The Naming of the Dead

I had a cold last week and it was one of those annoying ones where every time you try to do something your nose starts to drip.  So you clear it, and it drips again.  In the end I decided to spend most of one day in bed, and we found one of the Ian Rankin stories I hadn't read as an audio book on the laptop.  It was The Naming of the Dead, which came out in 2006, and is set in 2005, in the tumultuous week in Edinburgh and the surrounding area when the Gleneagles G8 Conference was taking place.  Add to that, at a later point in the story, the London Underground bombings, and you have a canvas broad enough on which to spread marches with people numbering in the hundreds of thousands, activist attacks, insurrections and a city full of policemen from all over the country keeping order and containing people who want to do damage to somebody. With this as his background, Rankin then proceeds to offer up a man falling from the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle - is it a suicide, an accident, or a murder? - as well as three murders that are seemingly related to each other: they may indicate a serial killer is on the loose, someone who appears to be working through a list of known rapists or sexual attackers.  Or they may not!

Rebus is the star of the show, as you'd expect, though not in the eyes of several of the other characters, and his accomplice in detective discovery is again Siobhan Clarke, who more than once frets that she'd becoming too much like her mentor, for better or worse.  Like Rebus, she finds it hard to leave well alone, or to work anything like the normal 9-5 hours.  Her parents have a big part to play in the story too, being hippies from way back, people who want to protest at what the G8 are doing.  Big Ger Cafferty returns as well, adding to the mix, stirring up trouble wherever he can, and there is a wide range of other characters, good, bad and devious.  This is a classic Rankin, in which he uses his skill to paint a detailed picture of a city in siege while at the same time giving us a superb detective story.  And better still, the murderer is someone who appears throughout the story but doesn't seem to be in the least likely to be a suspect until late in the book.  This is in marked contrast to the most recent Rebus story, where the murderer seemed to be invisible for most of the time.

I listened to what I thought was almost all of the book, got up the next day intending to listen to the rest - about an hour and half's worth - came to the end of that and found that the book wasn't even half finished.  We had a copy on the shelves that I'd never got round to reading - we also had the rest of the audio book on the laptop as it turned out, but it was in another different folder.  So I was swamped for choice.

Scottish actor, Tom Cotcher

The narrator on the audio book version is Tom Cotcher (as far as I can tell; I haven't got the cover of the CD to hand).  He's narrated a number of the Rebus books and does a superb job with the characterizations of a large cast.  I probably should have allowed myself the time to listen to the rest of the book instead of reading it, but it would have taken me at least another full day to do so, whereas I could fit the reading of it in much more productively around other things.  This is the only problem for me with audio books: I find it hard to just sit and listen to one - I want to be doing something else at the same time.  They're great when you're on a long journey (we listened to a non-Rebus Rankin book - Watchmen - earlier in the year in this way), or when your body just doesn't want to do, or can't manage to do, anything else at all; when you've got a heavy cold, in other words.  And there's always the issue, when you're in bed listening, that you might fall asleep and miss something - this doesn't tend to happen when I'm listening in the car!

Watchmen is one of Rankin's one-off stories.  As far as I know the characters don't appear in any other book.  It's a curious piece about a kind of behind-the-scenes department that's dealing with espionage and such, but the characters in the story seem as much intent on double-crossing their colleagues as attending to their proper business.  It's set in both London and Ireland, and the main character is as unlike Rebus as you can imagine.  A desk-job man, essentially, but forced out into the field, and forced to find courage and initiative he wasn't always aware he had.  He does share with Rebus a certain amount of lack of respect for authority, and a difficulty with his marriage and his student son (though he fares better than Rebus in both these areas), but otherwise he's his own man.

A Cold, Whiskey and the Opera Quartet

I've got a cold.  Not so-called 'man-flu' - just a cold.  I thought I'd have a lie-in this morning, but my brain is fizzing so relaxing in bed doesn't seem possible, even though it was comfortable and warm.   And the dog came and joined me and lay in a place that kept part of me just that much warmer.  But I couldn't relax.  

