Writing Prompt:

Write a story or poem inspired by any of the following:

An old letter

            An old theatre or concert ticket

                  An old bus or train ticket


       A diary entry you wrote years ago

An old newspaper clipping


             An old theatre programme

What I've learned this week: The problem of feeding the Oldies [cont]

 My partner’s mum, whom I will call Ermintrude (because it makes me laugh), is in her eighties and, though she has no underlying lung problems, she is quite frail and has had at least one TIA (essentially a mini-stroke, TIA stands for Transient Ischaemic Attacks), so we are very concerned about her in the current crisis. 

One thing that makes her easier to deal with than my own mum is that she rarely goes out except into the garden anyway these days.  Under normal circumstances, getting her to come over to ours for a meal or let us take her out somewhere for the afternoon is a major feat of persuasion.  She requires several weeks of preparation time in the build-up to such a jaunt – but then she has never been a spontaneous person.  When her husband was still alive, whenever we took them out anywhere, we’d arrive at their house to pick them up and find them sitting on the settee in their coats and outdoor shoes, where they would have been waiting for at least an hour.

 

            Ermintrude doesn’t eat much. In fact, she eats less than an anorexic squirrel.  Her diet is not only small in quantity but also very restricted in variety due to her being what we call round here ‘faddy’ (or ‘normal’, as most people I come across since we moved back north in the early 2000s seem to be surprisingly unadventurous about food – it’s the same instinct that made so many of them vote Brexit).  She used to have Wiltshire Farm Foods delivered to her house, but apparently they were introducing far too much ‘weird, foreign food’ (like pasta, which in Ermintrude’s opinion should be restricted to milk puddings – though she isn’t keen on them either). 

These days, she has a ham sandwich for lunch and a Marks and Spencers mini-meal every evening. Ordinary sized ready-meals are far too large for her.  She won’t eat lamb because she likes lambs. She won’t eat pork because her father used to have a smallholding and he kept pigs. She’s not keen on beef because it’s too chewy for her dentures.  She doesn’t like sauces of any description, including ketchups, pickles, chutneys, etc,  except gravy, because she’s from Yorkshire. She won’t eat fruit because ‘I used to work in a greengrocers’ – this non-sequitur always makes me think that she’s implying that she’s seen how they really treat fruit, behind the scenes, like those whistle-blowers in abattoirs: flaying oranges alive, dipping lemons in boiling wax, juggling with innocent apples.

Her comments about food are often mysterious, random and hysterical.  For example, on Christmas Day, while watching a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, she suddenly said:

‘Did you know, Louise, that pigs can’t swim?’

‘Well, I knew they couldn’t fly,’ I muttered.

‘My father used to have a smallholding and he kept pigs.  We were always running down to the river to fish them out when they fell in.  It’s their little legs…’  She then tried to demonstrate how a pig would, according to her, flail its short legs wildly. She looked like she was having another TIA. ‘They cut their own throats, see?’

‘What?’ I asked, mouth dropping open in astonishment. ‘How?’

‘It’s their trotters,’ she explained, deadly serious. ‘They thrash about so much in the water that they end up cutting their own throats with their trotters.’

I spent some time trying to visualise this.  I didn’t think pig’s knees were the right way round to allow for this incredible feat of self-immolation and I foolishly expressed my doubts, ignoring my partner’s frantic hand gestures behind his mum telling me to shut up.

‘Oh, yes,’ she went on. ‘It’s a terrible thing.  My dad always used to tell us we had to get them out of the water double-quick before they slit their own throats. They just sink, you see.’

‘But loads of four-legged animals can swim…’ I tried.

‘Their bodies are too fat.’

‘So is mine, but I can swim. What about hippos?’

But she wouldn’t be persuaded. ‘Pigs just thrash about, sink, and cut their own throats.’

Later, my partner told me he had been through this conversation with her many times and had even shown her videos of pigs swimming, from the internet, but all she did was solemnly shake her head and say ‘Well, I don’t know about that, but all I do know is that pigs can’t swim because they cut their own throats with their trotters’. Presumably, she thought the Youtube films were somehow CGI-ed or photoshopped in some way. Or that the pigs they showed were specially trained performing pigs with hidden water-wings.

