Finished Things - the next Saturday Slaughters book

 

It's ages before the next meeting but I got this early and then read it really quickly because there aren't as many copies as there are would-be readers, so I rattled through it so I could return it for someone else to get  hold of it. 

Good things first. It was a quick and easy read. There were two good twists in it that I didn't see coming. The author is very good at slowly revealing the real character of his two narrators, I  thought that was excellently done. 

Not so good things. Naturally none of the characters were particularly nice people. There was an angle to the relationship of two of them that appeared towards the end and came out of nowhere and psychologically just didn't fit. But the main problem that I had was the problem that I have with all books of this type, which is that I never find the set-up from which all else flows, at all credible. Here it was a house being offered at a ridiculously cheap rent with 200 rules attached for the tenant to keep (including, after the relatively normal no children, no pets, such things as no pictures, no soft furnishings, no books, putting everything away as soon as it was finished with, washing down the shower walls as soon as you'd showered etc etc) plus an application form to which you had to attach three recent photographs. In whose mind, however desperate they were to find somewhere to live, is this not a wee bit odd? In fact who would not take one ok and run for the hills as fast as they could? 

So summing up, this isn't my sort of book, so I wont be searching out any more by this author. However I don't  resent the time I took to reading it as totally wasted, unlike the hours I spent reading Gone Girl of ridiculous and  predictable memory,   so that's something. And I think, if it is your sort of book, you would find it good of its kind. 

Finished Things - A Cardigan

Not for me obviously. It was supposed to be for one of the grandsons at Christmas before the air mail  charges went through the roof and I realised that it would cost a fortune to send that way and I didn't have long enough to finish it and send it surface to get there on time. So I abandoned it and didn't pick it up again until recently. I've now got it done and I'll send it surface and it may get there for his birthday which would be a nice coincidence and if it doesn't well it's not really a birthday present; it looks very big but how can you judge when a child's about to be six and you haven't seen him since he was three. 

Anyway by the time it was done I was beginning to think it was far too bright, and don't get me started on how much I worried about the possible cultural appropriation and  insensitivity of doing a native American pattern in the colours of the Canadian flag. In the end I decided that I was probably the only person I knew, bar a couple in Canada itself, who would even think twice about it, so bashed on regardless. Canadian colours for my Canadian grandson. Can anyone reasonably object? 

I have to say I was quite pleased with how I managed to line up the front stripes but was sorry that the buttonholes didn't line up with the white ones. But I daresay that (the buttonhole thing) is something else no-one but me will notice. 

Granite Noir

 

Granite Noir is the annual crime writing festival held in Aberdeen. I've often thought vaguely about going to it, as I've thought about going to its sister festival Bloody Scotland in Stirling without ever quite getting around to it. This year it was digital, and all the sessions were streamed free. As a result  I had no excuse not to 'go', so I had a look through the brochure and settled on three sessions to watch. It was coincidental that that meant one each day, but I was pleased it worked out that way because I find these on-line things can be quite tiring if you do too much at once. 

As far as I am aware most if not all of the sessions are available to watch on YouTube,  I haven't checked but sticking Granite Noir 2021 in the YouTube search box should throw them up if they are there. 

I had two hits and a miss which isn't a bad strike rate and the miss was on Sunday so it didn't put me off going to the other two. Friday evening was a discussion with Ian Rankin and Stuart McBride called 'The police procedural is dead; long live the police procedural'. I enjoyed this very much. Rankin and McBride obviously know one another well and there was lots of banter - this perhaps underlined the weakness of digital events since this would have been easier had they - and the audience - been sharing the same space. Oddly enough I don't read either of these writers much; I gave up on McBride because he was too gory for my taste and I've never really 'got' Rankin. They both seem very nice people though, and very funny.

Saturday was Val McDermid and a publisher who specialises in reprinting classic crime novels discussing Josephine Tey with particular reference to her book Miss Pym Disposes. MPD was always my favourite Tey book, and my battered Penguin green crime edition has survived various ruthless culls of my crime fiction collection, so I was pleased to see my judgement confirmed by the 'Queen of Crime'. I already knew quite a bit about Tey but I learned lots more from this session and came away wanting to make time to reread some of her books so that's a good thing. 

Sunday promised more than it delivered; it was a discussion panel of three women writers, two of them writing books set in Scandinavia. I'd chosen it for the scandi-noir vibe but didn't get much out of it. All of their books it seemed were psychological thrillers, which is fine if that's what you like, but I don't much. The discussion was dominated by the one English writer who was keen to jump on any question directed at all three and get her contribution in first, and at great length.  I'll be giving her books a wide berth simply because I took against her which is horribly unfair and unjust, but then so is life. 