I'd already been in bed all night, and had had a couple of sessions of being distinctly uncomfortable because of the nose playing up.  The first time was when my wife came to bed - I must have been asleep, woke up and shifted position and next thing I knew I couldn't breathe through my nose at all.  Suffocation must be a terrifying thing, and just having your nose blocked isn't comparable, really. It's mainly just irritating.  But it's still a very weird sensation: you have to focus on breathing, which for most of our lives we don't bother to do.  It just happens.  Have you thought about breathing lately?  

Anyway, I got up and thought I'd apply some Vicks - that eventually worked, and breathing returned to normal (at least as normal as it ever is when you've got a cold).  Woke again around five, and there was a lot of clogging going on in the nasal regions, though I was breathing pretty much.  (I've just noticed on the Vicks page that you're not suppose to apply it directly inside your nostrils - whoops!)

The thing is that on Saturday, in spite of having the first symptoms of the cold, I actually got a lot done.  And yesterday I was up most of the day, and though I didn’t go to church or Sunny Side Up, I took the dog for a walk and felt okay.  I’ve had whiskey in the evening the last couple of nights (some whiskey that someone gave me – it had already been opened at that point, but they never drank it apparently) – but I’m not sure that it’s made a lot of difference.  I remember when I was rehearsing for the Opera Quartet that I was at Raymond Opie’s house [see below] and had a shocking cold.  Don’t know why I was there particularly, but anyway, Ray, who was a bit of a drinker, insisted that I have some whiskey (and I think there was something with it – sugar?) and so I did.  I went to sleep not long afterwards in a chair, and woke up sweating but feeling fine.  But I’ve never been able to get this method to work since! Though another friend of mine recommended a bit of whiskey in a hot milk drink before bed.  That worked the first time, but after that the body obviously decided that it wasn't going to be fooled by that again.  

Just had a look at a page on the Net that supposedly answers the question of whether whiskey has any effect – the general response is that it doesn’t, though there are all sorts of variations in the answers.  Some say it’s worth having it with water and sugar, some with lemon juice, some suggest brandy instead, and so on.  And several insist there’s no cure for the common cold.  And then further down the page you get others who say it’s a great cure, particularly if you get under the covers and sweat it out.  Some say definitely not because it dehydrates you – they recommend lots of water instead.  Well, it just goes to show.  No one agrees on anything, except their own experience.  

There's another page headed Whisky Boys (which shows its bias). It recommends whiskey, honey, lemon, cloves, hot water, etc.   In spite of the detailed preparations it discusses it admits it's more of a pleasant drink than a curing one!

Apropos Raymond Opie.  He was a well-known New Zealand operatic tenor, who, by the time I met him was getting on in years, although he could still sing well.  Along with three other singers, Lucas Bunt, the baritone, and general organiser (and permanent driver), Kathleen Johnson, the soprano, and Corinne Bridge (all four of them mentioned here) and myself as pianist, we formed the Quartet, (yes, I know a quartet is four, but the pianist didn't count in the title) and toured secondary schools throughout New Zealand, in a fairly exhausting trip that took us from the top of the North Island to the bottom of the South.  This was back in the mid-sixties before I went to England to study at the London Opera Centre.  

The five of us travelled in a station wagon with advertising for our sponsors, Rothmans, plastered all over it.  It was a bit ironic, since Rothmans was a big cigarette company; you can't imagine that happening now!  We presented a 45-minute recital of operatic songs, duets and quartets, and were generally well-received around the country.  We'd do two or three performances a day, and travelled as well.  Occasionally we did a full concert for adult audiences.  At the performance in Milton - about forty km from Dunedin - the lid over the keyboard fell down and hit my thumb.  I continued playing but by the time we'd finished I was in agony, with the bruising under the thumbnail swelling dramatically.  We must have been heading back to Dunedin, because we called in at my house and my mother dealt to it by putting a hole in the nail with a hot needle to relieve the pressure.  At least that 'cure' worked!

Lemon Soup

Just made Yucatan Lemon Soup - or at least a minor variation of it (we had no shrimps, and I don't much care for them anyway, so I used some leftover chicken).

