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November 2003
Dear Visitor
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds—
November!
Just part of Thomas Hood’s 1844 poem ‘No!’
which I like, even though I disagree with his gloomy view
of the month. November has its charms, I think, along with
the other eleven months of the year. I rather like it once
the clocks have gone back and you can draw the blinds in
the early evening. I even like dark mornings; there’s
something cosy about lit windows and morning bustle before
sunrise that has always appealed to me.
What I’m not so keen on is the fireworks. Or firecrackers,
if you prefer. I prefer neither, myself. Professional firework
displays are OK, I suppose, though I could live without
them, but fireworks in the (sometimes unlucky) hands of
dim-witted youths are definitely not my cup of tea.
For anyone who doesn’t know, we in Britain are exhorted
‘Please to remember, the fifth of November, gunpowder,
treason and plot’ and we do indeed celebrate the foiling
of the gunpowder plot in 1605, when a group of Catholic
conspirators attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
And how do we celebrate? By selling explosives to anyone
who cares to buy them.
We’ve foiled other terrorist plots since, but we
haven’t felt obliged to celebrate by selling Semtex
over the counter, and if we could stop selling gunpowder
in this way the emergency services and casualty departments
might not have to treat so many burns victims every year.
OK, I’ll get off my soapbox now.
The site is two years old this month, and as promised,
I have a special competition for you. Carlton Television
have very kindly given me permission to offer videos of
the Lloyd and Hill TV movie A Shred of Evidence as prizes,
and I have five copies to give away. I’m running this
competition in addition to the usual monthly competition,
so if you want a chance of winning the video, be sure to
enter the right one! Why not have a go at both?
I’ve now been told that the movie hasn’t been
sold to American TV, so this might be the only chance my
readers in the USA get to see it. I am of course aware that
US video recorders work on a different system, and I have
one NTSC copy to give away. The others are PAL, so if your
video recorder can play both, please make sure you say so,
as this will increase your chances of winning a copy.
I’m sorry to disappoint all the people who have written
asking me when it will be shown in the US, but that’s
the way it goes, especially if you were born on a Saturday,
as I was. Saturday’s child works hard for a living,
and I knew there was no way that I was going to be able
to sit back and reap the rewards of a TV series sold to
eighty countries, even if Carlton, bless their hearts, believed
that was what was going to happen.
So, if you fancy seeing the movie, have a go at the competition,
and postal strikes permitting, you might just get a copy
winging its way to you by Christmas.
And the news element of this newsletter is that number
thirteen has an official publication date, and I can at
last tell you its title. It’s called Unlucky for Some,
and it will be published in the UK in June of next year.
I don’t have any news about US publication yet, however,
but I’ll let you know as soon as I do.
See you in December!
Love,
Jill
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