The Betrayal, Sister and A Visit from the Goon Squad

The last three books I read were all excellent. The first was The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore that was long listed for the Man Booker prize, and should at least have made the shortlist. It is set in 1952 in Leningrad, where the siege during the war still haunts the city. But Moscow is oblivious to what the powers that be see as an embarrassment. Stalin's harsh regime holds sway and it's effects are told in the story of Andrei and Anna. A young hospital doctor and his wife, a nursery schoolteacher, are caught up accidentally with a high powered security chief and his ill son. The story is gripping and the writing is powerful and bewitching. The writer has published eleven novels including A Spell of Winter that won the Orange Prize, and in this latest book she is on top of her game. It is a sequel to the critically well received The Siege which I now wish I had read first.

Crime fiction is not usually my thing, but Rosamund Lupton's Sister is a classy piece of literature. The story is told by Beatrice who returns from New York as her sister is missing. Has she taken her own life as the police believe, or was she murdered. Beatrice thinks so but is in a minority of one. Her quest to find the truth becomes one of increasing danger, with the biggest twist at the end of any book I have read for years. This was one book I found very hard to put down.

The three books have all been by women writers and have all been terrific. But the last stands head and shoulders above the others. It is the best book I have read for a long time. I wasn't put off by the title. A Visit from the Goon Squad must be a reference to time (as in "time is a gooner") and it is time that plays a big part in the book. Each chapter tells a story from the point of view of a different character. They all connect in some way, and at times it is at first hard to know how. But the author does not keep you guessing for long, and the smallest clue will give you all the information you need. The main thread of the book is the music industry (which was what interested me in the first place), so we have Bennie, a producer, Sasha his assistant, someone in PR, a journalist and other family or friends. And each chapter can take place at a different time, even in the future. It sounds like a highly complex novel but somehow it works really well. The writing is excellent and no wonder it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize For Fiction. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

One Man, Two Guvnors

I am still reeling from last night's performance of One Man, Two Guvnors at The Waterside Theatre in Aylesbury. This National Theatre production, superbly directed by the genius who is Nicholas Hytner and starring James Corden, is bar far the funniest thing I have ever seen on stage. In fact I had to concentrate on not laughing because my head hurt from a succession of hilarious turns. This is a highly original presentation based on an Italian farce, but imbued with the comic stupidity and coarseness that is British humour.

It all starts with a skiffle group (James Corden's character it turns out has been sacked from one such band) on stage, playing original material by Grant Olding, for ten minutes as the audience take their seats. I say skiffle, because the percussionist plays a washboard (not even as well as I could in the old days), but an electric guitar was never skiffle, and where was the banjo? Apart from that, they were really very good. Music plays a big part in the play. On occasions, between scenes, the curtain is drawn and the band come back on, and later are replaced by members of the cast who at various times perform a turn. James Corden on xylophone and the two black members of the cast with their calypso are highlights. As I say, highly original.

The play itself is part farce, part stand up (James again), part audience participation. And given the complications of the plot, you would think it very strange. But in some miraculous way, it works superbly. James Corden, who I never really liked before, turns out to be a fantastic comedy actor and stand up comedian as the bumbling minder Francis Henshall. His interaction with the audience had me in fits of laughter, in fact I cannot remember the last time I laughed so much. The last half hour of the long one hour forty minutes first half, is non stop laughing. The whole of the cast are larger than life and ham it up splendidly. I especially liked Oliver Chris as the ex public school twit Stanley Stubbers who also happens to be a murderer. And somehow newcomer Tom Edden is brilliant as the 87 year old decrepit and abused waiter Alfie, the male equivalent of Mrs Overall from Acorn Antiques.

The final plaudits must go to Richard Bean for his adaptation of Carlo Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters. Thank goodness that this is a theatre going experience that will tour for years and years, so all the people who will hear about it can see it for themselves, and I can go again.

Another Holiday in Cornwall

This was the tenth year in succession that we have had a weeks holiday in Cornwall. Every year we stay at Port Quin, previously at Doyden, but for the last two years at a cottage called Lacombe (that can be found on the National Trust cottages website) near the tiny harbour. It is the white building on the far left, and was used in the TV series "Poldark". We arrived on Thursday to wonderful weather and the photo above is taken as we had time for a walk along the cliffs towards Port Isaac.

The next day was equally fine and we took the walk we usually do along the coastal path to Pentire Point. Here are great views of Polzeath, and a good place to eat our lunch.

The tide was coming back in as we reached Lundy Bay on our return, so we could not venture too far along the beach. We were out for over five hours, so pretty tired when we arrived back at the cottage.

However, it was such a lovely late afternoon, we drove the short way to Port Isaac for a slow stroll around the harbour.

