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Yesterday was a real massacre of expertise, with nobody at all foreseeing the Saudi victory over Egypt, or Spain failing to beat Morocco. Only four people out of nine got even one of the four matches right, with
Current
Le Mariage de Figaro, by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
Robot Visions, by Isaac Asimov
Last books finished
Old Friends, by Jonathan Clements, Marc Platt and Pete Kempshall
Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch
City of Stairs, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, by James Finn Garner
Virgins, Weeders and Queens, by Twigs Way
Moominvalley in November, by Tove Jansson
Brexit and the Future of Ireland: Uniting Ireland & Its People in Peace & Prosperity, by Senator Mark Daly
Heroine Complex, by Sarah Kuhn
Next books
Your Code Name is Jonah, by Edward Packard
Rose de Paris, by Gilles Schlesser
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I'm glad to say that I managed to call all three results yesterday; nobody else got more than two.
Some people (well, one person) asked about the standings so far. By dint of answering my own questions diligently, I am currently in the lead after the first 32 matches; but it's all to play for. 128 out of 212 predictions have been correct so far, just over 60%. Congrats to
| ✔ | N | % | |
| 19 | 32 | 59% | |
| 17 | 26 | 65% | |
| 14 | 22 | 64% | |
| 14 | 26 | 54% | |
| 10 | 18 | 56% | |
| 8 | 13 | 62% | |
| 7 | 12 | 58% | |
| 6 | 8 | 75% | |
| pseudomantid | 6 | 9 | 67% |
| 5 | 6 | 83% | |
| 5 | 6 | 83% | |
| 4 | 6 | 67% | |
| 3 | 3 | 100% | |
| 3 | 9 | 33% | |
| 2 | 3 | 67% | |
| 1 | 1 | 100% | |
| 1 | 1 | 100% | |
| 1 | 3 | 33% | |
| 1 | 3 | 33% | |
| 1 | 3 | 33% | |
| 0 | 1 | 0% | |
| 0 | 1 | 0% |
The prospect of Brexit is changing the dynamic on the ground in Northern Ireland. Whitehall's failure to come up with a way of keeping its promises on both Brexit and the Good Friday Agreement is causing huge problems for the UK in negotiations, to the extent that yet another deadline will be missed at next week's summit. But it's clearly impacting the mood in Northern Ireland as well. How much, though, is another matter.
Opinion polls
There has been a flurry of opinion polls recently indicating that support for a United Ireland is up from a few years ago. But the data vary considerably. To go through the most recent polls individually (and they all have much more data, much of it very interesting):
Lord Ashcroft's poll, published 17 June, is the most recent. He found less than half of respondents, 49%, in favour of remaining in the UK, 44% in favour of a United Ireland, and 7% don't knows. The survey was carried out in late May.
The annual Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, released on 13 June, found 55% favouring the UK, 22% a United Ireland, 10% don't knows and 12% who wouldn't vote (an option not offered by Lord Ashcroft). The survey had been carried out over the winter months.
A poll carried out for the BBC by Lucid Talk, published on 6 June, found only 45% who would vote for Northern Ireland to stay in the UK, 42.1% who would vote for a United Ireland, 12.7% undecided and a mere 0.1% who would not vote. The survey was carried out in early May.
An Ipsos Mori poll published on 9 June and carried out for a QUB research project put the question a bit differently, looking not at how people would vote now but how they think they might vote post-Brexit. Asked "When the UK leaves the EU, if there was a referendum in Northern Ireland asking people whether they want Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom or to re-unify with the rest of Ireland, how would you vote in that referendum?", the results were 50.3% to remain in the UK, 21.1% for a United Ireland, 18.9% don't knows and 9.7% who would not vote. The survey was carried out in February and March, ie after the NILT survey.
Even more theoretically, an earlier Lucid Talk poll from last December, carried out for the GUE/NGL Group of the European Parliament (of which Sinn Féin's MEPs are members) asked the question, "In the context of a 'Hard Brexit' and Northern Ireland leaving the EU with no deal on the border, the Good Friday Agreement or citizen's rights; if the question used in a NI Border Poll Referendum was: Should Northern Ireland REMAIN in the European Union through joining the Republic of Ireland or LEAVE the European Union by staying in the United Kingdom? If a NI Border Poll Referendum was held tomorrow (using this question) which way would you vote?" the results were 47.9% to remain in the EU by joining a United Ireland and only 45.4% for staying in the UK and leaving the EU, with 6.0% don't knows and 0.7% wouldn't votes.
I have to say that from a purely technical point of view I don't find the wording of the question very satisfactory – respondents are asked to consider a rather specific (and I think unlikely) scenario as if it had already happened last week with the referendum tomorrow.
