Doing nothing

'Seven Steeples' by Sara Baume has been as engaging and weird as her other books. In it two young people meet and bond, and go to live at the foot of a remote mountain in a tatty little cottage. And there they stay, never venturing further than the village and the beach, their routines forming such a deep groove in their existence that there can be no diverting from them. I don't feel like I got to know them well, felt more like a fly on the wall, or an alien, watching but not understanding their behaviour. There was no crisis to break them out. I kept expecting one of the dogs to die or a calamitous fire or something. But as I have reflected before books where nothing much happens are ok too. It is a quiet mediation on life. And in some places read like poetry, with disruptive line breaks. Conversations are reported but neither of them speaks aloud, and the house, slowly, disintegrates around them. 

It's all about the writing. I love authors who are all about the writing. 

"Although it surpassed the full spread of its surroundings, the high, rocky land was not strictly the right shape to be called a mountain. From sea level it appeared mountain-like, but the house itself had been built on a sharp hill above the scabrous shoreline. From the perspective of the driveway where they stood, the facing outcrop appeared to be more a ridge or bluff - blunt but tall, inhospitable.

Gently and unspectacularly it ascended from the Atlantic, as if it had accumulated its stature over centuries. As if, over centuries, it had steadily flattened itself upwards.

It was the shape of a prehistoric bank,

a drove of smoke,                 an obliterating wave,

a mud and rock and foliage barrier,

                                 impeding,         protecting." (p.11)

Here the scene is set for the general atmosphere of the place:

"For seven decades, the mountain had watched as new tenants moved in and out again, leaving behind the props and shrapnel of their passing. There was a laundry pole, a breeze block, a tyre swing, a partially rotted pallet. There was the orphaned fixture of an old satellite dish, and a marginally newer satellite dish.

The house had always remained unpainted - raw grey plaster except for the sea-facing gable, which was smattered with mustard-coloured lichen - an abstract mural painted by

                         fungal hyphae,               airborne nitrates,

                                            and time." (p.16)

On arrival they announce an intention to climb the mountain, but ...

"It remained unclimbed as the batteries inside the carbon-monoxide detector ran flat, and then the smoke alarm - as the former ceased to blink, and the latter commenced to chirp,

        once every sixty second,             out in the dark hall -

        like a supermarket checkout,      or an orphaned chick." (p.64)

They don't just leave behind their old lives, they separate themselves utterly, turning inwards towards each other:

"They talked about the bits and pieces of family they left behind, back in their autonomous lives. They wondered aloud, in intricate detail, whether or not to face down the embarrassment of having lost touch in the first place,          and get in touch again.

They settled it, as had become their habit, by doing nothing." (p.84)

As time goes on their lives become smaller, they walk the same path, eat the same food, have the same conversations, play the same games:

"During the overlong evenings, they played Connect 4.

Their set was missing several of the yellow counters and two of the red. When they first started playing, the absent counters made no difference, but as they practices and improved, the games started to drag on and exhaust the supply of the set's parts, and so they cut duplicate counters out of thick card, painted them yellow and red, but still there came a point at which no game could ever be finished; at which they were both able to foresee every coming move. The blue board, standing erect, would fill up until there wasn't a single slot left empty, even though neither of them had won." (p.224)

"Indoors they tackled the potted plant situation for the second time in six years. They laid old newspapers down across the oriental rug. Laboriously they uprooted and rehomed the descendants of their first generation of succulents, cacti, geraniums and spider ivies.

At last they were forced to abandon the idea that each pot should be mounted upon a pedestal of some form. There wasn't a square inch of vacant surface left inside the rooms of the house - not the narrow ledges jointing bathtub to wall, not the flat heaps of book heaps, not a sliver of windowsill. They resorted to the floor, plugging the gaps of bare lino between the rug islands with the chipped dishes and bowls that cupped the homemade pots. Almost immediately the plants drifted from their allotted spots, encroaching upon the islands themselves.

What once had been empty space was then root, leaf, stem and prickles.

What had once been lifeless floor           undulated. (p.196-7)

"Many reusable shopping bags - of canvas, jute and hessian, of recycled plastic bottles, tyres and string - had been hung on the hooks on the back of the kitchen door, so many that, by then, it would only open wide enough to admit a single body at a time.

They would queue to enter the kitchen from the living room, the living room from the kitchen.

Every item of food, with the exception of their own potatoes, had been carried into the house in one of those reusable bags, mostly the several closest to the front. The layer of bags at the very back, squashed against the timber of the door, remained untouched. There was still a flake of the skin of a red onion inside one, some dry earth inside another, a few strands of hair from an ear of corn." (p.234)

I found myself frustrated by their passivity, but that is the point. They choose not to not make choices. They lean in to each other. There are lots of lovely descriptions of the natural environment too. A book heavy on atmosphere, weather, tiny details of life. A book to be absorbed by.

It is due back at the library and I fear they may issue fines ... but also, someone else wants this book.

Stay safe. Be kind.

A little reading

 

Mostly I have been doing puzzles, but also a little reading. 'The Rest of Our Lives' by Ben Markovits: strangely another book about someone possibly dying of cancer, and like Panenka he is very much in denial. Tom is planning to drive away from his marriage, but when he does it doesn't feel quite as he anticipated. It's a very 'blokey' book (if that's a word?). Liked this little bit, not the only time he mentioned a 'power dynamic', which feels like something that men are often concerned with, and cars, and the notion that women are impressed by them:

"We took his car. It's a funny thing to be driven around by your son, you feel the power dynamic shifting. He had an old Acura Legend, which he'd bought secondhand and still smelled of cigarettes. But it was a nice-looking car and I thought, Betty wouldn't mind driving around in this. The air-conditioning stank though, at least at first, so he turned it on and kept the windows open until we got to the highway. After that the road was too loud." (p.195)

Then on the next page, this lovely sentence: "All of this makes it look like we were having a conversation, but it was more like, sometimes one of us spoke." So beautifully observed, made the book worth reading.

'Man With a Seagull on his Head' by Harriet Page was requested after the others from Bluemoose Books so impressed me. Quirkiness will always win me over and this one ticks all the boxes. Raymond is hit on the head by a dying seagull, an event witnessed by Jennifer. It has a huge impact on his life, and very little on hers. A copy of the local paper plays a significant role and in the end Mira transports an entire bungalow to the Tate Modern. How's that for a teaser trailer. 