The next day was pretty windy with showers and the sea kayaking we had planned was cancelled. Alison had a run whilst I drove to Polzeath to look at the waves and buy a newspaper. So it was good to have a rest after the previous day's long walk. We headed into Wadebridge for lunch but some heavy showers persuaded us back to the cottage for the afternoon.

The next day was even windier but sunny, and we made our way to Padstow. We had a great walk up to the monument and along the cliffs where we had a superb view of the windsurfers making use of the conditions. The walk back along the beach was equally spectacular. Lunch of sausage and chips at The Quayside cafe and a stroll around the shops.

The forecast for Monday was not very promising, and as we headed towards Helston on the day we explore somewhere new, the rain was unrelenting. We were very quiet in the car. However as we arrived at the town, the rain had stopped. Nothing much to see in Helston, so after a cafe stop for tea and cherry cake, we headed to the National Seal Sanctuary at Gweek that was not far away. When we arrived it wasn't long before the sun came out and a beautiful day began. We were amazed just how many seals were there, all having been rescued because of injury or abandonment. Last year 49 pups had been rescued, looked after and released back into the wild. On our visit we saw a week old abandoned pup called Murray in their hospital.

The older seals (Common, Fur and Gray Seals) are in separate spacious tanks and are amazing. There are also penguins, otters and sea lions. Alison helped to feed them.

We were there over three hours, it is such a wonderful place in a magnificent setting by the estuary. It was now such a nice day that we headed down the Lizard Peninsula to have a look at Kynance Cove, again somewhere new for us, and very impressive it is too.

The National Trust look after the area with car parks and a tearoom where we were just in time to have a cup of tea sitting at a table overlooking the bay. Quite incredible.

It was raining when we woke the next day, and it didn't stop until we went to bed that night. It was only light in the morning so we took the short drive to Polzeath for a superb session of bodyboarding. The waves had never been better. After a shower and change back at the cottage, it was time for lunch at our usual cafe in Wadebridge. The rain became heavier in the afternoon, but we did not have long to rest before we were off to have dinner at Fifteen at Watergate Bay. A table by the window overlooking the beach meant that we had great views of the crashing waves. The meal was fabulous, the best ever tasting menu.

The following morning was sunny, but still slightly cool as it had been all week, so we still went on our planned visit to The Lost Gardens of Heligan. We never tire of going there, and the tea room is splendid.

On our last day we usually head straight home after packing the car. But Thursday looked to be such a nice day we decided to make up for the day we missed where Alison runs from the cottage to Rock and takes the ferry to Padstow. I have driven there and hired a bike to cycle down the Camel Trail to Wadebridge and back.

We then meet at the car park, I have most of the fish and chips at The Quayside cafe, and then we walk up to the monument (again), some last bits of shopping before heading home. Once again a thoroughly enjoyable week.

Family History Website

In the end it was pretty straightforward. My brilliant family history software (Family Historian 4) has a special programme to save all my data to a folder especially for a website. It also had instructions (not very clear) about how to download an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and suggestions on recommended free web space. The FTP is Filezilla, and what an excellent piece of kit it turned out to be. But first I had to set up my webspace on RootsWeb freepages which is part of Ancestry. The link is http://freepages.family.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~davidbbroberts.

So I was all set to go, and the transfer went really well. After a couple of days I could access my web space but I was very disappointed that it was not searchable. I tried for days searching for individuals but to no avail and I went off on holiday wondering what I could do next.

I need not have worried. As soon as I was back home, my first search on Google ( and every other search since) brings up any family member who has at least two Christian names with the link to my web space. That is just fantastic. All the individuals are on my father's side of the family. My next project will be to do the same for mother's ancestors.

I have also created some web space on Google Sites where I am starting to place some family history documents. The link is https://sites.google.com/site/dbbrobertsfamilyhistory. The two sites work so well together.

Final Destination 5, The Skin I Live In and One Day

At last we come to the end of the summer movies which are either fantasy, superhero or gross out comedy. "Final Destination 5" fits none of these categories, but is still aimed at the end of the holidaying teens. It is basically the same old story, but the filming in 3D works spectacularly well on occasion. The set piece bridge disaster is a revelation, and quite the best use of 3D I have seen to date. Otherwise a diverting but unmemorable movie.

