If my computer is anything to go by then England is, this morning, blanketed beneath a silent bed of snow.  Here in Ireland we have no snow at the mo’ – the snow is a no-show. (sorry).

Oddly enough, I think I’d quite like some.  As ever, my novelty with it would only last an hour but that hour might be worth it.  The white, the crispness, the transformed landscape, the sudden re-awareness of the birds in the garden.

Watching everybody tweeting about their snow with excitement/annoyance/joy/pain, I got to thinking about whether I have any particular memories of snow.

I used to go skiing quite a bit, back in the Eighties, so you’d think my snow memories would emanate from there but, no, my most vivid memory was of an evening in my hometown where there was probably no more than an average dusting of the white stuff.

We were sixteen – me and the boys – and we were out drinking.  Well, to say ‘we’ were out drinking was only partially true.  I was the one who didn’t drink.  Never touched a drop until I was twenty.  It’s not that I was particularly pious or anything, perhaps the fact that I worked part time in a bar made me a bit over aware of the vagaries of alcohol… perhaps I was just a boring little bollix – that’s a scenario too.

Anyway, it was Saturday Night and we were all going to ‘Valentino’s’, the night club of choice.  ‘Valentino’s’ was strictly Over 21’s so it wasn’t’ a foregone conclusion that we would get in.  Still everyone always did – except me, of course.  Week after week, just after it first opened its doors, I was turned away from ‘Valentino’s’ while all my mates sidled in.  I guess I was the runt of that particular litter and just that inch too far away from being twenty-one in any imaginable universe.

There was a girl in there too and she liked me and wanted me with a passion that burned like the fire of a thousand suns and all I had to do was get in and claim her for the slow dance and she would be mine and…

… eventually, as business tapered off, I too started to be allowed in and that ‘Fire of a Thousand Suns’ thing did not quite work out as planned.

But that’s another story.

I got in.  It was a big thing for me.  No more trudging home alone to watch ‘The Late Late Show’ on telly with my parents.  No more catching up with all the stories the next day.  I got in.

And, hey, it was great.  Loud music, dancing, girls, lights… great.  We had all the hits of the day: Billy Joel, Meat Loaf, Boomtown Rats… fast sets, slow sets.  Oh, and fights, there were great fights too – mighty barnstorming affairs between grown men and their knock-kneed women.  Great stuff altogether.

What else?

Yes, drink.  There was drink.

My friends had different expectations of ‘Valentino’s’.  Some expected to dance until they dropped, some expected to get a girl, some expected to drink as much as humanly possible and one of these was Martin.  It’s not his real name, his real name is Peter (no, it’s not) but we’ll call him Martin.

Martin was a good guy, quiet and sensible and funny and nice.  But, on Saturday Nights in ‘Valentino’s’, Martin would ‘get his drink on’ in a big way.  While others danced and cavorted, Martin would sit in the corner, at a paper-tableclothed table, with a long line of flat pints of Smithwicks in front of him and he would slowly and unceasingly work his way through them all before the night was through.

“Ken,” you might well say at this point, “this is all very well but where’s the snow?  Where is the snow?”

It’s here, look, outside the night club doors.

It’s two am and ‘Valentino’s’ is over.  Nobody expected snow, it is late February and everything is frozen solid.  It is too cold for snow.  Yet there it is, like a calm surprise, a glistening blanket for the small town grime.

And Martin can usually make his own way home. He is a large boy and he seems to be able to accommodate the vast quantities of beer he consumes, usually.  Tonight, though, he has consumed one too many or perhaps two or three.

We rally round, those of us who have not found a girl, and we resolve to get Martin safely home through the ice and snow.  It’s across town, out of our way, but those were the adventures which defined our teenage years, those occasional sojourns off of the beaten track.

Overcome with Smithwicks, Big Martin soon becomes a largely immovable force.  We cajole him and encourage him and roar at him but his progress is slow, terrible slow.  We arrive at the top of the ‘The Promenade – ‘John F Kennedy Parade’, which is a gently sloping wide paved path along the Garavogue River.  It’s three am now and there’s another hour of ‘Operation Get Martin Home’ to go.  Unless…

“I have an idea,” says Tommy, “let’s get him down on his hunkers and slide him along the promenade.”

It seems like a ludicrous notion but the snow is falling large and sticky and the night is fading fast.

“Martin, Martin, get down on your hunkers and we’ll push you down The Promenade.”

“No, no, no, no, no… no… no.”

“Come on, it’ll be grand.”

So Martin gets down on his hunkers and we slide him along down the slope, keeping firm hands on his shoulders.”

