It is said that one of the dafter questions an American can ask a Briton is how they’re going to be spending Thanksgiving. I’ve actually never been asked this question, but if I had been, as a child, I’d have said “well, we’ll probably be having roast turkey and all the trimmings,” for my mother is American. And as my father’s birthday falls in the last week of November, we would combine the two events, which seemed to make a fair amount of sense.

That said, there was always something a bit alien about it. I had a vague mental image, created by the illustrations of the articles I skipped in educational magazines like Look and Learn, of seventeenth-century English settlers landing in Virginia and being served a nice dinner by friendly native Americans, who didn’t want to see these people starve. The food was, of course, indigenous to the area, hence all that weird stuff like sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie. And turkeys; weren’t they American in the first place?

I became increasingly sceptical as I grew older. For one thing, as I learned more about American history

I became increasingly sceptical as I grew older. For one thing, as I learned more about American history, I began to think that the natives, who, last time I checked (Saturday afternoon cowboy movies on the telly) were being shot from their horses at a staggering rate by what seemed, even given the standard one-sided nature of the narrative, to be invasive colonisers; and if they had given the settlers all those yams or whatever then they were either hopelessly naive or incredibly unfairly treated. Thanks for what, exactly? Your land? Here, have some smallpox-infested blankets.

A streak of anti-Americanism entered my soul, later to be bolstered by Watergate, Vietnam, and a few years after that conflict ended, songs like the Clash’s I’m So Bored With the USA. I was also being educated at very traditional British institutions and in the 1970s it was unwise to mention, let alone stress, any foreign part of your make-up.

But it was my Dad’s birthday, except when it wasn’t (Thanksgiving is held on the fourth Thursday of November. My father’s birthday was the 26th. Close enough).

My mother had a voice and an accent that could carry over the length of Hampstead Heath. And whenever she picked me up from school, loud and in furs, I would die of embarrassment.

And another thing: my mother wasn’t only American, she was, and remains, wholly exotic. English mothers were, in my experience, all from Hampstead and had identical hairdos and quiet demeanours. My mother, on the other hand, an ex-opera and -musical star, had a voice and an accent that could carry over the length of Hampstead Heath. And whenever she picked me up from school, loud and in furs, I would die of embarrassment. I’m not exaggerating. I actually died every time, until I told her I’d be getting the bus home in future.

That said, I had problems enough with the feast on its own terms, without taking any historical or geo-political concerns into consideration. For one thing, there had to be a symbolic distance kept between the Thanksgiving dinner and the Sunday roast. (Which we always had.)

Read more: Different Christmas rituals around the world

The turkey wasn’t a problem. Children are greedy little sods, and are generally supportive of roasted fowl, the bigger the better. What was a problem were the sweet potatoes and other bits and bobs that marked the occasion as peculiarly American. Also you had both mashed and roast potatoes, and one year she even tried doing that thing with marshmallows, the details of which remain buried in traumatised memory, but which resulted in my saying whatever the ten-year-old’s equivalent of “what the fuck?” was.

Dessert was always pumpkin pie, made from the internal organs scooped from the Hallowe’en pumpkin. (To this day, I have a strong suspicion that my mother was solely responsible for the importation of this custom into the British Isles, and when people mutter about the increasing Americanisation of winter festivals, I know who to blame. For that matter, I also suspect that she had the first car in England that wasn’t brown. Which did at least make it easy to find at Brent Cross car park.)

….the whole of December seemed to be spent eating turkey, in various permutations or disguises

My mother isn’t a bad cook, so her pumpkin pie was pretty tasty, but I could never get the hang of sweet potatoes. To this day my heart sinks when I see them as the default carbohydrate on a menu. But there were other tensions. Because turkeys are huge, and because you have to have them at Christmas too (absolutely no one cooked goose in those dark days), the whole of December seemed to be spent eating turkey, in various permutations or disguises, and after a while people would get fed up with it. I think my father suffered particularly: as if having his party taken over by his wife wasn’t bad enough.

But in my mother’s household, the tradition persists. Aged eighty-something, she became a little too frail, so I took over the cooking duties. I shall be doing it this year. I am not looking forward to the turkey, and only a little bit towards the pumpkin pie (which my mother will be making, I don’t have a clue). But there will definitely not be sweet potatoes. Or, for crying out loud, marshmallows.

The post Nick Lezard on the ups and downs of being Anglo-American at Thanksgiving appeared first on Silver Magazine.

Ever thought about writing a novel? They say there’s a book in everyone, but how many of us get that book down on paper? Julia Crouch is the first in our series of interviews where we meet the novelist. And find out more about their writing challenges and habits…

How would you describe yourself?