"Jennifer looked up. Here she was, in her shop. The silence was heavy; the street seemed emptied out in a way that made her wonder if she'd missed something, some catastrophe. But then a lone car drove slowly past and, as the sound of the engine receded, she caught the distant judder-judder of machinery making holes in the road somewhere, and now a woman walking past, a child running on behind, and she breathed again, relieved, and a little disappointed too, that the world was carrying on. The day she'd seen the seagull fall on the head of the man called Ray Eccles seemed impossibly remote, the memory a mist around her mind in which she flailed about for a moment trying to grab at least some recollection of his face." (p.53)

Caring for my sister leaves a lot of time for reflection and introspection. So I wrote a poem. My life has become small, focused on the happenings in the living room, but hers, swiftly and unimaginably, has become tiny.

Such a little life A little eye open A little drink A little bite A little wash A little teeth clean A little hair brush A little foot rub A little roll over A little blanket But not a little sleep A long long sleep Everything else gets smaller but not the sleep

Stay safe. Be kind.

Panenka

It turns out that libraries are everywhere, and Torquay does not insist I prove I live here before it will let me borrow books (and puzzles).

I read Leonard and Hungry Paul back in January and so loved it that when I came across Panenka by Ronan Hession I ordered it right away. It is coincidentally about a man with a brain tumour, though it does not feature significantly in the story. Panenka is a man who's life has been blighted by a mistake in his youth during a football match, for which the whole town continues to blame him, for the loss of the match and the subsequent decline of the team's fortunes. But rather like Leonard and Hungry Paul it is a book all about the people and their relationships. While I did not feel it was such a strong book because there was too much people-talking-about-their-relationships rather than those relationships being revealed by events, it had some lovely moments which made it a lovely book.

Two little moments, description, then something else. Firstly Panenka is looking for somewhere to get his hair cut when his usual barber is closed:

"As he stood there in his indecision, an elderly woman approached him slowly on the narrow, uneven path. She was smoking a cigarillo and exhaled lazily from the side of her mouth, her expression conveying the general impression that she was too old to give a damn. Her look was moneyed and eccentric, and she was walking a ratter on an extendable lead. Though it was warm, she wore a nicotine-yellow fake fur coat and a red beret with a white bobble, like a pimple. She made no concession to him as he stood sideways to let her pass, but he didn't take offence, momentarily hypnotised by the weird charisma unique people have. Panenka watched her disappear around the elbow of the road, taking her colour with her like a departing parade and leaving him alone again with the morning melancholy. The street was less alive without her." (p.62-63)

Then his first meeting with Esther, watching her with another customer, and then after she has coped so graciously with his existential crisis (joined in to one quote because they are on subsequent pages):

"She showed him the back of his head in a hand mirror. He had a thin comb-over that she had managed to trim without exposing the lost cause.
'How's that for you?' she asked.
'Perfect. I don't like taking too much off. It's hard to know which will go first: me or the hair.'
She handed him his hat - one of those old-man jobs - and an anorak with a lavender scarf tucked into the sleeve. Panenka wondered whether it had been his wife's.
'That's perfect. I look beautiful again,' he said, leaving a tip in small coins that was more generous in intent and amount. 'I'll see you next time, please God.'
'Bye now,' she said, with a smile that seemed to transfer from her face to his. 

...

When she turned back to face him, he noticed that a stray hair had come out from behind her ear and was caught on the side of her mouth. He considered for a moment what it would be like to be the one who could reach out and return that hair to its place." (p. 78 and 81)

I couldn't return it without a record because it was such a wonderful book. I have also read in the last few weeks Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, which was quite hard going but so well written (of course, I would never have expected otherwise), it did quite inspire me to read David Copperfield, not a Dickens I have tackled before. 

Stay safe. Be kind. 

Hiatus

So, there has been something of a hiatus, not so much in the reading as in life. 'Mere' by Danielle Giles and 'Awake in the Floating City' by Susanna Kwan were both book club books, which, as the year has mostly gone so far, I felt ambivalent about. Both suffered from the same thing in a way, that the author was not sure what kind of book they wanted to write. Especially Floating City; it is sold as some kind of post-apocalypse but that is barely mentioned and morphs into a relationship book with a sideline in artistic expression. Loved Louise Doughty's 'A Bird in Winter', a fast paced drama about a woman agent who goes on the run on discovering high level double agents, excellent escapism. Eurotrash by Christian Kracht was pressed on my by mum, a slightly surreal tale of a mother/son relationship as they trail around Europe with a pile of cash and a colostomy bag. Also listened to 'Cold Enough for Snow' by Jessica Au on the train to Devon, which was a delight. A story of a mother and daughter travelling in Japan.

So, it feels a little as if life came to a halt, several months ago, the day before my birthday, when I phoned mum and she told me my sister has a brain tumour. Very little else has been occupying my thoughts. It is surreal to watch people around you carrying on as normal. So, it has become a thing that is not just happening to her, but to our whole family, and we are closing in around her to take care of her. 

Christopher Hitchens book Mortality, written as he was dying of cancer was not designed to be comforting, but I found it to be, because the temptation is to pretend that this is not happening and it helped to find someone unafraid.

So, there will be something of a hiatus.

Stay safe. Be kind.

The new routine

So it seems that once a month-ish will be all I can manage for the time being, brain space being occupied with other stuff. 

'Come to the Edge' by Joanna Kavenna, was excellent fun, it had something of 'Spoiled Creatures' about it, rural idyll that is not so idyllic and populated by crazy people. An unnamed narrator leaves her husband and heads off into the wild north in search of maybe the meaning of life. Instead she finds Cassandra and mud. I found it depressing in the end because the woman does not change; she is bland and biddable at the beginning, and bland and biddable at the end. There is no epiphany where she finds true inner strength, she survives the events and returns to what she left behind. 

