Hi everyone, good morning it is a weekday
but I'm going to take most of today off because I worked the past two Saturdays. I was working for the national centre for
writing on Saturday which was really nice. I realized that I haven't done any work things
with other people inā¦ six months, I think, apart from the book launch that I did with
Elle and this was a zoom call with about 40 people and everyone had their cameras on and
I was delivering a talk for two and a half hours but we were also having conversations
within that time too and ā¦yeah, I realized that I hadn't spoken to people in a work context
or in any context for quite a long timel it was quite nice. I'm going to take most of today off and I
really like doing that actually at the moment, taking some time off midweek if I've been
working weekends because it means when I go for a walk it's much quieter and that is very
good. So I thought that I would vlog today. I'm also going to make some hot cross buns
throughout the day, they need to be proved three times, I think, so I'm going to be making
that in between reading, going for a walk, and doing some speed cleaning with you, if
that's okay. Holding myself accountable, I need to do some
hoovering, very exciting, but infinitely more exciting for you because it'll be sped up. Anyway I thought at the beginning of this
vlog I would show you what has arrived in the post this morning, I've bought myself
a couple of books, I never do that do I [sarcasm] I mean what a treat for myself. I decided to buy a couple of Catherine Laceyās
books because I was thinking I loved Pew so much which I read last year, it was one of
my favourite books of 2020 and she has a backlist and I have not gone into that at all so let's
see what that's about, so I bought a novel and also a collection of short stories by
her. This was the novel that appealed to me the
most which is called The Answers ā¦when was this published? 2017m so this one is very recent too, it says
āout of options, Mary signs up to an audacious experiment masterminded by a troubled Hollywood
actor. Mary is to play his emotional girlfriend,
alongside a maternal girlfriend, an anger girlfriend and of course an intimacy team. Each woman has her debts and her difficulties,
her past loves and her secrets. When the experiment changes Mary and the girlfriends
find themselves exposed to new perils, foremost among them love ā Then this is the short
story collection, it really reminds me of something elseā¦ Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey,
perhaps, bit of that and maybe a bit of Debrorah Levy, I don't know. Anyway it has French flaps, we know that we
love a French flap. It says āCertain states are hard to shake,
or so Catherine Lacey's characters find in these 12 tales of breakups, grief and strained
family ties. In āplease takeā a bereft wife gives away
the shirts her husband has left behind. In ātouching peopleā a flirtatious widow
takes a honeymooning couple to see her husband's grave. In āthe four immeasurables and 20 new immeasurablesā
a young woman overwhelmed by her own feelings and the feelings of others tries to make sense
of her relationship with a buddhist monk.ā What I really loved about Pew was how atmospheric
it was and also how effortless the writing was especially when it came to families and
the subtle unspoken things hanging in the air when characters were interacting, so I
think I'm probably going to really enjoy her short stories because short stories or at
least the kind of short stories that I love really rely on those tiny intricate details
to build tension really quickly. So these are two new books I was going to
say are for my shelves but actually no they should go on the book trolley right here,
until I have hauled them. And then I also bought twoā¦ do we call them
board games because they're not, they're card games. They're escape rooms. Mr M and I have been playing a few escape
rooms, he got a group of three Unlock escape rooms from our friends for his birthday last
year and we ended up playing them around Christmas. I don't know why it took us so long to get
to them but we played them around Christmas and really liked them, you download an app
that times how long it takes you to solve the clues and get out the room. It plays atmospheric sounds and stuff, it
was really, really good so I've bought us another three of those Unlocked. This one is Unlock numberā¦ because I think
they come in numbersā¦ it doesn't say but this one is called Mythic Adventures, so there
are three different types and they go from easy to hard, and then I also bought another
Exit game this one is smaller and cheaper, I think that this one costs about 20 pounds/25
pounds, I think about 25 pounds, but what I really like about these is that once you
have played them you can then give them to a friend if you would like to they are replayable,
you're not destroying anything and what frustrates me about this brand of escape room called
the Exit game is that you have to destroy the game as you play it. So recently we played this version of an Exit
