Watch…

Army of Crime (2009)  French film about the Resistance. Directed and co-scripted by Robert Guédiguian,  son of a German mother and an Armenian father,  who is best known for his leftwing movies about working-class life in the Marseilles area.  He wanted to make this  film because he was concerned about the rise of the right in France and  wanted to to remind French people that  many members of the  Resistance were outsiders,  including refugees from the Spanish Civil War, Hungary, Poland, Armenia and Italy. It’s a shocking and horrifying film, truthful about the reality of war, which poses the question none of us really want to think about; what would you do if you lived in an occupied country?

Listen…

I Could Read the Sky…(2000) ..the  sound track to the lives of the Irish in Britain. A mixture of sounds and voices….anonymous and familiar…telling the story of moving from rural Ireland to urban Britain.

Read…

I Could Read the Sky by  Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke (1998)  to quote the preface “I dare not go deeply into this book, for if I did, I would stay with it forever and I wouldn’t return.”

The Anatomy of a Moment by Javier Cercas. Spain, not the sun, sea and sex version,  but all you need to know about the history of a country that in the last forty years has gone from a dictatorship to a modern democracy. Nothing is that simple, of course. It begins with an attempted coup in 1981 and ends with Javier examining his relationship with his father. Secrets and lies..

Follow…

Blog of the week –Going Postal..occasional thoughts from an overworked postie. One of the few blogs that have been used to record the life of a working class person. Roy is a postal worker  and details the destruction of one of the few national institutions left; the Royal Mail. Postal workers used to have  good jobs, offering decent pay, a unionised workforce and a pension. Roy explains how this has been swept away and  how its now almost impossible to get a permanent job with the increased casualization of the workforce and an enforced privatisation policy from both Labour and the ConDem government.