Tupper and Laurier

were the names given to the latest pairs of socks knitted for son no 1 and they went off yesterday. He's getting two pairs at once because I shall be otherwise engaged in  July so I thought it as well to Be Prepared and get a bit ahead of myself. As it happens it cost the same to send two pairs as it has previously cost me to send one, so he may be getting a few more double deliveries. 

Both pairs done in West Yorkshire Spinners Signature 4 ply and in theory will therefore wash in the washing machine but I don't think I'd put that to the test with the black pair at least. These were just 'vanilla' socks but the pair underway for  August have a pattern and I am very pleased with how they are turning out. 

Level Zero

 Life at Level Zero is not quite normal life as we knew it before the pandemic, but it's very close. Majorly, for me, it means I can entertain at home again. Don't get carried away with thoughts of 5 course dinners or luxury lunches, it's strictly coffee and cake. And considering there was only one person coming on Tuesday I may have got a it carried away  ....

It was fun though. And see that decoration on the buns? it's the left over filling from the Viennese biscuits which I put n the freezer and then remembered about. Somebody give me a medal. 

Saturday Slaughters

 So the SS group had its last meeting before the summer break on Saturday and, fingers crossed on lots of people, it was also the last meeting by Skype. Personally, as I may have said before, I prefer the Skype to the real thing since it is less bother and more comfortable, but I do get that lots of people prefer to meet in person.

The book was The Dentist by Tim Sullivan, who has a successful career apparently, as a scriptwriter for film and TV and this was his first foray into fiction. It was self published which in  an established writer in other genres was a bit of a red flag but nonetheless I approahed it with an open mind. I think. 

And I found it incredibly frustrating. There were the makings of a really good book in there. The plot was strong, there was a bit of a wist, you couldn't tell whodunit, and there wee some good and even some likeable characters, in it. 

And that's the good news. 

The bad news is twofold. Firstly, although Sullivan thanked both an editor and a proof reader in his acknowledgements  neither had done their job particularly well. Bits of the book were very very repetitive. There were numerous grammatical errors, the most common of which was changing tenses between two clauses in a sentence. And presumably if either the editor or the proof reader had been on the ball they would have noticed that a character first introduced as Daniel became Alan several pages later and stayed Alan throughout the rest of the book. 

Secondly, I've commented before on how people starting to write police procedurals these days have to have detectives with a 'thing'. Sullivan's detective, George Cross  (and yes, really!) suffers from Asperger's syndrone. This is established by overly long and constant descriptions of behaviours plus many many reminders of his inability to pick up on other peoples body language, or to feel empathy with anyone. A prime example of the horrors of tell, not show. Also Sullivan painted himself into a corner (wrote himself into a corner?) because to make George bearable to the reader he had occasionally to give him sympathetic or empathetic feelings towards others. I think it is probably impossible to write an accurate  central fictional character with Asperger's and make them someone the reader likes: I could be wrong, but even if I am  Sullivan is not the man for the job. 

There is a second book in what is obviously planned to be a series, and it would be interesting to see whether and/or by how much the Asperger's aspect of Cross gets watered down. I suspect the condition  may end up being simply a series of more or less irritating behavioural tics, but who knows? 

Mother's Day Jigsaw

 

Completed - it was harder than it looks. 

Well that was a nice day

The weather was lovely yesterday , warm, sunny, no wind. I'd arranged to drop off my pile of no longer wanted jigsaw puzzles at the library, which seemed very grateful at the prospect and the OH suggested that, as we were going to town we could do our not-quite-daily- walk somewhere on West Mainland. It seemed like a good idea, so off we set. 

We started off at the Broch of Gurness, which is where I fell in love with Orkney, twenty odd years ago. (I;ve since rather fallen out of love with it, but Gurness remans one of my favourite places ) so I've got dozens of picture of it already. I was restrained  yesterday but u I took a few at the broch itself. 

I don't  normally take a picture from this angle, but the flowers were pretty

The inside stair of the broch

Way back in early spring  I took a picture of this self same nest  and I assume the self same fulmar although that's open to doubt I suppose

We then drove back along the road that leads to the Broch a little way and got out and scrambled down to a beach which, in sixteen years of living here, we have never visited before. It was wide and long and sandy and nice to walk on, but  I wouldn't rush back because it was also very smelly. 

The OH improving the view

Yachts on the Sound

Lok at all that sand - also how blue the sea is!

Razor clam shell, known locally as spoots. I  didn't take  a photo of the dead crabs.

Sandy Ripples

After we'd walked the breadth and half the length of the beach we went to a place called Fern Gully. This is mainly  famous for housing meerkats which we passed on, but we went to the tea room where I had a late lunch of a cream tea. It was very nice and I was impressed by their scone. Not often I  say that. 

        

Also courtesy of Fern Gully we welcomed a new member of the family. 

I call  him - what else? - Stark.He even howls. 

Bedside Books/Books to Read Poster No 27

 Yes, I'm double dipping. Here's the picture from the poster

So, having seen that, no-one will be surprised to hear that this one was A Game of Thrones, the first book in G  R R Martin's (as yet and probably always to be) unfinished fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire.

I was in this party a long time. Not quite from the beginning as my copies of Game of Thrones and Clash of Kings (which was number two) were both paperbacks, but by the the time of number three A Storm of Swords I was waiting with cash in hand to get my sticky mitts on it in hardback as soon as I could. Storm of Swords was perhaps the best of them, after that the quality of the writing and the stories dropped like a stone. I bought the next two, although it was a long wait, five years for number four, and another six for number five. So number five came out in 2011 and number seven has been promised as being almost imminent ever since.  So that's  another ten years and no sign of it .... I no longer care. Number five was so dreadful that I swore the man would never get another penny of my money and if the final volumes were published tomorrow I doubt I would bestir myself to borrow them from the library. I just don't care any more, but there again some people came along and did a TV series that gave us the end of the story so I don't need thousands of pages of violently pornographic, dull and repetitive prose to discover what happened to my favourite, and in fact not so favourite, characters.

In a way re-reading this after so long was a bit of a sad experience. Before he got carried away by his own publicity and grew a head so big he presumably walks through doorways sideways Martin could write and he was telling a good story with strong characters and storylines.  He didn't shy away from having the good guys come last, now and then,  although his claim to be subverting every fantasy trope there ever was came adrift when it turned out, after many trials and tribulations that  the overlooked bastard son  was in fact the long lost and rightful King. How many times have we seen that one? 

On a related but lighter note, I saw with some amusement over the past few years that all the shops in Edinburgh which carried A Game of Thrones merchandise, and there were a lot of them, all majored on items bearing the Stark branding. Wolves, long memories and a wish for self rule - I wonder why that spoke more loudly there than the other Houses of Westeros? 

Some non-knitting crafting

 

It's several years since I bought the magazine that had this Scandi Christmas Tag kit on the front. I was away at the time and I thought I would while away some spare moments whipping up a few labels in time for Christmas. Ha, ha. And then of course life intervened in the shape of eye problems and Ph Ds and so on. I'm trying to pick up my cross stitch again a bit, although its relatively slow speed compared to knitting plus the need to see quite well have been putting me off. But there you go,  these at least are done. Whether I will remember where I have put them come Christmas is another matter entirely!