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Until last weekend we had two compost bins in the back garden. One is a (broken) plastic one which came with the garden (it wasn't broken when we moved in but in the last 20 years the plastic has cracked, it has a big hole in one side and the top part doesn't fit onto the bottom part). Also it has housed at least one bees' nest, though fortunately not this year.

The other is a wooden bin with a roof on top for inserting vegetation and a panel at the bottom from which one can in theory extract lovely new compost. In practice not so much as we don't turn the compost enough as it's a huge faff digging it out and then putting it back again. Also it was full, but with a large space behind the panel at the bottom which had not been magically filled by lovely new compost when I took out some for use earlier this year.

So last week our new rotating compost bin arrived, only requiring "a basic level of DIY skills" to assemble. Despite my doubts that we could muster one of these between us, M managed to put it together and erect it in a functional state.

I also bought a compost turner for the wooden bin, on the hypothesis that this would improve our efforts at rotating the stuff.

I then spent this morning turning the compost in the wooden bin, and moving half-composted detritus from the broken one to the rotating one. I also moved over some woodlice and wormy things on the theory that these are also necessary for the process. I was going to get rid of the broken one, but having discovered a layer of perfectly good compost under the detritus I thought I would leave it until I had used it up, and piled the non-fitting plastic bits back on top again.

Tired now.

Another lovely day, so I set out to explore a bit more of Cambridgeshire. Again I stayed relatively close to home, but chose a route that followed two pathways that I had wanted to cycle along for a while. I was armed with the largest scale ordnance survey map (or should that be the smallest scale, not sure), and acquired some cycling leggings complete with gel padding. I must say cycle padding has advanced a lot since the last time I bought cycling shorts, some decades ago.

I started off by riding through the Addenbrooke's hospital campus to get onto the DNA cycleway to Shelford. It runs beside the railway line and from the carriages I had often seen people cycling to and fro alongside the central colour-coded strip. This is made up of stripes of four colours to represent the four nucleotides of the BRCA2 (breast cancer) susceptibility protein. (This is from the description on the internet). There are also double-helix sculptures at the end. It was a lovely ride through fields, and very weird to see the same landscape that I was very used to from the train at a different angle, like cycling through a picture.

From Shelford I headed towards the Trumpington park and ride, to pick up the cycleway along the guided bus route to Cambridge. This is a project that had been in the news a lot, first for the many delays and astonishing expense of constructing the guided (or the misguided) busway (as the locals call it). Secondly there have been a number of accidents, as summarised in Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridgeshire_Guided_Busway#Incidents. I hadn't in fact realised there had been so many, though I was aware of some. Anyway, this afternoon it was incident-free and bus free, and provided a delightful ride free from motor traffic, and wasn't unduly crowded by cyclists or pedestrians.

The ride was about 9 miles long, and took me about an hour and ten minutes, including stops to look at the map, so probably consistent with an average road speed of around 9-10 mph.

Not being fond of having grey hair I've had coloured hair for a while, but I've always been able to rely on professionals to provide it, most lately my excellent hairdresser Ian.  This was my first attempt at DIY, and an exciting adventure for me.  Ian had in fact sent me a note of the shades that he uses, but I suspected I should stay off the professional dyes and get something formulated for amateurs. 

I also didn't spend a huge amount of time selecting the shade, because let's face it, it wasn't going to be exactly what was shown on the box anyway.  Ian uses Schwartzkopf dyes, so I chose one that looked about right (Mango Twist, if anybody is interested).

So after watching some YouTube videos two or three times and following all the instructions about patch testing and strand testing, and taking advice from T who has Experience (vaseline your ears!), I set to it. 

What I learned:

Dye Gets Everywhere!
Vaseline your ears (and all round your hairline).
A shower cap is probably a good investment, or worth nicking from a hotel room the next time you are at a convention (I had to tie my hair up in a Sainsbury's bag to let the dye take)
A silicone pastry brush is probably not as great as a brush actually designed to put dye on your hair

Anyway, I'm very pleased with the result.  It's very bright, but as T says, subtlety is overrated, especially in lockdown.  I will post a picture as soon as I can get one that I'm happy with.

Got my bike out today for the first time in months to take a trip into town.  Everywhere is very quiet, the few people visiting the few open shops (bike shops, food shops and chemists) enthusiastically practising social distancing.  Some have face masks, others wear gloves.  I have ordered some face masks from Etsy but they haven't arrived yet.  I have a scarf that I pull over my nose and mouth if I think someone is getting too close.

First stop the post office, to post an Amazon book, then Arjuna Wholefoods on Mill Road.  The Council have taken advantage of the current situation to dig up Mill Road (again!), so you can't drive across the bridge but by taking a detour down Argyle Street you can cycle over it.

