Nan the Great

So, Nan lived to meet three directly descended great-grandchildren and enjoy being able to have conversations with a teenage step-great-grandchild. Somehow, being a great-Nan she became known among her youngest descendants as Nan the Great, and quite right too. She predated the Russian Revolution by 8 years and outlived the Soviet Union by 21. Her aunt once met someone who could remember seeing the fleet return from Trafalgar. Less than a fortnight before she was born, Blériot flew across the English Channel, and within three quarters of Nan's total lifetime, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Well into her seventies, she was jetting around the world herself.

100 years, 6 months, 12 days.

Nan loved to socialise and to network. Even when she broke her leg in her nineties, it took just minutes to establish that she knew the mother of the ambulance lady. Her friends were all of a similar background and nature to her – impeccably upper middle class and by today's standards very often quite dotty.

The family fortune was a memory but the breeding and manners lived on, combined with flashes of attitude from a bygone era. When hospitalised for a period a few years ago, she could still unblushingly refer to her doctor of Asian descent as a little brown man. (For the record she had often had people of similar ethnicity to stay as house guests.) Her idea of an ideal conversation was one that wittered on and on and on and preferably didn't touch on anything at all that's important. Any attempt to make it relevant or meaningful had to be resisted by dragging in yet another anecdote about someone no one but the speaker had ever heard of who did something utterly unimportant. I spent a lot of my prep school weekends with Nan; it may be why I find it very easy to stay silent and generally tune out if the point of a conversation isn't at least looming on the long distance radar after about a minute.

But let me not for a minute do her down.

My grandfather spent most of World War 2 in the Far East fighting the Japanese and having a whale of a time. Nan's memories of the war were always less rosy. His rather tactless letters back home were full of news about what fun he was having and very short of any share of the money he was earning to help keep his wife and child. So she crossed the Atlantic twice with her young daughter during the U-boat crisis, seeking a better life in Canada, not finding it and coming home again. Peacetime did nothing to reduce the long separations. She would have looked at today's 6-month tours of duty in Afghanistan and laughed a hollow laugh. After the war she found herself having to raise a mentally handicapped son; and when Granddad had a stroke in the 1960s she had to look after him too. She can be forgiven some quirks.

The funeral was held yesterday, in the Trinity Chapel of Salisbury Cathedral, where she had spent many years as a guide: quite by coincidence it was 35 years to the day after her husband's own send-off. It was the first decently sunny day for ages and the chapel, the pointy bit at the end of the building, is light and airy and full of space – the perfect setting. The music of the organ filled an almost empty cathedral, which has always looked good but at lunchtime on a term-time weekday looks absolutely stunning.

Nan's first intimations of mortality began over a decade ago when my parents went to New Zealand for a few weeks and Nan became convinced she wouldn't last until they got back. So, I was summoned to discuss her funeral arrangements with the then Vicar of the Close, who could barely keep a straight face at this obviously hale and hearty old lady convinced her time was nigh. All that really came away from that meeting was (a) no, she did not want "Candle in the Wind" and (b) I was to select and read a suitable Bible passage – she trusted my judgement and would be in no position to complain if she didn't like it. We managed both of those stipulations, and the passage in question was 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. Being able to say "We believe that Jesus died and rose again", with your amplified voice echoing around a cathedral, is a powerful experience.

I also designed the order of service for the funeral, which she might just have understood as a concept; and I downloaded an MP3 of "The Road to the Isles" from Amazon to burn a CD to play at the Committal, which I would never have been able to explain to her in a thousand years. I mention all this because she was the one who set me on the path to computer literacy in the first place, by giving me the money for my 21st birthday with which I bought my first computer, my faithful and beloved Amstrad PCW. She was in tune with the modern world enough to ask me once to demonstrate 'an internet'. I chose the National Rail website as most likely to be understood as something useful. I asked her to name a town. "Salisbury." I asked her for another. "Portsmouth." I asked for a date. "Tomorrow." Click, click, click ... And behold, I could show her that there was a train from Salisbury to Portsmouth at 10.30 the next day.

"Well, I knew that," she said and thereby dismissed the Internet revolution from her consideration.

