Pun based title, when I think of one

2020!!*!%&!! 😬 This year... I've read a lot of books. I may even manage a 34th by midnight! That's a lot for me. However, there's a lot I haven't done. Like see a film. A big regret is that I failed to visit the cinema before my trip to Finland in early March. In other words, the last time there was no issue about going to a cinema. There's all the difference in the world as far as I'm concerned between idly watching a film on the telly, probably with lights on, probably with adverts, lavatory breaks and so on, and actually going to the cinema. HOME includes Manchester's arthouse cinema, and I miss that place, right down to its sweet potato chips and boutique beers. Even if it is a bit of a trek from the station to get to it. I want to see a film with someone, take a trip, have a meal etc. quite apart from enjoying the full experience of great sound, widescreen and everything.  That's seeing a film properly . Worse, at this end of the year, I don&

Courrier Sud was St-Exupéry's first novel. It's known in English as Southern Mail , and sometimes published together with his next book Vol de Nuit / Night Flight , both books being quite short. A few years ago it received a translation into Finnish, as  Postilento etelään . The story tells of a French mailplane pilot who on a return visit to Paris, meets up with a childhood friend he has always loved, just as her marriage falls apart when her child dies. He tries to take her away from an urban world and a husband now inimical to her, but away to his own world, which is even more alien; before they ever get there she falls ill and the dream is seen for what it is, an impossible one. The central narrative is topped and tailed by the circumstantial scenes of resting and flying in the harsh environment of the Sahara . Short though the book is, I've been saving it up since finding, with great surprise and delight at the time, this Finnish translation . Who would have t

You should be just about able to pick out the bird in this poor mobile phone picture - sorry - and identify it. The  oystercatcher  has no close relatives, so while it may have a muddy outline here and - sorry again - in the other pic, its characteristic features stand out well enough. See the bright orange beak (and legs, visible in someone else's superior photo image), and black and white plumage. Finland boasts 4,000 pairs, seen mostly on the coasts. As in Britain, or so I thought, until I saw these on the River Lune, though to be fair this wasn't so far from the coast. Anyway, to return to my self-apponted task of telling you what a bird is in Finnish, I can tell you as per the title of this post, that they call it the meriharakka . I found this quite interesting, because I knew that ' meri -' meant ' sea -' something-or-other. So what is a harakka ? The answer is that it's a magpie , so they're calling the oystercatcher a 'sea magpie',

... "with" William Fotheringham ! There, that, is a tiny part of how this book seeds tiny bits of mistrust throughout. (And beyond, as we will see.) Yes, there is a ghost writer at work; to be fair, it's not often that the presence of one is so upfront. It still nudges one into suspecting some image massaging. Overall my reading has been quite eclectic, but I must admit I've very rarely ventured into the sports genre. These books are almost always the work of journalists, which doesn't mean they're poorly written, not at all, but stylistically they tend to fall into a narrow range. William Fotheringham is a good writer, by the way, I've read some of his pieces in the Daily Telegraph if I remember correctly. As for other sports books, I certainly liked Simon Kuper's Football Against the Enemy , all about clubs and fans in odd places around the world; but the biographies, usually published to cash in on recent achievements, have been a bit lik

The entertainment never stops! Yet another entry in this unique unmissable series on 'Finnish names for utterly ordinary birds'! Here's another temporary visitor to the pond up the hill. Except for a handful of mallards and moorhens, the pond is just a pitstop for birds having a short rest on their way to somewhere else. This one is known as the naurulokki in Finland, which sounds like it means 'laughing gull'. It's common, with 80,000-130,000 pairs there. It's Latin name is larus ridibundus , known in Britain as the black headed gull . Like the others I've recently featured, it's probably already gone. But past experience suggests there'll be more now and again, as the summer goes on. Who knows what else will turn up? As far as overall bird numbers is concerned, that's down to available food , and there won't be much until the fishermen return, the pond is restocked, people in general start feeding the ducks again and also the reeds

I probably don't need to translate kanadanhanhi for you, but yes, kanadahanhi is the Finnish name for the  Canada Goose . I've just been up to the pond for my legal allowance of coronavirus exercise, and I was surprised to find another visitor, so soon after the tutkasotki/tufted duck . It's by itself and I'd be surprised if it hangs around. There are only a few mallards after all, and I assume there just isn't enough nutrition available. Also, in normal times, people often come and feed the ducks, but not at the moment. I often wonder why certain species thrive and others don't. True, we did give the Canada Goose a major free leg up when it was brought over here for ornamental purposes, but even so, you still have to take your opportunities, don't you? And this bird certainly did. I hadn't realised it had also got to Finland too. According to my Suomalainen Lintu-opas (Finnish Bird Guide), the kanadanhanhi only arrived there in 1964, and it now

