Read: Winter Ali Smith ★★★★★ 📚
Amazing book, floats between time and characters, dreams & hallucinations. Funny too.
Her sister Iris is making nothing of her life. Sophia thinks of their mother, when Iris worked at the filling station, telling anyone who asked how her daughters were doing that Iris had a good position in an oil company.
Getting to be a bit of a butterfly blog. Walked the RSPB site at Ardmore last Tuesday. Highish tide & a strong breeze. The path was often protected by windward bushes. Lots of small tortoiseshells & some painted ladies basking. Devils-bit scabious flowering. Some whites too, mainly green-veined.
The Distance Between Us by Maggie O’Farrell ★★★ 📚
I enjoyed the telling very much, clever switching between characters, time & location. The whole story didn’t really move or gel with me much though.
Read: Bringing the House Down by Charlotte Runcie ★★★★ 📚
Great fun. Critic makes a right mess of mixing review & life in the most selfish way. The criticised act tears him apart. Online cancelling follows.
Burial of Ghosts by Ann Cleeves ★★★ 📚
Convoluted telling of a convoluted mystery. I enjoyed the twists and turns without any idea of the solution. An unstable narrator who recalls fragments of her past at different times.
Read: The High Places by Fiona McFarlane ★★★★ 📚
A quite varied and strange set of short stories. My favourite involved a colossal squid and the ghost of Darwin. There was an eternal mechanical budgie in another!
Lots of butterflies on the walk to Greenside today. Small tortoiseshells, Painted Ladies, Red Admirals and Green veined whites.
On Monday I was planning a walk but it felt a bit hot to go to the hills. I got the train to Milngavie and walked back down the Kelvin walkway to Glasgow.
Saw the first kingfisher on the Allander water which kept my eyes on every overhanging branch for a while.
Both the Allander and the Kelvin are lined with the pink stink of Himalayan Balsam. The path quite overgrown in places with nettles, thistles & brambles making shorts a poor choice.
Despite the warm weather the rivers are quite full. Less butterflies than I expected, green-veined whites all long the way.
Everything seems to have come to autumn early, brambles, acorns and already red hawthorn berries.
Once back in Glasgow I was looking across the river and saw a reflecting, the colour and shape of a foxes ear. Lying in the balsam above was a young looking fox. It didn’t look quite right, spread and very still. Zooming in I couldn’t see breathing and it was still when I made a loud clap. My second kingfisher of the day arrowed past.
Once I got to the science park I saw a couple of specked woods. Birds along the way: a kestrel, mobbed by wee birds; warblers, and goldfinches. I watched one goldfinch feeding a youngster in those incongruous hawthorn berries.
Two Small Heath Butterflies #butterfly.
Read: – The Sleepwalkers by Scarlet Thomas ★★★★ 📚
Quite a fevered read. Story told in fragments, notes, voice memos from different p.o.v. The narrators are all unreliable, even the voice memos, mixed up like an automatically generated transcript. Gothic & gruesome.
