Hemingway’s Macho Men and a Long Line of Literary Heroines

One advantage of insomnia is that you get to hear the weirdest, graveyard-shift radio programmes. The BBC World Service’s documentary about Quiverfull Christians (The Womb as a Weapon), for instance, which I heard at 3 a.m. the other morning and am still pondering.

QC’s don’t hold with birth control. They believe that children are weapons in the fight against evil: the more the merrier, but 6.8 at the very least. It goes without saying that women on quiver duty can’t have jobs. They have to stay at home procreating and being submissive. So far, so goodish. I’m submissive, have half a dozen kids, work from home but what’s with this 6.8 minimum requirement? Because that’s the average child count per Muslim family, and Christians have to keep up or give up, says Nancy Campbell, the Quiverfull’s spokeswoman.

She sounds about as submissive as Mrs Pankhurst. You have to be tough to tell women bashing their heads against glass ceilings to be meek. But telling them to have more babies than Muslims is something else.

In the circumstances, should I postpone the macho man piece I was going to write (I’ve just hoovered up Hemingway in one of my intermittent ‘listen-again-to-favourite-novelists’ blitzes) and write about tough Nancy women instead? I could do both. Hemingway’s novels may fall into the iceberg category – 90% of what’s really going on isn’t written down, it’s in the subtext – but his heroes are pretty straightforward. They’re tough, taciturn, stoical, sexy and subscribe to the ‘grace under pressure’ code.

And that’s about it. They can, like Harry Morgan, get into a gun fight with Cuban bank robbers and lose an arm. Or be wounded in the war, like Jake Barnes, and become impotent. But they remain pretty much the same. Well, maybe not Jake. He gets even sexier, and also heart-wrenchingly tragic, because he’s so damned taciturn and stoical and the love of his life is a nymphomaniac.

Every actor fancies himself as Jake Barnes, narrator of ‘The Sun Also Rises’, but be warned: famous Hollywood stars aren’t necessarily the best readers. William Hurt does tough-taciturn-stoical OK, and Spanish bullfighters perfectly. But cuckolded Scottish drunks and nymphomaniacs aren’t his strong suits. Nor, with one notable exception, are strong women Hemingway’s.

Pilar, married to a treacherous guerrilla leader, in ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ is the odd woman out. It must be 15 years since I sobbed through this achingly sad love story set in the Spanish civil war, but I’m sure it is Pilar who coined that schmaltzy, post-coital query about whether the earth did or didn’t move. Hemingway’s women are beautiful, but they aren’t tough like Nancy, whose strident ‘we are doomed unless we multiply’ harangue gave me the creeps. And the quivers. She’s a bully, which isn’t the same as being tough.

Becky Sharp in ‘Vanity Fair’ is tough. Scarlett O’Hara in ‘Gone With The Wind’ is mega-tough and Lisbeth Salander in ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ is mega-mega-tough. Bullies they are not. On second thoughts, let’s ditch Nancy and her dangerous neonatal nonsense and come up with a list of tough, inspiring literary heroines/anti-heroines, preferably beautiful, too (which rules out Jane Eyre, thank God!).

Here, in no particular order, are some of my favourites: Hester Prynne in ‘The Scarlet Letter’, Flora Poste in ‘Cold Comfort Farm’, Jean Brodie in ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’, Madame de Merteuil in ‘Dangerous Liaisons’, and Alice in ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

Fiction aside, the toughest woman I’ve ever met is Aung Sang Suu Kyi, Burma’s tiny, fragile, exquisite, pro-democracy leader. We had tea when she was under house arrest at her home in University Avenue, Rangoon in 1995. None of her books are in audio, but you can listen to a 15-minute clip of the interview she gave to Charlie Rose on American TV in 2012.

Rose: “I’m going to ask you two simple questions: where exactly are you right now, and where is Burma?”

Daw Suu Kyi: “Those are not simple questions. They are the most difficult questions you could ever ask. But…”

And – quietly, resolutely, patiently – she proceeds to put him right. Listen to it and rejoice. You too, Nancy.

