NOT (EXACTLY) THE SUNDAY SNAP

Notes from a medium sized island in the middle of the Mediterranean

When I was writing my book Crusaders, I came across a wonderful medieval Greek idiom, courtesy of the great Byzantine chronicler and princess Anna Komnene. ‘You can’t out-Cretan the Cretan’ is the English translation. Our modern equivalent is something like ‘You can’t [bull]shit a [bull]shitter’. Anna Komnene was relying on her readers recognising that Cretans had a reputation for slyness and cunning, and more generally that they stood apart from other Greeks. I don’t know about the first part, but the second is certainly true. Crete is big, mountainous and wonderfully weird. Its architecture and geography is far removed from the twee, blue-and-white Hellenic fantasies you encounter on Santorini or Mykonos. Its people speak a distinctive sort of Greek. Its history is a mishmash of Minoan and Mycenaean, Byzantine and Arab, Venetian and Ottoman. Once upon a time this is where you came to get eaten by the Minotaur. These days it’s where I come in the month of July to chill out, work out, read novels, drink beer and eat vast quantities of fresh soft salty tangy cheese. I’m sitting in the garden writing to you now. The Cretan guy from the taverna in the square just dropped off a loaf of fresh bread. No one has sung a song from Mamma Mia, and I ain’t complaining.

My holiday reading has gone all to pot, though. As advertised a few posts ago, I brought a stack of novels and a couple of histories, and so far I’ve read absolutely none of them. This is the fault of Leo Tolstoy. Just as I was leaving home to come here I picked up the Penguin edition of War & Peace, which was sitting fat and squat on my desk, glaring at me. I started reading it on the plane and have barely put it down since. I have been avoiding the book all my adult life, mainly out of cowardice.  But guess what, it’s amazing. It’s strange that the one thing most people know about War & Peace is that it is very long, whereas what strikes me about it is that it is one of the subtlest, wisest, funniest, most acutely observed [etc etc] novels I’ve ever picked up. What a time the early nineteenth century must have been to live! If you were super rich, Russian and into war, I mean. Not unlike now… Anyway. I wonder if W&P would get a better airing if it were published not as a single volume, but in its constituent form of fifteen little novellas. It would probably strike the ordinary, busy reader as more accessible, perhaps even as ‘bingeable’. And the publisher would make roughly 10x as much money on the cover price. Just a thought.

This is probably a niche British cultural relic, but go with me on it. When I was a child, one of my favourite European summer holiday activities was to be sent to the local mini-market to buy an English-language newspaper. Since there were no smartphones in those days, this was the only way one could find out what was going on in the world outside the family-run bed-and-breakfast hotel in which we were billeted. But it came with conditions. The newspapers were sold at three or four times their normal cover-price. They were at least one day out of date. And the selection usually extended only to three or four tabloids: The Sun, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. We were a broadsheet family (The Telegraph, when it was staid and boring rather than clickbaity and borderline fascistic) and my mother was extremely allergic to the gutter press. But needs must. If there was a choice to be had I would buy the Mail, since it had superior crossword puzzles and the most extensive coverage of Test match cricket. It also carried reliably insane feature articles, which I found very entertaining. I can still remember spending a whole afternoon on a beach in Portugal (or somewhere similar) reading and re-reading an earnest feature about ‘the Bible Code’. The premise was, I think, that in the (English) text of the Bible were hidden secret messages that could be accessed by reading every third or fifth or seventh letter – or some sort of horseshit like that – and that these messages predicted, almanac style, future world events. Needless to say, accessing the truth of the Bible Code was the privilege only of a tiny, initiated illuminati – and all readers of the Daily Mail. This was before Dan Brown, I think – or maybe it was simply before I had heard of Dan Brown. Who knows? I often wonder if I should write a book of absolute cynical bollocks divining and extrapolating a plan for all human history by cherrypicking random stuff from ancient texts and stringing it together in a persuasively argued but totally tenuous way. I almost have the right name. But I don’t think I have big enough balls.

Did you watch the trailer for Essex Dogs yet? If you like it and you want to get the book the day it is released, you can preorder a signed copy here or here.

It’s hotter in the UK than in Greece. Apparently. This is all people seem to be talking about. People in other countries have been texting my ass to check whether I am okay (I am, thank you). When I occasionally look at the news on my phone I keep seeing scary line graphs and maps coloured an angry red, and quotes from politicians and other, similarly worthless scumbags trying to turn the weather into a dividing-line issue in the culture war. Well, I guess this is what happens when the news has been degraded to the status of meme exchange, when provoking anxiety and anger has become both political currency and a business model and when there is a pseudo-scientific diagram to be drawn up for literally everything. I yearn for the days when the world was not like this - in other words, for the days when I consumed my summertime news in the pages of an out-of-date tabloid bought from a southern European mini-market. But it’s pointless. I will stop whining.

Why are we – or book publishers, at any rate – fascinated with ‘lost worlds’? Another late addition to my holiday TBR pile is a book I have been sent to review for a newspaper, all about the ‘lost realms’ of early medieval Britain. It looks interesting, so I’m not throwing shade here. But there does seem now to be an entire sub-genre of history books about political units that have vanished. The ur-text is Norman Davies’ Vanished Kingdoms. But in the last few months there has also been Matthew Green’s Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain, Bart van Loo’s history of the house of Burgundy (a lost wannabe kingdom); and I see that there is An Atlas of Lost Kingdoms coming out later this year. Do these books touch a nerve (if they do) because in much of the West our borders have been stable for a few generations, and the idea that they were once otherwise has the thrill of the unimaginable? Or do we perhaps suspect that before too much more of the twenty-first century has elapsed, kingdoms will start to vanish all over again?

Okay, I’m off for a nap. And I need to do my daily Greek lesson on Duolingo. I managed to make a joke in Greek the other day. The person I was talking to laughed. So I think she got it. But who knows. She could have been laughing at me while pretending to laugh with me. You can’t out-Cretan a Cretan, as they say.