And yes, I’ve been watching a gorgeous concert on Sky Plus about Rodgers and Hammerstein that has left me with a wide choice of ear worms and rejoicing because my young adult children have reached the right age to appreciate the songs and storiesI love so much. Okay, my student daughter is talking about cultural signifiers and how the music reflects an era that isn’t one she thought it was. My son just says they’re happy, and he feels the world is short of happy right now. I don’t think anyone is going to argue with him, are they?
This means that my Christmas plans have now expanded to include looking out for old musicals on TV and recording them. Not the King and I though, because I always cry buckets at the end. I don’t know why, because I know what’s coming… But that’s for another time. Right now, I’m thinking about my favourite things because, guess what? It’s Monday and it’s raining. If I believe the forecast then it’ll also rain on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, so there’ll be plenty of raindrops on the last roses in the garden because it's still peculiarly warm. There are also cute whiskers on a young ginger catling who’s started hanging round with our cats and comes bouncing in for fuss while his owners are at work.
His owners know and have offered to stop their teenager cat, which is what I think of as a catling. That’d be good for a laugh, I thought to myself, because my cats aren’t the territorial sort. Instead, they have a pride of pals with whom they hang out and woe betide annoying dogs or rival cats. They station themselves all along the lane at the back of our house, high up on fences or gateposts and little yappy dogs who think they can tackle them end up bouncing frantically along and yapping even more frantically as they get more and more wound up. And that’s without mentioning what happens when they spot a squirrel who’s thought they could move in. He usually ends up at the top of a tree or a telegraph pole chittering angrily while the cats watch and wait until they get bored…
So anyway, I told Ginger’s pet humans that he was no trouble and they said he was lovely but a fussy eater. Hah! I thought. He’s not fussy when he has my cats’ Iams, which they’re happy about him having because the matriarch of the pride, Catling, likes him because he does as he’s told and is smaller than she is. So I offered them a bag of it from the sack I bought and now he too is an Iams cat and comes to me for some fuss whenever I come outside or pops in if it's wet, then goes to his loving owners for weekends and evenings. It left me thinking that there might well be a story to be told about a timeshare cat, so watch this space! The Cats Protection League call them ‘Six Dinner Sids’ after a children’s story, and we have a lot of them round here. One substantial black and white one has a tartan collar with an ID disk on it that reads. “I am not hungry and have a loving home.” So far, he hasn’t managed to get it off, but I bet he’s working on it.
I too have been working hard, so my first draft of the fourth Esther and the Professor book is now finished. I’ve even got a title, and it’s ‘A Darker Kind of War’ and a new research book has arrived today. I’d searched for it for ages and winced at the price on Amazon because it’s quite old, and then the nice man who looks after the lifeboat museum told me I could get it for £13-00 from the Dorset Family History Society. Guess what? They’ve got lots of other out of print books on ‘print on demand’ so I shall gradually collect those.
Think of me this week as it rains. I shall be curled up with coffee or tea or hot chocolate while I time travel back to the time when millionaire’s playground Sandbanks was known as Parkstone on Sea and used by the Army. There we were, with Poole as the fourth most likely place to be invaded, so they put top secret research activities there. Between that and the Flying Boats that were our only air link to the rest of the world, it's no wonder we had so many spies.
If you feel like curling up, then here are some books on special offer this week at 99p UK and 99p US
As Tia Brown we have ‘Vintage Girl Summer’ which is one of the Windy Bay series and let me indulge my love of all things vintage. (I’m vintage too, which is much nicer than ‘old’ and a few chips and knocks and a bit of fading only makes me more lovable.) It’s an older man, younger girl romance, with a hint of tricky family relationships and a good dollop of reconciliations and discovering that hard work makes dreams come true.
Then there are four books from the Christians Cross series, which are Times Veil
Nature Strikes Back No greater love and Mistletoe and Mischief. Watch out for the Gremlins because you’ll meet them in ‘By Special Request’ my Christmas anthology, which is out four weeks on Thursday. I hope you’ll like it because every single story was in response to a call out for ‘which characters would you like to hear more about.’
So till we meet again, think of me in soggy Poole. Today’s picture is one I took on a day when I decided that I'd rather be wet than stuck indoors and it's of a beautiful egret. And now I’m singing, with apologies to Frank Sinatra ‘egrets, I’ve seen a few…’ There’s no hope for me, is there?
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