Barbecue summer

So now the Met Office says we are going to need our brollies quite a lot next month. Apparently the scorcher of a summer they predicted is not now going to happen. What a surprise. So what happened? The Met Office says now that they only predicted a 65% chance of the UK enjoying a long hot summer. When they sent out all their press blurbs though these percentages seemed to have got lost in all the talk of a barbecue summer. At least the Met Office press office was warm as they basked in the glow from all the sunny news reports that deluged us in the spring. Actually it has been a barbecue summer after all for us but only because one of our ovens went on the blink.

Beacon Fell

The first time Mark and I set out to conquer Beacon Fell we actually only got as far as Beacon Fell View Holiday Park near Longridge. As caravan parks went it was fair enough but hardly matched up to the wonders we had been promised. We lurked around the higher reaches of Longridge for a while and tried to wax lyrical about the views it afforded. It was a fairly clear day, revealing a vista that stretched for miles but I had to concede that the view fell somewhat short of revealing the Isle of Man. We ate our packed lunches and turned for home. We're not the best map readers in the world and we do sometimes end up in quite a different place than the location we originally set out for.
The next week we set out again. This time it was an even hotter day. We made our way though Ribchester, passed Longridge without stopping and nearly drove past the turn off for Beacon Fell. Now these were great views. The top of Beacon Fell is quite heavily wooded and a road circumnavigates its summit. We bought some ice-cream at the cafe and took in the views. They stretch back over Lancashire and the Forest of Bowland. Spectacular. They say that on a clear day you can see all the way to the Isle of Man. I believe them. I only wish I'd known which way to look for it. Mark got his camera out and starting snapping away. I should have kept a closer eye on him but I was too busy drinking in the patchwork landscape that stretched one way and the fells and moorland that spread out the other. When we got home I found out that he hadn't taken a single photograph of any of the views. All the shots were either of me with the grassy summit and cafe behind me or the shadowy depths of the woods.

Little dog on the prairie

Harry is in seventh heaven here. An open space where he can get up some speed and he's found some sticks. Don't think that this is the last time that there will be a picture of a black Labrador with sticks on Badelynge. Harry has a vast portfolio of dog with stick photographs.
Debbie says this picture is Harry's homage to Little House on the Prairie. You know, the scene where you see the kids running down the hill to greet someone. No? I suppose that tv series was a long time ago. Here's a screenshot to demonstrate. I almost titled this entry Prairie Dawg but I suppose that was just Harry bringing out my silly side. Watch this space for further adventures with Harry and every loose stick in Lancashire.

A French detective

An intelligently written, tightly plotted detective story set in Paris. I do like a good detective yarn. Unfortunately many detective books are far from good. This book ticks a lot of the requirement boxes I look for when I'm selecting books. I like detective books that follow the detective almost exclusively; you walk in his footsteps, see what he sees, hear what he hears and match yourself against him with your deductive reasoning. This book never leaves the detective's side. So many detective books don't do this and you have to wade through chapter after chapter of scene changes following peripheral characters, sometimes even the killer, sometimes retreading the same ground with page after page of padded filler.
I was also impressed by how David Barrie managed to depict Paris. There is a city behind all the postcard views of Paris that we don't often get a flavour of in books and the author here is the guide that takes us there. I've read a few books set in Paris, the last was Louis Bayard's Black Tower, which featured one of history's first detectives, Eugene Francois Vidocq, but even that didn't really make you feel you were living there. I liked detective Franck Guerin. He's not flash, he's not hip, he's not on the make, he's just a straight down the line investigator, good at his job (although he's actually a disgraced spook on secondment), conscientious, a bit methodical but far from stupid.
I've got to say that I was as much lost at sea as Franck was amidst all the lingerie connoisseurs (who'd have thought there were such folk), models, photographers, artists, publishers and business people but the way we follow Franck's initiation into this region of the fashion industry greatly helped me find my way to dry land. Barrie's descriptions of the photographic clues, lingerie design and the models within them sometimes flirts with a mild eroticism that sometimes distracts both detective and reader.
I'd certainly be interested in reading any further books by Barrie and if they feature Franck Guerin well so much the better. Wasp-waisted is a surprisingly accomplished first novel. It deserves to find a wide readership.

