Sunday Summary | Mid-Monthly Missive // Should auld acquaintance be forgot...

Dear FOQ

Is it too late to wish you a Happy New Year?

Or has the damage already been done, thirteen days in?

I hope you all had lovely Christmases that met with, if not exceeded, your expectations.

I certainly did and I have my lovely famalam to thank for that! Sis QB and Ceri did a magnificent job of Hosting the Harweeds, and Ma and Pa as ever.

I got much sleep (especially up in C&C's wondrous guest cocoon in the attic!), saw many people... it was gorgeous.

I enjoyed the excellent piggy company of Alan, aka Surrey Editorialan, of course; oh and Brian and Steve (and Ferdy the Birdy), became the new additions to the family. Let's just have a moment, shall we, for Brian's welcome to the set(t)...

Did someone say:

Anyhoo.

Unlike previous years I won't go into full "Here we are as in olden days, happy golden days"/"look at all these pictures of our Christmas"/"check out ma sprouts" mode. I'm pretty sure that if you wanted to look upon a content family Christmas you'd either look through your own photos, or put on something cosy like Home Alone or National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and really go to town.

{Sis's log-burner. Bliss.}

So instead, later on, I shall just regale you with a few of the more atypical moments of Christmas.


This month, I have been mostly ...

Reading 📚

Is it Just Me? | Miranda Hart

(No it isn't, and thank you for the gentle snorfles, Miranda.)

Bookworm | Lucy Mangan

Now.

I really, really wanted to want to marry this book.

It's a beauty from the lavish jacket inwards. The shot above does not do justice to how utterly glorious the jacket is. It has gold on it, people. Actual gold. (OK, it's a finish but it's pretty.)

And Lucy Mangan is fabulous.

I met her, once, you know. Very nice. Very tiny.

And I did absolutely love the book.

It was another nifty way of an author writing an autobiography... but with a twist, aaaah! Lucy and I (for I'm assuming first-name terms now) would have been such great friends if we'd known each other at school. (Of course she's got about four years on me but her outlook is identifiable!)

Neither of us would have spoken to each other. Just sat there in mutual silence. With our books.

However.

However!

My reluctance to wed this book on principle was hindered by... wait for it...

All the typos.

So many typos.

I found myself committing the cardinal sin of turning down pages just so I could mark where all the typos were.

Normally I can, ooh, let it slide. (Well, not let it slide per se; you've met me, right?)

But not in a book by a woman who is a known stickler for the spelling bein rite and the grammar what be good.

Not in a book on children's literature which I'm sure is responsible in our formative years for grasps upon spellin and good grammar to be... got. Gotten. Gleaned.

Unasseptable, as Jo "SuperNanny" Frost used to say.

If you can't check and correctly spell the name of the female character in Tom's Midnight Garden twice consecutively (Hattie/Hatty*), if you can't fact-check and correctly reproduce the name of Polish-British author-illustrator-legend Jan Pieńkowski (accent on the n, and it's not Pienowski) then I'm afraid, Bookworm Book, I begin to judge your legitimacy.

*It's Hatty-with-a-y, incidentally. The interwebs told me so.

(Disclaimer: I do still love the book, by the way, Charlie, and I do love Lucy Mangan: it's Mssrs Penguin, Random and House Esq and their inability to gauge a decent proofreader I take Tonbridge Umbrage with. ...(With which I take umbrage?))

My Brother's Name is Jessica | John Boyne

I loved The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

I was chilled to the core by The Boy at the Top of the Mountain.

I was... very uncertain about 'Jessica'.

Quick precis: Sam adores his older brother Jason, the school football hero. But Jason is transgender and at age seventeen tells his family he is actually a girl, named Jessica.

Jessica's mother is climbing the greasy pole of politics to become Prime Minister. She does not have time for her transgender child. Jessica's father is a two-dimensional tool with no clear-cut opinions of his own. Sam is being bullied so he decides not to understand how Jessica is feeling until the very end.

I wish I liked this book more (it's topical) but I had no sympathy for any of the characters except Jessica and even she seemed to align being female with wearing dresses and makeup as if Those Are the Marked Traits of the Female. (Although, radical thought, Jessica still enjoys football. Because girls can.)

Oh, John Boyne. Sorry, but no.


Watching 📺

Tidying with Marie Kondo

I'll admit that I could not get on with MK's first, groundbreaking book.

I couldn't quite see the point of holding each camel-print sock I own in my hand and asking myself if it brings me joy (hello, it's a camel-print sock; ergo it brings me unbridled euphoria, thank you very much).

And while I'm not one for a book-to-TV-adaptation (per se), I'll admit that the series grabbed my attention and before I'd even reached the end of the series (binged over one very productive weekend), my airing cupboard and all my drawers had been reorganised.

Witness:

The criticism levelled at Tidying... has centred, mostly, on the fact that Marie Kondo and her translator, Iida (actually Marie Iida but how confusing would it be to have two Maries in one room?!) come into a family's home and look around; Marie K then introduces herself to the house (you have to see it to understand it), tells the family (largely through her translator) to fold their pants upright in a drawer or even in a box within a drawer, then comes back about a fortnight later to find that at least one family member has had a breakdown-followed-by-a-revelation about why they've kept a lock of their grandmother's chest hair in a plastic clip-lock tub for 60 years.

