Lance Greenfield's Blog, page 27
June 23, 2019
#weekendcoffeeshare: ABBA, Andover GP, TeenTech and Ruby
If we were having coffee, I would be telling you about the most fantastic last seven days.
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GX Todd – author
Last Saturday, I was at the Annual Bloggers Bash Awards (ABBA) in the Grand Wellington Hotel in Vincent Square in London. What a great time we had! Apart from all the awards, we had two great talks from Laura Creaven and Gemma Todd and a workshop on creating flatlay photos for your blog. The greatest part of the day, for me, is the opportunity to network with such an amazing mix of bloggers and writers. Some are now old friends, from previous bashes. Each time we meet, we learn more about each other. It is always interesting and stimulating. Then there were new friends. There was so much, almost tangible, enthusiasm and energy in the room. Everybody was fired up. I can’t believe that anyone left the hotel not thinking about returning for ABBA 2020.
[image error]On Tuesday evening, we met for the AGM of Andover Green Party. I was delighted to be appointed as the Chair and we made plans to run a long time to run a long campaign to position ourselves to challenge the Tory MP when the next general election is called. The first steps are to nominate our Prospective Parliamentary Candidate. I intend to put myself forward.
Thursday was a very exciting day for me. I was an ambassador at TeenTech Hampshire for the second consecutive year. This is a hugely inspiring event which is the brainchild of Maggie Philbin, who is passionate about the cause. There are many sponsors, who are all companies who showcase their innovative technologies. The core of the event is STEM. Three hundred year eight pupils from schools around Hampshire attend. The main auditorium is laid out with thirty tables, seating ten children with a teacher from their school and an ambassador, who is an experienced representative of their industry.
[image error]I was very lucky to be assigned to Table 2, populated by ten St Swithun’s students and their physics teacher. I say that I “was very lucky,” because this group proved to be, in my opinion, the best team in the whole event. My opinion was confirmed by the number of prizes that they deservedly won for their performances and inputs during the day. Some of my fellow ambassadors also commented on how impressed they were with this team.
All ten of the students at my table were great and represented their school in the best possible light.
The young lady who was sitting to my right was awarded the prize for her “best idea of the day.” Scientists and technologists from sponsoring companies judged over a thousand ideas that the students had been sticking onto the Ideas Board during the day. They selected this girl’s idea of manufacturing carrier bags that disintegrate into fish food when they come into contact with sea water. She listed the two main impacts as feeding the fish and saving turtles. To be selected as the top idea is quite an achievement!
The whole St Swithun’s Table 2 Team came up with one of the most impressive innovative inventions for the next 50 years. They called it HyperPlant 2030. They all deserve credit for coming up with the design and their creative use of technology. The idea was very well presented by two of my ten students, who had practiced their pitch to get the timing and wording right and finished off with a powerful punchline. Excellent!
They were also one of the best teams at assembling a gear box in Xtrac’s workshop and challenge.
KPMG set an engineering challenge to build a tall tower out of paper, sticky tape and straws. The challenge wasn’t simply to build the tallest free-standing tower. The other elements were to make it profitable, taking into account the cost of the materials at £500k per item and being credited with one million pounds for each centimetre of height. The girls were divided into pairs for the challenge. The winning pair, from all of the schools throughout the day, were, once again, from St Swithun’s Table 2.
TeenTech is a tremendous event. It is very well-organised and supported by sponsors and participant companies and presenters. However, it could never achieve its amazing success without the support of Hampshire schools and the unbounded positive attitudes of the students.
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Joy, Doreen, Lance
Saturday was my Ruby Wedding.
Forty years ago, on 22nd June 1979, I married my darling Joy at Andover Registry Office. The ceremony was followed by a reception at The Cricketers public house in Longparish, where we’d met, four months before on 15th February 1979. The wedding breakfast consisted Ploughman’s Lunch and Champagne. How classy is that?!
The photo of us with the pub landlady, Doreen Beecroft, in the garden of the pub. We are still friends with her. She lives not far from us, in Charlton, Andover.
