Rants

Two new books — the published-today hardback of Jeremy Avigad’s new book from CUP, and the just-arrived, published-next-week, hardback of my GWT. Both excellent books, it goes without saying! But they have more in common than that. These copies are both produced in just the same way, as far as I can see to exactly the same standard, by Lightning Source, one of the main printers of print-on-demand books for the UK. So both copies have the same paper quality (reasonable, though with more see-through than we’d ideally like) and the same sort of case binding (a flat spine, with the pages not gathered in signatures, but glued: how robust will this binding be in the long term?).

Now, I’m perfectly happy with the hardback of my book. It is serviceable and looks professional enough (maybe one day I’ll get round to redesigning the covers of the Big Red Logic Books; but I quite like their simplicity). I’m just noting that, although Avigad’s book will cost you £59.99 (if you don’t happen to be able to call on the very large discount for press authors), it is another print-on-demand book produced to no higher standard. Once upon a time CUP’s books were often rather beautifully printed and produced. Now, I’m afraid, not quite so much.

It is a small thing to ask, isn’t it, a decent caffè macchiato?

You would have thought so! But oh, how you can be setting yourself up for disappointment when you order one (at least here in the UK).

So, folks, as everyone knows, you do use a proper thick china espresso cup of the traditional shape (there’s a reason it’s traditional). Warmed, yes: but you don’t scald the cup first with boiling water. You most certainly don’t use some fancy “artisanal blend”, since they are mostly crap and too bitter and only suited to  flavouring those milky drinks that the British seem to love (for straight espressos or macchiatos, they will be beaten hands down by Illy or Kimbo or the other good Italian brands). You don’t make a mini-cappuccino: “macchiato” means “marked” or “stained”, not “drowned” — so two or three teaspoons of silky foamed milk is enough. And yes, for heaven’s sake, learn to make decently textured milk: filling the cup with wet bubbles is just evil. Do supply a proper coffee spoon so we can scrape the last remnants  of crema from the cup (wooden sticks? no!!!). And do, without being asked, add an elegantly sized small glass of water (not a paper cup, not a half pint mug, not lukewarm, not lemon-flavoured, …).

Now, that wasn’t too difficult, was it?

The old always think the world is going to the dogs. I try to resist. Sometimes, though, it is difficult. 

Going, gone (Nov 23, 2011)

The main road west from Cambridge used to go down the main street of the market town of St. Neots before crossing the river. But there has long since been a bypass, and it is quite a while since I’ve chosen to turn off it to take the old route. But I wanted a coffee, so today I stopped in the town and went to a scruffy and run-down branch of Caffè Nero on the large market square.

Their espresso wasn’t very good, but that’s probably only to be expected. What I hadn’t really bargained for was just how depressing the view out to the square is now. Even on a bright autumn morning, it looked as scruffy and run down as the coffee shop. This was never a very wealthy place: but there was once some small domestic grace to the surrounding mostly nineteenth century buildings. But now many of them are quite disfigured with the gross shop-fronts of cheap stores, and others look miserably unkempt. There’s a particularly vile effort by the HBSC bank, which gives a special meaning to “private affluence and public squalor” — only an institution with utter contempt for its customers and their community could plonk such a frontage onto a main street. Where once even small-town branches of banks were solid imposing edifices in miniature, with hints of the classical orders here and a vaulted ceiling there, signifying permanence and  reliability, now they are seem to take pride in having all the visual class of a here-today, gone-tomorrow betting shop. How appropriate.

And the square itself (like so many other urban spaces in England) seems to have been repaved on the cheap, with the kind of gimcrack blockwork that always seems, a few years in, to settle into random waves of undulation. The bleakly open space cries out for more trees to surround it, and inviting wooden seats. But no, on non-market days it is just the inevitable carpark.

Next to coffee shop, still on the square, a horrible looking cafe is plastered outside with pictures of greasy food. I walk a little further down the road before driving on. It is a visual mess. Even Marks and Spencer manages a particularly inappropriate shout of a shop-front, as sad-looking charity shops cringe nearby. Could anyone feel proud or even fond of this street as it now is?

A couple of hundred yards away there are lovely water-meadows by the bridge over the river, and some fancy residential developments. On the outskirts of town the other side, as the road leaves towards Cambridge, there is a lot more quite expensive-looking new housing (though heaven knows how it will seem a few years hence). But the town centre itself is in such a sorry state.

“Most things are never meant,” wrote Larkin when he foresaw something of this in ‘Going, going’. And we — I mean my generation, for it is we who were in charge — surely didn’t mean this, for the hearts of old country towns like St. Neots (or the larger next town,  Bedford) to become such shabby, ugly, run-down places. But it has happened apace, all over the country, and on our watch.

Philip Larkin reads ‘Going, going’.

One of the fixtures of the Cambridge year is the annual Cambridge University Press booksale. It lasts for a week or ten days in January, with the shelves continually being replenished as they empty. The Press sell off oodles of “damaged” books (where, very often, the only damage is caused by a neat red stamp on the verso of the title page, marking the book as “DAMAGED”). The going rate for a few years has been £3 for any paperback, and £7 for a hardback. The range of titles is extraordinary. And you can pick up some delightful bargains — important but inessential work-related books that it would be really rather nice to have but which you would never have forked out the full price for, or interesting finds that are intriguing enough to take a chance on. So far this year, I’ve picked up a few pleasing purchases, including a copy of Linsky’s The Evolution of Principia Mathematica which I’ll want to dip into (but could never have warranted spending £100 on), and a paperback of David Wyn Jones’s The Life of Haydn which is proving to be fascinating and highly readable.