               Ermintrude’s dislike of most food groups comes into it’s own at Christmas – she doesn’t like mince pies, Christmas cake, Christmas pudding, stuffing, pigs in blankets (possibly she feels the blankets are a cruel additional burden for an animal so liable to cut itself with its own trotters), any more than one and a half sprouts, roast potatoes if they have any ‘hard bits’ on them, trifle (because it might contain sherry and she doesn’t drink alcohol as she hates the taste, and it might contain fruit), turkey (we have a chicken on Christmas Day to keep her happy), chocolates, crisps, sweets, biscuits, gateaux, shop-bought meringues, dates, nuts or any sort of spice.  Which makes cooking Christmas lunch for her very easy.

               Anyway, I digress. My point is that we now have to get food to her. As we are on complete lockdown due to my partner’s health, my niece, who is being fantastically helpful, is prepared to go to the shops for her, but though Marks and Spencers does have food on its shelves, including mini-meals, Ermintrude will only eat a limited range of these meals. There are about four she will tolerate. So there is unlikely to be many of the particular meals she likes on the shelves, and my poor niece will have to make more journeys than she needs to in order to get the specific things Ermintrude wants.  She can’t store much anyway. She has a small fridge freezer that holds about twelve mini-meals and two loaves.  A week before lockdown, we offered to buy her another freezer as there is room for an under-counter one in her little utility room (which she calls ‘the porch’), but she refused on the grounds that it would have to go in front of the electric plug for the washing machine, and she would therefore be unable to unplug the washing machine between washes. 

               We love Ermintrude, despite finding her inadvertently amusing.  She is in many ways a fabulous woman, as is my own mum, and the mums of my friends, all of whom are weird in their own individual fashion.  They are entitled to be weird. They’ve lived a long time. They’ve brought us up. Their bodies are failing and their mental acuity is not what it was.  They deserve to be looked after.

But they do make it very difficult at times! 

What I've learned this week...

My Mum and Covid-19

Like most people I know, I have several older people to think about during this crisis.  The elderly are advised to completely self-isolate, not leaving their houses (or at a stretch their gardens) at all for several months.  This seems like sensible advice.  If they stay in their homes, the chances are they won’t catch Covid-19 and won’t therefore have, at best, to face the symptoms of an illness that by all accounts tends to be more extreme in older people, and, at worst, to risk their lives.  Friends, family, neighbours or volunteers can do their shopping and leave food outside their doors so that they don’t have any physical contact. Indoors, they have TV, the radio, the telephone – many even have computers, though many are like my mum and believe the Lenovo in their spare bedroom will empty their bank account, hack into their medical records and read their private thoughts if they actually turn it on, because Doris across the road says they do that, you know, if you’re not ‘careful’.  They are in many ways better placed to cope with enforced isolation than younger people, as many elderly people live very isolated lives anyway, sadly.

However, what this very sensible policy fails to take into consideration is what elderly people are actually like.  Unlike other vulnerable groups, such as those who are very ill with cancer or other life-threatening conditions, these days many elderly people, even those over eighty, are very fit, healthy and energetic. And unlike people in younger generations, they no longer care what people think of them and they are often what can only be termed bloody-minded.

          My own mum is in her late seventies. An ex-ward sister in a busy District General hospital, a woman who by all accounts was highly respected before she retired (aged 72!), and who has a degree in Social Sciences, she nevertheless has some odd beliefs about medicine.  For example, she believes that antibiotics kill viruses and she doesn’t really believe, deep down in her bones, that there is a shortage of effective antibiotics or that we are over-using them.  If she got her way, people would be prescribed antibiotics for everything from the common cold to a slipped disc.  She sees them as a cure-all.  Yes, logically, when tackled on the subject, she admits that she can understand about the antiobiotic crisis, but dig only a little deeper and she’ll end up complaining that GPs won’t give you antibiotics, presumably implying that they are stockpiling them for themselves and their friends.

