Missing Persons - Nicci Gerrard

Missing Persons – Nicci Gerrard. Release Date: May 24^th

This thoughtful book traces the effects of a missing child and is being launched alongside Missing Children’s Day 2012.

Johnny was 18 when he disappeared from University and it was a week or two before his increasingly anxious mother and father realised that he had gone. From this point the story traces the effects his disappearance has on his friends and family. In their attempts to find him it becomes clear that he has left of his own accord causing even greater grief and bewilderment to his loving family as they can’t come to terms with why he won’t get in touch.

The story spans seven years and moves from the acute pain and fear that his loved ones feel to show the poisonous way in which the event marks and twists each person who knew and loved him. Lives are changed, paths are stunted and gradually as they all try to start again you can see how deeply the disappearance has affected them.

This is a sad read and even the ending doesn’t seem to offer the resolution that you would hope for. In this, the book is an honest reflection of a very difficult reality that families across the country have to deal with every year.

The Saints' Way Walk. Part One.

It’s time again for the school’s Saints' Way walk.  Every year in the summer the school take the year 6 pupils on a trek across Cornwall, they stretch it out over 3 days and it gives the children a chance to get out of class.  By the summer term they are ready to move on, they’ve done their SATs, they can rings around the curriculum, and they are itching to go up. Up to the big school with all the terrors and the excitements that it promises and suggests.

So in a rather smart move years ago, it was decided to exhaust this over excited, nervous pack of puppies and the Saints' Way walk was borne.  Stage one is Fowey to No Man’s Land above Lostwithiel, we were due to go two weeks ago but an early rain shower meant that it was called off despite howls of protests from the children and parents alike. Naturally the rest of the day proved dry and sunny. In fact it was probably the last dry and sunny day we’ve seen since.  Yesterday we were scheduled to try again and as I woke up I looked out the window to see heavy misty rain blowing along the street with almost no visibility and high winds.  An even worse day than last time.  However Mr F. was not to be thwarted a second time and the walk was on. The mini bus was loaded up with children, parents and dogs and we were off!

We jumped out at Fowey and stepped straight up to the church and the Saints' Way.  Days out with Mr F. are always special because of the enthusiastic and bizarre way in which he presents information. Nothing in his mind is boring except maybe paperwork, no child is a failure so long as they are trying and very little is impossible.  We started in the church where I discovered that during the civil war Cornish hospitality towards the Parliamentarians was lacking and they were all sent home naked having been beaten and had all their provisions removed. The pulpit is from the wrecked timbers of a Spanish galleon and that the decorative piece of stone in the graveyard came from atop of the church tower when it was struck by lightning.

We were about to set off on the Saints' Way but what exactly is it?  This is an old path that connected the early Christian Celts in Ireland through Wales across Cornwall and down over to Brittany. As the Saints and pilgrims progressed across the lands they were banishing the pagan religions as they went and brought the word of God to the people they met.  So we were going to follow their route spreading the word of God, banishing such pagan practices as worshiping water deities and woodland spirits.  Looking around me I felt quite confident that the woodland nymphs and deities would be safe from our bunch of heathens!

Off we set, nattering and chattering, wrapped up against the wind and rain and soon we were walking up some very steep hills, shedding coats and jumpers as we went and very glad of the damp air to cool us down. Eventually we arrived at St Sampson’s at Golant. A Holy Well stands at the entrance of the Church so maybe those water nymphs weren’t so much banished as assimilated? Inside we discovered that St Sampson fought dragons and brought the dead back to life. Early saints seem to have more in common with super heroes rather than being nice, kindly folk. In an interesting aside Mr F suggested that dragons might have existed, in the form of fire breathing pterodactyls that ignited their own malodorous, methane burps with their rough teeth. Who knows? Stage two of the walk coming soon.

