Begin the Beluga

Yesterday there was glorious sunshine and it was hot and Augusty.  I spent yesterday indoors knitting.  Today it bucketed down for several hours.  Today I walked into town for a haircut. 

Nonetheless, I now have better hair, I have a complete mini cardigan, I have jars in which to bottle home-made passata (recipe from the excellent River Cottage Preserves book by Pam Corbin), and I had lunch with a lovely friend.   

Sometimes it is hard to know where to start.  I forget sometimes that it's not as important to know where you're going as it is to set off in the first place. 

Douglas Coupland is amazing.  Do you follow him on Twitter?  Do you use Twitter?  It's worth it if only for Mr Coupland's occasional remarks.  This morning he had posted this: "Life is beautiful: http://t.co/6uBq0xj".  As days go, this is a good way to start. 

Novel Ideas

I’ve been reading mainly non-fiction for a while now.  I have bad fiction-reading habits – for a long time I would read half a book and become distracted.  Once I did this with The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and left a character down a well for six months.  At least I did come back to it.  I never finished The Blind Assassin, because I knew Something Awful was going to happen. 

Emotionally intense though non-fiction can also be, it doesn’t really have the same effect on me.  Last year I read Richard Holmes’ two part biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  The second book, Darker Reflections, (and, therefore, the second half of Coleridge’s life) was full of disappointments, financial and emotional difficulties, addiction and pain, but even though he was actually a real person who experienced these things, rather than a fictional character, it didn’t make me want to stop reading.

It’s been quite a long time since I’ve read a novel that I couldn’t stop reading*.  When I love a book I read it all the time, and also very fast indeed.  My all-time favourite novel is Under the Net by Iris Murdoch.  It is incredibly funny and cleverly plotted, and one of those books that I keep buying for other people in the hope that they will like it as much as I do.  I read it about once a year, and sometimes in 3 or 4 sittings.    

A representative sample of the books currently on my desk are:

Tree-Ring Dating and Archaeology – M.G.L.Baillie

Roman Britain – Martin Millett

Preserves – Pam Corbin

Vogue Knitting: The Ultimate Knitting Book

Katharine Hepburn – Sheridan Morley

What novel could get me back into a fiction habit?    

* Has anyone seen the film of Norweigan Wood yet?  Is it good??

Re-ravelled

The photos are fixed...... and in fixing them I have found a way of ensuring that should they, by some disaster, disappear again it will be easier to reinstate them.  I also noticed that I don't add photos very often, and that I don't talk about knitting either, which is odd.  So by way of starting to address both gaps, here are photos of the most recent item to leave my needles, a quickie cowl (designed by f.pea), knitted in Rowan lima yarn, which is gorgeously soft stuff in a stunning colour.

Pancakes, pancakes, pancakes....

I have eaten pancakes, pancakes and pancakes. Later I will eat more pancakes. I like Spring festivals. Particularly the eating.

(The photo isn't great - my phone's camera is pretty poor - but the message is a happy one.)

Oops

I changed some things here and my photos vanished.

Fortunately, I know why, and I know how to fix it.

In the meantime, here is a photo of an American Mastodon skull. (It is HUGE).

(photo taken in Dorchester's Dinosaur Museum)

Fifth Avenue to the Sargasso Sea

Quick! Today is Jules Verne's birthday (183rd) and the Google Doodle is an amazing interactive underwater view. You too can be Professor Pierre Aronnax.

I had thought that Prof. Aronnax was James Mason, but was thinking of him in Journey to the Centre of the Earth. James Mason is Captain Nemo, and with a beard.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea has one of the best armchair travel quotes I have ever read. Not, as you might think, his descriptions of deep water caverns or terrifying ice shelves, but his useful information about the route from the Fifth Avenue Hotel to the Brooklyn pier where his boat was moored.

"The carriage, available at a fixed fare of four dollars, went down Broadway as far as Union Square, proceeded along Fourth Avenue as far as its junction with Bowery Street, turned into Katrin Street, and pulled up at Pier 34. There, the Katrin Ferry transported us, men, horses and carriages, to Brooklyn, that great suburb of New York, situated on the left bank of the East River, and in a few minutes we arrived at the wharf where the Abraham Lincoln was belching clouds of black smoke from her two smokestacks."

