Having spent a long weekend in Bath I thought I should give some awards for the Best Things We Saw in Bath. This is wholly idiosyncratic as we completely failed to make it to many of Bath's main attractions such as the Abbey (and yes, we were staying about 50 yards away from it).

Best Ruin

The Roman Baths  (Well, duh!)

Best Museum

The Herschel Museum, a Georgian house with a garden and a tiny cinema in the cellar where they show an excellent film narrated by Patrick Moore.

http://www.bath-preservation-trust.org.uk/?id=8

Best Restaurant

DeMuth's vegetarian restaurant where Caro had the unusual experience of being able to eat everything on the menu, and thus having Choice.

http://www.demuths.co.uk/

Honourable mention to the Circus, where we had a lovely lunch on our last day.

http://www.thecircuscafeandrestaurant.co.uk/

Best bookshop

Mr B's Emporium http://www.mrbsemporium.com/

(but run a very close second by Topping and Co  http://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/ )

Best shoe shop

Shoon - I needed some smartish low-heeled sandals for a wedding and they brought me at least seven possible pairs.  Sorry, can't get at the website.

Best clothes shop

Oh, all right, Uber, for the Not Your Daughter's Jeans http://www.uberview.co.uk/index.html

But there were lots more museums, restaurants and shops that we failed to get to.  Must go back sometime.

To the National Theatre yesterday with la_marquise_de_ and the Marquis, whose LJ name I forget, and Michael WINOLJ, to see the Dame in Phedre.  Having failed to see Diana Rigg in Medea, many years ago, I was determined to see this, and booked tickets ages ago.  Helen Mirren!  Greek Tragedy!  What's not to like?  Well, unfortunately....

Visually the production was stunning.  The BBC review puts it best:  "Nicholas Hytner's new version benefits from not just a first class cast, but a breathtaking set - a marble palace drenched in Mediterranean sunshine, with a sky of holiday brochure blue that darkens as the ghastliness unfolds."  Add to that growls of thunder from the blue sky at moments of tension, and you have all the atmosphere you need.

But the director Hytner seemed to think that the play was problematic, and decided it had to be performed as Racine's audience would have seen it.   The programme says:  "How did the actors manage to secure the audience’s attention? They performed in a declamatory style: they employed an artificially emphatic pronunciation and intonation; and they made extensive use of gesture."  Unfortunately, that's the way that Hytner decided to direct it, and for me it didn't work.  I found it really frustrating as he has directed some productions that I've loved - The History Boys, and Much Ado About Nothing with Zoe Wanamaker and Simon Russell Beale which was one of the standout experiences of last year.  In Much Ado the actors inhabited the text, the lines came to them as naturally as breathing, and you really believed that they were thinking up the quick-fire dialogue on the spot. 

Phedre could not have been more different.  The gestures were stagy, the actors declaimed their lines as though they were reading them from the script, and Hipploytus was just wooden.  Theseus reminded us all of Brian Blessed, enough said.  There were points where they seemed deliberately to ruin the sense of a sentence by breaking at the end of a line.  Helen Mirren was good in parts, as was Margaret Tyzack as her old nurse Oenone, but I kept being distanced by the acting.  There was one performance which really made sense of the lines, and that was from John Shrapnel as Theramene, Hippolytus's aged advisor.  Every line that he spoke had meaning, and he did an absolutely terrific messenger's speech reporting Hippolytus's death.  It was very dramatic, but he spoke with the text, illuminating it, not against it.

Anyway, I'm still glad we went to see it - at least I won't spend the next few years regretting that I didn't make the effort.  And it is apparently going to be shown in cinemas on June 25th, so you can make your own minds up.

The freezer is over-full.  Some of the stuff in the freezer is ice cream.  It's hot outside.  I should eat ice cream.

It seems reasonable when I put it that way.

As part of the project to read books that have been sitting unread on my shelves for longer than six months I picked up the above, intending to flick through it.  After fifteen minutes I found that I could not put it down, and I've been reading it pretty constantly for the last couple of days. 