From Bond to Smiley: A Spy for Every Taste

This was scheduled to be a serious bonding session, with the complete 007 canon released on audio last year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first James Bond film, Dr No. If you’ve missed out on the books, especially this latest audio series read by some of the best actors around – Kenneth Branagh, Damian Lewis, Dan Stevens, Toby Young – you’re in for a treat. Unlike children, Bond should be heard but not seen.

I’m biased. If I had 20/20 vision, or even 3/3, I’d probably appreciate the special effects and gadgetry everyone binds on about in the films. What you don’t get on screen is any indication of Fleming’s skill as a writer. Marry this to a good reader – Rory Kinnear, say, whose recent National Theatre roles include Hamlet and Iago – and wham! Why flog out to the cinema to see CIA agents being fed to the sharks in ‘Live And Let Die’, when you can picture it just as vividly at home in your head?

I did actually see the film. It was the quintessentially English Roger Moore’s first crack at James Bond. At this point you should know that I am married to a chippy Scot, who thinks that nobody did, or will, ever do it better than Sean Connery (apart from Andy Murray after he has won Wimbledon this year). Last time he went to St Andrews to play golf, (my husband Ian, not Andy Murray), he bought me a tea towel printed with the ‘Declaration of Arbroath’. When I have had it framed, I shall hang it above his desk.

Here is an excerpt: ‘For as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any condition be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for Glory, nor Riches, nor Honours, that we are fighting, but for Freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with Life itself. 6 April 1320.’

Sorry about that. My self-imposed mission to crack the Bond series must be a bridge too far, if Robert the Bruce is the light relief. Having heard all 12 books, I can reveal that my favourite is not ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ read by David Tennant, the only Scot in the pack, but ‘Moonraker’ read by Bill Nighy.

‘Isn’t Nighy’s voice a bit wet to read a Bond thriller?’ you demur, remembering the dysfunctional, mal-co roles he usually plays. Well, yes; maybe it is. Then again, uber-macho, licensed-to-kill 007 getting in touch with his feminine side makes a refreshing change. And, this is really why I like ‘Moonraker’, playing that extraordinary game of bridge against the villainous Drax, where he makes a grand slam with just eight points.

The Bond books owed much to Fleming’s own experience in British Intelligence during the Second World War. ‘My Adventures as a Spy’ by Robert Baden-Powell (Crimson Cats, 79 mins, read by Michael Cochrane) is a charming little period piece adapted from the original, published in 1915. It describes the sort of old-fashioned espionage techniques employed by the future founder of the Boy Scouts, based not on gadgets and guns but on those time-honoured Sherlock Holmes skills: observation and deduction.

Wearing an old tweed cap, and hung about with nets and maps and thermos flasks, Baden-Powell, disguised as a batty old butterfly-collector, tramped through the Dalmatian mountains making sketches of lepidoptera and churches. Only he knew that the patterns on his butterfly wings and stained glass windows represented maps of Turkish forts and positions of guns.

Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Kim’, set on India’s exotic North-West Frontier circa 1850, is still the ‘Great Game’ classic, followed by either Len Deighton’s Bernie Samson Cold-War trilogies or John le Carre’s George Smiley Cold-War series, both brilliant. Small, tubby, bespectacled Smiley is technically cuddlier, but he’s a cold fish. No wonder his hot wife keeps running off. I prefer jaded, hard-drinking Bernie, whose wife has defected to Russia. He has kids, he has flaws; he’s human. So am I, and after this binge I’ll be happy never to listen to another spy story again. Unless it’s William Boyd’s ‘Restless’…

Of Queens and queens

Predicament. Should I buy a ticket to see Helen Mirren’s BAFTA-winning royal performance at the Gielgud Theatre before it transfers to Broadway, or get the boiler serviced? It’s the same price – £125 – for both. I know what I’d rather do, but will the memory of HM playing HMQ keep me warm when the boiler breaks down this winter?

No. Besides, it isn’t exactly uncharted waters. Remember Mirren’s monarch in the film ‘The Queen’, eye-balling the stag at Balmoral after Princess Diana’s death? This latest Queen eye-balling her prime ministers in ‘The Audience’ couldn’t be that different. Nor anywhere near as fascinating as her chance meeting in Buckingham Palace one afternoon with Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, before he was unmasked as a Soviet spy.

