KEV67

I am over half way. If I were still on Good Reads I would give it five stars. Doris Lessing is very good at reproducing speech patterns and keeping her characters in character.

The Vampire Lovers was a surprisingly faithful adaption of Carmilla.

I'm getting quite into this book, although I still do not understand why anyone would leave signed cheques made out to cash lying about. I certainly hope Mrs Proudie, the bishop's wife, gets hers.

I went to St Mary's yesterday evening. The vicar and his wife were back from holiday. Also back was the thief, but only two other people. I was not sure it was him. I wanted to warn the vicar's wife who normally stands close to the collection plate and hands out the books. However I was late and the service had already started. I put my £20 in an envelope and put it on the collection plate and took a pee behind the suspected thief. Late on in the service he got up to leave, went to speak to the vicar's wife, then switched the envelopes on the plate and left. I saw him do it, but I cannot really rugby tackle someone during a service. So, I expect there will be a different system for taking the collection next time.

Still soldiering on with the Old English and still making heavy weather of it. Eskimos were supposed to have 18 words for snow. Anglo-Saxon a have about a score of words for 'warrior' and a dozen for 'lord'.

Mr Crawley, or is it Rev Crawley, is a perpetual curate in a constant state of poverty. He is paid £130 a year. That is not much by middle class standards, but the majority of the population were much poorer than that. Factory workers earned about £1 a week. Costermongers and farm labourers earned about half that. Most Victorians were really, really poor.

The first part of the story revolves around a stolen cheque.

In the ten pages I read today, the narrator was recounting two business dinners she had with television/theatre producers who wanted to turn her most famous book into television series. One was British. He said they could not afford to shoot in Africa, but they could transpose all the important bits to Britain and make it a doomed romance similar to Brief Encounter. The other was an American. She said her theatrical company was always looking for fresh stories about different sorts of people in different situations, but there were certain topics that were off limits, such as race, religion, extra-marital sex and politics. The narrator said her book contained race and politics. So the narrator was quite rude to them both. The narrator is not exactly Doris Lessing, but come to think of it, I cannot think of any television or film adaptions of her books. I wonder if any television or film producers would be interested in them now they are far more wokified.

There is quite a lot of self-flagellating introspection, but it is still pretty good. I am wary of experimental novels. I like books with chapters, so I know when I can stop reading. This book has parts rather than chapters. Some sections are fiction written by a fictional author, who is basing her fiction on her own life, which by implication is Doris Lessing's own, but you don't know. I have never totally understood what the term 'post-modern' meant, but I think in literature this is post-modern. All these stories about people telling stories, jumping around in timelines and the blurring of fact and fiction. Generally, I don't care for it. Umberto Eco used to write like that and although I liked Name of the Rose, his books Focault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before drove me nuts. I did not like Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five neither. Quentin Tarrantino does something similar in film making. I do quite like his stuff, although I would like it more if he edited his films down.

I went to St Mary's on Castle Street in the evening. The vicar and his wife were on holiday, so his deputy was delivering the sermon. There were only four of us. About forty minutes into the service, someone came off the street and approached the collection plate. The deputy said "Excuse me, Sir". The man, who sounded east European said he wanted to contribute. The sermon continued. The east European messed about with the contribution envelopes and left. At the end of the service the deputy vicar walked straight to the collection plate and said he had taken some of the money. The brass neck of some people.

The Grantly family seem to have changed again. In the first book I came across them the Grantly's had two daughters, both high-spirited girls. The next time one of the girls had changed character. She was beautiful but dull. The other one had been bumped off, although her family did not seem all that cut up about it. In this book it turns out they also have two sons. I have not heard of them before. One of them is a retired major with Victoria Cross no less. The other is a clergyman, but he has not been introduced yet.

Finished it, just don't test me on any of it.

Only went to one church today, the Church for bigots on Castle St. The vicar did say something in his sermon which troubled me a bit. He said there was a parade of sin through town the day before. I wondered if he meant there had been a gay pride march. I looked it up on the interweb, and there had been something like that. I don't think I will tell my lesbian friend about that; she would not be happy. On the other hand, St Mary's Minster about 100 yards away from there is displaying a LGBTQAI+ banner again, as well as refugees welcome banners.

Actually, it is not that bad. It is a lot better than Alexandria Quartet. I wonder if all her books were about the African ex-pat experience.

I am running out of churches to go to in my area. The ones that are left are a bit out of my comfort zone. There are the Seventh Day Adventists. Their church is actually the one closest to me, but I would be the only white person there. There are the Mormons. I would be wary going there. There are several Orthodox churches, but they all speak foreign languages. I went into a Greek Orthodox service once. They were renting an Anglican church and I got my times wrong. There is a Romanian Orthodox church at the bottom of the hill who share another Anglican church. I attended the evening service at St Mary's Castle Street, Church of England (Continuing). The vicar's wife was not there. The pub historian was doing her job of handing out the prayer books and taking the collection. Not that there were many people to collect from. Apart from the organist (who is improving) the vicar, and the pub historian, there was myself and two Hong Kong Chinese couples. Someone came in about half way through, but did not listen to the whole service. The vicar told me he opened the door to the pew, kneeled and crossed himself, but then the door closed, so he opened it again and knelt and crossed himself again, and that this happened about four times. Then he left without taking his cap. The vicar referred to Jacob wrestling with the angel again, then about an expedition to find the source of the Nile. He had a bit of a rant against some of the other churches. He did not say which ones, but I suspect the Church of England, and possibly some of the churches who play a lot of music and appeal to the kids. He said just because a church was well attended it was spiritually full, and neither alas was a poorly attended church. I wondered what the Chinese couples made of that. I had not seen them before. I wonder if I will again.

