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84 Charing Cross Road
Miss Fiske would have loved this movie. And I would have loved seeing it with her, through her eyes. I almost even loved it myself, because “84 Charing Cross Road” is a movie made for people who love London and books. The only problem is that the heroine doesn’t get to London until it’s too late, and nobody ever seems to read in this movie.
The film is based on a hit London and New York play, which was based on a best-selling book. Given the thin and unlikely subject matter, that already is a series of miracles. And yet there are people who are pushovers for this material. I should know. I read the book and I saw the play and now I am reviewing the movie, and I still don’t think the basic idea is sound.
The story begins in the years right after World War II, when London was still gripped by food rationing and pocked by bomb craters.
A New York woman (Anne Bancroft), who loves books but cannot afford expensive ones, sees an ad in the Saturday Review for a London bookstore. She sends them her want list and is soon delighted to receive a package of used books – good readable editions, cheap. She begins a correspondence with the bookseller (Anthony Hopkins), and thus commences a relationship that lasts for years without the two people ever meeting each other.
There is not a lot of drama in this story. Most of the action takes place in the post office. The director, David Jones, does what he can. His previous film was Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” which was a love story told backward, beginning with the unhappy conclusion and ending with the lovers’ first kiss. Now he has a love story in which the lovers do not meet. What can he look forward to next: autoeroticism? Bancroft sends care packages of ham to postwar England. Hopkins sends precious editions of Boswell, Chesterton and Cardinal Newman (“Dear John Henry,” Bancroft calls him). Bancroft leads a lonely life in a New York apartment. Hopkins occupies a silent marriage in a London bedroom suburb. After many years, Hopkins dies and then Bancroft finally goes to London and visits the now-empty bookstore.
Sigh. Miss Fiske, who you may remember from the first paragraph of this review, was the librarian at the Urbana Free Library when I was growing up. She instilled such a love of books in me that I still search used bookstore for the adventures of the Melody Family, by Elizabeth Enright; those were the first “real books” I read. Miss Fiske ran the book club and the Saturday morning puppet shows and the book fairs and the story readings. She never had to talk to me about the love of books because she simply exuded it and I absorbed it.
She would have loved this movie. Sitting next to her, I suspect, I would have loved it, too. But Miss Fiske is gone now, and I found it pretty slow-going on my own. And for that matter, Miss Fiske had a sharp critical intelligence, and I suspect that after seeing this movie she would have nodded and said she enjoyed it, but then she might have added, “Why didn’t that silly woman get on the boat and go to London 10 years sooner and save herself all that postage?”
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The powerhouse typhoon is the equivalent of a very strong Category 4 hurricane as it approaches the northernmost island of the Philippines before turning to the north, continuing its damaging path.
Violent Typhoon Mawar, which pounded Guam with destructive winds and flooding downpours earlier this week, is continuing to churn west across the Pacific Ocean and will impact more landmasses in the western Pacific and eastern Asia next week, according to AccuWeather forecasters.
Despite already achieving the status of strongest tropical cyclone on the planet so far this year, Mawar may strengthen further and then aim for portions of the Philippines, Japan and Taiwan beginning Sunday, with more flooding rainfall and strong winds expected.
Super Typhoon Mawar is seen on AccuWeather Enhanced RealVue™ satellite May 27, 2023.
As of Saturday afternoon, local time, Mawar was a powerful typhoon centered several hundred miles to the west-northwest of Guam, packing winds equivalent to that of a strong Category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale (maximum sustained winds of 130-156 mph, or 209-251 km/h).
According to the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA), the governing body which monitors and tracks tropical cyclones in this portion of the western Pacific tropical basin, the ‘violent’ designation is given to typhoons with maximum sustained winds of at least 121 mph (194 km/h).
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“Mawar is forecast to maintain intensity, or even strengthen slightly, as it continues to track westward across the Philippine Sea into this weekend,” said AccuWeather Lead International Forecaster Jason Nicholls.
The Philippine Sea is a marginal sea located within the western Pacific Ocean, bounded by the Philippines to the west and the Mariana Trench to the east.
The AccuWeather EyePath® forecast calls for Mawar to peak at the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane (maximum sustained winds of at least 157 mph, or 252 km/h). After that, the storm will maintain or lose some wind intensity as it begins to impact land again.
“The typhoon is expected to bring heavy rain and strong winds to northern Luzon in the Philippines from later Sunday through Tuesday, local time,” said Nicholls.
Much like what happened in Guam earlier this week, the eye of the typhoon is expected to remain to the north of Luzon when it approaches early next week. However, there will still be impacts, and AccuWeather meteorologists warn that the storm is likely to be the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane around then.
“The amount of rain that falls and the strength of the wind in the Philippines will depend on how close the storm gets before making an expected turn to the north,” added Nicholls. Despite that uncertainty, even the outer rain bands of a tropical system like Mawar can bring flooding downpours and damaging wind gusts.
As Mawar approaches the Philippines, the country’s weather bureau, the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA), took over from the JMA in monitoring the typhoon as of early Saturday morning, local time. At that point, the typhoon gained the designation of ‘Betty’ in the Philippines.
