All posts filed under: Reviews

Posting from abroad

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Okay, we did it again! Got on a plane with minimal fuss(and preparation) and went to see Papou and Giagia in Greece. There are adjacent reasons to the visit but I’ll share when there will be something to share. For now, we are here, doing paperwork by day and passionately debating(as concerns hubby)/begrudgingly avoiding(as concerns me) politics at night. And eating LOADS in between. Everything that’s fresh, everything that’s tasty, everything that’s smelling nice finds its way into our mouths.Both hubby and I were raised in warm countries where the fruit and veggies you eat come no further than 20 kilometers away and are always ripe and juicy and ready to be eaten. We have missed that more than we want to admit even to ourselves and we are making up for it now and teaching our daughter to do the same. Anyway, I wanted to do another thing in my post today. I have been nominated for the  ‘Versatile Blogger Award’ (http://versatilebloggeraward.wordpress.com/) and I would like to return the favour, thanks Iva and nominate …

On illness and encouragement

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http://youtu.be/Lg9naUc9BUs

Okay, I was hoping to go and see the Titanic Quarters last weekend but the opportunity never materialised. Instead I was back to nursing sick people in our home. This time it was my hubby. He came down, fast and furious, with the same throat infection Ems had at Easter. And I was not a happy bunny!!

It’s not the nursing that got to me, it’s never the nursing in itself, it was the constant moaning: one toddler on the mend, making demands for my exclusive attention; one sick hubby, feeling sorry for himself and sniffling miserably around the house.That and the ISOLATION. You have to remember I had been in the house ALL Easter week with a feverish child (she was given antibiotic that Friday but she was still weak on Easter Sunday) and I missed hubby’s birthday party on Easter Saturday and the Easter service. Both events had been much anticipated but eluded me at the last moment. I just couldn’t bring myself to drag a wretched toddler out of the house just because I needed to see friends and take part in the Easter celebrations.

So all that kept building up over two weeks. And it did get to me this Sunday past. So as the worthy daughter of a former nurse, I ordered hubby to see the out of hours doctor and stop moping about and then I had an emotional shut down. I just didn’t have anything else to give. I downloaded the second book in The Hunger Games trilogy and I finished it in a day and a half. That sort of focused my mind on something else. Today I came upon this other book, “Mother Letters”, that’s just been released. “Share the mess and the glory”, such an appropriate logo for parenthood. It promises encouragement and support, a silent companion for mothers everywhere. Check it out, I sure will, my only regret is that I haven’t found it on Sunday night. It might have filled my emotional tanks sooner…

Movie Review: Rabbit Hole

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It’s established: Saturday nights are movie nights in our house! Last Saturday this movie jumped at us in the video shop. We were in a rush, toddler was amassing  chocolate star bags and Peppa Pig DVDs off the shelves at an alarming rate so we didn’t even have time to read the clippings on the back. It was enough to see Nicole Kidman was in it, we knew we couldn’t go terribly wrong.We did expect complexity of plot(which we got) but we didn’t expect a message of hope out of such a sad case. Storyline? A young couple who have it all going for themselves (big house in an affluent suburb, important jobs,the kid and the dog!), face indescribable loss when their six-year-old boy is hit and killed by a car in front of the house. The movie observes the aftermath of the tragedy and the very different  coping mechanisms the parents resort to. It’s almost a clinic observation of  techniques on “How to deal with the death of a loved one.” The only thing …

Movie Review: Doubt

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Doubt… We watched the movie last Saturday and it kept us awake into the small hours of the morning. The story line is quite flat, just like bad gossip: a superior nun,who’s also the principal of this Catholic school, suspects a newly appointed priest of inappropriate behaviour towards one of the pupils. She doesn’t have any evidence, only a few incidents brought to her attention by an eager and easily impressed young nun. But she convinces herself and everybody else involved that the priest has wronged the child somehow and makes him leave the school and the parish. The movie is on the other hand brilliant in exploring the human mind and its intricacies: it makes the viewer aware of how easily a “reality” can be created out of suspicion and self-justification.  As, indeed, nothing is explained in the end and the viewer is left battling a sea of endless possibilities and scenarios. Was the reality Sister Aloysius Beauvier constructed veritable or was it all in her head and she  blamed an innocent man? Or …

Promised Book Reviews

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A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini and Harmattan, by Gavin Weston Okay, so chronologically these are not my two most recent readings. I finished Harmattan today but I can’t remember how long it’s been since I read A Thousand Splendid Suns. These days I recall events as “before and after the move” so I am sure I read it last year before October, before we moved to this part of Northern Ireland. Similarities? Both stories take place in the Muslim world (Afghanistan for A Thousand Splendid Suns, Nigeria for Harmattan), in countries ridden by war, poverty, and death. Both novels revolve around young girls whose lives are maimed by their unfortunate circumstances: war and the Afghan society’s prejudices in Mariam’s case; illness and the Nigerian society’s inability to look after its innocents, in Haoua’s case. In both cases, the girls are left without their mothers’ tender presence and vigilant protection from a young age, to the mercy of ruthless, uncaring, selfish fathers who perceive them as offsprings, but not as in the definition “a …