I thought for this week’s post I’d do a combination post, a little of my book bag mixed with some sun lounger thoughts. Let’s see how it all pans out.
Just now we have finished our touring part of the holiday and we have come to our rented gîte where we have parked the van and are spending time in this wonderful house that we regularly rent just outside the small village of Parçay-les-Pins.
I quite often, back in England, watch that TV show about people who want to buy a new house abroad. It’s called A Place in the Sun and it’s aways interesting to watch couples look for a dream home, especially when it features a location we know a little about like France or Lanzarote for instance. Sometimes the contestants -for want of a better word- will come across what I think is a really nice place and will criticise it and start saying how they will rip the kitchen out and knock this wall down and I really want to slap the pair of them. Now and then, the show will produce something really nice and the couple will fall in love with it, put in a bid and find themselves the new owners of a fabulous house in the sun.
Sitting by the pool outside this house in France I do feel that it’s really a place that Liz and I have both fallen for. It’s an old country house with very thick walls and our bedroom is a modern extension with an en-suite bathroom. In a morning our usual routine is for me to get up, make a brew and bring it back to bed and for Liz and I to check our emails and then see who will be victorious in a card game we play together on our iPads. Those thick walls come into play here though as being so thick we don’t get much of an internet signal in the bedroom so one of us will have to reach out for our phone and switch on our internet hotspot so we can play.
Card game done it’s time for breakfast and then out to the pool for a swim, a read and some sunbathing. Here’s the first of my holiday reads;
The Lady in the Van
I saw the film version of this a few years ago which was pretty good, if a little odd. It was presented in a very peculiar way in that the author, Alan Bennett, is portrayed as two people, one as himself as he appears in the story and two, as himself as he writes the story. That oddity aside it was really a rather good and original film. When I heard there was a book version I quickly went to one my usual internet book stores and promptly bought it.
I was disappointed to find that it was a very slim volume, only 100 pages in fact and the author might have been better saving it for a collection of short stories. Anyway, it actually made me feel better about my own book, Floating in Space, which is also a rather thin book, though I might add, much longer than this.
Anyway, moving on to the story it was a rather good read. It’s about an oddball character, an old lady who parks outside Alan Bennett’s house in a van and stays there for some time, actually living in the van. She appeared sometime in the 1970’s and when double yellow lines appeared moved into the author’s driveway, staying there until her death in 1989.
The lady, the enigmatic Miss Shepherd, lived in her van continually throughout the year, rain or shine, hot or cold and the author tells her story using his own diary entries. It’s a funny story but also a sad one too. When the lady passes away, he is forced to go through her things in the van;
“…I realised I had to grit my teeth (or hold my nose) and go through Miss Shepherd’s possessions.
To do the job properly would have required a team of archaeologists. Every surface was covered in layers of old clothes, frocks, blankets and accumulated papers, some of them undisturbed for years, and all lying under a crust of ancient talcum powder. Sprinkled impartially over wet slippers, used incontinence pads and half-eaten tins of baked beans, it was of a virulence that supplemented rather than obliterated the distinctive odour of the van. The narrow aisle between the two banks of seats where Miss Shepherd had knelt, prayed and slept was trodden six inches deep in sodden debris, on which lay a top dressing of old food, Mr Kipling cakes, wrinkled apples, rotten oranges and everywhere batteries – batteries loose, batteries in packets, batteries that had split and oozed black gum on to the prehistoric sponge cakes and ubiquitous sherbet lemons that they lay among”
In the van he finds about £6000 in cash and a name and telephone number. Bennett calls the number to find the man at the other end has never heard of Miss Shepherd but then after he describes her, the man realises Miss Shepherd was his sister, although she had for some reason been using an assumed name. Alan Bennett had a love/hate relationship with this strange old lady for many years and came to -I was going to say like, but that’s not the right word. He came to be connected to her in a strange way until one day her social worker arrived with some clean clothes only to find her dead in the van.
To sum up, this was a lovely read even though it only lasted a couple of days for me but I think now I might look out for more of Alan Bennett’s books.
Vide Greniers and Brocantes
Liz and I always visit a village fête at the weekend, usually those with a vide grenier or brocante attached. A vide grenier is just a car boot sale which we both love. I usually pick up connecting leads for my laptop or iPad, after all, you can never have enough electrical leads. Brocantes are more like flea markets or antique fairs. Just the kind of place to pick up those old telephones that I still love, especially those Bakelite ones.
We visited a couple of vide greniers last weekend although the rain put off a great many sellers. The refreshments area was still open though and I ordered sausages and frites undercover from the rain while Liz nipped over to the covered bar across the way and ordered two glasses of vin rouge.
Over the years I’ve picked up various things at French vide greniers including pin badges, glasses and decanters as well as old telephones, cables (of course) old photos and paintings including a framed poster from the Le Mans 24 hour race. What else? A small bust of General de Gaulle which sits on my mantelpiece back home and numerous other things which took my fancy.
