There is a programme called Apparitions on the BBC next week - it is a gory drama about Exorcism and I feel slightly duty-bound to watch it because some of it was filmed in the house of good friends of ours. However, I'm not sure it is really my thing - I am not expecting the humour of Sea of Souls. Not sure whether duty will win.
A much better prospect is Regeneration based on the book by Pat Barker. It is far more gruesome than Apparitions and the horror is multiplied by it being true (or at least a fictionalised account of truth - See In Cold Blood as well I suppose). I'm not sure how Pat Barker managed to make something so horrifying so unputdownable and in some ways more intense than The Ghost Road in the same series which is actually about warfare and includes the battle in which both Billy Prior, the fictional main character and Wilfred Owen died only days from the end of the war. As I said in another context yesterday, the flickering of battle seems to be in my head at the moment. The silent flashing of distant fireworks on the walls of the house last night added to this. One display sent what must have been over three hundred flares vertically into the sky at 1 second intervals leaving heavy lines of smoke drifting in battlefield formation. More simulation of war than celebration I thought.
My wife reserved The Last Fighting Tommy, the biography of Harry Patch at the library, which I picked up yesterday. I tried to find something worthy to read but ended up with I Used To Know That and Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural instead. Still I suppose they are educational in a way and I do deserve some lightness after Mind of its Own.
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