Here’s a whimsical column on book lengths, also to tie in with Friday’s publication of Even Flow (note: my book is quite short!). With thanks to the Irish Independent’s Weekend magazine…

The following is, almost literally, a never-ending story.

A while back I read this book called The Historian, and jolly good it was, too. Sorry, let me rephrase that: a while back I read this book called The Historian over a period of no less than ten weeks, and it may have even stretched to 12 or 14.

Why, you may ask, was this fellow labouring through one book for the bones of three months? Why did he not simply finish it and move onto that new Rutger Hauer biography, like everyone else was doing? Is it just that he’s a painfully slow reader, or was there something else – something darker, one might almost say – at work here?

Well, there were a few reasons. One is that my attention would get called away, from time to time, by other attractions. It’s just so hard to pass the video shelf at home, for instance, and for my eye to catch the cover of Point Break, without putting the damned thing on one more time. Oh Bodhi, you lovable bank-robbing surfer-dude Zen-master little scamp.

But the main reason this infernal book was a weight in my bag for so many weeks is this: it’s incredibly long. The thing comes in at about 700 pages, and these are bigger than normal pages with smaller than normal text.

I did a very rough estimate of the word count, and reckon it’s somewhere in the region of 280,000 words. The average book, by contrast, is somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000, depending on genre etc.

As a consequence, it took me two months to crawl past the 500-page mark. By that stage I was thoroughly sick of the sight of The Historian, and only finished it out of a sense of duty. This is not to say it’s bad – au contraire, it’s a reasonably well-written, evocative, gothic-horror sort of thing, which I normally love.

But it’s not natural to spend this long in the company of one book. My ideal runs to about 200 pages – roughly of a length that you’d finish in three or three-and-a-half hours of solid reading.

Metered out into ten-minute snatches here and there, and maybe a half-hour in bed over a few nights, this means the deed is done in about a week, which is perfect. Just long enough so you feel that sense of satisfaction on completing the job, but not too long that you start to forget how the book began in the first place.

This became a major problem with The Historian: after a while I could barely remember what it was about, where it started and who any of the characters were, because it had been so long since I was introduced to any of them.

(Though this may have been as much my fault as the book’s, because I have a notoriously feeble memory. Things just leak away or something.)

But as I was saying before being rudely interrupted by myself, The Historian is far too long. And it’s not alone: way too many books are now way too long, so much so that I can barely muster the energy to finish them.

John Lanchester’s Capital, for instance, released last year, was one such: I did read the whole thing, just about collapsing over the finishing line that is the final page, but that was probably only because I was being paid to review it. Otherwise, not a hope – I’d have given up somewhere between page 7,123 and page 11,994.

I exaggerate, yes, but that’s what it felt like. And the funny thing was, the book was fine; actually pretty good. But man oh man, so looooooong it hurt.

What’s the reason for this? Do publishers feel they must give value for money? Do they believe that quantity (of pages) is equal to quality (of material)? Are they afraid that a literary version of Eddie Hobbs or someone will descend on them, ranting about rip-offs, for publishing short books?

(I’ll also tangentially note the amount of arse-numbingly lengthy movies in cinemas over the last few years. Keep it short, Hollywood! You only have the one good idea for this movie, don’t do the dog on it!)

I disagree with all this, I must say. For me, the words and ideas on those pages is what makes a great book, not how many pages there are. In books, as in so many things, less is more, folks, less is more.

• Darragh McManus’ crime novel Even Flow, out on September 28, is available in bookshops and online, as a print edition or e-book. And it’s relatively short!

I was featured in the Sunday Independent’s 4 Minute Interview slot yesterday, to promote Even Flow which is officially released this Friday. Much thanks to the paper, and journalist Donal Lynch; not so great thanks to whoever decides what goes up on the independent.ie website, because this hasn’t!

So, I’m posting it below…

What was the worst moment of your life?

When I was fully convinced that I’d never be a published novelist – that was one long, dark night of the soul.

What secret skill or talent do you have?

I do a decent Elvis impersonation on “The Girl of My Best Friend” – too self-conscious to ever unveil it publicly.

If there were one song you associate with your youth what would it be?

Smells Like Teen Spirit: I was 18, grunge ruled the airwaves and my affections, and everything was pretty good in the world.

What is your greatest regret?

Not learning to play guitar when I was a kid, and then forming a band in college – I almost physically feel the regret.

What is your ultimate guilty pleasure?

Watching the Twilight movies over and over, although I don’t really feel that guilty about it.

Who is/was the love of your life? 
My wife and child.

