Blog Posts - M J Johnson

Radio Four

17/4/2016

I've been decorating over the past week or so - trying to catch up with the stuff I pretend isn't waiting to be done when I'm busy writing. I'm not a great fan of the paintbrush, if the truth be told, however, I have been grateful for the opportunity to listen in to more on the radio. When I say radio I am naturally referring to BBC Radio 4. We generally wake up to Radio 3, the classical station, as the other half dislikes opening her eyes (ears!) to the full-on confrontation that is the Today news programme on 4.

The variety of programmes on Radio 4 is always astonishing, and as someone who rarely watches television I think I'd happily pay my BBC licence fee for this service alone, which has managed to both educate and entertain me over many years. If only I could write and listen to radio programmes at the same time! Alas, during periods of writing the radio has to be switched off until I break at lunchtime (here I must confess to having been hooked into the Helen & Rob marital abuse storyline of late in Radio Four’s daily soap The Archers!). I've really enjoyed some of the drama offerings, especially Killing Time by Peter Jukes, starring Lenny Henry, and The Clerks' Room by Janice Okoh, plus a number of one-off plays and some serials like Home Front, about the First World War, which relates itself to a day exactly a hundred years ago. But the Radio 4 diet is completely omnivorous, and this week I've also particularly relished hearing Thinking Allowed and The Media Show.

There is one fifteen minute programme that I've found immensely engaging though, and I'm so glad I didn't miss any of it: Free Speech, written and presented by Timothy Garton Ash. Basically this is a series of essays on a subject I truly believe we should all feel passionate about - the hard won right to express ourselves without prejudice. This is a terrific short series and I can highly recommend listening to it.

So, mostly thanks to BBC Radio, the decorating has been getting along nicely and relatively pain-free!

Gales, Fence Posts, Aussie Literature and Bexhill-on-Sea

2/4/2016

I haven't written a blog for weeks, not because I didn't want to, or ran out of ideas, simply because I needed the time for other stuff. My overall writing hours have reduced by about eight hours a week, because at the moment I spend one day a week working on my house. Readers of this blog may recall that a while back we had quite extensive work done to the exterior. This in itself had consequences, which resulted in quite a lot of re-plastering and repair work becoming necessary on the inside. That has mostly all been completed, but unfortunately every room still requires some decorating, and the phrase employed here 'requires some decorating' generally means ' needs completely redecorating'. So, one day a week, I do the job I most dislike, put on my hair shirt (tendency to badly overdramatise), and get decorating! Okay, it's not that bad - it beats eight hours down a pit!

But there's a ray of light at the end of every tunnel: I'm only days away from completing the draft of the book I'm currently working on. It's quite a complex story, with two strands running parallel to each other like its predecessor Niedermayer & Hart (reviews). I'm excited for two reasons: it's always a relief to reach the end of a long piece of work, and secondly, because the book is now in such an advanced state that I'm quietly confident I have something which will satisfy the many fans of the earlier work. If you haven't read Niedermayer & Hart, now's your chance, and if you have read it and it wasn't to your taste (takes all sorts to make a reading world!) I hope I'm speaking for most writers when I say please don't take it too personally! Sometimes when I look at reviews on Amazon I'm truly aghast at some of the comments made on one star ratings relating to a product, giving reasons such as: because it arrived later than guaranteed, or the packaging was damaged, or because you hadn't realised you had a region 2 DVD Player and you bought a region 1 DVD. Although, especially to the independent author, the star rating system is a vital tool for marketing books, I guess the best writers can hope for is that most potential readers will, as I do, take the majority's view as the best guide, for everything from books to hotels to coffee grinders!

The one star reviewer can take his/her axe to anything it seems. Even the beautifully written, wonderfully engaging Harp in the South trilogy by Ruth Park isn't immune. I discussed buddy reading the first book she wrote in the series in my previous blog, which turned out to be the second part in the final story order. I personally chose to read the books as they were written, and I'm glad I did, simply because Park, I think, became more confident as a writer over the thirty years between Poor Man's Orange and Missus (first chronologically but written last). This is a lovely series of books, deeply insightful into the lives of the Irish/Australian Catholics who inhabit their pages without ever becoming either too romancified (could that possibly be a word? Should be if not!) or doomed never to get a break and to suffer pain and torment for all eternity like the characters in a Cormac McCarthy novel. If you enjoy good writing and well-drawn characters you really care about that are never stereotypical, I strongly recommend this series. My buddy reading comrades all agreed.

