Much as I love the Brontë sisters, I thought this was hilarious.
I hope you enjoy it too.
FIFA World Cup
6 June 2010 17:23
My husband has been pining for the FIFA World Cup to begin. He doesn’t have long to wait now as it starts on Friday, and he’s going to be watching as many of the matches as he possibly can.
This is the Association Football world cup – the biggest sporting event on the planet bar possibly the Olympic Games – played with a round ball as opposed to the game that men play with funny shaped balls and lots of padding.
As I would generally rather watch paint dry than view a football match, I’m going to be a bit of a ‘football widow’ for the next month or so. Somehow I think I’m going to get a lot of reading done then.
Unfortunately, Scotland didn’t qualify to take part this time. My husband says that the good thing about that is he can watch the whole thing and just enjoy it with no pressure and stress. I bet the hospitals are looking at it that way too as there should be fewer men admitted with heart attacks.
As ever, England are in the easiest group. (Scotland are always grouped with Brazil, Germany, Holland and the like.) According to the pundits on the radio though, they are all terrified of their first match, which happens to be against the U.S.A. on Saturday June 12th.
Those are the very same commentators who drive us (Scots) round the bend with their arrogance and assumptions that England somehow have a right to be the winners at everything, just because they aren’t ‘Johnny Foreigner’. I bet with the first touch of the ball they’ll claim they’re going to go all the way.
So, not that I’m racist or anything – but just for that day, I’ll be supporting the U.S.A. – for the sake of my sanity as much as anything else.
A Blunt Instrument by Georgette Heyer
5 June 2010 10:52
This is the second murder mystery by Heyer which I have read and I must say that I found it to be entertaining reading. It was first published in 1938. She managed to combine mystery and comedy and she just couldn’t resist the temptation to throw in some romance too.
Ernest Fletcher is murdered whilst sitting at his desk and as there had been a lot of coming and going of visitors via the low window that evening within a short time of each other, Superintendent Hannasyde has trouble with the very tight timing involved in the case.
As with the other Heyer mystery which I have read, Footsteps in the Dark, I guessed the culprit early on in the book, but it didn’t detract from my enjoyment. In fact I quite enjoy getting it right.
It’s definitely what I would call light reading, but sometimes that is just what you need.
I read this book as part of the Thriller & Suspense Reading Challenge 2010.
The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon
4 June 2010 09:24
Still on the subject of the First World War: My husband’s grandfather bought this slim volume of Siegfried Sassoon poems in 1919 and it’s one of the many books which we inherited from him. I found myself leafing through it when I was on one of my frequent hunts for a particular book. How many months of my life have been used up in searches for books?
Anyway, for some reason the poem below caught my attention.
Arms and the Man
Young Croesus went to pay his call
On Colonel Sawbones, Caxton Hall:
And, though his wound was healed and mended,
He hoped he’d get his leave extended.
The waiting-room was dark and bare.
He eyed a neat-framed notice there
Above the fireplace hung to show
Disabled heroes where to go
For arms and legs; with scale of price,
And words of dignified advice
How officers could get them free.
Elbow or shoulder, hip or knee,
Two arms, two legs, though all were lost,
They’d be restored him free of cost.
Then a Girl Guide looked to say,
‘Will Captain Croesus come this way?’
It seems to be saying that officers could get free artificial limbs, which implies that the other ranks had to pay for them. If this is so, I’m outraged. I know, it’s 90 years too late to do anything about it, but how could they justify such inequality, particularly when most of the ordinary soldiers would have been really poor and people like munitions workers were being paid far more than the men at the Front. All that suffering and then they were treated like muck.
The National Health Service came into being in 1948, so I’m now wondering what happened to anyone who lost a limb in World War 2.
There has been quite a lot of talk in the newspapers recently about injured military personnel having a bad time of it in hospitals, and just not getting the kind of treatment which they deserve. They shouldn’t have closed down military hospitals for one thing, but at least they don’t have to pay for anything nowadays.
Back to Siegfried and if you are interested in him you should read his books Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man.
The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
3 June 2010 09:00
The Ghost Road was first published in 1995 and it won the Booker prize that year. It is the last book of the Regeneration trilogy.
In it Billy Prior is hoping to be pronounced fit enough to go back to the fighting in France. Although he has been offered a safe job by Charles Manning at the Ministry of Munitions in London he turns it down. Despite having such bad asthma that he is nicknamed the canary by his men, because his chest was affected by the least whiff of poison gas, he is passed fit for the front. He is attached to the 2nd Manchester Regiment along with Wilfred Owen.
Although Billy’s enthusiasm for sex is so rampant that he seems to look for opportunities anywhere and with anyone, he has got engaged to Sarah.
In this book we find out more about Dr. Rivers’s experiences studying tribespeople in Melanesia, before he got the job of piecing shell-shocked soldiers’ minds together again.
I loved the first book Regeneration, the second one The Eye in the Door somehow didn’t quite hit the same mark for me. However with The Ghost Road and the return to the madness of the war, Barker is on terrific form and if you are interested in World War 1 her books are essential reading.
A Dunkirk Survivor
1 June 2010 09:00
Meet my in-laws, George and Nancy.
George had been in the Territorial Army when war broke out in 1939, so he was one of the very first ones to be called up into the army.
As we have had the 70th commemorations of the Dunkirk beach evacuations all over the television at the week-end, I thought it would be appropriate to write a wee bit about George.
In 1940 he was in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, one of the Scottish regiments, and as he was the company clerk he was given the task of staying behind to burn all of the paperwork, orders and such to stop any information falling in to the hands of the Germans who at one point were in tanks only one field away from him.
After completing the job he legged it as fast as possible to join the rest of the British army waiting patiently on the beach at Dunkirk, despite the fact that they were being bombed and strafed by the Luftwaffe.
Luckily, he was one of the thousands who did manage to get on to a ship and get back to Blighty. Which is just as well really because if he hadn’t, there would most likely have been no husband for me and no Duncan or Gordon either.
The photographs were taken in the family garden after George and Nancy’s wedding which wasn’t until May 1944. Everything was done in a hurry as the whole battalion had been given leave prior to them taking part in the D-Day landings. They thought that it was very likely that he wouldn’t survive it so decided to get married. (As it happened his battalion didn’t land in France until two or three weeks after D-Day.)
The ceremony took place in the bride’s home which happened to be the Episcopalian Rectory as her father was the minister, although it was a colleague of his who officiated.
Nancy always said that she knew as soon as she saw the new choirboy (George) walking down the aisle that she would marry him. They were 9 years old then. They were 24 when they married. I suppose they might have married earlier if he hadn’t been away in the army for nearly five years.