Irony has been the stock and trade of novelists through the ages. George Orwell’s The Hanging is a perfect example of dramatic irony. We follow a condemned Burmese man on his way to the gallows as he carefully sidestepping the puddle of water along the path so as not to dirty his shoes. Or Shooting an Elephant we witness the torment of a British colonial official in Burma who is torn between allowing an elephant to live and lose his authority over assembled villagers and shooting an elephant as a way of reinforcing his power. This is an example of situational irony.

Irony is that lovely, moving, touching human situation where the best of our writers present us with incongruity or a conflict that transcends the behavior, thoughts, words or desires of the character. Irony has been labeled as a rhetorical device or literary technique.

As a short hand wiki definition that is good as far as it goes, but irony is something else. It is subversive, it is a both an invitation to a kind of bonding that comes from recognizing the disturbing contradictions that thrust themselves into a characters life and it is also a shock or surprise as we deliberate about the meaning of life written in evoked in a larger frame that we expected. We wide angle the context of the scene or situation and irony is our lens.

We’ve entered, or will soon do so, an era where literary irony which operated a cartel on irony has been exhausted. Literary irony for most purposes is dead. Not buried, but dead. The zombies continue to haunt the pages of our novelists, thrusting a goulish finger at what passes for a condemned man’s puddle jump and we look, we stare and then we shrug and turn the page. Literary Irony is quaint, dated, and old fashioned. We are longer impressed or surprised. We don’t feel the same degree of intimacy as our parents and grandparents felt reading an ironic passage.

My theory is our present information world has been hyper-inflated with incongruity and conflict. Large data dump that pass our eyes daily from politics to culture and economics; the default for communicating discontent is to use irony. From Jay Leno to the Daily Show, TV has colonized irony like termites in a wood palace. Switching metaphors, the smoking gun of irony is found at the scene of just about any blog you read, Twitter feed is littered with irony, Facebook is an open sea of irony, obit piece are dipped in it, TV commercials sell you stuff based on irony, and lyrics have put it to music.

We suffer from a massive irony overload. It’s not that irony no longer moves us as in the past, our lives are now lived as if incongruity, the heart and soul of irony, is our normal, expected, and demanded psychological state. Like an old married couple sitting across the dinner table attending to their iPad with half a dozen windows feeding irony fix as they work their knives and forks in an oddly synchronized fashion. They call this the modern family meal—and without irony. Our sense of incongruity has been blunted like a sword struck too many times against a large rock. It is even useless to fall on.

How did I come to this conclusion that we no longer respond to ironic dramas and situations in the same way as Orwell’s time? It happened during a visit to a cemetery in Buenos Aries. Prisons, cemeteries, courtrooms, universities and slums are a good place to judge the place of irony in a culture.

The day before my trip down the rows of the dead, I’d been taken by car out to La Plata University where I was scheduled to give a talk about cross-cultural issues in my writing. My task was to address a class of about 40 English majors who were studying to become translators. These were the kind of young people who had a professional stake in irony.

On this journey, the car passed through the outskirts of Buenos Aries. We passed kilometers of slums—hard-scrabbled squalid hovels bearing witness to heart-wrenching suffering, poverty and desperation. It was hard to believe that human being could inhabit such awful conditions and not revolt. The students were attentive and asked many questions about Thailand, literature and culture. In the corridors students made protest banners. They seemed politically engaged in a way that Thai university students were not. These were large state universities and didn’t cater to the offspring of the ultra rich.

The next day, my gang of four Latin American authors (we were attending Buenos Aries Noir, a conference organized by Ernesto Mello) and I set off to visit La Recoleta Cemetery. This sprawling 14 acres in the heart of in Buenos Aires contained 4691 vaults. Mausoleums grand and small housed the remains of generals, presidents, with a dusting of poets and actors. Their final vaults inspired by Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Baroque and Neo-Gothic created a city of the dead unlike any place I’d seen.

The contrast between the slums along the road from Buenos Aries to La Plata which housed the living and the Art Deco mausoleums made from fine marble was like watching a thousand condemned men do a tango around a puddle on their way to be hanged. The celebration of the powerful in death transcends humanity offered to the living. I watched as people came to bring flowers and take photographs of Eva Peron’s mausoleum. Eva Peron was a perfect example of a patron who entered the grand station of national politics on the side of the poor. In death, she wasn’t buried with those she sought to represent and encourage.