Needless to say, she is not enjoying the self-isolation.  Under normal circumstances, though she spends a lot of time on her own, as we are a small family and most of us work, she does look after her great-grandson on a regular basis, she goes to ‘town’ on the bus once a week for her shopping, and she goes for (incredibly slow) walks several times a week.  She has an artificial hip but that isn’t why she walks more slowly than an exhausted tortoise: she has always walked very, very, very slowly.  It is a kind of hobby: it’s a pity there isn’t a Slow Walking Society she could join. But she’d never get to the meetings on time. 

Obviously, she can (or certainly she used to be able to) walk fast if she chose to.  Presumably, as a nurse, she had to zoom round the wards with brisk speed and efficiency – in fact, on one memorable occasion when I lived in London, we got a call to say she had walked so fast at work that she’d walked straight into an external brick wall and caused herself enough damage to keep her at home for some time.  So, maybe, her slow walk is just a reaction against the apparent danger of the constant speed required of her during working hours.  But I remember as a child finding it excruciating that it took us about an hour and a half to walk to the next village, a journey that would take a short fat man in his sixties, with a blister and a sprained ankle, carrying several bags of shopping and with a gale force wind in his face, about half an hour. My sister and I used to talk wistfully of buying her a skateboard or having her fitted with casters.

 

Needless to say, her ‘bionic hip’, as my partner calls it, is not making her any faster. A morning constitutional can end up taking up the bulk of her daylight hours, which is fine under normal circumstances but in the current crisis she might end up being wiped down with a Flash cloth by an over-officious Police Officer in case anyone inadvertently leaned on her, assuming she was an ornamental gatepost. 

And elderly folk don’t like ‘being a burden’, do they?  Two days ago, my mum was contemplating walking to her local pharmacy to collect her prescription. The pharmacy is about a mile away, but, in addition to the fact that it would be an eight-hour round trip for her, she is supposed to be staying at home to avoid catching the virus. She hasn’t quite grasped yet that a ten-day course of Erithromycin isn’t going to hack it with C19. My twenty-eight year old niece, who is an RSPCA Officer but is only covering emergencies during the crisis, would be happy to collect her prescription, but mum doesn’t feel she can ask her.

               ‘I’ve never asked anybody for help in the past and I don’t want to start now,’ she muttered on the phone. I don’t agree with this idea myself.  I think that people helping each other is what raises humans higher than the cretinous yobs I read about on Huff News who’ve been spitting at council employees and jeering at NHS staff. Those morlocks don’t deserve to be helped, but people like my mum, a woman who has given most of her adult life to helping the elderly through her job as a nurse, should not feel uncomfortable about accepting some help from her family. Accepting help with grace is as great a skill as giving it.

              

[To be continued…]

Today's Writing Cue:

Write a story that ends with the words:

"She lay on the beach, unmoving, as the wave's fingers reached towards her."

What I'm reading now...

Edith Nesbit Five Children And It

It’s too hard to read serious grown-up literature at the moment, so I’m comforting myself by re-reading some Edith Nesbit.  If you like kids’ stories and haven’t read Nesbit’s books, I would recommend you do so in this time of crisis as they are funny, entertaining and, above all, lacking in violence, serious tension and intellectual challenge.

                        

I have been a fan of Edith Nesbit’s stories ever since my aunt Edith sent me a copy of The Story Of The Treasure Seekers for Christmas when I was eleven.  That particular novel doesn’t contain magic, like the Nesbit novels I love most, but it does contain some likeable children and a fabulous narrator called Oswald.  And it contains jokes that adults will ‘get’ even though the focus and sympathy of the narrative is always with the children.

     Later, I saw the film of Nesbit’s most famous novel, The Railway Children, and quite liked it – though I was never such a great fan as some people seem to be, and I personally found the scene where Jenny Agutter runs along the railway platform towards her father shouting ‘Daddy! My Daddy!’ to be cloying and sentimental. This might be because my own dear papa ran off with our teenage babysitter when I was seven, so I don’t have a sentimental attachment to fathers. 

