Teaser Tuesday - Nov 25

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

I went up and down my tables like a ladder. I made the names of the Kings and Queens of England blaze across my mind like banners: Edward Edward Edward Richard Henry Henry Henry Edward Edward Richard Henry Henry Edward Mary Elisabeth James...

again Helen Dunmore's The Lie - this month's book group book.

Mutterings - Nov 23

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Seal :: Arf!
2. Grown up :: Behaviour
3. Rags :: [to] Riches
4. Collar:: Feel (what the police do)
5. Fears :: Tears
6. Yellow :: Belly
7. Link :: Missing
8. Patrol :: Army
9. Fancy :: Little (of what you...)
10. Ears :: Big (and Noddy)

Mutterings - Nov 16

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Drive thru :: Eugh! (sorry!)
2. Horse power :: Engine
3. Plates :: Meat (probably the cockney plates of meat lurking there!)
4. Coffee break :: Chat
5. Dress :: Sense
6. Ferrarri :: Red
7. Bangs :: Hair
8. Charisma :: Dazzle
9. Muffler :: November
10. Crossroads :: Serial (an old TV soap in the UK - I don't think I ever saw it)

Teaser Tuesday - Nov 11

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

I rolled a granite boulder to the head of the grave. I knew how quickly green would cover the turned earth.

Helen Dunmore's The Lie, all very elliptic at the moment, our book group book of the month. No doubt the direction of the tale will get clearer soon?

Mutterings - Nov 9

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Fencing :: Mending
2. Mediocre :: Attempt
3. 19th :: Century
4. Candy :: Man
5. Scorch :: Iron
6. Allergies :: Hayfever
7. Swirl :: Skirt
8. Level up :: Game
9. Modern :: Tate
10. Tasty :: Treat

Teaser Tuesday - Nov 4

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

'Did you know that Mr Barber's life was insured with his wife as sole beneficiary?'
The question was like a wire drawn tight at ankle level: it brought her down with a bump.

A final teaser from Sarah Waters 'The Paying Guests' I'm now in the courtroom drama stage of the novel - maybe the different phases are rather taut and enjoyable! Here's my previous tease from the book.

Mutterings - Nov 2

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Feelings:: Emotions
2. Bake :: Clam
3. Corrupt :: Management
4. Amber :: Insect
5. Awesome :: View
6. Peace :: Stillness
7. Benches :: Alpine
8. Sultry :: Glances
9. Choker :: Pearl
10. Juice :: Grape

Teaser Tuesday - Oct 28

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

When Monte called in for his regular cup of tea in the morning, Tom and Rachel were introduced. He was the double of Harold, although a few stone heavier and with permanent laugh lines etched into his face.

From Peter Lihou's Rachel's Shoe our BATS (book group of the month) - rather too many names in those 2 sentences for a teaser. I wasn't impressed, it felt like teenage fiction (though I suppose there's nothing wrong with that) lots of derring do and a little predictable - having recently watched Edge of Darkness I preferred the rather similar denoument of the TV series.

Mutterings - Oct 26

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Family :: Nuclear
2. Leather :: Armchair
3. Chunky :: Monkey
4. Shaking :: Fear
5. Suffering :: Servant
6. Pockets :: Deep
7. Loose :: Change
8. Show :: Girl
9. Vest :: String
10. Finale :: Grand

Mutterings - Oct 19

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Freak :: Out
2. Thrown out :: Pub
3. Wedding :: Ceremony
4. 99 percent :: Whole
5. Terminal :: Cancer
6. Culprit :: Thief
7. Bows :: Struck (I'm with the violins)
8. Stock :: Beef
9. Hospital :: Ward
10. Dodge :: City

Missed a week - we've been away!

Ginger shortbread

I cooked ginger shortbread yesterday for the during(!) morning service this morning and used a recipe from an old Scargill cookbook:

Ingredients

150g self raising flour
• 110g margarine
• 55g sugar
• 1/2 tsp ginger

For icing:
• 55g margarine
• 4 tblsp icing sugar
• 1/2 tsp ginger
• 1 dessertspoon syrup

Method

Melt margarine and sugar.

Work in flour and ginger.

Bake in swiss roll tin in mod. oven 20-30 min (yesterday I found it was around 20).

Melt ingredients of icing and pour on shortbread while it is hot.

Cut when cold.

