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  1. Here's my latest round-up of the things I've recently read: John Meaney - To hold infinity. Well it was OK, a competent enough hard SF novel but I never felt I really cared much about any of the characters. Robert B. Parker - Death in Paradise. This is one of his series involving police chief Jesse Stone as opposed to most of his output about private eye Spenser, but it's still set near Boston and written in much the same way. Good as usual. James Lovegrove - Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows. A Holmes/Lovecraft mash-up that was good fun. Agatha Christie - The mysterious affair at Styles. A classic, the first Poirot novel. Charles Powell - The poets in the nursery. A little book of parodies: nursery rhymes cleverly rewritten in the style of poets of the day (which was 1920). My copy belonged then to noted Bristol lawyer R. N. Green-Armytage and according to the inscription in the front was lent to his close friend Walter de la Mare in 1933. John Rhode - Blackthorn House. Stolen cars and a body turning up in a trunk. Another enjoyable Dr. Priestley mystery, though he doesn't feature all that much in this one. P. G. Wodehouse - Uncle dynamite. One of the best Wodehouses I've read for a while.
  2. I agree with some of the previous posters: if there was something going off in Sheffield, the forum used to be the place to come to find out what it was, and it was always more up to date than the Star. But now things happen and never even get a mention on here until days later, if at all. Now if I want Sheffield news that's up to date, I look at Sheffield Online on Facebook. The forum needs to try to get back that sense of being the go-to place for local stuff. And yes, the classifieds do need revitalising.
  3. Looks completely ridiculous for that location.
  4. The Mind of Mr J. G. Reeder on Talking Pictures TV at 9pm on Wednesdays. Originally broadcast in 1969-1971. Hugh Burden plays the mild-mannered detective from the Public Prosecutor's Office with a criminal mind created by Edgar Wallace. Great stuff.
  5. You need to go to Account Settings and change it there, I think.
  6. Very sad. She was a class act in everything she was in.
  7. Recently read: Miles Burton - Death in the tunnel. Retired industrialist is shot in a locked compartment of a train going through the tunnel. An ingenious working out but as with so many detective stories of the time, you do wonder whether it would actually have worked in practice. Miles Burton - Death in shallow water. Several deaths by drowning in a few inches of water in one village attract the interest of Scotland Yard. Unusually for Burton/Rhode, this one doesn't involve an ingenious murder method or an elaborate attempt to frame someone else for the crime. P. G. Wodehouse - The small bachelor. A relatively early effort (1927) and you might say it's basically the same as all the others, but it never seems to matter because, well, it's Wodehouse, and he was incapable of writing anything dull. Jack Vance - Night lamp. Another SF novel set in the Gaean Reach, Vance's version of far-future colonised space. Typical independent social-convention-defying Vance hero Jaro Fath tries to find out the truth about his early childhood after his memory was wiped. Pretty good, especially when you consider that Vance was about 80 when he wrote it. Seishi Yokomizo - The Honjin murders. Japanese locked room mystery. Ingeniously worked out, though again you wonder if it would be worth all that effort. Ron Goulart - Cowboy heaven. Despite its title, this is a humorous SF novel. Goulart's usual themes are robots and other technology going wrong, and so it is here. Probably this is as out of fashion as possible at present, but I quite enjoyed it. Now reading: John Rhode - The two graphs. 50 pages in and one of two brothers (who happen to look remarkably similar) has been "accidentally" drowned in a Norfolk Broad. I'm guessing that the identity of the victim will play a part, but the relevance of the two graphs has not appeared yet...
  8. If you've watched that Manctopia programme you'll know that property prices have gone through the roof there. Maybe consider living in Stockport instead?
  9. I took some to Shirecliff tip the other week and was told to just put it in general waste, which surprised me a bit.
  10. I used to enjoy going for a stroll round the charity shops, but it's just not worth the effort now. A lot of them still haven't reopened, and those that have are sometimes only open for reduced hours or on certain days only. Then there's the queuing outside, mask wearing, hand sanitising, only allowing a certain number of people in (sometimes a ridiculously low number for the size of the shop - and often means that if you go as a couple, one of you ends up stranded outside), one way systems, and then you're told not to browse for too long - I mean, what do you go into a charity shop for except to browse, it's not like going into Sainsbury's for a pint of milk. Surely now, when it's estimated that about one in 2000 people might have the virus, the chances of getting close enough to one in a charity shop is pretty small, yet in March when the infection rate was at its peak, they were happy enough to open when we didn't have any of these things. People used to go shopping because it was a pleasurable experience, but it simply isn't any longer, it's just a struggle and a pain. The country will never get back to anything like normal while the current level of fear and paranoia continues. It's Sense, not Mind, and to their credit they at least did reopen pretty much as soon as ordinary shops were able to.
  11. Actually at the moment I believe that Huddersfield has had free parking for a while: from 15 June until the end of August to encourage people to come back. But I just know that you're going to say it's only a third the size of Sheffield and isn't a city. https://www.kirklees.gov.uk/beta/transport-roads-and-parking/parkingspaces/
  12. So what you're really saying is, that for people who don't live there, there's not much point going there anyway. Especially at the moment.
  13. Reruns of the original Randall & Hopkirk (deceased) on Freeview channel 48 at 8 o'clock every night. Daft but classic.
  14. Recently read: Raymond Chandler - Farewell my lovely. Philip Marlowe tracks down killer Moose Malloy, encountering a selection of other homicides along the way. Those offended by various terms in use in the 1940s for people of colour will probably want to avoid this one, because it's got most of them in. P. G. Wodehouse - Uneasy money. Penniless Lord Dawlish inherits a million, but not without complications in this early Wodehouse. He never fails to amuse, and this one's no exception. Roger Zelazny - To die in Italbar. Various people chase a man who is a walking pandemic across the galaxy for varying reasons. 70s SF that seems a bit dated now, but OK. Now reading: The Secret of High Eldersham by Miles Burton. Murderous goings on in an East Anglian village. Burton was a pseudonym of John Rhode and the Burton books are even more difficult to get hold of than the Rhode ones, but this one and one other (Death in the Tunnel) were reprinted a couple of years ago. Good so far.
  15. Not really my sort of thing then, and sadly I can't see you getting much for them if I'm honest.
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