Peters and Rankin

I came across some of Ellis Peters' non-Brother Cadfael murder mysteries at an op shop in Devonport the other day, none of which I'd read or seen before. Decided to start with A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs. It's an Inspector Felse mystery, though since he's on holiday with his family in this one his detective work is minimal. The plot is neat enough, with a few surprises, though I thought I'd figured out the villain early on, and for once was right. Except that things weren't quite as they seemed, and Peters had one or two twists up her sleeve before the end.
The dialogue made things seem very dated - it was written in 1965. Perhaps the most curious thing was having both the 18-year-old and the 15-year-old boys in the story call their respective mothers Mummy.  Even among the middle-classes of that period I would have thought this was a little odd.  In this book the characters don't seem to have distinctive voices, and sometimes when Peters doesn't qualify who's speaking, you can't actually tell who's speaking from what's being said. It seems that it takes a much stronger character, like Cadfael, to lift the bar for Peters.  In the Cadfael books it's generally seemed to me that most of the characters had personality - as opposed to having it described. I find this with Agatha Christie too.  If one of her strong characters, such as Poirot, or Miss Marple, is missing, the tone of the dialogue goes downhill.  These strong characters somehow make the other characters take on more life.  Of course there are Christie books in which nothing comes alive, but they aren't the majority.
I finished reading another book I picked up secondhand, last night: Ian Rankin's Doors Open. Compared to the more well-known Rebus books (Rebus is another character who lifts everything around him) this is largely a lightweight story, though it has an intricate plot and some considerable violence towards the end.  But it shows that Rankin isn't going to die as an author if he's not writing about Rebus. Still, the main character here isn't as rounded as Rebus, and he and the other characters are mostly subservient to the plot. The characters aren't memorable, as Rebus is, but they do well enough given their own room to play in, and the story is very entertaining, especially the way in which the professional criminal (as opposed to the amateurs he's surrounded by) keeps us guessing as to whether he's actually got a heart with a leaning towards culture or not.
The plot centres around an improbable heist - pinching reasonably famous, and certainly valuable, paintings from the storage warehouse belonging to Scotland's National Gallery, replacing them with fakes and then pretending there was no actual heist at all. Of course it all unravels, and the best part of the book is seeing how the various individuals react to the unravelling.  If you've had enough of gloomy Rebus for the time being (and when you think you have you find you can still take more of him) try this one out.  You'll read it in great gulps.

Exit Music

While we were touring around over the last couple of weeks, I dropped into a few secondhand bookshops (and one or two new book shops, as well).  In Picton, if I remember correctly, I found a very good secondhand bookshop and a proprietor happy to talk at length if I'd so desired.  He had a copy of Ian Rankin's Exit Music, originally intended to the the last in the Rebus series.  We had this on CD, but I'd never listened to it, so I got the trade paperback he had in stock.

Having just read the most recent Rebus book, Standing in Another Man's Grave, in which Rebus, although officially retired, is in no way devoid of his usual energy and insight, it was a bit odd to go back a step and see him preparing for imminent retirement.  Like the latest book, hinges on a huge red herring, though in saying that, the red herring here is actually a vital part of how the book works itself out, rather more so than in the most recent story.

In the first chapter the body of a Russian poet is found on the street in Edinburgh, and everyone who appears in the story - and I mean everyone - is in some way involved with this man, from politicians to small time crooks, from drug addicts to pushers, from academics to bankers.  Not a soul is outside the ever-widening circle of people who are affected.  It's so well written it would easily have made a fitting climax to the Rebus series, and Rebus himself is in fine form - ageing  but not old; sarcastic but witty, anti-authoritarian yet endeavouring to train the younger police officers to respect the right channels.  He knows from his own career how difficult it is to go against the flow.

There's a lot of warmth in this book; more than in some of the Rebus stories.  There's minimal violence - apart from the murder(s) obviously - though the arch villain Big Ger Cafferty comes a bit of a cropper, much to Rebus' annoyance (!)  It's the sort of cropper that could see Cafferty die before he pays his dues.  Rebus would much prefer that he's put behind bars legitimately.