Leaving that aside, it's clear that of the four polls published in the last five weeks, two (the academic ones for NILT and QUB, carried out earlier) found more than 50% in favour of staying with the UK and only 21%/22% favouring a United Ireland; whereas Lord Ashcroft and Lucid Talk (who did their surveys more recently) both found a much narrower gap, with the UK still the more preferred option but below 50%, and supporters of a United Ireland in the lower 40s.
I do not believe that public sentiment shifted much between February and May. To me the most obvious conclusion to be drawn is that at least two of these polls, and perhaps all four, have seriously messed up their methodology. Having dabbled in this a bit myself, I'm very aware that an awful lot can depend on the training of the people with the flipcharts and the accuracy of sampling and weighting; not to mention how the questions are sequenced with other questions in the poll. The numbers suggest that there is a group of 10-12% who told IPSOS Mori/QUB and NILT that they would not vote at all, and then told Ashcroft and Lucid Talk that they would vote for a United Ireland, but that does not explain all of the difference.
I'm sure that public opinion is shifting. Gerry Lynch has a great piece up on Slugger about the revolutionary times that we are in. But it's not clear where we are, let alone where we are going.
The Daly Report
A news item during the week flagged up to me the 452-page report by Senator Mark Daly, with the title Brexit and the Future of Ireland: Uniting Ireland & Its People in Peace & Prosperity, published by the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement last summer. I am sorry to say that it is a poor piece of work on an important subject. Almost all of the good bits are blatantly cut and pasted from the 2009 book Countdown to Unity by Richard Humphreys, an Irish judge. Almost all of the rest is cut and pasted from various other sources. The text has many spelling errors – "Hungry" for "Hungary", the border described as "preamble" rather than "permeable", and the gorgeous prospect of a "lassie faire approach". The internal presentation is very confusing. In a two–part review, John Barry says he'd have given it a high 2.2 if it was submitted by a student; I am not sure that I would be so generous.
Having said that, there are some particular points of interest. One chapter deals with the EU approach to reunifying Germany and the prospects for reuniting Cyprus, and also points out the precedents of Saarland (which I knew about) and St Pierre and Miquelon (which was new to me); there's a lot of good material there from experts. There's some very interesting reflection (mostly cut and pasted from Richard Humphreys) about how the Irish constitution would need to adapt to absorb Northern Ireland, possibly to the point that it would need to be completely rewritten (and that is with the very large assumption that Unionists accept an eventual referendum result gracefully).
It's good that some people in the Republic are now starting to think seriously about the implications for their own state of a United ireland, but I hope that the next stage in the process is better prepared than this.
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Yesterday was a rare day when all three matches were won by the favourites. For some bizarre reason I ticked the Sweden-beats-Germany box; otherwise I would have joined
Hooray! My run through the winners of the Oscar for Best Picture has brought me to what was already a favourite, Casablanca. It won the Oscar for Outstanding Motion Picture of 1943 (despite December 1942 general release). It got a total of eight Oscar nominations, winning also Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, a total of three.
Both IMDB ratings have Casablanca as the top film of 1942 (here and here), with Bambi second. For the Oscars, it was in contention with 1943 releases, for which IMDB voters rank Hitchcok’s Shadow of a Doubt top under both systems. I don’t recall seeing a single other 1943 film. (I guess I’ll be fixing that when it comes time to watch next year’s Retro Hugo nominations.)
Here’s a trailer:
You’ve probably seen it already, and if not, you really should.
I’m not going to run through my usual litany of things I liked and didn’t like (well, OK – one rather negative point is that for a film set in Africa, there are not a lot of actual Africans visible). I think it’s terrific in portraying a mood of desperation in Europe at the brink of totalitarian domination; of course by the time the film came out, the war had reached a turning point with the Allied conquest of North Africa, Guadalcanal, and the beginning of the slow agonising crumbling of the Eastern Front, and the story is one of maintaining morale for a long fight that is at least going in the right direction. It’s still brilliantly set up as good vs evil, with only Major Strasser firmly on the evil side; Renault is a bad man, but opts for good in the end.
Ingrid Bergman really glows. Part of the reason for this, I realised from TV Tropes (which is an excellent resource) is that she is often slightly out of focus, which makes her seem more luminous and attractive. I think that hers is the standout performance.
Bogart of course dominates the film, and has a much more credible character arc from defeated cynicism to newly rediscovered idealism than most movie protagonists do.
