Friday 31st July - Reading List

I barely read a single book during term times this academic year just passed. In the evenings I've tended to browse the blogs that are on my www.feedly.com, and scroll through twitter, and flip through flipboard, with one eye and one ear vaguely directed to "easy-watching-TV). I really didn't have many brain cells left to deal with any kind of "input" that needed proper thinking about.

It's because I've had a particularly tough teaching year, and I have had more behaviour management issues that I have ever had to deal with, but that is all over now - and it wasn't all bad, just jolly hard work. And extra dosh.

Anyway, it took about a week before I was able to start reading books again, and I'm now about ready to start reading "proper books" as opposed to "easy-reading". There are still plenty in the house in spite of the hundreds that we have got rid of this year.

(When we were house-hunting back in about 1979, I can remember going round houses where there was not a single book, or even a magazine, anywhere in sight. Scary. The house I grew up in, had books in every room except the downstairs loo and the laundry room.)

I've been loading up my kindle in readiness;

These are the books I'm reading at the moment.

"The Year of Reading Dangerously" is the only really "booky" book. The others are dip-in-and-out, which is what I do; read a page or so of each every so often.

These are new books that I have loaded up recently.

 I've no idea why I downloaded "Daisy Miller"; it was referenced in something else I was reading but I can't remember where or when. Likewise "Castle in the Air". "The Daisy Chain" was mentioned in a blog I follow on early English Literature (Saxon and such-like), and the author of the book, Charlotte M Yonge, is probably the only slightly famous person from my school. I've never read any of her books, but she was very popular in her day.

"A History of the World in 100 Objects" is the book of the radio 4 series. I've got the series on CD and listen to it frequently at night instead of reading. It's fascinating, I love it, but listening to any kind of talking book is also an excellent way for me to fall asleep, so the CDs are lasting me for months and months and months.

These are ones that I have started at various times over the past couple of years - they are all more of the dip-in-and-out-of kind. I'm thoroughly enjoying "A History of England in 100 Places", and have gone out of my way to visit some of them (others I've already been to). Reading "Cultural Amnesia" is a bit like reading an encyclopaedia; you really need to read it while sitting next to a computer so that you can follow up the links to a piece of music, or a poem, or google some background to the subject under discussion.

I'm also sort of reading "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Attwood. It's what I think of as a "proper" book, you know, Booker Prize shortlist and all that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryx_and_Crake

Not sure if I'm going to stick with it, having just read the wikipedia synopsis. Andy Miller used to just read 50 pages per day to "get through" a book on his "Dangerous List". He said that it helped him stick with a "difficult" book for long enough to be able to appreciate it. Maybe I'll just reach for the next Mary Stewart, now that I've put them all in order on the landing bookshelf (bottom row, right-hand-side, underneath all the Dick Francis books).

Thursday 30th July - Brighton

What shall we do today? The weather looks reasonable (cloudy, sunny, overcast, bright, windy, calm, warm, a bit chilly, all by turns).

Mottisfont Abbey being rather a long way to go, we went to Brighton instead.

We made our usual pilgrimages to The Utility Shop

(image from their website at http://www.utilitygreatbritain.co.uk/cms/Brighton_Shop_)

 

where you can find all things utilitarian (bought a dozen hankies for £2.50 and an unbreakable soap-dish. Resisted wantable blue-and-white Swedish china platters decorated with ships and roses and anchors, based on popular tattoo designs in the Navy)

and to Pen to Paper

(image from here http://www.thepalimpsest.co.uk/2012/09/stationery-store-series-pen-to-paper.html)



where you can find many things pen- and ink- and paper- and notebook-ish, especially moleskine (bought a nifty pencilsharpening rubber, or perhaps it is an erasing pencilsharpener, hard to tell really, and Yet Another lickle-ickle tin of coloured cartridges - eclat de saphir this time - for my lickle-ickle Herbin fountain pen.)

En passant we examined all the mysterious products in Yum-Yum Oriental Market, a little further along. Sydney Street. Oh wow. But not this time - I didn't want to lug a load of weird and wonderful ingredients around Brighton.

By now my eyes were full of everything we'd seen, so lunch (Carluccios - pick the tables with chairs, not benches as the springs are going, but the food's still good) and a stroll along the sea-front back to the car.

I was completely done - (had been since Oriental market, if truth be told) but made it back.

A brief stop at "The Hiker's Rest" Saddlecombe, nested into the South Downs below Devil's Dyke, for tea and cake, and home.

Thursday 30th July - A mystery

Can you see these vertical lines on my car headlamp?

WHAT has made them?

A snail, maybe? We spotted these weird tracks last November on the bonnet of a car; a bit of research confirmed that they were caused by a snail grazing on the gubbins growing on the car.

If I increase the size of the picture of the car, you can see the tracks more clearly;

Well, that's a maybe - but ol' snaily seems to be going in a remarkably straight line. Perhaps the ones on the silver car were giant drunken snails, and mine was a tee-totaller?

Wednesday 29th July - Buttons

On Monday I stayed in my nightdress and dressing-gown All Day. This was in an attempt to make sure that I did Absolutely Nothing to help the antibiotics see off the chest infection.