Arjuna is a cornucopia of stuff you can't get in Sainsbury's: couscous (wholemeal, not sure if it's instant, should have asked, Oh well) wholemeal flour, herbs and spices, smoked tofu, tins of beans.  I could have filled my bike bag twice over, but I only have the one.  Maybe next time.  Then on to Superdrug for hair dye (I've never dyed my own hair, but a woman in her 50's has gotta do what a woman's gotta do).  Also scored some hand-sanitiser. 

I felt a huge relief as I got back without (as far as I can tell) having been closer to anyone but shop staff than 6 feet, and they were all masked and gloved.   Shopping has never felt so like living in a science fiction novel before. 

I missed my usual post last year because of being laid up with a broken collarbone after a car accident.  Somehow it knocked me out of my groove and I haven't got back to posting at all, which is a shame.  I'll try to post more in 2020.

The accident did however mean that I spent Christmas and January mostly lying on the sofa, reading and watching daytime TV.  I read 125 books in 2019, and in no particular order, these were my favourites.  The comments are brief notes that I made at the time to remind myself - apologies if some of them are bathetic.

Best SF&F

N Lee Wood Looking for the Mahdi  - Middle eastern politics with replicants.
PERRY Sarah Melmoth - Set in Prague, a careful examination of guilt and responsibility
CHO Zen - Sorcerer to the Crown - Entertaining romp, with a very forward heroine
WALTON Jo Farthing - Cosy Nazism in England.  Spine-chilling.  Some slightly annoying americanisms - due to publisher no doubt
MCCARRY Sarah All our Pretty Songs - A retelling of the Orpheus myth.  Novel and touching.
MILLER Madeleine Circe Circe exiled from the halls of her Titan family struggles to make a life for herself on Aiaia.  Myths retold from the view of the outsider.  Very engaging and I liked it a huge amount better than her first book.
KAY Guy Gavriel Children of Earth and Sky  Feelgood story about Venice and Dubrovnik and pirates and Istanbul at the time of the siege of Vienna.
LEE Yoon Ha Ninefox Gambit Breathtaking ride through a universe whose realities are determined by calendrical mathematics.
ELLIOTT Kate Buried Heart Third in a YA trology.  I thought it wrapped up really well, giving secondary characters their own stories.
HARDINGE Frances A Skinful of Shadows.  Ghosts in the English Civil War.  Terrifying and humane.  I could never guess what was going to happen next.

Best fiction

PETERS Elizabeth Crocodile on the Sandbank Thoroughly enjoyable and Egyptian archaeology seems realistic.  Amelia ought to have known where Caesar was assassinated, however.
RENAULT Mary The Mask of Apollo  (Reread)  Very plausible description of actors and acting in Ancient Greece.  Little reference to music however, and Nikeratos does not mention singing arias.
BARKER Pat The Silence of the Girls - The Iliad retold from the point of view of the captive women in the Greek camp.  Harrowing.
SAUNDERS KateThe Secrets of Wishtide - Detective story set in 1850s.  Entertaining, historical setting very plausible.  Options for women living in poverty explored with sensitivity.  She doesn't seem to have written more - why not?
ROONEY Sally Normal People - Conor's mother cleans Marianne's mother's house.  Marianne is bullied at home and at school.  Can they construct a relationship?  Crystalline prose, fresh writing. 
BURNS Anna milkman We are in Belfast during the troubles, inside the head of middle sister, an eighteen-year old girl who is being stalked by milkman, a paramilitary on the side of the "renouncers" as opposed to the "supporters of the state"
GRIFFITHS EllyThe Stranger Diaries - Modern school gothic in the vein of Carole Goodman.  Excellent
HARPER JaneThe Lost Man Nathan's brother Cam is found dead of thirst in the outback, below the grave stone of a legendary figure.  Gradually the family dynamics come to light. Compelling
MOSS Sarah Ghost Wall - Students doing bronze age reenactment, but then the adults decide to replicate a sacrifice.  Seriously creepy.  Reminded me a lot of The Owl Service
EVARISTO BernardineThe Emperor's Babe A black girl living in Londinium, is married to an elderly senator, meets and falls in love with the Emperor Septimius Severus.  Supported by her childhood playmate Alba and Venus, a transexual.  Boiling over with life, but can it end happily? In verse.