And the script! I’ll have more to say about this below, but it’s not surprising that this film got more coverage than any other in the American Film Institute’s list of the hundred most memorable lines in cinema. (It got six: “Here’s looking at you, kid”; “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”; “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By'”; “Round up the usual suspects”; “We’ll always have Paris”; and “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”) And there are some memorable exchanges as well.
Captain Renault: By the way, last night you evinced an interest in Señor Ugarte.Victor Laszlo: Yes.Captain Renault: I believe you have a message for him?Victor Laszlo: Nothing important, but may I speak to him now?Major Heinrich Strasser: You would find the conversation a trifle one-sided. Señor Ugarte is dead.Ilsa: Oh.Captain Renault: I am making out the report now. We haven’t quite decided yet whether he committed suicide or died trying to escape.Captain Renault: I’ve often speculated why you don’t return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Run off with a senator’s wife? I like to think you killed a man. It’s the Romantic in me.Rick: It was a combination of all three.Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?Captain Renault: I’m shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]Croupier: Your winnings, sir.Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.[aloud]Captain Renault: Everybody out at once.
I could go on, but I won’t.
The scene that always gets me is the battle of the anthems, when Laszlo interrupts Die Wacht Am Rhein with the Marseillaise; I can’t watch it without sobbing. The emotional charge no doubt comes from the fact that at least ten of the speaking characters actually were played by refugees.
 |  |
| Peter Lorre (Ugarte): born László Löwenstein, in what is now Slovakia; became a film star in 1920s Berlin; being a Jew, moved to America in 1933 after Nazis took power. | Conrad Veidt (Strasser) – started acting in films 1916, married a Jew and moved to America in 1933 after Nazis took power. |
 |  |
| Paul Henreid (Laszlo) – left Austria for England in 1935 after Dollfuss/Schuschnigg regime came to power; left England for USA to avoid detention as enemy alien in England (though Conrad Veidt spoke out for him). | Curt Bois (Pickpocket) – Jewish, left Germany in 1934 after Nazis took power. |
 |  |
| Madeleine LeBeau and Marcel Dalio (Yvonne and Emil the croupier) – married in 1940 and fled Paris after the German invasion; Dalio was Jewish. He filed for divorce during the filming of Casablanca. She was the last surviving member of the cast until she died in 2016. | |
 |  |
| S.Z. Sakall (Carl the head waiter) – born a Hungarian Jew, became a Berlin film star in the 1920s, returned to Hungary in 1933 after Nazis took power, moved to America in 1940 after Hungary joined the Axis. All three of his sisters and his niece, as well as his wife’s brother and sister, died in concentration camps. | Helmut Dantine (Jan the Bulgarian roulette player) – Austrian anti-Nazi activist who was imprisoned in a concentration camp after the Anschluss in 1938; his parents got him released and sent to America, but they themselves died in concentration camps. I saw him a few weeks ago as the crashed German pilot in Mrs Miniver. |
 |  |
| Leonid Kinskey (Sascha) and Gregory Gaye (banker) – both born in St Petersburg, and fled the Russian revolution. | |
This all may help explain why it is quite so powerful:
Well, this is going right to the top of my list of Oscar winners. I don’t know if anything will come close.
Now, it’s generally forgotten that Casablanca was actually based on a play, Everybody Comes to Rick’s, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. The play had not been produced before the studio bought it, but it has been staged a couple of times in recent years. Here is the opening of the third scene (Act 2 Scene 2):
Place: The bar of Rick’s Cafe.
Time: That evening.
Once again we see Rick’s as it was in Act 1, Scene 1.
The room is brilliantly lit. There is laughter and chatter, but it is earlier in the evening than in the first act, and tho place is not so crowded.
The RABBIT is sitting at the piano, attired as he was in the first act, playing and singing softly. Rick’s table is unoccupied, but there is a reserved sign on the other left front table as usual. The RABBIT is obviously nervous and distrait. He continually glances at the door, and then mops his head with a handkerchief. Shortly after the CURTAIN RISES, the door opens and RICK, haggard and worn, enters. He is dressed as we last saw him, and his costume is incongruous in this gathering. The RABBIT immediately leaves the piano and goes to Rick, RICK pats him on the shoulder, and takes a drink at the bar. The RABBIT evidently wants to talk but RICK shoves him toward to piano, and climbs the stairs behind the bar. The RABBIT shakes his head worriedly, and returns to the piano. Shortly after RINALDO, also attired as he was in Act One, Scene One, enters. He glances around, openly searching for Rick, but upon failing to find him, goes to the piano and the RABBIT stops playing.
Rinaldo: Good evening, Rabbit.
Rabbit: Evening, Captain Rinaldo.
