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.
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