And finally to some thoughts on Bexhill-on-Sea and fence-posts: the wife and I paid an Easter Sunday visit to my mother-in-law in her nursing-home last weekend. She's ninety-two, and sometimes, as on this visit, she has a sleepy day. I think it's just that the battery gets run down, and when it does it takes a long time to charge up. Anyway, we've learned to accept things as they are and to be grateful that she's well and happy, and when she is fully alert she can still read half a dozen books in a week and make you wish you'd paid more attention to the dictionary when you play her at Scrabble. We had a lovely bracing walk along the seafront and had a nice coffee at Reillys cafe with my brother-in-law. 'Storm Katie' continued overnight and we woke to find two fence-panels down in the morning - let's hope our climbing rose and clematis will recover!

Buddy Read - The Harp in the South

13/2/2016

I think I mentioned a few weeks back that I was about to take part in a buddy read of The Harp in the South by Ruth Park. A few of us on Twitter choose a book unread by us all, (often an unexplored author too) and we start reading on a set date - no rules really, other than we only do a title every six months - this is because reading has to be a pleasure, not a chore!

This book was suggested by our Australian member* and I think all of us feel really pleased about it, because we found it a hugely enjoyable book. The Harp in the South (published 1948) is actually the second book in a trilogy, although it was written first. The success of the novel was followed by Poor Man’s Orange (1949 - last book in trilogy) and Missus, the first book in the trilogy but actually written very much later, in 1985 in fact. I had no idea until I read, in the aforementioned review, that the (Harp in South) book was the winner of a newspaper competition and serialised in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1947. It’s not difficult to believe it won, because it really is so very well wrritten; it perhaps also explains the slightly episodic nature of the narrative, which might be viewed as a flaw in the writing until you’re aware of that fact. The novel, perhaps surprisingly today, was seen as controversial when it first appeared, many arguing that Park had made up the slum life we experience through the lives of the Irish Catholic Darcy family who are central to her book. Park attested to the book’s authenticity, having herself lived in a tenement in the Surry Hills area of Sydney with her husband when first married.

The book is set at the time it was written, which certainly took this reader by surprise, probably because of the acute poverty experienced by its cast of characters. Initially (because the period isn’t stated), I thought it was set in the early 1930s or even earlier, but oblique references to Lana Turner etc put me on the right track. What really came across for me was the tolerance and care these people demonstrate for each other, how despite everything they somehow manage to uphold their standards of decency, despite the plodding grimness of their lives. It’s hard to believe (from our cosseted lives today) how a day’s outing to the seaside could have been seen as a momentous occasion. There is tragedy, ugliness and despair here, but there are also many light-hearted moments, and the book left me feeling exhilarated and uplifted. The writing itself is excellent and Park’s descriptions are always beautifully crafted.

Ruth Park (1917- 2010) was actually a New Zealander by birth and was no stranger to poverty, having grown up through the Depression there. She was a prolific writer, wrote several novels including many books for children and produced literally thousands of radio scripts. She died at the fine age of ninety-three.

If like me you were almost completely ignorant when it came to Antipodean literature, then add this title to your TBR pile. Or, just add it simply because it’s a very good book. I’m delighted to have found a new author and especially happy because I still have two parts of the trilogy left to go. Woohoo!

* Caffeine and Chapters review

Making Room for the New

31/1/2016

I wrote a (slightly tongue-in-cheek) blog recently about The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, a simple, effective way to banish clutter forever by Marie Kondo (see Wrong Twice). I admit that I found the book a little bit of an ordeal to read, and I joked in my blog that the good thing about its lengthy title was that, being a slim book, there wasn’t that much more to get through! However, joking aside, it has proven to be an immensely practical aid to de-cluttering.

