Good evening fellow Bookworms!
Back again with another blog, and it’s 30th April today so it’s time for a monthly review. Books I’ve read, books I am in the process of reading, and the other usual randomness and nonsense that you’ve come to expect from this blog, lol!
I would just like to give a big thumbs up to Francisco who works in the IT section of John Lewis at the Trafford Centre, as he has been a massive help to Mum today and sorted out her emails on her iPad!
Onto books now, and I have finished three books this month, so that has been three per month so far this year, 12 in total. Not as many as I would have liked to have read and behind compared to the last three years, although I’m fairly sure I am up compared to this time in 2020.
I didn’t buy any this month, but I expect May will see some purchases of reading matter, particularly as I got a National Book Tokens gift card from my friend Sarah for my birthday last week!
I’m including this post box topper photo again because the first book I finished in April was Heroes of the RNLI, by Martyn R. Beardsley, which I was reading to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Lifeboats this year – the actual anniversary was back in March. As I have said on a number of occasions on here, my paternal grandparents were big supporters of the RNLI and Nana often bought and sent out notecards and Christmas cards from them. They lived in Malahide, so they were on the coast, over in Ireland.
Next up on the finished books front was Rambling Man, by Sir Billy Connolly, which is my choice for favourite of the month, but I might be a bit biased as I’ve been a fan of the Big Yin for absolutely donkey’s years! I was only little when I first heard his parody version of “D.I.V.O.R.C.E “ – the song was a UK number 1 in 1975 so it did better than the original version, the country song by Tammy Wynette. Sorry, Tammy!
I would have to say he’s my all-time favourite comedian, my second favourite funny man will be coming up later in this blog as his current book is one of my recent additions to the Ongoing Concerns.
Not quite finished the finished books yet, though, if you know what I mean, lol! The third and final finish for April was The Almost Nearly Perfect People, by Michael Booth, which looked at the Scandinavian countries and also included mentions for the Pet Shop Boys and Zlatan Ibrahimovic!
Talking of the Pet Shop Boys, this month has been a good month for a Pethead like me! They were on Rylan’s show on Radio 2 on 6th April, and then there was a PSB Night on BBC Four on 19th April. The following night, they were also featured on the 60 songs at 60 celebration of BBC2’s six decades on air! Then, on Friday just gone, the new album, Nonetheless, was released, so I downloaded it onto this very iPad on which I am blogging right now!
X marked the spot in April… eventually. We have local elections this coming Thursday, 2nd May, but for those of us who have a postal ballot, we have already made our choices and posted them back to be counted later this week. Thing was, I had geared myself up to vote only to find that the first envelopes just contained leaflets about the elections, but the actual ballot papers did come a few days later, so I was able to put my X next to the name of the person I least hated the sound of, ha ha, and then followed the instructions and sent my vote back to be counted on Thursday night or into the wee small hours of Friday morning at the civic centre.
In my previous blog, on my birthday last week, I included my theme from my book journal for May, the I Need Space theme, so this one is my theme for my general journal – Up Up and Away featuring balloons and hot air balloons plus a playlist on an “up and down” theme.
Obviously, with having finished some books, there were vacancies on the Ongoing Concerns list, and those have now been filled for now. There is the ebook, About Britain, by Tim Cole, on my Kindle, which is about the series of 13 “About Britain” guides that were created for the 1951 Festival of Britain, and Mr Cole found these books in charity shops and second-hand book shops, managing to collect the series, and decided to spend 2021 revisiting the suggested itineraries and seeing what had changed and what had not in 70 years.
This particular Ongoing Concern is now 25% read and even just a quarter of the way through the book, it gives an interesting history of the rules of the road in this country and when different laws came in which affected motorists. The Motor Car Act was passed by Parliament in 1903 and licences were also introduced that year, although it wasn’t until the 1930s that any prospective car driver or motorbike rider had to pass a test in order to earn a licence!
Test centres didn’t exist though, so drivers or riders just agreed to meet up with their examiner in a central location, such as a railway station, for their half-hour test.
Excuse the photo but I wanted something with cars on it while I waffle on about Tim Cole’s book. He said that the guides to the Festival of Britain were sponsored by a brewery, who were hoping motorists would stop at one of the many inns on the route, which brought him onto the issue of alcohol laws, which were nowhere near as strict in 1951 as they are now. There were some rules though…
It had been an offence since the 1930s to be “unfit through drink” when driving, and the Motorway Code warned of the effects of alcohol and drugs on a person’s judgement, with even small amounts of either having an adverse effect. At the time of the 1951 event, however, the UK was still some years away from stricter alcohol laws. A maximum alcohol limit for motorists was passed into law in 1967 along with the introduction of breathalysers to test how much someone had had to drink.
The other safety issue mentioned so far in Cole’s book, which was in place by the late 1940s, so in time for the Festival, was the invention of reflective road studs, better known as cats’ eyes. They were invented by Percy Shaw in 1934 and he set up a factory to manufacture them in 1935. They were mandatory road markings by the late 1940s, although they don’t last all that long and need replacing every 2 to 3 years.
So, there you are! A bit of a history of our driving rules, or some of them anyway! Apart from seatbelts. He’s not mentioned those so far in his book, but I did a bit of looking up as I know those didn’t become compulsory until my lifetime. Wearing a seatbelt became compulsory in the UK on 31st January 1983. I was 9 going on 10 by the time we all had to buckle up in cars.
Anyway, I’ve got another two newly-started books to the 10% stage the other day, so I will introduce my most recent Ongoing Concerns. They are T.V. by Peter Kay, and Unofficial Britain, by Gareth E. Rees.
As you can imagine with Peter Kay’s book, this is all about the small screen… from his viewing habits and favourite programmes as a kid, to trying to get on telly in his working life before making it as a comedian and starring in various TV shows, including “Phoenix Nights” and “Car Share”.
Unofficial Britain is a book I bought back in January 2022 after it caught my eye in Waterstone’s while I was in town one afternoon. I’d had a quick shufty and found the page where he said it was 1979 and he was 6 years old, so that made him the same age as me. I am 10% of the way in and already read about electricity pylons. To my imagination, as a kid, passing loads of them while in the car, on motorways, wires stretched between pylons, they reminded me a bit of music manuscript paper, and if birds were perched on them, you could imagine them being the dots of music notes. Electricity hums, so music is rather apt.
Birds on power lines – and there are five lines in that particular image, so it definitely bears some resemblance to sheet music! I will be reading more of Unofficial Britain later, after this blog, and I’m on for the part about ring roads and roundabouts, the latter of which remind me of Macclesfield, lol!
There are loads of roundabouts in Macclesfield, it certainly seemed that way in the early months of 2019, anyway, after Dad died and we made several visits to the Cheshire town where he had been living since the mid noughties. He worked there prior to his retirement in 2010.
Anyway, we’re about to head into May. No choir this week as not enough people are able to make it, so I can do my May theme in my choir journal. On Friday, I’m off out for a meal with my fellow minute-takers from work, we’re off to Deurali, a Nepalese restaurant not far from our HQ, and it’s a long weekend as there is a bank holiday on Monday! Yay!
However, that is about all from this blog for now, so until next time, take care and Happy Reading!
Joanne x x x
Books mentioned in this blog entry…
- Heroes of the RNLI – Martyn R. Beardsley
- Rambling Man – Sir Billy Connolly
- The Almost Nearly Perfect People – Michael Booth
- About Britain – Tim Cole
- T.V. – Peter Kay
- Unofficial Britain – Gareth E. Rees
Joanne's Bookshelf 