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I've got a blog interview up over on the Nebula Awards site… gibbering about the origins of certain imaginary people.

 

And here's Chapter 3 of The Winter Prince at

simien_mtn_fox

 
 

On the home front, Tim has installed electricity to the Little House in the Big Garden, so now we have heat and light in the summer house. The oil lamp is not entirely redundant because we don't actually have any permanent lights fixed out there—we are using his workman's clamp light. We do have some pretty battery-powered paper lanterns, too. You can't read by them.

 

It is incredibly wonderful to sit out there on the wicker porch chairs on a chilly Saturday evening in October, strathspeys playing on the radio (I want to say "the wireless" because it's just so old-fashioned), playing cards with your children. Unlooked for, unexpected pleasure.

 

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That same Saturday, this one past, I took the kids to Broughty Ferry, half an hour up the road. An EXCELLENT cheap day out. I always forget how close by it is (katranides, it is the beach we went to on Christmas day last year). On Saturday it was incredibly windy and smelled of the sea as soon as we got out of the Diddy Car (inherited from our dear neighbour who died suddenly last February—his wife doesn't drive). We walked half a mile along the Tay esplanade along to Broughty Castle. There was an ice cream van parked there, the Rainbow Ice Cream Van, so we all had ice cream first thing and then went into the castle because it was open. And because it was free. And because we'd never been there.

 

 

It had a brilliant museum—three floors of exhibits, one on local life over the past 5000 years, one on local paintings from the last century, and one (hands on) about local wildlife. At the very top was a lookout room with binoculars for checking out Mouth-of-the-Tay wildlife and I saw a dolphin!  (We'd seen them last week in the harbour at Aberdeen, too—they are bottlenose dolphins.) The fifteenth century castle was in ruins by the early 19th century but was rebuilt as a Napoleonic fortification, and then during WWII they planted mines in the sea all around it—the mines now feature as hazards in the mini-golf course on the other side of the parking lot, by the fantastic and very new playground which Mark rightly remembered is called Castle Green.

 

We stayed in the castle till it shut and they kicked us out. Then Sara and Mark went to the playground and I went to fly Tim's Spitfire kite on the beach. It was too windy (too gusty)—it's got 3-metres' worth of red and yellow tail streaming out behind it, so it looked like it was just plunging into the sea in flames over and over again! Then I went to watch the kids and drink my coffee, which I'd brought in a thermos. It is a lovely little city beach.

 

 

In the supermarket afterward I discovered that the Dundee Tesco's has a WHOLE SHELF of Jamaican food. I actually spotted this out of the corner of my eye by instantly recognizing THIS BOY, who has not been redesigned since at least 1970 when my 3-year-old brother ate this stuff every morning because he was so taken with the resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman… Jared called this cereal "Man-inna-Box." (Presumably a variation on "Man in the Moon.")  Apparently a re-design by schoolchildren of this ridiculous but, dare I say, iconic branding is UNDER WAY according to the Jamaica Star on-line, but—this kills me—they will put the new design ON THE BACK.  And keep the Man. So it will always be Man-inna-Box.

 

I never in a million years would have remembered the brand name, but I recognized the Man instantly.

 

And I also got salt fish and gungo peas and plaintain chips and Ting and sarsaparilla and egg nog. I left the Jamaican Food Section in a little daze of happiness—an unexpected corner of Caribbean Sun in Dundee—and walked straight into the Aisle of Christmas Puddings and Mince, which was a bit surreal.

 

So that was our weekend.