and-a-half nonsense just annoyed me.

On Monday I was again struck by the apparent shortness of the Welsh. While visiting the slate mines at Llechwedd, which, should you care to exercise your tongue, is pronounced something like 'thLechhooeth', I must have hit my head off the roof at least eight times. It was most embarrassing, not to mention frustrating. The mines were fascinating, and one cavern, housing a sizeable lake, was particularly eerie. I've read that that cavern was used as a location for the Disney film of The Black Cauldron; this seems unlikely, since the film was animated rather than live-action, but I suspect that it may well have been sketched by Disney artists who would then have used it as the basis for some backgrounds.

Shaggy Dog Stories

I had headed off to Wales on Saturday morning, and was met by my Dad at Bangor's train station. It had cost only £14.65 for a return trip to Bangor from Manchester - Bargain. Mam, Dad, and myself set off in the car for Harlech, where my sister had hired a house for the week.

Leaving Bangor we passed by the old Roman auxiliary fort of Saguntium, easily identifiable by being, as Eddie Izzard would say, a series of small walls. We carried on along a stretch of road that supposedly followed the old and oddly crooked Roman road. Evidently the Romans had decided that the A487, the main road through Caernarvon to Portmadog, was far too busy and cluttered, and instead decided to cut through the mountains.

We had lunch at the beautiful village of Beddgelert, first going to see Gelert's grave. I'd heard his tale as a child, and had deeply upset me then. My dad said that he'd read it when he himself was a child, and it had quite distressed him.

Gelert was a great hunting dog belonging to the thirteenth century Welsh prince, Llewelyn the Great. One day the prince went hunting, leaving the hound behind to guard Llewelyn's infant son. When the prince returned from the hunt the dog eagerly ran out to meet him, and Llewelyn was horrified to see Gelert covered in blood. He rushed into the lodge to see the everything torn asunder, with the cradle overturned and blood everywhere. Horrified, he turned on the dog, drew his sword, and stabbed Gelert, believing that he had killed the child. Only then did he approach the cradle to find the child safe and well, lying beneath the cradle next to the dead body of a wolf. Gelert had clearly slain the wolf to protect the child, and indeed, had been wounded himself in doing so. Llewelyn, it is said, was so distraught by what he had done that he never smiled for the rest of his life, and had the site of the dog's death named Beddgelert, raising a great rock to mark his grave.

While I stood at the grave it struck me that this story was almost certainly a Victorian fiction. I hadn't thought about it since I was a child, but looking at the grave, and the tourist industry that has grown up around it, I couldn't help but be suspicious. Call me a cynic.

So I did some reading when I got to Harlech, and found that the tale appears to date from no earlier than 1798, when a a canny publican, David Pritchard, either invented the story or imported it from elsewhere, and had a big stone put in a field not far from the Goat Hotel, which he owned, claiming that this stone marked Gelert's grave.

Typical.

Men on Harlech in the hollow...

Looming over Harlech, on a great rocky crag, is Harlech castle, a stunning and defiant fortress looking out over the sea. In the fourteenth century the garrison of Harlech, led by Dafydd ap Ivan, held out for several months against Yorkist troops. It is said that when the Lancastrian garrison was asked to surrender, Dafydd proudly replied, 'I have held a castle in France until every old woman in Wales heard of it, and I will hold a castle in Wales until every old woman in France hears of it!' 

They continued to hold out, evntually being starved into submission, but only after the defenders had been promised a pardon. The King tried to go back on his word afterward, but his own commander threatened to replace the garrison himself and renew the siege if the pardon was not granted.

Or so I hear.

The castle was in plain view from the kitchen window and the door of our house, which was perfectly located, with the gorgeous and enormous beach and sand dunes lying just behind us, across the railway track. The town was admittedly a bit of a hike, being quite high above us, but I got used to the steep climb; it reminded me of Siena, Assisi, or Cortona in that regard. Just behind the town were beautiful woodlands, while below the castle law a large flat fertile plain, which had evidently once been the sea bed.