Plenty of times we have sheltered in makeshift bars until a rain shower has passed over and the sellers have peeled away plastic covers to reveal their goods.
My Word is my Bond by Roger Moore
I picked this book up ages ago and thought it would be a good holiday read. I’ve always liked Roger Moore even though I absolutely hate his James Bond films. I love Moore’s self-deprecating humour, plenty of which is evident in this book. The first part of the book was really interesting and entertaining but like a lot of celebrity autobiographies, this one just gets a little tedious when Roger just seems to list the films and locations and other celebrities he seems to know. On the back of the book was a review claiming this to be the best film autobiography since David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon. Sorry but I can’t agree. Roger reveals numerous ‘funny’ incidents from behind the scenes of his films, all of which must have been from the ‘you had to be there’ category because I didn’t think they were that funny. His marriage to his third wife fizzles out with no explanation and the last section is just an endless list of his various travels as a UNICEF ambassador.
He seems to have had a great deal of fun making the Bond films but for me his tenure as 007 marked the series fall from serious spy films into farce. The crazy thing is that after making his first Bond film, Live and Let Die, in which he comes over as a sort of stuffed dummy rather than an action hero, he made a film called Gold. In Gold he starred as the boss of a goldmine and really looked the part of a very tough guy indeed so why he couldn’t have done that as Bond is beyond me.
I prefer to remember Roger as the star of The Saint and The Persuaders, two TV action and adventure classics I loved. Anyway, this was for the most part an entertaining read but don’t think for a moment that it comes anywhere close to David Niven’s classic book.
That’s all from me. The sun has come out so it’s time to put my laptop away and enjoy the pool.
Bye for now!
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We came over on the ferry from Portsmouth to Caen after spending the night in a small pub called the Jolly Boatman somewhere in the south of England, actually Kidlington, I think. We have visited this pub once before back in May and it was nice to find that the staff remembered us even after just one visit. The trip over on the ferry was good. We paid a little extra for a top of the range cabin and it was well worth it. We had a little balcony, a tv, kettle and various cold drinks in the fridge. After a bit of a sleep and a shower, we awoke refreshed and ready to find a place to stop for the night in France.
To be honest, I do use ai, not to write posts but to make the quirky memes and graphics that I use to promote my blogs. This is one over to the right. I had never even thought about using ai to actually write a post. Even so, I thought as I was a bit low on ideas it might be interesting to ask ai what I should write about. It came up with a plan for a post asking me to answer various questions about my work. Anyway, here are a few of them.
I’m betting that whatever this guy had produced it couldn’t compare with Billy’s dazzling line-up of classic films.
Rooting around in a secondhand shop in St Annes recently I picked up a hardback copy of Winston Churchill’s book My Early Life. It’s a thoroughly wonderful book written in Churchill’s inimitable style. He says in the introduction he has written a book about a vanished age and indeed he has. Churchill was born in 1974 at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. He was the son of Lord Randolph Churchill who was in turn the son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough. His mother was an American, Jennie Jerome, the daughter of an American businessman. She married Lord Randolph and became Lady Churchill.
Looking back, I must have seen the film version before I read the book. Young Winston was directed by Richard Attenborough and is a wonderful adaptation of the book. When Winston first attends school, which of course was boarding school, his headmaster was played by Robert Hardy and he directs Winston to learn some Latin. Winston doesn’t do very well and the headmaster glares down at him and informs him that if he misbehaves, he will be punished, which to a great extent was Churchill’s overall view of school. Later he comments about exams ‘they always contrived to question me about things I didn’t know. I would much rather they asked me about things I did know.
The charge was depicted in the film Young Winston and in his book Churchill ponders about fate and a problem with his shoulder which necessitated using his revolver rather than his sword during the charge, reflecting that if he had been using his sword he might well have been killed in the latter stages when he was surrounded by the enemy.
One of things I particularly liked about Young Winston was the music. I bought the soundtrack album in 1985. The music for the film was in the main composed by Sir Alfred Ralston. He was brought into the film by director Attenborough as the two had worked together on a previous film, ‘Oh what a Lovely War’. The soundtrack features music by Edward Elgar, notably the Pomp and Circumstance March no 4 as well as Nimrod from the Enigma Variations.
Churchill ended up in a POW camp but resolved to escape despite also claiming to the Boers that he was a correspondent and should not have been detained. With the help of a group of Lancashire miners, Winston stowed away on a goods train and made his way back to the British lines.
Goldfinger is probably one of the best books in the Bond series and only the second 007 book that I ever read. (I’ll tell you about the first one later). I was at school at the time and for one of our assignments in English, we were asked to bring in a book which contained a really good description of a character. I chose Goldfinger as in it, Ian Fleming describes Goldfinger as a man who appeared to have been made using bits of other peoples’ bodies. This must have been in the mid-1960s and although the character of James Bond was pretty well known, the films had not begun to permeate down to the television screen.