Here just an amusing description. I liked that the story plainly did not take itself too seriously and the writer did not hold back from the chaos that ensues from Cassandra's plans:

"Mandy has long straight hair and the atmosphere of the village fete hanging off her, and she would be outraged if she knew what was really happening. She's something of a hippy but not one who wants to get slammed in prison. A peaceable, authority-respecting organic-food-buying type of hippy, not a man-the-barricades and smash-the-pigs type." (p.184)

'The Last Sane Woman' by Hannah Regel (who has no website) was also excellent. It charts the lives of two young women artists. I was endeared to it immediately because Donna has recently graduated from North Staffordshire Polytechnic in the same era that I did. She is a ceramicist with a bright future but of course the world is a tough place for struggling artists. In the 2020s is Nicola, also a struggling ceramicist, who finds a feminist arts archive that contain a collection of letters that Donna wrote to her childhood friend Susan. So we just follow the lives of them both as they try to make their way in the world.

Here Susan reflecting on their friendship:

"If she's interrogated the matter further, she might have said that this dislike came from how her friend now appeared: as letters, addressed to her, and therefore secret. Donna was not the kind of friend they had over for dinner on a regular basis. Even when she was with Dev and they could have done the whole couples thing, the idea had never occurred to her. It was not that she didn't want to share her friend, but that she didn't know how. Not without losing the sense of herself she had build without her; without tripping that self over and falling back into being sixteen, eleven, four." (p.89)

Lovely metaphors:
"As instructed, Donna dries her face and the three of them step out into the blizzard. The snow lands on her head like a cat's paw, padding her hair into a wet white ball and squeaking underfoot." (p.114)

"She pulled a fitted sheet over her own stupidity and smoothed it out, waiting patiently for her accident to dry and for Marcella to finish." (p.159)

And, just how you imagine an artist would exist:
"Nicola surveyed the worktops surrounding her. Every inch was crammed with stuff: anagram fired bowls stacked with ripening plums, their sangria skin waxy with storm clouds, dusty kilner jars full of muesli and dried flageolet beans, piles and piles of rhubarb, freshly pulled with the dirt at the tip, scrunching bags of dried figs." (p.171)

The whole book was a delight of such descriptions. But Donna remains something of an enigma, and when Nicola steals the letters I hoped for a dramatic denouement but was left hanging ...

'The Beautiful Atlantic Waltz' by Malachy Tallack was the book club book for February, about three generations of a crofting family on Shetland. It focusses on Jack, who in the present has withdrawn more into his own quiet existence, keeping to himself, until new neighbours and a cat upset his carefully organised routine and give him a reason to care about others. It was not my sort of thing, a little predictable, but I enjoyed the story and the characters and sense of community. 

The world is going to hell in a handcart but we will soldier on. Green Party win in the by-election was so encouraging; I even participated and so felt permitted to share the glory. 

Stay safe. Be kind.

 

What is real?

I have had Ruth Ozeki's 'The Book of Form and Emptiness' from the library before, it's long and I ended up returning it barely started, and for once I actually got around to borrowing it again. I confess it has been difficult. I read 'Tale for the Time Being' a decade ago, so I was determined to like this too. Like the previous book it also asks the question about reality. Benny and the Book take turns to tell us what is happening, and a lot is happening. I initially thought that Benny was experiencing something supernatural and was a bit suspicious of where the book was going, and I struggled watching Annabelle be overwhelmed and unable to have much agency in her life. The whole set up was quite frightening, how easily an apparently ordinary life can slip out from under you, and how much they had depended on Kenji, even though he seems to have been less than dependable. 

Kenji is killed in a stupid accident and Annabelle and Benny are left with grief and just each other. When object around him start talking to Benny he finds it annoying, to begin with. As the talk gets louder and more intrusive he has nowhere to escape it. He is sectioned the first time after the scissor incident and on the children's psyche ward he meets the Aleph. She has struggles of her own but she becomes someone who helps him make sense of things that are happening. 

"Is it odd to see a book within a book? It shouldn't be. Books like each other. We understand each other. You could even say we are all related, enjoy a kinship that stretches like a rhizomatic network beneath the human consciousness and knits the world of thought together. Think of us as a mycelium, a vast, unconscious fungal mat beneath the forest floor, and each book a fruiting body. Like mushrooms we are a collectivity. Our pronouns are we, our, us.

Because we're all connected, we communicate all the time - agreeing, disagreeing, gossiping about other books, name-dropping, and quoting each other - and we have our preferences and prejudices too. Of course, we do! Biases abound on library shelves. The scholarly tomes disparage the more commercial books. Literary novels look down on romance and pulp fiction, and there's an almost universal disregard for certain genres, like self-help." (p.94)

The Book as a character in the book is Benny's book. It is said we all have a book inside us, the story of our own life. Benny's book starts talking to him and as he spirals into his breakdown he feels that the book is the one in charge, the one making the bad things happen, and he wants to shut it out. The book tries to explain that it is just a narrator but Benny is struggling to see what is real. The other book that appears in the book is 'Tidy Magic', a decluttering self-help book written by a Japanese Buddhist monk.

While the book is about so many things, it centres on Benny's mental health crisis; we watch as he falls off the edge, it is vivid and frightening, and Annabelle is powerless to help him. He escapes school and finds a safe place in the local library that he visited as a child, reading voraciously and randomly to quiet the voices in his head. But then Annabelle has an accident trying to clear some of the accumulated junk from the house and things all fall further apart. The library becomes however a place where they both find help and a community of people who catch them before they hit the bottom. 

Sometimes a story does try to do too much, and there is a lot going on in this story; the sense of belonging and family, the disconnectedness of society, consumerism as a replacement for the lost connection, grief and friendship, and several references to the earthquake and tsunami of 2011 (that feature also in Tale for the Time Being). But it is all pulled together in this mother and son who need each other, but who cant weather their storm alone. 

Sometimes you get to the end of a book and are just glad to be there. 

Stay safe. Be kind.

Existential Disarray

'A Field Guide to Reality' by Joanna Kavenna, is reviewed on the front cover as 'hallucinogenic', and that is definitely a word I might have come up with. Fever dream might be another description. Another book with a young woman narrator. And a book with pictures. More grown-up books should have pictures.

Eliade Jencks works in a cafe, but she has a somewhat mysterious connection to Professor Solete who has just died. When a philosophy professor leaves his magnum opus, The Field Guide to Reality, to a waitress his colleagues are understandably confused. When the box he has left her turns out to be empty things get weird. What follows is somewhat like a treasure hunt, Eliade and Anthony Yorke following clues that take them across Oxford, meeting with old friends and obscure secret societies. The story flipped between the mundanity of her everyday life and these academicians who live almost in another world. 

