Another collection, Still Further: New Poems, 2000–2019, will be published by the Uhlanga Press this year. Back to the Future: The Fall and Rise of the British Film Industry in the 1980s - An Information Briefing" (PDF).

I explained that I loved the film and I thought the choral/orchestral music worked brilliantly but it was very big and rich and I felt a score would have to emerge from it and be very pure and expressive and quite small — and that I could only hear this in my head as done by strings only. His personal life also in disarray, he gladly accepts a commission that will take him out of London for the summer, to the village of Oxgodsby in Yorkshire, where a recently deceased parishioner has left a bequest to the local church, contingent on the uncovering of a wall painting she believed was concealed beneath centuries of whitewashing. He discovered that the film had appeared as part of the National Film Theatre's Branagh season in May 1999, and that the film's American distributors, Warner Bros. Le charme du village, l'hospitalité des villageois, la beauté naturelle des lieux vont faire de cet été un moment inoubliable.Like the wall-painting, the pleasures of the story are revealed steadily and slowly, and by the end you can only stand back and admire. The jacket illustration shows Tintagel Parish Church in Cornwall, but the story is set in Yorkshire. The narrator, Tom Birkin, reflects on a summer spent in the small Yorkshire village of Oxgodby in 1920.

With the peaceful and idyllic countryside setting providing a backdrop as he slowly finds solace and meaning amidst the ruins of his past.I do know what you mean about the tendency to fade though – what remains most strongly is the atmosphere and mood, the feelings it evoked at the time of reading.

Both, outsiders from the south of England here up North where the accents are thick and the daily rhythms slower. Tom Birkin is hired to uncover a church mural believed to be under many layers of whitewash, as he slowly uncovers the mural there is a slow healing in himself from war trauma and the dissolution of a marriage.It also perfectly captures the ephemeral nature of time – the idea that our lives can turn on the tiniest of moments, the most fleeting of chances to be grasped before they are lost forever. Set in rural Yorkshire during the summer of 1920, the film follows a destitute World War I veteran employed to carry out restoration work on a Medieval mural discovered in a rural church while coming to terms with the after-effects of the war. In particular, he forms a close friendship with archaeologist James Moon, another war veteran, who, like Birkin, has been emotionally scarred. This pleasant vision is countered by his rawer and more acute account of the deep mark left on a man when a chance of happiness is glimpsed and missed and left to settle in the memory.

Book and dustjacket both in near fine condition, with typical lightening to the spine of the jacket (see image). One is a war survivor, living in a church, intent upon uncovering and restoring a historical wall-painting. As well as the bittersweet reverie of looking back across a lifetime at events and people who made up previous life.It is a war-novel set in peace-time, full of the horror and unspeakable fear of war-memories, which can’t be spoken about. Birkin gradually realizes he is dealing with a masterpiece: ‘A tremendous waterfall of colour, the blues of the apex falling, then seething into a turbulence of red; like all truly great works of art, hammering you with its whole before beguiling you with its parts . We discover, quite late on, that Moon had been found in bed with his batman, stripped of his captain’s rank and sent to a military prison, despite a record of bravery which had won him the Military Cross.