France

The Water Clock by Jim Kelly Published in about 2002 this is the beginning of a series set near Ely featuring a local journalist, Philip Dryden who has a wife in a coma following a car accident two years previously. It’s the depth of winter and freezing cold. A car is found dumped in a drainage ditch and there is a body in the boot which appears to be linked to a violent robbery on World Cup day in 1966. Shortly afterwards a corpse that has been there for at least thirty years is found on the roof of Ely cathedral. Philip believes the two might be connected and is soon being warned off investigating any further but his real obsession is finding out who caused the accident that immobilized his wife. The investigative part of the story is competent but not outstanding, what really makes this book stand out is the sense of place, he makes them evocative, beguiling and very cold! I barely know the Fens but I almost feel that I’ve been there. I’m really looking forward to reading more in the series and the only really annoying thing is that I got this at a local twice yearly charity book sale and could have got the first five, I only bought two. Oh well, he’s written another series too so I’ve got loads to look forward to. I have no idea who suggested that I should look out for Jim Kelly, but whoever they are, thank you. Behind Closed Doors – B A Paris From the back: "Everyone knows a couple like Jack and Grace." Given the title you can get the gist of the plot. Oh goodness this was bad. It claims to be a gripping, shocking, million copy best seller, ok it was a best seller but unless you’re gripped by juvenile writing and cardboard characters it’s neither gripping nor shocking. I gather the end made up for quite a bit but I didn’t get that far. Wild Strawberries – Angela Thirkell. Angela Thirkell wrote pleasant romantic comedies in the 1930s set in big houses among the comfortably well off. I’ve read a couple and though they are very dated they were nice enough to keep an eye out for any of her other books. Unfortunately Wild Strawberries, one of her early ones, is a bore. It’s populated with single-characteristic characters so lady Emily is vague and constantly losing her glasses while accusing her maid of misplacing them, her daughter is kind and obsessed with her children and keeps on saying fondly ‘Oh wicked ones’. I did finish it but it was an effort.

Reviews are by their very nature highly subjective so what's wrong with giving it one star if you really didn't like it? If you didn't like it but thought it had a few good things in it then give it two stars.

Try coming to rural France, Timebug! I've lived in 3 different places here and mobile signal has been poor in all of them, we've finally got decent internet (most of the time) but I often have to go out in the garden to be able to hear what people are saying. Better than our last house where you had to stand on the well to get a signal! Rosamund Lupton's Three Hours is about a school shooting and nearly all the besieged seniors had forgotten to charge their phones. I have never met a 17 year old who didn't have a charged phone. Fortunately it's a good enough book to be able to suspend disbelief.

I very rarely give one star reviews but I have doled them out to books I haven't finished because I loathed them or were horribly violent.

Yes, it's all explained in the end.

I was given The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley for my birthday which I absolutely loved. It's strange, stranger than her previous books and definitely not for anyone who can't cope with multiple time lines, shifting alternate realities and not having a clue what's really going on (quite a few of the members of my real life book group!) but I was totally gripped. I really don't know what to think about The Summer Book. I'd heard so much about it, that it's an absolute masterpiece etc and I have to say that it didn't grip me. It didn't bore me either and I have a feeling that I need to read it again. It's very short so that won't be a problem.

Chateau de Sudiraut is one of the top class Sauternes chateaux and right next door to Chateau Y'quem, their second wines (the Castlenau de Sudiraut or Lions de Sudiraut) will both be very well made and lighter than their premium wine but probably the ones to go for. Sauternes is an intense drink and very few people drink more than one or two glasses at a time. It keeps brilliantly in the fridge with the cork put back in (because of the high sugar content, think of how long jam keeps). The purists say you can keep it for 10 days to 3 weeks, I've had an opened bottle in the fridge for over three months and it was still perfect when we finished it.

