A few weeks ago, we had our first holiday abroad since the pandemic started (and we hadn't been abroad since 2019 anyway). We decided to go to Nerja on the southern coast of Spain - my grandparents used to own a villa there and we were fortunate to enjoy family holidays there for the entirety of my childhood. When my grandad died, his wife decided to sell it, but we've continued to go back on occasion, though since Ellen moved to Canada we've been spending our holidays there.
Ellen and Tom moved back last year after the arrival of my niece (who is the best baby in the world btw, just saying) so we decided to take a family holiday to Nerja - take Maisie and Tom (though we took Tom 6 years ago, on the holiday when it turned out my dad had a heart attack before we left and he just thought he had indigestion 🙄).
When I'm on holiday, I've been known to devour books at a great rate; between me and my dad, we could read into double figures in 2 weeks. But on this holiday, I was planning on doing some uni work for the summer courses I had picked up at Regent College.
Great laid plans and all that...
I did manage to "read" (combo of reading and audio books) 3 books: The Shining by Stephen King, Murder Before Evensong by Reverend Richard Coles, and The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, but managed to get very little work done.
The Shining ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This was a re-read - though I had read it only once when I was a teenager. My gorgeous puppy couldn't come on holiday with us, so she went to stay with my awesome friend Shena. When I went to drop her off we watched Doctor Sleep together. I really enjoyed it but it made me want to read the book - because of the differences I remembered between The Shining film and book which were continued with this film. For example, [spoilers!] I was sure at the end of the book, The Overlook hotel blows up - whereas in the film, it doesn't. They return to The Overlook in Doctor Sleep and they do blow it up - in a kind of mirror of exactly how it happened in The Shining (or so I thought I remembered)... to the point where I could describe some of the things that happened (like the hotel sounding like it was screaming). So I decided to start listening to The Shining on my drive home and continued listening to it over the holiday, finishing it on my drive back with my gorgeous doggo after getting home.
Reading the book again, I remember the comparison I felt when I read it initially - I had thought the film was great, but got a bit confused as to whether the ghosts were real or in Jack Torrance's head, and got annoyed at how pathetic Wendy was. The book though... goodness! It's such a brilliant, slow burning, intense story. So much of the book is dedicated to the almost encounters: thinking you could see something out the corner of your eye, thinking if you close your eyes and count to five, it will disappear. All happening before they are trapped by the snow - with so many opportunities for them to leave, and all family members thinking leaving would be the best choice, but if they left they would have nothing.
The character development, or rather depth, adds so much. Understanding Jack Torrence changes the story narrative entirely. Surface level: he's a struggling to recover alcoholic, he's abusive and has anger management issues. Deeper level: he's struggling, but he's trying so hard to stay on the wagon. Even when the hotel tempts him, he actually refuses, and he's forced into it - the hotel wanted him to give in, but he was stronger than it thought. He is abusive, but he recognises that. He recognises that it was often fuelled by the alcohol, and that was part of the reason he quit drinking. It also ties in with his anger issues - he is aware of all his flaws and he is doing everything he can to improve himself and make himself a better man for his wife and son. A lot of his anger and resentment is also borne from the interactions with his wife. They stayed together when they probably shouldn't have done. She never really believed he had quit drinking - she didn't think he could do it and she accused him of it subconsciously all the time (out of habit, smelling his breath etc), he had also broken his son's arm years earlier, and despite his genuine repentance and doing everything he could to never hurt him again, she didn't trust him around Danny. There was also some childhood trauma from his father - he had been an abusive drunk too. None of this excuses his behaviour, but understanding that he's not a monster, he's a deeply flawed human being changes the story. He's overtaken by the monster that lives in The Overlook at the end of the book, but it's made clear that Jack has died and the monster is using his body. Jack Torrance is not a bad man - but a flawed man trying to be better.
The hotel itself is terrifying. From feral hedge animals, to dead women in the bathtub in room 217 - nothing in The Overlook is good. There is so much terror there, and the writing is exceptional; Stephen King is a true master of horror. In fact, it isn't even horror, it's imaginative and creative and creepy.