Best Non-Fiction

Harry Ayres Horace and me - Engaging look at Horace's poetry through his life and wine
SWEETMAN David Mary Renault a biography
PRYOR Francis Britain BC - Monumental
NICHOLSON Adam The Mighty Dead (Why Homer Matters) Interesting - has a theory that the roots of the story are in tribes from the steppes arriving into the med at around 2,000-1,800 BC.  Honour culture.  Troy a pre-established city but they speak the same language.
MACFARLANE Robert The Wild Places The man is clearly a nutter, spending nights out in the mountains in storms.
WINN Raynor The Salt Path An elderly couple lose everything and decide to walk the South Coast way, wild sleeping and living from month to month on tax credits.  Moving, gripping and humorous (Moth, the husband, keeps being mistaken for Simon Armitage)

I have a list of 125 books that I read last year. Here are the ones I most enjoyed, in order of reading. I've added some brief notes of what I remember about them, but my memories may not be entirely accurate.  I have included some novellas, but not short stories.

SFF

M R Carey - Fellside - a very grim tale of life in a women's prison, but worth it for the ending.
Emma Newman - Between Two Thorns (and sequels)  - hugely engaging exploration of fairy society which has stagnated in the Victorian era, while the human world has advanced to the modern day.
Naomi Novik - League of Dragons - a satisfying conclusion to the series
Claire Humphrey - Spells of Blood and Kin - Russian magic in Toronto.  I'm really hoping she is writing something else, but so far this is the only book of hers that I've been able to find.
Max Gladstone - Three Parts Dead (and sequels) - Um, these are just difficult to describe briefly. I suggest downloading a sample from Amazon.
Jo Walton -The Just City (and sequels) - The goddess Athena decides to set up Plato's republic in the past, on an uninhabited volcanic island.  Things do not go according to plan.
Gloria Naylor - Mama Day - Witchcraft in Georgia.  Reminded me a lot of Nalo Hopkinson.
Kij Johnson - The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe - Feminist Lovecraftiana, what's not to like?
Foz Meadows - An Accident of Stars (and sequel) - Worldwalking with insurrections, polygamy and dragons.
Charlie Jane Anders - All the Birds in the Sky - Magic and computing twine around each other like strands of DNA
T Kingfisher - Raven and Reindeer - Pen name of Ursula Vernon.  A delightful and inventive re-telling of the Snow Queen.
Nicole Kornher-Stace - Archvist Wasp - Mythic storytelling.  Amazon says:  A postapocalyptic ghosthunter escapes her dire fate by joining the ghost of a supersoldier on his quest to the underworld.
Lois McMaster Bujold - Penric's Demon and sequels, set in the world of the Curse of Chalion, where religion is a real force.   Penric is a young man possessed of a demon.  The first three are quite light in tone, the last two a lot darker and (I think) more interesting.
Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan books - I started doing a re-read, but have got stuck on Mirror Dance, where it all gets a lot more serious.
Alan Garner - The Owl Service - re-read in advance of a visit to the Blackden Trust, who were having an Owl Service day.  Story set in  a Welsh village in which the spirit of Blodeuedd periodically takes over a young girl to reenact the tragedy of  her marriage to Llew Llaw Gyffes.  Re-reading it again I was astonished by the density of the narrative, and also the subtle commentary on class and society in the 1960s.
Alan Garner - Strandloper - Spurred on by re-reading The Owl Service I finally made it through this book.  It's dense and mystical, and uses both 17th Century nautical and Australian Aboriginal vocabulary.  Having read Patrick O'Brian and using the internet I managed to make sense of the former, but it turns out that the Aboriginal language Garner uses was rendered extinct by the massacre of the tribe that he describes in the book.  And no, Garner doesn't approve of glossaries.
Martha Wells - the Murderbot Diaries - Murderbot is a SecUnit, a part human, part machine construct that has hacked its own governor module following its accidental massacre of numerous humans, and is trying to come to terms with this by watching the entertainment feeds.  Reminiscent of Aliens, with a lot of sardonic humour.
Lila Bowen - Wake of Vultures - Fantasy western set in 19th Century Durango (which is actually Texas, I think).  Our hero is born female, but adopts a male persona to become a horse wrangler.  He is is cursed with a destiny to defeat the Cannibal Owl, a monster who has been stealing and eating babies.  Thoroughly entertaining.