Perhaps, having read the two most recent Rebus titles back to front, I should continue in the same vein, and read through the series again, in reverse!

Standing in Another Man's Grave

Ian Rankin's latest book features Rebus again, that incorrigible policeman who works as much by hunch and instinct as by the rule book; perhaps more so.  Certainly he "solves" the crime in this story purely by hunch in a way that's a little less than satisfactory for the reader: the murderer comes out of nowhere almost, so that much of the book is about red herrings rather than about pinning down a particular character as the villain.  In fact, many of Rankin's books are more about the characters than about the mystery, although the mysteries can be very intricate.  They aren't really whodunnits in the sense that the reader can work out who murdered someone, but more about peeling back layer upon layer and revealing the corruption at the heart of a particular set of circumstances.  There's quite a bit of that here too, with some of the obvious villains being exposed, a young man revealing himself as more villainous than he first appears, and the presence of Cafferty, that perennial thorn in Rebus's side, who is still pulling strings - though less successfully here than elsewhere because he too, like Rebus, is feeling the effects of old age.

Old age pervades the book, and what Rebus is going to do with his retirement is a major question.  He knows little else besides police work and it obviously energises him.  At the opening he's back working after having officially retired, this time for the underfunded cold case office which is due to be disbanded  at the drop of a hat.  He's also considering reapplying for the force but he's hounded by Malcolm Fox, the main character from the two Complaints books (who appears here rather differently, since we're not in sympathy with him particularly and Rebus certainly isn't).  Fox is out to get Rebus, the man who's broken so many rules in the past, but Rebus is always too wily, too old-school for him.  

The story mostly concerns a missing girl, who may have been murdered.  It's a case Rebus should never have taken on; indeed, he only comes across it by accident, and it's almost by accident that he stumbles across the possibility of a serial killer at work, and the consequences of what that brings.  Rebus has a knack for going outside the boundaries, for insulting people with wit and insouciance, for mentoring Siobhan Clarke, his young police companion from many previous books, even though she's never quite sure if his style of mentoring is satisfactory. (Fox definitely doesn't think it is.)   He can undercut authority without blinking and keeps the pompous in their place.  He's a rich character and it's not surprising Rankin has given him yet another outing after implying he wouldn't write any more books about him. 

There's an enormous amount of chasing around the countryside in this one - Rebus, in particular, spends a lot of time on the road following up hunches - and Rankin delights in describing the nature of the different areas, in describing the traffic snarl-ups and the queues and the road works and the huge trucks getting in everyone's way.  He plainly has a love-hate relationship with Scotland and its traffic.   You almost need a map beside you to keep tabs on all the shifting scenes. In fact it might help to make more sense of how much driving Rebus actually does, sometimes alone and sometimes with others and where he's going.  Maybe I'll do that next time I read the book!

Door precedence

Alexander McCall Smith is a writer I've quoted before on this blog, though never at length as I'm about to do here.  He's a prolific writer, and seldom uproariously funny, yet there's a wonderful crazy sense of humour underlying his books that only occasionally bursts into all-out mode.  I've read most of McCall Smith's books because, for a while, the editor of the Books page of a paper I review for would invariably send me anything by him.  Unfortunately there's been a change of editor and I note that someone else is getting his books to review these days. 

Anyway, the 44 Scotland St series is one of my favourites, although in fact they're the most rambly series you're likely to come across.  There's little in the way of plot (something they share with most of the AMS books), lots of characters whose lives only marginally intersect, and a goldmine of a child called Bertie.  Bertie is ostensibly six, and has remained so over a period of several years.  In the book I'm reading just now, which I happened to come across on the library bus the other day, he's going to turn seven.  This is momentous!

But Bertie doesn't appear in the following extract, which is taken from pages 36-8 of The Importance of Being Seven.  This ramble on the topic of who should open a door for whom comes out of nowhere, and has nothing to do with the story, and shows McCall Smith at his quirky best: funny, but not laugh-out-loud funny. 

