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Mike’s blog – for his amusement

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  • The Special Prisoner – Jim Lehrer

    Jim Lehrer’s The Special Prisoner is a stinker of a novel!

    It’s a story about revenge for crimes committed in Japanese prisoner of war camps during World War II. Despite being mildly curious about how the story might develop, the stilted writing and preposterous plotting forced me to give up halfway through.

    My first thought was to destroy the book, to prevent anyone else picking it up, but on reflection I’ve decided to give it to the Oxfam charity shop. I’m sure there will be many more purchases and returns of this book, generating a steady flow of income to the charity!

    This does, however, contradict an earlier post I made on the subject or giving bad books to charity shops…

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  • Southampton – Itchen bridge

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  • Being Dead – Jim Crace

    Jim Crace’s Being Dead is a fabulous book. It’s a beautifully written story, effortlessly switching between past and present. A simple story about the slaughter of a couple, this is no crime novel, but rather a love and death story. Be warned that it deals with the details of death in an extremely detailed though sensitive way. This is the third novel I’ve read by the author, and it’s the best. Highly recommended.

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  • Prefabs

    PrefabIconInterested in British post-war prefabs?

    I have added two new posts to my blog about prefabs.

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  • An untypical day

    It’s an untypical day.
    There is an amazing blue sky and not a single cloud.
    I’m sat in the garden. In March!
    It’s warm and the grass is growing.
    I’m on my own.
    I don’t feel too good and I haven’t eaten anything.
    It’s an untypical day.

    But typically, I’m reading a book, Jim Crace’s Being Dead, and so far, it’s a wonderful read.

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  • The Man in My Basement – Walter Mosley

    Walter Mosley’s The Man in My Basement is a an odd tale. The setting up of the story was interesting and I was curious to know the ending, but that was all.

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  • Camel case?

    ImageI’d heard of upper case, lower case, proper case, sentence case, title case, but camel case is new to me.

    iPad, iMac and eBay are examples of words in camel case. That is, joined words with the initial letter of each word capitalised, apart from the first word.

    Joined words with the first joined word also capitalised (eg FedEx, WordPerfect, WordPress) are sometimes described as being in camel case, but generally camel case implies the first letter of the first joined word is in lowercase.

    Lower camel case and upper camel case can be used to distinguish between the two situations.

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  • I should be out in the sunshine…

    IMGP4565[1]
    Instead of playing around with Photoshop Elements, I should be out in the sunshine….

    OK, OK, I’m going!

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  • A spectacle in Brighton

    I was in Brighton. A young guy calls out to me and hands me a pair of specs and then goes on his way. I’m always misplacing my specs, so I assumed I had dropped mine.

    Without looking at them I spent a good 15 seconds trying to figure out how I dropped them, since I don’t use them when walking or when taking pictures. Puzzled, I looked at the specs only to realise they weren’t mine!

    When I got home I thought I’d have a go at tracking down the real owner. Typing “pair of specs found in brighton” into Google turned up a link to “Lost & Found Stuff in Brighton | Gumtree communities”, and after registering with Gumtree I posted an ad as follows:

    “Men’s specs found Brighton seafront Thursday, March 13th”

    A couple of hours later, up pops an email, from a guy named Joe, with the message “Hi there, I lost my glasses yesterday. They’re black on the frame with vertical grey and black stripes along the arms”.

    Bingo!

    Unfortunately the specs have one of the lenses missing (for the left eye) and on telling Joe this he emailed me as follows:

    “My back-up pair are missing the lens for my left eye. Maintaining and keeping my glasses is something I definitely need to work on!”

    And then another email:

    “Not to worry though, you can throw them away as my other pair are missing the same lens.”

    So if the specs had had the left eye lens in place instead of the right, Joe would have been able to use the specs that I had to repair the spare pair he had! Hilarious!

    IMGP4561[1]So I now have a quite nice £79 spectacle frame which, if fitted with the appropriate lenses, I could use for myself.

    What do you think?

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  • Misty Brighton and Hove

    A thick mist descended on the Hove/Brighton seafront within minutes of my arrival and this is how it stayed for my two hour visit. According to my iPad weather app there were 8 hours of sunshine in Brighton today, but obviously not on the seafront! However the  images I took using my zoom lens (which I never use) came out pretty good, so I think I’ll repeat the experiment and take it out again.

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