If you enjoyed the film, the book will be so much more satisfying for you. The characters are richer and The Overlook is sinister. Worth a read - or a listen (I found the narrators voice dry [Campbell Scott], but after a few chapters, it felt wholly appropriate and I couldn't imagine it being read in any other voice).
The flight out was brilliant. It was only a week or two after the news about flights being delayed for hours and even days, some being cancelled whilst on the runway, baggage handling issues etc - and we (fortunately) missed out on any of that drama. I love airports. I love how you used to have to arrive so early for your flights and you got to shop and eat and relax ready for your flight. That doesn't really happen anymore. You have enough time to either grab a meal or do some shopping - but all of it is fast. I guess the magic of air travel has kind of gone, it's much more streamlined and matter of fact - but I still enjoy the time we have in that magical location.
Maisie was a superstar and my dad and I sat next to a very chatty nervous flier for the flight. Landing in Malaga was lovely, just being on foreign soil again, in somewhere so familiar but also unfamiliar after so long felt comforting. There was a bit of a mixup with cars before we headed out and so we'd resolved it prior to leaving but finding one of the cars was a bit of an issue. Still, we got all sorted.
We had a text message from the management company for the villa we were staying in - we could get in earlier if we wanted to. So we headed straight there and dropped off our luggage, sorted out rooms and headed out to the beach bars for a late lunch/early dinner. We headed to our "usual" place - and were relieved to see it still in business and some of the faces we knew still working there. The food was as good as we remembered it.
Murder Before Evensong ⭐️⭐️
My mum, dad and I all like Reverend Richard Coles. He's a refreshing voice and face of the Anglican Church, and his writings and thoughts on faith, but more importantly how he lives in faith, are important to us. He recently retired from his role at Finedon church - less than 10 miles from where my parents used to live and where I grew up. My mum actually saw him in a garden centre once, not long after his partner died. She felt too awkward to approach him, as she felt he was still mourning his loss and as a stranger she felt intruding on that would be inappropriate.
When we saw him on chat shows talking about his new book, I decided to pre-order it. He's written non-fiction before, but this was fiction with a twist. They say write what you know - so he wrote about a reverend in a small parish.
The world he created is brilliant - it is so true to small village life. The strange sense of community, everyone knowing each others business but without malice. The characters were brilliant. In the village I grew up in, I knew those characters. They are very much real in rural English villages.
However, that is where my enjoyment of this book ends. My first annoyance was the reference to the village as a hamlet. As someone who lived in a hamlet and every Christmas had the discussion as to what is the difference between a village and a hamlet, the fictional village having a church and shop cannot be a hamlet. A weirdly small gripe, but one of personal significance!
The bigger problem I had with this book was the general story telling. It was simply not good. No clues were given, vague information offered - the story hinged on character development. The characters were well formed and well written, but for a murder mystery, there was far too much mystery. The ending came from nowhere - the suspect was unpredictable. Part of the joy of reading crime novels is being a detective as the reader - trying to figure out the culprit, knowing something the main character doesn't know and feeling infuriated or worried about it all. This had none of that. You were not really following the crimes, you were knowing people - which is the role of a reverend.
The other main issue was the language used. In the first chapter there were some abbreviations about working in a Parish church with no indicator as to what they actually meant. These are explained later in the book, but as someone with limited knowledge about parish churches and councils etc, I felt at a bit of a loss on what was going on.
In saying all of this - if I actively do not like a book, I don't finish it, and I did finish it. So although it wasn't great, it wasn't terrible either. It does give you a greater appreciation for Richard Osman whose books are so well written, you forget what a great skill it is that he has. This does appear to be the intended first book in a series, so hopefully Richard Coles' fictional writing will develop over time.
The solid floors in the villa and concrete floors around the garden and outdoor area quickly became a problem. Maisie is fiercely confident and independent, and is now able to walk unaided. Although she's sure of herself, she is not sure-footed. So most of the holiday was spent with at least one person following her around, on edge that she might fall and hit her head at any moment. There was one moment when it did happen, but fortunately it wasn't as bad as it could have been - she got a bruise and cried, but she was fine. There were a lot more near misses - where she was scooped up, or hand grabbed just before the inevitable happened, but mostly she knew to fall backwards - onto her nappied bum (a good cushion) and occasionally rolled backwards. But this didn't stop all of us worrying about the what ifs.
