Knitting Update

It is an age since I posted any knitting pictures, so here is an update on recent projects.

I finally finished the aran cardigan that I started the Christmas before last (apart from buttons). The pictures aren't great but they give an idea of the end result. 

This was an awful lot of cabling but the end result was worth it. A cosy, classic cardigan, which will be warm enough to wear instead of a coat in spring and autumn. 

Another successful project for myself was this green lace vest using Wendy Bernard's Jordan pattern. I haven't worn it yet as I finished it in October, but I think it will get quite a bit of use in the summer. The yarn was discounted end-of-line Jaeger Trinity. This is a very simple lace project knitted as a tube and two flat rectangles.

There have been smaller project too. These are my third pair of skew socks (for me!):

And I knitted this Bella's mittens pattern for Helen for Christmas in Rowan Cocoon. Gorgeously soft and warm. I shamelessly borrow them!

My current projects are a grapevine sweater in the same yarn as the Jordan vest and a pair of Jaywalker socks in Noro Kureyon sock yarn. I like this wavy pattern and it works beautifully with the colours of the yarn. I am being very brave and just knitting the socks as they come rather than trying to match the colour sequence on each socks. The anal part of my brain really feels that non-identical socks is a radical move! This is the first time I have used Noro. Having read lots of comments about its shortcomings - scratchy and uneven texture being the usual criticisms - I was very unsure whether I would like it, but I picked up a couple of balls in our local yarn shop's January sale. Although the thickness variations are crazy (in places it is more like one ply than four ply and in others there are thick clumps of badly spun yarn) I actually like it better than I expected. The colours really are lovely and I am very happy with the way it is coming out. 

I have another ball of Noro Kureyon that I am thinking of turning into an Ishbel shawl. I am also seriously considering making this beautiful St. Ninian's Scarf in one ply Shetland yarn. It looks challenging but well worth the effort.

Book 7: G is for Ghosts

Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one just squeaked up to four stars. Written by a British author who lives and is raising his family in Madrid, it looks at modern Spanish culture and how it has been shaped by history. Although I have studied bits of Spanish history, I have only visited Spain once and didn't have much of a sense for how Spain and its people tick. Much of the book was fascinating and I now feel I know a lot more about the country, including certain aspects that were a complete blank to me before - flamenco, Basque separatism, and the establishment of democracy after the death of Franco, to give a few examples. There was also a section on contemporary morality which was pretty graphic! The style is quite easy to read though I did find the book a bit over long - the final chapters on different regions were still interesting, but my focus was slipping by this stage. I found the author's casually anti-Catholic attitude a bit irritating and the close association of the Church with the Franco regime uncomfortable. I also couldn't help wondering how much things have changed in Spain in the light of the financial crises fo the last few years.

Next on my list for 52 Books in 52 Weeks is The Help. I didn't see the movie so I am coming to it with no preconceptions.

Diamond Queen

I meant to post last week to comment on the 60th anniversary of the Queen succeeding to the throne. It was a royal-ish sort of week. Rose's school had a Diamond Jubilee themed day on Wednesday - they decided to go with the date of her accession rather than the official celebrations in June which coincide with the school's summer half term break - and the BBC started a three part documentary called the Diamond Queen. Two things in particular struck me watching the programmes that have been shown so far:

(1) Duty. If there is one word that sums up the Queen it is duty. Thanks to the sense of duty inherited from her father - who became king as a consequence of his brother Edward VIII putting personal interest first - she has spent sixty years, day in and day out, doing a grindingly hard, relentless job in which she is constantly on display. Just imagine. And she doesn't do it because she chose to live such a public life, but because it was thrust upon her. If Edward VIII had remained King and had children of his own, she would have spent her life as a comparatively minor royal.

(2) The incredible knowledge of the world and public affairs the Queen has amassed over those sixty years. Every time she meets a visiting leader or dignitary or travels abroad she is briefed and given the opportunity of conversation with them. Every week she meets the British prime minister to discuss current affairs. She takes all this seriously. Imagine the depth of personal knowledge and experience of someone who has known such an extraordinary list of world leaders: Winston Churchill, Eisenhower, John F Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela, Charles de Gaulle, Pope Benedict XVI, to name just a few. It seems to me that this continuity is one of the benefits of monarchy - rather than a head of state changing every few years and having to get up to speed from a standing start, the Queen is able to consolidate and increase her already extensive experience year on year. Her political neutrality means that every prime minister and his government is able to draw on this, as are the heads of state of the Commonwealth countries.

