24 Season 6

I’ve just finished watching 24 Season 6 on DVD, I’m a big 24 fan, started watching season 1 on BBC2 and then of course Sky brought it (boo hiss) so we had to start watching it on DVD instead. I’d heard grumblings about season 6 before I watched it and much as I still thought this season was good (there is after all not much on TV like 24), I could see why, particularly in the last 5 hours. I loved the storyline about the suitcase nuclear bombs but when they wrapped that up at about 19 hours in it was like “christ, we’ve got 5 hours left to fill,” so the concoct the whole Audrey storyline to tack on the end and resurrect Jack’s father, it just really truly felt tacked on.

Richard and Judy’s Book Club 2008

Thanks to a gentle prompt to keep an eye on what’s popular in the book market from Susan Hill’s Creative Writing course, I’m planning on reading the Richard and Judy Book Club list this year, no great hardship, there looks like some great books on it! In tune with one of my New Year’s Resolutions to read more, I am going to try and keep up with the rate at which they are reviewed on Richard and Judy. I don’t think I am going to be able to read the first book on the list in time but I will try with the others. The list for those who are interested is as follows;

A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini – 9 January 2008
Random Acts of Heroic Love – Danny Scheinmann – 16 January 2008
The Rose of Sebastopol – Katherine Mcmahon – 23 January 2008
A Quiet Belief in Angels – R J Ellory - 30 January 2008
Notes from an Exhibition – Patrick Gale – 6 February 2008
Then We Came to the End – Joshua Ferris – 13 February 2008
The Visible World – Mark Slouka – 20 February 2008
Mister Pip – Lloyd Jones – 27 February 2008
Blood River – Tim Butcher - 5 March 2008
The Welsh Girl – Peter Ho Davies – 12 March 2008

List from lovereading.co.uk

Books I’m particularly looking forward to include Mister Pip and Blood River.

Happy reading!

‘Learn’ to crochet with Rowan

Having been inspired by Jane Brocket’s The Gentle Art of Domesticity recently, I decided to check out the learn to crochet kits in John Lewis, there wasn’t much choice, two basically, a kids version and an adult version, so I plumped for the adult option, ‘Learn to crochet with Rowan’, which consists of an instruction booklet containing three patterns which you can choose to make one of (hat, gloves or scarf) from the three balls of blue Rowan Kidsilk aura and the crochet needle supplied. Now I’d always assumed crochet was a relaxing activity, not conducive to making me rant but this kit does, for a start the beginners instructions are incomplete, I had to search on the internet for more complete instructions (about.com‘s and lionbrand‘s instructions are much clearer and have better photos/diagrams) AND the wool supplied, although all very nice and trendy and fuzzy is too fuzzy, making it difficult to see your stitches clearly, something important when you’re a beginner and you need to see where you have to put your needle. So I got as far as getting half way through my tension square before giving up in disgust. What I’ll do is dig out some ‘normal’ yarn and find one of the truely beginner’s patterns on the web (that’s another thing, the patterns supplied looked too complicated), something I should have done in the first place and have a go at that before attempting the hat with the fuzzy yarn!

Skinny denim skirts, ‘safe places’ and the Norovirus

1. I have recently felt in dire need of a denim skirt, blame it on me trying to emulate my 4 year old’s wardrobe (she’s got several nice denim skirts) but I was missing having one in mine. I used to have two, both Gap, a shortish one that had such a big split up the front it was indecent if I sat down and forgot for a moment where my legs were and I had a long one that was so stiff it was like walking around in a roll of wallpaper, so they went in one of the great wardrobe purges of 2007, but I was missing them, denim skirts are great, get a decent enough one and you can wear it in the winter with opaque tights and boots and wear it in the summer with a nice pair of Converses (showing my predilection for certain types of footwear here). So I looked for a new denim skirt and Girl Lacer looked to (“you can have a skirt like mine mummy”) but we couldn’t find any (bar an awful mumsy (in the wrong sense) skirt in M&S), until I found some tucked up in the corner of Cath Kidston, just above the knee, not too big a split, dark denim with a nice fabric internal waistband lining thing (nice touch but nobody’s going to see it are they?) but as usual with me they had every size other than my own (14), so I continued looking around else where, nothing, so I went back to Cath Kidston, now I wasn’t going to squeeze into the tiny changing room with two small children thank you (although Girl Lacer sneaked in there anyway and was having a great time bouncing around on the cushions), so I was guesstimating by eye, I thought about possibly getting a size 12 because I’m a size 12 – 14 really but tend to stick to the safe side of 14 so I don’t have to worry about my chocolate intake too much, but my guesstimating eye thought the 12 looked a little small, so I held up the 16, thought “oh well it’ll be a little big but it can be ‘fashionably low slung’”. So I brought the 16, tried it on today and I can only say one thing, Cath Kidston clothes must be cut really on the small side because although the skirt fits, it’s really on the snug side! So just to warn anyone else tempted away from Cath Kidston’s floral mugs and onto their clothing range, possibly look at a size bigger and honestly I haven’t put that much weight on over Christmas, I’ve got a size 14 long M&S skirt that’s so loose on the waist now I’m getting Victorian muddy patches because it keeps dragging in the mud, honestly everytime I wear that skirt I’m having to walk round like one of the transvestites on Little Britain holding my skirt up prim and proper, so yes Cath Kidston sizing, a little different.
2. Girl Lacer’s ballet starts up again tomorrow, so consequently I had to tidy up the desk today (aka the pile of paper) because I couldn’t find the ballet invoice which needed to be paid tomorrow and I had a sneaky feeling that it had gone where all pieces of paper go when I have no immediate need for them, the towering piles. So I cleaned the desk (which majorly needed doing), managed to find the list scribbled down in green pencil of what the kids got for their Christmas presents (still haven’t done thank you notes sigh) and a red toy train which had been causing marital strife (you don’t want to know) but I couldn’t find the invoice. I kept on visualising the invoice in my head, where I last saw it and I was pretty sure I had rescued it from going underneath the sofa and put it in a ‘safe place’, now my ‘safe places’ are the kiss of death for me finding anything because all I can ever remember is that it is in a ‘safe place’ not where the safe place is and obviously the safe place this time wasn’t the desk, so I had a flat wide tour of my various known safe places, underneath the telephone, the medicine cabinet, my bookshelves and eventually found it behind last year’s 2007 calendar, well at least I found it, now just need to find the ballet tights.
3. Finally I hate this time of year, the time of year where there’s not much going on in the news so the reporters have a rummage around in their annual new stories file and go “ah January, that must be the Norovirus then,” cue the annual story about sick people on a cruise liner and various technicolour descriptions of the symptoms. Now I know the Norovirus is dangerous to the very young and very old, so it is good that the message is getting out about hygiene and keeping yourself in isolation if you’ve got it but for a person with health anxiety tendencies and a phobia about throwing up (yes, I know nobody likes it) makes the annual spate of Norovirus stories not particularly pleasant, specially now that Girl Lacer is at school and that’s prime stomach bug stomping ground. On the only bright side of my throwing up phobia though, I have never been a heavy drinker which probably makes my liver far better than some of the women my age who I used to work with, after all someone with a phobia about throwing up is not going to go out and drink so much of a noxious substance that it makes you throw up!