Petrina Binney's Blog, page 67
March 16, 2019
Day #75 – Tara-Dog
And I’ve not been completely deprived. I went to London a couple of weeks ago. Still slightly giddy from that. With my writing, I’m always somewhere else inside my head. And I read a lot, too. So, whether I’m physically here or not, I’m somewhere.
However, in terms of going away and staying somewhere – in a different area, a different bed, with a continental breakfast – no. Not since my electrical courses in Southampton. And then, I was working, and the continental breakfast was a banana and a bottle of orange juice, in an overpriced paper bag, which sat outside my hotel bedroom door, often until I got back from work at 5pm.
Actually away for a break – we’re going back quite a long way.
When I first met Aimée, she used to bring Tara, the Labrador, to the Clubhouse and, as much as Aimée was happy to see me, it paled into insignificance with how delighted Tara was.
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Aimée was probably joking when she suggested I go on holiday with Tara, leaving the rest of them at home.
We’re going.
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Probably not far. We’ll go somewhere quiet and safe, with a pub and a fondness for dogs, a few local legends and a famous casserole. That sort of place. We’ll send the others a postcard, I expect. They’ll be having the exact same thing, but with council tax.
March 15, 2019
Day #74 Enya
I’ll save you some time.
Very.
I tend to play music in my car. If I find an album I like, I just play it over and over again until the lyrics stay in my head through wakefulness and dreaming.
One of the best albums that has ever been, and will ever be, in my car, was Paint The Sky With Stars. Every song, a delight. Cannot recommend it highly enough.
One of my characters decides to use an Enya song to reconnect with her husband in Book Three. It’s a good choice. Barry White can be intimidating. Boadicea is perfect.
I absolutely love the song. It’s been sampled by everyone and with good reason. Haunting and divine, it’s a total cracker. I’m sure I read somewhere that one of the reasons Enya doesn’t tour is because there are something like fifty layers of vocals on her songs, it would be hard to replicate in an arena.
Go ahead – give it a listen…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKQwgpaLR6o
When I was little, perhaps six or seven, a song came on the radio while my Dad was picking up fish and chips. I’d never heard anything like it, and tried desperately to replay it by hitting rewind on the tape deck, little realising I was just scrolling back through the switched-off Best of Abba. The song finished before my Dad came back to the car and I was distraught because he wouldn’t be able to listen to it with me.
I think I had a crack at singing it to him myself but I was six and not musically-gifted. My not singing it would have been as useful and my trying. It was Orinoco Flow, which, at the time, I believed was called Sailor Way. Because I was six.
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My Dad, who was the kindest man in the world, went into work and hummed it to the women in the office. They knew the song well, so despite my Dad’s slightly embarrassed attempt at replicating my admittedly poor rendition, they were able to identify the tune. It was some time later, at a loss regarding Christmas presents, a word was had, and my godmother bought me the album.
Best. Present. Ever.
There you have it. Day #74 in the best of things: Enya.
March 14, 2019
Book Review – Codename Villanelle by Luke Jennings
Now, I like to think of myself as the sort of person who reads a book, watches the series or film, and wonders if anyone else saw the character differently in their heads. Viewing the film or series not with disappointment, but with a healthy level of skepticism. Okay, perhaps not that healthy, but I lean on the idea of my reading the book first.
This, however, is not the case. I am the sort of person who watches the film or binge-watches the whole series in one go, and then… thinks about ordering the book. Perhaps a time will come when I do buy the book. At a much later time, I’ll read it. Much later.
I adore the series ‘Killing Eve’. Really.
When the first series came on BBC1, Aimée was working on occasional Saturday nights. Arguably, I could have watched some of it without her, but that felt unfair.
I’m not a saint. I allowed myself the sneaky joy of watching episode one while Aimée was out to dinner with her parents, but I decided to stop myself at that point. And then, Aimée got the flu.
I did all the stuff you’re supposed to do as the caring significant other. I bought Manuka honey. I filled her up with Lemsip. I allowed for the mountains of tissues piling up around the house, and I sympathised.
And then, I switched on the iPlayer, and watched ‘Killing Eve’ from start to finish in one night. She’d stopped hacking by that point. I’m not a monster.
Anyway, enough about me. I decided, as I often do, to buy the book, and now I have read it.
Codename Villanelle by Luke Jennings
First published May 2015
Oh. My. Word.
Now, there are plenty of places where the series and the book differ. Some of the characters from the series are not in the book. Some of the settings are unexpected, and Eve is not in her forties. Okay, but that’s the lot for spoilers, so we can all take a breath.
The thing is this: the book is beautifully written. Stunningly, in fact. The landscape is rich and beautifully drawn. The characters reverberate from the page. The dialogue is snappy and clear. I love this book.