Personally, I'm very much a monarchist. Here in the UK we have an old and in some ways odd political system, with no written constitution. While in matters of day-to-day government the Queen is essentially a figurehead, she is also the guarantor of the system. If, to take an extreme scenario, the prime minister decided to suspend future elections and turn himself into a dictator (though I can't say I see David Cameron as a dictatorial type!), the Queen could force an election, at least in theory - in the most extreme case it would depend on whether she could carry the army with her, which is quite likely as their allegiance is to Queen and Country rather than to the government of the day. I once had an interesting conversation about this in the House of Lords tearoom, but that is a whole 'nother story! The bottom line is that without the Queen (and her future successors) this country would not only be poorer in many ways, it would also be less stable.

God save the Queen!

(I also picked up the tie-in book for the TV series as a Kindle deal of the day yesterday, which is now waiting for me to get to Q for Queen on my A to Z reading challenge.)

School Report

Rose ... is as good as gold at school, bless her. (Actually she is pretty good at home too!) She is very proud of the fact that she has never, ever misbehaved at school or been told off for anything by her teacher. She likes learning, and her teacher describes her as "a little sponge". Everything just soaks in. Reading is coming along fast, though she tends to need a bit of coaxing when she is ready to move up a reading level as her confidence lags behind her ability. On the whole, though, she is getting steadily more confident. She was actually excited instead of nervous about getting to collect a merit certificate in front of the whole school (at her school the kids get stamps on a merit card for good work, and after 25 stamps they get presented with a certificate). On the other hand, when the school had a professional theatre company in to perform a pantomime, Rose took one look and bolted straight back to the classroom! Fortunately her teacher had more sense than to send her back and she apparently had fun helping to do "jobs" while everyone else watched the show.

Marie ... her new school still seems to be a good fit for her and most of her teachers were complimentary, though a bit more focus and a bit less day-dreaming would be good.  She is now at the stage of choosing GCSE courses. Compulsory subjects are English Language, English Literature, Maths and Science, for which Marie has been put in an advanced group where they take three separate GCSEs in Physics, Chemistry and Biology; she then gets to do four more subjects of her choice. Her options form had to be in by the end of last week and her final choices were Art, French, History and Business Studies. Art she has always enjoyed. Her choice of history surprised me as she has always complained she doesn't like it. Apparently "history is much more interesting at this school". Glad to hear it! Business Studies is her makeweight, as there was nothing else that particularly wanted to do. French has become a favourite since she started at this school in September. I can't say enough positive things about her French teacher, who has somehow managed to enthuse Marie into working hard and using what is turning out to be a latent talent for languages. The UK National Curriculum is graded in Levels, with the average rate of progress being one full Level every two years. At the end of last school year Marie was graded as Level 4b for French (below average for her age). Suddenly she has shot up to Level 6a/7 (well above average) - in theory that is 5 years worth of progress in 6 months! At the parent-teacher consultation I said how impressed I was with how well she was doing given that she had only been at Level 4 last year. Bemused teacher said that simply wasn't possible! Amazing what a bit of effort on Marie's part can achieve.

Helen ... is also still loving the new school but had a disaster with her Product Design course when she lost a folder containing an entire term's coursework. Faced with the near impossibility of catching this up we have come up with a Plan B. She dropped Product Design - a shame in a way as she was good at it, but she did admit that the amount of work was beginning to overwhelm her even before she lost the folder - and is planning to add in Maths and ICT (information technology) next year. Usually young people in the UK who take A level course take three subjects at A2 (advanced) level and one at AS (advanced subsidiary) level. Helen will end up with two A2s (English Language and Media Studies), two ASs (Photography and Maths) and a BTEC (technical / vocational qualification) in ICT. If she decides she wants to go to university she may need to take a second year of Maths to boost that up to an A2, which she could do during a gap year, but currently she thinks she would rather look for an apprenticeship in something media or ICT related, possibly web design.

