Like waves on the sea, I was just where I should be
I had a quiet birthday with my parents and my husbands and autumn. Just before sunset,
rushthatspeaks and
spatch and I walked a meandering loop of the Great Meadows that took us past the low-tussocked marsh that was dry hollows in last summer's drought, a soft-winged owl taking flight after prey, and an office chair sitting empty in a stand of pines, exactly like an invitation to avoid.

Evening in the water. Everything smelled like cold earth, leaf-fall, ground-fall, moss. It smelled wild. The birds were calling through the twig-tangled trees in a way that Angela Carter would have recognized. There was lichen on the dry stone walls.

Me in the evening. Taken by Rob, with Rush standing behind him.
choco_frosh had gotten me Peter Davison's Is There Life Outside The Box?: An Actor Despairs (2016).
nineweaving sent the 25th anniversary edition of John Crowley's Little, Big (1981) exquisitely wrapped in the Great Wave off Kanagawa. The short stack of books also contained Eckart Frahm's Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire (2023), R.B. Lemberg's Everything Thaws (2023), and Sarah Monette's A Theory of Haunting (2023). My niece made a tele-appearance in her pneumatically eared unicorn hat. The cake was marmalade, decorated with whipped cream like the candle-whiskered face of a cat. I am not sure anyone got a picture of the smoldering rose of the sunset glimpsed between houses as we walked back for dinner, but it was spectacular. It felt like October.

Evening in the water. Everything smelled like cold earth, leaf-fall, ground-fall, moss. It smelled wild. The birds were calling through the twig-tangled trees in a way that Angela Carter would have recognized. There was lichen on the dry stone walls.

Me in the evening. Taken by Rob, with Rush standing behind him.

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Thank you! I had to be pried out of some of them already.
(Nicely chosen icon.)
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I am enjoying it very much, despite having to hold it at literal arm's length because of the size of the print; it's informative and delightful and he writes about his younger self with a thoughtfulness which I appreciate as a reader and which does not interfere in the slightest with him telling very funny stories about things he did or which happened to him including in the course of writing the book. He has a very good style and reads like a genuinely interesting person, which is different from a person who has interesting stories. Recommended, and I imagine the audiobook is fantastic.
[edit] Mentioned in passing, but I thought I should pass it on to you:
"I was keen to make The Last Detective; it reminded me of a show I'd watched as a teenager called Public Eye that starred Alfred Burke. With its easy pace and gentle humour and world-weary central character, it had been a success for many years."
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Aw, thanks! I felt sure that on one of the commentaries he'd talked about watching something, and then got the DVDs and it had started with spending ages watching the detective make a cup of tea, and he was commenting on the slowness of that (but then it got going and was great still), and it's been niggling at the back of my mind that it must surely have been PUblic Eye, but I couldn't remember which commentary. So thank youoo! <3
ETA: Last Detective isn't as good as PE, though, lol. (But I can see that with the character indeed.)