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The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce is Paul Torday’s second novel, after “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen”, and is being offered for £2.99 when you buy this weeks Times Newspaper.

It is a poignant tale about a character named Wilberforce, a 37-year-old former software engineer, who has sold his business to pursue a life of drinking. Or as he sees it, to safeguard the inheritance of his great friend Francis Black, whose house and underground wine cellar (”the undercroft”) he bought for a million pounds. Not bad for a hundred thousand bottles of priceless wine.

The book follows Wilberforce from the building up of his software business to the success it is today, and looks at how he spent his time working, often until late at night at the expense of his relationships, through to his gradual alcahol fuelled decline, to his present predicament and how he got there

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the formation of the Hawksworth Coach Fund, the forerunner of the Great Western (SVR) Association - which was originally set up to preserve steam locomotives & Coaching stock, a special train ran on Saturday 27th September 2008 From Bridgnorth to Kidderminster.

The motive power was provided by GWR Small Prairie 4566 and the Dukedog 9017 visiting from the Bluebell Railway, It was brilliant to see them double-heading They both departed from Kidderminster at 12·10pm and arrived back at Kidderminster at 17·30pm, via Bridgnorth, There was an extended stopover at Highley giving people the opportunity to look round all the steam engines currently being stored at the Engine House, a light lunch was also served. Among the The coaching stock used were the Association’s three Toplight carriages plus Siphon G 1257.

The Severn Project performed their latest work at the Severn Valley Railway station in Bewdley last Saturday. Entitled “Sabrina & The Engineer” it was billed as a performance of colour, light, music & song inspired by the River Severn & The Industrial Revolution.

The performance started at Bewdley Station at 6.30pm. There was also a procession afterwards aswell. There will be a second performance at Bridgnorth on Saturday 4th October at 6.30pm to which I am hoping to go.

These are genuine clips from British Council house/flat tenants
Complaining to the Local Authority about problems with their accommodation.

1. My bush is really overgrown round the front and my back passage has
fungus growing in it.

2. He’s got this huge tool that vibrates the whole house and I just
can’t take it anymore.

3. It’s the dog’s mess that I find hard to swallow.

4. I want to complain about the farmer across the road; every morning at
6 a. m. his cock wakes me up and it’s now getting too much for me.

5. I am a single woman living in a downstairs flat and would you please
do something about the noise made by the man on top of me every night.

6. And their 18-year-old son is continually banging his balls against
my fence.

7. Please send a man with the right
tool to finish the job and satisfy
my wife.

8. My lavatory seat is cracked, where do I stand?

9. I am writing on behalf of my sink, which is coming away from the
wall.

10. Will you please send someone to mend the garden path? My wife
tripped and fell on it yesterday and now she is pregnant.

11. I request permission to remove my drawers in the kitchen.

12.
50% of the walls are damp, 50% have crumbling plaster and 50% are
plain filthy.

13. I am still having problems with smoke in my new drawers.

14. The toilet is blocked and we cannot bathe the children until it is
cleared.

15. Will you please send a man to look at my water, it is a funny
colour& not fit to drink.

16. I want some repairs done to my cooker as it has backfired and burnt
my knob off.

17. The man next door has a large erection in the back garden, which is
unsightly and dangerous.

18. Our kitchen floor is damp. We have two children and would like a
third so please send someone round to do something about it.

19. I wish to complain that my father hurt his ankle very badly when he
put his foot in the hole in his back passage.

20. I wish to report that tiles are missing from the outside toilet
roof.I think it was bad wind the other night that blew them off.

This excellent 1983 BAFTA award winning comedy/drama is being given away with this Sunday’s Observer Newspaper

It was director Bill Forsyth’s follow-up to the film Gregory’s Girl and stars Burt Lancaster as Felix Happer, a billionaire head of an American oil company, who sends a minion named Mac (Peter Riegert) to a remote part of Scotland in order to buy up an isolated village and secure the property rights for an oil refinery that they want to build there.

However Mac doesn’t bargain on the villages integral strength of community, and as he starts the negotiations he finds that the although the locals are initially keen to get their hands on the ‘Silver Dollar’ things change when Mac meets a local hermit and beach scavenger, Ben Knox (Fulton Mckay), who lives in a shack on the crucial beach which he also owns and Mac is is forced to negotiate on Ben’s terms and things don’t go according to plan…

This film also features a really brilliant theme tune by Mark Knopfler, of Dire Straits fame.