It isn’t true, of course. It’s a one-act play by Alan Bennett called ‘A Question of Attribution’, which premiered at the National Theatre in 1988. I’ve just listened to the radio version again (BBC Single Spies, £12). It’s brilliant; Bennett at his best – sharp, clever, witty, understated. Ditto Prunella Scales as HMQ. Think Dorothy Parker cloned with Cruella de Vil and the headmistress of Cheltenham Ladies’ College and you’re getting close.

Sir Anthony (he hasn’t yet been stripped of his gong) has doubts about the authenticity of one of the Titians. Standing on a ladder examining it, he is unaware that the Queen, whose official opening of a municipal swimming pool has been cancelled, is watching him.

“I suppose that is part of your function, Sir Anthony, to prove that my pictures are fakes,” she observes, her mouth snapping shut, vicious as a nutcracker.

“Because something is not what it is said to be, Ma’am, does not mean it is a fake. It may just have been wrongly attributed,” murmurs the Royal Surveyor.

Thus begins an extraordinary conversation, bristling with doubles entendres, about self-portraits and forgeries, Blunt struggling to stay afloat.

“Be careful how you go up the ladder, Sir Anthony. One could have a nasty fall,” is her parting shot. Our dear little Queen? Menacing? Oh, surely not. Judge for yourself, gentle listener.

“What were you talking about?” asks the security man afterwards.

“I was talking about art. I’m not sure that she was,” says Blunt shakily.

If the Queen-as-rottweiler is a bridge too far even for closet royalists, fast forward 20 years to Bennett’s third royal classic – you forgot ‘The Madness of George III’ – ‘The Uncommon Reader’ (Audio Go, £19.50) If, as they say, only a diamond can cut a diamond, it must follow that only a queen can play a queen. QED Bennett playing Brenda in this achingly funny 2007 novella about the Queen’s new passion for books.

One has always read, of course, but not like this. In the old days, before she came across the mobile library van parked in a Buck House yard, things were different. She used to ask the people lined up to meet her in mills and mines and shopping malls, investiture guests in the Waterloo Chamber – even me, once, at the Peking press reception before the royal tour of China – whether they’d come far.

Now she wants to know what everyone is reading. She has been longing to ask him about the writer Jean Genet, she confides to the French president at a state banquet.

‘“Homosexual and jailbird, was he, nevertheless, as bad as he was painted? Or, more to the point,” and she took up her soup spoon, “was he as good?”

‘Unbriefed on the subject of the glabrous playwright and novelist, the president looked wildly about for his Minister of Culture, but she was being addressed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

‘“Jean Genet,” said the Queen again, helpfully. “Vous le connaissez?”

‘“Bien sur,” said the president.

‘“Il m’interesse,” said the Queen.

‘“Vraiment?” The president put down his spoon. It was going to be a long evening.’

But not, alas, nearly a long enough book. Bennett is easily our funniest living writer. And reader.

I’d better quickly mention Sue Townsend’s brace of Mrs Windsor spoofs – ‘The Queen and I’ (Audible, unabridged, £11.99) and its sequel ‘Queen Camilla’ (Audio Go, unabridged, £18.99). Britain is a republic under Comrade Jack Barker, the Windsors are living in a council house, Princess Anne has married a chav called Spiggy.

So far so good – well, goodish – but I draw the line at talking corgis. Isn’t it time for ‘Adrian Mole: The Viagra Years’?

Henry James and some all-American misery lit

Sorry about the gap. I wasn’t in Barbados, my laptop was on the blink. No PC, no downloads. The good news is that foraging among my overflowing audio book shelves, I’ve come across some gems. And that was only under ‘A’ for American, starting with Henry James. Yes, of course it’s ‘The Portrait of a Lady’, arguably the best, certainly the most famous, of his 24 novels.

No one under 30, better make that under 60, reads James any more. Too long, too boring, too much sitting around having afternoon tea in the garden with a rug over your knees. That’s how this classic famously begins, and probably explains James’ zero rating with the Starbucks generation. The version I unearthed (Naxos) was savagely abridged to five hours; uncut it’s about 25, (Tantor Audio, read by Wanda McCaddon, £17.49). But if you’ve never read Henry James, dipping your toe like this into the shallow end of his Olympic-sized swimming pool is a good way to start.

