The Snows Are Melted, the Snows Are Gone

Ou sont les neiges d’antan? Well they have gone for at least a while and for the first time in ten days we have action on the solar panels and people are moving about outside.
A1 is rereading Black Widow by Chris Brookmyre. A2 is rereading The Mind’s Eye by Hakan Nesser.

Still Snowy

It is still freezing cold, ice everywhere, lethally slippery pavements. A1 had to go to work in the horrible conditions and said it was like walking over crisps. A2 only went as far as the dustbin, wearing crampons and holding onto the wall, and noticed that the snowperson population had increased.
A1 is reading I will Find the Key* by Alex Ahndoril. A2 is reading The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami (thx A1).

Snowy Sunday


We’ve had 13cm of snow today and next-door’s kids have made a very traditional snowperson on the traffic island.
The family slogged here through the wintry weather for a dinner of meat loaf with potatoes, sprouts and pico pizzas for the mini people, followed by a reprise of last year’s Christmas pudding ice cream bombe.
We missed the Quadrantids and yesterday evening’s occultation of Saturn by the Moon due to the miserable weather. And oh dear, we scored 7 on the first GSQ of the year. The snow is turning to rain and we’ve registered over 50mm so far this month. Things can only get wetter.

Return of the Sun

After the solstice, a brighter dawn, with Mercury somewhere behind the clouds.
A1 is rereading Mercy by Jussi Adler-Olsen, his first Department Q novel from 2007. This was prompted by reading his recent novel Locked In, which finally resolves the mysteries posed in Mercy and ends with the start of that book.
A2 is rereading The Strangler’s Honeymoon by Hakan Nesser.

Windy Solstice

Today was unconscionably blustery; bins blowing everywhere. A2 had to keep stopping and planting herself foursquare (legs, stick and shopping trolley) to avoid being blown off course. But she emerged from a ginnel like a wind tunnel to the sight of this evanescent rainbow. Then the sun went away and the wind blew on.
A2, inspired by a list of Christmas crime novels in the newspaper, is rereading Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton, which starts with Christmas and ends with a crime but is really a story of a man remorselessly exploited by a woman.

Snow Fox Trot

Earliest snow on our records and a fox comes exploring in a winter wonderland with the colours of Hokusai’s Wave.
A2 is reading The Labyrinth House Murders* by Yukito Ayatsuji. Just like in Ink Ribbon Red* (qv) a birthday party host orders his guests to write a murder story involving themselves (it’s a 60th birthday, the guests are professional crime writers and there is a big prize at stake — but still). Where do they get their crazy ideas?

Hallowali

It’s a festival of lights in one culture (but no fireworks this year) and an excess of pumpkins, ghosts, skeletons, witches and bats in another. Here’s next-door’s creepy display.
October was the second coldest October on record and has less rain and sun than average.
A2 is rereading Bryant & May: Strange Tide by Christopher Fowler and A1 is rereading Fowler’s Bryant & May: The Victoria Vanishes in an annoying American edition. If there’s one thing I can never imagine Arthur Bryant saying, it’s “cell phone” — but oddly, this is the only thing that’s been Americanised: there are still sweets, not candy, pavements rather than sidewalks, colours not colors and so on. Which made the ubiquitous changing of “mobile” or “phone” even more noticeable. And irritating. These books are quintessentially English — more specifically, Londonish (if there’s such a word), and Americanising them is just wrong. I don’t want US-written books to be Anglicised, so why do the opposite? US readers aren’t idiots.

Autumn Leaf

And so the foliage withers and falls, the nights draw in, the temperature drops, the sweaters go on, the bills go up… Last month was our coldest, wettest and cloudiest September of all time and yesterday only had 0.3mm less rain than the whole of August.
A1 is rereading The Half Life of Valery K by Natasha Pulley. A2 is reading The Future by Naomi Alderman; the tech oligarchs get their comeuppance as is only right and proper.

Today Is…

Cloud Appreciation Day. So here’s a montage timelapse of today’s cloudscapes, about 6 hours in less than 2 minutes: cumulus, altocumulus and cirrocumulus all blowing in different directions.

A2 is reading Precipice by Robert Harris; the PM dallies with a young woman on the brink of World War One. True story; nothing changes.

Pop-up Rainbow

Here come the clouds with a surprise transitory rainbow, caught on our weathercam.
A1 is reading Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson. A2 is reading Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts; a crazy space opera that sucks you in like a black hole, and one of his philosophical novels — a Deleuzian delusion.