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

Wash Out

Saturday was a total wash out, literally and figuratively. It poured with rain and blew a gale. Sadly the direction of the gale meant I had a crippling migraine and although I had decided it was time to clean 'upstairs' I only managed the bathroom before collapsing back into bed.

The upstairs is in inverted commas because we live in a one storey house, but it's useful shorthand.

For the curious, the picture is of the fair city of Inverness. I thought I owed it to you all to show how appearances can be deceptive. I mean, it looks like a nice place in the photograph doesn't it? And indeed, bits of it are very decorative.

Done and Done

Friday was the day I was summoned for my Research Skills Analysis and it went fine. We established that I'm quite bright, and that I can read and write. We also established that I have no need of assertiveness training, which I thought a shame. Previously when I have said I thought it would be useful to have this, people have looked at me and laughed like drains. Which just goes to prove you can never tell when someone is shaking like a leaf and feeling sick inside.

The word methodology was not mentioned, although I thought I saw it lurking on a piece of paper.

We did broach the dread topic of Gaelic. Since the subject of my research wrote a good proportion of his work in Gaelic I feel I need to learn a bit. Translations are available, and some of them he even did himself but, you know, translation is not the same.

I've always been told that I am good at languages and I've certainly learned a few in my time, so some months ago I threw Teach Yourself Gaelic into the tape player and prepared to absorb a bit of the old ancestral language (I had Scots grandparents). It was a total and utter failure. But now I am going to get some proper teaching in due course, and maybe if I have a real life teacher, rather than a machine, I might make some progress.

Incidentally it amazes me that knowledge of Gaelic is always expressed by the verb 'to have' and often with the definite article. People say 'Can you speak French?' or 'Do you know Norwegian?', but with Gaelic it's always 'Do you have (the) Gaelic?' A mischievous part of me often wants to say No I don't and if I did I wouldn't give him back to you, but flippancy isn't always well received.

There are other things I need to be taught, but so far it's still all exciting and only the Gaelic is at all frightening in prospect.

That was a good start to the day and I followed it up by finishing off these -

Roman Rib Socks 



Snug as a Bug in a Rug

I've been busy for the last couple of days and fighting off a threatened cold, but today I didn't have anything special to do, which probably explains why the cold marched in and made itself right at home. I made an executive decision to go with the flow and curled up on the sofa under my Auskerry blanket with a small pile of half read books and dedicated my day to getting some of them finished.

First up was Camilla Lackerg's The Drowning and many apologies to her in her absence for incorrectly calling it The Mermaid yesterday. The denouement of the main story was more satisfying than I had dared to expect, but the last few pages after the reveal were incredibly melodramatic; obviously designed to have you gagging for the next book. Personally I'm not. I still find her domestic scenes incredibly arch and cloying and have decided that it can't all be down to the translator.

Next on the list was Diana Wynne-Jones' The Merlin Conspiracy. This was another re-read and very satisfying; she was an excellent writer of fantasy, and although she was marketed as a children's writer, many of her books would be labelled as 'Young Adult' these days. My favourite is Fire and Hemlock, loosely based on the Ballad of Tam Lin. Her Tough Guide to Fantasyland is very very funny and should be required reading for those who overdose on the 3 volume fantasy tome. It should also be required reading for George R R Martin, as he would then realise that however much he declares his writing avoids fantasy cliches, it really doesn't.

I took a couple of breaks in my reading marathon and watched Pointless and Location Location Location. I enjoy Pointless, but worry when I watch it that I might be turning into my parents who had an unbreakable date every weekday with Countdown. I was comforted today by the realisation that I didn't actually watch Pointless yesterday. As for Location Location Location, I do wonder whether there is any point in taking on, as 'clients' for the program, people who declare at the outset that there are only 18 streets in which they are willing to buy a house. Tonight's edition seemed to establish that the answer to that question is No.

And now I'm off to bed with the part read Broken Angels by Richard Montanari; a writer new to me. Alert readers of this blog will have noticed that there has been no mention of  Linklater's Magnus Merriman, last seen being thrown with a flounce into my small suitcase. It has now taken up a reproachful position on the bedside table, roughly where I place my glasses last thing. So far, I am managing to ignore it quite well.

In which Inverness takes revenge and I needlessly purchase a book

I don't know what it was that I did to Inverness, but it must have been something truly awful because I cannot go near the place without disaster following. We can't even drive past it without the car dashboard making strange noises and flashing up generally incomprehensible messages about depollution systems being faulty. As for the occasions we take it there to get the car MOT-ed, well, the least said the better.

Since my teens it has also been the centre of two miserable holidays and  a truly horrendous overnight stay on the way home from Orkney. That was a long while ago now;  but I still remember the B & B, and the expression on the owner's face when we asked where we could get an evening meal. In Inverness? On a Sunday?? After 7.00 pm???