Too Much Stuff, Too Little Time!

Life here is busy! On that edge between very busy and crazy busy. My mum is waiting to have her second hip replaced, which will probably happen either the end of this month or early next. Meanwhile she has been needing more help than usual. She had a stairlift fitted in her house on Monday which should make life quite a bit easier for her. Getting upstairs had become a mountain to climb. We weren't sure how easy it would be to fit a stairlift as her stairs are narrow with an inconvenient bend at the bottom. After consultation with the nice man from the stairlift company I (yes, me! Apparently I missed my vocation as a stairlift engineer!) came up with a neat solution that worked - so I am feeling quite pleased with myself now it is successfully installed.

The last couple of weeks have been a marathon of school appointments for Marie and Rose (still can't get used to this name change!). There was an information evening about how Rose's school teaches numeracy, a GCSE options evening for Marie, and parent-teacher consultations for both. I'll write about those later. In amongst that, Marie has been having trouble with the wires on her braces, requiring two extra visits to the orthodontist. Helen is in a state of wild excitement as she heads off on a five day school trip to New York today.

Meanwhile I have been busy with work and study. I am still working an extra day a week, which for complicated but good reasons may increase in the spring rather than decrease as I expected. Fortunately my current archive course module is palaeography (reading old handwriting), an area where have already have a fair amount of experience. As a result the course is not too time consuming. Just as well!

Book 6: F is for Five

Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The suggested theme for 52 Books in 52 Weeks for this week is Dickens. I am almost there as Arnold Bennett is an author who has been compared to Dickens. I remember reading and enjoying Clayhanger maybe 30 years ago but haven't read anything by Arnold Bennett since until I picked up this free eBook. I had forgotten just how good a writer Bennett was. Like Dickens he was a journalist who also wrote fiction. Like Dickens his work has a very strong and acutely observed sense of place - Victorian London for Dickens, the early 20th century Potteries for Bennett (the Potteries is an area in Staffordshire which was traditionally the centre of - duh! -English pottery making). Bennett's fictional Five Towns based on "Bursley" are in reality Six Towns centred on Burslem.  Like Dickens, Bennett is a master of language. What in a lesser author could be dense and turgid text in Bennett's hands becomes finely crafted description. In some ways very little happens in Anna of the Five Towns, a coming of age story in which the heroine Anna begins to break away from her miserly father and experiences the first stirrings of romance, but I found I couldn't put it down. My one disappointment was in the ending. It seemed to stop very suddenly without any of the subtlety that is characteristic of the rest of the book. Maybe it was because this is one of Bennett's early works.

As a flavour of his style, here is the first sentence:

The yard was all silent and empty under the burning afternoon heat, which had made its asphalt springy like turf, when suddenly the children threw themselves out of the great doors at either end of the Sunday-School - boys from the right, girls from the left - in two howling, impetuous streams, that widened, eddied, intermingled and formed backwaters until the whole quadrangle was full of clamour and movement."

I have a sense that Arnold Bennett's works have fallen out of fashion among the classics. It's a shame as they deserve to be more widely read.

Snow!

After a bitterly cold week we finally got our first (and only?) real snow of the winter, with three inches or so falling overnight. Rose and Marie built a snow-girl. As Rose pointed out, "you should know it is a snow-girl because it has plaits".

Book 5: E is for Eat

Eat Well Spend Less by Sarah Flower

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I don't have much to say about this one. I got serious about eating more healthily last year and thought this book might give my improved diet an extra boost and some new recipes. It was OK, but didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. There were a few useful and reasonably economical recipes I will probably try.

ETA: Coincidentally the topic for week 5 of 52 Books in 52 Weeks is Literary Cookbooks. I love the idea of The Jane Austen Cookbook. 

