Coronavirus panic-buying...

... as a wheelchair user turns out to look a lot like my normal bi/tri-weekly shop. Only so much you can fit in a wheelchair trolley and I hit that normally anyway.

Recent Reading 2-3-20

The Crow Trap - Ann Cleeves

It was a woman in her fifties. The first impression was of a bag lady, who’d wandered in from the street. She had a large leather satchel slung across her shoulder and a supermarket carrier bag in one hand. Her face was grey and blotched. She wore a knee-length skirt and a long cardigan weighed down at the front by the pockets. Her legs were bare. Yet she carried off the situation with such confidence and aplomb that they all believed that she had a right to be there. She took a seat, bowed her head as if in private prayer, then looked directly at the vicar as if giving him permission to continue.

And that's our first glimpse of DI Vera Stanhope. This is the first of the novels on which the long-running (currently filming season 11) UK detective drama is based, but a lot of people picking it up for that reason are probably going to be surprised, because Vera doesn't appear until that paragraph on page 53, and then disappears again until page 230.

Instead what we get are three gorgeous character portraits of the three biologists conducting an environmental impact assessment on a proposed quarry development in the North Pennines. Living in the isolated Baikie Cottage, things get off to a bad start when team leader Rachel (birds) arrives at the adjacent farm to find her friend Bella hanging in the barn, with a note that she knows Rachel is sensible enough to sort everything out. But Rachel can't accept that Bella had something bad enough happening in her life to kill herself without contacting her for help, so she, and her mother Edie, set out to investigate why Bella might have killed herself. Next up is Ann (plants), a bit of a snob, notoriously sexually active and married to a gay man, something she is finding less and less satisfying as she transitions from amateur botanist to professional, and as her affair deepens. Then there's the self-sufficient Grace (mammals) who if the novel had been written more recently (it's a 1999 release) would probably have been explicitly labelled as neurodiverse.

And then there's a second death, and Vera and her team arrive to investigate, installing themselves at the farm. And Vera still isn't front and centre, as the women form the lens through which we initially see her, and they gradually realise that she is keeping them at the cottage to draw out the killer, much as the tame crow of the metaphoric and literal crow trap is staked out on the nearby moor to draw in its wild brethren.

It's only in book 3 that Vera takes centre stage, and we learn the details of her own connections with Baikies cottage, inevitably - for those who've watched the series - through the machinations and misdemeanours of her egg-robbing father Hector. And her character portrait is just as well developed as those of the biologists. I hadn't really thought of Vera as being ambitious through watching the series, but when you think about it, to be where she is, versus how the police would have been when she started (especially as the novels are effectively set a decade earlier than the series), then yes, she would have needed more than a little ambition.

This is a little north of my childhood neck of the woods, though my birthplace, Morpeth plays host to a couple of scenes and a few details about Grace's un-named childhood hometown suggest it may be my parents' hometown Blyth (Cleeves lives in the neighbouring Whitley Bay). There are a lot of themes in the novel that are familiar from the series, with upper and lower class families interlinked by hidden strains, and business and private motivations criss-crossing each other. And of course there is the countryside of north Northumberland, with much of the story taking place on the moors and hills that lead up to the Scottish borders. And of course there's Vera, a woman who's perfectly willing to tell people to 'haddaway and shite!"

The one thing I wasn't a fan of was the denouement. Yes, it was adequately signalled, but ultimately it's cliched.

I was slightly surprised to find that Cleeves isn't a native Geordie, but clearly she's lived locally for a long time.

Brief Cases - Jim Butcher

Short stories from the Dresden Files universe, Harry's the most common protagonist, but he's only the protagonist in about half of them.

The first story, A Fistful of Warlocks is set in the Old West, with Warden Anastasia Luccio hunting down a warlock wanted for multiple murder with the help of Wyatt Earp.

B is for Bigfoot is the first of three stories involving Harry and Irwin, a boy who is half-Sasquatch, in this case helping 9yo Irwin deal with a bullying problem.

AAAA Wizardry is told within the frame of a class Harry is teaching for trainee wardens, which outlines his investigation methodology, and how he can get it wrong.

I Was a Teenage Bigfoot has Harry investigating another threat to half-Sasquatch Irwin.

Curses is Harry vs the legendary curse on the Chicago Cubs, who went 71 years without winning the World Series.

Even Hand is told from the perspective of underworld kingpin John Marcone as he finds himself caught in a conflict with the Fomor, and for a man who opens the story with a double murder, Marcone has some standards he won't walk away from.