She might have enjoyed the slideshow at the reception afterwards: a PowerPoint montage of pictures that ran on a couple of laptops, showing photos of her from babe in arms to old lady in receipt of her telegram from the Queen (who looks almost equally grumpy in her picture). I had a brief crisis of conscience in assembling the pictures: should I include the arty one of her in her twenties, tastefully naked sitting on a rock by the sea (which really can't have been very comfortable)? Tact won out over truth: besides, there were a lot of her contemporaries among the guests and I wouldn't have wanted them on my conscience.

RIP, Nan, and I promise not to tune out when we meet again.

Edited by Bonusbarn

This is the modern equivalent of putting your kid's work up on the fridge door.

The Man is a Success who has Lived Well

I've never expected to be wanted for my body and especially not at a funeral, but so it came to pass yesterday. My two cousins, with a combined height of about 4 metres, wanted to bear their father's coffin - but unless they did it all by themselves, this was going to present a problem, so they needed equally vertically gifted pallbearers to balance the load. As it was I was the only one they could find. The excellent undertakers, who can cope with practically anything, did what they could to even things out so the coffin was born in by me + senior cousin J (back), junior cousin R + tallest undertaker (getting a free ride) (middle) and two regulars at the front. There was a slight incline but nothing to worry about. You learn to walk like a duck so as not to kick the heels of the guy in front.

And what an honour it was. Afterwards I said I would try and reciprocate when the equivalent occasion comes up in our family, but that event might also include things like Union Jacks, guards of honour etc. so it might just be best to leave it to the professionals. They understood. Anyway, we'll cross that one when we come to it.

It was a wonderful service at the Parish Church of All Saints Weston, full of love and happy memories for a life-loving man with a long and successful career. The readings - Robert Louis Stevenson and Ecclesiastes 3.1-13 - summed him up perfectly; my cousins kept their brimming emotions contained in their tributes in a way I'm really not sure I could match; and the Revd Fred Harte did wonders with bringing the Christian message of hope to a not particularly religious congregation, without issuing an altar call or invitations to Alpha.

Then to Putney Vale crematorium, which has seen off most of that side of the family over the last 30 years or so. The coffin moved off to Bunk Johnson's "Walk through the streets of the city", an exciting bit of New Orleans jazz I've not heard before. We were then expected to leave to the sound of Roxy Music's "Avalon", except that when the undertakers opened the door next to the sound console they knocked something and the music switched back from soppy 80s crooning to New Orleans jazz again. Would that all Bryan Ferry's works went the same way. If (and it's a big "if") I must have Roxy Music at my funeral, please make it something like "Love is the drug" or "Do the Strand".

Then home, to find that Bonusbarn had eaten the last pizza, so we did what we very rarely do and went out and bought fish and chips. And, stillfeeling keyed up from a long day, washed it down with a brandy. Extravagance! But fully in the spirit of the closing verses from the reading.

My father shared a memory that I wasn't going to mention to my cousins but afterwards thought maybe I could have, because they joked that thanks to my uncle's Eastenders connections, when the curtains closed over the coffin they could have played the famous intro drumbeat - duh, duh, duh-duh, duh, duh-duh-duh ...

So anyway. On the occasion of one of my great aunts being sent off at Putney Vale, the furnaces were obviously going at full strength that day. There was the distinct smell of smoke and bits in the air and it really was unpleasant. My uncle took a deep breath and remarked, "Ah, ze ovens are vorking vell today!"

He was bombed out by the Luftwaffe as a boy. He's allowed to say things like that.

He will be missed.

Except you become as little children

"I'm off. I've left the dehumidifer running in the bathroom."

[Exasperated teenage sigh.] "You know, it's never going to dry out the bathroom completely because the toilet's full of water."

"No, but it will help the air dry and that will help the paint dry."

"What paint?"

"Didn't you notice that mum had repainted the wall?"

"No." [Pause.] "I did notice the bare patch had gone."

"Did you think it had just healed?"

"By the grace of God, strange things can happen even to walls ..."

This is not Bonusbarn

It is of course Martin Gore of Depeche Mode, c. 1981. But since Bonusbarn's new haircut, there is a distinct similarity, and I have had "Just can't get enough" going round in my head for the last couple of hours. Drat the child.

All those moments will be lost in time

Bonusbarn stuck his head round our door.

