The Sunday List

Yes it's a week late, or I've skipped a week, depending on your point of view but I think I'll forgive myself all things considered. I'd planned five things to be grateful for, as a counterbalance to last times rather wistful things I wish I were, but decided that might sound a bit Pollyanna just now, so instead you get, in no partucular order,

Five Life Affirming Films

1 Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing

2 Crossing Delancey

3 Love Actually

4 Moonstruck

5 The Shop Around the Corner

I know - I'm a sloppy sentimental old thing at times.

A Revealation

It came to me in the early hours of Friday morning, when I was being particularly bothered by pain, that obviously my broken ankle is the universe's way of ensuring that I sit down and finish Magnus Merriman. To this end I read rather more than 80 pages of it on Friday before deciding enough was enough and picking up my cross stitch. My cunning plan now is to finish the book before my next appointment at the fracture clinic, because obviously once it's been read, the universe has no further interest in my being immobile. So the sooner I finish the book, the quicker my ankle will heal.

 

Or does the universe not really work like that?

The Cause of All the Pain!

P. S.  I discovered this afternoon that some kind soul has uploaded onto You Tube the film version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead with Tim Roth and Gary Oldman as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and  a very young Iain Glen as Hamlet ). If you like the play and haven't seen this before, which I hadn't, I would recommend it. The script is brilliant regardless, but Roth and Oldman are wonderful.

Kind Thoughts from Abroad

OK so the original said Home Thoughts, and the Abroad in this case is only England, which some people hardly consider to be abroad at all.

I still wanted to show off the beautiful flowers my sister sent when she heard about the broken ankle. The photo hardly does them justice - they're gorgeous! And just my colours too.

They went a small way towards allaying the disappointment I felt at the fracture clinic yesterday when they told me the foot was still too swollen to put a proper plaster cast on. Back there on Monday for a 'swell check' and, if all is well,  again on Wednesday for the cast. 

The good news would be that I'm getting better at moving around on crutches.

I blame Iain Glen

OK, so last week was never going to be good. Son and daughter in law, after 6 months of living and working in Orkney, were going south and naturally enough taking our grandson with them. I know all the stuff about how lucky we were to have them near for six months; I've said it myself, I've agreed with other people when they've said it to me, but at the end of the day that wasn't going to make saying Goodbye any easier.

 

Monday actually was OK; in fact I might go so far as to say that it was a pattern day for how I hoped autumn and winter would be. Got up at a reasonable hour, did a bit of housework, a bit of ironing, a bit of baking, had a walk and then did lots of reading. And knitting in the evening. Lovely, constructive, peaceful day.

 

Tuesday it started to go pear shaped. OH, who was taking them south, started to get a wee bit stressed. Son starting to pack, trying to clean ready for landlord inspection. Lots of coming and going. Boxes brought in. Discussions about routes, timings, logistics. Front door left open A LOT.

 

Wednesday was Tuesday in spades. Given that I was getting more and more wound up I resorted to my usual method of overcoming stress and got out a jigsaw puzzle. Experience has taught me that imposing the order of a finished picture on the chaos of several hundred pieces of oddly shaped cardboard is very soothing to my nerves. Sadly, last week this fail safe let me down. Seems some stress is just beyond the reach of the calming effects of puzzling.

 

Friday came, inevitably. I spent a lovely morning with the grandson while his parents did all their last minute stuff and OH got in some sleep and  at 3 o'clock they all got into the car and set off for the ferry. I'll draw a veil. It was hard.

 

The plan was that OH would drive through the night all the way to Cheltenham, a drive of about 12 hours with minimal breaks, so that the kidlets could pick up the key to the new flat early on Saturday morning. Motorway all the way from Glasgow. I think you could safely say I was worried. I got progress reports until I went to bed. When I got up I checked with my sister who was expecting them all for breakfast. They had been and gone - all was well and going according to plan.

 

Which was all very well for them but, at the risk of sounding totally self centred, that didn't help me much. Yes, I did at least know that they weren't all lying dead or dying in a mangled heap of metal on the motorway, but I was miserable and alone with four cats and a recalcitrant fire to look after. It was, I decided, time for A Good Wallow.

My wallows these days generally take the form of time on You Tube. I might sample every recording known to man of Tosti's Ideale, or I might watch a young Mandy Patinkin singing Younger than Springtime, or it might be the Productio Diary videos from the forthcoming film of The Hobbit. Like Lord Peter of that ilk, it's a case of Where My Whimsy Takes Me. Saturday it took me to Iain Glen.

 

(Just in case there's anyone out there who doesn't know Mr Glen is a talented Scottish actor of considerable charm who also posseses a very pleasant voice.)