It makes very engaging viewing, believe me.

And MK gives the best demo for folding fitted sheets that I've seen thus far on the interweb. And trust me, I've lost precious minutes trying to work this out. (Spoiler alert: it's in Episode 3, about 18 minutes in.)

Also, she's adorable. You just want to slot her smiley little self into a pocket and have her with you for always.

---

Of course, hungry for more of This Sort O' Thing, I cast a web over, well, the web, and Netflix came up with this rather peculiar offering:

Consumed

There's something almost deliciously unsettling about Consumed that ultimately marks it as different from most decluttering programmes. Here are a few salient things about the show:

1) It's Canadian so the accents are different;
2) The families are encouraged to pile their most hoarded items in one massive pile to confront their problems (someone will almost inevitably cry) then try to toss as much of it as possible. Someone will almost always uncover that clip-lock pot containing grandmother's chest hair, and the whole project will be thrown off-kilter as people cry a bit more.

3) The families are told to live for two weeks without most of their belongings, and between them to chose ten non-essentials (no technology);
4) One family member will almost inevitably slack on their packing responsibilities when trying to shift their belongings to the warehouse;
5) One family member (the same member as 4, usually, but not always) will have a revelation about how good it is to be able to sock-skid with their kids across a bare floor without hitting three months' worth of laundry or a Tupperware mountain (and yes, that's a thing);

6) The families are told to get rid of 75% of their belongings in the warehouse. Usually, but not always, they succeed;
7) The show's onsite carpenter dude – Darren Doyle, for that is his name; he's like Handy Andy but Canadian – makes a lot of ropey-looking but functional furniture to help the family maximise their storage potential.
8) Now, here's the clincher.

Three months after the family's return to their newly uncluttered home, the show team, led by presenter Jill Pollack ("I'm Jill Pollack", she reminds us at least three times at the beginning of the show) goes back to revisit the family.

This takes one of three turns, which makes the show oh-so-very buttock-clenchingly exciting:
i) The family has learned a valuable lesson and now lives in minimalist splendour, and everyone's delighted and flourishing out of the whole experience especially the as-standard weepy teenager;
ii) The family has learned absolutely nothing and has accumulated more piles o' crap;
iii) All the hugging, hand-holding and soul-searching in the show has amounted to a) the family separating (awks) or, b) selling up their beautifully new, clutter-free refurbished home, and leaving the town entirely without telling the production company (double awks).

Decluttering programmes should come with advisory drinking games.

The Sinner (both series)

We-he-he-ird. But compelling. Especially for the resurgence of Bill "The Beard/Dishy Jack from While You Were Sleeping" Pullman. Oh yes.

Jessica Biel is wondrous. Just laying that one right out there on the proverbial line.

Christmassing 🎄🎅

I won't beffle on at length about the exceptional Christmas shenanigans; I will just say that on Boxing Day we wandered into Ewell village and managed to catch a rather wondrous display of Morris Dancing as the local Morris Men paraded through town from pub to pub, and then ended with a Mummers' Play by the Mill.

Sadly, we missed the play, but did manage to see some men of a certain age frolicking in the streets like earnest youths of yesteryear.

{Spot Father Christmas, and a piggy photobomber!}

{Enjoying the local colour}

{As they say in Sweden*, det är en häst!}

{I've pixellated these folk as the ones on the left
looked like they were witnessing a cortege, not
a display of merriment. And then it felt unfair not to
pixellate the guy next to them.}

Such fun!

On New Year's Eve... Eve... (30th December), Ma and I joined friends Jan and Penny and their clan, for a wander around Bedgebury Pinetum's Winter Light Trail.

Light Trails at Christmas seem to have gained popularity in the last couple of years; RHS Wisley (not far from me here in Surrey) hosts such an event, as does Kew; Bedgebury more than holds its own, and the trail was wondrous, like a last hurrah to Christmas before the inevitable expectations of the New Year.

{Ma and moi}

Cue amateur little compilation of gif-able moments. Including one that was so brief I really should have duplicated it for effect but it was half eight on a Sunday night so that was never going to happen, sozza.

Language Learnin' 💬🌍

You may remember at the tail end of last year I started playing about with Duolingo to refresh my very limited *Swedish, and learn a bit of German from scratch.

Ja, ich verstehe Deutsch. ⮜ get me!

Well, I'm doing pretty well on it at the moment although my pronunciation is appalling (it's hard to speak-and-say while you're on the mornin' train; heck, it's hard enough to listen with the amount of melodramatic twittering and Instagram-related dramas going on around me from the schoolchildren and of course I was never flippant as a teenager, noooo...).

And I can't spell the Swedish word for 'turtle'. Which bothers me. "Sköldpadda." Yes? Oh! Got it!

But otherwise, it's great fun.

Link Love 🔗

I'm afraid that yet again I've had no time to compile any half-decent links for you to follow; as you can see I am still trying to regain the blogging mojo and should probably dedicate some actual brain space to this pursuit.

New Year's Resolution for the Quirky Brunette?! Just try harder, mmkay?

Until next month, stay groovy, peeps.

qb xx

{With thanks to Jan for this gem...!}