In Dublin a week later, that would be September 19th, Neary minus his whiskers was recognized by a former pupil called Wylie, in the General Post Office, contemplating from behind the statue of Cuchulain. Neary had bared his head, as though the holy ground meant something to him. Suddenly he flung aside his hat, sprang forward, seized the dying hero by the thighs and began to dash his head against his buttocks, such as they are. The Civic Guard on duty in the building, roused from a tender reverie by the sound of blows, took in the situation at his leisure, disentangled his baton and advanced with measured tread, thinking he had caught a vandal in the act. Happily Wylie, whose reactions as a street bookmaker’s stand were as rapid as a zebra’s, had already seized Neary round the waist, torn him back from the sacrifice and smuggled him halfway to the exit.
‘Howlt on there, youze,’ said the CG.
Wylie turned back, rapped his forehead and said, as one sane man to another:
‘John o’ God’s. Hundred per cent harmless.’
‘Come back in here, owwathat,’ said the CG.
Wylie, a tiny man, stood at a loss. Neary, almost as large as the CG, though not of course so nobly proportioned, rocked blissfully on the right arm of his rescuer. It was not in the CG’s nature to bandy words, nor had it come into any branch of his training. He resumed his steady advance.
‘Stillorgan,’ said Wylie. ‘Not Dundrum.’
The CG laid his monstrous hand on Wylie’s left arm and exerted a strong pull along the line he had mapped out in his mind. They all moved off in the desired direction, Neary shod with orange-peel.
‘John o’God’s,’ said Wylie. ‘As quiet as a child.’
They drew up behind the statue. A crowd gathered behind them. The CG leaned forward and scrutinized the pillar and draperies.
‘Not a feather out of her,’ said Wylie. ‘No blood, no brains, nothing.’
The CG straightened up and let go Wylie’s arm.
‘Move on,’ he said to the crowd, ‘before yer moved on.’
The crowd obeyed, with the single diastole-systole which is all the law requires. Feeling amply repaid by this superb symbol for the trouble and risk he had taken in issuing an order, the CG inflected his attention to Wylie and said more kindly:
‘Take my advice, mister -’ He stopped. To devise words of advice was going to tax his ability to the utmost. When would he learn not to plunge into the labyrinths of an opinion when he had not the slightest idea of how he was to emerge? And before a hostile audience! His embarrassment was if possible increased by the expression of strained attention on Wylie’s face, clamped there by the promise of advice.
‘Yes, sergeant,’ said Wylie, and held his breath.
‘Run him back to Stillorgan,’ said the CG. Done it!
Wylie’s face came asunder in gratification.
‘Never fear, sergeant,’ he said, urging Neary towards the exit, ‘back to the cell, blood heat, next best thing to never being born, no heroes, no fisc, no-’
Neary had been steadily recovering all this time, and now gave such a jerk to Wylie’s arm that the poor little man was nearly pulled off his feet.
‘Where am I?’ said Neary. ‘If and when.’
Wylie rushed him into the street and into a Dalkey tram that had just come in. The crowd dispersed, the better to gather elsewhere. The CG dismissed the whole sordid episode from his mind, the better to brood on a theme very near to his heart.

My copy is the Picador paperback, published by Pan Books in association with Calder and Boyars in London in 1973 and its pages are yellow with age, the spine cracked and, as I read further and further, more cracked so that several of the pages came loose and tried to escape.
The book was first published in the UK in 1938 after being rejected more than forty times. As a prose satire it follows the doings of several characters with enormous vocabularies, at the centre of which waxes the consciousness of Murphy. At the bidding of his lover, Celia Kelly, Murphy finds employment in a mental hospital in London and discovers his own desired reflection in the catatonia of the patients. This allows him to pass over from a consciousness in crisis to a state of total oblivion when he mistakes a gas tap for a lavatory chain.
Pointlessness seems to be the point of the narrative. Pointlessness and entrapment. London is a trap. The entire solar system is a trap, and there is no way out apart from death, the release into silence and the absence of being. None of the Dickensian characters pursuing Murphy around London achieve anything at all. Their dreams are transparent and unattainable. It seemed apt that the book was disintegrating in my hands as I read it, and when I came to the last chapter pages were falling out all over the place and I was waked by random leaves spreading out behind me like the tail of Mr Kelly’s disappearing kite.
Nevertheless, the unsympathetic Murphy and his followers do provide Beckett with a vehicle for innovation and linguistic invention, always ironic, often blackly so, which would be refined and enhanced in later works. In Murphy, the two tramps of Godot are already becoming apparent.

Richard Ellman believes that:

Samuel Beckett is sui generis…He has given a voice to the decrepit and maimed and inarticulate, men and women at the end of their tether, past pose or pretense, past claim of meaningful existence. He seems to say that only there and then, as metabolism lowers, amid God’s paucity, not his plenty, can the core of the human condition be approached… Yet his musical cadences, his wrought and precise sentences, cannot help but stave off the void… Like salamanders we survive in his fire.

artsdepot presents an exhibition celebrating the work of its participatory arts programme for refugees, asylum seekers, migrants and newly arrived communities.

