Diary: our Christmas decorations

Our yearly review of Christmas decorations, inside and outside the house.

The Christmas tree, the mantelpiece and the hearth vie for your attention

The white lights are next door's illuminations, but they harmonise, yes?

I believe Clare is looking for a transit of one of the Iridium satellites

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I've just reread John Banville's "The Infinities" which I reviewed back in 2009. Banville always benefits from a second pass - this time I had a feeling the novel offered some homage to Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" but failed to find any deep connection.

I've been listening to Joni Mitchell's "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" (1975), usually described as 'experimental'. It's the album which precedes 'Hejira'. The tracks are diverse and some appeal more than others. I wouldn't say I 'get it' at the moment but I am prepared to give it time. It has a potentially rewarding complexity I no longer find in work from (for example) Jimi Hendrix or Deep Purple (I know I'm comparing apples with oranges here).

My sympathies this evening are with the London Zoo Aardvark which so tragically died in the cafe fire today. No doubt it too had plans for Christmas but I am reminded of Mike Tyson's justifiably-famous aphorism: "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."

Or in this case, incinerated.

The Sea - John Banville

Banville's novel won the Booker prize in 2005. Art historian (special subject: Pierre Bonnard) Max Morden returns to the small seaside village where he once holidayed as a child. Suffering recent bereavement, he has been drawn back to a scene of ancient trauma.

In that long-ago summer, he had befriended the Grace children - working class 'townie' boy meets up with wilful Chloe and her mute twin brother Myles. Childhood cruelty and the first fumbling stumbles of attraction are followed by unimaginable tragedy.

Max tells the intricate, complex, self-aware story linking those first glimmerings of adulthood with his later marriage to Anna and her protracted death. A profound analysis of the truth and limits of relationships, and the impact and depth of loss.

I read 'The Sea' a few years ago and did so, I'm afraid, rather literally. I am persuaded that Banville's highly metaphorical and self-referential writing almost demands a second reading.

'The Sea' delivers on literature's deepest promise: to tell you more about human experience and the human condition than is possible to one's unaided introspection.

I have on my table yet another Banville novel I've already read: 'The Infinities'. The title, amusingly enough, refers to the infinities in quantum field theory which were finally tamed by renormalisation theory. Naturally, for the erudite Banville, this is yet another metaphor.

Doctor Copernicus - John Banville

I recently read (and posted a review of) John Banville's 'The Untouchable', a fictionalisation of Anthony Blunt's life. This novel is a similar psychological portrait, of Nicholas Copernicus who launched the heliocentric paradigm of the cosmos in the early sixteenth century.

This is not a biography - Wikipedia is perfectly adequate for that. Banville is interested, as he was with Blunt, in the inner life of an intellectual with controversial, heretical views.

Intellectuals are frequently not so brave, especially when their subversive ideas cannot be understood, except by specialists. Mocked and traduced by ignorant rabble-rousers with baleful agendas, trapped by their intellectual precision and honesty, they lack defences.

And is it worth going to the wall for a theory? Especially when we know that theories are invariably provisional and should not be confused with absolute truth. It is known that Copernicus was conflicted, frightened and ambivalent. He may have been aware of the ramshackle nature of his theory: due to his insistence on circular orbits, he had to utilize more epicycles than the conventional geocentric Ptolemaic system.

Banville's style comprises fine descriptive writing with a penetrating insight into character and motive. His novel transports the reader to late-mediaeval Europe with its squalor, cold, lice and power-politics. I'm glad I went and I'm pleased to be back!

The Untouchable (John Banville)

This is John Banville's cerebral, psychological exploration of the character of Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, Poussin expert and Soviet spy. I'm about a third of the way through this novel and as always in thrall to Banville's writing and acute analysis of his characters' states of mind.

May I sound like a fortune-teller? A much-awaited return to Canada is mooted, but not in circumstances predicted. More later ... and who would have thought an essential part of the carry-on baggage of a thirty-something snowboarding instructor is two Terabytes of USB hard disk capacity?

Immortality is getting harder. Think of all the educated people of the world (at a particular time) filling a circular stadium. In one direction we rank the mathematicians, in another the novelists, in a third the singers and musicians, and so on. The best of the best are out on the periphery and only one or two people per generation - those on the extreme circumference - will be destined for cultural immortality.

The ratio of circumference to area is inversely proportional to the population of the stadium: generations pass, civilization expands and the competition gets ever more severe; immortality gets harder.  (I feel I'm channelling Banville's hero Victor Maskell here ..).