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or hashish filled bongs

You too Luna. Merry Christmas all. 📚 📖 📙

Starting here

I hope that each and every one of you have a marvellously Merry Christmas and very happy New Year filled with bookish goodness.

The Voices of Time by J G Ballard “To Powers the sky seemed an endless babel, the time-song of a thousand galaxies overlaying each other in his mind. As he moved slowly towards the centre of the mandala he craned up at the glittering traverse of the Milky Way, searching the confusion of clamouring nebulae and constellations… Like an endless river, so broad that its banks were below the horizons, it flowed steadily towards him, a vast course of time that spread outwards to fill the sky and the universe, enveloping everything within them.” A collection of eight short stories by J G Ballard. The stories were written in the late 50s and early 60s, originally published in 1963. Some have elements of science fiction and there is certainly a strangeness to them. I suppose Kafkaesque is a good way to describe them. The stories are not easy to categorize, but there are elements of how we react to technology and mass media. More than one story has a sense of an outside threat which is not easy to quantify or describe. The first story is dystopian and concerns a neurosurgeon Powers who is overseeing a facility which looks after the many people who have succumbed to a type of sleeping sickness which puts people into a coma, never to wake. He is gradually developing the disease himself. The quality is inevitably variable. One of the better stories is The Garden of Time. An older married couple live in a walled villa and garden. In the garden there grows remarkable crystal flowers. The villa is surrounded by rolling hills. In the distance there can be heard the sound of hordes of people approaching the villa. The sounds appear to be threatening. The couple can pick a crystal flower and the flower pushes the people back. However the garden is running out of flowers and the people get nearer. External threat is a theme in a number of the stories. These stories are interesting and thought provoking. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

tricky for Western tongues

Do You Hear What I Hear ~ Bing Crosby

"Zat You", Santa Claus ? - Louis Armstrong

28. Speedboat (Renata Adler, 1976) Its like a story told through context-less anecdotes arranged in a near-random order and I think that's a really fun idea but tbh I just straight up don't have the brain power to connect all the threads and really get much out of it. Its certainly amusing at points in a "sensible chuckle" sort of way but I was mostly just lost. Probably would have dug it if the prose grabbed me more. 6/10

the latter is extremely

Santa Claus Is Back In Town ~ Elvis Presley

It wouldn't really be Christmas without them 🥰

Was sad to hear this 😥

Yes, it is sad

Sad to hear that Chris Rea (Driving home for Christmas) has passed away.

The Curse of La Fontaine by M L Longworth - this is the 6th in the Verlaque and Bonnet series - he's a judge (though it has a different job spec in France) and she's a University professor and they live in Aix-en-Provence - and starts with the couple marrying, then back to work in Aix and soon they are confronted with a local mystery, when a skeleton is unearthed in the grounds of a local restaurant, whose owner had been planning to put some outside seating in the garden of the restaurant, much to the horror of neighbours, for apart from the inevitable noise from al fresco diners, they are convinced it would stop the fountain (hence the title) flowing - and indeed the fountain does stop when the body is discovered. It's soon identified as a local resident, the son of a wealthy family who have since moved, but the parents and brothers are all still alive, and Verlaque is soon questioning them, and opening the usual can of worms. This took a while to get going, but at least in this one there weren't endless pages about Verlaque's cigar club, and there are some lovely descriptions of food too, though sometimes these also slowed down the plot. But once the back story of various residents started to unfold it became more interesting, I wouldn't exactly say gripping but it was an easy read and quite enjoyable. 7/10

I agree with both of you. A beautiful song. Christmas music in general is great to listen to. There are so many wonderful songs that endure and endure, you never get tired of hearing them.

What I love so much, apart from the beautiful melding of their voices (Malakai is perfect!), is the obvious bond these two share. They're an absolute joy together. This is another beautiful one of them together. Of course, Aled Jones is the more famous of the two, but he lets Malakai shine and doesn't try to overpower him with his voice. ( Madeleine, on reflection, I agree with you that O Holy Night is my favourite 😊)

Shake Hands with Santa Claus - Louis Prima

Amazing! Beautiful song.

Swahili or even !Xóõ,

I'm sure you're familiar with Aled Jones and Malakai Bayoh's beautiful rendition of Walking in the Air, but in case anyone hasn't heard it 💕

I liked some things about the book. I liked the Quilp, Swiveller and the Marchioness characters. I think Dickens was still refining his trade, because his later books were better. The humour was good. With the exception of Dick Swiveller, the fun characters were evil and the good characters were boring.

So do I