New year's blog

 

Our all-too-brief stay with Sam and family is over halfway through as I write - lovely and we shall miss them but the weather began - let's say - sub-optimal (grey and wet, though not cold).  But new year's day dawned with blue sky and sunshine.

Before we left home we indulged in Dickens DVDs, 2 sets of Little Dorritt, one excellent, the older dismal  (I once liked this version...), and then a surprisingly good Martin Chuzzlewit (Tom Wilkinson who played an excellent Pecksniff has just died).  The casts of all three are mostly outstanding, but the earlier Little Dorritt despite iconic actors like Alec Guinness and Derek Jacobi seemed wooden and stilted.  Not helped by a weird 2-part presentation which separated Amy's view from Arthur Clennam's.  Claire Foy's heroine is heaps better than Sarah Pickering, who seems to have done nothing else in film - Dickens writes a low-key character but not that low key.

I was encouraged by an Eng Lit friend to read most of Dickens on train journeys commuting to London, and still love the books - Mary came to them after she met me, and I remember buying a job-lot on £1 paperback classics to  round out our library.  Thinking over the whole series, the theme of financial insecurity and ruin, together with the vital importance of inheritance, is a strong common thread.  Dickens' father was in debt and spent months in the Marshalsea, so  CD knew of what he wrote.  Few punches pulled either - the suicide of Merdle with a penknife in Little Dorritt is memorable in book and on film.  But other books like Great Expectations - the title gives the game away -  Bleak House with its fog of law-courts, A Christmas Carol of course (we have just seen a DVD with the splendid Michael Hordern hamming it up), Our mutual friend with its heaps of valuable dust, all have money and greed at their centres.

In between whiles I have caught up with Ken Follett's latest Kingsbridge novel, this one skipping centuries forward to the  Napoleonic era, and yet another fictional rerunning of the battle of Waterloo.  The moments where a character tells another rather artificially the name of such and such a farmhouse or Quatrre Bras crossroads does jar slightly, but Follett like Bernard Cornwell has done his research, and Follett is respected enough to write about cathedral construction in the rebuilding of Notre Dame Paris just as Cornwell has written a decent factual account of Waterloo alongside the romantic version.  In my more idiotic moments I wonder how Sharpe, and a Follett hero, acting as adcs to Wellington might have bumped into one another!

We are having a great, relaxed family time here, and trying to live day by day before we drive back.  Having heard some of the awful horrors and knife-edge adventures of Sam & Sas's family holiday (they did ultimately have a good time with close friends) across the world we feel glad to have chosen more local, staid journeys, and in our own car.  It does of course strike us that the distances and complexities of air travel are inevitable when people fall in love with others from New Zealand or have great friends in the USA.  These things tend to conflict with environmental considerations.  But good plans tend to involve meeting family and friends in France, in spacious well-equipped gîtes as we did with Judi last summer.  Sam and I have been discussing areas of France to meet in, and in any case we plan to visit friends in Normandy in the summer.

This is to wish all our friends and family a hapy and healthy 2024.