Book 4: D is for Darkly

A Darkly Hidden Truth by Fletcher Donna

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The series title "Monastery Murders" and the promise of dashes of medieval history and iconography intrigued me, although I am not generally a murder mystery enthusiast - I enjoy them occasionally, but it is not a genre I read often. The bargain price in Amazon's post-Christmas Kindle sale made me decide this book was worth a try. It turned out to be an easy and reasonably entertaining read, but I'm afraid I found the heroine Felicity rather irritating and the plot required me to suspend disbelief too far and too frequently. I was also bugged by both major and minor inaccuracies - a female ordinand in an Anglo-Catholic Anglican seminary? Sounds odd given that opposition to women priests is a defining characteristic of most Anglo-Catholics. American Felicity lectured by a policeman fo failing to carry her passport and visa while in the UK? Um, no, there is no requirement for anyone in the UK to carry any sort of ID. This is the second book in a series and not knowing what came before made it harder both to get into the book and to identify with the characters (how did the previously non-religious Felicity end up at theological college, I wonder?). There were aapects I enjoyed - the ways she brought in the anchoress Julian of Norwich and eccentric medieval pilgrim Margery Kempe, for example - but I didn't enjoy the book enough to want to go back and read the first one.

Next time I want a monastery murder with a medieval flavour I think I'll stick to Ellis Peters' Cadfael books.

For more reviews visit 52 books in 52 weeks.

The Iron Lady

Tevye and I decided that this year we would try to go to the cinema once a month - really, we should take more advantage of our on-hand babysitters! Our first trip was to see The Iron Lady, with Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher. We had seen mixed reviews. Some (most?) writers felt that the movie dwelt far too much on Maggie's old age and waning faculties; others praised it and felt it was well done.

We both came away with the same opinion, which was that it wasn't the movie we would have liked to see. We were in the "too much old age" camp and felt the movie put too much emphasis on an aspect of her life that ultimately isn't that significant in terms of the whole. While it did tell the story of her life and political career it did so in short flashbacks that never did more than skim the surface of a complex and interesting story. We both wanted more about her life and politics and less of the fictional (or loosely factual) "human interest". Our feeling was that the movie avoided any political subtlety and focused on Maggie the person in order to appeal to the American market. From the British perspective it completely glossed over the strong feelings, both for and against, that the Margaret Thatcher years still evoke.

Having said that, we were glad we saw The Iron Lady. While we would have liked it to take a different angle, Meryl Streep's acting was superb and carried the movie beyond what we felt were its weaknesses. Jim Broadbent as Dennis Thatcher was also excellent.

My Life in Facebook Updates

Haven't posted one of these for a while (apologies to those of you who have already read these on Facebook):


Why is my life like a series of scenes from Outnumbered? The latest one involved the car, toast, crumbs and the frustrations of a 5 year old who can't grasp the concept of lending money.

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Oops! Slight fail. Took Rose to school for the second time since September. Have maintained my 100% record of getting her there late ... Me: "Are you ever late when Daddy takes you?" Her (shocked): "No! Never!!!"

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Just found a Christmas tree bauble in the back garden. Why????

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Just started watching a period drama about a midwife in the East End of London, then realised it was set in the year that Tevye was born, also in the East End. Suddenly "period drama" doesn't seem quite the right description!

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Why do all three of my daughters have to hold conversations with me simultaneously on entirely unrelated subjects. This morning one wanted to know if I had any spare plastic folders, another was trying to work out what clothes she wanted to take to a sleepover, and the third was explaining the difference between digraphs and split digraphs (that was the five year old - she takes her phonics lessons very seriously). *Head explodes*

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And in sequence, the tale of Rose the rabbit-lion-rabbit:

Rose came home from ballet yesterday bursting with excitement about being a toy rabbit in her dance show. She has written down instructions to remind her what she has to do and pinned them up ready to practice before school ... "All the time. Bend down and jump." Not that tricky to remember for a rabbit!

Oh dear. Dance show disappointment. After a week of excitement about being a rabbit, Rose is now a lion. She is decidedly not impressed! Apparently lions do not get to jump.

Update on the Rose dance show casting saga. Sympathetic ballet teacher has reinstated her as a rabbit. Not only that, but she got to try on her costume last night and she is a PINK rabbit. A very happy pink rabbit.

And for those who asked on FB - I will try to provide video, but the show isn't until the end of March / beginning of April so expect a long wait!

