Spaghetti juncture

Divali mubarak everyone! We had spag bol again for our Sunday dinner, followed by individual apple strudels with our inexhaustible apple crop and the rest of the filo pastry. We did two weeks’ worth of quizzes and scored 8 on one and 10.5 on the other. Oh dear. Average now 9.66666666666666666666666666666666666666666 and so on.
A2 is now rereading Schrodinger’s Cat III: The Homing Pigeons by Robert Anton Wilson. Can’t find SC1 but the volumes aren’t contingent on each other and 2 out of 3 is not bad. Sex and drugs and quantum electrodynamics and all in the worst possible taste.

Moreshrooms

This lot seems to have sprung up overnight around an old tree stump. There’s not mushroom between them.
A2 tried reading The Lost Women by Tim Weaver but didn’t enjoy it and is now rereading (after, like, 45 years) Schrodinger’s Cat II: The Trick Top Hat by Robert Anton Wilson.
Happy Birthday Guida.
[update] Here’s what happened in the next couple of days. Change and decay in all around I see.

Ear We Go

The rotting logs blocking vehicular access to Scott Hall Playing Fields have been replaced with big stones but a few of the logs have just rolled a short distance away and this one is embellished with a fine crop of wood ear mushrooms. A2 passed it en route for her jabs which nowadays are done in chemist shops so no jabberwock or Salvation Army shop on offer.
A1 is reading Archangel by Robert Harris.

Friday Food

Our family dinners have been creeping back from Sunday to Saturday Night, then Saturday lunch and now Friday night, when we ate toad-in-the-hole with mash, multicoloured carrots, broccoli and caramelised onion gravy, followed by apple strudel made in the traditional way with filo pastry. So we couldn’t do the Guardian Saturday quiz and were reduced to asking Faye questions about syzygy, palolo worms, nerve cells and recent elections and discussing cloning techniques with Bob.
A1 is reading The Raging Storm by Ann Cleeves. A2 is rereading Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguru.

Saturday Lunch

Happy Independence/United Nations Day everyone!
Storm Austen is coming at us from the south and Storm Boelo from the north so we had our family lunch of baked potatoes, eggs and salads followed by plum cobbler before the roaring winds and pouring rain arrived in both directions. Hatches are staying battened down for the foreseeable but meanwhile we scored 9 on the GSQ, reducing our average to exactly 10.
A1 is reading Precipice by Robert Harris, about the relationship between socialite Venetia Stanley and PM Herbert Asquith in the run-up to WW1. Contains many letters from HA to VS, all of which are, astonishingly, genuine. Fun fact: the author is married to the sister of Nick Hornby, author of Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and others.
A2 is appropriately reading The Raging Storm by Ann Cleeves.

Chicken Tonight

A Saturday dinner, for a change, with roast chicken, potatoes, Yorkshires, carrots, broccoli, stuffing and gravy, followed by a Swedish apple cake. We did two weeks’ worth of quizzes and scored 10.5 on the first and 9 on the other, so our batting average is still above 10, just.

Sight of the Night: the Northern Lights over Potternewton Heights

Here is something we don’t see very often (actually we don’t see it all, but our phones can): the Aurora Borealis. And here it is again, with a small amount of structure.The telephone wires look messy because the wind was blowing. This display was seen throughout the UK.
And later, the Dwarf Mini had an outing to observe Mars passing through Praesepe, or the colourful Beehive Cluster, in the constellation Cancer. Mars is the brightest object here, slightly elongated due to its movement through the 1-hour exposure at 5am. The Mini isn’t powerful enough to image Mars as a disc, but it makes a pretty photo.

Coasting

Gez and Lucy drove us to the seaside for the weekend, stopping en route to admire a neolithic monolith in a churchyard:
It was a glorious late-summer day, and we travelled on to Bempton cliffs…
…where we saw a tatty one-eyed jackdaw

and a plunging of gannets. Later we went to Scarborough and observed the moon over the water. After fish and chips on the prom from Winking Willy’s, A1 and A2 went back to Green Gables Hotel but Gez and Lucy went out on the razz. They were up for breakfast though.Thank you Lucy, thank you Gez and thank you Caroline for looking after our cats.
And back home, to end the day, a rainbow:

Hell of a Sky

The sky lights up as the sun goes down.
A1 is reading Eden Falls by Vaseem Khan, who joins Abir Mukherjee and Ajay Chowdhury as South Asian UK-based crime writers turning their hand to (mostly US-based) thrillers. With mediocre results, it must be said. This one veers into technothriller/science fictional territory with a mysterious alien object crash-landing in the desert, and the efforts of a pair of ill-matched women to hunt it down, while being chased by the FBI, an Elon Musk figure and an Indian intelligence agent.
A2 is reading Land by Maggie O’Farrell; a historical Irish family saga with plenty of misery, starting slowly but galloping to a reasonably happy end.

Apple and Pear Pie

A fruity pudding is served after a meal of pork in cider and everybody is sitting around reading instead of getting stuck in. Afterwards we did the quiz, with long-distance input from Dave who was hors de hangover, and scored a not disgraceful 10.
A2’s bog book is The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow; a rather thin argument for M Theory. M is for, um, Maybe.

Critter of the Day: Volucella zonaria

Oh no, not another bee photo, even if it’s an exceedingly large and beautiful one. But it isn’t a bee; it’s a hornet mimic hoverfly, the largest of its kind in Europe and quite rare in these parts. Fun fact: it lays its eggs in wasps’ nests and the wasps look after its children. Fun fact 2: it’s also found in Battersea Park Nature Area (see below).
A2 is reading Eden Falls by Ajay Chowdhury (thank you A1); another Indian novel relocated to America, set in the near future and featuring an alien artefact pursued by several different security services and a techlord called Markus Noel.

Feed Me!

Here’s Ganny, crying for his supper.
A1 is reading Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson, which took ages for the plot to get going but the journey was highly amusing and entertaining. It’s about the somewhat farcical setting up of 1951’s Festival of Britain, part of which was a funfair in Battersea Park. This evoked childhood memories, as I was taken there in the mid 1960s and had three rides on the Rotor (mentioned in the book) until I was sick.
A2 is reading Agrippa by Robert Harris; ancient Roman war and politics, carried on in most brutal terms, so not unlike today.