Crimbo Time

Last Christmas we were striking and the whole thing was very stressful, so in comparison this year has been a breeze; cards and parcels have been delivered on time, there is no backlog in the office and the mood has been pretty positive. The manager informed us that our office had successfully handled over 66,000 tracked packets this December. That's a lot of packets. But look how tidy and organised my cage is. I have done lots of overtime, to keep things running smoothly and to help everyone else do their jobs. I tend to feel quite ambivalent this time of year, I do it because it matters to people, but I am mostly glad when it's all over. 

My favourite job in December is making sure people's Christmas cards get where they are supposed to go, so I spend time every day with a pile of badly addressed cards finding their intended destination.

Our home made Crimbo tree is still going strong since 2016. It gives me joy not to add to our carbon footprint to have some glittery decoration.

I am not sure how much I have read this year ... so lets see ...
Must I Go by Yiyun Li
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Long Live the Post Horn by Vigdis Hjorth
Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi
Otherlands by Thomas Halliday
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon
If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura
Forget Me Not by Sophie Pavelle
Chorus by Rebecca Kauffman
The Last Resort by Jan Carson
The Reservoir Tapes by John Mcgregor
Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry
A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ni Ghriofa
How to be Human by Paula Cocozza
The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li
Various Poetry
A Brief History of Everyone who ever Lived by Adam Rutherford
My Friend Anne Frank by Hannah Pick-Goslar
Elena Knows by Claudia Pineiro
Resistance by Anita Shreve
Hard by a Great Forest by Leo Vardiashvili
Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura
Wild Things by Laura Kay
A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
The Hero of this Book by Elizabeth McCracken
Quilt by Nicholas Royle
A Widow for One Year by John Irving
The Zoo of the New
The Power by Naomi Alderman
The Future by Naomi Alderman

That is not a lot of books ... but you know what, I don't beat myself up about how I have spent that last year. I am not sure that I have a favourite from this year's reading, lots of things I enjoyed but nothing stands out for me looking down the list. 

Wishing regular readers and random visitors Merry Christmas.

The Future

I had to take 'The Animals in That Country' by Laura Jean McKay back to the library because 'The Future' by Naomi Alderman arrived ... and there are only so many hours in the day when I'm not at work. It's a pandemic story with a disease that makes people able to understand animals. While I like a good disaster movie as much as the next person I was not finding the story very engaging and the nonsense that the animals were talking was just meaningless and I was impatient with it. And anyway, The Future arrived.

So now I have to try and write a review without giving *anything* away about this book. Like 'The Martian' (that I read nearly a decade ago!) it feels like a book that will make an excellent film ... the end of the world is nigh, how would you behave, what would you need to survive, will technology save the day ...

It is a portrait of the power of wealth, and of inequality, and of how the super rich do seem to live on a different planet from the rest of us.

That's all I can say, anything else would step into spoilers.

Stay safe. Be kind. Be prepared.

Winter Garden

I have not been out in the garden hardly at all since June. The rain arrived in July and it seems to have been raining ever since. I have pushed past the overgrowth a few times but not sat and enjoyed, nor watched the bees. It is very straggly and scruffy this time of year anyway but I knew the worms really needed sorting out ... so instead of the gym today I spent an hour chopping stuff back and just taking a look around.

To my delight the worms are still alive ... and having been left so long the bottom layer of the worm bin was full of the most beautiful dark magical plant food, with not a trace of tomato skins or undigested random lumps. I literally just scooped it out into an empty compost bag ready to be used in the spring. 

Also delightful was the small selection of blooms that I found.

Most delightfully, a rosebud:

To be expected, the ubiquitous self-seeded pelargoniums:

And on the kitchen windowsill, some alyssum:

Stay safe. Be kind. Hurry back inside where it's warm.

Meanwhile, in Japan ...

Two weeks ago we took the daughter formerly known as Monkey, now known as Monkey sensei, to Terminal 3 at Heathrow and she officially went to live on the other side of the world. She has just finished her first week as a JET teaching assistant in Kawagoe. Like the process of getting into Manchester University it has been long and torturous. Having applied over a year ago she was told back in March that she was on the reserve list, but that if she didn't heard by July she would be unlikely to get a placement this year. Then back in October she got a message telling her she had been 'upgraded' and to expect to travel in November. A huge flurry of activity ensued: many random purchases were made, another trip to London for her visa, much yen was acquired, copious forms were filled in. And the next thing we knew she was gone. 

Look, there's a shrine, just to prove she's really there.

And she eats Japanese food (but they just call it food), and even school dinners too:

And watches Japanese telly (but they just call it telly):

She has a tiny apartment, with a tiny kitchen, tiny bathroom, tiny living space ... and this fab cosy sleeping mezzanine:

So, there will be many updates about life in Japan in the coming months ... and years. She might stay. Who's to say how long. I am planning a visit in spring 2025, she gets a holiday in the break at the end of the school year.

Stay safe. Be kind. Try not to miss your daughter too much.

