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People - NT Live

27/3/2013

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The more out of touch I become with mainstream cinema and its movies that are extended trailers for forthcoming computer games, the more I thank my lucky stars for NT Live! Several times a year the wife and I skip along to the cinema (which I love) to see stage plays that are invariably worth watching. People, a new piece of work by Alan Bennett, was shown at our local Odeon Cinema last Thursday, and it was a delight from start to finish.

At seventy-eight, Bennett hasn't lost the wicked edge to his comedy writing. People as a play probably isn't up there with some of his finest work, but heck, if you're Alan Bennett that's quite a tall order! In my opinion if Bennett rewrote the marketing blurb on a box of cornflakes it would make it worth reading.


The wonderfully lugubrious Frances De La Tour plays Dorothy Stacpole, who has inherited a great crumbling pile from a rather dissolute brother who allowed the family estate in South Yorkshire to fall into serious disrepair. Dorothy was once a jet-setting fashion model, but we learn that she stepped out of the limelight at the height of her fame because of a great sadness in her life. She has become almost reclusive in the once great house which she now shares with Iris, a part hilariously performed by Linda Bassett. Iris has her own personal attachment to the house which we discover during the course of the play. Selina Cadell plays June Stacpole, Dorothy's archdeacon sister. The part itself is more earnest and less immediately likeable than the other two female characters, but Miss Cadell brings her to life with great aplomb. I am not going to mention any more names but the supporting cast are excellent.

Basically, Dorothy is penniless, burdened with a crumbling house and needs to find a solution. To sell would incur vast sums of money in death duties and her sister June favours donating the property to the National Trust. There appear to be other options in the guise of a shady consortium who would like to dismantle the house brick by brick and relocate it to some warmer clime, like Dorset or Hampshire. Dorothy is tempted by the promise of a renovated lodge and an en-suite bathroom with hot water on tap. A third option appears in the guise of an ex-lover ( possibly a little contrived but still funny) who now directs porn movies and who might use the house regularly as a film location.

Bennett makes us laugh but he wants us to examine our values. How we now see everything as wearing a price tag. As a society over the past forty years we have allowed countless libraries to close and watched a decline in the general standard of education. He takes a swipe at the National Trust and parodies the way it packages 'England'; its intention here being to preserve the house and provide its visitors with an interactive, multi-media experience. Dorothy points out in one of her speeches that the house itself doesn't represent 'England' or 'Englishness' and never did; she basically just wants to live in a little comfort without hordes of people tramping through her home.

People is definitely worth watching. Check out the NT Live website and catch one of the many encore performances showing around the UK during April, and also see timings for performances broadcast at different times right around the world. Get to see a terrific new comedy, performed by a cast of highly accomplished actors under the able direction of Nicholas Hytner - for the price of a cinema ticket!

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A Ramble Round the Subject of Formatting!

20/3/2013

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Anyone who regularly reads this blog may have noticed that wherever possible I generally avoid the subject of my daily experiences as a writer. I've done the odd piece on things like e-book formatting, hopefully to pass on to others any useful stuff I've discovered about the process. But to be fair, I can't really imagine that anyone would desperately want to know what's been sloshing around in my addled brain from day to day. Honestly, would anyone really be interested to learn that on Wednesday last I took the unusual step of adding a teaspoon of sugar to my morning coffee because I'd got to bed slightly later than usual the night before, was therefore feeling slightly tired and in desperate need of a carb boost? Or, is it at all feasible that anyone might be with child (as they may have put it in the late 18th century) to hear that I took a walk and returned my wife's library book last Thursday? If there is anyone out there who would like me to expand on either of the two preceding questions, then I suggest they immediately write themselves a prescription "I must take more fun daily!".

