It rained almost all weekend (a nice country rain), so Partner and I caught up on all the series that we missed in March, especially Star Wars: Bad Batch. We hadn’t seen the last five or six episodes of the second season, and they were very good. A horrid cliffhanger ending, though. Now we have to wait for a year to find out what happens next (if there is a third season – I hope so). We also watched a couple of episodes of Star Trek: Picard, which were also good, except for all that emoting. First Picard and Ricker are all touchy-feely best friends with each other and next, it’s “leave the bridge, you’ve caused all our deaths” (as if). Kind of exhausting and we’ve still got three or four episodes to go, as well as all of the new Star Wars: Mandalorian episodes that have come out since the beginning of March, and I don’t know how many episodes of the second season of Carnival Row. So many things to watch – good thing there’s the long Easter weekend upcoming.
I started watching Buffy, the Vampire Slayer while I was ill, on my phone with Disney+. I used to celebrate this series with friends when it first came out. There were three of us, and we used to meet for dinner and then watch the episodes as they were aired on German TV (dubbed, of course). We also did it for various Star Trek series, Babylon 5 and The X-Files. I’ve got all of Buffy on DVD, but never managed to watch all of them, but it’s quite convenient to watch episodes on my phone – but I haven’t had any time for the last two weeks. It will probably take me ages to watch the entire series.
Mum is starting to recover at least a bit from her bout of Covid 19. At least she’s starting to eat more and sleep well. She’s lost a lot of weight, though, which she could ill afford, as she was anyway rather skinny. Before Corona, she was slight but active and now she’s frail and feels tired all the time. I hope she’ll get better as the weather improves and there’s more of an incentive to move around a bit outside or in the garden. It’s sunny now, but the wind is still cold – it may be warmer at Easter.
My landlady has changed her mind about exchanging the oil furnace for a gas furnace. First, she made a fuss about having to get things done by the end of March. Then I contacted the neighbours asking if they would like to buy my oil and now it’s “You can keep your oil because I’m planning to install a new oil furnace instead”. No apologies about all the hassle, either. I’m sure she changed her mind because getting gas installed would be more expensive than just replacing the oil furnace. Personally, I don’t think either gas or oil are future-proof, but since it’s not my house I don’t really care what she does, as long as it doesn’t cause a nuisance for me. I pay a lot of rent and if I wanted to be bothered with stuff like that, I wouldn’t be a renter (except that I can’t afford my own house hereabouts). It’s enough of an anxiety to ponder what to do about the heating in our old house in Bavaria. Apparently, there’s an oil furnace supply bottleneck and so she can’t say when the new one will be installed. “When it’s warm” she mailed when I asked. A very precise statement, perfect for planning. Whenever we interact, this woman manages to annoy me (but to be fair, it’s partly me, expecting to be annoyed).
Apart from watching all those episodes, I did a lot of house cleaning, so that I won’t have to do much next weekend, when it’s Easter. I even polished the bathroom door. That door, like all the other interior doors in the house, is cheaply wooden (somewhat flimsy), with a dark reddish-brown varnished veneer. The varnish, unfortunately, is old and porous, especially on the bathroom door (I suppose the water vapour is hard on it). I talked about it with the landlady, and she told me that she had this great stuff to fix the problem and then she sent me a link to a certain kind of paint (or maybe it’s a stain). Apparently, she thought I was going to paint or stain the doors. Well, of course, I’m not doing that. But I found a good polish, one that doesn’t contain wax or silicone and doesn’t smell. Now the bathroom door looks much better, it only took about 20 minutes, and I’ll probably polish some or all the other doors during this year. The door’s not perfect, but it no longer looks like it could do with a fresh coat of varnish. It was fun because it looked so much better afterwards.
I read The Secrets of Hartwood Hall, by Katie Lumsden in two sittings. She has a booktube channel that I follow more or less: Books and Things. She’s the one that inspired me to read all of Charles Dickens’ novels in 2020 and I’m doing a reread now with her “Mega Dickens’ Readalong”. Hartwood Hall is her first novel, and I was curious to see how it turned out. I found it interesting and engrossing, but it didn’t blow me away. If I gave stars, I’d give it a solid three stars.
The novel is about a young widow, Margaret Lennox, who accepts a position as a governess at an out-of-the way manor. The marriage doesn’t seem to have been a happy one. Mrs. Lennox (as she is mostly called) used to be a governess before her marriage. She is deaf in one ear and her letters of reference are out of date, because she didn’t work as a governess (or as anything) during her marriage, so she is glad to have the position. However, things at Hartwood Hall are strange. There are only a few servants, there are rumours that the house is haunted, and the villagers avoid the place. Mrs. Lennox builds up a good relationship with her young pupil and with her employer although the latter, Mrs. Eversham, is oddly anxious about her son’s well-being. He’s not allowed to be out of adult supervision at all. There are a lot of, I thought, unsubtle hints about what is going on – I felt that I knew what was up early on and I was partly right, but near the end of the book there’s a twist that I didn’t see coming, which I appreciated. I thought that there were a few too many subplots in the book. Margaret, for instance, becomes infatuated with a young man, the gardener, and has an affair. This was hard to believe, as she would have lost her position if it had been found out and she was anyway being blackmailed by one of the other inhabitants of the hall, who threatened her position and who had stolen one of her letters. This person was also blackmailing at least two other people. When the blackmailer rather drastically got what was coming to them, the other characters (including Mrs. Lennox) were rather unconvincingly sorry – if I had been blackmailed and it suddenly stopped, I’d have been not at all inclined to see extenuating circumstances for the blackmailer (especially since they were very vindictive). I did like that Margaret’s affair played out in an unconventional way. The story became rather exciting toward the end of the novel. I felt that the ending would have been a good beginning for a sequel, as the characters are left at an interesting point. All in all, an entertaining read, but not something that I would normally have picked up. But I will be reading Katie Lumsden next novel, too.
I also read a bit of the first volume of Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers (in German). It’s all about how Jacob prefers Joseph to his other 11 sons, which we all know from the biblical story. What struck me about that, is that it’s well known (at least in Germany – the Mann family is famous) that Thomas Mann had three favourites among his six children. You’d think that someone who wrote about the negative consequences of parental preference would have avoided this with his own children. Well, you’d be wrong. By all accounts, the Mann’s family life was hard on some of the family members.
Reading this novel of Mann’s makes me feel sleepy (it’s all those long sentences) and reminds me of long boring summer holidays, but I’m strangely still enjoying it. I’m keeping a skeptical eye out for women protagonists, and how Mann deals with them. I can’t remember if Mann wrote believable women characters or if he had sexist opinions. Considering his own role as a family patriarch, I wouldn’t be surprised. So far, there have only been a few mentions of Jacob’s wives, hard to judge. But I’ve only read 70 pages.
Lesser Leaves 