     However, Nesbit’s stories which do have actual magic in them are wonderful.  The trilogy beginning with Five Children and It (1902), and continuing with The Phoenix and The Carpet (1904) and The Story Of The Amulet (1906), are my favourites.  The fine children are Anthea, Jane, Cyril, Robert and the two-year-old ‘Lamb’, who live for a while in a house between a gravel quarry and a sand-pit, in the latter of which they meet a magical creature called a psammead who grants them one wish each day.  The wish lasts until dusk, then stops.  Predictably, most of their wishes turn out badly in one way or another, but I really enjoy the psychologically plausible relationship between the siblings conveyed mostly through their dialogue, and the intrusive narrative voice that often speaks directly to the reader. 

     Yes, they are old-fashioned, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Nesbit has a distinctive voice and a charm all of her own.  And they are undemanding, which is lovely in a time like the current crisis. 

     Nesbit herself had a fascinating life. A founding member of The Fabian Society, she lived a highly unconventional life, and had several affairs with well-known people. Her husband had a child by one of her close friends and Edith brought this child up as if it were her own (the ‘lamb’ is based on this boy) and even employed its mother as her housekeeper. How that worked in practice, I can only speculate!  A.S.Byatt based her fantastic novel, The Children’s Book (2009), on Nesbit and her circle of friends. 

      Other Nesbit novels for children include: The Enchanted Castle, The Magic City, Man-size in Marble, Pussy and Dog Tales, The Book of Dragons. 

RATING:
Five Children and It  

**** 

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way

What I've learned this week...

Teaching online is fine in theory

I had assumed, after the Clown Prince announced that exams were being cancelled, that teenagers all over the country would throw their phones in the air in a flurry of joyous excitement and dance round like happy toddlers, thanking Covid-19 for making them the jammiest students in recent history.

I also assumed that my private tutees would cancel their tutorials, as who wants to pay for lessons preparing you for an exam you no longer have to take? 

And, as my main annual income is from my examining work on two different A Level papers, I was depressed that this was being wiped out at a stroke.  My other job, as a tutor at a private tutorial centre, is pay-when-you’ve-worked, so once that shut down on Saturday, I’d be getting no income from there either.

However, things haven't quite panned out like that.  There is a chance that I’ll be able to do some online teaching for the tutorial centre if they have students who want it. Fingers crossed.  And there may be exams later in the year which will need marking, so there might be some work from that.

And it seems that students are more reluctant than expected to leave their future educational choices down to teacher-predicted grades.  Maybe they’re regretting all those times they were rude to Miss Smith, or when they laughed when Mr Brown slipped in the snow, or all those lessons when they arrived late, or all that homework they failed to complete, or the mock they didn’t revise for. When I taught in schools and colleges, teachers giving predicted grades in my experience were always conscientious and fair, but the kids don’t know that, do they? Anyway, any unfairness will err on the side of generosity – there is nothing in it for schools to get low grades!

So, my private tutees want to continue with their sessions, but do them online.  In this modern age, this should be a doddle, surely?  Well, I investigated the possibilities of Skype yesterday.  It took me a day to work out how to open up the website and contact people.  I say a 'day' but most of that time I wasn't looking at Skype, but simply doing various mundane tasks in that bunny-in-the-headlights frame of mind that everyone seems to be experienced at the moment, as our world turns upside down.  However, finally I asked my other half to go to the top floor with his laptop so we could try skyping each other.  

After several false starts, a blurred picture of a middle-aged bearded man wearing an expression of existential angst appeared on my screen.  I had a set of headphones with a microphone jammed on my head – I’d bought them following advice on Tutorhub – so I looked like a dishevelled and very stressed local radio host. And why do I shut my left eye all the time?  I don’t know I’m doing it.  It makes me look like I’m drunk. I should wear an eye-patch – looking like a pirate is way cooler than looking like I’ve been on the pink gins all morning.