The similarities, especially near the beginning, jump out at any reader who knows Casablanca – some of Burnett and Alison’s lines survived unchanged to filming, which makes it a bit rough that they did not share in the Oscar for the screenplay. “As Time Goes By” was theirs. So were “Play it, Sam”; “We’ll always have Paris” and “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…” At the same time, the film is a considerable improvement on the original. The battle of the anthems is there, but on stage the Germans are allowed to finish singing rather than be interrupted.
The character of Sam is crucially upgraded in the film as well. It’s odd, because of all characters his lines are possibly least changed (well, him and Ugarte); but the fact that he is just called “the Rabbit” in the theatre script and speaks in dialect is pretty demeaning. Dooley Wilson invests the part with considerable dignity, but so do the other actors.
Even more crucially, the female lead of the play is not a twenty-something Scandinavian but a thirty-something American, Lois Meredith, who got to know Rick in Paris in 1937 when both were cheating on their respective spouses; she has now ended up with Laszlo, and explicitly sleeps with Rick to try and get the letters (whereas we are left wondering a bit about Ilsa in Casablanca). Laszlo too is less heroic, his dispute with the Germans being about money as much as politics. Luis Rinaldo (rather than Louis Renault) and Rick himself are also much less attractive characters; it’s difficult to care as much about what happens to them as to their film counterparts. Also – complete spoiler – at the end, though Lois and Laszlo make their getaway, Strasser is not shot but instead arrests Rick for helping them escape, which makes one wonder what the point was.
It’s a bit cruel to say (as one critic did) that Everybody Comes to Rick’s is the worst play ever written, but it certainly isn’t up to the mark of its descendant. If you want to judge for yourself, you can download it from here.
My next Oscar-winner is Going My Way, of which I know nothing more than that it is a musical starring Bing Crosby.
1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
Yesterday, everyone expected Brazil to win, but only pseudomantid expected Nigeria to beat Iceland, and only
Second paragraph of third chapter:
As they progressed, Nicholas kept seeing faces he knew. A goldsmith. A shipmaster. A chorister from Trinity College. A man who sold fish-hooks. A man who made traps for devils. As with a person drowning, he appeared to be compulsorily reviewing his past, while all the time attending to Albany’s disjointed discourse.
So, it’s taken me not quite seven years to read the House of Niccolò books by Dorothy Dunnett; thanks very much to
This was my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on that pile is Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters.
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As for yesterday, although most of us expected France to beat Peru, only
Second paragraph of Part 3:
Sometime during the night, Meewee was awakened by the shaking of his bed. His first thought was — Earthquake! He opened his eyes to unfamiliar predawn walls. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember where he was, and this alarmed his half-asleep brain. The bed shook again. Not an earthquake but a gentle swaying, like the old-fashioned railway cars he’d traveled in as a boy.
I first encountered David Marusek as the author of the haunting short story “The Wedding Album”, shortlisted for the Nebula in 2000 (when it was beaten by Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”, which later became the film Arrival). Fate then threw us together as room-mates at the 2005 Glasgow Worldcon, for which he arrived 24 hours late on the Friday morning after a series of flight problems. “Have you slept?” I asked him in our first conversation. “Not since Wednesday,” he replied. I then got and enjoyed his first novel, Counting Heads, to which Mind Over Ship is a sequel.
I shouldn’t really have left it so long between reading the two. Mind Over Ship is quite closely linked to the first book – the combined sequence of events takes place over a short period of time, and the reader is banged right into the action. But if you can catch your breath, there are a lot of great ideas here – the collective and individual politics of clones, the manipulation of the launch of generation starships, the character whose severed head is attached to a slowly growing new body, another character whose consciousness has been transferred to a swarm of fish. And yet the plot doesn’t quite resolve, and some years later we are still waiting for the third volume of what feels like a trilogy. Maybe when that emerges we’ll see the form of the whole more clearly. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2010. Next on that pile is The Martian Inca, by Ian Watson.
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Yesterday was a rare day when nine out of ten people called all three matches correctly. The lucky nine were
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The somewhat surprise election of U.S. President Donald Trump was followed by predictions of a collapse in the transatlantic relationship. President Trump, whose view of the world is highly transactional, had campaigned on a platform hostile both to NATO and even the general concept of long-term alliances. During the campaign, allegations were made of Russian interference.
Charles Tannock is one of the two Conservative MEPs for London, and has been vocal in his despair at Brexit and his desire to minimise the damage that it will do to the UK. (He has taken Irish citizenship to maintain his own EU links.)
