Brian.

I'm looking forward to Peter Schmeichel's autobiograhy, One, which is out at the end of September.

Since I’m still struggling to really get into anything I decided to have a crack at something easy to read. The book I chose is Champagne Football by Mark Tighe and Paul Roman. It is a non-fiction book detailing the corruption and mismanagement of the Irish Football Association under the stewardship of John Delaney. I’m about 100 pages into it and so far it’s a great read.

No I’m not. I’ve really struggled to get into anything much for the last month. I’ve been feeling a bit out of sorts about quite a few things so it isn’t just isolated to reading.

Is it a fiction or non-fiction book?

My reading has really slowed down over the last month so I have only finished 3 books since my last update. SAS Ghost Patrol by Damien Lewis (3/5) This is a non-fiction book all about special forces missions run against the Nazi's and Italian forces which held Tobruk and surrounding areas. I knew nothing about these raids beforehand and was constantly left amazed at the audacity of the raids. One of the main aims was to train a group of soldiers to imitate the Afrika Korps and use this to gain access to huge camps where POW's were held. To do this, the selected group lived and trained exactly the same as the Afrika Korps, stole vehicles, and then set up road blocks checking paperwork just as the Nazi forces were doing. When this was successful they would enter transit camps, rest, eat in the canteen etc, and then move on. Eventually they used their cover to enter the camps and areas held by Nazi forces and cause chaos. The story told is amazing but the book doesn't quite live up to the content. Zero by Eric Van Lustbader (2/5) The main character in this book is Michael Doss, an American living in Japan who studied martial arts in Japan as a young man. Life is ticking along until his father dies under suspicious circumstances in Hawaii. The family gets together at the funeral and his sister is kidnapped shortly afterwards. Michael's father's 'business' partner reveals a little about what his father had been doing in Hawaii. As a result Michael goes to Hawaii to see if he can work out what happened to his father and see if it leads to his sister's location. I wanted to like this book but the forced way the Japanese culture was constantly pushed really grated on me after a while. I didn't care for any of the characters and found most of them fairly cliched. I found the Yakuza stuff interesting but on the whole it felt like a bad 80's martial arts movie that Jean-Claude Van Damme would have starred in. Silence by Erling Kagge (2/5) The blurb on the back of the book says " Behind a cacophony of traffic noise, iPhone alerts and our ever-spinning thoughts, an elusive notion - silence - lies in wait. But what really is silence? Where can it be found? And why is it more important now than ever?" This really jumped out at me from the shelves in my local Waterstones and I was really interested as it also stated that Erling Kagge had spent 50 days walking across Antarctica on his own with a broken radio. I expected an explanation of how he felt and the mental jumps that happens when faced with complete isolation for a long time. Instead I got a collection of thoughts and short passages on silence and how it can be found anywhere. It was all a bit vague and flighty and while I am sure others will love it, I didn't get on with it. Hopefully my next reads will be more suited to my tastes

I will be surprised if Italy don't win the final despite what the bookies odds might say. I'm still not convinced by the England team but I'll be delighted if they do manage to pull it off.

Still going along with Zero by Eric Van Lustbader but I've not been in a reading mood much in the last week.

No plans to travel abroad this year. We normally take a few trips inside the UK every year so this year we'll take a few more than usual. When restrictions are lifted worldwide we have some pretty big trips planned.

I have the cheapest one on the Cult Pens website, the M5-450T.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a grumpy git and England have let me down too often, but there is a big disconnect between what I see on the pitch and what the pundits say about England’s performances. They played better than against Scotland but it still wasn’t great and Czechia could have easily scored from one of their chances and drew the game.

Welcome to the forum nirdhar. It’s always good to have another Murakami fan on board.

If you haven't used one already I would recommend one of the Uni Kuru Toga mechanical pencils. They have a rotating mechanism which rotates the lead slightly every time you lift the pencil off the page. By doing this the lead is always pointed and you never get that broad flat spot on the lead that happens with other mechanical pencils. I bought one about 15 years ago and it's still my go to mechanical pencil.

After a day or two with no reading I’ve picked my next fiction book to read, Zero by Eric Van Lustbader. I have no idea what to expect from this, I bought it a while ago because I liked the way the cover looked.

I bought a box of Palomino Blackwing 602 years ago and I still have some of them unused, I’ll send you a couple if you want.

Copied across from my blog thread. Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed by Catrina Davies (3/5) The blurb on the back of this book reads as follows "Aged thirty-one, barely making the rent and homesick for the landscape of her childhood, Catrina Davies moves away from the city and into a tiny, dilapidated shed in Cornwall. As a child, she saw her family and their security torn apart; now, on this battered granite peninsula, she slowly rebuilds the shed and, piece by piece, her own sense of self. This is the story of a personal housing crisis and a country-wide one, showing how it can trap us or set us free, and what it means to feel at home." I have two strands to my thoughts on this book. The book as a book, and what the book has to say. As a book, its works well. The writing is descriptive without being flowery, the chapters nicely defined, and thoughtful quotes used in the right places. Davies also makes it clear at the start that the timeline is tweaked and certain things changed to make it flow better but the story is truthful to her experience. This was a good decision because the book is very readable when it could easily have been a disjointed mess at the hands of someone else. It would have been nice if the book contained some photos of the building as many are available online as part of news articles. Now onto what the book has to say. We have a housing crisis in the UK as a whole but it is particularly bad in some places such as Cornwall where Davies lives. Loads of houses are bought up as second homes which sit empty outside the holiday season. This means a lack of houses for those who live there year round. This lack of houses means house prices are beyond most of the residents and that rental prices are also very high compared to the average wage of locals. Davies says this is very unfair and something needs to be done about it. So far, so good. I agree with all this and I'm constantly bewildered by the rate at which house prices increase across the UK each year. After having enough of paying rent for a pokey room in a shared house in Bristol, Catrina decides to move into an old shed (more or a ramshackle studio truth be told) which has been left to run down. The shed is owned by her father and it has sat empty for years so it takes a lot of work to make it even barely habitable.This is where my agreement with Davies started to diverge. She claims the housing crisis made it a necessity but I don't believe this is true. She has a degree (but she never tell us what in) so she is educated, but hates the idea of working so picks up the odd bit of casual work here and there until she gets sick of it. This is the reason why she moves into the shed. It is a conscious choice, not a forced necessity. Many of us have to do jobs we don't really like because we know it gives us the security of four walls. Yes, there is big issue with the housing market, be it rental or ownership, but choosing not to work is a choice. I'll use myself here as an example. I would love to live in the Lake District or near the hills in Scotland. However, I work in an industry which means I need to live near a city which means I can't live in one of these areas and do the job I do. So I make a conscious choice to carry on doing the job I do because it provides me with a level of financial security that I am comfortable with (at the moment at least). My compromise is that I can't live in my dream location. It is a trade off like most of life is. Incidentally the Lake District shares many of the same housing issues that Cornwall does. Catrina seems to want to spend all her life around nature or surfing but doesn't feel like the compromises she needs to make are fair. Reading the book it is clear, and she admits as much, that she has some mental health issues brought about because of her past. I couldn't help but wonder how much of her situation is due to her mental health issues rather than the housing situation. She wants to run away to her carefree upbringing where she had no responsibilities. I feel mean writing all this as I believe there is a lot of validity in what she has to say but at the same time if we all ran away from life's hardships where would we be. She talks about landlords not paying tax and how this hurts society as a whole but then mentions ordering stuff from Amazon regularly throughout the book. The final thing which pushed me over the edge was the following quote when she came across a rotting Dolphin carcass on the beach "The Dolphin had either got caught in a net, or lost its way because GPS interfered with it's sonar". GPS does not interfere with Sonar in this way and the statement is utter hogwash. In the end I guess I feel a level of empathy with Davies, and because I largely agree that the housing system in the UK needs fixing I gave it 3 out of 5.

I have just finished another book but I thought it could do with it's own post. Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed by Catrina Davies (3/5) The blurb on the back of this book reads as follows "Aged thirty-one, barely making the rent and homesick for the landscape of her childhood, Catrina Davies moves away from the city and into a tiny, dilapidated shed in Cornwall. As a child, she saw her family and their security torn apart; now, on this battered granite peninsula, she slowly rebuilds the shed and, piece by piece, her own sense of self. This is the story of a personal housing crisis and a country-wide one, showing how it can trap us or set us free, and what it means to feel at home." I have two strands to my thoughts on this book. The book as a book, and what the book has to say. As a book, its works well. The writing is descriptive without being flowery, the chapters nicely defined, and thoughtful quotes used in the right places. Davies also makes it clear at the start that the timeline is tweaked and certain things changed to make it flow better but the story is truthful to her experience. This was a good decision because the book is very readable when it could easily have been a disjointed mess at the hands of someone else. It would have been nice if the book contained some photos of the building as many are available online as part of news articles. Now onto what the book has to say. We have a housing crisis in the UK as a whole but it is particularly bad in some places such as Cornwall where Davies lives. Loads of houses are bought up as second homes which sit empty outside the holiday season. This means a lack of houses for those who live there year round. This lack of houses means house prices are beyond most of the residents and that rental prices are also very high compared to the average wage of locals. Davies says this is very unfair and something needs to be done about it. So far, so good. I agree with all this and I'm constantly bewildered by the rate at which house prices increase across the UK each year. After having enough of paying rent for a pokey room in a shared house in Bristol, Catrina decides to move into an old shed (more or a ramshackle studio truth be told) which has been left to run down. The shed is owned by her father and it has sat empty for years so it takes a lot of work to make it even barely habitable.This is where my agreement with Davies started to diverge. She claims the housing crisis made it a necessity but I don't believe this is true. She has a degree (but she never tell us what in) so she is educated, but hates the idea of working so picks up the odd bit of casual work here and there until she gets sick of it. This is the reason why she moves into the shed. It is a conscious choice, not a forced necessity. Many of us have to do jobs we don't really like because we know it gives us the security of four walls. Yes, there is big issue with the housing market, be it rental or ownership, but choosing not to work is a choice. I'll use myself here as an example. I would love to live in the Lake District or near the hills in Scotland. However, I work in an industry which means I need to live near a city which means I can't live in one of these areas and do the job I do. So I make a conscious choice to carry on doing the job I do because it provides me with a level of financial security that I am comfortable with (at the moment at least). My compromise is that I can't live in my dream location. It is a trade off like most of life is. Incidentally the Lake District shares many of the same housing issues that Cornwall does. Catrina seems to want to spend all her life around nature or surfing but doesn't feel like the compromises she needs to make are fair. Reading the book it is clear, and she admits as much, that she has some mental health issues brought about because of her past. I couldn't help but wonder how much of her situation is due to her mental health issues rather than the housing situation. She wants to run away to her carefree upbringing where she had no responsibilities. I feel mean writing all this as I believe there is a lot of validity in what she has to say but at the same time if we all ran away from life's hardships where would we be. She talks about landlords not paying tax and how this hurts society as a whole but then mentions ordering stuff from Amazon regularly throughout the book. The final thing which pushed me over the edge was the following quote when she came across a rotting Dolphin carcass on the beach "The Dolphin had either got caught in a net, or lost its way because GPS interfered with it's sonar". GPS does not interfere with Sonar in this way and the statement is utter hogwash. In the end I guess I feel a level of empathy with Davies, and because I largely agree that the housing system in the UK needs fixing I gave it 3 out of 5.