Instead, Evita took her place along side other members of the privileged with an address along a lane with rows and rows of other long dead patrons in their marble palaces. Walking down those lanes, peering at the names, the tombs, and the heavy marble walls, it wasn’t difficult to understand these dead had left a legacy for the living. It is one that most people in the world can understand. The elites, even those who pledge themselves to helping the poor and suffering, ultimately enter the afterlife in shrines erected for the few.

No one in the cemetery spoke of any irony in the incongruity of the slums and the marble mausoleums. Somewhere I am quite sure there is a marble tomb at La Recoleta Cemetery where the earthly remains of irony are housed. I didn’t find it. 4691 vaults is a lot to inspect on a cold, rainy Buenos Aries afternoon. Leaving the cemetery we came across a large, well-fed cat curled up into a ball under a tree in the shadow of a dead president. It was an ideal place to be a cat. After closing time when the tourists left and the rats came out of the shadows. The hunting must have been good. Like shooting fishing in a barrel. Rats stalking the dead, the cats stalking the rats, and not even a hint of irony in the ecology that has come to represent our time and place.

I am prepared for a Western post-irony future. After nearly twenty-five years living in Thailand, a culture rich in puns, riddles and word play but autistic when it comes to irony, I can give you a hint of what to expect next. Without knowing it, you begin to accept that incongruities aren’t really contradictions that need resolution. Reality is large enough and people are adult enough to not dwell upon such matters. Once you accept that premise not only is irony dead, it was stillborn.

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www.cgmoore.com

Christopher G. Moore’s latest book is a collection of 50 essays titled Faking It in Bangkok, which is available as a kindle ebook.

As Willy Wonka says in “Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator,” the wisest men know that they need to indulge in some nonsense from time to time. Which is why I like to take my research for my novels just a bit too far.

For A Name in Blood I did more than just read about the great Italian artist Caravaggio and look at his work. I learned to fence with a sixteenth-century rapier and to paint with oils, for example. A bit beyond the call of duty, but so far so reasonable.

But then I decided to follow Wonka’s advice. So I grew a beard and dyed it black, because that’s how Caravaggio’s beard looked. I cut my hair in his style. I communicated with the spiritual energy of the artist and his lover in a what might be described as a very New Age fashion. I was gripped by fear and panic at night in Malta, as was he, and I got into a little, ahem, trouble in a bar in Naples. He, of course, found trouble everywhere.

The result was twofold. For one thing, it’s a stunningly good novel out in the UK on 5 July. (If I can’t blow my own trumpet, then what’s a blog post for?) But also the extra stages of my research took me so deeply into Caravaggio’s experiences that they changed my own experience of the world.

Caravaggio’s story is usually told as a tale of a brilliant painter whose tendency to violence, leading ultimately to his death at the age of 39, ruined what could otherwise have been a much more productive and happy career. After all my research, I decided the central feature of his life had been something else entirely: Caravaggio was looking for love.

How did I know this? I found it in his paintings. Look at his amazing Madonna with the Serpent and you’ll fall in love, as I did, with Lena, the model for the mother of Jesus. But more than that, behind all the dressing up and role-playing of my research was the sense that Caravaggio’s experience of life had been similar to mine. Not absolutely parallel, because fortunately my father and grandfather didn’t die of bubonic plague as Caravaggio’s did. (There were no recorded outbreaks in Wales in the early 1970s.) But his psychodrama was close enough to mine for me to feel a kinship with him. I’d summarize it thus: like him, I have a deep creative urge that’s rooted in what felt to me, at least, like childhood upheaval; I’ve often been compelled to work for people I despised; our romantic histories are complicated; anger has been… a problem; neither of us lived long in one place; we both found love.

That’s why I didn’t leave my interest in him on the gallery wall. I had to make of him a book, because I believed his story would help me make sense of my own emotions.