It's actually three books bound into one:  A London Child of the Seventies, A London Girl of the Eighties, and A London Home in the Nineties.  It's the story of the author growing up in Victorian times, with a family of four older brothers.  The first book deals with her home life and the second (so far) with her schooldays and her first work experiences as a teacher. 

Her father died unexpectedly when she was a child and there was very little money, so she decided to go to the best possible school so that she could earn a living.  Fortunately her aunt, a tin entrepreneur in Cornwall, managed to pay for this.  Molly's contemporaries were studying for Newnham and Girton (which presumably could not be afforded) but I was fascinated to discover that after matriculation she got a place on the very first women's teacher training course in Cambridge.  I was thinking vaguely of Homerton, but suddenly realised that as the Principal was Miss Hughes (no relation - the author's maiden name was Thomas),  this had to be Hughes Hall in its earliest incarnation.

It's a fascinating documentary of Victorian life - I was staggered by her description of going on a bus, which was so utterly different from now, and of the family taking trains down to see their relatives in Cornwall.  Trains were invariable late in those days, which makes you wonder how early commuters managed, but perhaps this was only long distance trains.  In the second book she describes a twenty-six hour train journey to visit her fiance's family in Aberdovey, which sounds appalling.  It also paints a fascinating picture of Victorian women's education - the Head of Molly's school was more or less inventing this from the ground up.

The bare facts don't give you any idea of the charm of the narrative.  The author has a very fast-paced, readable style and a lively sense of humour.  Tragedies happen but she does not dwell on them, being determined to extract the most from every situation.  Anyway, I think it's great.  It's fascinating and hugely enjoyable.  I was cursing the fact that the third book seemed to stop before the First World War, as she wrote it in 1937, but have just discovered from Wikipedia that there is in fact a fourth volume, set between the wars, which I have just ordered from Amazon.  Apparently she died in South Africa in the fifties.

My aunt died just after the New Year.  Here is her obituary in the Guardian "other lives" section.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/apr/13/obituary-margaret-perry

Huh.  Well, we had the pigeon down the kitchen chimney experience at the weekend, complicated by the fact that the kitchen chimney is in fact blocked by the extractor fan.  So we had to unscrew the extractor and take it out and then try to find the bird (not at that stage definitively identified as a pigeon) in the clouds of soot that descended from the chimney.  Bird not immediately apparent.  There were, however, a couple of greyish feathers in amongst the soot.

'Maybe it flew away up the chimney?'  suggested Michael. 
'Maybe.'  I was not so optimistic.  We shone a torch up the chimney but still no pigeon.  Then we swept up a lot of soot, and contemplated getting the extractor fan back into the chimney.  The plastic hose had come unstuck, and it was not immediately apparent how it could be reattached.

At that point our builder returned my panicked phone call, and said that if we had not managed to get the fan back up the chimney by the next afternoon (Saturday), he could come by and fix it, but not earlier. 

Then the pigeon made its appearance, sitting beside the fan, on top of the stove.  It must have been perched out of sight up the chimney, waiting to make its move.  It was completely soot-free, and paralysed rigid.  Michael opened the French windows.  'Maybe it'll fly out of its own accord if we just leave it alone for five minutes.'

Five minutes later it had flapped its way over to the (firmly shut) window opposite the stove.  At this stage Michael lost patience and decided to shoo it out.  It went, eventually, after flapping three times round the kitchen for effect.

Now all we had to do was reattach the hose, stuff the extractor fan up the chimney and screw it back in.  About an hour later it was more or less in place, although Michael couldn't manage to screw it in properly with our crappy screwdriver with twelve replaceable tops all of which fall off when you try to actually screw anything in.  Note to self:  Buy proper screwdriver.  Or set of screwdrivers.

Fortunately the next day our builder showed up with an electric screwdriver and finished the job.  The extractor fan is (mirabile dictu) actually working.  We even managed to feed Sunday lunch to eight people the next day, and if any of them noticed crunchy bits of soot in their food they were too polite to mention it.

Bad Black Cat Next Door keeps trying to get in through the cat flap.  Every so often I hear a thump as he head butts it.  The trouble is, it's not that robust, and I'm afraid he may break it.  Am thinking of solutions involving water pistols.  Any other ideas gratefully received.

