A change of scenery

‘All change, please!’ Except the guard didn’t say that. Instead, as we sat – packed like sardines – on the train from Copenhagen airport, the PA system indistinctly informed us something was about to change. Our end of the train was going no further. Only, he said it in Danish, and bad English, so it wasn’t either helpful or clear.

And we’d only just got acquainted with the couple out to celebrate Mother’s Day, whom we were sqeezed far too close to for polite company. So we ran for it at Malmö. Even Daughter made it, but only just. She was further in, so had longer to get out.

The drip in the bathroom has changed. It used to be considerable, becoming less with each passing day, while helpfully dripping into a rectangular former ice cream box. Now it refuses to drip into the box, and it is not slowing down, and I’m having to change its nappy, so to speak. (Square of towelling on the floor, which soon gets sodden.)

We’ve had Birdie with us for a week. She does incomprehensible subjects at university, along with Daughter. It means we’ve tried to explain some of the weird ways of Sweden, and we were working on the bottle and drinks can deposit system when we realised the smallest amount had doubled. After a while I hit on the reason for this. The place no longer has 50 öre coins, so can hardly have a 50 öre deposit. No small change here.

Birdie is staying on for the summer. Not with us, but with one of the country’s leading universities, which will mean a considerable change for her. She has spent her week here being led from one outdoor café to another. She’ll think we do nothing but eat. (She’d be right.) When not being force-fed cake, she has read incomprehensible books.

Speaking of books, I went into town (no, I never learn…) and wanted something from the bookshop. You know the drill by now. It had moved. Only about two doors down (or do I mean up?), so I found it easily enough once I could see I’d overshot. When I’d bought what I came for (amazingly they had it), I discovered it had changed names as well. It is now a completely different shop, except it’s the same, really. To me it will always be Larssons Bokhandel.

Went to look for the next thing on my list. Definitely didn’t get that. Mainly because the department store wasn’t there. In its place was a building site, and the only shop open for business was a – new – chemist’s. Presumably to make up for the halving of the old one and the moving of the door which they hit me with last year.

Remember the bus tickets? The ones that changed? Well, now they had to be ex-changed. Every four years your Oyster type card thingy has to be freshened up, so I came armed with the family’s tickets, with all of a week before they became invalid and fizzled into thin air. (I made that last thing up. We’d just have been stranded.)

And speaking of the bus tickets and being stranded; the unions have called a strike for Monday. Either they strike all the time, or we are simply extremely gifted at turning up when they do. May not be able to get rid of the Resident IT Consultant quite as smoothly as planned, because of this.

Shadow Girl

This is a beautiful book. I cried. And whereas I don’t always want to keep a Barrington Stoke book after I’ve read it, Shadow Girl by Sally Nicholls will stay right here. It is that wonderful.

I especially appreciate Sally naming one of her characters Maddy.

Shadow Girl is about two girls in care; Maddy in a children’s home and Clare who is living with a foster mother. Both have tough lives, but feel better for having found the other. It means they have someone to talk to.

Except, one day Maddy fails to turn up, and Clare doesn’t know what to do. She finally speaks to her foster mother about it, and her life changes radically.

(Short review, I know. But the book is only 67 pages, and that’s Barrington Stoke pages. I loved every single one of them, and didn’t at any time feel I was reading a ‘dyslexic story.’)

You just have to love Shadow Girl.

Cracks

How many dystopias featuring a girl named Kyla can a witch take?

As long as they are as fantastic as those written by Caroline Green and Teri Terry, then you can keep sending them my way. I have belatedly come to Caroline’s second novel Cracks, and it’s the sort of book I’d happily give to anyone. I defy any young (-ish) reader not to devour this book in very few sittings.

What made me so content was the fact that it wasn’t just like every other book. Some are. This one was ‘itself’ and all the better for it.

14-year-old Cal thinks he’s going crazy. He isn’t, of course, but while I wondered if he was about to be abducted by aliens, the truth is far, far weirder. Most interesting, in fact. Different.

Set in the not too distant future, the world is terribly different from the one we know. But as with any good dystopia, you can see how easy it’d be for us to end up there.

So far Cal has led an unhappy life, but pretty normal. Soon this changes to strange, confusing, and almost hopeful.

I believe there is a sequel, so there’s plenty of scope for more developments. You don’t have to read further, but you will probably want to.

Food, glorious food

How can anyone not love the food in the Famous Five books? I just don’t get it.

I obviously liked the children and I liked their adventures, but I’m pretty sure I rated their food above everything else. Oh how they ate! Lots of it, all the time. And it sounded so tasty, too.

