Where the gargoyles play

It is a dear friend’s 40th birthday celebrations this weekend. I know. 40. She’s barely out of short trousers. An evening of conviviality is planned, after which a group will be retiring to an Airbnb. I will be retiring to a one-woman tent, because there’s a limit to my appreciation of conviviality and it’s about four hours. Which I think will be stretched to six this evening but I already settled my get away plan because I shall drive. This seems a better idea than clip-clopping around Oxford on my own in search of a cab, and I don’t Uber because, well, that company is dodgy as fuck.

I did have my own Airbnb booked (see how Airbnb has become the brand name for B&Bs, like Bic used to be for pens?), in a nice little canal boat somewhere in Jericho. They suffered an arson attack so had to cancel my reservation, which is the least of the concerns in that scenario. Who sets fire to a boat? Bastards. Anyway, I don’t know if you have checked the price of accommodation in Oxford during the summer, but it’s ridiculous. I mean, the Malmaison, which I think we can agree you might go to £150 on for a special occasion and if it was a particularly nice Mal, charges £400. Pull the other one, mate, it’s got tourists on.

Hence, I am camping, for £20 a night. My friend’s horror at this prospect is matched only by my horror at the thought of sharing a 3-bed house with 9 people. We have tacitly agreed to disagree, each confirmed in their own conviction that the other is a bit nuts. But we love them anyway.

I thought I’d get down early, get the tent set up and spend a few tranquil hours wandering the ole dreamin’ spires and hoping for a sighting of Peter Whimsey. Then I remembered. I don’t miss Oxford. Ms Just Turning 40 and I had this conversation, because both of us lived there for years and moved away, and really only remember the horrible inconveniences. The city is undoubtedly beautiful but only at dead of night or very early in the morning, when the gargoyles climb down to play and before all the bloody tourists wake the poor spires from their only-too-rare opportunities to dream. One day, they will set the gargoyles on the tourists and then we’ll see a proper Dr Who Christmas Special.

Now, I do have to go to Blackwells. Genuinely, because the new Mick Herron is out and he did a signing and I couldn’t make it and tweeted my sadness and Blackwells said they could get me a signed copy and keep it for me. And they did, because a bookseller’s word is his ‘Have you seen this new edition of Bond?’ Admittedly, that is only Baby Blackwells in Westgate but it’s also only a hop and skip to the mothership. And I have 6 inches of space on the TBR shelf (add own joke here about the most pleasure a woman can get from 6 inches), if we don’t count the three books that arrived from Blackwells yesterday, which we don’t. Because… we don’t want to.

So my plan is basically to yomp through town, collect books, retire to my tent with my preciouses, and NOT start reading the Herron or I’ll be late for dinner. At some point I have to squidge into a dress and heels and chuck mascara at my face, but that’s all of 10 minutes.

Right then. I’m off to pack the cafetière.

 

 

Reading roundup January – March

Technically, also a listening round up as I’ve been getting through audio books so fast I keep buying extra credits on Audible. The hard part is finding anything – as with Amazon, unless you know exactly what you’re looking for, browsing on Audible is a horrible experience.

Wins of the year so far:

London Rules – Mick Herron. Inevitably, because I am such a fan of the Jackson Lamb series. In this one, hopeless Roddy Ho has been giving out secrets to his girlfriend, which explains how he even got a girlfriend, and someone is trying to kill him. The only reason Lamb objects is because if someone is going to kill one of his Slow Horses, he’d prefer it to be him. Meanwhile, a terrorist cell is making use of the plans Roddy inadvertently passed along, the minister who engineered Brexit is gunning for higher office (and hoping his cross-dressing won’t come out), while the PM is hoping he can retire and write memoirs from his shed. Shed. Got that? Definitely not shepherd’s hut. Can Jackson’s motley crew save the day? Can Jackson get any more objectionable? You betcha.

Brilliance, A Better World and Written in Fire – Marcus Sakey. Seriously, I don’t understand how these haven’t been optioned into a Netflix series already. Picture a world in which 10% of people have abnormal abilities. Could be maths, science, pattern recognition, you name it. In the US, the government has responded by putting the most brilliant in concentration camps schools, where they are routinely de-humanised and driven to be dysfunctional. Nick Cooper is an agent with the Department of Analysis and Response (DAR), which hunts down criminal abnorms, and he’s one of the best. Nick finds out that DAR isn’t what it seems, the factions within the government, society and abnorm society start to follow up on their independent objectives, and the world is heading for a showdown.

The Smiling Man – Joseph Knox. I loved Knox’s debut, Sirens, which i also listened to, and which introduced us to extremely flawed DC Aidan Waits. In this follow up, Aidan is clean but back on the night shift with his partner Peter ‘Sooty’ Sutcliffe, who could give Jackson Lamb a run for his money in the being deeply unpleasant stakes. Aidan is investigating a dead body found in a disused hotel, while also battling his own demons in the return of the brutal father figure who traumatised and criminalised his childhood. There is a nightmarish, hyperreal quality to Aidan’s life, helped by the narrative being from his point of view and the fact that he barely seems to sleep. I’ve seen Knox’s novels described as ‘Manc noir’ and it’s certainly the dark underbelly of the city that we get to see.

The Ruth Galloway series – Elly Griffiths. I’m not going to name all the individual titles, but having read the first four novels in this series, I suddenly got addicted to them in audio form and listened to the next six. All the individual mysteries are strong and compelling, but almost more than that I like the overarching story of the difficult relationship between Ruth Galloway and DCI Harry Nelson. That’s what keeps me coming back, as with Susan Hill’s Serrailler series. Just as you think something might come of it, another blocker ends up in their way. Which may not be a bad thing, because try as I might I can’t see Ruth and Nelson actually living together with any degree of success.