Tuesday, February 24, 2009

From Russia With Love

Last night I was watching From Russia With Love, the 1963 James Bond film, based on the novel by Ian Fleming. It was the second James Bond film, and involved James Bond (played by Sean Connery) on an assignment to meet a beautiful Russian defector (Daniela Bianchi) who has access to a top secret Soviet coding device. However the whole operation is in fact a trap by the deadly spy outfit SPECTRE in order to assassinate James Bond. It's often regarded as one of the best of all the James Bond films, and sticks closely to the plot of the original novel.

Later on this evening I was listening to the first part of a radio play called The Woman in Black, a ghost story based on a 1983 novel by Susan Hill, telling the story of a young solicitor who goes to a small English town to oversee the estate of a recently deceased client of his firm, but is distracted by the appearance of a mysterious woman dressed in black. It was followed by a reading of the 1908 story Ancient Sorceries by Algernon Blackwood, which tells the story of a shy English clerk on holiday in France who stops off at a small strange village and is struck by how strongly, in both appearance and behaviour, the town's residents resemble cats. They were both pretty good and pretty effective for late night.

Getting into work this morning there was a notice on the office intranet that there would be a very special announcement on the plasma screen TVs on the landings and the canteen, that everyone in the office would have to attend to, so there was a huge crush on the landings to hear the announcement, but no-one knew how to work the volume control on the TVs and so they couldn't hear it. So we had to troop down to the canteen, but were kept waiting for half an hour because there were too many people trying to get in. When we finally got to see it, the announcement was cut off part way through, and so we had to read the transcript on the intranet, and basically it was just that everything was carrying on as normal. Absolutely nothing that couldn't have been put in the monthly team briefings. The only kind of news was that the accomodation review had been cancelled again, for about the fourth time in the past six years. A lot of people were really scared when they heard that there was going to be an announcement, because there hasn't been much work coming in over the past few months, but everyone was really annoyed by all the mess surrounding it all.

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