Another family meal, another creamy pudding. Since the Co-op shop was hacked there have been shortages on many shelves but a vast oversupply of sell-by-date cream. A1 served up a delicious beef stew and A2 concocted a creamy courgette gratin for the vegetarians. We enjoyed it all and scored our usual substandard 9 on the GSQ.
A2 is reading The Last Weekend by Blake Morrison.
The Secret Garden
This peony blooms unseen behind the spreading apple tree. A2 pushed through the greenery to photograph it and got nettled for her pains.
A1 is reading The Dark Wives* by Ann Cleeves, compassionate and absorbing. A2 is reading The Hymn to Dionysus* by Natasha Pulley.
Sunday Lunch
We had chicken and/or vegetable creamy pasta for lunch, followed by this strawberry sponge cake which was snapped up before it could be snapped, and scored an improved 10 on the GSQ.
A2 is reading The Cuckoo* by Camilla Lackberg.
Turkey Tail Fungus
The multicoloured fans of Trametes versicolor growing on a tree.
A1 is reading The Shadow by Ajay Chowdhury. A2 is reading The Vinyl Detective: Underscore by Andrew Cartmel.
Dejeuner en Famille
Dinner with the family in their lovely new house: salmon, salad and cherry cake for afters. What a treat!
Faye was our quizmistress and kindly gave us a score of 9.
A1 is reading The Vinyl Detective: Underscore by Andrew Cartmel. No proper recipes this time, but more on Vinyl Detective Macaroni Cheese, which is now credited to Sam Wong’s article How to Hack Your Macaroni Cheese in the 23 Nov 2022 issue of New Scientist (behind a paywall, but free to Leeds libraries members).
A2 is reading The Girl in the Woods* by Camilla Lackberg; child killers and child-killers, with 17th century witch trials added in.
The Garden After…
…the second driest April on our records. The tulips are packing up and the bluebells are pushing through. Compare two weeks ago and all previous May Days. As well as being the second driest, April was our third sunniest and fifth warmest April of all time. May Day started well with 28°C and 10.6kWh but it won’t last if the forecast is correct.
A2 is reading The Dark Wives* by Ann Cleeves.
Halo Again!
This pretty halo is actually from yesterday; today’s weather news is that it is the warmest day this year so far: 25.6°C with warmer days to come, probably.
A2 is reading Perfidious Albion* by Sam Byers.
Family dinner
Another Sunday dinner of spaghetti followed by a trifle decorated with leftover Easter eggs, at which we scored a sorely disappointing 8 on the GSQ.
A1 is reading Burn After Reading by Catherine Ryan Howard.
Jabadabadoo!
A2 went for another covid jab today. Here’s the Jabberwocky in its current incarnation.
A2 is reading Annihilation* by Michel Houellebecq, a novel with a wandering plot skipping through politics, paganism, christianity, terrorism, but mostly about reconciliation to marriage, to family, to death.
Halo There!
A faint halo with a lucky pigeon. Today we overtook last April on the solar panel front.
A2 is reading A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering* by Andrew Hunter Murray. Third book in a row in which a character gets messages saying I KNOW WHAT YOU DID.
Easter Monday
We had chicken bacon broccoli and cheesecake for our family meal and did the last two weeks’ quizzes, scoring 13 on one and 10 on the other. Here’s the cake:
A1 is reading The Alaska Sanders Affair* by Joel Dicker. A2 is reading Burn After Reading by Catherine Ryan Howard. Another book about a Writer.
Raindrops on Tulips
A flower, a fly and a few drops of rain the day after our solar panels recorded nearly 11 kWh.
A1 is reading Buying Time* by EM Brown, the impenetrable pseudonym of sf writer Eric Brown. This is another approach to the relive-your-life subgenre (cf North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Atkinson’s Life after Life etc), in which a rather irritating Writer goes back to various events in his past and tries to learn from them.
A2 is reading The Alaska Sanders Affair* by Joel Dicker, in which the hero, who is special because he’s a Writer and has apparently written all Joel Dicker’s books (Joel should sue) solves a cold case with the help of the police and all their resources. Irritating.
First Poppy
Welcome to the first big poppy of spring, surrounded by tulips, dandelions and uncut grass.
A2 is rereading Pandemonium by Christopher Brookmyre.
Speckled Wood
New life on a dead tree.
