Ramblings
music, literature, football etc.
Interests other than those leading to lucre. Doesn’t everybody?
I’ve attended to gigs, listened to albums on Spotify and read great works of literature – full disclosure, I’ve also read plenty of not-so-great works of literature. I’ve stood in the cold at far too many football matches, stood in the rain at rugby internationals, cowered in the shade at The Oval with only sun cream and beer for company.
Bookworms’ corner
I once encountered a disappointing Jonathan Coe novel. This isn’t it.
Jonathan Coe has long been one of the sharpest chroniclers of modern Britain, blending satire, political unease and intimate character study in novels such as What a Carve Up! and Middle England. Coe’s fiction portrays an unmoored middle-aged UK; bewildered by shifting power structures, cultural fragmentation and elites whose quiet consolidation of control reshapes everyday life. The Proof of My Innocence continues this trajectory, exploring themes of paranoia, manipulation and the fragility of truth in contemporary Britain.
It’s also, as are nearly all of Coe’s novels, a page turner in the greatest sense of literary fiction – a story-telling genre he shares with a host of other great English language novelists, which both informs and entertains.
The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe
Penguin 2025
Musical interlude
We’re fast approaching the anniversary of this Madrid gig in February 2020. Despite news reports emerging from Italy describing a new virus that was taking its toll on the elderly and sick.
If you like modern British Jazz and it’s seemingly unstoppable rise over the past few years, give Resoution 88’s back catalogue a listen.
Copyright – David Genis 2026. With thanks to WordPress.
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