Due to the headphones, I could hear him perfectly, including the loud gasping for breath resulting from climbing two flights of stairs.  He, on the other hand, could only hear a distorted time-lagged voice that was difficult to understand.  "Try wearing the headphones from the electronic keyboard!" I managed to say to him.  After ten minutes of listening to him searching for them, I realised he hadn't understood that I meant the organ/piano keyboard of the electronic instrument he bought me for Christmas four years ago (my house is full of unused Christmas presents).  He thought I meant the laptop keyboard.  Anyway, the headphones for the keyboard wouldn't plug into the laptop, so he came downstairs and found the headphones we used to use with a voice recorder he bought me for Christmas in 2017 (and lost in February 2018). Then he staggered back up two flights of stairs.  The sound of his heart pounding and his loud wheezing through the headphones was very alarming!

Once he’d recovered, we engaged in a long period of trying to get a good picture on both screens, occasionally accidentally clicking on inappropriate screen buttons or even leaving Skype altogether and having to begin again. Every so often one of us would knock the laptop off the desk or fall off our chair or engage in a cacophony of swearing.  Sometimes we'd have weird conversations:

     'The top of your head's disappeared!'

     'Has it?'

     'Can't you crouch down or something?'

     'You could raise your laptop...'

     'How would that help? It's you who needs to raise your laptop!'

     'Is that better?'

     'You're too close to the screen now. All I can see are two nostrils and your moustache - it looks like two caves above a forest...'

  

Two hours after we started, we still weren't much further on in our 'expertise'.

So, whether I’ll actually ever manage to deliver an online lesson to an actual student, I have no idea. Wish me luck!  

What I've learned about writing this week...

As the limit on our movement and social interaction ratchets up, I count my blessings: 

1. Yes, I am getting old, but I'm not yet in the 'elderly' category.  Also, twice as many men have died from Covid-19 than women, so that ups my odds of survival!

2. Yes, my partner, who is on immune-suppressant drugs for Crohn's Disease and also has asthma, is having to self-isolate, which means that I am too, but at least it is giving him a well-earned rest. He has been exhausted for the past year, dreaming of early retirement, and he could do with a few months of sleeping til midmorning, dossing around, bingewatching boxsets, working on the book of philosophy he has been wanting to write for years, and generally being idle.

3. Yes, we both have elderly mothers who live alone.  But I am phoning my mum everyday now, which hasn't been the case in the past few years as our relationship is pretty poor. Admittedly, if I talk to her for more than two minutes I inevitably annoy the fuck out of her for reasons beyond my understanding (maybe I have this effect on everyone but most people are too polite to show it?), but at least we are communicating more.  What the government don't appreciate is that getting old people to do anything different from what they usually do is like trying to get a river to flow uphill.  They are all feisty buggers to varying degrees.  But my partner's mum barely consumes anything anyway, being excessively parsimonious, and my mum has always been a hoarder of food and household necessities. I think she has been stocking up for an apocalypse since my childhood. So I doubt she'll starve, even if I can't get food to her.

4. My sister and her partner live some distance away, across the other side of the Peak District (basically, they've gone to the Dark Side - ie, not Yorkshire), and sis can't drive at the moment.  She is having to continue working as she is a key worker, but her partner might be sent home as his job is non-essential (he's a traffic warden).  But on the bright side, people will be able to park where they like!  We won't be able to visit each other for a while, but that'll save me money buying her lunch every time I visit her...

5. Worst thing - I won't be able to see my six year old great-nephew (I'm an extremely young and glamorous great-aunt).  I like to think he'll be sad at not seeing us, or his great-grandma, and he probably will be, but I'm sure he'll cope better than us. As long as he is safe and has enough toy cars to play with, he'll be fine.

6. I thought I'd lost my personal income as there will be no examining work in the summer, and I assumed my private tutees would no longer want their lessons but in fact the students do want their lessons and I expect that many kids will choose to sit the exams when they are offered later in the year, so there might be examining work available then.  So my only problem now is working out how to teach them online.  Still, hooray for the internet. How would we cope without it?