Weekend Coffee Share is hosted by Eclectic Alli.
Check out her blog to read her own Weekend Coffee Share post.
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June 21, 2019
Book Review: Beneath a Scarlet Sky by Mark T Sullivan
Beneath a Scarlet Sky by Mark T. Sullivan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Even with exclusive interviews with the hero himself, it takes a tremendous amount of additional research and some wonderful writing to produce such a compelling account of the wartime years of Giuseppe (Pino) Lella. In his telling of Pino’s story, Mark Sullivan has achieved the pinnacle of his craft. If I could award six, or even ten stars to this book, I would.
Initially, Pino is just doing as his father and the priest, Father Re, tell him to do. He learns to be a guide in the Italian Alps and builds his strength. Despite the threat of the Alpine climate, challenging terrain and some people with very evil intentions, he delivers many Jews from Father Re’s school into the safe hands of Mr Bergstrom in a forest that straddles the Italian-Swiss border.
Eventually, he returns to his home city of Milan and fortuitously, almost by accident, becomes the driver of General Hans Leyers, Hitler’s second-in-command in Italy. This gives him the opportunity to enter a very dangerous career as a spy for the Allies. By now, he fully understands the dangers and is a true, if somewhat reluctant, hero. He also meets Anna, a young lady whom he’d last seen on the day of the first bombardment of Milan by the Allied bombers. She’d stood him up on a cinema date on that evening and had been on Pino’s mind ever since. Despite an age difference, they fall in love and Anna is complicit in Pino’s espionage activities.
I shan’t say any more about the story except that it is gripping to the point of distraction. On two occasions, I rose early from my bed and donned my running kit, with good intentions. I picked up my book to read a couple of pages before I set off, then spent the next two hours reading. It takes something serious to keep me from my running. This book was it.
The horror, sadness, brutality, unfairness and continuous, sudden shocks of war are all vividly illustrated in Sullivan’s account of Pino’s life. The author also does a great job of hitting home the awful truths that violent death is often sudden and is always irreversible and that the killing and horrific injuries and other terrible consequences of war do not magically stop the moment that peace is declared.
The book is further enhanced by a fairly lengthy and very interesting Aftermath, which explains much of what has happened in the lives of Pio and the other principal characters since the end of the war.
I cannot recommend this book enough. Read it and be prepared to have your emotions stretched to their limits.
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Mark and Pino at Isola Bella in Lake Maggiore
Photo Credit: Elizabeth Sullivan
Pino’s son, Michael, has written an essay that explains more of the truth behind Pino’s story. It is well worth are read, although I would recommend that you leave it until after you have finished reading the book, including the Aftermath. You will find Michael’s essay here.
June 17, 2019
Book Review – Crossing the Line: An Erotic Massage Story by Ava Sterling
Crossing the Line: An Erotic Massage Story by Ava Sterling
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is a very straightforward and predictable tale of an novice masseuse becoming attracted to her sportsman, first time on the table, client and seducing him in stages. The author tries to convince the reader that the masseuse is reluctantly giving way to her unexpected feelings and temptation but fails. It is mildly arousing, but nothing more than that.
I don’t recommend it. Your own imagination could come up with a better fantasy. I only read it because it was free and short.
Book Review: Watching the Bodies by Graham Smith
Watching The Bodies by Graham Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Jake Boulder is a night club bouncer in Casperton, a small town in Utah. He occasionally helps his private eye friend, Alfonse, with some of his cases. Jake, a Scot, a fighting MacDonald, is the man of action and Alfonse is the brilliant techie.
The first victim in the book is Kira Niemeyer, who is a former lover of Jake. The Watcher, the killer, is concealed in the undergrowth, observing the discovery of her body. At first, you think that it is because he gets a kick out of seeing the reaction, but it turns out to be so much more than that.
There is a connection between the discoverer of the victim and the choice of his next target. It also comes to light that Kira is not his first victim. Far from it.
We soon get clues to the identity of the serial killer and the author does a fantastic job of describing both the killings and the convergence of the paths of the murderer and Jake.
