2016 January

The Reader

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, a time to remember the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust and all of the victims of Nazi persecution, subsequent genocides, and discrimination today. I urge everyone to visit the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and Holocaust Educational Trust…

2016 Classics Challenge – The Book Thief

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was taking part in the 2016 Classics Challenge and that I would try to ensure that one book a month would be a “classic” – however classic is defined. The first book I’ve chosen is The Book Thief, the Markus Zusak novel…

Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie

I have a confession and I know some of you might think less of me for this but I don’t hate Mrs Brown’s Boys. I don’t love it either and I wouldn’t call myself a fan but will watch episodes when they are on and generally have a couple of laughs throughout. It’s not clever…

Pretty Is

There’s something visceral and terrifying about the thought of children being kidnapped. As a child I remember being scared of the bogeyman who would take me away from my family and the first news stories I remember are of girls my own age going missing from home…

Avengers: Age of Ultron

I’ve been watching films long enough now not to be too disappointed when sequels don’t match the brilliance of original films. I don’t mind that and have an inbuilt expectation of diminishing returns when film series go into multiple instalments. So I wasn’t expecting Avengers: Age of Ultron to be as good…

Snowblind

A few years ago we visited Iceland for a long weekend and I absolutely fell in love with the country. Darren dived at Silfra between the European and North American continental shelf while I mooched around Reykjavik taking photos and being mesmerised by the water and the mountains…

Strictly Between Us

One of the first books I read last year was Jane Fallon’s Getting Rid of Matthew and in an unintended coincidence the third book I’ve read in 2016 is the new Fallon novel Strictly Between Us, published on January 14th this year…

Carrying Albert Home

There’s an anecdote that my husband loves to recount about a holiday we took to Kenya. We were sleeping in tents (very posh tents) on the side of a lake and I looked at the furtherest tent which had a number of crocodiles nearby. “The poor buggers in that tent” I sympathised…

Archives for January 2016

Cinderella