KEV67

Yes, it is good. I have only read two Stephen King books: Holly and Joy Land. I do not think Stephen King writes straight crime novels. He usually includes elements of the supernatural or the macabre. Holly does not have any supernatural elements, just the macabre, but other books in which the protagonist (Holly Gibney) appears do have supernatural elements. As it was a book about crime with an element of the supernatural, it made me think of G.B.H. by Ted Lewis, and compared to that, Holly is not as good. Holly Gibney is a good character. She is a middle-aged female detective, who prays every night, and frets about things and who is very conscientious. That actually made the final confrontation a little contrived and unbelievable to me, but then the premise is fairly implausible and this is not true crime.

I finished Holly. It was a page turner.

Little Adrian's favourite book so far is Where the Wild Things Are. He likes Sue Hendra and Paul Linnet's books. These are very silly. I have bought three of them: No-bot, the Robot with No Bottom; Barry, the Fish with Fingers, and Norman, the Slug with the Silly Shell. Hendra and Linnet wrote the Supertato books, which have been turned into children's TV cartoons. Adrian likes Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler's books. I have read him The Scarecrows' Wedding, The Gruffalo, and another one about a penguin called Jonty Gentoo, who escapes from a zoo and swims to the South Pole. I think Julia Donaldson's rhyming is very good, although I am not sure how much of these books Adrian understands. The Gruffalo has a good plot, but I doubt Adrian is old enough to appreciate it yet. I think he understands quite a bit of Where the Wild Things Are, because he does not have to understand the words to understand the story.

I have ordered a copy. I have a few other books on my TBR, so it will take me several months to get to. If I like it I will probably tell you, but if I don't I will probably keep quiet.

I went back to the United Reformed Church in Bury St Edmunds. It seems like URC churches are not named after saints. We had another female pastor this time. She appeared interested in wars around the world and social justice issues. I brought Adrian. He was quite noisy, but they told me afterwards he was not bother. However one of the elders recalled there was a couple that came to the church because they were put off by the children in the church they used to attend. This made me wonder. The congregation is very elderly, so one would think they would want some children so that the church did not die out. But perhaps what happens is that most their recruits are elderly to start with. I was talking to one of the regulars and said I was interested in having Adrian christened. He said he'd talk to one of the elders. Yesterday I took Adrian to an Epic Dad event (carpet bowls and mini golf). Epic Dad is a charity which helps single fathers. I told the organiser I took Adrian to church, but that they had no child provision. He said he went to the Beacon Church, also in Bury St Edmunds, which does. This puts me in a bit of a quandary. Personally I am not into happy clappy, very child-oriented churches, but I suspect Adrian would prefer them when he gets a bit older. He would probably prefer them to listening to someone drone on about why the tax collector's prayer found favour and the Pharisee's did not. The poor old Pharisees could never do anything right, while the Samaritans could never do anything wrong.

I went back to the United Reformed Church in Bury St Edmunds. It seems like URC churches are not named after saints. We had another female pastor this time. She appeared interested in wars around the world and social justice issues. I brought Adrian. He was quite noisy, but they told me afterwards he was not bother.

I am only on Chapter 11. It will be December before I finish it. So far, so good. What a silly old fool the old man was!

I started reading The Old Curiosity Shop. It starts with a gentleman walking the streets of London at night. That's what Dickens used to do himself, wasn't it. I was wondering if it were televised who they would cast as Quilp. He's a malignant dwarf. Peter Dinklage comes to mind. I wonder if he can do 19th Century London accents. Another good thing is the chapters are short, which means I can get through one at bedtime.

That was quick.

