Lord Samper's Library

As a child, I used to hate going back to school, after the summer holidays, because… Well, it’s obvious, I was a kid and I hated school. Those days are long behind me now, thank goodness, but as a parent, I still hate it when school starts up after the summer. Nothing to do with the work etc, more a case of September & October being the months where I come down with at least one heavy cold that one of my daughters has brought home, from school, with them. My youngest daughter was the responsible party this time and so, pretty much all of yesterday was spent in the comfy chair, drinking Lemsips and generally feeling sorry for myself. Luckily for me, I’m already on sick leave ;o) I’m working my way through ‘The End and the Death: Volume 1’ and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that I really need to be on top of my game to stand any chance with this book. I’ll tell you more about that when I finally post my thoughts; for now, lets just say that I wasn’t on top of my game yesterd...

  Page Count: 164 Pages I wouldn’t recognise the people behind Valancourt Books if I bumped into them in the street but I still owe them a hell of a lot. There’s a lot of horror from the seventies and eighties that I never saw (being too young to read for a chunk of it) and a whole load, before then, that I wasn’t aware of at all. Thanks to Valancourt Books, I’ve been able to revisit some of it without having to trawl through second-hand bookshops (not exactly a chore but you never know what, if anything you’ll find) or resign myself to being fleeced on eBay. Which brings me round to Robert Bloch. I’ve read a couple of Bloch’s short stories (and I posted about them, Here & Here ) but even though I’ve always meant to read more, I’ve never really known where to start. Thanks (again) to Valancourt Books, I got to do just that with Robert Bloch’s collection, ‘Midnight Pleasures’. And… Midnight Dreams (1987) collects some of Robert Bloch's best tales from later in his career, feat...

  It feels like a long old while since I’ve watched any ‘Classic Doctor Who’ for the blog; ok, July , this year just feels like it has gone on for as twice as long as normal… I was at a bit of a loose end, the other day, and figured it was time to do something about that. Scrolling through the ‘Doctor Who’ episodes on Prime Video, I thought that, instead of revisiting an old favourite, I’d take a chance on a serial that I watched back in the day but could barely remember the other day. So that is just what I did :o) And… The Doctor is enjoying the sun on a holiday island, until things get hotter than he bargained for... Rescued from the sea by Turlough, Peri Brown, brings a mysterious object to the TARDIS that her archaeologist step-father has found in a sunken wreck. When the Doctor’s robot friend Kamelion reacts to the object unexpectedly, it has bewildering consequences for the TARDIS crew. For Kamelion sends the Doctor and his friends to Sarn, a terrifyingly beautiful planet o...