First thing to know is that Sauternes can be eye-wateringly expensive. The entry level price for Chateau d'Yquem, the top de la top of Sauternes is £250 a bottle! For a good bottle you'd pay 30 euros here, and upwards. There is a reason why it's so expensive; nearly all grapes whether picked by machine or by hand are picked by the bunch. The flavours in the Sauternes grapes come from a microclimate and the grapes ripen unevenly, so the pickers cut out individual ripe grapes, wait a few days for the grapes on the patch to ripen a bit more, go back and cut out the ripe grapes. All Sauternes chateaux have to send their pickers out at least three times before all the grapes are harvested, some like Chateau d'Yquem do it 11 times. Labour costs are huge and there are no shortcuts. Lecture finished! I take groups to Chateau Rayne Vigneau and their wine is delicious. They make 2, their second wine Madame de Vigneau (I think, could be Rayne) is lighter and there's their first wine Chatau de Rayne Vigneau, full bodied and more expensive. They are a premier cru but to be honest any decent Sauternes chateau which bottles at the chateau and isn't dirt cheap should be OK. The rcher the straw colour the more intense the flavour. Drink them chilled, as an aperatif, with snacks, salty food, (absolutely wonderful wth sardine pate!) and surprisingly, Indian food and curries. Not with sweet things, it's too much.

Two really disappointing books recently, frstly Dog Days by Ericka Waller which was highly recommended by a book blog I follow as being feel good and for all lovers of dogs. I love dogs and it was a Kindle cheapie, feel good it isn't (won't go into details for spoilers) but it left a nasty taste in the mouth. The main charecters are George, an extremely grumpy pensioner who has just lost his wife and is angry about it, a councellor to whom it has never occured that he might never have had a girlfriend because ...(not a spoiler it's obvious) - none of his family seem to have had a clue either, and mother with her child in a refuge who won't say what happened to her. The dogs don't really play much of a role ether. She can write though, I hope the next book has a better plot line. I only bought Kirsten Hannah because I was in our local English bookshop and thought I'd better get something and had heard that her descriptions of Alaska are wonderful. That's true, as a love letter to Alaska it really works, as an enthralling story it doesn't. Overblown, cardboard charecters, uneven plotting. Won't read anything by her again. The Miseducation of Evie Epworth by Matson Taylor is a coming of age story set in 1962 and is great fun. 16 year old Evie has to decide what she wants to do with her life while trying to free her farmer father from the clutches of his busty housekeeper Christine. I loved this, only two small quibbles. Firstly in the opening scene Evie catches sight of a neighbour with a cow. All I'd say is that either it was a minature cow or he was standing on a box. Nuff said. Secondly, Christine gets rid of the old friendly Aga and replaces it with a modern electric cooker and you can see wallpaper where the Aga used to be. The author can't ever have seen an Aga, they're built in and weigh a ton, there simply wouldn't be paper behind it. Never mind, still a thorougly enjoyable read.

Yes, it's utterly disgraceful. My youngest daughter was interviewed for a job at one of the big Amazon depots in the south of France as an h&s officer and lets put it this way, she was rather relieved not to be offered the job.

He undoubtedly had contacts - he was a Scottish earl albeit a very poor one which is why he went to sea. He was also very talented and very daring, I think he hadn't made post when he took the two ships and only had a 28 gunner. The ships he captured were fully sized warships (sorry don't have my biography of him to hand so can't give the full details). It's well worth getting hold of his biography, he was quite a character. He was so tall (very unusual for a sailor) that he had to shave with his head sticking out of the trap on the ceiling of his cabin with his mirror on the deck.

One reason why you might find Hornblower/Aubrey/Bolitho etc all a bit samey is because their authors have read the same memoires and biographies for research, Cochrane in particular. I think every one of those fictional captains has an encounter where he takes one or two much larger ships by sailing into attack and at the critical point calling below decks for the soldiers to come up and board. Thinking they are about to be overwhelmed the enemy surrenders. There are no soldiers. That was one of the first of Cochrane's noteworthy exploits when he was still only about 22. Edward Pellew is another whose adventures are often borrowed by fictional sailors.

It's 33°C (91°F) and still. All garden work has halted, I'm staying in the shade.

That's another one I read in my teens, I bought it because the Penguin edition of the time had the most evocative cover, a single ruined arch in a landscape (quite a well known painting I think). I know I enjoyed it but I'm sorry to admit that I can remember much more about the cover than I can about the content.

How are you getting on with it? I'm thinking that it might be time for a re-read.

I read W & P when I should have been revising for my mock O levels (which dates me!). I lay on my bunk and read obsessively for 10 days and did all my exams with practically no revision. My marks surprised all my teachers who started muttering about me perhaps not being so thick after all. I've never tried to reread it because I'm afraid I wouldn't capture that magical immersion I felt aged 15 but most of the plot is still very clear and I'm still furious about how Tolstoy portrayed Natasha in the last chapter.

