Halloween

Nothing's gone to plan tonight.

My son wanted to join a party of kids Trick or Treating around Cancajos without an adult in sight. Now Cancajos is full of bars, and now and then you get some dodgy people around. Sin City it ain't, you understand, but nor is it somewhere we could letave our son unsupervised. So I was going to supervise a party of two.

Then the other girl insisted on going with the unsupervised party, her parents said, "Oh no you don't," so she announced they'd ruined her life and she wasn't going out with us either.

Luckily my own son wasn't too fussed, but if I'd known we wern't going out, I'd have organised something at home.

A vampire for Halloween

The green threads wrapped around this parsley are dodder (Cuscuta). It's a parasitic plant without any leaves or roots of it's own. It finds a living plant, wraps around it, and digs sharp spikes into the victim plant to suck the juice. Other names include devil's guts, devil's hair, devil's ringlet, goldthread, hailweed, hairweed, hellbine, love vine, pull-down, strangleweed, and witch's hair. Essentially it's a vampire, and the dang thing's found its way into my garden when I wasn't looking. What's worse, it's flowering. I only hope to goodness I got to it before it set seed.

A Sailing Boat and a Rainbow

I saw this boat from my balcony. I think it was trying to get to the harbour before the rain started.

The Inferior

I just finished reading "The Inferior" by Peadar Ó Guilín.



I loved it.

This is Peadar's first novel, but I've admired his short stories for a long time. They stick in my memory them for years.

Although the novel's SF, it begins like standard fantasy dystopia, with the protagonist, Stopmouth running for his life, chased by intelligent animals who want to eat him. Then he turns back to help his brother, who escapes, leaving Stopmouth in mortal danger. When Stopmouth finally makes it home, he finds that his brother has grabbed all the credit.

Ó Guilín keeps up this pace all the way, with the surpises jumping out at you like marauding Bloodskins.

Stopmouth is my kind of hero. He doesn't think he's special - just the reverse - because he has a stutter and a charismatic older brother. But he's not stupid, and he has one plausible talent - he runs fast. He has to win through by his own efforts, so I cared. The other main characters are distinct and plausible too, from the brutal Crunchfist to the enigmatic Varaha.

It turns out that in Stopmouth's world there is no plant food. Apart from the insects, there are many intelligent species, and everything hunts everything else for survival. At this point I started thinking, "Hang, on, this ecosystem doesn't work," but this is indeed SF, and Stopmouth's world isn't what he (and we) thought at all. The truth is much nastier than that.

My only real problem with this novel is that it's the first of a trilogy, and I'm going to have to wait far too long for the next installment. No wonder it's coming out in eight (count 'em!) languages.

Driving Licences

I met Helen and Theresa in town this morning, to see if there was any progress on sorting out their Spanish driving licences. Nope. The man at the gestoría (paperwork agency) explained that the first thing they do is to contact the UK and see if it's a real UK driving licence, and he thought they did them in batches. Anyway, they hadn't done it yet.

Sigh.

But I went looking for some new plates. Now I'm not a great consumer, but we've had the same plain white plates since we were married - in fact I had them before we were married. And I was just plain bored with them.

While our son was little I felt that new plates wouldn't be worth the worry, but he's 11 now. But somehow most designs here don't appeal to me.

And I found just what I wanted - very dark brown on the underside and yellow shading to red on the top, and just 22€, so I wouldn't cry if they smashed anyway.

Now I got Helen and Theresa a set of crockery as a wedding present when they arrived on the island, and I remembered that getting the heavy, heavy box to the car half killed me. So this time I left my friends sitting at a pavement cafe beside the shop, minding the crockery, and I went for the car.

Here's the surprising bit. I drove through four green traffic lights, and the last one, beside the cafe, turned red as I arrived and stayed red just long enough for Helen to put the crockery in the car.

And after we got home the gestoría phoned to say that the police had confirmed that Helen and Theresa's UK licenses weren't fake, and could we come back to sign something.

So it's back to town on Monday.

And the novel's up to 62,916 words.