I went for a walk in the woods on Sunday morning after mass, climbing down the 'zigzag' path to the railway track, which I followed back to the house, and that afternoon visited the castle. Inside it members of reenactment society were demonstrating medieval archery techniques and bashing each other with swords and maces. Apparently they don't choreograph their fighting, which strikes me as perhaps just a tad risky; the many dents in their helmets testified to this.

I climbed the spiral staircases to the battlements with surprising ease, perhaps because there was a rope bannister, held in place by metal clips in the wall, giving me something to hold on to. I have a thing about spiral stairways. I don't think I'm actually scared of heights, as such, rather of heights where there's a good chance of me falling to a rather nasty death. Spiral staircases seem to invite that. The stairway in Berlin's Siegesaule is one of the worst in this regard, but the worst of them all is the bell tower of Florence Cathedral. It's between six and seven hundred years old, worn shiny smooth and slippy from countless thousands of feet, and lacking in any form of hand holds. I climbed that, slowly, back in the summer of 1997, with a cold sweat on my forehead and trying to clutch the smooth wall for support. It was worth it for the view, as I knew it would be, but I don't think I'll be doing that again.

The view from Harlech Castle's battlements was fantastic, especially looking north towards Snowdon. Unfortunately, being up on the battlements was quite nerve-wracking. It was extremely blustery, and it didn't feel all that safe being up on the ramparts, especially since the parapet was usually barely above knee high. It would have been quite a drop had I fallen. Suffice to say that I would not be typing now. My nervousness must have been quite obvious.

One woman smiled while passing me and asked 'Not good with heights?'

'No,' I replied, 'You might say that.'


An eye like Mars, to threaten and command...

I had some trouble with the TV schedules while there, mainly because S4C, the Welsh Channel Four, has quite different programming to Channel Four proper. My Mam was a bit put out when she expected The West Wing to be on one night, and I pointed out that that was only in England. It turned out that S4C was showing it the following evening though, so I managed to see it when everyone else had drifted off the bed. I'd seen it before, as it happens. Channel 4 is a full season behind RTE.

On Monday evening we all watched 'Major Fraud', the ITV documentary about how Major Charles Ingram conspired with his wife and a Welsh lecturer called Teflyn Whittock to use a coughing code to cheat and win the grand prize in 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?'. It was highly entertaining, but what really struck me is how useless the Major must actually have been when in the army.

'Sir, what do we do?'
'Well, we could attack, or attempt to negotiate with them. Or we could just dig in. That's probably the thing to do. I've never heard of radioing for support.'

(Cough)

'No, I still think we should probably dig in. Or attack. Or maybe negotiate. That sounds like a good idea'

'Are you sure?'

'I've never heard of asking for support...' (Cough) 'I'm fairly sure we should either attack or negotiate...'

'So which is it to be?'

'Well, I think we should probably attack.' (Cough - NO! - Cough)

'Is that your final decision?'

'Well, like I've said, I've never heard of asking for support-' (COUGH!) '-so that's what I'm going to do.'

'What?'

'Yes. I'm going to go for that. I'm going to ask for support.'

'You're not going to attack?'

'No. I'm going to ask for support.'

'Even though you've never heard of doing that before?'

'Yes. Definitely.'

'Okay....'

A man to inspire confidence in the field, what? I bet you'd follow him to Hell and back.

Fire on the Mountain shall find the harp of gold...

On Tuesday I went out to Dolgellau with Mam and Dad. After lunch Dad drove me around the eastern slopes of Cader Idris, and as we neared the northern shores of Tal y Llyn, a rather beautiful lake and the site of the finale of The Grey King, I got out and started walking. My plan was finally to see places that I'd read about and been enchanted by the thought of as a child.

I walked the length of the lake, around its southern tip, and then further along the valley, after a couple of miles turning right along a winding lane that led me over a pass into the adjoining Dysynni valley.