...while Scotland has an order of precedence, it is never enforced and people may walk through doors in front of others who really should be allowed to go through the door before them.  That, of course, is how things should be; who would wish to live in a society in which the order of walking through doors was something that anybody cared about?  The important thing is that traffic through doors should flow freely, and that there should not be awkward moments when people hesitate, politely ushering another before them, who demurs, and invites the other to go before.  Such a situation can result in small knots of people building up in front of a door, with very little through traffic. 

The answer, of course, is a system based on common courtesy and consideration, mixed with a measure of sheer practicality.  In general, women should be invited to precede men, not because this in any way endorses chivalric notions that many may now find awkward or even condescending, but because it provides a totally arbitrary rule that at least minimises the chances of congestion.  It may be viewed then, in the same light as the rule that states one should drive on the left of the road rather than the right.  There is no real reason for that: countries in which people drive on the right are in no way different from those where people drive on the left, or, if they are - and they may be - then that is for historical reasons quite unconnected with driving on the left or the right.  So the fact that historically women have been invited to go through doors before men provides a basis for a contemporary rule that this should continue to be done. 

Unless, of course, the man reaches the door first; in which case he should go through naturally, rather than wait until the woman catches up with him.  An exception to this simple,, practical rule would be where the person reaching the door first wants to show particular consideration to the other; in such a case the first person should yield to the second person, ushering him or her in with an appropriate gesture.  This makes the second person feel better about himself or herself, in that he or she has been shown by the first person to be somebody the first person particularly respects.  For this reason, it is a good general rule to allow everybody to go through the door before you.  People who do this are usually much appreciated for their manners, but may not get very far in life, owing, perhaps, to the number of doors through which they do not ever pass. 

People with obvious infirmities should be allowed to pass through a door before those who are hale; under no circumstances should they be pushed if they take a longer time than usual to pass through the door.  Very aged people, those approaching a hundred years of age, should also be allowed through first on the simple, compassionate grounds that there will not be many doors left for them to pass through.  

Brave

We went to see Brave today with three of our grandchildren, one daughter and one daughter-in-law.  What a wonderful film, though not entirely for children, who might find it quite scary in places.  The five-year-old grandson assured me he was okay while at the same time telling me it was a bit scary.  And it was: the scene in which the ferocious bear appears, and especially the big battle between the male and female bear at the end, are very frightening.  If you're five.

But frightening bits apart, this is a delight.  The characters have originality about them, the story isn't as straightforward as it might first appear, and the detail in every scene insists that we come back for a second or third look at the movie.

The wonderful thing about animated movies in particular is the artwork that's involved. It's in a league of its own, but more importantly it invariably celebrates the beauty of the world.  Brave is no exception (and the short Pixar movie that accompanied it, in which three generations of starkeepers deal with the latest influx of stars, is just a wonder from beginning to end).   The Scottish wilds are wonderfully portrayed, and the animals in the film (in particular the heroine's horse, and her father's dogs) have their own personalities, but are also animated wonderfully as animals.

Brave's big plus, in terms of animated movies, is that it concerns a young girl who knows her own mind, and who's finally allowed to follow it.  While females have often been the subject of cartoons, from Snow White onwards, they've seldom been as adventurous or forthright as Merida, the heroine of this movie.  Merida has to battle with her mother at all points, but she manages to win through at the end still on the same side.  Both characters have matured by the time we're finished.

The vocal work is delightful too - the script includes a number of less commonly used words that fit well with the Scottish accents.  Kelly MacDonald plays Merida, Emma Thompson her mother, and Billy Connelly her father.  I wasn't sure that Connelly was going to work at first, even though he seems an obvious choice for the role: he's larger than life and the character he plays is larger than life both personality-wise and physically.  But Connelly has a way of reading his lines in movies that doesn't always ring true.  Fortunately for Brave this style is soon left behind, partly because he gets fewer and fewer lines to say as the movie goes on.