We decided that the most sensible (and sane) approach was for us to make a slow tactical ascent of Clutter Mountain by tackling it in stages. We pencilled into our diaries a series of weekend dates over the end of 2015 and early part of 2016 - aiming to tackle at least one of the categories Kondo describes in her book every third week (practical for us). First we took on Clothes, then Books, and our most recent session was with Papers. I foolishly thought this particular category would prove to be a doddle - but five solid hours later, after producing a heap of papers beside our shredder reminiscent of the Nixon White House, I thought differently! We still hadn’t quite completed the task by the time we deemed it necessary to stop for the day, the plan is to finish off with a few hour-long sessions over the next week. All this stuff, I hasten to point out, was all very easily identified as thoroughly unimportant, or totally redundant and of no significance to either our present or future lives. Frankly, it is hard to credit the amount of junk that accumulates around us over time. Clutter had taken on the persona of a curmudgeonly old miser that had insidiously built a little kingdom for itself around the periphery of our lives and was threatening to take us hostage. It had to be shown the door!

The ‘fumigation’ process still has a few months left to run, however, I think it safe to say, eviction orders have definitely been served and the clean-up is underway. What’s really remarkable is how much lighter and brighter the house feels, and despite having toted about half a dozen sacks of clothes and about twenty large boxes of books to charity shops, we still have clothes to wear and books to read - but only the things we actually like wearing and books we either love, plan to read, read again, or simply want to keep for reference etc.

So, basically, if the idea takes your fancy and you too would like to try this approach, take heart from my assurance that the baby doesn’t have to be thrown out with the proverbial bathwater!

I’d love to hear from anyone who has de-cluttered in this way, or pursued an alternative method.

Little Tales

17/1/2016

This week I’ve been reading Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith, a collection of vignettes, about the type of person it’s easy to dislike. These little fables, often very brief, take on a different character study e.g. The Victim, The Evangelist, The Mobile Bed-Object, The Prude, The Middle-Class Housewife etc. and each in turn is subjected to Highsmith’s unique, acerbic and archly wicked eye. A lot has been written about Highsmith’s misanthropic nature, even her friends seem to have found her difficult and spiky a lot of the time, but I couldn’t honestly comment on whether these tales in any way reflect her own (reputed) hatred of her own sex; personally, I think Highsmith is simply having a lot of fun with this collection. The tales almost invariably end badly, are often a little bit sneaky, unkind, unpleasant or downright nasty - they are also (at all times), hugely entertaining and great fun. I suspect Highsmith wrote these stories, as the title itself suggests to me, with her tongue very firmly fixed on the inside of her cheek. I read them, as I believe they were written - to be enjoyed. And so I did.

Next week, starting tomorrow, I am very pleased to say it’s Buddy Reading time again! It’s an untitled, non-exclusive club that is open to anyone. We read no more than two books a year together, which makes the exercise a pleasure rather than a pain. No genre is excluded, and so far the only plan appears to be taking on a book one of us suggests that hasn’t been read by anyone else. This time we are reading an Australian classic, The Harp in the South by Ruth Park. It’s the second book in a trilogy of the same title, however, it was the book she actually wrote first. Park completed the first part of the trilogy, Missus, almost forty years later. Some of us have taken the time to read Missus first and others, like myself, plan to read the books in the order they were written. I am really looking forward to discovering a writer (slightly ashamed to admit this) that I had previously never heard of; in fact, it’s my intention to rectify my woefully poor knowledge of Antipodean writers.

Pick up a copy of Harp in the South, send me a message and when you’ve completed the book leave any comments you have either on Amazon or Goodreads or on your blog (if you have one) and send us the link, or, better still, join us on Twitter - myself and the other Buddy Readers will very much enjoy hearing your views. Believe me, it’s a surprisingly painless way of finding good reading.

Careless Talk ...

10/1/2016

As mentioned before (see How I came to Traditional English Folk via Abba) it can be a dangerous thing to voice a preference in my house. This Christmas I received a pile of Patricia Highsmith books - I read her Ripley stories last year as well as her classic first novel, the psychological thriller Strangers on a Train. All it would have required from me were the words “I really like ...” and Judith would have ear-marked them for her pressie drawer. Fortunately for me, I probably completed the above sentence with words along the lines of “(I really like) and admire the way Patricia Highsmith writes,” rather than “(I really like) the artwork - it’s the best thing about her books!” So, lots of great reading for me to look forward to in 2016. I already own a (tragically small) cache of the Charles Portis titles I haven’t read yet - I eke my Portis out because he’s a favourite writer, and as a novelist he hasn’t been very prolific (although he may still surprise us, of course!) - maybe I’ll pick up one of the new ones and re-read an old favourite this year. Yippee!

