Pea Arts About

The following response to the book contains significant plot details. There’s nothing like doing an English literature degree for dampening your love of reading novels. And nothing like doing a PhD and the subsequent years of futile academic jobhunting to stamp it out altogether. (That’s how it was in my circumstances, anyway, and I commend anyone who refuses to let that happen.) Having said goodbye to that career path and clawed back my health, I’ve been slowly and with difficulty overcoming the guilt of not working every minute of every day and am reading the books that have for years been silently screaming for me to wipe off the dust and give them a good going through. One of those books is Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (Virago, 2009), which I’m excited to have learned is being adapted as a feature film directed by Lenny Abrahamson – whose work I greatly admire – due out later in 2018. What a gripping, carefully-written tale it is. And what an underlying scathing exami

Devoid of television but feeling the need to wind down of an evening with short doses of effortless comedy, we’ve been going through the vaults of All4 , Channel 4’s catch-up service. Having loved Derry Girls (2017-), himself was curious about writer Lisa McKee’s earlier comedy which ran for only one series, London Irish (2013).  Guessing accurately that it would focus on a bunch of stereotypically drunken hallions in Big Smokie, and therefore wouldn’t have the charm of Derry Girls , I am neither surprised nor sorry about its demise. While there were some well-delivered corkers of lines and an episode-stealing performance from Siobhan McSweeney who plays Sister Michael so deliciously in Derry Girls , the highly-strung yet underdeveloped characters, the 0-60 ridiculousness of the scenarios, and the clunky writing shoehorning in Norn Irish sayin’s (notably, the culturally Catholic bunch only refer to Ireland, never the North, even though they all apparently hail from Belfast) l