Just For Lookin' Thru

What moment would you pick as the standout moment in a weekend of adventure travel films, workshops and presentations camping and bush craft, organised by Lois Pryce and Austin Vince ? It’s a tough call. You may have been baffled by Tim Cope and Chris Hatherley’s fourteen month trip from Russia, across Serbia and Mongolia, to Beijing, enduring cold, hunger, exhaustion and frostbite. The two twenty year old guys from Australia shared a tent, their sleeping and waking hours, and the arduous journey in ‘ Off The Rails’ (2001). Maybe you were impressed by the nomadic Bakhtiari people in the 1976 film ‘ People of the Wind ,’ filmed by Anthony Howarth, making the annual migration across the Iranian mountains, leading their flock from Summer to Winter pasture.  With speaking much, without visible signs of communication or affection, the families are individually focussed on their roles: small children carry their younger siblings, lambs or puppies, colts or calves, along hazardou

According to Emma Graham Harrison and Rory Carroll’s news feature in The Guardian (2 June 2014), Bowe Bergdahl sounds like an unusual young man. Raised and home schooled in a book filled cabin, without a telephone, but with the Idaho countryside as his playground, he is described as ‘thoughtful and quiet.’ A well read thinker who joined the US army, Bergdahl is quoted in Rolling Stone as emailing home to say that he felt ashamed to be American because: “These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live. “We don’t even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armoured trucks … We make fun of them in front of their faces, and laugh at them for not understanding we are insulting them.” His father, Bob, spoke of Bowe’s apparent disillusionment prior to his capture, the exact details of whi

Tonight is the final episode of Sally Wainwright’s unmissable Happy Valley . The whole sorry mess of a kidnap instigated by a local businessman’s weak and resentful accountant has become more violent episode by episode. There have been criticisms of the shocking violence, and questions as to whether it’s necessary. It’s only necessary to the casual rapist and throat slitter Tommy Lee Royce (played by James Norton), as his method of shutting people up; if they can’t be relied upon to keep quiet they have to die. The kidnapped young woman, Ann, (played by Charlie Murphy) was roughly handled, then raped, then injected with heroin, and raped again (neither rape filmed). Not a classic weeping victim, her character is refreshingly tough; she resisted, yelled and struggled and, when discovered in the cellar by Sgt. Cawood, wrestled herself free, wrenched some dumbbells from the floor and swung them at her captor, dealing him a decisive blow. The plucky lass dragged and heaved the badly

Paulina will be awarded her doctorate in July. In the UK from Poland for a holiday in Somerset, she’s bored sitting about in her family’s home so she’s signed up with an agency for some temporary work. I met her and Nora before a charity function where I’m waiting to interview some of the guests. Paulina’s PhD is in chemical engineering and she tells me there will be work for her, in some country, but maybe not in Poland where her fiancé is living. She is rueful, “Germany perhaps, but then I won’t see him.” She is resigned to living where she finds work, and missing her loved ones. A guy dressed in kitchen wear comes out and says, “There are Russian jets in our air space, and they’ve got ships in our territorial waters, off Scotland .. and they won’t leave." When he gets no response from this cheery piece of news, he disappears back through the swing doors. The barmaid leans forward and yells into the room, to no-one in particular, “We’re going to war, and I don’t give a sh