Mr Levett's Scottish Tour (Part Two)

Bothwell Castle In Which Jeremy Levett and family continue their explorations north o' the border. We left the New Lanark youth hostel early on Sunday morning and followed the Clyde to Hamilton. First on the day’s list of entertainments was what remains of the country house Chatelherault. The various Dukes of Hamilton owned a truly absurd amount of land in Scotland, which when the Industrial ...

The Fall

By our man with the DVD player and no social life, Philip Reeve. It's always depressing when film critics complain that a movie is all style over substance, as they did with Avatar at the end of last year - stunning visually, of course, but oh, my dears, the story...  I think it's worth remembering that the movies started out as fairground attractions: visual roller-coaster rides which appealed ...

Haywired

Natalie Crawford reviews Haywired, a 'Steampunk Fairytale' by Alex Keller Reading this book, I felt remarkably underdressed. I wanted to be sat in a wing-back chair, maybe wearing a cape and chugging on a bubble pipe. I have the chair, but sadly not the whimsical ensemble to match. I find pretending to be someone else rather therapeutic and fun – which is exactly how I felt stepping ...

Mr Levett's Scottish Tour (Part One)

The Bee's Jeremy Levett, along with his parents, and brothers Nick and Oliver, recently made an expedition north o' the border.  This is his Tue Account of their epic journey... Take me out to the Penrith chippie, where the food is hot and the air is nippy Up at something unreasonably early to dump the tortoise on lovely Havercrofts, then the long road north, with Oliver at ...

A Book of Books

By Philip Womack When I left university, I started to keep a list of every book I read. I suppose that, now I no longer had to read books, I still wanted to prove to myself that I was expanding and growing. It quickly became an obsession. The list lived on my computer; during the closing pages of a novel I would experience a strange kind of pleasure at the thought that soon I could enter the ...

A Seed of Hope

Natalie Crawford reviews A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Afghanistan, as we know, is a complicated mess. But for many, myself included, this is often the beginning and end of our education. If it were not for the images seen on our evening news and the opinions of those indirectly connected to the conflict ‘over there’, we may not have this sensationalist view of a ‘backwards’ country ...

To Go To the Mo

By Andrew Gorton. In April I started as a volunteer gallery steward at the ‘Mo’ museum. The ‘Mo’ is a recently opened museum in Sheringham, Norfolk. (One of its exhibits, the J.C. Madge, was discussed in an earlier article.) Some of its collection used to be on display in a row of cottages set back behind the shops of the main street – the cottages were sold to part-fund the new museum, now in a ...

What're you doin' doon there on the floo-er, Ross?

Bored by the Beeb? Run out of HBO boxed-sets?  The Bee continues its quest for simpler telly from a bygone age.  This week, Philip Reeve has been watching: POLDARK! Ah, Sunday evenings in the 1970s; Cliff Michelmore's Holiday programme, and then, if you were lucky, Poldark.  This was the first bit of grown-up telly I remember watching, and terribly grown up it seemed ...

Secret Weapons Over Normandy

By Bill Havercroft Discovering a hidden gem is one of life's great pleasures. So it was several years ago now, when my father decided to purchase and try out a couple of these newfangled video games for himself. He selected Secret Weapons over Normandy, a World War II flying game on the Playstation 2. This was released with almost zero hype or publicity in 2003, and despite receiving favourable reviews, ...