Matthew Hurst

So this was the other Saturday. Both car and dude are normal size, but my iPhone did weird things.

Read: A Necessary Evil by Abir Mukherjee 📚 Loved the setting, and the humour. Mysteries can be so po-faced. Made me want to try his non-series thrillers too. #booksky #amreading #bookstodon

My grandfather got out of the car, and casually asked me to move it down the hill while he was inside the office. I was 12.

The first time I acted like an adult while feeling like a kid, but not the last.

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Read: Triple Cross by Tom Bradby 📚

Smart, efficient, gripping. Does what it says on the can, in a very good way. #bookstodon #booksky #iamreading

Read: My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor 📚 Less than keen on his others, but this is manages to be richly told without losing suspense. #bookstodon #booksky #amreading

Abandoned: Red Queen by Juan Gómez-Jurado 📚

No feeling for pace, language or humans, for people who would secretly prefer a comic but a book makes them feel more intellectual, made worse in the audiobook by Scott Brick’s overwrought self-infatuated narrating style. #bookstodon #booksky #iamreading

My grandfather stretched his left arm across the passenger seat and looked out of the back window of his ancient Renault as he reversed into the undertaker’s yard. I looked up from my book on the back seat and watched his right arm reaching away from me, towards the steering wheel. I was twelve years old.

My grandfather helped the village undertaker with his ‘Books’, which were the huge ledgers where he recorded payments, and, far more interestingly, by painstakingly applying small cardboard letters to brass coffin plates to spell out the name and dates of the dead person. It was a similar process to my Letraset transfer letter but he took far more care than I ever did. I had watched him do this on the dining table, the tea-tray at his elbow. Now we were taking the Books and the coffin plates into the undertaker’s office in the village.

My grandfather stopped the car, and pulled on the handbrake. He got out of the car, and casually asked me to move it down the hill while he was inside the office.

“Oh, yes,” I said, nonchalantly. He left the keys in the ignition and disappeared into the office, holding the Books and a bag containing a couple of meticulously annotated coffin plates

I sat alone in the car, my book limp in my hand. Was he just assuming that as a male, I had the innate sense of What To Do With Cars, just as he seemed to?

I had no such thing, despite watching males of the family struggling to start our succession of secondhand cars, twisting ignition keys, wriggling gear levers (they were levers, in those days in England), shifting feet between the three pedals. I’d watched as they mended, replaced, sworn. I’d interrogated and earwigged, trying to understand what was going on.

But I had never, ever been behind the wheel of anything more than my pedal car. And that had been many years ago when I had been a lot younger.

Now my grandfather had handed over a full ton of metal car to me with the implicit confidence that I could be trusted with it. I was thrilled and scared.

My grandfather felt like the centre of the village. He was a teacher at the local school. He was chairman (still a chairman in those days) of the parochial church council, he ran a drama group which toured local village halls, which he compered as a stand up Farmer Giles, amusing the local Mothers Unions and Women’s Institutes. Shopkeepers knew him. Everybody knew him. He’d taught them, or he’d been helping them with their Books, or dealing with officialdom. He knew everyone, and I trailed round in his wake.

And now he was assuming I could do this man-thing.

I scrambled between the front seats and sat behind the wheel. I was not a tall child but if I sat on the very edge of the driver’s seat, I would just be able to see over the steering wheel, and the tips of my toes would just about reach the pedals.

I eased off the handbrake, and waited for it gravity to overcome inertia. The car stayed put. I replayed in my mind the car-starting I’d watched dozens of times, and captured that grip of the gear lever, the quick loose push left and right. I hadn’t done that. I tried it, and felt something ease free. Gears, I guessed.

The car started to roll slowly down the hill towards the road, at less than walking pace.

My grandfather had left it in first gear, the result of a cautious mind and decades of cars with ageing brakes.

The car rolled down the slope in a straight line, towards the archway at the bottom of the slope, next to the road.

My foot hovered over the middle pedal. The brake, I knew, from my interrogations.

My hands gripped the steering wheel. The car needed know steering, but this too was what you did when you drove.

Which was what I was now doing for the first time. Even without the engine running. On private land. And very slowly. Downhill. Ten yards. It was enthralling.

The front of the car drew level with the archway, the entrance to the road.

I pushed down on the middle pedal, holding my breath, feeling the resistance against my foot, pressing down further and the car slowing jerkily, twitching me forward.

And the car stopped.

I kept holding my breath.

My fingers closed round the handbrake, pushing the button on the end in, which took my strength than I’d expected, and I pulled the lever up, listening to the ratchets click, till it wouldn’t go any further. I let go of the button, released the brake.

The next move was to lift my foot off the brake pedal, but what if the handbrake needed the gears to be in first, as my grandfather had left it? What if the handbrake wasn’t good enough to keep the car in place on this slope?

I grabbed the gear lever and pushed it forwards to the position I’d pulled it away from a few seconds ago, but it wouldn’t click back into the place where it had been. I had no idea how to solve this.

I would just have to trust the handbrake. I lifted my foot off the footbrake.

The car stayed put.

I breathed out and lent back in the seat, the way I’d seen drivers do after a long, stressful journey.

