2009 Brussels 20km

It's time to start seriously preparing for this year's Brussels 20km run. It is on 31 May, which means there are only three more weeks to train. So far I think I'm OK - I'm running 15 km every Sunday without any problem - no blisters, no pulled muscles, no heart attack! Hopefully the stretch to 20 km will not be too hard - I'm hoping that the extra adrenalin that such an evnt produces will carry me to the finishing line. Unfortunately the last 5 km, that I have not yet added to my training schedule, include the notorious Avenue de Tervuren/Tervurenlaan, a long hill that comes just at the point when the very last thing you want is a hill.

February 14 - no love for Salman Rushdie

Lesser known than St Valentine's Day, February 14 this year is also the 20th anniversary of the issuing of the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his book The Statanic Verses.

I've read The Satanic Verses, and frankly don't see what the fuss was about. I suppose that Ayatollah Khomeini hadn't read the book, but I'm far from an expert on the workings of the religious mind so maybe there's something I didn't see. Either way, I'm glad that nobody was foolish enough to try to act on the Fatwa, and that Rushdie is still alive and well (I saw his cameo role in Bridget Jones's Diary again recently). It's a pity, though, that he had to live his life in fear for a decade because of the inability of an aged cleric to understand the modern world.

I recently read Rushdie's earlier book, Midnight's Children, for which he not only won the 1981 Booker Prize but also won a unique 'Best of Bookers' in 2008. Both well deserved prizes - it is a much better book than The Satanic Verses and presents a convincing picture of an India (and Pakistan) that few westerners know. Written in a disarmingly simple style, its message is powerful and moving. At times you feel that the true central character is Mumbai itself, Rushdie's birthplace and obviously a place that exerts a strong influence on its natives. But the story goes well beyond Mumbai and brings the reader with it brilliantly.

By coincidence Slumdog Millionaire, also a film with Mumbai as its unforgettable backdrop, came out not long after I read Midnight's Children. It presents another, but not inconsistent, view of that great city. I think we'll be hearing more and more from Mumbai as India moves more decisively towards the global mainstream.

Brussels Metro 2009

Today they finally put up maps of the new arrangement of the Metro lines in the trains themselves, but so far the new map is not on the STIB/MIVB website. The new arrangement will start on 4 April.

The new arrangement adds only a small extra piece of track, between Clemenceau and Gare de l'Ouest/Weststation, but they have taken the opportunity to completely rearrange the Metro lines. Where before there were three lines, known (confusingly) as 1A, 1B and 2, there will be four, to be known as (stll confusingly) as 1, 2, 5 and 6. The missing lines 3 and 4 are not actually metro lines - they are the 'through-town' tramlines which used to be clled 'pré-metro' lines. Got all that? Good.

Anyway, I will be on line 5, which will go from Herrmann-Debroux to Erasmus (instead of Heysel at present). There will also be a kind of circular line going around the centre of town (the old Line 2, but now all joined up). It isn't yet clear if it will go in a continuous circle, or if it will go back and forth like a circular pendulum.

All in all it will mean quite a few changes in the way we look at the Metro. With four lines it will make Brusels seem like really grown-up big city. But for our daily lives I don't really see much change, on the eastern side of town anyway. Over in Gare de l'Ouest/Weststation, the only place along with Beekkant where all four lines will run, it will make a lot of difference I suppose. If they increase the frequency, which is already quite good, it will be an extra bonus.

Belgian Boat Show

Don't bother, if you're a sailor.

I drove to Gent this morning to go to the Belgian Boat Show. Although I am not yet an active sailor, it is my intention to get a boat one day - a real boat, a sail boat. But the Belgian Boat Show had, ... well ..., almost none to see. There were about 10 superboats, of 10 metres length or more, and price tags to match, and two (yes 2) smaller 'day sailor' boats. But the whole large range of 7 to 10 metre boats was entirely missing, and yet this is both the most popular range, and the most affordable.

There were a few (but not many) dinghies, and a lot of motor boats - basically macho boats, all white leather seats, champagne bottle holders and chrome.

So, if you are looking for a power boat, something to make you feel cool and trendy on the Cote d'Azur, then go to the Belgian Boat Show. Otherwise don't bother.

Me, I'll be going to the Paris Boat Show next year.

What happened to the 1980s?

In economic terms the 1980s seem to be returning in my country – unemployment is increasing rapidly, factories are closing every day, and people are starting to feel poor again.

But although I remember the 1980s all too well for exactly those reasons, it seems that in one sense I slept through most of the decade.