‘The greatness of James’ mind was a sort of immense littleness,’ Adam Mars-Jones, my favourite book reviewer, once remarked. Remember that if/when you start to flounder. The ‘lady’ in question is beautiful young headstrong Isabel Archer, brought to England by her wealthy aunt to pit her innocent New World wits against the scheming sophisticates of Europe. Poor, doomed Isabel. That’s what happens to wannabe Germaine Greers circa 1880. If only she had accepted that nice rich Lord Warburton, it would never have come to this.

Losing 80% of the original book inevitably telescopes James’ leisurely unfolding of events into a Bourne thriller with frock-coats. No matter. Elizabeth McGovern’s cool intelligent reading (she was the countess in Downton Abbey’s first series) keeps you listening. And tut-tutting. And possibly curious to know a little more about the author.

Cue Colm Toibin’s ‘The Master’. It isn’t a biography, it’s a novel about Henry James. I love a good fic-biog. Give me Hilary Mantel’s take on Thomas Cromwell in ‘Wolf Hall’ and ‘Bring Up The Bodies’ (Whole Story Audio) rather than a dry-as-dust biog every time. But only if you trust the novelist.

I trust Toibin: see ‘I’ for Irish, we’re still on ‘A’ for American, which has to include John Steinbeck, though I wish it hadn’t been ‘Of Mice And Men’ (Hachette £10.79). Steel yourself. This is misery lit in spades. Remember what bereavement councillors say about grief being good for you. In which case, this harrowing story about two itinerant California bums in the ’30s should be a real tonic.

Lennie is a gentle, not-too-bright giant, who loves the feel of soft warm things. He pets mice and puppies and rabbits and girls so tenderly, he breaks their necks. ‘I done a bad thing George,’ he whispers, and his street-wise buddy, who promised Aunt Clara to look after him, has to pick up the pieces until…. There are feel-good buddies – Butch and Sundance, Bernstein and Woodward, Noddy and Big Ears. And there are George and Lennie. You choose: grief is good.

Just as well, because the next audio I turned up was another all-American buddy book. Cormac McCarthy’s ‘All The Pretty Horses’ (Audible) isn’t a barrel of laughs either. It’s violent and depressing, but it’s also uncharacteristically, heart-breakingly romantic. Can this picaresque tale about two young Texan cowboys riding across the Rio Grande to look for work as gauchos in Mexico really be by the same author as the one who wrote ‘Blood Meridian’ and ‘The Road’?

John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins are Greek gods in Stetsons. Why the millionaire Mexican ranch owner won’t let his beautiful daughter marry JGC, who can break in five wild mustangs before breakfast, beats me.

So, alas, does time. I’m accompanying a sad single friend to a happy-clappy service at Holy Trinity Brompton in ten minutes. Someone told her that coffee in the crypt afterwards is better than online dating. Thank God for the bunch of transatlantic poets I’m taking with me (British Library, The Spoken Word, American Poets, 4 hours). I will happily listen to Frost and Ferlinghetti reading their poems to me while she cruises.

A tea service fit for a Tsarina

Is it reasonable to give up on a book you’re listening to because you’ve just heard the author on the Today programme defending the Daily Mail? Maybe not. There are worse things than the Daily Mail. I can’t think of any right now, but A.N. Wilson’s novel ‘The Potter’s Hand’ (Audible download, read by John Telfer, 15 hours 41 minutes, £15.74) is too good to sacrifice to mere principle.

It’s a fictional biography of Josiah Wedgewood, 1730-95. You know about Wedgewood. He was the brains behind the Midlands pottery company that became the rival of the great Sevres in France.

But did you also know that he had a wooden leg, was Charles Darwin’s grandfather, a chum of Voltaire’s and sent his nephew Tom to America to do a deal with the Cherokees in South Carolina? Outside China, it was the only source of white kaolin clay to make the paper-thin porcelain he needed for his latest commission, a 1,000-piece dinner service decorated with frogs for Catherine the Great. All those foreign accents – Cherokee, Russian, Stoke-on-Trent – are a challenge, but reader John Telfer rises to it.