Without giving away the story of A Name in Blood, I’ll tell you that Caravaggio’s early paintings show a yearning for love in a man with little control over his life. His middle paintings reflect a sense of the love that he found. The late paintings show a man on the run (under sentence of death) who only then appreciates the depth of his love, both physical and spiritual.

Now that A Name in Blood is about to be published, I don’t have to keep dying my beard. But Caravaggio’s still with me. I hope he’ll soon be with you, too.

–

I’ve posted a pronunciation guide of some Finnish names, words and phrases to be found in my Inspector Vaara series, on my website, courtesy of she of the lovely voice, Maritta Hakola. I’m frequently asked how long it took me to learn to speak Finnish. The answer: I’m still learning and always will be.

I have a minor in Finnish from the University of Helsinki, but learned the language in nightclubs, in which I worked, for the first several years I lived here. That learning method caused all sorts of problems. I learned like a child, one word at a time, matriced English grammar on top of Finnish language, often was uncertain whether a word was Finnish or Swedish, the list is long, and it led to all sorts of bad habits, I’ve un-learned most of them, but never managed to get many of them out of my speech. Still, my Finnish is functional and gets me through the day. Additionally, there are so many dialects of Finnish that although many cite ‘book’ Finnish as correct, I don’t believe there is a right or wrong way to speak the language. Word order isn’t particularly important. It’s even acceptable to create words. To me, if people manage to carry on a conversation, their Finnish is fine, but I’m writing this in the hopes that, if you’re trying to learn the language, I can make it a little easier for you.

It’s often said, although I know of no measure by which such a thing could be quantified, that Finnish is the world’s second most difficult language, behind Mandarin Chinese. In contradiction, it’s also said that the rules of the language are 100% consistent, and is always pronounced exactly as spelled, so that if approached methodically, Finnish is an easy language to learn. I take exception to this. When studying at the university and on occasion asked an instructor why a word didn’t bend according to the rules, her answer was “just because.” A simple truth. There are some differences in spelling and pronunciation, largely loan words. And even if this claimed consistency were true, learning the rules seems futile when there are about 100,000 of them (an exaggeration, but thousands, far too many for my tiny brain to absorb). In the end, I found that the key was to not worry about the rules or to ask questions, but to approach the language with simple acceptance. With seventeen noun cases and six verb conjugations, which many times render the root word unrecognizable, it works better for me to memorize than theorize.

So-called ‘book Finnish’—proper written Finnish—is taught at the university, and a great deal more emphasis is placed on writing than speaking (despite two years of study, my written Finnish remains abysmal). This is problematic. Properly written Finnish is nearly a separate dialect from colloquial spoken Finnish in its other many dialectic forms. Foreign students often earn degrees in Finnish language, believing it will make them fluent, and this sometimes leads to disappointment. They graduate, discover that they can write and even translate Finnish, but can’t hold a conversation. I co-authored a textbook, Steps Into English 3 (part a series of I think four books), meant to teach English to Finnish adult learners. It’s earned surprisingly good royalties over the years and so must be popular with teachers in the classroom. So I hope that gives me some credibility with you as proof that I have a clue what I’m talking about. I’m writing this from memory, no resources, so if you find a mistake, feel free to correct me in ‘comments’, for the further edification of readers.

As an English speaker—and this essay is largely geared toward English speakers who face the same problems I did and do—there are concepts difficult to grasp. To name some major ones: no articles; no gender marker; no future tense; rather than hyphenating words, they’re simply strung together, sometimes to make a word upwards of twenty letters long; no accenting of syllables, so the language is spoken in a monotone; some sounds don’t exist in English and are similar, e.g., recognizing the difference between Y (a vowel in Finnish) and Ö was difficult for me; when letters are doubled in a word, they’re both pronounced. AA—pretend you’re at the doctor, “let me here you say aaaa;” consonants, like TT and KK can’t be elongated an a vowel can, so the result is a sort of snapping emphasis and full stop (you need a language tape or Finnish friend to grasp it).

The language has many hard sounds, and this, along with the combination of the noted difficulties, may make the beginner feel that they’re only hearing akkkakkakkakkakkaa, and are unable to differentiate where one word ends and the next begins. Most of the above obstacles disappear, with exposure, over time, even the overwhelming length of words. You just get used to it.

