Some Really Bad News, and some recent reading

 So the bad news is that our insurance company told us earlier this week that we weren't covered for losing our holiday due to a passport lost or stolen in the hours before leaving on the trip and it has taken me some while to get over this blow. We are registering a complaint; they are obviously obliged to tell you that you can do this although they also tell you it is unlikely to do you any good. I have now passed over dealing with this to the OH, partly because he is better than me at this stuff and partly because when all is said and done it's his fault. I don't suppose we will actually be able to screw any money out of the Scrooge McDuck Corporation that is NFU Mutual, but it gives me some satisfaction to reflect that we are at least inconveniencing them by not just going away and whimpering in a corner about their meanness. 

And now to some books. I have read some dark stuff lately. This was partly to do with the Bloody Scotland book club which is a Facebook based, three book, quarterly thing which sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. I've read two of the three books for the June one; The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves and an Icelandic thing called The Darkness by someone called Ragnor Jonasson. I do not recommend The Darkness unless you are looking for an entry way into a deep depression. It was bleak squared. The Crow Trap I had read before but as with all of Ann Cleeves books I can read them over and over because I never remember who did what to whom or why. I mean, I wouldn't have re-read this if hadn't been for the prompt of the book club but at least I didn't; spend half my team reading it thinking that yes I knew where this was going. The plot is quite good actually, she's good at plot, but it can't be denied this is one author who never bothers lightening her tale with even a glimmer of humour. Her characters are all totally without any sense of it. The third Bloody Scotland book is The Waiter by Ajay Choudhry and I have that on request from the library. Whether it will turn up before the discussion I don't know. So far, no show. 

On the way back from St Pancras I started a new Karin Slaughter  which I bought to read on the miserable trip back from London to Glasgow. Even for Karin Slaughter it was really dark. She lives in a world completely dominated by the evil of men and what they do to women and I thought here she slipped over into the realms of the incredible.  Even while realising that she probably hasn't and that what she describes is probably only too likely. Her redeeming features are  that she has good people, even some good men, who try their best to hold the line against the darkness of the world, and that many of her recurring characters are people who have survived terrible things and gone onto become beacons of hope to others. Even so, it will be a while before I broach another; too many too close together would not be a Good Thing. 

So after all that when I next went to the library  I ignored the fiction shelves, because I really couldn't face another slew of misery and murder and took myself off instead to the Large Books Art and Craft shelves where I picked up some stuff based mainly on how colourful the pictures were and how life affirming the contents were likely to be. The first two that I looked at were these

Only Us by Stuart Dunn which is a series of portraits of people taken by Dunn, a professinal photographer and filmographer all around the world and Arne and Carlos Twenty Five Years of Favourite Knits (or some other such celebratory title). These did do something to restore my equilibrium. I didn't see anything I wanted to knit in the Arne and Carlos book although if I were younger I might have thought that knitting baubles for my Christmas Tree was a good use of my time, and the portraits in Dunn's book were from a limited number of places - obviously those where he had made documentaries and had taken still shots as well as film. But neither  required anything from me other than to look and admire and drown myself in colour and texture  and that was restorative.