Working with professional female photographer, Poppy Szaybo, the images have all been created by women aged between 16-85 years, from countries such as China, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Congo, Eritrea, and Uganda; many of whom have never used a camera before. The result is a fascinating, vibrant and personal collection of photographs, exploring identity, language, cultural heritage, family, and making new lives in the UK.

Inga Hirst, Education Manager at artsdepot, explains: ”The Women and Girls’ Refugee Groups meets at artsdepot every week. The aim is to improve the confidence and self esteem of those that come along, women who are often isolated and may suffer physical and mental health problems as a result of the trauma that has led them to seek refuge in the UK. Through the skills they have learnt the women have begun to develop language and communication skills, express their feelings and experiences, and have fun with new found friends – and this exhibition is a real celebration of their achievements.”

Listings Information:

Venue: artsdepot, 5 Nether Street, Tally Ho Corner, North Finchley, London N12 0GA

Date & Time: Tuesday 8 April – Tuesday 22 April 2008
12pm – 4pm daily, and selected evenings

Tickets: FREE entry.

Box Office: 020 8369 5454

Travel: Tube: Finchley Central, West Finchley, Woodside Park (Northern Line)

Website: http://www.artsdepot.co.uk

Londoner’s have three free newspapers foisted on them every day in the streets. This adds up to a lot of waste and a lot of people are getting pretty upset by it. As a response to this litter, and as a political statement about “making something high-quality out of something that has no value”, Sumer Erek has created a five metre high Newspaper House out of all the discarded free papers around. The house has been “built” in a London square. Along with numerous volunteers, he has been constructing it out of donated papers for the past five days. Using almost 150,000 discarded free papers carefully packed inside a wooden frame for the construction, people were encouraged to write their own thoughts and wishes on the paper before it was rolled into “logs”.

The Morgan family have always believed that Daniel was murdered because he was about to expose police corruption and have fought a long and often bitter battle to bring his killers to justice.

An inquest in 1988 heard allegations that Daniel Morgan’s partner, Jonathan Rees, had planned the murder with the assistance of officers from Catford police station and that Daniel’s place in his company would be taken over after the murder by a member of the murder squad, Detective Sergeant Sidney Fillery. Fillery later took early retirement and took over Daniel Morgan’s place in the company.

The file presented to the CPS amounts to around 300 pages and represents the product of five investigations, some of them highly contentious. Daniel Morgan’s murder is one of the most-investigated murders in British policing history.

“It has been a long and sometimes hellish struggle for us to get to this point” said Daniel’s brother Alastair today. “We will now have to wait several months for the Crown Prosecution to decide whether, and against whom, charges will be brought. We want the whole truth to come out so that we can move on with our lives”.

The family have been told that the submission of the file to the CPS will not be the end of the investigation and that offices will continue to seek evidence to support the prosecution of all those involved in the murder.

“In the past, the Met’s treatment of my family has been shabby and downright provocative. In 1998-99, an inquiry was carried out behind our backs after we’d been campaigning for over a decade. The Met then forced us into a high court battle to obtain disclosure in 2003 of a report by Hampshire police on the murder”.

“Throughout our twenty-year battle, the Home Office has been an utter waste of space. We tried everything in our power to warn them about serious police corruption and were ignored year after year. It took seventeen and a half years before we were granted a meeting with a minister, Hazel Blears. We found them uniformly remote, gullible and ill-informed. I do not believe anyone in that department has ever read a report on Daniel’s murder”.

Since the intervention of the Metropolitan Police Authority in 2005, the family say that the climate has changed radically and that they finally have confidence in the integrity of the current investigation. “Until this point every single institution designed to protect against police malpractice has failed us.”

2. Which author and/or book has most influenced you?
As an author, many have influenced me. Among them: John Fowles’ The Magus, which made me want to write novels as beautiful as it is (and I always wished I could have told Fowles that while he was alive.) Jack London’s Call of the Wild, which started me on a lifetime of reading. Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, which clarified for me the storyteller’s role.

3. Which three blogs do you most visit?
I routinely visit many more than three, and almost always they are blogs maintained by my blogosphere friends. Some of my favorites are actually bloggers who tend to disagree with me about things, yet we have relationships that are not just civil, but downright friendly. It proves two people can disagree without being disagreeable.

4. Why do you read fiction?
I have mostly ceased being able to read for pure enjoyment. I now tend to look at every book I read the way a carpenter looks at a beautiful house. So now, I read fiction for mostly professional reasons: To review it, to learn from it, and a distant third, to escape.

5. What makes you laugh?
A good joke, a clever turn-of-phrase, The Three Stooges.

Ron Franscell blogs at Under the News, which can be found here: http://underthenews.blogspot.com