A Hot Day Spent Doing Stupidly Hot Things

Having worked all weekend this is my last day off before going to Shetland at the Weekend, the temperature here has been in the high 20s so of course, instead of reading a book and doing a little light packing I had a wool jumper to finish. I might conceivably want the jumper in Shetland where temperatures might be a lot lower. I could have finished knitting it in March so I wasn't sitting under all its cosy wooliness at near 30C. Could have. Didn't. 

It's on the board drying now, but even washing it was hot work. I compounded this folly by seeing cheap raspberries passing their best before in town and thinking it was too good a chance to miss them for raspberry fridge jam. I was briefly lulled by the airconditioning in the supermarket, and possibly high on ice cream, when I thought that was a good idea. The little supermarket didn't have jam sugar, and crucially my freezer wouldn't fit a kilo plus of slightly mushy raspberries in it. The bigger tesco was also out of jam sugar suggesting I'm not the only lunatic deciding that an evening spent over an oven whilst it's this hot is an awesome idea. They no longer sell pectin sachets or liquid pectin and cheap is a relative term with raspberries. 

Do I make my own pectin stock with a bag of apples (inexpensive) or risk £10 of raspberries going mouldy whilst I don't know, I wait for amazon to deliver some pectin powder? I got the apples. The internet in Tesco is intermittent and they were out of Bramleys so I made a best guess at the sharpest looking ones there and a quantity, and boiled them up. In this heat. And then made jam - I hope it's worked but it looks sloppy even for fridge jam with the extra liquid. 

Now all I have to do is a load of washing, remake my bed, run the hoover around, and think about packing. I'm going to need that holiday when it comes, and I hope to heaven it's cold enough to wear this jumper. 

Keep Using Cash

I've never much liked the idea of a cashless society and Friday was an excellent example of why. Theoretically, I don't particularly want to give banks, credit card companies, or whatever applications I use them through so much free information about my spending habits, though in truth I don't think about that as much as I should. 

I try to avoid online shopping where possible partly to support local businesses - price matters but so does choice, a decent range of competitively paid jobs, the chance of some on hand expertise, human interaction, not having to negotiate around delivery times or drop boxes, not having packages stolen from your doorstep - and I don't believe Jeff Bezos got where he is by fair pricing and paying staff decently. The other reason is it lays you open to fraud from too many angles. 

I'm not a fan of high contactless limits either - lose your card and someone could spend hundreds of pounds on it in minutes, lose your phone and you're high and dry. I couldn't count the number of people using apps to pay via phones or watches who can't quite comprehend when the machines say no, it's time to verify your pin. I assumed Britain's relentless march towards a cashless society was a universal thing until I was in Vienna a few years ago and saw how many cash-only businesses there were there (they weren't big on Sunday opening either which was refreshing, if a little awkward when you arrive on a Sunday with no idea it's going to be an issue). 

After spending over a year and making at least 5 attempts with the Bank of Scotland to get a joint account I'm really not a fan of how banks have cut back on services either.  You need to have a face-to-face appointment to open a joint account. In some branches, the waiting list was over 6 months, in others there simply wasn't anybody who was authorised to set one up, but this is surely something people still need? The extravagant length of the queues whenever I go near a bank (never more than 2 tellers available on the desk) suggest there's no shortage of demand for them either. 

So with all this in mind, Friday was interesting. Our card machines were out for several hours with the Microsoft problems, and most of the day for some people depending on which systems their bank used. We've been seeing a bit more cash generally since the cost of living crisis hit - cash is easier to budget - which is my main reason for liking it. In the end a surprising number of people were ready with cash, they'd listened to the news and come prepared - there were also a fair few who hadn't and weren't. They were uniformly outraged that they couldn't pay as they wished and generally didn't have a bank card as a back up.

Are you, dear reader, cash or contactless people and if contactless have the recent outages made you think again about carrying at least some money around with you? 

Lessons in Crime - edited by Martin Edwards

It's been a while since I've read a crime classics anthology, and this one has been an absolute treat as well as perfectly timed for the start of the school holidays around here. At work we have a perennial debate; which is more stressful? Summer holidays or Christmas. The consensus is generally the school summer holidays on the grounds that not only do we not have the extra staff, but with our own holidays we have less than normal, and everyone is hot and bothered. Last Friday was the end of term here, a few thousand kids, very excited to be free of school for the next six weeks descended on the city center and it was chaos. 

If nothing else it absolutely put me in the mood for a few academic murders, kidnaps, and near misses. There are a couple of absolute gems in this collection - Herbert Harris's Low Marks for Murder where what seems like an excellent plan falls apart, somewhat to the readers relief as the culprit is a cold-blooded piece of work, The Harrowing of Henry Pygole which almost veers into horror territory, and Miriam Sharman's Battle of Wits all particularly stood out. 

It's a nicely put together anthology too with some old favourites - Dorothy L Sayers, Michael Innes, Arthur Conan Doyle, alongside some unexpected names - that Jacqueline Wilson and those 3 stories above all from names I didn't immediately recognise. I love an anthology that does this - gives me a few safe bets and introduces me to lots of new things, or encourages me to reassess a writer I don't normally care much for. Edmund Crispin for me in this case - but the example here is both short and effective and has temporarily made me forget why I generally dislike his books. 

The visits to Oxford are charming too, and altogether I thoroughly recommend this collection. It might partly be a timing thing and I've never been disappointed by any of the anthologies in the series, but one has gone straight onto my favourite list. 

Storm Pegs - Jen Hadfield

I don't think I've ever read a book quite like this, and I'm not sure where to start with talking about it. I am on the other hand absolutely sure that one reading isn't enough to have properly got to grips with it, my copy is an uncorrected proof, in the fullness of time I'll buy the paperback edition and compare notes. 

