Buddy, can you spare me 20 cents for the toilet?

 It is a beautiful, sunny day and I took a trip to the city of Cork. Spring is definitely in the air!

I mooched around for some time, just enjoying the feeling of freedom from all those restrictions, even though I continued to wear my mask, as indeed did a lot of people I saw on the street and in the shops.

And then it happened. I needed to go to the toilet. Not a problem, I thought. I knew that at the nearest mall (a somewhat fancy name for a restaurant and two shops on the ground floor and TK Maxx one flight up, but anyway) there were toilets downstairs. Last time I looked, entry was free, the lock had been removed, due to the pandemic, I thought. This time though, you had to cough up 20 cents in order to get inside. Now, I will admit that I always - or nearly always as it turned out- have a few 20 cent coins in my purse for just this purpose. Only, sadly, not today. So I stood there, jigging from one foot to the other and calculating how long it would take for someone within the hallowed toilet area to emerge and hold the door open for me. Lady luck - the patron of all would-be wee-ladies - arrived in the form of another woman who had the required coin. We bonded immediately!

My question to this mall and to all the other coin-spinning toilets is : who the heck is going to have the requisite small change? We nearly all pay by card not cash. That's what those malls wanted, remember? All easy peasy for them, no need to count money at the end of the day and have to bring it to the bank.

Use your imagination, shop and store managers. We are customers, we bring money into the city and into your premises and yet you don't think we merit the slightest consideration. And if you put someone in charge, someone who checks the toilets from time to time, it would give someone a job. In the above toilets, the locks on most of the doors did not work, so as you were doing a pee, the door would be pushed open and the usual "I'm so sorry"'s exchanged. Do we need this? Should we boycott these places until they have learned to provide a service which is as necessary as it is obvious? 

Don't get me started!

Loyalty Card Junkie

 I came across this article that I wrote some years ago and which I find is still relevant. For us "silver-agers", the fast world of internet business is becoming more and more of a mystery.

Anyway, here is the article again, just for fun:

Have you ever added up how many user IDs and passwords you have stored away in your memory – you wouldn’t be writing them down, now would you?  I was thinking about this the other day when I went to a restaurant in a Cork shopping mall and before I knew it, I was handed out a loyalty card with the lure of getting a portion of chips or half a chicken or something for free if I produced the card when I came again. I don’t know when I’ll be back to this restaurant but it bothers me to think of a possible freebie sitting there unused.

 I spend hours registering on loyalty card sites.  First you have to think of a suitable ID.  I suppose the sensible thing to do would be to use the same one for every site, only a friend of mine who happens to be an IT freak  warned me that this makes it easier for hackers to get into all your sites.  Well, I don’t want that.  Not that I think it would do a hacker much good to see how many Real Rewards I have at SuperValu, for instance,  since I’m not sure what to do with them myself.  The biggest problem though is getting the password right.  If I dream up something creative I’m always told that it isn’t very “strong.”  It has to be words and numbers and caps and what-have-you.  By the time I’ve fought through the whole process and registered correctly I’m exhausted and cranky. And there’s a very real possibility that when I want to check into the site again I can’t remember my password exactly and have to go through the “forgotten your password” process in order to get into my account.

Not that I’m against this loyalty card idea.  You can really save money or get yourself a treat.  And I don’t blame the stores and restaurants for trying to secure customers this way.  The small shopkeeper though doesn’t have the money for all this kind of publicity.  The only way they’ll get people coming back is if they provide the service the customer wants and keep the customer happy.  What I like most about small shops is the personal contact.  You see, that’s where big stores miss out and why they suggest that your loyalty card is your best friend.  But I can’t chat to my loyalty card, can’t complain about the weather or find out the latest juicy bit of gossip doing the rounds.  No, I just hand it over along with my laser card to a smiling employee who wouldn’t know me from Adam if she bumped into me five minutes later.

But next time I’m asked if I have a loyalty card and if not would I like one, I know I’m going to say yes please and start the online registration process as soon as I get home.  Don’t want any bargains slipping away now do I? In years to come, will there be a therapy for loyalty card junkies?

What I'm reading in January

 I'm back home from Germany. I always pay my respects to the sea first thing and the weather has been so good, it has been a lot of fun walking on the beach. I watched a fishing boat heading for home with a trail of seagulls in its wake, a few ducks swimming about near the shore looking unimpressed with these antics. The sea a wonderful blue, mirroring the cloudless sky. Home. Wonderful.

Over Christmas I read The Secrets of Primrose Square by Claudia Carroll. I had not read any of her previous work and would not normally go for a novel of this type but I wanted something light and easy to read for the holidays. The book did not disappoint. It was a pleasant read with a (predictable) happy ending. The characters were endearing and had me cheering for them. A perfect holiday read.

I have now started reading Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers. This novel was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021. I am really enjoying it, it has an intriguing plot, I love Clare's style of writing. In fact, it is considerably better than other novels I have attempted to read which have been cried up as "fantastic, engrossing etc".

I have ordered books, of course, although I still have Mary Higgins Clark's Stillwatch and Robert Goddard's One False Move. I am a fan of both these writers, especially their earlier novels.

There is absolutely nothing like settling down with a good book. But I don't have to tell readers that!

I now have to completely revise my Christmas novel which I never got round to doing much work on. Just haven't got into the routine of regular writing yet. I'll start tomorrow.....

Happy Christmas 2021 to everybody!

I wonder if anyone else managed to cut a finger on a cinnamon stick while making mulled wine? Only me, was it? Oh well, it could be worse.

