My Book Shelves (2): 'On Broadway,' by Damon Runyon. [20th Oct 2022]

 Runyon On Broadway: *****

OK - I’m a realist. I know I won’t convince you to pick up a book of Damon Runyon stories unless you’re already a fan. Why would you? These were comic tales written in the 1930s. They’re not terribly relevant to the world of 2022. They are written in a curiously unique style which takes some getting used to, and they employ a vocabulary of jargon that is never adequately translated. They may even be out of print. So I get it. However much I twist your metaphorical arm you’ll find something else to read first. But let me tell you, please, what you’re missing.   

"On Broadway." *****

These stories are masterpieces of literature.  Each one is an exercise in perfection. Damon Runyon was a newspaperman in New York during the prohibition years. He wrote around 100 short stories during this time. They are not long. An average story is about twelve pages. But in those pages Runyon creates rich comic characters and extraordinary situations, and every story resolves itself with a gratifying (if occasionally murderous) twist.  Various collections of his ‘Broadway’ stories were published – but today the cream of the cream appear in two volumes – ‘On Broadway’ with around 45 stories, and ‘From First to Last,’ which includes 33. The stories unravel among the low life hoodlums and criminal fraternity of New York, all struggling to make ends meet in the depression. They, (the characters who inhabit this world) generally assemble in the speakeasies and illegal hooch dens around Broadway, or at Mindy’s restaurant, or at one horse racetrack or another. Every story is written in the first person, from the perspective of a narrator who is never named, who claims absolute innocence of any offence and who feigns distaste for lawbreaking or alcohol, but who inexplicably seems to be on friendly terms with every suspicious character in the city, and who rails against the quality of the whisky at Good Time Charley’s . And every story is written in the present tense in a spoken vernacular where all men are ‘guys’ and all women are ‘dolls’ (hence the movie ‘Guys and Dolls,’) and no one goes by an ordinary name. The kind of people you might meet in Mindy’s could include Little Isadore, Spanish John, Harry the Horse, or the Lemon Drop Kid. Or Bookie Bob, or Benny South Street, or Dave the Dude, or The Seldom Seen Kid, or Joe the Joker. They will all be up to no good.

Let me give you the opening lines of some of the stories:

Off or on I know Feet Samuels a matter of eight or ten years up and down Broadway, and in and out, but I never have much truck with him because he is a guy I consider no dice.

(A Very Honourable Guy)

One night The Brain is walking me up and down outside Mindy’s restaurant, and speaking of this and that, when along comes a redheaded raggedy doll selling apples at five cents per copy.

(The Brain goes Home)

One cold winter afternoon I am standing at the bar in Good Time Charley’s little drum in West Forty-Ninth Street, partaking of a mixture of rock candy and rye whisky, and this is a most surprising thing for me to be doing as I am by no means a rum pot, and very seldom engage in any alcoholic beverages in any way … when the door opens and who comes in but a guy by the name of Blondy Swanson.

(The Three Wise Guys)

One morning along about four bells , I am standing in front of Mindy’s restaurant on Broadway with a guy by the name of Regret, who has this name because it seems he wins a very large bet the year the Whitney filly, Regret, grabs the Kentucky Derby, and can never forget it.

That's how they begin. Our innocent narrator is standing around minding his own business when who should drop by with a story but ... 

Runyon’s Broadway stories bristle with wit and humanity. If you want to dip in and try a couple (maybe they’re available online somewhere) – try ‘Little Miss Marker,’ or ‘Sense of Humor,’ or ‘The Lily of St Pierre.’ 

 

“The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's how the smart money bets”

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

"From First to Last." *****

My Book Shelves. (1) ‘The World According to Garp,’ by John Irving

I’ve always been a pretty avid reader. And I do so love books. When we moved home in 2017, from Shropshire into Cheshire, we brought with us 52 boxes of my books, much to the dismay of the removal men. But it could have been worse. Before we moved, in an effort to down-size my library, I gave 27 boxes of books to charity shops and, gulp, threw 12 boxes away. And over the years I have probably lent, given away, or simply lost almost as many books as I now possess. But that’s the thing with books. They are curious possessions. I rarely read a book twice (unless it’s a very special book) – so why do I keep them? If you were to steal a book a day from my shelves, I probably wouldn’t notice. Not for quite a while. And yet I love them all. They feel, to me, as if they are part of my memory – a kind of off-line archive – a record of who I am and what I’ve read for more than half a century.