The Dysynni valley is beautiful, a level green and gold plain, surrounded at flanks and rear by high mountains and gently leading down to the sea by Tywyn, from where I was due to catch a train to Barmouth a few hours later. There are very few interruptions to the flatness of the valley, but one striking one lay a mile or so north of where I entered the valley, so I set out in that direction.

Castel y Bere is a thirteenth century castle, built by Llewelyn, apparently, around 1220, and taken by the English around 1280. They extended the castle greatly, but it fell again when the Welsh rose up a few years later; after that it was left to nature to break it down. Situated on a rocky and heavily wooded hill, the castle appears to grow directly out of the rock, with its thick broken walls and pretty grassy courtyards. It's well worth a visit if you're ever in the area.

As I emerged from the woods towards the castle I was spotted by a young boy, brandishing a plastic sword and shouting 'I can see you, Sir Knight!' No sooner had he uttered the words he realised that I was not who he thought I was, and ran away.

I met his father shortly afterwards, a fellow named Will who was originally from the area but now lived in Somerset with his wife Fiona. He seemed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the castle, which is hardly surprising, since as a child his mother would regularly leave him there with his friends for the day, and he grew up playing in the ruins and the woods, hearing stories and reading about the place.

After spending a couple of hours relaxing in the castle, clambering about, chatting, and admiring the views, I returned back to the path and continued towards Tywyn.

I soon reached the crossroads where I had initially turned right towards the castle. The map indicated that a standing stone should have been there, but it took me some time to find it, concealed as it was behind a hedge, and with the rusty hinges of an even rustier gate embedded in it. This doesn't strike me as a wholly appropriate way to treat prehistoric monuments, however humble.

Another mile or so along I came to the massive rocky outcrop that is Craig y Aderyn, the Bird Rock. This is the only place in Britain where cormorants nest inland, albeit only four miles from the sea. I'd never seen them before, and didn't realise quite how big they were. In a more nostalgic vein, Craig y Aderyn is also the place in The Grey King where Will and Bran find the Harp of Gold.

It was quite a painful journey to Bryncrug, as my legs started to play up. I have bad knees, and a tendency to forget to take my glucosamine supplements for them, despite one of my friends having gone so far as to buy some for me at one point. Anyway, by the time I reached Bryncrug, a tiny village, it was hitting seven and I had a further two miles to go before I got to Tywyn, from where my train was due to leave for Barmouth at 7:31. Normally this wouldn't have been a problem, but with every step feeling like a small explosion in my knee, this was going to be difficult.

In agony I rushed to Tywyn, and then limped painfully through the town as fast as I could, ignoring the church that houses the oldest extant bit of written Welsh, which is mentioned in one of Susan Cooper's books, and made it to the station at 7:33. I gave thanks for the inneficiency of British railways and dragged my tortured legs up the hill to the station and then boarded the train, sagging in exhaustion into a seat to wait for someone to sell me a ticket. The doors closed, and the train started to move.

The wrong way.

I sighed with resignation and dug about in my bag for the timetable. Yes, the 7:31 for Barmouth had already gone, it appeared, as it was scheduled to do. I was clearly on the 7:34 to Machynlleth, where, if I wanted, I could get off and change to go to Birmingham. Feeling that would be rather off my planned route, I paid 35p and got off in Aberdyfi, where, incidentally Silver on the Tree begins. This was, if you'll pardon the expression, a bit of a silver lining. 

I had two hours to kill, so wandered about futiley looking for an open newsagent, then sat in the Dovey Inn, where I had a pint of bitter and a very welcome bowl of soup, before heading off to get a train direct to Harlech.

My right knee has almost recovered.


Back for Good
I came back to Manchester on Wednesday afternoon, Dad having brought me as far as Porthmadog. I got a bus to Bangor from there, and then a train to Manchester. God alone knows when I'll get away again. I have a lot of work ahead of me in the next while, so I might not get a chance to get out of here again until June, when I have weddings to attend. We'll see.

Susan Cooper And The Worlds That Books Build

I felt somewhat tender this morning, despite not having overindulged by any stretch of the imagination when I was out last night. There are times when I feel rather shortchanged on the alcohol-hangover exchange mechanism. If I have a mad night, I expect to suffer. Fair enough. But not when I just have a couple of beers. I mean, come on. Where's the justice in that?