Whole stream of quotes, because the whole book is pretty much quotable. Here they arrive at Cassavetes' narrowboat:

"An oil lamp was swinging above our heads. The place was rammed with books and detritus. If books are detritus too, then the place was simply rammed with detritus. Every surface, every region, was full of papers, books, pencils, drawings of the river, tastefully executed, musical instruments, compasses, maps, pot plants, plates, cups, teapots. A cat mewed from below; Cassavetes leaned down and stroked it. There was a pan steaming on the stove, and Cassavetes dished out bean stew. We ate on tin plates." (p.104)

They spend a lot of the book tromping around in the cold and wet. Here they have just had an argument over her use of the phrase 'I lost my father' as a euphemism for death:

"That produced a pause. For a while we walked inside the pause, which spread as the darkness spread across the meadow. Animals punctuated the silence, as if they were trying to help - a last flurry of birdsong and unknown beasts rustling through the hedgerows. All nature chorused and then, suddenly, fell silent. The pause swept across the darkening fields.

Yorke was hastening along again, shuddering and occasionally stumbling on the hard ground.

The treacherous moon rose above the houses, filling the mist with injurious light." (p.114-115)

I just love that 'walked inside the pause'. It captures so perfectly how it feels to be with someone and not talking, feeling the tension of things unsaid. 

Here, later, things are becoming unreal (but also loved 'sartorial philosophy'):

"Anthony walked faster and faster. There was something relentless about his pace. Of course, the cold, his general hypothesis that coats were evil, or whatever his theory of the coat. It wasn't quite the time for sartorial philosophy. I understood. I didn't understand at all. Anything. Even coats were becoming strange and controversial. I carried on, and on, and I felt something like - resistance? My own? Or, the mist was becoming turgid? We were approaching the centre of the old earthworks, the place of maximum power. If you believed that sort of thing, which I didn't. And I assumed, neither did Anthony. But we were desperate. Everything else was increasingly intangible. Trees rustled as we walked, and the clouds moved slowly above the towers of the city. Electricity hummed, or some other force I couldn't begin to understand. The moon slid through the mist, staining it silver. Another shadow leered towards me - I recoiled! But it was nothing, of course. Another frill, a tendril, and then I moved into another region of shadow, I stepped into it, felt the cold air grip me. Reality came in and out as if I were receiving it on an ancient radio. Crackling on the wires. Intermissions of static." (p.172-173)

The book lurches into mysticism and magic and science and mathematics before drawing us back to philosophy. At one point the book reminded me of Sophie's World, that I have actually only read part of, but it's as if Solete has left Eliade a puzzle to solve, rather than his own answer. And all the people she encounters tell her parts of a story that she has to make sense of:

"I thought for a moment that I would just keep walking around the rivers and around the city until something occurred to me. But what would occur to me? The sun shone, as if some fetid branch of fate was trying to convince me it was all OK. I didn't believe the symbolic urgings of the weather. I kept thinking, surely if I just try one more time, I'll manage to solve the thing. I was completely convinced for a moment that I could still find this single final thing, and even the Field Guide, if I just made more of an effort. I had to find something, and put it in the box. Solete had left me alluring emptiness - and of course, what else do you do with emptiness? You fill it!" (p.207)

The black and white drawings punctuate the book, sometimes of places they go, sometimes more abstract ideas. Here Eliade is in the canal, after Cassavetes pushes her in. It is almost as if the dunking breaks the spell and returns her to the real world. I had to let go of some stuff that I didn't understand but that did not lessen for me how much I enjoyed the book. There is a denouement, but I felt the exploration was the point of the story. Definitely a writer I will seek out again.

Stay safe. Be kind. Read something challenging.

Cold Water

I read 'Sick Notes' way way back in 2013 and it was a book that stayed with me because of my reaction to it. I must have read about a new one expected out from Gwendoline Riley (who still doesn't have her own website) and came up with Cold Water in the library. Again she is writing about Manchester and the book is littered with references to places, streets and businesses across the city. It's funny how it does make you feel more invested in the story. This one is actually her first book and you can see the same themes running through it, it could almost be the same character, the same aimlessness, trying to make sense of existence. Again life is very grubby. But I think what I like is that she makes something out of nothing. These people are utterly unremarkable, but aren't we all, and that does not mean their lives and thoughts are not worthy of interest.

Carmel is recovering from a broken heart. She works in a bar, when she bothers to turn up. She wanders around and hangs out with friends. She gets drunk. She tells us about the people she's hanging out and getting drunk with.

After all the lovely metaphors in 'Portable Veblen' I was on the lookout.

"'Well, whiskey killed my mother so it has semi-romantic associations for me,' he said as he lifted the glass. How drab. Some people carry their emotional life around with them like a dead rat in a shoe box. Ready to whip it open and flash it under people's noses." (p.16)

"I'd mentioned Tony, but he didn't even exist for me anymore. I'd sealed him in the past. He was a myth, he was a rumour, and this talk was just night-time, half-drunk hyperbole. It's a relief when you can fall out of love. It's one less stone in your satchel." (p.19)

"Her tights twinkled cheaply in the light of the blue-orange flames and her face dissolved into the vague dusk. The fairy lights cast weird shadows like barbed wire." (p.52)

"A couple of days later, at Irene's behest, we went looking for Gene's brother Arthur at Longsight Market, where I knew he ran a book and record stall. A bare-bulb sun hung beneath a slanting bank of black clouds; the rain made a static crackle as it hit the pavement. The cold air carried out the stink of the meat counters and the grubby tarpaulin canopies above the fruit stalls held their own puddles." (p.78)

That's kind of it really. It's a book all about the writing, the atmosphere she creates. Loved it again. Will keep an eye out for the new one.

Stay safe. Be kind.

Next Time

'Next Time Will Be Our Turn' by Jesse Sultanto has been the January pick for my book group, and I have to say I quite enjoyed this one. Set in Indonesia it concerns Magnolia (or Tulip to her friends) telling her life story to her granddaughter Izzy. We don't get to know Izzy much, she is just the modern day commentator on her grandmother's experience. 