Urgency AND accuracy. I do love Jules Verne.

Brighton Zoo

We have been collecting pictures of animals from Brighton and Hove, which you can see here. More to follow soon.

(Ceci n'est pas un chat)

Interestingly, Mr JT pointed out to me that there was a real Brighton Zoo until the 50s, at what is now the Withdean Stadium, soon to be vacated by Brighton & Hove Albion. Further rummaging also reveals that there was a menagerie at what is now Park Crescent, although it only lasted a year from 1839. Although the 1990 Encyclopaedia of Brighton says that the lion and lioness on the gates were removed in 1987, they have since been restored.

Brightoners, are there other zoos I should know about?

Age of Wondering

It has been proved to be the coldest winter since I was much too small to remember, and there has been too much ice and not enough talking.

This year, because I am very very very lucky, I went to a hot and sunny place for a week, with lovely people and a suitcase with 4 jumpers in that I didn't need. In February next year I will look at pictures of the hot and sunny place, have a bath and retire to bed with a pina colada and a fat paperback.

And shall we do this? Because it would be excellent.

Two Short Lists of Not Much.....

2 Things I Have Not Been Doing:
It is very cold indeed. I have not written anything here for a while but am not hibernating.

8 Things I Have Been Doing
I have been running about trying to buy presents with appropriate care and attention but without having to go to a shopping centre on the Saturday before Christmas. I have written about my Christmas preparations before, and this December is proceeding pretty much as expected, although this year I have been making vast quantities of mincemeat.

I have also been telling everyone how excellent leg-warmers are. I have excellent thick, dark red wool leg-warmers. They are MARVELLOUS and I love them. I have also been showing them to people, enthusiastically pulling up my trouser leg and waving a woolly ankle in the air - "Look! Aren't they great! I'm so warm!!". This is not always appropriate.

I have been wondering how much it might snow tonight. If you have a snow day tomorrow I have ideas of what you can do with it here.

I have been listening to A Charlie Brown Christmas.

I have been amused by Christmas perfume adverts.

I have been stalking sydthecat, trying to take a photo of him with a Father Christmas hat hovering above his head. With limited success.

(Some) Books of the Year (2002 mostly, it seems)

And so we come to the end of 2009, and also to the end of the decade we (rightly) hesitated to call the noughties.

I wasn't really prepared for the end-of-the-decade thing this time, as the last one was also the end of a century and of the millenium and so was heralded with nostalgia, smugness and predictions of technological meltdown and apocalyptic doom.

I do not have my ear to the ground or my finger on the pulse or my anything else on the whatever of the zeitgeist, so cannot give a definitive top [insert number, preferably multiple of 5 or 10] [insert cultural experience of choice] of 2009.

I can, however, exclusively reveal the list you have all been waiting for (subconsciously, probably, but waiting nonetheless):

5 Good Books I Have Read This Year.

Exciting stuff.

In no particular order then:

1. The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future by Jenny Uglow.
This is really, really good, and there is plenty (500+) pages of it (and with pictures). A group biography of members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which includes Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles, polymath), Josiah Wedgewood, Joseph Priestly and James Watt.

2. Samuel Pepys, the Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin
This was Whitbread Book of the Year 2002 (see?) and is marvellous.

3. Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
Neurological case studies of music and the mind. Very interesting indeed.

4. The Golden Age of Couture, Paris and London 1949-57 ed Claire Wilcox
Absolutely gorgeous big dresses. Beautifully cut tweed suits. Yum.

5. The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland
All of Douglas Coupland's books are good, but some are too sad for me to read. This one is quite sad, and is also very funny.



These are not all the books I have read. They may not be the top 5 - I'm not sure. I also read Sputnik Sweetheart and After Dark by Haruki Murakami as well as Norwegian Wood, and I read (sections of) lots of Political Philosophy books for work. I note that mostly I have been reading non-fiction and this is interesting. I shall go on as I started, as I have just launched into Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy.

So there you are. Furnish your Christmas list with listingslightly. Coming up, some music released sometime which I have listened to somewhere at some point, collated for your enjoyment.