Pippi Longstocking

Astrid Lindgren, Puffin Audiobooks, 2000

Pippi is a great character; strong, independent, funny, adventurous and irrepressible. She obeys no conventions. Well, what could be expected after a life at sea with a father who is a pirate king and a mother who is an angel. Both parents are absent. Pippi lives with Mr Nelson, a monkey, and a horse in a large house with no rules, no school, no manners. Such fruitful freedom. The neighbour's two children act as the straight guys to Pippi's zaniness. Her adventures make me laugh out loud and Joy is captivated eventhough I'm not sure she fully understands.

gardening

Gardening on the balcony and playing hop scotch. Saw long healthy looking worms, hopefully the plants will soon be as vibrant.

Thanks for the gardening kit, Tracy. It's so well loved.

Journey to the Stone Country

Alex Miller (2002) Allen and Unwin

Book group book. Grown up romance (in a good way). Begins in Carlton, Melbourne Uni academia and travels to outback Queensland cattle country. Observational language. Lifelike depictions of camping, swimming in cool rivers, mining settlements, moving cattle, and driving through dark country. Touches on indigenous and settler pasts and the sins of the fathers/ grandfathers. Plenty of symbolism; some a little clunky. About reasoning, clever thinking and the simple things in life. The loss and a return to a meaningful home. 

Sharon, keep your hair on

Gillian Rubinstein (words) and David Mackintosh (pictures), A Mark Macleod Book,Random House, Australia. first published 1996, reprint 2004.

So Sharon said,

'Jase, we need more space,

We'll have to move to a bigger place.'

Jase said, 'Sharon,

Keep your hair on,

I'll just build a little bit more on.

I can put another floor on.'

Jason is a builder whose family grows and grows; children, ponies, unicycles, sobbing sister in law and unruly family, safari-going parents and a pining gorilla (the full wonder of family life). He just keeps taking out the saw and adding on another floor. Zany rhyming fun. Great ending. I can read this over and over (and do).

'Very sorry to trouble you, lad.

We're coming home. We've sold the villa.

Can we stay, just me and Priscilla?

and the gorilla?

Called K.K..'

A day out

haircut, visit to see the crabs at the market, noodle soup

Few Eggs and No Oranges

Vere Hodgson, (1976) London: Dennis Dobson: 'A diary showing how unimportant people lived in London and Birmingham lived through the war years 1940 - 1945 written in the Notting Hill area of London'. (has been recently published by Persephone publishers)

Phew, what a long title.

Diary format, (just like a blog). Small pleasures and daily life during the blitz in London. Very captivating.

Vere is a spinster in her 30s. She used to be a governess for Mussolini's daughter in Florence. During the war, she works for a charity doing good works and keeps a diary writing a few paragraphs every couple days. This is a long book. 

Lots of discussion of bombs: the sounds, the fires, the blackout, the discomfort of sleeping in bomb shelters and feeling 'second rate' and sleep deprived, and the deaths. Many passages of Vere hurrying home with a torch in with 'barking' machine fire and whooshing bombs, checking for fires from the roof and practising putting out fires. She is passionately involved in the war and feels personally uplifted by Churchill's speeches.

The main title - Few Eggs and No Oranges - captures the shortage of food, one of the main themes in the book. The thrill of fresh fruit, kippers and even potatoes.

Sometime in the middle of the war Vere moves into a flatlet (with a sink and a cooker!) and I loved reading about her revelling in a sense of home.

Vere is also involved in metaphysics and the diary is peppered with peculiar predictions about the war by fortune tellers.