A funny thing happened this Christmas - the first time in all the Christmasses Judith and I have spent together : we gave each other the same present. It was a DVD of The Seventh Cross (1944) starring Spencer Tracy. It’s a bit difficult to get a copy of it in the UK, and I’d always wanted to see it again having caught it only once on the TV as a boy in Wales. It’s set in pre World War Two Germany, with the Nazis in power, where an atmosphere of fear exists. It’s easy to understand why we thought to give each other this film, as we did a Christmas market trip in mid-December to Dortmund in Germany, where we visited a former Gestapo prison, now a museum which bears testimony to those who opposed the Nazis and their despicable ideology. The film tells this story too, and is perhaps an unusual example of a wartime propaganda movie because many of the Germans are portrayed sympathetically and not simply as stereotypical bad guys. For my money, Spencer Tracy is always worth watching. The museum in Dortmund was excellent and my wife Judith has written a very interesting piece about it on her own blog, take a look Winterreise to Dortmund .

So, here we are, the Christmas/New Year shenanigans are behind us once again and most of us have, I expect, settled back into daily life. I’m back writing, working on the last chapters (second draft) of the follow-on book to Niedermayer & Hart. One nice thing about writing a second draft, in contrast to a first, is the certainty that you actually do have a book.

Pip Pip!

Happy 2016!

1/1/2016

I stopped making New Year resolutions many years ago. I admit that I’ve had a number of bad habits in the past that were regularly marked down, destined to become ‘has beens’ in the forthcoming New Year - sometimes my iron resolve lasted days, weeks even, but generally I was lucky if I made it til midday on 1st Jan. So much for those determined declarations of intent!

On reflection, my most destructive habits (e.g. smoking) are now happily consigned to the past. Even so, I still cautiously avoid getting physically too close while anyone’s actively smoking and even find myself holding my breath as I walk past them. I would hate to become ‘hooked’ again and know full well that it would only require me to listen to the delusion that ‘one little cigarette would do me no harm’ to be led astray. I always feel sad to see young people smoking, but understand that they wouldn’t appreciate me pointing out the dangers of smoking to them.

So, no specific New Year resolutions. However, I do have a number of wishes I’d love to see come to fruition:

I’d like to live in a more equal society where the gap between the richest and the poorest people in my own country and on this planet is dramatically reduced. I don’t think the answer to this is quite as simple as just taking all their money off the rich - a truly fair and just world requires all of us to play a part.

I’d like to see some genuine consensus between our leaders on environmental issues. So far we’ve only witnessed lip-service and a good deal of hot air - we live together on one planet, and it behoves us all to take more care of it. Our politicians are all too often vain, complacent and slippery and must be held to account, which demands more effort from individuals like you and me - politicians will only pay attention if we make them listen.

I’d like to live in a world where peace prevails and where differences are aired around a table. Most human conflict ultimately concludes in this way, so what a shame we find the inevitable solution so unthinkable at the beginning. The cost of intransigence is invariably great suffering and too often means the loss of many innocent lives. I’d dearly love to see the world’s arms dealers go out of business. Harry Patch (1898 - 2009), last surviving British soldier who fought in World War One, put it very powerfully when he asked: “Why did we fight? The peace was settled round a table, so why the hell couldn’t they do that at the start, without losing millions of men?”

Unless every human being on this planet has a profound change of heart, it’s hard to imagine these wishes coming true in 2016, in my lifetime, or even within the lifetime of my beautiful new grand-daughter - or even that of her own grand-daughter. Yet, these remain my wishes for this and for every New Year.

And I do truly believe that change begins with me.

In 1987 my wife and I moved out of London to a village in Sussex. I told the man who owned our little grocery store that the reason we didn’t buy his eggs was because they weren’t free-range. The following week he got some in for a try-out. Guess what? His egg sales actually increased. Thirty years on it’s hard to imagine a time when free-range eggs were not widely available. Likewise, when Mrs Thatcher refused to impose sanctions upon the South African Government and its loathsome apartheid system, thousands and thousands of people in Britain and Ireland boycotted South African products e.g. fruit. I believe this action on the part of many individuals made a real difference; justice finally prevailed, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the rest is history. One young woman in Ireland and her union colleagues spent two and a half years on strike pay after refusing to sell Outspan grapefruit at her checkout.

