The Imitation Game

This is one film I am determined to see at the cinema and have booked tickets for Ros and me for a performance on Sunday at Cineworld, Brighton.

The film (sorry US readers - movie) is a nail-biting race against time following Alan Turing (pioneer of modern-day computing and credited with cracking the German Enigma code) and his brilliant team at Britain's top-secret code-breaking centre, Bletchley Park, during the darkest days of World War II. Turing, whose contributions and genius significantly shortened the war, saving thousands of lives, was the eventual victim of an unenlightened British establishment, but his work and legacy live on.

The cast includes Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Beard, Matthew Goode and Allen Leech.

This Boy by Alan Johnson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

SPOILER ALERT
In this his first book, Johnson vividly invokes his childhood, the early loss of his mother, and being brought up largely by his elder sister in the Rachman slums of north Kensington. Reading this deeply moving book I found it sometimes difficult to reconcile that Johnson grew up in much the same era as me (i am four years his senior) given the poverty and squalor that he lived in. His mother Lily’s life was a constant struggle against loneliness, grinding poverty and poor health, having married the feckless, ne’er-do-well Steve. She died, aged 42, leaving Alan and Linda, aged 13 and 16, to fend for themselves. Johnson’s sister Linda is the real hero of the story. Resisting attempts to take them into care, she succeeded in persuading the local authority to find them a council flat in Battersea and held the fort until Alan was old enough to make his way in the world.
Given his start in life Alan Johnson could have been forgiven had he turned into an angry, bitter class-warrior instead of the affable, sensible, laid-back politician that he was to become.
If you grew up in much the same era you will find this book riveting.

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Wonderful Waterstones

My favourite emporium in Brighton is the bookseller Waterstones. If I am in town I am compelled to visit, I cannot walk past the place. It is a magnet that draws me in and it is futile to believe I won't buy at least one book, which will be added to the list of at least forty or more I have at home waiting to be read. To date this year I have read forty-five books so I have almost a year's worth of reading material stacked away upstairs. Will I ever catch up I wonder?

It is that time of year when Waterstones unveil their eight contenders for Waterstones' Book of the Year, with titles nominated by the chain's UK stores. The winner will be announced next month from the following:

• Everyday Sexism Laura Bates Simon & Schuster
• The Miniaturist Jessie Burton Picador
• The Narrow Road To The Deep North Richard Flanagan Chatto & Windus
• Persiana: Recipes From The Middle East & Beyond Sabrina Ghayour Mitchell Beazley
• Once Upon An Alphabet Oliver Jeffers HarperCollins Children's Books
• The Opposite Of Loneliness: Essays And Stories Marina Keegan Simon & Schuster
• H Is For Hawk Helen Macdonald Jonathan Cape (This gets my vote)
• Capital In The Twenty-First Century Thomas Piketty Harvard University Press

I would like to have seen This Boy by Alan Johnson amongst the nominations but I will Take H Is For Hawk as my favourite.

The Brighton beautiful light extravaganza

MOTHER Nature has once again laid on a spectacular light and sound show.

The sky was illuminated with multiple bolts of lightning, crackling with electricity – and then came the crashing of thunderstorms over southern England.  The dramatic images show the impact of the unsettled weather on the South Coast on Sunday evening.

Warm winds brought in the lightning, thunder and sheets of driving rain along with the dark, foreboding skies.

The ruins of Brighton’s West Pier were eerily framed by two large fingers of lightning, while the night sky was split in half above the Isle of Wight by a huge lightning bolt.

And we can expect to be lit up by more powerful lightning strikes again over the coming days....

H is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald was announced last night as the winner of the UK's most prestigious prize for non-fiction books. Her memoir H is for Hawk, described by the judging panel as "a book like no other", was awarded the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. It is on my book-list as next to read.

‘In real life, goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble housecats. Bigger, yes. But bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier, and much, much harder to see. Birds of deep woodland, not gardens, they’re the birdwatchers’ dark grail.’

As a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T. H. White’s tortured masterpiece, The Goshawk, which describes White’s struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest.

When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.

‘To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk, and so gain the ability to predict what it will do next. Eventually you don’t see the hawk’s body language at all. You seem to feel what it feels. The hawk’s apprehension becomes your own. As the days passed and I put myself in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her, my humanity was burning away.’

Destined to be a classic of nature writing, H is for Hawk is a record of a spiritual journey - an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming. At the same time, it's a kaleidoscopic biography of the brilliant and troubled novelist T. H. White, best known for The Once and Future King. It's a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to try to reconcile death with life and love.

A Week In Paris

A Week in Paris by Rachel Hore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Having looked at other reviews on Goodreads of Rachel Hore's 'A Week In Paris' it appears that most readers are female. I trust that I am not alone as a male reader because I thoroughly enjoyed this compelling story, set in the years between 1937 and 1961 and located mainly in Paris, a city I love and know so many of the places featured, although in these pages darkened by the Nazi Occupation during the 2nd World War. A well developed plot, comprehensively researched, with wonderful characterisation, had me hooked. A heartwarming tale of war, secrets, family and enduring love. Yes, I loved it.

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Here You Come Again

Heard this again today on BBC Radio 2. Here You Come Again by Dolly Parton. Every time I hear this it takes me right back to a night in 1978...

I was on a business trip to St. Louis, MO and Ros came with me. We had flown into New York on the Laker 'Skytrain', spent a couple of nights and then continued our journey to St. Louis on either Ozark or Eastern (memory a little grey here!).

On the night in question we had enjoyed dinner with some American friends and finished up, late, in 'The Roaring Forties' bar in West County. We were drinking Budweiser I recall and I was playing a pinball machine when I heard raised voices at the bar. A guy built like a bear and wearing a stetson was telling Ros that the Marlboro cigarettes on the bar were his and Ros was insisting that they were mine (go Ros!). The dude remained polite but insisted they were his. I turned away from the pinball machine, pulled my cigs from my pocket and waived them at Ros! Profound apologies followed. The guy just shrugged and said: "It's OK, you're English" !!

 
And whilst this was going on, Dolly was in full voice over the music system in the bar with 'Here You Come Again' !!

I love America, I have some great American friends, I love Dolly and I remember with great affection 'The Roaring Forties' bar in St. Louis, MO and the dude in the stetson... And 'Here You Come Again' is one of my all-time favourites...

Here You Come Again

The official music video for "Here You Come Again" from the recent release, "Dolly: Live From London."

WWW.YOUTUBE.COM

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