The truth is that I haven't done very much in the past week or so that I'd consider particularly thrilling to share. The snow and cold snap of a week ago seems to have left us now. I saw some newly-born lambs when I drove over to Penshurst with Jude, tails frenetically wagging as they fed. Is it possible to pass a field with new born lambs and not go 'Ahh!'? We invited Jude's brother Jonny and his wife Pam over for a lovely Sunday lunch. Now that's an important thing, to make sure you keep in touch with and see whenever possible the people you care about - especially crucial as time passes. Sorry, just realised we ate a leg of lamb! Mmmm! (I am wheat and lactose intolerant so it would be very hard to be vegetarian).

I've spent most of my weekdays going through the final proof copies I had back from my generous readers, and then went on to format the print version of Roadrage. Once again we plan to use Biddles who are based in Norfolk to do the printing - they did a tremendous job for us with N & H. Roadrage is a very different book, still a thriller and still hopefully 'thrilling' but without any supernatural shenanigans; it will also have a slightly less traditional look and feel about its pages. Again we've opted for trade paperback (Airport) size. This is because after doing the maths it's really the only viable option for us as independent publishers. It's really important to us that our books are pleasurable to hold and look at (and read too of course!). Let's face it, the ebook is four times cheaper to buy, it contains exactly the same words, but if you're like me, nothing compares with holding a nice, fat, lovely book in your hands!

I'm very fortunate that my son Tom is doing the cover for me again as he did for Niedermayer & Hart. I may be biased, but I think it's wonderful. He's gone for a photographic image this time in contrast to the original watercolour of Valle Crucis Abbey (his own) that graced the cover of N & H. I hope to give you a preview shortly. At the moment we're still making last minute adjustments and changing bits of the 'blurb'. Now that's a subject that can make me tear my remaining hair out - writing 'blurbs'! How can 150 words possibly demand quite so much attention and cause so much frowning and shaking of the head?

So, print version complete, I have finally emerged from formatting hell - I embark upon the e-version tomorrow!


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Synchronicity

13/3/2013

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PictureMr Handel's House at 25 Brook St
Many years back I read Memories, Dreams, Reflections by the great psychiatrist C G Jung and Aniela Jaffé. I recall coming across the word synchronicity, which Jung used a lot and had spent many years researching and trying to explain. Here's how my dictionary describes the word - synchronicity - the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection. Jung seemed to suggest that these moments are a result of the multifarious underlying patterns constantly being thrown up by the universe (or multiverse or whatever) and which we remain largely oblivious to in our conscious lives. I've personally always felt we're far more interconnected than we 'think' we are. Anyway, don't panic, I'm not about to go into a great philosophical waffle. I think Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe summed up my feelings on the subject perfectly when he said, "Everything is both simpler than we can imagine and more entangled than we can conceive."

A few years back the actor/director Robert Rietty did a series of Sunday afternoon radio talks. My wife and I really enjoyed listening to the true stories he recounted. I recall one involved a Jewish couple living in Israel shortly after the war. The wife had felt compelled to take in a refugee child who had just arrived in the country. Her husband was angry about this as they were not wealthy and could barely support themselves, let alone look after a child who was badly traumatised after escaping the Holocaust. I'm probably not recounting this story exactly as it happened, but if memory serves me right, the wife heard the child exclaim "Mutti!"  She rushed in to find the child looking through her own family photo album and pointing at a photograph of her sister who had died in one of Hitler's extermination camps. She had unwittingly taken in her own sister's child.

Last weekend was our thirty-third wedding anniversary and we headed off to London  for a fun day of 'museum action'. We took in the Handel Museum and the Foundling Hospital Museum (which of course Handel was a great supporter of). It was a lovely day, and visiting a museum with my wife Judith is a bit like taking a walk through woodland with a springer spaniel - the enthusiasm is tangible! On the train up to London we had briefly discussed what had happened concerning a request I'd received last December from a member of the Dunvant Male Voice Choir (near Swansea, South Wales) to reprint a blog article I'd written. They'd asked if they could use it in their annual choir magazine. It had been about my old English teacher at Gowerton Boys' Grammar School, Gilbert Bennett, who'd been at one time Vice President of the Dunvant Choir. After emailing the article off as requested I hadn't heard anymore about it.

