Firestation Book Swap: Thursday April 21st

Roll up roll up roll up! (Roll up what? Or on the ground? Or fold yourself into a ball and roll towards me? You decide. But anyway - ) It's going to be a stonking book swap on Thursday, featuring as it does the most excellent Stuart Evers - book journalist and writer of Ten Stories About Smoking which will almost certainly probably not make you want to start smoking (again) but will entirely entertain you in every way, and Jake Wallis Simons, who aside from being the author of The English German Girl and The Exiled Times of a Tibetan Jew (those are two separate books, though the amalgam is intriguing) AND being a superstar journalist, once had the great privilege of working with me at Daunt Books. We both survived.

All details here. Indeed why not join our Facebook group? That way Scott will email and tell you when there's a book swap, rather than you having to rely on me remembering to trail it here.

As ever it's free if you bring cake. Not as ever, it's the day before my birthday. What I'm saying is if you were dithering over cake, bring cake.

(As an aside, did you know that you can listen to the book swap on iTunes? Just do a search for Firestation Book Swap. I am amused to note that there's an 'explicit' warning. YES. THAT IS HOW WE ROLL (UP).)

Spiral: an update

I think I just voted with my feet. Last night I got home just as Spiral was starting and I had the following thoughts in quick succession: "Spiral is starting!" "Oh, god, no."

I think you are going to have to watch this one without me.

Blog Playlist (sort of): songs that make you cry

Everyone's talking about songs that make them cry. And when I say everyone, I mean some people who write for the Guardian and a girl I follow on Twitter. Everyone.

Music doesn't make me cry. It doesn't have long enough. Like someone who needs a lot of foreplay, I just can't reach tearful climax in three minutes or less. On the few occasions I have cried listening to music, it wasn't the music on its own that did it. It was the soon to be ex boyfriend sitting next to me or the recent loss of a beloved friend or - well I don't know why I cried listening to Coldplay play Clocks at Glastonbury, but the weather was really bad and I'd been standing up all day.

There is just one song I shouldn't ever listen to in public and it's Ruby's Arms by Tom Waits. I find it heartbreaking. Just getting the video on YouTube, I had to switch it off after the first few bars. In fact I just tried reading the lyrics to see if I could quote some here, and I only got two thirds of the way through. It's devastating. Listen to it and you'll see what I mean.



The Guardian have their own Spotify playlist of sad songs and you can contribute to it here.

Spiral S3 ep 1 & 2

Well. That was grim, wasn't it? My first mental note was: do not watch this and eat at the same time. In the first two minutes we had WHORES! TITS! BLOW-JOB! EVISCERATED CORPSE IN A BIN BAG WITH HER TITS CUT OFF! The Killing this isn't. God, wasn't The Killing nice? I mean, sure, it didn't end well for Nanna Birk Larssen, but oh to be in a nation so sleepy that mayoral debates are apparently televised every night, where the worst vices the police can muster up are nicotine gum and junk food, and even the murdered takes time out from his killing spree to go shopping for puppies. By the end of two episodes of Spiral, we had another girl in a bin bag (tits yet to be accounted for), a paedophile with a Terry Thomas moustache, several buckets of chicken blood, a small child ripped to pieces by a dog (off camera, thankfully), a corrupt lawyer getting shot three times at point blank range but surviving (the head, people! aim for the head!), a nasty posh lady in a Chanel boucle two-piece and a particularly ugly broach getting done for drunk driving, the judge's bitch-mum having a stroke, the police inspector hating her home life so much she's sleeping in her car, some casual betrayal, a really skanky nightclub, a teenager getting accused of sleeping with her own dad, a shoe-collecting vagrant smoking dope in the park, occurrences of corruption too numerous to mention, one of the most repulsive double chins I have ever seen, plenty of child neglect, did I mention the buckets of chicken blood, entire buildings crammed with illegal immigrants and homeless people, a missing earring, and my own particular favourite moment, an innocent suspect being punched in the stomach by the police until he vomits and then rolled in his own sick. Did I miss anything out?

Being half French, I can help you out with some of the things you might have found confusing. Judges in France, for example, don't wait around for the evidence to be brought to them in court. They take an active role in the investigation, and at the trial they retire with the jury and, unbelievably, direct them on their verdict. They are all-powerful super-crusading mega-judges in other words, and thus favour full hairstyles with silvery highlights. Defense lawyers and prosecutors are similarly up to their necks.

Also, you may have missed the full force of profanity which has been toned down for the subtitles. I can only imagine the meeting at the BBC4 translation unit where they decided how many shits and fucks they were going to allow per episode. But you can bet that when the subtitles say "Get off my back," what the character has actually just said is "Stop riding my arse, you cunt." To their boss. My favourite French swearword has no equivalent in English. It's "bordel", which means "brothel", and can be used in almost any context. "What is this brothel?", "This situation in which I find myself is a brothel," or just plain "Brothel!" when under duress, sometimes supplemented as "bordel de merde!" ie "Brothel of shit!" If we can get the British walking around saying "Brothel of shit!" then Spiral's work will be done.

To be honest with you, I'm not sure I'm going to make it to the end of twelve episodes of this. I'm exhausted already. And we can't even play along with "find the suspect" because there aren't a lot of useful candidates hanging around, wearing knitted beanie hats, being suspiciously good at teaching, or appearing on televised mayoral debates. Plus, no jumpers. I guess it's not that cold in Paris. What did you think?