Month: April 2015

Bloggage · Books · Friends · Reading

The Organised Criminal

MsWalsh1 Comment

Last week we were at a book launch – it was a friend of ours that was having the launch.

A book by a friend is always a dodgy thing.  It could be great but it might not.

Well today I finished The Organised Criminal.

Generally I’m not a great one for florid writing but in this time I lapped it up.  In this instance the sentences were short and sharp, maintaining a steady pace.

The voice of the book is that of Jay O’Reilly who is also the main protagonist.

On the opening page we find out that he’s heading home for a family funeral, home being Crossmaglen, Northern Ireland.  He’s not overly happy about being back – no that’s not right – he’s not comfortable being back but it’s good to see some old friendly faces.

I don’t want to say anything else about the story as that would give the story away.  A good sign for me is that as I come to the end I just don’t want to put it down – I have to find out how does it all work out and in this particular instance I couldn’t put it down.  Now all I want to is to read more by Jarlath.

Bloggage · craft · Family · Home · Life

Slow Progress

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Confession time – I hurt my hand from playing Nintendo 😦  At the time I was also making a baby blanket for my cousin, so the blanket kind of ground to a halt.

Ok it wasn’t just that my hand/thumb was killing me – it was also the fact that I’d decided to make this blanket with stripes that encouraged me to put off picking it back up again.  Don’t get me wrong – I love this blanket – it goes up lovely when you’re doing it all in the one colour.  However, a different colour for every row is a pain in the bum!  For the first few rows I didn’t weave in the ends – figuring I’d do it with the border – however I realised it was going to have to be done with each row if it was going to be well hidden.

On Friday night I dreamt that my cousin’s wife had, had a baby boy.  This would have been a good thing ’cause I was making a blanket for a girl – this might have been my sub-conscience trying to ease my guilt.  So although the plan for the weekend was to read I put it on hold and picked up hook & wool.

As I type I’ve got 50% of it done (no photo) – the fact that it’s 100 rows makes it easy to see your progress.  I also decided to post updates on Instagram as I went along:

Saturday Morning
Half way through the day…
End of Day / Sunday Starting

BTW the blanket is from this pattern: www.Lemonlaneblog.wordpress.com
If you do it – enjoy it.

I’ll post another photo this evening to show where I am by bed time.

Bloggage · Books · Life · Reading

A Scream In Soho

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I did it!

I bought a copy of A Scream In Soho from the British Library during the summer last year and started to read it shortly after Christmas but found it very slow going.

It took me a while to get used to the style of writing.  Words are spelled out using accent phonetics – if there is such a thing – you knew if you had a Cockney, Italian, Irish or upper class British character.  The other thing I found was that for the first 50 pages or so it was mainly scene setting and hypothesising and theories – it felt a bit turgid – like wading through tar.  On the other hand, once the first corpse is located, it takes off at a gallop.  It took me 3wk to read the first few pages and the other 200 pages took 3 days.

I must add that I was under a cloud for the first while got a confidence shot last week, which might also have boosted my reading concentration…

A Scream In Soho by John G Brandon

(Click on Image to be taken to the British Library Shop – better still go to the actual shop it’s heavenly)

Bloggage · Life

Change of direction…

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I have another WP blog but I’ve decided to use that one for photos and hopefully witter away about life it’s ups downs and questions.

It does mean that the out put might be increased a little bit but only just a little as let’s be honest I’m a bit rubbish about posting.  Mind you – you’d never know maybe 2015  might be the year I figure it all out…