It's been a busy few weeks as I desperately tried, and failed, to finish a jumper before I went away for a week - failure doesn't really matter as it stands because the temperatures have shot up and it's far too warm to wear it. Tomorrow is forecast to be exceptionally rainy and wet wool isn't appealing either.
I missed the King's coronation due to being at work which I'm a little bit resentful about - it should have been on Friday (in my opinion) and a proper public holiday. It's something I'd liked to have shared with people and made a proper memory out of; there's nothing special about being at work, and for a mercy, there was nothing memorable about it (memorable in retail terms is seldom a good thing).
I've also started many books without waiting to finish any of them - until tonight when I've finally read the second half of Alan Warner's 'Nothing Left to Fear From Hell'. It's shameful that a book of roughly 130 pages has taken me weeks to read but so it is.
'Nothing Left to Fear From Hell' is the third book in the Darklands series, Denise Mina's Rizzio is a masterpiece, and Jenni Fagen's Hex was equally unforgettable so Alan Warner had a lot to live up to. He does it and confirms this series as something to look out for. I love the novella format - someone who wasn't consistently distracted by knitting and other books would have read it in an afternoon. I'm also in awe of the emotional intensity each book packs - and whilst both Hex and Rizzio condense their action down into a space of hours, 'Nothing Left to Fear From Hell' covers the months Bonnie Prince Charlie spent on the run across Scotland after Culloden.
Reading about a Charles who didn't become King seemed appropriate on a weekend when another Charles did. I share Warner's ambivalence for the young pretender (who seems to have been the Boris Johnson of his day as far as bringing misfortune on all those close to him goes).
Warner's Bonnie Prince is introduced to us vomiting up wine and incapacitated by diarrhea as he steps off a small boat. He's invested with a certain charisma, and perhaps the decision to follow him makes more sense this weekend, when we've witnessed the full, ridiculous, paraphernalia of majesty than it would most. This prince is vain, lewd, boastful and inconsiderate of his companions. Capricious, inconstant, and an unsurprising failure.
History has not been kind to him, and there's no reason for the historical novelist to be so either. And yet - by the time we reach the end of the journey across the islands, carried out on foot with inadequate shelter or provisioning, and made hideous by midge bites it's possible to feel some sympathy for the man who lost forever the chance of a throne and in doing so cost countless others everything.
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