July brought a heatwave but also some very heavy rain and storms.

What I have read

I started out well in July but didn’t keep it up. Still, 10 books isn’t bad for during the school holidays! I’m now done with the Robert Langdon books so I’m not sure what I’ll focus on next. I’ve still got one more Indian in the Cupboard book to read, and loads of other things on my to-read list.

• Remember Me? – Sophie Kinsella
• Inferno (Robert Langdon #4) – Dan Brown
• Detective Stories (Rivers of London graphic novel #4) – Ben Aaronovitch
• Wishful Drinking – Carrie Fisher
• The Mystery of Tully Hall – Zöe Billings (reviewed here)
• The Mystery of the Indian (The Indian in the Cupboard #4) – Lynne Reid Banks
• Tayside’s Last Days of Steam – W.A.C. Smith
• Fife’s Lost Railways – Gordon Stansfield
• Chimney Corner Stories – reviewed here
• Origin (Robert Langdon #5) – Dan Brown

And I’m currently reading:

• Dilly’s Lass (Dilly’s Story #2)
• Confessions of a Curious Bookseller – Elizabeth Green

What I have watched

• Hollyoaks, some more Mythbusters and a few more episodes of Loki.
• Only Connect, which returned for a new series this month.
• I have finished the fourth season of True Blood which is as far as I ever watched before, now I’ll have to open the still-wrapped season 5 boxset and start that.
• Our Tuesday night movies this month were: Full Out 2: You Got This!, Footloose and Magic Mike XXL.

What I have done

We’ve been quite busy this month with lots of day-trips as we both took a week of annual leave so we could enjoy ourselves a bit.

We went to:

• Auchmithie, and explored the beach and caves
• Two zoos, the larger Five Sisters Zoo which is near Livingston, and the tiny Fife Zoo where we saw armadillos for the first time – they were much livelier and more curious than I had imagined.
• A new nature reserve we happened to discover (Birnie and Gaddon Lochs) where we saw ducks, swans, a heron, a frog, lots of bees and little blue dragonflies
• The Discovery – the ship that the ship that took Scott and Shackleton to Antarctica in 1901!
• Murton Farm which has a few animals but we mostly go for the trampolines, sandpits and other play equipment
• The Scottish Deer Centre, now reopened under new management and with the addition of a vintage fire engine, which of course Brodie loved.
• The Dundee Museum of Transport – we went on the special emergency vehicles day and saw a load of police cars and fire engines which were parked outside.
• East Haven beach where we paddled and explored the rock pools
• And lastly Auchingarrich where Brodie enjoyed milking a fake cow, petting the guinea-pigs and tortoises and playing in the park

Apart from all those days out we also:

• Had two separate days of isolating and waiting for Covid test results. On the second day we set up a campsite in the garden and ‘toasted’ marshmallows on a pretend fire.
• Did some baking. We made some banana bread and ice-cream, but I had rather a disaster trying to make a rhubarb crumble. It was so hot that the crumble just melted together and turned into a soup… It still tasted OK though.
• Have been looking after nursery plot which is where we got the rhubarb from
• Visited various parks

What I have bought

After my discovery that my copy of Chimney Corner Stories didn’t contain the original 20 stories I ordered myself a new copy which I think is a first edition, though it doesn’t have a dust jacket.

What has your month looked like?