Sam Redlark

image generated by Craiyon This is my response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 30th October, 2022. The Guardian is apparently no longer happy to host my comments on their site, so it is appearing here instead. This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented here under the terms of fair use. ~ What if the British empire never existed? Would the world be a better or a worse place? In the West Bengal village of Tarapith, Michael Carden was examining the sun-baked wall of a house, that I would have thought was constructed during the 1920s or 30s, but certainly sometime within the reign of King George V. It was the former monarch's worn down profile that garnished the centre of each brick, though in the case of one row they have been laid upside-down, with the head of the head of state inverted. “Without a date of construction, and a feel for what...

  Throughout November, I will be participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). As the name might suggest, this entails writing a novel over the course of a month. The default target is 50,000 words, which amounts to around 1,667 words per day. Many participants use NaNoWriMo as a jumping off point for producing a first draft of a book that they will later knock into shape, sometimes with the long-term aim of selling it to a publisher, or publishing the work themselves. I am participating for slightly different reasons: For several months I have been working on a novel that has been meticulously plotted and is now being meticulously written, to the best of my limited abilities. As an antidote to this lengthy and methodical process, I want to write something on the fly, where I sit down and hammer away at the keyboard with only a very vague idea of where I might be going. Those who adopt a more organised approach to NaNoWriMo, will have spent October plotting their novel...

image generated by Craiyon Below is a response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 19th June 2022 The comment has since been deleted from the website. This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented under the terms of fair use. ~ Why do we eat pudding last? As a young girl, my grandmother, along with her mother and father, her four brothers, a St Bernard who monopolised the hearth during the winter, and an African grey parrot named Joey, all occupied a cramped bungalow, that was situated towards the end of an unmade road, in Thundersley. The road remained unpaved until the late 1990s, by which time the house had long been demolished, and many of its former occupants had been interred in the terraced churchyard at St Mary's, a couple of residential streets away. Periodically, I am called upon by the church to attend to family gravestones that have...

image generated by Craiyon This film review first appeared on Letterboxd. It contains spoilers for 'Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead' and 'Dead Snow'. These films are not for the faint of heart, and neither is this review. ~ Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead A film that bills itself as “the sequel you did Nazi coming” is not setting itself up as a poignant study of life under one of the most evil regimes of the 20th century. The dregs of the Third Reich may figure prominently in 'Dead Snow 2', but this film is not 'Schindler's List', or even 'The Sound of Music'. Its predecessor, which goose-stepped into theatres under the tag-line “Ein! Zwei! Die!” expanded the list of vengeful entities and criminal organisations that you should never steal gold from (generally speaking, leprechauns and the mob) to include Nazi zombies. Beginning as a fairly standard run through the well-mauled tropes of the monster movie subgenre, 'Dead Snow' followed the misfortune...

image generated by Craiyon This is my response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 23th October, 2022. I am replying here as The Guardian is apparently no longer happy to host my comments on their site. This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented here under the terms of fair use. ~ What’s the shortest joke? What’s the smallest ratio of words to laughter possible? When lining up candidates for the shortest joke, one might well conclude that the answer lies within the realm of slapstick. In the words of Robin Dracup: “There are few things in life that are funnier than a man wearing a top hat walking face-first into a lamp post, evoking a dull chime that broadcasts the shame of his self-inflicted fall from the arms of victory.” The variations upon this common theme are endless: In the aftermath of a prokaryotes infestation that I picked up while in ...

image generated by Craiyon I wrote two responses to this query, both very different. I don't know why. Boredom, perhaps. ~ How much does it cost to change the British monarch? The minor bell-tower protruding like a chimney stack, from the south-eastern corner of the church of St Lidwina's, chimes the half-hour past noon. In response, the Royal Mint dutifully exhales a torrent of lunchtime workers through the embedded architecture of its main entrance – a former railway arch connecting to the bowed semi-ribs of the archways that once stood their ground on either side, before they were partially demolished and absorbed into the newer building. In that strange way in which the Capital will periodically reinvent itself, what was once a conduit for incoming and outgoing rail freight is now a pedestrianised gateway for the base coin of that wealth. Many of the workers choose to settle, like a flock of London pigeons, on a nearby triangular road island with rounded corners. A few yea...

