The Path to 'Freedom'

What's on my mind right now? The departure of three allegedly intelligent teenagers on their path to 'freedom'. And all the keening, breast-beating and blaming of the 'authorities'. These three are third-generation immigrants; British nationals. They have enjoyed all the freedoms and benefits this great democracy of ours has provided them. Protection, homes, education, healthcare, equality - all of these will be denied them in their brainless quest to become jihadi groupies. These girls know what they are doing. They have planned it from day one. They have chosen to become part of a foreign conflict and contemptuously turned their backs on all of the values and opportunities this great country of their birth has afforded them. Well, may they find all they deserve. They have no place in a civilised society. So, become Isis slaves, enjoy being part of a bunch of rampaging, murderous thugs. Enjoy being raped by bearded jihadis. You will come to rue your decision. My opinion? What you sow, so shall you reap....

Swansong at Bellota's

Once again, yesterday, I met up with four close friends (one absentee) for our regular lunch club meeting at Bellota's Bar y Tapas in Brighton. A group of disparate individuals: my brother Dave, Market research consultant, Phil, a retired Pub landlord, Graeme, a retired Regulatory Affairs Director, Lesley, a retired teacher, and me, a retired Managing Director. I say disparate because we are individuals of strong views on most subjects, our political views encompassing the left and right of politics. Opinions on the arts and culture, film, music, literature - never a dull moment. Bellota's has become our home ground. A place where we feel 'at home', where we belong if you will, and the manager, Mark Lampit and his front house staff, have always provided us with second-to-none service.

So, here we were, once again, the usual warm welcome from Mark, beers at the bar, robust conversation, back-slapping old friends, decisions about what to eat, similar choices made to the last time we dined here, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose... That warm feeling of being with good friends, enjoying the occasion...

And then, Mark dropped the bombshell! He is moving on. This would be the last occasion that we enjoyed his hospitality at Bellota's. Mark IS Bellota's, so far as we are concerned. We come here, we are entertained by Mark. That's it. Moving away, Mark, you take the heart and soul of Bellota's with you. So now, we have to decide, whether or not we stay loyal to Bellota's without you, or relocate our meetings to your new establishment Crafty Chooks if we do, Mark, might we suggest a change of name!

Anyway, for the record, here is a pic of those of us who love Bellota's Bar y Tapas. Mark is on the far right, I am wearing the trilby hat with my arm around my brother.... Graeme, far left, then Phil and Lesley...

Well, it was Mark's swan-song and it was the end of an era I guess.  A bittersweet occasion...

Pop Goes The Weasel

Pop Goes the Weasel (Helen Grace,#2). by M.J. Arlidge
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Another fast-paced thriller from M.J.Arlidge, Pop Goes The Weasel is the 2nd in the DI Helen Grace series, following on from Eeny Meeny. Arlidge uses short chapters to heighten the tension creating a roller-coaster ride through 425 pages that I finished in two days. Like Eeny Meeny, PGTW features a female serial killer, her victims being subjected to a particularly gruesome fate. Grace powers her way through the book on her Kawasaki motorbike. Grace is a strong and determined character but the one totally bizarre aspect of the story (as in the first book) is her propensity for clandestine visits to ‘Jake’ who whips here with a riding crop, to help her relax! It is the one aspect of these riveting thrillers that I find rather pointless. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed PGTW and recommend it to those who enjoy a good police procedural.

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The Fish Ladder

The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream by Katharine Norbury
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I often select a book to purchase based upon the sleeve artwork. ‘The Fish Ladder’ by Katharine Norbury was no exception. I came across it on one of my recent forays into Waterstones bookshop and bought a copy. Philip Pullman describes it as “A beautiful, strange, intoxicating and utterly unique story”. This book is a gem. Described as a combination of memoir, travelogue and nature writing The Fish Ladder is incredibly visual. Interlaced with fragments of poetry and tales from Celtic mythology. Katharine Norbury was abandoned as a baby in a Liverpool convent. Raised by loving, adoptive parents she grew into a wanderer, drawn by the beauty of the British countryside.

