yesterday was the last episode of murder must advertise - i knew who did it and how it was done throughout the series - but i had forgotten how it ended, with talboy taking the "public school" way out. i'd been enjoying the dian de momerie caper (which i had so disliked in the book) and sniggering at the advertising slogans - bigger and butter! you'd bet it's butter! (hm hm!) so it was quite horrible when i remembered too late what was to happen - and to hear him walk out of peter's flat and not look back and wait to be run over by the waiting murderer. sooner shoot yourself, than to do it this way! quite the most horrible ending of any of the sayers books. the nine tailors is on now - the exact oppositie situation - i remember the terrifying end - as if the wild bells of heaven had rung out - as in the hodgson poem - but i don't remember the last thing about the case.

the madness of bells always remind me of one of my favourite robert aickman stories, ringing the changes. if you do not know the story you should most certainly read it.

it made a great impression on me as a child and while i remember much about it there are two things especially that keep coming back to me through the years. one was from the beginning of the story, the couple in the train going away for their honeymoon, and the one thing that is clearly imprinted in my mind was that the husband is 36 years older than his wife. the second thing i remember was that his wife was "curiously helpless in the dark", something i understand very well. this is in the middle of the story, where he turns out the lights and she has to wait for him to come to help her to bed. i remember the mysterious colonel who saves the young wife, the stench of the sea, the endless bells: "they're ringing to wake the dead", the insistence by everyone that they had come in the wrong season, the wild dance of the awakened dead, the man clinging to his struggling young wife, the awful hotel, and the wife stepping in something that the author never identifies but is suggestive of slime, i always think, in the way in the ancient mariner the sea was a slimy one, and a thousand slimy things lived on.