Magnolia's elder sister Iris is shipped off to an Indo-Chinese run home in America when she gets too fond of the boys and risks the family reputation, which seems a weird thing to do but there you go. The two girls, previously close, become strangers, with Iris coming back in the holidays transformed into an American girl. It seems that many affluent families would send their kids off to West Coast universities and when Magnolia graduates she joins her sister and their parents have set them up in a little apartment together. Pushed aside and ignored by the worldly and experienced Iris Magnolia is all at sea. On her first day she encounters the amazing Ellery. They become firm friends but when Magnolia begins to fall in love with Ellery her life is turned upside down. She loves her, but cannot acknowledge it, and, as they do, things fall apart; Mangolia goes home to Indonesia while Ellery heads off to London. They live their lives. Magnolia recounts her life in a long series of letters that she writes and never sends to Ellery. She marries, but it is Iris' choices that set the future in motion. 

It was a lovely tale of a strong sisterly bond, that in the end is more important than anything else. It is about how you self sacrifice for love. 

What's weird about the book is the timeline, which has Magnolia born in the 1980s, and is a grandparent to a teenager at the end, so maybe it's supposed to be being told at some future time. Whatever. 

I managed to come home from work and sit on the sofa and forget to go to the book club meeting, and writing that I just realised I also forgot to go up and get the new book. I see a trip to town in my very near future.

Little quote, it made me feel sad how she resigned herself to the life that was expected of her, but then many many people live their lives like that and it does not mean it was an unhappy one:

"Parker and I dated for almost a year before he proposed to me. The proposal itself was sweet, but not a surprise because, of course, we'd very sensibly discussed it in great detail beforehand. We'd had meals with both my parents and his where marriage was brought up, and nobody expressed any negative opinions. We were, after all, perfect on paper - both of us from similar ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. We even looked good together, Parker was five eight, tall for a Chindo guy, and when we stood next to each other, people often remarked what a cute couple we made. We rarely fought, and at the time, I thought it was because he was so agreeable and reasonable. I didn't think of how muted I had become over the years, how it had simply become habit to nod and agree with whatever anyone said." (p.166)

Stay safe. Be kind.

Never The Same Again

'The Portable Veblen' by Elizabeth Mckenzie is overdue at the library ... sorry. It was an excellent start to the year, a delight, that turned a little scary at times, because who doesn't need a bit of dramatic tension in their lives. And I love books with real people in them: Thorstein Veblen, after whom our heroine is named, was a real American economist and critic of capitalism (he doesn't appear in the story, but does get several mentions, and there are photos). Veblen and Paul are something of an odd couple, both with mildly dysfunctional families, but not in a bad way, but more than merely quirky. While Veblen is still deciding quite what to do with her life Paul has invented a device for relieving inter-cranial pressure after trauma to prevent brain damage, and interest in his device from a very powerful and wealthy woman sends events in all sorts of undesirable directions. Squirrels play quite a significant part in the story too. I can't really describe the story so that's all you're getting. The metaphors/similes were to die for:

"She was plain and mild in appearance, with hair the colour of redwood bark, and eyes speckled like September leaves." (p.2)

"Sometimes her reactions seemed to happen in slow motion, like old, calloused manatees moving through murky water." (p.14)

"He finished his bottle. The foam bubbled on his lips, tickling like root beer and first kisses." (p.70)

"This appeared to further unsettle him, which she rather enjoyed, a cool slap on the buttock of assumption." (p.179)

"She felt deflated, a balloon skin on the ground." (p.211)

"She drifted in like a stray feather." (p.295)

"She was aware that her mother had trained her to turn herself inside out, like a pocket to be inspected for pilfered change." (p.349)

The evolution of her relationship with her mother is central to the story. It has been a struggle for her to free herself; her mother constantly tries to reel her back in. This one gives you some idea of how things go:

"By now she recognised the patterns of her mother's behaviour that were triggered by any forward progress in her life. When Veblen finally made her move to Palo Alto, her mother fell into a horrible snit as Veblen finished packing that last day, throwing something at her while she zipped up one of her bags.

It was a patchwork cover for her computer, perfectly fitted, finely finished, made of scraps of Veblen's childhood dresses, just like the one her mother made for her typewriter once upon a time, an otherwise loving gesture except that her mother pitched it at her head and ran from the room in tears.

'Mom?' she called.

'What?' yelled her mother.

'I love it!' Veblen said.

'Melanie screeched, 'Go on, get out of here! Go, go, go, go, go!'" (p.130-131)  

I think I loved Veblen because she believed things so fervently, cared about everything. I loved her uncrushable idealism. And yet she still lived in the real world.

This, towards to end:

"She used to think falling in love was alchemy, that animals had weddings, that coal was a gemstone, that mountains were hollow, that trees had hidden eyes." (p.364) 

Stays safe. Be kind. Listen to the squirrels.                                                         

Leonard and Hungry Paul

The best thing about 'Leonard and Hungry Paul' by Rónán Hession is the fact that we never find out why Hungry Paul is called Hungry Paul. It's a book all about people, my favourite kind. I knew I was going to love it from the opening sentence: "Leonard was raised by his mother alone with cheerfully concealed difficulty, his father having died tragically during childbirth." So Leonard's mother has died but he still has his surrogate family at Hungry Paul's house. Lovely description of Hungry Paul's parent's relationship:

"She met Peter after he had stopped one day to give her directions to an art exhibition and then invited himself along. They fell in love effortlessly. Their initial chemistry broadened into physics and then biology, until they were blessed with Hungry Paul's sister Grace as their first child. They then had Hungry Paul after two difficult miscarriages and, understandable in the circumstances, they treasured him. As a couple, Helen and Peter continued to share the closeness of two people who have been through a lot together." (p.6-7)

I think it would be fair, and they would be unlikely to disagree, to use the word nerds about Leonard and Hungry Paul. This is an early example of their conversations, during a game of Yahtzee:

" 'Indeed I do. I see you still have the fridge magnet of The Scream you bought afterwards as a momento. It's not just any artist that makes it onto that fridge.'

'Well, I was reading an article about that very painting today and guess what? Do you know what the most fascinating thing about it is?' tantalised Hungry Paul.

'Okay, let me think. The orange background is related to the eruption of Krakatoa isn't it? Is that it?'

