Slowly getting back into the swing of things both on and off blog now, though a visit to Colchester town centre yesterday to go to bank and carry out a few errands, left me feeling exhausted but no need to repeat that rather depressing experience for a while yet. Have been generally catching up on reading and posting and have two or three reviews which I will settle down and write tomorrow ready for the coming week.
In the meantime this will just be one of those Random Rambles when I note down things of interest – well to me, anyway, and hope they will be for you as well.
Whenever I drive to Cambridge I park my car in one of their excellent Park and Ride Schemes and the one I use is called Trumpington. UK readers of a certain age will understand why each time I park I 
mutter under my breath Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grub. For others, I need to explain. These were the names of the fire brigade at Trumpton (geddit?), which was a simply delightful children's programme of the sixties and seventies. My two used to love sitting down and watching these little wooden figures dealing with the fire call out and the rest of general village life. The other part of this trilogy was Camberwick Green and Chigley and, thanks to some pushing by the Trumpton creator, who is now 90, the BBC has digitally remastered all 39 episodes of this trilogy and they are to be released on DVD. In its usual careless way of mislaying programmes that the BBC don't care about but we do, the master copies could not be found, but Mr Murray persuaded them to have another look and lo and behold they were found in a vault. Odd that….
I am about to nip over to Amazon and check these out as I simply cannot wait to show these to Florence and see what she makes of them.
Another little tit bit of news which has delighted me is that a film is being made of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie and shooting starts in March. This is a simply gorgeous book which I reviewed here when it was first published. Sadly, the author died before its publication and never saw it in printed form though she knew that it was being published. It is a one off and a simply marvellous one off at that. If you have not read it may I urge you to do so. Kate Winslet will play writer Juliet Ashton who penned columns for a magazine during Word War II. After the war she is contacted by Channel Islander Dawsey Adams and, as their correspondence continues, the story unfolds of how a book society was established on Nazi-occupied Guernsey to fool curlew patrols. It is being directed by Ken Branagh and this is a film that I am really looking forward to seeing and only hope that it does the author justice.
It is now Saturday evening and it is dark outside and I love the feeling of the curtains drawn against the cold and all cosy indoors. I am just embarking on my re-read of Great Expectations and, while I loved the recent TV version, am looking forward to acquainting myself one more with, not only the characters we saw on the BBC, but seeing more of Biddy and the Aged P.
So supper calleth and later on two more episodes of Borgen, the political drama on BBC4 which is a channel that proves you don't need to dumb down and can show interesting, well made and adult programmes that don't cater to the masses. BBC has, naturally, cut its budget…..
What larks!
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