In the end, like I’ve said many times, all they sold me was boredom.
In the end all they sell us is boredom.

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A footballing priest from Burkina Faso has been sent off in a church tournament for throwing his shirt at the referee in Italy.

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Brandon Robshaw in The Independent reviews Looking for Enid, By Duncan McLaren:

A biography of Enid Blyton, but a peculiar one – this is as much about the biographer as it is about the biographee. McLaren, a lifelong Blyton fan, takes to the road with his girlfriend, visiting sites where Blyton lived, worked and set her books – including, of course, her country house Green Hedges where she lived with her second husband and wrote the most celebrated of her 600 books, including the Famous Five series, the Malory Towers series and the Noddy books. Each chapter ends with a curious parody of a Five Find-Outers mystery, with Fatty appearing to represent McLaren himself, and little Bets his girlfriend Kate.

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It struck me later, after he’d gone, that he might be on some kind of medication. I really have very little insight into boredom. My mind seems to be firing on several cylinders at once. I’m thinking about whatever I’m working on, or a book I’ve read, or a film I saw last week or a film I’m going to see tomorrow. I’m thinking about my kids, my friends, the political situation. I can hold these thoughts at bay if necessary, put them to one side and hone in on practical or theoretical problems, like baking bread, mending a puncture in my bike’s tyre, or sorting out which activities are regarded as sacraments.
Or I can do none of those things and try to empty my mind completely. For shorter or longer periods I can make it all still. At least relatively so.
But I don’t get bored. Ever.
Is it just me? What’s the split like? How many people get bored?

Against these so called, rational, western leaders, there are the Islamist fundamentalists condemning the Great Satan, again, playing to people’s fears and feelings and, like their western counterparts, refusing to acknowledge their own responsibility in what is happening in the world.

For the time being the politicians seem to be getting away with this nonsense, simply because the people who vote for them are also not demanding rational argument.

My job brings me into contact, mainly, with writers and readers, and it is unusual in those circles to come across many who subscribe to the fancy of evil or the will to evil.

Small children sometimes believe that they do bad things but more mature people act against society or other individuals because they are psychopathic, or greedy or frightened or poor. They may commit crimes from some ideological or chauvinistic conviction, perhaps convincing themselves that the ends justify the means. Vandalism is not brought about by evil, but by envy or boredom.

It is sometimes necessary to point out to beginning writers that discerning readers do not want to see a crowd of hooligans destroying property for the sake of it, because they are evil; but in place of that vision perceptive writers will construct a number of individuals, each with his or her own motivation.

It used to be all right to show the crowd of hooligans, but we have moved on. It used to be all right to particularize the villain of the piece by a physical disability or by the colour of his skin or his ethnic background, but we have moved on.

Apparently it isn’t the case with politicians, they haven’t moved on; but as a writer, if you don’t move on and present a rational argument for your villain’s motivation, you will remain unpublished.

Murder – A Beginner’s Guide, with Kathy Lette and John Mortimer was one of the events that didn’t work for me. Lette wrote How to Murder Your Husband. Mortimer created Rumpole.

The two of them were obviously friends and may have done similar gigs together in the past. But Lette was patronising towards Mortimer, begging him in little-girl fashion to repeat this or that story and constantly telling the rest of us how much she adored him. Similarly, she tried to ingratiate herself with the women in the audience, referring to them collectively as ‘girls’.

Wrapped in a sliver of red and white cotton on a particularly cold afternoon she was brimming with sound bites and carefully prepared one-liners and succeeded in lifting the temperature not a jot.

Mortimer, for his part, was hampered by his microphone being too far away from his wheelchair, making it difficult for us to hear what he said. But apparently he was only telling the stories he usually tells, so we may not have missed much.

I had a very nice snooze.