While Coetzee’s novel is primarily a story of personal disgrace – our protagonist is cast out of his university’s ivory tower thanks to his inappropriate fondness for students – the country’s political transformation is not a simple backdrop. I happened to finish Disgrace just as the Guardian reported on the plight of a couple of white South African asylum seekers refused residence in the USA. Whites who, like Professor Lurie, have failed to find a comfortable place in the new South Africa.

So this is a novel that captures change experienced from the other side; those favoured by an unfair system; those forced to surrender privilege. The professor doesn’t appear to hanker for apartheid’s return, but his disgrace is symptomatic of a world view somehow incompatible with the new South Africa. The country has transformed without bloody revenge, but that doesn’t mean there are not scores to settle and in Coetzee’s world such issues are worked out personally.

A Booker Prize winner, Disgrace obviously fits the emerging literary genre and it’s an accomplished piece. Yet I found the style somehow distancing – almost alienating – holding me back too far from the people on the page; capturing a story that needs to be told, yet somehow too coldly.

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In the quiet old days before blogs filled cyberspace and clogged Google – before Google and even before Alta Vista – people used to resort to pen and paper and write a letter to their local rag.

This first step towards interactivity was not as popular as all this blogging malarkey might make you think. My first proper employer – a Stockport public relations consultants – had a publishing arm that produced an equestrian magazine called Hoofprint. It did okay, but we had to make up letters to fill the space and on one occasion competition entries (this was tricky, as I had to make sure my entries were good enough to be printed as runners-up without bettering the winners).

Anyway. There are still some good old-fashioned letters pages and Katharine and I make a point of checking out the Manchester Evening News’s postbag every night. 153,125 copies of the MEN are sold each day, making it the UK’s third biggest evening newspaper and even they print almost every letter they receive; look here and here’s a cracker. Then there’s the pennames people use…

It’s sad that Postbag’s web presence – www.manchesteronline.co.uk/postbag is so poorly maintained. Some days’ letters get uploaded, some don’t. I guess there’s some bored geek whose job it is to upload the daily rants and that some days he (almost certainly he) simply can’t be bothered (probably writing his blog). Which is a shame because I wanted to share the letter of an old Swintonian called Ed, published on Monday 26 April. With the web archive skipping a couple of days, I used a feedback form to ask if Monday would appear and to my surprise – I was expecting to get the bored geek – the operations director of Guardian Media Group’s regional digital division replied in such a way as to reveal he knew little of blogs and even less of the MEN’s postbag’s place on his website.

So it falls to me to bring Ed to cyberspace. Ed hasn’t gotten over Swinton’s absorption by the City of Salford in 1974; ‘Real Swinton people still detest Salford and all it stands for…when I pass the Salford sign… I feel it should not be there… oh and I come from Lancashire not Manchester or Salford’. I don’t believe Ed. I think he’s gotten a little carried away. Should I ever go the same way, please shoot me.

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Michela Wrong uses her New Statesman column to argue for more corpses on TV as exposure to the realities of war – like the 800 civilians killed by the US in Fallujah over last couple of weeks – can only turn us into peaceniks.

News bosses seem desperate to save us from the horror, preferring safe images of ‘choppers rattling across the sky, marines opening fire in an eerie green glow’, you know, the kind of stuff that makes you proud. Yet I recall that before hostilities began, it was war supporters who wanted more gore. The argued that faced with images of torture, gas attacks and summary execution under the old Iraqi regime, the public’s natural – albeit base – response would have been anger and a call for revenge.

It’s not just war images that are censored. Concurrent with Michela’s campaign, others are fighting to ensure our television screens are at all times suitable for viewing by the most sensitive 10 year old. Nobody seems to be making the case that exposing children to violent imagery will produce more passive adults.

Violence begets violence – ‘why don’t we just bomb the lot of them?’ – more gore means more war supported by a fearful population whipped into a frenzy, like that of a ten year old shooting PlayStation monsters.

Scared and scary

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Monster’s not the gore-fest some make it out to be – unless the words ‘based on a true story’ set your teeth on edge. It’s okay as a non-judgemental biopic of a serial killer whose decline – nasty die, then naughty, then good – seems too steady. Theron’s Oscar winning ugly is no substitute for fully realised characterisation.

A watchable 7.5 out of 10

(PS After seeing Nick Broomfield’s Aileen: Life And Death Of A Serial Killer, I realise I’ve been harsh on Theron. 14/6/4)

Adaptation……El otro lado de la cama (The Other Side of the Bed)

If you found my comments useful, let Amazon know by clicking Monster and hitting the ‘yes’ button underneath their copy of this review. You may buy while you’re there.

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I’ve saved this from my last visit to Purgatory; did I ever tell you the village is in dying? I was in my early teens when we relocated. I thought I’d died and gone to… well Purgatory. Moving from Islington, London to a place with one bus an hour to nowhere interesting was… well I’m still bitter.

When we arrived they were still building the vast Wimpey housing estates that engulf the village and the population has grown rapidly to 4,239. A quarter are under 19 – poor sods – and 45 percent between 30 and 59. The rest are older people. Born in Purgatory you get out quick – no twenty-somethings – thirty-somethings with kids retreat to Purgatory from the horrors of the city (yeah right). When they’re not looking after the kids or working, these people watch Sky TV. The village is simply a dormitory for the city of Cardiff.

It wasn’t always this way. When we arrived the village had a lively pub, three shops and a ‘constitutional club’ for OAPs who could hardly walk. On my Easter visit we popped over to the Purgatory Inn on a Sunday lunchtime when a village pub should serving traditional roast dinners, children should be running around making a nuisance of themselves and the rest of us downing a couple of pints before lunch. And that’s how it used to be – say fifteen years ago – but this Easter Sunday (when it should be all that and more) Katharine, mum and I were the only ones in.

