Puppy, wild daisies and The Breaking of Eggs.

The Breaking of Eggs by Jim Powell
Separated from his family as a child when the Nazis invaded Poland, Feliks has spent his life producing a travel guide to Iron Curtain countries for Western readers. However, following the collapse of Communism in 1989 and the imminent retirement of his long-term publisher, Feliks finds himself tipped into a maelstrom which he cannot avoid. As he journeys for the first time to America to sell his travel guide there, Feliks is reunited with his half-brother, Woodrow, who no longer considers himself a Pole but rather an American and nothing more. Feeling his own alien status ever more acutely, Feliks has a growing desire to discover the fate of others from his past. Embarking on a journey that takes him back to his Polish hometown, to a long-lost love and to the bewildering landscape of a newly reunified Germany, Feliks is forced to confront the truth about his family's and his own past and to question everything he once believed.  I chose this novel at random in Waterstones (B3GOF) because I thought it was set in Paris but Paris hardly comes into it all.  As the blurb says, it's a late life journey for the narrator, a leftist intellectual 61-year-old Pole, interested in politics rather than people, who begins to thaw as the book progresses. I learnt a good deal I had forgotten about wartime and post-war European history.  It really is an excellent novel, please read it and don't be put off by the dry-sounding protagonist and subject matter.

Films (a girly contrast)
I remember being rather disappointed by the novel The Jane Austen Book Club, so didn't expect much of the DVD but it turned out fun with interesting characters.  A good evening in for middle-aged females.
But I am struggling with the film of Eat, Pray, Love, despite Julia Roberts.

BBC WW2 Memoirs

Well, of course, I was born long after 1940 but can identify with some of the following:

"We were born before TV, penicillin, polio shots, frozen foods, Xerox, contact lenses, videos and the pill. We were before radar, credit cards, split atoms, laser beams and ballpoint pens, before dishwashers, tumble driers, electric blankets, air conditioners, drip-dry clothes…and before man walked on the moon.
"We got married first and then lived together (how quaint can you be?) We thought fast food was what you ate in Lent, a Big Mac was an oversized raincoat. We were before disposable nappies. We had never heard of FM radio, artificial hearts, word processors, or young men wearing earrings. For us time sharing meant togetherness, a chip was a piece of wood or fried potato, hardware meant nuts and bolts, and software wasn’t a word.
"In our day, cigarette smoking was fashionable, grass was mown, coke was kept in the coalhouse, a joint was a piece of meat you ate on Sundays and pot was something you cooked it in.

Those born before 1940 must be a hardy bunch when you think of the way in which the world has changed and the adjustments we have had to make. No wonder there is a generation gap today — but, by the Grace of God, we have survived!"
(Abridged from Mr. Bridge’s Tea Towel)

'WW2 People's War is an online archive of wartime memories contributed by members of the public and gathered by the BBC. The above is accredited to Joyce Gibson.

I didn't realise that penicillin wasn't in use before the war. I hadn't really given much thought as to when radar was invented either. But yes, in my youth smoking cigarettes was deeply fashionable, oh dear.