Barry Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000

Fernand Braudel was namechecked quite often, and his spirit was ever-present in this sweeping history of a continent over 10,000 years. The Roman Empire just a blip, much more emphasis on 'pre-history' and the thriving cultures and communications links that pre-date classical civilisation and were based on the three 'oceans'; the Med, the Atlantic and the North Sea/Baltic.  We've just got back from a week on the Isle of Wight, staying just outside Newport on the Medina. Obviously I'm now a sailing expert having spent nearly 48 hours on a boat last April, so was confidently striding round the harbour giving my valued opinion to all. We spent an awful lot of time at a lavender farm, which was a beautiful spot, like Cold Comfort Farm at the end of the novel.

Fred and I built a Lego X Wing Fighter as our holiday project; obviously it’s been smashed up and fallen apart and we've lost Jek Porkins' blaster already. For the last couple of nights I've been using  the Star Wars Lego to act out Ep IV as Fred's bedtime story. Pretty sure Helen wouldn’t be happy If I bought/assembled a couple of AT-ATs and Bespin Cloud City out of Lego to enact The Empire Strikes Back. My story would really have benefited from a Lego Death Star though. . . .

Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue

'An Oakland Middlemarch'. Took me a while to get into, but was hooked by the end. The opposite of 'Kavalier & Clay', which I was immersed in from the start and then came to an underwhelming and rushed conclusion. Gran's funeral was on Wednesday, so it's a bit of a strange time, but we've been able to formally say 'Goodbye' now.  The kids were too young to be involved, so it would be nice to do something like plant a tree or dedicate a bench that they can attend and have something to remember Gran. 

Marc Morris, Castle: A History Of The Buildings That Shaped Medieval Britain

Gran passed away last week a few days after she left hospital to go into a Nursing Home. Have seen lots of Mum and Dad since just so we're all together, and Dad seems to be coping ok. Gran left a notebook full of the story of her life, which is heartbreaking. It begins 'If only I'd been born a boy'. Her Father wouldn't look at her when she was born apparently, as he only wanted a boy. How very sad. I've said I'll transcribe it after the funeral. M&D asked for us to put together some memories for the funeral, these are mine:

As children, it was wonderful to have grandparents so close by and to have them as such an integral part of our lives. We were so very lucky to have Gran there when we were growing up. We loved having Gran babysit us, and playing Monopoly or Knockout Whist, or endless rounds of Newmarket with her. Once a week we would go to 13 Hatch Lane after school and it was always a treat. We'd have biscuits from the green biscuit tin, play in the coalshed, the greenhouse and the garden and then a wonderful roast dinner with the best roast potatoes  followed by perfect custard for pudding. Gran would start each meal by declaring 'What do we want?', to which the enthusiastic response was 'Clean Plates!' We still use this at family mealtimes today!

 We'd spend Saturday mornings with Gran and Ben too playing in the park, or on Ben's allotment behind the village hall, or collecting conkers from the vicarage garden. When we went into school on Monday we would have to draw our  favourite thing from the weekend and those Saturday mornings always featured.

Gran and I appeared in the local paper in 1977 having planted a tree on Moor Lane, which in later years was pointed out whenever we passed it. It's wonderful to think that a sapling we planted 35 years ago is still there and thriving amongst all the change in the village. In recent years we've always consulted Gran when we need gardening advice and her love of flowers and nurturing plants has been passed down to her great grandchildren who love to be out in the garden, getting dirty digging and weeding.

Jerry White, London In The Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing, Henry Treece, Swords From The North, Tom Fort, The Grass Is Greener: Our Love Affair With The Lawn, Jake Arnott, The House of Rumour, Peter Ackroyd, London Under, Derek Miller Norwegian By Night, Adam Hopkins, Holland, Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was very moving, and a few times even caused what Freddie calls 'Goosepingles' to appear. The story of a retired Middle Englander who receives news from someone who affected his life profoundly twenty years previously that she is dying. He cannot think of what to write to her that expresses his feelings, and so rather than post the terse 'sorry' letter he has written, walks straight past the postbox, then past the post office, and then keeps on walking to the other end of the country to see and save Queenie Hennessey. Along the way he has time to think about his life, his regrets and his relationship with his family. At the same time, so does his wife at home. I'm not doing this justice at all, but it was a wonderful book. Swords From The North is one of the few books concerned with Harald Hardrada. He must be due a biography, but looks like there are very few resources to draw on, so fiction is the way to go. How strange it seems that someone whose name is so well known is so unknown. Tom Fort's The Grass is Greener was a reread, based on my current lawn obsession. Since reading the book, there's been a heatwave that has meant the grass hasn't grown, it has instead been bleached into straw by the sun and is dying on its erse. The rubber paddling pool even managed to burn its kidney-shaped outline into part of the lawn somehow.