“I feel sick,” says Martin, the unusual motion doubtless contributing.

“Sing a song,” says Tommy, who seems inspired tonight, “sing a song and it will keep your mind off the sickness.”

So Martin starts to sing.  An unlikely choice.  And, as we ease him down The Promenade, the gentle slope becomes less gentle and Martin slips away from us.  We try to hold him but his bulk and his momentum is simply too great and for a time he is gone, away from us, down The Promenade, off into the snowy night

And this, then, is my one particular memory of snow:

Martin, on his hunkers, easing gracefully off down The Promenade, singing Rod Stewart loudly at the top of his voice,

“I am sailing… I am SAILINNNNNG...”

I don’t often write reviews of books I read but Stephen King is different, for reasons which I have doubtless already set downelsewhere. You see I started young with Stephen King and I have never-ever stopped. I read Salem’s Lot in ’76 when I was 13 and, with the exception of some of the ‘Dark Tower’ series, I’ve since read everything he’s ever written.

So, like many other people in the world, I perhaps feel that I have a stake in Stephen King (no pun intended, not really) and that I know his work pretty well. For this reason, I like to write at least a note about his new books after I read them.

One of the difficulties that Stephen King has, in his real world, is with people who think they own a piece of his soul because they’ve read all his books. I’m not one of those. 

The reason I think I can write about his books with some insight is different for me. It’s simple, it’s this: I don’t like them all. I like reading them, I like his style and I love his story-weaving skill but all of the books have not set me alight, not by any means.

And this one, this new one ’11.22.63’ well, it had me a bit excited. The premise, you see, it seemed to portend that Stephen was veering off into unknown territory, that a historical/political perspective would be incorporated into the novel which would break new ground in his writing and garner him a larger chunk of the respect and love he undoubtedly deserves.

I requested the book for Christmas, got it and launched in.

I will do what I always do now – I will tell you what I thought of it but, perhaps annoyingly, I won’t tell you the story of the book. Lots of reviewers seem to take up two-thirds of their piece doing that and I don’t see the point.

Here, though, in one sentence, is the gist of the story.

A man finds a time portal and travels back to exact change on history, primarily to stop the assassination of JFK on ’11.22.63’.

I loved reading this book.

Stephen King always does this for me. He writes in such a lovely way and he weaves his story in such a lovely way that I am invariably drawn-in and involved and entertained and encouraged to read on. He is, in my opinion, a magical writer. He gives himself colossal problems in his stories and then he solves them without flinching away from them. 

So, again, I loved reading this book. It provided me with a highly-enjoyable reading experience through every single page and, as a reader who has seen some dry times this past year, I am enormously grateful for that. Thank you, Mr. King, for making my reading of this book such an enjoyable thing that I oftentimes longed to get back to it. That's the best gift I can ever receive.

There’s a ‘But’, though, isn’t there?

Well, yes there is.

This thing I expected – this historical/political veer-off into new unexplored territory… it didn’t happen. This is a Stephen King book, with all the Wonderful and Brilliant things which that statement implies. What it is not , however, is markedly different from his other books, in fact it is markedly the same. That, for me, was a wee bit disappointing.

There are two key aspects to this sameness. The first is the scenarios in the book and the second is the characters. With so many books now to his credit, I find that King has both scenarios and characters that he returns to regularly in order to tell his stories. His characters give me the clearest way to illustrate the point. He will, so very often, use these characters; 

The Brave Everyman with the Tragic Past.

The Lovely Girl Who You Cannot Help But Fall in Love with Along With The Brave Everyman.

The Grizzled World-Wise Old Guy With The Rough Exterior and the Heart of Gold.

We see them insomany of his books.

And scenarios? At various times through the book, I felt I was revisiting other King novels. This, of course, is overtly done with the novel ‘IT’ because the town and some the characters actually reappear in what was, for me, a rather unsuccessful device. But I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about the ghosts of earlier stories which haunts these pages. The ghosts of ‘Christine’, ‘The Dead Zone’, ‘The Mist’ and others. 

For all the promise of this new high-concept premise, Stephen has not broken his mould in any meaningful way. Rather, he has made this new mould from salvaged bits of all the old moulds. This works and makes a good archetypal ‘Stephen King’ book but, alas, nothing more.

This sounds churlish to me as I read it back. I enjoyed the book, what more should I want? The man has been grossly injured, suffers with eyesight, has written a Gazillion books… why should I have even wished for some radical new departure at this late stage of his wonderful career?

I don’t know. I just did.

Anyway…

The book is masterfully done. The writer could hardly have given himself a tougher narrative challenge – one man, alone, in the past for years-on-end – and he not only makes it work, he makes it work well.