"I'm watching Blade Runner. Why have you never told me about this film?"

I'm a proud, proud stepfather.

Bringing it one step closer

And so it came to pass that a sleepy teenager was crowbarred into the car at 8am on a Saturday morning and driven by his equally sleepy stepfather to the University of the West of England for an open day. The teenager was able to sleep for most of the way down the M4.

"I've read it all on the web, I don't need to see it ..."

Though even he ultimately admitted he was glad he went.

Accommodation Lady couldn't handle the complexities of interrupting a Powerpoint presentation to show a filmclip off a DVD. Eventually a parent in the audience had to show her how. She got the filmclip running and immediately (for some reason) clicked on the Powerpoint in the background, which of course came to the front and blanked out the filmclip. I have never before heard such tragic two syllable desolation as her squeaked "oh no!"

I fancied I detected a stirring of interest next to me when she got to the university's Student Village: "en suite and wireless internet." I was not wrong.

The course of interest is joint honours in Criminology and Media & Cultural Studies (i.e. watching lots of CSI). Criminology Lady was faced with a roomful of about 100 assorted parents and would-be students. She would wander vaguely around with a pile of about five brochures to hand out, get rid of them all, notice with a start of surprise that there were still some other people who didn't have one, and get another five out of the box at the back of the room. I got hold of one before my pension became due by standing in front of her and not moving until she pressed one into my hands.

The Media Dudes scored the most points with a bit of two-way banter, an interesting presentation and just giving the impression of being guys you could get on with. One had a pigtail and had to be gently coaxed away from getting into a Mac vs Windows dialogue with a parent in a public meeting. (Perhaps he could have a useful word or two with Accommodation Lady?) Definitely a score, anyway.

The course would be at UWE's St Matthias campus, a pleasantly period (I'm guessing Victorian or early C20) place with sixties add-ons, apparently known as the Harry Potter Campus. Across the valley and the other side of the M32 is UWE's main Frenchay campus, sitting gleaming at the top of its hill like mighty Diaspar. That's where the Student Village is, and at some time in the next three years the course will move over there so that's where Bonusbarn will end up. So I took him on a drive around it, also showing him the offices of my ultimate masters, HEFCE (who provide the dosh) and JISC (who pass it on to us).

"They're on a university campus. You're in a science park. Why aren't you in charge of them?"

We tried to drive into the city centre. On a Saturday? I hear distant laughter from any readers who have actually met Bristol. Quite why someone decided to build the M32 on stilts through some quite pleasant pre-war suburbs, injecting traffic directly into the heart of the city, I don't know. He had to take my word for it that once you're through the tangled spaghetti of traffic lanes winding past the feet of concrete monstrosities, it's quite pleasant in there. He's probably taking a year out and he has friends who will be there next year, so they can show him round in due course.

It's quite possible I was present at the precise moment when Bonusbarn began to think seriously about being a student. Cor.

50 not out, and Biblical hit jobs

If either of us makes it to our 50th wedding anniversary we will be in our nineties. My parents are a little younger but then they started earlier. Still, 50 years, eh? The oldest friends I am still in touch with, I will have known for 31 years this September - I met them upon starting at a new school in September 1978. That's still not 50.

So, a weekend given over to due celebration of the Big Gold, and quite right too, in far better weather than we had any right to hope for. Mostly shirtsleeve order, with just the occasional sprinkling of a few molecules of water to remind us we were having the weather by special dispensation of grace only.

Saturday saw two dozen friends and family converging on the parental home, the criterion for non-family being that they (or at least a spousal partner) had to have been at the wedding itself. I asked one of the former bridesmaids if she was retired now.

"Yes, thanks. Fifty years, remember?!"

Well, okay, point taken but she was quite a young bridesmaid.

The one of my father's close army pals who isn't one of my godfathers, i.e. the one who became a multi-millionaire, remarked that he had been married for a total of 45 years. "To four different women, of course ..."

As well as hundredth birthdays, the Queen will apparently send congratulations to long-lasting couples ... but only starting at the 60th anniversary, so the Aged Ps will have to stick with each other for a while longer.

