The Cuckoo's Called JK Rowling

A little while ago, I was delighted to be asked by the big Harry Potter fan website, Mugglenet Academia, to do a podcast about Harry Potter as detective fiction.  For anyone who, for some inexplicable reason missed it (I know, I know; the car needed washing, the cat needed feeding, the telly needed watching) or who wants to refresh their memories, here’s the link

http://www.mugglenet.com/academia/podcast.shtml

I’ll just go off and entertain myself for an hour while you listen.

OK? Nice to be back.  Anyway, as I was saying, the point I was making, as a massive fan of Agatha Christie et al, (and al’s a really nice guy when you get to know him) that deep beneath the wizarding skin of Mr Potter lies Hercule Poirot.  Think of it as finding your inner moustache.   Or, if you’re feeling inclined to be more a Miss Jane Marple, your inner knitting needles.  (Incidentally, did Miss Marple ever finish anything she knitted?  She always surrounded by balls of wool and, occasionally, when in the heat of explanation, will drop a stitch, but never seems to be able to bring herself to cast off.)

        

Well, now it can be told. And has been, lots.  Last weekend the news broke that in addition to writing The Casual Vacancy JKR has also written The Cuckoo’s Calling, a straightforward detective story. Naturally I nipped onto Amazon straight away and ordered a copy.  It arrived this morning and I can hardly wait to dive in.  It has a satisfying chunky feel and the set-up sounds classic (A troubled model falls to her death.  Her brother has doubts she committed suicide and calls in private investigator Cormoron (what is it with birds, I wonder) Strike...) As everyone knows by now, she wrote it under the pen-name of Robert Galbraith, apparently to see what would happen if she wrote a book with all the bally-hoo associated with writing as JKR.  I could wish she’d chosen a different pen-name; Dolores Gordon-Smith would’ve worked really well as a pen-name, for instance, but the saddest words of tongue and pen are only these, it might have been, so to speak, to add a bit of poetry and culture. 

She might – and did – want to remain anonymous, but I can’t help feeling that somebody somewhere knew Robert Galbraith was a mere figment of the imagination.  It was reviewed in the Daily Mail and The Times and that doesn’t happen by chance.  Mysterious, eh?  The plot thickens...

Mustn't Grumble

I’ve been away from the blog for a couple of  weeks – not from any sense of haughty disdain, but because various mishaps and ailments and what-have-yous have beset me.  First and foremost, was the internet playing up.  It’s amazing, isn’t it?  It’s not so long ago that t’internet, as Peter Kay would say, was a bit of a luxury, an addition, just one of those added bits of technology that made life more interesting - or awkward – for those who hadn’t grown up with it.  Then it became, without a great deal of fuss being made, utterly central to our lives.

What is irritating, of course, is when it is central to work and keeping in touch, to meet those (it’s a bit like meeting someone who won’t have a TV or doesn’t need to drive) who doesn’t use t’internet; for some obscure reason they pride themselves on not using it, as if we’re all bespectacled geeks, enslaved to a screen, whereas they get out and about and do – what?  Run marathons?  Read Tolstoy?  Build scale models of HMS Victory out of matchsticks?  Call me cynical, but I don’t think so...

Then there’s my tooth.  Ouch.  What is it with teeth?  Take your average brachiosaurus, sabre-tooth tiger or luckless cave-man and involve them in a tsunami, volcanic eruption, a meteor strike bigger than Deep Impact or just general, hideous death in a tar pit and their teeth will come up white and shiny and looking like something from a Colgate advert.  Left to their own devices, teeth clearly have the staying power of Jon Bon Jovi on his fifth encore and the metabolic rate of granite.  So why, when housed in a warm, comfortable gum and not called upon to do anything out of the ordinary, such as open metal bottle tops or chew leather – when, in fact. Mr Tooth gets brushed twice a day and even flossed occasionally, does AN Tooth suddenly decide enough’s enough and hand its cards in?

 Take my back tooth, for instance.  Although you can’t take my back tooth because the dentist has done that. There it was, minding its own business, not drawing attention to itself, not making a fuss or interfering with its neighbours, just standing quietly in the rear  – the Tooth version of a bass guitar player in a Seventies rock band, as you might say – when suddenly, without warning, it was chucking its weight about and sending All Dive signals to my central nervous system. 

Just attention seeking, you may think.  No, it’s an abscess, and it didn’t make the heart grow fonder.  How sharper than (the pain from) a serpent’s tooth is the tooth that’s got a ruddy abscess under it, as Shakespeare or someone probably said at some time or other.

There’s just a hole there now.  Memories.  That’s all.  And a pit, hole, void or gap that feels as if someone’s been doing deep-cast mining. 

Still, worse things happen at sea, mustn’t grumble, there’s often a crumpled leaf in a bed of roses, etc., etc., etc.  Which is why I’m not even going to mention how I managed to break my metatarsal bone and end up on crutches.  It was just one of those days, really.