Saturday Lunch

Storm Austen is coming at us from the south and Storm Boelo from the north so we had our family lunch of baked potatoes, eggs and salads followed by plum cobbler before the roaring winds and pouring rain arrived in both directions. Hatches are staying battened down for the foreseeable but meanwhile we scored 9 on the GSQ, reducing our average to exactly 10.
A1 is reading Precipice by Robert Harris. A2 is appropriately reading The Raging Storm by Ann Cleeves.

Chicken Tonight

A Saturday dinner, for a change, with roast chicken, potatoes, Yorkshires, carrots, broccoli, stuffing and gravy, followed by a Swedish apple cake. We did two weeks’ worth of quizzes and scored 10.5 on the first and 9 on the other, so our batting average is still above 10, just.

Sight of the Night: the Northern Lights over Potternewton Heights

Here is something we don’t see very often (actually we don’t see it all, but our phones can): the Aurora Borealis. And here it is again, with a small amount of structure.The telephone wires look messy because the wind was blowing. This display was seen throughout the UK.
And later, the Dwarf Mini had an outing to observe Mars passing through Praesepe, or the colourful Beehive Cluster, in the constellation Cancer. Mars is the brightest object here, slightly elongated due to its movement through the 1-hour exposure at 5am. The Mini isn’t powerful enough to image Mars as a disc, but it makes a pretty photo.

Coasting

Gez and Lucy drove us to the seaside for the weekend, stopping en route to admire a neolithic monolith in a churchyard:
It was a glorious late-summer day, and we travelled on to Bempton cliffs…
…where we saw a tatty one-eyed jackdaw

and a plunging of gannets. Later we went to Scarborough and observed the moon over the water. After fish and chips on the prom from Winking Willy’s, A1 and A2 went back to Green Gables Hotel but Gez and Lucy went out on the razz. They were up for breakfast though.Thank you Lucy, thank you Gez and thank you Caroline for looking after our cats.
And back home, to end the day, a rainbow:

Hell of a Sky

The sky lights up as the sun goes down.
A1 is reading Eden Falls by Vaseem Khan, who joins Abir Mukherjee and Ajay Chowdhury as South Asian UK-based crime writers turning their hand to (mostly US-based) thrillers. With mediocre results, it must be said. This one veers into technothriller/science fictional territory with a mysterious alien object crash-landing in the desert, and the efforts of a pair of ill-matched women to hunt it down, while being chased by the FBI, an Elon Musk figure and an Indian intelligence agent.
A2 is reading Land by Maggie O’Farrell; a historical Irish family saga with plenty of misery, starting slowly but galloping to a reasonably happy end.

Apple and Pear Pie

A fruity pudding is served after a meal of pork in cider and everybody is sitting around reading instead of getting stuck in. Afterwards we did the quiz, with long-distance input from Dave who was hors de hangover, and scored a not disgraceful 10.
A2’s bog book is The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow; a rather thin argument for M Theory. M is for, um, Maybe.

Critter of the Day: Volucella zonaria

Oh no, not another bee photo, even if it’s an exceedingly large and beautiful one. But it isn’t a bee; it’s a hornet mimic hoverfly, the largest of its kind in Europe and quite rare in these parts. Fun fact: it lays its eggs in wasps’ nests and the wasps look after its children. Fun fact 2: it’s also found in Battersea Park Nature Area (see below).
A2 is reading Eden Falls by Ajay Chowdhury (thank you A1); another Indian novel relocated to America, set in the near future and featuring an alien artefact pursued by several different security services and a techlord called Markus Noel.

Feed Me!

Here’s Ganny, crying for his supper.
A1 is reading Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson, which took ages for the plot to get going but the journey was highly amusing and entertaining. It’s about the somewhat farcical setting up of 1951’s Festival of Britain, part of which was a funfair in Battersea Park. This evoked childhood memories, as I was taken there in the mid 1960s and had three rides on the Rotor (mentioned in the book) until I was sick.
A2 is reading Agrippa by Robert Harris; ancient Roman war and politics, carried on in most brutal terms, so not unlike today.

Take a Bow

A nice double bow, captured by the webcam.
A1 is reading The Killing Stones by Ann Cleeves. A2 is reading Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson, which is what Graham Greene would have called an “entertainment” and was indeed very entertaining with its irresistible-to-women protagonist and its mixture of nostalgia and espionage; it was rather too much like the William Boyd trilogy in those respects so I regret reading it immediately afterwards.

On the Rails

Today we had new handrails fitted on our garden steps which makes getting up and down them one hell of a lot easier.

The acetone smell of the paint turned out to be very attractive to insects (pheromones probably). Here’s a jewel-like rosemary beetle revelling in the perfume, its antennae vibrating with excitement.A2 is rereading The Predicament by William Boyd.

Clouds in Raindrops and a Super Supernova

The clouds have now blown away and the Dwarf Mini is out observing a supernova in a distant galaxy.
Later: And the results are in! I first photographed this galaxy (C 30, known as the “Deer Lick group”, bizarrely) a couple of weeks back on 21 August. In early September there came news of a supernova, so on the first clearish night for ages I had another go. Clouds moved in so there there were fewer exposures this time (hence some of the fainter stars don’t appear), but the supernova — designated SN 2026aaiv — is clearly visible. A supernova is an extremely energetic explosion that happens when a star reaches the end of its life, and can briefly outshine a whole galaxy of billions of stars. Luckily this one is about 45 million light years away.
In preparation for reading Cold Sunset by William Boyd, A2 is rereading the rest of the trilogy (so far), starting with Gabriel’s Moon. A1 is reading The Lost Women by Tim Weaver.

Happy Birthday

A2 blows out the candles on her exquisite cherry almond cake after a succulent roast chicken dinner and before we scored 9 (8 would be more accurate but hey it’s a special day) on the GSQ.
The cat wanted to join in too.
It is also (and is on this day every year) National Read a Book Day. A1 is reading The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davies. A2 has 6 exciting new books to choose from (thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you A1) and is beginning with The End of Everything by M John Harrison, a post-apocalyptic alien invasion story which was like a weird dream but good all the same. First book I’ve read where the colophon warns AI not to scrape.

Critter of the Day: Harvestperson

Oh no I can’t think of anything to say about this leggy creature of autumn, except that its diet of squashed slugs, bird droppings and jam seems more healthy than that of its lookalike the pholcus which just eats other spiders, the bastard.
A1 is reading Body of Lies* by Jo Callaghan, the conclusion of JC’s trilogy of crime novels about an AI detective. Somewhat melodramatic and polemical, and unfortunately the plot was in service of the polemic, rather than the other way round.
A2 is reading The Clues in the Fjord* by Satu Ramo.

Chicken Pasta Bake

Today we had a chicken, courgette, cheese and pasta bake with a veggie version for Bob, followed by air-fried peaches and ice cream and the GSQ on which we scored 10, or possibly 11.
Blimey, is it really more than a week since we had new books? Well, Slow Gods and The Bone Clocks are both big books which require close attention. A1 is now reading The Silent Bones* by Val McDermid (something of a return to form) and A2 is reading Body of Lies* by Jo Callaghan.