For Sunday we (family only) gatecrashed what used to be my grandmother's local church and was the one where the ceremony had taken place, 50 years and 24 hours earlier. I'm delighted to see it now has a lady vicar and what looks like a really thriving all-age congregation, and all that without going all ghastly and modern. Good on them.

It's a very pictureskew little village south of Salisbury but I had always thought of it as a rather staid retirement community. In my thirties, to my surprise, I met a retired Spitfire pilot who during the War had been shot down by Adolf Galland. Blimey, someone interesting! Where had he been all my life?

And yesterday I had someone pointed out to me: "He designed part of the Eurofighter ..."

And in my grandmother's former local, where we had lunch, there was a poster with photo in support of the village's team entry into the Spire FM Naked Gardener competition. (Apparently they won, too.)

Eurofighter gent also drew my attention to the legend inscribed around the pulpit: "I have a message from God unto thee." Even though I spent probably about half my Sunday mornings between the ages of 8-13 in that church, and many more before and after, I had never really noticed it and it would certainly never have occurred to me to look it up. Now I was gleefully told it is from Judges 3:

"... And Ehud said, I have a message from God unto thee. And he arose out of his seat.
²¹And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly:
²²And the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out."

There's lovely. I hope that's the kind of Bible reading they still do in their Sunday School.

To the Tower!

Here's a useful tip. If you're going to a Sunday morning service in the Chapel of St Peter Ad Vincula within the Tower of London, and provided you're pre-booked in (or just plain convincing, smartly dressed and clearly not a terrorist) you can get in for free. See, there is a plus side to an established state religion. Of course, it's probably best that you actually go to the service after that if only to establish some cred.

Or, in today's case, to attend (arriving five minutes late due to a crash [not ours] on the M4 and having to awaken a slumbering teenager at 7.30am on a Sunday) the christening of Junior Nephew in the same building that has previously seen the christening of his sister and brother and the marriage of his parents. This is a chapel royal and they do it ... differently to Christ Church on Long Furlong.

The medals worn by the vicar on his robes are the first clue (six of them, one with bar and a mention-in-despatches). The robes themselves are another. As the service progressed I had cause to discover (and feel quite pleased that) I can still mumble my way through the Venite, the Te Deum and the Jubilate, all in 1662 English. And I can safely say that the highly spiritual meditative aid that starts "Oh it's great great brill brill wicked wicked skill skill to have a friend in Jesus" has never rattled these particular rafters.

The rafters are however rattled by a marvellous choir who can hit their notes so perfectly that the sound just seems to come out of the air around you. We finished, as you would only expect, with the National Anthem and the final verse of "Eternal father strong to save"-

Oh Trinity of love and power
Our brethren shield in danger's hour.
From rock and tempest, fire and foe
Protect them wheresoe'r they go.
Thus ever more shall rise to thee
Glad hymns of praise from land sea.

In case this all seems a little overpowering, it's also worth mentioning that the choir master has a pony tail, he looks (from behind) like the lead singer of the Commitments, and at my niece's christening four years ago he played "The wheels on the bus" on the chapel organ for the benefit and delight of Senior Nephew.

Sometimes it's good to take a break, eh?

On previous occasions we've taken the opportunity to see the Crown Jewels, but not this time as the queue was winding around the block and there's some things even chapelgoers can't jump. As I recall they have a conveyor belt down either side to carry the tourists past, thus preventing build-ups of gawkers which is a very good idea. With only a small effort you can make the perceptual shift that you are standing still and it's the Crown Jewels that are gliding past, like a very expensive edition of the Generation Game. "A priceless diamond. An orb. A sceptre. A cuddly toy ..."

Then we repaired to Zizzis in St Katherine's Dock for lunch, where I had the seafood risotto "with a hint of chili". I would say more than a hint - it gave me several harsh nudges, a couple of curt requests and at one point it was outright barking orders at me. Very nice. I'm loath to admit to any good coming out of the Thatcher era at all, but sheer honesty often forces me to admit that quite a lot did and one of these things is the renovation of the Docklands. If a building has to be one thing or the other, would you rather an Italian restaurant with a slightly experimental menu or a mouldering warehouse that's no good to anyone except rats? Not a hard choice to make.

Why the slippers were red

The participants in this conversation were a middle-aged prime of life man whose degree course included a year on Comparative Communist Systems, and a child born three years after the Berlin Wall came down and who is now studying the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalin.

