We’ve been watching Allo Allo on DVD – reliving our childhoods – for the last two years. We’re coming to the end of series five now, out of nine, and it’s an easy opt for watching over dinner. By this point in its production the BBC had half an eye on the American market, so it had trimmed down each episode to about 23 minutes, to allow for adverts, and upped the number of episodes to somewhere around 24.

So when it came to town we were always going to go. Especially as we missed our chance last time around.

I think we were the first to book tickets, which bagged us seats in the balcony front row and centre, and an excellent view.

But 25 years on, Allo Allo has changed, and I think that by still watching the DVDs we probably had a different experience to the rest of the crowd. Vicki Michelle is the only original character left in it. Rene, who was once Gorden Kaye, is now Jeffrey Holland, better known as Spike from Hi-de-Hi. The other actors are less well known, and their ability to recreate the original characters highly variable. Mimi Labonq, Michelle of the Resistance and Helga were all true to the original, but the others far less so. Herr Flick looked like David Starkey with a limp.

It must have been quite galling for the other actors that Vicki Michelle was the only one to get a big cheer when she walked on, and another when they took their bows.

Once you got past their inexplicably changed appearances, though, it was excellent fun, and the story both funnier and smuttier than anything on the DVDs, probably because they would never have got away with it on TV.

Well worth seeing if it comes your way – doubly so if you haven’t recently seen the originals.

So the UK clearly doesn’t want to win Eurovision this year. Perhaps the BBC is saving all of its budget for the Olympics, and has decided that hosting Eurovision 2010 would leave too big a hole in its coffers.

Not that I care. I’d rather see it come from somewhere else, and see a bit of another country in the tween-song postcards.

As a result, we’re putting in the weakest song for a long time. Very repetitive, and really going nowhere until it comes to an end. Put it up against some of its rivals and I can see us coming home in the bottom half again. Maybe the bottom quarter. Perhaps the bottom five.

So, my first pick of the five UK beaters is Sweden’s Malena Ernman, who mixes English and French with opera and pop in La Voix. And she looks like Ulrika Jonsson. I’ve had this on semi-repeat for the last two days.

An unlikely winner, but top 10, I’m sure, and nice to see them doing something so different to last year’s (also excellent) Hero.

I’ll be drip-feeding the rest of my reasons why the UK won’t be winning Eurovision this year over the next few days. Happy listening.

This is turning into a bit of a book blog at the moment, isn’t it? Well, more news about that in a few days, perhaps. In the meantime I seem to be reading faster than I ever have before, and I’m clearing my to-read pile at a rate of a book a week. It feels good to be doing that. I’ve spent far too much time with the hand-out London papers.

I do have plenty of books not written by Paulo Coelho, but a couple of months back I bought a stack of 10 of his works for £9.99, and I’m steadily working my way through them, which brings me to The Devil and Miss Prym.

I could picture the scenes in this one very clearly indeed. Coelho set it in Viscos, but it read like it was in Brasov, Romania, although on a much smaller scale. Like all of his books, it sets out to explore one simple idea: in this case, what could induce a murder.

A stranger arrives in Viscos with eleven bars of gold. He shows them to a local girl, tempting her to steal one from the spot where he’s buried it on the mountain behind the village and telling her that if the people of the town would murder someone by the end of the week, they can share the remaining ten between them.

Those ten bars, when sold, would be enough to revitalise the whole town, and free them from ever worrying about earning a living again.

So, in essence, does she want to be responsible for tempting the village to kill one of its own?

But there’s a twist. To force her hand one way or the other, the stranger tells her that if she doesn’t reveal his offer to the rest of the inhabitants within a week, he will tell them himself, and then if they decide to do the deed the chances are they’ll do it to her. She, after all, risked letting them lose everything, and they probably wouldn’t take kindly to that.

It’s a book that keeps you wondering what you would do in her situation. If he’s going to tell the whole village anyway, what harm is there in telling them yourself just a few days earlier? Or perhaps you would be able to talk him out of it? Or should you run away?

I won’t reveal what she does, of course, or it would spoil the story, but it is resolved in a believable manner… one way or the other.

Price £7.99 (£5.99 from Amazon)
ISBN 0007116055
Author Paulo Coelho

The Moneypenny Diaries has sat on my bedside table for months, waiting to be read. If I’d known how good it was I’d have got around to it much sooner.

