Monday

 This morning I am taking the car for its first MOT.  It will also have its annual service.  I will wait while all this happens, about two hours.   I am happy to do this sitting in the waiting area.  I will take my philosophy book.    Sometimes I walk up to the nearby  MacDonalds and have something to eat and a coffee but I don't think I can do that in my current state.   

The car has done just over 20,000 miles and it had only 3,000 on the clock when I bought it. 

I have done Wordle which had a stupid word as the answer which took me 6 to get. 

It is a grey morning, I thought about being abandoned as soon as I got up which is madness but that is how it goes even though it is six years since the event.   No wonder my health is bad, stressed out and not helped by blogging.  I really should give this up.  Friends?  No just bloggers who let you down because that is what they are, people who write mostly with anonymous names.  They want readers who do not cross a line.  

I really should give up. 

I saw the moonlight so I guess it's a full moon.  I just checked my stars and the month is in two and it will get better.   

Gripping

 I am going to see my brother this afternoon, the first time in about 6 weeks.  When I was ill he was keeping out of  my way because he was waiting to have his pulse slowed down which he has now had.    He went to London with another brother to a hospital there who did it.   I will hear about it today.  The brother he went with is not one I speak to.  I was wondering if he would ever take me to hospital as I drove along yesterday shouting words not repeatable.  

   Last night I carried on with my book in bed after watching a fascinating story on Netflix about a French serial killer and his serial killer wife accomplice.  I watched it all in one go.    He is now dead, died in prison and she is still alive hoping to get out at 85, evil woman, should rot in gaol like he did.   The story is one of fact being stranger than fiction in that they also bought a chateau in the most fortuitous of circumstances that make the whole story even  stranger.   I won't tell you how they bought it in case you plan to watch the documentary.   But God there are some awful people who roam the streets.  

I also watched Scandia Man again on Friday, the man who murdered the Swedish prime minister in the 1980s.  Very good viewing and I enjoyed it all the second time.  He died without ever being charged but there is little or no doubt he did it.   

Wordle and Warm

 Each morning I start the day with Wordle.  Very boring I know, particularly for you who don't do it.   Sometimes I am lazy at it and just stab around until I get the answer on 5 or 6.  Sometimes I am more diligent and work at it and get it quicker, or more to the point, in less steps.  Of course there is always the element of luck which plays an important role in how quick you solve.    But the scenario that catches one out and can lead to failure is when you have the last four letters and only the first letter to guess but those four letters are  the worlds your oyster for those letters.

 For instance, if you have solved, say,   ATCH then you have trillions to chose from for your final letter, the  first letter,  left from those you haven't already eliminated. 

Hatch

Batch

Watch

Match 

Catch

 Latch 

Patch

It was with one of these words, I can't remember the actual answer, that I recorded my first failure some while back.    They were all the kind of  first letters that one may not have already eliminated, with L probably being the most likely to have gone already. 

After failure number 1 future failures are much easier. 

I have other scenarios like this and they end in a failure or a do it in 6.

I hate it when it comes down to the guessing game.  

What else is there to say today?  It is still cold.   My electricity bill was paid yesterday by me of course and was a joy in that I have been heating myself so well during the cold months and was bracing myself for a biggish figure but the government monetary  help sorted that all for me.  I cannot imagine another winter of almost free heat ever happening again in my life time. 

I am now on to book three of the Balkan Trilogy and the Levant Trilogy awaits.  Of course we know that Weave is doing it in reverse order.   She is sworn to secrecy in not telling me the ending before she has reached the beginning. 

Friday

 I've written several posts this week but not published them.  I often think it is futile to say what I want to say and all looks pathetic on paper and is often taken that I am complaining, unhappy or  lonely when in fact none of these things are the case.  It is possible  to express opinions of disappointment with the way of the world without having a miserable profile.   I am a happy person, an optimist, glass half full, brimming over, but I still have disappointment in the what is going on in the world, even despair about the future, but I don't go around with a long face or become bad company.

