Until recently, I was looking forward to collecting my State Pension later this year as a great way to gain more disposable income and make the lifestyle a bit more comfortable. As the markets now stand, I’m watching my private pension fund diminish at a disturbing rate; we’re not yet in Truss/Kwarteng territory, but turmoil in the markets mean squeaky-bum time until the markets finally stabilise, whenever that might be. I also have a Civil Service pension and find that this year’s index-linked increase is *less* than our annual Council Tax rise. Anyway, six months to State Pension day and it suddenly looks a lot more like a safety net than a comfort blanket.
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The Butcher Bird has been out for a month now. I am delighted to say that I have sold some copies, but not many copies. So it goes, as Billy Pilgrim said, poo-tee-weet. I don’t write for sales, but it is always nice when I see that a book has sold or someone says something kind on social media. And as I write this I see that someone, somewhere in the UK, has bought a hardback copy; I got quite the endorphin rush.
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One of my TV memories from the early 1970s was watching Clochemerle on BBC2, a satire that revolves around a proposal to erect a public urinal near the church in a small wine-growing town in Beaujolais. I have it on a DVD and should watch it again, not least because the luminous Cyd Hayman is in it, an early crush of mine. A lot later I read the book by Gabriel Chevallier and at least one of its sequels (I have all three of them but I have no memory of reading the third, Clochemerle les Bains.) I also have one of his other novels in an old paperback, The Affairs of Flavie, but didn’t get along with it. They’re quite old translations and could do with an update. What I didn’t know until recently was that he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, La Peur, based on his experiences in the trenches in WW1, a novel that was effectively suppressed when WW2 came along. It was eventually released in English as Fear in 2011. I’m reading it at present and enjoying it: the modern translation helps.
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A trailer is out for Star trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 is out and I’ve embedded it below. It drove me to watch my three favourite episodes of season two – Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Those Old Scientists and Subspace Rhapsody. Easily the best Star Trek show since Deep Space 9.
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