Today in Sussex...

On a whim I stopped my car and walked into this church. Like every other medieval church I've been to recently, it was stunning. I almost wish I wasn't a heathen.

People like to complain about the declining standards of written and spoken English as if there was a golden age, but 300 years ago things were far worse. Every church I go in seems to have different spellings of everyday words.

This is Bewl Water - a reservoir on the Sussex-Kent border. It almost looks as if Excalibur should appear out of the water

I have no idea what this antiquated mobile phone (or is it a pager?) is doing in the middle of a wood. It's striking how impotent and pointless technology looks in this setting.

This is a teabag in a holly bush. I don't know why either.

Young love

Spring

Transplant this sign to certain parts of London and I suspect that it would be a little controversial...

This afternoon in Brighton...

A new arrival, paying the traditional act of homage to the City of Brighton and Hove

His exclusive new address, only a hundred yards from the seafront

Found in a hole in a wall: 'Save the Winged Badger Shark'

A lock of hair from King Edward IV (1461-83) in Brighton Museum

He used to work in the City

A young couple, probably from London, on a day out.
They sat in silence.

FACT: Britain has more CCTV cameras per person than any other country in the world

Bestselling crime writer Peter James wanted to give something back to the boys in blue and decided to buy them a police car with a small, understated reference to its donor.

Healthy eating

The Government don't like fat people, although they would never admit it. Instead they constantly bang on about having your five a day and getting regular exercise. I can't argue with that, but I wish that their motives were altruistic rather than fiscal.

The Goverment's ultimate nightmare are people like the Chawner family, for example. Philip Chawner and his wife Audrey both weigh 24st and neither of them have worked for 11 years due to obesity-related health problems. The Chawners receive £22,500 in benefits which is the equivalent of a take-home salary of £30,000. Not a fortune, but not bad either.


However Mr Chawner complains that £22,500 'barely covers the bills and puts food on the table. It's not our fault we can't work. We deserve more.'

Mrs Chawner agrees: 'All that healthy food, like fruit and veg, is too expensive. We're fat because it's in our genes. Our whole family is overweight.'

The press haven't been very kind to the poor old Chawners, who have only just recovered from the humiliation of their daughter Emma's appearance on the X Factor:



But beyond the comical aspects of this story, there is a sinister undertone. Most people would agree that it's a little galling that a family receive state benefits because they have rendered themselves unemployable through overeating. However, there are many reasons why people are unhealthy and it is dangerous to imply that individuals are always accountable for their own illnesses.

And if you are unlucky enough to visit hospital as a result of failing to heed the Government's advice, what nutritional food and beverages can you look forward to?

I once tried to find some fruit juice in a hospital and failed miserably. Maybe they don't really want us to be healthy. After all, if we all had a healthy BMI and only ate fresh, organic fruit and vegetables, what would our doctors and nurses do with themselves?

Going Dutch

I've just finished reading The Assault by Harry Mulisch (the more dapper of the two gentlemen in the photo), an excellent novel which deserves a wider readership. Born in 1927, Mulisch has an interesting background. His father was an Austrian-born Nazi collaberator who spent three years in prison after the Second World War. Mulisch's mother, however, was Jewish.

Mulisch once joked that he was the Second World War and in many respects, The Assault is the work of a writer trying to reconcile himself with his mixed inheritance. Set between 1945 and 1981, this novel manages to say an awful lot in its 180-odd pages. I hope that this European classic doesn't disappear into the ether of obscure fiction in translation.

This is the third great novel I've read by a Dutch writer in as many months and yet Holland hasn't exactly set the literary world on fire. Why is this? There are many possible answers, but none of them are entirely satisfactory and if you apply the same criteria to other countries (weighting the results according to population and number of people speaking the relevant language) the results vary wildly.

Why has the Czech Republic produced so many world-class writers compared to Poland, Switzerland or Finland, for example? Why have France and Russia contributed more to world literature than Germany and Italy?

If you take the English-speaking world, although every relevant nation has produced a good crop of writers, for some reason Ireland and Canada are head and shoulders above everyone else. The number of great Irish writers is particularly impressive when you consider that Ireland's population is 2% of the USA total.

But I'm rambling. My point is this: is there a thriving literary tradition in Holland waiting for an enlightened Anglophone publisher to share it with an English-speaking audience, or are Harry Mulisch and W.F.Hermans big fish in a very small stream?

If Antal Szerb's wonderful Journey by Moonlight could be regarded as a classic of Hungarian literature for 60 years before anyone bothered to translate it, then that would suggest that we have a lot to look forward to.