The cookies that were also cooked - I'd provide a recipe but my notes have the following as the instructions:
Rub in marg
and the ingredients say 'milk' with no quantity - so we're lucky they turned out well!

Mutterings - Oct 5

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Candle light :: Carols
2. Kevin :: Bacon
3. Fireplace :: Stone
4. Pots :: Pans
5. Scarf :: Dr Who
6. Colossal :: Rhodes
7. Golf :: Ryder (Cup)
8. Construction :: First (First Construction in Metal is a work by John Cage)
9. Reason :: Sense
10. Washington :: State

Teaser Tuesday - Sept 30

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

The salami and olives seemed to have disappeared: inroads had been made into the ciabatta. Mentally he substituted grapes for the sliced oranges with cointreau he had planned. His attention was claimed in a quite other direction.

Taking another sentence to the end of the paragraph - another teaser from our book group book for the month. As with the last teaser - choices!

Mutterings - Sept 28

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. 20 :: 20
2. Spark :: (fly) upwards (from the Old Testament book of Job)
3. Hangnail :: and I
4. Distant :: Relation
5. Muffin :: Mule I didn't realise (or had forgotten the BBC had recently revived this)
6. Compute :: Does not
7. Bangs :: Explosions
8. Mattress :: Springs
9. Tense :: Future
10. Sarah :: Rachel

Teaser Tuesday - Sept 23

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

After this spectacular and, it seemed, defining reproach he felt he had only two options. One was to cultivate the life of the mind.

Anita Brookner's Strangers - I'm afraid option 2 doesn't appear for quite a few sentences so you'll have to remain teased both to the reproach and his other option! This is our book group of the month which I am, at last, getting down to! Here's Hilary Mantel's review of the book in the Guardian:

Sustained only by grilled sole, the pale repast of the dead, he haunts galleries and museums. Then, in the hopeless cause of cheering himself up, he locks up his gloomy flat and takes off to Venice. .... Each book [of Brookner] is a prayer bead on a string, and each prayer is a secular, circumspect prayer, a prayer and a protest and a charm against encroaching night.

Mutterings - Sept 21

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Equality :: Justice
2. Strappy :: Underground (probably via the straps for holding onto)
3. Kitten :: Sex
4. Program :: begin (showing my pascal roots!)
5. Inventory :: List
6. Choice :: Road less travelled (Frost - though the word choice never appears in that poem and neither do my associations!)
7. Scuba :: Diving
8. Purchase :: Order
9. Promotion :: Value
10. Organization :: Corporate

Teaser Tuesday - Sept 16

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

Soap left streaks on the black tiles. The first, wet rub was important for loosening the dirt, but it was the second bit that really counted, passing the wrung cloth over the floor in one supple, unbroken movement ... There!

More 1920's detail from Sarah Waters The Paying Guests and oozing with sensuality. Here's a review:

Frances Wray doesn’t know the first thing about being a landlady. The first thing about being a landlady is that under no circumstances should you sleep with your young married female lodger, especially if it’s 1922. But given that Frances is the protagonist of a novel by Sarah Waters, a torrid lesbian affair is perhaps only to be expected. The question in Waters’ new book, The Paying Guests, is just how spectacularly Frances’ decision will lead to disaster—and whether or not she will find a path through the wreckage to the other side.

An incoherent mumbling of ice-floes

I'm in the midst of reading (very slowly!) Thomas Merton's Journal for 1939-41 and last night I found this sentence:

Then the Archbishop of Canterbury, smiling in his sleep, announces like the incoherent mumbling of ice-floes breaking up in the wastes of the Antarctic, 'You know Russia is gravitating back towards religion. The people will insensibly return to God because they have to.'

Wishful thinking then, wishful thinking by some on the right now. Merton was obviously not a fan of Cosmo Gordon Lang!

Mutterings - Sept 14

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Men :: Women
2. Partial :: Eclipse
3. Expenses :: Scandal
4. Notification :: Popup
5. Bubble wrap :: Squeezable
6. Speech :: Direct
7. Rumble :: West Side Story
8. Sounds :: Gong
9. Sweaty :: Wrist band
10. Mud :: Slide

Mutterings - Sept 7

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Bubbles :: Squeak
2. Urges :: Primal
3. Doorknob :: Broomstick
4. Insipid :: Stew
5. Freckles :: Arm
6. Leafy :: Glade
7. Volkswagon :: Golf
8. Scrap :: Metal
9. Illuminate :: Display
10. Headboard :: Bed