An occasional journal
So much to celebrate! We had more food than you can shake a chopstick at, followed by A1’s sublime chocolate cake with 10 candles and 10 Lego minifigures sunk knee-deep in ganache.
A1 is reading HHhH by Laurent Binet. A2 is rereading Valis by Philip K Dick. We scored a most excellent 11 on the GSQ.
Another family dinner. A1 roasted a delicious chicken with roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, carrots and broccoli and A2 made a wobbly trifle. We did this week’s and last week’s GSQs and scored 10 on the first and 10.5 on the second.
A1 is reading It’s Not a Cult by Joey Batey, a debut horror/fantasy novel about an alt-folk band in northern England who manage to conjure up a legion of Solkats — small gods of trivial things like empty glasses and bruises. JB (day job: actor) claims to have been writing for years without getting published, and you can perhaps see why: it’s horribly over-written. Some interesting ideas and touches of humour, but he’s clearly been paying obeisance to the Solkat of purple prose.
A2 is reading Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds.
Game on for the quiz after our Sunday dinner of stroggers followed by parkin with custard, cream and chocolate sauce. We scored a dismal 8, bringing our average back to exactly 10. All to play for, folks!
followed by Nordic Blood Orange & Almond Cake.
after which we scored 12, 13 or 13.5 (mileage varied) on the GSQ before the family went off to source indigestion tablets.
A1 is rereading The Last Voice You Hear by Mick Herron.
Faye with their pre-birthday cake of ice cream, biscuits and chocolate after a dinner of spag bol and before we managed to score 10 on the GSQ.
A1 is rereading Joe Country by Mick Herron.
After 17 days, A2 has finally reached the end of ICE, an alternate history set in the 1920s, in which the Tunguska impact delivered new materials to the world, bringing new elements and glaciers at absolute zero, setting in motion cryotechnologies and black physics and freezing history so the Russian revolution and World War 1 never happened. Reading it was akin to reading War and Peace as a teenager; an unlikeable protagonist, a mix of historical and fictional figures, long philosophical, theological and mathematical disquisitions and an enormous cast of characters. Like W&P it was a struggle to read but the feeling of genius was strong. A2 is now going to relax with The Burning Grounds by Abir Mukherjee.
A reprise of 2024’s Christmas Pudding Bombe with added stollen, pannettone, brandy butter and more brandy plus loads of chocolate, cherries and a candle. Which followed A1’s succulent pork in cider and preceded the GSQ at which we scored an inauspicious 9, but could be worse.
A1 is rereading Dead Lions by Mick Herron.
The last family gathering of this quarter-century at which we ate chicken bacon broccoli and a tiny banana blueberry white chocolate cake and scored 12 on the last quiz of the year for a fairly neat average of 10.225, a step down from last year’s 10.2268518518519, and another step down from 2023’s 10.2756346153846. Onwards and upwards everyone!
Prompted by watching series 5 of Slow Horses, A1 is rereading London Rules by Mick Herron (on which it’s based), to remind himself how much better the books are.
Our family dinner. Same as yesterday but with added peas and a successfully flambé Christmas pudding.
There were many more presents to unwrap and a quiz to do at which we scored 11.5 against all odds.
And here’s Dave being very childish with one of his presents, and causing much amusement:
For our family meal tonight we had tomato chicken, baked potatoes and creamy cheesy leeks, followed by A1’s magnificent marble cake with cream, custard and chocolate sauce, and generously scored ourselves 9.5 on the GSQ.
A2 is reading We Solve Murders by Richard Osman,in which a different bunch of (mostly) agreeable (mostly) old buffers turn their backs on village life to form an international crime-fighting syndicate. Thanks Gemma’s!
Roast beef, Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes, sprouts, broccoli, stuffing balls, gravy … but A1 forgot to serve the carrots. But never mind, Gez scoffed the lot anyway. Plus A2’s delicious afters of Squidgy Chocolate Pear Pudding and cream, after which we scored 13 on the GSQ with Bob as quizmaster.