My reading mojo has come back with force and as a result I have quite a few updates to catch up with. The Barcelona Legacy by Jonathan Wilson (4/5) This ties in to both Brilliant Orange (more later) and Pep Confidential which I read early on this year. In this book Wilson looks into the coaching lineage of two of the biggest names in football management, Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho. Over the course of the book we learn about their core tactical beliefs and how, despite both coming from the same football education source, they have diverted and landed on two opposing tactic viewpoints. I really liked this book even if it is a little dry at times. Wilson is really good at picking part both their approaches to football and the weakness which emerge from that. Brilliant Orange by David Winner (3/5) I've had my eye on this book for a while as it tells the tale of Dutch football and why they produce brilliant players but often fall short on the international stage. Winner ties this into the Dutch way of life and also links it to things like art and architecture. I enjoyed the football stuff, especially the players and tactics around the 70' and 80's. The art and architecture stuff not so much. Atomic Habits by James Clear (3/5) This is a re-read for me. An admirable attempt to bring all the science behind habits together in one book. All the stuff in it is really good but it does get repetitive towards the end. I also think it could do with a conclusion at the end which brings all the advice together in one guide to improving good habits and/or breaking bad habits. The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter by Anonymous (3/5) Not a book, more of a very short story which I read purely because it is number 2 in the '1001 books' list. The tale is pretty strange but it occupied me well enough for 45 minutes. The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty (3/5) What would you do if you found a letter in the attic, addressed to you, from your husband - to be opened in the event of his death? This isn't the kind of book I would normally buy but I do like to pick up something completely different from time to time. Every time I logged onto Amazon, popped into Tesco, or browsed Waterstones I would see this book on the shelves. I knew nothing about the author but I had vague recollection of hearing good things about one of her other books, Big Little Lies. So I decided to take a punt as I was struggling to decide what work of fiction to pick up next. Initially I found the book tricky to get into because a lot of characters are introduced in the opening chapters. I kept forgetting who was who and what their particular life issue was. Although this did get a little better, I found myself having to stop a few times later in the book and thinking hard to remind myself. I didn't really care for the characters but there was enough intrigue to keep me engaged throughout. I saw the big event towards the end of the book coming and I was left feeling a bit disappointed by the ending as it all came to a conclusion very quickly. Nevertheless it was good enough that I picked it up every time I had a bit of time to read this week.

I hate it when publishers do but I tend to pick up a Penguin Classic every time I buy books from Waterstones. My collection so far isn't huge but it's slowly going. I had intended to collect some classics by buying Everyman editions but they aren't always easily available and they seem to change the dust jacket designs all the time.

I confess that I bought it purely because the cover jumped out at me.

I did a bit of book shopping yesterday and got a little carried away as usual.

I’ve been meaning to read Almost Human for years but never got round to picking it up. Thanks to your review I will endeavour to read it in the coming weeks.

It was time to start a new book this afternoon and I picked up Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed by Catrina Davies. I finished The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty earlier in the day. I’ll post some further thought later but I felt a bit disappointed by the ending.

I finally managed to sit down yesterday afternoon and dedicate some time to The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty.

Its been confirmed that he is conscious and has been transferred to hospital.

I expect France to do well and if I had to pick a winner I would choose them. I don't expect much from England, the team just hasn't been able to train together enough and although I know the friendlies didn't feature the likely starting eleven, they looke very poor in my opinion.