Late in the afternoon I went into town on a brief shopping blitz to buy presents for my nephews and niece. I was pretty clear on what I wanted to get one of them, but I hadn't the faintest idea what to do for the other two.

I checked the theatre to see was Stuart in, just to say hello, but it was closed so I made a direct line for Waterstones. Crossing Saint Anne's Square I met a friend of a friend, who'd been out on the tear with a couple of my mates the previous evening. She too was on a present-buying mission, so we had a root around Waterstones together.

She's a historian like myself, albeit quite a bit more modern than me, working on American slavery, and so naturally suggested a children's history book for the elder of my nephews. I was tempted by Terry Deary's Horrible Histories, but I'm fairly sure the lads have a few of them and I'd worry that I'd wind up getting them something they'd already have. I tentatively settled on a big book about Rome, and then Laura and I went our separate ways, she going into the history section while I went up another floor to the children's section.

I'd wanted to get The Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper, a book I had read repeatedly and loved dearly as a child and young teenager. Brother the Elder gave it to me, for my ninth birthday, if I remember rightly.

Unfortunately, although the shop computer was convinced there were two copies in stock, neither was anywhere to be found. Since that was the only present I had planned, I decided to go back to the chocolate egg option for all, and left the Roman book back on the shelf.

Strolling back across Saint Anne's Square I thought I'd chance my arm in the smaller Waterstones there, and found three copies of the Cooper book. 'Back of the net!' I thought, and set about getting something for the other two. I spotted Neil Gaiman's Coraline there and thought that would be an ideal gift for the eldest of the three - it's a fine book, wonderful and scary - so decided to buy that. And after ringing my sister to check, I picked up Jill Murphy's The Worst Witch for my niece.

Happy with my purchases I came home, and then opened Coraline, for no particular reason, and made a rather pleasant discovery.

Neil Gaiman had signed it. 

By the pleasant lake the sleepers lie...

So why was I so keen on getting the Susan Cooper book at this point? Couldn't it wait?

Well, yes, it could have. But this weekend is quite special.

I'm going to Wales in the morning. Sister the Eldest has hired a house for herself, her husband, and the kids for a few days, and Mam and Dad are coming over from Ireland. Well, I suppose they're already there, more or less; they're staying over in Bangor tonight.

I've never been to north Wales before, though I've been through it dozens of times. Other than journeys by road and rail through Anglesea and along the north coast, my only real experience of Wales is of a day in Swansea at a University Open Day, and a rainy day in Cardiff, spent in profitable conversation about different aspects of ancient warfare.

But I've always wanted to go to north Wales, mainly because the Grey King and Silver on the Tree, the last two books in the Dark is Rising Sequence are set there. I'm probably one of the few Irish people who finds Welsh reasonably easy to pronounce, due to having carefully studied the lesson in Welsh pronunciation Bran gives Will in The Grey King, and Cader Idris has drawn me since I was eight.

Cader Idris and Tal y Llyn are only a few miles south of where we'll be staying. I'll finally get to see them.

And if the kids read Cooper's books, these places might someday have the same magical meaning for them that they do for me.

Parochial, but not provincial...
In some respects, when I was growing up in Dublin, England and Wales were more real to me than Ireland.

That sounds odd, but while I knew every inch of my parish as a child, and even now it seems soaked in a deeply personal mythology of place, my knowledge of places further away was limited. Ballyfermot was a frightening place across the field, populated, or so it seemed, by savage shaven-headed men on horseback -- it was only safe to go there, to the Library, or to the Church, when accompanied by an adult. Lucan and Clondalkin were exotic faraway lands where older brothers and sisters went to school, while Ashtown and Baldoyle were where my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins lived. The Phoenix Park I knew well, as I did Montpellier Hill, site of the notorious Hellfire Club, and the City Centre began to gain familiarity once my friends and I began sneaking in on the bus, at the rather precocious ages of eight and nine.

