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Charmer and I watched Get Carter (the original with Micheal Caine of course) and Boyz n The Hood. Charmer had not seen either before.

So many books so little time

Welcome Lou this is a great place you will love it

Thanks Ruth and Vladd. Interesting! Now I have thought about it lots of memories of the original series have came flooding back. I don't know if it will have stood the test of time but I would like to see some of both the old and the new. In the original series Rose was very stern but had a good heart underneath. Mrs Bridges was on old bag. I was only little but I used to have a crush on Miss Georgina (Lesley -Anne Downe) I used to think she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I remember a Christmas episode where Miss Georgina and the new maid (Daisy?) took it upon themselves to go take some food to Daisy's poor family in the back streets of London and went missing for several hours and came back in a state. That was quite a powerful episode.

Ah if it's a voucher then that's not really a slip at all is it? A voucher is free books just needing to be converted . Anyway why 80 that's a funny number why not 100? That way you can still have 13 yet

Confused. Is this a remake of the series my parents used to watch on a sunday night about 40 years ago? With Hudson and Mrs Bridges and Rose ?

Bring it with you tomorrow honey I will read that next and you can take something else off our pile!

Liked your review for De Profundis poppy very funny. That reminded me of Monty Python...." It's really made me respect the Romans"

I will have to wait for this on DVD I guess....

I guess I like the idea of Ben being a neanderthal. It also makes it easier to see him as "other" and justify locking him away or disposing of him to preserve the other children's quality of family life. I fall in that camp. Harriet knew he was "other" but she still loved him. Although she was still a crap parent and gave him to a motorcycle gang to look after so she didn't have to think about him. And later she quite accepted the fact that he was out there raping and stealing and doing violence in society. Way to go Harriet !

sorry to seem argumentative Maureen, I am really not trying to be, it's just a difference of opinion! But I don't agree with what you have written above. Even normal children at that age don't know they have done wrong, they only know they are being told off. I have seen stupid teenage mothers slapping very young children in pushchairs and it makes my blood boil. It was obvious the child did not know what it had done "wrong" and just became scared and frozen because it did not know what to do to make mum "love " her again. In Ben's case, he didn't start to "learn" until he had the bad experience of the dying place for Harriet to threaten him with.

I have to disagree about Ben! I don't think he was actually malicious in the accepted understanding of the term. (Although the author does describe him as having a look of pure malice) . I think it was that that he did not understand why he should not kill the dog. To him maybe it was just some sort of prey that was an easy kill , again more of a hardwired survival instinct to kill rather than a knowledge of good and evil. I agree the accepted opinion of a neanderthal is of a shambling sub human. But any modern text book will tell you that is wrong. They were actually with us till only 25, 000 years ago. They co-operated together to hunt mammoths and buried their dead with ceremony and made weapons and clothes and looked after their sick. They may not have had many Shakespeares among them but they were fully human, if a bit different. I think Ben would fully fit the bill, for the purposes of the novel.

And this is actually the crux of the book and the theme, motherhood. I think it was a very good book choice. This story has certainly made me think a lot.

Neanderthals were not slow or stupid! They actually had bigger brains on average than Homo Sapiens!! But their heads were different shape which suggests different areas of the brain were more developed and others less so than ours.

One would hope so!

Hi Brida! I did wonder where you had gone. Welcome back

Gonna make a big effort to get on board and do a GGK novel next month Steve.

I never liked Arthur C. Clarke. I always thought his writing was a bit stiff and boring even when I was a kid. But he was a clever fella no doubt. He invented the geo-stationary satellite.

Am enjoying The Knife Of Never Letting Go. Would be great to have a talking dog.

They gonna have to prise my kindle out of my cold, dead fingers.....I don't need no other reader

For some reason the Foundation books passed me by when I was a kid. Should I read them now? Why are they so good?

Coraline? By the way I think your system for getting your TBR pile down is brilliant Claire, all your little visual tricks .

Interested to know what you think of this Laura , I read it a couple of years ago. Scary ?

As you have already read Jane Eyre it can do you no harm Ruth! Although reading it before (as I did) does seem to affect how people view Rochester.

I can't justify spending that much on a book so I guess it will be a few years till I get to read it!