In this photo provided by the U.S. Coast Guard, downed tree branches litter a neighborhood in Yona, Guam, Thursday, May 25, 2023, after Typhoon Mawar passed over the island. The powerful typhoon smashed the U.S. territory of Guam and continued lashing the Pacific island with high winds and heavy rain Thursday, knocking down trees, walls and power lines and creating a powerful storm surge that threatened to wash out low-lying areas. (Chief Warrant Officer Adam Brown/U.S. Coast Guard via AP)
Ahead of the expected impacts this weekend, officials in the Philippines are preparing. Sea trips around the archipelago nation are being suspended, an official with the Philippine Ports Authority told CNN. Additionally, operators of smaller boats are being warned against fishing and sailing in the waters off the coast.
By next week, after Mawar impacts the Philippines, AccuWeather forecasters expect the typhoon to take aim at portions of Japan and Taiwan as it begins to slow in forward speed.
“Despite an expected loss in wind intensity as the typhoon churns to the north, Japan’s Ryukyu Islands and eastern Taiwan could also endure impacts during the middle and latter portion of the week,” said Nicholls. “Eventually, the southern Japan mainland could endure impacts by next weekend.”
Mawar has already caused substantial damage
Mawar has already carved a powerful and destructive path since it was first designated as a tropical system over the open waters of the Pacific back on May 19. Just two days later, it became the first typhoon of the 2023 season and the strongest storm the planet has seen so far this year less than a week later.
Although typhoons regularly impact Guam, Mawar has since achieved a strength, both in wind intensity and minimum central pressure, not seen in the tropical basin as a whole since deadly Typhoon Surigae in 2021 or in that specific part of the basin near Guam since Typhoon Damrey in 2000.
When it impacted Guam on Wednesday, the typhoon unleashed strong winds of over 140 mph (225 km/h) snapped trees, ripped roofs off of buildings and brought more than 2 feet of rain in just hours.
“We’re looking out our door and what used to be a jungle looks like toothpicks, like a scene from the movie ‘Twister,’ with trees just thrashed apart,” Landon Aydlett, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Guam, told The Associated Press.
While damage and power outages were widespread, the AP reported that there were no fatalities and only minor injuries as Mawar moved through.
President Biden approved a disaster declaration for the island late Thursday, which will allow federal funding to flow to the United States territory to aid in the recovery effort in the coming days and months.
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The country’s defence ministry says Russian ‘intelligence-gathering’ aircraft spotted near its coasts along the Pacific Ocean and Sea of Japan.
Japan scrambled fighter jets after spotting Russian “intelligence-gathering” aircraft off its coasts along the Pacific Ocean and Sea of Japan on Thursday, the country’s defence ministry has said.
One Russian aircraft travelled from Japan’s north down along part of its west coast, while the other took a similar route along the opposite coast and returned the same way, the Joint Staff office run under the defence ministry said in a brief statement.
“In response, fighters of the Air Self-Defence Force’s Northern Air Force and other units were scrambled,” it added.
There was no further information on the incident, which comes days after Japan hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the summit of Group of Seven (G7) – a grouping of rich nations – in Hiroshima city.
Japan has joined Western allies in sanctioning Moscow over its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and has warned of the threat posed by Russia.
Its latest security document, which once called for enhanced ties and cooperation with Russia, now warns that Moscow’s military posturing in Asia and cooperation with China are “a strong security concern”.
Last May, Chinese and Russian military jets carried out joint flights near Japan immediately after a meeting of the United States-led Quad grouping in Tokyo. India and Australia are other members of Quad.
And more recently, Moscow has carried out military exercises, including test-firing missiles, in the Sea of Japan.
Russia considers Japan to be a “hostile” country – a designation it shares with all European Union countries, the US and its allies, including the United Kingdom and Australia.
Tokyo had complex relations with Moscow before the invasion of Ukraine in February, and the two sides have yet to sign a post-World War II peace treaty.
Attempts to do so have been hampered by a long-running dispute over islands controlled by Russia, which calls them the Kurils.
France has banned domestic short-haul flights where train alternatives exist, in a bid to cut carbon emissions.
The law came into force two years after lawmakers had voted to end routes where the same journey could be made by train in under two-and-a-half hours.
The ban all but rules out air travel between Paris and cities including Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux, while connecting flights are unaffected.
Critics have described the latest measures as “symbolic bans”.
Laurent Donceel, interim head of industry group Airlines for Europe (A4E), told the AFP news agency that “banning these trips will only have minimal effects” on CO2 output.
He added that governments should instead support “real and significant solutions” to the issue.
Airlines around the world have been severely hit by the coronavirus pandemic, with website Flightradar24 reporting that the number of flights last year was down almost 42% from 2019.
The French government had faced calls to introduce even stricter rules.
France’s Citizens’ Convention on Climate, which was created by President Emmanuel Macron in 2019 and included 150 members of the public, had proposed scrapping plane journeys where train journeys of under four hours existed.
But this was reduced to two-and-a-half hours after objections from some regions, as well as the airline Air France-KLM.
French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir had earlier called on lawmakers to retain the four-hour limit.
“On average, the plane emits 77 times more CO2 per passenger than the train on these routes, even though the train is cheaper and the time lost is limited to 40 minutes,” it said.
It also called for “safeguards that [French national railway] SNCF will not seize the opportunity to artificially inflate its prices or degrade the quality of rail service”.
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