Sonata for Unaccommpanied Sheep

Radio 3 just played the Dolly Suite which, as all you people of a certain age will know, was the signature tune for Listen With Mother. The result is a very calm Office Worker who is nevertheless feeling slightly despondent over the fact that those days will never come again. I cannot actually remember what was on Listen With Mother so follow the link to find out all about it. Misty-Eyed indeed! Aha! My Naughty Little Sister! I loved those books and so does my daughter. I think my copies had the original illustrations in rather than the lovely Shirley Hughes ones. As I was an elder brother, I identified with the narrator - the older sister of the pesky little scamp of the title. My daughter has all the stories now which is a lot more than I had and she will read them over and over again.

Anyway, back to the Dolly Suite. The music never fails to conjure up long, empty and always sunny afternoons. I know that it must have rained sometimes but those days never stick in your head do they? If you remember it and hear it again then I would say that you couldn?t fail to be moved.

We watched Enigma last night. I was worried because I was aware that this was a fictional story set around real events and thought that maybe we Brits could do just as good a hatchet job on history as the Yanks did with U-571. All fears ungrounded. Well nearly all fears. Bletchley Park did not look like Bletchley Park which should have been a bit like a school rather than the barbed-wire-fenced horror in the film. It seemed more like some outlying ministry from nineteen-eighty-four rather than a secret station. Bletchley was only bombed once and that was a stray bomb meant for the railway station so the Germans never suspected what was going on there at all. So after having said how good the film was and then having complained about the central location being all wrong I will let you either ignore everything or go and watch it yourself. I didn't manage to see Mick Jagger in it though.