Category: Weekly Events

Saturday Snapshot

Published on by Margaret18 Comments

I still haven’t sorted out my photos of Glencoe and Glen Nevis from our holiday there the other week. So, in the meantime here are a few photos I took the day we didn’t go to Lyme Regis.

We were staying with my sister on New Year’s Eve nearly five years ago. We had wanted to go to Lyme Regis – to see the Cobb and so on, but when we got there it was so full of people and cars that there was nowhere to park and so we carried on along the coast to Seaton, a small traditional seaside town at the mouth of the River Axe. In contrast to Lyme Regis there were just a few people strolling along the promenade and beach.

Its coastline is part of the Jurassic Coast, a World Heritage Site. The whole Site is 95 miles long and covers a complete record through the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods of geological time. The White Cliff at Seaton is composed of white chalk about 90 to 110 million years old.

At the other side of the bay the cliffs are red, which the interpretation board told me are from the Triassic period and the red colour (caused by iron oxide) indicates the climate was hot and dry for much of the year just like present day deserts in the Middle East!

I suppose the lure of fossils, combined with the literary association of Lyme Regis – the Cobb in Jane Austen’s Persuasion and John Fowles’s setting for The French Lieutenant’s Woman mean that more people are attracted to visit Lyme Regis but still Seaton is an interesting place to see – I don’t imagine there are many places you can see a 185 million-year ‘˜geological walk through time’. And I had walked along the Cobb the last time we went to Lyme Regis.

For more Saturday Snapshots see Alyce’s blog At Home With Books.

Book Beginnings …

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

I’m currently reading  Ian McEwan’s latest book, Sweet Tooth. At the moment I’m still quite near the beginning of the book.

It didn’t take me long to decide that I wanted to read Sweet Tooth. I like Ian McEwan’s books, although I wasn’t that keen on his previous book, Solar, but this one looked good when I picked it up from one of the display tables in a local bookshop. Set in 1972, it’s about Serena Frome, the daughter of an Anglican bishop, who is a compulsive reader of novels. She works for MI5 in a very junior position, until she is assigned to a ‘special mission’ called ‘Sweet Tooth’, which brings her into the literary world of a promising young writer.

I’m hoping it’s going to be as good as Atonement, one of my favourite books.  Like Atonement, Sweet Tooth is both a love story and a book about writing.

It begins:

My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British security service. I didn’t return safely. Within eighteen months of joining I was sacked, having disgraced myself and ruined my lover, though he certainly had a hand in his own undoing. (page 1)

For more Book Beginnings on Friday see Gilion’s blog Rose City Reader.

Saturday Snapshot

Published on by Margaret24 Comments

I had intended to post some photos of our holiday near Glencoe, but I’m so pleased with ‘these’ that I decided to do a bookish Snapshot instead.

‘These’ are …

Book Darts

I first read about them a while ago and couldn’t find a supplier in the UK and then just the other day I was reminded of them by Stefanie’s post on Reading Accessories and searched for them again – and found they’re available in the UK  through Amazon!

Sometimes I use the very small post-its to mark pages I want to refer to again, but the book darts look so much better. They’re archivally safe and won’t mark or stain the pages and are so neat …

… compared to the post-its:

Post-its

For more Saturday Snapshots see Alyce’s blog At Home with Books.

Saturday Snapshot: On Holiday

Published on by Margaret19 Comments

We’ve been away last week, over at Kentallen on the west coast of Scotland – near Glencoe. These were the views of Loch Linnhe from our bedroom windows, taken late afternoon on the day we arrived. Click on the photos to enlarge them:

Here’s a close-up of the flag:

We got back home last night and I’ve got lots more photos of the places we visited – I just need time to sort them all out.

For more Saturday Snapshots see Alyce’s blog At Home with Books.

Saturday Snapshot

Published on by Margaret18 Comments

Heidi’s new bed –

We bought this little bed yesterday and deliberately didn’t attempt to put Heidi in it or even to show it to her because cats are fussy creatures and like to find places to sleep for themselves. So we just left it on the worktop in the utility room, where she likes to sit and this morning this is where I found her. I’m so glad she likes it.

For more Saturday Snapshots see Alyce’s blog At Home with Books.

Teaser Tuesday: Laurie Lee

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of ‘˜Should Be Reading’.

I’m currently reading As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee, his autobiographical account of what he did after he left home in the Cotswolds in 1934 and walked through Spain. (He tells the story of his early years in Cider With Rosie, which I read and wrote about over three years ago.) Initially he had travelled to London, where he worked as a labourer on a building site, then knowing just one Spanish phrase for ‘Will you please give me a glass of water?’, he decided to go to Spain.

This passage shows how that phrase came in useful in one of the hottest days of that Spanish summer when he set out in the morning to walk to Valladolid:

After a while, being out-doors became a hallucination, and I felt there was no longer any air to breathe, only clinkered fumes and blasts of sulphur that seemed to rise through cracks in the ground. I remember stopping for water at silent farms where even the dogs were too exhausted to snarl, and where the water was scooped up from wells and irrigation  ditches and handed to me warm and green.

…

By mid-morning I was in a state of developing madness, possessed by deliriums of thirst, my brain running and reeling through all the usual obsessions that are said to accompany the man in the desert. Fantasies of water rose up and wrapped me in cool wet leaves, or pressed the thought of cucumber peel across my stinging eyes and filled my mouth with dripping moss. (page 72)

Just like Cider With Rosie, this book is beautifully written, lyrical and poetic capturing Spain as it was in the 1930s before the Civil War, beautiful countryside, both dazzling and squalid.

A book to savour.