KEV67

I started to read this book when I was sixteen, but I put it down about three-quarters of the way through, because I could not see how Winston Smith could win, or escape and join the counter revolution. Should have read Fahrenheit 451 instead. After reading most of Orwell's other novels, non-fiction and essays, I started reading 1984 again. I thought it was genius.

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Bounderby reminded me of a certain orange president. I thought he was the best character in it. Some bits of the book worked and some bits did not. I liked the bit when Gradgrind was passing on Mr Bounderby's proposal to his daughter. Other bits were rather boring. There was a circus master with a lisp, who was rather annoying. Those parts were difficult to read, as was the poor factory worker's northern accent. The book is sometimes listed as a factory novel, along with Mary Barton, North and South, and Shirley, and not many others. To me it seemed more about education than working in factories. Charles Dickens appeared to be worried that only STEM subjects appeared to be valued, and that concentrating on a very limited curriculum useful to business and industry would cause children to grow up stunted. Coke Town is thriving, economically speaking, but the city is ugly and polluted, and its inhabitants are not very happy.

I am reading Live and Let Die. It is good, but it definitely would not find a publisher these days. But then The Expedition of Humphry Clinker contained racism, sexism and general bigotry, and I do not think a word should be changed. The Prioress's Tale in The Canterbury Tales is horribly anti-semitic, but that should not be toned down neither, although the version I read was updated to modern English.

Hope you are on the mend. What does 'no physical activity for a while' mean?

There used to be a trade called baby farming. If a woman had an unwanted baby, she would pay another woman to find it a home. The other woman would smother it and dispose of it. I read a bit about this while reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles, because the English judiciary system did not actually hang many women, but they would still hang baby farmers, and women who used poison or firearms, because those murders would be premeditated.

The copy of Live and Let Die that I am reading uses terms that would be underlined by modern sensitivity readers: negro, negress, Chinamen, Japs. I have only read two chapters. Negress might be considered racist and sexist these days. I expect negro was considered more respectful than a similar term. OTOH M was more respectful of blac people's abilities than a lot of British people's at the time. I was a little surprised to learn Live and Let Die was Ian Fleming's second James Bond book.

What do you think about all this sensitivity re-editing of old books? There was some controversy about Roald Dahl's books being wokified. Actually, I am pretty sure it was Roald Dahl himself who sanctioned the Oompa-Loompas being changed from black/brown to sort of orange. That was so long ago people have forgotten about it. Possibly, royalties from the film had something to do with that. It is not just Dahl, though. I bought a copy of the James Bond book, Live and Let Die. I wanted to check how Ian Fleming's Bond compared with the current film version. However, when I read the note on the text, it said they had tried to edit the version they thought Fleming would have approved of, using parts from the British and American editions; that they had altered some of the outdated terms, but had by no means bowdlerised it. I tore it up and threw it in the bin. Then I ordered another copy from World of Books, which sells second hand books. Judging by the cover, it has not been wokified.

Actually, it did get better towards the end. Things did not work out as pat as I expected. There were some good descriptions of heart break. I thought the penultimate chapter was particularly good.

I intended to go to another Methodist church this morning. I got up at 9:40, but by the time I had breakfast, washed, ironed a shirt, and got into my suit it was past 10, and I think it is over half an hour's walk. Therefore I decided to visit an Anglican church about a mile and a bit away. It was a bit further than I thought and did not get there until 10:36. I was going to walk on and see if I could find another church that started at 11, but someone noticed me lurking and invited me in. It was a modern church with no steeple and chairs instead of pews. The hymns were modern, as was the scripture. There were two vicars, or maybe one was a curate. A couple were celebrating forty years of marriage. There was a photo of them on their wedding day projected on the screen. Corr, they were ugly. They were one of the ugliest couples I have seen. The female vicar or curate started by observing that Mother's Day appeared to be spelt with the apostrophe before the 's' these days instead of after. That made me wonder. I used to think I knew the rules about apostrophes, but now I am not sure. Is it 'Three years time," or "Three years' time"? It means "Three years of time," so maybe it needs an apostrophe, but 'years' is plural. I decided it did need an apostrophe because you would say "One hour's time," and hour is not plural. Then she read from Exodus 2. A Levi man visited a Levite woman and she fell pregnant. When the child was born she hid it, then when she could not hide it any more, she put it in a basket and put it on the river, where it floated off watched from afar by the child's sister. The Pharoah's daughter found the basket, and decided to adopt it, which did not seem very likely to me. Then the sister offered to find Pharoah's daughter a wet nurse, and returned with her mother, and the Pharoah's daughter said she would pay her to bring up her son. So, was Moses' mother a prostitute? Maybe she was a widow driven into it by economic necessity. Was Moses perhaps a bit ungrateful to the Egyptians, bringing down all those plagues on them. I remembered the Pharoah had ordered an execution of new born baby boys to stop a prophesy coming true, so I suppose fair's fair. The Pharoah's daughter might not have approved of her father's policy of infanticide, but maybe she would have thought she got a poor return for her kindness when Moses sicked the Angel of Death on their firstborn sons. The service dragged on a bit and I made a quick getaway so I would not get asked for coffee. Edit: I read the start of Exodus again and Moses's mother was a married woman, and the Pharoah had started his policy of male infanticide because the Israelis were becoming too numerous.