At its heart, the story is reflected well by the series. It’s still the cat-and-mouse, assassin and agent story. Even though there are plenty of characters in the series who I missed in the book, I feel able to love both book and series equally, even though they’re not the same.
I’ll include a passage I absolutely loved – a flashback to when Oxana tried putting the moves on her teacher, Anna:
“As Puccini’s music swirled around them, Oxana reached out a hand and laid it over one of Anna’s breasts. Gently, but firmly, Anna removed the hand, and equally firmly, a moment later, Oxana replaced it. This was the game she had played many times in her mind.”
Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle, Chapter Three, page 119
Loved it. Recommended.
Go. Read. Enjoy.
Day #73 A Body That Cooperates
It’s an odd thing, and astonishing to me that it’s taken me nearly thirty-seven years to consider it.
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Since my childhood, I have been at war with my body. I have been fat. I have been thin. When I was thin, I was just working too hard in a job I didn’t like, I was quite stressed, and I was full to the brim with Red Bull.
My favourite quote from Liberace is and always has been: “My clothes come in three sizes: Thin, fat and impossible.”
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Much as, at the moment, I am firmly in a fat phase – my body is not so much a temple as an airport hangar – it is, at least, cooperating.
Now, it happens on ‘Come Dine With Me’. A group of people who don’t know each other, sit around and quite often, make some sort of terrible faux pas. Something genuinely awful. I think most people know not to guess other people’s ages. But it is shocking when they talk about plastic surgery.
Someone, perhaps after a little to drink, will wonder (aloud, which is often an error) what everyone else would have if they could have any sort of surgery. What usually makes it truly stomach-churning is when they either a) have a list: devastating, or b) ask the others to guess: oh, lord, no.
Usually, someone around the table will give a full recitation of their entire body and everything that, time and cash permitting, they would have removed, shrunk, enlarged, or shuffled about a bit.
When the question comes, ‘If you could have any surgery, what would you have?’ the answer usually goes something like this:
(Deep breath)
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“Well… Tummy tuck, breast enlargement or breast reduction – possibly one and then the other, face lift, bum lift – just yoink up the whole body and snip off the excess.
“Then, oh, whatever the surgery is called where they can remove upper arm fat and tighten the skin without your having to prick it like sausages if you’re going out on a warm day.
“What next? Probably an eye lift, smidge of the old rhinoplasty, tighten up the jawline… In all honesty, if they could just swap out the face with silly putty until I’ve got it into an order I’m okay with, and then ram it full of botox and filler before it melts, that would be great.”
No one ever says, “I’d probably get my varicose veins done.”
I had a chat with a chap in his, perhaps sixties, the other day. I’ll point out, this was in the foyer at Sainsbury’s. He was on his way in, I was about to leave. I don’t know his name. He doesn’t know mine. But we’re polite. He asked how I was. I said I was fine, thanked him, and asked how he was. Because I’m a person, and that’s what we do.
Years back, he broke his shoulder. Since then, he’s had three knee replacements. Three. One of them wore out. But just recently, his hip has started crunching. Audibly. Now, this is not when he walks, or jogs, or tries to get out of a chair after a nap. This is when he’s lying down. Flat on his back in bed, straightening the bedclothes, and thinking over his day, he can hear his hip crunching.
“Anyway, love,” he said cheerfully, “how are you keeping?”
I imagine I did an excellent impression of a goldfish while I tried to think of a less complacent way of saying – “I’m really well, as it happens.”
Fat be buggered, I’m feeling pretty well.
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So, there you have it. Day 73 of #365HappyDays – A Body That Cooperates.
March 13, 2019
Day #72 Spike Milligan
We had a cassette of music from kids’ shows, which was usually playing for an hour or so. After the tape had played through once, no one wanted to turn it over again. The theme tunes included those from Doctor Who, Magic Roundabout, Thunderbirds and possibly Inspector Gadget. I can’t be totally sure as I’m digging around in the back of my head and we’re going back thirty-odd years.
Anywho, once the tape was exhausted, if we hadn’t got to wherever we were going, we’d play I Spy. We didn’t play I Spy for long because my Dad was watching the road, and my mother was looking at the scenery but getting swept up in it. And I Spy loses some of its magic when you’re playing solo.
Sometimes, there would be a family sing-song. My mother wasn’t much for singing. If we take it as a given that the tune didn’t really matter, she was pretty good. Songs in the car tended to be of the “If I Knew You Were Coming, I’d’ve Baked a Cake” type, but with the words changed and the tune slightly mangled.
For example,
“If I knew you were coming, I’d’ve…
Left the house.
Burnt it down.
Changed my name.
Grown a beard.” That sort of thing.
The finest moment in family journey history came when a new cassette suddenly appeared in the car.
I don’t know whether we actually knew where it had come from, but I imagine it was a surprise for my mother from my Dad. The Goon Show.
