My Holiday Reading

 

I'm reading the first of Anne Cleves' Shetland stories, featuring Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez (who local legend says is descended from a Spanish sailor, the only survivor of a ship from the Spanish Armada which had been blown off course and sank just off fair Isle) and I have discovered that I made a mistake!

Of course, I brought my Kindle with me to London – and I have found the time to read two other of these detective novels set in the Shetland Isles. My mistake was that I thought the first one I read, White Nights, was the first, and the next, Red Bones, was the second, but in fact Raven Black, which I am now well into was the first. This might not be of any significance in the 'Grand Scheme of Things', but it has thrown my normal approach to a series of books into confusion. I like to begin with the first and read them in sequence – the Alex Delaware books of Jonathan Kellerman, and Donna Leon's Venice-set novels featuring Commisario Guido Brunetti; the John Shakespeare series by Rory Clements, and C J Sansom's Giordano Bruno novels – and this has slightly thrown me off kilter. No, I do not have OCD and I am not a person with Aspergers Syndrome. I'm not! I just like to begin on page one and read page by page to the end. I'm the same with TV dramas, and movies. I watch from the beginning to the end. Years ago, if I missed the first 5 or 10 minutes I wouldn't watch the rest, I couldn't. Impossible. Now, and ever since my first clunky VCR, I record every episode of a serial or any other programme I want to watch and then, if for any reason I miss the beginning or I get a phone call from my mum or aunt or a friend who doesn't know what's on TV, I will answer it and be perfectly cool, because I know I can go back to the paused show and press play. I do admit that when I first saw Play it again, Sam! I tried to hide behind the cushions while the friends present in the room burst out laughing and pointing at me and shouting “Play it again, Teri!” which I thought was rather childishly OTT, but hey, they were right. I was uptight and neurotic and have one fixed an unerasable rule: I watch from the beginning to the end, the same way I read a book. Surely that's just normal, no?

And having the Kindle with me is handy. Although I'm not the only smoker in the house, I am the one with the most consistent habit. Coffee, Kindle, Ciggie. They go together like Horse and Carriage. So while everybody else is watching TV or gossiping over their coffee, I pop out into the back garden with mu accessories, alone, because I respect Celeste's rule that it is a “No Smoking House” simply because it is her house and anyway, having never smoked indoors at all since the ban came into force on pubs and clubs, and before that I always respected the wishes of my family and friends, and now I would never dream of lighting up indoors. Even at home. Even alone. I just don't smoke indoors, period. Except, maybe, if I'm honest and there really isn't any point in not, if I've got PMT and it's a monsoon outside and there's no-one else in, or if I'm at Jonesey's, cause she smokes in her house and it would be daft me going into the garden for a puff, while she's in the kitchen, having a puff. So I compromise.

And I love my Kindle. It's basic, not a Fire or Paperwhite, which means that if it’s dark outside I stick a Headlight on before going out – or I night take my tablet if it's handy. And an umbrella if it's pelting down. I used to keep a golf umbrella by the back door at work, until it blew inside -out in a gale and most of the spokes got bent or broken. But there's now a little kinda porchy/gazeboey thingy or actually, it's like a bush shelter, at the bottom of the garden, all it needs is a destination board and one of those poles with an enamel plate saying which buses come through the garden.

But maybe it's a sign of my maturity that I haven't abandoned the Perez novels just because I've been reading them out of sequence. I'll just double-check before I start on the next one, that it really is number four, and not seven. Because otherwise, I don't like to contemplate!