See if you can guess which speaker is which.

- "Yugoslavia had maybe the most successful communist system, though it was only held together by Tito-"

- "Dorothy's dog?"

- [after baffled pause] "what?"

- "Dorothy, in that film ..."

- "The Wizard of Oz?"

- "... had a dog called-"

- "TOTO!"

- "Oh. Well. It's only one vowel."

Pratchett, games and lists

To the Unicorn Theatre last night for the latest of the Studio Theatre Club's Pratchett plays. The group has gone back to its roots with a revised version of the very first such play that it did, in 1991, a few months before I came to Abingdon and a year before Bonusbarn was born. Wyrd Sisters: The Director's Cut.

The usual high standards; nigh on perfect casting all round. It was a shame they left Death out but you can't have everything. Plays also can't include lines of narrative text: I remember from the novel the lovely line "they turned to see a dwarf trying to loom over them". Also difficult on stage would have been the bit where someone tries to sit in a chair occupied by the ghost of the dead king. "Is someone sitting here?" / "Yes ..."

On the way back home Bonusbarn gave an interesting insight into the politics of gamery, or the workings of his own mind, or both, speaking contemptuously of the people sitting in the row in front, who I would guess to have been students. "I’m never going to be that nerdy. They were talking about Magic: The Gathering. That’s a card game."

… which led on to a discussion of which is better, a technologically accomplished piece of work graphical like World of Warcraft, where everything is laid out for you on screen, or a proper role playing game (you may see where my prejudices lie) where you may have a few props and enabling items but the main action takes place in the imagination.

… which led on to a reminder (following from his suspicious identification of my ability to recognise authentic player-talk) that I was in the university SFSoc in my day, even though I hardly ever went to a meeting because they clashed with scuba diving on Thursday evenings and so I just turned up to the end of term video weekends.

[Sigh] "Were you the president?"

"No."

"Did the president have long hair and a trench coat?"

Um. Thinks. I do remember a long(ish) haired president. I also remember a trench coat. I forget if they were the same person. But …

Hm.

Which leads on to something almost completely different but saves me doing two blog posts where one will do. Apparently the Guardian is having one of those prescriptive moments that the national press do so love and is listing the 1000 books everyone must read. They’ve now got down to science fiction and fantasy titles. There’s 149 of them (for the sake of convenience Discworld, Narnia, His Dark Materials etc. count as one title each) and the full list is kindly summarised here so I pinched it.

Some I've never heard of; some (I'm looking at you, Rowling) I'm thinking "what??" With the possible exception of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell I'm thinking that any book published in the last five years is too recent to say everyone should read it; I'd say published this century except that China Mieville's there (though not with the title I'd have chosen). But anyway, here's the list again, with the ones I’ve read (60/149 = 40%) in bold.

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)
Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)
Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)
JG Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)
JG Ballard: Crash (1973)
JG Ballard: Millennium People (2003)
Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)
Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)
Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)
Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)
Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)
Greg Bear: Darwin’s Radio (1999)
William Beckford: Vathek (1786)
Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Poppy Z Brite: Lost Souls (1992)
Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland (1798)
Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)
Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)
Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960) [seen the film; does that count?]
Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)
Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912)
William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)
Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)
Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)
Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)
Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)
Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
Angela Carter: The Passion of New Eve (1977)
Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)
Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
Arthur C Clarke: Childhood’s End (1953)
GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)
Michael G Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)
Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)
Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)
Samuel R Delaney: The Einstein Intersection (1967)
Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Philip K Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Thomas M Disch: Camp Concentration (1968)
Umberto Eco: Foucault’s Pendulum (1988)
Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)
John Fowles: The Magus (1966)
Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)
Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973) [didn’t understand it, but read it]
William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)
William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)
Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)
M John Harrison: Light (2002)
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
Robert A Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)
Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)
Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)
James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)
Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)
PD James: The Children of Men (1992)
Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)
Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)
Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)
Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966)
Stephen King: The Shining (1977)
Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)
Ursula K Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Ursula K Le Guin: The Earthsea series (1968-1990)
Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)
Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
CS Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56)
MG Lewis: The Monk (1796)
David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)
Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)
Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)
Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)
Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)
Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)
Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)
China Miéville: The Scar (2002) [why this and not Perdido St Station?]
Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)
Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)
Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)
William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)
Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)
Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)
Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003)
Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970)
Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)
Flann O’Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)
Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)
George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)
Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)
Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)
Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)
Frederik Pohl & CM Kornbluth: The Space Merchants (1953)
John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932)
Terry Pratchett: The Discworld series (1983- )
Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)
Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials (1995-2000)
François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)
Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)
Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)
Joanna Russ: The Female Man (1975)
Geoff Ryman: Air (2005)
Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943)
José Saramago: Blindness (1995)
Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)
Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)
Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)
Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)
Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)
Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)
JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937)
JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889)
Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)
Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)
Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)
Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)
Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)
HG Wells: The Time Machine (1895)
HG Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)
TH White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)
Angus Wilson: The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)
Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)
Virginia Woolf: Orlando (1928)
John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)
John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) [what happened to The Chrysalids?]
Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)