One thing that is amusing me is that Holly is a lot about writers. It is not much of a spoiler to say the baddies are an academic couple, one of whom worked in the English faculty. Another member of the faculty was an author of one successful novel. Yet another was a renowned poet. Another character in the book is an aspiring poet. Of course, Stephen King is a multi-bestseller, although I would say he was more on the entertainment end of the literature spectrum. Not entirely, though. In the latest chapter, the aspiring poet meets the renowned poet to show her her poems. They have a discussion of poetry. Stephen King had to write the character a bit of poetry to present and discuss. Personally, I could not tell the difference between a good poem and a bad one, unless it's very bad. Much like my knowledge of fine wine. The renowned poet thinks the aspiring poet's poems are good. I wondered how much time Stephen King spent composing this poem, considering that it was supposed to be good, and the pace at which he writes. Stephen King writing about these semi- and not very successful writers strikes as being similar to a retired international football player turned pundit commentating on lower league football games to spectators who know from quite-a-bit to next-to-nothing about the game.

I took Little Adrian to the local United Reform Church. It was a different pastor this time. They seem to have a rota of pastors at this church. I was a little concerned Adrian might be disruptive to proceedings. I gave him a bottle of milk, which kept him quiet for the first half of the service. I gave him vegetable straws and other snacks after that, although that did not prevent him giving a running commentary on the service. There were two visitors from the Anglican cathedral on some sort of inter-church thing. The pastor reminded them that the Congregationalist Church, as it was before they united with the Presbyterian Church, had their first female leader in 1916. He asked whether anyone understood what 'Ecclesia semper reformanda est' meant. One old lady at the back said, 'The church should always change.' She must have paid attention in school. Then a woman from the congregation read a passage from the bible, but it was the wrong passage. So then she read the right passage, which was about a Pharisee who prayed that he was glad he was not a wrongdoer like the tax collector next to him. The tax collector prayed for forgiveness. Jesus commended the tax collector and censured the Pharisee. I was not surprised. Jesus had a real problem with Pharisees. After the service I went for tea and biscuits with the others. They all said they liked Adrian being there and did not mind his childish noise.

Never heard of him. The Nobel Prize for literature seems a bit dodgy to me, almost as dodgy as the peace prize. Bob Dylan won it once, and sure he's written a lot of good songs, but did he deserve the preeminent prize for literature? Winston Churchill won the literature prize once. I am a big fan of Churchill and I suspect his history books were pretty good. I expect there were better history books published in his time, and really he is known for his other achievements.

I have started reading a Stephen King book called Holly. It is about a case taken on by Holly Gibney of the Finders Keepers detective agency. The way it is written makes it seem like it is one of a series, but I do not know if it is. It is set at the time of Covid, which makes me shudder somewhat. I do not know whether Stephen King is of the same political persuasion as his character, Holly Gibson, but it annoys me a bit. I have had covid at least once. The first time it seemed like a mild cold, yet the government closed down the country, spaffed £400bn up the wall, interrupted children's education, stopped relatives visiting their loved ones, and probably did not save many quality-adjusted life years in the end, by the time you take into account all the cancer sufferers and other sick people who were put off seeking an appointment. Stephen King seems of a similar political outlook to my stepmother, who berated me for not getting vaxed. I didn't see the point as I had natural immunity by that time and an antibody reading to prove it. Stephen King is naturally against Trump and MAGA, so it seems. Putting that aside, it is early days with this book. The only other Stephen King book I have read was Joyland, which I did enjoy. There was a sort of inside joke in Holly. A missing woman's mother says her daughter was a pretty girl who was prom queen at school, and did not get splashed with a bucket of blood, referring to the film, Carrie, which was based on a book by Stephen King. Stephen King has been writing a long time. Carrie came out in the 70s.

Go on then. I had just finished Villette by Charlotte Bronte, which I did not go a bundle on. Nevertheless, I invested in a copy of The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens. I am not going to try and complete it by the end of October, because I am a slow reader, and I am working through three other books at present.