Amazing that the best film I have seen this year happens to be a subtitled Spanish melodrama. None of the critics use this description for "The Skin I Live In", preferring physcological thriller or a soap opera horror. "The exageration of plot and character to appeal to the emotion" as melodrama is defined, suits this brilliant movie, although certainly it mixes all the other ingredients to make one superb pot. The credit all goes to the director Pedro Almodovar. He also co-writes the screenplay loosely based on a French novella. One lasting impression is how suptuous the film looks. The lighting of the gorgeous sets produces something special on the big screen, the costumes, sound and music are all excellent. There are jumps in time that are well done and go to give us the one huge twist well before the awesome ending. Antonio Banderous is great as the barmy but brilliant surgeon and the rest of a fairly small cast are equally good. It will take something special to beat this to the best foreign movie oscar.

Having read the book of "One Day", I was nervous as to how such a rich study of two peoples' relationship over sixteen years would translate to the big screen. The first half hour proved my fears were well founded. After skipping a few years after the predictable opening, I felt it hardly captured the feel of the platonic friendship. It did not help that the longer scenes were quite boring as they included too much of Emma's "boyfriend" Ian and Dexter's decline into booze and drugs. And Ann Hathaway's occasional attempt at a Yorkshire accent was quite offputting. Apart from that, she is very good, as is Jim Sturgess as Dexter. After seeing him in "Heartless" and on the trailers, I thought he was no way the right actor for the role. But he grew into the part really well. Things pick up halfway through. Dexter's downfall, and becoming nicer as a result, is well complemented by Emma's maturing character. Why the wedding they attend had to be situated in central London rather than Somerset I dont know, but their scene together sets up a much better final third. The last few scenes are brilliant. The director follows the device in the book to bring in the second half of Chapter One set in 1988 at the end. And it makes far more impact in the movie, as time jumping sometimes does. So I left with a warm feeling, something I had not expected early on.

131 Songs - Numbers 105, 106, 107, 108, 109 and 110

Number 105 - Solo by Sandy Denny

The only British singer on this section of some of my favourite female songwriters who combine folk, country and modern popular music to give each their distinctive style. Sandy Denny joined Fairport Convention in 1968 and recorded three albums with them, including their most successful "Liege and Lief". She left the band soon after to pursue a solo career and concentrate on writing her own songs. In fact, her most famous composition "Who Knows where the Time Goes" (my second favourite of her songs) was first recorded with The Strawbs in 1967. Sandy recorded four solo studio albums before her death in 1978, however the live album "Gold Dust" from the end of 1977 is truly superb. It is from this CD that I have chosen "Solo" which originally opened her third solo album "Like An Old Fashioned Walz".

Number 106 - Learning How To Live by Lucinda Williams

Everything I wanted to say about this song is on my posting of 16th March 2007 (where have the last four years gone). It is the third track on the album "West" which I believe is even better than "Car Wheels On A Gravel Road". From this earlier CD, I almost chose "Cant Let Go" for one of my favourite cover versions. But I will stick with one her own songs for this list.

Number 107 - I Take My Chances by Mary Chapin Carpenter

My huge collection of Mary Chapin Carpenter CD's are hardly played these days, just on the "country" side of country for my taste these days. But rummaging through them, I knew it was about time to give them another play, and mostly I was not disappointed. In particular, the first album of hers that I bought ("Come On Come On") still stands as her best ever. It even has a track called "Passionate Kisses" penned by ... Lucinda Williams. And from this album also comes my chosen track. Like many of her recordings, it is distinctly jolly. And there are just not enough of those songs around these days.

Number 108 - Shawn Colvin - Get Out Of This House

I have to admit that I only own a greatest hits album of Shawn Colvin. She has , though, a big link with the previous artist, Mary Chapin Carpenter. She actually wrote the title track of "Come On Come On" as well as other songs she gave to her. And Mary returned the favour. I have ignored perhaps her most well known song "Sunny Came Home" from her breakthrough album "A Few Small Repairs" and instead gone for "Get Out Of This House". Just one terrific song.

Number 109 - Wall In Your Heart by Shelby Lynne

The three albums in my collection from Shelby Lynne are probably her most popular. "I Am Shelby Lynne" released in 1999 won her a Grammy Award for best new artist. And "Identity Crisis" is her stripped down and most personal set where she plays all the guitar parts and produced the recording herself. But I first heard her on the radio with the track "Killin' Kind" from the even better follow up album "Love, Shelby". This is one great series of country soul songs. "Wall In Your Heart" is co written by the prolific producer Glen Ballard who also produced  the album. A fabulous combination.

Number 110 - You Do by Aimee Mann

The last in this section of American crossover singer songwriters is one class act. "You Do" is from my favourite album of hers  "Bachelor No 2 or, the last remains of the dodo" from 2000, although "Lost in Space" from 2002 runs it close. It is from that year that Aimee appears on "The West Wing" episode called "College Kids" where she sings the James Taylor song "Shed a Little Light" at the "Rock the Vote" concert. It was only last week that we caught up with this particular episode, and never having seen Aimee perform before, that was just a knockout. And what a way to end this group of favourites.

