I don’t care about plants

There’s a pattern in my life. My mum tries to get me interested in something, and I resist, then I decide by myself that actually it’s great. So far, this has happened with: reading, cooking, driving, and, most recently, plants. Also being tidier, but that’s a slower process because I have terrible habits. You’d think, now that I know this about myself, I wouldn’t still resist. You’d be wrong. I am still regularly heard declaring that, obviously, I don’t care about plants and gardens. At all. It’s all lies.

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The long way to a small angry planet – Becky Chambers

“I can wait for the galaxy outside to get a little kinder.”

Pages For You, and Pages For Her – Sylvia Brownrigg

‘Some fans’ – Flannery’s voice had both hint and humour in it – ‘just won’t quit.’

Why do birds suddenly disappear? – Lev Parikian

“The thought bludgeons me around the head, as it has done repeatedly throughout the year: what the hell was I doing for those thirty-five years? How could I have gone so long without this simple pleasure in life? What was I thinking?”

Ex Libris: Confessions of a common reader – Anne Fadiman

This lovely little book was recommended by a friend a few months ago; I never would have come across it otherwise.

Daphne du Maurier, or, finding out what I’ve been missing

I’m going to Cornwall this summer. I’ve never been, and I’m excited. I’ve got a google map with loads of places saved on it already. With any luck, I’ll get to swim in the sea, which is a joy, always. 

Burial Rites – Hannah Kent

“They will say ‘Agnes’ and see the spider, the witch caught in the webbing of her own fateful weaving. They might see the lamb circled by ravens, bleating for a lost mother. But they will not see me. I will not be there.”

I finished some books!

It happens every winter: I stop reading. Or, more accurately, I stop finishing books.

A theatre review, by me!

 

I reviewed A Curmudgeon’s Guide To Christmas Round Robin Letters for The LGBTQ Arts Review last week. I really enjoyed the play (letters! lesbians! audience participation in a good way! hats! a small cry!), the venue is fantastic, and I felt all Christmassy and wonderful afterwards.

Read my review and get yourself a ticket – it’s on until 23rd December at the Hope Theatre in Islington.

The Seabird’s Cry – Adam Nicolson

It is not stupid to think that birds might play, and here from the clifftop it has always looked as if that is what the fulmars were doing: the endless, repeated turns, first on one great circle and then another, skaters outlining discs on the ice, stiff-winged, patient, waiting for the long rotation to take its form, a series of geometries, as if the birds were cutting shapes through the paper of the air.

The air doesn’t always comply. Now and then a strange lack of certainty runs through a fulmar, even as it makes these Euclidean digrams beneath you, a whole-body hesitation, coughing in mid-flight, when it shudders and disassembles, all sleekness gone and all purpose paused, as if waiting for the data stream to resume, which it then does, and the long effortless gestures, milking energy from the wind, continue from one end of the ballroom to the other.