Have left it far too
long, there's definitely books missing from the above list. My 'to read'
bookshelf is now overflowing with goodies, but I just can't stop buying books.
I was online yesterday debating whether the £20 it would cost to get a copy of
The British General Election of 1983 from New Zealand was worth it, or whether
it would be better spent on the biography of Philip Snowden that is
unaccountably in Arkansas. It was very sad to read the final Wallander book,
and Mankell's uncompromising last pages when Wallander's descent into
loneliness and Alzheimers are starkly set out will stay with me for a long
time; Helen felt the same.
Marc Morris' book
had enough in it to make me buy his 'Castle' book, obviously the sandcastle
influence. In the meantime, we've been to Brittany and Normandy on holiday
which feels like it will go down in our memories as a golden holiday; Fred
learnt to ride and to swim without armbands! So proud of the little fella; on
the first day he was saying he couldn't ride at all, and by the end of the
holiday he was tearing around the campsite and along the corniche. He's riding
to school every day now too.
Dad bought us a
lawnmower as a moving-in present following on from the lawn care service, and
mowing the lawn has become mildly addictive. I've bought Tom Fort's 'The Grass
is Greener' to reread. My gardening is still limited to the destructive
elements; mowing, weeding and the like, but I'm trying to expand my repertoire.
The garden just looks and smells so lovely. It really is different every day.
The Sextons obviously knew what they were doing, although they'd be horrified
if they saw our levels of incompetence! Next up is trimming the hedge. . .
Libby is still
somewhere between a viking berserker and a Tasmanian Devil, albeit one with
pretty dresses and beautiful flowing hair. At the weekend I heard Helen shout
'No Freddie! Don't give Libby anything she could use as a weapon!' Fred had
naively given her a spoon, an instrument that Libby could kill a Rhino with.
Yesterday she ran headlong into a trolley at Morrison's, and the trolley
definitely came off worst. Libby just stood there for a moment, and like Sean
Fitzpatrick against Ireland in 1992, took her metaphorical gumshield out, spat
out the blood and gore from her gob and then just scrummed down again.