Hello. I read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which I was not very impressed with. I was impressed with Philip K. Dick's Ubik, but I have not read very much by him. I used to read quite a bit of science fiction when I was young. I liked Larry Niven and his collaborations with Jerry Pournelle. Niven was a bit flip while Pournelle was a bit stodgy, but together they wrote some good books. I used to read Frank Herbert until The White Plague put me off him. The last sci-fi book I read was Project Hail Mary, which was very strong on science.

I have seen Mary Archer in real life. The one the judge thought was fragrant. She was the president, chairman or something like that, of the Solar Society. She is big into photovoltaic panels. I wondered whether DI Warwick's wife, Beth, was based on Mary Archer, although Mary Archer is a scientist, while the fictional Beth Warwick is a curator at an art museum.

Here is a bit of Old English you might understand. It was very selectively edited. Harold is swift. His hand is strong and his word grim. Late in life he went to his wife in Rome. Is his inn open? His cornbin is full and his song is writen. Grind his corn for him and sing me his song. He is dead. His bed is under him. His lamb is dead and blind. He sang for me. He swam west in storme and winde and froste. Bring us gold. Stand up and find wise men. A Guide to Old English. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson

I thought I would give Jeffrey Archer a go. I have always been a bit prejudiced against him in the past. It is mainly about this Detective Inspector Warwick at the yard and his team. It is also a bit about an undercover officer who used to be in the SAS. DI Warwick has a lovely wife who organises art exhibitions at the Fitzmolean Museum. There is a Mr Big who has a lot of valuable paintings, and his crooked lawyer. Then there are various other London gangsters to deal with. I had a hard time working out when it was based. It seemed to be the 80s because there were no mobile phones or internet, but the book appeared from the cover to have been recently published. It is pretty well plotted. It is not deep, but it is not bad. It is a bit more credible than some other crime fiction I have read.

Way, finished it! Incredible story, although for some reason, not gripping. Anna was a very bold and determined woman. She was also remarkably loyal, considering the shabby way she was treated after being liberated from a POW camp.

She mentioned Oestre, or the goddess the festival was named after, which sounded a bit different. Someone passed around a booklet with all the pagan seasons or festivals. I recognised Samhain. This puzzled me a bit because Oestre sounds like it might be Saxon, but Samhain sounds Celtic for something.

I went to the church for bigots in the morning. I had to jog because I got up at 10:35, and I had to iron a shirt and go to the cashpoint. Therefore I have had slight BO all day. We struggled with one of the hymns. Eventually I worked out how to sing the first lines of each verse, but not the endings. Each verse seemed to start off low, and end high. I went to the Unitarian meeting in the afternoon. I have missed the last three months. A woman from the Green Spirit movement conducted the service, if that is the right terminology. She said Gaia-ism and Druidism were similar spiritual movements. So it seems Unitarianism encompasses paganism now. However, it is a cosy sort of paganism: no animal or human sacrifice or weird sexual rituals, worse luck. There were readings from scientific-spiritual writers. One was about how if oxygen content of the atmosphere was 5% higher than forests would catch light every time there was a spark, while if it was 5% lower then the brain would not be able to function well enough to be capable of conscious thought. Another was how everything in the universe came from a pin-prick in space, so everything and everyone has a common source. Someone brought in a sort of wheel she had made from different coloured materials, representing the earth, fire, air and water. I tactfully did not point out there was no green in the wheel. I always find cosmology and earth science weird and mysterious myself, whenever I read about it or watch YouTube videos on it, but I am not sure how much,spiritually, you can read into it all.

comparison of Welsh, Cornish and Breton

I don't think her French is as good as her English and German. She says when she is at home she speaks a dialect of Dutch.