I'm sort of glad I didn't have to travel to Aberdeen and spend money on travel and accommodation for this, but equally if it had been a live event I would have gone to more sessions and there would have been a lot of scope for meeting people and discussing things. So I haven't ruled out going in person when these things are allowed and safe again. Meanwhile, the internet was my friend!

Finished Things - A Paper

 not the sort you read every day, the sort you write.

Remember I gave a paper on-line in January instead of bring in Toronto to give it in  person? A few days afterwards I was approached and asked if I would be wiling to revise it for publication; the idea was that the papers from our panel would appear as a supplement to a journal that deals with Scot Lit. 

I sort of felt obliged to say yes, and enquired when it was needed by and was told the end of Feb. So naturally I kept thinking, I must get around to that and then not doing it. Last weekend though I did get around to it, in proof of which I give you a photo

 I must have been taking it seriously because I proof read it on screen then printed it off to proof read it again in hard copy. Because we all know that there are always mistakes that don't show up on the screen. I don't know why I always put these things off, because actually writing them is quite enjoyable once you get into it. And that holds for most things, but for me it's particularly true when I'm writing about Alistair MacLeod. 

I took The Guardian on Saturday for a year before recognising that I only found the time to get through half of it; not always the same half but there were always swathes of it I never read every week. But one entertaining thing was author interviews, and they usually asked the question 'Which is the book you give to people?' And this, this  is the book I give to people. It's just brilliant. 

Baking Subscription February

 

This is strawberry and banana loaf cake. Seemed like an odd combination of flavours really. That said it is nice, although personally I wouldn't mind if there had been rather more of the freeze dried strawberries to go in the cake, and I could take or leave the cinnamon. They are in general a bit over fond of cinnamon I feel, it seems to be included in at least every other bake. 

On the upside, it wasn't too faffy. You had to rehydrate some of the strawberries but that wasn't hard, and there was a crumble topping as well as cake batter to make. And then buttercream through the middle and water icing on the top. I feel very proud to report that this time I did the drizzling of the water icing rather than cop out and ask the OH to do it. See, sometimes I improve! 

Finished Things - A Hat

 

Fairly fresh off the needles, it was finished two days ago. The photo was taken in artificial light so the colour reproduction isn't the best. The wool is DK  and was from Giddy Yarns in their Christmas Eve treat box, and the colourway is The Land of Sweets.

I had two of these as one was destined for a friend but luckily it had not been sent, since I ran out of wool four rounds before the end of the pattern and so had to use the spare ball. This does mean that I have an almost complete ball of it left and I shall use it in due course to make some mitts. The friend will have to be sent something else. 

I hasten to add that the yarn shortage was not the fault of Giddy Knits. There was yardage given on the ball band but I used a very old pattern from the days before they thought to specify the length needed for the pattern. Annoyingly, since the hat is a tad too large, had I knitted it on a size smaller needle it would have been a slightly better fit and I would have had enough wool in the one ball. But there you go, that's knitting for you. And on the bright side I will eventually get a pair of matching mitts! 

Finished things - the Saturday Slaughters Book

 

This was Burial Rites by Hannah Kent.

It's a grim but gripping and beautifully written story which deals ( in a saga like way)  with an unfolding tale of murder and retribution, raising important questions around  justice and social conformity while presenting the reader with a fascinating picture of 19th Century Iceland and some of the people who lived there. 

Well that's what everyone else in the reading group thought.

As sometimes happens, I beg to differ. 

Finished Things - Blanket Square

 

This is the third and final square for February, so for the first month at least I'm keeping up! 

I was going to write about the Saturday Slaughters book today but as the discussion was moved from Saturday (library closed due to appalling weather) to this evening I thought 'd wait and see if anyone there could persuade me that the book had been worth reading after all. Report back in due course. 

Happy Valentine's Day

 Last year I had a post about Valentines Day here and I thought then that perhaps I should  up my game in 2021. From a starting point of zero of course that wasn't going to be hard. 

Anyway we both managed something and voila

Hearts and Flowers with added cat. And chocolate. The fancy box is from me to him; it's Florentines from  the Highland Chocolatier which we bought for a few people at Christmas. It seemed only fair that we should give them a go ourselves. And the flowers were from him to me. We both agreed that they were lovely but that cut flowers are a faff if you don't have a housekeeper you can hand them to, requesting they be  put in a vase. 