This is the first in a new series of detective stories, set in (you may have guessed) Palestine.  Although it's not brilliantly written (contrary to the claim by a certain Colin Dexter on the front) I'd definitely recommend reading it.  The prose is workmanlike, and I only say it's not particularly well written because the characters spend a lot of time explaining things to each other.  Without getting into the politics, the novel gives a convincing idea of what life is like for ordinary Palestinians, caught between the Israelis on one side and the Palestinian gunmen on the other. 

The characters are good, especially the detective, who is a history teacher on the point of retiring (or being sacked for being too liberal).  He gets involved because one of his old pupils, a Christian, is being set up for a murder that he clearly didn't commit.  The author asks how you can maintain humanity or the semblance of a legal system in the face of the overwhelming pressures of life in Palestine at the moment.  And the answer is a depressing one.  I think the book is well worth reading, and I'll look out for the next in the series, but I think I'll pick my moment to read it - not when I'm feeling a bit low, for instance.

It being 12th Night (according to some) I have taken down the decorations.  Gone lights, gone tinsel, gone beyond, all sparkly things, altogether gone!

On the other hand, Christmas cake:  Not Quite Gone.

Have been out doing some weeding.  The good news is that some of the bulbs that I planted in the autumn have survived and are sending up new little green shoots tentatively into the air.  The bad news is that -er - I have trampled some of them with my great clod-hopping feet.  Oops!

I went to Mass at King's College yesterday.  Despite having lived in Cambridge for a number of years, I'd never been to the Christmas choir service before.  Michael's away and I was due at Naomi's for Christmas lunch, so it seemed an ideal opportunity.  One of my friends from rowing had assured me that I would get in, but by the time I actually joined the queue (at ten to eleven, due to faffing about) I was expecting to have to stand at the back.  In fact they had filled the chapel with folding seats, and the last few rows were empty.

I had barely sat down before the choir procession started, and we had to stand up again.  All the choristers wore red cassocks, with white surplices over them, and some of the boys were very tiny indeed.  The tiny ones were followed by tall young men, and then at the end a small group of choir girls and ladies.  They all gathered at the back with candles, incense and the processional cross, and sang Hodie Christus natus est, before processing to the front, and past the screen, so that they were lost to view.

King's Chapel is a great long building, and there was no amplification, so that although we could hear the music and singing perfectly well, the words of the service were mostly inaudible.  Fortunately we were provided with comprehensive orders of service, including the words of the sermon.  But mostly, when there was no music, I sat and let my eyes wander over the building.  Stone dogs and griffins support the royal coats of arms, the three lions quartered with fleurs de lys.  Crowns, roses and portcullises adorn the walls.  Slender columns run up the walls and branch out above into graceful fan vaulting, like an alley of stone trees in a stone forest.  On a grey day, muted light leaches through the stained glass windows, blotting the stone with mottled blues and yellows.

And the music!  It was a full sung mass with Latin and everything.  The setting was Mozart's Missa Brevis (in F, K192), so there wasn't just organ music but violins as well, which seemed a little strange in the medieval chapel, but it was very beautiful.  We the congregation got to sing too; Oh come all ye faithful, Once in Royal David's City, all the old carols, and at the end my favourite, Hark the Herald Angels, just at the upper end of my range, so that I had to let go and fling my voice upwards and let it fly up towards the great spaces under the roof, hoping it would fly true.  Because of the length of the chapel, the carols had to be sung at a very stately pace, otherwise the time delay between the people at the front and at the back would have been too noticeable.  Even so, the timing felt a bit odd at times, and I found myself guessing  where to come in somewhere around the note.

The choir sang descants, which I also love, although they weren't the traditional ones but written by the choir master.  I do love that great shrieking descant to Hark the Herald Angels, with the notes that I could never reach even when I used to sing in the church choir.  Never mind, it was still lovely.  And I came out feeling as though I'd done a proper Christmas thing.