Like I said, I believe change begins with me. The American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead put it like this: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Let’s all do our best to make it a healthy, peaceful and happy 2016 for all!

Links:
Irish anti-apartheid movement:
http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/an-boks-amach-the-irish-anti-apartheid-movement/

Wrong Twice!

14/12/2015

I listen to my wife’s advice on what to read for the following reasons:

1. Because after thirty odd years, she knows my taste.

2. She’s very well read herself (far better than I am - but don’t tell her I admitted it!).

However, advice and gentle suggestion are very different to being ‘told’ you have to read a certain title and are even issued with a timetable for completing the task. The ultimatum stated .... “Read it by 1 December or else I’ll start without you!”

Yes - not just bossy behaviour but behaviour that goes way beyond bossy!

I dug my heels in as you’d expect, and met her insistence and righteous fervour with sarcasm and the odd withering glance (mostly I withered when she wasn’t looking). But eventually, gentle reader, her eyebrow arched just one too many times, and my resistance collapsed.

Booohoohoo! (sound made by weeping man).

The book I was forced into reading, you’ll need to know?

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying: a simple, effective way to banish clutter forever by Marie Kondo

Did I enjoy reading this book?

Nooo!

Do I think the author is a nut?

Yes.

Was it worth reading?

(Grudgingly) Yes.

Booohoohoo! (same sound of man weeping again).

Yes, this book was definitely worth reading. We were deluged beneath an ocean of clutter that had been acquired over decades. The simple points Marie Kondo makes, and her practical tips about getting rid of accumulated clutter, were definitely a new and useful approach for tackling this very real problem of having too much stuff!

And I should know about too much stuff - having had the unenviable task of reducing my late mother’s belongings shortly before she went into sheltered accommodation and a greatly reduced living space. I counted over twenty car journeys I made to the municipal tip/recycling centre, and approximately the same number to local charity shops. Mam hadn’t been able to throw out anything over her whole lifetime - hanging in a wardrobe were all my father’s clothes, despite him having passed away seventeen years before. It filled me with great sadness, and there were real tears shed at times; I vowed I wouldn’t leave such a legacy for my own son to have to deal with.

If you seriously would like to get rid of the clutter that surrounds you and lighten-up your life - then read this book! Fortunately, the book’s title covers a considerable percentage of the entire reading matter if you’re tackling it on Kindle - so, mercifully, not too much more to go!

Would I recommend this book as a practical aid to de-cluttering?

Yes, definitely.

Would I recommend this book as good reading?

Sorry, I must’ve dropped off, what was the question again?

However, I did read something over the same period that satisfied all criteria. From First to Last by Damon Runyon is a truly fantastic read . This is a companion volume to On Broadway by Damon Runyon and between the two they contain (I understand) just about all his stories. They are truly delightful, literally from first to last! The language, dialogue and cast of quirky characters are richly comic and unique.

We have had these books on our shelves since the late 70s and Jude had encouraged me time and time again to read them. I resisted, mainly because I told myself I didn’t like short stories much.
I don’t think I had a closed mind. It must simply be because short-story writing has improved.

Okay, I was wrong again!

Catalogue of Dreams!

8/11/2015

As a boy, I remember a favourite pastime of mine was browsing the pages of toys in my mother’s mail-order catalogue. When I was a little older I may have sneaked a peek at the ladies lingerie section (undoubtedly at the behest of naughty, bigger boys who’d befriended me and wished to deflect me from my naturally saintly inclinations!).

I remember my son Tom had a great penchant for the Argos catalogue and remember him as a little lad sitting up in bed happily surveying all the stuff he would like to have possessed whilst listening to the Mozart Horn Concerto that he invariably had on the cassette player at bedtime. He would have been lucky if he ever acquired a tiny percentage of those things he fancied, as we were pretty broke when he was small. But I recall the wise words of Bertrand Russell who said, “To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.” Tom was always a happy contented child who easily accepted what he could or could not have, and let’s face it, sometimes a thing is far more enigmatic and satisfying in our imaginations than it is in reality. I recall getting a wonderful pedal car for Christmas when I was four - subsequently took a bend too sharply in Aberdare Park on its test drive, landed on my head - and never went near that car again! However, I played happily with the giant box it came in until it fell to bits and recall shedding a tear when it was put out for the rubbish men.