I managed to be idle until lunchtime, and then I set about a small task that has been on my mind for weeks and weeks now - the sewing drawer.

For a couple of months, well, probably years, I have just rammed stuff in on top whenever I have needed to put away sewing materials, so the resultant tangle was making it increasingly difficult to get any more sewing done.

Eventually everything went back again, except for various bits and pieces which found a new home in the bin.

The tin and jar on the shelf are button collections, mine in the jar, and my mother's in the tin. I used to  play with the button tin for hours when I was a toddler, but I hadn't opened it for decades.

I remember many of the buttons; that big one, near the bottom of the picture, with a green tweed insert came from a winter coat, sort of  cape-like in style, with a broad collar.

I was curious about the tin - you can buy them on the net for £10 - £15 as "vintage collectables".

Wednesday 29th July - Reading again

Hey, reading this post again I  thought I was being very dismissive of both Many Stewart and Miss Read . Well, maybe they aren't publishing Great Works of literature but they have still written more books than me , And l do keep reading them over again. Anyway, let's get back to the original post:

This one emerged from the dust as we sorted and sorted and sorted the shelves yesterday and today (another dozen books ready to go, and three or four more binned as too old/too tatty/too appalling to be inflicted on British Hearts - there are limits)


Bit of a fuzzy image, but the current book covers are even soppier than the stories within.

And yes, the baddy WAS the baddy, and the goody WAS the baddy, and it all ended happily ever after. I used to think of her books as a kind of valium. (I put the school stories by "Miss Read" in a similar category)

this might even have been the edition
that I read - was it my grandmother's?
Ah, memories...

I was given valium once, intravenously, about ten years ago now. I was about to have a my first ever right-heart-catheter, where they run a fine tube from a very personal part of the anatomy up into the right side of the heart, in my case to check the internal pressures. They checked my blood pressure in the normal way beforehand, and clearly I was showing some signs of stress. (I was bloody terrified, to be honest!) We (my Best Beloved was with me) knew something was up when they said, in ultra-calm tones, "Let's just try this machine over here, as this one doesn't seem to be working properly, ah, yes, I see. Yes. Thank you, and the Doctor will be along shortly to see you".

So, the Doctor very sensibly decided to start things off with a dose of valium, and then carry on with the catheter. An excellent idea. The effect was like drinking a large sherry on an empty stomach, and all my fears subsided.

Reading books by Mary Stewart is actually not at all like the effect of the valium that time. I can report that they don't cause wooziness, dizziness, total relaxation and freedom from all care. It's more like being slowly, and inevitably overcome by sleep. Perfect, if that's what you were wanting.

I was looking for the right word for the way these books cause sleep to happen - inveigle, lure, ensnare, etc etc. Now that the bookshelves are tidy, it was the work of seconds to locate my Thesaurus (a gift from my Uncle and Aunt "on the occasion of her confirmation, March 10 1973").

I managed to tear myself away from the Thesaurus after a while; one can get seriously lost in there. And the exact word I want is still just beyond my grasp.



 

Tuesday 28th July - NOT reading books

These posts are going to come thick and fast, and in the wrong order, now that the holidays have started.

The Summer Cold that I started over a week ago was threatening to become a chest infection. So on Saturday 25th I started the antibiotics that I keep ready in my private pharmacy "just in case".

Good decision.  I tested out my stamina mooching around Guildford (walking up the High Street is always a good diagnostic procedure) and found that I was "creeping" up the hill rather than walking. Reminds me of the stories of Grandfather's car which had to tackle some hill somewhere in the west Country in reverse gear, as that was the only gear with enough - power? torque? whatever - to get to the top.

I have tried walking uphill backwards to see if it is easier. But not on this occasion.

Anyway, "taking-it-easy" wasn't scheduled to happen until Monday - and by today I was bored with lolling around and got stuck into the bookshelves which have been annoying me for months.

result - well, the bookshelves still appear to be almost completely full.

 These are the ones in the sitting-room.

I also had a good sort out of the ones above our bed, over my chest of drawers, and the two bookshelves on the landing. They all appear to be completely unchanged - still crammed with books. One bookshelf looks very much like another, so I haven't trundled upstairs to photograph them.

And another 12 bags of books to the charity shop.

Monday was a duvet day, (more about that another time - I did say I'd be posting things in the wrong order, didn't I?), and I reckon most of tomorrow will have to be one too. The secret seems to be Not To Get Dressed, which makes me less likely to climb up and down step-stools and lug the books around.

Tuesday July 28th - Reading Books - Tapas etc

A whole month since I last blogged? It's been busy, and tiring, and pretty much non-stop. And when it did stop, all I wanted to do was click away on Freecell, or browse through Twitter and Facebook.

Reading required too much effort and concentration. Seriously. However, I read this one;

It was free to download on my Kindle. 

And it was exactly what it said it would be - a "cozy mystery" with recipes, set in a cafe on a harbour-side in Cornwall. (No, the butler didn't do it*).

I remember the carrot cake, but not any tapas. Perhaps I was asleep for those pages.

Easy-reading, and worth every penny.

*there isn't a butler, that's why.