Book 3: C is for Cake and Crag

The Tale of Oat Cake Crag by Susan Wittig Albert

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have been chugging gently through this series for a few years now - I see I read the first one back in February 2006 (reviewed here) and the rest at intervals since, getting through both the last two on train journeys up to Scotland. They are light, gentle reads that don't need too much concentration when there is lots of switching trains and hanging around in station cafes in between. The Tale of Oat Cake Crag is the seventh in the series and is essentially more of the same. Real biographical facts about Beatrix Potter's life mixed in with local colour, mostly likeable imaginary characters and anthropomorphic animals. The series has now reached the stage where Beatrix's marriage to solicitor Will Heelis is approaching but is still opposed by her parents. This book also brings in a real life hydroplane being tested on Lake Windermere and a rather less realistic visiting dragon. Occasionally the narrator's voice is irritating, but overall I like the style and the characters enough to be looking forward to the next (last?) book in the series when it becomes available on Kindle at a reasonable price. If you like Beatrix Potter's books and are interested in Beatrix herself in particular and the Lake District in general then this series is fun to read. If you hate anthropomorphic animals or anything a bit twee, avoid!

How appropriate! I just realised my header photo is one I took up in the Lake District a couple of years ago

Next up A Darkly Hidden Truth by Donna Fletcher, described as "a gripping modern mystery enriched by liturgy, iconography, and medieval history". I'm intrigued to see whether it lives up to the description.

Day Zero Project: Catching Up

I started the Day Zero Project back in October 2010 and after six months of enthusiasm mostly forgot about it. In a fit of New Year-ish-ness I decided to see what else I had checked off since I last posted about the project last April and what I would particularly like to do this year.

So, successes over the last few months:

• 11. Fit comfortably into a pair of size 14 jeans. Yay! I am now the proud owner of three pairs of size 14 jeans which I had to buy as every single pair of jeans (and other trousers) I owned had got to large. Pride forces me to add that a UK size 14 is a US size 12!
• 18. Buy a zoo membership and use it at least 4 times a year. Teyve and I took Rose to zoo at the beginning of the month, which I am sure is at least the fourth time we used our zoo passes, and possibly the fifth.
• 30. Swim in the sea - Spain in August.
• 31. Make a sand castle - ditto. 
• 36. Knit myself a sweater - it wasn't the greatest sweater ever, but I finished on in October.
• 54. Watch the entire series of Upstairs, Downstairs. I think we got to the end of Series 5 in July.

Hmm. Not that many, but it makes a total of 33 out of my original 101 ideas so far. I have also made progress on a number of others. I never imagined there was any chance of doing them all, but it is a fun way of recording ideas for things I would like to do and to at least occasionally encourage me out of my comfort zone.

This year I would like to achieve some of my fitness, reading and decluttering goals. Tevye and I are planning to try to go to the cinema once a month this year, I'm aiming to knit twelve pairs of socks (you can never knit too many socks, and I only made it to seven last year) and I am truly optimistic that I can reach my goal of losing 20 pounds, as I think I have already lost about 12 to 15. You can see my whole list here. 

Thirty Five

I haven't been doing Jen's 7 Quick Takes for a while but always enjoy reading hers (and others). This week she celebrates her thirty fifth birthday and asks ... "if you are older than 35, tell me about what you were doing at this age. How do you feel about that time of your life? Anything you'd do differently?"

I remember 35 as a particularly happy time. Helen (oh dear! I can't get used to this! I may yet simply revert to using their real names) was seven months old and I was still technically on a maternity break from working on my doctorate on medieval knights. In fact by that stage I was back to doing quite a bit of research but was not under any pressure to get a particular amount done, making it an enjoyable and leisurely process. I was able to work from home most of the time as a lot of the source material for the period I was working on is in print. The London Library's mail order service was a godsend at this time.  Tevye had spent nearly a year at home after taking redundancy from his previous job so took on a large share of the baby care. I think at this point he had just started doing some freelance work writing exam questions for a couple of days each week. I may have been teaching in London one evening a week, but I can't remember for sure.

I don't think I am looking back through rose-tinted glasses, but I honestly can't think of anything I would do differently. We were very fortunate to have a wonderful work-life balance where we both got to spend lots of time with Helen but also to do other mentally stimulating things. Rather to my surprise I had discovered I loved having a baby - with no small relatives or close friends with babies I had no experience of them before having my own, and had rather expected that I would find the baby stage boring. In fact, I adored it. Thirty five was good!

