By the seaside
Today, I thought I’d share some of Niel’s photos. These were taken over the weekend when he went for a stroll to Yialos and around to Nos. As you can see, the season is changing. On some mornings, there’s more cloud and grey, though there are still sunny days and the sea stays warm enough to swim until November, or December depending on how hardened you are.
We had some rain overnight on Sunday, though I’m not sure how much or exactly when, but the courtyard and balcony were wet when I got up. The courtyard was acting as a temporary dormitory for seven cats who had been to the visiting vet under the SNiP programme. They were from our local bin area, they’d been SNiPped, if you see what I mean, and a couple had also had life-saving operations for things the vet found going on inside. As I write (6.00 yesterday), we’re waiting for the sun to come up before we take them up the road and release them closer to their home. I have to say, they’ve been very quiet all night, which is something I wasn’t expecting.
My tasks this week? Well, I am working on the second draft of a prequel to my Clearwater Mystery series, and thoroughly enjoying myself sifting through unnecessary adverbs, repetitive pronouns and subordinate clauses, or some such. I’ve done a fair amount of research for this novel, delving into the world of London’s East End in the 1880s, and my stack of research books and online papers has increased. I’ve also been sifting through the National Newspaper Archive to find original reports of certain events, and dipping into Dickens’ sketches of London life, though it’s slightly earlier than the period I am writing in. My latest afternoon TV viewing has been YouTube and a couple of documentaries about the horrors of the Victorian workhouse. The thing that struck me during all of this was how easy it is to draw an analogy between then and now. It seems that, for some, not a great deal has changed in the last 140 years. My next story in this series will be set over 1889/1890 when the world was living and dying through a flu pandemic. Interesting.