Norbury’s clever use of word combinations is unique. She has a very special talent:

“I could make out occasional townships, slipped like love-notes into cracks along the coast”

just one sentence that conveys so much.

“... and a few aged sisters sat in pews, white as doves, tucked into prayer”.

Such a beautiful depiction of the purity of introspection and contemplation.
There are moments that take your breath away. This passage made me stop and then re-read several times:

“I could feel the boniness of his frame, pared by illness, and no matter how close we stood, or how tightly we embraced, the gap between us seemed to be widening, the pockets of air expanding, and then acquiring the solidity of Perspex. Dad felt like a fairy’s child that disappears when seen for what it is. I held in my arms a bundle of twigs and feathers, already splintering into dust”.

On her journey of self discovery Katherine is accompanied by her nine-year-old daughter , Evie. This is a captivating story that is also an exploration of the majesty of the natural world. It is totally original and life-affirming.


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Early Signs of Spring

Today in Brighton we experienced wall to wall sunshine with cloudless blue skies. Mind you, it was very cold with temperature not getting above 6ºC. It is a hard time for our wildlife particularly the birds that visit my garden, but there are definite signs that Spring is on its way.

I first recorded a male Blackcap in the garden on 26th January, since when it has been in the garden everyday, on the feeders.

He is a particularly aggressive so-and-so, attacking the Goldfinches that are regular visitors to the sunflower seed feeders.

Blackbirds both male and female have been in evidence for more than a week, feeding mostly on the ground. Yesterday, for the first time this year, I spotted a ChiffChaff flitting around the garden.

Like the Blackcap, more and more ChiffChaffs are now over-wintering in the UK, particularly in the South.

Yesterday also produced the first Dunnock sighting this year in the garden.

And the birds all appear to be very busy. A sign of the approaching Spring. I just hope that we can arrive at periods of more clement weather without any further spells of Winter!

A 'Shropshire Lad' Rhapsody

This is one of the works that I am considering entering as one of my selection of three to the Classic FM Hall of Fame 2015. This exquisite piece A Shropshire Lad Rhapsody by George Butterworth is a miniature symphonic poem based on his setting of A.E. Housman's Loveliest of trees. The programmatic subtext is one of conflict culminating in death. Butterworth died young, being killed in action in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 when he was thirty-one.

Classic FM Hall of Fame

Every year over the Easter period Classic FM broadcast the top 300 classical works as selected by listeners to the channel. Participants have to send in their own top three selections and it is from these that the top 300 list is compiled. It makes for a wonderful four days of listening.

But how do you decide on your own three favourites from the thousands of available recordings? There are those works that always appear in the top 10, indeed those that always appear in the top 5. Like Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto and Ralph Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending. These two works are certainly amongst my favourites. But then so are Frederick Delius' The Walk to the Paradise Garden, Edward Elgar's Sospiri for Strings, Harp and Organ, Robert Schumann's 2nd Symphony, George Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad, Chopin's 2nd Piano Concerto, Rachmaninov's 2nd Symphony, Wagner's Siegfried Idyll and more recently as an introduction from my brother, Ivor Gurney's A Gloucestershire Rhapsody. I could go on. But which three to choose to submit to Classic FM? Maybe I should consider The Theme from Out of Africa or John Dunbar's Theme from Dances with Wolves or the heartbreakingly beautiful Theme from Schindler's List.

Which works would you choose? Whatever you like you would certainly enjoy the four days over Easter, listening to Classic FM. That is, if you like classical music of course.

Now, back to my deliberations......

Thinning Out

I had put it off long enough. I just had to thin out our collection of books. Every bookcase in the house is full, books are stacked up beside bookcases, books are stacked up beside books, beside bookcases, books are stacked on bedside cabinets and besides - we have a significant collection of Kindle books.

This bookcase is in the lounge - full - and is mirrored with a similar bookcase on the other side of the chimney breast. We have bookcases in the bedrooms and a bookcase in the dining room...