The premise is simple: Jane Moneypenny, M’s secretary and 007′s muse of many years, is dead. She died 10 years before the start of the book, when Kate Westbrook – supposedly her niece – received three packages in the post, in the largest of which were Moneypenny’s secret diaries.

Highly secret, it turns out, as she should never have been writing them.

The main thrust of the story, though, takes place in 1962 and follows a year in Moneypenny’s life. In the Bond timeline that places it between On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice; in real life 1962 was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Westbrook has done a stunning job of weaving the two storylines – real and fictional – into one another, and used the books rather than the films as her source material.

But if you expected this to be the tale of life in M’s outer office you’d be wrong (and disappointed if you really did want to read about humdrum secretarial happenings). It starts out down that track, but soon Moneypenny is dragged off to Cuba on a mission with Bond, and she ends up playing a pivotal role in both the Bond timeline and world events.

There are plenty of twists, and it had me fooled as to who was good and who was bad on one of the threads right up until the last couple of pages, but it’s skilfully resolved in a very satisfying and believable way.

The question is, though, if you’re not into the Bond films would you enjoy the book? The answer is a resounding ‘yes’. Bond himself plays second fiddle to Moneypenny, and even if you’re not interested in the Bond franchise this is a cracking adventure story built around actual historical events, told at impressive speed.

Price: £7.99 (£5.99 from Amazon)
Author: Kate Westbrook
ISBN: 0719567424

Spring lamb (and mother)

The weather thoroughly spoiled us over Easter. Surprising, really, as spring bas been cold and wet so far.

We took the train up to Darlington on Thursday night, straight from work, leaving the cat and chickens in the care of the neighbours, and spent until Tuesday morning in the countryside before commuting back to London for work.

We packed in so much. On the Friday we went to Richmond, where we walked around the cobbled main square and down by the falls, and then motored over to Barnard Castle for tea in the Bowes Museum, which still has one of our family heirlooms in its collection.

I’d seen it from the outside as we drove past it when we stayed in Consett almost two years ago. It looks like a French chateau, externally, and that’s impressive enough, but inside it’s a whole other world with a grand staircase and chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, and that’s only in the entrance hall.

On Saturday we headed into the Dales proper, revisiting many of the places we stopped by when we stayed in Yorkshire last August (how the time flies), clambering over boulders on river beds, jumping over dry stone walls, hunting out the youngest lambs we could find in the fields…

The Dales

But we didn’t spend the whole weekend in the Dales: we visited some old family haunts in Darlington that I haven’t seen in 25 years or more, or not at all as they were my grandparents’ houses, vacated years before I was born.

On the Monday we went to Durham, a city I have always wanted to visit, and although we really only looked around the cathedral (internal photos forbidden) and walked along the river, it was good to be able to say I’ve finally been, and have reason to go back and see the rest.

Durham

It was a sharp contrast to the sights we saw on our journey there. If you go straight from Darlington it’s about 20 miles all told, but instead we drove through the industrial heartland surrounding Middlesborough. Not nice, but very interesting. One of my earliest memories – perhaps my earliest memory of all – is of being taken around the steel works by a family member when I was maybe two and a bit as I was still an only child at the time. At the end, as we left, I was given an absolutely lethal spiral of steel shaving with razor-sharp edges to take home as a souvenir. Needless to say mum put it in her handbag to ‘keep it safe for me’ and it was never seen again.

We did briefly break the car when the gear stick came off in Andrew’s hand, leaving us stranded outside Kettlewell. It looked for a while like we were in for a three hour wait for the AA to come and pick us up, but after retreating to a coffee shop with excellent teacakes it somehow fixed itself, much to our mix of relief (that we’d get home) and disappointment (that there would be no more teacakes for us).

It was a great weekend, and a brilliant start to the season, and for once the trains didn’t spoil any of it. We rode up on the East Coast Main Line, with all the free wifi and regular trolley service that entails, and it ran to almost perfect time.

What a shock it was to get back on our scummy commuter trains yesterday evening for the 30 miles home it takes an hour and a half to cover after work.

Ugh.

