Quintin Jardine's blog

A new experience: being involved in a minor traffic accident in a car park then discovering that the driver of the other vehicle, a middle-aged geezer who lives and works in Edinburgh, does not speak a single word of English.

The day I hate; the last Sunday in October.

The Early Years, Vol 2: Tom Waits

Rex doesn’t get it yet ‘cos he’s only eight months old, but one day he will, I promise.

I am something of a geek. If it’s out there I’ll buy it. This month’s acquisition is a thing called Amazon Fire TV. It’s their version of Apple TV, but it’s easier to use and lets you access all the music you’ve ever bought from Amazon, plus pics etc. Crucially it lets you access Netflix as well as Amazon Prime. So far it’s a winner.

Oscar was never better named.

He did it, no question, even if he did get a ‘Not proven’ verdict on the murder charge. He turned into a Quentin Tarantino character and started blazing away at a door knowing there was someone behind it. All through the trial I waited for the prosecution to hammer away at the key questions:

‘When you heard the noise, why did it not occur to you to  check whether your girlfriend was still in bed beside you?’

‘When you heard the noise, why did it not occur to you to ask Reeva if she’d heard it too?’

‘When you got out your gun, why did it not occur to your to turn and say to Reeva, “Stay here while I investigate.”?’

Of all of it, that’s the part I don’t understand, and that’s where reasonable doubt must kick in.

In all the circumstances, five years for shooting and killing your girlfriend, most of it to be served under ‘house arrest’, seems like the deal of the day.

I’m not a big Strictly fan . . . that is an understatement . . . but I happened to catch the end of the results programme last night. It featured, to my astonishment, the duetting Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga.

I like Lady G even less than I like Strictly, but Tony Bennett could make anyone sound good. The remarkable thing about the pairing is not that someone thought to put them together, but that when his partner, now 28, was born, Mr B was already sixty years old.

Dipped into the unwatched BluRay pile last night, and pulled out ‘Nebraska’. Bruce Dern has been on most people’s ‘What ever happened to ….?’ list for years, but not any more. It’s the best thing he’s ever done; too bad it took him 55 years.

I have had a brainwave. How to turn The Apprentice from an unpleasant spectacle into  a global chart-topper. Fire the bully that is Alan Sugar and replace him with Graham Norton.

Last night we finally got round to watching ‘The Dallas Buyers Club’, without any prior knowledge of the story. Absolutely brilliant, and a best actor Oscar well deserved.

Then I soured it  by watching the first episode of ‘The Great Fire’, on ITV. Three more to go, apparently, but I don’t care if they never put it out.

Trying to work, with a building site next door on my right, and another two doors down on my left. Pain in the butt.

I note that the BBC has invested my Broadcasting Tax money in yet another series of The Apprentice. Pushy and arrogant young people, confronted by an unpleasant and arrogant older man. Explain it to me, please.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve tuned in to ‘Grantchester’ on ITV.

I knew of it in advance because my stepdaughter worked on a couple of the episodes, but it was only when it aired that I realised it’s based on short stories by one James Runcie, son of the late Archbishop of Canterbury.

Out of interest, I bought the first volume on Kindle. I am not given to criticising another author’s work but here I’ll make an exception. Leaving aside  the very obvious Father Brown comparison, I found the prose laboured and the dialogue as stilted as any I’ve ever read. The works are labelled as mysteries, without a scrap of the mysterious about them.

Runcie Junior displays no obvious latent for crime fiction, and yet he is pulling in TV rights money, and no doubt spin-off royalties, on the back of  his name alone. Worst of all, he has stolen part of his father’s life, in that he has portrayed his character Sidney Chambers as an active officer in WWII. The late Archbishop won the Military Cross, in the Scots Guards, like Chambers, and not for preaching good sermons. He was a tank commander and is reckoned to be the only holder of the Canterbury office to have killed another human being, as Sidney is shown doing in episode one.

What next, I ask myself? Can we expect the recently retired Archbishop Rowan Williams to unveil a Druid detective?

This morning I spent an hour an a half with a chap in India, after holding on for 45 minutes to get through to him. He was a very pleasant chap, but at the end of our conversation we failed to agree that the very sporadic service I have been receiving lately from BT Broadband was in any way his employer’s fault. It was mine, because I was requiring a wireless signal to travel 45 feet to my computer, most of it across open ground. The maximum range I could expect, he said, was 25 feet.

All the tests he ran were remote, and none of them were designed to explore the possibility that the machine might have had a sporadic transmission fault. I’m on line now, and my signal is crap. Yesterday it was fine. Tomorrow it will probably be fine, but it’s the days of uncertainty that do my head in. This is compounded by BT’s failure to  offer anything that approximates to decent customer service.

But you know what? It is my fault. For a few years I had a very good ISP, a small firm called Zen, which operated no call centres at all and sorted any problems instantly. To my shame I left them, not because of their service but because BT lured me away with their flashy, misleading advertising and with the bribe of free BT Sport.

At the first opportunity, I’m going back.

Big news from Waterstone. Mathew’s Tale, my new stand-alone historical novel, has been selected as the chain’s Scottish Book of the Month for October.

To tie in with this, the publication date has been brought forward from October 23 to Wednesday, October 1. Look out for it in all bookshops from that date on, in hard back and trade paperback. Signed copies will be available as always, from http://www.campbellreadbooks.com and ebooks will be available also through the usual outlets.