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The Next Day- David Bowie

Bed of Roses - Bon Jovi

I saw a funeral notice for my father's first cousin. She died in 2022, aged 92. She still had her maiden name and there were no tributes, so I suppose she had no children. I found another funeral notice for another first cousin. However, on his funeral notice there were tributes from four children, and he had grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He also had a tribute from his sister and three nephews and nieces. I am using the FindMyPast website. It is better for finding ancestors than living relatives.

Currently reading The Silence Factory, Bridget Collins. Crikey, Andre Agassi's biography Open took a very long time to read!

Roses Are Red (My Love) - Bobby Vinton

9. Ballpark: Baseball in the American City - Pete Goldberger - 4/5 - I really liked this book as it "started" with baseball being played in the 1840's - 1850's and how the ballparks came to being bult. Primarily though it is about the Ballparks that baseball has been played in over the years including detailed descriptions of the parks and their surroundings. Baseball was truly the American pastime for many, many, years though the 1950's and 1960's and then the game started to change. it is still a good game but has lost so much.

Heresy by S J Parris “I realised with a prickle of discomfort why he bothered me: it was not so much that I resented the hearty backslapping bonhomie of English upper-class gentlemen, for I could tolerate it well enough in Sidney on his own. It was the way Sidney fell so easily into this strutting group of young men, where I could not, and the fear that he might in some ways prefer their company to mine. Once again, I felt that peculiar stab of loneliness that only an exile truly knows: the sense that I did not belong, and never would again.” A slice of Tudor crime based around an actual historical figure, Giordano Bruno. He was an Italian former monk who left the cloister and escaped the Inquisition. He had unorthodox cosmological views. He also had views on religion and the afterlife that ran counter to those of the Catholic Church. He was in England from 1583 to 1585 and then wandering around Europe for the next seven years. He knew Sidney and Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymasters. Parris manages to hang the whole novel on this relationship. This is set in 1583 and focusses on Oxford. Quite a few of the characters are historical. The disputation with Dr John Underhill was an actual event. There are a series of gruesome murders (when aren’t there) in the college where Bruno is staying. He finds himself having to investigate at the behest of Sidney. There’s a fair amount of philosophising, any number of secretive Catholics, several banned books, priest holes, secret midnight meetings, atmospheric rooms and weather. It’s quite predictable and Bruno does run around hopelessly for a while before he stumbles over the truth. It’s well written with a first person narrator, but it’s nearly 500 pages long. 5 out of 10 Starting The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin

Kiss from a Rose - Seal

said, 'vicar, I was reading 📚 a truly spiffing book by Reggie A. Theist, called 'Abolish God:why religion is wrong' and I wanted your..' The reverend parson disappeared so fast it was almost like he'd been asked to do a day's work. ' This is quite unacceptable ', mused the parson as he ran down Book Street, until he saw a sign asking for people...

Cressida slurped it all....

A Kiss to Build a Dream On - Louis Armstrong

absolutely no cream because

Ugh, I think I read something like that a long time ago, but now I can't sleep until I remember what book it was.