Julie Walters appears as the wood-carving witch, and is quite unrecognisable.  There are a number of other reasonably well-known actors in the smaller roles including an actor named Patrick Doyle. This is the same Patrick Doyle who composed the score, and his score is a delight from beginning to end; even the bagpipes come across effectively.   Doyle the actor has appeared in other movies he's composed the score for, including two of the Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare adaptations.

At the opposite end of movie-making, as it were, we watched the second in the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo trilogy; The Girl Who Played with Fire.  Like its predecessor, it's violent in the extreme, though there are thankfully no sexually abusive scenes.  (There is one what-seemed-to-me-to-be unnecessary lesbian sex scene, however.)  Unlike its predecessor, it relies on a lot of coincidence, and there's much less actual mystery to it. The heroine manages to find out things fairly easily, and Blomqvist finds her even more easily at the end, by which time she's been beaten, shot and buried alive.  She's one tough cookie.  The story is left hanging (unlike the first film) and it's presumably necessary to see the last movie to get some of the unfinished business dealt with.  The revelation about her father in this one seems a bit far-fetched, especially as the first time we saw him he was drastically on fire to the extent that you wouldn't have thought he'd have survived.  Seemingly he's as tough as his daughter.  (And let's not mention his even tougher son, who's very unpleasant.)

Re-reading Soul Survivor

I've been re-reading Philip Yancey's Soul Survivor, and enjoying it as much as the previous time I read it. This time, I've just been looking for the most part at his chapters on writers: Chesterton, Annie Dillard, Frederick Buechner, Robert Coles, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
I want to read these writers all over again - apart from Coles, whom I had never heard of before Yancey introduced him. But I'd like to read him.
Not that I've read everything by these authors, not by any means. I've begun War and Peace twice and failed to make it very far (perhaps I was spoilt by the movie with Audrey Hepburn and co), but it's a book I'd like to get into some time. Apart from that, I've never even opened anything else by him. I've read some Dostoevsky, mostly back when I was a lot younger. And at a time when I probably didn't appreciate him for what he is. He definitely needs to go back on the list again. I read Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov (struggling through the Russian names to such a degree that I wrote them down when they first appeared so I could figure out who was who!), and perhaps one other. I've started others, but I think I wasn't ready for them at the time.
Dillard and Buechner are two more authors I'd like to read more of than I have. It's years since I read Dillard's great book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but I remember finding it a wonder. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what I've read of Buechner's, except that I know I have read several of his books. (Dillard's site, by the way, has a front page that is quite disarming. She says, amongst other things: Here is some information for scholars. I’ve posted this web-page in defense; a crook bought the name and printed dirty pictures, then offered to sell it to me. I bit. In the course of that I learned the web is full of misinformation. This is a corrective.) Dillard doesn't always appeal: I didn't much enjoy her Writer's Life. In fact, I think I gave up on it.
And then there's Chesterton, whom I have read a great deal of. I also have a reasonable number of his innumerable books on my shelves. He's not always easy to read: Chesterton can burble along at a rate of knots making you think he's saying something of value when in fact he's just being Chesterton on a roll. And then suddenly out of the blue he'll turn something upside down and a whole world opens up. To read all of Chesterton would be an indulgence, I suspect. He's always great, but not always great to read. Even some of his best books have their downtime. But when he's on a rolll, no one can match him. In fact, few authors can match him even when he's not on a roll! He's like Dickens. There's an awful lot of him, and a case could be made for everything being absolutely superb. It's not, but it's a world that no one else has ever come close to creating.
To go from these masters to the book I'm presently reading to review is like coming down off the top of the mountain. The book is by John Cairney, who, if I'm not mistaken, is the husband of a cousin of one of my oldest friends. Cairney and his wife were both actors, and it looks as though he may still be.
Anyway, Cairney has written this strange book called flashback forward (no capital letters on the cover). If the blurb hadn't told me that something unusual was going to happen at some point, I don't think I would have persisted with it. It takes a 100 pages for the odd thing to happen, and suddenly the story goes from being a fairly ordinary account of a family moving from Scotland to New Zealand in the late 19th century. The main character, Tom, is not particularly engaging.
And then Tom experiences the volcanic eruption that destroyed the Pink and White Terraces, and the book splits in two. Tom eventually goes back to Scotland and we next read of him as a 60-year-old or so. Tom number two wakes up after the Napier earthquake in 1931, 45 years after his previous disaster experience, and is still an 18-year-old. That's where I'm at currently, and certainly this part of the book has proved to be more effectively written than the earlier stuff, which could have been vastly abridged. No doubt more on it in due course.

