You know when you've been looking forward to a real treat, saving it up for a special occasion ... well, I've been saving my last EH Young (last, that is, aside from a handful of early works - A Corn of Wheat, Yonder, Moor Fires - that aren't so easy to find).
The title was so promising and I've loved every single one of her other novels.
Aaarggh  - but not this one! Slow - ponderous - repetitive. I'd have abandoned it except I chose it for book group, so felt I had to plod through to the end. Think I might need to bring cake!

'Tis the 13th day of Christmas, when children go back to school and traditionally there's a good chance of a bargain at a matinée of A Christmas Carol. And so I found myself at the Old Vic this afternoon, gleefully - seat knocked down to £10 from £65 - in an audience that might have arrived on a Saga coach trip. Free mince pies and oranges, Christmas carols and bells - and the feeling that Mr Dickens would have been in his element.
I didn't warm to the BBC version at Christmas - still haven't seen episode 3 but it was all too gloomy and modern for me and though I daresay Mrs Cratchit might have been forced on the game in real life, I prefer to think of her cooking a goose the size of a sparrow.
But the Old Vic production is Dickens just as I like it, pleasingly ghostly with a snowstorm or two (huge foamy flakes smelling of Persil) that must have frizzed several shampoo-and-sets. But the best bit is when the whole audience joins in to deliver Christmas dinner to the Cratchits ... passing down jellies and platters of oysters and dishes of cake and baskets of bread rolls and strings of sausages that would have stretched to Waterloo station ... not to mention the arrival of a XXXL flying goose.
It was a happy ending to the Christmas season, now all that is left in the cupboard is one mince pie and  a chocolate reindeer. (It runs for another week or so; the ticket sale that I found has expired but it's always worth keeping an eye out for these last-minute offers.)
Happy New Year, everyone.

Great start to Christmas howling with laughter with my best friend of more than 40 years at the QEH last night. Even if Victoria Wood deserves a credit for doing some of it first! She really should have copyrighted the word grouting!

Word of warning, it's VERY long - I could have done with an intermission/coffee break - but this is an amazing film about the reverberations of China's one-child policy as it follows a group of friends from just after the Cultural Revolution until today. A fascinating glimpse of ordinary Chinese lives. Not aways easy to keep up with the flashbacks; I came out wanting to see it again as I'm sure I didn't always pick up on threads that proved important later on. As ever, it's on hardly anywhere. Sorry.

Good to see Glenda Jackson back - after 25 years! - and absolutely terrific as a woman with dementia in Elizabeth is Missing.

What do you get if you cross a lion's roar with the hiss of a snake ... well, apparently the menacing whoosh of a torpedo speeding through the ocean. (That's how they achieved it for the sound track, we were told.)
The cinema ladies - that's me and my friend J - do occasionally venture out of our comfort zone and last night (with resignation rather than enthusiasm on J's part, I admit) we decided on this French submarine thriller ... 
It was very exciting. 'That was a good film!' said J at the end.
I think it's on Netflix but you really need to see it on a big screen.
And who knew about 'golden ears' - the acoustic analysts who can detect anything in the water from an enemy sub to a baby dolphin?
I'm tone deaf but I did think that here's a film that might appeal to musicians. At least, musicians who like submarines!

And here I am again plugging a film that barely features anywhere in London, let alone the rest of the country. The Observer called it one of the best films of 2019 - and although there was only a handful of people in the cinema this afternoon, I think they'd all agree. There's a trailer here. (And the somewhat slicker US trailer here.)
















London Film Festival seems quite a long time ago - but I've been lazy about posting lately and never got around to mentioning Harriet, the gripping true story of Harriet Tubman, who led hundreds of slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad. (Nothing to do with this book but it did remind me how much I enjoyed it.) On general release later this month. Highly recommended.




As for The Aeronauts ...well, I enjoyed that little snooze I had in the middle. (Just resting my eyes ...)
It was - okayish.