Bonus Bonusbarn

Work has had a desktop calendar printed for customers and clients, advertising a different service for each month of the year. January's is for educational videoconferencing content and features the face of a schoolchild reflected in an astronaut's visor as he peers in.

I don't know who the astronaut is but the schoolkid who posed for the picture is none other than my stepson, the one and only Bonusbarn. Except that he's no longer one and only, we had 1000 of the things printed. All my close-by colleagues have one on their desks. I walk around the office and I see him everywhere. Please, roll on February.

At least I'm not at the BETT show this week, where our stand includes a 10ft high image of the same glowering down at the public. [Shudders]

Is thermoregulation different for teenagers?

Put it this way. You're sitting having your breakfast in the living room of a clear December morning and you feel a little cold. You're wearing just a t-shirt on top. Do you put on:

• a) another layer?
• b) a scarf?

If you just answered (b) then experience suggests you may be a teenager. Or at least a teenager with half-Swedish blood.

In your Dreams

One of Bonusbarn's conversational gambits - usually when he's bored and no one has spoken for five seconds, so there's a gaping void of silence to fill - is "when can I have a new bed?"

The question is much more reasonable now than it was two years ago. He sleeps in the same high riser he's used for the last seven years. He is now long enough to fill it exactly, and when he climbs up into it, he can feel it beginning to tilt as the centre of gravity shifts. But there is a lot of storage space under it and, because you should always play hard to get when granting teenage requests, my usual reply is "show how you can fit everything in with a normal bed."

Which, irritatingly, is what he spent most of yesterday doing, rearranging his room and turning out bagfuls of rubbish. By teatime, it really would have seemed churlish to say "well, maybe at Christmas ..." So today we ventured out to buy one.

Beds are like carpets - it's very hard to find an outlet that insists on selling them at full price. We settled on Dreams, which is not only having a multimega 50% sale (okay, Coxeters was having an actual closing down sale, which is hard to beat, but almost everything was gone so we went with the next best thing) but offers a free Dreams sleeping kit with it. This consists of:

• a dream catcher. "Do you believe in dream catchers?" the salesman asked. "No," said the prospective user. You could see the man's face fall.
• a Sounds of Sleep CD, "including soothing compositions from Chopin, Vivaldi and Schubert".
• a sleeping candle, lavender scented.
• a blindfold with a pair of long eyelashed, slumbering eyes tastefully embroidered thereupon.
• a book on Understanding Dreams, (c) Nerys Dee 1991 (relationship to Dr Dee unknown). Open randomly at page 39: "Telepathic communication often takes place during dreams, usually spontaneously." Quietly close it again.

Plus, if we hang onto the documentation, in ten years time we can go back to Dreams and buy a replacement at a discount. Bonusbarn's 26th birthday present is sorted.

Granted, by the end of this Sunday afternoon I've spent more money than I thought I would on Friday evening, but I think good was done. Unusually, he even settled for one of the cheaper options available because he genuinely liked it, despite the salesman's subtle attempts to push him further up the price range. It arrives a week tomorrow.

"I need a new desk," he said as we left the shop ...

So that's what the inside of a keyboard looks like

Bonusbarn's laptop means that the remaining computers in the family can be redistributed. At long last Best Beloved gets her own PC!

Meaning that first it must be debonusbarned.