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Driving along, crying with laughter, the journeys seemed to go much faster and we were at our destination in no time at all. I seem to remember sitting in the car in some elderly aunt’s driveway, waiting for the line, “He’s fallen in the water,” before we ventured near the doorbell and the side window, with its net pulled back and a very proper lady in tweed, tutting.
Like everybody else, I loved Peter Sellers. At one point, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan lived opposite each other. At around three in the morning, and knowing that Spike was suffering from insomnia, Peter Sellers crossed the street and knocked on Spike’s door. When he answered, yawn-eyed and shattered, Spike saw his friend, standing completely naked, except for socks, shoes, a bowler hat and a furled umbrella. Before he could say anything, Peter Sellers said, “Do you know a tailor?”
My mother adored Harry Secombe, especially when he fell to fits of hooting giggles. But there is no one finer than Spike.
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I’ve read all his autobiographies, grown up on his poetry, and he made hour upon hour sitting on the M25 seem glorious.
There you have it. Day 72 of #365HappyDays, Spike Milligan.
And because you must hear it, here’s the Ying Tong Song…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nebe1zuEtbc
March 12, 2019
Day #71 A Book Club
As we were leaving school, my buddy Kirsty turned to me and asked what I wanted to do with my life. In the year running up to this question, we’d sat career assessment tests and attended mock interviews with potential employers.
The results of the career assessment tests indicated most of us were “perfect” or “well-suited” to between three and five careers; I came back with thirty-two potential employment directions, including politician and fish farmer.
With the mock interviews, we were asked to name the field we would like to enter, and whoever organised these things, would procure an interview with a related firm for us.
I wanted to be a poet.
It’s quite difficult to interview for the position of poet when you’re too young to drink and haven’t got TB. As such, I was sent to an interview with the local newspaper in Exeter.
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Anywho, we went through the standardised hoops. I decided it would take me several years to read up on the various careers I was allegedly “perfect” for, but I already knew I lacked the detachment required for a career in journalism, and then, quite suddenly, Kirsty asked me what I wanted to do.
“I just want to read everything. And write more.”
In the twenty-ish years since I said that, I’ve read a huge amount. I’ve written quite a lot. I think my sixteen year old self would be quite proud. Although, she would be stunned it took me this long to find a book club.
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Here’s the thing: with the book club, as with any book club, we choose a book (shock horror!), we read it, and then six or so weeks later, we reconvene, talk about it, and pick the next book. It’s lovely. And I don’t know whether it’s solely because I’ve read books I wouldn’t have gone near otherwise, but my appetite for reading absolutely anything has increased to near-teenage levels.
I’m reading everything. And for renewing this now-insatiable appetite for reading, the book club will have my endless gratitude.
There you have it. Day 71 – Book Club.
Also, the title of a cracking film with Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, Diane Keaton and Mary Steenburgen.
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Brilliant.
March 11, 2019
Day #70 A Local Pub
I like a local pub. The sort of place where everybody knows everybody and therefore, there are very few problems. And the arguments that do exist go back three or four generations, and nobody remembers quite what started it. That’s my sort of place. Somewhere with comfortable chairs and a smidge of intrigue.
My local is my Royal British Legion Club, as previously mentioned, repeatedly, and for a couple of years now. It’s a thing. I love my Legion.
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But it’s the localness of the place that makes it so cosy. I can think of nowhere else that my Jack Russell could help himself to my pint, while I was chatting to my brother, Ben, and no one would bat an eyelid.
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And there are people at the Legion who’ve been there since the sixties. They’ve changed position, here and there. They haven’t just sat in the same corner, acquiring cobwebs and allowing the foam on their pints to go full-on millpond, in the years in between.
Because they’ve been there for so long, many of the locals have something approaching patois. It’s their own language, composed mostly of half-remembered jokes, which improve with every telling, and the theme tune to The Godfather.
I remember thinking, when Aimée first took me to her ringcraft class, how I was looking into a little world I would never have cause to know about otherwise. In the ringcraft classes, people bring their dogs and practise walking in a triangle, walking up and down, and having the dog stand perfectly still during an examination of their teeth, ears, general shape, on the table. Ringcraft is its own little universe, and it doesn’t take long to get pulled into it.
It’s very like a local pub. As viewed from the outside, it’s filled with connections that don’t need to be explained. It’s comfortable, but somehow, a little distant until you’re part of it. But that’s the joy of a local boozer. You only have to go in twice to be absorbed into the family.
I’m from the eighties, and might have romanticised the whole experience of a drinking establishment because of over-exposure to ‘Cheers’.
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But, as much as there have been times when people have struggled to spell it, at my local, everybody knows my name.
And there you have it – Day 70 of #365HappyDays – a Local Pub.