Going Home
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMwcGPjYAIk

The Mail on Sunday offered a CD entitled Ten Tenors featuring, you guessed it, ten different opera type tenors or groups. I prefered the 80’s CDs so I didn’t bother this time, but anyone interested may be able to pick up a copy from Ebay cheaply.
Artists featured on the CD are:

* Russell Watson
* Jonathan Ansell
* Blake
* Will Martin
* Placido Domingo
* Aled Jones
* Jose Carreras
* Alfie Boe
* Vittorio Grigolo
* The Three Tenorx

I finally got the X-Files DVD Collection, through the post today, which was recently offered by The Sun Newspaper & The News of the World to promote the latest movie “The X-Files - I Want To Believe”. To be honest I had completely forgotten about it until it arrived on the doorstep this morning lol

Titles in the collection are:
* The Erlenmeyer Flask
* Anasazi
* 731
* Small Potatoes
* Redux
* Monday
* Requiem
* Bonus Disc - containing the Classic episode Vienan, The History of the X-Files and some Fox TV Trailers

Catch Me Who Can was the third lcomotive created by Richard Trevithick. It is similar to Pen-Y-Daren & was built in 1808 by John Urpeth Rastrick & John Hazledine at their foundry in Bridgnorth on the bank of the River Severn, and was demonstrated to the public on a circular track in Bloomsbury, London, near where the present day Euston Square tube-station is located.

The locomotive reached a top speed of 12 miles an hour before its weight finally
broke the relatively brittle cast-iron rails, causing a derailment. Despite this being a relatively minor incident Trevithick gave up & closed his exhibition after only two months, turning his attention instead to stationary steam engines.

A Replica of Catch-Me-Who-can has recently been completed down at the Severn Valley Railway and I was lucky enough to see it pottering along the rails during a trip to the 14th CAMRA Severn Valley Beer Festival (I’m amazed that the photos came out so well considering the amount of Beer I had consumed by that stage,

The locomotive was also on display, happily puffing way during the Autumn Steam Gala too.

As I mentioned in a previous post I am a big fan of Folk Group Bellowhead, having seen them in concert years ago, I also thought that they were excellent at the recent Shrewsbury Folk Festival too.

So I decided to get their latest album entitled Matachin. I think it is just as good as their previous album Burlesque, full of the same mix of Enthusiastic upbeat numbers aswell as more laid back traditional numbers. ‘Fakenham Fair’ , ‘Whiskey is the Life of Man’ and ‘Roll Her Down the Bay’ are my favourite songs so far, but all the songs are growing on me the more I hear it. Here is the Track-listing:

1. Fakenham Fair
2. Roll Her Down The Bay
3. Vignette #1
4. I Drew My Ship Across The Harbour
5. Kafoozalum/The Priest’s Miss
6. Cholera Camp
7. Vignette #2
8. Whiskey Is The Life Of Man
9. Spectre Review
10. Widow’s Curse
11. Bruton Town
12. Trip To Bucharest/The Flight Of The Folk Mutants
13. Vignette #3

Here are some of the songs they performed at their BBC Proms performance courtesy of YouTube:

Fakenham Fair
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PwuqBz5gaA
Roll Her Down The Bay
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h8ACcqdGmk

This epic & provocative novel is being offered for £2.99 with the Times Newspaper this week

It is Khaled Hosseini’s follow up to his bestselling novel The Kite Runner & is a stirring story set against the backdrop of Afghanistan’s volatile recent history - from the Soviet invasion, to the reign of the Taliban, to post-Taliban rebuilding.

It tells the story of two women named Mariam & Laila who are brought together by adversity - Mariam was born an illegitimate child in 1959 and was married off to a man from Kabul when she was 15 who is abusive and cruel and forced her to wear a burqa even though many liberal women in Kabul were free to go without it, and Laila who was born just before the Russian invasion and had dreams of a life of education and travel until a bomb kills most of her family, luckily she is rescued and recovers from her wounds in Mariam’s house.

As Laila recovers the woman bond, meanwhile Mariam’s husband has his eyes on Laila, and With the emergence of the Taliban, the women have few options, if any, and their plight highlights the sadly accurate version of what many Afghan women have experienced over the years in Afghanistan

A Thousand Splendid Suns is a stirring story of personal lives & the struggle to survive, raise a family and find happiness amidst great turmoil.