What is your present state of mind?

Mostly contented, mildly panicked (a low-level, ever-present panic is the default setting of the human animal, IMO).

What do you consider the greatest work of art?

Alto Giove by Nicola Porpora.

What living heroes or heroines do you have?

I’ll limit myself to three, though there are many: Aayan Hirsi Ali, Don DeLillo, Richard Linklater.

What’s been your biggest recession sacrifice?

Still driving a 12-year-old car with a bockety exhaust.

On what occasion do you consider it ok to lie?

When a kid asks you about Santa Claus, death, or any combination of the two.

What’s the sexiest quality in a man/woman?

Self-confidence in its purest sense, i.e. not brashness but being at ease in your own skin.

What are the consolations of getting older?

People indulge you more: bad dress sense, grouchiness, talking to yourself, bizarre views on how to fix the world, etc.

Which local star – in any field – should the world outside Ireland know about?

Chris Binchy – a really fine writer.

What’s your best chat up line?

Are you gonna go my way?

• Darragh McManus is an author and journalist. His crime novel Even Flow, released on September 28, is available in print or e-book.

A pretty big day for me today: first I got my gratis copies of Even Flow through the post, and started to get properly excited about the book’s release on September 28. And it looks really cool! The cover should – hopefully – leap off the page.

Also got the front cover for my next book, The Polka Dot Girl, which is coming out next January. And here it is (click for larger image):

I like it: think it’s mysterious, sexy, shadowy and suggestive and a little bit spooky. Hopefully will entice readers in. Also hoping to lure a few easily confused 50 Shades of Grey fans into thinking it’s actually an erotic novel, not a Chandler-esque noir-style mystery.

Anyway. Onwards we go…

Recently I was reading a blog which declared, in so many words, “Thank God we have a recession.” Apparently we had been labouring under the unbearable halter of prosperity; the Irish race had spent long years wandering, lost, through the desert of economic success and political tranquillity.

Things are much better now, this thinking goes. More meaningful. More real. We’re happier now that our eyes have been cleared of the cataract of materialism. We’re less pampered but more fulfilled, because life has become a greater struggle.

What utter rubbish.

I’ve even seen people claim they’d like to have lived during war time, which is even more ridiculous; you feel more ‘alive’ then, or some such nonsense. (I suppose this is an extension of that bizarre urge felt by insecure men to take up white-collar boxing. You only fully know yourself when you’re in the boxing ring, they say. Really? Well, you know how good you are at giving or taking a punch. What else?)

I literally can’t understand this mentality: this belief that surviving in times of penury, conflict or misery are somehow better than living in a pleasant, stable, comfortable society. It glorifies and romanticises what is Other, and constructs an entirely false equation: struggle = fulfilment and authenticity (that most misused of words).

I despise mindless consumerism as much as anyone else, and it’s right that we criticise and strive to make our country better; and yes, modern life is fundamentally dull and futile and unfulfilling. But so what? That’s what life is: a set period of vague, monotonous ennui, interspersed with heightened moments of beauty or dismay. Nobody promised it would, or should, get any better than that.

And how, by any logic, can war and plague and grinding poverty be considered desirable? Certainly, violence and drama make for great entertainment, but 300 or Enemy at the Gates are not real; they’re just actors and clever effects.

Real war is blood and pain and faeces and rats and tedium and depression and horror. Only someone who fetishises militarism and the vampire cult of battlefield nobility could think otherwise. Indeed, I often suspect there’s something a bit simple-minded about men who lionise war; they seem infantile, emotionally retarded.

You don’t even need actual warfare to descend into hell. A while back I read about a city in Mexico called Juarez, which has an incredible crime and murder rate (because of poverty and gang wars): last year alone more than 3,000 people were killed. This is absolutely staggering for a city considerably smaller than Dublin. And the details are truly horrifying: torture, burial alive, disgusting and unimaginable slaughter, scarcely believable.

And this is somehow a better or more fulfilling existence than shuffling along in our relatively peaceful, affluent, dull little country, where we can live some kind of normal life, whether happy or not? I don’t think so.

I’m happy to live in a boring, safe environment. More than that: in some senses I believe that coffee shops are one of the high-points of civilisation. I mean that literally: to while away an hour, drinking coffee and eating a cake and reading the paper…how blessed and privileged we are to be able to do something like that. How fortunate to live in a society that has reached such a pitch of civilisation.

The choice and freedom and security and luxury of it: medieval peasants or Soviet workers would have thought it fantastical, impossible. That anyone bar the tiny gilded minority could savour such earthly delights: how could such a thing be?