'Interesting, but that's not it.' Hungry Paul was rattling his dice in the cup the whole time, adding to the sense of suspense.

'Okay, I give up.'

'The figure in the painting isn't actually screaming!' Hungry Paul spilled his dice on the board as he revealed this; a little too enthusiastically, as one of them had to be retrieved from under the table - a four, which did him no good.

'Really, are you sure?'

'Absolutely. That's the whole thing. The figure is actually closing his ears to block out a scream. Isn't that amazing? A painting can be so misunderstood and still become so famous.' " (p.16)

A few pages later they discuss the meaning of life (as you do):

" '... As you know, I have always been modestly Hippocratic in my instincts: I wish to do no harm. My preference has always been to stand back from the world. Much like the Green Cross Code, I like to stop, look and listen before getting involved in things. It has stood me well and kept me on peaceful terms with my fellow man. It's certainly better than trying to make my mark on the world, only to end up defacing it.' " (p.18-19)

And a few pages after that this lovely quiet sad moment after Helen has phoned Leonard about wedding arrangements (Grace is getting married):

"Leonard hung up and took off the mask of easy conviviality. Standing there in the kitchenette, there was something about the sincerity of Helen's awkwardness that had bought it home to him. The 'plus one' on his invite, received several weeks ago, must have been intended for his poor mother. The thought stunned him gently for a moment as a man in chinos walked in and made disapproving noises at finding mugs left to soak. In a hurry to get back to his noise-cancelling headphones, Leonard put away the tea caddy and finished stirring his own palpable milky loneliness." (p.24-5)

So Leonard forms a low key relationship with Shelley at work and Hungry Paul enters a competition organised by the local Chamber of Commerce, and the arrangements for Grace and Andrew's wedding are both vitally central to the plot and utterly in the background. Significant changes to their quiet lives seem to be afoot. 

I just have to put this lovely little bit in, because Hungry Paul has a part time job as an ad-hoc postman and this description is so weirdly out of date (wooden pigeon holes have long since been phased out in favour of frames with individual slots) that I wonder what research the author did to come up with it (love the reference to 'bachelorhood' too as if postmen are young and unmarried, very much not the case):

"When he entered the sorting area where his post bag was waiting for him, the large room was practically empty, the early rising full-timers keen to get their day started - or more specifically finished - as soon as possible. This was a busy place in a state of desertion, with a lingering atmosphere of bachelorhood and strong opinions. Hungry Paul started organising the post into pigeon holes, one for each street on the route, before ordering it by house number. Throwing up and setting in, as it was called. If you didn't know a street you didn't know how to order the letters. Some streets were best done in odds and evens, some in numerical order. In semi-rural areas, where houses had names but no numbers, it was all a question of local knowledge, which was unavailable to the casual postman. In most cases it would have made more sense to just leave the post until the next day when the regular man would be back, as hardly anything urgent went by post anymore, but they never did that. It was said that a clean bench was a clean conscience." (p.52)

So while Helen is gently trying to coax Hungry Paul out into the real world by taking him with her when she goes hospital visiting a random exchange with a mime artist is set to alter the course of his life entirely.

I don't want to spoil it for you. The whole thing is just a delight. 

Stay safe. Be kind.

Looking Back and Forth

So we have rolled around to another year. There seems to be some consensus on good riddance to 2025. Routine life has plodded on with the highlight being my trip to Japan, but it now seems so long ago that I am barely sure it happened. Monkey is visiting in July this year so I can count down to the next time I see her. We chat on WhatsApp but it's not the same. I have restarted (for the third time) learning Japanese, but deliberately started before the new year so that it was definitely not a resolution. I need to go back to exercising but am going to consider my brain health first. And then financial health, which will involve not taking on anything else that will cost money; paying down the mortgage is going to be a priority.

So, books? I don't feel like I have read very much, and certainly far too many that were a bit meh. Having started well I have often not really liked the book club books, but I love the talking so have persevered with it and will continue to do so. Here is this year's list:

• On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
• The North Light by Hideo Yokoyama
• Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty
• The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
• The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft
• The Gentleman From Peru by André Aciman
• Enter Ghost by Isabella Hamad
• Orbital by Samantha Harvey
• Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
• Bird Life by Anna Smaile
• When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson
• There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
• The Beekeeper of Sunjar by Dunya Mikhail
• The Echoes by Evie Wyld
• The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
• Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
• Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
• The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
• Your Neighbour's Table by Gu Byeyong-Mo
• Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil by Oliver Darkshire
• Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
• When Will There be Good News by Kate Atkinson
• The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan
• Spoiled Creatures by Amy Twigg
• The World According to Garp by John Irving
• Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by Harriet Scott Chessman
• Should We Stay or Should We Go by Lionel Shriver
• Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
• The Anechoic Chamber by Will Wiles
• Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo
• The Witches of El Paso by Luis Jaramillo
• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
• Take Nothing With You by Patrick Gale
• The Wonder by Emma Donoghue
• The Ghost Orchid by Michael Longley
• Recursion by Blake Crouch (not worth a review, though I did read it all)

37 reviewed last year, though several abandoned part way and two to come from before Christmas, both wonderful (see one below). Highlight of the year has to the Emperor of Gladness, but also Orbital and Safekeep (below). More than I remembered that I did enjoy, maybe I was just being negative, it wasn't bad reading just neglectful reviewing.