This is an interesting story and the resulting film has perhaps become the quintessential Bond film even more so than Goldfinger. The story is about a criminal underworld organisation (SPECTRE) that steals an aircraft with nuclear weapons and holds the west to ransom threatening to explode the bombs.
In this book the secret service find that Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE, is trying to assume the identity of the Comte Balthazar de Bleuville. Bond poses as Sir Hilary Bray of the College of Arms in order to meet with Blofeld. Interestingly, Sir Hilary gives Bond a quick resumé of Bond’s family history including the Bond family motto ‘the world is not enough’ which was used by the film producers for the title of a later 007 film unrelated to Fleming’s books.
This book follows on from the previous one and we find James Bond depressed and disillusioned with his job after the death of Tracy. M considers sacking Bond but instead sends him on a diplomatic mission to meet the head of the Japanese secret service. The British want access to Russian documents which the Japanese are currently decoding. The Japanese decide to offer this information to Bond if he will assassinate a British resident who has created a garden of death, a garden full of poisonous plants which are attracting many Japanese citizens who want to commit suicide. Bond realises that this man is Blofeld and decides to keep this quiet until after he has killed him.
Casino Royale is the first book in the 007 series and it’s a pretty interesting and original one too. ‘Le Chiffre’, a gambler and also a member of SMERSH, a murderous department of the KGB is engaged in a desperate effort to win a great deal of money at the casinos of Royale Les Eaux in France. Le Chiffre is desperate because he has used SMERSH funds for his personal use and his spymaster bosses will not be pleased if they find out. Britain’s secret service happens to find out about this and sends Bond to France to make sure Le Chiffre doesn’t recoup those funds as of course as we all know, James Bond 007 is a bit of an expert with the cards.
This was the second Bond book to be published and the action takes place in the USA and the Caribbean, which Fleming loved and bought a house there which he named Goldeneye. Live and Let Die and in fact the whole book series were recently reissued with all the politically incorrect stuff removed which makes me wonder whether there was in fact anything left to publish after that process was complete. The book was published in 1953 and comes complete with all the prejudices and sexual and racial intolerances of the era. In one segment when Bond visits Harlem, Fleming tries to reproduces the accents and slang terms of the black people of Harlem and for me it’s not one of Fleming’s best books. In the film version, Roger Moore took over the licence to kill and the result was a very tongue in cheek version of James Bond. Sorry but Roger Moore as Bond just wasn’t for me. The film did feature a great theme song from Paul McCartney which was really a little underused in the film. Another feature of the film was a power boat chase along the Bayous of Florida which was a lot of fun but not entirely serious.
This was the third entry into the 007 series and the action takes place mostly in Dover. Millionaire Hugo Drax wants England to enter the space race and so he spends his own money on a rocket named the Moonraker which he intends to donate to the British government. It turns out that Drax is actually a nazi who wants to avenge defeat in the second world war by arranging for the rocket to destroy London. I read recently that Fleming wrote the book while staying in a cottage situated down by the famous chalk cliffs of Dover which was once owned by Noel Coward and later Fleming himself. It’s not a bad read at all and starts off with M asking Bond a favour as he suspects Drax to be cheating at cards and he wants Bond to see if he can sort things out as at the time, this was the mid-1950s, cheating at cards in London high society could really be a big scandal.
Fleming wrote this book at Goldeye, his house in Jamaica, after doing a great deal of research about diamond smuggling. Bond’s mission is to investigate a diamond smuggling ring and he does this by impersonating a diamond smuggler called Peter Franks. Franks leads Bond to an American woman called Tiffany Case who he begins to fall for. He tracks the smuggling ring to the American Spang brothers, leaders of the Spangled Mob, a criminal gang. The finale takes place in the Spangs’ restored western town, Spectreville.
British Secret Service. To do this they persuade a cypher clerk, Tatiana Romanova, to pretend to defect to the west with a Spektor cypher machine. She claims she will only to defect to Bond, having fallen for him after reading his KGB file.
Prior to the writing of this book, a firearms expert called Major Boothroyd wrote to Fleming explaining that an agent like Bond would never be armed with a Baretta as it was more of a ladies gun. Boothroyd recommended a Walther PPK. Fleming was so impressed he included the new gun in Dr No and also added a new character named Boothroyd as the armourer of the secret service.
A long time ago I decided that I would set myself the task of reading the entire Hamish Macbeth series of books. There are 34 books in the series, all written by author M.C. Beaton which is in fact a pen name for Marion Chesney. Marion actually wrote many books under various pseudonyms including Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, Helen Crampton, Charlotte Ward and Sarah Chester. After Marion’s death in 2019 further Hamish Macbeth novels have appeared penned by writer R.W. Green.
I mentioned a while ago about my 
Letters from an Unknown Author! 