Where Have I Been?

Well nowhere, which is part of the problem. I've been home, doing the various restricted-by-virus home things that I do, not finishing much and finding little of note to say. However I suppose that having little to say is a feature of the times we live in and should be recorded as much as anything else.  

I finished a couple of puzzles. One I knew before I did it was destined for the library/charity shop pile. It's fun to do - but only  the first time really. 

and then I did a little 500 piece one that I  knew wouldn't take me long. It's a keeper.

Having finished that I have now pulled out a much older one that was designated 'do once more and give away' and I hope to start that later today.

On the knitting front I've done lots of knitting without finishing much apart from this scarf, which is for a friend's  Christmas present. It's in Rowan Kidsilk Haze which is beautifully light and soft and warm, which makes it wonderful for scarves, but it is also an absolute trial to knit with.

I also finished the Saturday Slaughters book club book, which alert readers will remember was The Memory Wood, last mentioned when I was part way through. I struggled to the end but took the decision not to attend the discussion last Saturday, as the subject matter became more and more unbearable for me. Decades ago I was at school with a girl called Lucy Partington, who disappeared without trace from the town where I lived during her final year at University, only to turn up a  very long time later buried in the cellar of Fred and Rosemary West. In those circumstances books about the kidnap and torture of teenage girls and young women do nothing but distress me and I honestly could not have discussed this book as though it were an entertaining read. When the summary of the discussion came through I marvelled at the opening line which said that the group had fallen into two distinct camps. Surely, I thought, no-one had liked the book? Turns out the two camps were those who, like me, had fought their way from cover to cover, and those who hadn't been able to face that and so had skim read it to catch the salient points of the plot. I honestly cannot imagine why anyone would find this a worthwhile or fulfilling or enjoyable read, but presumably the publisher thought there was a market for it. 

Today, I have decided, is officially the start of the Countdown to Christmas, which basically means I'm going to do one thing every day to get me towards getting everything needful done by 24th. I sort of started this yesterday by buying the OH a chocolate Advent Calendar, although I feel this doesn't really count as it entailed no effort on my part bar asking the shopkeeper to pass me one, and then getting out my wallet to pay for it. Today however I am going to wrap my nephew's Christmas presents, which will stretch me slightly more and therefore feel more like a  meaningful task completed once it's done. 

Can I tempt you to read this book ...

I've been making a start today on a good old tidy of my study and I came across a sheet of paper on which I had photocopied a page of James Meek's To Calais in Ordinary Time. I'd meant to review it when I read it, but life must have got a bit busy, or other subjects presented themselves, and it fell by the wayside apart from a passing mention of how awful I found it. 

To demonstrate its unique qualities I had photocopied this page before returning the book to the library so that I could quote from it. Here you go 

Ces ne gave no thanks, and her neb ne tokened no feeling of blitheness that she was free. She kept a hard stern cheer, and her gaze wouldn't meet Will's. It was like to she hated him'. 

390 pages all written like that. It was hard going. I might have found it worth while struggling my way through it had any of the characters in it been at all likeable but this was yet another example of a book peopled by the violent, the misogynistic and the plain and simple unpleasant. I did not want to spend time with these people and if I had to I certainly didn't want to be struggling through almost 400 pages of weird syntax and odd vocabulary to do it. 

As the title suggests the book centres on a group of people making their way to Calais from the Cotswolds. I was rather startled to realise that almost at the end of the book they hadn't even reached Bristol where they were gong to get on a ship for France. I felt like I had travelled with them to the end of the world by that stage.

It's set at the time of the Black Death, and I gave a small cheer every time one of the group succumbed to the disease. I was cheering quite a lot towards the end - although not enough, as the three most irritating characters of all were sadly still alive on page 390. 

I'm not going to deny that it's a very clever book, written by a man who is himself clever, although possibly not quite as clever as he considers himself. It is apparently about identity and gender and language and constructing the world and I'm sure it is about all these things and many more, and scholars will, in the years to come, have a field day writing about the book, its themes, its structure, its meaning etc etc. Which presumably will delight Meek, or his shade, because if ever a book was written in order to be written about, rather than read and enjoyed, this is it. 

And now I can throw away that photocopied sheet, and think about which bit of the study I will tidy tomorrow. 

100 Books to Read Poster 22

 

This was Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. I have no idea how it is that I have never read this before as I must have known of its existence for 50 years or more. Somehow it never came my way. 

In a way I wish I had read it when I was in my late teens as she captures so accurately all the difficult emotions and thought processes of that age, but there again perhaps that would have led me to wallow, rather than reminisce. And I wouldn't have appreciated how well she writes about girls of that age had I still been one, because that would have seemed as natural to me as breathing and nothing that took any writerly skill. But f course it takes a good deal.