When I reached the point that I could get through my day in Finnish, people still often looked at me like I had three heads, as my accent screamed foreigner. I hated drawing that attention to myself. Finnish and English not only don’t translate well, but Finnish spoken with an English accent is grating, truly a butchery and hard to listen to. I learned how to cure this problem in one day, through a lecture at the university on how the sounds produced in Finnish are physically made, as compared to the way sounds are produced in English. Once I practiced and learned these physical skills, although my accent remains soft compared to a natural born Finn, I lost two of my three heads and stopped attracting attention when I spoke. I’ll share some of those tips.

English is a nasal language. When speaking Finnish, don’t let air come up through your nasal passage. It’s that nasal twang that grates. The New England accent—think Robert F. Kennedy as an extreme example, can reach up to 4000 HZ. In Finnish, it hurts. A Finnish male voice can sink to as low 40 HZ, so low that the voice begins breaking up like a radio that needs better tuning to a station. If I speak only Finnish for a few weeks on end, my voice will get lower and lower and eventually will do that. Incidentally, I’ve always been fascinated because Finns, especially women, can continue speaking while inhaling without pause. I haven’t a clue how it’s done.

Finnish is spoken from a different part of the throat than English. Put three fingers on your throat and start talking. Move the top finger to where you feel the main vibration as you produce sound. Continue speaking and force the vibration lower, until sound is generated from where your lowest finger rests. Lower if possible. Voila! You may have reduced your tone by an octave, your grating on the ears of others is over. It sounds difficult, but after you get the hang of it, speaking in this way requires much less effort and is more comfortable than your higher pitched English accent. You’ll draw far less attention and go back to having one head instead of three in public.

Aspiration. I still sometimes have trouble with this. Don’t do it. When you make, for instance, a P sound, don’t let air pass beyond your lips. The combination of all I’ve mentioned will likely, for a time, make you feel as if you’re holding your breath while trying to talk. It will come to feel natural over time.

The: the TH sound. It’s made by touching the front of your tongue to your front teeth and pushing air out. You no longer need this sound, and remember, you shouldn’t aspirate anyway. Make a similar sound required in Finnish by putting your tongue to the back of your front teeth. The result is more DA or TA sound. You may find you feel like you’re faking a Brooklyn accent and it make stick in your English speech as well. That’s just the way it goes.

And lastly, the all-important rolling of Rs. Touch your tongue to the top front of your upper palate. Force air through that point until you’re able to make a low-pitched trill. You may want to do this in privacy to avoid feeling silly. A few Finns have a speech impediment that won’t allow it, so they use the same tactic, but with the back of the tongue against the back of the palate, in effect, rolling Ks. I even met a guy who had, through lifelong practice, managed to eliminate all words with the letter R from his speech. But, it’s really not that hard to roll an R. You’ll find a way.

And here endeth the lesson for the day. Go forth and jabber Finnish!

James Thompson
Helsinki, Finland
26.6.2012

James Thompson is an established author in Finland. His novel, Snow Angels, the first in the Inspector Vaara series, was released in the U.S. by Putnam and marked his entrance into the international crime fiction scene. Booklist named it one of the ten best debut crime novels of 2010, and it was nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Strand Critics awards. His second Vaara novel, Lucifer’s Tears, released in March, 2011, earned starred reviews from all quarters, and was named one the best novels of the year by Kirkus. The third in the series, Helsinki White, was released on March 15 to critical acclaim.

www.jamesthompsonauthor.com

FB: James Thompson author

Twitter: tassu15

There. I thought that would grab your jaded Monday morning attention. What’s there to say about sex? To start with, I’m given to understand there’s a lot of it about. Humans (men, anyway) are supposedly hardwired to think about it every nine seconds, and something like seven-eighths of the internet seems to be devoted to various aspects of it. Sex, and its more respectable sidekicks, love and romance, are fairly central themes of fiction all round. There’s not much these days that doesn’t feature one or the other, or both, or all three.