I’m a novelist, runner, speccy yoga-doer, mother of three grown-up beauties – and I’m soon to be a grandmother. I pot, paint and go for long walks with my dog. I have been married to Tim for 34 years, though I would never call myself a wife. I am – generally – quietly political; a green, lefty, vegetarian feminist. I’m handy, practical and good in a crisis. Oh, and I cook like a bitch.

Where is your most ‘fertile’ zone for writing?

I have a studio at the bottom of my garden, which I bought in a good graphic design year about 20 years ago. It has had many incarnations and for the last decade, it has been my writing studio. I used to do most of my work in there, either at my sit/stand desk or lying on a day bed.

But in the last couple of years, my pottery and painting habit has commandeered half the space, and my writing area is now just the desk corner. Now my nest is empty, I have plenty of nooks around the house where I can write undisturbed. To be honest, most of the actual writing stuff now happens on the front room sofa, surrounded by my two cats and my dog and with the fire and fairy lights lit in the winter.

When you write, are you a longhand merchant, making notes by hand, or do you go straight to the keyboard?

I used to write notes longhand, but now my thumb arthritis makes handwriting painful and ugly. Also, I am a geek, so I love different software writing tools and I touch-type as fast as I think, so it makes sense to work on screen.

I will do note-taking on my phone, either voice notes or dictated. And I plot and plan using Scapple for mind-mapping, Aeon for time-lining – I find knowing when things happen helps with what happens – and Scrivener for drafting. For the arthritis, I dictate notes when I am emailing or marking up manuscripts for my teaching and mentoring work, but there’s some sort of disconnect with my brain for fiction writing.

If you didn’t write in the domestic noir genre, what would you explore instead?

I would like to write women’s/literary fiction, where my writing, characters and themes can breathe without so much plot! Don’t get me wrong, I love plot, but it would be lovely to be able to step back and just write without that particular discipline at the top of the pile of considerations. In fact, for a forthcoming novel, I am aiming to do exactly that.

Read more: Nick Lezard’s fave romantic novels

What’s the strangest thing you do to inspire yourself when you’re running on empty?

Go for a run with Nick Cave playing in my ears, throw a pot, or go and comb the mats out of my dog’s curly hair. I like that better than she does…

How do you overcome any distractions, stop prevaricating, and finish your work?

I use Mac Freedom. This switches the internet off, which really helps. I work in chunks – focusing on word count if drafting, chapters if editing, and time if doing admin and plotting. Mini goals are really important in keeping me focused.

I like to get up and do things like make a cuppa, put the washing on the line or get the supper prepped. Activities like that provide punctuation and, even if I don’t get far with my writing for the day, I’m making progress with other things around me.

How many of your characters are based on real people?

I invent all of them, but they are Frankenstein’s monsters, cobbled together from real people I know. But the characters come to me almost fully formed, which I always find weird. Very early on, I know them. They develop as I think about the story – their function grows with their form.

Character is plot, plot is character, said F Scott Fitzgerald. And I think about what relationship I want the reader to have with them. I trained and worked in theatre for the first 10 years of my working life, so I do think, for me, that creating characters is a bit like the work an actor does. It’s a sort-of inhabiting.

Has anyone ever recognised themselves in any of your novels?

My second novel, Every Vow You Break, is about an English family spending a summer in Upstate New York, while the husband, an actor, plays the lead in a Shakespeare. Every other year for about a decade my own English family did exactly that and it was an absolutely wonderful thing for all of us to do.

I made very sure that the husband – Marcus, who is the worst kind of male actor – very clearly has a fine, thick head of hair. Tim, my own actor husband is completely bald, so there can’t possibly be any similarity. A friend spotted her house once – I do tend to steal houses and settings more than characters.

Do you eat and drink while you write?

I’ve never been asked that before! Always a big mug of tea to hand, after my three morning mugs of coffee. I don’t like to eat because I can’t bear a sticky keyboard and I’m a mucky eater. Even in my drinking days – four years sober, dib dib – I never followed Hemingway’s exhortation to write drunk. Although on a couple of National Novel Writing Months, of which I have completed four, I would have only the end of the day and perhaps a bottle of wine down my throat to write my 1,700 words. Sometimes the results were interesting…

Does playing music help you write?

Yes, but it can’t have words. Regulars for me are Philip Glass, Bach and Handel’s piano music, Max Richter, Dirty Three, and film scores by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

Are there any hard and fast rules you set yourself about your stories or characters?

No coincidences. I think that’s it. Oh, and I like Chekhov’s thing about the gun. He said, “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” I love planting things.

Will the internet and people’s shortened attention spans ever mean the end of the novel?

Sorry, did you say something?

Ha, very funny…

I have a feeling that, just as people are wanting less mass-produced shit in their lives, real books are going to become more popular than ever. People have enormous attention spans for long form TV and stupidly long movies – I’m looking atcha, Scorcese. The low-tech activity of curling up with your cat, a cuppa, and a good, beautifully produced novel is quite alluring in this fast-paced world. It’s certainly Instagrammable!