Tring Book Club - What Was Lost and Great House

The only problem with "What Was Lost" is that it was over too quickly. Catherine O'Flynn's debut novel is so very enjoyable. From the first page where the "bus driver was keeping the bus at a steady 15mph, braking at every green light until it turned red", her storytelling is quite magical. I was led to believe that the central character was Kate, a ten year old part time sleuth, who keeps watch at a new Birmingham shopping mall in 1984. Not always the most diligent detective "useful drill though, he caught us sleeping" and her still childlike tendency to keep swivelling her office chair on the lino "tried to keep a tight rein on this habit", O'Flynn captures her personality right on the button. Although a sense of impending danger is inescapable.

But by page 68, we have travelled forward to 2003 and Kate is no longer around. Instead we follow Lisa, the assistant manager of a record store, and Kurt a security guard as they go about their dreary working lives in the revamped Greenoaks shopping centre. These are two wonderful characters, especially Lisa whose brother Adrian we met in 1984. Lisa deals with with one stupid shop assistant in such a mature way that you can only wonder at her maturity.

But the star of this mystery story is Greenoaks itself. Built on industrial wasteland that Adrian had made his playground, the author portrays a wonderful atmosphere that  is down to both the workers and customers of the complex. She writes with a style that is funny, witty and unpretentious. Just very readable and a great mystery story, what more could you ask.

If only Nicole Krauss had learnt the skill of brevity. Her complex and literate book "Great House" is possibly the most tangled and confusing novel I have read for a long time. I liked the idea of the story being told by four separate characters (well five actually, but that is what I mean) at different times and in different places and this is challenging enough without being so oblique. We eventually find out who the narrators are talking to, except for the fourth. Is Isabel just talking to us? And I like a book with jumps in time and place, but it needs to be consistent and sometimes we wonder where we are. Especially if you read it over a couple of weeks. So put all these together and you have a really challenging book. It is certainly not without merit, and there are many passages that will stay with me. The writing is sophisticated, compulsive and at times very instructive.

To illustrate my concerns, I have to refer to a letter written by Lea to Isabel in the last of the four sections that make up Part One. This is a most valuable piece of information about this particular story, but in my view should have waited until the end of the book which is when it was written. It almost gives too much away. And then by the time you read Part Two, you have forgotten what it said. The link between the four stories is a huge old desk that belonged to the father of one of the main characters before it was stolen, along with all his furniture, in 1944. Although it never appears in the second story which seems like it it is from another book.  There are passages where our narrators recall memories, but these are sometimes too long, boring and detract from the narrative. It seems like the book is really a memoir or a confession. But just as you become frustrated, there appears a gripping passage.

Ultimately I felt a little let down that what could have been a superb novel ended up being too clever for it's own good. It was complicated enough without trying to be even more obscure. I will try to read it again, this time not having to unravel what is going on, and missing out "True Kindness". The explanation of this part's title not for the faint hearted. One reviewer said it was like a pack of cards that the author had dropped and picked up in the wrong order. I just think she left some on the floor.

Waterperry

It was such a beautiful day on Friday, perhaps the last in the mid twenties of the summer, that we made a visit to Waterperry, something we had been planning all summer and never quite getting there. We had not been for a couple of years, so it was probably our last chance.

The gardens looked spectacular in the late summer sunshine. It was actually quite nice to find a bench in some shade.

We ended our visit with tea and cake at the cafe, and luckily found a table outside under a tree.

Postings on my family history

I thought it might be a good idea to list all those articles I have posted on the Roberts family history. Here they are:

2/7/2008     Jacob Roberts

27/8/2008   Three Generations of Cutlers

1/12/2008   The 1937 Family Tree - Charles Augustus Roberts

27/1/2009    Louisa Maria Brooks

23/2/2009    Three Generations of Brush Manufacturers

24/3/2009     Eric S Roberts

22/6/2009     A Visit to Sheffield

10/8/2009     Hannah Mayor

11/8/2009     Edith Wynne Mathison

14/8/2009     Vincent Littlewood Roberts MA MD

25/8/2009     The Shearwood Sisters

25/1/2010     Roberts Family Tree

1/2/2010       Derek Finch Roberts

3/2/2010       Charles Hoyland and Hannah Selina Wynne

3/2/2010       William James Gibson Boyd and Ellen Cundy

11/7/2010     William Boyd of Berwickshire and Hull

16/8/2010     George Boyd of Stichill

17/11/2010    John Shearwood Roberts

22/11/2010    Newfield Hall (residence of JSR)

19/10/2011    Kate and Isabel Hoyland