'The Safekeep' by Yael Van Der Wouden was shortlisted for the Booker and won the Women's Fiction Prize in 2025, so was definitely on my radar. It starts a bit slow, with Isabel who lives a very small life in her childhood home, after her mother's death. Lots of snippets to come because it was so beautiful; coming back from dinner with her brother Hendrik :

"Home, when she arrived, welcomes her with relief. There you are, said the dim light in the kitchen, left on for comfort. I've waited up for you, said the rattle of the key in the door." (p.18)

After another family dinner her other brother Louis announces he is sending his current girlfriend Eva to stay with Isabel while he has to be away working. She resents the intrusion in her life but is so meek and submissive she just accepts it. The days, then weeks go past, the two young women tiptoeing around each other, Isabel resentful, Eva desperate to ingratiate herself. Isabel is obsessed with her possessions and the fear of someone stealing them, she goes around the house making an inventory, rechecking the spoons and ornaments. But Eva pushes back against her reserve until a tension exists between them. It starts really slow and builds:

"Up in her room Isabel sat at her dresser. There was a cloud of bugs by the open window, catching there setting sun, dancing up, down. In the mirror Isabel tried to see what Eva had seen. She pulled the strand from behind her ear, arranged it over her eye again. Pushed it back, hand slow, smoothing it back. She touched her cheek, the corner of her wide mouth.. Her fingers to her lips: she pushed two inside, over her tongue, the ridge of her teeth, and then a door slammed shut downstairs and Isabel got up and dried her fingers off on her skirt and swallowed three times. She could still taste her own skin. She rearranged herself, looked from the window to the wall to the bed." (p.58)

The next day Louis phones:

"Isabel put her forehead to the papered wall, looked in through the gap of the door hinge. Eva sat on the arm of the couch, phone to her ear. She had her hair up. Her dye job had missed the patch at the nape of her neck, and there was soft brown hair there, a few curls. The top buckle of her spine jutted pout above the collar of her blouse. Of her face, Isabel could only see the curve of her cheek, the shape of her smile." (p.63)

On the surface there is a formal awkward atmosphere between them, and then a horrible interlude where a local man who is basically harassing Isabel takes her on a date, because she is incapable of refusing him (and I became convinced he was going to rape her). Hendrik and his boyfriend Sebastian come and visit for a few days, and it breaks the tension between them, diverting their attention, but then Eva kisses her, and all hell lets loose.

"Isabel, too full to be teased, came to stand behind her. Wrapped her arms around her, pressed her face to Eva's neck and stayed there. Eva's laughter went quiet. She let herself be held a moment. She stroked Isabel's arms. She said, quiet, 'Who are you?' she said, 'Have you always been like this? Have you just been waiting to happen?'" (p.149)

Then, 

"'That's nice,' Eva swayed into her. Isabel turned her face this way, that. Eva let her. Isabel kept her with a hand to the small of her back. She put the wet towel to Eva's throat.

'Yeah,' Eva sighed, and shivered. Isabel held her there. A hand over coth over throat - held her there like that. Held her by the throat." (p.152)

and my mind leapt ahead anticipating huge crushing heartbreak and a terrible, terrible consequence. The intense passion of their relationship seemed to only allow for tragedy. But the story is so much more subtle than that. There is back story that emerges gradually, as we learn who Eva really is and how she came to be in Isabel's house. 

The first part of the story is tight with anticipation and the second half swamped with passion. Both women, so lost and alone, you want them to find and keep each other. 

I'll just finish with this last one, a quote from Eva's diary February 8 1961:

"She was staring at me. She stared in a way that I knew she would want to talk to me. I did not want that. She came to me just as I wanted to bike away and held my arm and said that I was Esther's girl. 'Aren't you? Aren't you Esther's girl? You are, I know it.' I couldn't say anything. It was like someone had put a stone in my mouth and now I could not speak. Who says my mother's name other than Malcha? No one says her name to me these days. She insisted on speaking to me. She wanted me to come have tea at a café at the corner. I thought, Oh, she has someone waiting there who will get me and send me to the Germans. That's what I thought! And then I thought: that can't happen anymore. Isn't that strange, how that works? You can think something that used to be true but isn't true anymore but still believe it in your bones." (p.196)

What a lovely book, intense and overwhelming. just what I needed to end the year.

Stay safe. Be kind.

It's nothing new

It was a dark and stormy day, and the rain came down in torrents; there were wolves in the mountains and bears ...

And then I decided I would actually finish the blog post I started a month ago ...

I recently found a 'reviewing round-up' post from 2018, so it seems I don't have to feel bad about my reviewing neglect because I have been doing it for years. Maybe it's my imagination that I ever wrote long thoughtful reflections on my reading choices.

I have to take Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin back to the library, it is now more than a fortnight overdue ... at least they don't issue fines any more, but that might have poked me into action sooner. Really loved this book. I have not read anything 'old' for ages, Giovanni's Room was first published in 1956. It is about a young man, struggling with his independence and his sexuality, but living a rather irresponsible life in Paris, supported by his father. He is engaged to Hella but meets Giovanni in a bar and begins what he thinks of as a summer fling with him, only to become more embroiled than he anticipated. It is quite torturous in fact, how he talks himself round in circles, unable to take responsibility for anything or make any real decisions. I did not like him much but I felt his suffering.

Here, talking about another brief entanglement:

"My father's attitude was that this was but an inevitable phase of my growing up and he affected to take it lightly. But beneath is jocular, boys-together air, he was at a loss, he was frightened. Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together - whereas, now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me. And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgement, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying." (p.14)

'Our Sister Killjoy' by Ama Ata Aidoo was the book club book for October. A reissue from 1977 I wanted to like it, because it was interesting experimental fiction in it's time but it was only ok.

'The Witches of El Paso' by Luis Jaramillo was the book club book for November. I did enjoy this more; I didn't realise till I looked that the author is a man, because it was a book populated by excellent women. 

'Take Nothing With You' by Patrick Gale was a delight, because everything he writes is a delight, about a young boy playing the cello, living in an old people's home and growing up gay in a boring seaside town. 

"Death was a regular caller at the old people's home, of course, especially in the spring, when the turning-down of central heating and opening of windows seemed to make the residents' birdlike grip on their perches less tenacious. Eustace had observed that, far from upsetting the survivors, death was as much a provoker of excitement as a visit from a minor royal or the winning of a premium-bond prize. A funeral was an excursion of sorts, with all the fuss and novelty that entailed, and there was always a tea party afterwards, at which his father served sherry, which went down very swiftly and made everyone a bit noisy and even less steady on their feet." (p.98)

'The Wonder' by Emma Donoghue was unexpected. A nurse travels to Ireland to oversee a young girl who is apparently surviving without food. The church wants to declare a miracle, but she is sure the whole thing is a scam. Things take an unexpected turn as she gets to know and become fond of Anna, getting to the bottom of what is going on and finding an interesting solution.

After Michael Longley died earlier this year I looked him up, there were several obituaries and I had not heard of him. His name on the back of an envelope sat in my backpack since then, and I finally tracked down this one, 'The Ghost Orchid". Lots of academic references and lovely imagery, making for a mixed bag of ones I loved and ones I did not understand.