I don’t want to turn this blog into a book-blog. There are book bloggers who do a really good job and I’ll never compete.  But what I thought I might do is to share some of my favourite books and authors. In no particular order, you understand. So, without further ado, let’s unchain the first contender. I give you, ‘The World According to Garp.’

 The World According to Garp by John Irving *****

My rather well-read copy of 'Garp.' 

This is the book that made me want to be a writer. It was, I think, the first time I truly understood the extraordinary power and poetry of good writing. There is a scene, early in the novel, when Garp and his mother, Jenny Fields, visit the school gymnasium on a mission to find young Garp a sport. They settle on wrestling. But the scene the novel gives us is so vivid and multidimensional, the emotions so strong, the images so striking, that I found myself as a young man re-reading these pages over and over to try and figure out how Irving had done it.

Is this John Irving’s best book? Perhaps not. It is clearly the work of a young writer (Irving was in his early thirties when he wrote it) and it ranges rather loosely over a shopping-list of issues (single motherhood, writing, bereavement, feminism, mutilation) in a way that risks losing focus. Its hippy vibe may not have aged well. It was made into a rather mediocre film. It deals with tropes that have rather been left behind by contemporary novelists. The conceit of a strong single woman arranging her own insemination and raising her son to manhood is not especially radical these days. But. But. But. Irving has somehow created a character with such depth, and painted a landscape with such detail, we cannot help but be drawn in to Garp’s odd world and the curious cast of characters that surround him. There is something deliciously experimental about the novel. Garp is finding his voice as a writer and Irving shares with us whole tracts of his (Garp’s) writing. ‘The Pension Grillparzer,’ (very much like Irving’s later novel – ‘The Hotel New Hampshire,’) and ‘The World According to Bensenhaver,’ an angry piece of work – not unlike, er, ‘The World According to Garp.’ I can’t imagine a publisher these days letting all this through.  And I can’t imagine the older Irving toying with his readers like this. ‘The World According to Bensenhaver,’ is almost 40 pages long and it drops plumb into the manuscript at such a crucial point in Garp’s life you start by begging it to wind up and let you back into the story. Until it too has you in its clutches. If I was to lend you an Irving I would probably go for ‘The Hotel New Hampshire’ or ‘The Cider House Rules,’ or even the super-heavy ‘Until I Find You.’ But I have an enormous soft spot for Garp. 

If you've never read John Irving you've missed a real treat. There is something about his use of language - like Turner's use of paint - that enchants you. He's a fan of the semi colon, and italicised words. He writes with rhythm. He is unafraid of repetition. He digs deep into character. All those are good qualities. There are negatives too. He writes long. Probably too long. I suspect that no editor now would dare trim his work which is a shame because it needs it. My copy of 'Until I Find You,' is 820 pages. I love it, but I might have loved it more at 400 pages. 

I have yet to read Irving's latest 'The Last Chairlift.' (912 pages). But until I do, here are my other John Irving recommendations - with my star ratings.

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

'A Prayer for Owen Meany.' *****

'The Hotel New Hampshire.' *****

'The Cider House Rules,' *****

'A Son of the Circus.' ***

'A Widow for One Year.' ***

'Last Night in Twisted River.' ****

'Setting Free the Bears.' **

'The 158lb Marriage.' ***

'The Fourth Hand.' **

'The Water Method Man.' ***

'Until I Find You.' *****

'In One Person.' **

'Avenue of Mysteries.' ***

 

Greenland - and 'The Wager and the Bear:' The Video [28 Aug 2022]

 

This is the video that Jon made of our visit to Kangerlussuac in preparation for 'The Bear at the End of the World' (The Wager and the Bear). 

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

The Greenland Ice Sheet (Point 660: My Map Pins 38) and ‘The Wager and the Bear.’ May 2022

Point 660

They call this place Point 660. I never figured out why. Our guide Daniel Jonssen (thanks Daniel) didn’t know, and he knew everything. It’s probably a map reference. Or something. Anyway, this is a quick blog about our (carbon neutral) visit there last week  (me and Jon), and it's a shameless plug for a new novel. More about that in a moment. 

It’s a five hour round trip from Kangerlussuaq to Point 660 (if you go via the Russell Glacier and you really should). You’ll need a good 4x4 and a guide who frankly isn’t bothered if he bends the vehicle in half. That’s because the route is rough. You will see reindeer, musk ox, and even arctic hares. If you're lucky (we were) you'll see chunks of ice calving from the glacier. Some intrepid adventurers trek this journey on foot and camp overnight, and I rather envy them. Maybe next time. 