A cup of coffee and a slice of cake in a nice quiet environment, that’s all it is; and yet, what an unattainable dream it must seem to a Bangladeshi farmer mired in drudgery and destitution, or a Colombian mother wondering if her child will learn something at school today or be murdered on the way home.

There’s nothing more or less ‘authentic’ about being shelled or tortured, about having your humanity ground down and squeezed dry by economic exigencies. There’s no nobility in all of that. It’s just ugly and horrible and totally needless.

Anyone who actually does struggle for survival in such awful situations would kill to have a bland, unexciting, suburban existence where they won’t be hacked to death or raped or starved out of existence. And it’s immoral and disgusting for us to romanticise any of it.

It’s also hugely self-indulgent, and on a broader level, symptomatic of a particularly insidious strain of soul-sickness in the affluent west, prevalent among certain men. Returning to the war-fetish theme, these sad creatures believe that the modern world has been overly feminised; that there is no place anymore for ‘traditional’ male virtues (whatever those may be); that we are rearing generations of namby-pampy, pampered wimps who don’t know how to be a real man.

Apart from the fact that it’s weird and illogical to define yourself by gender anyway, there is a perfect solution for these gung-ho wannabe Iron Johns. If they honestly feel that safe, feminised, bland western society isn’t ‘real’ enough for them, there’s nothing stopping them from joining the marines and heading off to Afghanistan or Iraq.

They’ll find plenty of life-on-the-edge ‘authenticity’ and manly, musty brotherhood while crouched under heavy fire from 200 blood-crazed jihadists. I’ll just sit here and enjoy my coffee and cake, thanks.

First published in the Irish Times, April 2011

I once overheard a conversation in Whelan’s in which a guy advised his female friend that all her emotional and sexual needs could be met by the simple expedient of getting “a dog and a rabbit”. The canine for companionship, the well-known mechanical sex-aid for the other thing.

At least I presume that’s the order he meant it, and not the other way around.

Anyway, it seems like vibrators have assumed a place in women’s affections once occupied by chocolate. Though I understand you can now combine the two, in a variety of flavours and power settings, but that’s a subject for another day.

Tulisa Unspelleablename – you know, her off X-Factor – was caught with a vibrator at the airport. The Sex and the City gals had to stage an alcoholism-style “intervention” when Charlotte got addicted to hers. And Googling “vibrators” gets you a mind-blowing – in every sense – 24 million hits.

By the way, FBI, I only looked that up as research for this column, so don’t bust down my door and arrest me for crimes of degeneracy just yet. Don’t worry, guys, you’ll get your chance.

So is the vibrator about to replace woman’s best friend, i.e. man? If that Whelan’s conversation I unethically eavesdropped on is correct, then yes.

But hold on a second, girls. Before you go throwing himself out in the gutter and rushing off to splurge five hundred quid at dasgrossensexxxmekanik.com, read this – my list of the ways a man is better than any electrical sex-toy.

Yes, even those ones they brought out in the shape of Barack Obama’s head.