Hedgehog love

Sometimes we can get sucked into the mindset that only the rare or hard to find creatures are worthy of our appreciation. I'm as guilty as any in this regard, see my Sound of Otters blog entry. I do have a soft spot for hedgehogs though. I love seeing one trundling along. There used to be one at The Tranquil Otter who I could watch walking along the decking on his rounds. Hedgehogs can walk up to two miles a night fact-fans. I learnt that factoid from the British Hedgehog Website. That's a lot of walking considering how short their legs are. Mark tells me I should credit him more when I use one of his photographs. See mate, you can photograph stuff that isn't a sheep.

The cat's meow

I've noticed The Guardian has been running quite a few articles with a bit of an anti-cat bias in recent months. Lots of people have pets, so it comes as no surprise that news services like to publish articles that feature them. They probably have people on staff who write nothing else other than articles about pets, desperately trying to engage us by telling us something we didn't know about our moggies, pooches etc. So far this year there has been quite a lot of articles written using the recession as an angle. First there were stories about cash-strapped pet owners abandoning their animals, or having to put them down. This was followed up by articles giving advice on how to cut the cost of owning pets. Every so often there is the obligatory hero dog article and recently the anti-cat article has crept up and pounced on us like... well like... cats on poor mices. We have had features about their bird killing habits. Another trying to tell us that cats aren't all that clever after all. They have been compared to our MPs; we need them but be wary of trusting them. And this week they've focused on scientific studies suggesting that cats deliberately use a sound in their cries for attention that mimics a high-frequency element that occurs in the sound of a baby crying, which we are hard-wired to respond to. To disguise this the cat purrs at the same time. Here is the article. The BBC ran a similar article the day before.

Blood Ties

Just watched my last weekly episode from my Blood Ties box-set that Debbie got for me Christmas. The series is based on the Vicki Nelson books by Tanya Huff which I started reading at the end of last year. Vicki is an ex homicide cop who has quit the force due to a worsening eye condition; retinitis pigmentosa which results in very poor night vision. The tv series doesn't use the restricted night vision angle as much as the books. It's not thrown away but beyond Vicki wearing glasses it is only touched upon a handful of times.
Vicki sets up her own one woman detective agency and soon starts getting roped into cases with supernatural elements. In the first episode, whilst unknowingly hunting a murderous demon, she encounters Henry Fitzroy who is also hunting the same killer. Henry is a vampire. He's also the bastard son of Henry VIII. The two hunters form a partnership which continues for the rest of the series. My favourite character though is Vicki's ex partner Detective Mike Celluci. The two of them argue like cat and dog throughout in a kind of feral love hate relationship. It works slightly better in the novels as, like a lot of book to tv adaptations, there is a lot of toning down going on. For instance, Henry's is bisexual in the books and continues a relationship with the other regular character Tony Foster (a street boy and Vicki's main source of info) at the same time as trying to woo Vicki. Tony gets completely dropped by the tv series and replaced by Coreen who is an overenthusiastic goth girl, mainly used for googling all things occult or supernatural. Despite all the changes the tv series is really enjoyable. Canada does make some decent tv. The show is set in Toronto, which I'm not convinced gets a huge chance to stamp its personality on the series. Yes there are plenty of city montages between the scenes, the CN Tower is viewed from many angles but beyond these and the whole sunset/sunrise riff Toronto could be almost any high rise city.
Then the series was axed. Well, not so much axed as tangled up in production issues that eventually resulted in the axe. Not as tragic as Firefly's demise but still a shame that a very watchable series ends after one season when dross like Lost and Heroes seemed to go on forever. At least my other preferred supernatural series True Blood based on the Sookie Stackhouse books has managed to get to that all important second season. Series three is planned already.