Rock and Roll, without the Boogie
“Book of the Week”… presumably it won’t go off if you read it the week after.
Combine ukuleles and books and there is one inevitable result: the punning title.
Clearly I’m not going to throw stones here, since in this respect I live in the glassiest of glass houses; and anyway, this sort of thing has a very long and noble tradition, going back at least as far as the great May Singhi Breen who liked to push her New Ukulele Method book with the slogan “Uke Can Play the Melody”. Putting out a book with even the most tangential ukulele connection and not rolling out the puns would seem like something of a betrayal.
In the case of this particular book the author has the added advantage of a surname already primed to pun. The result is The Uke of Wallington: One Man and His Ukulele Round Britain, the latest book from Mark Wallington and his first travel book since, I believe, 1996′s Pennine Walkies. Not that he has been idle since then, as Mr Wallington is also well known as a writer for television and of books which have been adapted for television, but I suspect that all of us who had read his travelling tales in the past had assumed that we were not likely to see another. And then Lo! not only does he write a book about a blissfully pointless journey across Britain but it’s got a bloody ukulele in it. Things were looking good.
My copy arrived yesterday afternoon; I finished it later that evening, an indication that I was rather enjoying it and also, perhaps, that I do not exactly pack my weekends with ambitious goals beyond doing a few chores and putting my feet up. A few weeks ago one of these chores was the painful process of deciding which books to send to the local charity shop (not too painful in the case of several Orson Scott Card novels, I might add), when I noticed that for some reason I not only had a copy each of Wallington’s 500 Mile Walkies and Boogie Up the River but also two copies of Pennine Walkies. They all went into the charity shop box: these were the paperbacks and I also have them in hardback copies, which I have kept along with a hardback of his Destination Lapland. At that point I decided to check if Mark Wallington had succumbed to the lure of Twitter, discovering that indeed he had and finding through his Tweets that a new book was on its way soon… and here we are.
The premise is simple: a man in his late fifties gets together with friends to form a rock and roll band they call The Elderly Brothers. Stardom fails to beckon. Stardom, indeed, gives an embarrassed cough and tries not to catch their gaze. The band splits and Our Hero realises, as he has always known, that lacking youth and novelty as well as real musical talent he has missed his chance to make any sort of splash in popular music, so he does what any sane person would do under such circumstances and starts playing the ukulele. This leads to the idea of touring Britain with the uke, playing at a venue and then moving on, in a vaguely northerly direction until reaching Cape Wrath, at which point geography does rather force one to turn around. Clearly an unknown player with a limited repertoire of Chuck Berry numbers at his disposal is never going to be in demand for bookings, so Mr Wallington hops aboard a bus – not a flash tour bus, just a bus – and sets off to find a string of “open mic” nights in pubs and clubs across the country. No pay, no guarantee of being able to play, no guarantee that the venue is even still there and still running an open mic.
Mark Wallington’s earlier travel books set a particular tone, where the writer places himself squarely as Everyman, someone we can relate to, someone who does not seem to outclass the rest of us in his talents and retains an admirable ability to either say the wrong thing to the wrong person or to have his cheerful pleasantries hopelessly misunderstood. In 500 Mile Walkies: One Man and a Dog Versus the South West Peninsular Path he was the woefully under-prepared hiker setting off to walk a coastal path with inadequate boots, borrowed equipment and somebody else’s dog. The sequel, Boogie Up the River: One Man and His Dog to the Source of the Thames, had him rowing an elderly skiff on his quest, despite exhibiting no relevant skills. And so on. It’s an understandable stance, particularly for humorous travel books where nobody is going to find a mother lode of belly laughs in tales of a well-equipped camper who uses all the right gear and his extensive skills to pass several very comfortable nights in the wild, thanks very much. These are also books where the supposed purpose of the journey – reaching Dorset, finding the source of the Thames, cycling to Lapland or whatever – is clearly not the point at all, merely an excuse. The Uke of Wallington continues in this vein, with the journey itself, the locations and people, being the real point.
As you might expect there are amusing encounters with bus-riding pensioners, cheerfully stoic or perpetually grumbling British holidaymakers, deluded performers, eccentric landladies and plenty of people who are perfectly happy that their regular turn at an open mic night is the closest they are ever going to get to celebrity. There are attractive seaside towns and crumbling industrial relics. What there isn’t is anything especially surprising to either a British reader or a reader of previous similar British travel books. As well as Mark Wallington’s own efforts this is quite familiar ground to fans of Bill Bryson and others. Familiarity certainly fails to breed contempt in this case, however, and if you’re after frequent chuckles rather than biting satire, genial observations rather than painful insights, then you’ll find page after page of them here. The book may not break new ground, but it does prove to be a very amiable companion along the way regardless. Less early P.J. O’Rourke and more PJs and an early night.