What do you wish you’d known before starting this novel-writing malarkey?

It’s a good idea to talk an idea over with your editor and/or agent and/or writing best buddy and get the story sorted before spending two years writing it. And if that sounds horribly specific, it’s because it is.

What is your advice for eager new writers?

Enjoy yourself. Read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Work at the craft – read like a writer, fall in love with grammar, sort out your relationship with adverbs. But be bold with your writing and your ideas. Know the rules and know that there are no rules.

• To find out more about Julia Crouch’s work and to order her books, go to juliacrouch.co.uk
• National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) takes place every November. It began in 1999 as a daunting but straightforward challenge: to write 50,000 words of a novel in thirty days.

The post Meet the novelist: Julia Crouch on writing with cats, cuppas, and Nick Cave appeared first on Silver Magazine.

The last time I was invited to review the Beach House Brighton restaurant, Cecconi’s, it was early summer 2022, and it was so bad I truly wondered if it was a set-up. I was looking for the hidden cameras, preparing my ‘oh you got me, you crazy kids’ face. The entire experience was a road accident in slow motion, and in fact it was SO bad, I honestly felt afterwards that I just couldn’t write it up. It seemed altogether too outrageous.

If I’d published an honest review, there might have been ‘visits’ to the restaurant from at least three different departments at the council, I calculated. I’m sure it would have made for hilarious reading, but I didn’t want to get anyone sacked.

There was a point during the meal where five staff members, including the restaurant manager, stood round the table looking at my plate, and nobody could find any words. It was quite an experience.

What to do?

I rang Camilla, who is head of something important at the London Soho House head office and told her what had happened. And she was as shocked as I was. Thanked me for not writing it up and said they were going to use the feedback to make changes. She’d give me a shout when they’d improved things, she said. And that, I guessed, was probably the end of that.

So imagine my delight and surprise when the lovely Camilla did indeed get back in touch. New managers, new staff, changes in training etc, she said. Would I like to go back and have another go?

Yes, I thought, I would like to have another go. And I really hoped it would be a Good Thing, because I’m a positive sort of bird. I scratched my head and thought about who I could persuade to join me for a long lunch that might include many courses and lots of wine. And decided Nicholas Lezard would be nobly altruistic enough to support me in this matter. And off we set.

Food, glorious food

We ate a lot, over several hours, so I’m going to do this a bit differently or you’ll all grow too old to read to the end. There will be a photo of something, and I will tell you what it was like. Then I’ll talk generally afterwards about the place and service, and then I’ll leave you to it. Sound good?

Let’s kick off with the cocktails, natch. Prices vary from £10-17

Lezard – classic dry martini with a twist £17
Very happy man. Had two, just to be sure of the quality.

Harrington-Lowe – the house cocktail, ‘Picante de la Casa’ £13
Aged tequila, chilli, lime, agave – if you’re going to a Soho House anywhere, try one. It’s a cracking drink – more refreshing than a margarita, and I love the chilli kick.
The Eastern Standard I followed it up with (Bombay Sapphire gin, lime, cucumber, mint) was also excellent – cold, zingy, minty.

And then we started eating…

APPETISERS

Lezard – six natives with mignonette £18

Good oysters, shucked (I believe) without any bits of shell left lurking. No spoon for the mignonette (missing cutlery and napkins has been a thing on both visits, if I’m honest) and a pedant (Lezard) might suggest the ratio of vinegar to shallot a bit skewwhiff – more vinegar please. But exceptionally fresh bivalves, which I noticed went down the hatch at the speed of light. A definite yes.

Harrington-Lowe – quails’ eggs, tonne £9

Perfectly-cooked eggs, not over-boiled to grey rubber. I adore caperberries which are not mentioned on the menu, so a delightful surprise. The tuna dollop was pleasant, but perhaps overly liberal in quantity. Also a bit bland. Chuck in some onion and seasoning and that fishy dollop would be more interesting. Both of us quite shocked not to have celery salt as part of the deal, and in fact NO celery salt in the house. How do they make Bloody Marys?!

STARTERS

Lezard – calamari fritti, chilli aioli £11

Everyone happy here. Light batter, fresh squid. No chewiness, none of that stringy nonsense. Lifted considerably by the zhuzhy garlicky chilli dip. Tick.

Harrington-Lowe – tuna tartare, avocado, chilli, mint £15

I confess that I have ordered this starter almost every time I’ve been to the Beach House. I can’t help myself – it’s the perfect blend of sashimi grade tuna, avo chunks, lime, chilli, mint… this is such an uplifting starter I would go to this place, just for this.

Wine
We decided it was important to check the quality of the house plonk and I can say very definitely that both the red and house whites are actually very decent (Maison Vincent, Languedoc £20 for 500ml carafe). Particularly the red. The white is perhaps a little short on the nose, but it goes very well with food. Bravo.