Lord knows what he's done to it in the last two years but the 30 second boot up time had somehow deterioriated to several minutes. The simplest solution was to restore Windows XP to its old settings. By a miracle similar to the loaves and fishes, he had kept the restoration disk. That bit was no problem.

With the software crud out of the way it was time tackle the hardware crud, which was the most fun bit. A combination of Mr Muscle and Henry dislodged about a ton of biological waste from the keyboard. He is now quite hairy; well, he would look like Cousin It if that lot was still on his head rather than stuck between the keys. And then we unscrewed the back - by now, more out of a sense of adventure and "because we can". The Page Down key was sticky; something very similar to jam (but we weren't going to taste it to check) had accumulated around it on the rubber membrane that the keys stick in to. More Mr Muscle. Marvellous stuff.

The wine glass is to keep the screws from the keyboard in. Trust me.

End of an era

That's a bit of a cliché, but when a 96 year old great aunt dies you're allowed to use it. My grandmother will shortly be 99 and so I may be using it again within the next year or so, but M got there first.

We were the only ones to call her M. Her initials were MDLWG and her family had always called her L. Her husband, G (who we really did call G, as in the initial, the seventh letter of the alphabet) decided he preferred M instead so that's what later generations called her.

Her eulogy at yesterday's funeral was eye opening. I knew she had been a Wren during WW2. I didn't know that before the war she had been earning a living as a single woman, and owned a car, and was able to strip and clean an engine. And I certainly didn't know that during the war she commanded 1000 Wrens decoding stuff at Bletchley Park. You don't often think "bloody hell!" during a funeral but this occasion was the exception.

I shouldn't have been surprised. She spent nearly 20 years almost blind, with audio books her salvation. A couple of years ago I recorded The New World Order for her as a present. I let her know I was doing this and she was delighted. "If you could put it onto CD for me, that would be perfect," said this frail, elderly lady in her nineties ... Wow, I thought, then. And now I know why technology never held any fears for her.

In fact, even G didn't know about her involvement at Bletchley Park until it was declassified - whereupon, after what must have been over 20 years of marriage, she calmly told him a few home truths about various missions he had been on during the war which he hadn't known she had known about. Where is a good fly on the wall when you really need one?

She it was who was Chief Wren in Ceylon (Sri Lanka to be) after the war. When she reached the rank of Commander she wrote to her brother, my grandfather, pointing out that being of equal rank but in the senior service she now took precidence. He wrote back to say that when she could spell precedence, she could have it. Knowing how meticulous she was about, well, everything, that must have rankled.

She had a firm Christian faith, which apparently she got when she sensed God's protecting presence as she lay in a hospital ward, too ill to be moved, in London during the Blitz as the bombs rained down around her. Hard to argue with. She had a much more traditional Anglican outlook than I did - for instance, she always lamented my generation's disregard for olde English translations and ceremony, and I remember discussing/arguing about Confirmation with her. Her outlook was that it's better to be confirmed than not. I had seen far too many contemporaries go through it and take some pretty important vows just for the presents afterwards, and so my view was that it's really better to mean it first. However, she was fully in favour of women priests, remarriage of divorcees in church and other things that still give the C of E hangups. In other words, her faith really was a faith, something that lived and breathed within her, rather than dryly following the rulebook.

Everything she did in life she did quietly, without fuss and without complaining, and she did it resolutely and well. On a beautiful summer day last month she pottered about in the garden, felt a little unwell, went upstairs and quietly died.

There was one more thing that I learnt yesterday, something she had never mentioned to me, which might be grounds for being nervous. If there's any member of the family I would trust to have a prophetic word, it was her, and apparently she always thought I would go into the church ...

Call me Bulgaria

My niece by marriage is about halfway to becoming a mother later this year. That means I will be a Great Uncle. I'm 43!!

And while I'm still reeling from that, Best Beloved tells me that the Swedish prefix for 'great-' in this context is 'gammel', which just means 'old'.

I already wear a cardigan from time to time. I may have to invest in a shawl and some half-moon glasses too.

You ought not to swear at your stepson

For the last week or so Bonusbarn and I have each been faced with a puzzle in our respective computing activities. I - the householder, the breadwinner, the one who pays for and regards our household broadband connection as a business expense - was wondering why the automatic backup wasn't backing up at 6pm each evening, as it's supposed to. It would start. I would go off to have dinner. I would come back to find it had given up.