 

So I spent some time Wallowing in the company of Mr Glen until I felt better and then I made a plan. I would have lunch. I would take a walk along to the house of my friend J, whose cat we were feeding while she was away. I would come home and make some lemon loaves, one of which would be nice for us when OH got back, and the other I would take along to my friend G the following day, as she was just back from Aberdeen hospital where surgeons had been fiddling with her knee.Upside for her - no more pain and the prospect of beng able to walk properly without sticks in the not too disant future. Downside - currently more or less immobile. 

 

It was a lovely day on Saturday and the walk to J's is not long, about 15 minutes, although half of it up a steep enough brae. The first bit though is flat and I was enjoying my walk. The sun was warm, the sea was calm and blue and sparkly, my day was planned for the next couple of hours, and there I was in a little world of my own, reliving the video clip of Iain Glen in Small Engine Repair singing If I Could Only Fly , and singing along with it. All was right with the world.

 

And then my right foot turned outwards and I staggered a long way along the road trying not to fall flat on my face. When I managed to get myself upright it was two or three minutes before I could bear to put my foot on the ground, and the phrase 'if I could only fly' had taken on a whole new meaning.

 

And this is where it gets silly, because instead of crawling along the road to the nearest house and begging for help, especially foolish in light of the fact that said house belongs to my friend R, I carried on round the corner and up the brae  to J's, where I fed her fish and her cat and left her a note about the necessity of worming, and then I locked the place up again and started home.

 

Fortunately my stiff upper lip was not stiff enough to get me past R's house twice, and to cut a long story short I spent most of the rest of the afternon in the local hospital, being x-rayed and plastered and shown how to inject myself with something that thins my blood, because my ankle is broken and the general feeling is that I won't be mobile again for approximately 7 weeks.

 

Looking back I have no idea what caused my foot to suddenly slip like that. I may have just caught an uneven piece of road, it may have slipped on a wet patch of leaves, or it might just have been my shoe being too loose. Whatever the immediate cause , I blame the whole thing on Iain Glen. Because if I hadn't had him on a distracting loop in my mind I would have been  paying a bit more attention to what I was doing. And then this would never have happened. I reckon the  guy owes me  a Get Well card.

Warmth on the Wall?

I have now finished Richard Montanari's Broken Angels. The blurb on the back flap informs me that Mr Montanari has had books published in over 20 countries and is a Top Ten Sunday Times bestselling author. In so far as  this means he is not in desperate need of a new fan, this is good news, because  I am not destined to become one.

Mr Montanari has a simple style. Short sentences, short paragraphs, short chapters. This makes the book a quick-ish, if unchallenging read. He is also a great exponent of the 'tell not show' method of storytelling, which is OK if you're writing screenplays, not so great in a novel. For example, if I am supposed to believe a female character is feisty (and that's not a word I enjoy particularly) I expect a writer to find a more subtle way of letting me know this than making her an amateur boxer. This book is all like that; all surface, no depth.

Other grumbles.

The psychology of the perpetrator is unconvincing. A more skilful writer could have made this plausible,:Mr Montanari, not so much.

The near cheating of the denouement. The unwritten pact between writer and reader in this sort of book is that the person whodunnit shoud be deducible by an alert reader, and shouldn't be pulled by the writer like a rabbit from a hat in the last 10 pages of the book. And although we had met the perpetrator in this book there was no way the most alert reader on God's earth could have solved this one. Actually given the detail which finally leads to the feisty female identifying him,  if she'd been a bit more alert in the beginning he could have been caught very early on and saved us almost 400 pages of anodyne prose.

And finally one of the detectives has the occasioanl supernatural experience which supposedly helps, but as far as I could see did nothing but fill up the odd page, to no real purpose. At one point he smells pine needles and woodsmoke and has a feeling of evil approaching. I don't like the supernatural inserted into the police procedural , but if you're going to do it at least have some consistency. There is no follow up to this 'vision'; the scents of woodsmoke and pine needles do not re-appear, separately or in tandem, nor does it have any meaning within the plot.  The approach of evil I will allow, but given that the book is about a serial killer,  evil is a bit of a given.

Some of this I could have overlooked, but in fact a small detail on page 148 convinced me that I was never going to pick up another of this man's books. Let me quote the exact phrase that determined this decision: 'the wallpaper was a cheerful beige gingham'

Now this is obviously a definition of beige with which I have been previously  unaquainted. Honestly if you wanted a description of dull and uminaginative decor, could you do any better than beige, whether it were gingham-ed or not? Who, who in the world, apart from Mr M of course, would ever describe beige gingham wallpaper as cheerful?

On the plus side, since I would like to be seen as balanced, it is quite tense towrds the end, say the last 30 pages or so) and if I am ever in a quiz that requires the names of both Philadelphia rivers I am now equipped to get the point. So the hours I spent reading weren't all loss, then.

The Sunday List

Five things I wish I were

Thin

A world class soprano

Competent to sail a small dinghy

More patient

Less judgemental