I used to read an awful lot of travel books, particularly the quirky and personal accounts proliferating throughout the eighties and nineties, and after a short time it became all too obvious that finding a fresh reason to take the trip, a hook for the book, was becoming difficult in a crowded publishing market. No longer could a book about merely walking across Europe hope to easily find an audience. Increasingly the shelves became overloaded with tales of people retracing historical journeys in period costume, riding unicycles across the arctic or crossing oceans in boats made from old copies of National Geographic. The novelty factor became so desperate that it inevitably obscured the reasons why people tended to enjoy such books in the first place. With his first travel book Mr Wallington hit upon an entirely brilliant and possibly wholly unintentional twist, undertaking the walk with a dog. Someone else’s dog. More than that, a thoroughly disreputable and rather unpleasant dog who nevertheless had an overabundance of star quality, the poster dog for dogs who were never likely to appear on posters. The dog was called Boogie and he was all that was needed to lift the story of a long walk up to a higher level of travel writing. It’s probably not a coincidence that the travel books featuring Boogie are still in print, whereas Destination Lapland, which is in many ways the same sort of book but features a journey by bicycle and does not include a dog, is not. The public do love a mutt.
The Uke of Wallington does not feature a dog either. I’m rather glad of that, to be honest. The original Boogie is long gone and his replacement in Pennine Walkies with a different dog smacked just a little of resting on one’s laurels, of trying to do more of the same even though it couldn’t happen, like a band reunion years after an acrimonious breakup followed by the death of several key original members. I wondered if the publisher was behind that decision; maybe they were, I’ve actually no idea. Unfortunately, I do feel that The Uke of Wallington misses a trick slightly, because while we did not need an actual dog here there’s definitely a sense that the role filled by Boogie is left glaringly vacant. The truth is, the ukulele ought to be a character. About all that we know of Mr Wallington’s travelling companion is that it was a gift and is carried in his rucksack with a mitten stuck over the end of it. That’s something at least; and I certainly wouldn’t want page after page devoted to exhaustive detail of the brand, the type of strings used or even the history of the instrument. The trouble is, it’s often almost as though the ukulele isn’t there at all, despite the fact that a lot of the book is about the performances. It has no character, there’s no mention of its particular quirks beyond those common to any ukulele. That does seem a shame and an opportunity missed to add a bit of colour here and there. This isn’t really a double act, but I rather wish it were.
So, after a long, long wait we have another Mark Wallington travel book. It’s a lot like the previous ones, which is no bad thing as far as I’m concerned even though I regret that it isn’t apparently available in hardback. The style hasn’t changed much over the years, although I’m pleased that the running gags, which became a little too contrived in the later Boogie books, are handled more easily and naturally here. Ukulele fans might hope for a bit more ukulele, whereas anyone looking for a good-natured wander across Britain will probably be very satisfied. It may not be Travels with Charley or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but it is a thoroughly enjoyable read with enough laughs to keep me going through to the end in a single sitting.
The Uke of Wallington: One Man and His Ukulele Round Britain is published in paperback by AA Publishing, priced £8.99.
Selling the family silver
Dice not included. Except when they are.
Surprisingly with a title like that, this is not a post about the budget. Nor is it a post about the family silver, since we don’t actually have any. Mind you, after that budget announcement the nation as a whole doesn’t have any either (ooh! politics!)
No, Gentle Reader, this is a post about freeing up some space, trying to get a little (probably very little) cash and taking a look at a hobby I’ve enjoyed for*cough* thirty years or so.
Games, role-playing games in particular, are something I’ve loved since I stumbled across confusing references to them as a child. Back then, with no Internet and limited understanding of “hobby” games in the media, deciphering what something like Dungeons & Dragons was and how to play it (indeed, how to actually find a copy to buy) was not an easy task, as I’ve briefly mentioned before. It’s no accident that the bulk of players who discovered the games back then tended to do so because of an older sibling or friend – or friend of a friend – who had themselves stumbled across D&D in some odd, random way. Since the games are essentially social activities – direct, face-to-face across a table social activities – it’s understandable and appropriate that word of mouth was the main way in which news of them spread at first. This was made all the more important given that the first games of this type were rarely written clearly and were particularly bad when it came to explaining how to actually play them. The concept may have been brilliant, but trying to convey just what it was and how to do anything with it was tricky: “It’s like a boardgame… except there’s no board and you can do anything you want… Except there are rules, so you can’t just make it up… Well, you do make it up but…” and so forth.