I analysed the music on my MP3 player by date of original recording, to see if it would show a peak of musical preference at a particular moment in my life. The results are shown below (with the raw figures grouped in five-year averages to avoid a too-spiky graph):


What the results show is that, as is normal, I have a visible preference for the music of my teenage years (the peak on the left). However, I have almost as great a liking for the music of the 1990s and 2000s. The surprise (for me) was that I seem to have no great liking for the music of the 1980s. Apart from 1988, which is quite well represented, I have an average of two tracks per year from the 1980s on my MP3. The question, of course, is not why I have those tracks, but why I do not have the others. So I checked back to see what was popular during the 1980s, to find that it was the decade of: ABC, Tina Turner, INXS, Hall and Oates, Bananarama, Pat Benatar, Whitesnake, Duran Duran, Billy Idol, Whitney Houston, Thompson Twins, John Cougar Mellencamp, The Police, Phil Collins, Lionel Richie, Cyndi Lauper, Bon Jovi, Huey Lewis & The News, Tears for Fears, The Go-Gos, Run D.M.C., Culture Club, Bryan Adams, Prince, Billy Joel, The Bangles and Wham!

OK, that explains it then!

Hunger

I recently went to see Hunger, a film about the 1981 hunger strike in Northern Ireland, and more particularly about Bobby Sands, the first of the men to go on hunger strike and the first to die.

For me at least the film was unsatisfying. The hunger strikes had been such a large part of my own life at the time that I learned nothing new, either factually or emotionally. I know what happened, and I knew the passions on both sides - passions I shared, I would have been at Bobby Sands funeral if it had not coincided with my university exams.

The most strange thing about the film is the way it completely ignores everything that happened outside the prison, with the exception of the assassination of one prison guard. By doing so, it gives the impression that the hunger strikes were an intimate action that happened only within the secrecy of the prison, when in fact they represented a massive explosion of popular anger and activism. Hundreds of thousands of people marched, organised, agitated, and voted in support of the hunger strikers, but this was ignored in the film. The fact that Bobby Sands was elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone during his hunger strike was relegated to a mere title at the end of the film. Yet this is a fact that remains significant in Northern Irish politics a generation later.

Clearly the producer (Steve McQueen) set out to present only the intimacy of Bobby Sands life and death in the prison, but to an audience ignorant of the background this could have the effect of making the whole thing seem irrelevant. I watched the film in a Brussels cinema surrounded by Belgians who, in all likelihood, did not even recognise the voice-over of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps believing her entirely one-sided statements to reflect a 'neutral' narrator. The bilingual subtitling did not make clear that the drawling voice was one of the main protagonists in the story.

The Beach, by Alex Garland

I got (gently) criticised for piggy-backing on Amazon.com reviews when I blogged a few of the books I have read recently, so this time I'll ignore Amazon, and try to use only my own words.

My first thoughts on The Beach, before I started it, were slightly negative. My copy (shown above) has Leonardo di Caprio on the cover, as he starred in the film version of the book. I haven't seen the film, so I don't know what it is like, but when publishers use a film to retro-sell the book, it worries me. In addition, the group of figures on the cover (on Leonardo's chest!) look like an ad for Lost.

The book was not what I had expected, though.

Richard, the main character and narrator, is a credible example of the kind of rich western youngster that is seeking ever more extreme excitement in south-east Asia. His characterisation is fairly moderate - Garland resists the temptation to make him either heroic or anti-heroic. He just is what he is, warts and all. The cover blurb refers to Generation X, and in some senses Richard is a classic example of the stereotype - well-versed in TV and film culture, but largely uninterested in the actual cultures of the countries he is travelling in.

The plot is a strange mixture of utopian fantasy and The Lord of the Flies. Again, the cover blurb refers to The Lord of the Flies, but I had had that feeling even before I succumbed to the temptation of reading the cover reviews. The similarity, though was clear to several of the reviewers. Initially, though, I was more interested in the sense that Garland was trying to describe a type of Generation X utopia - an isolated beautiful spot inhabited by young people from all over the (western) world, where food and dope are free and plentiful, modern problems like illness and boredom are absent, and everyone is cool. Curiously absent is any mention of Generation X's other recreation, sex.

The utopia gets strained, though, and the modern world intrudes, ultimately destroying paradise. Perhaps Garland was trying to make some deep point, but it gets lost in the plot. Ultimately the book is simply a good read, retaining all the reader's attention right up to the end, which in typical Generation X style is a bit of a blur. Richard, the narrator, tends to take both the life and death of paradise fairly stoically, as if such things are expected by the jaded 'traveller'.

Garland's style is fairly sparse but effective. You are drawn into the book slowly - there are no clever literary hooks to grab you - but before long you want to continue reading simply because the book is interesting and readable. You don't really identify with Richard - he's too shallow for that - but you follow him nonetheless.

All in all, a good book, and Garland is a writer with talent. I have also read The Coma, his second book, and I would really ecomment that too.