Another family lunch of leftover pasta and trifle at which we scored 10 on the GSQ in the absence of Dave who was ill.
November was cooler and cloudier than average but was our rainiest month this year and our fifth wettest of all time: 145.2mm.
A2 is reading Hearts, Hands and Voices by Ian McDonald, a magical science-fictional take on 20th-century Irish history.
Publicititty
Another fun window from the underwear shop.
A2 is reading The Blue Hour*, a thriller by Paula Hawkins, which would have been more thrilling with less killing.
It’s Coming…
Yes, the season of … well, trying to avoid it. The shops are full of it, and still a month to go. And last week the Chapel Allerton willow tree got its lights.
A2, who walked to the shops today, but not those shops, is rereading The Priest by Thomas M Disch.
Frosty Morning
Last night was our coldest this winter: -2.1°C and this morning brave flowers are pushing through the icy leaves.
A2 is reading What the Dark Whispers* by MJ Lee; a detective with a dead wife and troubled teenage daughter on the trail of a revenge killer. A workmanlike book fool of Type Os spill chequers cant sea.
Jet-propelled Macaron
Yet another (very short) rainbow with a spoke.
We had an unscheduled family dinner of spag bol on Friday so today we just had coffee, mince pies and a disintegrated apple cake and scored an encouraging 11 on the GSQ.
A1 is rereading IT by Stephen King. A2 is reading The Lamplighters* by Emma Stonex; a confusing story of the disappearance of a lighthouse crew seen from 20 years later with flashbacks to hidden secrets, marital disharmony, a ghost and a Chekhov’s pistol that never goes off.
Night Snow
A dusting of white precipitation in the wee small hours equalled our record for the earliest snow of the winter exactly one year ago.
Rainbow
A fleeting flash of colour; compensation for another cold miserable rainy day after a cloudy night that stopped us seeing the Leonids.
A1 is rereading Finders Keepers by Stephen King.
A Family Dinner at Last!
A2 is finally up to cooking a family meal of porky veg with rice and A1 contributed a parkin with custard. Sadly we only managed 8.5 on the GSQ.
A1 is rereading The Outsider by Stephen King and A2 is rereading seveneves by Neal Stephenson.
Raindrops
Things can only get wetter. And they did. 41.7 mm; our fourth wettest day ever. Thanks, Storm Claudia.
A1 is rereading If It Bleeds* by Stephen King. [A1, later: Well, it says “rereading”, but despite it being listed as read on this blog I have no memory of it.]
A2 is reading The Glassmaker* by Tracy Chevalier, a story about a Venetian fabricator of beads and her family glassware business. Despite the action moving through the centuries from 1485 to 2020, the main characters only age by 50 years which makes for excellent continuity.
Sunday Lunch
Today the family convened around the table for a meal of shop-bought pizzas and profiteroles, at which we scored an encouraging 12 on the GSQ.
A2 is rereading the monumental REAMDE by Neal Stephenson. A1 is rereading End of Watch by Stephen King.
In the Morning Mist, a Crow Salutes the Moon
A2, who is rereading Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson, walked all around the traffic island today. Onwards and upwards!
A1 is rereading Mr Mercedes by Stephen King.
Toad in the Hole
A2 did get out of the house today and walked three houses down the road and back but there was nothing much to see on her travels so here is a picture of A1’s delicious sausages in batter served with creamy cheesy leeks and cheesy fried mashed potato. Yums!
A2 is reading What We Can Know* by Ian McEwan. In the unspecified future, after climate change and a few nuclear wars, most of the world is underwater, Nigeria is the superpower, America is overrun with ravening warlords… and the focus is on a couple of academics in the Cotswold archipelago trawling the archives of surviving libraries in search of a poem that was read to drunken guests at a dinner party in 2014 and never seen again.
Super Beaver Moon
On Bonfire Night the full moon rises in an explosion of iridescence.
A1 is rereading a falling-apart copy of The Dead Zone By Stephen King. A2 has been rereading V2 by Robert Harris and The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe.
Coffee Morning
A2 is now descending/ascending the stairs! Huzzah! But we were still not ready for a family meal today so we had one flat white, one long black, one macchiato, one cappuccino and two espressos, served with stollen, croissants and biscuits (and a ton of sweets, mistakenly bought in expectation of Helloween visitations). We did this week’s and last week’s quiz, scoring 10.5 on one and 11 on the other.
A1 is rereading ’Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. A2 is reading Rosy & John by Pierre Lemaitre.
