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I hope to live the year 2019 with the hope and optimism of my dog, who every time we return from a walk attempts to enter the house via the cat flap. Even though so far experience suggests that she can’t fit anything more than her snout through the tiny entrance, she still never gives us. Maybe today will be the day she does it.
I suppose it’s the same kind of optimism might get us through Brexit. Or if Wolfie is anything to go by it will get about one sixth of us through Brexit.
I managed to get the first draft of my latest script finished in the first hour of the day, as I sat in the cafe at the gym, just before an exploratory half hour work out. If that’s not some kind of New Year motivation I don’t know what is. I listened to the latest
Drunk Women Solving Crime podcast whilst one of the drunk women ran on a treadmill only yards away from me. I am not convinced that she was even drunk. It was a really funny and fascinating episode with the brilliant Lucy Porter and a fascinating, if possibly enhanced by myth story of Lavinia Fisher.
After that I had no real work to do and I don’t think there’s any point in trying to book RHLSTP guests until next week (there’s a few irons in the fire), so the day was my own. I finished reading “The Real Great Escape”by Guy Walters and I am encouraged that I have managed to read a whole book already this year, when I maybe only go through the entirety of two books last year.
It’s a much more tragic story than the film makes out, but the book is critical of Roger Bushell and questions whether a mass break out had much value to it, even if it hadn’t resulted in the murders of 50 men. There’s something to be said for this argument, though it would have been hard for the escapers to predict that the Nazis would defy the Geneva Convention (though apparently the Nazis weren’t that nice all round) and it could be argued that even if the escapers didn’t distract the Germans from their war effort, the repercussions of the murders maybe did more to fuck things up for them.
It’s still a remarkable story of bravery and ingenuity, even if friendly or blackmailed Germans played more part in it than is generally acknowledged. The murders were humiliating as well as atrocious (generally the men were executed as they urinated by the road side) and it’s terrifying that human beings can lose their moral compasses so readily and easily and there’s of course absolutely no reason why this couldn’t all happen again.
It was a good, if upsetting read. It’s quite an old book but it’s available on
kindle.
I used the rest of my day to update the history section of this website to include the
year 2018 and sent out
a newsletter mainly to remind you all that series 2 of Relativity kicks off this week and is on every Friday in January at 11.30am and will subsequently be available on
the Radio Player.
There seems to have been little or possibly no pre publicity for the series, so spread the word if you can. I was pretty pleased with the scripts in the end. And the cast, with one exception are excellent (though I think the duff one only got the part because he was wanking off the writer).