Other fiction

Curtis Sittenfield - Eligible! - modern reworking of Pride and Prejudice, set in middle class America
Elizabeth Wein - Rose under Fire - an American female aviator ends up in Ravensbruck.  The author's storytelling genius drags you through an otherwise unbearable narrative.
Patricia Finney - Do we not bleed - New mystery series set in Elizabethan England.  Our hero is a female smallpox survivor who is managing to make a living as a lawyer, disguised as her own brother.  Shakespeare is coaching her on how to present herself as a man.  This led me to re-read the Robert Carey series, of which she has written a number of new ones (as P F Chisholm) while I wasn't watching.
Chris Brookmyre - Black Widow - thriller told from the point of view of a surgeon who may (or may not) have killed her husband
Margaret Atwood - Hagseed - Retelling of the Tempest, set in a men's prison
Jane Harper - The Dry - Australian murder mystery, set in a small farming community during a drought
Anya Ulinich - Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel - graphic novel about a 2nd generation Jewish Russian immigrant woman

Non-Fiction

Christiane Ritter - A woman in the Polar Night - In many ways an odd story of a woman in the 1930s who leaves her children with relatives and spends a year in a hut with her trapper husband, who is himself absent for weeks at a time.
Tim Parks - Italian Ways - The Italian railway system.  Much more entertaining than it sounds, and quite revelatory about the Italians.
Edmund Gordon - The Invention of Angela Carter - fascinating biography, relating her life directly to her novels.  It made me want to re-read them all.
Paul Cartledge - The Greeks; A portrait of Self and Others - Not sure if this is actually a structuralist analysis.  The author demonstrates that the Ancient Greeks did in fact think in a series of binary oppositions.
Michael Scott - Delphi - A description of the significance of Delphi in the Ancient Greek world.  It explains the Amphictyonic League!
Rowan Williams - The Tragic Imagination - Brief but dense exploration of the whole of Tragedy, ancient and modern.  Has some interesting things to say about Sarah Kane (sheds some light on the Phedres we saw at the Barbican in 2016)
John Stubbs - Donne The Reformed Soul - Fascinating biography, and fitted in with my Patricia Finney reading
Nicholas Hytner - Balancing Acts - brief and lucid description of Hytner's tenure as director of the National Theatre
Edith Hall - Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun - fascinating and very readable analysis of the context of Attic drama.  I found out a lot of stuff that I never picked up in my degree.

To Sadler's Wells last week to see the above. It was a short revival after a well received run last year. I booked it months ago on the grounds that it might be interesting. It was astonishing.

Take Giselle, the romantic ballet par excellence. Lovely music, cod-medieval setting, beautiful peasant girl seduced and betrayed by an aristocrat, suicide, 2nd act with ghosts of betrayed maidens. Tutus.

Now destroy it. Set it in front of the concrete wall of a deserted garment factory where the dispossessed workers eke out a marginal existence performing for their ex-landlords. Swap the pointe shoes and the tutus for dingy body hugging clothes. Swap the music for ominous industrial noises, occasionally enlivened by the distorted echo of a tune from the original ballet. Swap the classical ballet steps for angular movements reminiscent of the factory machinery. Giselle herself is disturbingly reanimated inside the deserted factory, in a scene more like a zombie movie than a romantic ballet. The ghosts of the dead women, in blocked pointe shoes and striking the stage with bamboo rods, are genuinely scary.

Not what I was expecting. Highly recommended.

First attempt to post a picture on DW:

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Hmm. That doesn't seem to have worked.

Right, now let's try again:



Bingo!

I got out into the garden for the first time this year and have had to divide up the sedum spectabile.  If anyone would like some please let me know. 

It is a good filler plant, being unobtrusively green in summer, with flower heads that go red towards the autumn, and "adds sculptural interest" as they say, in winter.  Here is a link to more details - http://www.crocus.co.uk/plants/_/sedum-spectabile-brilliant-group-brilliant/classid.3592/. I'm not sure that mine is exactly the same variety but it looks pretty similar.  Description says grows in full sun on well-drained soil, but it seems perfectly happy on my clay soil, and in semi-shade.

I haven't posted for so long that I feel slightly inhibited about it. Nevertheless, having set up a dreamwidth account, here's a go at cross-posting.

Total books read in 2016: 96 which is about 20% down on usual numbers

Best SFF

My Real Children Jo Walton
Dreams of Shreds and Tatters Amanda Downum
Voyage of the Basilisk - Marie Brennan
When We Wake - Karen Healey
Dark Matter - Michelle Paver
The Race - Nina Allen
Tender Morsels - Margo Lanagan
Nobody's Son - Sean Stewart
A Calculated Life - Anne Charnock
Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Team Human - Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan
At the Mouth of the River of Bees - Kij Johnson
Ancillary Mercy - Ann Leckie
The Raven Boys - Maggie Stiefvater
Rachel Bach - Fortune's Pawn (and sequels)

Best fiction

Last Night in Montreal - Emily St John Mandel
Nora Sakavic - the Fox court (and sequels)
Track of the Cat - Nevada Barr -(and sequels)
Enough Rope - Barbara Nadel

Best non-fiction

Shifting Sands - Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson
I leap over the Wall - Monica Baldwin