A sneaked in book for Reading Wales Month 2026. In "And: A memoir of my mother", artist and writer Isabel Adonis tells the story of her parents Catherine Alice and Denis Williams and her disrupted childhood. It's pure, lyrical brilliance.
thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2026/03/11/a...
Whimsy - the fanciful oddness that is a mirror of fey - is my watchword.
A broken glass bottle that used to contain soya milk and that crashed to the floor from the 80cm square table that acts as the kitchen at my place of work. The table (not pictured) holds a microwave, a kettle, mugs, teabags, a jar of coffee, paper towels and an empty plastic bottle for ferrying drinking water from the sluice room.
When you don't have a kitchen at work and everything (microwave, kettle, mugs, teabags, coffee, paper towels) is crammed onto an 80cm square table in the corner of the room that should be a kitchen.
Tall trees, possibly Scots pine, in Knightslow Wood at Lyme Park. Their long, scaly trunks reach up to the sky, topped with green foliage. The ground below is a rusty brown from the needles shed by the trees. The ground rolls away and down to the left.
Tall trees, possibly Scots pine, in Knightslow Wood at Lyme Park. They are dark against the brightness of the sky which is shades of blue, grey and white. A dry stone wall runs low in the background.
Tall trees, possibly Scots pine, in Knightslow Wood at Lyme Park. Their long, scaly trunks reach up to the sky, topped with green foliage. The central tree is dark and contorted. The sky is a bright blue with hints of cloud. The ground below is a rusty brown from the needles shed by the trees. The ground rolls away and down to the right.
A view across Drinkwater Meadow from Knightslow Wood at Lyme Park. Tree branches hang down from above, dark and whiskery against the sky. A large, pale grey and pinkish cloud cuts the blue sky from the rust and green land. A copse of trees is in the distance, one tree standing separate from the others. The meadowland is rough with tufted grass.
Trees. I bloody love them.
I love the M&S blood orange margarita. Their spicy marg made with chilli mescal is also good.
I'm a third of the way through the books from my backlog I've chosen to read this year. Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus is monumental. Magical realism, folklore, politics and adventure. What more could you want?
thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2026/03/07/n...
This sounds amazing. Savoury bread and butter pudding made with cheese and yoghurt? Yes, please!
My lips are sealed.
One person's touching is another person's cranking a handle so furiously it breaks. 👀
That mug is your teapot and everyone knows that you don't wash a teapot, you season it.
This is the reply thread I didn't know I needed. Dewi Sant: Fashion Influencer.
Number 14 from my list of 45 books by women from my backlog is Tracy Chevalier's Falling Angels, a moving account of the transition from Victorian to Edwardian and the societal change that started to gather pace.
thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2026/02/28/f...
Hope it gets you some more followers x
@lizaadamczewski.bsky.social always brightens my day with her art, her dog and her rescue lizard.
@alisonaye.bsky.social always makes me think with her stitched record of the people who appear in the paper.
M&S needs to have a word with itself.
Just the phrase "hot cross bun range" makes me tired.
This is magnificent stuff. Proper writing-to-work-things-out stuff. History is ever changing. We rewrite it and ourselves in relation to it constantly. At its heart, though, is a kernel of truth.
Book 13 in my Year of Reading Women is The Heart Goes Last. Not the best thing I've read by Margaret Atwood, but not the best, either. Farcical about sums it up.
thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2026/02/24/t...
I haven't watched The Worst Person in the World yet, but saw Sentimental Value at the cinema and cried in public. Renate Reinsve is phenomenal in it.
It shows you a colour for 5 seconds and then a set of sliders for hue, saturation and brightness and you have to recreate the colour. It's supposed to prove that humans are bad at remembering colours. Turns out that the massive box of Derwent colouring pencils I had as a kid was excellent training!
Screenshot of my dialed.gg score which has earned me a "that's just weird" from Mr'icks who is even now attempting to beat me. What I say? I like colours. I'm wearing a jumper that looks like a sherbet rainbow. The screenshot says: You ranked 4,444 out of 451,372 48.08/50 Perfect score. Congratulations. You've peaked. It's all downhill from here. ENTER INITIALS JRH Post 48.1 & challenge a friend Play again
Uh oh. Mr'icks has introduced me to something that tickles my obsessiveness. And I'm better at it than him.
48.1/50. I remember colors better than I remember names. Come at me.
dialed.gg?c=WTJEWP
Book 12 for my Year of Reading Women was Jane Fletcher Geniesse's Passionate Nomad, about Freya Stark, a woman who became an expert in Arabic culture in West Asia and whom I'd never heard of. I didn't always like her but I was thoroughly entertained.
thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2026/02/18/p...
We should all be more hare. This is beautiful, Liza.
My engagement with the sadmin is an age ago, now - 16 years, I've just added up on my fingers. You would think they'd have got their acts together by now. It was the energy companies that were the worst, but DWP was pretty bad, too.
And I'm sorry my phone autocorrected you to Melissa! I am sleep deprived and lacking in vigilence today.
Have you read The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists? Here’s the graphic novel version - the whole story told in cartoons.
You can still enjoy the story without reading the 255,000 word original text
And there are lots of horses and bicycles to look at
I'm sorry you're going through this, Melissa. If it helps, my standard position on this sort of nonsense after my dad died and my mum was diagnosed with dementia, leading to POA being put in place, was "I'd like to speak to your manager." POA seems to be off-script for call centre workers.
Graph showing unusual activity on my blog that WP characterised with a 'Boom!' message, like 6,894 computers wasting water and other resources to scrape my blog 8,215 times was a good thing.
WP characterised this with a 'Boom!' message, as though 6,894 computers wasting water and other resources to scrape my blog 8,215 times was a good thing.
So far today, I've had 80 views, which is nice.
Of course I blogged about it. I'm not sharing it here, though. I'm still spooked.
This article is interesting. I had massive (to me) scraping activity on my inconsequential blog about book nonsense over the last 4 days and it threw my reptilian brain for a loop. 53 views an hour? Fine. 1,143 views an hour? WHAT?
There's something about maps. I always make sure we have maps out when we have an open day at work. Strangers bond over them.
This level of research is what makes great historical fiction - prose or graphic.