1. A vibrator won’t take out the rubbish.
2. Or the recycling.
3. Or that icky “green waste” bin that’s now a festering mulch of rotten food and swarming slugs, because the both of you were too drunk to remember it had to go out a fortnight ago.
4. A vibrator isn’t very warm to hug in bed, when you’re feeling “soooo cooooold” in that way Irish women have, as mocked/honoured by a Des Bishop sketch.
5. A vibrator won’t get up and change the channel when the remote is missing-in-action.
6. A vibrator won’t get up and change the channel AS-bleedin’-AP when the opening credits to Tallafornia are rolling.
7. A vibrator won’t do the shopping. Alright, so most fellas are probably stone useless at doing the shopping, and bring back Kinder Buenos and lemon-scented room-freshener instead of the carefully compiled list you had made out. But a vibrator can’t even manage that much.
8. A vibrator won’t investigate that noise you hear downstairs in the middle of the night.
9. In his jim-jam pants and ironic Bon Jovi t-shirt. Wielding a hurley like a samurai sword.
10. A vibrator can’t even pick up a hurley.
11. There’s another one: a vibrator can’t play hurling.
12. Or any sport. Even the crappy ones, like rugby.
13. Possibly snooker, now that I think about it.
14. A vibrator won’t explain the plot of the movie you’re watching. The one with the really straightforward story and clearly drawn characters and how the hell can you not follow this? Did you fall into a coma halfway through or something? YES, Jesus Christ, that’s the villain.
15. A vibrator won’t remove the decapitated carcass of a rat that’s been strewn around the utility room by the two cats for no apparent reason only to annoy you.
16. Or root around on all fours, searching for the head.
17. Or make grisly-but-amusing jokes about how the blood and entrails look like squiggles of kids’ paint.
18. A vibrator won’t do loud Al Pacino “Hoo-hah!” impersonations at hilariously inopportune moments. Like Great Aunt Annie’s funeral.
19. A vibrator can’t balance a balloon on its head for two minutes to entertain small children.
20. A vibrator won’t paint the house in summer. A vibrator won’t even promise to paint the house in summer, then conveniently “forget” until it’s too late in the year to do any painting.
21. A vibrator won’t tell you it loves you. (They’re notoriously commitment-shy.)
22. A vibrator makes even more noise than a man. Except for when he’s drunk. Then it’s like whoa, earplugs in folks, the deaf, blaring walrus has just trundled onto the beach.
23. A vibrator won’t write funny articles like this one.
24. A vibrator won’t read funny articles like this one to you as you lounge in the bath.
25. Which it didn’t run for you.
26. Sipping a nice glass of wine which it didn’t fetch for you out of the fridge.
27. A vibrator will never appreciate the violent delights of a good old-skool Schwarzenegger splatterfest. You don’t either, but that’s beside the point.
28. A vibrator can’t empathise with or understand someone.
29. A vibrator may seem like it’s listening – but is it really hearing what you say? I think not.

You know what’s the worst thing about men who make rape jokes? They’re such total pussies. Aren’t they? They’re pussies and wimpy faggots and sissy-assed little bitches.

Oh, sorry. I should apologise for the language. Obviously, as a relatively well-balanced human being, I don’t normally use these hateful words. But I wanted to speak to the kind of men who make rape jokes in their own language.

And what I mean is this: I mean that these guys are wimps. They’re weaklings and cowards. They are, by their own argot, whiny bitches and limp-wristed faggots.

They presumably think of themselves as tough guys, alpha male all the way, real men’s men. The sort of man who doesn’t just think he’s better than women, but knows it, goddamit. The sort of man who looks down on those of us who are feminist, pacifist, vegetarian, pro-gay rights, or less-than-all-man in any other way, with utter contempt.

They’re bad-ass motherfuckers, these ones, cool rebels who make their own rules, like a marine crossed with Che Guevara crossed with The Terminator.

Except, of course, they’re not. They’re bullies. Which is the complete antithesis of being a rebel, or being bad-ass, or cool, or tough, or courageous. Being a bully means you’re gutless, conformist, narrow-minded, stupid and vindictive. It means you suck up to the powerful and take it out on the weak.

And comedy is never really funny when it’s coming down the chain of power, is it? Like, a working-class stand-up slagging off a billionaire, that’s fine; Bill Gates taking the piss out of a homeless guy, not so funny.

So it is with rape jokes. Yes, yes, it’s just a joke, you say; but it’s not really funny when the joke’s being made by the powerful (men, the people who commit this crime) at the expense of the victims (women, almost always. Although all those rape-in-prison jokes? Yeah, they’re not very funny either).

Sure, rape-joke comic guy, you have the right to make these hideously off-colour gags. Just as you have the right to be a gigantic fucking asshole all your life. Sadly, you being an asshole isn’t yet illegal, and punishable by you being beaten to death with your own limbs. And neither is your rapey comedy.

But it still isn’t funny, and more than that, it still ain’t cool. It ain’t cool and it ain’t rebellious and it doesn’t mark you out as a hard man. It shows you up as a chicken-shit weasel.

You know what’d be a really cool thing for the likes of Daniel Tosh to do? Something that would show us just how tough and daring and macho they were.

Daniel Tosh, and all the other comedians who supported him on grounds of free speech and ‘get a sense of humour’ and ‘fuck you if you were offended’ et cetera et cetera…I’d like to see them go to a punk club in Moscow and tell jokes about assaulting the audience’s mothers or children. Or tell Holocaust gags in a Jerusalem club. Or go to Johannesburg and make some hilarious cracks about black people.

Never mind the rape jokes, the easy targets, some poor woman in the minority of a crowd. Front up, fellas. Grow a pair. Show us how fearless you really are.

I mean – you’re not going to pussy out, are you?

The movie industry isn’t particularly renowned for originality – witness the plethora of sequels, prequels, remakes, adaptations and ‘re-imaginings’ clogging up studio production slates and giving ire to anyone interested in seeing something new every so often. And did the world really need a prequel to The Scorpion King, Tremors or 2003’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, itself a remake of the 1974 original, which had, in turn, inspired a belated sequel (I know, it’s confusing)?