image generated by Craiyon This is my response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 26th June, 2022. The Guardian is apparently no longer happy to host my comments on their site. I am replying here instead because it is too good a writing exercise to give up: How quickly can you go from a prompt, a blank mind, and a blank page to a finished piece? And how good can you make it? This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented here under the terms of fair use. ~ This piece was written prior to the death of Queen Elizabeth II How much does it cost to change the British monarch? In July, 1964, Ronald Wren found himself deposed from what he had regarded as a secure position within the civil service, following the internal restructuring of his department. “'Curtailment' is how they referred to it,” he recalls. As a man in his mid-40s, whose work expe...

image generated by Craiyon This review first appeared on Goodreads ~ Brett Anderson mentions very early on in his selective autobiography that the last thing he wanted to write was “the usual 'coke and gold discs' memoir.” In keeping with his decision, this account of his formative years cuts off deliberately at the point where his band, Suede, sign their record deal with Saul Galpern's Nude label. His chronicle of a rock star in waiting stakes out unpromising territory in what is frequently the most turgid part of any musician's biography – the bit at the beginning where you get to learn something of their family background, prior to the arrival of the drugs and groupies. Fortunately, Anderson is good enough of a writer to breathe life into his early childhood and adolescence, lightly sketching the influences that would mould him into the frontman of Suede: A band that rose to prominence during the early 1990s, whose shop-soiled grandeur wobbled precariously between th...

image generated by Craiyon This is my response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 16th October, 2022. The Guardian is apparently no longer happy to host my comments on their site. I am replying here instead because it is too good a writing exercise to give up: How quickly can you go from a prompt, a blank mind, and a blank page to a finished piece? And how good can you make it? This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented here under the terms of fair use. ~ I can vividly recall a row of plush toys pressed tightly together across the length of the avocado-coloured dashboard. They formed a low, multicoloured skyline against the windscreen of the camper. There was an elephant sitting upright. A tiny flag attached to one of its front legs read: “I've been to Whipsnade Zoo.” When I tried to remove it, the line of toys at first bowed outward, then ...

image generated by Craiyon Below is a response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on the 3rd July, 2022. The comment has since been deleted from the website. This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented under the terms of fair use.   ~ My Christmas present from Ethel Luff (a mug bearing the image of a kitten entangled it's own unravelled DNA code) arrived garnished with a section of Olympic-grade gymnastic ribbon. “I'm retiring” she announced, when we spoke in person a couple of months later, though she used a stronger turn of phrase. “Well, I retired over two decades ago, but now, if anyone asks me for a demonstration, I can say with all honesty that I no longer have the equipment. No more pushing the settees up against the wall and prancing around on the shagpile, with all my bits flopping about, for the benefit of the magpie-eyed Hampstea...

image generated by Craiyon This review was originally posted on Letterboxd ~ There is a scene in Susanna Nicchiarelli's dramatization of the final years of Christa Päffgen (better known by her stage name - Nico) when the singer is being interviewed on the radio. The DJ mentions the enormous portable cassette recorder, that she carries around with her in an oversized shoulder bag, and enquires whether she is looking for a specific sound. Nico replies that she searching for a sound that she heard as a child, carried to her on the wind: The sound of Berlin being bombed by the allies. “It was a sound that wasn't really a sound,” she reminisces. “It was, many things at the same time. It was... It was the sound of defeat.” By the late 1980s, Nico was 20 years past her prime. A former model and actress. In the early 1960s, she had embarked upon a career as a singer, despite a perforated eardrum that, combined with her heavy German accent, sometimes resulted in her vocal performances s...

image generated by Craiyon This is my response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 9th October, 2022. The Guardian is apparently no longer happy to host my comments on their site. I am replying here instead because it is too good a writing exercise to give up: How quickly can you go from a prompt, a blank mind, and a blank page to a finished piece? And how good can you make it? This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented here under the terms of fair use. ~ How many people does the average person talk to during their lifetime? A few years ago I received a confusing and distressing email from Banu Javadi, who I had once worked with, behind the counter of a Greenwich coffee shop, while she was studying for an economics degree in London. I recall that we got on fairly well. I remember her chiefly for bringing her own carbon paper to work. We used it ...