Quintin Jardine's blog

My first gig of the year this evening. We’re off to Kinross Library, to entertain however many people brave what the forecasters say is likely to be a lousy night. Thanks in advance to those who do, and my understanding to those who don’t. (Please note also: it’s a Champions’ League night and Man U are playing.)

With another couple of million viewers, I made it all the way to the end of Outcasts on BBC1 last night. It kept me watching so it couldn’t have been that bad, but I can’t recall a drama production that was so riddled with anomalies and unanswered questions. We don’t know who was in the space-ship that was coming in to land as the series ended. (Captain Jack Harkness?)We still don’t know whether Stella and Lily forged a renewed mother-daughter bond. We still don’t know how mankind managed to achieve  capability of interstellar flight and full-scale genetically engineered human cloning all within a period of twenty years from now, as the rule of law fell apart all around it. We still don’t know where the ACs shopped for clothes, or whether any of them other than Rudi the leader could actually speak. We still don’t know what the **** the evil Julius was constantly smiling about.

And yet . . . call me perverse, but I still find myself hoping that there will be a second series, if only to annoy the dick-head, smart-arse TV columnist in this morning’s on-line Guardian who managed to  post a trite, sarcastic review of the final episode five minutes before it ended. By the way, if any of the idiots who have so far commented on his blog switch their attention to mine, I will send Jack and his XPs to hunt them down and kill them.

No, Dangerous Pursuits won’t/can’t be available anywhere other than the Amazon US Kindle Store, and maybe on other American ebook outlets, until Headline get around to publishing it. As I said, it’s a reworking . . . call it ‘director’s cut’ . . . of Blackstone’s Pursuits, which is still in print. I could argue that it’s now a completely different work, but I don’t plan to do so. Thanks for the tip about Kobo readers in Oz. I’m glad to hear that.

Further to the Amazon problem, I’m trying something just to test it out. I’m in the process of publishing privately a book called Dangerous Pursuits. It’s an expanded and reworked version of the first Oz mystery Blackstone’s Pursuits, and in its new form it’s an even more satisfying read, IMHO. Thing is, I hold US rights to my titles, so I can do this without infringing any existing contracts. In the listing I’ve put up I’ve specified US market only, so in theory it should be accessible to American readers, but not in the UK Kindle store. Look for it to be up in the next 24 hours.

Meantime, I’d be grateful for any further feedback my friends can give me on the issue. If it’s a problem for me, it could be a problem for others.

I’ve been advised by two American readers that they’re having difficulty accessing Amazon Kindle versions of my work. I’m being told that when they try to make a purchase they’re being re-routed to the Kindle UK store, and that Amazon.co.uk will not accept American registered credit cards. If that’s the case, and my own investigations make it seem likely, that’s a major annoyance to me as well as to potential readers. My own records indicate that the titles I’ve published privately on the Kindle platform are still selling, but I’ve asked my publisher to investigate the rest. When I know more I’ll post what I’m told.

A few days ago, it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard anything of Kate Bush for a while. So I bought a CD called Aerial and now I know why.

Things you never imagined. Over the last three years, police forces in the UK have paid out £770,000 to people bitten by their dogs. There’s never been a dog in a Skinner book, but if there is, he’ll be well behaved, I promise.

Excellent lunch yesterday with a group of chums in Edinburgh. Only one of us was under sixty, but I thought he stayed the course pretty well, all things considered.

Shocking news this morning from Japan, the land of my daughter-in-law’s birth; an offshore earthquake so big it’s having repercussions throughout the region. Christchurch and now this; is the planet trying to tell us something?

Nice evening with the ever youthful Jack and Brenda to see them off on their latest adventure; a trip to meet up with their globe-trotting daughter in Cambodia. God speed.

How about that? Mario Balotelli, of Man City, the man who, according to Jose Mourinho, is still trying to find his second brain cell, is allergic to grass. Fifty grand a week or whatever and he’s allergic to grass.

This is a quote from Massimo Busacca, the referee in the Arsenal game on Tuesday.

“I have my limits and God is at my side.”

In which case, mate, you should have a word with him about the difference between genuine commitment and time-wasting, and about fairness in general. And by the way, since clearly God didn’t tell you that when Messi was tripped in the first half it was a stone-wall penalty, you should consider leaving him in the dressing room next time.

An elderly man lay dying in his bed. While suffering the agonies of impending death, he suddenly smelled the aroma of his favourite scones wafting up the stairs.

