Wednesday, May 16, 2007


Diary of a Somebody

It was nice to see (a clean-shaven) Hugh “Pooter” Bonneville reading the bedtime story on CBeebies yesterday. The BBC must have something their actor’s contract which says that the Children’s TV producers can bags any actor they like as they come and go about the BBC studios, dress them up in causal clothes and sit them down to read the stories. It might also be a sly way of putting the programmes that the actors are in later in the minds of any adult minders who might happen to watch as well. Mr Bonneville was indeed on BBC 4 later in the last episode of Diary of a Nobody which had a satisfying and poignant ending – much more poignant than I remember from reading the book. The main problem with watching it is that Mr Pooter looks uncannily like my dad though that might just be the beard.

I have to say that I was worried that I wouldn’t get into the central story of Cloud Atlas after reading that some people skimmed it because of the strong dialect form but it’s actually quite intriguing – I was fearing it would be like A Clockwork Orange but it’s quite easy to follow most of it. It also has a strong ability to lead you forward to wanting the next bit. As this story is the central one in has no split – at least one story would have to be left unsplit in order for the book to finish – but I wonder if there is a point somewhere in the middle where the split would go. I already know the link between this and the previous story so I have an idea where the split could be.

There were fewer correspondences between Cloud Atlas and yesterday’s tranche of I am a Strange Loop. I think I dreamed something connected with it the other day though – it was very vivid at the time though of course without writing the details down at the time it is now just a fuzzy memory. There was a book of poetry in it somewhere – an icon of something – I could see the cover in great details though I didn’t get to see any of the actual words. This was probably triggered by the poetry I was reading at the Viking demonstration at the weekend. I did also think of something which I thought really quite staggeringly interesting while I was getting the boy to sleep yesterday – something regarding structure of systems – but the detail of that has vanished as well.

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