Very lemony!  It uses both the zest of lemons (three in this case) and the juice (the same three).  That was the original reason for my making the soup: to use up some of the overload of lemons we had - some friends had brought them down from Christchurch and some of them (the lemons, not the friends) were starting to have seen better days.   But my wife said it might do her cold some good; she's had it for well over a week.

For once we had everything else in the pantry that we needed: cloves, cinnamon sticks, cumin seeds, fresh coriander, onion and so on.   There wasn't a lot of soup at the end; just enough for the two of us, and it seems a bit of a pity that the recipe calls for all the solid stuff left after simmering for twenty minutes to be removed.  I looked at this pile of stuff left in the sieve and wondered if I could possibly do something else with it, but in the end decided to give it to the worms along with all the other composty stuff we accumulate.

Ah, the joys of having time in retirement to try some different foods...

Heating up

We have three heat pumps in our house. Two were installed some years ago high up on the wall in adjoining rooms, with the heat pumps virtually back to back, and running off the same outside system. It hasn't been the most successful approach, and the person who came to put in the third pump a couple of years ago pooh-poohed the way things had been done. By which time it was a bit late, of course!

The result of having both the pumps running off the same system, and of both of them being a bit underpar for the work they're supposed to do, is that in the room we use as our main sitting room, it can be warm up around your head, but cold around your feet. It always seems a bit ironic to be paying for a heat pump to function when we have our legs encased in blankets. Still keeping warm is the prime thing, especially as the winter draws on.

I was talking to one of my colleagues at work yesterday and she was saying that they have a heat pump up on the wall in their house too - it's common practice, of course. On the weekend they were experiencing the same problem as we have: hot heads, cold feet. Her husband went and got the dehumidifier, plugged it in, set it going, and voila! it drew in the cold air and allowed the hot air to move around the room.

Result: warm feet. Now, do we want to go out and buy a humidifier? And is the extra drain on the power bill going to be worth it?

The third heat pump that I mentioned above is installed in the hall, which, because of the nature of our house, is the coldest area in winter. When that heat pump is going, however, not only the hall but the adjoining rooms warm up. It's down near the floor, for one thing, and it's a bigger model for another. I guess in a way it acts in a similar fashion to the dehumidifier: it pushes the cold air around and pulls the warm air down (well, I'm sure that's not technically what happens, but it's something along the lines of what happens).

I'm thinking about these things more at the moment, because we've run into a cold patch, and as well, in three days I retire, and won't get the benefit of my workplace's heating during the day...!

Coping with life - while having a cold

Since the Wednesday before last I've had another heavy cold. Not a man-cold, in case any of you ladies get on your usual high horses, but a real stinker, one that's had me coughing so hard that I can scarcely breathe, and has made my sinuses so sore that every time I blew my nose or sniffed over the last day or so, it feels like my head has been about to crack open.

Of course, all the women out there will be saying, man-cold, man-cold, as they always do. I'm not surprised men don't go to the doctor more readily; they get mocked at for being sick. Do us guys mock women for trying out the latest weight loss pills? We wouldn't think of it. So give us a break, women.

Anyway, in the middle of all this, I've also been accompanying one of the singers in the senior vocal competitions here in Dunedin - even made it into the finals of the Otago Daily Times Aria Competition. I also played on Saturday for one of the bandsmen at the Provincial Competitions at Mosgiel, and I've coped with a very important meeting at work, one in which at least two people were in tears, and strong words were spoken, and truth was finally allowed some breathing room. (Incidentally neither my singer or bandsman got up into the top placings this time around. Ce la vie.)

And today, as part of my continuing education through work, I attended the first day of the Calvin Conference. (We have another day tomorrow.) I found it interesting, but couldn't have sat through the whole day, even if I hadn't had to go to the doctor's. Apart from my bum getting sore after two or three hours sitting on a hard chair, my brain concentration just gives up eventually. I listened to Professor Randall Zackman, who talked about Calvin and the beauty of the Universe, and how it's a sign to us that God is speaking. But in fact his message, if it had been pared down to bare essentials, was basically good old fashioned Gospel - disguised, somewhat, as an academic lecture.

The next speaker was Jason Goroncy, who spoke on John Calvin: Servant of the Word. I'm hoping he'll put the paper up on his blog, as he spoke at considerable speed, and I had difficulty taking notes. Some moments of real passion emerged from his talk, perhaps to the surprise of his audience!