One of the more depressing aspects of the Brexit squabbling has been the potential deterioration of UK-EU security co-operation. This started badly, with Theresa May suggesting that the whole area could be in play as part of the negotiations, and has continued badly, with the EU looking to push the British out of the Galileo satellite project.
Tannock here offers two things – a guide to EU security capabilities for dummies (and quite apart from the ridiculous rhetoric about an EU army, there are a lot of people, including many EU experts, who are surprisingly unversed in this aspect of the organisation’s capabilities), and a positive proposal for structured future co-operation in the form of reviving something like the old Western European Union, which was set up in the institutional confusion of the 1950s and was gradually absorbed by the EU. He suggests a permanent structure which could be open not only to the British but to other interested neighbours of the EU, notably Norway and possibly Ukraine, which would include a mutual defence guarantee and a parliamentary angle, without competing with NATO which will remain in the lead.
It’s a nice idea (disclaimer: I’m credited as having had a look at it pre-publication), though I think in fact the UK government will be looking for a bespoke special security relationship with the EU, excluding the possibility for the Norways and Ukraines of this world to participate on a similar footing – that is, if the UK knows what it is looking for at all; I’m simply not clear on that.
You can download the book from here.
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For yesterday’s matches, nobody foresaw Senegal beating Poland, which just goes to show. Both
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The chapterhouse of the Bastard’s Order lay two streets behind the great stone bulk of the city’s, and the Weald’s, main temple. The old wooden merchant’s mansion that had formerly housed the servants of the white god had burned down twenty years ago, and been replaced with a fine new edifice, built more to the purpose, in the cut yellow stone of this country. As the chief chapterhouse of the realm, and in close competition with its sibling Orders for the other four gods, its architecture was high, balanced, and austere, not nearly as makeshift as the more provincial chapterhouses Pen was used to. It made him feel rather provincial himself.
Last year’s Best Series Hugo final ballot included only one series that I had not read before (October Daye). This year’s Best Series Hugo final ballot includes only one series that I already knew at all, Bujold’s World of the Five Gods, where I think I had read everything except this novella, included with the Hugo voter packet.
We’re back in Penric and Desdemona territory, but actually not in sequence, this being set third in what’s currently a series of five. It’s a murder mystery with demons, where I must admit I spotted the likely villain quite early, but the journey of discovery of our main characters was very entertaining, and also it’s great to see Bujold allowing her young protagonist to mature through the course of what is quite a short story. I was certain to vote for the World of the Five Gods for Best Series anyway, but Penric’s Fox confirms my decision. You can get it here.
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Current
City of Stairs, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Old Friends, by Jonathan Clements, Marc Platt and Pete Kempshall
Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch
Last books finished
Ghana Must Go, by Taiye Selasi
The Art of Starving, by Sam J. Miller
Everybody Comes to Rick's, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison
Next books
Virgins, Weeders and Queens, by Twigs Way
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, by James Finn Garner
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Congrats to
Third page:
| Over to foreign news. A heated debate broke out today between the Financial Times newspaper and the Portuguese minister Manuel Pinho… |
 |
The reason for this? The Financial Times' use of the acronym… DIINNG DOONNG Good morning, Good morning, |
I picked this up from the author herself at FACTS last October. It's a nicely done short graphic novel about the experience of being a young Italian immigrant in Ghent, just at the time that the financial crisis was hitting the southern European economies and Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain were dubbed PIGS by the Financial Times. Cecilia has a pig's head but does not realise it, as she tries to pass for human in Belgium; and she learns that you really discover how much you belong to your home country by leaving it. The story is therefore a bit cliched, but the art is really good. In particular, she makes great use of the space on the page – no boxes, a lot of two-page spreads, giving a broad canvas, and placing her characters several times over in a frame as they move around, giving a sense of movement and space that we don't often get with comics. It hasn't been translated into English, of course. You can see the first half of it for free here, and buy it here.
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Well done to
A few years ago I posted about a visit to the Three Tumuli of Grimde near Tienen. These are three first- or second-century Roman graves; when we went five years ago, they were covered in trees and undergrowth. (Also F, then 13, was noticeably smaller than he is now.)
The tumuli are being cleaned up. Here's B contemplating where the undergrowth used to be:
And a panoramic view showing the width of the site:
It's all under construction right now, and we probably shouldn't have gone into it, but I think it will be striking when it is finished.
Not far away is the Church of Our Lady of the Stone, another place I've been before. B was enjoying the good weather now.
Inside the church is the shrine of St Maurus, whose iron crowns may be worn by sufferers from mental disorders, hopefully offering them some relief.
And sometimes it's just nice to be inside in the cool air of an otherwise deserted place of worship.
