Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

humour with which this farrago of nonsense is narrated) are eminently satisfying.
For many years I avoided novels by Nancy Kress for the silliest of reasons. The first work of hers that I
was aware of was called Beggars in Spain and the juxtaposition of the words in the title with the name
of the author set up odd resonances in my mind.
You see when I was a child in England, a radio journalist called Nancy Spain was a popular and influential
figure. She died under tragic circumstances in a plane crash and I still remember the almost palpable
sense of shock that swept the country. Seeing the word Spain followed immediately by Nancy just
made me feel sad and a little eerie. So I avoided the book and the writer.
But the work received so many awards and had such popular acclaim that it obviously wasn't going to
go away so I gritted my spiritual teeth and ignored my fey feelings and read it. And guess what? It was
just as good as everyone said it was.
The novel was quickly followed by a sequel (Beggars and Choosers) and now by a third volume which
is called Beggars Ride on the front cover and Beggers Ride on the spine and that mis-spelling is
unfortunately the only interesting thing about the book. I suspect the series has simply gone on too long
and now the plot and the politics of her "sleepless" society have become so complicated and
recomplicated that I simply can't follow it any more. The book bogs down in detail.
Nancy Kress alienated me again with the title of Oaths and Miracles. This time the euphony was too
close to Hons and Rebels; the snobbish semi-autobiographical ravings of one of the Mitford sisters (I
can't be bothered to go and look up which particular one it was). It is a book which I loathe and detest
with a deep primeval hatred.
But once again I was being foolish. When I read it, Oaths and Miracles proved be a taut and exciting
thriller; one of the best I've read in ages. Robert Cavanaugh is an FBI agent with a quirky sense of
humour and a penchant for drawing slightly sick cartoons. Ben Kosinksi is a prominent biochemist who
is murdered shortly after a job interview with a biotech company in New Jersey. Other deaths and a
vague hint of mafia involvement lead Cavanaugh to a paramilitary splinter group, a religious commune
and the deadly secret that ties these disparate threads together. This secret, in retrospect, turns the
book into science fiction for it is a pure speculative Mcguffin. But don't let that worry you; go along for
the ride. The tension will have you on the edge of your seat, and the dénouement (when it comes) will
take your breath away.
The problem of cleaning people is almost as intractable as the problem of cleaning things. We shower in
the morning in order to stop our smelly bits giving offence (and also to wake ourselves up). One of the
smelliest of the human smelly bits is the feet; and yet I have never found any satisfactory way of
washing my feet when I take a shower. In the type of shower that pours into a bath, one can always sit
down. However this is cold and hard on the bottom and the extra distance that the water falls on to the
recumbent carcass in the bath imparts a peculiar body-penetrating force to it which makes the whole
operation decidedly unpleasant.
In the type of shower which is little more than a tiny cabinet, it is possible to wash one foot by dint of
some undignified balancing and hopping on the other foot. However the washed foot then becomes
soapy and very slippery and attempting to balance on it in order to wash the first becomes fraught with
bone-fracturing peril.
Perhaps you are only supposed to wash one foot a day? However this too is difficult. I don't know about
you, but I can't remember anything in the morning, let alone which foot I washed yesterday. Suppose I
get it wrong and wash the same foot twice in succession? It doesn't bear thinking about. Imagine, one
foot might go unwashed for a whole year! Thank goodness for tightly laced shoes to keep the smell in.
I remember reading William Gibson's Neuromancer when it first came out and I was completely blown
away by it. I re-read it years later, when the hype had died down, and found it to be appallingly bad
(Raymond Chandler with computers) and appallingly ignorant (you could engrave all of Gibson's
knowledge about computers onto the head of a pin and still leave room for a portrait of Isaac Asimov).