MAIN COURSES

Lezard – ribeye, fries, bearnaise £38

I had to beat Lezard back with a stick to stop him eating this before I took a photo. And I’m not saying that for dramatic effect. I don’t blame him – I had a taster of this steak, and it was astonishingly good. And actually cooked properly (rare, for those of you who need educating). Bloody good work.

Harrington-Lowe – Dover sole, meunière £40

It’s genuinely a long time since someone whipped up to the table and did something cheffy next to me. I’m going to campaign for the return of proper crêpes Suzette done at the table complete with fire and brimstone, because I love the theatre that this sort of thing brings to the meal. James, who fileted the fish, probably felt less excited about the whole thing than me. And indeed I have had fish fileted more efficiently. But it was fun, the fish was exceptionally fresh, that lovely little crisp on the outside, plenty of zingy capers. I’m drooling typing this.

Wine
Lezard stuck to the house red for his plate of cow. I went for a different carafe, the Gavi at £36. The sole, with all its tangy capers etc needs an oomphy white like this, and it was a perfect companion.

PUDDINGS

Lezard – sticky toffee pudding £9
Harrington-Lowe – chocolate mousse, raspberry sorbet, maple honeycomb £9

Personally, I thought that might be the best STP I’ve ever tasted; light and somehow still sticky. The chocolate mousse is delish but not for the faint-hearted. It’s exceptionally rich, but the fruity raspberry cuts through it. It’s still quite a beast though.

Wine, coffee, liqueurs…
Yes, we went there. It was at this point, suitably ‘relaxed’, that we started asking for things off-piste, which they managed without any issue. They rustled up a very respectably-chilled La Fleur d’Or Sauternes for us with pud, which isn’t on the menu. Then we had coffees – I asked for a French, which is the same as Irish but made with brandy rather than whiskey; Lezard had an espresso and a vast bucket of brandy. They warmed his glass, we were pleased to note. At this stage I’ve got no idea what anything cost, because it was the end of a long lunch, and who the hell knows anything by that point? It was all lovely though.

What a feast!

This was the kind of lunch where one arrives in the daytime, and leaves under cover of night. We rolled out of there feeling absolutely no pain whatsoever. The service we had was excellent – special mention goes to Dan, who is head of something important in Brighton. He took care of us like we were his own – and in fact, I remembered him well from the first visit, when he’d been the shining star then too. Soho House, hang on to that man for all you’re worth.

Interestingly, you’re not normally allowed to take photos of the food – or in fact AT ALL – at any Soho House venue. So consider yourselves privileged to see this grub.

As soon as I whipped out my trusty iPhone, James bustled over to the table to stop me. Having explained what I was doing, he stared at me for a bit, the cogs turning; should it be allowed, was I a chancer, should pictures be in reviews, how rude would it be to ask me for proof… I could see the whole thing passing through his brain… and then he allowed it.

The reasoning is, apparently, because the Soho House brand has famous members who appreciate the opportunity to shovel food and drink into their faces without having photos. One has to have some respect for that.

And to be fair, a very gobby famous person turned up as we were eating, and sat at the table next to us, in a scruffy tracksuit. So I can sympathise with the reasoning. I wouldn’t want to have been photographed looking like that either.

All in all

A very good trip. You do need to be a Soho House member to eat at the restaurant, but you can join just for the Beach House, rather than the whole SH group. There’s some shared workspace coming along as part of the venue. And apart from Cecconi’s, there are other bars and private hire spaces. It’s a good setting to be in, lovely outdoor seating during the summer, and right on the seafront. There are far worse things to spend your money on.

Will I be going back? Definitely yes. New general manager Molly Rafferty has had a clear impact on the whole setup, top down, and it was a joy from start to finish. Well done to all at Beach House, this is a commendable recovery.

Brighton Beach House
Madeira Drive
Brighton
Website

The post Beach House Brighton review – a tale of two sittings appeared first on Silver Magazine.

There is a sadness, as well as a terror, about ghost stories: we may not want to be haunted, but we may want to haunt. Is an unappeased afterlife better than total annihilation?

Haunting a draughty castle with your head stuck under your arm may not sound like much fun, but it beats non-existence (for the non-Buddhist among you) or Hell (for the Catholic among you).

Ghost stories are best enjoyed at the liminal times of year: where autumn slips into winter; when the dark starts to last longer than the light; when the portal between the living and the dead worlds flickers into existence.

The most anarchic of customs occur around this time, the other time being April 30th, or Walpurgisnacht, when a similar inversion tales place. The ghosts seek closure, or vengeance, or just recognition. Don’t we all?