I went to the local United Reform Church this morning. I brought Little Adrian with me. I told the lady handing out hymn books I'd take him out if he started getting noisy, but she said not to worry. He started making a noise, but then I gave him a bottle of milk and he fell asleep. I reckon he reduced the average age of the the congregation by three-and-a-half years. I counted twenty or twenty-one people in the congregation and I reckoned the average age was 70 (being generous). 70 years/20 congregants=3.5 years per congregant, rounding the figures a bit. We had a lady preacher this time. Her sermon was about doubts, concentrating on Doubting Thomas, and Peter when he lost his nerve walking on water. At one point the pastor asked if we didn't all sometimes have doubts. Everyone kept schtum. This made me think back. I received a Gideon bible at school, which converted me from Atheism to Christianity when I was twelve. When I started reading I was expecting it to be like an Arthurian legend, but the way it was written made Jesus seem like a real person. As I grew older I started to have more doubts because of inconsistencies, unbelievable bits, and things I just did not agree with. I noticed that the more believable bits were events that happened in front of crowds, while the most outrageous miracles were only witnessed by his Apostles. I once read a book on the origins of Christianity, which said that as far as Jesus's mission was concerned, the first three gospels were to be preferred, but that regarding the events leading up to the crucifixion John's gospel was to be preferred. St John seems to have had source to some extra information regarding the crucifixion, despite his gospel having been written later than the others. I read another book on the origins of Christianity which said John's Gospel was the most Christologically developed of the four. I think it is the one with many of the most outrageous miracles. There was lots of faith healing in the Synoptic Gospels, but not so much walking on water and turning water into wine. I had a problem singing one of the hymns. I could not reach the high notes, so I tried starting off deeper, but still had trouble reaching the top notes. There was some music written above the verse, and according to that lowest note was E and the highest was D. That is just one octave, isn't it? In honesty I have no idea which notes I am singing, or the key. I am pretty vague what 'key' means in music. I have been trying to learn the tin whistle at home, and the piece I have been trying to play goes from lower D to upper F, and I am able to sing the words to that.

I think so. They cannot stop you from attending and unless you are obnoxious they will talk to you over tea and biscuits at the end.

That was jolly good, and it did not take me as long to read as Villette. I learnt the odd nugget. I didn't know capital punishment in the USA varied by state. I should have done, because it varies by state now. Curiously, capital punishment seems not to have been legal in 19th Century Russia, where you would think they were more brutal. Getting back to the book, it would probably make a good film, which I might even go and watch. It would be better than most films I see at the cinema.

I did not like the ending. I do not like sad endings, generally. In the notes to the last chapter, it said that Patrick Bronte did not like the ending either, so Charlotte Bronte changed it to make it ambiguous. Charles Dickens did something similar for Great Expectations. He wrote a first ending, which many people prefer, but which is sad and bitter. His girlfriend and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, most famous for coining "The pen is mightier than the sword," did not like it. So Dickens changed the final chapter for one that was much more ambiguous. I did not think the ending to Villette was as good as the ambiguous ending to Great Expectations. I watched a YouTube video of an American professor of literature. He said Victorian books had crummy endings. For example, he said Anna Karenina went wrong after the death of a principal character in the last part of the book. That did make me wonder. The only Victorian book that I thought had a really good ending was Wuthering Heights. I thought Moby Dick had a pretty good ending too. I read somewhere Herman Melville added a short chapter to the ending, but only to explain an inconsistency in the story. In one of David Lodge's campus trilogy books, I think Small World, an academic started reading an old book in preparation for a creative writing class. I was struck by the advice. It said there were three types of ending: a happy ending, a sad ending and a neither-nor ending. He advised most writers opt for happy endings, and that only a genius should attempt a neither-nor ending. That sounds like good advice to me. I thought the ending of Captain Correlli's Mandolin was spoilt by the neither-nor ending. I can see that Louis de Berniers did not want a happy ending, because that would have been too pat and not dramatic enough. He did not want an unhappy ending, because that would have been too bleak. So he went for the unhappy but happy ending, because that had a bit of a twist and some drama.

