8 December 2015
A really tough year gradually draws to an end in much the same fashion it started: business dwindling. virtually grinding to a halt. Freelancing is not for sissies. Know that before you venture there!
A really tough year gradually draws to an end in much the same fashion it started: business dwindling. virtually grinding to a halt. Freelancing is not for sissies. Know that before you venture there!
- I have just completed reading The dust that falls from Dreams of Louis de Bernieres. Much as I love his work and the enormous amount of research he clearly pushes into his writing, I was a touch disappointed. He still plies his trade like very few other modern writers can, but the story line was so clearly poached from the real life of Vivian Brittain as she told it in her masterpiece, Testament of Youth. The war in the trenches, the lead female character joining the VAD as a volunteer nurse after losing her lover to the war, the impact of the Spanish Flu n the soldiers, the ignorance of the mother of the female lead, the return to the family of the fallen soldier's clothes and the impact this pathetic bundle has on the family, are all borrowed from Vivian Brittain. Yet her novel was first published in 1933, more than 90 years before De Bernieres published his.
- I am now reading The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, a gripping novel of which I will tell you more when I am done with it.
- We have moved back to our original home in Kempton Park. It had been left in a mess by our former tenants, and posed significant challenges to restore within the confines of budget and creative thinking. But the garden is coming on nicely, the birds have retuned and the house has grown a new warmth and ambience that both Ina and I love.
- I am seriously considering organising a final hike with all our former hiking friends again ... partially to test-drive my replaced knee, and partially as a farewell to hiking. The knee has been holding up magnificently since the operation in 2011.
- New Afrikaans blog just posted.