thomaswilson-sveltekit/src/content/posts.json

{"hangover-square": {"title": "Hangover Square", "author": "Patrick Hamilton", "date": "2021-05-25T00:00:00", "book_review": true, "preview": "I was gifted this book by my mother, so I feel terrible for what I am about to say about it. It was gifted with the best of intentions: someone or other famous reported that it mad", "content": "<p>I was gifted this book by my mother, so I feel terrible for what I am about to say about it. It was gifted with the best of intentions: someone or other famous reported that it made them feel at home in London, a city I love. But a city that can feel indifferent to you. This book did not make me feel at home in this city. It showed how it is possible for a place to be the centre of art, politics, ambition and still allow anyone to shift un-affixed through their life.</p>\n<p>Credit where it's due: Hamilton captures this mood so well in <em>Hangover Square</em>, a book set in London in the winter of 1938. Written between 1939-1941, just as the Second World War loomed and then broke, the backdrop is bleak, and various characters' enthusiasm for the Nazi regime isn't particularly endearing.</p>\n<p>This is a bleak book. There is little in it to broadcast hope. We get a few weak flashes, but we know well enough that they\u2019re faltering and won\u2019t last the evening. Let alone the night. This is thanks to our hapless protagonist, George Harvey Bone: a man who seems rarely to have his own self interest at heart. A man who is in hapless love with Netta, a sometimes actress but always cruel woman who uses Bone for nothing more than social leverage and free drinks.</p>\n<p>The drudgery of unrequited love apparently runs in Hamilton's other works, namely <em>Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky</em>. He writes it incredibly well. Though I am largely unsympathetic to Bone, Hamilton draws out the sympathy, even when you're pretty stone-cold on the same narrative arc repeating itself for the fourth-or-fifth time in the book.</p>\n<p>Netta strings Bone, along with her two other drinking companions (and sometimes lovers) Micky and Peter through the pubs of Euston. Gin and beer and sandwiches appear cycle through this book. Unsurprisingly, Hamilton himself was a drunk. A lonely drunk. But golly can he write.</p>\n<p>This complete haplessness and lack of control over his whole life makes the book drag. There is little to no change in narrative style or characters throughout the book. We're introduced to Bone's \"dead moods\", what we might now recognise as schizophrenic or psychotic/depersonalisation episodes. Times when the illusion of self and consciousness are completely freed from him, and he is overwhelmed by a desire to kill Netta.</p>\n<p>But these are never explored. He's had dead moods for his entire life, but he's not known Netta his entire life. Are they an expression of things he truly wants, or some perfect negative of his \"normal\" self? We're never given any hint of an answer.</p>\n<p>At no point do you believe that Bone actually will change, or wants to change. He has no mastery of himself, he is subject to the abandonment of others. Romantically and platonically, people leave Bone. It's sad, but also I have no sense of who Bone was. He's taken advantage of by those around him, they see him as nothing more than the taxi fares and gin bottles he can buy. And they're not wrong. They're obviously callous and unkind and taking advantage, but... what else is Bone? Our poetic narrator.</p>\n<p>If nothing else, read sections of the book, just for the language. It is singularly the largest redeeming feature, making this book worth the (literally groan-inducing) effort that it took from me at other times. It reads as though freshly graduated from the school of Dickens, though with the bone-tired-from-the-effort-of-alcoholism that can\u2019t be bought at eighteen years old. A mature student of the Dickensian school, then.</p>\n<p>I\u2019m unsure if the prose capture the 1940s accurately, or instead a few decades before. I\u2019m not familiar with literature of the time. The little interact
    "2022-09-13-wainwrights": {
        "title": "Listing all the Wainwrights",
        "author": "Thomas Wilson",
        "date": "2022-09-13T00:00:00",
        "book_review": false,
        "preview": "On a recent holiday in The Lake District I wasn't able to find a complete list of the [Wainwright fells](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wainwrights) online, in a concise way",
        "content": "<p>On a recent holiday in The Lake District I wasn't able to find a complete list of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wainwrights\">Wainwright fells</a> online, in a concise way that I could use to track the height and location of the hills.  </p>\n<p>A few hours in the morning later and I've compiled a list <a href=\"https://github.com/thomaswilsonxyz/wainwright-peaks\">here</a> on GitHub.  It gives you all 214 fells with their</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Name</li>\n<li>Height (Metres and Feet)</li>\n<li>Col &amp; Drop heights (Metres)</li>\n<li>Location (Latitude/Longitude, Ordnance Survey Reference)</li>\n</ul>\n<p>enjoy !</p>", "slug": "2022-09-13-wainwrights"}, "2021-01-09-things-i-learned-22": {"title": "Things I learned this week #22", "author": "Thomas Wilson", "date": "2021-01-09T00:00:00", "book_review": false, "preview": "This week the UK Government has brought us _Lockdown The Third_, a threequel in the franchise after the straight-to-TV movie that was the November lockdown. Cases, deaths, and hosp", "content": "<p>This week the UK Government has brought us <em>Lockdown The Third</em>, a threequel in the franchise after the straight-to-TV movie that was the November lockdown. Cases, deaths, and hospital admissions are at an all-time high in our country at the moment, with London in particular looking pretty scary. It might be the \"the last push\" like this (boy, I really hope it is the last push), but that doesn't help the healthcare workers being forced forward/backwards/downwards by this whole situation. So for goodness sake, just stay inside. Call out people who are making selfish choices. We're all making decisions for everyone else around us, it really is that simple. Arrange FaceTime calls, yoga sessions, happy hours, online games, book clubs, Netflix watch parties, and craft dates with people. Life isn't going to be normal for a while, but we're going to get through this together and then one day get irresponsibly drunk as we sit in or outside a pub until closing time with the people we love, and think about what life looks like now. Until then just... learn to crochet or cook or something.</p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>This cat</strong>: Mike the Cat guarded the British Museum, who was \"probably the most famed British feline of the 20th Century\". Which seems like a narrow competition, but look, I don't want to detract from Mike's notoriety. After a decade's service, he passed away in 1929, and officials at the museum placed a memorial stone near the Great Russell Street entrance of the museum. (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_%28cat%29\">source</a>)</li>\n<li><strong>This not-fireworks display</strong>: At Mariana Bay, Singapore, officials organised a light show performed (which feels like the wrong word) by five hundred drones. Just watch the video, it's mesmerising to watch them twinkle, form into animals, or just geometric patterns. (<a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7Ul_EmHiJM\">YouTube video</a>)</li>\n<li><strong>This over-qualified actor</strong>: Y'all have seen <em>Stranger Things</em>, right? The Netflix original 80's horror show which lives in my heart forever because I watched it during my Ph.D. with my housemate and like a whole bunch of popcorn. Mate, honestly it's so good. Anyway, there's this iconic scene right at the end of the third season where the world is about to end, and some of the characters are driving their iconic 80s car away from a world-consuming monster. The Duffer brothers took nearly three minutes of screen-time during this climax for an over-the HAM radio <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EiRjwjp30I\">rendition</a> of the title theme from <em>The Never-Ending Story</em>. It's baffling and I'm amazed it got approval. Susie, the long-distance (previously almost certainly fictitious) girlfriend is played by Gabriella Pizzolo, played the title role in Matilda on Broadway in 2013. Pizzolo gets less than a minute's screen time but she rocks it. Bonus fun fact: the composers for the show (Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein), wh