 
7. Self-isolating shouldn't be a problem for people like me. I'm a bookworm. I'm a writer. I'm physically lazy. I like to sleep in and go to bed very late. My favourite place in fact is in bed. My view is that everything worth doing can be done in bed. We bought a smart TV last winter and there are loads of Prime series I want to watch.  My idea of doing exercise is doing Wii-fit yoga.  My idea of entertainment is working out new recipes based on stuff I have left over in the cupboard and fridge.  It will give us the chance to give the entire house a thorough clean. We could have a 'project' of getting fitter and slimmer during our enforced isolation, like those convicts who spend ten hours a day lifting weights and doing sit ups.  I have my Masters course to complete and a writing challenge I'm attempting where you write a story a month. I also have my children's fantasy novel, Hollowmouth, to finish. I have no shortage of things to do. And it won't be a lot different from my usual life except that I won't be able to go to coffee shops for a while - good god! I might have to learn how to use the beautiful coffee machine my partner bought me two years ago!  And of course I will have to spend much more time with my partner, but that's just a burden he's going to have to bear. If he didn't want to spend several months in a small house with only me for company, he shouldn't have developed Crohn's and asthma.  It's his own fault....

8. I am by nature a misanthrope - I am grumpy, cynical, antisocial.  But I now feel the urge to contact people constantly to check they're ok.  This must be a good thing, surely?  Covid-19 is making me more kind and sociable.  It's just my basic bloody-mindedness, I guess.

9. And it's making much less profligate with toilet roll.

Today's Writing Prompt

Write a story or poem from the viewpoint of Covid-19.

What I've learned about writing this week...

Writing in a time of contagion...
There seems to be a new bug in town.  Have you heard about it?  It's a member of the virus royal family and is apparently out to get you, particularly if you happen to be elderly or already have a pre-existing lung disease.  
          But it might get you even if you're young and otherwise healthy. In fact, even if you've already had it and are therefore supposedly immune, you know, deep in your heart, that experts are always 100% wrong, sometimes due to incompetence but usually deliberately, as part of a global conspiracy.  And you've heard, from reliable sources (not the man in the pub as pubs have all been shut down, but from the internet, anyway) that people can get this virus repeatedly. The virus returns to reinfect you again and again until you die. It's like a crazed serial killer - or, no, more like a crazed wizard serial killer who makes you hot and then your lungs fall out.
          And no one really knows how many people actually have been or are infected because government figures only count those who've been tested and tests have, predictably, run out (due to the Global conspiracy mentioned earlier, or the Chinese). So it could be that, in reality, most people in your town have had it and just thought they had the flu, and while wandering about the streets partying, they'll have passed it on to everyone else, because apparently it is so contagious that you can catch it just from emailing someone.  
          In fact, at this very moment, everyone on your street might be dead or dying, but you'd never know because you locked yourself in the attic a week ago with the microwave, a pile of ready-meals, 102 cans of beans (all dipped in bleach), and 365 rolls of toilet paper.  You are at this moment reading this on your phone and worrying that Covid-19 might be able to travel down electricity cables.  
          And having to throw the contents of your makeshift toilet (ie, a plastic bucket) out of the Vellux window once a day is no laughing matter. 
           And if Covid-19 doesn't kill you, well, it's bound to make you more susceptible to its friends, isn't it?  The next thing you know, cholera, diphtheria, typhoid and polio will be queuing up outside the door.  The country's infra-structure will collapse.  The Town Hall will, quite literally, fall to pieces in a gigantic explosion that will kill all the people looting Waitrose next door.  The congregation of All Saints will all be electrocuted simultaneously in the middle of a skyped sermon, and they'll all follow the vicar up to heaven in the Rapture, except for the secret paedophile who'll volunteer to take the town's school-less children to safety in the Cairngorms.  Paramedics will push sick old people into disused bingo halls and set fire to them.  Family members will turn on each other, fighting over the last face mask.  The government will be overthrown by a squad of University academics driven mad by terror and absinthe. Birds will drop out of the sky, dead. Pets will run away and set up collectives in the Outer Hebrides. Rivers will flow with blood.