But aside from that? Outside Dublin?

I knew Offaly quite well, and spent plenty of Sundays in Wicklow and the odd spot in Kildare, but other than that, the country was a blur to me. I knew of plenty of places, but with very few exceptions, they were no more than names on a map.

A Bookworm's Atlas...

On the other hand, I read a lot as a child. Too much, perhaps. And from the age of eight on, I think I lived almost in a world that books built, protecting myself from the world with stories. And most of those stories - at least most of those that weren't set in outer space, Narnia, Prydain, Oz, Middle Earth, or southern California -- were set in England.

Malcolm Saville's 'Lone Piner' books have long left me with a wish to visit Rye, and Winchelsea, and Romney Marsh, and to wander throughtout Shropshire. Richard Adams made no secret of the fact that if anyone wanted to they could visit Watership Down. Wimbledon Common is still the home of the Wombles for me, thanks to Elisabeth Beresford's books at least as much as the television series. And Roger Lancelyn Green's phenomenal retelling of the tale of Sir Gawaine has ensured that whenever people mention the Wirral to me I don't think of shrill scousers, but rather of the inhospitable wilderness that was the home of the Green Knight.

Thanks to Susan Cooper's books, I've long had a desire to visit not just North Wales, but Cornwall too, the setting for Over Sea, Under Stone and Greenwitch. I've made a point of avoiding Alderley Edge since coming to Manchester, even though Cheshire is really only a short drive away, because I suspect that the reality of middle England would destroy the mystique conjured up by Alan Garner in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

Other writers, rather than locating their books in any particular location, instead conjured up a flavour of a fictional England that had more reality to me than any anecdotal Ireland, however vague their writings were. I could never figure out where Michelle Magorian had set Goodnight Mr Tom, but its Englishness, at least on paper, was beyond doubt. E. Nesbit, with books like The Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It, filled this world with magic, as if it were needed, while Hugh Lofting's Doctor Doolittle merrily plied his trade across the land. And surely it was on the Thames that Ratty persuaded Mole that there was nothing more enjoyable than messing about in boats? Even if it wasn't the Thames, it was blatantly England. It could hardly have been anywhere else.

Quarries and Smugglers

Enid Blyton hardly ever located her books anywhere in particular -- though they're blatantly all set in the West Country -- but through them I became enamoured with this strange land of moors, coves, and islands. The villains in Blyton stories were almost invariably smugglers. As a child I had a severe dislike of the dictionary, and tended to believe that if a word was important its meaning would be clear soon enough. This generally worked, but, sadly, Enid never saw fit to explain what exactly smugglers did. I must have read at least fifty Blyton books without any idea what the bad guys were up to. 

Quarries were another regular feature of her books, and a great place to find prehistoric arrowheads in. I was particularly excited when I was about nine and saw on a map that there was a quarry only a few miles from my house. Diarmait and myself plotted at length to go there, but never did. I've no idea what he wanted to go there for, but for me, arrowheads were crying out to be found. Despite having also read dozens of Doctor Who novels, far too many of which were set in and around English quarries, I never expected to find any Cybermen tramping about. There were, after all, limits to my credulity. 

In hindset, a somewhat inaccurate view of British education...

That said, the consensus of my childhood reading did lead me to think all English children went to boarding school. Roald Dahl talked about his own experiences there in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, but most of the fictional characters in whose exploits I revelled were clearly public-school sorts; they came home for the holidays, after all.

I didn't read any 'Billy Bunter' or 'William' books, but I read my fair share of books set in public schools.  Blyton's 'Malory Towers' and 'Saint Clare's' books being engaging but inferior sisters of Anthony Buckeridge's marvellous 'Jennings' books. Buckeridge was a true comic genius, a Wodehouse for children, and his books enamoured me of this odd land where people lived in their schools, and played cricket, and learned Latin. True, the school at the start of C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader didn't sound like much fun, but that was clearly an anomaly.