I have not attended any churches recently. This is in part because the URC I have been going to isn't a great place to take a toddler. I don't really want to leave Little Adrian with my mother for too long, because she has things she wants to do, and she gets exasperated with Adrian's naughtiness. However, yesterday was the first Sunday of the month, so I went to the Unitarians in the afternoon. I took Adrian to the park first. He never goes to sleep on the way out, because he is excited about the swings, but he usually goes to sleep on the way back. Worked out this time. He fell asleep in Caffè Nero, then stayed asleep through the Unitarian service, despite the loudness of the organ playing. He woke up briefly about half way through, but then went to sleep again. The theme of the service was how the Unitarians would change if they started off afresh. The pastor said a lot would stay the same. They would still ditch all the theological doctrine, but would stay committed to social justice and equity. This annoyed me a bit. If a church has no theological doctrine, why should it be prescriptive on political doctrines? I am not committed to social justice or equity myself. I do not think it is up to the government to equalise any advantages parents might strive to give to their children. I do not think the government should take the father's place to provide for his children, in theory, anyway. Similarly, I think children have a responsibility to look after their aged parents, although that is often difficult. I didn't say any of that. I stayed behind for tea and biscuits. They cooed over Adrian. I was talking to one of them. I told her how in Reading some pagan from Earth Spirit turned up. I had been surprised by that, because Unitarianism had derived from Protestant Christianity, although it is not really Christian now. She said that when she first attended a Unitarian meeting, someone introduced himself as an Atheist, which she seems to be herself. That made me wonder why she bothered turning up at all, but I have wondered that at other churches, because many do not seem very orthodox. We were told next month's theme will be rivers. One of the old ladies said she thought about the Mersey. She remembered being a young girl and her father urging her to walk along the gang plank to the ferry, which had gaps along each side. She is 80 now. I expect I might say something about the Thames. The Thames along Reading was very pretty, and I used to envy the rowers. I once spent two days swimming from the source of the Thames in an organised activity holiday.

It is odd that Anglo-Saxon England's greatest poem was set in Scandinavia. The Anglo-Saxons had great difficulty with the Danes and Vikings, and Norse people generally, so why listen to stories about them? Does the Beowulf story originally come from Scandinavia?

Not the Nine O' Clock News was great, so many great sketches. I liked the Guy the Gorilla sketch in which Mel Smith is interviewed about a gorilla he has brought back from the jungle and educated. Then there was another with Griff Rhys Jones as the racist Constable Savage, getting told off by the superintendent about a citizen of African extraction he keeps arresting. Then there is a spoof on the famous television argument about the Life of Brian, but rejigged as the Life of Monty Python. Then there was the 'Failed in Wales' advert. One of the funniest things I ever saw was an episode from Catchphrase. The way the panels were revealed made the animation obscene. Extremely funny, particularly as one of the panellists was none-too-bright and couldn't work out why people were laughing.

I wondered whether Adrian might be a bit scared of the wild things, but he does not seem to be. He likes the wild thing that sticks its head out the sea when he first gets to the island. What is strange to me is that Adrian accepts a bedroom turning into a jungle. I do not know how much of the book he understands.

There was a film called The Vanishing, which was a remake of a Dutch film, which was based on a book by Tim Krebbe. I have not actually watched the film, although I had heard how creepy it was from film review shows by Barry Norman. I was at work once, and I overheard someone describe the plot. It freaked me out just listening to it.

I have never managed to watch Alien all the way through. There was a scene in which an android, played by Ian Holm, had been attacked by the alien. Instead of blood he was squirting hydraulic fluid. Another film I could not bear watching was Tess by Roman Polanski, starring Natasja Kinski. It was well acted, but I had to stop watching after about twenty minutes, because I could see what was coming next.

I am still reading this between other things. Daniel Defoe is now writing about Yorkshire and the North Midlands. He talked about he and his party came across a woman who lived in a cave with her family. Her husband was a lead miner. He said they were poor, but not desperate. The husband earned 5d a day, while the wife earned 3d a day washing the ore, when she could work, which as she had small children was not often. They made a whipround and gave her a sum not exceeding a crown, which I think is 10 shillings. Later they met a miner who appeared out of a hole in the ground. They couldn't understand what he said, but they had a local as an interpreter, who said he worked so many fathoms under the ground. I am not sure how far a fathom is, but Defoe reckoned it was as deep as St Paul’s Cathedral is high. They gave him a couple of shillings, with which he made off to the pub, but Defoe and his party got there first. They bought him some beer and made him promise to take his money home to his family. I found this quite interesting. This all happened three centuries ago. Who would imagine that you meet someone on an average, mundane day, and people still read about it centuries later.