Alternate Title

It's Oh, Babe, What Would You Say, really, but I thought I'd take my title from the Monkees' American naming protocol for Randy Scouse Git.

Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama has achieved something that many other books never did. I had to put it to one side to read Patrick Hamilton's Monday Morning and Don Paterson's The Poem. Needs must sometimes.
The house is not quite strewn but intermittently ashamed of its unfinished books. Not always ashamed. Sometimes you wished you'd never started and from time to time I wonder whether to get myself a Collected John Ashbery but fear that it might be twenty minutes of amazement followed by however many more years there are left eyeing it nervously.
But I've gone back to Six Four, sometime admirer of Japan with special reference to prose fiction as I am, and I will make it to the end. Apparently, not all noir is Scandinavian. I am much more Midsomer Murders than I am all that fashion for endless darkness. Having been less than impressed with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, somebody gave me a fiver for it. They could have had it for nothing but you admire a man who stands his round or pays his way. I sat through the first series of Marcella, for no better reason than Anna Friel because there is no better reason, but I think there was a second series. Oh, come off it. Eventually one needs to know. Suspense is a fine thing but I'm not prepared to wait forever.
But I am persevering and we will see now the complications of Six Four, which is a 'police procedural' with missing, sometime dead young girl, rivalry between the machinations of departments, something to be got to the bottom of, work out. It is to be hoped that nothing essential needs reading for another week or two. Please, Danny Baker, don't surprise us with any more unputdownable memoirs just yet. Or, let me put that another way, please do.
--
The TLS. What can you do.
An e-mail from them saying how sorry they are I've left, please have another introductory offer.
I haven't left but it is as if they are reading my mind. Perhaps the internet is more sinister than I thought. It would be great if they would just keep sending it but not charge me for it but it's not the money.
It's the self-regard.
It remains of interest in places, sometimes even in the bath. For instance, V.S. Naipaul hardly had a good word for anybody. Let me put that another way, he regularly had a bad word for a lot of people. But one writer he liked was Maupassant. And then you think he might have had a point.
All these old curmudgeons-  not so much the young ones- it would be great fun to become more like them. I'll try my best.