The food seems to be one of the things people have to point out as a negative aspect of Enid Blyton’s books. That, and the class distinctions between the children and the baddies. But the class stuff was lost in translation. We didn’t do class (I won’t say ‘at all’ but not like that, so it wasn’t noticeable). Hence we didn’t see it.

My best friend during the Blyton years kept saying ‘but they eat all the time.’ She enjoyed the books, but clearly felt the food got in the way slightly.

I thought the books were so truly wonderful it didn’t even occur to me to apply any literary analysis. Not that I could have, even if I’d known about such things.

They wake up in the morning and come down to (that phrase, ‘come down to,’ is so wow, in itself) a cooked breakfast, provided by the mother/aunt. And if they stayed in (hah) there was lunch and tea and dinner. Cake for tea, and puddings. What’s not to like?

There was food in the larder. You could help yourself.

If they went out on adventures they made sure to pack all sorts of goodies. Heaven for a fat little reader. It seemed to be allowed. I suppose they ran so fast chasing baddies that they used up the calories.

Ice cream. Sweets. Crisps, probably.

They led charmed lives. They really did.

(The only time I came anywhere close to this state, was when visiting my pen friend in Surrey for two weeks. We watched television in the afternoon – an impossibility in Sweden – and her mother brought us freshly made cake every day. It was probably a blessing it was for a fortnight only.)

The Night Raid

Boys will be boys. They were – mostly – just the same back in Roman times. Or do I mean Greek?

Caroline Lawrence has written her first Barrington Stoke story, and it is both an exciting read and quite educational for people like me. If you’re a bit shaky on the Classics, then The Night Raid is for you.

It begins with the fall of Troy, when two young boys, Rye and Nisus, flee for their lives, having lost family members. Both want revenge, but first have to start new lives with the leader of the Trojans, Aeneas.

The reader learns what happened to the Trojans in exile, and how they arrived in Italy, years later.

If the story sounds at all familiar, it will be because a chap called Virgil wrote a poem called the Aeneid, and Caroline has borrowed from that to tell us what happened to the teenagers, Nisus and Rye.

I think it’s fantastic the way an author can take something old and seemingly difficult and bring it to a new audience by re-writing something that many of us will happily avoid for as long as we possibly can.

Thank you for educating me a little bit, Caroline.

Is that a crocodile?

No. It’s me on holiday. I mean, it’s where I am going to be for a week or two. Listening to the water. Dipping my toes into it, even. Possibly dipping more than the toes. Sitting in the sun.

And then I’ll be back. Hopefully. (If it was a crocodile, then possibly not.)

Stealing and borrowing

Some people put it better than others. That’s why I am borrowing someone else’s words to talk about stealing. Simply because they said it so well.

First it was Nicola Morgan who discovered that ‘pirates’ were offering her ebooks online. She has worked hard to bring them out, so wasn’t terribly pleased to find that people were that keen to avoid paying the mere £2 she’s asking for her books.

Nicola reckons ‘pirate’ sounds much nicer than ‘scummy thief’ and that it’s time we stop thinking of these book thieves as rather loveable pirates. She’s right.

Then came Joanne Harris who discovered her fans tweeting happily about how and where to best steal her books. Except if you use the word download it sounds rather better to those who do it.

She wrote a great blog post about it, and she doesn’t just mention her own – lack of – income, but that of everyone else in the book business, who will not have the money to feed their families or pay the bills.

It’s worth noting, too, that this is the way to lose the publishing business, and anything else connected with it, like libraries. Which is just as well, really, as there will be no books written, that could be published, or that might be borrowed from your local library.

For free.

Scotland for your holidays

Yeah, I know. It’s not as appropriate as it was.

But as we were packing our interim stuff, I said to the Resident IT Consultant, ‘let’s take it, in case we need entertainment.’ The ‘it’ being the jigsaw you see here. I gave it to him for his birthday last year, and although favourably received (or is he getting better at pretending?) it didn’t even come out at Christmas, which tends to be when we need something for the family to gather round.

We arrived to find a half made jigsaw puzzle on the puzzle board, and eventually it was finished. At that point the Grandmother complained she didn’t have another, so we looked at each other and he brought out his present for her. She thought the picture was ugly, but she did need a jigsaw, so got going, dividing up the 1000 pieces into edges and red bits and what-have-you.

Good thing it was ignored at Christmas. There wouldn’t have been the time. Turns out this Forth Rail Bridge holiday poster was more complicated than I’d imagined. She complained a bit, but soldiered on.

And after a little over two weeks of slaving over that bridge it was done. Funnily enough it was the Resident IT Consultant’s birthday when it happened. I decided it could be his present, since I had nothing else for him. Not that I’d helped, but I don’t mind taking credit for other people’s hard work.