Be careful what you wish for

As a child, and I cannot be alone in this, I both craved to see a ghost and craved not to see one. Scooby-Doo cartoons taught us that they did not exist, but that the fear of them was powerful. Ghosts now are more of a metaphor than an actual fear; like quicksand.

The great-grandfather of Scooby-Doo, of course, is The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which the spectral hound is – spoiler alert – just a bloody big dog with luminous paint all over it. It’s the first modern anti-ghost story, and I like to think that Scooby himself is an ironic nod to Conan Doyle’s creation.

But we still like being scared by them, and this is the time of year to do it, when darkness falls. The most famous ghost story of all was composed during the particularly miserable summer of 1816, “the year without a summer”. Mary Shelley, staying with Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, came up with a monster.

Frankenstein and other classics

Frankenstein’s monster

Frankenstein not a ghost story? Well, it may not be a conventional ghost story, but a ghost story was what Byron had asked everyone to come up with. And it is, after all, about a kind of survival of life after death. Not to mention that its very composition conforms to the classic way such stories continue to be told, right up to the days of The Simpsons: around a fire, and extemporised.

There had been ghost stories before: the so-called Gothic novels of the mid to late 18th Century had plenty of ghosts, but they are of debatable quality, i.e. I think they’re rubbish.

You could argue that Hamlet is a kind of ghost story, and indeed some of the elements of all the best ghost stories are contained in it; similarly Macbeth, with Banquo’s ghost scaring the bejesus out of the eponymous antihero. All children, in the days when they were obliged to read these plays, considered the bits with ghosts in them (or witches) to be far and away the best bits. (The other good bits were when people were killed.)

Henry Fuseli – Macbeth, Banquo and the Witches 1793-94. Petworth House collection

Are the parts of The Odyssey set in the Underworld a ghost story? Is Dante’s Inferno kind of a collection of ghost stories? Not really, even if they deal with the shades of the dead; but they do provide a kind of authority or reference point for the more contemporary ghost story.

Proper ghostly horror

But the best ghost stories, of the kind that we now understand as ghost stories, came about in the lateish 19th and early 20th centuries, with the big literary gun among these being Henry James, whose stories “The Jolly Corner” and The Turn of the Screw are still – especially the latter – capable of giving even the jaded modern reader a frisson. Not to mention the fact that students groaning under the wight of James’s epic sentences in his more ‘serious’ works have seized with relief the relative simplicity of his narrative here.

In The Turn of the Screw we have lots of candles being mysteriously snuffed out, and apparitions at windows. And the notion, which had escaped people at the time, that everything was a figment of the governess’s imagination, gives things a surprisingly modern twist.

Before then we had, of course, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. And even though we have Marley’s ghost clanking its chains, I am not sure it is the kind of ghost story we are after. It is rather didactic and has a soppy ending. I do not think ghost stories should have soppy endings, or even happy ones.

Much more satisfactory is Dickens’s own “The Signal-Man”, whose appearance portends some terrible railway accident. The reason this is such a good story is that Dickens had skin in the game, so to speak. The year before he had been in the famous Staplehurst rail crash, and had been severely rattled, both literally and metaphorically, by it.

Fear of the unknown

But the really big beast in the ghost story canon has to be MR James (no relation to Henry). Here is the genuinely spooky stuff: there are grown men I know, and I am one of them, who come over all queer, in the old-fashioned sense of the term, when they hear or read the very name of his most famous ghost story, “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”.

Illustration by James McBryde for MR James’s story “Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad”, first published “All Hallows Eve 1904”. As recounted in the book’s preface, James was close friends with the illustrator and its publication was intended as a showcase for the illustrator’s artwork. McBryde died having only completed four plates. If that’s not spooky…

This, to lapse into literary critical jargon for a moment, is the business. It’s got everything you want from a ghost story, and provided the template for much of James’s other ghost stories: an innocent professor of something arcane (Ontography, in “Whistle”’s case, whatever that is) who gets in over his head after discovering an ancient artefact of great malice, and an apparition of great power which is yet also indistinct.

It gives me the heebie-jeebies just to think about it. And if you want to spend the dark months of winter looking anxiously over your shoulder and wondering what that noise was, then I strongly suggest you get hold of a copy of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary right now. You won’t regret it. Or maybe you will.

The post Darkness falls across the land – and Nick Lezard is close at hand… appeared first on Silver Magazine.

Naturally, before the gig, I found myself singing a song. I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a thing to wear … but seriously, what does one wear to a Morrissey review these days?

It was so much easier in the old days. Bunch of gladdies in the back pocket, shirt undone, hearing aid; job done. You looked like your hero, everyone else did, and everyone was happy. “Happy” being a relative term when the Smiths were playing, of course, but you know what I mean.