Bought new Christmas tree lights
Decorated the Christmas tree
Gave Michael a lift to the station
Collected an Amazon parcel from the post office
Wrote and posted the last remaining non-local cards
Delivered some local cards
Dull domestic stuff (hoovering, cleaning cat litter tray etc)
An hour's work (aargh!  not supposed to happen in the holidays - something came up at the office and my colleague rang me)
Read part of large multi volume fantasy novel by Juliet Marillier (well, I enjoyed it, anyway)

I think I deserve some Christmas cake, don't you?  Well, deserving or not, I'm going to eat some.  And read more of said novel.

Then I may put up some Christmas cards round the walls.

http://www.darwin2009.cam.ac.uk/

Have just finished reading the above.  It's an amazingly well-written noirish detective story, set in LA in the 50's (or possibly 60's).  Unlike Chandler et al it's told from a  woman's point of view.  The narrator (Lora King) is a school teacher whose beloved brother Bill marries a woman from the film industry.  Gradually Alice's secrets seep into the text, and start to corrupt Bill and Lora's lives.  The prose is tight, the characters seedy, and the narrator's motives are a secret even from herself.  I was gripped from beginning to end.

Also read:  Jennifer Stevenson's Trash Sex Magic

This is a puzzling book, in more ways than one.  I picked a copy up at Novacon, and started to read it a couple of days ago.  It's a story about an elderly women (Alma Montague) returning to her hometown, a small town in Mississippi, in order to restore the family mansion and then live out the rest of her days in peace.  But nothing is quite as it seems.  Who is the mysterious Mr Dark?  Why does he give her a key that only she can see, and what is the land that she finds when she uses it, peopled with the dead (but also visited by some of the living) and shifting unnervingly between the past, present, and future?

Having read the first hundred or so pages I was intrigued enough to look the book up on Amazon, only to find that neither it nor the author exist.  Neither on Amazon.co.uk nor on Amazon.com. I then googled, and discovered that G A Kathryns is a pen-name of Gael Baudino, and as far as I can tell there are no other works under that name.  I've never actually read anything by Gael Baudino, and I don't know if anyone would recommend them.  [Going back, if you put the ISBN number into Amazon it not only recognises the book but offers you a number for sale in the Marketplace.  This must be Amazon being crap, then.]

So, I've finished the book, and I'm still baffled.  I mean, yes, obviously, it's about the approach of death and reconciliation to it, but there are an awful lot of plot strands that aren't finished off.  Was there intended to be a sequel?  Am I being dense and just not spotting that the answers are all there in the text? In which case please would someone explain to me what is going on with Mrs Gavin and Magic, and a couple of other things that I can't describe for fear of giving away the plot. 

Would I recommend it?  Cautiously.  It's well written, and what's going on is interesting, though baffling.  She seems to me to be very good at describing the tensions and odd relationships between white and black people in a small town in Mississippi, so that's worth reading it for.  Overall I enjoyed reading it.  I wouldn't say it was a must read, but good if you like that sort of thing.

I went for a run this morning, quite slowly, as the pavements were icy.  I decided to walk across one of the side-roads, and discovered my feet slipping around on the wet-looking stuff in the middle.  Yes, this morning, everything that looks like water is in fact ice.  And I saw two cycle accidents in the half hour that I was out.  One woman tried to turn left in front of me and went straight over.  Not hurt, fortunately, and the car that was heading towards her stopped until we had picked her up and got her stuff out of the road.  She was pretty shaken up though.  So what happened to the Council's road gritting programme?

Had a slightly weird experience earlier today.  I had gone into town to do some shopping, and when I got back I had to park a bit further up the road than I normally do.  I parked in front of a house that I had never seen before parked in front of before.  When I opened the car door to get out I glanced sideways and saw a little old man in the doorway of the house.  He was half-naked (from the waist down) jumping up and down and shouting "Help!"

It's not the sort of thing you can ignore.  I sat there for a minute considering my options.  I decided reluctantly that "leave now and don't look back" was probably not amongst them.  I thought that even if he did mean mischief he was probably too little and old to cause me serious damage, so I went over to ask him what he wanted. 

