August was a better month all round.

What I have read

I had a much better month in August. I picked up quite a few books which turned out to be un-put-downable and so got read in two days each. Last month there were a couple of books that were easy to put down and I wasn’t excited to pick up again.

What I have read:

• George’s Marvellous Medicine – Roald Dahl
• The Magic Faraway Tree: A New Adventure – Jacqueline Wilson reviewed here
• The Wreck of the Argyll – John K Fullton reviewed here
• Fantastic Mr Fox – Roald Dahl
• One Foot in the Fade (The Fetch Phillips Archives #3) – Luke Arnold
• Scotland’s Lost Branch Lines: Where Beeching Got it Wrong – David Spaven
• Dirty Gertie Mackintosh – Dick King-Smith
• Are We Having Fun Yet? – Lucy Mangan
• Home Fires and Spitfires (Wartime Midwives #2) – Daisy Styles
• Five on Finniston Farm – Reviewed here and here
• Death and Croissants (Follet Valley Mysteries #1) – Ian Moore
• The Bookshop on the Shore (Scottish Bookshop #2) – Jenny Colgan
• The Adventurers and the Continental Chase (Adventurers #4) – Jemma Hatt reviewed here
• Keep Smiling Through (Wartime Midwives #3) – Daisy Styles
• Five Hundred Miles From You (Scottish Bookshop #3) – Jenny Colgan

And I’m still working on:

• The BFG – Roald Dahl
• The House in the Cerulean Sea – TJ Klune
• The Light Years (Cazalet Chronicles #1) – Elizabeth Jane Howard

What I have watched

• We’ve continued House of Games, Only Murders in the Building, and all of The Sandman.
• I gave up on the effort of swapping discs for Murder she Wrote and finished Cabins in the Wild with Dick Strawbridge, the new series of Dream House Makeover and Instant Dream Home. Then I started on Red Dwarf and went back to George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces.
• I also stuck on some movies, making use of our Disney+ subscription to watch Cheaper By the Dozen 1&2 and Pollyanna.
• On Tuesday nights we watched Honey We Shrunk Ourselves and both versions of Freaky Friday.
• We watched about half of Lightyear (about the ‘real’ Buzz Lightyear but Brodie found the robot too scary). Brodie and I also watched Ghostbusters 2… again, he’s gone Ghostbusters mad. He got some of the Playmobile sets for his birthday and randomly bursts out with Busting makes me feel good! and I ain’t afraid of no ghost.

What I have done

• The big things that happened were that Brodie turned five and started school! So we have all been adjusting to the new routine. He seems to like it so far and be happy to go, so that’s good! For his birthday we had a little party in the house which, although in August, had a snow theme. We made snowflake biscuits and I made marshmallow snowmen. All because he wanted a snowmobile (a real toy of course) on his cake. We also went ten pin bowling (I won, Ewan called it my best sporting achievement, I regard it as my only sporting achievement…) and crazy golf (where I did manage more holes in one than anyone else but also managed to ricochet the ball off a stone edging and send it careering across the car park…)
• Towards the end of the holidays we went down to the waterfront for ice cream, played at the urban beach and Brodie ran around in the fountains getting soaked
• We went to the beach and Brodie got pretty confident in going into the water after a while
• We took a longer than anticipated walk along the old railway but only found one of two caches we hunted for
• Brodie completed his summer reading challenge so we went to the library to get his final prizes (and play with all the toys).
• We set up our new (non-holey) paddling pool in the garden on a hot afternoon which is when we did our blackberry picking and a bit of gardening
• We visited the transport museum, and played some board games in the cafe before pretending to drive lots of vehicles
• And lastly we went to Montrose Air Station –  which is less than an hour away but we’d never heard of it before. It’s a former RAF base (1913-1952) with several of the hangars still standing and turned into a museum.

How was your August?