Miscellany.

Ryanair leads the way.

The Tories berated the government for its ‘slow’ handling of the problem of repatriating British tourists stranded by the Icelandic eruption. Though God knows what Brown could have done other than he did. However we can comfort ourselves that, once the Cameroons have taken over, the market place will handle things so much better than ‘big government’. As a foretaste we have RyanAir initially refusing to reimburse stranded passengers for their living expenses and only backing down because there is an EU law which requires them to honour their commitments. A pity Nick Clegg didn’t raise this during Thursday’s leaders’ debate in Bristol, rather than going along with the eurosceptics’  twisted view of Europe and trotting out a story about how long it took the ‘bureaucrats’ to define chocolate. Given that most people loathe Ryanair even more than they do the EU, pointing out this example of EU legislation standing up for the rights of the ordinary person might have won some converts. But I think Ron Liddle has said all that needs to be about the LibDems’ boy wonder.

  And it’s not only Ryanair showing the compassionate and caring side of the airline industry. Rather than putting stranded passengers on the first available flight BA is flogging off any spare capacity at hugely inflated prices. Their ‘explanation’ of this extraordinarily callous behaviour was laughable. Yet, to its eternal shame,  Radio 4 reported it without comment.

Fictional selves.

In the days when I was paid to bore people about  the English novel, I read an interesting article on the relation between real life and fiction. It suggested that novels were popular because we all try to create novels out of our lives: give them a shape, pattern and significance which they lack in reality. 

  At the time, Walter Mitty wannabes aside,  fictionalising one’s life was largely for self-consumption. You told yourself that you were much, nicer, cleverer etc than other people appreciated. In other words you played the implied author - as distinct from either the actual author or the narrator - to the novel of your life. The advent of the net has greatly increased the scope for this activity. Some people create on-line avatars, others write blogs, and some restrict themselves to on-line reviews. The problem is that putting something on-line doesn’t feel real. You’re not speaking to someone face-to-face, there’s no one to argue back. It’s not even like publishing a book which involves meetings with publishers and editors. If you’re writing a blog you’re fairly safe: it’s the twenty-first century equivalent of vanity publishing. Apart from those forming part of an on-line edition of a newspaper or magazine they’re largely unread. On-line reviews, though, as Orlando Figes has discovered to his cost are a different matter. Interestingly he chose the pseudonym ‘Orlando-Birbeck ’ when writing his reviews. Hardly the most cunning way of preserving your anonymity if you’re a professor at Birbeck College. But I don’t think he realised that this was an issue. After all he was writing for the web: and that’s not like writing for the TLS. It’s merely an extension of a private conversation with yourself, part of creating your implied author. As a high-powered academic Figes probably doesn’t read Science Fiction. If he did he’d know that there are certain points where it’s possibly to cross unwittingly from one parallel universe to another. Unfortunately for Orlando he’d stumbled upon just such a point. Unlike Ariosto and Woolf’s eponymous protagonists his creation straddled both the real and the virtual worlds. 

The Dave chairs regenerate.

When we bought our house it contained only one easy chair. Not so bad before we took up permanent residence. Rather a pain when we had, and were waiting for the sitting-room to be restored to house our three-piece suite. Disastrous when we had friends to stay and there was only one chair to go between the four of us. So the very tatty chair we’d inherited with the house was reborn as two rather smarter easy chairs for the kitchen. Doctor Who has had to regenerate eleven times; after six years our Dave chairs have just morphed for the second time. Until we acquired Meg they were fine. But not only, like Eva, did she climb on them for a snooze, but she decided to start eating the cushions. The problem was compounded by Eva’s recently developed, and occasional, incontinence. Although it’s pretty common for old people’s houses to smell of urine, it’s usually their own. Hence the new chairs. In order to prevent the dogs wrecking them our Matt Smith updates fold up. All we have to do now is to remember to collapse them whenever we leave the kitchen.