game which is called the Enchanted Forest, I got it for my birthday from my godmother
and it was really, really fun but let me show you insideā¦ you have to cut out bits to make different
shapes to then use within the game itself. Whilst it's fun to cut out things and solve
clues that way, obviously the reason that they have done this is because they don't
want you to pass this on to your friends, capitalism, they want everybody to buy a copy,
don't share them! So that is a downside of this, it is much
cheaper than the other games I think this was about 11 pounds but you do have to destroy
it. Snother downside of this one is that it was
originally in German I think so this one I don't know if it's the case for all of their
games but it rhymed and the way that it had been translated made it still rhyme but it
was really forced: āA little tailoring is just the thing for the dress with the bow
and a little bling, the bow is not quite long enough so give things a turn, that's the stuff.ā I don't know, it just seems a bit cheesy. I kind of enjoyed the cheese at the same time
though, so I'm not going to complain about it too much and plus clearly we enjoyed it
because I bought another one in the series. The one that I bought this time is called
the Sunken Treasure, it says āset sail on a treacherous quest for the legendary treasure
of the Santa Maria. While investigating a mysterious shipwreck
something goes terribly wrong and you are trapped underwater. Can you solve the riddles of the wreck and
recover the treasure before your time is up?ā This one also doesn't come with an app like
the Unlocked ones so it's less atmospheric in this way, still fun though. Anyway I'm going to crack on, do some speed
cleaning, I'm also going to finish listening to Passing by Nella Larson which I'm loving,
so I'll talk to you about that once I finished it. Time lapse please! The flat is looking smarter and the dough
is doing its first rise, its first prove. I will link the recipe that I'm using for
hot cross buns in the description box down below. It's a Paul Hollywood one on BBC food and
I'm substituting a few things simply because the first time I made it I didn't have all
the ingredients that he said that I needed but it worked out fine so I'm just doing the
same thing again. Very minor things. I think it says that you need to use mixed
peel but instead I'm using the zest of one orange and two lemons and then I think it
calls for just sultanas or just raisins but I have some mixed dried fruit from when I
made mince pies, so I'm just using that and as I said last time it was fine. I finished reading passing by nella larsen
and I think I mentioned in a previous video that there are several different audiobook
versions of this and I chose the one narrated by tessa thompson because I'm a big Marvel
fan and it was a delight! It's a very short book, I think the audiobook
is only three and a half hours, it felt longer not because it dragged or anything like that
but just because I felt as though I came to know these characters so well. It felt like I spent so much more time with
them than I actually did. I'm aware that as I'm filming this it's near
the end of the month so I will be talking about this in a wrap up soon but suffice to
say I actually enjoyed this much much more than the vanishing half which is by britt
bennett and came out last year and that is based on this book Passing, I think that's
because the vanishing half is quite plot heavy whereas this really isn't. Passing unlike the vanishing half is not about
two sisters who've drifted apart, it's about two friends, two lighter-skinned black women
who are living in Harlem in the 1920s, they haven't seen each other for ten years then
they run into each other at lunch and they catch up. One of them, Claire, has passed over, so she
is passing for a white woman, married to a white man who knows nothing about her past
and our protagonist Irene is married to a black man and the two of these characters,
Claire and Irene, they get tangled up in each other's lives and there was also something
about it that reminded me of Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, these two people
who are inextricably connected but acting in extremely different ways, both have the
same fears but are responding to them again in extremely different ways and there is that
violence that is just constantly in the background of both stories. I thought Passing was incredible and if you
haven't read it yet I really recommend picking it up. I'm going to go for something very different
now, I think I'm going to pick up a crime book, I am going to go for The Lost by Claire
Mcgowan, as you know (I know I am a broken record but) I have been looking for a book
or a series of books that will match my love of the frida klein series by nicci french
and I have yet to find that series. I did start reading the Vera series and I
liked it but it's not got a patch on frieda, so I'm going to try this, this is about a
forensic psychologist who's called paula mcguire who's from a border town called let me tell
