Edmund Lester

Okay, if you read this blog (hey, someone might) you may hvae noticed a distinct lack of any activity whatsoever in recent times. Sorry! I'm afraid I've been a little unwell of late and really haven't been in the mood to type in blog entries - or to do much of anything to be totally honest. I finally gave in to the fact I was feeling like crap and went to see someone about it. Result is I was diagnosed with severe depressive disorder - clinical depression in old money. It's fun let me tell you. (Yes, I'm lying) So I was put on pills to alleviate the symptoms. First citalopram and then fluoxetine. Neither of which seemed to do me much positive good and both of which came with a whole host of side effects that made me feel crappier. I'm now off meds and trying to deal with things (unless doc advises I go on other meds - we'll see). I'm hoping to find enough strength to start getting my life back - and hopefully developing some new coping strategies for the...

It's been a while since my last blog. Not far off two months. I've been twittering a bit - easier to do as the iPhone lives in my pocket 24-7 and I've written a review or two (ok, maybe 20) but in truth my time on this PC has been limited. And the reason has been my mother. At the end of October she was taken into hospital after a fall and diagnosed with an infection (which had caused the dizziness that meant she fell). Well we thought that that was all but it was soon clear that her faculties were very impaired. She didn't recover them when the fever was cured and she was diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer's. They tell me that the infection increased the speed of onset - I'm not a doctor but I trust they know what they're doing. So we set about loooking for nursing care for her and visited a number of homes that could provide the level of care she needed. We even thought we'd found one - out by King's Lynn - and were going to visit it this week to c...

Forget all the drawings, paintings, models and computer generated imagery of what an alien race should look like. All you have to do is look up this creature - the giant isopod or Bathynomus giganteus. It is a very weird looking animal and you can find them in the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean. You don't need to go traveling to other worlds (of the imagination or otherwise) to see strange creatures.

I just noticed I haven't blogged since the 5th. Wow. Where have the last three weeks gone? Okay I think I can put some of it down to being on holiday in Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France and Germany for ten days in there somewhere (I will add some blog entries about the trips at some point). But it doesn't account for all the gap. To be truthful I haven't written all that much in that time either - half a dozen reviews for Murky Depths is all. Well the fact is I have had nine new book cases delivered and have spent a good deal of the time since getting back from mainland Europe sorting out the various boxes of books and getting books onto shelves. And it's been great fun. That may sound sad but it's true. I love books and a lot of these books haven't been out of boxes in years. Good times.

I enjoyed reading. Okay a number of people may read much more than me but I do manage to get through two or three books in a week so I don't think I do too badly. And I will admit this is largely due to a liking for shorter books. I read a lot of novellas so I guess I get a bit of assistance from the books I choose to read. Anyway I recently discovered a new way of adding to my reading tally. I take a book with me to work. Before you start accusing me of not actually doing anything for the day job, I want to say I restrict my reading to lunch hours only. But it does mean I can add an extra book into the reading schedule each fortnight. As long as I stick clear of fiction that is. I don't think I could ever read a novel in the middle of a crowded canteen. But non-fiction. I can do that. So recently I've read a book about the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, Dava Sobel's Longtitude, a couple of travelogues and am currently reading a book on Fermat's Last Theore...

Okay, the question has been answered. I had enough time to post three book reviews before the episode finished... Hope you like them. I might post a film review or two in the next few days. Those kindly folk at Organic Marketing have been good enough to send me some more review copies and I think I might post the details here. Or at least short notes about them. I may still go out to find them an alternate home whilst my main market is temporarily unavailable. (Terry from Murky Depths is going on holiday for a bit so there's not going to be much in the way of activity in that direction.) The episode of House BTW was the right back from the beginning - Occam's Razor from near the start of season 1. Cool show although my wife occasoinally tells me I'm about as subtle as House and have other of his idiosyncrasies. Mind you she does know me best.

I've just read a news article on the BBC News website that reminded me that there still are people in the world who want to do spontaneous things just for fun. Apparantly there is a tradition that's grown up in recent years in California which sees thousands of people moon passing trains on a given day each year. The appropriately named Moon Amtrak day was yesterday, July 11th. The even have a website dedicated to the event http://www.moonamtrak.org/ Yeah, and you'd guess for something fun, the authorities are trying to "crack" (sorry couldn't resist the pun) down on it.

