Temple Cloud

So, we finally meet a dragon!   But not before we have encountered Frau Tossilo at work, where, in contrast to her irritability with her young neighbours and her flustered response to unexpected callers, she is ‘friendliness personified’ and five times winner of the Salesperson of the Year award. Considering her obsession with shopping and consumerism, it isn’t surprising to discover that Frau Tossilo works in retail.   Every item of clothing or furniture in her flat is described in terms of colour and materials, in contrast to the only information about Johann and Janka’s fashion preferences coming in a few lines of banter in the opening chapter, to introduce the characters: ‘But the suitcase is pretty, isn’t it?   I’d love to have one like that.’ ‘Honestly, Janka, are you eleven or five?   You’re through with that colour by the time you’re past first grade.’ ‘Well, I’m not.   And at least it is a colour, not like your boring black jeans and even more boring grey hoodie.’ ‘

  Warning – this post contains spoilers!   Not very many, as it only covers the first few chapters, and you can probably guess where the story is going, but I thought I should warn you. So we come to the first book on my reading list.   To start off with, we have a glittery picture of a lovable-looking dragon’s face, in front of blue mountains which look nothing like the urban setting of – at least – the first half of the book.   And the title is – well, as printed on the front cover, it looks like two words, which I initially assumed meant something like ‘Dragons Awaken,’ or, to make the rhyme slightly better, ‘Drakes Awake’.   But a glance at the spine confirms that this is one word which had to be broken up for convenience, and means ‘Dragon-Awakening’. This is a book which PDB11 and I brought home from a holiday in Germany a few years ago.   This seems appropriate, given that the book opens with a character coming from her holidays.   She is ‘not alone’.   She has her faithful

  A few weeks ago, I read a New Scientist article on ‘ Why Ghosting Hurts So Much ’ .  Until then, I wasn’t familiar with the term ‘ghosting’ to describe cutting off contact with a person without warning or explanation, but I had experienced it three times that I know of.  At other times, friendships had drifted apart or friends had suddenly stopped returning my calls, but I couldn’t be sure that they were deliberately shunning me.  Some of them might have died, and others may simply have changed their address or phone number and forgotten to give me their new details.  But equally, sometimes friends are just going through a bad time and don’t feel up to communicating for a while – perhaps months or years at a time – and then the friendship recovers.  As I am sometimes appallingly bad at keeping in touch myself, I can hardly complain if other members of my friends and family group sometimes do the same. What I was surprised by, though, was the assertion in the New Scientist art

As I described in my previous post , I have called off my plans to go on a massive walking challenge.  However, I still want to fundraise to support Ukrainian refugees. Equally, I would still like to take up some sort of personal challenge.   There don’t seem to be any rules on what you can invite people to sponsor you to do.   I recently saw an article in a local paper about a man called Rob Hendra who has shaved off his beard  to raise money for the Disaster Emergency Committee’s Ukraine appeal through Tearfund.   If you are interested in supporting him or finding out more, please click on this link . Personally, I don’t have a lot of facial hair to start with.   However, what I would like to challenge myself to do, if I’m not going to be stretching my body’s limits with lots of walking, is to stretch my brain by practising reading German. A quarter of a century ago, I managed to learn enough German in two years to scrape through the GCSE exam.   Five years ago, as I described

When I began this year, I meant to be on a sponsored walk by now. Actually, when I finished last July’s sponsored walk of 300 miles, I thought, ‘I wonder whether I could have managed 400?’   After all, in July I had been hampered by the hot weather, and had also been trying to fit my walking challenge around normal domestic activities like cooking meals.   If I had already been in good shape at the start, and had set out to walk from dawn to dusk, six days a week, in the comparatively cooler but still fairly dry weather of May, or at a pinch June, I might even be able to manage 500 miles in a month. I started receiving emails from February onwards asking me to do sponsored walks for various good causes, including the Big Issue Foundation , which works to help homeless people in the UK overcome poverty and social exclusion, and ActionAid , which works with women and girls living in poverty in Africa, Asia and Latin America, though at the moment it is also working with Ukrainian refu

Hi, I’m back.   I’m sorry that I haven’t been writing for nearly three months, but I’ve been going through a crisis of confidence.   When I’m depressed, I can’t write anything worth reading.   Conversely, I worried that anything I wrote when not too depressed which was intended to be sane, cheerful and encouraging just ended up sounding saccharine and hypocritical and resembling the villainous character Media in American Gods  - and, of course, this thought made me depressed again. When I asked PDB11 if I did sound like Media, he said, ‘Only a little bit’, which didn’t exactly reassure me.   After considering for a while, he added that if I did, it was only because my blog offered an edited view of my life, discussing the good bits without the lows.   So, while I don’t want to expose everyone to my paranoid ranting, possibly the answer is to write fairly regularly about whatever is going on in my life, and I’ll try to make most of it not too preachy. However, this column is defini