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A Haunting in the Arctic by C J Cooke “In the mirror opposite, she could see it—her foot was no longer human, but the fin of a cetacean, dark and slick as ink, bringing fresh revulsion every time she looked at it.” This is more horror than historical fiction and is very definitely a ghost story. There are three separate storylines. The first is in 1901 and is on a whaling ship out of Dundee called the Ormen. The narrator is Nicky, a woman who has been abducted and is on the ship against her will. Her story unfolds as the novel progresses. Dominique is in the present and is exploring the wreck of the Ormen, which is on the shoreline in Iceland, near an abandoned whaling station: she is joined by three others who have arrived independent of Dominique with similar intent. It soon becomes clear that no one is quite who they seem to be, but that’s part of the gothic nature of the plot. In terms of folklore, what is pertinent is the “selkie wife”. This myth is common in Irish and Scottish folklore and involves women who become seals and vice versa. It plays a part in this novel as well. None of the characters are particularly likeable (apart perhaps from Nicky) and the there are plenty of twists towards the end. Some are clearly guessable and by the end when I understood what was going on, it all seemed a bit pointless. The violence is brutal and this is not for the squeamish, but it’s a clever reworking of the folklore. So I have mixed feelings. 6 and a half out of 10 Starting Oaklore by Jules Acton

Go wild in the country - Bow Wow Wow

and grabbing things that

Are You Ready For the Country ~ Neil Young

Take Me Home, Country Roads -John Denver (lyrics from a person's previous post): Show me the way to go home I'm tired and I want to go to bed I had a little drink about an hour ago And it’s gone right to my head Everywhere that I roam Over land or sea or foam You can always hear me singing this song Show me the way to go home

I want to read and understand Thomas Mann and I want to read and understand Friedrich Nietzsche. Not necessarily in that order and not necessarily this year but it is an ambition of mine. I also aspire to read more widely. By this I mean read a lot that I’m not in the habit of reading on a wide variety of subjects yet to be determined.

Run for Home - Lindisfarne

interests in invading nations

and cross-eyed, with peculiar

Show Me The Way To Go Home ~ Irving King

She's Leaving Home - the Beatles

Leaving On a Jet Plane - John Denver

Only when you leave - Spandau Ballet

Ronnie Bump, orange faced

Love Me Or leave Me - Doris day

of his fellow tippler

Lost In Love ~ Air Supply

I took Adrian to a different church this morning, the Bridge Community Church in Bury St Edmunds. I think it is an independent church. It had a band with a drummer, and a guitarist, maybe a keyboard player. One of the nursery nurses from Adrian's nursery was a backing singer. She was his primary carer last year, and he particularly likes her. Adrian seemed to like the place. There were lots of families and young children. It was difficult restraining him from running off. After 20 minutes the small children were taken upstairs where there was a play room. I left him there and went back downstairs. The modern hymns were quite good. There church used white screens. There was a video clip of a zoom call between the preacher and two former parishoners who had moved to Turin. The main sermon was about how Jesus used to preach at synagogues, particularly when he preached at Capernaum in Galilee. The preacher said Capernaum was about the tenth the size of Bury St Edmunds, but still quite an important place. It was a centre of religious learning. They wanted him to stay, but Jesus insisted in going into isolation, then going to preach around the synagogues in Judea. So the preacher talked about retreating from and extending into the community. He said he would be taking his seclusion the Abbey Gardens, but would be happy to meet people there. I was going to put £10 in the collection, but the preacher said it cost £4,500 a week to run the place, so I put in £20. I reckoned there were about 25-30 in my wing, probably a similar number in the other wing and maybe double that in the central section. By my maths all the adults would have to give £40 a week, but maybe they have other sources of income. Then I went to get Adrian back down, and it was difficult to stop him running around again. I came up against the preacher, who looked about 6'5" tall. During the sermon he said he'd been a semi-professional footballer, and had gone around the world, spreading the word via his football contacts. He must have been a goalkeeper, or possibly a centre half. I did quite like the service. The people were friendly enough. Adrian certainly seemed to like it.

Lost in France - Bonnie Tyler

You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' - The Righteous Brothers

tic, similar to that

Cum on feel the noize - Slade

I think he may well have done Madeleine. Brotherless Night by V V Ganeshananthan “Many people have died there: some killed by the Sri Lankan Army and the state, some by the Indian Peace Keeping Force, and some by the Tamil separatists, whom you know as the terrorists. Many people, of course, have also lived.” This is a novel set during the civil war in Sri Lanka in the 1980s and early 1990s. It concerns Sashi, who is sixteen and her four brothers, charting their progress through the turbulent times of the civil war. The novel won the women’s prize for fiction in 2024. Sashi’s progress towards her goal of becoming a doctor is charted over the years in parallel with the development of the violence and unrest. Although this is fiction, it is very much based on the real events and Ganeshananthan charts the violence from all sides: the Sri Lankan government, the Tamil Tigers and the Indian peacekeepers. Because it is effectively a family saga the impact on the family is at the centre with losses of friends, family and beloved colleagues. The title has some meaning. Ganeshananthan makes the complexities and nuance of the situation clear, all sides have blood on their hands: “I did not wait. Neither did the war. It was with us now. Since Dayalan and Seelan would not tell us, I went out and asked my friends what they had heard or knew, and in that way began to collect information about the new lives people were choosing. Were they responding to the war or were they making it? Boys joined in droves; the ranks of the militant groups swelled. Almost every week now one of our neighbours told Amma about those they knew who were going. People spoke about it more and more freely. Some of the parents were proud. “What did we expect them to do, after all,” said Jega Uncle, Saras Aunty’s husband. His nephew had joined. “After what they did in Colombo, how did they expect us to react?”” Ganeshananthan looks at the space between militarised societies and questions of choice and coercion, In the relationships between the Tamil Tigers and the Tamil population I saw parallels with the IRA and the Catholic population in Northern Ireland. The novel is by no means perfect, but it is very effective and stays in the mind. 8 out of 10 Starting Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

risked developing a nervous

I think Christopher Lee knew M R James when he was at Cambridge.