I have magpie characteristics. The Angel of the North (my title) earring carrier has been filling up for a while and received two new opals today. I suppose after sixteen days of temperature and the last ten or so in solitary confinement with no hope of retail therapy, it wasn't the most sensible thing to go to the Himalayan Crafts Exhibition where I always find trinkets to tempt me. Ganesh the elephant god obviously had to come home with me, I've always felt him to be a jolly fellow and in blancmange pink who could resist! (The dragon and Ganesh need to be seen large to get he full colour blast). Of course I needed the dragon protector for my bedroom door and - well, a slim grey scarf is this season's must-have accessory... and then the opal earrings... my birth stone.... so again a no-brainer...

Oh  damn. There goes the budget. 

There was cookie decorating - an all-the-e-numbers-you-can-eat-in-an-hour bonanza that made this granny feel quite ill but didn't stop the boys longing for the magic cream eggs the magician gave out to his assistants. Fin learned to spin a plate then proved himself a star by sharing the sickly prize with his little brother. The rabbit was wonderful; she picked cards out of a fanned deck and stood for the applause.

Holidays are exhausting.

First there was the run-up to it then there was the event itself, then there was the euphoric exhausted feeling of a job reasonably well done. I’m not talking about the Olympics, I’m talking about my annual ‘holiday’ in Ballater with the Cornish arm of the family. I cook and freeze so I don’t have to cook so much once we are together but somehow for seven people there is always more food needed and expectations are high. With grandfather  present meals are a sit-down affair with proper food, no fish’n chips or take-away pizza or pre-cooked stuff. Not that I would want to do that either, but once in a while it might be good. 

I suppose I like the chance to feed up my son who left home early and does much of the cooking in his own home. I suppose I also like to perform the one thing I’m still fairly good at  to an appreciative audience.

It didn’t give me time for taking scenic outdoor photos and neither did I have the inclination. I’ve seen Ballater so many times before, crossed the switch-back roads over the Lecht; seen the heather and the patchworks of peat cuttings or forestry plantations; seen the blues and grey and purples of the hills... I tend to forget to stop to hear the silence and breath the sharp clean air, which is a shame but I can’t photograph them anyway. All I took photos of were my grandsons which is OK for the family albums but not much fun for others.   

Not so much time to read either. I took ‘The Anatomy of Shadows’  by Andrew Taylor away with me. I think it’s very good, a ghost story set in eighteenth century Cambridge (which is a change. that sort of book is usually set in Oxford.) Sadly I couldn’t settle to it so I’ll start it again another day. I’d looked for something large to take with me  thinking I’d finish the Anatomy and grabbed ‘Game of Thrones’ first volume because I have three friends on contemporary age who are addicted to this series. I started it when I got home and immediately went down with a flu virus so had an excuse to stay in bed. I hated it all the way through for the relentless brutality, cruelty and violence but had to keep reading, even when I really wanted to throw it out the window. George R.R. Martin is, unfortunately, a very good writer and has created something much more balanced  than ‘The Lord of the Rings’ (women have strong roles too and aren’t wifty wafty fairy princesses) but so far it lacks the essential ingredient that might make the violence bearable - clearly drawn up good-bad, Light-Dark lines. I know life isn’t like that but I do like my fantasy to be. The battles in this are about pride, vengeance, and stupidity dressed as heroism. Which now I think about it is exactly like real life.

The same 'flu gave me time to reread 'The Four-Gated City' the last of Doris Lessing's 'Children of Violence' cycle. If I was ever asked which books I would take with me on into a castaway situation the 'C of V'  cycle of five volumes would be the first of my choices (I'm not so interested in the much miss-represented 'Golden Notebook' which I probably came to too late for it to change my life). C of V relates the experiences of young people born into the decades either side of WW2, starting in S.Africa and moving, with Martha Quest, the chief protagonist, to London after the war.  The radical socio-political and philosophical changes that occurred in those time were enormous. Martha painfully absorbs them as she tries to break free from the stifling world she was born into. In an attempt to also set her child free to be who she wants, unconstricted by a mother's expectations, Martha gives away her baby daughter to her ex-husband and his new family. Because I empathised so strongly over Martha's poisonous relationship with her mother I found that very upsetting!

'The Four-Gated City,' a longer novel than the preceding four, follows Martha's flight to post-war Britain where everything is grey and ugly and the people bitter. She is swept up into the era of CND marches and global madness, flower power and the summers of love, through a period of well-organised personal madness alongside Linda. Linda is an interesting character. She has failed to lead a normal life although she has a loving and supportive husband and a small son who wants his mother. She is too sensitive to the waves of humanity in turmoil; she hears voices, eventually learns to separate them and becomes a telepath, an essential part of a dystopian future after the bombs have fallen.