Monday 7 August 2017

Treading water...

River Tay at Dundee, 5th August 2017

I haven't done a lot of posting here over the summer. This isn't due to a big holiday away or anything (quite the opposite). Things have been pretty quiet... and this is always an odd sensation when (it feels like) everyone else is dashing off and doing exciting things. Of course not everyone is... it just feels that way. Some people, quite the contrary, are dealing with terrible things and would love some of this kind of peace and quiet (London's Grenfell survivors, for example, or people fleeing their homes and risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean to Europe... it's less in the news but it's still very much happening). On Grenfell, I watched this clip the other day containing interviews with a survivor (well worth watching, though very sad on many levels). 

For me there's not been a lot of my paid work coming through (I am on a zero hours kind of a thing...) so I've been lying low and reading more than writing. I suppose I'm in a post-book-publication-confusion phase (or something) and so I'm following the minds of others to get me out the other side (oh, and watching a bit of TV... 'Handmaid's Tale', 'Fargo', 'OITNB'... and others). But, as for books, after Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends (reviewed on here a few posts ago) I moved on to Dave Eggers' The Circle (2013) and then Sarah Waters' The Night Watch (2006)  both excellent in very different ways (and I still read paper books  tried the electronic kind once... and once only). Also daughter and I have been reading Jane Eyre. I've read it once before but daughter likes to read aloud and so I haven't been able to speedread/skim/think-about-something-else-whilst-moving-eyes-over-the-page this time. I hadn't realised it contained so many long descriptive passages when I read it on my own... 

It's been quite quiet on the music front here too... we've booked tickets for Rhiannon Giddens for later in the year (hooray!) but in the meantime here is a video from local singer/songwriter/musician Rhona Macfarlane. I took delivery of a couple of hard copies of the CD of her new EP 'The Tide' recently and you can listen/buy the other kind of copies here. The beach in this video is local to here (Lunan Bay). Rhona is very talented and at that exciting beginning-of-adult-life phase. I look forward to following her career... from a comfortable chair... and in increasingly comfortable shoes... Enjoy.