Book 2: B is for Beasts and Belfrys

Beasts in my Belfry by Gerald Durrell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I went through a phase of reading Gerald Durrell's books many years (decades!) ago. I picked this one to re-read for local interest as it describes Durrell's time as a trainee keeper at nearby Whipsnade Zoo where we have annual passes. It isn't the best of his books - not in the league of My Family and Other Animals - but was an easy, light read with his usual humorous touch. I enjoyed it more for being able to picture both the locations and the animals. Although the zoo has obviously changed since Durrell was there in the late 1940s, it still has many of the same types of animal, with at least some in the same locations.  I imagine some of the animals we see today must be the direct descendants of those Durrell worked with as the zoo has breeding herds. I read the Kindle edition, which has a few minor issues I presume are down to character recognition problems ("rn" turned into "m", odd punctuation and so on). These happened just enough to be a minor irritation, but not enough to outweigh the convenience of instant download and reading on the Kindle.

Next up for 52 books in 52 weeks ... The Tale of Oat Cake Crag by Susan Wittig Albert (C is for Crag. And Cake)

Two-Seaters

I want to get back to posting here more regularly, so expect some random off-the-top-of-my-head rambling. I'm not sure what it says about me that the first topic that tripped into my mind was toilets. I blame Bill Bryson, who commented in his bathroom chapter on the communal nature of such things in past centuries ... which reminded me that my childhood home had a two-seater! That put us in good company as, according to Bryson, so did Thomas Jefferson. Admittedly our two-seater was in a shed at the bottom of the garden and no longer functional. By the time we lived there it was used for storing garden tools rather than its intended purpose, but I imagine though that even in the 1960s there were probably few still surviving - if there were ever many around in the first place. Strangely, I can still picture it quite clearly ... a small brick-built building with a wooden door, with a wooden box-like structure running across the full width at the back with two suitably sized holes in the top. There was no plumbing, so I presume it was an earth closet. Why a two-seater I have no idea. It was a farm, so maybe a combination of family and workers meant it was in high demand. Unfortunately we lived there long before digital photography, and nobody ever thought to waste photographic film and record it for posterity.

I'll try to come up with a more delicate topic next time! Back to my Kindle now. I finished the Bill Bryson book and am about to start book 2 - Beasts in my Belfry by Gerald Durrell.

Book 1: A is for At Home

At Home by Bill Bryson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I rather stupidly chose a "chunker" of over 600 pages for the first of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks. I have only managed to get through two-thirds of the book so far, though I'm quite pleased to have got that far given that I also had to submit final assignments for last term's archive course module by Friday (including an essay I didn't start writing until Monday!) . I am going to post a review not despite not having finished the book as I don't want to get behind and I am determined to get to the end this weekend.

At Home is more of Bill Bryson doing what Bill Bryson does. Mostly I enjoy his easy-reading style, but this is not my favourite of his books. It is a history of domestic life which he hangs on a room by room tour of his home. In fact, the connections with the rooms are often pretty tenuous and he flits from topic to topic with an almost frantic speed, skimming over the surface of each. Often I found that just as he had aroused my interest in something he skipped on to something else. Still, I learned a little about a whole raft of subjects I knew nothing about before - why it does not work to build a house with iron or concrete, Capability Brown's landscape design, bedbugs, candlelight and the spice trade are a few that come to mind. Overall, though I quite enjoyed the book I also found it a bit too diverse and overlong.

52 Books in 52 Weeks

To encourage myself to read more this year and get plenty of use out of my Kindle I am copying Faith and taking part in the 52 Books in 52 Weeks reading challenge. The rules are:

• The challenge will run from January 1, 2012 through December 31, 2012

• Our book weeks begin on Sunday.

• Participants may join at any time.

• All books are acceptable except children books.

• All forms of books are acceptable including e-books, audio books, etc.

• Re-reads are acceptable as long as they are read after January 1, 2012.

• Books may overlap other challenges.

• Create an entry post linking to this blog.

• Sign up with Mr. Linky in the "I'm participating post" below this post.

• You don't have a blog to participate. Post your weekly book in the comments section of each weekly post.

• Mr. Linky will be added to the bottom of the weekly post for you to link to reviews of your most current reads.

