Walking: A truncated walk along the canal to Shipton-on-Cherwell and back

After yet more heavy rain yesterday, today is a crisp, sunny autumn day, and we thought we'd walk along the canal to Shipton-on-Cherwell and then back across the fields via Hampton Gay and Hampton Poyle. Unfortunately, as the top left image below shows, when we got to Shipton-on-Cherwell we realised that the path across the fields was under rather a lot of water.



There didn't seem to be anything to do but to loop back past the church in Shipton-on-Cherwell and home again the way we'd come along the canal from Thrupp. Still, it was lovely along the canal today, and we still managed just under four miles in the fresh air and sunshine, which is better than nothing.

Reading: Anna Chronistic and the Scarab of Destiny

As Amal El-Mohtar pointed out in the Guardian earlier this year, there are a lot of books about time-travelling lesbians (or at least women who love women*) around this year. Ankaret Wells's new novel, Anna Chronistic and the Scarab of Destiny, is one of the ones I was most looking forward to.

In a world where there are two great Powers of time travel, the Timeguard (a kind of time-travelling police force with a mission to fix errors in the continuum) and the People of the Horizon (who exist in a temporal protectorate in the very early days of ancient Egypt). Anna Chronistic, daughter of the inventor of time-travel and owner of a steampunky time-machine hard-wired around her spinal cord, prefers to operate independently of both powers, enjoying the way her time-travelling abilities allow her to mingle with courtesans and painters in Second Empire Paris while occasionally travelling to Bronze Age Anatolia for liaisons with Helen of Troy. However, when the carved ruby Scarab of Destiny, key to the People of the Horizon's mysteries, goes missing, throwing the time continuum into disarray, Anna is forced to team up with Time Agent Polly Shapiro to find the ruby and restore it to its rightful place.

This is a delightful romp of a book, with a slightly bittersweet undertone which prevents it from being pure fluff. I thought the narrative style was rather reminiscent of Terry Pratchett, partly because of the liberal use of footnotes to convey asides and explanations (slightly awkward to read on my ancient Kindle, but well worth it - the Kindle app on my phone, and possibly the newer touch-screen Kindles, handled them much better) but also because of the way the narrative was peppered with allusions and in-jokes between Anna and her twenty-first century readership. It's extremely entertaining, and made all the more so because Wells is a friend of mine and I spotted several mutual friends (and, indeed, myself) making cameo appearances. (I was particularly delighted to be reading a section with several of these cameo appearances earlier in the week when I was reading at 4am due to a bout of insomnia. "A good book to read when suffering from insomnia" might sound like a rather backhanded compliment, but in this case I sincerely mean that it was so charming and fun to read that it managed to make me forget both the worries that had woken me up at twenty past one and had kept me awake since then and the misery of being awake at 4am and knowing the alarm would go off in less than two hours.)

All in all, I absolutely loved this, and really hope that there will be sequels someday.

*Anna is bi, rather than being a lesbian, though appears to be predominantly attracted to women. Obviously, the bi rep is another reason to love the book.