charles barrow's writing

My mum and dad both worked at Warner Brother's film studios, in Teddington (UK), when they were teenagers. It's where they met, in fact. It was something of a family tradition, working there, as both had either aunts, an uncle, a mother or a sister all employed in one capacity or another at the studio. While my mum worked in the offices, as a gofer, my dad was an errand boy, cycling around the studio lot delivering messages. But family legend has it that he did have one brush with the glamorous side of film production when he was promoted to the role of clapperboard boy on a James Mason film, Candlelight in Algeria (1944). Apparently, my dad harboured ambitions to work his way up to cameraman eventually, but the Luftwaffe put paid to those dreams when the studio was badly damaged in a V2 rocket attack in July of '44. Damn Hitler to hell for millions of reasons, but I feel really bad for my dad that he had to watch that dream of his go up in smoke. Curious to see the movie t...

This, really, is a reminder to myself that I shouldn't give up on things so easily. I've just picked up a book that I gave up on reading previously, and I'm really enjoying it. The book was a smash hit, bestseller back in the early 90s. It was the title that everyone was reading that year, and it was a critical success as well as a commercial one. Of course, I jumped on that bandwagon, and I bought it, and I dove right in, and... I hit a brick wall. It doesn't happen often that I give up on a book, but it does happen sometimes, and it happened with this one. I struggled, so I closed the book, and put it down. But, here's the thing, the author did his job on me. The echo of the book never left me, even after decades. The flavour of it lingered. I don't know whether it was the characters, or the atmosphere, or the insights into a different culture that fascinated me, or a mixture of all of those things, but it put a hook deep into me and I never managed to shake i...