To add a little spice I am going to add in the A to Z mini challenge:

Challenge yourself to read books alphabetically by Title and/or by Author.  Have fun searching out those difficult letters. For titles, the letter doesn't have to be the starting word. It can be any word in the title, but to make it more challenging try to find one that starts with the letter. This year I am making a bit more challenging by discounting any book that started with THE. For authors, it can be their first name or last name. Have fun with it and be creative.
A to Z by Title - Commit to 26 Books
A to Z by Author - Commit to 26 Books
A to Z by Title and Author - Commit to 52 Books

I don't want to be over ambitious so I am going to go for the 26 books by title option, with the word anywhere in the title.  I looked through the books I have already downloaded to my Kindle or have on my wishlist and can already cover most of the alphabet. This extra challenge will help me with the potentially paralysing choice of deciding which book to read next by narrowing it right down for me.

First up ... A is for At Home by Bill Bryson.

New Names for a New Year

I have been thinking for a while that Angel and Star are both outgrowing their blog names. I want to stick to pseudonyms for the sake of the girls' privacy, so I have decided I am going to switch to using their real-life middle names. The New Year seems like a good time for a change, so meet:

Helen (Angel)

Marie (Star)

And Rose (Cherub)

Tevye and myself will stay Tevye and the Bookworm. Whether or not I will remember I have changed the girls' names is an open question!

Taking Stock

I haven't blogged enough to look back at posts over the past years, so I am doing a little family stock taking  instead. Littlest first.

Cherub - has had a good year. She is still loving school, maybe even more so now she is in Year 1. She likes learning and likes rules, so school is a good fit for her. She is much more confident than a year ago, though still extremely cautious about anything new and reluctant to confront anything that might be even the slightest bit scary. Reading and writing are coming along nicely. She isn't ready to read on her own yet, but I can see the skills slotting into place. Her spelling is pretty much entirely phonetic - mostly legible but entertainingly wrong.

Star - loves her new school. Long may it last! Star and school are in some ways not a natural fit (rules? what rules?) so feeling positive makes it easier for her to deal with the constraints. She has made two new close friends, as well as keeping up most of her old friendships. It's hard to believe she will be starting her GCSE courses next summer. She has to choose her options next term and is thinking of French, Art, Child Development and possibly Business Studies (in addition to compulsory English language and literature, maths and science).

Angel - this has been the year when she has become a young adult. She passed her GCSEs with creditable grades, is tackling A levels with her usual competence, loves being a sixth former and being at her new school, has proved herself working in an adult's job, and has managed to juggle school, work and a social life. Oh, and has acquired a boyfriend! She is stretching her wings and getting ready to fly, and though it is a little bittersweet to see her moving away from us into the adult world I am very proud of the capable, independent young woman she is becoming.

Tevye - mostly more of the same. Overall he has a good work-life balance which makes up for the frustrations that sometimes go along with his work, and the recession hasn't had any noticeable impact on his company. His eyes have been up and down - he has a condition affecting the cornea which is not degenerative but fluctuates in severity and gives him some vision problems. A separate pair of occupational glasses for computer work and reading has helped, and glasses with a new prescription he collected this month seem to have improved his vision significantly.

Bookworm - lots of changes for me! This time last year I was about to start my archive course and now I am already half way through. Getting a job has been a big change, but I am absolutely loving it. I find it hard to imagine anything I would enjoy more. The content of the documents I am working with is fascinating, the working conditions are good and I like the people. It has been quite hard fitting in an extra day of work each week over the last couple of months while still trying to fit in my study time, but I have enjoyed the variety of doing something different and getting to learn more about how the archive ticks. I will probably be doing it for another month or so, after which I will be back to working my usual mornings only routine - which is now going to seem beautifully easy! The other big positive from this year has been that I have managed to get into much better eating habits, which have had the nice side effect of causing me to effortlessly lose weight. I have no idea how much as I have no scales, but I am a size smaller and have had to throw out clothes that got too big. I have been eating lots of fruit and veggies, sticking to wholemeal and wholegrain as much as possible and mostly avoiding sugar and junk, which I compensate for with a couple of squares of dark chocolate and a small glass of wine most days.