Of course it didn’t. While The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (either version) was primo horror fare, this isn’t quite The Godfather we’re talking about. And one shudders to imagine what the prequel involved: a young Leatherface paying his first visit to the hardware store for piano wire and a nail-gun? Mom and Pop Leatherface presenting their son with My First Little Chainsaw at Christmas?

Pretty pointless, really. But I’m not totally averse to the notion of prequels, providing the right source material can be found…

Triassic Park

An excitable Scottish billionaire constructs a fantastical theme park, recreating the long-gone Triassic era. All turns to disaster, however, when tourists realise that incremental changes in climate and the excruciatingly slow evolution of various strains of fern don’t make for a very exciting holiday, and visitor numbers drop vertiginously.

Terminator -1: Procreation Day

The sperm and egg which will one day become the future Sarah Conner team up to defend humankind against a relentless computer chip which can’t really do much and is rather immobile but will one day form part of the future Terminator’s CPU.

The Omen – Let’s Play the Waiting Game

Extremely slow-moving drama, with a running time of three billion years, as Lucifer hangs around the barren netherworld of his exile, smoking too much and waiting for the stars to align so some prophecy or other comes to pass and he can assume dominion over the world. Look out for the scene where the fallen angel plays chess with Death for 230 million years. Then they get bored and switch to Connect 4 for the next eight million.

Internally Debate Hard

John McClane ponders whether to visit his wife in Los Angelesor stay at home watching Moonlighting reruns instead. He then ponders whether or not to wear a vest that day. Starring Hayden Christensen as McClane and Bruce Willis as the vest.

The Matrix Reworked as Farce

Super-powerful, self-aware computers begin construction of an enormous fantasy world to enslave the human population, seemingly unaware that it would be far easier to use unthinking but equally warm-blooded animals. Like hippopotami. And that the energy-giving sun is blazing like billy-o a mere thousand feet above them, just beyond the low-lying toxic cloud.

Apollo 12 – Fairly Uneventful

Humdrum account of the not-at-all ill-fated Apollo 12 space mission, during which everything passes off pretty much as planned.

Squeak

Young Sydney Prescott begins elementary school one year to the day since her older sister was bullied to tears by a really mean girl in gym class. Now a pop culture-fixated juvenile psychopath is playing a terrifying game of cat-and-mouse involving nursery rhymes which reference themselves in a self-consciously post-modern style that initially seems clever but quickly becomes tiresome. Cameo appearance by Wes Craven as a furry pencil-case.

Willie Wonka: Oomps, I Did It Again

A thrusting young entrepreneur builds up a confectionery empire by using slave labour from a fourth world country populated by orange-faced dwarfs, and getting kids hooked by filling his products with Scrum-diddly-E-numbers. A tragic accident involving the Chocolate Swirl-o-vator and a batch of Diet Wonka Koke shatters his mind, turning him into a reclusive weirdo in a top hat.

Ocean’s 10

Surprisingly gritty account of the early lives of all those smug tools in nice suits, before they reinvented themselves as cheeky chappie ordinary decent criminals. Brad, George, Matt and whoever the hell else weld together the halves of crashed cars and beat the wrong man to death for informing on them to police, to the accompaniment of a funky David Holmes soundtrack.

Babe: Makin’ Bacon

Shortly after giving birth to a plucky little piglet called Babe, an unfortunate sow is butchered and processed into a wide variety of tasty pork products, including chops, hickory-smoked rashers and those disgusting feet things they eat in Cork.

ET the Barbarian

Aggressive, expansionist aliens with extremely long fingers send their top warrior on a mission to destabilise Earth before full-scale invasion. Entry into our atmosphere alters his brain chemistry and transforms him into a croaky-voiced peacenik.

Gladiator – Guy Who Sweeps Up the Coliseum

Stirring tale of a young slave with ambitions of becoming a mighty gladiator, ruling the amphitheatre and, like, getting all the chicks and glory and that. But it ends in tears as he gets drunk on an amphora of honey wine and slips into the tiger pit.

JFK – Magic/Johnson

A young magic bullet, minding its own business, is inveigled into a wide-ranging conspiracy to assassinate the American President. The bullet is promised, by Lyndon Johnson, Sam Giancana and Joe Pesci in a nasty wig, that nobody will ever know. But he begins to suspect he’s being set up as the patsy…

The Lord of the Rings: The Legend Begins

Ooh, let’s see…how about something like The Hobbit for a title? A doughty man-midget with hairy feet, travelling in search of adventure, comes across a magical ring which is sought by a Dark Lord who… Oh.

