Monthly Archives: December 2008

So this is Christmas..

.. or rather, was Christmas!

And given that I’ve lost a lot of fondness for the festival of capitalism as in the past couple of years it has proven rather a portent of ill-tidings rather than good; and given Granny and Dad’s recent heart issues, this year could’ve proven tricky.

Happily, things turned  out pretty well.  Lots of gifts were given and received with fairly resounding success – the dinner was ace, and ‘operation Spinning Wheel’ went according to plan as well*

Boxing day was spent lying in until it was time to meet some of the good folks from LTLF to take in the pitiful showing Forest put on against Doncaster, a 4-2 reverse was enough to cost the bronzen Colin Calderwood his job – I’m sad in a way, but well, going to watch Forest has been like visiting a dying relative at times under his tenure.

Tomorrow I’m off to Naaaaaarwich to watch the now managerless Nottingham Forest take on the Canaries, I am sharing this pain with Andy, Kat, Rachel and Drei – so that at least will make the experience fun, as will plenty of alcohol!

Aside from Christmas and Forestness I’ve had some misfortune in that I knackered my ankle playing football a few weeks back, indeed, to the point where I was signed off work for almost two weeks!  I’m back on my feet now although there’ll be no running about or kicking things for a while still.

Thanks to some help from Rob, though, Cat and I have now got an operational downstairs – not least thanks to some heroic painting efforts from my Dad.  We have managed to scratch the new floor already, which is annoying, but aside from that, everything’s hunky dory and it’s good to be back downstairs again!

* Operation Spinning Wheel was a mission to acquire a Spinning Wheel, funnily enough.  This is something Cat had expressed a desire to own, but typically isn’t simply a ‘thing’ you can just buy, well, it is, but there are different kinds – and they suit people differently.  So we went to see someone ostensibly to set up lessons for spinning, but actually to test out the different kinds.

Little was I to know they came in flat pack form – so I also ended up having to assemble it; the wood also came untreated, so I had to varnish it too!  It does look ace though, and judging by stuff that it has been producing that looks suspiciously like yarn, it seems to work as well!

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Testing


Testing this new widget on my iPhone; indeed, the subtly modified picture above was made using another iPhone application.

I am a semi-literate dunderhead..

I just scrape in to the realms of being semi-literate, crossing off 13% of this list of books, most of which look terribly boring, and a number of which I read as a child or was enforced to through study (although some of which, I’m looking at you, Thomas Hardy!) I never finished despite completing exams about them!

The key is thus:

Bold means I’ve read them
Underlined means I might intend to read them (or it, in my case!)
Italic means I love them (I bolded them too, since presumably to love a book one must have read it?)

You might want to join in too via the means of copying and pasting.  Or you may not!   

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling 
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible – I liked bits of Revelations.
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – does listening to the Kate Bush song count?
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare 
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – J D Salinger came highly rated, it was bobbins.  American bobbins at that.
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres 
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquezit’s a great Levellers song, though!
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
I was meant to for English Lit, but it was dull.
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
I was disappointed this wasn’t about the number.
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding 
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute –
Is that where the Clash song comes from?
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

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