But — O tempora o mores! — truffling through the sale shelves just isn’t the enjoyable experience it used to be. In the past the rule was that you could only buy ten books at a time (or was it a ten a day? I think so). There were busy times, but it was mostly other readers young and old you were bumping into, and you would have occasional friendly book chats to people as you browsed, swapping recommendations, and (by the sad standard of academics) a quietly Fun Time was had by all.

Now the rules have changed. You can buy as many books as you can cart away. So various second-hand booksellers come with bags and bags, boxes and boxes, and stand around like vultures, pouncing as soon as the staff bring out more stock as shelves empty, immediately grabbing great armfuls, not quite coming to blows but certainly jostling for space. And just as, when at a buffet, people heaping enormous stacks of food onto their plates simply puts you right off your lunch, this too is off-putting — the rapaciousness on display by people who want to turn a quick buck rather than find some interesting (and perhaps previously unaffordable) books to read themselves. Greed is never a good look.

I know that the Press want to get rid of a lot of stock in their sale. But it’s rather sad that in the process of increasing the number of books they get rid of (if that’s what’s happening) the genuinely enjoyable atmosphere seems to have gone.

Update Others have expressed disquiet too: new arrangements have been announced, with early morning until 10.30 and afternoons after 3.30 as “quiet times”. Hopefully this will help.

Another update The new arrangements have indeed made for a much more congenial experience, the couple of times I’ve dropped by since.

When I was a lad, a long while since, the usual English alternative to tea seemed to be a beverage known as ‘milky coffee’. Black coffee was suspiciously foreign or downright louche — and indeed had to be drunk as a bohemian pose rather than for enjoyment since the coffee itself seemed almostly universally awful and (the cost of beans being as it then was) very weak.

Now of course, we have a sophisticated coffee culture here. Sort of.

Well, you can get a fairly decent espresso macchiato in Caffè Nero (if you gently nudge the barista to doing it properly — the clue is in the name, guys: mark with a just bit of steamed milk/foam, but don’t try to fill the espresso cup to overflowing!). But I couldn’t help but notice that today what is usually the majority choice was universal: everyone else in the busy place had either a huge cappuccino (surely three times the size of anything you’d get in Italy) or a giant mug of latte. Fifty-something years on, milky coffee still rules, OK?

The main road west from Cambridge used to go down the main street of the market town of St. Neots. But there has long since been a bypass, and it is quite a while since I’ve turned off to take the old route. But I wanted a coffee, so today I stopped in the town and went to a scruffy and run-down branch of Caffè Nero on the large market square.

Their espresso is best passed over in silence, but that’s probably only to be expected. What I hadn’t really bargained for was just how depressing the view out to the square is now. Even on a bright autumn morning, it looked as scruffy and run down as the coffee shop. This was never a very wealthy place: but there was once some small domestic grace to the surrounding mostly nineteenth century buildings. But now many of them are quite disfigured with the gross shop-fronts of cheap stores, and others look unkempt. There’s a particularly vile effort by the HBSC bank, which gives a special meaning to “private affluence and public squalor” — only an institution with utter contempt for its customers and their community could plonk such a frontage onto a main street. Where once even small-town branches of banks were solid imposing edifices in miniature, with hints of the classical orders here and a vaulted ceiling there, now they are seem to take pride in having all the visual class of a here-today, gone-tomorrow betting shop. How appropriate.

And the square itself (like so many other urban spaces in England) seems to have been repaved on the cheap, with the kind of gimcrack blockwork that always seems, a few years in, to settle into random waves of undulation. The bleakly open space cries out for more trees to surround it, and inviting wooden seats. But no, on non-market days it is just the inevitable carpark.

Next to coffee shop, still on the square, a horrible looking cafe is plastered outside with pictures of greasy food. I walk a little further down the road before driving on. It is a visual mess. Even Marks and Spencer manages a particularly inappropriate shout of a shop-front, as sad-looking charity shops cringe nearby. Could anyone feel proud or even fond of this street as it now is?

A couple of hundred yards away there are lovely water-meadows by the bridge over the river, and fancy residential developments. On the outskirts of town the other side, as the road leaves towards Cambridge, there is a lot more quite expensive-looking new housing (though heaven knows how it will seem a few years hence). But the town centre itself is in a sorry state. “Most things are never meant,” wrote Larkin when he foresaw something of this in ‘Going, going’. And we — I mean my generation, for it is we who were in charge — surely didn’t mean this, for the hearts of old country towns like St. Neots (or the larger next town,  Bedford) to become such shabby, ugly, run-down places. But it has happened apace, all over the country, and on our watch.

I’ve just been asked to report on an application for a substantial grant from a rather wealthy grant-awarding body. “We will greatly value your expert opinion” etc. etc. Huh. I’m sure you will. Value it so much you aren’t offering a penny for what would be most of a day’s work to do properly.

I gave my usual six word response: “No proper fee, no proper report”.

Of course, if the proposal had been bang on topics that I currently am tolerably up to speed on and from someone whose work I already know well and admire, I’d no doubt have done the job (it would have been a very much quicker task, and might help keep up activity in areas I really care about). But then, if that’s other people’s policy too for selecting when they are prepared to write reports, grant awarding bodies are getting a pretty skewed set of  views on proposals. I’d have thought they would have wanted reports written with a bit of distance. They should be prepared to pay decent fees to get them.