I’m not greatly fond of high summer, for reasons that are odd and obscure even to myself. There can be something stark and depressing about the season; time can feel sluggish, sickly somehow. It’s hard to hide away in summertime.

But it’s also the most sublime time of year in many ways, with the greatest capacity to dazzle and amaze. Where I live we get a beautiful light on summer evenings, or rather, a range of beautiful lights: from soft ochres to vivid reds, from a wash of organic colours to slashes of something so brilliant it nearly looks artificially generated.

Facing west towards the Atlantic, you can watch the sunset being played out as drama on a giant, skyscraping screen; all that’s missing are the velvet curtains rolling across as we fade to black, show’s over, time for bed.

The day dies slowly, languorously; it’s reluctant to go, it drags out the farewell, like an elemental orchestra returning with just one more refrain, one final flourish, and then another, and then just one more, and one more, and one more.

If it’s been a hot day, the sky is a bleed of orange and purple, vibrant and dramatic. If the day was a little cooler, maybe the sun is now drowning slowly, submerged in a layered sea of scarlet and tan.

Or perhaps there has been rain and shafts of warm sunlight are now breaking through the crust of cloud overhead, making the skyscape cinematic, almost painterly: off-yellows and strong shadows, a chiaroscuro of the elements.

At times like that you smile to yourself, and think: the universe likes me today.

Or maybe you just think. It’s natural to get contemplative while looking at the summer evening sun. And today (June 21^st) is the solstice, the longest day of the year, the slowest, most languorous dying into night. The longest time to look and think about light. Reflections on reflections.

To remember back: reading that popular science book a while ago, last summer actually, and how a lot of it was about light, that was the central contention, how everything basically is light; the entire universe described as light evolved to different stages: matter, radiowaves, ultraviolet, that book, this thought, you. Remembering how fascinating and literally wonderful you found that.

And that brings you onto thoughts about light and looking at light, and how we can never actually see the real thing we’re looking at, the heart of matter, because the sub-atomic interaction of the object with the light changes it ever-so-slightly, alters it so minutely that only God can tell the difference but this is philosophical not practical so it still matters. You think about the fact that what you see is infinitesimally but crucially different from what it would be if you weren’t looking.

And then you dawdle along a different mental path and arrive at this realisation: we cannot see anything in the present, because everything we see is light that’s been reflected off an object a microsecond before – or more, minutes or years or millennia more, in the case of stars.

Stars and aeons, stretching across time and space. Insignificant man struggling to impose order and will on blank chaos, struggling to draw his design across the canvas. And you think about art, visual art and its relationship to light. You think about how and why artists are so fascinated with it; how light is everything in visual art because light is everything we see – we only ever see reflected light, we literally can’t see the object itself, even before it changes.

Then you notice a slight chill in the air, maybe your skin notices before your mind does, and you think about these long, light-filled days. Light as everything we see and everything we are, everything that is.

Remembering back again, to something written years ago: “There is hope in the purity of light. Light is straight, constant, unyielding. Light wrestles tachyons and reins in the wilder elemental forces. Time bends but cannot defy light. Light is simple and unconquerable. This explains the literary fascination with light, the blinding pearl, the subconscious leitmotif. e = mc2 is not a mathematical formula: it is a poem to the universe.”

Then you notice it’s dusk; the light is almost gone. The late evening air now has that eerie twilight tint, like a blue filter placed over the world to gently usher us into darkness.

You close your eyes and finally stop looking. Show’s over. Time for bed.

Previously published in the Guardian’s Comment is Free section

Ah, summer – where would we be without it? Waiting anxiously for autumn to come along, presumably.

And where would we be without summer movies? I’m not just referring here to the annual blockbusters, but also what might broadly be termed ‘summer’ films: those with a theme, vibe or temporal placement within the warmest of all seasons. But how to spot them? Simply look out for these tell-tale clichés – sorry, I meant ‘signs’ – and enjoy the metaphorical ‘endless summer’ that is cinema:

The main character is a young boy from a damaged family who ‘learns’ something about life after finding a dead body down by the old Henderson place. Which is pretty ironical, when you think about it.

Or is an old geezer living in the endless flat plains of Kansas who feels a pressing urge to achieve ‘closure’ on certain issues before he pops his clogs somewhere around the two-hour mark.