I must confess, I came here hoping for outrage

Now, though? Morrissey has become … problematic. Which is probably the politest way of putting it. I will mind my words, for we are in lawyer-infested waters here, and it is best to be careful. One thing I can say without fear of legal reprisal though: any suspicion that you might have had that he was a wrong ’un were confirmed in spades when he insisted on his autobiography being published by Penguin Classics. Although at least the publishers ended up looking more foolish than the pop star.

Anyway, to the gig, at Brighton Centre, a large venue of quite astonishing ugliness. I did wonder, Brighton being the kind of place it is, whether there might be some kind of protest outside; or whether he’d manage to get a decent audience. (No one wanted to go with me; well, almost no one.)

Well, there was no protest, and a large crowd. Not completely packing the place out, but nothing to be ashamed of. And all in all quite a feat when you consider that they must have managed to get every Brexit voter in Brighton to show up. I am pretty confident in my assessment of how everyone voted in the referendum, but I promise you I am not being mean or snotty.

The music

That is why we’re here, after all, and it soon becomes clear that we are in Wagner territory here: in that someone with very murky views can still produce a good tune. And for the first half of the gig, they are very good tunes indeed. A mixture of Smiths and solo stuff. And the thing about them is that they are fast, and punchy, with a very tight band behind him. The slowest song is “How Soon Is Now” but that counts as fast because it’s so good. Sorry, but it was when it came out, and always will be.

The pace slows down about halfway through. At this point I remember why I was never the hugest Smiths fan: because so many of their songs are, essentially, dirges. The audience is happy though; of course they are. Shouts of “love ya!” happen every couple of minutes. At one point it looks horribly as those in the front are giving a straight-armed salute with unfortunate associations; but we’ll let that pass. However, the woman sitting next to me does ask why I am not cheering or waving my arms about; I let that go too.

I must confess, I came here hoping for outrage. I wanted Morrissey to say something incredibly inflammatory and regrettable. Damn it, I’d have been satisfied if he’d waved a Union Jack. But no: this was the final date of a long tour, and he was probably knackered. (He said his voice was “raggedy” towards the end, but I didn’t notice it.)

There was a mild irony in the way the crowd loved “Every Day Is Like Sunday” – another great song, but he can’t really have had Brighton in mind when he wrote it, for the place is quite jolly even in the off-season. I wondered if he’d play “The Queen Is Dead” but he didn’t. I also wondered if he was going to play “National Front Disco” which, until his views became clearer on the subject, always struck me as an extremely fascinating and poignant song. But of course, it isn’t any more, and playing it would be unwise, to put it mildly. So instead, we had Morrissey carefully and professionally safeguarding his legacy. It’ll be a long while before I see him again, but everyone else loved him; live and let live.

Morrissey official fb

Read: Interview with Gary Kemp

The post Morrissey review – the light that never goes out? appeared first on Silver Magazine.

I’ve been trying to come up with decent romantic novels, and despite a degree in Eng Lit and thirty-six years’ experience as a book reviewer, I can’t think of a single one. I mean, apart from the obvious one.

In fact, you can probably come up with the top three yourself. (Google will deliver the same three if you can’t be bothered to do it yourself). The other two are Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, which seems to me to be stretching the concept of ‘romance’ somewhat.

Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, even Austen and Eliot, are all wonderful writers, but their work is founded in wish fulfilment

Looking at lists generated by an internet search can be a dismal affair for those who take their literature seriously. I looked at the results of a poll conducted by National Public Radio (NPR), the worthy non-commercial sector of American broadcasting, and it was quite the eye-opener.

NPR persuaded 18,000 people to write in with their suggestions and, scrolling down the lists (there are several categories: historical, paranormal, what have you) I find myself looking at a lot of book covers showing muscled hunks and bosomy women in revealing dresses. Revealing, either because they are marvellous satin ballgowns, or because they have become somewhat décolleté after a romp in a haystack. Always a haystack. And if not a haystack, then a stable. Where there is, of course, hay.

Every single one of them is by a woman. Or says they are. I suspect there may be a few men writing under pseudonyms in this racket. Here are some picks from the top of the deck (the ‘historical’ section).

Ravished, by Amanda Quick: “Fossil-hunting rector’s daughter Harriet Pomeroy summons the notorious Viscount St. Justin to sleepy Upper Biddleston …”

Lord of Scoundrels (part of the Scoundrels series) by Loretta Lynda Chase (“… stands out for the matchless banter between gruff, unruly Sebastian Ballister, Marquess of Dain, and his lovely nemesis Jessica Trent …”)

The Rules of Scoundrels, also a series, by Sarah MacLean, is about “four notorious aristocrats”, who learn that “love has a way of offering absolution”.

I could go on, but then you might think I’m deliberately taking the mickey. I am not. Do you begin to see a pattern here? Maybe one or more of these is one of your favourites. And maybe, despite superficial similarities, each one of the novels I have mentioned is a tour-de-force of originality.

