Of Shoes and Ships and Shopping Trips

The big thrill of the week was leaving the house to go to Sainsbury’s. Other than two short walks in my wellies, this is the only time I’ve been out of the house since my last shopping trip. This time, the OH didn’t have to push me out. I managed with a bit of revving to surmount the deep grooves in the snow in our drive, which was a bit like a train driving over points; then on to the already made tracks, courtesy of the milkman or the refuse collectors – not sure which. Once I’d travelled the 250 yards along two tracks carved into the snow, to the main road, it was all right.

The thaw of the last couple of days brought a rash of telephone calls for the OM. Having been exceedingly quiet for the last month, three calls came in on Friday and he will be racing out on Monday to deal with them all. If that sounds a bit stressful, I can assure you that the OM was like a gleeful child. There's nothing he likes more than being busy, and he's been extremely bored recently. Never have so many repeats of Poirrot been watched in such a short time.

I’ve finished the current book – Notes from an exhibition in which Patrick Gale uses the device of an exhibition of artist, Rachel Kelly’s various pieces to trigger off a chapter about an event or character in the book, related to her.

I felt he wrote in a very humane way about his characters, and one couldn’t help empathising with each of them, when one got under their skin. Since being able to feel for the character is an important element of a book to me, that was something that I liked about the book. I did begin to feel after a while, however, that there were just too many characters (each chapter told in his or her viewpoint) and I was losing track of what the first ones had contributed to the story. There were several chapters in which Rachel, both as an adult, and when young, featured. Also, Antony, her husband, as a young man, their four children and Rachel’s sister.

Since, as I said before, each of these extracts was like a snapshot of a particular time in a character’s life, and because these occasions were not chronological, I felt the story lost impetus, after a while. In fact you couldn’t really say the book had a strong plot. At the end, I felt somewhat unsatisfied. Possibly it is the sort of book that needs to be read a second time. I might find it more satisfactory, then, rather like Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which I enjoyed much more second time around, and which was constructed in a similar way.

We cancelled both the Reading Circle and Writers’ Circle meetings, because of the icy roads; so many side roads were still covered in snow – new snow on Wednesday – and iced over due to the very cold weather, so we will discuss our book in a month’s time at the reading circle.

I also finished listening to the serial – Six Suspects – which was totally far-fetched but I was nevertheless drawn back to find out who did it. Also the last part of Antonia Fraser’s memoir about her life with Harold Pinter – Must You Go? Who would have imagined that Harold Pinter would be such a romantic – filling the house with flowers when she first went to live with him. A non sequitur - I remember my father saying he went to the Pinters’ wedding – but that was Mr & Mrs Pinter senior, Harold’s parents.

The news of course has been filled with the earthquake in Haiti. Whatever wimpish statements we may make about our weather here, what a privilege it is to live in a country where there are no earthquakes or volcanoes or tsunamis to cause such devastation. We are indeed very fortunate here for many reasons.