It’s a good while since I came to the decision that too much sex is normally best left out of the work in progress. It’s not that I have a problem with a bit of horizontal jogging in my fiction, I’m no prude in that department. It’s more that it’s just so damned hard to strike the right balance and write about sex in a way that doesn’t raise a laugh or an embarrassed groan – or both. One reader’s sizzling seduction scene is another’s custard pie slapstick, and it’s a difficult line to tread between the two. There’s a lot to be said for those three dots that imply it’s time for the reader’s imagination to take up the slack.

My arrival at crime fiction was by a roundabout route that certainly wasn’t headed that way to start with and I’d certainly looked at other things on the way before deciding to head for the then relatively sparse uplands of Gloomy Nordic Crime Fiction. Fortunately, or unfortunately, whichever way you want to look at it, I was tapping out my first (published) novel just around the time that Stieg Larsson’s was making its arrival in Sweden, so my arrival on the bookshelves was a few months behind his – and since then Nordic Crime Fiction is everywhere. That’s no bad thing, as far as I’m concerned, the more the better.

A couple of years ago I asked an editor what I should be writing, wondering what the next big thing would be. Scandi crime fiction was already here (hopefully, to stay) by then and vampires were starting to take over the world, not for the first time – making this a bandwagon that was already too late to be jumped on.

‘Not sure, darling,’ this editor mused, describing the forays into gay erotic vampire fiction that she had been working with and unexpectedly predicting the return of the old-fashioned bodice-ripper as the coming thing.

Well, she was partly right. Bodice ripping appears to be back with a vengeance, but not in a way that anyone suggested. Three bodice-shredding volumes of Fifty Shades of Grey are all over every airport book stall after a new twist on rumpy-pumpy (as British tabloids so coyly refer to sex) is back, spiced up with some spanking and made commuter friendly by your ereader and branded as erotica rather than whatever you might want to call it.

Other publishers are tripping over themselves in indecent haste to join the party. It’s remarkable that the publishing business as a whole that really doesn’t like to be taken by surprise, and which likes lead-in times on a practically geological scale between a writer handing over a manuscript and the finished article appearing on a bookstore shelf can actually do things quickly when it’s time to keep up with the Joneses.

Fifty Shades of Grey appeared from nowhere as an ebook, taking mainstream publishing by surprise by sneaking unnoticed along the wing and becoming one of those word-of-mouth successes that come along every few years. It’s already been dismissed as badly-written mummy-porn. I haven’t read it and I’m not going to judge it, but there have been plenty of unfriendly pastiches and sour criticisms. In fact, it’s always easy to sneer at something that becomes a moneyspinning mainstream success; Dan Brown’s stuff, the overblown later Harry Potter books, Jeffrey Archer’s clunky stories.

But the fact remains that EL James’s much derided venture has made something hugely successful out of good ol’ fashioned sex. It’s at #1 in the Kindle chart and has spawned a publishing boom of its own, complete with detractors and imitations. ELJ has managed to snaffle the jackpot by doing the right thing at the right time, tapping into a demand for erotica of a kind that surely someone had been writing before, that appears to be largely aimed at women.

It’s a bizarre business and getting lucky in the way that EL James and JK Rowling did is largely down to chance. While it’s possible to sell ice cream to Inuits with the right kind of smart marketing, this kind of runaway success isn’t something that can be engineered.

Or can it? Is there a market there for a series featuring an irresistible Nordic crimefighting vampire who pings the buttons off well-filled bodices with a single smouldering glance? Do bodices have buttons?

I may be some time. There’s some bodice-related research that needs doing and then I may have a proposal and some sample chapters to write.

I was reading this week about a 23-year-old cricketer who died tragically in strange circumstances. He was stopped by police driving erratically in London at 4 a.m. Shortly afterwards he was lying on a train track and killed. What drew my attention, after consideration of the tragedy, was that when he was stopped, this young cricketer was driving a Mercedes. When I was young and had the time to watch a game of cricket, most of the players earned about the same amount as a school teacher (ie. not very much.) Now young cricketers are driving Mercedeses. Which led me to the conclusion that the only people not making boatloads of money in this age of bank bailouts and political corruption and Olympic overspending are journalists and writers. As a former journalist and current writer, I find this more than slightly irksome. So I decided to do something about it.

I decided to give away a short story.

