Ripe Tomatoes are Here!!!

Yes!  The Tomatoes pamphlet is here, with a brilliant cover by Daniel showing a church as a tomato:

Don’t you think that’s great?  He’s terrific at Graphics – a possible A* at GCSE.  So, hot, sizzling and juicy, the pamphlet will be on sale at Tomatoes next Saturday at the knock-down price of £1 each – and once I have cleared costs 10p of each sale will go to support the work of Tomatoes!  It includes perennial favourites such as ‘The Ballad of the Bowstring Bridge’ and ‘The Ode to the Upperton Road Bridge, as well as the Tomatoes poem: so come along next Saturday and get your copy.

http://www.martyrs.org.uk/tomatoes.htm

Last night I watched ‘Transsiberian’, on iplayer.  it’s an excellent film starring Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer – she has a bigger part than he does.  They are travelling across Siberia and meet Carlos, a good-looking but arrogant and utterly repellent character who turns out to have convictions for sexual violence, robbery and drug-trafficking.  He tricks her into carrying his drugs, then she kills him by an overenthusiastic clonk* on the head with a cemetery paling as he is threatening to rape her.  There’s a terrific performance by Ben Kingsley as a corrupt Russian policeman (sorry, perhaps that should just be ‘a Russian policeman’) – he speaks Russian fluently in the film, or appears to (my Russian extends only to ‘glasnost’ and ‘samovar’, though I can say those words fluently.)  Justice slowly sorts itself out as the snow covers everything: the woman gets away with the killing; the policeman is brought to book and the much-abused girlfriend of Carlos finds his jacket – if not his body – buried in the snow, and takes the money he’s carrying.

But the real hero of this film is the railway, running through the Russian landscape, that vast expanse of snow in which the train is the only corridor of warmth and safety.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0800241/

The snow at the end reminds me of the finale of Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ – ‘snow was general all over Ireland… falling over the living and the dead.’  Terrific ending.

http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/260248-dubliners

And finally, let’s spare a thought for the prank that went horribly wrong.  Juvenile and pathetic though the prank call was, they could not have foreseen such an outcome.  It is very sad for all concerned.

Kirk out

* it’s ages since I’ve had the opportunity to use the word ‘clonk’