Sunday 13th July

Well after all the cooking yesterday, I took it easy today - ham sandwich for lunch! It was really good, funny how something simple can just take your fancy.
So what have I been up to today? Cleaning mostly, I've got the gas board coming tomorrow, and I want the place to look well at least half way presentable. I'm also off on holiday soon, so I'm busy making up bagcharms and bookmarks to list for when I get back - oops, repeating myself there I think!
I've been re-reading an old book recently, the Helliconia Trilogy by Brian Aldiss. There's no doubt that this book is one hell of an achievement, way up there with things like the Dune books, and I highly recommend it if you've not read it - it's about a world - the eponymous Helliconia, which owing to quirk of astrophysics has a small star in orbit around it, and a big star they both orbit. A wanderer star that turned up sometime back in the past, and has given this world two years - a great year, and many small years. Over the course of a great year, the planet goes from ice age to global warming, and I can't say that I noticed much seasonal variation over the small years. There's a satellite world as well, sent there by the humans of Earth, who after scouring the galaxy for ages have only found this one single world bearing any other meaningful form of life, and send this satellite, the Avernus, to record everything that happens on Helliconia. There are three books - one set in the spring, one in the summer and the other in the autumn of the great years, and the way this ecology affect the races that live on the planet is fascinating. But in some respects they're odd books - for instance in the summer book, the story is focused on a king - JandolAnganal, (excuse the spellings I don't have the book in front of me as I type!) and his queen, Myrdemingalla. Jan, to shorten his name, sets out to divorce his queen, who is much beloved by her people (apparently for her beauty, although this isn't really focused on) and marry the daughter of a neighbouring kindom, Borlien, for political reasons. The story focuses quite closely on these people, but seemingly presenting the Avernus' view of what's happening, because at the end of the book, the queen is riding away with a small cortege and that's it, you never find out what happens to her. Beyond the fact that Jan has gone to Borlien despite the murder of the girl he was intending to marry, and marries her sister instead, and that the pair of them found a joint monarchy Borlien and Olderando then becoming a single country - yes, I can tell by this point you're feeling very confused.
It's an extremely long book - I have one volume with all three books in it, and the tendency is to sit down and read the whole thing at one go. I have quite a good mental image of the stories in my head, but the details are so prolific, and so complex that frankly you just can't keep them mentally for any length of time. What really does stay with you are the immense vista's this book presents you with - the herds of flambreg (a sort of cattle) so tortured by flies that they race eternally from one end of land to the next driven mad by the flies. The Wheel at Kharnabar, literally rowed through a mountain. Embruddock, surviving the ice age with the help of the hour whistler (a geyser) where the battle of the sexes is re-fought to the personal tragedy of it's combatants. The Avernus and it's mobile pudenda (you really have to read it for this, I'm not going in to the details!!!), and of course, the fall of Earth following the much avoided but finally occurring nuclear holocaust. It's an amazing book, whose images live inside my head - even if sometimes I wished they didn't. There's a sadness about it, a sense of decay over time and the inevitability of that decay. It's well worth reading I'd say, but you need some stamina to get through it!