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Mike’s blog – for his amusement

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  • Dallas Buyers Club

    We enjoyed the film Dallas Buyers Club. Set in the 1980s, it tells the story of Ron Woodruff who, on being told he has HIV and has 30 days to live, sets out to find alternative treatments and to make a bit of money. A terrific performance from Matthew McConaughey in the lead role.

    There’s an interesting alternative view of the film in this Guardian review.

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  • House of Fools – Bob & Vic

    Magnificently weird!

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  • Enemy Combatant – Moazzam Begg

    Moazzam Begg’s Enemy Combatant is an exceptional telling of the author’s kidnapping and incarceration in Guantanamo Bay. It’s shocking and so well written it reads like a novel. It’s unputdownable and highly recommended.

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  • Just a simple experiment

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    The legs belong to the St Pancras Station statue ‘The Meeting Place’.

    The building is at Chatham Dockyard.

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  • Arundel, West Sussex

    Arundel is a very pleasant market town with many independent shops, galleries and eating/drinking places. It also has a castle and two bookshops.
    If I’d had the appetite, a good lunch of sausage and mash at the Red Lion could have been followed by bread and butter pudding – foiled again!
    Across the road is the wonderful Kim’s Bookshop, where I bought a couple of novels and a copy of How to Cheat in Photoshop. There are 30,000 second-hand books spread over 3 floors and all nicely categorized.
    Arundel is a good starting place for country walks, but today, shortage of time, the floods and the variable weather meant it was mainly a day for eating, drinking and book browsing!

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  • 1974 – David Peace

    David Peace’s 1974, is a gritty, Northern thriller that’s not for the faint-hearted. It’s a decent read, providing you can stomach the earthy language and extreme violence. 

  • The Dispatcher – Ryan David Jahn

    Ryan David Jahn’s The Dispatcher, is a pacy American crime thriller of the type I enjoy. A seven year-old girl is abducted, and seven years later briefly escapes to make her existence known to her family. The chase is on to find her!

    It moves along at a cracking pace that forces you to want to read another page. It’s 400 pages of large print, easy reading, which I read in a day, and is recommended if you like American thrillers. 

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  • Netherland – Joseph O’Neill

    In Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, not a lot happens and it became a tiresome read. It has had rave reviews but I note that Amazon reviewers were split.

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  • Hindhead & Haslemere

    Hindhead was a village on the A3, the main road between London and Portsmouth, and was a notorious traffic bottleneck until a tunnel bypassing the village was completed in 2011. As a result of losing the through traffic, Hindhead has become pretty rundown. The village is famous for the Devil’s Punch Bowl, a large natural amphitheatre. The A3 used to go around the outside of the Devil’s Punch Bowl, which made for a very noisy beauty spot, but the area is now quiet, and the road has been dug up and removed.

    Haslemere is a rather attractive small town a couple of miles from Hindhead, and has good train links to London. The Haslemere Bookshop is rather good, and I picked up Ryan David Jahn’s The Dispatcher. There is a large collection of second-hand books on the first floor.

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  • Hampton Court, again

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