I love books about experts. Try Peter Carey’s quirky, retrospective love story about the mechanical wizardry of Victorian automata (‘The Chemistry Of Tears’, Wholestory Audio, read by Susan Lyons and Jefferson Mays, 9 hours unabridged, £20.41). But, if you want an old fashioned ripping yarn, start with Wedgewood.

Finnish mythology uncovered

In my excitement to plug you into birdsong last time, I forgot to tell you about that party to launch the first English audio of ‘The Kalevala’ (Naxos, by Elias Lonnrot, translated and read by Keith Bosley, 13 1/2 hours, unabridged, £42). What the Iliad is to Greece, Dante’s Inferno to Italy, the Mahabharata to Hindus and Beowulf to me years ago at TCD struggling with Anglo-Saxon literature, the Kalevala is to Finland.

So how much do you know about Finnish mythology or, for that matter, Finland? I’ve asked around and come up with a few useful facts. Most Finns can dance the tango, have their own lake (187,888 at the last count – lakes, not Finns), were the first nation to give women the vote, have more mobile phones (well, they invented Nokia) and email addresses than any other country, hold an annual Sonkajarvi (a wife-carrying championship), deal with 35 species of mosquito and eat a heck of a lot of pickled fish. You could smell it as soon as you walked into the Finnish ambassador’s residence. Rollmops, gravadlax, soused herring: so much for romantic candle-lit dining afterwards – we’d all smell like sea lions.

Serious Kalevala experts flown in from Helsinki were lined up to talk to us. If Longfellow, Sibelius and Tolkien were inspired by this million-year-old saga, why not us? Keith Bosley, frail, elderly, smiley poet, translator and reader, kicked the evening off. His voice, high and tremulous, is spot on for this sort of epic oral hand-me-down.

The Kalevala is the story of Vainamoinen, the Great Wizard of Creation, who defeats his arch-enemy Jaukahainen by burying him up to his neck in songs. It’s also about his friends the eagles, cuckoos, elk, wolves – the whole Attenborough line-up. By the way, listening to the Kalevala is far easier than reading it. Being Scandinavian, it’s full of long, unpronounceable names with two dots over the vowels. Right now though, try reciting this little amuse bouche aloud in a sing-song Hiawatha chant. That’s how the late, great William Hutkyn used to read Longfellow. It’s even better if you stamp your foot and slap your thighs as you chant.

‘Thus the ancient Vainamoinen,
In his copper-banded vessel,
Left his tribe in Kalevala
Sailing on the rolling billows,
Sailing through the azure vapours,
Sailing through the dusk of evening,
Sailing to the fiery sunset
To the higher landed regions,
To the lower verge of heaven…’

I’ve been listening to it like trance music, while sorting stuff out for the Trinity House Hospice shop. I got so involved, I had to rescue the three-legged knitted reindeer and stuff it back into the toy box. That’s the power of poetry for you. If they’ve got distinctive voices, listening to poets reading their own poems is better than foie gras to the sound of trumpets, with sex and George Clooney thrown in.

Only an audio can let you hear the controlled passion of Seamus Heaney (Faber Collected Poems, 15 hours, £75), the avuncular geniality masking the doubt, depression, despair of Phillip Larkin (Faber, The Sunday Sessions, 1 hour, £15) or Ted Hughes’ murderous delivery of ‘Hawk Roosting’ (The Spoken Word, Ted Hughes, 2 hours, British Library, £12.99).

‘I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. 
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!
The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray 
Are of advantage to me; 
And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark. 
It took the whole of Creation 
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly – 
I kill where I please because it is all mine. 
There is no sophistry in my body: 
My manners are tearing off heads –

The allotment of death. 
For the one path of my flight is direct 
Through the bones of the living. 
No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me. 
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change. 
I am going to keep things like this.’

Remember the chilling, intractable voice of the psychopath about to kill poor little Jane Fonda in ‘Klute’? This is him all over again. Poor little Sylvia Plath; she didn’t stand a chance.