This was the first of Michael Palin's books I listened to on Audible and now I seize them every time they come up on a two for one (I'm really mean about my credits). He reads his own books and he's a wonderful narrator: warm, funny, self deprecating.

I'm falling behind with comments on what I've read, so a very quick round up on some of them: Abide With Me - Elizabeth Strout, this story of a widowed minister in the late 1950's and his daughters just re-inforced my love of Elizabeth Strout's books. Moving and wonderfully written. Close to Home -Cara Hunter. Real page turner of a police proceedural. There are bits which you realise don't quite add up once you've finished but it's such a good read it doesn't matter. Also read The Whole Truth which is no 5 in the series. A Country Road, A Tree - Jo Baker. Biographical fiction about Samuel Beckett's life inFrance during the war. She has a dry style but it was an excellent read. The Darkest Evening -Ann Cleeves . A welcome return to form after the disppointing The Long View. She Lies in Wait - Gytha Lodge. Police proceedural. Don't bother. The Killing Season-Mason Cross. Not unlike Jack Reacher but very readable. The Midnight Queen - Sylvia Hunter Fantasy set in an alternative England in the 18th century. Very enjoyable. The Fifth Season - N K Jemisin. Can't think how I didn't know about her before this came up as a cheapie on Kindle. Winner of the Hugo prize and really, really good. The first of a trilogy, I'll be reading everything of hers I can lay my hands on, fortunately she's got quite a substantial backlist.. 4

A lot of them aren't chateau bottled and if it's labled as say 'Bordeaux rosé' some companies have no compunction about putting an entirely different wine into the second load of bottling to the first providing it's all Bordeaux rosé so two bottles bought at the same time can taste quite different. (Know this for a fact, my husband worked for one of those companies!) Marks do buy from chateaux and re-lable the bottle (or did) but even so I'd suggest going somewhere like Majestic and getting a bottle that you know comes directly from the chateau.

Really? I knew Anne had a sister who was Henry's mistress when I was about 14. OK, I was a history nut but I wasn't that clever and certainly not obsessed with the Tudors so didn't read an awful lot about them.

What a shame. To be honest, and it's not just prejudice because I live here, I think that French wines that cost about the same as Australian ones are often better, because transport costs play a major part. The French also usually go for blended wines rather than single grape varieties. I remember a wine merchant in the Uk telling me that all wine has a certain amount of fixed cost, taxes, duty, transport can vary a little which is approximately the same for bottles costing £5 and bottle costing £10 (or £500), so what the extra £5 reperesents is the quality of the product. If you want to give French wines a try look for chateau bottled wines "mis en bouteille au chateau" rather than ones produced by companies. It's not an abolute guarentee of good wine but given that most French chateaux sell a lot of their product locally it's usally quite drinkable.

I live near Bordeaux so there's loads of excellent wine made locally (our mayor makes a wonderful rosé and a sparkling pink which is our go-to party wine). Then if you want to up the game a little there are Graves wines just over the river (lovely, flinty dry white and reds) and a little further away there's St Emilion and the Medoc where bottles can get seriously expensive. I went to a wine tasting at Chateau Haut Brion (one of the top 4 Bordeaux chateaux) where they opened two bottles for a group of 15 - 2005 vintage, which retailed at £500-700 and £750- 950 respectively! They don't sell wine at the chateau either! I also love Sauternes and it's close cousin made on our side of the river, Loupiac, whch are vins liquoreux, sweet and aromatic, and are defintely not the same as most sweet wines (made quite differently) and drunk here with savory dishes, not sweet ones. I occasionally take tour groups of mostly Americans to a couple of the Sauternes chateaux and even those who go saying they hate sweet wines are usually totally converted by the end of the tasting.

French was used almost as much as Russian by the upper classes in Tolstoy's day (and in Natasha and Pierre's too). I adored war and Peace when I read it aged 15 (I did skim the battle scenes and masonic stuff though) and can still remember nearly all of the plot which shows how much impact it made. If you aren't getting on with the translation it's worth looking out for another, my book group read Anna Karenina (also read as a teenager and almost completely forgotton) and among 9 of us there were seven different translations in totally different styles.

The Penguin Lessons by Tom Mitchell is 99p on Kindle today. It's delightful true story and not to be confused with Away With the Penguins which is, I believe for I haven't read it and am going on the voews of people whose reading tastes I share, a sacharine novel about an older woman finding herself.

Lily James drove me mad, all that pouting as if she were trying to immitate a duck.