it takes a girl

Thank goodness I arrived at the boys bonfire and BBQ to take charge. They had the cooking under control but gee whizz, they didn't know how to keep a bonfire going ;)

After a day working without any natural light it's great to sit by a lake in the evening with mates, eating BBQ, gathering sticks from the woods, drinking beer and waiting for the rod tip to move.

today's colour chart

pale blue all day then a dark purple evening.

special mention

special mention to boyf of borrower who bought us a rather splendid indian nosh last night. fanks mate. welcome to the piratha elite.

"which was nice"

seems i have a new job. didn't see that coming a week ago. nothing exciting for the outside blog reader - internal transfer blah blah blah - but a pretty big change for me and rather exciting too.

culkin roadshow

watched 'igby goes down' this evening. granted, i had to suffer it with a settee full of girls talking the whole way through but even so it was a disappointment. got back to read one rave review on amazon. hmm. well, the main character could have had so much more depth. he was an interesting idea but not half as raw as he should of been if they were trying to portray a really rebellious young man. my 13 year old has more attitude than him and we were meant to be convinced he was a drop out from a string of schools and dealt drugs. no he was too preppy by far. the estranged, mentally ill father figure could have been so interesting as well but guess what, they kicked him out after the first scene and shove him in an institute. there's a slight twist at the end when you discover the 'murder' was assisted euthanasia. not really enough to turn it round!

rent something else.

Marsh Arabs

Call me a lightweight but I've never really tried travel writing before and I always feel slightly unnerved when I read non-fiction. For some reason I think I'm going to tire of real life in a way that fiction continues to grip me. Anyway, no need to worry with Wilfred Thesiger. Really good. I haven't finished yet but I am really glad I picked this one up. After seeing his photos at the Natural History Museum in Oxford last week I knew I had to read this book. I suppose he's the last of the explorers. I'm entranced by the way these people build homes from reeds. Not only protection against the elements, as you often see in the 'mut hut' approach to foreign travel, but beautiful structures that look Arabian even though they are essentially a bunch of weeds a la three little pigs. http://www.public.iastate.edu/~mariposa/images/11-Mudhif.jpg These Arabs live in Iraq and, from what I've read so far, seem to be entirely uninfluenced by the outside world. Does anyone know what has happened to these people since Thesiger wrote about them in the 50's?

Kitchen

have just finished 'kitchen' by banana yoshimoto which has a short story, 'moonlight shadow', at the end. They both gave me a similar feeling to Murakami even though the themes were quite different. They are quietly impacting. Not a lot seems to happen but after you've closed the last page you think how that was actually a very touching and enduring read. I would recommend them both but don't expect action.