I did buy it, after all.

Craig Robertson and ‘the grandad rap’

I know only one author in Stirling, and that’s Craig Robertson. He had the decency to launch his brand new crime novel yesterday, right here ‘at home’ and he had even tweaked his usual Glaswegian crime, to offer up a Faroese murder in its place. (I suspect he just wants to be one of these fantastically rich Nordic crime writers…)

The launch of The Last Refuge took place at The Mediterranéa restaurant (obviously some compass malfunction here, but I’d much rather attend a tapas bar than a dead whale kind of restaurant, or fried puffin place) and the Resident IT Consultant and I made our way there to rub shoulders with other local literary types. In the end it was the Faroese connection that persuaded him.

Craig received the news of our recent move with surprising calm and almost seemed to think it was a good thing. He had asked my ex-Bloody Scotland blogging colleague – and crime writer – Michael J Malone to come and talk to him about his new book. They were both rather fascinated with the traditional Faroese whale slaughter, the word for which I didn’t catch, but which Michael’s spellchecker suggested could be ‘grandad rap.’

After some mingling and Faroese music and pretty photos of the islands, Craig read a wee excerpt from the first chapter, where his hero John Callum wakes up dead drunk in the harbour, with a bloody whale knife in his possession. And there has been a murder…

Apparently the islands had not had a murder for 26 years, but soon after Craig’s visit there was one. It was probably not his fault.

Craig had initially wanted to set a novel in Tallinn, but was beaten to it, so went to Torshavn instead. He found his female main character in a bar one night, and soon learned to say ‘thank you’ and ‘beer’ in Faroese. He also realised you should never get drunk with the leader of the Faroese Hell’s Angels.

They have no forensics on the islands, so when – if – there is a murder they have to send for someone from Copenhagen. And speaking of Denmark, Craig couldn’t afford to buy the Sarah Lund jumper someone asked him to get, and he wouldn’t mind a Danish film being made of The Last Refuge. The book will also be translated into Danish for any islander who happens not to understand English (which seems pretty unlikely).

He missed the opportunity of joining a whale slaughter, which he would have liked (!) because it would be so interesting to see people’s faces as they do this dreadful (my word) deed. Craig thinks that – in theory – it would be good for a crime writer to have a go at this kind of killing…

The Q&A session that followed was fun, but possibly not taken as seriously as they sometimes are. The Mediterranéa was just about full, which is great going for this kind of event. There were tapas to eat and free drinks, and anyone brave enough was invited to try some of Craig’s 50% Faroese akvavit (although I believe he soon regretted having some himself), illegal to make, but not drink, in the Faroe Islands.

We’d planned to stay and have a meal afterwards, but ‘unfortunately’ there was so much free food on offer that we were too full to do so. We will have to go back some day when we actually feel hungry.

Instead we did that thing we hardly ever do. We paid for a book.

The Demons of Ghent

You know that feeling you have when you’re climbing about on the rooftops of Ghent, with Death right behind you? That’s The Demons of Ghent, the second of Helen Grant’s Flemish trilogy. It’s that strange thing, the perfect book, both extremely soothing and calm (I suspect it’s the Flemish aspect), and heart-stoppingly scary.

Climbing to the top of buildings and walking across whole city blocks is frightening enough on its own, without adding a stalking monster who kills people. Someone you might encounter as you run along some vertigo-inducing parapet or other narrow strip of roof. Add rain or darkness, and it’s almost heaven. (If you’ve been good. If not, it will be the other place.)

Veerle has had to move from the small village that she loved and knew so well, and is forced to live with her father and his new – pregnant – wife, who resents her presence. Not happy at school, Veerle bunks off, and meets Bram, another desirable young man (Kris seems to have dropped out of sight, to begin with), who is into rooftops.

People are dying, though. ‘Suicides’ jumping off houses. And Ghent natives are seeing ‘demons’ on the rooftops at night. As an outsider Veerle finds this rather odd.

Until the day she comes across someone whom she thought was dead and it all goes horribly wrong. It’s tough being wanted by two handsome young men all at once, as well as having Death turn up wherever you go.

I’m wondering if we will ever have an explanation, or if Veerle will keep putting herself in danger until it’s too late? Are the odd things that happen to her connected, or is she just prone to meeting new monsters at every new turn?

Helen writes so naturally that you can’t really see how she pulls it off. And although the reader screams at Veerle not to do whatever she has in mind to try next, it makes for surprisingly comfortable reading. Yes, Death and vertigo are both scary, but there is an intrinsic calm to this Flemish life.

Comfy horror. I love it!