It seems hard to believe but another year has passed and the rugby season is finally over. It’s been a rough year for the club having its club house vandalised and losing Paul to cancer but Lankelly Fowey aren’t ones for giving up.  The boys have turned out most weeks for training and matches, they have played in hail and driving rain, slid along mud slides, been gouged, thumped and tackled again and again and again but they loved every minute.  I’m not sure how much fun it was for the coaches and parents who also turn out every week but for our sins we must enjoy watching our children try their hardest and sometimes succeeding.

So now that rugby is over you’d think I’d get a rest but my youngest has decided that he wants to come running with me. The first time he came I tried to keep up with him which proved to be a massive mistake.  Not only can I not run a mile yet, I’m also not Usain Bolt. Finn can not only run rings around me at speed, he can do it for miles and miles.  To make things more fun he has decided to lap me, to see how many miles he can run whilst I try to run just one. I’m not sure who is finding this fun. I know it’s not me but I suspect by his grin and shouts of encouragement as he goes past that it might be him.

My eldest boy now having lost his weekly outlet for rage and violence has turned to his piano with gusto and no little amount of trepidation on behalf of his piano.  His teacher was a bit concerned that he wasn’t making much progress recently until we discovered that there was a language breakdown. Rachel was telling Thomas to look at a certain piece. Thomas did just that, he looked at it. For weeks he looked at it, and then went on to play his own pieces. Rachel has now stopped asking him to look but to actually play and progress is being made.

Of course running and piano is not enough of an outlet for sporty kids so out come the surf boards and the sail boats and there goes the state of my car. I wish there wasn’t this modern obsession with carpeted cars, the sand gets so wedged in and it never hoovers out – just more mess to learn to live with. I liked the old lino types where it all just sluiced out, dog hair, mud, sand, food, the whole lot swept out and then washed down.

So it’s going to be a long sporty summer ahead of us, hopefully with lots of lovely sunshine and long sunny evenings. The children can go grab their bikes and ride their socks off and Steve and I will relax over a well-earned glass of something chilled. Cheers!

We're choking in our own rubbish.

Well it’s all rubbish really! That’s what the past few weeks seem to have been all about, I’m not talking metaphorically but actual rubbish. It all started two weeks ago when I was woken up by the almighty crashing of glass. I ran to the bedroom window where I saw the new recycling van coming round to collect the new bags and boxes, if it was a minute past seven it was only by a hair’s breath. I had two thoughts, the first was that that wasn’t the nicest way to wake up, the next was even grumpier as I realised I had missed my collection.


 I am so used to putting out my bins when I wake up (seagulls and deer – I know – only in Cornwall) that I hadn’t realised that the recycling rounds would start so early. Anyway this morning I was up at six and duly put out all my bins, bags and boxes, startling a deer that ran off down the road – a very surreal start to the day I have to say. I was hoping that the crash of all my wine bottles didn’t alarm the neighbours too much but I needn’t have worried, it’s 9 o’ clock now and no one has collected them yet. I also needn’t have worried about getting up at 6 o’clock but then I’d have never seen the deer. It seems though that I am one of the lucky ones as some people are having their recycling rejected, are not having rubbish collected or don’t have the new bags yet. I hope it all settles soon and I am in favour of it but it is a bit of a fag trying to find a place for all these large bags. Still if it’s a bit of a fag versus landfill pollution I can cope with the former.

My next encounter with rubbish was the incinerator debacle at St Dennis. I mean how long do those residents have to keep fighting? Burning rubbish is rubbish. It is the last word in wastefulness and it will cost a bomb to build. Nothing about the incinerator makes sense to me. If we can’t produce enough waste to burn because we are all recycling instead, then SITA can import waste from other counties to burn. Wonderful! Lots of lorries driving up and down the motorways carrying rubbish. Absolutely barmy.


Finally I was having a chat with someone and he was telling me about a chap that drives to a layby has a cigar or two and then empties his cigar tin etc. on the floor and away he goes. Fundamentally this is the problem isn’t it? Not land fill management, not what day and time our bags are going to be picked up but bottom line, do we really care what we do with our rubbish? You can’t walk five minutes anywhere without seeing rubbish. Our hedges are festooned with poo bags, the curbs have fag ends and paper cups in them, our beaches are awash with plastic bottles and crisp packets. And it’s not a holiday maker issue this happens all year round, too many of us couldn’t care less. There’s a place where I park with Harry, it has a litter bin but every time I go there the carpark is littered with rubbish, I often see local residents picking up the McDonald wrappers and the tins of beer and putting them in the bin that is within 5 metres of the rubbish but why couldn’t the person who threw it out the window not have done the same thing?