It also saw the death of a very important student relationship. It's possibly a bit unfair of me to blame Inverness for this one, since it had been on/off for a while and it had almost been given the death blow in Guidlford a year before, but it was in Inverness that I finally realised that it really was over. Since realisation dawned on Wednesday and my train ticket  home was booked for the following Saturday I put in a few unhappy days.

So I was on the look out last week for the Curse of Inverness. I wondered if I had hit it Monday afternoon, when we finished early, courtesy of the management guy who couldn't cope any longer without more caffeine and who therefore brought his session to a premature end. I decided to trek through town to a wool shop and buy some sock wool. Good idea. Except by the time I got to the shop it was 4.20 and the shop shuts at 4.00. Every week day. This was disappointing but light stuff for the curse. So I shrugged it off as  just One of Those Things that can happen anywhere.

There again it seemed to hit on the Tuesday morning when I developed an unsightly blotch,  a bit like a birthmark, under my eye. It didn't hurt. It didn't itch. It wasn't even very big, although there were shaky moments while I tried to decide whether or not it was spreading. It just looked horribly red, and then as the morning wore on, it looked horribly purple. This is it, I thought, I'm going to worry myself sick about this, I won't be able to take in anything anyone says and then this evening when I don't have anything I need to concentrate on,  it will fade away as quickly as it came and I will feel stupid.

This was foolish of me. I was planning to stay in this town that hates me for three nights and I thought the best it could do was a facial blemish? Oh boy, was I wrong about that.

It was lunchtime when the blow fell and I didn't see it coming.  A very nice woman from UHI Postgraduate admin sidled up to me in the lunchbreak and truly I thought she was seeking me out for the pleasure of my company.  I may even have smiled at her as I passed a plate of sandwiches. It transpired that there was a problem with my registration. In fact I couldn't register. Well not yet. Yes,  I had been told that I could. Yes, I had been invited to Induction. Yes, I had been told that a previous problem had been solved. But the fact was I needed to be patient, just a little while longer.

Inverness 1 - Anne 0.

I took two books away with me to read. One was Ann Cleeves' Red Bones and it was a re-read. The BBC are doing a TV version this autumn and I thought I'd like to remind myself of it before seeing it on the small screen. OH is dreading it, because in its wisdom the Beeb have cast Douglas Henshall in the main part. I think it is fair to say that Dougie is not one of OH's favourites. In fact he has frequently been heard to compare his acting abilities unfavourably with the stars of that childrens favourite of yesteryear, The Woodentops. I don't have that sort of problem with Mr Henshall msyelf. OK, he's not a great actor, nor do I think he can do accents. I base this belief on having seen him in a TV series in which he and Hugh Bonneville were cast as brothers who lived in Bristol? Manchester? somewhere in England anyway. And they both spoke with Scottish accents, which seemed odd in the circs. HB's was beter than you would expect if you've watched him doing all those posh parts on the telly. But even though  I'm not unduly concerned about the acting I do wonder; Cleeves has written a quartet of novels set in Shetland with the same protagonist, so to me it would make sense to dramatise the first one, rather than No. 3. which is what Red Bones is. But then who amongst us can fathom the ways of the meejer?

Anyway I knew before I went that Red Bones wasn't going to last me all my time away so with a conscious sense of virtue I also packed Eric Linklater's Magnus Merriman. This was Ph D related in the sense that it was background reading for 20th C Scottish Literature, and also  features, in thinly disguised form, several lumnaries of  1930s Scottish life. I had made reasonable headway with it, but it wasn't the most enjoyable experience of my reading life and I was so cross after the news about my delayed registration that I threw it into my suitcase for the trip home, planning on buying something more to my taste on my way. By which I meant somewhere between my Guest House and the bus station on the morning of my departure. Sadly the only purveyor of fiction that fell into that category also fell into the category of 'not open until 9.00 am', and I was passing a wee while before that. What is it with shops in Inverness. Don't open until 9.00 and close at 4.00. How do they make money?

Red Bones and a bit of lookng at the scenery got me to the ferry, but once actually on the boat and faced with the prospect of gazing out to sea for 90 minutes I was forced to buy a book in the ship's shop. They have one (yes, count it, one) of those carousel things with a selection of paperbacks on it; the choice is  limited. This would explain why I passed over hard earned cash for a novel by Camilla Lackberg.

