Indian Summer
24 October

Our long term Indian summer is unfolding day by day.

This week as I have been going to work at around 7:20am, the temperatures on the digital display on Crosby Road South have been well into double figures, somewhere round the 13° C mark.

I should love to tell you that I'm enjoying it but I'm not really. Truth be told, I should like for it to hurry up and be winter so we can get it over and done with so that spring can start up again. But that's really wishing my life away and I hate that also.

Ross and I are still getting over our respective colds. We've both been left feeling somewhat depleted to the extent that early nights come as something of a blessing. And weekend mornings I'm not above getting up at my normal 6am, making a cup of restoring tea and then going back to bed again.

In this way I get to listen to early morning weekend radio programmes which are about farming, nature and religion - and indeed they are much more informative about the world in general than are the run-of-the-mill news programmes. I also get a go at talking books as well.

I essayed Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit but it was scuppered by John Wells's eccentric vocal performance. So, I gave that up and I'm now well into the same author's Barnaby Rudge read by Richard Pascoe which is probably a lesser novel but a far more satisfying performance.

Evening times Ross and I have been working our way through the complete Harry Potter oeuvre. We have just started book six so, if the final book does come out next spring, we shall be well prepared for it.

I've been doing some work in the garden and it's showing the same sorts of confusion that it did last year. With the mild weather, there are patches of winter jasmine which are flowering whilst elsewhere in the garden the ordinary jasmine is also flowering; the summer clematis is still flowering whilst the February clematis has burst into a very early flowering. The roses are set for some late splendour also.

The trees in the neighbourhood are beginning to turn and drop the leaves in earnest. this is about right for the time of year. Our twisted willow and the rhibes bushes still seem quite happy to hold onto their leaves.

Other good things to note include the fact that the eczema which always used to appear on my shins in the autumn has not yet fully kicked in for the second year running. Also the price of petrol has now dropped to 84p per litre.

On Saturday night, we made a rare foray out to the Odeon at Switch Island to see the film version of Alan Bennett's The History Boys. We've already had quite an association with this play. Notably, illness prevented us from seeing the touring version at the Lowry last year. However, we did listen to a radio production earlier this year. That an looking at the trailer for the cinema release had the effect of spoiling the experience for me.

I'm not saying that the film was bad. Simply that I'd already heard most of the best lines already.

However, I did like the developing relationship between Stephen Campbell Moore's teacher, Irwin, and Dominic Cooper's wide boy, Dakin (fourth from the right below). It reminded me very much of the sort of relationship I had with one lad, Dave, when I worked at Liverpool Polytechnic.

So I was not surprised when the boy propositioned the man. Though Dave and I didn't do the bad thing, we got very close to it simply because he was intrigued and wanted to know what gay sex was like.

However, that was the 1990s and not the 1970s when this was supposed to be set. So, it didn't feel that real. In fact, a number of things about the film didn't feel quite real. Like the fact that entrance interviews take place in December and not summer as shown by the Cambridge punters in the film. And the flowery artificiality of the language which is fine on stage did not sit well in the stubbornly concrete environment of a film.

Still, it was a good enough experience to warrant three stars.

I also polished off Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. This has the intriguing premise of being written from the point of view of a young girl who has been murdered by a serial killer and is watching life on earth continue without her. I liked the fact that it was not a bit mawkish and that, ultimately, it was about how people, including the dead, can move on if they choose to. However, just in terms of narrative interest, I felt that the book dropped several gears in the last hundred or so pages. So, I'm going to stick with three stars for the book as well.