This week I have been to my classes and seen my friends.   Yesterday, early morning,  I attended via Zoom a committee meeting of the life long learners to which I volunteered late last year you will recall.   I took a delivery of logs late morning and chatted to the log driver  and in the afternoon, just after lunch, I took a train to the city to see a film, What's Love Got to Do with It.    Unfortunately the film wasn't showing when I got there, the email to tell me of the problem only arrived as I arrived at the cinema (there was a lighting problem).  So I went in to see the second half of Tar rather than go straight back home so I have now seen Tar two and half times. 

I had an enjoyable day and made the most of it.  With so much going on I don't dwell too much on my predicament.    

I was told that common sense is laughable and old fashioned not long ago.  Well so be it, but a bit of common sense in Britain wouldn't go amiss.  We used to get along fine and we probably would get along fine again if it became alright to go back to calling a spade a spade, sticking up for ourselves,  and government could go on making fools of themselves on their own like Anthony Eden and his mistakes  and Profumo and  Wilson and his Ganex mac and devaluation  and strikes and Red Robbo and Beeching and Macmillan  and Thatcher  and the scandals that went along the front pages of the papers then, nothing new today,  but we still let ourselves talk to each other as friends with differences  and have great music, great films, great education, great hospitals, great industry, and great friendship with each other.   It may be old fashioned and out of order but I can't think why anybody would poo poo being friends with each other in the old way and putting differences to one side at least until reaching the dining table at home when politics could be talked about in private. 

This morning  I have a new course starting locally on Patronage in the Arts in the Renaissance Period.    Not a new subject to me but there will no doubt be something I haven't heard before.  The speaker is running a three week course and she is an art historian from the university here. 

Keeping going

 A dull day and I am up and gettting ready to go to Film class.  Today we look at '60s films.  I looked last night and gave up, so many to choose from and Nigel hasn't sent us a prompt for today's class.  The start of Bond with Sean Connery, Dr No, then there's Beatles films, or Kes or A Taste of Honey, or Blow Up, the list of British films of the '60s is endless.  So no notes today in preparation. 

My Netflix recommendation for those who haven't already seen it is Don't Look Up which I have now seen 3 times and probably recommended here the same amount of times.    This is the satire on modern society and is both funny and dark.   Currently one of my favourite films.  I would like to have seen it at the cinema rather than just at home but it never made the big screen here.  If there is ever a one-off showing I will go in spite of having seen it already so many times. 

As you can see I haven't got a lot to talk about,  a reflection on how I feel at the moment, a complete outsider to life and current affairs and paddling my own canoe.   It is too depressing in the world to do much else and the best way to enjoy myself. 

Later

The Films we looked at as significant to British film in the early 1960s were as follows:-

Room at the Top (actually 1959 but significant to our build up to the 1960s)

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning  1960

Billy Liar 1963 

Tom Jones 1963

A Hard Day's Night 1964 

Georgy Girl 1966

And we just mentioned Dr No (1962) and the beginning of Bond era.  And we closed with Cliff Richard in The Young Ones (1961)  as we always have something like noise or singing to end on. 

We continue with the 1960s next week. 

I thought you might like to know and you will most likely remember the films I mentioned. 

Women Talking - film

 I went to see Women Talking yesterday afternoon and loved it.  A superb film with brilliant acting.  Not everybody's cup of tea but extremely moving, even funny in places, and enormously passionate.  The story is of  the Mennonites, a closed religious community/  The women  have been violated, raped, assaulted and abused by their own menfolk for years - raped by their own sons and brothers and husbands, not always  their own.   The story is based on a novel which itself was based on a true story, a story that really happened in the 21st century.     The females of all ages are raped, many of them children, and were tranquillised by a cattle drug sprayed in their faces and they never saw who was raping them, which man or boy it was.   The resulting offspring of incest were all to be seen. 