A1 is reading A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering* by Andrew Hunter Murray — an enjoyable light read (if a bit overlong), and highly reminiscent of Andrew Cartmel’s Vinyl Detective books in style and characterisation. So much so that A1 wondered if a pseudonym was in effect here … it turns out not (AHM is a Private Eye contributor, among much else). But in the course of this wondering A1 discovered that, on that very day, a new Vinyl Detective book was published! Spooky or what? Anyway, duly ordered.
A2 is reading The Friends of Harry Perkins* by Chris Mullin.
Speckled Wood
First butterfly of spring on the hottest day of the year so far: 23.4°C.
A2 is rereading A Snowball in Hell by Christopher Brookmyre.
Florence and the (Xbox) Machine
A1 has been reading the recently published Perspectives by Laurent Binet, an epistolary murder mystery set in 16th-century Florence. And was rather struck by this passage:
As I descended from the ramparts, I heard some guards climbing the stairs. Since I had no business being up there, I would have had no excuse to justify my presence if they had seen me. So I hurried back to the roof. But you know the palace better than I, so you know that there are no hiding places up there. I ran to the wall; a leap from that height could be fatal, even to me. But God rewards the brave: at the foot of the wall was a cart loaded with hay, left there by some groom. It all happened in a flash: the decision, then the execution. I climbed onto the parapet, arms outspread like Christ on the cross, I closed my eyes and I dived. During my fall I heard the cry of an eagle. My landing was as soft as on a feather bed, and in a second I was up on my feet again, completely unscathed.
That’s from page 140. So here’s a sequence from 2009’s Assassin’s Creed II, which is set in … 16th-century Florence. Which is where we are here:
This really does stretch coincidence too far. All that’s missing is the eagle — but as any fule kno, nearly all Assassin’s Creed games have an eagle perched on the viewpoints you can jump from (he must have flown off before I got there this time). And there is always a convenient hay cart below (well, unless there’s a lake).
I think it’s pretty certain that M. Binet is a fan 🙂
Blueberry Lemon Cake
Our pudding after our family meal of roast pork, stuffing, potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, broccoli, sprouts, carrots and gravy, after which we generously allowed ourselves to score 10 on the GSQ.
A2 is rereading Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks by Christopher Brookmyre.
More Japanese Animals
More wildlife from Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
Here are some boxing hares, being drawn by our heroine Naoe. Who turns out to be a dab hand at sumi-e (ink wash) painting.
And here’s a kitten!
Starlings
A bird showing off the ring on its leg while its mates preen themselves in the background.
A1 is reading The Wilding by Ian McDonald. A2 is rereading A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil by Christopher Brookmyre.
Bright Sunshiny Day
April begins with our sunniest day of the year 8.71kWh. March was more than averagely warm, less than averagely wet and our second sunniest March of all time.
A2 is rereading All Fun and Games until Somebody Loses an Eye by Christopher Brookmyre.
Mother’s Eid
It’s Eid-al-Fitr, Mother’s Day and Gez birthday eve and A1 has made a delicious strawberry sponge to round off our meal of stroggers and pasta, after which we scored 11.5 on the GSQ.
A1 is reading The Trap* by Ava Glass (don’t mind if I do), which was a tediously cliched spy thriller — ChatGPT could do better. A2 is rereading Be My Enemy by Christopher Brookmyre.
Partial Eclipse Day
The day started auspiciously with a fine 22° halo, seen on the webcam.
Clouds rolled in, but there were enough gaps to see the eclipse between 10am and noon.
And here’s the traditional colander picture, with hundreds of crescent suns:
A2 is reading The Sacred Art of Stealing by Christopher Brookmyre.
Contrails
Warmest day of the year so far: 19.0°C, and the sunniest by a couple of watts, and dry.
Met Office forecast for today: “Cloudy with strong winds and rain”
We have been watching Adolescence. Phew!
Magnolia World
A fly exploring the central castle. Here is an overview of the magnolia population:
A1 is reading A Wake of Crows* by Kate Evans. A2 is rereading A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away by Christopher Brookmyre.
Sad Kiwi Fruit
No wonder; it’s no fun being chopped up and mixed with a load of common fruits.
We had porky vegetables and cheesy courgettes for our family dinner, followed by parkin with custard, and scored 10.5 on the GSQ.
A2 is rereading Boiling a Frog by Christopher Brookmyre.