The Russell Glacier

If you look at the map of Greenland you’ll spot a swathe of green down the west coast, and roughly where this landscape is at its widest, you’ll find the village of Kangerlussuaq (population 450) (pronounce it kang ul schwua). Remarkably there is a road to nowhere that leads east from here for 26 kilometres. The road was apparently built by Volkswagen to test cars on the ice. It is the longest road in Greenland (unsurfaced of course) and it winds steadily upwards along the desolate glacial valley alongside the Sandflugtsdal meltwater river, through sandy desert, hills, and utterly breath-taking landscapes, past frozen lakes and glaciers, and then it ends abruptly when it meets the Greenland Ice Cap. This is Point 660. You won’t have passed a living soul for almost two hours. You leave the ‘comfort’ of the 4x4 and you trek on foot over a rocky moraine – like the spill from a gravel quarry – and after a while, you find yourself on the ice sheet. And here you draw a very deep breath. 

The Greenland ice sheet is one of the great natural wonders of our planet. It is colossal. From Point 660 you’d need to walk 600 km in a straight line over ice to reach the west coast. The walk to the northernmost point would be 1,000 km, and it’s 800 km south until you run out of ice. That is a seriously big lump of ice. And it’s deep. Really deep. Most of it goes down more than 2 km. That’s well over a mile for English readers. And while we might idly imagine that Greenland could lose a little ice and still have plenty to spare, it might be helpful to consider the impact this immense block of ice has on the globe. A lucky accident of geography has plonked it right at the top of the Atlantic, where it acts as a global air conditioner, keeping the world from heating up too much by cooling down winds and reflecting away a lot of sunlight. It also holds a heck of a lot of freshwater. If (or maybe when) it all melts it would raise sea levels all around the world by 7 metres. 

My new novel for 2023, 'The Wager and the Bear,' features the Greenland ice sheet.  (The title may be subject to change of course.) The story unfolds in the fictional village of St Piran in Cornwall, and it begins with a very public altercation between two villagers – one a climate activist and the other an ambitious politician. The argument concludes with a dangerous wager that only one man should be able to survive. Events spiral out of control and somehow both men find themselves alone on the Greenland ice sheet, and then adrift on a giant iceberg, floating down Baffin Bay. It does make sense I promise. It is a novel about climate change, but it is also about enduring love, friendship, and community. Watch this space – or follow #thewagerandthebear on Instagram or Twitter and I’ll let you know when it is available for pre-order. 

So back to Point 660. It is an awesome destination. Desolate and beautiful. It made me feel quite emotional to walk out and stand on the ice. I hope it stays, pristine and forever frozen. I fear that it won’t. The what3words link below takes you there.

https://w3w.co/superhero.spelled.crooned

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

Dogs (11 May 2022)

 

Poppy

On 4^th March this year we lost our beautiful golden-retriever, Poppy. She was fourteen years old -  not far off fifteen. Which is old for a retriever. And of course we knew the day was coming. We could see her health failing. She had been stone-deaf for over a year (which meant she never had to come when anyone called her, and this suited her just fine). Her back legs were weak and getting progressively weaker, and she had small cancerous growths on her belly. But she still enjoyed a walk right up to the end, and she never lost her appetite. We still couldn’t leave food out in the kitchen without returning to find it had mysteriously disappeared while Poppy gave us her ‘who - me?’ innocent-face. But knowing that the day was coming doesn’t make it easier when it does come. You may need to be a dog-owner yourself to appreciate how heart breaking it is to lose a family dog. Losing Poppy was hard.

Rosie

Why do we have dogs? I often ask myself this question. Why do we burden ourselves with the inconvenience, and costs, and grief? Why, quite frankly, do we willing submit ourselves to chewed shoes, destroyed carpets, disturbed nights, damaged flowerbeds, stolen food, dealing with poo bags, unwelcome bodily fluids, lingering dog hairs, unpleasant smells, and all of the other miscreant activities and proclivities of dogs? Why indeed? The PDSA estimates that a medium sized dog will cost its owners around £27,000 over its lifetime. Madness! We must be out of our minds to even consider such a commitment. Surely only a complete fool would have one.