Like any number of kids who loved to read (mostly science-fiction and fantasy for me at that time) role-playing games were instantly attention-grabbing. Creative, exciting and fairly cheap, things started to make a lot more sense once I heard about the upcoming Fighting Fantasy games from a newspaper article and fantasy games became a pretty big craze for a time. I bought several, along with numerous books about them such as the reassuringly directly-titled What is Dungeons & Dragons? Over the years I’ve bought more and sold many, although a fondness for the history of the hobby means that I kept all of those “how to” and “what is” books.
These days I still play the games, face-to-face with friends as a social activity after work and more recently via web-based video through Google+. I can only play so many, though; and a good number of the games I’ve picked up over the years either don’t suit me or are simply never going to make it onto the schedule. It’s a slightly awkward point as far as the business of making RPGs goes, but if you buy one that you like then you need never buy another; indeed, you need never buy any extras for it either. A game like Marcus L. Rowland’s wonderful Forgotten Futures, based on the “scientific romances” which preceded the modern form of science-fiction, not only has enough material provided with it to last a lifetime, but it also has a virtually inexhaustible supply of adventure ideas and background details available in the form of the original stories (often free to obtain electronically) and period magazine articles. The Internet makes discovering such things easy and more or less free, so how many new games and supplements are really needed?
All of which brings me to a hard look at the books and boxes on my shelves and a long overdue paring down to the games I actually get to play or find particularly enjoyable to read. A few things have found their way onto eBay already, but in the case of a couple of rare items and a number of quite recent titles I’m not sure that’s the best way of selling the surplus. For now I’m popping a list of some of the books I intend to sell here, partly as a way for me to organise myself and partly to see if anyone has any good ideas for what to do with them or would like to make me an offer for one or more. Links provided for more information, where possible:
- Tunnels & Trolls 30th Anniversary Edition, boxed set (with dice! and signed card from the author)
- Mortal Coil 1st Edition
- Elfs
- Dogs in the Vineyard
- Cold City
- Primetime Adventures
- The Shab-Al-Hiri Roach (with cards and rubber cockroach… really)
- The Shadow of Yesterday
- Don’t Rest Your Head
- Solipsist (signed by the author and the publisher)
- Inspectres
- Sorcerer and three supplemental books: Sorcerer & Sword; The Sorcerer’s Soul; The Dictionary of Mu
Obviously many of those links lead to the publisher websites where the games are offered for sale. If you’d rather buy new than used then I doubt they’d mind. I might cry just a very little, though.
A couple of other games are trickier, since they are rarer and reasonably valuable in these editions, but not necessarily hotly sought-after. If you can find a copy then the price is high, but an eBay listing isn’t likely to attract many bids unless I’m very lucky:
- High Fantasy, along with its three supplements and adventures: Adventures in High Fantasy; Wizards & Warriors; Goldchester.
- The Book of Mars: a combat system, 1st complete edition.
And if I do manage to sell anything then I promise not to blow all the cash on games.
Serving Suggestion
Morrisons, venturing boldly to astounding new vistas of the imagination.
Hearty applause to Morrisons supermarket for the audacious, groundbreaking serving suggestion displayed on their own brand of brown sauce. Best served, it seems, on a sausage, robustly pronged by a shiny fork, and with no trace of the actual product on show.
Walking the Black Dog? Put your Wellies on…
Not a photograph of the actual band.
I have a problem.
Winter is a time of year I’ve always enjoyed, with its crisp air and wonderful silence. Hiking around the Peak District during the winter was always a particularly fine experience; in Manchester the benefit is chiefly a reduced number of yobs hanging around to hurl abuse and missiles at passing cyclists. Winter, however, is seemingly less keen on me.
Friends and family have commented on dramatic changes in my mood and level of anxiety during the winter, although this was only voiced following something of a breakdown after I moved to Manchester and had to be referred from work to a doctor: apparently I had acquired a pet, a very heavy and constant companion, a black dog. More accurately, as described by Dr. Johnson and Churchill among others, the Black Dog, depression. Ironic, really, as I’m rather more of a cat person.
Today things have improved greatly from the really low times, when the sight of a soap bubble bursting had me in a flood of tears and despair and nothing had any reason, worth or purpose. I no longer take medication and I have become considerably more adept at spotting the warning signs as a depressive front circles and moves in. I still get depressed, however, and I do mean depressed rather than just feeling a bit sad and low. That’s normal; and I’d probably be concerned if I was unshakably, bouncily happy every moment of every day. Depression is not simply feeling down, it’s accompanied by wildly inappropriate and extreme moods, an unshakeable certainty that there is no point doing anything at all (I mean really, with the inevitable heat death of the universe ahead of us why would anyone get started on a thick novel?) and other thoroughly miserable and unreasonable elements. It isn’t fun for me, it certainly isn’t fun for those around me, and the blasted thing is far, far harder to avoid in winter. Christmas is ill-timed in this respect, another blow as I love Christmas.
