poliphilo

"Is it unreasonable," I asked Ailz this morning, "to expect April to be warm and sunny?"

"Yes," she said, "it is..."

We have seen the sun today, but we've also had powerful winds. Earlier I tried to go out onto the patio and the wind wouldn't let me. "Oh. no you don't," it said as it put its shoulder to the door. "OK, OK, I said. "it was nothing important. I'll try again later..."

We were warned. "40mph," said the weather folk.

I'm reading The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex. Only published in 2021 and already it's been translated into 20 languages. Is it that good? Could be. But with this sort of book judgement has to be suspended until one gets to the end and finds out whether the author has resolved or deepened the mystery in a satisfactory manner. In 1900 three keepers disappeared from a Lighthouse in the Hebrides; no-one knows what happened to them. Stonex has imagined a similar occurence off the Cornish Coast in 1972. The blurb promises psychology and ghosts. We have already had lots and lots of weather....

Talking about ghosts, I found myself watching one of the BBC's MR James adaptions yesterday evening. A Warning to the Curious was first shown (O synchronicity) in 1972. It stars the Norfolk coast and that lovely character actor Peter Vaughan. It isn't as good as Jonathan Miller's version of Oh Whistle And I'll Come to You- the film that set the ball rolling- but then what is? I checked it afterwards against James' original story- and found that all along the line it had coarsened what in James is subtle and suggestive. Is this inevitable? I asked myself, and then remembered Fanny and Alexander and told myself that film can handle the supernatural quite as delicately as prose- but that ghosts are fiendishly difficult to pull off in any medium....