The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

Last night I listened to the second part of Guards! Guards!, based on the Terry Pratchett book, and the second and concluding part of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, which was a really good reading of the story.

Today I was up pretty sharp and went out to get my groceries for the week. After I had put them away in the fridge and taken out my rubbish I set off again to meet my mum in the city centre. We were there to get my Ridacard bus pass transferred to Direct Debit payment, but were told to wait until the card had actually expired. Also it turned out that the initial cost of transferring to Direct Debit was more than we had expected. So we had a look around the shops at the Tvs on sale, before heading over to the opticians for an eye test. It was just a check-up, like I have every two years. It turned out that my eyes were fine and there was no change to my glasses. After that we went along to Pizza Express for some lunch. I had a Diavolo pizza (a pizza topped with tomato, cheese, pepperoni, spicy beef, green peppers, jalapeno peppers and some tabasco sauce) it was really nice. After the meal we went our seperate ways and I bought the game of Grand Theft Auto IV for my Playstation 3 in the sales.

This afternoon I finished reading the novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carre. The book was published in 1963 and tells the story of Alec Leamas, a British secret agent in Germany during the Cold War, who has been running a spy network in communist East Germany. However, his spies are being killed off and, with his network completely destroyed, Leamas returns to Britain in disgrace. Broken, burnt-out, cynical and bitter, all Leamas wants is to leave the world of espionage and spying (in spy terms to "come in from the cold") until he is offered one last mission to set a trap to destroy the sadistic spymaster who slaughtered his network. However before long Leamas discovers that he is a pawn in a much crueler game. It was the third le Carre book to be published, but this was the one that made his name. A million miles away from the glamorous world of spies such as James Bond, this relentlessly downbeat book depicts a brutal, morally ambiguous world filled with casual violence, with very little, if anything, distinguishing the "good" from the "bad". Well worth reading.