Engage!

Fancy New Chair has arrived. It has six different knobs to twiddle with, but the best feature is that you can move the support arms and pretend you’re Picard from TNG. I will not be taking further questions at this time.

I meant to have a six month check-in on this year’s books, but that definitely didn’t happen. I will say that H.E. Bates’s Love For Lydia felt like more of a horror story than the “yawn, really?” 2025 horror novel I also read this month, which I will decline to name because both the author and her fans often react badly to any sort of criticism…but you can bear it in mind for the month of August when I put the whole year page up.

Family arrives on Wednesday. I only have about 3 tonnes of cardboard to remove before then…