spoons of sugar and

Kaputt (1944) Curzio Malaparte Curzio Malaparte travelled around Europe during World War 2 in service of the Italian government and as a journalist, witnessing the Eastern front, Poland, Finland, Romania, Ukraine. Here he creates a (mostly) fictional account of what he had seen and experienced. As such, the content is grim and brutal revealing a diseased continent in turmoil and decay, grasping at ideology and destiny, all while the bodies pile up. It is an account which is honest in its descriptions of the horrors of war but somewhat less convincing in its moral stance. Firstly, it should be noted that Malaparte's writing can often be truly exquisite. It is descriptive and romantic all while being engaging and entertaining. There are moments of levity and decadence (which I disliked and we will get to that) but when he's being serious, describing the dead suffocated Jews falling out of the train, the frozen bodies, the prostitutes, when he's setting the scene and exposing the moral poison in the veins of his (often) caricatured characters, he is at his best and conjures up language that is fluid, creative, and mesmerising. Ultimately the combination of his prose and the war content makes for a fascinating reading experience. But then we come to the issue of Malaparte's complicity. Italians have always had a tendency to pretend they were always with the allies and Malaparte is no different. As he dines on succulent meals with high ranking Nazis, he is keen to impart his superior opinion that these people are indeed monsters and yet if that were so, why does he so readily accept their invitations and glasses of wine? There is a distinct feeling when reading the book that Malaparte is waiting to see which way the wind will blow before making any firm commitment. One suspects had the Nazis won the war he would have tweaked a few chapters here and there but ultimately published the same book. There is something unquestionably distasteful and inauthentic about his putative sense of grief and shame. It stinks of being sorry... because you got caught. That being said, the book is still magnificent. He so desperately wants to be Proust but doesn't quite have what it takes. There are moments when he comes close but certainly not enough of them. And then there are too many chapters where rich people have self-indulgent and condescending conversations. A good editor could have done wonders for Malaparte. It's close to being something glorious but never quite gets there. 9/10

Anything Goes by Lucy Moore “a professor of sociology asserted that “the most dangerous weakness in a democracy is the uninformed and unthinking average man.” Lucy Moore is a writer of “popular histories” and this is no exception. She has produced a history of the US in the 1920s. A huge canvas. She manages it by the simple expedient of producing a chapter on a series of topics. The sweep is broad and there are chapters on: business, the Crash, Prohibition and organised crime, film, Jazz, Hollywood, the Ku Klux Klan, politics and particularly Harding, Lindbergh, sport (especially boxing and Jack Dempsey), the literary scene (an excess of Fitzgerald), immigration, labour unions, the rise of the motor car, evolution vs creationism and the infamous trial and much more crammed in between. It is readable and very anecdotal with very little that cannot be found elsewhere. It does feel like a first year university student’s attempt at it, following the adage “let’s cram everything in” (in terms of topics). As a result of there being so many areas covered, there is no real depth. Certain characters are focussed on: Al Capone, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Jack Dempsey, Warren Harding, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Charles Lindbergh and many others. There are occasional flashes of insight which raise it from the really dire: “So many aspects of the Jazz Age recall our own: political corruption and complacency; fear of outsiders; life-changing technologies; cults of youth, excess, consumerism and celebrity; profit as a new religion on the one hand and the easy availability of credit on the other; astonishing affluence and yet a huge section of society unable to move out of poverty.” However the very number of areas under consideration mean that nothing is covered in real depth. There are a few errors scattered around. But if you know nothing about the US in the 1920s you will learn a good deal. 6 out of 10 Starting Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

with at least three

were perched on the bench watching and waiting for any wayward, escaped spaghetto. Rosie came in like a little thundercloud with bits of lightening escaping. 'The Vicar is drunk, Johnny! And he's been making very suggestive remarks! Do something!' 'Gladly, my love, I've been waiting for the chance.' I marched up to him and ...

Dream a Little Dream Of Me ~ The Mamas and the Papas

Still reading. That period after WW1 was a lot different to the Victorian age, but it was a lot different to now. D.H. Lawrence had a strange writing style. His characters spend much time philosophising on the meaning of life. I am not saying it's bad, though. Also there are nude scenes. I tend to think of that interwar period as dominated by the likes of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. They were experimental writers. I think mainstream literature was moving in other ways.

"The Star’s Tennis Balls " by Stephen Fry - Tough. Really tough. But as you keep reading, it draws you in...

😃 😀

I feel OK.. indeed, were it not for social conventions and the diktat of our father Lord, one would squeeze your ..ahem'. Rightly shocked, Rosie protested, but the vicar, looking inebriated, kept on grinning and being a fool. Anyway, he received a slap from Rosie,which, if nothing else, will have brought to his mind the saying, ' no greater wrath have the a wild cat, than a female scorned'..or was it a female scone..? Meantime, I was cooking spaghetti and the cats...

tea, hot 💪 strong tea....

Dream Lover - Bobby Darin