you let me find it ballyteran which is on the border between northern ireland and Ireland,
she used to live there then she moved to london and now she's come back because some cold
cases may be linked to some new disappearances, some teenage girls who have recently gone
missing and she has some secrets in her past from the 80s that I don't think the rest of
her workforce know about, so that sounds really intriguing, always here for crimes within
crimes, or secrets within crime books is probably a more apt thing to say, so I'm going to start
reading this and then I will need to add the fruit to the dough once that has proved, I've
left it rising for an hour and then I'll come back to you tell you how I'm getting on. Thatās all! I am loving the Clare McGowan book, I think
Iām already about a third of the way through and Iāve only just started reading it but
itās very easy to read, very engaging, yes there are some cliche things in it, some predictable
things, you know, she fancies her boss and theyāre probably going to have an affair
but itās not as straightforward as that might seem, there are lots of things going
on under the surface and I just really believe in her as a character. Iām finding her complex which is wonderful. I think the reason that I wanted to read crime
today is also because we finished watching the latest series of unforgotten. I think itās possibly my favourite crime
drama, with Nicola Walker who was a queen, and there were three seasons, I didnāt realise
that there was a fourth until Jean told me. I was kind of glad I didnāt know that there
was a new series because it comes out weekly and this meant that we could watch it all
and (no spoilers) but the end of that season, I just thought it was very unnecessary, it
was very good but unnecessary and I wanted to read something that would help with that,
to ease that, and this is definitely doing the trick. I will report back in my wrap-up with how
the book ends up because obviously with crime it really does depend on what the outcome
is, you know, how easy it was to guess/. You want that really good balance of being
able to guess some things and therefore feeling like youāve done some of the work as the
reader but also being surprised but not in a way that is infuriating, so you find out
that someone who youāve never been introduced to committed the crime and how are you supposed
to help solve that if you had never met them? I hate that. It really does rely on the ending but so far
Iām enjoying the writing very, very much. I need to turn the dough now into hot Cross
buns, 12 hot Cross buns, and then I need to let it rise for another hour during which
time Iāll go for a walk, Iāll take you with me, and then I need to make the crosses
to go on top and I never knew what those were until I made them the other week and theyāre
really not exciting, itās just a paste using flour and water, then it can go in the oven
and then I can eat them. I would love to knowā¦ very important question:
how are you eat hot Cross buns? I just like them with butter but a side of
cheese, which I think Iāve also mentioned in a video and someone commented saying there
is never anything wrong with a side of cheese and I wholeheartedly agree, but do you have
jam? Do you Marmite? What do you have? Let me know in a comment down below. I am so thrilled with how they turned out. I havenāt eaten them yet, Iām being good
because they should cool for a bit. The glaze that you put over the top I think
is supposed to be apricot jam but I donāt have that either so I just mixed some orange
juice with sugar and thatās what I did last time and it tasted really good, so thatās
cooling and then Iāll devour one or several. I am about halfway through the Clare McGowan
book now, the lost, and still absolutely loving it, itās a really good pace, lots of things
are happening but a lot of it is backstory, so Iām covering secrets and not just things
happening in the here and now, it is a good balance of character development and plot. Right now Iām a big fan. Fingers crossed that Iāll still be a big
fan by the time we get to the end. Iām going to wrap this up now but I also
wanted to mention I know that I have spoken about cunning folk magazine, they are a beautiful
magazine fully illustrated, they publish short stories, poems and things to do with the witchcraft
and folklore, I think theyāre great. Their new issue, the water issue, is coming
out next month which you can pre-order now and I have a new poem in there, a long poem
called āthe anatomy of the seaā which I really enjoyed writing so Iāll leave them
in the description box down below if you happen to be interested. I would love to know what youāre reading
at the moment in a comment down below, let me know if you have read any Claire McGowan,
I have a feeling Jean may be a fan but maybe Iāve misremembered that I donāt know. I will see you next week. I hope you have a good weekend and Iāll
be back to talk to you about all of the books that I read in March, sending lots of love
to you all, bye!