Tukkasotka? Yes, it's become a bit of a thing for me now, to check whether a visitor to the pond up the hill is also familiar in Finland. As you can see, the tukkasotka is what we know as the tufted duck . It's not uncommon in either country; apparently they have between 100,000 and 150,000 breeding pairs, while in the UK it's "numerous" . It just so happens that I haven't seen one up on the pond before. Or two, because this looks like a pair. In general the wildlife there has diminished over the last year, so it's nice to see these birds around, however long they stay. The thing is, from what I understand, the ownership of the pond is up in the air, and there's even the possibility of it being filled in, which would be a bitter outcome because it's the one natural amenity visible between a new housing estate and the services area with MacDonalds, KFC, Starbucks etc which I've mentioned before. It's actually an outlier of the much la

Yes, I have just finished reading Moby-Dick . This particular copy here, with JMW Turner's picture of whalers on the front. Not one of his best paintings, but the scene is roughly contemporary with Melville's great opus. It's a very thick volume, over 1,000 pages. The story itself makes up over 600 of them. The rest? Mostly the commentary , ie. notes on Melville's text, shedding light on all the references and allusions, on the extraordinary scope of the novel's vision. This great and famous American novel. Possibly one of the great unread novels, along with James Joyce's Ulysses , and that Stephen Hawking book, that guy who invented time (that's a Big Bang Theory joke). I've recently mentioned it to several friends, and the few who had tried reading it had all given up on it, even the Literature students. (I'm not going to cast any aspersions there - one time I was supposed to read Richardson's Clarissa , another standby of Lit courses, a

Remember the fad for fridge poetry ? Quite a while ago now. I think you can still get packs of words here and there but you have to hunt for them these days. Well, I picked up 3 or 4 packs around ten years ago in Finland , not so much to create masterpieces in verse, as to help with learning the language . At first I got a board suitable for moving the words around on, but I quickly found trying to make sentences was a non starter . Although I had a lot of words, they were designed for use in verse which was too restrictive; and the packs I had were limited in theme - I think one was for children, another for romance, and so on. Furthermore, Finnish as a language doesn't easily lend itself to this activity. It's not just the 17 cases , affecting the word endings, but consonant gradation , which can massively change the internal spelling of words. Here's my fridge today (it may help to click on the image, if it's unclear) . As you can see, the front is entirely devo

Soldier of Sidon is the third and last volume in Gene Wolfe's Soldier of the Mist series. It was published in 2006, some time after the previous two, which date from the early-mid Eighties. I confess I read Soldier of the Mist so long ago that I've forgotten almost everything about it; but perhaps that's a nice reader's tribute to the series, which tells the tale of a soldier of the ancient world who forgets everything from the day before, and so relies on what his supposed friends tell him and also on what he writes in these scrolls, which in the shape of 'translations' forms the substance of these books. Many other writers have written stories set in the ancient world; and Wolfe is certainly not the first to use the device of a 'translated' ancient text (in Soldier of Sidon   a papyrus scroll found in a sealed jar under the waters of Lake Nasser). But there's something distinct about Wolfe's writing which produces a sense of originali

The Western Wind is set in the Middle Ages, in an obscure village in Southern England. At first sight it's a murder mystery, told in the first person by its protagonist John Reve the village priest, who is set to unravel the truth about the death of Thomas Newman , the one man in the village with wealth and substance. He has been steadily buying most of the land in the village, largely from Oliver Townshend , the previous man of substance who has had to trim his cloth due to unwise schemes and the general poor fortunes of the village. Their attempts to build a vital bridge across the river have failed yet again, and Newman seems to have disappeared into the river during a spell of torrential rain, while inspecting the latest collapse. As much as the intrigue suggested by Newman's death, the reader's attention is immediately caught by the character of the village and the villagers. The lives of most of these people is one of never ending oppressive toil, and the grindi

I'm having to scratch my head a bit about any culture I enjoyed in 2019. One overarching factor was British politics which seemed to infect life with more and more depression as the year went on. We've just had an election which seems to have at last broken the parliamentary deadlock, but may prove to be a false dawn, once they get back to talking to Brussels. Me, I voted Green anyway, knowing full well that it doesn't force anybody to do anything. This is a safe Conservative seat. I'm one of those who think climate change is far more important than Brexit. I simply wanted to give a minuscule bump to the Greens' national percentage. I saw four films ! Stan and Ollie , Apollo 11 , Transit and The Irishman . Yes I certainly like going to the cinema but for circumstantial reasons that means organising a day around a train journey into Manchester. Especially because that's where the most prominent arthouse cinema is. All four films were good, and very differe