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Continue reading →: Storms, and Lively WaterfallsI left Meteora yesterday morning before the busy campsite atmosphere and tourist aspects of the place began to get too much for me. It had been great, but I suspected another day would not have been. The family in the green bus at Papingo showed how home-schooling could work, and…
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Continue reading →: La Montagne (The Mountain)
France 2022 The star of this pleasantly strange film without doubt is the mountain itself, set as it is, almost entirely on the snowy peaks and rockfaces of the Mont Blanc massif above Chamonix. As to the question of what it’s about, it’s about a middle aged man caught in…
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Continue reading →: The Monasteries of the AirThis journey of mine, my route here in Greece, is inspired by Patrick Leigh Fermor’s books, Roumeli, and Mani. I’m in Roumeli territory right now, and have been for a couple of weeks, the Pindos mountains. Meteora is the subject of the second chapter ‘The Monasteries of the Air’. Fermor’s…
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Continue reading →: The Bride Wore Black by Cornell Woolrich
Eddie Muller’s introduction to the Mystery Classics issue of this is an appropriate summary.. Woolrich was the most noir writer in the mystery genre, as The Bride Wore Black amply proves. It contains all the requisite elements: the obsessive protagonist on a murderous quest, the latticework of dreadful coincidence, the…
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Continue reading →: A weekend in the Vikos GorgeThe rain did come on Saturday but not as continuous as had been predicted. Late on Friday night the sky at night was quite spectacular with the amount of lightning around. In the end Saturday was a series of closely knitted together showers, of varying strengths. Roja and I got…
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Continue reading →: Encounters on the RoadWe were just ready to depart from Papingo this morning when a green bus with a UK plate pulled up next to me. This was Nige, a climber from the Isle of Harris, and his wife from Sweden, and their two children, about 8 and 10 years old. Nige had…
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Continue reading →: Aunt Jeanne by Georges Simenon
translated from the French by Geoffrey Sainsbury Jeanne is a plus-sized fifty-seven year old widower, recently returned from almost forty years working overseas, in Turkey, in Egypt, but mainly in Argentina. For most of the novel we don’t know exactly why she returned, just that there was some sort of…
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Continue reading →: A Journey to a Sacred GroveOne of the restaurants in the village was open last night. I arrived and ordered a beer. They were quite happy for Roja to go inside, preferable to the tables outside, which were a bit cold at 10C. I was invited to join a group of three at the neighbouring…
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Continue reading →: Papingo, Vikos Aoos National ParkThere were storms overnight, with rain drumming so hard on the roof that I struggled to hear the film I was watching and had to turn on the subtitles. After a few nights of watching stuff from the horror genre I can recommend only one film at the moment, an…
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Continue reading →: A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand
The jacket notes proclaim this to be the ‘authorised’ sequel to [book:The Haunting of Hill House|89717]. Authorised by whom I wonder, not Jackson herself who died in 1965. Rather, I think the queen of literary horror fiction would revolve in her grave if she read this, or even knew about…
To live more widely
supera superiora sequi
SafeReturnDoubtful is my alias. Rua is my fox red labrador pup, born 14 Feb 2026 and learning fast..
Where is Rua?
I was so much older then…
Quote of the Week
Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, ‘What road do I take?’ The cat asked, ‘Where do you want to go?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it really doesn’t matter, does it?’
Lewis Carroll
Safe Return Doubtful 