The book was funny and touching and charming by turns, with - good heavens! likeable people. Some of them, it is true, behave in less than likeable ways some of the time, but it's behaviour that is understandable within the terms of their characters and situations. And surprisingly, for a book first written in 1949 and set in the period before World War 2 it has dated very little. 

Definitely a hit for me. 

Well, that was unexpected

Getting up in the early hours of Friday morning to visit the bathroom I thought 'Gosh the house seems very cold!' This proved to be because the front door had blown wide open. A large swathe of the sunroom floor was very damp and two discombobulated cats were wandering in and out, damp and puzzled. Further investigation revealed that the door between the living room and the kitchen had blown shut and that there was moreover a large pool of cat sick on the kitchen floor. Additionally the smart meter was showing red almost off the scale as the underfloor heating in the sunroom attempted to heat the whole island through the open door. 

This is not the sort of thing you want to discover at 4.00 a.m. 

I closed and locked the front door, I said a few soothing words to the confused cats and  opened the door to the kitchen so that they could access their food and water. I then dried my feet and went to bed, giving a full report to the OH. After about 30 minutes he dragged himself out of bed and dealt with the cat sick and come back to bed, noting that the underfloor heating had dried the sunroom floor very nicely and that the smart meter had returned to green. He was a bit worried that the cold shock would have damaged the coffee plant, but it seems to be surviving OK, so fingers crossed for that. 

The winds here have not stropped since Friday evening so we're now being very careful about locking rather than just closing the front door when we go to bed. As Sean Bean, in his iteration as Eddard Stark, would doubtless say 'Winter is Coming'. (And that's assuming it isn't already here)

A Day for Finishing Things

That's what yesterday was. 

I finished a pair of socks. This was the third of the five pairs I'm wanting to do before Christmas, and the first skein knitted up from the wool I bought in Pittenweem in September. These are for me. And although they're  a bit more colourful than I usually go for I like them. 

I also (finally finally) finished what has been my 'current' jigsaw puzzle for absolutely ages. I cannot imagine, looking at it, why I ever thought it was a good idea to buy it. Not only are there multiple images of the same thing on there but the pieces do not all interlock, a large number of them simply adjoin with sloping edges, which is an absolute nightmare. This one was finished yesterday evening, re-boxed this morning and is already in the library/charity shop pile. Later this afternoon I shall look out a puzzle that I know I will enjoy doing, I feel  deserve it, after fighting my way through this one.

The day was sadly rather too short to allow me to finish the latest Saturday Slaughters book from the library crime readers group. This is sad, because I would dearly have liked to have it finished and out of the house. It's  The Memory Wood by Sam Lloyd, and if you enjoy stories about young teenage girls being kidnapped and tortured it will be right up your street. Otherwise I would suggest you leave it alone. 

100 Books to Read Poster NO 21

 

And this was My Man Jeeves by P G Wodehouse. I know lots of people who find Wodehouse hysterically funny. I never have. However this was on the poster so I got a chance to see if, in the decades since I last read anything of his, my taste in that direction had changed. It had not. 

This is a book of short stories and I think is the one in which Jeeves and Wooster were first introduced. There are also a couple of stories about another Wooster type, although one who likes golf,  called Reggie something. Possibly Pepper. 

I still don't find these clever, except in a very mechanistic, Whitehall farce kind of a way. I still don't find them funny ether. What I do find is that, under a false cloak of 'how-dim-are-men?' they are deeply deeply misogynistic, and that leaves a very unpleasant taste.  

I might have left this as  neither a hit nor a miss, on the grounds that of its type its quite good, its just not my type of thing. But the misogyny I'm afraid takes it a very very long way  into Miss territory. 

Baking Subscription October

 

Blueberry and Lemon Biscotti. I've never made biscotti before, largely because I had no idea how to do it but  also because I'm not their greatest fan. 

I have to say these were a great success. There was quite a lot of hanging about the kitchen/oven, waiting for them to bake, and then cool, and then crisp up on both sides but it was worth it. They came out just right; light and crisp and crunchy.

I left out the supplied poppy seeds because, since  neither the OH nor I like them  it seemed silly to include them. There was also some icing sugar because you were supposed to ice the biscotti. I don't recall ever seeing an iced biscotto, not that that means much because I don't go round looking at them, but anyway we decided that we didn't need the extra sugar hit involved so they are icing-less. 

I would make these again, and I might even flirt with variations - apricot and almond? cranberry and chocolate chip? we'll see.