Any five things make an LJ post

[shewhomust]

On Wednesday evening durham_rambler and I went to the University Gallery, so that Gail-Nina could tell us summer ghost stories: why do we associate ghosts with winter, and darkness, she asked. "If the ghosts we see at night are doing what they did at night during their lifetimes, then my ghost will spend its nights sleeping, and thinking about breakfast." Her story, The Parasol, is all about the ghosts of summers past, half glimpsed in the dazzle and glare of bright sunlight - which works, certainly, on the imagination. What we need this summer, though, are wet ghosts, mysterious dampness and dripping, splashes in puddles where no-one is walking, shapes imagined in the falling rain as if in the flames of the fire...

And there'll be more summer ghosts at the Lit & Phil next month...

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On Thursday we indulged in an overnight in Harrogate for the Crime Writing Festival (which I have already written about in the Cornwell Internet blog: also syndicated to LJ as cornwell_feed, but I've removed some typos from the version on our web site!). The less professional version of that story adds that while it was fun, it wasn't as much fun as the various Con reports elsewhere on my f-list. I'm particularly jealous of the Dealer's Room: this doesn't exist at Harrogate, and won't as long as the event is sponsored by a bookshop! Waterstone's had done a good job of stocking up on books by writers appearing at the Festival, but that isn't the same as books, old and new, which might appeal to people attending the event. Ah, well, the positive aspect of this is that I was more frugal in my bookbuying than I might have been.

I also forgot to record that as we were leaving, we had a brief conversation with Zoë Sharp and her husband; they live high in the Cumbrian hills and had arrived later than planned as they had had some clearing up to do after the beck flooded. This was far from the worst of the floods, but "...and this morning the village green was covered with dead fish."

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Yesterday lunchtime, after shopping in Durham, we called in at the party for the opening of Julia Triston's workshop space in Fowlers Yard; the workshop, which was already buzzing with colour when we were there for the Fowlers Yard open evening, is now full of brilliantly coloured objects as well. An Indian-style dress, gaudy in red and gold and mirrors, is displayed next to two bright pink plastic chairs; a polka dotted bucked hangs by the sink, and Julia's richly embroidered portraits hang on the wall. I tried to take pictures, but my little camera was dazzled, overwhelmed.

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Quite by accident (we'd been listening to the news) we caught a Radio 4 programme in the Archive Hour series about David Munrow - full of good things.

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And in The Guardian, Laura Barton traces the routes mentioned in Jonathan Richman's Roadrunner - a splendid project, and one she approaches with a proper attention to detail:

For authenticity's sake I have chosen to make the trip in January, because, as Richman observes in Roadrunner (Thrice) on winding down his car window, "it's 20 degrees outside". Having consulted a weather website listing average temperatures for Boston and its environs, I find it is most likely to be 20 degrees at night-time in January.

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And that's five.

Comments

[ratmmjess.livejournal.com]

For those of us who grew up around Boston, hearing "Roadrunner" for the first time...and then hearing it again as you drove some of those roads, late at night...well, "secular epiphany" is the only apposite phrase, really.

Even now, I could, I believe, be around a bunch of Mass. men and women my age or a little older, and simply call out "Radio on!" and get a call-and-response going.