Storm Pegs mixes biography, nature writing, poetry, travel, and an examination of language and place. It's both personal to the author's experience and full of moments of recognition and connection. Jen starts her introduction with a moment of wondering how to define a place like Shetland which defies easy definition. 'Where am I' She asks? I in turn am wondering how to define her book. 

The answer to both questions might be home. My relationship with Shetland informs how I've read 'Storm Pegs', not everyone will feel the same about it as I do, but reading this for me was like seeing a much loved view after a while away from it. When I wrote about Kathleen Jamie's 'Cairn' I talked about how these two books have become a sort of literary pair of meids to me - meid is a Shetland word for landmarks seen from the sea - line them up just so and you know where you are; you can find your way home, or mark a good fishing spot so. 

I stand by that. It's been an eventful few months full of change and planning, these books have been fixtures that continue to help me navigate through this current set of challenges. But why should you read 'Storm Pegs'? 

It's the structure of the book that makes it so special. If I've read Jen's posts about it correctly it's been years in the making, so most of the 17 years she covers are in the present tense and arranged roughly by season and by the sense of a word. There's a beginning, a first visit, the decision to stay, and an end for this book at least; the starting of a family. The middle part of all this exists outside of a strict chronology, it doesn't read like fiction, but it's compelling in a way I associate with fiction. 

It's Shetland that's at the center of this book, seen through Hadfield's eyes and experiences. She alludes to the things she's doing in that time - the travel for residencies and teaching, the poetry she's writing, the relationships she finds, and the house she builds, but they are peripheral things compared to the landscape she finds herself in and the elements that define it. If this book is like anything I've ever read it's Nan Shepherd's 'The Living Mountain' which must, I think, have been a key influence - references to it and to Nan's relationship with her beloved landscape run through the book. It's hard not to think of George Mackay Brown either, except that where he looks back, Jen looks forward or exists wholeheartedly in a moment. 

Hadfield's treatment of Shetland's language is interesting too - Storm Pegs is as much about exploring that language as anything else I think. Dialect as I remember it being spoken in the 1970s and 80s is fading away, but that's also been recognised and people are fighting for it. Mallachy Tallack talked about the twin pillars of accent and ancestry that gate keep a Shetland identity (I can't remember where exactly) with a sense of frustration of being kept out. 

Jen seems to have a less complicated delight in words that express something fundamental to her -  Lightsome/Lichtsome is one of them. She chooses to discuss it in the winter part of her book - I'd describe lightsome as something that you take joy in with others - good company and good times - an evening laughing with friends, though a person can also be lightsome. An example here is a group of women swimming through a sea filled with Mareel (bioluminescence - tiny luminous creatures in the sea that light up as anything moves through them). I have seen this, paddled in it, rowed a dinghy through it - it's magical, definitely lightsome, and so is the description of it here. 

The answer to Jen's question of where am I? Is somewhere a group of serious women can gather on a dark, drizzling winter's night to swim in a sea full of living light and for that to be both remarkable and not remarkable. I am not there but I wish I was. 

A Duke of One's Own - Emma Orchard

Another week has gone by in something of a blur. Work is busy; fortunately, after a not-great May, we've been flood-free for several weeks. There are interesting projects in hand, and on my part at least some excitement about today's election. I'm hoping for new faces and change, I'm not paying too much attention to polls - they've been wrong before. I'm not wildly optimistic about what the next few years will bring, the damage is too deeply rooted for a quick fix but if we can fix the water supply and work on the NHS as a country that would be something. 

I'm currently on a waiting list for an injection into my foot that will help with the referred pain arthritis is causing. I'm at the getting text messages to ask if I still need treatment stage of the process (yes I do, the arthritis has not gone away of its own accord). I hadn't considered the option of going private until the text landed, and haven't yet looked into it, but the pain is getting worse so at some point the consideration will be can I work like this? Or sleep. 

Altogether then there are a lot of distractions, so easy reading to keep my mind off the serious business of what kind of country we'll wake up to tomorrow is about all I can manage (current book is Lessons in Crime, the academic mystery themed British Library Crime Classics collection). I read A Duke of One's Own a little while ago, and because it was on a kindle app didn't exactly forget about it, but it was out of sight and therefore out of mind. 

Emma Orchard is a friend, we met during lockdown in the Georgette Heyer readalong on Twitter (as was). I like her books, I love the easter eggs for Heyer fans, the fact that her characters sometimes need to pee (I suppose it's part of the fantasy in a lot of romances that nobody has any bodily functions to contend with beyond sometimes being hungry). These books are funny, honest about female desire, and probably spicier than I would otherwise read.

The heroine of A Duke of One's Own is Georgie, sister to Lord Irlam, hero of the last book. Bridgerton style - because that's the current frame of reference, the Pendlebury's are a large and loving family of mostly boys. Georgie is a mess of a human being. She's young, stubborn, sexually curious, and full of hormones. It's a combination that has led to some very poor but entirely realistic decision making. 

The double standards applied to female sexuality are touched upon here, and although the consequences for stepping out of line might have been theoretically more severe in the past I sometimes winder how much they've really changed. I don't doubt for a moment that girls did mess around though, what mattered was not getting caught. For a woman in Georgie's position - a socially powerful family who will support her, and plenty of money, I also wonder how severe the consequences would even have been? 

This is Emma's third book, the tone is more assured each time, and again, the thing I really love here is that people might behave outrageously from time to time, but always in a way that makes sense for the character, and is understandable from a human perspective. Add to that humour, genuinely complex emotional situations, a hugely likable cast of side characters who get proper space and attention, and you have a series to really enjoy.