On my usual 6-mile, circular walk it wasn’t as sunny as it was forecast to be, so I’ve selected these images for their colour.
Iris – nearly 4 years
BBC4 are repeating The Young Montalbano and what a glorious treat it is.
A great story (Mortally Wounded) was pure joy. There’s so much to be gained from being familiar with the main characters, their quirks, their repetitive behaviour. It’s quality drama with complex and rich, crime stories. It’s funny, it’s farce, and it’s charming and brilliant. The acting is wonderful, the characters are warm and the actors are beautiful.
An acquired taste, for sure, but when you get it, you’re in for a treat.
A grasshopper, if I’m not mistaken. As a boy I used to seek them out in the long grass.
Thank you, Lucy.
So far this month I’ve re-read from my shelves three Swedish police procedurals by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö. They wrote ten altogether and they are so good I’ve ordered the other seven! I’ll space them out so that I don’t get tired of them.
The main character in all the novels is Martin Beck and we very much enjoyed the TV series Beck which was based on the novels. Interestingly, though Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö plotted and researched the stories together, they wrote alternate chapters.
In the meantime I’ve just finished reading The Offing, by Benjamin Myers. It’s set around the lovely, Yorkshire fishing village of Robin Hood’s Bay. An old man looks back to 1946 when, as a 16-year-old boy, he set off for an adventure and stumbles across an eccentric, older woman. A really lovely read. I’ll certainly look out for other novels by the same author.
I’m currently reading A Dry White Season, by André Brink. Set in apartheid South Africa, this is a step outside my usual fiction comfort zone and, so far so good.
A deviation from the normal route took me along narrow and overgrown paths. A minor head injury from an overhanging branch was a consequence of my concentrating on beating the overgrown plants blocking the path. Incredibly I came across a prefab being used by a small car-maintenance business, and a rather pleasant church. Finally, just a couple of miles from home, I came across an attractive new area for exploring.
[Reminder to self for the next time: take an OS paper map – it’s all very well using the OS phone app to find one’s way (isn’t it brilliant!), but I’d be stuck if the phone failed or the battery died!]
So it was not exactly climbing despite how it appears on the graph, but walking at 3.5 mph for just under 2 hours is not bad for a seventy-something.