I am about 60 pages in. I am worried I may have made an Alexandria Quartet sized mistake. Doris Lessing did write in the preface not to read stuff you don't like, so I cannot entirely blame her. I read one of her other books I found in my father's bookcase. The cover made it look like a romance. I think he liked it in part because it was set in Rhodesia and the protagonist's lefty politics resembled his own in his youth. My father lived for six years in Zambia where he was a teacher. The Golden Notebook looks like the one Lessing got the Nobel Prize for, but I am concerned it will be a ton of self-flagellating introspection. And I don't share her politics.

I am not sure I would read Watership Down again. It was one of my favourite books as a boy and aspects of it are great. For instance the rabbits' religion. The ending is one of the best I have ever read. I tried reading it once as an adult and it suddenly seemed very dated. It was as if all the characters were voiced by actors in a British WW2 film. I image John Mills would play Hazel. Trevor Howard would be there, maybe he would be Bigwig. The does would speak like Miss Moneypenny. I am no male feminist or white knight but it suddenly seemed embarrassingly sexist. It was not an entire surprise when I learned Richard Adams had been a soldier during WW2.

I started reading 1984 as a 15 or 16-year-old. We had read Animal Farm in class. I got about three-quarters through and I could not see how Winston Smith could win. There were not enough pages for him to escape and lead the counter-revolution. I should have read Fahrenheit 451 instead. When I was about 40 I read it again and I thought it was genius. By then I had read most of his other fiction, non-fiction and essays.

In the next episode Stan is put in charge of the canteen. He appoints an Indian driver's wife to be the cook, only the drivers have never had curry before and are all gasping for water. Only the inspector takes it in his stride because he served in India during the war. He can even talk Urdu. Honestly, he's wasted being a bus inspector. Last episode of series 1, Stan and his friend unwisely challenge two female clippies to a darts match. There is a bit of horseplay which would get you marched to HR in these enlightened days. Before the match Iris nobbles Stan by getting him drunk and getting him excited, telling him her landlady is away. Obviously Stan and his friend are £5 down by the end of the evening. Iris was going to make it up to Stan, but he can't take advantage, because he had to take his mother home.

The gardening tools were explained a little further on. Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit. If I understood correctly they then have a game of doctors and nurses. What I do not understand is that the only real knowledge this fruit of the tree of knowledge has given them is that they were not wearing any clothes. Why does it matter? There is no one else around. They have already seen each other naked. God already knows and the angels are above that sort of thing. I suppose it is a metaphor for something.

In what way does your C of E parson behave more like a Methodist or Baptist?

The Christadelphians are more like what I thought the Unitarians were like. I think maybe the Unitarians were like the Christadelphians generations ago. Wikipedia tells me the Christadelphians reject the Holy Trinity and the pre-existence of Christ. That would make them like the Arian Church. There was a big conference in 325 about whether Arius was right or Athanasius of Alexandria was right. The Athanasian view won by a landslide and the Arians were declared heretics. When I was more religious than I am now, this bothered me because Nicean Creed did not really match up with what I read in the Bible, and I wondered where they got the extra information, and why was it considered valid. Also according to Wikipedia, the Christadelphians do not believe in an afterlife, at least not one that starts immediately after death. I think they believe in an earthly resurrection following the second coming. Actually, the exact nature of the Resurrection and the afterlife always puzzled me too. The Bible is not very consistent. The Old Testament Jews supposedly did not believe in an afterlife at all. But even they are not very consistent.

I attended the Christadelphian meeting this morning. There was a bit of confusion. They wanted me to sign in the visitors' book. Then they asked me to write where I was from, so I wrote Reading. This confused them, until I told them I was Church if England, not from another branch of the church. The congregation was mostly white British and Iranian. The Christadelphians are involved in some sort of campaign over these Iranians' immigration status. On the screen there were English and Farsi projections from biblical texts. Otherwise the service was quite traditional and more like what I imagine Dissenter churches used to be like. A woman played an electronic organ. The hymns sounded traditional. The women wore hats or headscarves. There was no stain-glass or ornamentation. There were no pews, just chairs. The Eucharist was slightly different: chunks of French stick were passed around and the congregation picked bits off. Then the wine, which tasted more like Ribena, was passed around on trays in little plastic thimbles. One reading was from Job and another was from Mark about Christ's arrest and Peter's denying of them. Overall I was impressed. I intend to go to St Mary's Castle Street this evening. I fear we may have lost the pub historian. I went to his local on Thursday. He was not there, but I overheard two locals, one of whom I know to be his friend, murmuring about someone who was either very ill or had died. On the way out I saw his friend looking into space. I will find out this evening, no doubt. Edit: the vicar says he is fine, just away on holiday.

It is weird. I have been searching for records on my Irish granny. Half the county turned up to her funeral and I can't find a thing. It is as if she never existed.

Thanks for that. If I understood correctly, my cousin's son, Jacob, is my first cousin once removed, but I am his second cousin once removed. Edit: I looked at the diagram and I would be his first cousin once removed too. Edit: which means the people I thought were my second cousins once removed are actually my first cousins once removed. I cannot remember actually ever meeting a second cousin.