It was while I was thinking about this subject that I read an article by the great critic, John Lanchester, in which he articulated something that had been bothering me for decades. “The reader whose idea of the novel is formed by the English canon may at some stage start to read books in the French tradition.

“At that point, it may suddenly seem that everything one has previously read has essentially been children’s literature. Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, even Austen and Eliot, are all wonderful writers, but their work is founded in wish fulfilment, happy endings and love conquering all … When you turn from that tradition to the work of Laclos, Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal, Maupassant and Proust, it’s like getting a glass of ice water in the face.”

He’s right. The so-called romantic novels mentioned above cannot really be counted as literature, that’s obvious; putting Dickens etc into an adjacent camp is, to say the least, audacious. But it’s a thought that’s very hard to shake off once you’ve come across it. (In the same essay I’ve quoted from above, Lanchester mentions the doyenne of English romantic novelists, Barbara Cartland, who “wrote 723 books in total. Nobody cares, because they’re all shit.”)

When I read Madame Bovary, it kind of inoculated me from every romantic feeling that fiction had to offer

I struggle to think of any novel in English literature where I have been affected by a central romance. Possibly I moped after Estella in Great Expectations for a bit. I remember thinking, while wading, heavy-footed, through Middlemarch, “what’s so bad about Casaubon? He’s a serious scholar, for goodness’ sake.”

I remember reading Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust when I was a teenager and falling in love with Brenda Last. If you do not know the work, Brenda Last is a shockingly poor choice of woman. Based on his own unfaithful first wife, Waugh portrayed a woman so vain and thoughtless and selfish that she sobs with relief when she finds out that it is her son, and not the worthless lover who shares his first name, who has died in a hunting accident. But I was in love, from a distance, at the time, and I thought women were simply like that.

When I read Madame Bovary, it kind of inoculated me from every romantic feeling that fiction had to offer. And I think that was precisely Flaubert’s intention.

So I am afraid I cannot offer any advice for Valentine’s Day reading. I presume everyone here has read Pride and Prejudice? That’s your lot, as English romantic novels go.

Try Lezard’s holiday reads

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Some of the best books to take on holiday; five of the best, in fact.

There is nothing that can make you tear through a book like taking it on holiday (major disclaimer: not if you’re on holiday with children. Let’s assume you’re not).

Of course, you need the right kind of holiday book. It shouldn’t involve too much concentration, unless you’re the kind of person who takes Proust in your luggage (and I have been known to do this, and, once when in Italy, Dante – in the original Tuscan, without a translation. I did better than I thought I would…).

But it shouldn’t be mindless. No Da Vinci Code, no 50 Shades of anything. And it’s nice if it involves travel, especially to the place you’re travelling to.

1. The Golden Rule, Amanda Craig

Craig’s latest novel, just out in paperback, is a nifty potboiler. Two women on a train are having hellish times with their husbands, so they agree, in the manner of Highsmith, and Hitchcock in Strangers on a Train, to murder each other’s. The idea being that with nothing to connect them, the crimes can be committed with impunity.

Of course, as with the original story, it all goes horribly wrong. Like Craig’s last book, The Lie of the Land, which is at least as good, the plot cranks up, until by the end there’s a race against time to stop something really terrible happening.

Craig is concerned about the state of the nation, so we get a lot about the class system and how ghastly things are for Cornish natives. The Lie of the Land was about how ghastly things are for people in Devon. Chances are you won’t be going abroad this year, so take one or the other depending on which county you’re going to.

The Golden Rule by Amanda Craig (Little, Brown)
£8.99 paperback, £16.99 hardback

2. Widowland, CJ Carey

It is a by-law in most parts of the country that each holiday cottage must contain a copy of Richard Harris’s Fatherland, his novel set in an imaginary past where the Nazis won World War II. But you’ve all read that by now, haven’t you? So try this one for your alternate history fix: a new novel by an established writer normally known as Jane Thynne.

Thynne/Carey has, with her Clara Vine novels, considerable experience when it comes to writing books set during the last war. Here, though, we are in 1953, in a miserably Nazi-occupied Britain, very plausibly imagined.

Our heroine, Rose, is employed rewriting literary classics to conform with the authorities’ stifling attitude towards women. You know, make Dorothea Casaubon or Jane Eyre less intelligent and independent, that kind of thing. Women are divided into categories, depending on their utility as baby-providers.

So as well as Harris, it’s also 1984 meets The Handmaid’s Tale. As I was reading this I was thinking, “hang on, there was something the Nazis did which was even worse than this”, but it gradually becomes apparent that Carey knows very well what she’s doing.

Widowland by CJ Carey (Quercus Publishing)
£8.99, £14.99 hardback

3. Journey by Moonlight, Antal Szerb

This 1937 Hungarian novel wasn’t translated into English until 2001 and a lot of people are now very happy it has been. The translator, Len Rix, learned Hungarian precisely to translate this book, which cultured Hungarians consider to be absolutely essential reading.