Moan over, one day I'm going to have to run the country and get it right again.

HHhH - Laurent Binet

HHhH by Laurent Binet. Release Date: May 3rd

This stunning novel, published in France in 2010, won its author, Laurent Binet, the coveted Prix Goncourt for the best and most imaginative prose work of the year. This is the English translation and it loses none of its original power.

This is a novel that reads as non fiction. It details the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich by 2 Czechoslovakian parachutists, in Prague, in 1942. Heydrich is variously remembered as "the hangman of Prague", "the blond beast" and "the most dangerous man in the third reich". He was also one of the architects of the final solution, the Nazi blueprint to exterminate European Jews. All in all, then, not a very pleasant man and quite deserving of his comeuppance. The book teaches us a lot about the history of the period, the rise of Nazism, the dynamics of the war and the politics of the region. It's also a reflection on brutality and persecution. All the characters are real and the events happened as described, but this is no dry history book. The book zips along at a fair old pace with short, punchy chapters (257 in all) which build the tension nicely.

I loved this book and, even though I knew the outcome, which is simply a matter of historical record, I found it a riveting read. My one criticism is the title, an anagram of "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich" which in German spells HHhH. A little too clever and obscure perhaps? I prefered the working title of "Operation Anthropoid". That aside, I predict great things for this novel. Definitely one to watch!

World Book Night

Happy Birthday Mr Shakespeare, hello St George (do leave the dragons alone) and welcome World Book Night!

World Book Night celebrates the wonder, the glory, the fun and the fundamental necessity of books and reading. With this in mind the organisers have selected 25 titles ranging from non-fiction to sci-fi to classics and all and everything in between.  People have then been selected up and down the country to hand out 24 copies each. There are over 2 million copies out there so Britain is going to be awash with people who love books passing on free copies to new converts!

I have The Player of Games by Iain M Banks, just a stunning science fiction novel that is clever, interesting, challenging but most importantly accessible. My other title is Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Not just a soppy love story. In fact it's not very romantic at all, it's dark and cruel, murderers flourish and madness reigns. Great fun.

It's fair to say that I don't like going up to strangers but I needn't have worried, I picked on the Mevagissey fishermen and they were poppets.  Many requests for the Karma Sutra but I had to tell them we only had the Braille version, half of them picked Rebecca which I thought was great, one boy said he was going to give it to his wife for her birthday but we all pointed out the word "Free" copy on the book.  It wouldn't be the best move. Much joshing about who could and couldn't read but I hope that they do get a moment out at sea to just stop for a second and read a chapter. If they have The Player of Games they can dream of alien seas, if they have Rebecca, they can look back to shore and see the rhododendrons rolling down to the shore and just picture the scenes in front of them.

If you want to know more and see if there is an event near you visit www.worldbooknight.org

The Testimony – James Smythe

The Testimony – James Smythe. Release Date 26th April.

If you heard a voice in your head would you think it was God or that you were mad.? What if the whole world heard the same voice?

One morning almost everyone in the world hears static in their head. No one can understand it or explain it, with a paranoid middle east and a trigger happy United States, nations start to feel the strain. The following day, the world hears the words “My Children.” Panic ensues, nations start blaming each other, is it God, aliens, terrorists? On the third day the voice says ”Do not be afraid” and the world falls apart.

This was a very clever apocalyptical novel, told through the lives of 26 people spread across the planet. It challenges how we view religion and politics and poses the question what would we do if we thought God was suddenly speaking to us? The book also cynically observes how quickly panic can destroy societies. Although no issues were posed in detail and no answers were given it still made for a gripping read.
Liz