Holiday

We're just back from a week in the Brecon Beacons, in a cottage with a view over fields and rolling hills to the Black Mountain. We managed four days of walking before the weather turned showery enough that we spent the last couple of days curled up in the cottage with books (not a bad way to spend the time either, and by that point we had done all the walks in the area listed in our book). Those who don't follow me on other social media can find pictures on Instagram (I tried to embed them in my post but can't make the embed code work properly).

Typically for the UK, I managed to catch the sun a bit of Sunday (while walking round the highest concentration of waterfalls in Wales) and get properly chilled on Tuesday, mostly because I took my jumper off ten minutes after we started uphill to climb Fan Foel and then foolishly didn't put it back on again as we got nearer the summit as the bitingly cold wind was so strong that I didn't want to have to unling my map-holder and take off my hoody to put the jumper back on in case they blew away while I was doing it. Possibly a zip-front fleece top rather than a jumper might be a good investment for future walking holidays. (After navigating several steep and muddy slopes, both uphill and down, I am also seriously considering investing in a pair of walking poles, as there are times when a bit of extra grip and stability really wouldn't come amiss. And I'm not quite sure why it only occurred to me after getting back to the cottage in trousers that were covered in mud and soaked to the knee after squelching across boggy ground and occasionally wading through literal ankle-deep mud that the waterproof gaiters I bought to stop rain soaking down my socks and into my boots if I was walking on rainy days in summer wearing shorts and waterproof trousers would make me too hot would also be ideal for tucking my trousers into on muddy winter walks and stopping the bottoms getting so wet and muddy, but I suppose that given that I left them at home I should probably be glad that I only worked this out after we'd done our last walk when the point was only of academic interest.)

I took some extra time off in the interest of trying to make sure I can use up all my holiday this year (I think I will still have about four weeks to take over the summer, which is harder than you'd think as it being summer doesn't stop there still being things to be done), so I'm not back at work until Wednesday and am planning a trip to London on Tuesday to go to this exhibition at the British Museum. If anyone is around and would be interested in meeting for a cup of tea or other beverage or maybe an early dinner, shout in comments.

Meanwhile, we're already considering the next holiday. I think it might well end up being the West Highland Way...

Reading: The Masked City

I wasn't completely sold on Genevieve Cogman's The Invisible Library when I read it a year or so ago, but I thought at the time that might have been because I was expecting it to be about the Library and the Librarians and their quests to retrieve obscure and magical books, whereas in fact the Library simply provided the backdrop for an alternate-reality, steampunky romp. In any case, my suspicion that I might have been a bit harsh in my judgement led me to buy the second book, and in fact I enjoyed it a lot more than I enjoyed the first one.

This book takes Irene from the steampunk alternate universe she has been living in to a Fae-controlled alternate Venice where it's always Carnival, in pursuit of her apprentice, Kai, who has been kidnapped by a powerful Fae lord. Like the first book, this is a romp, with Irene having to use all of her intelligence and resourcefulness to survive in a city full of enemies and find her way to where Kai is held. I'm not entirely convinced by Irene's ability to win out against daunting odds, which seems to owe a lot more to luck than careful planning, along with her general likeability and ability to talk her way out of tricky situations; I can't help feeling that the highly trained professional she's supposed to be shouldn't give quite such an impression of making things up as she goes along, although she is operating quite a long way outside the parameters of her job in this book. In any case, I found it a fun and enjoyable read and am glad I gave the series a second chance.