the choccys are running out!

Happy New Year to all my visitors. It has been a hectic time, work and non-work wise. The trouble with my job is that you are so busy in the run up to Christmas that you don't get the chance to anticipate the upcoming festivities, and mostly end up relieved when it's all over. I have been working in the cage for about six months now, so it has been my first Christmas in 16 years in the warm and dry. We do get sent out on delivery on a regular basis so I have not missed the outdoors too much. 

On the home front, we were given notice to leave our lovely little house as the landlord wants to sell, but it turns out we can gather enough money in one place to buy it ... so that is the plan. Tish has increased her aerial silks/hoop training with a view to learning how to be an instructor. Monkey has been doing an access to higher education course and is all set to go to university in September to study Japanese. UCAS application submitted and five offers of places later the next impossible decision is between staying in Manchester or venturing further afield. 

So, reading has been a bit sluggish, but not quite as bad as the regularity of blog posts would imply. I have definitely lost my blogging mojo. Books have been read and then I have moved on. I have enjoyed some things but struggled to get truly absorbed by anything. Crafting has ground to a halt a bit too. I made a blanket and some sofa cushions for Dunk but nothing else for some months now. After our initially flurry of activity making stuff for the house we have stalled there too, though we have more significant decorating plans for once the brick and mortar are all ours. 

I find that unusually for me I have read more men than women this year, 25 of the 41 books listed. I have a couple of things stalled in the draft folder, and Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco has been on the go for most of the year (it feels like) and I am down to the last fifty pages, and hopefully the denouement of the story. Plenty of things I enjoyed this year, but nothing jumps out at me as a favourite. 

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck
Beside the Ocean of Time by George Mackay Brown
The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling
The Dumb House by John Burnside
La Belle Sauvage by Phillip Pullman
A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick Dewitt
So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba
The Sunset Limited by Cormac Mccarthy
Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith
Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
What We lose by Zinzi Clemmons
Inside the Wave by Helen Dunmore
Barracoon: the story of the last slave by Zora Neale Hurston
Harvest by Jim Crace
The Trick to Time by Kit De Waal
The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Sight by Jessie Greengrass
The Making of Henry by Howard Jacobson
Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett
Sourcery by Terry Pratchett
Yesterday's Weather by Anne Enright
When I Grow up I want to be Mary Beard by Megan Beech
The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmny Ward
New Boy by Tracy Chevalier
The Man Who Rained by Ali Shaw
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
The Man who Wouldn't Stand Up by Jacob M Appel
That Awkward Age by Roger McGough
The Quarry by Iain Banks
Three Elegies for Kosovo by Ismail Kadare
Nutshell by Ian McEwan
Love in Blind by William Boyd