Now generally I think Nordic Noir is a good thing. This is partly because it is Nordic, since OH and I are both big fans of Scandinavia and Scandinavians. I love watching the Swedish Wallander partly because of the scenery and  partly because I can try and tune in to the Swedish and do some half hearted revision. I never learned any Danish but I loved The Killing, and not just for Sofie Grabol's sweater and Lars Mikkelsen's cheekbones. But just because I think the new interest in crime fiction from the northern climes is generally a good thing, it doesn't follow that I like it all. Jo Nesbo - yes. Hakan Nesser - no. Anne Holt - if I'm in the mood. And so it goes. Just because it's written by a Swede doesn't mean it's good, although it does mean I'll give it a go. Which is what I did months and months ago with Camilla Lackberg's first Fjallbacka detective novel. Borrowed it from the library and gave it a go. After two weeks and stalling at about page 84 I finally admitted to myself that I had absolutely no interest in who killed the victim or why, and since discovering these two things are the main reason for this sort of book, the sensible thing to do was to take the thing back to the library.

It is a well known fact that author's books often improve over time, and I have found this to be especially true of crime series. The Mermaid,which is the book I bought, appears to be Ms Lackberg's 8th or 9th trip out, and the back cover made the plot sound fairly interesting,  so I gave in and bought it. Although it must be said that there  really were no other candidates on the rack. I haven't managed to finish it yet but I have got far enough to realise that a) I will do so and b) half the problem is that her translator is not very good. Anyway I will see if the denouement is satisfactory. Meanwhile anyone looking for a  good Scandi crime novel that is well plotted, well written, haunting and serious in intent would do well to check out Mons Kallentoft's Midwinter Sacrifice. Lyrical, atmospheric, and rooted in swedish society, it's one of the best crime novels I have read for many years.

Enough for now. I'm summoned on Friday to have my research skills audited. We're doing it over coffee so I suppose it won't be too painful. It will all be fine as long as no-one mentions the dread word methodology.

In Which I take Wee Jaunt South and Am Inducted

So the first step to this Ph D thing is to get inducted. For UHI (University of the  Highlands and Islands) students this means a trek to Inverness. Sadly Inverness and I have history. So now we have this agreement going.  I undertake never to go there, and Inverness promises to leave me alone. If however, I am ever so misguided as to set foot in the place it reserves the right to mess me about. Generally then I avoid it like the plague. But avoiding induction wasn't an option, so off to Inverness I went. Ferry, coach, walk. Small suitcase. Two days.

It's lucky I'm used to being in a minority that's all I can say. I wasn't the only mature student there, but I was the oldest. And I was the only Humanities student. Every new speaker who came in asked us to give our name, college and subject of study in turn. It has to be said we all got very bored with hearing these details about one another over and over again. When the person telling us all about the importance of networking worked round to me and I said my research topic was a poet, she looked as though I had held something very smelly indeed under her nose, and quavered 'How diverse', before turning rapidly to the boy beside me. ( Water Quality Measurement in Restored Peatlands before you ask ). The marine scientists definitley had the rest of us outnumbered.

The induction itself was like the infamous Curate's Egg; excellent in parts. The highlight was definitely the chap who came to tell us how to write our thesis. Lots of good advice, delivered with a sense of humour, and as his first degree was in Linguistics and English he could at least understand why someone might want to write about a poet, rather than seabed sediment. The lowlight was a toss up between the aforementined networking lady who, in addition to being sniffy about humanities TALKED VERY LOUDLY, and the management trainer who came to talk to us about managing our supervisors. He had a whole afternoon allotted to him, but didn't say anything that anyone with a modicum of common sense and rudimentary good manners couldn't have worked out for themselves. And assuming that you couldn't have worked it out for yourself, it certainly shouldn't have taken him longer than 30 minutes to pass on.

They gave out several goodies; pens galore, a car sticker (?), and a computer mouse, which has the advantage of giving off an eerie glow in the dark, and the disadvantage of not actually working very well. Last year they were dishing our pen drives apparently and I could certainly have found a home for one of those. Then again,  it was Inverness. I was never going to get a working gadget.

But , dear reader, should you ever find yourself in Inverness I can recommend two places to eat: Riva and No 27 . Good food, reasonably priced,  and a special mention for the pannacotta at No 27. 

Next time, Inverness takes revenge, and I am ambivalent about a manifestation of Nordic Noir....

Welcome

So here I am, blogging at last. I've thought about it off and on for ages, but the final push to actually get on and do it has always been lacking. Until now.

Now I'm about to start on the five year journey to a Ph D. It's a long held ambition, and it looks as though I'm finally in a position to realise it. But it's going to be a long road, with a lot of ups and downs.

And so it seemed to me that it would be useful to have a blog; partly to chart those, partly so I can look back in five years time and see how far I've come, and partly to keep a record of the other things that I did and that happened while  I was studying.

So it won't all be about reading and studying. Lots of other stuff; what it's like to live in the Northern Isles, family news, crafty things, comments about TV shows and non-study books. All sorts.

Please read. Feel free to comment, or ask questions, or whatever. Reassure me I'm not alone!