Birdsong and other aural delights

Old habits die hard. I’ve just heard the British Library’s Dawn Chorus CD, a 70-minute recording of birds singing their socks off in three different English woodlands in early spring. It’s magic, awesome, inspiring – a steal at a tenner. If you’ve never heard a blackbird, live in a city and don’t especially relish the idea of getting up at 4am to look for a wood, get it now, right now. It will lift your heart and make you a better person, trust me.

Why? Because I’m a professional listener and we’re a dying breed. Ostlers disappeared when cars replaced Wolseleys. You can’t ostle a Wolseley. The same applies to audio book reviewers. Ten years ago, when I started listening to talking books for the Guardian, I remember….

Good grief, did I really say that? I sound like that terrible old bore Solomon Selby in Hardy’s Wessex Tales (Naxos, 9 hours, read by Neville Jason, £29.99), who used to sit with his mug of mead in the inglenook, boring fellow taverners to death with stories beginning ‘I remember…’. As soon as they see him take out his pipe and smile into the fire, they know what’s coming. ‘The smile was neither mirthful nor sad, not precisely humorous, nor altogether thoughtful. We who knew him recognised it in a moment. It was his narrative smile.’

What the narrator really means is: ‘Oh God, here we go again. Another load of Sol Selby’s shaggy-dog shit about the time in 1804 he and Diggory Venn met Old Boney himself and one of his Frenchie generals recce-ing their long-planned invasion of England…’. Enough. There will be no tedious reminiscences in this blog, or its successors.

Now, back to business, and birds. And, if there’s time, I’ll tell you about the party given by the Finnish ambassador in his big, gloomy residence next to Kensington Palace to launch the first English audio version of ‘The Kalevala’, Finland’s answer to the Greek myths (Naxos, 13 1/2 hours, translated and read by Keith Bosley, £42).

Having taken my advice and ordered, downloaded or better still, visited the British Library’s treasure chest of a shop and become hooked on dawn choruses, you may want to take the bird thing a bit further. And then again you may not, when you hear it’s a guide book called ‘A Bad Birdwatcher’s Companion’ (Naxos, 4 1/2 hours, written and read by Simon Barnes, £16.99).

Barnes is a sports writer on The Times and an off-duty twitcher. I know what you’re thinking: Bill Oddie behind a bush with binoculars, but you’re wrong. Simon Barnes isn’t a bird nerd. He’s practical, informative and, above all, he’s funny. The great thing about this witty, charming guide to 50 British birds is his simple bird identification format. Sublime as those BL dawn choruses are, I want to know who is singing what when, but there’s no one around, only birds far too busy tweeting to stop and identify themselves.

Maybe that’s why it’s magic. Barnes gives you a quick check-list for each bird, viz: Robin; where to look: gardens, spade handles, Christmas cards; when to look: all year; what to look for: red breast; what to listen for: thin pretty song. And then – here’s why audios are so bloody marvellous – you hear a robin singing its light, merry, chirruping little riff and your heart lifts. You have to tell someone, share it as we reviewers once did before downloads changed everything. Oh well, it was too good to last and it didn’t.

Downloads are to the majestic audio collection of Trollope’s (Anthony, not Joanna) complete and unabridged collection of ‘Barchester Chronicles’ (Audio Go, 6 volumes, 148 CDs, read by Timothy West, from £22.50) what Wolseleys were to stage-coaches. Who plays CDs these days, apart from my long-distance lorry-driver friend ferrying antiques and objets d’art in his truck from Glasgow to Florence? He’s working his way through Dickens, currently ‘Nicholas Nickleby’, read by the inimitable Alex Jennings (BBC, 34 hours, £32.50). Kingsley (he’s the lorry driver) doesn’t download. He’s what my kids call a saddo, a techno klutz, a wrinkly, like the little old lady fumbling in her purse, muttering: ‘Why didn’t they change to decimalisation when all the old people were dead?’

Unless they’re mega bestsellers or celebrity memoirs, most audio books go straight to download these days. I’ll miss Dr Who in a tardis, Harry Potter in a tin, Michael Palin’s travels in a miniature suitcase, but I’ll get over it. So much to listen to, so little time; you need a guide with good ears. Borrow mine.