Finally, gentle reader, I come to the confession part of this post ! Brace yourselves!

On Saturday last, my wife caught me browsing the Tool Station catalogue before breakfast. It seems where I was once mesmerised by the Marineville Control Centre from Stingray, or ached to own a Thunderbird Two, I now find myself drooling over the Makita RP1801X Plunge Router or Milwaukee M12BDDXKIT - 202C 4-in-1 Drill Driver.

Maybe I should disguise this Aladdin’s cave of secret desires in a brown paper wrapping, or better still, conceal it under another cover, perhaps one torn from a great work by Marcel Proust, or the collected poems of Ezra Pound, perhaps?

Happy browsing!

Halloween Again!

31/10/2015

The clocks went back last weekend, so it’s light when we wake up and gets dark sooner in the evenings. The shops have been jam-packed with the paraphernalia of Halloween for weeks. This still seems quite an odd phenomenon to people of my generation, as it wasn’t a very celebrated festival when we were kids and the ‘trick or treat’ element, imported from the US, took at least a decade after my own childhood before establishing itself as a cultural event in Britain.

Judith and I just returned from a few days’ holiday in Wales. We had a grand time, visiting old friends and interesting places. Last Sunday morning we could be found walking across the cliffs at Ogmore, where during my teenage years back in the early Seventies I spent many happy weeks at the school camp there. I could find no trace of it and wonder if the site itself is no longer? A large amount of house-building has gone on there since I was a boy and although the coastline is unassailably spectacular it has lost something of its wildness due to this. Still beautiful though, and I was delighted to be introducing Judith to a section of coastline we’d somehow missed during our many dozens of return trips home.

The evening before, we’d visited Rest Bay in Porthcawl, just six or seven miles around the coast. We sat on the bench I always associate with my parents. It was their favourite spot and it's not hard to see why! Judith and I sat in silence and thought of them for a while, all the happy ‘jaunts’ we’d been on with them to that very spot. Very soon it will be three years since Mam passed away and inevitably, as with the death of any loved one, I find my mind at this time of year filled with memories, some happy, some melancholic.

Appropriately for Halloween:

I recall visiting my parents back in the eighties. I think on this occasion I had come alone, and I remember HTV, the Welsh commercial television network, was showing the TV movie of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot over two consecutive evenings, late night. Dad was a man who liked to get to his bed before midnight, but Mam was a night-owl like me and loved a good drama. Because Salem’s Lot was made for television and consequently (1979) wouldn’t have been able to rely on gore and violence to tell its story, it concentrated on the building-up of suspense and atmosphere to communicate the tale’s horror. The excellent vampire make-up design for Mr Barlow, based on Count Orlok from the great silent classic Nosferatu, and completely going against the more urbane vision of evil that King gives us in the novel, works marvellously. Tobe Hooper, who directed the TV mini-series, keeps ratcheting up the tension and allows us only the briefest glimpse of Mr Barlow in the first episode. A great deal of the work of chilling the audience is handled with great aplomb by the superbly cast James Mason in the role of Mr B’s acolyte, Straker. Mason presents us with a truly unsettling vision of evil, allowing us to get just a whiff of the man’s viciousness and depravity masked beneath a wafer-thin veneer of sophistication. He was a fabulous actor, and Salem’s Lot is worth watching for his subtle but very scary performance alone. Yes, the series probably looks a little dated today, but no CGI here, just a good script, excellent direction and a competent cast. A horror classic in my view, and I’m sorry to have to admit (apologies to any die-hard Stepen King fans reading) considerably scarier than the novel!

Anyway, Mam and I stayed up late and watched both episodes. I’m immune to horror movies (I believe that this may be because as a teenager I was scratched by a radioactive reel of Hammer Horror film!) but I remember my mother saying to me over breakfast the following morning after we’d watched the even more unsettling second part, “I had to give myself a good talking-to after watching that film with you last night ... that Mr Barlow was horrible, wasn’t he? When I got into bed, Dad was asleep, it was windy outside, the curtains were blowing around ... my imagination got going. I had to tell myself, ‘Don’t be so soft, Mair, it was only a film’ ... it was really good though, wasn’t it Mart?”

Happy Halloween.