That’s right. Just to show that I’m not concerned by the fact that I chose the only two professions to have missed out on the booms and gluts and balloons of the last two decades.

My historical crime novel about the mysterious end of Caravaggio is out in the UK in a couple of weeks. As a taster for A NAME IN BLOOD, I’m making available a short story “Lazarus’s Brush” that’s also about the great Italian artist. The download is FREE until Sunday. It includes the short story, plus a sample chapter from the novel and a personal essay about how I came to write A NAME IN BLOOD. (A bit like all the extra stuff you get on a DVD, but without the “commentary” track. Maybe I’ll do one of those on my Podcast some time….Well, if you listen now to the Podcast, you can already hear me talking about how I wrote A NAME IN BLOOD and reading a chapter.)

In the short story “Lazarus’s Brush,” Caravaggio flees to Sicily with a price on his head. Commissioned to paint the raising of Lazarus, he learns about his fears of the violence that stalks him. But the story also charts a profound change in his artistic technique. It’s an episode I didn’t include in my novel, but it’s a compelling moment in Caravaggio’s life and work nonetheless. Download the US version. Get the UK edition.

The Caravaggio painting at the heart of “Lazarus’s Brush” has just been restored, by the way. You can read more about the restoration here.

–

The wait for a successor to Amadeus is over.
MOZART’S LAST ARIA by Matt Rees
www.mattrees.net

To live in the capital of an exile population is a strange experience. The people who belong to that population are here, but a part of each of them is not here. Each has a separate existence in a version of their homeland that exists in their memories, their imaginations, their longings. They are people with two existences, and the world that exists only in their minds and hearts is often much more real to them than the place they happen to live in at the moment. That gives exile capitals an extra layer of life, as if a land of the imagination floats above or next to a real place and there are certain beings who commute between the two.

Miami and its surrounding towns and cities are certainly the capital of the Cuban exile world. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans have shown up here in the 63 years since Fidel Castro and his band took over in Cuba. Some flew from the island –with permission or without. Others left on ramshackle rafts and were swept to Florida by the Gulfstream current, while others have been smuggled to Mexico or Central America and then made their way to the U.S. border. Under a law written especially for Cuban exiles, they are legally in the U.S. and allowed to stay the moment they step on U.S. soil. Life changes radically with one stride.

They come but they don’t leave Cuba behind. The older Cubans who have been here for all those decades will still talk about the old Cuba, before Castro. It is as if they are speaking about the mythical island continent of Atlantis, which sank into the ocean and took with it a wondrous civilization that had never been seen before and has not existed since. Atlantis was run by magicians, but still has nothing on the old Cuba, which, according to those Miami accounts, was a rapturous place full of magical musicians, gorgeous dancing girls, sexy casino life, a landscape and beaches right out of heaven, the sweetest of sea breezes, and food and drink that tasted better than anywhere else in the universe, including heaven.

The loss of that paradise has created a sadness and anger that is major element in the air we breathe here in Miami. There is, of course, plenty of Cuban music, and  the delicious aroma of Cuban coffee and of Cuban food. We hear outbursts of super-fast, excited, guttural Cuban Spanish  and, of course, our share of  wicked Cuban laughter.

But we go through moments where the two worlds –real and longed for –collide and that anger and/or sadness is thicker than usual. The most famous such passage was the 2000 controversy surrounding a six-year old boy named Elian Gonzalez. He, his mother and about a dozen other people had tried to reach Florida from Cuba in a small boat. The boat sank, his mother and most the others drowned and the boy was found at sea floating in an inner tube, a bit like the baby Moses floating down the river in the reed basket. In the case of this Cuban boy, he had a father back in Cuba who wanted him and many non-exiles supported the claims of the father. But distant relatives in Miami, backed by many highly emotional members of the Cuban exile community, said his mother had given her life to reach exile and that made her child one of them. Since exile is a whole other state of being, he was like a boy with dual natures and both sides fought for him.  Anger and outrage exploded all around you in Miami in those days and at all hours. The two distinct species of Miamians who live here – those who are exiles and everyone else—were speaking two totally different emotional languages and couldn’t understand each other at all. A few months later the boy was returned to his father by the U.S. government, but even today, twelve years later, people can still get into bitter arguments over that outcome and they still speak two different languages.