Rosie

So, with all that in mind, may I introduce Rosie. She’s an eight-and-a-half week old Welsh collie. And she’s adorable. She has already given us two sleepless nights and our kitchen floor is covered with wee-mats. And we couldn’t be happier. Dogs eh!

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

Driving the Plymouth to Banjul Rally (2007): (Posted in April 2022)

Here’s how it all came about. Some of this might be apocryphal. You will need to decide. Once upon a time (so the legend goes) a London banker called Julian Nowill thought it might be fun to drive the Paris-Dakar rally. But when he looked into it, he discovered that a realistic entry could cost anything up to a quarter of a million pounds – once you’ve paid for several high-performance cars, a huge support team, a trailer load of spare tyres, and salaries and expenses for a retinue of mechanics and PR people and film crews and hairdressers and cooks. So he decided to set up a rival rally. This would go from Nowill’s hometown of Plymouth to Banjul in the Gambia, following a similar compass setting to the Paris-Dakar. The difference would be that cars should generally cost less than £100, teams should try not to spend more than £15 on preparations, and the whole event would lack organisation or support. Now admit it. That sounds a whole lot more fun. And to top it off, cars (or what was left of them) would be auctioned off at the end and the proceeds would go to Gambian charities.

It is fifteen years since Mike Taylor and I drove the Plymouth-Banjul Challenge. Dozens of cars set off on the same day and teams broadly choose their own routes, and you meet up from time to time along the way. Or you don’t. It’s all a bit random but that’s kind-of how it works. There were six of us, in three cars. Mike and I drove a 1988 Renault 5 we bought from a scrapyard in Brest. (The car costs us €200 so we had already broken the rules. But no one really cares, which is part of the charm of this rally.) My mate Graham Ibbotson (who appears from time to time in this blog) drove a big old Renault (I can’t recall the model) along with his son Tom. And Tom’s mates Adam Flowerday and Don Howarth drove some kind of Fiat Panda rip-off. (I don’t know what it was). Anyway, there you have our little convoy, and on the way, we grew to include two farmers in a little hatchback, two prison officers in a huge van, three guys in an unreliable Ford Modeo and a pair of Portuguese teenagers in an ancient Hillman Humber. (One of the two wasn’t old enough to drive, apparently).

It is an absolutely madcap rally. Bonkers. It isn’t a race (thank goodness). It’s a kind of test of endurance for man and machine. It rattles through eight countries (UK, France, Spain, Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia), has three ferry crossings (the Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar, and the Gambia River), and it includes one serious mountain range (the Atlas), one active minefield (see my blog on Guelta Zemmur), hundreds of miles of appalling roads, and around 350 miles of open desert sand. Which is AWESOME!

I would recommend this event to anyone with a sense of adventure. It takes three weeks – which is a lot of driving – but it is never, ever boring. There are days off in Gibraltar, Marrakech, Daklha and St Louis. The camaraderie is amazing. The adventures come thick and fast. I won’t regale you with stories because once I start I really won’t know where to stop. But trust me. The stories are good. Our little Renault barely made it. None of the dashboard dials worked. Ever. Which was a relief because we didn’t have any warning lights to worry us. We trashed the gears in the desert when we hit a massive rock so we did most of the second half of the rally with only third gear (the only gear that worked). And we bent the car so badly in Mauritania that afterwards the doors wouldn’t properly close. But hey. We kept going, we made it to Banjul, and we raised a shed load of cash for Kid’s Action.

As well as being an adventure, the experience was also pretty humbling. Mauritania is one of the world’s poorest countries. Senegal and Gambia have their challenges too. We are used to thinking that problems like these are somewhere on the other side of the world. We don’t imagine them as close enough to drive to. We all learned a lot on this trip. We grew up a lot. We are all linked. We all live on the same road. Literally. I still find it helpful to think of humanity this way. All of us just different numbers on the same road.   

My what3words link takes you to the beach. (Did I mention that you drive along 200 miles of beach! That’s 200 miles of BEACH!)

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

You can find some of the video that Tom took on YouTube. Here are the links:

Plymouth Banjul Rally 2007 Part One - YouTube

Plymouth Banjul Rally 2007 Part Two - YouTube

Plymouth Banjul Rally 2007 Part Three - YouTube

 

 what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

My Map Pins 37: Grenada (21st April 2022)

My sister Lorraine lives in Grenada. She farms bell peppers on the windward side of the island (the East coast) along with my nephew Shaun, and Shaun's son Grahame. Their farm is right by the sea. So, you see, we had a perfect excuse to visit. But here's the thing. No one should need an excuse to visit Grenada.  It's the original spice island, a jewel in the Caribbean, and it's a truly tropical island - a lush rainforest, mountainous and green, with perfect beaches and a genuine, laid-back, reggae-music-infused-West-Indies vibe. It may not have the brand identity of Barbados, or the huge tourist infrastructure of St Lucia, but it has charm, and it feels curiously undiscovered, and I love it. 