The Lovely Emma, a remarkable source of strength through difficult times, bought me a ukulele for Christmas. I’d fancied getting one for years, but since I had never got anywhere with halfhearted attempts to learn piano, horn, guitar and harmonica over the years I never bought one, expecting it to exist primarily as ornamentation for the inside of the wardrobe. So far, it has been a very different story.
Quite what makes this diminutive guitar-like instrument so different is hard to pinpoint. It only has four strings, which is a boon for sausage-fingered slowcoaches such as myself, is conveniently small and portable and, for a beginner’s model at least, quite cheap. That fails to cover it, though. There’s something ridiculously cheerful about the thing. The bright sound helps, as does the visual absurdity in a world more used to the relative size of guitars. Perhaps it’s the association with George Formby (here not playing a banjolele for once), Tiny Tim (shopping bag and all) or even Kermit the Frog (note the dazzlingly deft finger-work). Maybe it’s because of Elvis. No no, the other one.
Anyway, whatever the reason I’ve been strumming along every day since I got it and, miraculously, making a degree of progress. Being able to run through a recognisable tune and even to sing along, in my tuneless cement-mixer fashion, is really rather uplifting. Playing the uke is only part of it, however. Getting to grips with the instrument has also rekindled a general love of music dampened during the depressive days and that has led me to explore new tunes and performers. I’ve long been aware that there are bands other than XTC, of course, but Swindon’s finest usually swim to the top when I’m fishing for something to listen to. The ukulele has taken me beyond a cursory familiarity with music hall songs to the discovery that many of them are hugely fun to play and sing; many are also absolutely filthy, which is a cheerful bonus. I’ve found my way to musicians I’d not heard of before, such as Manitoba Hal Brolund, and some I’d encountered in passing but shamefully paid little attention to at the time. In particular, I found The Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra.
They weren’t the first ukulele orchestra, nor the first playing popular and seemingly inappropriate tunes on the uke (The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain certainly beat them to it on both counts and there may have been others). They aren’t necessarily the most technically dazzling and they are not, yet, the best known. Listening to the various songs they’ve put out on a series of reassuringly cheap EPs though, there’s a fantastic sense of fun running through so many of them. The Wellies play brilliantly well and manage to convey something missing from some other performers, the sense that they are not only involving the audience but also waving an instrument at them and saying, “Come on, you can do this too!” and if that’s not enough there’s also that bloke from Flight of the Conchords and The Muppets.
Since downloading the first EP they’ve brightened my days enormously.
February is here now and snow is just beginning to hit the window as I type. It’s still dark and bleak, still very cold, still winter. The Black Dog is still around, but he’s outside at the moment, not here in the warm, nowhere near my ukulele. He seems not to like it when I reach for the Wellies.
Summon Elemental
Appropriately grainy semi-Victorian photograph
Monday in Manchester and the start of a strangely steampunk week for me. Despite a reputation as a Victorian a century or so out of his time I have never actually had anything to do with the steampunk crowd, a generally charming and usually very enthusiastic bunch taken to cleverly constructing outré outfits and exotic sci-fi machinery from old clockwork and machine parts. That’s not to say that steampunk is unknown to me; indeed, I’m a keen reader and great admirer of the work of K. W. Jeter (among others), the man who is credited with coining the term back in the eighties, and I’ve played and run many role-playing games such as Victoriana and Space: 1889 which have steampunk themes or elements. What I’ve not done is either dress up in Victorian togs and attended a gig in a Manchester pub, nor spent an evening sporting cavalry whiskers and play-acting my way through a murder mystery with friends.
Until now.