Mount Fuji (from the plane)

The Power

 

'The Power' by Naomi Alderman won the Women's Fiction Prize in 2017. At one point I did a challenge to read all the winners but I have not kept it up in recent years and there are four that I have not read (but probably still will at some point). The Power is a pretty scary book. What might happen if women suddenly find they have the power to inflict pain on others ... will they behave just like men do? It turns out that power does corrupt. A young woman finds she can produce electricity from a mysterious skein organ across her collarbone, and with practice can target and control it. Soon more women can, and younger women can awaken the power in older women. There ensues a fight for control of the human race. Men try to cling to their millennia old position but you can see where it is all going to end. A new religion is born and wars begin. Some women just go mad with their new found freedom. The tale is told in retrospect ... somewhat I suddenly realise, like Handmaid's Tale, but by a man, who has researched and written a book about the period of transformation. His editor suggests he might want to use a woman's name, to add credibility to his narrative. That's all really. So much going on in the story, lots of strong women characters of course, but not lacking in men, and utterly gripping. Fantastical but also utterly believable.

Here Margot is a politician, and has had to pretend that she doesn't have the power. I love the notion of 'constant ease', the idea that having this new strength makes her feel safe.

"Late at night in a part of town that she knows has no surveillance cameras, Margot parks her car, gets out, puts her palm to a lamp post and gives it everything she's got. She just needs to know what she's got under the hood here; she wants to feel what it is. It feels as natural as anything she's ever done, as known and understood as the first time she had sex, as her body saying, Hey, I got this.
All the lights in the road go out: pop, pop, pop. Margot laughs out loud, there in the silent street. She'd be impeached if anyone found out, but then she'd be impeached anyway if anyone knew she could do it at all, so what's the margin? She guns the gas and drives off before the sirens start. She wondered what she'd have done if they'd caught her, and in the asking she knows she has enough left in her skein to stun a man, at least, maybe more - can feel the power sloshing across her collarbone and up and down her arms. The thought makes her laugh again. She finds she's doing that more often now, just laughing. There's a sort of constant ease, as if it's high summer all the time inside her." (p.64)

Stay safe. Be kind. Don't let the bastards grind you down.

Library books and not-library books

Like number 17 buses the library books always arrive all at once, so I will have to check out which ones have a reserve queue and read them first. I was handed a sample chapter of Naomi Alderman's new book 'The Future' when I was in Chorlton Bookshop the other week, so I ordered it along with 'The Power', that won the Women's Fiction Prize in 2017.

'Quilt' by Nicholas Royle (who is not the Nicholas Royle who has written several other novels) was bought because I thought from the ambiguous blurb that it might have something to do with quilts. It doesn't. A man coming to terms with the death of his father goes quietly crazy and builds a huge aquarium in the downstairs of the father's now empty house ... to house rays. They require a very specialist environment and he goes to a great deal of trouble and expense. Weird and disconcerting as he behaves as if it were all totally normal for the people at the wake to have to move around this huge tank in the middle of the dining room.  Not quite sure how I felt about it. Just a very unusual story.

'A Widow for a Year' by John Irving again suffered from the fact that it was not Owen Meany, which I loved so much and nothing else I have read by him has quite measured up to it. What I did like very much about it is that it is not about one person. All the characters in it seem equally significant to the story and the relationships between them and their own individual story arcs combine to create something very engaging. Eddie spends his life pining for Marion. Ruth spends her life pretending that she is not pining for Marion. Ted is an arsehole. I loved Harry and I sympathised with Marion's decision. And the whole book is somehow overshadowed by the lingering legacy of death of the two sons. The empty spaces where the photographs had been are this huge glaring symbol of the sense of loss that people struggle to cope with. A book very much about the human condition. And who the hell would publish children's stories that are so fucking scary. 

'The Zoo of the New' has been a lovely large anthology of poems edited by Nick Laird and Don Paterson. It covers a few hundred years (so a lot of poetry) and mixes up old favourites with undiscovered gems. I stated off reading them all, as I often do and then began to flick through and pick and choose. I still managed to pick out lots that I enjoyed so now I'll have to find just one ...

Field Guide by Tony Hoagland

Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,

up to my neck in that most precious element of all,

I found a pale-grey, curled-upwards pigeon feather

floating on the tension of the water

at the very instant when a dragonfly,

like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,

hovered over it, then lit, and rested.

That's all.

I mention this in the same way

that I fold the corner of a page

in certain library books,

so that the next reader will know

where to look for the good parts.

Stay safe. Be kind. Look for the good parts.

Pre-Christmas post - postage and scams

These old postage stamps are now no longer any good for posting letters. If you use them your item will be surcharged. If you have some they can be swapped for the new bar-coded stamps. If you buy postage on the website or app please don't guess how much your item weighs or measures, if you underestimate your item will possibly be surcharged. Be aware there are lots of fake stamps out there ... the main clue is the price, you are not getting a bargain to send your Christmas cards, you are getting worthless bits of sticky paper.

Beware. It's nearly Crimbo time so the scammers are going to be out in force. I have had several people in recently with messages about missed deliveries. Beware of any message that does not include a tracking number. If you are expecting a package check with any dispatch confirmation you might have been sent that will provide tracking information. Messages might refer to a specific delivery company or might be vague. Some messages include a delivery driver's name in order to seem more authentic. Any message that asks for money outright is a scam. I don't know about other companies but Royal Mail never asks for payment for redelivery. Some ask for a very nominal sum, this is because it is your bank details they are after. If you click any link or supply details to any scam website, contact your bank immediately. The Royal Mail website has lots of examples of scam texts and emails:

Enjoy your Christmas preparations, I'll be back in a few weeks with my annual posting advice.

Stay informed. Be cautious. Delete that scam message.