The women decide to fight back when one man is identified and the men go off to bail him and the women remain to plan their next move.  This is what we see in the film.  The women's  conversations in the barn are minuted, the women wanted a record of what they said, by one man who they allow in, the community school master who has himself been banished from the community by the men but only allowed back to teach the boys.  He is played by Ben Whishaw and an extremely moving account he gives.   He confirms that the women and female children are not safe from any of the males, boys and men.  (None of the women can read or write, only the boys in the community are taught).

The film is the women planning what they are going to do next.  We see nothing of the rapes except the blood stained beds, clothes and bruises, and resulting pregnancies and offsprings.    They discuss the options, forgiveness, revenge or leave.  I cannot begin to describe the passion, the sometimes anger, and the sometimes quiet voices of  reason and practicality  of the women,

I loved it, grim but lovely to watch and listen and  gripping waiting on every word.    Normally I am not a Jessie Buckley fan but here she was brilliant, along with all the others.   Filmed in a subdued light, or a palette of subdued colours more like,  amongst fields of grasses and flowers  one felt part of the community with the women.  I lived and breathed it with them.    

Writer

 A few weeks ago, before I was ill, I bought four books in a charity shop for £2 in the hope of finding a decent book of fiction to read.  (I find popular fiction on offer today is poor, poorly constructed stories, poor endings as if bolted on  because the author doesn't know how to finish the story,  and poor build up of characters,   altogether poor). 

Anyway, back to the charity shop purchases,  two were rubbish, one was ok - the story of a schools inspector in the Dales who apparently had been popular on the TV at one time, a bit like a schools inspector and not a  vet in the Dales type story - and one outstanding find.

The outstanding book was the last one I picked off the shelf in fact.  I had passed it by, glanced and left it and then gone back to it only because it was set in Bucharest and I had been to Bucharest once upon a time.  I returned to it thinking it might be worth a look and at only 50p nothing particularly lost if it turned out rubbish.   It wasn't.

It was like discovering another Barbara Pym.    

The author is Olivia Manning.  The book is The Great Fortune,   The cover told me it was Book One of the Balkan Trilogy.     Like Pym Manning has a shrewd eye for detail, nuances, people.  

Olivia Manning was born in 1908 and died in 1980.    Barbara Pym was born in 1913.   Iris Murdoch was born in 1919.   Of the three Iris Murdoch was the only one who found success in her lifetime.   Barbara Pym's publishers stopped publishing her altogether in the 1950s and Olivia Manning fought long and hard for meagre success.  She was a book reviewer for various journals of the time and also a poet.   She struggled to get her work published. 

She lamented that Iris Murdoch was the female author most talked about and thought it grossly unfair.  She probably didn't do herself any favours as she protested loudly about this.  

I am now on book two of the Balkan Trilogy obtaining a copy via Amazon and will soon be ordering book 3.  It is a fictional story based on Olivia Manning's real life wartime experiences with her husband, a British Council teacher who was sent to Bucharest  at the start of war and ended up in the Middle East.  The Balkan Trilogy is followed by the Levant Trilogy.  No doubt I will be obtaining copies of these as well.   In the books she re-invents herself and her husband as Guy and Harriet Pringle.   Each night now I go to bed to find out what Guy and Harriet have been up to and what is happening in Romania and surroundings during the early part of WW2.  It is beautifully written and a page turner.  

It is not easy being a successful woman in a man's world  but hopefully that is changing.  In fact it has changed so much  in literature that we get loads of published rubbish that should never be published.   I threw so many rubbish novels across the room I gave up reading fiction for years.   Who are the Olivia Mannings of today?  I was recommended to read Sally Rooney and thought her writing was pretty ordinary, nothing like that of a great writer and story teller.  It seems it is a rare gift. 

(If you want to read just one Olivia Manning for a book club recommendation or something then the first of the Trilogy, The Great Fortune, can be easily read as a stand alone book).