It'll be worse then Brexit!

That's what I've heard, anyway.

So, don't blame me if I can't concentrate on my Masters course and on writing stories!  It's very difficult to write creatively when the back of your mind is ensnared by mass hysteria.

What I'm reading now...

Ben Aaronovitch False Value [Rivers Of London series Book 8]

The first instalment of Ben Aaronovitch's 'Rivers Of London' series was published around 2011, and became a Sunday Times bestseller, though I came across it by chance after idly glancing at my Kindle recommendations.  I soon became hooked on PC Peter Grant, and I have just finished reading the most recent novel in the series, False Value.  Aaronovitch has written two novellas, in addition to the novels, and has also published several short stories and graphic novels with Andrew Cartmel and others, based on the series.

                                   

  
Book 1:  Rivers Of London                               The Furthest Station [novella]

Book 2: Moon Over Soho                                 The October Man [novella]

Book 3: Whispers Underground

Book 4: Broken Homes

Book 5: Foxglove Summer

Book 6: The Hanging Tree

Book 7: Lies Sleeping

Book 8:  False Value

There are several reasons why I enjoy this series, the main one being the protagonist, PC Peter Grant, a young, black police officer in the Met who narrates the novels with a self-deprecating, wry humour.  Peter Grant is from a working-class mixed race family - his mother is from Sierra Leone. His father is a well-known (within the world of British jazz) jazz musician.  Peter wanted to be an architect but ended up joining the Police, and in the first novel in the series, he learns of the existence of magic and meets Thomas Nightingale, the country's only 'magical detective', based at The Folly.  

         And that's the second reason I love the books - the depiction of Peter's own development as a magical practitioner, and the 'Falcon' cases he is involved with is a brilliant twist on the usual police procedural.  Aaronovitch manages to combine the arcane and supernatural with the everyday problems of modern policing, in a way that is often funny, often tense and always entertaining.

          Each novel has its own complete plot but there are narrative threads that run through the series so it is recommended that you read them in order.  For example, Peter's friend PC Leslie May, is magically injured in book one and is then compromised as she turns 'to the dark side' for several novels. 

          Most of the stories are set in London, which is my third reason for loving them, as I find the London portrayed to be recognisable and accurate.  I lived in South London for over a decade and the atmosphere of Aaronovitch's novels makes me homesick for the city at times.  However, not all the novels are set in London. Foxglove Summer, one of my favourites, moves Peter temporarily out into the serious countryside.  The novella, The October Man, dispenses with Peter altogether and is narrated by his German counterpart and Trier, Germany.

          My fourth reason for loving the series is that I love the river gods and goddesses.  By book 8, Peter is living with Beverley, the goddess of the Thames tributary Beverley Brook, who is expecting his twin children.  The characters move on and progress through the novels, rather than remaining in an artificially static location in space and time, like some book series characters do.  The Folly gradually expands in terms of practitioners and facilities. 

          My fifth reason for loving the books is that the characters are extremely well-drawn and distinctive - from Thomas Nightingale to other senior detectives like Seawoll and Stephanopoulos, and more junior police officers like Guleed, and then moving more widely to characters like Peter's parents and the various river gods and goddesses - all are lively and well-delineated.  The plots are generally good too, with enough action sequences to keep you interested and enough mysteries to keep you turning the pages.  I personally enjoy the more mundane police procedural elements too.

          I am not a great reader of detective fiction, and if you are the sort of fan of the detective genre who wants their stories firmly set in the real world, then you probably wouldn't enjoy this series. But if you like a good detective story but are open-minded enough to enjoy the supernatural aspect, you should find these books a breath of fresh air.  They are brilliant examples of hybrid novels, drawing on several genres to create a new genre.  Energetic, entertaining and enjoyable.

https://www.benaaronovitch.com/

RATING:
False Values   

**** 

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way