The mulled wine was delicious, at any rate, and everyone was asking for the recipe. I don't have a recipe, it is a process of pouring in the red wine, adding a dash - or is that a splash? - or two of port, some red (Irish) lemonade, slices of orange, cloves and the aforementioned cinnamon sticks. Warm everything up, turn off the heat and let it "mull" for an hour, then re-heat gently.  Delicious.

Mind you, drinking mulled wine at a Christmas market under a starry sky, feet turned to icicles in the frosty air, is what I call enjoying the run up to Christmas. I love the time from the first Sunday in Advent, usually the last Sunday in November, to Christmas Eve. I remember how excited the children were when we lit the first candle in the the Advent wreath. They would start to count off the days until school holidays. The Advent calendar was another hit, opening those doors the height of fun, even though there were usually only very indifferent chocolates behind them. 

As I write this, we are almost there. One week more and it will be Christmas Eve. I will be celebrating with family in Germany where Christmas Eve is the big day and the presents are distributed. Santa doesn't come, of course. St. Nikolaus comes on December 6th, although he does not bring the main presents. He is not the fat, jovial figure of the advertisements. He is a bishop with a bishop's mitre and crozier and he is quite slim, as befits a bishop, I guess. Children learn that he was a bishop in Myra in present day Turkey. Sometimes he comes with Ruprecht, who carries a stick to beat naughty children, although this is pure legend, whereas Nikolaus really did exist and was good to the poor.

Whatever you believe in, Christmas is a time of good will, a time for meeting up with friends, for visiting older family members.

I wish all my readers a peaceful, happy Christmas!

Where to find a good thriller - am I too hard to please?

 I am currently reading a thriller which has been cried up as being "twisty, scary" and was recommended in the Sunday Times and on its cover by another crime author whose books don't appeal to me. Perhaps I should have been warned. This was a random purchase because I recognised the title. The plot is, indeed, scary but regrettably that's all I can say for the book. I could not bond with any of the characters, two of whom were depressingly similar, it was hard to tell one from the other. And it all went on and on, the hand-wringing, soul-searching, conversations which didn't do anything for the plot. I daresay I am out of kilter with what is popular in this kind of fiction. I loved Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty and I sometimes get the feeling I am reading bits of this novel when I try other work out there at the moment. 

Being a writer myself, I appreciate all the hard work that goes into writing a novel and I also fully understand that reading tastes vary widely, and thank goodness they do, otherwise we'd only have one kind of book available to us. However, I have to feel empathy with the main character and if I do not feel that in the first ten pages of the story, my attention will start to falter. "They can all kill themselves for all I care" I have thought on a few occasions. 

I am currently flicking through this novel but I just cannot read through another chapter. I'll keep turning over the pages and checking to see who did it and why before I drop the book off at a charity shop. 

Nearly there with the new novel

 Well, I have finished my sixth or seventh draft of the new Sergeant Alan Murray novel and just need to read it one more time to check for errors and omissions and all that kind of stuff. I have to psych myself up to do this because I have been reading, re-reading and editing for weeks now, or so it seems. I feel I know every word by heart - and that is not good. Familiarity breeds typos, incorrect names and backgrounds of the main players, to mention but a few problems. So I need to knuckle down one more time.

As usual, I have enjoyed writing the story, getting the characters to develop before my eyes and sorting out the whys and wherefores of the plot. Nearly there. I have the cover sorted (I hope). Next comes the blurb, the outline of the story which hooks the reader and persuades them to open the book or download to Kindle. I always find this the most difficult. What to leave out, what to put in? Basically, someone commits a crime (murder usually) and Sergeant Alan Murray has to find out who the perpetrator is and bring them to justice. Inbetween the crime and the solving of the crime, comes what the French so elegantly call the denouement, the unravelling of all those bits and pieces of information which I have scattered into the pages of the story. 

I have some loyal readers who are waiting impatiently for the novel to be completed and available. Readers are what makes it all worthwhile. So here goes.

 Time to relax at least for a bit.

I finished another psychological thriller on my TBR pile about a week ago and decided that I needed a break from all the tension. I have to say that, thanks mainly to Twitter, I have been able to pick up some excellent thrillers and I am grateful for that. But I felt it was time to turn to the gentle world of Jane Austen and so I took Emma down from my bookshelves. I have read it so often that I nearly know it by heart but this does not lessen the enjoyment. You know that line in the song The Second Time Around? Well, reading Emma is "like a friendly home the second time you call". It is like visiting old friends where you can talk as if you had seen each other only yesterday. Randalls, Hartfield and the village of Highbury, they represent a sheltered world which is gone for ever. The no-nonsense Mr. Knightley and Emma, who we have to like even though she thinks "a little too well of herself", because with all her faults, she is basically like us all: good at heart but liable to make blunders.

I should, of course, be editing my Sergeant Alan Murray novel. I have finished the first draft and now comes the hard work. But I do it for fun, I keep reminding myself. I hope to have this fourth novel in the series ready for publication by September at the latest. A plot for a Christmas novel is also starting to tick over in my head but I haven't got beyond thinking about the main character. 

Writing is a wonderful pastime. It beats knitting bed socks, let me tell you, at least for me. I never could learn any kind of handicraft. At least if you are a writer you can repair, unravel and start anew without having to pick up wool and needles or scissors or whatever. 

Maybe I'll just read one more chapter of Emma to keep the feel good effect going. Might start on editing tomorrow.