nineveh_uk

As, I am feeling a bit better, it is time to start my read of He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan, which fortunately I pre-ordered for delivery rather than collection, as inevitably my parents both now have Covid*. It arrived yesterday, but held off until I was sneezing a bit less and finished a Heyer. So here goes. I really hope it is not too violent, as I am a lightweight and it is hard to read through one's fingers.

I would have had a long and speculative post about what might happen, who among the traumatised people in medieval China would do what terrible thing, but life intervened. In any case, they're all going to do irreversible things and then regret them too late. So I note the most important question for a novel with an aesthetic debt to Chinese television drama:

Will anyone fall off a cliff?

ETA: I've just realised - somebody already did in She Who Became the Sun. I just hadn't spotted it as a Cliff Scene, because it isn't a tropey scene. So, a new question:

Will Ouyang's horse get a name?

*They are fine. I don't feel guilty - I gave them Covid, but they gave me my immune system.

Sainsbury's delivery arrived at lunchtime with a driver I have met before, this time wearing a long face. "I've got some bad news" he said. No, not a sudden shortage of chocolate eclairs or asparagus, but the leakage of the jar of pickled onions all over the bottom crate.

Fortunately, said crate didn't contain that much and it all being non-perishables was mostly stuff I could rinse under the tap, so I took it. But everything in cardboard - eggs and chocolate, both of which I had planned to eat tonight - was a write-off, and of course worst of all the pickled onions themselves! Chances of someone having slipped poison in, all but zero. Chances of a jar with a broken seal containing soggy picked onions? Far too high to contemplate!

Obviously, I ought to be feeling more worried at today's other news, that my parents have both got Covid (Mum tested after an email that someone at an AGM she attended had tested positive). But though not young they are in good health and they are both feeling OK, ironically Dad feeling much better than in the first half of the week when he had a non-Covid bug. So at the moment, no major reason for concern.

I am so, so glad it is the weekend. The past couple of weeks of work have been exhausting, I've been trying to do house purchase admin at the same time, which is difficult when work is high pressure and I can't face the computer in the evening, and the end of lockdown means the end of the blessed period of no other viruses so I'm back to waking with congestion again. But I have got a new garden chair, and look forward to sitting in it.