Finishing Things - Lego

I got the now customary Lego Brickhead in my Christmas stocking (well in fact I got two) and this being the Chinese New Year and me having finished the first one recently it seems a good time to share a picture or two. 

Sweet, isn't it? I think this is possibly the size of Lego set that I am most comfortable with, bigger ones tend to get finished off by the OH. I must make a start on the other Christmas one soon.

Meanwhile after yesterday's rant  considered appraisal of London Fields I spent a wee while Googling Martin Amis. What a very unpleasant man he seems to be. 

Finishing Things/100 Books To Read Poster No. 25

 

I have been finishing things like books and knitting recently and here's the first 'finished things' write up. It's the poster book, which has taken me weeks and weeks and as a couple of readers have picked up from Facebook, this was London Fields by Martin Amis. 470 pages of reading hell.

See, remember that thing your mother used to say about 'that's not funny and it's not clever'? Well this is sort of the reverse of that. It is funny if you have a particular sense of humour (I don't, grotesque caricature in an otherwise realistic setting just irritates the hell out of me) and it is very very clever. Meta fiction in spades. Honesty at one point I thought my whole review of this book would just be the word meta 50 times followed by (whimper...)

And overwritten much? There are paragraphs and paragraphs that are just lists of things being piled one on top of one another for no other apparent purpose than to illustrate just how many disparate things Amis can cleverly describe in one sentence. 

I don't object to authors laying games with their audience when there's a purpose to it that serves the narrative. I do object to it when the whole reason for dong it is to display to a (presumably awestruck) reader just how very much more clever than them the author is. Why bother? If we're all too stupid to appreciate your great cleverness why do you go to the trouble  to write such pearls and then cast them before swine? 

I think that Amis considers himself to be a bit of a modern Dickens; the grotesque people, the uncaring systems, the narrative technique of detail upon detail. Sadly he has missed, or is temperamentally incapable of grasping, the huge point of difference. Dickens wrote for may reasons, but he was possessed with both compassion for the characters he created and their real life counterparts, and a  burning desire to bring about some measure of social justice. Amis writes from a position of total contempt for his characters and their real life counterparts; if you aren't like Amis, - so if you're a woman, or working class, or titled, or American, or foreign in general really, or work in the city, or live on benefits, or live in a council flat, or not 'well educated', or overweight, or underweight, - or anything other than a white middle class Englishman, then Amis despises you. 

I have a friend who hates the expression 'check you white male privilege', possibly because he is uncomfortably aware that if he did he might not like what he sees, but Gordon Bennet if ever there were a reason to invent the phrase and try and get people to take it to heart it's this guy. Well, him and Laurence Fox. 

Good Heavens! It's the Outdoors!

We have been confined to barracks  for days now due to snow (falling), snow (inconsiderately lying underfoot and very very cold temperatures. Yesterday we finally got out of the house, although not to walk, only in the car.  It was at that point that the day started falling apart and really I got very little done because I seemed to be thwarted at every turn ( I know I'm not alone, we all have days like this sometimes).

However I was briefly cheered by the sight of these two chaps outside the local shop

And one thing I did manage to do was finish the current Saturday Slaughters book, which is just as well as we are discussing it this Saturday coming. It was grim - but I'll save more details for another post. 

The Queen of Hearts

 she made some tarts, but she didn't make these ones!

These were made by the OH one afternoon while I was working. We'd had steak pie the night before and there was some pastry left over so he made me these and delivered them with a cup of coffee half way through the afternoon. There were actually three but I had eaten one before I thought to take a picture. 

He didn't have one, on the grounds that the jam would be too much of a sugar hit for an in remission T2 diabetic, so I scoffed all three, and although I am not in general a fan of pastry with sweet fillings I did enjoy these, for the thought as much as for the actual tarts themselves. 

Here is the (Knitting) News

Let's start with socks. Here is the second pair for son No 1 in Canada; the February socks. Name of sock Mackenzie, yarn from Ripples Crafts in the colour Crushed Berries and the pattern is Oh Hello Sock which was free on Ravelry and which came out very well. Card of cat chasing a ball of yarn by me! 

Then there's some blanket progress. I have done two out of the three February squares on the new blanket.