Or is/are a group of sparky young girls hitching their way across America for some reason or other. Like, one of them is upset because her parents are divorcing, or some junk. Oddly, despite the fact that these ingénues are placing their trust in complete strangers – in a nation with the highest incidence of serial killers on the planet – nothing bad happens to them.

The film starts with a bunch of kids bursting out the doors of their high school and chucking their books in the hedge, to the strains of Alice Cooper’s School’s Out (for Summer).

Any romantic couple that hooks up at the start of the summer is doomed to tragedy. One of them will die of a terminal illness before the first leaves fall from the trees.

Something disastrous happens during the annual Fourth of July celebrations. Ideally these are taking place in a New England fishing village, and even more ideally, the something disastrous will involve one of the pods on the carousel being tampered with and flying off into the night. Its occupants are then impaled on one of the ubiquitous white picket fences.

Unattractive nerds lose their virginity to preposterously good-looking foreign exchange students. On the beach, by moonlight.

Several of the characters surf. It is, apparently, a ‘source’ and can change your life, swear to God. The best surfer in the bunch subsequently ships out to ’Nam, man, where the VC show scant regard for the fact that he needs his legs to stand up on the board, and proceed to blow them off.

A trip to Rome results in a super-hot romance with a beautiful Italian (gender directly inverse to gender of main protagonist).

All baseball games are played under a softly setting sun, golden dust drifting gently through the air as the plucky little slugger at the centre of the action hits a homer – whatever the hell that is – and stirring orchestral music sweeps the audience along in a tidal wave of emotional manipulation designed to hide the fact that the preceding 106 minutes blew the big one.

Fat men waddle about the place, sweating like Phil Spector in an overly warm witness stand, fanning their face with a paper and remarking to everybody, ‘Whew – hot enough for ya today?’

The film begins with the narrator – usually Richard Dreyfuss, for some reason – intoning, ‘After that summer, my life would never be the same again.’

There are chronic water shortages throughout New York as a steaming heatwave lays waste to the city. The cheeky little scamps in the Bronx, though, somehow find water to spray on passing convertibles, soaking/annoying the driver who responds by swearing at them in a comical way.

A huge shark eats lots of bathers in a small coastal town.

A blazing hot sun appears in shot quite frequently.

The movie has the word ‘Summer’ in the title.

The credits roll over likeable potheads, pneumatic babes in string bikinis and fun-loving off-duty cops partying on down at the beach.

Recent decades saw Premier League football transformed from a sport for the working man to a branch of the global entertainment industry. The hype, glamour, wealth, rows, tears, ridiculous diamond-cross earrings…one could as well be enjoying a Bette Davis melodrama as watching 22 athletes kicking a ball.

And with the influx of foreigners to the English game, we had exotic names to match. No longer were all players called Tommy Robson or Ronnie Smith or Ronnie Robson. Now the Premier League is a footballing Tower of (Ryan) Babel, with all nationalities and languages represented.

Many names have been so colourful, unusual and cool-sounding that they make you think less of a sweaty, dull-witted ball-player, and more of a character in some yet-to-be-produced movie…

Juan Sebastian Veron: moody first lieutenant of Man from Del Monte-style agricultural tycoon

Gustavo Poyet: dashing South American Marxist guerrilla who smokes big cheroots

Mark Viduka: loose cannon cop played by Kurt Russell in so-so actioner

Mart Poom: weedy warm-up comedian in Vegas nightclub with “connections”

Nikos Dabizas: playboy son of Greek shipping magnate; dating horse-faced minor British royal

Emerson Thome: mediocre mid-nineteenth century American novelist

Mark Fish: cheesy sports reporter on little-watched cable TV station

Alpay: semi-mythical freedom fighter based in upper Himalayan region permanently wreathed in cloud

Fabrizio Ravanelli: arrogant, annoyingly handsome Milanese racing-driver

Darius Vassell: Star Trek android with idiosyncratic technological innovation in front cortex

Finidi George: unnecessary sidekick introduced to boost merchandise tie-ins on Barney movie

Uwe Rosler: 1970s East German professional assassin who wears horrible tinted glasses

Claus Lundekvam: 1970s East German skier stripped of world title after drugs scandal. Also wears tinted glasses

Boudewijn Zenden: Jedi master in one of those dreadful Star Wars prequels

Junior Lewis: token black character in Guy Ritchie flick

Stig Inge Bjornebye: Norwegian whaler with giant white beard rivalling the original Cap’n Bird’s Eye