Tom doesn't relax on holiday in the same way our family does - we like to rent a villa and stay there. Buy food in, sit by the pool, read, and swim when it gets too hot. Tom likes to have plans - places to go and things to do. We're all different, and I totally feel that way on city breaks. But in the Spanish heat, on the first holiday abroad in 3 years, I just wanted to relax. We didn't really discuss practicialities, and I ended up just in a constant state of flux. Were we going out? Or staying home? Who is watching Maisie and walking with her right now?! I didn't feel relaxed. In the meantime, Shena was sending me photos of Dolly - who was very relaxed and having a lovely time. I was a little bit jealous of her.
One morning, I was sat on the balcony with my dad and he was complaining of trapped wind in his chest and indigestion. My mum came out and asked how he was feeling and my mum and I looked at each other. This was deja vu, but my dad wouldn't hear of it. He said it was indigestion, not heart pain. He thought the same 6 years ago. I bought him an Apple Watch a few years ago, and had decided to get the one with an ECG monitor in it, thinking it might be useful post-heart attack. The ECG looked irregular. We managed to convince him to contact the insurance company and we ended up heading into a medical centre in town. They took another ECG and we got sent on to a hospital in Malaga.
My dad spent 5 days in hospital, most of it waiting for the insurance company to approve an angiogram. My mum and I travelled back and forth to Malaga each night, apart from one - when my sister went (Tom was going home and she wanted to take him to the airport with Maisie, so tied it in with a visit to my dad).
Ellen and Tom went out whilst my dad was in hospital, but for me and my mum - we just didn't want to do much. We stayed in the villa, quietly worrying about my dad but knowing he was in safe hands in the hospital if something did go wrong. The one day we did go out for lunch we had a worrying (and we found out later, misleading) text from my dad saying he'd unplugged himself from the monitors and was going to a pharmacy to get paracetamol, because no one was giving him any in the ward. We later found out he had threatened to do that and he was then given the paracetamol. He didn't realise the message hadn't said that, and he apologised for misleading us.
My dad was given GTN - he has a spray of the stuff to use if he feels heart attack like symptoms - and it cleared the pain immediately, but gave him a headache. He was occasionally given painkillers, but no one really spoke English, so he was struggling a bit. Eventually the insurance company approved the angiogram and it clarified that my dad was suffering with angina. Completely manageable, he was cleared to fly home the next day, and told he could return to normal. He felt exhausted with it all, but okay, and relieved to be allowed to return home as planned.
The Midwich Cuckoos ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Ellen and I went to the cinema to see the new Top Gun film a few weeks ago, and the trailer was played for the new Sky series adaption of the book. It creeped Ellen out, but I thought this was something I would enjoy, so I made a mental note and checked it out later. When I Googled it, I discovered it was based on a book by John Wyndham who had also written The Day of the Triffids. I remember enjoying a TV adaption of that too, and thought I'd try reading the book before I watched the show. So I downloaded it onto my Kindle app before we left.
Reading about Wyndham as an author made his work sound like episodes of the TV series Black Mirror - science fiction that is eerily close to reality. The trailer had been really creepy, so I was expecting something sinister and disturbing. The book has those elements, but they are the background. The real story is in the discussion of ethics and morality.
In a non-descript village in England, something happens one day. Everyone appears to just pass out. Anyone who crosses the boundary passes out, and if they are pulled out they come to as though nothing happened. No one can explain why. The army tries flying over, but flies too low and they lose the pilot in a crash. In a second attempt, they manage to capture photographic images of something unexplainable - an unidentifiable object in an open area. After 24 hours, whatever happened lifted and the unidentified object has gone. A few people died of exposure or in house fires, but other than that everyone was just fine.
Eventually it becomes apparent that every woman in the village who was able, was pregnant. It appeared that this was the reason for the so-called 'Day Out'. You check in to Midwich occasionally over time, most of the babies are born with no issue (an unusually high survival rate) and it appears the children grow at a greater rate than normal children. How should humanity deal with this oddity? These are not human children, but they are humanoid. The mothers were like surrogates, these aren't their children, but some felt close to their children regardless. The boys and girls are all identical - no one could truly tell the difference. How should such an event be handled? Especially after it becomes clear that these children are abnormal in other ways...