My grandfather emerged from the undertaker’s office, this time without the Books and the bag of coffin plates. I scrambled between the front seats into the back of the Renault.

My grandfather bowed into the driver’s seat again and twisted the ignition. “You managed then Freddo.”

“Yeah.” I had. I had managed. I knew more than I thought I did, as it turned out.

He clicked the handbrake button in and pushed it down. His right foot pushed the brake pedal down. Then, his left foot pressed the clutch down and he eased the gear lever into first.

I remembered this for future use.

Read: An Honest Man by Michael Koryta 📚 Straight ahead innocent man vs corruption, gripping and unpretentious. Fast, easy read. #Bookstodon #booksky #iamreading

Read: Heartwood by Amity Gaige 📚

Great American wilderness novel on the Appalachian Trail. Three women intersect after one of them gets lost. It’s character more than breakneck action (in a good way) and human warmth rather than darkness.

Read: This Is Not a Game by Kelly Mullen 📚

Self consciously smart arse and genre-aware. People say things like ‘but how could the maid be leaving the kitchen at 9pm? Letitia said the dog hair wasn’t on the vicar’s collar till 10pm!’. Not my thing. #BookSky #amreading #bookstodon

I used to be a local journalist in East Anglia, UK, and I thought the whole Byline network was a really good idea - a model for funding grassroots, often investigative reporting, holding local councils to account, etc.

According to their website:

“We are a not-for-profit citizen journalism publication. Our aim is to publish well-written, fact-based articles and opinion pieces on subjects that are of interest to people in East Anglia and beyond.

East Anglia Bylines is a trading brand of Bylines Networks Limited which is separate to, but allied with, Byline Times.”

However, this was on their East Anglia Bylines BlueSky account this morning. (pic also attached).

And their website is full of similar slop: https://eastangliabylines.co.uk

It’s Reach PLC style indiscriminate ‘bung it out everywhere for social media clicks’. Much as I hate the orange manchild, this has nothing in particular to do with East Anglia, or what Byline was set up to do.

Have they been taken over? Are there VCs starting to tighten their financial leash? What’s going on? Have they been hacked?

The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel📚

Safe to skim everything before Chapter 24 (which covers Diesel inventing his engine and getting rich in a boringly methodical way) because all the interesting stuff about his disappearance is in the last third.

… and it’s weirdly underdeveloped, as though the author is far more interested in the licensing agreements Diesel had with foreign engine makers than - [SPOILERS] - the British secret service making him disappear and secretly setting him up in a new life with his wife in Canada to stop the Germans forcing him to make submarines for them to win WW1.

There are literally two sentences about his wife’s disappearance and perfunctory research.

And there’s strangely little about the fuel we call diesel now, as opposed to petrol or gasoline. Diesel engines can run on anything that will ignite under pressure and Diesel the man specifically wanted them not to use oil-based fuel. However, Rockefeller somehow managed to ensure his oil company got in on the act, hence the oil based fuel we now call diesel. However, this is skimmed over in the book, in favour of copious infodumps of Diesel’s tours of America and development agreements with other companies.

No idea how this got to be an NYT bestseller.

On the lake

Got some CDs

As a recidivist 80s nerd who spent high school in what we were pleased to call ‘the computer room’, I’m loving Halt And Catch Fire on ITV. It’s a fictionalised version of microcomputers in the 80s where people invent the internet on Commodre 64s.

Breaking news: the new head of MI6 (C) got started with spying when she was given the Usborne KnowHow Book Of Spycraft. I too have this book and memorised it as a kid. When is it my turn to be C?

Read: Never Flinch by Stephen King 📚

King is always compulsive, without me being able to figure out why. He’s sneaking some suspense in there without me realising how. #Booksky #amreading #bookstodon

Trump’s been outplayed by Putin, Netanyahu and every other world leader because he’s all ego and bluster and not very bright. All he has left is lying to his base

Read: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly 📚 Audiobook recorded by the author, Liz Pelly, in an intensely irritating? slackjawwwd valleh girrl drawl? that almost made me? stop listening? Not helped by? Adolescent horror that? the music business? is a business? #BookSky #amreading #bookstodon

Read: Who Could Ever Love You by Mary L. Trump, PhD 📚

As fellow family-of-a-narc, I found a few moments in this resonated, but if you’ve come across The Donald ever before, there’s not a lot new here. #BookSky #amreading #bookstodon

I bought a stack of very cheap CDs yesterday at a stall at a Thing. They sound marginally better than Tidal High Quality but mostly, I can’t curate what’s on them. I can’t think about which playlist to add tracks to. I just have to listen to them. #MusicSky #Music

Read: Come Closer by Sara Gran 📚

New York architect is either possessed or has a psychotic breakdown in a tightly written novella. Psychological thriller or horror? You choose.

So that’s the plotting done. Now it’s just… typing. Which is great and also daunting.

#writingcommunity #iamwriting

The world’s richest man and most powerful man bitching about each other like mean girls. Meanwhile the climate is in meltdown, there are at least 3 international confrontations that could lead to world wars, and dictators are seizing power everywhere. I’m off to watch Midsomer Murders.