Bigfoot on Campus, Harry gets the call to go save Irwin again. He's now a college football player, and has picked himself up a remarkable girlfriend. Unfortunately she has a father, who has his own ideas for her.

Bombshells, with Harry missing, presumed mostly dead, Harry's protege Molly is fighting, and probably losing, a battle to keep Chicago free of the Fomor. Then she's drawn into the problems of Justine, another of Harry's waifs and strays, which ends up with Molly, Justine, and werewolf Andi crashing a high-end party in the Chicago fortress of the svartalfar.

Cold Case, Molly, newly elevated to a position of power in the Unseelie Court, gets her first assignment, collect the tithe from the fae living in Unalaska, Alaska. Of course things aren't quite that simple.

Jury Duty, Harry gets called for jury duty, and the case is a slam-dunk, with the proverbial bullet-headed thug beating a respectable businessman to death on the street. And the bullet-headed thug (serving as his own defence counsel) even admits it, but says he did it to protect a little girl. The problem is, Harry believes him, and he knows the evidence is enough to damn him.

Day One. Mild-mannered coroner Waldo Butters gets to prove he's worthy of being a Knight of the Cross. I was slightly annoyed by this one because it pulls the 'I can't see anything without my glasses' cliche, though Waldo does explain in advance that he's just short of legally blind without them (OTGH the definition of legally blind doesn't work that way, it's based on corrected vision).

Zoo Day, This is told in three consecutive parts, narrated by Harry, his daughter Maggie, and Mouse, her assistance dog, as they go out on a day out to the zoo and each take a moment to protect the others from threats they aren't aware of.

Storm Front - Jim Butcher (re-read)

First of the Harry Dresden novels. Harry's the only wizard in the Chicago phone-book, and even with a PI license and a gig consulting for Lt Karrin Murphy, head of Chicago PD's Special Investigations, who get all the cases no one else wants to touch with a bargepole, it can be difficult for Harry to keep the wolf from the door. So when someone hands him $500 and asks him to find her husband, who has gotten into weird magic stuff Harry thinks his immediate problems are over. But Murphy simultaneously has a case for him, a double murder, with the hearts ripped from the chest of the victims, a call girl and the bodyguard of underworld kingpin John Marcone, who would really rather prefer that Harry called in sick for the next week, so that he can deal with the issue in his own way. So things get complicated, moreso when Harry, who isn't exactly a ladies man, finds himself unexpectedly in possession of a date. And further complicated by White Council Warden Morgan, who thinks the likeliest suspect for the murders is Harry himself. And of course there's the actual murderer to consider. Harry's going to be busy.

I like this for its fully developed world. Not only is Harry's magic fairly rigorously thought through, but we're effectively dropped in media res into Harry's already fully-developed life. This simply doesn't feel like the first book of a series, it feels like we're half-a-dozen books in, and while the story never openly addresses this being the opening book, when we need the background on something, it's there.

Recent Listening

Some friends of mine keep posting stuff by Scott Bradlee's PostModern Jukebox, whose thing is taking well-known songs and transposing them into other eras and styles of music, for instance Abba's Dancing Queen as 1920's Jazz, Mad World vaudeville style, or Gorillaz in the style of Ella Fitzgerald. It's a collective, with an ever changing cast of ridiculously talented musicians and dancers - it's not unusual for the vocalists to suddenly pull out an instrument and do their own solos, and everyone looks like they're thoroughly enjoying themselves. I was up early a couple of Sundays ago so started working through their videos on Facebook, and I'm still playing through them.

Favourites:

Don't Stop Believin' - Journey (absolutely incredible choreography/camera on this one) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UngXu2zwF9E&list=RDs60lYl_TeNo&index=21

99 Luftballon - Nena (Jazz) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TliE9rTrzXg

All the Small Things - Blink 182 (Sad Clown cover) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZoyCSffM7I

Zombie - The Cranberries (Soul) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiDKLltU118&list=RDs60lYl_TeNo&index=14

They've just released a cover of the Friends theme, covering every decade from 20s through 90s that features The Rembrandts (the original artists) and which clocked up 2.5m Facebook plays in a week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7ExHaKt2M

Obligatory Kitten Video

One of our kittens is a bit of a drama queen pic.twitter.com/oklQb6eTae

— Kittens (@kittensfolder) February 27, 2020