Here are the stats. Grenada is one of the smallest countries in the world. It ranks 179th (out of 195) by population (113,000 people), and 185th by land area (just 133 sq kilometers). This makes it marginally larger than Malta but only three fifths of the size of the Isle of Man. It's a dot on the map, basically. And it feels like it. You're never far from the sea, and you're never more than around 15 miles from anywhere else on the island (although slow winding roads mean those 15 miles could take you an hour to drive).

They really don't know how to do tourism in Grenada (apart from wham-bang ferrying around of passengers from the cruise liners).  We hired a car (pretty much essential) and we criss-crossed the island until we felt we knew it all. Almost. Driving is easy. The roads aren't busy. Just slow. 

Sandy Island

Signposts are rare (or non existent). Google maps reception is patchy. You need to navigate with the one rather unhelpful map provided by the island authorities. But it's ok. You can't get too lost. And anyway, exploring is fun. The Grand Etang rainforest park in the centre of the island is the must-see location. But my what3words map pin today is Sandy Island - an uninhabited paradise island a couple of miles off the North East coast. You pay a chap in a boat to take you there and maroon you for most of the day. It's the place where they filmed the Bounty Ad back in the day ( https://youtu.be/h8S7B8lnOL4 ) and it is still utterly unspoiled and lovely.

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3words: decisions.trickled.deeply

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

Grand Anse Beach

Grand Etang

The view from my sister's farm. Yes, really!

Out today for COP26 ... 'The Year of the Dugong.' (1st November 2021)

 

My novella for COP26, 'The Year of the Dugong,' is now available in English as a Kindle Novella. I should dearly love you to read it. I would especially love you to read it during COP26. It isn't a long read. It's about one quarter the length of a full novel. But I hope it packs a serious punch all the same.  Here is the link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09KQRY62C/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_S30JFFM17SMMND320K9V

I wrote this as a short story to highlight issues around climate change and extinction. If you like it, and if it moves you at all, do please let me know. 

The story has been published exclusively as a hardback novella in German by S Fischer Verlag - as 'Das Jahr des Dugong.' 

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

Why I’m retiring (but not from writing) (23rd July 2021)

 

The overwhelming response when I’ve told people I’m retiring from full-time paid employment has been, ‘what kept you?’ ‘You should have retired when your first novel came out and devoted yourself to writing,’ one friend told me. Others are astonished that I’ve still been working all this time. ‘What!’ they exclaim. ‘You’re still working!’ As if this was somehow a sin.

A lot of novelists never give up the day job of course. Anthony Trollope wrote ten novels while working for the post office.  Conan Doyle was a doctor. Kafka was an insurance clerk. T.S. Eliot was a publisher. Nabokov was a lepidopterist (I bet you never knew that). Most of the writers I know still do a nine-to-five of some kind. Personally, I never wanted to give up the day job. Not really. I have always rather enjoyed working. I like the people I work with. I get carried along with the projects we’re doing and the ambitions we have. It’s fun. I have worked in my industry (healthcare computing) for so long that I’ve become something of a sage. There are very few of us left who recall the early days. I remember one of the first computer systems I was involved with (a lab system at a London hospital). It had 512KB of memory. Half a megabyte. It seemed a lot at the time. I remember the clunky green screens and the colossal monitors and the achingly slow response times. I remember learning BASIC programming on a Commodore PET.  And all those things that might now be hard to explain. Queuing for the photocopier. The telex machine. Memorising phone numbers. Carbon copies. The tea trolley. Circulation envelopes. Treasury ties. Ties! Fax paper. Floppy discs…

… and now, like a very-slow-motion movie, the decades have passed, and I’ve watched things change. The kind of systems we’re installing today would have been extraordinary science-fiction to my twenty five-year-old self. The almost limitless power of mobile tech, and the coming of AI are transforming this space beyond recognition.

I have been incredibly lucky.  I’ve visited hospitals in ten US states, in UAE, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait and most of Europe. I’ve worked on deals in South Africa and Malta and Nigeria and Scotland and Ireland and too many other places to mention. It has been a blast.

