Monthly Archives: July 2015

The Taste of Murder by Joanna Cannan

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The Taste of Murder cover

The Taste of Murder by Joanna Cannan was published in 1950. The original title seems to have been Murder Included, but in the US it was published under the title Poisonous Relations, so confusing, I can’t see any reason for changing the title.

Joanna Cannan came from one of those families which produces a lot of writers over different generations. All three of her daughters wrote, mainly pony books which I certainly remember reading as a youngster. They were the Pullein-Thompson sisters, but Cannan was completely unknown to me.

This is one of the many books which Peggy brought me from the US but as Peggy herself said, it’s not one of the best. It suffers from having no really likeable characters.

While Sir Charles d’Estray is on holiday on the Riviera he asks a widow to marry him, more or less on a whim. Bunny is the widow of a French poet, used to leading a very free and easy lifestyle with lots of gentlemen friends. She fancies a change of scene and accepts his proposal which means she goes back to his country estate which she discovers is very run down.

She turns the place into a guest house, much to the disgust of Sir Charles’s family and when murder ensues Bunny finds herself being viewed as the chief suspect.

I will try some more of Cannan’s books if I ever come across any, but I wouldn’t seek them out.

Greece

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It isn’t often that I feel the need to stick my head above the parapet and blog about politics but the crisis in Greece just goes from bad to worse and I have an almighty urge to knock heads together.

We all know that if an individual has a credit card then they are given a maximum sum which they can spend on it. So why did the countries who have loaned money to Greece not have something similar in place. The lenders have a duty to only lend what can be paid back, if they ignore that then as far as I’m concerned the lenders are more at fault than the borrowers are. Anyone who is owed money from Greece should just write off the debts and learn from their mistakes.

Apparently the UK is owed around £1 billion from Greece but for the Germans the sum is closer to 40 billion Euros. I haven’t been following the minutiae of the subject but I have heard that the Germans loaned the money to the Greeks so long as the Greeks spent a large part of the money on buying German goods, mainly armaments, which is something that I’m sure the Greeks didn’t plan on spending any money on.

This is a strategy which goes on in Third World countries with the so called overseas aid money from First World countries coming with long strings attached to boost the manufacturing in those countries.

This evening on the news I heard that the Dutch prime minister was the latest leader to wag a finger at the Greeks and tell them that they must abide by the rules of the European Community. What a laugh. I happen to know that the Dutch governments have been cocking a snook at European rules for years and years. They still have tax relief on mortgages there, something which they should have stopped when the UK did some 20 years ago when the EU told us to stop it. The UK government is always very quick to obey any rules whilst other governments just say – our people will not stand for that – and ignore the rules which don’t suit them.

At the beginning of the German bullying of Greece I said that as far as I was concerned it was come-uppance time for the Germans, a bit of pay back for what they did to Greece during World War 2, and I still feel that way. The Germans have completely forgotten that at the end of the war their debts were written off and more than that – they had money thrown at them so that there would not be a repeat of hostilities within 20 years – as there was after the First World War.

Meanwhile the UK was debt ridden and in fact it was only a few years ago that we paid the last instalment of our debt to the Americans. Angela Merkel was brought up in East Germany so she almost certainly doesn’t know that the difference between 1970s Germany and 1970s Britain were vast. I was in Germany in the 1970s and I was astonished by the country. Compared with Britain it was so wealthy looking and the standard of living was way beyond that in the UK. In 1970s Britain there were still bomb sites which still hadn’t been re-built on. Areas of housing in Germany which were thought of as being poor were in fact of a far higher standard of anything in the UK. That’s what happens when a country is given a blank cheque to re-build.

As everyone has been saying that the financial meltdown of 2008 will have to be paid for by generations to come – I see nothing wrong with expecting the post Nazi German generations to write off the Greek debt – as war reparations, a fine for what they did to the Greeks during World War 2.