He, freeloading parasite off the network by my grace and that alone, was wondering why around 6pm each day the available bandwidth for World of Warcraft shrunk down so low that WoW becomes unplayable.

Problem solved! Backup starts. Bandwidth shrinks. Unaware of the backup, he resets the router without thinking to tell me about it. Backup ends prematurely. WoW back to normal. At 6pm the next day, the cycle recommences.

We finally worked this out yesterday. He came in to reset the router and found me staring at the backup status on the monitor, trying to catch the moment it stopped. Um.

He was most put out to learn that I regard WoW as a frippery, not a basic human right that should be provided by the state. My 100% lack of interest in his ability to make pixels run around the screen and pretend to kill each other was a personal affront. This was not what Alan Turing did all that work for. Still, I tried to be reasonable, I really did. The backup (unlike WoW), I pointed out, is actually necessary. It's a duty of care to the people on whose behalf I do work. So what does he suggest I do? Ideas and solutions were batted about, but the sad fact is that any backing up be while I'm around in the evening (I don't leave the computer on all day) and thus would inevitably cut into the time that he might like to be playing WoW.

Or, of course, he could just do some revision or get a life while it happens.

"Well," he said, "it's a bit inconvenient ..."

And that, I'm afraid, is when it just blurted out. A paraphrase of God's command to Creation, but in a more vulgate version. It took him aback. Me too.

But isn't it nice that after (nearly) two years of familyness we can still learn new things about each other.

Light absorbing ovines

For many, many years (until the advent of the internet) the only Jeapeses I knew, or knew of, were ones I was directly related to. Then suddenly, around the mid-nineties, others started getting in touch. Eventually it was even possible to piece together a fairly sketchy history of the Jeapes family. It still seems odd to see a first name that isn't one of a repertoire of eight (nine if you include my lovely wife) appended to my surname.

Like Jesse Jeapes, for instance, who lived in the mid nineteenth century and who had four daughters.

And today I learnt that Jesse was a policeman, constable no. C146 to be precise. (Unless, of course, there were two Jesse Jeapeses, which isn’t impossible.) A right little thief taker he was too, being cited as a witness in 13 of the 19 cases you get if you enter JEAPES as a search term in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey.

George Jeapes, a witness in two cases, was constable D152. We’re a law abiding lot.

Apart that is from William Jeapes (17) who on 25 February 1895 pleaded guilty to a burglary in the dwelling-house of John Campbell Wells, and stealing a purse, a pair of stockings, a pair of gloves, and £2 10s. in money. I am shocked, shocked to my core. Mind you, I happen to know there was a William Jeapes who was a company director in 1929, so maybe he went straight. The little brute got six months hard labour so maybe some good came of it.

Henry Jeapes, witness in a fraud case of 16 November 1903, was an accountant, so there are black sheep in every family.

Something in the air

Family lore says that Pilot Officer Sidney Jeapes was killed in action over Germany on 25 April 1944, though I'm not sure precisely where. He wasn't in my direct line of ancestors - no more than a very distant cousin. And curiously enough, on the same night the Boy's great-uncle was killed when his Lancaster was shot down over Munich.

So Best Beloved was moved to do some web searching and see exactly what else was going on over Germany on that date ...

And, wow. From the Bomber Command history page, we learn that on 25 April 1944 Germany was attacked by ...

• Karlsruhe: 369 Lancasters, 259 Halifaxes, 9 Mosquitos. 11 Lancasters and 8 Halifaxes lost.
• Munich: 244 Lancasters and 16 Mosquitos. 9 Lancasters lost.
• 165 aircraft carried out a diversionary sweep over the North Sea to a point 75 miles off the German coast. 2 Wellingtons lost.
• 23 Mosquitos bombed Düsseldorf.
• 6 Lancasters dropped flares and target indicators over Milan as a diversion for the Munich raid
• 4 Stirlings to Chambly railway depot, 18 Halifaxes minelaying off Channel ports and in the Frisians, 7 aircraft on Resistance operations. No aircraft lost.
• Total effort for the night: 1,160 sorties, 30 aircraft lost.

And that, boys and girls, was a typical night out in 1944.