But there’s a certain tone that was prevalent in ‘Christine’ and also in ‘IT’, lurking behind all the comic-book horror shenanigans. It’s a tone that implies that there was a time, in the late 50’s and early 60’s, which was simply Perfect. Even though it was not, for this reason and this reason and this, it still just was. Perfect. It’s a gloss that King either can’t or won’t scratch too hard. Perhaps it’s just nostalgia, I don’t know. The entire mid-section of the novel is permeated with this ‘Everything Was Perfect’ sheen. No matter how horrible the action gets, it all still somehow remains… Perfect.

Hmmm.

Anyway. I loved reading this book much more than I loved the book.

Sorry, but that's the best that I can do.

Two of the jokes I enjoy telling the most have been discovered by me in the pages of novels.  I want to tell them to you.

I love telling jokes.  I think I’m pretty good at it too.  Everyone knows that Timing is important but I reckon Pacing plays a big part too.  For me, one of the best aspects of hearing a ‘new’ joke is the fun to be had in working out how I will eventually retell it.

Unfortunately, for all the usual reasons, my social activities are not what they used to be so it is a rare thing, these days, if I find myself in a situation where I can actually tell a joke to anybody. 

Social media is great for one-liners and repartee and such but it doesn’t lend itself to full-blown jokes, not really.

At their best, jokes are a verbal art form, like storytelling.  One can read a joke that is written down and enjoy it but it is the bringing it off the page, the ‘relating’ of it, that makes it breathe.

Funny then, that the jokes I find in novels might appeal to me as they do.  Well, no, not really.  The secret is in the re-telling.  When I read them in a book, I can re-tell them without evoking the nuance of the previous teller.  Because the joke is flat and on the page, it becomes somehow more ‘mine’ when I raise it up and tell it.

It’s perhaps a bit pointless, after all that, to write down two jokes I’ve read in novels.  I wanted to revive them a bit so that you can perhaps enjoy telling them to someone.  I haven’t seen the inside of either of these books in over fifteen years so my telling might be completely different to, or exactly the same as, the original.  It might be interesting to check sometime.  Not today, though, not today.  I also don’t think I’m breaching copyright in telling them, it’s what jokes are for, but if I am and you want to let me know, I will take them down again.  Ta.

The first is from ‘Marathon Man’ by William Goldman.  It’s a great book, Goldman writes great books as well as screenplays.  His ‘Color of Light’ still resonates with me, twenty years later.

So.

This guy is offered a part in a Broadway play.  One night only.  He’s never acted but often said how he’d like to give it a try.  His friend puts him on to it.  “The guy in the play is sick, you only have to say one line; ‘Hark, I hear a cannon’s roar,’ and then you’re done, straight on/straight off again.

One line?  He could do that, sure.  All day he learns the line, over and over, ‘‘Hark, I hear a cannon’s roar.’ ‘Hark, I hear a cannon’s roar.’  He heads for the theatre nice and early.  But the taxi gets stuck in traffic and he arrives late, terribly late.  They quickly dress him on a soldier’s uniform and they push him out onto the stage, “Remember your line, they say ‘Hark, I hear a cannon’s roar,’”

The guy suddenly finds himself in front of an audience of hundreds of people – expectant faces all looking up at him, “Remember the line, remember the li-“

Suddenly an enormous bang goes off on the stage right behind him.  The guy jumps, turns, and shouts, “What the Fuck was That?”

(That’s number one.)

Number two is from the novel 'Gorky Park' by Martin Cruz Smith.  This one has even more bad language in it.  I’ll asterisk the rude words to save my Google neck.

Two Russian friends meet in a Moscow Bar.
“See that guy over there?” One says, “That’s Yuri, the most travelled man in the district.  Do you want to meet him?” 
Sure.  They go over and sit down, ‘have a few drinks.
“Yuri, tell the guy about Paris.”
Yuri says, “Paris?  The Eiffel Tower?  … fu*k your mother.”
“Tell him about New York.”
“New York?  The Stature of Liberty?  … fu*k your mother.”
“And London, tell him about London.”
“London?  Buckingham Palace? …fu*k your mother.”
The guy sits back and gazes at Yuri in undiluted admiration.
“Ah Yuri,” he says, “the things you’ve seen.”

(And that’s two).

The reason I’m thinking about jokes is because I saw this programme ‘Old Jews Telling jokes’ on the telly recently.  I fell head-over-heels in love with one of the jokes concerning stagecoaches and Indians.  I’ve worked out how I would tell it and I can’t wait to try.

Stop me if you haven’t heard it.