A1 is rereading The Stand by Stephen King. A2 is reading Desolation Road by Ian McDonald.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A cold-weather cake after our warming lunch of pasta bakes at which we scored another substandard 9 on the GSQ.
A1 is reading The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths, featuring a time-travelling detective. EG has no idea how to write skiffy (which she sort of admits), so she keeps the science and wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff off-page, sensibly. A more worrying feature is the similarity of her protagonists — here Ali is indistinguishable from her previous archaeologist protagonist Ruth Galloway, and is pretty unbelievable in her reactions for a DS. Still, readable and entertaining enough.
A2 is rereading Buried by Jussi Adler Olsen.
Our family dinner tonight featured shepherd’s pie, pineapple pizza and perfect nanaimo bars and we scored 10 on the GSQ with help from Bob.
A2 is reading Laying out the Bones by Kate Webb.
Yesterday was one of our rainiest days of all time: 39.3mm, making this month our wettest this year and our rainiest September ever. Today was bright and sunny, the washed-clean solar panels served up 6kWh and the family came round for lunch. We had roast chicken, roast potatoes, carrots, parsnips, onions, cabbage, cauliflower cheese and Yorkshire puddings, followed by Swedish applekaka, and scored a miserable 9 on the GSQ.
A1 is rereading The Square of Sevens by Laura Shepherd-Robinson. A2 is reading The Art of a Lie, also by Laura Shepherd-Robinson, which was very entertaining. Thank you A1.
Feeding time again. Today we had pork in cider and chocolate ginger beer cake which was tasty but filling, and scored an above-par 11 on the GSQ.
A1 is reading The Predicament by William Boyd. A2 is reading Clown Town by Mick Herron.
Transit of Bob. It was A2’s birthday yesterday so she got a lot of lovely presents of things to drink, read and wear to the gym. Our family dinner was chicken, bacon and broccoli with A1’s cherry cake and perfect garden apple charlotte for afters. We scored 9 on the GSQ. Could have been worse. And we could have seen the lunar eclipse if it hadn’t been cloudy, and then raining. But it was clear in Lusaka (see right) — thanks, Guida!
A1 is reading The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith, the latest biceps-straining volume in the Strike/Ellacott saga. Expensive, too — probably the first £30 mass-market novel (although it’s been heavily discounted).
It’s nominally a fiendishly complicated crime novel (and it is complicated — you may want to take notes), but RG is having great fun with the on-off relationship between the protagonists, which fortunately errs on the right side of soapiness; you can imagine her smirking at the readers’ reactions. The targets this time include Freemasonry and another stab at an evil Boris Johnson analogue, who really seems to appeal to writers (cf Mick Herron, MW Craven etc). Can’t imagine why… Criticism? There’s a bit too much phonetic transcription of accents, and the subplot about human trafficking gets somewhat lost in all the fol-de-rol. But a thoroughly enjoyable read nonetheless.
A2 is reading The Predicament by William Boyd, which was absolutely delightful. Thank you A1.
Today’s family dinner was spag bol with stuffed mushrooms for the kids and trifle for pudding, after which we scored a miserable 8 on the GSQ. Can’t win them all.
But we did win on the solar panels, which passed last year’s total with four months left to go. August itself was averagely sunny and warm, but very dry (and nearly half of the total came down yesterday — 10.5mm out of 22.5). Only 2022 had less August rainfall, and 2025 is looking like it will be our driest ever year by some way, even allowing for the weather station’s downtime in May/June.
Today’s family meal consisted of stroggers for the meat-eaters and homegrown bean, courgette and tomato stew for the veggies, followed by homegrown apple crumble with cream and custard. We had two weeks worth of quizzes to do and scored 13 on the first and 12 on the second.
A2 is reading The Final Vow by MW Craven.
A side-on view of Vanessa atalanta sipping nectar from the buddleia.
We didn’t have a family dinner this week but we did have lots of carrots so we made a cake anyway.
A2 is rereading The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick.