Balmy Novembers and good lives.

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It’s incredible, really, how the temperature seems so completely haywire.  Even if the trees start dropping their leaves, and I spent all day yesterday raking them up and bagging them, it is still quite warm out there and in the day time you can get away with wearing just a t-shirt.  How crazy is that.  In one corner of my garden I saw some of my spring crocuses peeping through the soil and I want to say ‘no no no, not yet, this is a mistake, go back to sleep!’

I planted well over 200 bulbs and I worry about them (and all my hard work).

That does not mean I want it to be miserable and cold and raining and freezing, not really.  I’m sure it’ll come though, all that misery, but for now we have nothing to complain about.

I’m really trying not to write about the last book I read: I did not really enjoy it as much as I thought I would.  It seemed too long, the characters in the end too boring even if that was maybe Linda Grant‘s intention, writing about a generation that ‘had it so good’.  I suppose that is my own generation, a generation that was brought up in the West and most of whom were not directly involved in any war, that just got on with life, and if an American male may have stayed out of the Vietnam war by marrying an English woman, and who started as hippies and drop-outs, lived in squats, smoked pot and then came through and settled down in a job that paid enough to buy a house in London (yes, this was before the prizes rocketed sky-high) and …  well you can go on.  Linda Grant writes well about this, she evokes that kind of life in which, on the surface, nothing happens: ordinary people who have kids, whose parents have secrets or who don’t get on with them, who suffer slight setbacks, have health problems maybe, or who miss out on getting married and it is not actually clear whether that is because of a childhood traumatic experience or simply because they are who they are.  So in the end you realise that there are quite a lot of things happening but they are related in a very undramatic way,  almost as if these events are barely worth mentioning, they are looked at from a distance.

Well written as I said, but towards the end I just wanted it finished, be done with it.  And I am, I have finished it and perhaps after all it made more of an impression than I was willing to admit when I read it….

There’s a conundrum, just like warm autumns: you like them but don’t trust them, because there’s something missing, something makes you feel uneasy because not quite right.  Not for you, anyway.

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