Such an idiot. I’ve just dissembled my iBook keyboard to clean under the keys. And now I’ve put all the keys back, but two or three are looking askew and sticking when I press them, including Backspace, which I use all the time.
Either I’ve not done it properly, or I’ve damaged the keys’ mechanism by not really knowing what I’m doing. I think I may have to take the laptop to a Mac repair shop, and pay through the nose as it’s out of guarantee. Oh well. I can just about type for the time being. We’ll see how much I mind about the sticking bits.
And all because I wanted to clean underneath the keys. Why do I do such things? Ah yes, an innate tendency to fiddle and tinker when left alone with buttons to push.
Note to the world: never leave me in charge of a nuclear submarine.
***
Have been enjoying the Radio 4 dramatisation of We Need To Talk About Kevin, the Lionel Shriver novel. Quite why it’s been held up as an argument for childlessness, a look at what makes some schoolboys into violent killers, and a discussion on the taboo of mothers who instinctively wish their children were dead, is beyond me. The novel is pure Gothic horror. Gothic defined not as wearing lots of black, but in the 19th century definition, when events pile up to a grotesque – if delicious – stretching of credulity, to the point of downright surrealism. Gothic as in Things Getting A Bit Much.
You may as well cite The Omen or Rosemary’s Baby as reasons for not having children.
Woman: Dad, I’m afraid I shall never give you grandchildren.
Dad: Why?
Woman: Because they might turn out to be the Antichrist.
Dad: Fair enough.
First of all, you can tell at once that Ms Shriver is unaware of popular English comedy. Mention a sulky teenage boy called Kevin, and I find it hard to avoid the image of Harry Enfield snorting in a backwards baseball cap.
Then there’s the imagery, some of which is close to actual demonic possession. At the age of six, Kevin is still wearing nappies – out of spite! He convinces a little girl at playgroup, whose skin is covered in chronic eczema, to finally give into temptation and scratch away. The book describes her discovered in the bathroom, standing in a kind of rapture of blood, while Kevin grins smugly at her side. It’s straight out of Clive Barker – horror as masochism, pleasure through pain.
And true to all great horror stories, there’s the bits which are like taking a shortcut through a graveyard at night. Given Kevin is clearly dangerous to others (he goes on to blind his own sister), do his parents enlist some kind of child psychiatrist? Or send him to a special school? No, they send him to a normal school, and give him his own crossbow and archery range in their huge garden, as it seems to keep him happy. Guess what happens next.
Ms Shriver’s book is a horror novel that’s been successfully marketed to those who would never read horror novels. Just as The Time-Traveller’s Wife is science fiction for those who would never read science fiction. It’s a sign – I hope – of a return to the time before genre fiction, where books were either well-written or badly-written. I think of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, two other literary classics with Gothic tendencies. Where the Gothic bits are just part and parcel of being female. Well, for some females.
Notes On A Scandal, too. In the film version, what is Judi Dench’s character if not Gothic?
Though as played by Dame Judi, she is of course, Poignantly Gothic.