He gathered his remaining strength, and lifted himself from the bed.  Leaning on the wall, he slowly made his way out of the bedroom, and with even greater effort, gripping the railing with both hands, he crawled downstairs.

With laboured breath, he leaned against the door-frame, gazing into the kitchen.  Were it not for death’s agony, he would have thought himself already in heaven, for there, spread out upon the kitchen table were literally hundreds of his favourite scones.

Was it heaven?  Or was it one final act of love from his devoted Scottish wife of sixty years, seeing to it that he left this world a happy man?

Mustering one great final effort, he threw himself towards the table, landing on his knees in rumpled posture. His aged and withered hand trembled towards a scone at the edge of the table, when it was suddenly smacked by his wife with a wooden spoon…….

‘Fuck off’ she said, ‘they’re for the funeral.’

Oz didn’t die in any book, Linda. His death was reported somewhere between For the Death of Me and Inhuman Remains, and announced in the latter.

Staying on football, or rather on the Old Firm, for there is a difference, a so-called summit was held yesterday to discuss issues arising from recent confrontations (for that’s what they are) between Glasgow’s top two clubs. The media are outraged, and the public are told to be, by the fact that there were 34 arrests inside the ground at the last game, and by reports that domestic violence increases in the aftermath of these events. I’m sorry; I thought the press were meant to report news, and anyone who doesn’t know about the link between wife-bashing an an Old Firm outcome has been walking around with his head up his arse, because that’s been happening for longer than I’ve been alive. As for the arrest total, just one is regrettable, but go back thirty years, to the time when the cops wore overcoats on the very hottest of days, knowing the fondness of the jollier punters for pissing in beer cans and emptying them down their backs as they walked past,  and you’ll find that 34 would probably have been regarded by the police as a quiet day at the office.

My newspaper this morning is filled with threats of draconian action against players and officials who misbehave, with on-field arrests of players not being ruled out. But nowhere do I see any sanctions proposed against the Scottish football authorities, who have managed to arrange circumstances in which the two sides will have faced each other seven times before this season is over. If the violence engendered by Old Firm matches is a matter of public concern, and it seems that it is, then the number of these clashes should be minimised, not least for the sake of battered spouses in wilder Glasgow, rather than made commonplace for the basest of reasons: money.

I’m well short of being an Arsenal fan but I am a football fan and I believe in fairness. So as Arsene Wenger suggests I should be, I am unhappy that last night’s game in Barcelona was marred by one of the worst, least considered and least defensible refereeing decisions I have ever seen. I’m not going to say it cost the Gunners the game, for they were outplayed for 90 minutes and if they’d had twelve men rather than ten that would still have happened. But I am angry that there are no sanctions against referees who fail as badly as that Swiss clown did last night. His career will carry on regardless. We will probably see him in charge of another European tie before the season is over, and that will be unfair to the people who pay good money to watch that game.

I can’t conceive of any realistic circumstances in which Mr Busacca would ever be given charge of an Old Firm game, but I can imagine all too easily the potential for disaster if he was.

At the other end of the celebrity spectrum from the prematurely praised Pixie, I’d place Professor Brian Cox, chief creator and presenter of the BBC series, Wonders of the Solar System, and now Wonders of the Universe. Professor Cox looks ridiculously young to profess anything, but in fact he’s 43, has three degrees, the most recent being a PhD in high energy particle physics from the University of Manchester, where he occupies a chair. In an era of bright youngish presenters he stands out as the brightest, the brainiest and the best at managing to get his message through to people like me, who begin from a position of not knowing what the **** he’s talking about, and end enthralled, educated and enriched by the experience.

The one Black Hole in his otherwise stellar CV: he played keyboards with the band D:Ream on that questionable anthem that was seized on by Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson as New Labour’s theme tune for its 1997 election campaign. It was called ‘Things can only get better’, but if the writers could have seen the future as well as Brian they would have added the lines, ‘for a very short time and then get a bloody sight worse.’

Just read a piece in the Torygraph ‘Celebrities’ section; its subject was one Pixie Geldof. Ms G is twenty years old, and as far as I can see has achieved nothing in her short life to date. Indeed she seems to have done precious little other than be chucked out of a posh school. So why should she be celebrated? Has the word really become so debased? I have a lot of time for Pixie’s old man, but in any talented daughter contest I’d back mine against his, time after time after time.

Nice and sunny this morning. What a bugger when you have to work.