So, to the point: I hardly if ever look at visitor books and my wife invariably does. However on this occasion, I did and she didn't. We were at the Handel Museum on Saturday 9 March. The last entry in the visitors' book was from the day before, 8 March, and it read:

I love singing the Hallelujah Chorus - Happy memories of Gowerton School and Ebenezer Chapel, Dunvant - K M, Dunvant, Swansea. (I use initials but the full name was given).

At such a coincidence, I think all one can do is nod the head, smile and say to oneself, "The world is indeed a weird and wondrous place!"


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Ladybird Books

7/3/2013

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PictureA selection of my Ladybird collection
There is not a room in our house that doesn't contain books. A day wouldn't seem quite right unless something had been read in it! Our son's first school, which he only attended for a short time, didn't believe pressure should be brought to bear on a child to force them to read. We agreed. However, once we'd moved, the headmaster of his new school, a far more traditional establishment, expressed horror that our son at five was unable to read! I told him he was read to every single day and totally loved books, that he lived in a house filled with them, and that it was inconceivable to us, his parents, that he wouldn't grow up with a passion for reading too. The school exerted some gentle pressure on us but we still refused to put any on him - and guess what? He didn't turn out illiterate as feared; he did English Literature at A level and might easily have taken it as his main subject at university, if Art hadn't been his chosen path in life.

My point is that early reading should always aim to be a pleasure! The first books I ever owned, and many of these are still in my possession today, were Ladybird books. I absolutely adored them. Each of them cost my parents 2/6d (that's 12.5 pence in today's money). My parents were not wealthy, and I was given one a month. I recall how difficult it was to pick from all the available titles. I still have several of these today and still love the wonderful illustrations: What to look for in Spring, What to look for in Summer, What to look for in Autumn, What to look for in Winter (all illustrated by the marvellous CF Tunnicliffe RA), Stone Age Man in Britain, William the Conqueror, The Story of Captain Cook, The Story of Marco Polo and many others.

Anyone who was around in Britain in the late fifties/early sixties will probably agree that everything was still a bit drab. The Second World War had cost us dearly as a nation, not only in the blood spilled but because of the great financial drain on our resources - some rationing was still in place until the year before I was born, almost ten years after the end of WWII. I seem to remember that just about everything: the woodwork on the outside and inside of houses, clothes, even toys were mostly grey, brown or dark green. It's perhaps why everything went absolutely nuts in the Flower Power era and so (embarrassingly, when you see pictures of yourself in that dreadful shirt!) colour-crazy and uncoordinated - a reaction against the austerity of those post-war years perhaps?

Ladybird books however were way ahead of the game. One of the things that attracted me to them, like a bee to nectar, was the wonderful full-page all-colour illustrations. Years after I had outgrown the books I still recall gaining pleasure from browsing through them and enjoying the artwork - indeed from time to time I still do. The first book was produced in Loughborough, Leicestershire during WWI, the company claiming to publish 'Pure and healthy literature for children'. Apparently in their first ABC book, A stood for Armoured Train - so it's doubtful these would be considered politically correct today! Their How it Works: The Motor Car (published 1965) was (he chuckles affectionately) used by Thames Valley Police driving school as a simple general guide. And their How it Works: The Computer was adopted by some  university lecturers as an introduction to computing for their students. And apparently, some 200 copies of this same book were ordered in plain brown covers by the Ministry of Defence (tee hee hee!). The pocket-sized Ladybird book complete with a dust jacket that my wife and I remember (yes, she was busy reading Ladybirds in Kent at the same time as me in South Wales) first appeared during the Second World War. Our son went on to have his own collection with titles that were of their time and often based on popular TV series,  like He-man and She-Ra, Transformers, Thomas the Tank Engine etc.

Today the brand is part of Penguin Children's Books and the books have been translated into over sixty languages, but fortunately Ladybird remains in business, offering fun affordable books for children, after nearly a hundred years.


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    Available in paperback and ebook:
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    Available in paperback and ebook:
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