It’s narrated by Mihály, a man for whom the word “diffident” might have been coined. He accidentally, or accidentally-on-purpose, abandons his wife Erzi during their honeymoon and then goes wandering through Italy in a kind of existentialist daze.

It’s a book with serious themes – such as the Hungarian fascination with suicide – yet it deals with them with such a tender, humorous grace that you don’t feel as if you’re reading anything substantial at all. Until you get to the end and realise you’ve just read one of the best novels ever written. And feel like starting it again.

I’ve recommended this novel perhaps more often than I have any other, and I’ve never had any complaints yet. If you’re holidaying in Wales, read his The Pendragon Legend, which is more of a romp, with ghosts and spies and castles, like a grown-up Tintin adventure.

Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb (Pushkin Press)
£8.99 paperback

4. Killing Floor, Lee Child

Frankly, anything featuring Child’s errant army veteran, Jack Reacher, will do. Killing Floor, from 1997, is the first. If you haven’t come across him, Reacher is a giant of a man; an ex-military policeman with more than a touch of the Sherlock Holmes about him. Peripatetic, whose only luggage is an ATM card, travelling toothbrush, an expired US passport. And the clothes he stands up in.

He travels by Greyhound bus or hitchhikes all over the US, and always ends up, despite wanting a quiet life, involved in the most heinous plots. Often in out-of-the-way places, but he does get to go to New York or Paris or London every so often.

He is usually up against some seriously evil hombres and the odds are stacked incredibly against him. But he is as tough as he is smart, and always acts honorably to decent people. Hates racists and misogynists.

We love him. Bonus fact: Lee Child’s prose is impeccable, like stripped-down Chandler.

Killing Floor by Lee Child, (Transworld)
£8.99 paperback

5. Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess

Many years ago, as a young man, I went on a trip all the way up Italy on the back of a friend’s motorbike. This was my holiday read, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a better one. Burgess had a brain the size of a planet, and this book takes us all around the globe and through the 20thCentury, tackling the big questions of good and evil and whatnot.

And yet without it ever being a strain on the reader. It’s perhaps the most deliberately outrageous opening line of all novels. “It was the afternoon of my 81st birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”

My Italian motorbike-riding friend, who like many Italians is suspicious of the Catholic Church and homosexuality, read this with a shudder and handed it back to me. I know I said holiday books shouldn’t involve too much concentration – and amazingly, you don’t need too much to enjoy this. Just let it all wash over you.

Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess (Hutchinson)
£10.99 paperback

 @nicklezard

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Sam Harrington-Lowe

In about 2016, heading fast towards 50, I looked at magazines that were aimed at my age group. In particular I was looking for a good magazine for the over 50s.

It was a bit dismal back then, to say the least. I’ve had a wild ride of a life so far, full of adventure, and the magazines I was looking at were focused on knitting, cooking, gardening… I don’t mind those things, but I wasn’t ready to hang up my spurs yet.

I felt there was a huge opportunity being missed, AND I wanted a magazine that I’d enjoy reading and relating to. So being the sort of person I am, and being the sort of person who loves making magazines, I just decided to launch one myself. As you do.

I didn’t get it all right…

Silver Magazine started life as ‘Senior Moments’, which I thought was hilarious. Until people in our focus groups, who were older than me, pointed out that senior moments might sound funny when you’re in your forties or fifties. But if you’re older and actually having senior moments, it was less amusing. Cue skidding to a halt. I knew instantly that I’d got it wrong.

Sifting through a range of suggestions that included Grey Matter, Midlife Crisis, and even Silver Tops, we settled on Silver Magazine. I’ve always been thrilled with the name, and suspect we only managed to bag it because we were ahead of the curve. These days there is ‘silver’ everything.

We have an amazing team, and brilliant writers

I’m very proud of our in-house team, all of whom are absolutely passionate about Silver Magazine, and now also Silver Lifestyle.

We’ve got some brilliant, challenging writers on board too. Bibi Lynch, Chris Sullivan, Joe McGann, Simon Evans, Julie Burchill, Nick Lezard, Flic Everett, Gustav Temple, Paul Burston, Paul Tierney, and many more all write for us.

Things have changed massively since we launched Silver Magazine

The conversation around ageing and ageism has change MASSIVELY in the past five years or more. It’s very exciting. People are embracing their second lives like never before. It’s been a cultural shift the like of which we haven’t really seen since the rise of feminism.

And I’ve watched as other brands moved slowly away from stairlifts and ‘anti-ageing’, and edged towards the age of revolution that Silver embodies. We have always been pro-ageing, and pro-doing what feels right for you. I am both proud to be leading the way, and thrilled to see the cultural shift.

Who are you?
Our promise to you
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