Tag Archives: Lewis

The Ashes of my List

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Got up later than I intended, had breakfast, drank tea, watched Lewis on TV. I didn’t see much of it originally and am enjoying watching the full run. I have watched 13 stories so far and have 20 more to go, though some are in two parts and I did watch a few of tha later episodes so, if I can remember them, I will skip them. The ability to catch up on Player like this is one of the few things i like about modern life. Along with anaesthetics and antibiotics I would name it as one of my top three favourite modern things.

I prefer Lewis to Morse.  The title character is more human. So far I have only watched a few of Endeavour, the prequel, but will probably give them a go. Unfortunately it suffers from the presence of an overarching corruption/conspiracy plot line, and I’ve rarely found one that worked. Generally they annoy me, and strike me as a sign that the writers are running out of ideas. It’s just jumping the shark in another guise.

Unfortunately I didn’t have “watch Lewis” on my list, but I did, fortunately have “blog” so by answering my comments and writing this I have, at last, made a start. I’m going to make soup now and work out the recipe for tea. It will involve meatballs because I (lazily) bought some ready made meatballs on Saturday. This means that I don’t have to work out a tasty vegetarian meal, and that I don’t have to make meatballs, which are simple enough but just an extra task which I can do without. The ever-present danger is that I get to teatime, decide that I can’t be bothered, and get a takeaway. My healthy eating strategy is based on buying some convenient ready made things and avoiding takeaways.

That’s why I tend to buy meatballs, fish fingers, pizza bases and ready chopped onions. The first three are shortcuts and the fourth is out of consideration to my arthritic finger tips.

Despite this, it’s likely that I won’t be getting through much of my list today. Again.

Iranian Vegetable Stew

Strange Meetings

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In 1932 a Mrs Reginald Hargreaves, then aged 80, met a man called Peter Llewellyn Davies in a bookshop. I was intrigued by it when I found out, and John Logan actually wrote a play about it.

Mrs Hargreaves was, you see, better known to history as Alice Liddell and young Llewellyn Davies was the inspiration behind Peter Pan.

I’ve always been interested in such things, though I suppose some of them aren’t as surprising as I think. When Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen they were both in the Army, and both tortured poetic souls so I don’t suppose it’s too surprising they met at Craiglockhart. There’s a play about that too, and a book.

Sassoon also knew Robert Graves, though that’s well known. It’s also well known that they fell out. What I didn’t know was that they met again in the 1950s when taking their sons to Oundle School. I’ve often driven through Oundle, but had never known that.

Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart both flew combat missions from England during the war, once meeting up for a photo-opportunity. Gable flew from Polebrook and Molesworth, neither of which are too far from Oundle. I’m struggling to find a reference for the meeting, but you can find a photo here, where Pacific Paratrooper comes up trumps. This shows you don’t need the internet when you have bloggers.

I suppose the chances of two Hollywood stars being photographed together when serving overseas is quite high.

Same goes for the chances of two academics with literary leanings joining the same literary society, as J. J. R. Tolkien  and C. S. Lewis did with The Inklings. It’s a small pool, so the chances were probably good.

There’s a good article on probability and coincidence here. I’ve actually been in a room with around 75 people and done the birthday one – we had three matches.

 

 

 

 

Tolkien’s Banjo

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I’ve just been watching an episode of Lewis on TV. In it, an art student was conducting tours of unknown Oxford, including telling people about a crocodile in the river and that Tolkien was well known for playing the banjo in the pub. However, a brief survey of the internet throws up several crocodile references, including a reference to fossil crocodiles. There is even a serious reference to Tolkien and banjos.

They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and in this case, though it’s difficult to measure strangeness, it would seem that this might be the case.

It is inevitable that I end up pressing more links once I get going, and as a fan of the Narnia books it seemed in order to search for “C. S. Lewis” and “harmonica”. How many do you think there are? I didn’t think there would be any but it seems there are a lot of religious people on forums who discuss harmonica playing and use quotes from Lewis in their signatures. 187,000 to be precise.

I would have loved to have turned up a reference to the Inklings running musical evenings but it seems I am to be thwarted. Instead I have managed to find that Lewis didn’t think that Pauline Baynes could draw lions, that Baynes learned her map drawing skills with the Admiralty in WW2, and that Kipling wrote a poem about banjos (it’s a long poem, and not one of his best).

As a result of this I searched for some help on concentration skills. I liked this list, and already have the “eat breakfast” and “take breaks” bits covered. That just leaves 14 more to master…