But there is a softer side to me, hence the bluebells and sheep. The cat decided to take on the entire flock, and pretty much immediately regretted that decision but tried to style it out anyway.
While I'm here: some book talk. Lisa McInerney's The Blood Miracles was a bloody, darkly funny, tale of Corkonian low-life which also managed to be rather moving. Naoise Dolan's Exciting Times was a shorter, sharper tale of a young Irish woman finding herself, largely in opposition to the English toff with whom she has a spiky sort of undefined affair, and the woman she eventually plucks up the courage to be with. It's all done in first-person narrative which I often find hugely irritating, but it's beautifully done here: Ava gradually becomes more honest with herself and with us. There are also a lot of jokes at the expense of unchecked upper-class English privilege abroad, and about the differences between English English and Hiberno-English. I wolfed down a collection of PG Wodehouse short stories, Young Men in Spats - formulaic but very funny, and there was a sharp interesting one parodying the idealistic young toffs who discover proletarian socialism that may find a way into a journal article one day. For now though, I'm on Mike Davis and Jon Wiener's enormous history of Los Angeles' protest movements Set The Night On Fire and it's inspiring. I'd never heard of Sister Corita before, and now I want her paintings on my walls.
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