The Casperton detectives are as incompetent as the Keystone Cops, which is very frustrating for the new Chief of police. He is grateful that he has Alfonse and Jake to assist his enquiries.
The story rolls along at a terrific pace, with graphic descriptions and wonderful tension-building. The characters are very well developed.
This is a great read with a gripping climax. Some parts of it are less than believable, but that adds to the fun. I have no hesitation in awarding five stars to this book and I highly recommend it to you.
Love the Madness
This is wild!
I love it!
I loved
the madness
that was you
Caught up
Spiraling
With you
Drunk with it
This madness
Delicious madness
I knew better
didn't care
Recklessness
the order of the day
I loved
the madness
that was you
Copyright (C) 2019 Penny Wilson
Image by David Mark from Pixabay
June 15, 2019
Book Review – Shadows Of The Past: Foreshadowing by Maggie Cobbett
Shadows Of The Past: Foreshadowing by Maggie Cobbett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is the wash, the background, going on to the paper on which Shadows Of The Past will take shape. Foreshadowing is the prequel to that book. It sets up the three main characters, Kate, Ronnie and Daisy, as they finish school and plan their fateful trip to France where they are destined to disappear. There is already a lot of interaction between the girls, and a fair bit of friction.
Foreshadowing is not much more than a good introduction and a teaser, tempting the reader into finding out what happens to them when they get to the village of Saint-André-la Forêt, near Paris. They disappeared, without trace, in 1965. Many years later a skeleton is discovered by a traveller in a nearby forest. The investigation opens up a Pandora’s box of secrets that some villagers would prefer not to expose.
Foreshadowing gives a taste of Maggie Cobbett’s writing style, which I like. The dialogue makes the story come to life. There is also a smattering of humour. I began to know the girls and their teachers.
This is based upon a true story. I am looking forward to delving into the dark secrets that promise to be revealed in the main book and where those will lead.
June 10, 2019
Elizabeth Ducie’s interview with Maria Hennings Hunt
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Maria Hennings Hunt
This is a very interesting interview with Maria, who is the Vice Chair of the organising Committee of the Swanwick Writers’ Summer School.
Visit Elizabeth’s blog for the full interview.
Introduction
Regular readers of my blog will already know how important the annual Writers’ Summer School in Swanwick is to me. And over the past few months, I have been featuring interviews with some of the Committee responsible for organising the 2019 programme. This month’s guest is the current Vice Chairman. She is also both a successful published writer and a fully qualified dance teacher. She worked in publishing for more than 20 years, spending 13 years with Travel Trade Gazette – the leading travel trade weekly newspaper in the UK. She also did a three month stint on the travel team at the Daily Express and wrote short stories for the women’s fiction market in her spare time. She went freelance in 1999, specialising in writing brochures and copy for the travel market whilst at the same time qualifying as a dance teacher. She now runs her own SE London based Dance school called Dance Generation and still writes shorts stories in her spare time. I am delighted to be chatting with Maria Hennings Hunt.
June 8, 2019
#weekendcoffeeshare: Flutter Back
If we were having coffee, I wouldn’t be able to resist telling you how excited I am to have my poem, “Flutter Back” analysed in Alison Chisholm‘s Poetry Workshop in July’s edition of Writing Magazine.
Until I attended Swanwick: The Writers’ Summer School for the first time in 2016, I had never considered my poetry to be worth sharing. I attended Joy France‘s specialist course on poetry. I’d always considered myself to be a rubbish poet because that is what my English teacher told me when I was eight years old. I had never shared any of my poetry until Joy persuaded me to read one of my poems during her afternoon session.
At the Summer School in 2018, I had a 1:1 with Alison Chisholm and I performed a couple of my poems at the open mic night.
I am absolutely thrilled that “Flutter Back” is featured and analysed in Alison’s Poetry Workshop in the July edition of Writing Magazine.
You can hardly imagine how much confidence this exposure gives to me. And there is the added bonus of some excellent advice from one of Britain’s top poets.