Saturday is book hunting day. It's my release. I've been a collector since I was a kid and I know there's always a chance that I'll find that next book out there. Today was one fot hose days. I found an old sf book that really appealed to me - a 1965 paperback of Milton Lesser's Secret of the Black Planet. It has a very typical 1960s cover - man in tight fitting space suit with ray gun looking all Buck Rogers, a woman in a short skirt with the image completed by a typicaly of the period cigar shaped rocket ship. Yeah, I know that image could also describe a typical 1930s sf magazine cover (for anyone who wants to go look at some there's a lot of them on a UK sf call The Eternal Night - http://www.eternalnight.co.uk/magazine/magazinea.html ) But I like these things as objects and I like finding them. Fortunately for me it's not an expensive hobby - these books aren't worth much, I picked this one up for two pounds. I just like finding them. And you never ...

I picked up a book at the weekend - Simon Hughes' "And God Created Cricket". I have a number of books on my reading pile that I really should read first but it sat there, calling to me. I was helpless, it knew all my weaknesses. Well it's as good as I had hoped it would be. Simon Hughes has an obvious love of cricket. When combined with his wonderfully acerbic wit it makes for a highly entertaining, if somewhat rambling and irreverent, history of the game. I recommend it to everyone - well everyone who likes cricket at any rate.

I'm addicted to this computer based life. So when I've not really spent any time on my home PC for more than a week (and wasn't away enjoying myself in Italy or Belgium) something just has to be wrong. I've had flu. Plain and simple. For four days over last weekend I really couldn't do anything. Pretty much at all. I'm not after sympathy. I'm not playing the martyr card. I was just ill. I don't like being ill. I know no one does and I'm not claiming anything special. It was only flu for heaven's sake. But it did expose me to the horrors of daytime TV. Golly that stuff's terrible. Sorry if you like it but I am afraid I just DON'T! And in the middle of the Winter Olympics too! Now I don't like the the Winter Olympics particularly. Okay falling off a hill (or ski-jumping) is half-decent. And I don't mind a little bit of cross country skiing or speed skating. But only a little. Still at least there were the documentary channels. I spe...

If you know me, or if you've read this blog for long, you will know that I am a passionate supporter of the European Union. And yes if you didn't know this you will probably find it odd for an Englishman to be a mad Europhile. Anyway in a conversation the other day it occured to me how little of this group I actually know. I mean really know. So I've decided to do something about it. I'm setting myself a little target. I am currently, as I sit here typing this, 42 years old. Before I am fifty I would like to be able to say I have been to the capitol city of every EU country. That's currently 27 different cities, although I would like to belive it might be more like 35 by the year 2018 (if the EU ministers decided to get Enlargement back on track following their recent loss of interest - but that's another issue). Even if I were to limit it to just the 27 I have a few to go. And this is mainly because I realised just how few I've been to. Being a mad Italophi...

A couple of days ago I saw a couple of things up for sale - a 4 DVD box set of the Critters movies and the DVD of John Carpenter's The Thing. Well I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, they are films I saw when I was a kid and they were cheap. The one thing I've noticed about them when compared to modern movies is pace. Having rewatched The Thing and the first Critters movie they start a great deal slower than more recent films. If these were remade now I can pretty much guarantee that the first five moinutes would have plenty of gore - after all they have to get the interest of the attention-deficit world we've become...

I was at Birmingham (UK) Airport last night to meet my wife on her return from India (a business trip). Arrivals Halls are places I like. It's like the comment in the Richard Curtis film Love Actually when Hugh Grant talks about them being happy places. They are. As always I was surrounded by other people awaiting friends and loved ones - together with all the expected hugs and kisses. Standing next to me was this guy - average looking, normal guy. Except for the bunch of flowers. Now most guys have an aversion to flowers - believing that there's something "cissy" about such obvous displays of emotion. This guy seemed on of them. Holding this bunch of flowers he looked very uneasy. But, all credit to him, he did it. He stood there and waited. And a couple of minutes before my wife walked out, his girlfriend/wife emerged. It was smiles all round, hugs and kisses and delivery of said flowers to much initial success. The only thing was as he moved towards her and raised ...

I admit it. I am the King of Procrastination. I wandered up stairs from my lounge to my office with the intention of doing some writing. And then I noticed an email about PS Publishing. They have an offer on where you buy two and get a third book free. Now I have many, many PS Publishing titles on my bookshelves and I am rather fond of them. So I thought as the offer ends today I would check it out. Which of course means I had to go sort out the books. Now normally I have my books in alphabetical order by type (and one of the types just happens to be PS Publishing) which means it would simply be walk up to the shelf and check which ones I'd already got. But with the building work going on I have had to box up most of my books and move the ones I decided to keep. When I did this I didn't put them on the shelves in order. So to be able to check which books I already had (I'd read a number of them from pdf review copies so I couldn't rely on knowing I'd read it) I had ...

