Recent Reading . . . and some Writing . . . Part 1

I have quite a wide taste in what I enjoy reading. I've had a passion for good reading since I was quite a young age. When I was at school we were always supposed to have something to read, taken out of the school library or else bought from a local shop. Infant, it's a habit which I have continued to this day. I always have a book to read and once one is read I have another to read.  I read Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" and the later books which featured the same characters. "We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea" which I believe was set in and around Essex, along the coast from where we used to go on holiday when I was a child, Frinton-On-Sea, Walton-On-Naze and all the little inlets along that stretch of coast. The characters were real to me, and the stories were good. I'm not sure whether children read them today. I think they were written in the 1920's and 30's so perhaps they wouldn't appeal to modern children, bought up with iPads, Gameboys, Nintendo etc. My father was a sailor and had yachts which were sailed along that bit of coast, around the Colne Estuary, Brightlingsea as well as Frinton (see earlier blog posts on our family holidays.) So a series of books featuring children who sailed was of interest to me, not that I was a sailor myself. My father put me off, to some extent, as he wasn't the most patient of people, when it came to his children in a boat he was sailing. When I went to work as a D.S.M. at Century Theatre in Keswick in the early 1970's they were in the process of making a film version of "Swallows and Amazons" on Lake Windermere, although I was too busy with the season of plays we were producing to be able to watch any of the filming, which was a real shame.

I got hooked on anything with a really good plot. I was a radio drama fan (something I doubt children of today can say.) Radio Four (or the good old Home Service it was named up until about 1967 when the B.B.C. introduced us to Radio 1, 2, 3 and 4. No doubt it was easier to give the stations numbers than to come up with any other name.) I think it's the fact that, with a radio adaptation, you have to use your imagination far wore than when it's done in a visual medium, such as film or television or even stage. For that I think Radio Four is quite unique. Where else can you get such a rich selection of drama? Nowhere I can think of. I got hooked on adaptations of novels, done as "Saturday Night Theatre" as well as a Sunday night adaptation of books as well as stage plays. It was through an adaptation of "Rebecca" by Daphne Du Maurier, that I discovered not only that novel, but all, or about all, her other novels, such as "Frenchman's Cove", "Jamaica Inn" as well as her later novels such as "The House On The Strand." Such an incredible author, how she could evoke a place, such as Cornwall where most of her earlier novels are set. "The House On The Strand" is a particularly clever piece of writing, and it worked so well as a radio piece and wouldn't work as a film or a television series (thankfully.) and knowing today's television it would be ruined. "Rebecca" is perhaps best known as being made into a film by Albert Hitchcock and starring Laurence Olivier as Max DeWinter. It has been adapted for television a couple of times, the first with Joanna David as "The Girl" and then much more recently with Charles Dance. More of Daphne DuMaurier's stories have  been made into films, most famously, another Hitchcock adaptation being "The Birds" as well as "Don't Look Now" with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland and directed by Nicholas Roeg. It's a really scary film and, although a good 40-plus years old, well worth a view if you get a chance to see it. It's shown regularly on television although you could get it on DVD. I supposed DuMaurier would be considered a 'woman's novelist' and I suppose, when I first came across her, not having then read anything of hers, it would have put me off,  as I think I might have thought the novels to be sort of 'Mills and Boon-ish', but how wrong could I be, as her books are so well plotted and the characters so captivating, particularly "Rebecca" that I was soon hooked and had to read more of them.

In the late 1960's Radio Four did a quite brilliant serialisation of the J.R.R. Tolkien novel "The Hobbit." It was done in eight episodes. I have recently managed to purchase this adaptation of a set of CD's from "The Works" in Milton Keynes. As a result of the radio adaptation I read the book and later on I discovered "The Lord of The Rings" (also adapted for B.B.C. Radio and part of the CD set.) I had it originally in a very thick paperback edition which I think I bought on a trip into London and took with me when I went to work as an A.S.M. at Liverpool Playhouse in the early 1970's. I read it every decade or so after that, and had it in three hard-bound editions, I think purchased from Book Club Associates and later I had an illustrated, one volume edition. So I know the trilogy very well and enjoyed the Peter Jackson movie trilogy which was pretty faithful to the original. At the time of writing this I haven't seen "The Hobbit." It seems unnecessary to me to make it into three films, because it's a relatively straightforward book. No doubt it was done for financial reasons, which seems a shame. I may eventually get round to viewing it on D.V.D.

Visit to Oxford

It's been another really warm and sunny day, so we went to Oxford. We didn't take the car, instead opting for bus travel. I now have my concessionary bus-pass (yes, one is now at the age when one can travel by bus for nothing!) and we caught the bus on Saxon Street which took us into the centre of Milton Keynes next to The Point, and then to the railway station, where we boarded the bus for Oxford, and within around an hour and ten minutes we were at Oxford Bus Station. So the entire journey there and back cost around £12.50, and without the hastle of driving, the cost of petrol, finding somewhere to park, or at least not having to use the park-and-ride system into the centre of Oxford. We have been there on several occasions, usually to visit the theatre, The Oxford Playhouse, or a performance of Creation Theatre (who perform in something called the mirror or spiegeltent.) and we've seen a show based on stories by the Brother's Grim and the theatre set up in the carpark of the B.M.W. car plant, and another show based on Shakespeare's  'Saints and Villains' and performed in a city centre church. The other shows we've seen have been at the Playhouse, and performed by Propellor, and all-male company who stage Shakespeare productions, and we've seen 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and 'Twelfth Night' there, as well as 'Henry V' at the Milton Keynes Theatre, as well as 'The Taming Of The Shrew' at The Old Vic, when we went with a party from Stantonbury School when Carol worked there.
Oxford on most sunny summer's days must be quite busy, particularly as it is very likely to be one of those places that attracts tourists, from whatever country, as it is a particularly historic place, featuring in many events over the centuries. Also, it has been used in many films and television drama series as well as being the setting for many novel, notably the "Inspector Morse" novels and the television series. C.S. Lewis, author of the "Narnia" books and J.R.R. Tolkein, of "Lord Of The Rings" and "The Hobbit" fame were professors here and were part of a literary group known as "The Inklings." Lewis Carrol was Dean of one of the colleges during the 19th century and wrote the "Alice" books. And also Philip Pullman used a version of Oxford as a background to his "Dark Materials" trilogy of novels. So, it wasn't at all surprising that we saw groups of people being taken on guided tours of the city centre. We also saw a film unit parked in one of the main streets. From experience as a television walk-on and supporting artiste I know what one of these looks like, and the amount of space all the vans, lorries and other paraphernalia looks like. We couldn't see exactly what the film or television series was they were filming, but I have an idea it might have been the "Inspector Morse" spin off, "Lewis."