The idea of midnight feasts always intrigued me, and I was fascinated by this odd game called 'lacrosse' that the girls played. It all seemed so exotic.

I suspect that I would have loved Harry Potter, had he been around then. He would have fitted right in.

What state is the Union in?

I was reading Bush’s State of the Union address yesterday, and am troubled by all sorts of things in it. I appreciate that his backing attempts to deal with AIDS in Africa is a very good thing, and I can’t comment on his economic policies because they’re none of my business. But as the world’s only superpower, America’s foreign policy concerns everybody.

 

It is strange that GWB should be claiming that one of his goals is 'to promote energy independence [...] while dramatically improving the environment'. His quest for energy independence has driven him to plan history’s biggest war crime, as discussed yesterday. As for improving the environment, I notice that no attempt is even hinted at regarding curtailing the SUV Hydra; this is hardly surprising for an Oil lobby president who has repealed environmental legislation, plans to plunder Alaskan reserves irrespective of the consequences, and has rejected the Kyoto Agreement.

 

‘The American flag stands for more than our power and our interests.’ Presumably then it stands primarily for power and interests. Fair enough, as long as we're clear on that. It may be a disappointment to those who salute it thinking it represents American ideals, but they can console themselves with the thought that the flag represents ideals too, sort of as an afterthought, or a by-product. What are these ideals, so?

 

'Our founders dedicated this country to the cause of human dignity, the rights of every person, and the possibilities of every life. This conviction leads us into the world to help the afflicted, and defend the peace, and confound the designs of evil men.’ The quasi-biblical terminology troubles me, but my main concern here is the reference to defending ‘the peace’. Is preparing to slaughter countless thousands defending peace? After all, prevention is better than cure. And is slaughtering countless thousands, in the knowledge that this will inspire anger, hatred, and fanaticism, creating countless new enemies, really conducive to peace?

 

I like the reference to continuing to seek for peace between ‘a secure Israel and a democratic Palestine.’ Interesting. Israel doesn’t need to be democratic, while whatever jigsaw state the Palestinians are allowed have will be far from secure.

 

‘And this nation is leading the world in confronting and defeating the man-made evil of international terrorism’ Maybe so, but if that’s the case then George ought to consider Nietzsche’s injunction to ‘Battle not with monsters, lest you become a monster.’ As my last posting hopefully made clear, terror tactics appear to be all the rage in Washington nowadays.

 

‘All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way -- they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.’ Ignore the issue of what happened to these suspected terrorists for a moment. Just concentrate on one word. Suspected. We don’t know if these people who were arrested or who ‘met a different fate’ were terrorists or not. Whatever happened to that principle of being innocent until proven guilty? And what was the ‘different fate’? Quite a chilling euphemism, that one. Is the President making a little joke here, about people who might or might not have been guilty of conducting terrorist operations being killed in combat or even executions or assassinations?

 

‘One by one, the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice.’ That last phrase is interesting. Justice is a universal quality, not a local or national one. By talking about ‘the meaning of American justice’, Bush implied that American justice is distinct from true justice. Sometimes these rhetorical flourishes reveal what is really going on . . .

 

‘Whatever the duration of this struggle, and whatever the difficulties, we will not permit the triumph of violence in the affairs of men -- free people will set the course of history.’ Does this even need a comment? He’s about to begin a war. He’s not merely permitting the triumph of violence, he is perpetuating it.

 

(I thought for the moment that he was lifting Shakespeare here - There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune’ and all that. I don’t think it’s anything of the sort, though. In the Two Towers there are several references to threats to the world of men, and if you look at George W. Bush’s lines prior to this what do we see but ‘In the ruins of two towers, at the western wall of the Pentagon, on a field in Pennsylvania, this nation made a pledge, and we renew that pledge tonight.’ So he’s riffing on Tolkien.)

 

‘This threat is new; America's duty is familiar. Throughout the 20th century, small groups of men seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals, and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world.’ Ignoring the questionable historical claims in the subsequent sentences, settle for how this sentence itself could well be used to summarise how Bush and his buddies took power in what was effectively a bloodless coup, and then began to behave on the global stage.