The last film I saw at the cinema was Babylon, which was better than the write ups. The last film I saw on DVD was Watchmen, which I have seen before, and which again was better than the write ups.

Thanks Brian, I shall give that a go. Still working through Over Fields of Fire. Anna Timofeeva-Egorova was very respectful and kind about her comrade pilots and the mechanic who fixed up her plane. There are a number of photos at the back of very handsome pilots who all died in action. She is not so nice about the Germans, understandably enough. She calls them Hitlerites and scum. She is flying Il-2 Sturmoviks now. The were ground attack planes, the most produced aircraft in WW2. Anna is piling up awards while living a charmed life. So far she has not mentioned her gunner. I wonder why not. Edit: it was because she was flying one of the earlier single-seat Il-2 Sturmoviks. She was allocated a two-seater later. First she had a young male gunner, then a female gunner.

I sometimes envy Welsh and Scots who can speak Welsh and Gaelic as their mother tongue. I cannot remember hearing people speak Welsh except in tannoy announcements at Cardiff Railway Station. I have heard some people speaking Gaelic. I walked into a pub in Stornoway in Lewis and there were people speaking Gaelic. I walked straight out again. Then on the west coast of Scotland I heard some people speaking it. All the same, I think I understand why Welsh used to be discouraged in Welsh schools. Being only able to speak Welsh or Gaelic would be very limiting career wise. It does take an awful lot of effort to learn to understand, speak, read and write a language. Remember all the time in primary school when you seemed to be doing the same thing again and again. I have been trying to learn Latin for two or three years now, and I still struggle to say or write down anything. My cousins in Ireland has to study Irish for years at school, but I do not think many of them are fluent. That is why I think the people trying to resurrect Cornish will have a hard time. It is difficult to find anyone to have a conversation with in Cornish. Unless you speak it at home then if you have children they will not learn it as a mother tongue. It would be difficult to perfect your Cornish because you would not have an expert to correct you when you go wrong. With Cornish I doubt they know exactly how it was pronounced as the original Cornish speakers died out centuries ago. Still, that said, I have a Dutch friend who learnt Dutch, French, German and English at school. She said she had to read Schiller in German and Shakespeare in English. I cannot understand Shakespeare unless I read a book that explains what he means. She says all the reading she had to do at school put her off reading. There are some Dutch who speak Frisian. I do not know how they find the time. However, there are a lot of native French, German and English speakers they can talk to and a lot of resources in those languages.

I like them. I have quite a few of them. The covers were designed by Coralie-Bickford Smith, who I was delighted to learn learnt her craft at Reading University. There was an issue with the patterns on the covers wearing off, but on the whole I do not mind that. When you read a book you damage it. They are more expensive than paperbacks, but they are generally long books. If you taken into account how long they take to read, and how pretty they look on your shelf, I think they are quite good value. On YouTube I have heard vloggers criticise the quality of the paper and the bindings. I suppose that is fair enough. I suppose that depends a bit on whether you consider the artefact to be worth a greater proportion of the art it contains. Personally, I only have a certain amount of money, which is more than I had when I was young, when I thought hardbacks were a waste of money. I like that Penguin keep bringing out new clothbound classics. I was not bothered about the 20th-century classics they brought out last year, but I noticed this year they have brought out The Life and Opinions of Tristan Shandy, and I still want to buy Paradise Lost, possibly The Mayor of Casterbridge, Les Miserables, and maybe Villette.

I went to another Methodist Church this morning in Caversham, which is north of the river. The congregation was fairly elderly. The pastor said that Adam was Hebrew for man and Eve was Hebrew for woman. He said the story of the Garden of Eden was not literally true but in another sense was. Methodists win for hymns.

I read one of her other books, The Fountainhead. Her hero was an architect who designed well thought out, functional buildings, but without any frilly bits. He would absolutely refuse to design Doric columns, or arches or leaded windows. He did not have any friends, although he had a mentor. I think he did cop off with some blonde beauty, almost as uncompromising as himself.