Watch your health!

Just watched Irresistible, a film made in Australia with Susan Sarandon, Sam Neill and Emily Blunt. A neat piece of suspense, if a little unable to overcome its improbabilities. Neill comes across as the least believable of the three, even though he has the easiest part. It’s almost as if he isn’t really bothering too much. Sarandon as always is strong and detailed in her playing of someone who might need to up their health insurance, while Emily Blunt does her best with a role that seems odd from the outset. The great thing about Sarandon is that she can let you know depths in the character without uttering a word. It’s a pity she has to deal with some melodrama here, since she actually invests the character with considerable personality.

Also watched The Last King of Scotland a few days ago. Forest Whitaker is superb in the role of Idi Amin, and James McAvoy (miles away from the last time I saw him as Mr Tumnus) plays the fictional character of a doctor who becomes Amin’s right hand man – when it suits Amin. McAvoy’s Dr Garrigan is a young man who appears to have it all together when it comes to healing the sick, but who is quite amoral in his dealings with people outside of his doctoring. He appears to be wise, but the film is about him actually learning wisdom, at great cost to himself ultimately, and at the expense of several other people’s lives. It’s a film to watch more than once, if you can bear the brutality of the world Amin inhabits (although the brutality is kept to a minimum, visually, until the very end; otherwise it’s mostly hinted at in cutaway shots).

Catching up on writing

Over this Easter weekend I've managed to get on and do some more writing for the Triond site, where articles can be left indefinitely, and can keep on getting viewed, and making money. (Peanuts, but it is money.)

I sat down a week or so ago and tried to chart out my writing/composing priorities. Doing an article a week for Triond was one of them. I kind of caught up by writing four articles, a couple of which were rehashes of pieces I'd done before.

So for those with an interest in other things I do, here are the links:

Blowing My Own Trumpet. This is a piece about trying to promote yourself on the Net. Self-referential is the term, I think!

Friends for Life. This one looks at some of the books on my shelves and concludes that some of them make better friends than the real people I know. Hmmm. This was a piece I started some time ago and never did anything more with.

The Delightful Lives at 44 Scotland St. Another 'rehash' - in the best sense. I've taken the four book reviews I've done of the four episodes in Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland St series and woven them together into a long overview. It's called recycling.

Support Your Local Circus. This was written new and fresh yesterday after I went to see Weber Brothers' Circus in Mosgiel, one of the outer suburbs of Dunedin. It's a lovely little circus, full of energy and life, with clowns that are genuinely funny, and some wonderful Asian acrobats. And three absolutely crazy motorcyclists racing around and around inside what seems a very tiny metal globe.

Photo by Atelier Teee

Scotland's other drink

In the Ian Rankin novels featuring Inspector Rebus that we've been reading while on holiday, he keeps mentioning Irn-Bru. Finally we looked it up on the Net, because it's obviously a drink, but that's about all we knew. Seemingly it was originally called Iron Brew, and somewhere along the line the name has been squashed. It's Scotland's other national drink (other than whiskey, that is) and is more popular than Coca Cola. It's actually a soft drink, not an alcoholic one, and it's....orange.