The week began, as I was saying, with the alleged first Manchester gig for bright Brighton peer Professor Elemental, billed as “Chap-hop’s enfant terrible” on the flyers, at the Lass o’ Gowrie pub. A small, indeed compact, venue but one which won me over instantly by the simple expedient of having Timothy Taylor’s Landlord on tap. The free WiFi was a nice touch, as well. Long a BBC haunt, it now seems to be positioned increasingly as a student and entertainment venue. I didn’t dress in a steampunk or Victorian style, sporting nothing more exotic than a sports jacket and fairly subdued cravat, but there were steampunks aplenty in attendance. The evening began with Freestyle Fictionary, a sort of performance word game group. I’d seen nothing like them before but gathered as things progressed that they represented in some ways the very roots of rap, flinging verse and rhyme back and forth in an improvised verbal battle. Part way through the performance The Lovely Emma directed my attention to the anonymous figure at the bar: Professor Elemental himself in his Clark Kent persona. Fearlessly interrupting his drinks-buying endeavours, and thus keeping his friends from their beers for a good ten minutes, I wandered over and said hello. We had, I should say, communicated occasionally before, as the good Professor was generous enough to allow the use of several of his tunes on the podcasts I produce for RPGMP3.com which led to periodic Twitter conversations, so there was at least recognition there to offset the inconvenience of being kept from his pint.
The show itself was delightful, once the main attraction had hurriedly changed into his pith helmet and safari ensemble, with an enthusiastic and appreciative crowd lapping up the performance as Professor E. effortlessly glided from playful banter to rapping about tea, village fetes, battling other performers (no love for “Mr B. the Gentleman Rhymer” from this audience) and performing awful experiments on animals. Most of the material was familiar to the fans – clearly so, given how easily they sang along and jumped in at the appropriate places – but there was one new piece; and that was something quite revealing. Offered the choice of a song about cutting the heads off animals and putting them onto other animals (cheering), one about the Quest for the Golden Frog (louder cheering) and something new and unfamiliar about men who dress up as owls and hunt in the night (almost desperate cheering) the audience’s preference was clear. Instead of a rap with the familiar, quirky hip-hop backing music of the rest of his work this one was clearly incomplete and was presented with no backing track, just a man speaking to the spellbound crowd. The piece itself was charming, although very much in keeping with his more familiar recent work, but what struck me particularly was what happened when it was offered in this raw, stripped-down form. The heart was revealed, the simple, rather beautiful core of the evening, as an amusing, light piece that will no doubt fit very well with the other catchy songs on a future album was instead given to us as poetry, quite enthralling in its simplicity. Behind every one of his songs the same poetic heart lies, waiting to be noticed once you’ve stopped smiling and tapping your feet.
The week ended with something far from simple, a convoluted murder mystery set aboard the airship Orient Express V. Despite having worked both designing and selling games in the past I had not previously played one of these murder mystery party affairs. This time the theme was steampunk, a fine excuse for a group of friends to cobble together some vaguely Victorian outfits (authenticity is excused, one of the beauties of steampunk over re-enactment, as there never was a “steampunk” period) and spend the evening trying to unravel the crime and catch the killer, a task made increasingly complicated as we worked our way through the wine cellar.
So it was that I bought a cheap bowler hat from eBay, raided my wardrobe and trimmed my beard into a style inspired by Nigel Green in Zulu, with a distinct dash of Malcolm McDowell as Flashman. Quite what reaction I’ll get at work tomorrow is anyone’s guess, but I’m sticking with it until the chin-whiskers grow back. Great fun. Anyone but me could have done it, although since I was playing a government agent on undercover assignment to protect one of the other passengers my actions were suspicious enough to raise eyebrows among the other guests. In the end the culprit turned out to be none other than The Lovely Emma. We returned home together, with me feeling somewhat nervous to be sharing a house with such a ruthless murderess.
A delightful bunch, entirely trustworthy...
‘Ello ‘ello, TGO
Popular business, this camping lark.
A quick “hello” (“hullo”, or “halloo”, according to your taste; I’ll even venture an “ahoy-hoy” if you must) to everyone who is dropping by as a result of the feature on the TGO Challenge in the autumn edition of TGO Magazine, in which I briefly feature. After recovering from being referred to as “weight-obsessed” (which may have a grain of truth when seen from some angles) I was horrified to see that this proud Staffordshire man has been labelled in the article as a Mancunian . I would immediately march on TGO HQ and demand that such an insult be rectified at once, but it’s an awfully long way to go so I’ll probably opt for popping the kettle on and quietly fuming over a cuppa. Ooh, cake.
There are a number of posts here covering the TGO Challenge and the gear I used, so do please have a wander round if you think they may be of interest. A quick glance at the dates of individual posts will highlight that this is only an occasional, sporadic blog rather than the more frequently updated and focussed ones linked to over on the right (do try them: they’re well worth visiting and there’s a satisfying *click* from the mouse when you do); and indeed when I do post the topic may well not be particularly related to hiking.
Hello as well to the occasional adventurous soul who clicks on my signature link from the various role-playing game forums, such as RPGnet and RPGMP3, and finds a blog consisting of lots of posts about rucksacks. I’ll be writing more gaming-related things soon. Ish. Probably.
Big Jack Brass