Here, have the title poem;

The Ghost Orchid

Added to its few remaining sites will be the stanza

I compose about leaves like flakes of skin, a colour

Dithering between pink and yellow, and then the root

That grows like coral among the shadows and leaf-litter.

Just touching the petals bruises them into darkness.

Stay safe. Be kind. Get a flu jab.

Scary Stories

 

I read 'Care of Wooden Floors' back in 2013 (go back and read that, I used to write proper reviews😐), and it was one of my best books of the year, probably *the best*. So 'The Anechoic Chamber' by Will Wiles is new out and I was excited to read it. While the stories are excellently clever, I don't like horror/ghost stories so some of them did not float my boat ... and they were not good for bedtime reading. I don't like being frightened, and there is a very fine line between disturbing and frightening.

While I did enjoy (just disturbing enough) the title story, and 'The Acknowledgements', that I started reading thinking it was the actual acknowledgments, the one that I enjoyed most was 'Moths', about a man sorting through family photographs after his father's death, an interesting tale of family dynamics with a hint of mystery:

"After Mum died four years ago, the photography tailed off. Everything tailed off. Had it been about her, all the time? He kept a photograph Blu-Tac'd inside the little bureau he used as a desk at home: Mum, in the mid 1970s, before any of us were born, sitting on a grassy slope with her knees up, a wide unguarded smile on her face, and a strand of brown hair blowing across her eyes, which are closed. Quite an 'arty' shot, now I think about it, but it was without a doubt Dad's favourite. By the mid 1990s, this exposure had faded quite badly, and Dad was able to find the correct negative and make a new print. That was an unanswerable vindication of his photo hoarding, and afterwards there was no question of him throwing anything away." (p.106)

Stay safe. Be kind. Don't forget it's Banned Books Week ... I did!

lots of books

I seem to have neglected the blog even longer than I thought I had.

Claire's library lends out puzzles, so we had a nice couple of evenings doing some. I also borrowed the Kate Atkinson (When Will There Be Good News) from her. I read another one while I was there as well, but the title escapes me. Enjoyed them very much, excellent holiday reading.

'The World According to Garp' by John Irving, whose style is becoming familiar, was also excellent. I have seen the film but don't recall it much. Another wonderful cast of quirky characters whose eventful lives are randomly intertwined. 

'Spoilt Creatures' by Amy Twigg was the book club book for August. Holiday time reduced the group to just three of us but we still have a lively exchange of views. It takes place in a women's 'commune', a safe place for those escaping various situations. It started out idyllic but very quickly got dark and menacing, shades of Lord of the Flies. I found it unsatisfying because people behaved in unrealistic ways and the motivations of some characters was too vague. The denouement was a little predictable and aspects of it felt lazy and clichéd. (I wanted to write something longer and considered but as usual have drifted away before I found the time) Here, the early atmosphere:

"The other women ate like carrion, tearing at the food with their dirty hands, greedy and fast and indiscriminate. I watched as Molly crammed an entire roasted onion into her mouth, the pulpy excess spilling on to the floor. Insatiable, these women. Again and again they filled their plates, squabbling over the last potato, their mouths glistening with oil. It was as if they were trying to plug something inside themselves, satisfy some unknowable need. Blythe was the only one who didn't eat. I suspected she survived in some other way, was able to sustain herself on light and air: the immaterial.

Afterwards, Sarah brought out dessert. Pears stewed in syrup, the size and colour of hearts. Lemon drizzle cake cut into uneven squares, the frosting so sweet it put stones in my cheeks. Hazel and Pearl fought over a slice, their playfulness turning mean as Hazel dug her nails into Pearl's arm and licked her tongue across the top.

I ate everything that was offered to me, eating until my stomach hurt. Ready to gorge myself on this new life I'd found." (p.74)

'Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper' by Harriet Scott Chessman was a random charity shop find and a delight. I was attracted after reading 'The Yellow House' last year; this is a novelisation about the work of Mary Cassatt and her lovely relationship with her sister Lydia. It follows a couple of years when they are living in Paris and closely involved in the Impressionist art scene. The book is actually about Lydia, her experience of watching her sister work and aware of her own impending mortality and how it felt that her only purpose in living is to contribute to her sister's work. I noted this, and wondered if this was the way it used to be to be ill, when there were so few actual treatments, you were just ill, waiting to either get better or die:

"I call to Lise, or to May if she's home. My mouth opens and my stomach pitches and heaves. Mother comes too slowly and I can't bear to ask her to clean up my messes. Lise in immature and dislikes illness; she wrinkles her nose and holds her breath, sighing and making a show of taking the basin away. May's better, because she has courage, and backbone, but she cannot disguise her distress at my condition.

Why is it that I must feel at fault for this sickness? Surely I am not at fault. In the midst of my collapse, I feel fury at my family, the way they tiptoe around me and look at me with hushed faces, as if I've already died; and yet, at the same time, they seem impatient with me. Be healthy or go, choose one or the other, I imagine them thinking, we can't bear to accompany you further into this illness." (p.65-66)

Lionel Shriver's book 'Should We Stay Or Should We Go' was a random library find on the wrong shelf. Kay and Cyril decide not to linger in mental and physical decline and agree to kill themselves at age 80. The book is a series of stories following the consequences of this decision where the event in question has different outcomes. It got a little surreal when human being end up discovering a regenerative medicine and live forever, and the story where they both get sectioned and live out a miserable existence in a mental institution is an object lesson in being careful what you plan. 

Lastly 'Beautyland' by Marie-Helene Bertino was the book club book for September. It was sold as being about an alien, but at no point did I engage with the character on that level. Adina arrives in strange circumstances and though her childhood communicates with her 'co-aliens' on the home planet via a fax machine. She experiences 'lessons' in her sleep where they teach her about stuff. I assumed the character was on the autistic spectrum and this explained her inability to fit in and understand social rules. In effect the book was very much about what it means to be a human and be accepted by other humans. Her friend Toni persuades her to publish her faxes as a book and she becomes something of a sensation as a mysterious reclusive author. I enjoyed it, it had some thoughtful observations about the human condition.

Can't promise I won't just do another one of these in six weeks time. Who knows.

Stay safe. Be kind.