Apart from anything else, have you had a look at the map of that area of the world. Syrian refugees are making their way there to get away from the mayhem in Syria. How easy it will be for the real bad guys, ISIS or whatever the hell they call themselves – just another kind of fascist if you ask me, to follow them to Greece when they want to, if we don’t get on top of it. And of course, Greece has loads of tanks and armaments which nobody wants to fall into the hands of nutters who will turn them against Europe.

We can’t afford to let Greece fail as a state, we stand together or we’ll fall together.

And another thing … I heard somewhere that Greece has actually already paid off the amount of money which they have borrowed, the money they still owe is actually all interest. If that’s true then shame on anyone for hounding them for more payments.

Garden and Bees

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back outside

I noticed that a lot of weeds were pushing their way through the bottom of the garden fence from the scrubby land at the back of our garden. Rather than risk breaking and squashing the plants in my border I decided to see if it would be possible to get at the worst of the weeds from the other side of the fence. The grass isn’t quite as high as an elephant’s eye, but not too far off it!

back outside + K

Check out my hideous gardening togs, they keep me well covered up anyway. First I had to force my way out there as the back gate opens out the way and there was a lot of greenery to push it past. Almost as soon as I started clearing away some of the rough grass, just by grabbing handfuls of it and pulling, I realised that I had uncovered a strange wee nest structure. I thought it must have been something constructed by a field mouse at first but a flurry of bee activity made it obvious that the inhabitants were bees. And yes, I do have ground elder creeping into the garden too, what have I done to deserve that?

Bee nest

So that was just about the end of my weeding, I pushed my hand under the fence into the garden to reach some goosegrass which was scrambling under it but I didn’t want to disturb any more bees. I could see that they must have at least one more wee hoose further along, going by their activity.

I’m quite chuffed that they have chosen to set up home so close to the garden, but I suppose to them it’s like being on Tesco’s doorstep, or maybe even Waitrose!
Bee nest

Bee nest

bee's nest

I feel I’m doing my bit to keep the bees happy anyway. I was a bit worried that they would abandon their home because it was definitely more open to the elements than it had been. So I checked it out the next morning and overnight they had covered up the top opening as you can see from the photo above, and were going in and out via a lower opening. I need to get that book about bees which Joan reviewed recently, Dave Goulson’s A Sting in the Tale.

And this foxglove is one of the flowers which is attracting them, although I think that that is a different sort of bee.

foxgloves

Arbuthnott, The Mearns, Aberdeenshire

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One of the places which Peggy was keen to visit was the Lewis Grassic Gibbon Centre at Arbuthnott in The Mearns, Aberdeenshire. So one fairly fine day we drove up there to the centre which is really a cafe with a small exhibition at the back of it, telling the story of Lewis Grassic Gibbon who wrote the Sunset Song books amongst others. Those are the ones which most people have heard about though as they have been dramatised for TV a few times.

It’s years since I read the three books which make up The Scots Quair, but I remembered The Mearns which is the area they are set in was depicted as being a harsh and grim place but as you can see in these photos it’s rather lovely, in the spring/summertime anyway.

Arbuthnott River Bervie 1

The wee river is the Bervie and it meanders across the fields which are just down the hill from the church where Lewis Grassic Gibbon was buried just days before what would have been his 34th birthday.

Arbuthnott Gorse

Standing on a wee wooden bridge which spans the river you can look over to this field of gorse or whins as it is called in Scotland, and see a bank of primroses still blooming in late May, everything is at least two or three weeks later in flowering than in the south.

Arbuthnott Primrose bank

If you look closely you’ll be able to see the primroses again in the photo below.

Arbuthnott River Bervie

Grassic Gibbon had a hard life, having to join the army just to save himself from starvation at one point, and it’s sad to think that although he did eventually find success in writing, he died way down south in Welwyn Garden City, a town which I lived in for a short time at the back end of the 1970s, not a place of beauty as I recall.

I’m sure that I took some photos of ruined houses which were standing either side of the rough track which leads down to the River Bervie, but again they don’t appear on my camera, I think it’s a temperamental beastie – that camera of ours.