One of the shops closed some time ago, the one with the post office franchise had nothing its shelves last visit; the remaining shop’s okay, but has given up half its floor space to other uses.

Traditional Sunday lunches have been replaced with tapas. Now I love tapas – Katharine and I went out for tapas last weekend – but the villagers are simple folk. Bizarrely when the regulars told the management they’d got it wrong, most got barred. Having no customers is bad for business, but they’ve got principles.

Purgatory does have some funny characters. There’s a guy who responded to his doctor’s instruction to cut down on alcohol by switching from Stella Artois to Carling. But that’s an old true story now.

Some get their fix from the Constitutional Club – where quiz night revealed the host hadn’t heard of Kylie Minoque (much bigger than Britney in the UK). The unlikely sounding alternative is the café of a nearby seaside trailer park. Ex-Stella-now-Carling-man chooses the trailer park and last summer his wife told me – as we discussed the poor sods who live in the trailers – how lucky we all were to have made it to Purgatory.

The Constitutional Club has a healthy crop of younger regulars – including my parents – in their late 50s and early 60s now. I’ll never forget a meal we had there. Prawn cocktail starter (with fresh side salad); Salmon with vegetables overcooked in the old English style (with the same, now slightly tired, side salad); huge doorstops of cheddar cheese and biscuits (with the same, now dried out, side salad). Musical accompanied was piped through; Chris De Burgh’s Lady in Red on panpipes. Now is that a description of Purgatory or what?

Dispatches from Purgatory#1: Mums & TV……Dispatches from Purgatory#3: Greener Grass

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I really tried to read the Mike Skinner stuff in today’s Observer Music Monthly with an open mind, but it just wasn’t happening. The cheeky – yet honest – chappy singing in the mockney-style about the stuff of life, leaves me yearning for Ian Dury, who did it all with insight so long ago. Skinner’s observations do ring true, but only because he sings about the façade. He seems unable to scratch the surface of anything, let alone get under anybody’s skin.

It’s like watching Christina Aguilera prancing around as a street corner prostitute in the video for Can’t Hold Us Down as she whinges that, ‘The guy gets all the glory the more he can score / While the girl can do the same and yet you call her a whore’. They’re talking about symptoms not diseases and you want to say, ‘yes, now tell us something we don’t know.’

What kind of woman plots against her husband’s mistress?

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I’ve mentioned already how great McDonald’s Quorn Premiere is. But they seem to have a gotten in all of a tizzy when it comes to selling their new healthier side. Last night’s Friends was interrupted by the most naïve McDonald’s advertisement; ‘here’s some new faces at McDonald’s’, it gushed. ‘Impatient Sophie, Sensible Charlotte and Joanna who’s always late.’ Where’s the creativity in that? Katharine’s larger projects have often seen her give names to customer types – like Vera the penniless pensioner – but the idea is to help other marketers get to grips with who it is they’re talking to. You’re not supposed to tell the Sensible Charlottes straight-up that your after them – they won’t play ball – but to excite them with promises of stuff you secretly know they like.

Naïve Marketing Strategies#2: easy4men……Naïve Marketing Strategies#4: ‘Academic’ endorsement

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The HR lady’s found a fun quiz to discover what’s in store for you on the other side, follow the link to find how far into hell you’re to descend. (Beware some pretty dodgy questions but what do you expect, eh?) HR’s most likely off to purgatory then heaven, but that said, it wouldn’t take much for her to drop seven or eight levels of hell to join some very nasty characters indeed.

I’m off to the City of Dis – six floors down from HR – to moan dolefully for eternity. Things could be worse; I’ve only a moderate chance of descending any further into hell; it wouldn’t take too much for me to rise up to the lustful area – whey hey! – but I’ve very little chance of making it into purgatory. Thing is, I’ve already tried purgatory, so I’m not that fussed. Given the choice, I think I’d like Limbo best.

Here’s my score sheet:

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The BBC made a big thing about the Express switching allegiance from Labour to the Tories yesterday with their Reeta Charkrabarti making out it’s big deal. Blair’s decision to have the European Constitution referendum they’d been campaigning for was the last straw. That’s bizarre in itself, but nobody who ever sees the Express could possibly think it was a pro-government paper anyway. It spends its days trying to out curmudgeon the Daily Mail with pages filled with ‘Violent Britain’ logos designed to put the wind up its aged readership.

The thing is, owner Richard Desmond is really pissed that he’s not rich enough to buy the Telegraph even after selling off most of his wank mags in an attempt to look respectable. His newspapers share printing facilities with the Telegraph and at meeting to discuss this he lost the plot. German publisher Axel Springer may buy the paper, so Desmond gave a Sieg Heil salute and ranted they’d soon be ‘owned by nazis’.

Anyway. Is Tony really going to miss his support?

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Earth has its own website now – you can tell you’re in the right place from the authentic Earth flag – maintained by motherly trustees and some say that today is its official birthday. Official because we don’t know the real one; Critter has a similar arrangement, his official birthday’s 28 December and so does the queen even though her real birth date is well documented.

However, the trustees are not happy and have labelled the 22 April as inauthentic; they want to keep it at 21 March. But others think 21 April is good as it will occasionally clash with Easter and help the pagans reclaim that festival.

Anyway. Either way we’re supposed to go out and celebrate the so-called natural world and deny all things manmade. Which is just plain silly! Other animals don’t get hung up over the stuff they build, so why should we? I choose an air conditioned gym with MTV over a walk in the hills anytime.

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