I thought of that time recently because I saw a picture of Elian, now 18 or so, and still living and going to school in Cuba. Just a kid, he has become a symbol of the dual nature of Miami and of the Cuban people. He always had an elfin quality to him and he still has it now, a light in his amused eyes as if he really is comfortable with both natures, with belonging to both worlds, and is immune to and amused by the controversy.

Seeing him made me think about the fact that the exiles who actually lived in Cuba before coming here will eventually die off. Then the hands-on experience of it will be gone and all that will remain are legends of a magical, imaginary place – just like Atlantis. I wonder if all, or at least most, of that sadness and anger of exile will dissipate too.

We love a good public inquiry here in the UK – except that we don’t. The ‘public’ (me etc) hate them but those who matter, our politicians, love them. There’s a set form to a public inquiry here and is goes something like this:

Firstly something goes wrong. A child is murdered by its parents, we go to war, a media organisation gets caught being too powerful, a politician is caught out being corrupt. Our political masters then tell us all that the way to deal with something like this is to have a public inquiry. What this means is that a lot of lawyers get together to quiz various public and private persons about the matter and make a lot of money. Inquiries generate reports that make the Bible look like light reading and generally end with some very lowly official taking the rap for some political grandee to get him or her off the hook. We could cut out the middle man by just sacking the odd political aide, social worker or nurse from time to time but ‘democracy’ has to be seen to have been enacted – whatever that is.

In recent years we’ve suffered from the Chilcott Inquiry into the Iraq War during which ex-prime minister Tony Blair told the world that the deaths of both Brits and Iraqis had been worth bloody war to bring peace to Iraq. I am not alone in wondering where he thinks Iraq is – maybe somewhere in the Mendips – it clearly has nothing to do with Iraq the middle eastern country. But he did what he thought was right with regard to Iraq and so he was, he told Chilcott, running on a clear conscience. Good. Maybe he’d like to bring a few thousand people back to life and donate some of his vast fortune to the orphans he’s created – or even pay off some of the money it cost to organise the Chilcott Inquiry.

Lately we have been treated to the Leveson Inquiry. This is all about the Murdoch media empire and the British establishment’s relationship to it. Now it has been an open ‘secret’ in this country for decades that uber ambitious toad impersonator media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has been in and out of 10 Downing Street since the dark days of Margaret Thatcher. He’s curried favour with politicians and they in turn have stroked his back in return for good media coverage. Over the years he has been protected, nurtured and feted by successive governments. What has changed in recent years is that we’ve all found out that Murdoch’s journalists have been hacking mobile phones in order to get an inside track into various news stories. Significantly they hacked into the phone of a girl called Milly Dowler who was later found murdered. Of course they hacked the phones of the rich and famous but they have been largely paid off now and so that side of the case is probably over. But doubts about the relationship between politicians and Murdoch remain – hence Leveson. Or not.

So far we’ve watched a vast array of ex-prime ministers, ministers, civil servants and journalists parade in front of Lord Leveson basically saying ‘It wasn’t me, guv, honest.’ So far a very minor ministerial aide has been sacked while his boss, the culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, looks on smugly. At vast expense the ‘democratic process’ is being opened up to scrutiny and once again we are being treated to the sight of our politicians moving their mouths about, protesting their innocence.

There is an old joke in this country which goes, ‘How do you known when a politician is lying?’ Answer, ‘His mouth is moving.’

Need I say more?

Airports are one of the curses of the age we live in. It’s not the flying that’s the headache, it’s the airports. Start by standing in a queue for a bored clerk or worse, a machine, then another where your hand baggage is turned upside down, then three or more queues before you even get to see an aircraft – and that’s on top of the odyssey of getting to an airport to start with.

The endless queues, the terrible shops full of overpriced junk and the heart-stoppingly expensive eateries and bars in the departure lounges are where a bored traveller with an incurable people-watching habit can let the imagination wander. These places provide a showcase of characters plucked from their normal lives and dropped into this unnatural air-conditioned false reality with piped music, fast food and shops full of nothing nobody ever really needs, although that’s obviously a sweeping statement and doesn’t apply to the bookshops that are a necessity to any civilised traveller.