I've been alive for more than four decades. In that time I've lived in Solihull, Birmingham, Leicester and now my wonderful small village in the middle of Leicestershire. In all that time I've lived no more than thirty miles away from Atherstone - currently it's more like ten. But until earlier today I had never visited it. So this afternoon when I found myself in Polesworth, a small town near Tamworth I thought I would drive there, spend an hour and see if it warranted more. (I only had an hour as this idea occurred to me at 4pm and England closes at 5pm.) Well I think I will have to return to see it in daylight. You see I like small town England and I like finding the details of the past still existing amongst the modern. And Atherstone seems as though it will give me plenty of chance to do this. There's a rather pleasant old market place with cobbled streets all around and a church at the top end. There's a decent smattering of oldish buildings, two bookshops...

I started keeping this blog a while back when I invented this pseudonym and decided to have a go at writing. It had a plain and simple purpose - promote the writing. Well I guess I do do that - at least to some degree. I do tend to post notices of any sales, rejections, publications etc. But I have to admit I've not proven all that good at writing. I've sold a number of reviews, a handful of articles and eight short stories.  Now some people might say I've been reasonable successful, but I'm not on about sales. The reason I've not been successful in my own eyes is I'm not very good at the actual writing. I go through days of thinking about writing but not actually doing any. Well apart from this blog. Now it's not necessarily a bad thing. You could say it's because I don't actually have a hunger for it. My day job is one I enjoy and one that pays reasonable well. So writing is something I don't actually need. I dare say I'll carry on doing it...

I made a friend last year. If you think I'm being overly dramatic by writing that here - "surely everyone makes friends all the time" kind of thinking - "it's nothing unusual, why's he mentioning it". Well I don't. I can't really say I've made a friend in years. I go to work every day and have acceptable, well-functioning relationship with colleagues. I do all the socially required side of working - and no, I'm not an anti-social person who does all this purely to make it look good. When I ask how they are, how things are, etc, I'm not just trying to appear normal - I have an amount of concern. But would I ring any of these people up to go for a beer? No. Not really. That is until one guy started at the company last autumn (replace with "fall" if American). I'm not going to mention his name as this is a blog I maintain under my writing pseudonym for deliberate anonymity reasons. But, suffice it to say, I found someone I ...

I've decided. My wife's job has taken her to Brazil this week. And in Brazil it's mid-Summer. So while I am freezing here in the middle of the UK and surrounded by snow (to the level I couldn't get out of the village this morning and had to work at home) she is sitting outside on a patio sipping cold beer and looking out over a rain forest. And to make matters worse she's soon off to Southern India to miss pretty much the rest of the British Winter. Some people, eh?

I'm not a fan of Christmas. Being truthful I rather try to avoid much of it. I'm not religious so the worship part is out. But equally I like to respect people's beliefs so the commericality of the Festive Season I find crass. I also am teetotal so the drink 'til you feel sick aspect escapes me. All in all, I have to admit to being a little bit of a "Bah Humbug!" Scrooge-like figure about the whole thing. For anyone that knows me this is not news. But I wouldn't dream of stopping anyone enjoying the season in whatever way they enjoy. Okay I might moan a little about it from time to time. I'm rather good at moaning, after all I am English, but being truthful I would never try to sway anyone's individual beliefs and practices. But it does depress me when I hear about children - seven, eight, nine years old or something like that - wanting a new bike, an iPod, a Playstation (or whatever the latest games platform is these days), a this, a that and a ...

I've been watching the Copenhagen Conference with interest over the last two weeks and all I've seen is childishness and ridiculous posturing. We have a real problem in the world. Pretty much everyone knows that. As a species we lice on just one planet and we seem keen on destroying its ability to support us. We need to cooperate to save our home. We need to have politicians who will step up and play their part. There's still time I guess but I feel despair growing within me. Are they going to do anything real at this gathering? Or are they just going to squabble? We in developed countries need to do more. We need to help the developing mations do more. It's that simple. Else we may have to accept large parts of our planet will become very inhospitable and many millions will die. There's still time. Fingers crossed.