A Great Book, A Cold Weekend And A New Car

I wrote the other week that, now that the house project is finished, I would have to find something else to write about. Unfortunately life has been too hectic to write a great deal lately and things are looking pretty busy for the next few weeks too.

A good deal of the last week was spent reading the 2001 Pullitzer Prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. It's not a book that I would have noticed but Scott Pack (see Meandmybigmouth in the blog list over on the right) suggested it as one of his occasional social reading events and a number of his blog readers read it over the past few weeks and then discussed it online. It is about a couple of Jewish cousins - Sammy a New Yorker and Joseph a Czech emigrant escaping the Nazis - who get together and write comic books.  Their superhero character The Escapist based upon a mixture of their childhood backgrounds is their route to success. It's a tremendous book and I strongly recommend that you give it a try.

As for life here in Suffolk, we finally managed to open the bi-folding doors for the very first time on Friday afternoon as the sun beat down to line us up for a glorious weekend.

Unfortunately that glorious weekend did not materialise and on Saturday when we went to the village fete in nearby Kettleburgh we found ourselves shivering and the first thing we did when we got back was switch the central heating on. And it's been on again two or three time since - not exactly blazing June.

Today we went to NEXT in Martlesham to get a few plants for the garden pots. Here's a new one on me, the Flowering "Current".

After that we drove to the Mercedes garage in Bury St Edmunds to test drive a new car. I phoned the Ipswich dealership last Tuesday but they didn't seem very interested in my enquiry about a special deal that Mercedes had on for June only. They phoned me back the following day only after I had to phone them to ask if they had forgotten me and then they quoted for a car with a different spec to the one I enquired about. Feeling that they weren't exactly in a hurry to sell me a car, I tried the Bury St Edmunds dealership. They came up with a car to exactly the spec that I asked for and phoned me back less than thirty minutes later. Ipswich phoned again late on Friday with details of another car that was one of the colours that I had ruled out. The test drive went well and in a couple of weeks I should take delivery of a shiny new motor. I'm not very well up on cars and all the stuff about engine sizes, 0-60 in so many seconds and bhp goes straight over my head but I do know when I like what a vehicle looks like and we've gone for this purely on its style - it's lovely to look at and very comfortable too which will make all those thousand mile round trips to St Andrews and the two hundred mile round trips to Rochester a bit more enjoyable.

It's a bit of a change from the eco friendly Prius (which we're keeping for a runaround) but its mpg is not a lot lower and when you take into account the carbon footprint of building the Prius and shipping it from Japan, there's not that much difference (at least that's what i'm telling myself).