August 11th Part 2 Before and After

No words needed!

August 11th Part One

Such an exciting day. At one o' clock  I have an appointment with the hairdresser. I'm not sure when I was last there but according to the evidence of my cheque book it was just before Christmas. It's more than time to tame the wild greying mane.Stand by for the before and after photographs ....

A Very Special Delivery

No not more food! but this book

Plague Clothes is a set of poems written by the Shetland poet Robert Alan Jamieson (and for knitting friends yes, he is connected to the Janieson wool producers!) during his recovery from Covid 19, from which he suffered quite badly.

As he started to regain his strength he went out for a daily walk and when he came home fell into the habit of composing a poem straight onto his Facebook page. Several friends, myself included, urged him to think about having them published, as an instant poetic response to the world of corona virus. 

He went one better. With no holiday possible this year he used the money he would have spent as seed money for the establishing of a small new publishing company Taproot Press, run by his son and daughter-in-law and Plague Clothes is their first book. They printed copies for all RAJ's friends who had requested one and they were given free as a thank you for the support given to him during his illness. People being people they all actually wanted to pay, so although there was no obligation we had the opportunity to give to a crowdfunder to help the new company if we wished. 

The copies, all numbered and signed, were  sent off last week and mine arrived on Friday. It's a beautiful book; hard back, with lots of wonderful photographs to illustrate the poems and I am delighted with it. I would say Taproot have got off to a flying start. 

100 Books to Read Poster No 15

I have absolutely no idea what that image is supposed to be, but the book was Roald Dahl's Matilda. I hadn't read this one before because I was prejudiced against Dahl many years ago when I read that he had abandoned his wife after she had a stroke, and so never bought borrowed or read any of his books, not even for my children. I am old enough now to realise that there was probably a lot more to the situation than that stark 'fact', but I am also too old to start reading his books - unless as now I am obliged to. 

Since I am not 'the target demographic' I can hardly pass judgement , although that won't stop me. I think it was a book of two halves; one's a school story, the other a fairy tale. I think the segue from one to the other is too obvious and jarring. I also think it shows Dahl to be an horrendous cultural snob. That said he was excellent in the first half on the powerlessness of small children in a world controlled, often in a manner perceived by them to be unjust, by adults.

I didn't particularly enjoy it, but I think as a child I might have done - although I am at a loss to think at what age I might have read and liked it

I am a bit concerned about the mess being made when scraping off the silver over the book pictures recently. I wonder if the stuff goes hard over time? with 85 (gulp) still to go, it would be  a sad thing if they were all, bar the first dozen, to be so mangled. 

A Day Late - but Yum Yum!

We love things from Betty's. We do not love how much they cost, which is probably the only thing that keeps us from a steady stream of what the Americans call Baked Goods arriving at our door from Harrogate. 

Birthdays warrant a little extravagance though, so I suggested the OH splash out and get something from Betty's for mine.  The postal service being even more than usually unpredictable  the box didn't arrive util Wednesday -

but well worth the short wait. Delicious! And not quite all gone yet, but they need eating up quite quickly before they spoil.

100 Books to Read Poster No. 14

It's a sad fact that, with my eyesight deteriorating  again I can make out that image better as a photograph on the computer than looking at it 'in real life'....

Be that as it may this was Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie and of course I had read it before. I was 10 when I read my first Christie (during a very wet holiday on Arran where my mother bought The Murder of Roger Ackroyd for something to do and I read it when she had finished it. Thus began a lifelong love affair with the crime fiction genre - not that it was called that when I was a child - and I had read the whole Christie canon barring a few short stories by the time I was fifteen. I preferred Miss Marple to Hercule Poirot, and probably still do to be honest.

I was dreading re-reading this in a way because I haven't read any Christie for a long time, although I have some BBC Radio Dramatisations on my tablet which I use when I can't sleep. I find They Do It With Mirrors particularly useful for curing insomnia. In the meantime I have become accustomed to thinking of Christie in the way she is talked of these days as a bit of a second class writer; fantastical plots, stereotypical characters, ,producing puzzles rather  than stories etc etc.

A lot of this is true, and if you want a fantastical plot then MOTOE is probably the GoTo example, and its not far behind in the stereotypes for characters department either. On the other hand there are some quite amusing touches , and Poirot on the page is not quite the caricature that recent film and TV versions of Christie's books have made him. 

There was an unwittingly chilling moment. The book was first published in 1934 and there was no reason then for Christie not to put into the mouth of a German character, commenting on a murder,  the sentiment that "We are not so wicked as that in Germany". Not many years later history would give the lie to that in a particularly terrible way.

Leaving that last aside though, I rather enjoyed this book, certainly more than I had anticipated and I decided that Christie was a better writer than I had remembered. So a hit rather than a miss for this one I think.

Happy Birthday to Me (for yesterday)

I wasn't feeling particularly jolly when my birthday arrived, but I managed to cheer up as the day went on, greatly helped by phone calls and Skype calls from family, some lovely cards and equally nice presents. The problem with the presents of course is where to start; do I cast on socks, do I start one of my jigsaw puzzles, do I read one of my new books? In the event I spent so much time interacting with people that I managed only to not quite finish the edges of the jigsaw puzzle before the day was over.

The OH produced the cake, which is a Baking Subscription reprise; the sticky toffee drip cake from October 2018. It was gorgeous then and was even more gorgeous this time around since I wasn't the person making it! 

Getting older is no fun really but the brother of the OH and I decided that we will just go with feeling  like we're actually only in our mid-30s until decrepitude convinces both ourselves and others of the fact that we actually left them behind some years ago. 

Onwards and Upwards.  Or bookwards in my case for the remainder of today.