It's a shorter book, but I absolutely loved it. It was strange to read it after Richard Coles' book - another small English village with similar typically rural characters - but the mystery was much more hands on. No one knew what was happening and you're a part of the mystery. The ending is fantastic and fitting. I'm looking froward to watching the show and sitting in judgement. Expect to hear "that's not what happened in the book" often. The best thing about this story is the fact that it is all about the discussions between the characters on morality and ethics - which unfortunately doesn't make great TV - so I'm interested to see how they adapt the story for viewing.
Highly recommend - and it's pretty short so if you're not a big reader, it's not too daunting. It's also creepy without being an all-out horror, as I've already said frequently, the emphasis is on dealing with the actions of the children and how to reprimand them, how to change our lives to accommodate something inhuman that appears human - or should we annihilate it? In so many alien films, invasions are clear. However, this is so surreptitious and insidious, would it not take humanity by surprise? Would it not spark a humanitarian discussion of rights? It is so interesting.
We flew home on the Saturday as planned - but the flight was nowhere near as peaceful as the journey out. It was delayed. Maisie was already tired and hadn't taken an afternoon nap, but she fought sleep like a warrior, pretty successfully. Ellen fed her milk as we taxied on the runway. She said drinking milk should stop her ears from popping. But we taxied for much longer than Ellen expected and the milk was gone before we had even taken off. So she got a second bottle out. I was certain Maisie was going to throw up. I don't know why, but it was like I just knew, and I was unfortunately right. She projectile vomited as we took off. It smelt exactly like the Manchego cheese we had fed her at lunch time. It was awful, but my response was to burst out laughing. The lads behind us also thought it was hilarious but the people in front were retching. It was so awful, but it was mid take off. There was literally nothing to be done.
I called the air stewards over once we could and they were absolute superstars. They cleaned up the vomit for us while we sorted Maisie out. Huge shoutout to easyjet and their staff - they didn't even hesitate. Actual superheroes in that moment. Maisie still didn't sleep. She ended up dropping a can of Diet Coke on the floor and it exploded, covering Ellen and the man in front of her in it. Ellen was overtired and it was too much for her. So I took Maisie and walked up to the front of the plane and sang to her, while my mum helped clean Ellen up and sort things out. I prayed she wouldn't start crying, I don't think I could've handled that, but fortuantely she was just curiously looking for mum without tears. Again, the air stewards were brilliant and came to check on us. When I returned with Maisie everything calmed down and Maisie finally lost her battle with sleep and snoozed on Ellen. Lesson learnt the hard way though - no late night flights for Maisie!
I met Shena halfway the next day and got my pooch back, and life returned to normal. My back is hurting a lot more - from stooping down and playing with Maisie and generally following her around to make sure she's okay. Last week I was in so much pain I was having spasms daily and was unable to move. I actually cried and groaned my way around ASDA one day, I got some very strange looks. I've since talked to the GP and I've had my painkillers increased and I've got an appointment to start physio.
Ultimately, I feel like I need a holiday after my holiday. My dad is fine again now, and Maisie is back to falling over on carpets and being fine. Ellen asked me what the highlight of the holiday was, and for a moment I struggled to think of something. But there was a highlight - although it was hard on my back and mentally exhausting to be on 'patrol' the whole time, spending that much time with Maisie was truly wonderful. I can't even begin to tell you of all the little highlights within that - the games, the stories, the dancing, the singing, the walking, her asking for my hand to walk, her asking to be picked up, her smile, just Maisie being Maisie everyday was absolute joy. And it also gave me so much appreciation for Ellen. Tom works everyday and is out some evenings or goes away at weekends occasionally, so Ellen manages with Maisie on her own the vast majority of the time, and although I never exactly thought that was easy, I didn't realise just how tough it could be. Especially as Maisie has regular fights with her ultimate nemesis - sleep. We were all on edge a little more due to the hard floors and it being an unfamiliar environment, but still - a lot more respect for mums!