What I’ve Been Doing Lately

Not writing, unfortunately, and not much book reading either, hence the lack of blog posts.

What I have been doing is:

– growing big, crunchy, delicious radishes.

Freshly picked bunch of radishes

Apparently what you need to grow large radishes is lots of sun, lots of water, lots of organic fertiliser, and being ruthless when thinning the seedlings.

– sewing a quilt.

Multicoloured quilt with hand quilted stitches

Hand-quilting while listening to podcasts or audiobooks is very relaxing and I have now managed to use up almost all of my fabric and batting stash, so hopefully I will not be tempted to do any more sewing.

– painting my bedroom pink. It looks very cheerful now.

– chatting with producer Lucy Butler about a television series she’s working on.

(I’ve also been doing less fun stuff, such as working at Day Job and having an infected tooth extracted, but you don’t want to know about that.)

Some miscellaneous memoranda:

– From the Smithsonian Magazine: An Icelandic Town Goes All Out to Save Baby Puffins. Did you know baby puffins are called pufflings? Pufflings!

– Here I am, being quoted in a dictionary! (I do not think it is a proper dictionary.)

– Excellent discussion here regarding whether Timmy the dog from the Famous Five was a border collie or not. I especially liked the speculation about why George in the new BBC series is wearing modern clothes while the rest are dressed in 1950s clothes (“Maybe she is from our time and Uncle Quentin invented a Time Machine and she got sent back”) and whether Julian grew up to be Tory MP Julian Fawcett from Ghosts.

– Speaking of Ghosts, the fifth and final series is released in November. I love this show and I’ll be sad to see the end of it. (Obviously I mean BBC Ghosts, not the American one, which looks awful, although hopefully it’s making the original creators lots of money. Fellow Australians, you can watch Series 4 of the proper Ghosts on ABC iView now.)

3 thoughts on “What I’ve Been Doing Lately”

  1. How lovely to hear from you again! And how super exciting about the TV series :0

    I have watched both versions of Ghosts and while the BBC one is obviously superior, the American one is not *totally* terrible.

    Radishes and quilt both very impressive, congrats 🙂

    1. Thanks, Kate! I’m very proud of the radishes, even though the seeds did all the hard work. And the quilt is now on the sofa, being warm and comfy!

      The Montmaray TV series is progressing slowly, not helped by the writers and actors strike. Making television is so much more complicated and expensive and difficult than making a book.

      I’ve only watched the trailer of US Ghosts and that was enough for me. It would be interesting to see how they’d translated the jokes and the history to a new setting, but I like the British ghosts so much that I could never truly accept new versions of them.

      1. Fair enough. and if you have doubts, I wouldn’t take the plunge. The American ghosts have some interesting twists, but they are also much less likely to stick to their appropriate period sensibilities and more likely to use modern slang, which does grate on me a bit. The gender balance is a bit better though!

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