March 10, 2019
Day #69 Otters
Oh, but they’re so pretty. And, gleaned from the internet, sea otters have pockets or, more accurately, a small pouch under each forearm in which they usually store a favourite rock. The favourite rock sounds entirely too cute, but it is practical and kept as a means of cracking open shellfish and clams.
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Sea otters also hold hands when they’re sleeping so as not to drift apart. My heart is melting.
Sometimes, they wrap themselves up in the long strands of kelp that grow from the sea floor all the way up to the surface, so as to avoid floating out into open waters.
When I was little, we used to come to Devon on family holidays. The only reason we found the area we wound up moving to was because my mother saw a sign at the side of the road. We were, not lost as such, but driving around, looking for somewhere to stop, and there was a small brown road sign which read ‘Otter Nurseries’.
Now, anyone who knows the south-west of England will understand that the road sign was indicating where we could find a large, thriving garden centre, at which every kid in the area has worked at one time or another.
We did not know the south-west of England all that well. So, my mother read the sign, fell into a rhapsody and exclaimed, “Oh, look! Baby otters! We must go!”
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Luckily, my mother adored potted plants, so her disappointment lasted only a few seconds. Then, she proceeded to buy a car boot’s worth of hydrangeas.
So, what is a group of otters called? Well, there’s the obvious: a lodge, a family or, best of all – a romp.
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Another reason to love otters is that they eat a huge amount of food. 15-25% of their body weight, daily. Foraging for anything up to five hours a day. Now, that’s an animal I can identify with.
There you have it – day #69 – Otters.
March 9, 2019
Day #68 Chess
My dad brought his parents over for dinner. My mother made a sort of bolognese thing, served in a marrow. I’ve tried to make it myself. It took four hours to get the marrow to go from solid as a rock to melting through the wire rack. You know how pears are when you buy them in the supermarket? You could knock a nail in the wall with them, and then, all you have to do is leave them in the fruit bowl, on their own for a few minutes, and they turn to mush? Like that – but cooked. And a marrow.
Anyway, my mother made this marrow thing for my grandparents. At the end of the meal, my grandfather put his napkin to one side, thanked my mother and said he couldn’t possibly manage another bite. My mother had the panic that comes to us all – convinced he hadn’t had more than a spoonful, and rose tentatively to take his plate. It was clean. He’d practically taken the pattern off it.
My grandmother, on the other hand, called my mother by the wrong name for the first three months of their engagement. Just to see if she was a keeper.
When my mother introduced my father to hers, the men struggled to find common ground. True, my dad had been in the RAF and my grandfather had been an aeronautical engineer, but they didn’t exploit the link. Instead, my grandfather, who had spent much of his marriage playing correspondence chess with people all over the world – creating for my mother a stamp collection that was the envy of the county, and a level of silence in the household – decided to teach my father to play the game. He bought him books on strategy, and spoke at length about various styles from Russia and Germany.
My dad wasn’t one to sit for any length of time so chess was never really his forte, but he tried. And over the top of the curtains at the back of my sitting room, I have the family chess set. My mother made it when she was skiing in Norway. She could have only been twenty-four at the time. These pieces have survived several house-moves and almost sixty years, but they’re too pretty to play with.
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And then, quite recently, I saw this:
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My strategy has never been all that great, but I think I could risk taking up chess again…
And there you have it. Day #68 of #365HappyDays – Chess.
March 8, 2019
Day #67 Killing Eve
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So, I’m going to mind my manners and not go mad on spoilers and such, but the story is tremendous.
It’s dark and twisted with jet-black humour, and it’s just the best of the best of anything in the last ten years. Perhaps it’s the idea of a female assassin, and a young one at that, which is fascinating. It is primarily a story of women: there’s the killer, Villanelle. The agent, Eve. The boss, Carolyn. The ingenue, Elena.
And in the background, are the twelve. A collective of largely unseen men who use Villanelle to kill people as and when.
Villanelle lives exceptionally well. She has a lovely apartment, travels the world, lives a terribly exciting life, and enjoys her job. As Eve joins a team which is tasked with hunting down this clever killer, she becomes more and more involved in Villanelle’s life and less in her own, but there’s an understanding between the two of them. As they get to know more about each other, they wind up really admiring one another. It’s really quite romantic. And the murders are so clever. So clever.
Jodie Comer is remarkable. Sandra Oh is incredible. We know I adore Fiona Shaw, but she’s just amazing. Kirby Howell-Baptiste is magical.
There’s a line which you will never get the justice it deserves from anyone but Fiona Shaw. “I once saw a rat drink from a can of Coke there. Both hands. Extraordinary.”
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If you haven’t found it already, go and look. The second season starts in a month.
And we’re on the last day of the freebie giveaway of Book One, ’Sex, Death & Canapés’. While you’re looking for the DVD of Killing Eve, have a little look at my book…
UK: https://amzn.to/2MXOaXL
USA: https://amzn.to/2olxxHK
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