The Intercom Quartet

I read Renee Gladman’s Ravicka series of novels, because I saw them mentioned in Drifts by Kate Zambreno: Could this work, could Drifts, unfold like a dream? It is still yellow outside but the trees are now bare. I bring The Tanners with me to the local café, along with Renee Gladman’s Event Factory, another […]

Space Is Deep

I watched the new film The Midnight Sky. I was originally going to watch it in the cinema, but even before the Tier 4 was introduced we thought it wouldn’t be a good idea to go out in such places as we were going to travel to see people on Christmas Day. That other plan […]

Operation Gold

The news of the death of George Blake startled me, as I had been thinking about Blake yesterday. The use of the term “Special Relationship” in the commentary around the UK/EU trade deal reminded me that that was also the alternative title of Ian McEwan’s 1990 novel The Innocent, which included Blake as a minor […]

The Green New Deal

I finally got round to watching all of the TV series The Brack Report. This has been a very long project, since I originally wanted to watch it when it was first broadcast in 1982. I did try to watch some episodes at the time, but it was all a bit much as I was […]

Brassneck

In this time of lockdown we have to make our own entertainment, which means finding an old play that got made in to a TV version, but the TV version isn’t available on YouTube so I just have to read the play and imagine the actions in the theatre of my mind. The great thing […]

Blackburn

This year I have also been reading the works of John Blackburn. I cannot remember exactly how I heard of them. I think they just turned out in my Amazon Recommends and I took a look. His oeuvre could be described as somewhere between the worlds of Dennis Wheatley and Kingsley Amis. Of the 28 […]

Harm Reduction Plan

I went to see Overflow at the Bush Theatre, the first show I’ve seen there since The High Table back in February, after which their 2020 schedule was cancelled by Covid-19. I got to see what the theatre had been involved with during the lockdown times. I got to see how live performances work under […]

Passages In Time

I watched films. Corridor Of Mirrors (1948), as we all know, featured young Christopher Lee’s first screen appearance as a hanger-on in the night-club scene. But there should be as much attention given to Thora Hird as the voluble visitor to Madame Tussauds a few minutes earlier, since she actually said some lines. We start […]