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Rereading a favourite childhood book: My Family and Other Animals

It must have been in my early teenage years that I first read Gerald Durrell's book My Family and Other Animals . I loved it, and I'm pretty sure I read it more than once. I decided recently to re-read it. I don't have a good history with revisiting things from my childhood. I had a bad experience rewatching Blake's 7 . Even one of my favourite TV Series, Heroes , wasn't that interesting when I rewatched the first episode. To put the summary at the start - it was a good move. In case you're not familiar with it, My Family etc. tells the story of how Gerry, his widowed mother, and older sister and two brothers moved to Corfu when he was ten years old. Gerry was fascinated by the wildlife around him and the book, and the following two books in what is sometimes sold as the Corfu Trilogy, is a mixture of descriptions of his nature explorations and the things his family gets up to. To give you an idea of the latter, here's a sample: “Les, muttering wrathfully, ...

I'm just listening to the music part 2 - ELO 1

This is part 2 of the series, " Me? I'm just listening to the music ". Before I start though, I need to tell you why the US version of this album is called "No Answer". An executive from the United Artists Records executive rang someone on the ELO side to find out the name of the album. When they didn't get through they wrote down, "no answer" and so that became the album title. I had ELO1 on tape in my teenage years, but never the whole album, so some tracks are very familiar and I heard some for the first time when I listened to it recently. 10538 overture is prehistoric ELO. I love that it's firmly rooted in the sixties in its sound. It's like an old uncle that you don't want to change. It introduces the heavy string sound that we're going to get familiar with on this album. Look at me is sung by Roy Wood, not Jeff Lynne and it doesn't age well. Nellie takes her bow is lovely and dramatic. It's a long song - nearly 6...

Threescore celebration

On the occasion of my 60th birthday, I, like so many before me, created a 16 page zine printed newspaper style by newspaperclub.com . The subject is mostly me, so modesty forbids I publish the whole thing online. However there are some things which are about the year of my birth. So here are three pages from Threescore , lightly edited to avoid controversy (maybe you can guess the edit).

Brum SF Group: Antony Johnston

This was my third visit to the BSFG , the second IRL, as the previous one was on Zoom with an author in the US. Antony Johnston writes in several genres and media: SF (of course), murder mystery, espionage, video games, graphic novels and non-fiction. He was interviewed and in answering the questions gave fascinating insights into how those different media work. He said that for graphic novels there's no set way that writers deliver their words to the artists, but he chose to do it in a screenplay format. That was handy when one of his works, Atomic Blonde, became a film. The process from start to finish was 5 years, which was, he found out, actually quite quick for the industry. The process of writing for videogames has similarly no set format and varies between studios and even different games with the same set of people. That process is a lot more iterative than others. I learnt a new term - vertical slice. That describes how when a game is being prototyped the creators c...

Me? I'm just listening to the music - Us by Peter Gabriel

It seems a contradiction if I say I listened to an old album by one of my favourite artists recently. The truth is, I'm not a very good music fan. I did think of talking about music that I liked, and then I realised I'd reinvented radio. I could do a reaction video on YouTube, "old man listens to old music", but I'm really a text person at the moment so I'm going to write about it. Here's an aside: a young adult asked me what my favourite music was. I reeled off a list of old artists: Genesis, Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush. Then I mentioned a modern one, expecting that he'd heard of them: Elbow. He hadn't. Then I realised that they'd won the Mercury music prize when he was probably two. Not so modern really. So here's the start of a new series: Listening to Us by Peter Gabriel for the first time I listened to Peter Gabriel 2 (aka Scratch ), a while back. 1 and 3 (known as Car and Melt ) even though that's not written on them) ...

First visit to Birmingham SF Group

View this post on Instagram A post shared by A.Y. Chao 🇨🇦🇹🇼🇬🇧 (@ay_chao) Last night I visited the Birmingham SF Group . Due to a problem with the meeting venue we decamped to a cosy room in a nearby pub. The guest was A. Y. Chao, author of Shanghai Immortal. As well as talking about that she read some of her new book Paris Celestial to us, and answered questions. It's due to be released on the 26th March 2026. This was the first time I've been to this group, and I found them to be a friendly bunch. It's been going since 1971 and there was a couple there who'd been there since the beginning. Although I hadn't been before, The Organisation APA which I wrote about a while back, was originally APA-B, set up by the Brum SF Group. So I have some common history with the group. Would I go again? Definitely.