And so it was, with much heart-searching, that I selected 60 books for donation to the local Hospice charity shop. The folk there were delighted with my gift. So now I have some shelf-space to load some of the books that are stacked beside the books beside the books.

And I must try and stop paying visits to Waterstones, at least for a while...

The Guest Cat

The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Guest Cat is a wonderful novel about a visiting cat who brings joy into a couple’s life in Tokyo. Winner of Japan’s Kiyama Shohei Literary Award, The Guest Cat, by the acclaimed poet Takashi Hiraide, is a subtly moving and exceptionally beautiful novel about the transient nature of life and idiosyncratic but deeply felt ways of living. A couple in their thirties live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo; they work at home, freelance copy-editing; they no longer have very much to say to one another. But one day a cat invites itself into their small kitchen. It leaves, but the next day comes again, and then again and again. Soon they are buying treats for the cat and enjoying talks about the animal and all its little ways. The book brims with many moments of staggering poetic beauty, but then something happens…. At times I was completely blindsided by Hiraide and one short paragraph of just 39 words, so full of heartache, left me with eyes brimming.

I cannot stop thinking about The Guest Cat. Captivating. A must for a 2nd read.

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A Startling Achievement

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There are many reviews of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall on Goodreads, ranging from the one star disappointment of some readers to those like me who rate Wolf Hall as a five star startling achievement, a brilliant historical novel focused on the rise to power of a figure exceedingly unlikely, on the face of things, to arouse any sympathy at all. Thomas Cromwell is the focus of Mantel’s loving attention for more than six hundred pages. Mantel uses her literary skills to put the meat on the bones of a tumultuous period of history when the son of an abusive, alcoholic blacksmith, Thomas rose to become for eight crucial years in the 1530s the most powerful political figure in Henry VIII’s England, the man who orchestrated the King’s momentous break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries and the seizure of their wealth, and the execution for treason of Sir Thomas More, Bishop John Fisher, the Carthusian monks, and many, many others.

Mantel’s novel takes Cromwell only to 1535, the moment at which he ascends to the height of his power. A vigorous fifty-year-old, he has risen to great wealth; his enemy Thomas More has just gone to the scaffold; the King, who has broken with Rome and married Anne Boleyn, holds him in the utmost confidence. It would have been easy enough for Mantel to gesture toward the future that we—in historical hindsight—know lies ahead, but she does nothing of the kind. Instead the novel ends with the tirelessly calculating and energetic Cromwell charting the King’s travels, as if in a board game, and planning that rarest of events for himself, a few days off: “I seem to have four, five days in hand. Ah well. Who says I never get a holiday?” That’s it. A holiday. He will spend it at Wolf Hall, the house of the Seymour family. And therein, I am sure, the opening of the sequel Bring Up The Bodies is to be found. It’s on my ‘to read’ list.

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It's Inevitable

I had to visit Brighton centre yesterday. My wife had two wristwatches that required new batteries and I wanted to purchase the Blue-Ray of the film 'Gone Girl'. This took me to Churchill Square for Goldsmiths - to install new watch batteries - and HMV for the Blue-Ray. It also took me close to the location of Waterstones, my favourite emporium....

I am a bibliophile. I cannot walk past a bookshop without slowing my step. I will linger at the window, gazing through the glass at stacks of books I have not yet read. I hover, telling myself I must read the pile on the bedside table before buying another. But I cannot resist the lure. Before long, I open the door, and that's it. I'm in, and I am going to be a while....

And so it was. There I was again, surrounded by thousands of books distributed over four floors. And of course I did. I bought a copy of "The Fish Ladder" by Katharine Norbury. It's her first book. According to Philip Pullman it is "a beautiful, strange, intoxicating and utterly unique story". Sounds good.

Meanwhile I must press on and finish reading "Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel - all 674 pages and then I have to read "Bring Up The Bodies", the sequel to Wolf Hall. So, I am not watching the BBC TV adaptation, currently showing, as this would probably get very confusing. I shall buy the series on DVD when it is released on 2nd March.

And then tackle that pile of books on the bedside table, not forgetting "The Fish Ladder"...