Madeleine

that was a good series. I'm currently catching up with a Minette Walters TV adaptation - The Ice House, with a young , pre-Bond Daniel Craig as a detective investigating a body which turns up in yes an ice house. It's so dated, with a phenomenal amount of smoking! Think it was made in the late 1990s.

Dog eat Dog - Adam and the Ants

Chasing the Italian Dream by Jo Thomas this book has a lovely setting, basically a small town near Naples. Lucia is Italian/Welsh, and every summer comes to the town to visit her Italian grandparents who run a pizzeria in the town, where she helps during her stay. To her horror, her grandfather announces that, following an illness, he has decided to hang up his apron and is thinking of either selling the restaurant, or handing it over to someone else, and the prime candidate is none other than Lucia's estranged (for several years) husband. She volunteers to take over herself, as she has failed to get a promotion at work and resigned in a fit of pique (a younger man who worked less hours got the job over her head), but is told that the locals will never accept a female pizza chef. Her soon to be ex, Giacomo, agrees to have a competition to see who gets the reataurant - his "new" menu versus her traditional one; whoever sells the most pizzas will get to keep the restaurant. Let battle commence - the thin as a thin-crust pizza plot then plays out fairly predictably, with a bit of sabotage and peril along the way, but no surprises how it will turn out. this is fine for a light summer read, but I've read better books by this author, and she does have an annoying habit (to me anyway) of repeating her plot, even buying a charger for her phone gets 3 mentions over 3 pages. A nice holiday read, and some of the pizzas sound mouth watering! 5/10

It certainly was, not much thunder but the rain made up for it! yesterday was dry and quite warm, not sure what today will bring.

Yes it was an interesting afternoon….. started raining around 2.30, few rumbles on thunder, quite heavy rain but not unusual. Then of course as we decided to go shopping at around 3.00, it threw it down – I had to run into the garden to put my seedlings in the shed as they were getting battered and would have been drowned with what came later, I got soaked just doing that despite putting on my packamac, anyway off we went , drove through some minor flood water then turned into another road which was practically bone dry! However different story on the way home ,this road was flooded, we drove through, the next one was also flooded although that always floods when it rains heavily, then we were OK for a bit til we hit a major jam, because the roundabout at the end of our high street was like a lake, eventually got through it and came home to find our back lawn replaced by a pond – it was nearly ankle deep. Luckily the grass bit is slightly lower than the rest of the garden otherwise the whole lot would have been under water. And then this morning it was all gone, apart from a bit of a puddle in one of the flower beds. A lot of manhole covers had water pouring out from underneath them, and I could hear it running underneath the drain cover in our garden, luckily it didn’t come up higher though. All gone this morning, though it was looking threatening again earlier, and the flying ants were coming out.

I follow the blog of someone who used to be in an internet book group that I was in, but that's about it.

Cooler but quite muggy, rained a lot overnight.

I was disappointed by Pine as well, a good idea which seemed to run out of steam after a while, and ultimately went nowhere. It feels like a first book, ie there is definite promise, and I wouldn't dismiss it totally, but it needed a better editor. Sometimes I wonder if editors even exist any more, as any old tripe seems to get published now!

Bit cooler here, more of a breeze, meant to rain and maybe thunder, hail etc over the weekend.

My tomatoes are still stubbornly green, still very warm here, no breeze yesterday though we did have a couple of heavy showers on Tuesday evening and overnight. yes I think it will get very wet this weekend! I find watering a bit of a pain as well, but also quite therapeutic!

They're gorgeous!

Yes it was a bit like that wasn't it over the weekend! Spent most of the time in the shade. Hopefully it will bring the tomatoes along, I have 5 green ones at the moment, normally they'd be covered in tomatoes at various stages of development.

Yes the dress has recently been restored, I'd love to see it too!

We tried to do a day trip there once when we were down in Cornwall, but getting there was so expensive it was ridiculous. Would love to visit though.

Yes especially when they're so small, with a limited pool of suspects!

There are going to be two more series of Sanditon, shown first on Britbox then on ITV, although the lead, Theo James, won't be coming back, so presumably that storyline is over!

It's a gorgeous iridescent blue/green colour.

Hell Bay by Kate Rhodes - this is the first in a new crime series set on the Scilly Isles, off the coast of Cornwall. Det Inspector Ben Kitto has been working with the Met police in London for several years, but following his partner's death (the circumstances of which are gradually revealed) he is given 3 months off work to go back to his place of birth to recover from the shock - he originally wanted to resign but his superior turned it down. He was born on the tiny isalnd of Bryher, and returns to his old family home, accompanied by his partner's dog, Shadow, who is a great character in his own right! Naturally there's little time for recuperation when the body of a teenage girl is found washed up, with a stab wound to her chest so definitely not an accident or misadventure. Ben offers to help the tiny local police force and the boss reluctantly agrees, however as Ben knows, and in many cases grew up with, most of the people on the island he finds himself having to face some difficult possibilities and make some hard decisions, even his own uncle is not above suspicion. When another teenager goes missing ,pressure from both his superiors and the other islanders, not to mention the Press, becomes intolerable. But the case is finally solved, and Ben has to decide what to do about his career. There are so far another four books in the series, I really enjoyed this one, it was well written and the setting was great, with both a good sense of place and excellent descriptions of the ever changing weather in this string of islands in the Atlantic Ocean - next landfall is the USA! A promising start to the series, and Ben is a likeable and believable character. 7.5/10

Another footnote - Ellen Terry played Lady Macbeth and wore the most gorgeous dress which is now on display at a National Trust property, there's quite a famous painting of her in the dress too. Must get round to starting this series!

Hi Gillian, do you have any favourite authors? Lots of crime threads on this site! there are lots of crime thrillers set in Italy - Donna Leon's series set in Venice is good - not too gory and lots of lovely descriptions of food as well!

Yep I've heard of coffee grounds and eggshells too, they eat my dahlias as well! I've just found some sort of ornamental grit in some old jars so I've sprinkled that around the worst affected - we shall see if it has any effect.

Maybe it's because they had an American version of spell checker?

Most likely slugs and/or snails. Grit is meant to be good, the TV gardeners all seem to swear by it, it's also meant to stop weeds growing. I would think they would be able to get over smooth stones.

Run for the Hills - Iron Maiden

It used to be studied in schools, I studied it for A Level in the early 1980s and hated it. However it's the sort of book which would make interesting reading now, I wonder what Orwell would make of the whole Big Brother phenomenon plus of course CCTV cameras pretty much everywhere, not to mention all the digital and online tracking, even down to supermarket loyalty cards and the direct marketing that comes from that.