Well I say done, the second one there needs some swiss darning on it. I tried to do this after I had blocked the square and failed miserably. This had nothing to do with not being able to do the stitch but everything to do with not being able to place them properly; there's a chart to follow and it's a zig zag pattern and I could not get it right. I will see how I feel about tackling it again after I have done the third February square.

Meanwhile progress on last years blanket inches forward; so much so that this weekend I was able to start the left hand border. So here's a teaser photo for that. Two more rows to go on this border and then it's back to weaving in ends* and  mattress stitching three more strips together. 

* I have learned from last year and keen eyed readers will have noticed that this years squares are having the ends woven in as I go!  

Yoga 2.0

Long term readers here may recall that one of the new things I undertook for Project 60 was a Yoga class. I think we can all agree that it wasn't a complete success. In fact I think it would be fair to say that it wasn't a success in any shape or form save for the fact that I did keep going until the end of the term. 

I was alerted recently to the existence on Facebook of something called The Virtual Village Hall which is run by the WVS (does it no longer have or use the R?) and which streams various activities on a daily basis. Some of them I am interested in, some I'm not. Today I walked into my study just as the Yoga with Dave was going live and I thought 'You know what - let's have another go'. 

So I did, for about 15 minutes after which I was convinced yet again that yoga is not for me and gave up to do a parcel for my sister instead, which was why I was in the study in the first place. I was OK-ish for the first 10 minutes, although sitting cross legged on the floor was very uncomfortable. Sitting cross legged on the floor is for flexible five year olds in my book, not women of mature years with a history of back trouble. I soldiered on until we came to doing a 'breath practice' which was going to shift my mood. 

Well it certainly did that but not in a good way, since it involved breathing in and out by sniffing. Now, I was brought up not to sniff. In fact I was brought up to think that sniffing was, if not exactly one of the seven deadly sins, certainly a close relation. I was not comfortable sitting cross legged on my study floor sniffing in and out for several minutes. My mood shifted from relatively benign to exasperated in double quick time.  So I gave up on Yoga. Again. 

The Drowning

 This is a new 4 part TV drama series which turned up on Channel 5. Episodes 1 and 2 were on Monday and Tuesday this week. It concerns, as they say so often on Pointless, a woman who thinks she glimpses her teenage son on the street; this is remarkable because he disappeared nine years earlier, believed drowned in a park lake. 

The trailers promised me Rupert Penry Jones and although he's not one of those actors I will watch in absolutely anything (and I do rather wonder whether there are any of those left these days, apart from Nicola Walker) I'll normally give whatever he's in a look. 

I watched Episode 1.

I did not watch Episode 2. 

 I won't be watching Episodes 3 and 4.

This has nothing to do with the fact that Mr Penry-Jones didn't appear until the last five minutes of an otherwise totally tedious hour. It's because the whole thing suffered from Stupid Woman Syndrome, Non-Credible Character Syndrome  and Look at That Plot Hole: You Could Drive a Tank Through It Syndrome, all of them in spades. 

I find I can't be bothered to go into detail but all of my complaints and many more are entertainingly covered by readers comments on  this Guardian Review If you have five minutes, and would like a smile they're worth looking at.

But honestly if this is the standard of TV drama these days is it any wonder that  I confine myself to property porn, faux craft competitions like the Sewing Bee and  Pottery Throw Down , and DVDs of ER? 

Wanderings (physical)

We have kept up our walks all through January, and missed only a few days because of really bad weather. I don't always blog about them as they can be quite repetitive although I take several photos on each walk and then choose one to put into an 'album' on Facebook. Choosing the right one can be quite difficult, which is when it's nice to have the blog so that I can share a few more.

Sunday we went over to Finstown again. We had planned to go to the Brough of Gurness and as far as the weather in Burray went that was a good idea. Weather on the West Mainland sadly was not nearly so nice and given that much of the ground is still boggy when not iced over and that the clouds got greyer and the precipitation got more marked the closer we got, we decided to turn round and come home. Not before we had paid a visit to Finstown tough where I took a would-be artistic type photograph of some sheds. 

We also took a trip into Firth Park. After our visit on New Years Day I had decided it might be a nice idea to go on a monthly basis, take a photo from the same spot and see how it changed over twelve months. Here's the photo from yesterday 

And to save you looking back here's the one from 1st January

    

Quite a difference. 

Today the roads were icy and the ground covered in snow but the sky was blue and the sun was shining. As we had no excuse for staying indoors we went down to the local beach, where the sand was covered in snow. Which gave rise to some interesting pictures. 

The colours were just amazing and we had a really enjoyable time.