Andrea Montgomery's Blog: Andrea Montgomery's Blog, page 2

The Garden – A Growing Obsession

I’ve been planning to remodel the garden ever since we moved in two and a half years ago.

The garden is very small by most standards and miniscule compared to the size of the gardens that surround us here in our rural Somerset village. Having such a small garden was a bone of contention for me when we were deciding whether to buy the house. I wanted a bigger garden and although I loved the house, there was a small garden-shaped shadow over my excitement when we moved in.

But ...

Butter by Asako Yuzuki

To me, Butter by Asako Yuzuki is a compelling amalgam of crime fiction and cookbook.

It was a single sleeve quote from the novel that had Jack heading to the till in Waterstones:

‘There are two things that I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine.’

And that, in a succinct nutshell, is the nub of much of the novel. Set in modern-day Tokyo, Butter explores the Japanese attitude to such weighty themes as misogyny, work ethic, sex discrimination, and body shaming, all ...

Beautiful Bute

Jack and I have just spent a glorious long weekend in beautiful Bute, Jack’s homeland off the west coast of Scotland.

I have no idea how many times I have visited Bute over the almost-40 years that Jack and I have been together but I could count on my fingers the number of times we have had dawn-to-dusk sunshine, superb visibility and summer-like temperatures for almost the entirety of the visit.

Stepping out

Taking advantage of the weather, on Friday morning we headed to th...

Curating Words

Curating Walking Routes

T he dictionary definition of the verb ‘to curate’ is: ‘to pull together, sift through, and select for presentation’.

Recently, Jack and I have been exploring further afield, curating new walking routes to add to our portfolio.

One new route in particular stands out as now being right up there with some of the best walking in Somerset. But we didn’t just stumble across it, we had to look at existing routes, then try to plot out a new way on the ground...

Rain Stops Play

Rain kept our lives on hold all through January and most of February and for a while, I began to wonder if we hadn’t made a mistake relocating to the UK.

Jack and I didn’t have any definitive travel plans in the pipeline, just the promise of an Italian garden tour which we first booked in 2020, had to cancel due to the pandemic, and have yet to re-book due to availability of all parties concerned. Walks were restricted to 7km circuits around the village due to the incessant r...

Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov

Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov is about life in a war zone, specifically the zone of Donbas which in 2014, lay between the Russian and Ukrainian fighting positions, and is known as the grey zone. A front line of 430 kilometres, in parts it is just a few hundred metres wide, in others it is kilometres wide. Most of the residents of the villages and towns that lie in the grey zone left at the start of the 2014 conflict, abandoning their homes, orchards and farms.

Grey Bees is set i...

Writing Endings in Trilogies

It strikes me that there is a world of difference between writing endings in a stand-alone novel and endings in trilogies. In the former, the story should reach a conclusion that, even though it may leave the door open for a return to this character or situation, nevertheless should leave the reader feeling that they have reached the end.

On the other hand, the endings in volumes one and two of a trilogy should also act as a springboard into the next volume.

Arcs versus endi...

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

When I took Orbital by Samantha Harvey with me to read on a train journey, Jack said, “You’ll have finished that before you get to Stockport.”

I didn’t. Yes I was distracted by the scenery, the comings and goings on the train, and by what waited for me at the end of my journey as I was going to say goodbye to my terminally ill brother, but most of all I found I had to repeatedly put the book down and try to digest what I had just read.

Weeks later, when Jack started to read i...

The Funeral

On the day of the funeral, snow was falling thickly, blanketing the graves and headstones in a soft white down as if it could disguise their very nature.

We gathered at the porch of the chapel in our bewildered, unsettled groups, shuffling our feet against the biting cold and wondering when someone would tell us what to do, where to go. We were like unsupervised children, incapable of making our own decisions.

Every few moments, someone came up to me and looked me in the eyes...

How to Complain

I seem to spend a lot of my time nowadays finding out how to complain.

I never used to be a complainer, for most of my life I have put up with so-so service, meh food, and a fair bit of corporate incompetence. But lately I’m on a one-woman crusade to raise the standard of customer service we have to put up with.

What changed

When we lived in Tenerife and then in Portugal, we daily faced levels of corporate incompetence that would have your toenails curling. But because I felt...