Halloween Spider…
…looking for a nice snack of a flamingo. And later, a double rainbow:
October 2025 was our coldest and least sunny October ever recorded. It was averagely wet though. A2 is rereading Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson.
Watts Going On
On the 300th day of the year, we’ve managed to reach 1,500.000kWh precisely in our solar panel output for this year. So giving an average of exactly 5.000kWh per day.
This year was looking like it would be our best ever for the panels, but that was probably scuppered by the very gloomy October. It’ll probably be only second best.
A2 is reading The Rose Field by Philip Pullman, which finished off the trilogy beautifully. Like with the knee replacement, she has been waiting for this for 6 years, with covid to blame in both cases.
Kneedful Things
A2 is indisposed, getting a new knee, so no family meal or quiz today. But here are some photos taken in the hospital grounds during various visits. Primrose and autumn leaves above, and some splendid fungi on the right.
Get well soon, A2!
[later] A2 is back. And A1 is rereading — of course — Needful Things by Stephen King.
Bollards!
The bollards outside the post office have been painted to look like letter-boxes which could be a problem for short-sighted people with macropsia.
A1 is reading Begars Abbey and A2 is reading The Plague Letters, both by VL Valentine.
Diwali
Some Diwali fireworks. The first few were local, followed at 9pm by the main event at the Sikh Temple. Obscured by trees from here, but still a splendid display.
Coq au Vin
The family meal on this very rainy day (19.8mm) was A2’s amazingly delicious Coq au Vin, served with mash, green beans and garlic puff pastry pinwheels. Yum!
And for pudding, here’s Dave cutting A1’s Orange Sponge, served with custard, cream and chocolate sauce.
After all that, we scored a reasonable 9 on the quiz.
A1 is reading Ice Queen by Nele Neuhaus, a fearsomely complicated story of a squabbling German family with secret Nazi pasts. An exhausting read.
Bracket (Fungus)
Fruiting bodies in the woods.
A1 is reading The Einstein Girl by Philip Sington, a somewhat ponderously written “literary thriller” set in pre-WW2 Germany, about a psychiatrist treating an amnesiac woman who may or may not have some familial connection to Einstein. Well researched, and the rise of Nazism is grimly drawn, but overlong.
A2 is rereading The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman.
Cats in a Box
This box once held coffee but since it was emptied it has been full of furry things.
A2 has paused rereading The Secret Commonwealth and is now rereading The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman since the latter book contains so much backstory for the former book.
Dish of the Day: Stew
Our family meal today was beef stew with thyme dumplings followed by garden apple frangipane tart. We strained our brains mightily but still only scored 9 on the GSQ.
A1 is reading The Plague Letters by VL Valentine — bought, appropriately, on our way back from getting COVID/flu jabs. London in lockdown, meetings banned, thousands dead, hospitals overwhelmed, quack cures and conspiracy theories abound, and while the poor keep dying, the rich party. Yes, it’s 2020 1665, the Great Plague. In this superbly well-written novel, someone is hastening the deaths of plague victims with bizarre apparent attempts at cures, amounting to torture. Can a kind but ineffectual rector and a very effectual but mysterious girl uncover the culprit? The characters (mostly real, with Dickensian names like Mincy, Greatrakes and Boghurst) are written with great relish, and there’s a lot of very dark humour underlying the tragedy. A quite wonderful book, one of the best I’ve read this year. Highly recommended.
A2 is rereading The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman.
Jab Day
Alas, the jabberwock has gone (perhaps defeated by the frumious Bandersnatch, or the Jubjub bird) and so have the COVID shots for under-75s. Still, we had what jabs we could get and are back home with uncomfortable arms.
A1 is reading The Society of Unknowable Objects* by Gareth Brown, a bad children’s fantasy with added swearing and violence. It’s not precisely a sequel to The Book of Doors (which worked much better) but is set in the same universe and has references to it. Disappointing.
In anticipation of the forthcoming final volume of Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy, A2 is rereading volume 1, La Belle Sauvage.
Autumn Moon
The Harvest/Hunter’s/Supermoon rises over a snowy bank of cloud.
A1 is reading The Anatomy of Ghosts by Andrew Taylor, a grim and rather depressing murder mystery set in an 18th-century Cambridge college full of unpleasant and highly class-conscious characters, both high and low. Creepy but overlong.
A2 is reading The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths; a historical/crime/science fiction/domestic/romantasy novel with space for one or more sequels.