BOOKS.
Kathy Reichs. I have recently finished Kathy Reichs' death du jour.
Ms. Reichs is forensic anthropologist at the Labatoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale for the province of Quebec. Her heroine, Temperance Brennan, is also a forensic anthropologist.
Fact and fiction merge so well in her stories that it is difficult to see the join.
I have the utmost respect for those talented people who succeed in transforming the subject of their working lives into award winning fiction. (Scott Turow, a practicing lawyer, has the same wonderful gift, though it comes as less of a surprise that a legal man should be able to spin a yarn.)
A forensic anthropologist clearly requires physical and mental toughness, patience, dedication and one helluva brain.
Kathy Reichs is good value.
Armistead Maupin. I read The Night Listener in less than a week: something of a record for me nowadays.
It is vintage Maupin: fascinating characters, absorbing plot and the sort of page turner one would expect from the man who wrote Tales of the City.
In a world beyond my comprehension Mr. Maupin, too, is good value.
TELEVISION.
De-Lovely. (ITV1) One good thing about television programme padding is the opportunity it gives to see films you missed when they were released.
This 2004 musical biography, directed by Irwin Winkler and based on the life and work of Cole Porter, starred Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd as the composer and his wife, Linda.
My Leader and I enjoyed it immensely.
Like all good musicals it bore no relationship whatsoever to real life.
Cole Porter was a gifted tunesmith and superb lyricist who, apart from his marriage, had much in common with Noel Coward and Ivor Novello: they were talented composers and they were homosexuals.
Now they're dead.
Best remember them for their music.
Inspector George Gently (BBC1). He's back then: good old Martin Shaw in Fabian of the Yard mode, all gruff-voiced authoritarianism and unflinching rectitude.
Lee Ingleby, playing the hasty, ambitious know-all D.S. John Bacchus, is still with him.
Excellent stuff.
Primeval (ITV1). Jason Flemyng has taken over from Douglas Henshall.
It's still as daft as ever.
Robin Hood (BBC 1). Toby Stevens, playing Prince John, is replacing Keith Allen's Sheriff of Nottingham for a couple of weeks.
Never fear, it's still as daft as ever.
HOME.
Sister Doris. In between the moves into sheltered accommodation and into care of two of my wife's sisters, another sister, Doris, was admitted to hospital where she died suddenly.
She was 84 and a Jehovah's Witness.
Her funeral service, held at Portchester Crematorium, was well attended by family members - religious and irreligious - and by a good turnout of brother and sister Witnesses.
It was a Witness service.
At the customary gathering afterwards the Watch Tower tribe turned out to be a pleasant enough bunch, bless 'em.
I regard them as cranks rather less sinister than Scientologists, but I do wonder what accident they witnessed. At worst they suffer from an unquestioning belief in their religion, but there's an awful lot of that about.
I remain blissfully irreligious.
Don't care who it is, Jehovah or L. Ron Hubbard: I'd as soon believe in Harry Potter.
Council Elections. Leaflets through the letterbox: the Blair clone Cameron running around the country exhorting people to "vote for change" in the forthcoming local elections (figure it worked for President Obama do they?) and, very soon, the smiling faces of people you do not know and do not want to know, people who have neither known nor particularly wanted to know you, will invite you to vote for them.
Well, we've currently got the Tories and they're rubbish. Before them we had the Liberals and they were ditto. Labour stands not a chance here but, as experienced nationally, who would bank on them?
Whoever gets in here will continue to be manipulated by the suits they are supposed to be employing.
Costs will escalate and services will depreciate.
It has been going on for years.
Don't talk about bloody change to me.
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