The only surprise is....

...it's coming too quickly! 

Three and a half years ago, during the first lockdown, I discovered a podcast called Shedunnit, devoted to vintage crime novels. The wonderful podcaster is Caroline Crampton. I subscribed, and got hooked! Later I joined their online book club, and aired my views in the forum. Later still, when the charity shops opened up again, I started looking for crime novels that had been mentioned by Caroline. Some I read, some I kept to be read later, some I gave away to bookshops after reading. 

Eventually the tower of books 'to be read' grew so tall that I stopped listening to the podcast altogether, in case I was tempted to buy even more more. A week or so ago I dismantled the pile, cleaned it up, put some of the books back on actual shelves, and took the remaining pile of unread books to a second hand store. They gave me five pounds for them. I kept the Josephine Tey novels, and the short stories, and a couple of others, in case there's another pandemic (sick joke). The ones rejected by the dealer  got taken to to a charity shop. 

Now: here's the thing. I love the podcast, and Caroline's description of the books, and the Josephine Tey books (she worked at Oban High school as a PE Teacher, don't you know?)  but the stories that were written in the 1920s and 1930s are almost incomprehensible to me. This is odd, because my grandparents were of that vintage,  and I understood them, (though they insisted on using Anglo-Indian phrases,  and pronouncing laundry as lahn-dree, which confused me). I know what a butler is, and a swizzle stick, a telegram, a down train, and so on, but I just cannot get to grips with the characters. They all seem so unlikeable.Their motives are beyond comprehension. Why do they stuff clerical clothes in a doctor's bag, then abandon them on the doorstep of a lonely widow? Why is it so wrong for a maid to have a 'lover'? Maybe I need to see the  stage version, with glittering costumes,  dumb waiters, and peacocks. The televised versions I can take or leave,. The theme has been done to death  for me in the 1970s.  I prefer a classic Ghost Story for Christmas. 

As I'd kept the short stories collections, I read one today that I couldn't connect with at all.  I am on to my second, but mostly I've been chatting online with friends far and near, and watching a documentary about the American Pie song by Don McLean. It was fifty years old last year. Fifty years, the same age as my youngest sister!

My friend K from Germany sent me a parcel, which arrived today, containing many nibbly gluten-free advent-ish things. This felt like a Red Cross parcel, as I'd decided to spend the day in bed, and Steve is not well either. K and I exchanged online chat about how she'd come to stay last summer, then broke her foot and couldn't go camping in Wales, and Steve had to look after her, because I was working. But, at the same time, another person I knew had to leave her husband in a great hurry. I had to take the day off and co-ordinate her house move very quickly, and  then live with a load of extra stuff in our cabin for the next six weeks... the evacuation day was scary, because the police and the various agencies would not get involved with the moving-out. To be fair we did it in record time, and got a couple of men to help us out (mostly I was scared of the husband coming back, so I wore a body warmer to look like a flak jacket). German friend K was hobbling around with her foot in a surgical boot, and was in charge of Humour at Home. I remember  that I made everyone sing  along to I Will Survive, and even dance!  Crazy time. This is why my entries got a bit thin on the ground earlier this year in July/August. Too much going on. 

It's ok now. Friend is rehoused and has been greatly helped and given furniture. My German friend K says she has some knee damage now. I have recommended supplements. I did not point out to her that it had been Extremely Unhelpful of her to force me to watch numerous episodes of Downton Abbey while I was trying to formulate a Crisis plan. She was having her own personal not-going-camping-crisis at the time. I couldn't have cared less about the fate of Lord Grantham's pigs. It's the country-house dramas all over again.  I prefer  the 'gritty in the city' crime genre, or dramas about people who work for a living, as opposed to merely casting aspersions on the morals of their maidservants.