All Activity

Puss 'n' Boots - Adam Ant

These Boots Are Made for Walking - Nancy Sinatra (Walkin' My Baby Back Home ~Nat King Cole....love this song by Nat King Cole and also love the version by Johnny Ray, who I believe had the original.)

Ozzy Osbourne, Last Rites. Companion to the Daoud and sent to me through the post by a friend of mine.

Walking back to happiness - Connie Francis

Oh what a lovely website, I'm going to follow her on FB, I'm desperately trying to learn how to crochet and made a stripey blanket in double crochet but that's my limit! Her colours are lovely and she's made me want to read Brambly Hedge even more,especially the winter one! Maybe it's a nostalgia thing, as she says there's something very comforting about them, I like to think of Jill Barklem as the Essex equivalent of Beatrix Potter, and it's a shame the books aren't as widely known. Good luck with the blanket, keep us informed of your progress!

stuff, once he actually

I follow Lucy from Attic 24 and she has designed a blanket using Bramley Hedge illustrations as her inspiration. I'm not using this pattern and I'm using several different colours in my blanket, but thought you might like to see this 😊 https://attic24.co.uk/posts/2025/10/08/storyteller-blanket-inspiration/

weight-lifting and hammer throw

Walkin' My Baby Back Home ~Nat King Cole

Near the end of the book I particularly liked the one line for Mr. Bennet – "He delighted in going to Pemberley, especially when he was least expected." In so few words, Austen again gives, or reinforces, an account of his dry playfulness and mischievous eccentricity. Again (like so many times before this), this made me burst into thunderous laugh (there was no danger of raising alarm with or eye brows of, anyone near me – but whether or not this is the case it does not matter).

list of prowess with

Songs of the Wandering Scholars by Helen Waddell Now must I mend my manners And lay my gruffness by. The earth is making merry, And so, I think, must I. The flowers are out in thousands, Each in a different dress. The woods are green and like to fruit, The earth has donned her grassy fleece, And blackbirds, Jackdaws, magpies, nightingales Shouting each other down in equal praise. This is an examination of lyric poetry (published in 1927), sung and said, sacred and profane between the fourth and thirteenth centuries: the bulk being between the tenth and twelfth centuries. There is a good deal of poetry in this as well as analysis. Many of the wandering scholars were clerics, many were troubadours, also known as goliards. Much of the poetry in here was translated by Waddell herself. The reader is introduced to some obscure poets and lyricists: most of whom I had not heard of. Some of the clerical ones I had heard of: Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard and the later Roman poets like Boethius and Virgil. Some felt familiar: the following reminded my of Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: O Spring the long-desired, The lover’s hour! O flaming torch of joy, Sap of each flower, All Hail! O jocund company Of many flowers, Of many-coloured light, All hail, And foster our delight! The birds sing out in chorus, O youth, joy is before us, Cold winter has passed on, And the Spring winds are come! On the whole I enjoyed this, particularly the lyrics that related to the natural world, but the whole was fascinating and I learnt a lot. You can tell this is an older publication as one of the original reviewers was C S Lewis. 8 out of 10 Starting The Disinherited by Perez Galdos

Sugar baby love - The Rubettes

because of his impressive

A Spoonful Of Sugar ~ Julie Andrews

Funnily enough I was reading about Dr Snow- the cholera Dr...in Elif Shafak's There are Rivers in the Sky this weekend. Great book incidentally.

Sugartime - The McGuire Sisters

of considerable reputation- mainly

#1. Hungerstone (Kat Dunn, 2024) Wanted to like this a lot more than I did. On paper there's a ton of appealing stuff about it, being a queer feminist reimagining of a classic vampire story with an anti-capitalist slant but unfortunately the anti-capitalism isn't much more than window dressing and the queerness is just used as a literary device. That's not really the problem though, the problem is that any time the book wants you to draw parallels or make connections or anything like that the character will just tell you and once I noticed this was becoming a trend I got pretty annoyed with it. It just gives you nothing to consider at any point aside from "what happen next?". Admittedly, this is ideal for an audiobook as I did have my focus split between this and work though and I definitely didn't feel like I missed anything lol. Another thing is that it overuses the word "hunger/hungry" to the point that it feels ridiculous. Like the conceit is comparing the vampiric hunger to a woman's need for freedom from the constraints of a shitty marriage/the patriarchal social structure which is clear and easy to follow and good but it touches on it a lot and then they also tie the character's eating disorder into this and maybe its just because I listened to the whole thing over two long nights but god you just end up hearing that word over and over and over again. That's a small gripe but it wouldn't have felt so ever-present if there were moments of profundity or emotional resonance and even though it does try these moments just don't hit. The closest we get to that is a good crowd-pleaser ending that even though it kind of feels like the only possible ending they do a good job of making you think they might go a different direction and there's some good catharsis in it. This probably sounds like an exceedingly negative review but I don't think this a bad book I think it just has different goals from what I want from it. Its focus is very much on being a functional, well-structured story where all the dots are connected and it succeeds in this for sure but its just not the type of writing that moves the needle for me. 6/10

This will (hopefully) be my first full year of dedicated reading and I have so much stuff I'm excited to check out! Hope its a good year for everyone ❤️ 01. Hungerstone (Kat Dunn, 2024) (audio) ★★★

A lovely book, one of my favourites. Hope she likes it.

Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard

The Housekeepers by Alex Hay “There were a dozen clocks piled up on the mantelpiece, ticking furiously, all out of time.” This was pure entertainment for the holiday period with no real thinking required. It’s essentially a heist novel. Many reviewers have compared it with Ocean’s Eleven or at least Ocean’s Eleven meets Downton Abbey. This is set in Edwardian London in 1905/6. The main protagonists are a group of women of the servant classes. Led by a housekeeper, Mrs King. She and others organise what is a heist on a large house in Park Lane. It is planned for the night of a ball and the idea is simply to remove all of the contents of the house and sell them. It involves a lot of planning and a large number of people. The plot follows the planning and the inception of the idea, through the night itself and its aftermath. I suspect other books will follow. It also feels like it could be made into a movie in the Thursday Murder Club mould. It’s also a debut novel. There’s also clearly a backstory that could be written about. This was ok as entertainment and escapism. 6 out of 10 Starting Babel by R F Kuang

It's an old one but I'm reading The Secret Garden again with my niece. It was a favorite of mine in elementary school, and I thought she'd enjoy it also.

one Bartholomew Grimshaw, dustman