A few lightweight book recommendations:

 

The following books are lightweight tomes for gentle, mindless entertainment – if you’re looking for something intellectually challenging, wet-your-pants funny or seriously thrilling, don’t look here.  But if you fancy something undemanding, a little cosy, with a soupcon of humour or a touch of the supernaturals, to read while you’re having lunch or standing in a queue, these will fit the bill.  And they’re all series so if you find you like them, there’s more of the same to be had.  All available as ‘proper’ books or on Kindle.

 

Deanna Raybourn

Lady Julia Grey series

Starting with ‘Silent In The Grave’, these novels are set in late Victorian England and feature the aristocratic Lady Julia, whose cold and secretive husband dies on the first page of the first novel.  Julia has a huge, eccentric family who provide a large portion of the entertainment. During the course of the novels, she gets herself embroiled in a series of mysteries and a will-they-won’t-they relationship with a Heathcliff-esque half-gypsy detective.  If you like gorgeous posh women with a masochistic streak, Byronic heroes, and a historical setting that encompasses London, India, Italy and even ventures into Yorkshire, you’ll probably enjoy these.  Humorous tone and mild peril.

Raybourne has also written a series based on a character called Veronica Speedwell.

 

Linda Stratmann

Frances Doughty series

Beginning with ‘A Poisonous Seed’, this is another female detective series set in Victorian England, mainly in London.  However, Frances, the heroine, is a less serendipitous detective than Lady Julia, setting herself up in business as a private investigator after solving a murder that is very close to home in book one.  Yes, there is a propensity for mysteries to be solved by the application of outlandish coincidence and sudden bursts of intuition, BUT that’s true of Sherlock Holmes and it never did him any harm.  I learned a few things about Victorian London from these books too, and there is an unexpected twist in the final novel (well, it surprised me anyway!).

 

Genevieve Cogman

The Invisible Library Series

Warning: contains fantasy.  The heroine here is a young librarian in a magical library – another name to add to the great librarian heroes of literature, the Orang-Utan in Pratchett’s Unseen University library and the Cheshire Cat in Jasper Fforde’s Bookworld  library – who, with her friendly and sexy human/dragon assistant, travels between worlds to safeguard the books.  Look, I didn’t say it made sense, did I?  But they are imaginative and well-written, so why not give them a go if you like this sort of thing?

 

Ransom Riggs

Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children

I loved the first one, got a bit bored somewhere after that in the series but enjoyed the last two books (I loved about 90% of the series).  They made a film out of the first book, so many people liked it enough to buy it!  The basic premise is that Riggs built a story around a series of weird photos he found in secondhand shops etc, which is interesting in itself, but he used his awesome imagination to create an unusual and exciting story involving children with strange abilities, time-travel, particularly horrible nasties and an engaging hero.  He incorporates the old photos into the novels so you can see them as illustrations which is cool – it even works on Kindle.

The Ongoing Wedding Shenanigans of Lou Wilful

 A Sight For Sore Eyes

I’ve sorted my hair out for the wedding (or TFW, as it has become known inside my head). I’ve been cutting it myself for the past two decades after a series of traumatic encounters with hairdressers. No, I wasn’t mugged at knifepoint by Vidal Sassoon, but it felt like it as I paid out large sums of money to stylists in the London area (you know who you are) and left their salons looking, on different occasions, like:

a)     1.  one of those Mabel Lucy Attwell children’s book illustrations;

b)      2. Velma in Scooby Doo;

c)      3.  Mick Hucknell.

At least hacking at my barnet with varying degrees of thoroughness depending on my mood and the amount of time available cost only the price of the scissors. I also applied hair-dyes at home, and I’ve tried every shade except brunette and black, so up until a week ago my hair was a sort of washed-out dirty blonde (which started life a month earlier as light auburn) with an inch of dark roots (at least it wasn't grey, astonishingly). It was cut into a shoulder-length style I think of as ‘sexily shaggy’ but is actually ‘middle-aged frump’.  I knew I couldn’t turn up to my wedding with this hair-do, as I would face ridicule from my sister, contempt from my niece, and embarrassment from my mother (it’s great having a supportive bunch of female relatives!). So, I started searching for a local hairdresser.

The first FIVE I rang were fully booked for months and had no appointments at all over the Christmas period (TFW is on 21 December). Who knew that booking a wedding hairstylist seven to eight months before your wedding day would be, as one hairdresser put it, ‘leaving it to the last minute’? 

Anyway, in the end, a friend recommended her hairdresser, only ten minutes away by car. It's a tiny salonette of a place, run by a magnificent and gorgeous woman called Louise, like me (well, in name anyway!). She could fit me in. She didn’t make me feel like Quasimodo’s ugly sister. She didn’t badmouth my hair-cutting ‘talent’. She was, in fact, completely lovely. She booked me in for a colouring last week and I was as nervous as if I was going to the dentist, but it was actually a pleasant experience. Who knew?  She coloured my hair expertly, cut it into a slightly better shape without cutting much off, and dried and curled it (a bit more curly than I like, if I’m honest, but P said it looked pre-Raphaelite – though he was looking at the back when he said this).

   

I even tried out the make-up I bought for the wedding, after a discussion on Facebook made me throw out my decade-old slap and invest in some new stuff. I can only wear certain brands due to allergies, but even sticking to the mid-range brands, it cost more than a hundred quid to buy foundation, powder, eyeshadow, blusher, lipstick, nail varnish, mascara and some new make-up brushes, and that included a £20 off voucher for No 7 and a free gift – so imagine my irritation when I tried it all out and realized that the foundation is a shade too light and makes me look like Morticia Addams, neither of the two lipsticks I bought work on me unless I go over them with a cheap watermelon-flavoured slightly tinted lip salve I already owned, and orange and gold eyeshadow just doesn’t look right on a woman in her fifties. However…

So, all I need now are clothes and shoes. She gives a hollow laugh…

I ordered a made-to-measure outfit from an online store. P measured me, which might have been where the problem started. The clothes arrived well before the deadline, though they were screwed up inside a plastic bag inside a small cardboard box which didn’t bode well. When I took the suit out (trousers, an embroidered top and a loose flimsy jacket, all in ivory), I couldn’t stop laughing. The top fitted ok but was several inches shorter than the photo on the website and looked more like an upmarket crop top than a bridal outfit for the mature bride. The jacket fitted too but was so diaphanous (ie, thin) that it was like wearing a cheap negligee. 

But it was the trousers that made me laugh. They looked like they’d been made for a clown. The Chinese seamstresses who made them must think that British women are a very peculiar shape. The waistband was around six inches too wide, so they would only stay up if I held them up manually, and the crotch was hanging down almost to my knees. When I rolled up the waistband until the crotch was in its normal position, the trouser legs only reached halfway down my calves.  I’m 5’2” and quite overweight, so you can probably visualize the shape of a woman who would fit these trousers.

I am now continuing my search for a suitable trouser suit in an appropriate colour, in a plus size, reasonably cheap. It isn’t going well. I’ve found several online but they are almost always out of stock in my size, or just out of stock (despite sometimes being described as ‘new arrivals’) . There are no department stores anymore in local towns and cities, and the risk of catching Covid-19 makes me reluctant to do a lot of browsing in actual shops.

And this is before I start searching for shoes…