Ugo Ehiogu: cannibal tribal chief from xenophobic Tarzan movies of 1930s

Lauren: international supermodel of either gender, famous for a studied sort of chic indifference

Alessandro Pistone: scion of Cosa Nostra family, holed up in Sicilian mountains

Sami Hyypia: shot-putter fondly remembered for hilarious 1980s incident when he accidentally brained an official

Daniele Dichio: Fabio-style model of amazing pecs and flowing Samson-esque hair

Bernt Haas: mayor of Cologne 1982-86, involved in monumentally dull rezoning scandal

Rufus Brevett: village parson in dreary adaptation of George Elliot novel about ruinous effects of Industrial Revolution

Titus Bramble: contemporary of Rufus Brevett

Christian Ziege: avant garde Berlin dance guru creating soundscapes so impenetrable they make Aphex Twin sound like Aqua

Rio Ferdinand: sexually ambiguous Portuguese crooner with permatan and hideous frizzy hair

Shaka Hislop: Emperor of Fifth Quadrant and Overlord of Known Multiverse in daft fantasy/sci-fi epic

Martijn Reuser: mousy Brussels bureaucrat who discovers unknown inner steel in claustrophobic spy thriller

Frédéric Kanouté: despotic ruler of Central African country; loves Mercedes, child soldiers and aid money

Jürgen Macho: villainous star of unintentionally homoerotic bodybuilding-themed Bavarian drama

Vedran Ćorluka: thinly veiled Aragorn rip-off in thinly veiled Lord of the Rings rip-off, probably played by Adrian Paul

Regi Blinker: vicious East End gangster with incongruously cutesy nickname in latest Danny Dyer abomination

Nicolas Anelka: underfed maths genius who inadvertently creates world-destroying super-weapon

Nigel Quashie: hyperactive, possibly bipolar commercial radio DJ with huge joke spectacles and puppet sidekick

Jacopo Sala: Everyman main character in whimsical but profound drama about the existential struggle of quitting smoking

Zoltán Gera: metaphorically and literally faceless intergalactic assassin in Iain M Banks adaptation

Carlo Nash: grizzled, hard-drinking bounty hunter with giant moustache, working Tex-Mex border

Tony Cascarino: low-level mob bagman so fat he wheezes loudly every time he takes a breath

Sylvan Ebanks-Blake: dissolute young aristocrat cultivating opium habit in 1920s Istanbul

Tal Ben-Haim: prosperous Nazarene merchant in indescribably hokey Bible picture

Ruud van Nistelrooy: urbane Rotterdam-based fence of stolen artwork in breezy but implausible crime caper

Bosko Balaban: title character of avant-garde 1970s cartoon much-loved by Croatians and incomprehensible to everyone else

Gianfranco Zola: Renaissance artist’s apprentice who becomes favourite of one of the more saturnine Popes

Ramon Vega: sociopathic Florida hitman with fondness for lime-green shirts and keeping fingers as keepsakes

Wilson Palacios: soul legend who literally took a shot at James Brown in heated royalties row

Igor Biscan: terrifyingly enormous KGB killing machine who tries to crush Bond’s head with his steel teeth

Abel Xavier: Messianic leader of hemp-wearing commune in sandblasted post-apocalyptic desert

Marco Boogers: bin-dwelling, snot-infatuated hero of scatological Roald Dahl-style children’s story

Francisco de Pedro: ancient Cuban band leader; still plays every day outside same barrio café

Brett Angell: lead singer in poodle-metal band Harley’z Angelz, best known for cowboy ballad Love Shot Down

Savo Milosevic: veteran of Balkans war, now obnoxious grenade-toting mercenary in Predator/Aliens/Expendables mash-up

Attilio Lombardo: doughty right-hand man to Garibaldi during Italian unification wars; wore giant feather in hat

Winston Bogarde: anthropomorphised rapping biro, almost certainly played by Will Smith, in manipulative kids’ flick

Tony Vidmar: ace fighter pilot in Battlestar Galactica-type hokum, bedevilled by useless special effects

Cobi Jones: neutered, unthreatening lead in tweenie phenomenon about school-kid with secret life as pop-star

Shola Ameobi: charismatic but violently unstable leader of Black Power faction in Oz-style max-security prison

Stephane Guivarc’h: Parisian academic dying of self-loathing in intense, geologically slow-moving drama

Mixu Paatelainen: short-lived and frankly inexplicable Finnish Pokemon, introduced to boost waning popularity

Gunnar Nielsen: leather-faced, cigar-chomping drill sergeant in vaguely fascist but fun boot-camp drama