About

I hope to post about a variety of topics that interest me, including:

• Books (with a definite slant towards children and young adult literature)
• Films (with foreign films and children’s films getting a big look-in)
• Classical music
• Arts/culture events that I attend

Other occasional topics are likely to include sport, politics, with a bit of economics/finance thrown in. I also will try to post about some of my projects such as re-subtitling of films and amateur translations of European children’s novels.

But who really knows what I will come up with?

“Few, but ripe”

Carl Friedrich Gauss, arguably the greatest mathematician since Antiquity, was well known for not publishing much. His personal motto was pauca sed matura i.e. “few, but ripe” and he only published mathematics that he considered to be perfect and above criticism. Unfortunately, because he had discovered many things years or decades before his fellow mathematicians had done so, he probably held back the development of mathematics by many years.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

As for me, I have meant to start this blog for some years now. I’ve felt that I’ve had a bit to say, but the world doesn’t need another bad writer! So every time I’ve wanted to start, I felt as though I had to write a flawless post, which is the reason why I didn’t start earlier. Finally, I’ve realised that if I want to start, I will just have to get on with posting and acknowledge I’ll never write to my ideal standard. As long as I take care, I should still be able to write posts that I will be reasonably happy with.

However, time pressures, the fact that I still want to produce decent quality posts, plus I only want to post when I have something I want to say, will mean that I am unlikely to become a high volume poster. Hence, the motto “few, but ripe”.

Although sometimes, I feel that “few, but tripe” would be a more appropriate description for the quality of my posts!

Why is the blog named Someone to Write With?

When I was thinking of names for this blog, I had recently read a great young adult novel by Israeli author David Grossman called Someone to Run With. I first became aware of the book after having seen the film. Both are thoroughly enjoyable.

Anyway, my cunning and punning mind adapted this name to Someone to Write With. I suppose it describes why most of us blog – we write on the internet, hoping to connect with others of similar interests, and hence find “someone to write with”!

Also, if some people think that my posts are worth commenting on, then I will also have “someone to write with”!

Why did I choose the name Little Stranger?

The name derives from Bashu, the Little Stranger directed by Bahram Beizai, and not from the well-known novel The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. It is my favourite Iranian film, and is probably the greatest Iranian film that I have yet seen. I love the film, and the moniker seems to fit my personality. I hope to write more about the film in a future blog post.

What does my avatar represent?


One of my favourite novels is The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren. Again I hope to write about why I love this novel so much in a future blog post. The avatar is from the poster used in the theatrical production of the novel. It was a nice picture and conveyed a heroic story, and so I have used it since.