We went camping in the New Forest  for the second time this weekend, and this time it was dry and hot rather than wet and freezing. The kids loved it, although it was stuffy in the tent. Next time we'll take more mozzy repellent and also some decent tent pegs - the ground was concrete. Any excuse for a trip to the camping shop. It's so hot I've been thinking about emptying out the summerhouse, inflating the airbeds and letting Freddie sleep out there. Now the holidays are about to start maybe we'll give it a go!

Henning Mankell, the Troubled Man, Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword, Naomi Alderman, Liars' Gospel, Marc Morris, The Norman Conquest, Keith Ridgway, Hawthorn & Child

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.

John Lanchester, Capital, David Salsburg, The Lady Tasting Tea; How Statistics Revolutionised Science in the Twentieth Century, Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, David Niven, Bring On The Empty Horses, Erskine Childers, The Riddle Of The Sands, Nate Silver, The Signal & The Noise

Two stats books, although neither was a patch on David Luff. Nate Silver is a bit of a liberal hero at the moment for calling the results of the Obama election and upsetting Fox News with his insistence on using data, but he's not doing anything spectacular. Fox are just upset that facts appear to have a liberal bias. Since the last entry, Fred and I have been sailing the Solent through snowstorms and freezing temperatures, and summer has arrived. Fred coped very well with sailing, although him and the other kids spent much of the time below decks, and it's persuaded Helen to go camping next weekend - we're going to spend a night in the New Forest to see how we get on. . .  .

Cold Comfort Farm and Riddle of the Sands were rereads, and just as brill as ever. RotS obviously inspired by sailing. Next up maybe the 39 Steps. .. .

Bernard Donoughue & GW Jones, Herbert Morrison; Portrait of a Politician, Dodie Smith, I Capture The Castle, Philip Mansel, Constantinople: City of the World's Desire 1453-1924, Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond, William Dalrymple, Return of a King; The Battle For Afghanistan

Leaving aside the first book, there's been some themes running through recent reading. 'I Capture The Castle' and 'The Towers of Trebizond' are written by authors with similar backgrounds writing at similar times about fictionalised younger versions of themselves. Both were wonderful, both were so funny and so arch. There's something very romantic about the remnants of the english ruling class in poverty/in search of a role after the Great War upset the natural order of things. How wonderfully quixotic to live in a castle with absolutely no income or means of providing for one selves other than relying on the goodwill of faithful retainers (I Capture The Castle) or attempting to convert the Turk to Anglicanism as the British Empire collapses and Ataturk's secular society is modernising Anatolia (Towers of Trebizond). The latter links in neatly with Mansel's History of Ottoman Constantinople, the most eye-opening part of the narrative being his convincing distinction between 'Ottoman' and 'Turk', both meaning very different things rather than the synonyms we often take them to be. 'Ottoman' meaning above nationality, multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan but very much Islamic, with 'Turk' as a national term, heterogeneous, defined as against Greek, Albanian, Kurd, Armenian,etc and suspicious of Constantinople as un-Turkish, unlike Ankara and Anatolia. This was particularly true with the ascent of Ataturk and the moving of the capital. Mansel also wrote 'Levant' which I read recently, and both read as laments for the lost, cosmopolitan, multilingual, tolerant societies of the Near East. Surely it can’t have been as wonderful as he suggests, and certainly the ethnic, religious and linguistic tensions have always been simmering away in the Levant.

Dalrymple's book on Afghanistan concentrates on the First Afghan War, rather than events since, and it's hard to read without picturing good old Flashman. It's probably fair to sum the whole thing up with that cracking line from The Princess Bride 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia.'

Since the last update Libby has had her 2nd birthday and now owns a scooter too. She loves it and insists on travelling on it everywhere, despite being unable to steer or stop. The long trip home has become even more interesting as a result. Fred is very good and patiently waits, but he's such a proficient scooterer now he glides through town looking very elegant, and there's always the worry he'll scoot off out of sight while I'm trying to wrestle Libby into the buggy, or juggle her, her scooter, the bags, the buggy and the food shopping.