It’s the 1971 version of Sunset Song which I remember most fondly and I’ve discovered that someone has kindly put it on You Tube. I might just wallow in some nostalgia. I must have been 12 when it was first broadcast and it led to me reading the books.

Culloden Moor – a battlefield

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Culloden battlefield

After spending a night in Inverness we (Peggy, Evee, Jack and myself) went to visit Culloden battlefield which is nearby. It was the first visit for Peggy obviously but the rest of us had been there a few times before. Jack and I visited Culloden when we were on our honeymoon which it seems amazing to think was almost 39 years ago! Back then there was no visitor centre and I think the place was more atmospheric, probably for that reason. It was just a vast battlefield with grave markers dotted all around it.

Although they’ve tried to make the visitor centre’s architecure sympathetic with the surroundings, just the fact that there’s a modern building there detracts from the experience.

This is where the Jacobite Rebellion featuring ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ came to a disastrous end. The battle was fought in 1746 and was the last battle to be fought on British soil. You can read about it here.

Culloden

There are red flags and blue flags around the site, marking the various positions of the opposing soldiers.
Culloden battlefield

The whole area has lots of grave markers around it, where the various members of different clans were buried, as you can see from the photo below there are still people laying flowers at the stones, in remeberance.

Culloden

The photo below is a close up of the cottage which you can see in the distance in the first photo. It has heather thatch, something you don’t see all that often nowadays and similar houses were there when the battle was being fought, which would have seen it all.

Culloden house

I love it. I could quite happily move in there, okay it needed a good sweep out with a besom broom but I could make a home out of it. A kind chap took photos of us all perched on the seat outside the cottage and I thought that he used our camera but I don’t have the photo so it must have been on Peggy and Evee’s cameras, I’m sure he took two. No doubt I’ll see a copy of it sometime.

If you want to see more photos of Culloden have a look here.

Hampton Court Palace Flower Show

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I’ve been busy in my front garden recently, it has been almost completely neglected since we moved house over a year ago as I’ve been concentrating on the back garden. The opposite from what most people would do I suppose but the front garden is obviously not that private and I’m not so keen on being on show while I’m working. I hope to have some photos of the front garden soon though, when some of the roses which I’ve planted are in bloom. So after all that exhausting digging up of grass and planting, I was glad to sit down and relax by watching other people’s horticultural efforts.

Yes it’s Hampton Court Palace Flower Show time again. Apparently it isn’t as snobbish as the Chelsea Flower Show and is more visitor friendly, but I’ve never got around to visiting either of them, I’m a bit London phobic! If you’re interested you can read a lot of articles about the flower show here.

There don’t seem to be any videos online of the gardens yet, but I found the sketches of gardens quite interesting.

You can see some of the show garden drawings here.

The Silent Pool by Patricia Wentworth

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The Silent Pool cover

The Silent Pool by Patricia Wentworth was first published in 1956 and it’s one of the many books which Peggy brought me from the US.
It’s a Miss Silver mystery and of course she’s never far from her knitting needles and wool. In fact I’ve come to realise that Miss Silver’s knitting fulfills the same function as Mr Harding’s cello in Trollope’s Barchester books, it’s a way of relaxing and de-stressing, an aid to concentrating on a problem.

Miss Silver is visited by a retired actress Adriana Ford, she suspects that someone in her household is trying to murder her. Adriana suffers from ill health and she has several members of her extended family living with her. They all rely on Adriana for a roof over their head, she’s financing all of them and they know that she has left them money in her will. It seems that one or more of them want to get their hands on the money sooner rather than later.

This was an enjoyable mystery and I didn’t guess who the culprit was. There are a fair few ghastly characters in the book, which can sometimes be a problem for me as I have no real wish to spend my time with people I really don’t like. It was saved by a couple of really likeable characters though. I’ll be reading more by Patricia Wentworth in the future.