Just trying to recall some of my reading over the last year or so, I re-read the whole of the Barchester Towers series, and what a sheer delight that was. It is frankly impossible to read any of the books without imagining as the characters those who played them so well in the now ancient BBC series…especially, I suppose it goes without saying, Nigel Hawthorne. Whereas normally I might find this a problem, in this case not. All of this prompts me to watch the first episode again on UTube….brilliant. A few thousand pages there then. I have also re-visited Morse, reading again all of those engaging novels. Much too complicated for me but highly enjoyable. I got so involved that I bought a couple of books on ‘Morse locations’…I always find this sort of stuff fascinating and in this case the surprise (to me) is that so much of the Morse, Lewis and Endeavour series are filmed outside of Oxford. I have also read lots of books on Cornwall (and Devon as we are only 20 miles away, and somehow I always have this uncomfortable feeling that I would rather be in Devon (where we lived once) than Cornwall. I now have quite a local library including the Bradt ’Slow’ series for Devon and Cornwall which are interesting reads in their own right but also never fail to come up with things to do which perhaps one wouldn’t have thought of (kayaking for instance, of which more later).