As you’ll read, if you get your hands on a copy of the magazine, the idea for this poem was seeded by a flash fiction exercise that we worked on at Andover Writers’ Circle.
Here is my poem.
Flutter Back
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Photo credit: Geoff Parkes
Fluttering from flower to flower,
loving my life of fragrant scents.
I’m a gorgeous, multi-coloured courier of pollen,
dancing gaily past those dowdy moths
as I paint precious powder on every stamen.
Every day I feel younger and sprightlier,
relishing each taste of sweet nectar
as I approach my youth,
showing off my beauty as I wave my wings,
twenty-eight sunsets before I stretch and yawn.
I fold up my wings and slide
into my sleeping bag, recently found
suspended by silk thread
from a gorgeous green leaf.
I pupate. I sleep. Deep sleep.
I unpupate and become fat and sluggish,
emerging slowly, crawling lazily onto the leaf.
My beautiful wings have disappeared, to be replaced
by a hundred legs. My belly is full.
I am drowsy, lethargic, weary; dreary.
Tired and hungry, I set off on my journey.
My many friends look exactly like me:
supple, exuding charm and constantly chomping
on our compelling mission to reconstruct leaves
on our little tree: our dinner.
Our labours rewarded: rejuvenated and slimmer,
we’re shrinking and massing as the world becomes dimmer,
huddling together, curling up, becoming sticky balls,
cuddling our neighbours under green leaf.
At last, and in the beginning, we are eggs.
If you liked this poem, you may be also like to read some more of my poetry on my Titbits page.
Weekend Coffee Share is hosted by Eclectic Alli.
Check out her blog to read her own Weekend Coffee Share post.
You can post your own link and join with others in this community for coffee by clicking on the following link.
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Book Review: Two Steps Forward by Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist
Two Steps Forward by Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the story of two people following the ancient pilgrimage route from south west France, over the Pyrenees and across northern Spain. The Camino Trail, also known as the Chemin de Santiago is an arduous walk which is well supported by the population along the way. To say that some hostels are better than others is an understatement.
The story is alternately told from the points of view of the two main characters: divorcee Martin, an English inventor and engineer who is testing his buggy, and Californian widow, Zoe, an artist.
It starts slowly, but soon gathers momentum until, towards the end, it sweeps the reader along at great pace. The ending is great.
There were times when I was irritated by the switching of narration from one character to the other, but it mostly worked and I enjoyed the style.
What I loved about this story was the building of the characters, from two distinct points of view, and the interactions between them. At times, they were hilarious, at other times they were surprising. There are a few shocks along the rocky way.
The will-it-ever-happen romance between the two main protagonists was extremely frustrating. I was almost screaming at the page. “Get on with it!” Do they ever get it together? Well, you’ll just have to read the book, because I am not about to tell you.
I thoroughly recommend this book. It is very interesting and I learned a lot about the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage trail. I was almost tempted to embark upon the walk for myself.
June 3, 2019
Book Review: The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman
The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the first Sally Lockhart story that I have read, and it probably won’t be the last.
In the beginning, it was difficult for me to believe in the strength and forthrightness of this sixteen year old. She shows maturity well beyond her years. However, the more that I followed Sally around the streets of London, the more convincing she was, and the more that I lived her dangerous adventures alongside her.
There are some very kind and generous characters in this book, and they form strong alliances with Sally to eventually get to the truth behind the mysteries surrounding the death of her sea-faring father. There are also some very dark and frightening characters, not least the daunting and evil Mrs Holland.
It is interesting to read about the practicalities of early commercial photography, and about the London of over a century ago, although some things haven’t changed!
Throughout the book, Pullman maintains an air of tension and keeps events moving along at a fast pace. There are a lot of violent deaths splattered throughout the book, but they just add to the fear factor.
Sally is such a resourceful and intelligent young lady. She sometimes survives by the skin of her teeth, but that is due to a combination of her own wits and the assistance of her good friends.
A great adventure and a terrific ending!