I left after lunch and went and went for a walk and some fresh air, Knox College being conveniently close to the Botanical Gardens. Finally I came back to listen to Kirstine Moffat, who spoke about Calvinism and New Zealand Literature. I enjoyed this, though it seemed slightly off on a tangent from the main topic of the Conference. However, good to have it there.

8 posts to go....

...before I reach the magic 1000th post. Well, I've given myself till the 31st to achieve this, so here's one more step on the way.
The piano arrived this morning, rather later than expected because when the guys went to collect it they found they'd left some vital tools behind. I heard this from the former owner, when I finally rang her to see if they'd actually left her house yet.
I'd been told that these guys - or rather this company - had experience at shifting grand pianos, and maybe they have, but I'm not sure that the entire team that arrived had all had the experience claimed. Well, they got it to my house in several pieces (that's the way grand pianos travel) and put it back together without too much difficulty, so there must have been some experience there.
I gave them the option of taking it in the front door or in the back, and they decided on the back even though there are four steps up into the house at that point. (There are two at the front, but there's also very little turning room, as we've often found when we've taken something large into the house.) Getting the main part of the piano up the fours steps was a bit of an issue: one guy was doing all the hoisting up, it seemed, (puffing and blowing) while the other three did....something else. They were on hand, but you got the impression that they weren't always putting full muscle into it.
Suffice to say, they hoisted it into the house, swung it round through the kitchen, along the hall and with ease into the lounge. And, as I said, put it together.
And I played it. It's very bright sounding, which will take a bit of getting used to, and it needs a bit more effort from my fingers to move at speed on certain passages. It's not sluggish, just a bit tighter than my other piano.
We're going to have to reconsider where we put it. The current spot isn't quite roomy enough for me and the piano, and at the moment I'm the one who's getting the short end of the space. My wife and I will do some rethinking tonight, and see how we get on. I'm most concerned not to have it against an outside wall, as I've been told more than once that this isn't good for pianos.
Neither is sticking them up against a heater, or a heating vent, as Teachers' College, where we hold our church services, used to do to the very nice baby grand they had. I played it a lot, but gave up in the end when the other musicians could never get in tune with it. Now it's stuck out in a kind of sunroom area where the temperatures are alternatively very hot or very cold. Someone needs to have their head read - it's likely the piano will become irrepairable - or irreparable, depending on how you want to spell it.

Rain and Cold

On the radio here in England they keep going on about how cold the water at the beaches is. What do they expect? This is England, after all, and the temperature in the sea most of the time will be similar to the temperature in the seas around New Zealand. Chilly at best, and only occasionally warmer as you head north.
Far more important, and still related to water, is the flooding here in England. Oxford has been hit, something we wouldn’t have believed when we there ourselves, and some other places have only just got back to having drinking water and water to flush in the loos. It’s hard to grasp what it’s been like for these people when you’re not affected by it yourself; having always lived on hills ourselves, we’ve never really had problems with flooding. Of course there’s been similar flooding in New Zealand after the last few years, but again it’s been nowhere near where we live.
And now on the news this morning we hear that certain `yobbos’ as they’re calling them, have been fouling the water in the places where water is desperately needed. It’s hard to understand why the local yahoos would do it to their own water when they must be in need of it as much as anyone. Perhaps they’re just so lacking in sense they don’t understand the implications of their own actions. Candidates for the Darwin Awards, I’d suspect.

Blasted daylight saving!!

We’ve just had the joyous news that daylight saving has been extended for yet another three weeks. Why don’t they just go the whole hog and make the whole year daylight saved? Before they brought in the longer period of daylight saving there used to be a time when you could get up in the mornings and walk around in the daylight before breakfast. This period has been so reduced now that for someone like me who has to go to work at eight am, there’s virtually no daylight in the mornings, except in high summer.
I’ve always loathed the changeover time with daylight saving. I always feel it takes me a fortnight to catch up, though this year, for some reason, it didn’t affect me as much. My wife sails through it and treats me in the same way as she does when I have a cold: get over it!