He wasn't very coherent, and I ended up going inside with him.  The house was overheated and there was a chairlift a the bottom of the stairs.  The phone was off the hook and one of those patient alarms was ringing.  He was in a bit of a state, but asked me to go upstairs and get him some clothes from the middle bedroom.  I found a quilt and a dressing gown, and managed to get him into the dressing gown and sat him down with a cup of water, and tried to work out what I ought to do.  It didn't help that he couldn't hear very well and his communication was very confused.  He did try to make some phone calls (including to the police, and 999) but the phone didn't seem to be working.

I think what had happened was that he had had problems getting up and had fallen over, and had pushed his patient alarm button, and nobody had come, so he had just got himself more and more worked up.  He couldn't ring out because (as I discovered) there was an upstairs phone that was also off the hook, so he couldn't get a dialling tone.  While I was there a nurse did answer the alarm, but she couldn't seem to understand what he was saying (this was mostly "come at once, emergency", so I'd have thought that was clear enough).  I tried to explain as much as I did understand and she ended up saying that she would ring his relatives, although some of them seemed to be in Australia.  There was a list of phone numbers on the wall so I started ringing them, and eventually got through to someone who said that she was his great niece, and was shopping in John Lewis, and would come as soon as she had collected her purchases.

So I found him his cup of water again and asked if he'd be all right for half an hour (which was about as long as I thought it would take for his niece to get there), and he said he would be, so I left.  I suppose I should go past there and check things look all right when I go out again, though I don't particularly want to.  I've even forgotten his name by now, though he did tell it to me.

Just to say I have been out in the front garden cutting back bushes.  It's bright and sunny, but there is a bitter wind from Siberia, and my fingers and toes have gone numb.  Also my nose and eyes were watering the whole time.  I managed an hour and have now come back inside to warm up.   My fingers are scarlet with returning blood, and a little fizzy. 

I hadn't read any Scott Westerfeld before picking up the first volume in this YA trilogy, The Secret Hour.  I'd been seeing good reviews and recommendations of the Uglies books, but My Library (qv) has the Midnighters books, so that's what I've been reading. 

The basic premise is that in Bixby, Oklahoma, there's an extra hour at exactly midnight, which only the people born exactly at midnight can live in.  The characters call it the blue hour, because as time stops for everyone else they see it in blue.  Jessica Day has just moved to Bixby, and as a midnighter she is enchanted by the discovery of the midnight hour.  But her enchantment soon turns to horror as it turns out that midnight is haunted by ancient and terrible shadows that take the shape of the humans' nightmares, and the shadows are hunting Jessica, specifically.  Each of the midnighters has their own power (eg, maths, flying, mind-reading etc), and they need these to combat the shadows, and ultimately to find out what is really going on in Bixby.

I thought the books were absolutely terrific.  Action packed, filled with good ideas, but with enough time for reflection and character development as well.  And, the second book is not a saggy bridge between the first and third, but contains new revelations and developments that make it worth reading in its own right.  I thought the five teenaged heroes/heroines were well-drawn, each of them with their own agendas, and as you see each through their own and through different characters' eyes your opinion of them changes too. 

The adults have their own agendas too, good and bad, and as we learn more about what is going on and the history of what has gone on in the past, the more the judgements that we made when reading the first book are revised or undermined.   I just love it when the author plays with your expectations, but is always just one step ahead of the reader.  Highly recommended.

We had an incident in the conservatory last night.  There was a lot of banging of cat flaps and shouting and then Tabitha bolted through the cat flap into the kitchen, with her fur all on end.  I went out into the conservatory to investigate and discovered next door's black cat, Veni, leaving hastily through the cat flap to the outside.  Yes, the one that has a magnetic catch on it so that strange cats can't get in. 

Now, he may have followed through the cat flap on Tabitha's heels, but there was only one set of wet footprints leading in, which implies that Tabitha was inside, not out, and therefore that he has managed to barge in through the cat flap even though it was secured against him.  Which is worrying.  I locked it after that, but I don't want to stop Tabitha popping in and out.  Maybe I'll start locking it at night. 

They have been having the odd spat through the glass doors to the kitchen, but as there's no way he could get through those I haven't been too worried.  I'm a little puzzled, actually, as to why this is happening as in general Veni seems to be an amiable cat, and Tabitha doesn't go out that much.  Strange.