Monday 29 February 2016

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Friday 26 February 2016

Good television...

This may be a contradiction in terms these days, but some programmes, such a the art ones on BBC4 presented by Waldemar Januszczak, are well worth the time spent watching them. Not only does one learn an enormous amount about the subject, but the presentation alone is well worth the licence fee. Every movement, every word, and every expression (there are not too many of those) is a work of art in itself. Highly recommended.

My lunch in London yesterday.

At the steakhouse opposite Paddington Station.

(An 8oz fillet steak, well-done, without sauce or garnish - which is my preference - together with a pint of Guinness, and English mustard, and an ice-cream to finish off. About £32.00.)

Wednesday 24 February 2016

Now available. A great thriller.

The Last Supper.
 
 
What do you give five millionaires who have everything? The powers of a Roman emperor? The highest snuff party in the world? Not enough. It needs to be something money cannot buy. And you’d better not get in their way. They think Max Grannit does when he foils a terrorist plot and is dragged onto television as a hero. They think he might wreck their fiendish plans. The terrorists’ cohorts are after him too. And he’s completely on his own. That is, until three mysterious people invite him to dinner at a luxurious lakeside villa. They want his help. The only problem is, they do not know why they want his help…
 
The Last Supper is the third in the Max Grannit series of thrillers. Set in France, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, it is a journey through menace.
 
About 60000 words.
 
 
 
And the collected edition. HERE
 
 

Grannit hung by the first two joints of his fingers, and now felt both of his hands getting numb. It was cold up here, very cold, and he had not thought to bring a pair of gloves. If he had thought, that at some point during his visit to this observatory, he would be hanging by his fingers above a drop of several hundred feet, he would have brought gloves. But he did not, and so he had not, and now he felt his situation had moved from desperate, to even worse.
  He glanced down. He knew it wasn’t the thing to do in a situation such as this, but he did. He didn’t know why he did it, but he did do it. He was looking, he guessed, to see whether there was any way of surviving the fall he looked destined to make in a very short while.
No chance! The first part of the fall, to the sloping, rugged, jagged, snow covered rock face was about two hundred feet or so, but that would just be the start. Assuming he was conscious after he landed, he would not be able to stop himself sliding and then dropping the remaining fifteen hundred feet, or whatever it was, to the Aletsch glacier below. He’d end up a bleeding, shattered, splintered, mass of flesh and bone, and probably worse than that.

He looked up, through the metal walkway, which ran around the observatory, and saw three figures several yards away. They were still there. He prayed they would go, go inside, for while they were there he could only be here, for if he tried to pull himself up, they would see him, and he most certainly did not want that. He tried not to move his fingers, which he had thrust through the openings in the surface of the walkway, fearing that the three figures would notice them and deduce he was here. But now the sharp edges of the metal framework had begun to cut into his flesh, and the pain was becoming unbearable.
  And then he saw two of the figures move. They moved away, around the structure. They were going inside, he thought, which was good, which offered hope. But one of the figures still stood there.
Grannit kept as still as he could. His fear now was that the figure at the end of the walkway would notice he was here. He gritted his teeth, tried to put the pain in his fingers out of his mind. He told himself he would not fall to his death so long as he kept his fingers wrapped around the metal treads, for his own weight would not be sufficient to pull the tread, sharp though it was, through bone.
And now, at last, the figure at the end of the walkway had started to move. But in this direction. Grannit whispered: “Shit!” and tried not to breathe too loudly. He tried to not move too, not to move in the slightest, not to do anything that might cause the approaching figure to look down. The figure came on, gun in hand, slowly, with a wide-legged walk, a walk that told all comers that he was a very tough guy. His hobnailed boots came onto Grannit’s fingers, and then he stopped! Grannit gritted his teeth, but this was not sufficient. He bit his tongue; and even that failed to mask the pain. Hell! he thought. Climbing boots. And, he thought, he was lucky that they were. He thanked his lucky stars that the guy was not wearing trainers. For, had he been wearing trainers, he might realize something was under his feet.
He just stood there now, admiring the view, perhaps, the view down into the glacier or across, perhaps, to the peaks on the Italian side. Take your time, Grannit thought. Don’t mind my bloody fingers! And that is what the guy appeared to be doing: just standing there, admiring the view! Grannit thought: I can’t hold on much longer.
He glanced down. The one good point about letting go now was that the end would be in no doubt. The bad thing was it would not be quick, but would probably be a crashing, tumbling, groaning, shouting, screaming, tearing, crushing, shattering end, that would almost certainly last several minutes. He looked up again. The guy still stood there. On his fingers…
And now the gunman looked down!

 

*

 


Wednesday 17 February 2016

The perfect place to spend eternity. 16.02.16

A more or less abandoned chapel between Llanvihangel Crucorney and Cross Ash.
There are many such places in Wales. Congregations would split up, because of disagreements with the resident preacher, perhaps, or because part of the congregation wanted to worship God in their own way, and people would leave and use money they could barely afford to build their own place of worship. Much later, people would move away, or their children would stop going to church, and the congregation would die out. There was one such chapel not far from my school. They used it to store spare desks!     
The shed at the rear probably contains the toilets.
The graveyard still has vacancies.
Looking into the misty interior at pews long not sat in.

Thursday 11 February 2016

Visit to Harrods 10.02.16

I spent an interesting few hours in the top people's store, yesterday. The men's fashion floors displayed few things of interest to me; the food halls contained a lot of exotic foods which were of no interest to me; and the furniture floors displayed a lot of interesting but (in my view) ugly, uncomfortable, or overpriced items.
One of the many home furnishing floors. 
 
A £15000 sofa.