03:54 BS 8.1 Higher than I’d like but had a snack without bolus before going to bed as BS was only 4.7: overdid the snack; rather that than go low while sleeping & wake up with a high & hypo hangover headache when my liver overreacts & dumps glucose like mad! Had that before & it’s ROUGH to wake like that!
😱
Almost there on the normal day front & already had breakfast of 2 cups of tea, 1 sandwich & 1 pot of yoghurt!
😛
A Very Good Morning to you all & have a Wonderful Day!
😉
It’s a new month money wise, well every 4 weeks, & I’ve read the last 2 full Ian Fleming James Bond as the other two are short stories not narrated by the all star cast of 2012: caved in a little early buying 4 & read 3 the last few days; You Only Live Twice, The Man with the Golden Gun &, because the first chapter was narrated at the end of the Hugh Bonnaville recording of Goldfinger, Anthony Horrowitz Trigger Mortis & Forever And A Day!
You Only Live Twice was nothing like the film at all, apart from the names of characters, & is actually a very fascinating account of Bond training & masquerading as Japanese ninja assassin! He’s fully indoctrinated into the Japanese culture of ritual suicide in the Japanese psyche as Blowfeld has created a “Garden of Death” on an island that attracted loads of Japanese to kill themselves: it’s where the idea for the garden of poisons comes from in the last James Bond film No Time To Die; the British secret service needs something from Japan & they want that Garden of Death destroyed so, Bond’s recruited to do so! I enjoyed it a lot & the Japanese culture etc. was fascinating to read about!
😛
The Man with the Golden Gun was the very last book written by Ian Fleming & he was already ill while writing it so, he wasn’t happy with it & wanted to rewrite it the following year: he wrote on his annual leave each year in Jamaica ; he died before he could polish it up to his standards & the publisher published it posthumously! It’s the weakest book as a result BUT, it’s still Ian Fleming & very good: just not quite as richly detailed as his others!
🙂
Anthony Horowitz is the latest writer appointed by the Ian Fleming estate to write James Bond in 2014 after the family found old manuscripts of short stories written for a tv series he was talking to producers about before the films were made & the success of made redundant. One of the short stories was about the world of Grand Prix racing & Anthony Horrowitz used it to write Trigger Mortis published in 2015: around 500 words in total from the first half of the book were actually written by Ian Fleming; he just fleshed it out a bit more to expand the story & those words helped him to write in Fleming’s style. I enjoyed it a lot & fits in very well with the Fleming Bond books!
😛
There was one thing that happened after I finished it, just before going to bed, that’s surprised me!
😱 In the 2nd half of the book the villain plans to blow up the centre of Manhattan & bring down the Empire State Building because of it’s iconic global statement of power & I thought surely The World Trade Centre was THAT much more so? Then, realised that in 1957, the year the book is placed, it wasn’t built yet & must have been after Ian Fleming’s time! So, I googled it after breakfast to find out when it was built? From Wikipedia I found out it was opened in 1973 & of course 9/11 etc. was in the entry! I, like everyone else, was horrified at the time with the tv news coverage & it had gradually faded from the forefront of consciousness but, since I’ve never really read newspapers, I watch tv news, I’d never read the statistics in written text before! Written text can be a cold, hard, unforgiving & stark medium: none more so than 9/11’s statistics of the loss of life; it hit me like a ton of bricks & I was brought back to that horror I felt at the time & was sobbing & crying early this morning!
It was over 20 years ago but, it’s still resonating & affected me today especially with the war going on in Ukraine!
