The Aardvark Blog

More Random Thoughts; Donna Leon; Dune; Reacher on Amazon TV
5/02/2022

A couple of weeks back from our week off and it is as if we never went away. Still it is amazing to me how many people came during that week ( truly January is no longer the completely dead month that it once was). In the last couple of weeks I have seen a number of long-term customers who have been absent for the last couple of years (  for obvious reasons ) and it does make me feel that notwithstanding the horrendous daily figures for infections, things do glacially seem to be returning to something approaching normality - normaliy itself is probably not going to be possible.

This morning we had a typical Aardvark discussion - what is the real meaning of distopian and how you pronounce the world 'potable' ( needless to say I was wrong) - and have had quite a few customers who have driven to us from a distance. It is constantly humbling how much trouble people take to come to Aardvark and needless to say I am extremely grateful that they do.

Speaking of returning towards normality tomorrow Ethel and I are going to the Spring Fair in the Birmingham NEC and I am feeling a little trepidatious about being around so many people in an indoor environment. I have a stock of the full medical masks so hopefully it will be reasonably safe, but the prospect of having to discuss my vaccination history before being allowed in seems somewhat peculiar.

On another completely unrelated topic I have just finished the 29th Donna Leon Brunetti Novel - 'Transient Desires' - and it is superb and probably one of the top five best in the sequence. It is incredible to me that if I were to come up with a list of my favourites in the Brunetti series, at least three of them would have been published in the last half a dozen years. I can think of no writer in genre fiction who has remained so relevant and readable so far into a novel sequence. For anyone who is yet to read Donna Leon I can only say that if you like good writing and are interested in Italy in the last thirty years, you have a treat in store.

Speaking of treats I have abandoned hope of being to persuade Ethel to come to the cinema with me to watch Dune, and have capitulated and bought Dune on DVD. We have recently acquired a new television from Ross at Invision in Leominster and although it will not make up for the loss of a big screen, I am hoping that something of the experience will be preserved. As I have written before I am one of the handful of people who remains a fan of the earlier David Lynch Dune film ( a group which does not include David Lynch himself), and I have resisted going back to the books only because I loved them when I first read them all those decades ago - I am not going to be reading the later volumes that Herbert co-authored or which have been written by his son as I hear mixed reports. I will let you know what I make of this film, but the reviews ( including from the sainted Kermode) have been very positive and I believe they have now greenlit production of the second film.

Finally yesterday Amazon released the episodes of the first series of Reacher ( an adaptation of the first novel in the sequence 'Killing Floor'). In some ways this book has never been bettered by Child and from watching the first two episodes I believe that the unmentionable company have made a pretty good fist of adapting it ( they seem to have dispensed with some of the more gothic plot elements - the biker gang etc - and have got their casting mostly spot on). If they do as well with Reacher as they have done with Bosch ( now in its last series) I will be well pleased. At least they have cast some-one of the appropriate height.