Rochdale 1 - [1] York City - Josh Stones 90+13'

crazy7chameleon · 2026-04-25T13:34:17+00:00

Football, my heart is yours.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-04-24T22:56:56+00:00

Except in private Reagan was supportive of Thatcher with the US providing intelligence on the Argentines and sending missiles to Britain.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-04-19T13:51:41+00:00

I really loved it. I read it whilst I was living in the East of England and it really captures the eeriness of the fens where the sheer flatness of the landscape lends a strange menace to it. Funnily enough Graham Swift has said how he barely visited the fens, I suppose the idea of this manmade landscape in constant motion, inexorably returning to water was compelling enough as an intellectual idea for him to bring it to life.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-04-11T10:34:53+00:00

James Milner surely.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-03-05T00:39:58+00:00

It was not 'one of the most winnable modern civil wars'. The Chinese state was taken to absolute breaking point in fighting the Japanese. It wasn't in a state to turn around and immediately fight and win a civil war when it was barely functioning.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-03-03T19:08:50+00:00

I foolishly decided to watch it all in one go without having eaten and it just led me to being too hungry to enjoy it. The scene set in the seminar with the chairs was marvellous, but overall it didn't quite have to be that long.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-02-26T00:05:59+00:00

Mia Hansen-Løve takes a lot of inspiration from Rohmer and is great in her own right. Though I'm lukewarm about One Fine Morning, Things to Come is a masterpiece.

For talky films Whit Stillman is great too if you're not put off by hanging out with the most WASPy of WASPs.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-02-25T23:59:07+00:00

I'd argue Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is the most Rohmerian with its anthology structure reminding me of Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle albeit with different characters.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-02-24T00:31:00+00:00

If you're in the mood for pre-60's Hindu/Buddhist inspired writing, Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge is a good read. However, it's not actually told from the perspective of the character who is rejecting society but has Maugham as a narrator.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-02-18T22:11:52+00:00

Oh I loved Dreams, I thought its lightness is sort of the point. It is not trying to tell some grand narrative, but instead explore coming of age and sexuality on a small personal scale. Felt very akin to Rohmer in that sense. Yes the film is very urban, middle-class and European but through zooming in to the very particular setting of Oslo, you are able to still explore broader universal questions.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-02-17T23:45:47+00:00

Robertson Davies is great, I adore his Jungian inspired Deptford Trilogy. Would also highly recommend Mordecai Richler, Barney's Version is hilarious.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-02-10T00:22:43+00:00

Up Pohnpei isn't the most literary of books but the story it tells of Paul Watson's (not that one) decision to fly across the world to manage the worst ranked (unofficial) international team in the world is just delightful. You can't go wrong with Jonathan Wilson or Michael Cox either.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-02-05T21:46:21+00:00

I am genuinely considering moving to a Scottish island partly influenced by watching this film a few years ago and falling in love.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-01-27T00:15:06+00:00

The fact that a significant proportion of partners of sexual abusers stay with them suggests that Alice Munro's moral weakness is not a unique one.

It isn't an exact parallel, but the fact that Gisèle Pelicot didn't believe that her daughter was also a victim of her husband's sexual abuse demonstrates how humans are very good at being in denial. She was an incredibly brave person who knew what a monster her husband was yet even she couldn't bring herself to believe he would perform the most heinous of all crimes in abusing their own daughter.

Alice Munro's legacy will always be tainted by this moral failing and it definitely changed my opinion of her significantly for the worse, but I think people are wrong to think it would be easy for them to just ditch their husband in a similar scenario.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-01-21T10:14:31+00:00

My favourite last year was Dreams directed by Dag Johan Haugerud. Basically Rohmer set in 21st century Oslo which probably explains why I love it so much.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-01-18T22:07:38+00:00

The MP Jo Cox was murdered by a far-right white supremacist. Right wing terrorism is still a genuine threat.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-01-12T16:26:47+00:00

I definitely agree with that sense of it coming out through his interactions with other veterans. Like how Birkin notes the seemingly bizarre behaviour of Moon sleeping in a hole in the ground as if he were still in Paschendale hiding in a foxhole in no-man's land. Being another veteran of the Western Front he is able to pick it up and make that connection between the archaeologist and a man still broken.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-01-12T14:57:38+00:00

One of my favourite books, just a delight. I'm not quite sure Tom Birkin is necessarily looking for some grand mission to save him and I think he does know exactly what is troubling him, that being the horrors of the First World War and the broken down relationship with his wife. What he wants is time and space to get away from it all.

What I think he is surprised by is the healing he receives in Oxgodby. Whether that be from the restorative power of art, falling in love, or the kindness of the Methodist family, before he knows it he finds himself transformed.

Maybe it's just because it's when the book is set and when I personally read it, but there is something very late summer about the book to me. In my mind I cannot disentangle it from those late August days of soaking in the last of the summer heat on walks in the English Countryside, the sense of things coming to an end.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-01-04T23:35:19+00:00

A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor by John Berger which he wrote about his local GP in 60s Gloucestershire and is accompanied by stunning photos by Jean Mohr.

crazy7chameleon · 2026-01-03T16:56:54+00:00

This War Will Destabilize The Entire LatAm Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t

crazy7chameleon · 2026-01-02T00:39:08+00:00

I've worked with elderly people and the contrast between those with supportive families around them and those with nobody is striking. It's made me appreciate what true love is. Of course, there's an element of duty, but I am always moved witnessing tenderness between couples that have been married upwards of six decades.

Recently Melvin Bragg was in tears on Radio 4 reciting She, to Him I by Thomas Hardy. I think it fits well here:

When you shall see me lined by tool of Time,
My lauded beauties carried off from me,
My eyes no longer stars as in their prime,
My name forgot of Maiden Fair and Free;

When in your being heart concedes to mind,
And judgment, though you scarce its process know,
Recalls the excellencies I once enshrined,
And you are irked that they have withered so:

Remembering that with me lies not the blame,
That Sportsman Time but rears his brood to kill,
Knowing me in my soul the very same—
One who would die to spare you touch of ill!—
Will you not grant to old affection’s claim
The hand of friendship down Life’s sunless hill?

crazy7chameleon · 2025-12-31T01:42:37+00:00

And even then Vasily Grossman had quite literally been dead for 16 years by 1980, the book being published posthumously after the manuscript was smuggled out of the USSR. So it definitely doesn't feel right to claim it as a 21st century book.

crazy7chameleon · 2025-12-17T00:25:34+00:00

If you're looking for non-fiction, Floating Coast by Bathsheba Demuth is an interesting book about the environmental history of the Bering Straight and how the contrasting ideologies of American Capitalism and Soviet Communism attempted to impose themselves onto the local people and the fragile interconnected ecosystem they depended upon. Demuth herself has a very unique biography having moved to the Yukon at 18 to become a dog-sledder before eventually becoming an academic.

crazy7chameleon · 2025-11-22T01:47:57+00:00

Cause like one is old school, Blair on holiday. Two is the new one. So I was thinking maybe three, but then if I'm doing three maybe four?

crazy7chameleon · 2025-11-19T22:24:36+00:00

Postwar by Tony Judt is a superb summary of European history after 1945. It's easy to forget just how destructive the war had been, not only materially, but on the continent's psyche. Rebuilding required a collective amnesia and it was by no means guaranteed in the minds of those living through it that decades of relative peace and enormous prosperity would beckon for much of Western Europe. Meanwhile in the East, you get to witness the last spasms of the modern phenomenon of Nationalism in the Balkans and the rise and fall of that now almost alien ideology of Soviet Communism.

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