A Debut Novel and a Clean Patio

 This was one of those books that explain why I prefer a good old crime fiction story. It didn't take long to read and when I got to the end I thought 'Oh....... OK?' But even so I did enjoy it.

I'm not sure how I came to reserve it - perhaps someone on a blog mentioned it.

It is 1938, and Manod is a young girl, just finished school and living on a remote Welsh Island, where life has been unchanged for years. The population is declining as young people move away. The men, including her father, are fishermen who battle the weather and the seas and many have lost their lives. Mamod looks after her father and young sister while wishing she could get to the mainland.

 

When a whale is washed up onto the beach, the villagers believe it to be a omen for what is to come and then two anthropologists arrive from a mainland university to study the people there and their way of life.

They ask Mamod to be their translator and she thinks they will take her back with them to the mainland.

I won't say anymore about the story - that would spoil it.

These are the plaudits on the back cover. 

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The patio here, which I have to walk over everytime I go outside for anything, was horribly black and slimey and I stepped down onto it last week and slid - ending up on the ground. Luckily I have inbuilt padding so no damage done apart from bruises.

The pressure washer that I have is useless, it only cleans a square inch at a time so I did what I usually do and sent BiL a text because I knew he'd recently acquired a mighty pressure washer in payment for mending something else. Unusually he hadn't got a lot of work on and offered to come over and sort out the slippery patio for me.

It got off the worst of the yuck, although not all of it but I'll feel much safer now. Better make him some Suffolk rusks or cheese straws next time I bake.

He said one of his friends had used a special liquid patio cleaner to clean up their patio and it worked really well. I looked online and read that some of them contain some really nasty chemicals but there are some safer ones to try. They might take off that black mould that's still left which will slow down the return of the slime build up.

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Sue