I am, however, now in my, er, mid-sixties. And here is the truth. I’ve become a bit of a dinosaur. I didn’t see it coming. But perhaps we aren’t supposed to. Maybe it takes everybody by surprise. You wake up one morning and you realise, with a start, that your time has come. There is the door, there is your coat, what’s your hurry? This is what happened to me. I can escape it no longer.  I am no longer a programme manager.    

But I am still a novelist.

I won’t ever give up writing. I couldn’t. It is what I do. So I am doubly lucky – to have had a first career I enjoyed, and a second to keep me going. Thank you to all the amazing, fascinating, brilliant people I have met and worked with for so many years. I will miss you guys a lot. Do, please, stay in touch. Keep on making the world a better place. I want to read about your great successes. And, by the way, if you fancy, just occasionally, putting your feet up with a good book – ask in any good bookshop or check out my page on Amazon.  

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins 36: Swimming with Manatees - Crystal River, Florida (10th June 2021)

It takes a little under two hours to drive from Orlando to Crystal River on the Gulf coast of Florida. Well worth the drive, and not just to escape the Orlando crowds. The Crystal River Reserve State Park is a little oasis of tranquility. Make sure you pre-book a session to go swimming with manatees. We booked with Fun2Dive Manatee Tours and would wholeheartedly recommend them. There is no sense of rush. You have half a day out in the boat on the river, a very helpful guide, and you see manatees! The water is brutally cold, but wetsuits are available if you need them. The manatees just ignore you, and go about their business munching the vegetation while you snorkel around them. It is perfectly lovely.

 Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

What3words: dangle.earbuds.paces

 

The Year of the Dugong (Das Jahr des Dugong): The Inside Story (31st May 2021)

 

This gorgeous cover-design is for my novella, ‘The Year of the Dugong’ (Das Jahr des Dugong)’ due to be published in German on October 26th by the amazing team at S Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt. So far, this is an exclusive deal and I don’t yet have (any may never have) an English language publisher for this story. All of which may sound a little odd, and it deserves an explanation.

Perhaps I should start with the story.

Early in 2020 my agent, Stan, called me for a conversation. Did I have another novel on the go? I told him I did. Sort of. Except it wasn’t strictly a novel. It was a collection of short stories. There was an uncomfortable silence on the phone. You never want your agent to go silent. And this was when I learned that short stories are not particularly popular with publishers. It may be my memory, but I seem to recall the expression, ‘career suicide’ being floated in the conversation. It wasn’t especially encouraging.

Anyway, I stubbornly persevered with the collection, and sure enough, just as everyone had predicted, the final set of stories was not really suitable for publication. Which is a shame, but I get it. I shelved the stories and started work on a novel instead.

But here comes the silver lining. There was one story in the collection I was reluctant to part with. It was a tale about climate change. Climate change is a tough subject for a fiction writer. It is a slow, unfolding catastrophe, and the time scales are generally too long to grapple with effectively – at least within the lifetime of a single protagonist. To get around this, I had the idea of a Rip-Van-Winkle character from 2019 who falls asleep and awakens a very long time in the future, only to find himself blamed for his part in the destruction of the planet. One day, in the spring of 2021, I mentioned the story on a zoom call with S Fischer Verlag. ‘The Whale at the End of the World, (Der Wal und Das Ende der Welt)’ had been in Der Spiegel’s Top 10 Paperback chart for 50 weeks, and we were exchanging ideas for the new novel. At one point I said, ‘this reminds me of a short story I’ve just written,’ and my editor in Frankfurt said, ‘send it to me.’  A day or so later she called back. Could they please publish it?

The story was The Year of the Dugong.

I am so excited that Fischer are publishing Dugong as a novella. I did wonder, for a while, if I ought to develop it into a full-length novel, but truthfully, the story felt complete;  I sensed that stretching it out, and introducing more characters would dilute the impact. I asked my editor at Fischer if she could time the publication to coincide with COP26, the UN Climate Conference planned for November 2021. She agreed. So it will hit the bookstands in Germany on 27^th October.

If no UK publisher picks up the story, I will post the English language original onto this blog as a PDF or Kindle file to coincide with the German publication. Or drop a comment into this blog and I will email it to you on 27^th October.  

And that’s it. That’s why I find myself in the very unusual position of having a book published exclusively in a language that I don’t speak. And it has a beautiful cover. Don’t you agree?

 Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

Tracing my Family Tree (6th May 2021)

 I’ve often been sniffy about people who obsess over their family tree. It always felt, to me, a rather pointless exercise to dust-off and parade your male ancestors from the last few generations when we are all pretty much related. I’ve blogged about this before, but it bears repeating. Every human who walked the earth ten thousand years ago is either a direct ancestor of everyone alive today, or else they are an ancestor of none of us. It’s true. Our most recent common ancestor, from whom everyone on the planet is descended, probably lived between 55 BC and 1,400 BC. We are all pretty close cousins. You and me and Kamala Harris and Xi Jinping and the Pope. We are none of us further apart than 27^th cousins, but we are almost certainly much closer than that. A shocking statistic for all those people who prefer to believe in racial purity or Brexit – but there we are. *

Anyway. This has always been my objection to family trees. Until I started to trace one. And almost immediately my opinion changed. Genealogy may still be wholly pointless as an exercise in understanding our biological origins. But as a way of uncovering some genuine family stories, it is extraordinarily fascinating. I’m a convert.

It started as a way to while away the long days during the first Covid lockdown. My wife, Sue, wanted to resolve a few puzzles in her family tree. So we started to dig. Ancestry.com proved to be really helpful. Expensive, but ultimately worth it. (We paid the subscriptions for about six months.)  I should warn that it all took rather longer than we anticipated. There is something of a learning curve you need to get past. And we made mistakes. We spent days unravelling the family of one Welsh ancestor who proved not to be an ancestor after all. Never mind. We did uncover a host of stories. Like Sue’s great-great-great-grandfather, born in 1801, who died of exhaustion on Christmas Eve 1869 walking with a heavy bag of Christmas provisions from Whitchurch in Shropshire to Handbridge in Chester, intending to stay with his son – a journey of around 30 miles. He collapsed and died less than a mile from The Old Red Lion in Handbridge – the pub where his son was the landlord. The pub is still there. Or the black sheep of Sue’s family who drifted from job to job in the 1800s, and was fined £10 for assault in 1882 after throwing a cup of tea over his wife. It is endlessly fascinating. We discovered the marriage bans of ancestors who signed the register with a cross. Neither of them could read.

Sue was a Newnes and her mother was a Sargeant. We compiled all the stories we uncovered into a book (for family only of course). After this I had to do my tree too. More fascinating stories, and another book. My dad’s family were cockneys, living in the borough of Bow in the East End of London for five generations. They worked on the railways. I never knew. One of my ancestors, Robert Ironmonger, was indicted for ‘certain petty larcenies’ and transported to his majesties colonies in America in 1774, leaving his wife and baby son (my ancestor) in London. In 1776 the pesky colonists only went and started a revolutionary war and Robert was conscripted to fight for the British. Fascinating! I traced my father’s family line back to a gentleman fittingly called ‘End Ironmonger,’ who appears to have been born sometime around 1400 AD. Or thereabouts. And that’s as far as it goes.

So here I am with some new advice. Check out ancestry.com (they’re not paying me a commission). And have a root through your family stories. You might be surprised what you find.

And by the way ... if you happen to be an Ironmonger or a Newnes or a Sargeant or a Wilson, or if you think you might be related in any way ... drop your email address into the comment field and I'll send you the pdf of the book.

 *Humans Are All More Closely Related Than We Commonly Think - Scientific American

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (35): Lombardy (3rd May 2021)

 Lombardy is a huge piece of geography in the north of Italy and I can never do it justice with a single map pin. But, quite frankly, if you haven’t been to Lombardy yet, what’s keeping you? This is the home of the Italian Lakes. It needs to be on your bucket list. This isn’t a manufactured landscape like the English Lakes, this is Italy rough and raw from Milan to the Alps, from urban to wilderness, possessing some of the most glorious vistas imaginable. Hire a car (a little Fiat 500 is fine), book somewhere reasonably central to stay, and then get out there and explore for a week or so. As well as all the things you’ll discover on TripAdvisor (and there are lots) I’d recommend hiring bicycles to pedal around Lake Varese (it's about 28km all around so not too taxing – although we lost out way at one point and ended up going much further), visiting the Parco del Campo dei Fiori national park and the Santa Maria del Monte Trail, taking the cable car up Laveno Mombello on the edge of Lake Maggiore, and of course those lakes. Ahh, those lakes. Bella. Bella.

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3words: decorate.solves.building

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com