Distressed by my ignorance

McCall Smith has a lot of fun with the clothes one of his characters wears in the latest book in the 44 Scotland St series. (The book is called Love Over Scotland.) In particular he talks a lot about a sweater in some colour called 'distressed oatmeal', and in general the other characters think it's not only passe but does nothing for the character who wears it.
I'd never heard of distressed oatmeal as a colour until I read this book and assumed McCall Smith was playing with words. However, I've just discovered that distressed mahogany is quite a normal description for a certain kind of table finish, including poker tables (which is where I saw the description first). I don't normally have any great need to be investigating sites where they sell poker tables, but was struck by the coincidence. Even looking at the pictures of the tables I don't really have much idea what the 'distressed' part of the finish is, and asking Google, 'what is distressed mahogony' turned out not to be helpful. Usually descriptions of tables are fairly obvious, more so than the colours of clothing, in fact, but this one has got me beat. Maybe there's someone out there who can help!

The Flying Scotsman

Some friends had enthused over The Flying Scotsman, so, when we couldn’t get in to see the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, we popped round the corner to see the other movie.
It wasn’t helped by the fact that our seats were so hard that by the end we were in agony, but even that aside (and the sometimes impenetrable Scots accents) the movie is pretty much a B movie bio, and is marginal on humour, suspense, character and most other things.
Jonny Lee Miller plays Graeme O’Bree, an amateur cyclist with great ambitions, most of which he achieves. Miller isn’t a particularly good-looking actor at the best of times, and as O’Bree he achieves a sourness of face that must almost be unique amongst movie ‘heroes.’ (He might play a good Darcy in Pride and Prejudice!)
O’Bree himself appears to have been a fairly difficult character: obsessive about his cycling, depressed by past events, uncompromising, and with a determination that overrode the better judgement of some of his family and friends. Miller shows all this with a jutting out lower lip, and jaw, and haughty eyes. Admittedly O’Bree had some overcoming to do: the World Cycle crew appear to have been quite toffee-nosed in their opposition to him, and dragging himself up out of depression (and an unsuccessful suicide attempt) can’t have been easy.
But Miller lacks much warmth, and consequently you never really respond to him as a character. His wife, played by Laura Fraser, is the opposite, but she has little to do except be supportive, and has almost no time to come across as a character. Brian Cox has a quiet role as a minister who doesn’t reveal his colours until late in the piece (unfortunately my friends had spoiled this me) and is excellent in his portrayal of a man who’s had to face the same sort of distresses O’Bree is facing. Billy Boyd is Billy Boyd.
We should have waited till it came out on DVD.

Love Over Scotland

In the following extract, Stuart and Irene are the parents of a precocious little boy of about six, called Bertie. Irene is ambitious for her child, but Bertie would prefer that she wasn’t. Stuart is a bit of a wimp when it comes to be a father, unfortunately, and finds it difficult to break out.

When Stuart returned home that evening, Irene was in the sitting room with Bertie, playing a complicated card game of Bertie’s own invention, Running Dentist. The rules, which Bertie had explained at extreme length, and with great patience, seemed excessively complex to Irene and appeared to favour Bertie in an indefinable way, but the game was quick, and surprisingly enjoyable.
‘Ah,’ said Stuart, as he put down his briefcase. ‘Running Dentist! I take it that you’re winning, Bertie.’
‘Mummy is doing her best,’ said Bertie. ‘She’s really trying.’
Stuart glanced at Irene. He knew that she was a bad loser, and that it was hard for her when Bertie won a game, as he so often did.
‘It’s a very difficult game to win,’ observed Irene, ‘unless you happen to be the person who invented the rules.’

From Chapter 13 of Love Over Scotland, the third in the series, 44 Scotland St, by Alexander McCall Smith. I think McCall Smith probably enjoys writing about these three characters more than any others in the series.