That couple over there, the middle-aged couple giggling like teenagers. They’re both wearing rings but that’s never his wife, and he sure as hell isn’t her husband. So what’s the story? Did they murder someone before making a quick getaway to head for a new life on another continent? Is that nondescript bag full of wads of cash in used notes? Or is it something mundane? Probably. But it’s the stuff of stories.

And at what age does it become acceptable to wear socks with sandals? Would that man wear that hat anywhere but on holiday? Which of those stag party guys is the lucky bridegroom and will he survive the drunken weekend in Prague intact?

That distinguished-looking gentleman with the piercing deepset eyes, the sweptback grey hair, the pencil moustache and downing a neat whisky at the bar, is he the disowned heir to a southern fortune returning home for the first time since leaving to join the marines thirty years ago? Or is he just an insurance clerk on his way to Tunisia to spend a few afternoons in the sun and his mornings exploring Roman remains? It doesn’t matter. Either way it works.

Good grief, young lady, those trousers. Should shorts like that even be legal? On the other hand, should showing that much leg be legal? Should those legs even be allowed out without a public warning attached to them?

That sulky young guy with the pouting girl at his side, what were they arguing about, and how come she seems to have won whatever they were squabbling over?

The huge gentleman with the ebony skin and the infectious laugh, deep as a well and smooth as honey, that rumbles across the departure lounge, what language is that he’s speaking into his mobile phone and what’s the joke, or is he just naturally cheerful?

Surely that pretty blonde bending down to look through her bag knows that a miniscule tracery of thong is on display high above those low-slung jeans? And does she know that behind her a pair of Estonian businessmen on their way to Lisbon are thoroughly enjoying the sight, laughing and making appreciative hourglass gestures with their hands?

How come that little feller you wouldn’t otherwise notice has a mouthful of gold teeth that only show when he smiles?

How about the majestic African ladies in their bright blue and green robes reminiscent of schooners under full sail, where are they going? Home to where? Or going shopping in Paris?

The young man in the dhoti and the badly-wrapped turban asleep under a blanket next the stairs, his sandals neatly placed by his head, what’s he dreaming about? And who’s the elderly man next to him with the lined face and the nose straight out of Kipling? His father? An elder brother or an uncle?

Arrivals can be interesting as well. The pair in identical suits and haircuts over there at the back. The shades hide their eyes and they never smile. Are they twins? They look like they could be. Are they waiting for someone who would rather not be met? A quick look at their shoes, and they don’t look like they could be from the police and they’re too obvious to be spooks of any kind. More than likely they’re just taxi drivers who like to look like gangsters, killing time until their fares come through the gate.

The three thickset guys with the bald heads and the tattooed arms, where are they coming from? Aberdeen after a spell on an oil rig? Or a religious conference in Riga? Or stopping over on their way to join a ship? Or are they returning from a gay pride get-together in Amsterdam?

The girl clutching a bunch of flowers and teetering on her heels at the arrivals gate, the one with the look of expectation and the blissful smile on her face, is she wearing anything under that buttoned-up-to-the neck trench coat? And what happens when whoever she’s waiting for so eagerly doesn’t get off the flight? Or arrives with someone else on his (or her) arm?

Screwing up people’s lives, even imaginary ones, can be a fantastic jumping off point into something new. There’s a story behind every single one, undoubtedly nothing like whatever the hapless novelist dreams up, and probably more interesting and exciting than anything we can come up with – as truth is invariably more strange than fiction.

Sometimes it’s nothing more than a face in a crowd, never to be seen again, or a mannerism picked up in passing, or fragment of conversation that can set off a train of thought and a string of new ideas. People-watching and letting your imagination run away with you is one of the prime tools in the fiction writer’s armoury. Even a fleeting glimpse of real life can be the spark that sets off some whole string of new ideas. So next time you’re waiting for a flight and there’s someone in the corner staring into the middle distance, be careful and take care not to stand out from the crowd. It might be a crime writer on the lookout for characters.

Departure lounge, Heathrow Terminal 5 and Wetherspoons, Aberdeen airport