Home is good, if difficult.

So, having been back for a week I've now spent four weeks at home out of the last ten. That's clearly not ideal, if for no other reason than I've forgotten how to do the home thing and am gradually re-indoctrinating myself into things like "You need to do shopping" and "but first you need to defrost the fridge, because that's enough ice to sink the Titanic".

Not strictly about forgetting how to home, but probably related. Standing outside the front door thinking "I know I've forgotten something, what the hell is it? Oh, wheelchair. D'oh!"

The weather has been hovering around almost hot enough to sit out, I tried sitting out for tea yesterday as it was sunny, but had to come back in when I started shivering. Hopefully today has tipped over the edge into acceptable.

I did mean to post about the end of my trip North, but keep forgetting, so I may as well segue into that. Despite being back North for a fortnight I only got to see my Dad during the first week, and the last visit was just 10 minutes prior to the meeting about him. My sister wasn't available for a lift on the Friday or Saturday, and on the Sunday we arrived at the home after a good Sunday Pub Lunch at the Copper Mine near Crook (Oh, god, that mash looks stolid, OMG, but it tastes excellent! - though their Yorkshires were just too thick and weirdly chewy) to find that the care home had had an outbreak of (presumably) norovirus and was asking people not to visit. We could see Dad sitting in the garden, and actually had to call my sister back as she'd gone in through the garden gate, but spending time with him was out. That continued through until last weekend, well past the point I came home, but fortunately Dad never caught the bug.

One advantage of being barred from visiting is that it meant we had greater freedom to take my mother out (it was half-term so my sister was free). Mam didn't want anything special doing for her birthday, and through sheer incompetence I'd booked to come home the day before her birthday anyway, but we took her out to Seaton Carew (on the coast near Hartlepool, also widely known as Seaton Canoe after a famous faked death a few years ago), for lunch. The weather could have been better, there was a heavy sea fret and you almost couldn't see the sea from the other side of the promenade, in fact with the wind blowing the fret into your face it was downright miserable. But we spent an hour in the penny arcades (total expenditure between the three of us £5) and then found a fish shop for lunch - normal practice would have been to eat them out on the prom, but given the weather we went for the sit-down option. Service was slow, but the fish and chips were excellent when they finally did show up.

We came home via Seal Sands, which despite the name is primarily an oil refinery, complete with an oil rig sitting on the shore (a quick google tells me it's the 24,000t Brent Delta production platform, which is in the process of being scrapped https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-39747670). Despite that we did actually see some seals, about a dozen basking on the banks of a creek the road ran across.

All in all a pleasant few hours, even if the weather could have been better.

Books Read:

Burn Bright, Patricia Briggs

Latest in the Alpha and Omega series. As I've been catching up on both Alpha and Omega and the Mercy Thompson series, which is interlinked, I'll save the full review and do all four recent books together when I have a chance.

The Flowers of Vashnoi, Lois McMaster Bujold

Set before Cryoburn, this is very much a thematic sequel to At the Mountains of Mourning, about the Young Miles discovering the hangovers of the Time of Isolation and Barrayaran intolerance of 'Muties'. This time it's Ekaterin's turn. Beyond raising two toddlers (and a teenager who never actually directly appears), and wrangling Miles, she's also helping out with Enrique and Martya's latest butterbug project, which, inspired by Miles, has the aim of cleaning up the radioactive ruins of Vorkosigan Vashnoi (nuked by the Cetagandans in his grandfather's time). The idea is the bugs munch through the various plant life in the Vashnoi Exclusion Zone, concentrating radioactive chemicals, and deposit them at set points for collection and safe disposal. Ekaterin's part of the project is (as usual) to manage the bug's external presentation, in this case by highlighting how radioactive they are, which she and Enrique have encompassed by turning the bug's thorax into a representation of the radioactivity trefoil, lit by bioluminescence. They've just reached the point of field trials in the zone, but it never occurred to Ekaterin that someone on radiation-conscious Barrayar might find the trefoil pretty, or that the intersection of the Vashnoi Exclusion Zone and someones is not the null set.

Overall it's fairly slight, there's not much mystery to the mystery, it's more about Ekaterin being Ekaterin and inately good at people-wrangling in a very different way to Miles. (Miles could lead a Children's Crusade, Ekaterin is much more likely to bring them home and feed them).

French Destroyers: Torpilleurs d'Escadre and Contre-Torpilleurs, 1922-1956. John Jordan and Jean Moulin

Excellent book on the history of France's interwar destroyers and super-destroyers, fully up to the same standard as the books on their British equivalents by Norman Friedman and (with wider focus) D K Brown (unsurprising as Jordan is the editor of Warship International). Fascinating, but ultimately depressing as more were lost in combat with Britain and the US than against the Germans, and most were scuttled at Toulon. So good I had to talk myself out of buying Jordan's books on French Cruisers and French Battleships on the spot, and they'll definitely be bought in the near future. Searching them out on Amazon was an exercise in frustration, I've not found one search that will actually get me all of the books in the series, I actually stumbled on a fourth one, Battleships pre-1922, quite by accident earlier this week.