Local Hero

Local Hero is one of those quirky Bill Forsyth movies that never go where you expect, and keep leading you up paths that turn out to be red herrings. No character in it can be said to be straightforward, even the main character, Mac, played by Peter Riegert. He’s supposed to be a tough wheeler and dealer for a big oil-company, but he proves just as soft as all the rest. Burt Lancaster has an odd role as the chief of the company, who spends most of his time on his own, or with his therapist, a man whose absurd agenda doesn’t quite seem to match that of his client. The rest of the cast are typical Forsyth characters, people who seem unwilling to go quite in the direction a typical story would take, which consequently often leaves the audience shaking their head at the weirdness of it all.
There are daft scenes at every point. Half a dozen fishermen stand around talking to Mac, with a toddler in a pram amongst them. Mac asks who’s child is it. The men look to one another in turn. Are they indicating that it could be anyone’s child, or that they don’t know, or that they’re not even sure what the child is doing there? We never find out, because the scene cuts and moves to something else. The publican turns out not to be the publican, even though he runs the hotel, and cooks the meals, and acts as barman. He’s also the local accountant, and a bit of a wheeler-dealer himself. The priest is black, with a Scots name, a man who doesn’t quite seem to know what he’s doing in this out of the way place. A young girl dressed in ragged jeans, with her hair spiked up, and a painted face, wanders in and out without remark by anyone else – except when she starts to chase the Scotsman who works for the oil company in Aberdeen. Then it turns out she already has a boyfriend – in the local band. The main female character spends most of her time in the water, like some nymph, or silkie. An unidentified person buzzes past on a motor scooter almost every time someone steps into the street. The publican and Mac agree to exchange their lives in a tipsy moment and then carry on as normal the next day. An old guy does impressions of famous film stars for another old man – all the impressions look the same – and the other old man gets them wrong every time. And the ending is a slap in the face for the audience, with Lancaster swapping places with Mac, and Mac arriving back home in Texas with two pockets of sea shells. Suddenly the film stops.
The film is well known – there are plenty of reviews on IMDB – but isn’t much seen. As someone notes, the film score is better known than the film.

Who cut the corner off?

The Royal Bank of Scotland has something they call the ‘mint’ card – it’s basically a form of credit card. I’ve checked out their site and can’t quite see why they’ve called it a mint card, but maybe I’ve missed something. (You’d think it had something to do with the Royal Mint). There are two odd things about the mint card: one is that it’s the first credit card to have a corner cut off it. Okay, you say, that’s interesting. (Yes, I thought so too!) This certainly makes it stand out a bit from the rest, but to me a far more interesting thing is that they’re offering a no interest deal up till December 2007 if you transfer your balance from another credit card. That’s pretty good. (There’s no interest, but there is a 2.9% charge on the balance, which is a little odd - number two ‘odd’ in fact).
The third odd, then, is that amongst their question and answers on the site (this in particular is related to the mint gift card – more about that in a minute) we have the question:
Why is there no chip on a MINT Gift Card? And the answer, which I find odd, is:
There is no need for a chip or pin to use a MINT Gift Card. Instead, the Card is neatly equipped with a magnetic strip, which means purchases will always need to be signed for.
‘Neatly equipped with a magnetic strip?’ But credit card producers have been working against this very form of identification for ages, and here in New Zealand, most people now use a pin as identification with credit cards. It’s almost invariably a lot safer than a signature. Oh, dear, Great Britain continues to remain behind the times when it comes to technology.
It always used to amaze me when US students or young travellers came into my former shop that they would proffer for payment a credit card without any signature at all on it! As far as I was aware, in NZ it’s illegal to offer a card with no signature, quite apart from the obvious possibility that the person proffering the card may not be it’s legal owner. They would happily tell me that they never signed the card in case it got stolen, which was a piece of illogic I could never get my head around, and then they would show me a student ID from back home, which was okay, but still begged the question of why their credit card wasn’t signed.
Back to the mint card. The mint gift card is a kind of credit card with cash already on it; the only thing is that when you’ve spent all the money on it, there ain’t no more. No credit limit you can then hook into. Aunty Sally sends you a mint card with £50 on it, and you gleefully go out and buy that new toy you’ve had your eye on, assuming that when you spend rather more than the £50, the credit will somehow link into Aunty Sally’s account, and she’ll pay the bill. No such luck. Once that card has run out of cash, you pay the bill.
The better deal here, I think, is the ‘no interest’ one. If I were in Scotland, which I am not, I might even take it up myself. (It’s a better deal than ANZ were offering some while ago, which I’ve also written about.)

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