 

'All free nations have a stake in preventing sudden and catastrophic attacks. And we're asking them to join us, and many are doing so. Yet the course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others. Whatever action is required, whenever action is necessary, I will defend the freedom and security of the American people.' Aside from the Messianic tone here, is he officially saying that the UN is irrelevant? That global approval is no longer necessary?

 

'Iranians, like all people, have a right to choose their own government and determine their own destiny -- and the United States supports their aspirations to live in freedom.' I'm glad that the US now supports Iranian aspirations to live in freedom. It didn't when the Shah was in power. I wonder how it feels about General Musharraf, or the House of Saud, or on the other hand Castro or Chavez?

I was amused by the claim that Hussein has shown ‘utter contempt for the United Nations, and for the opinion of the world.’ This from the man who has scorned the Kyoto Agreement, and attempted to strangle the International Criminal Court. References to pots calling kettles black would not be out of place . . .

 

'U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Inspectors recently turned up 16 of them -- despite Iraq's recent declaration denying their existence. Saddam Hussein has not accounted for the remaining 29,984 of these prohibited munitions.' Perhaps so, but such missiles are hardly a threat to anybody. They are used on unguided rocket artillery systems, and only have a range of about 12.5 miles. They might be useful in defending against an invading army, but not much else.

 

'Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.' Several nuclear scientists have said that such tubes probably weren't suitable for this purpose, while the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed El Baradei, thinks they were probably for use in non nuclear rockets which would have a range less than 150 kilometres. I don't know why he thinks that, but Mr Bush should probably follow his lead on this matter, if he is indeed 'strongly supporting the International Atomic Energy Agency in its mission to track and control nuclear materials around the world', as he claims.

 

'The 108 U.N. inspectors were sent to conduct -- were not sent to conduct a scavenger hunt for hidden materials across a country the size of California.' Really? I imagine that's news to the inspectors. Bush was right before he corrected himself. I think Iraq may be even bigger than California, for what it's worth.

 

Referring to Hussein’s as yet unseen arsenal, Bush claimed ‘The only possible explanation, the only possible use he could have for those weapons, is to dominate, intimidate, or attack.’ That’s a reasonable supposition, I suppose. After all, that’s what Bush uses them for.

 

'Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda.' This seems rather unlikely, since round the time of the attack on the World Trade Centre it was thought that Hussein had very few links with terrorists, since he regarded them as unreliable and potential loose cannons. A spurious story which circulated in the aftermath of September Eleventh concerning meetings between Mohamed Atta and a prominent Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague looks unfounded, and no other convincing evidence for such a link has been drawn up. It is certainly possibly that imprisoned members of Al Qa'ida may have claimed that there was a link between Iraq and their network, but they may well have been attempting to provoke a war, knowing how it is likely to whip the Islamic world into a frenzy. We need to remember that Osama bin Laden has described Saddam Hussein as 'an apostate, an infidel, and a traitor to Islam.'

 

‘Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans -- this time armed by Saddam Hussein.’ There is a logical collapse somewhere in the middle here. Hussein hasn’t done anything except fire off the odd anti-aircraft gun in over a decade. If he had anthrax or such weapons, he would have been in a perfect position to supply terrorists before September the eleventh. So why didn’t he use them? This whole argument is utter rubbish.

 

‘Your enemy is not surrounding your country -- your enemy is ruling your country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation.’ George was referring to those ‘brave and oppressed’ Iraqis,* not the people of America. Strange.

 

*You know, the ones that have been dying for the past twelve years since their water supply was ruined by the last Western attack on Iraq – a war crime, incidentally, if you take a look at article 54 of the Geneva convention.

 

Finally, from my standpoint as a military historian, the following claim is completely false. ‘Sending Americans into battle is the most profound decision a President can make. The technologies of war have changed; the risks and suffering of war have not.’ This is a lie. The risks have changed immensely. Over 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War. Guess how many died in the Kosovo conflict?

 

Answers on a postcard please.