I read my last London freesheet on 17 March, finished the sudoku and switched to reading books. The freesheets take less than six stops to read and do both puzzles, and then litter the tube. Not a good use of trees.

So last night I finished Eleven Minutes, my second book book in three weeks. The boycott is paying off.

It was patchy. Intriguing for the first half, dipping for the latter but ultimately rescuing itself in the last few pages, it’s the story of Maria, a Brazilian prostitute lured to Switzerland who discovers that love and sex are more meaningful than she thought. In a nutshell.

It’s simply written, like Coelho’s other books, isn’t too taxing and is quick to read. I like the way he plays with the craft of writing, doing little to hide the fact that what you are reading is anything more an a figment of his imagination. When he drops you into excerpts from Maria’s diary he does it with a quick ‘From Maria’s diary later that night…’, rather than trying to smooth the transition from third- to first- person.

He sets out his stall right from the off, making it clear from the start that this is, at heart, a simple fairy tale. From page one:

Once upon a time. there was a prostitute called Maria. Wait a minute. ‘Once upon a time’ is how all the best children’s stories begin and ‘prostitute’ is a word for adults. How can I start a book with this apparent contradiction? But since, at every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss, let’s keep that beginning.

And later, a reminder that this is just a story in a book…

…lovely dark girl with her pale eyes and hair as black as the wing of the grauna (the Brazilian bird often evoked by local authors to describe black hair)…

There are references to The Alchemist when he mentions that his main character reads a book about a boy who tends sheep in Spain, and to The Pilgrimage, as Maria walks a small part of the road to Santiago.

It’s certainly not the best of his books I’ve read so far, and nothing has yet trumped The Pilgrimage, but with eight or so to go, it’ll be interesting to see where it sits in the collection, particularly as he admits in the introduction that he was nervous about publishing this one. I think I can see why.

How big do they think my wardrobe is? I have never lived anywhere like where I do now (sorry – bad grammar) for begging bags. Three a week, at least, cluttering up the doormat when you get home, ready to make you go skidding across the hallway. And they have the gall, after poking it unsolicited through the letterbox when you’re not at home, to ask you to keep it away from pets and kids.

Here’s the last week’s haul:

I wouldn’t mind if:

1. They weren’t so picky about what you could put in, but while handbags and jewellery are most welcome, bric-a-brac almost always most definitely is not.
2. They were all actually for charities, but they’re not. Some of them are, granted, but plenty of them are for private individuals who then sell the clothes and give some (or none) of the proceeds to charity.
3. They all actually included a bag, but some are so lazy, like the two A5 fliers in that pile, that they want you to use a shopping bag and drop it on the pavement, making your street look like the council tip.
4. We didn’t get six in a week.

I will never use one of these bags. I’d rather make the effort to take my old clothes to the charity shop, and for the other valuables they want you to give so they can sell them on, sell them myself on eBay.

I might one day, just out of spite, put some ‘bric-a-brac’ in one and see what happens.

My tube this morning was adorned with little paper doves, cut from scrap and hanging from the overhead handrail by bits of old string. Whoever made them had written little notes on them, like ‘NO CO₂AL’, ‘End Climate Chaos’ and ‘Be the change you want in the world’.

I quite like protests like that, particularly as the police have been hyping up the potential for flying punches later when the G20 protests properly take hold.

What that’ll do to my chances of getting home at a decent time I don’t know, particularly as Liverpool Street is supposed to be one of the focal points.

Lots of businesses around there – and particularly the banks – have told their staff to dress down in case their suits make them targets, which highlights their generally outdated attitudes to work wear. If it’s OK for staff to come in wearing smart casual when there are protests on and the work will still be done, why can’t they do that every day?

My RSS reader tells tales on writers, by comparing before and after copy on the posts it downloads. Anything that gets changed is struck out in red, with its replacement added in green. I always keep that in mind when writing as it won’t be the only app that does that, and I don’t want any of my own subscribers seeing what corrections I’ve made.

So there’s some irony in the way it has highlighted the corrections made to a Guardian story about the Independent largely doing away with sub-editors, who are responsible for, among many other things, keeping a watchful eye over the linguistic and grammatical accuracy of a paper’s content.

Take, for example…

And elsewhere…

And thus the Guardian accurately demonstrated the art of good subbing.