![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Time slips
Dec. 27th, 2022 05:54 pmQuite late in the pre-Christmas period, we learned that S. would be holding her traditional Christmas morning party this year. I say "traditional", but it's a tradition that had lapsed a year or so before lockdown (she spent a couple of Christmases abroad, apart from anything else). It's always a good party, but it's always a struggle to fit a traditional Christmas around that break in the middle of the day; and it's not as if I'd been well ahead in preparations, anyway. No problem: we have no-one to please but ourselves, anyway. We observed Christmas on a one-day delay, and I'm very happy with that solution.
So on Christmas Eve I took the first of the two steps of the process of preparing the Christmas cake; on Christmas morning we drove into Newcastle for S.'s party, which was small but perfectly formed.
And on Christmas afternoon I took to the sofa with a detective story: what could be more seasonal than that? Except that what I picked off the pile turned out to be a very emphatically Hallowe'en story - three murders echo each other over a period of a hundred years, a ghost is reported to walk, and the third death, which leads to the story being unravelled, takes place over Hallowe'en. If you were looking for a seasonal mystery novel to read over Hallowe'en - and you weren't likely to be triggered by the very horrible deaths of three young women - I entirely recommend Martin Edwards' The Frozen Shroud. But 'horrible' is the right word, I think: the resolution plays entirely fair by the rules of the Detection Club (as it should) but the journey there is through the territory of horror.
Yesterday was Christmas Day Plus One. We opened presents and ate roast turkey: I bought a turkey joint from Sainsbury's, which probably wasn't as good as doing it myself but enabled me to do all the vegetables and trimmings to my satisfaction.
And today is Boxing Day Plus One, and a dinner of leftovers is in the oven.
Must get back onto real time. Have a Literary Clock (with thanks to the Guardian for the link).
So on Christmas Eve I took the first of the two steps of the process of preparing the Christmas cake; on Christmas morning we drove into Newcastle for S.'s party, which was small but perfectly formed.
And on Christmas afternoon I took to the sofa with a detective story: what could be more seasonal than that? Except that what I picked off the pile turned out to be a very emphatically Hallowe'en story - three murders echo each other over a period of a hundred years, a ghost is reported to walk, and the third death, which leads to the story being unravelled, takes place over Hallowe'en. If you were looking for a seasonal mystery novel to read over Hallowe'en - and you weren't likely to be triggered by the very horrible deaths of three young women - I entirely recommend Martin Edwards' The Frozen Shroud. But 'horrible' is the right word, I think: the resolution plays entirely fair by the rules of the Detection Club (as it should) but the journey there is through the territory of horror.
Yesterday was Christmas Day Plus One. We opened presents and ate roast turkey: I bought a turkey joint from Sainsbury's, which probably wasn't as good as doing it myself but enabled me to do all the vegetables and trimmings to my satisfaction.
And today is Boxing Day Plus One, and a dinner of leftovers is in the oven.
Must get back onto real time. Have a Literary Clock (with thanks to the Guardian for the link).
