We started the month with TT week, which I think all would agree was a dispiriting washout. Doubly frustrating given the glorious weather we had before and after...

We used the sunniness of Senior Race Day (Friday 5) to do another walk to Port Soderick. But that day saw the last of the racing. The whole of the subsequent programme was called off, which must have been cruelly disappointing for the fans.



Otherwise, it has been a month with quite a lot of out and about in it:

We went south for galleries and vintage engines; and north to visit Taggart's folks (for those of you who don't know him, Taggart is the Manx cat who has been with us since 2023).


We had a bit of a St Patrick theme going on at one point (he's our saint as well as Ireland's).


And we celebrated the longest day with a sunrise walk and lunch in the garden.

Ah yes, the garden... Which is still full of surprises. The roses finally decided to flower, although I'm not sure about some of their choices... All those blooms right at the top of a spindly stem? Really?? I always thought our roses were youngsters, and I more and more get the impression they're still figuring out how to do things.

The purple geranium's flowers are pretty much over now (although, as per instructions from people who know about such things, Nigel has dead-headed them, in the hopes they might pump out another batch). And my grass also produces different sorts of flowers, which I do my best to cut round. It's not so much a lawn as a mini-meadow.


But I digress...

June was also a great month for music. We had two organ concerts in a single week, and last Sunday afternoon we went to a fun event in Port Erin, featuring the Douglas Choral Union, who enjoy their singing in a really infectious way, and Ellie Quayle, whose entertaining songs are reminiscent of Victoria Wood's.






There has also been lots of local walking, the variety of which is one of the things I really love about being here:



It got quite warm here last week. Up to about 25 or 26 degrees. That's HOT for the Isle of Man. And too hot for me... If I want HOT, I go to Malaysia. Still, it was much more pleasant over here than it was across the water, where folks absolutely sweltered. Generally, temperatures are more manageable on the Island. Our main problem is the wind (which every local I've talked to says is worse than it used to be, presumably as a result of climate change).

What else? Well, nuisance of the month was the blinkiness of Nigel's computer. Kind of sorted, but still in the "unreliable" basket, which is not at all where you want a computer to be.

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So, is The Velvet Cushion behind as usual? Of course it is... But it was another interesting month of book reporting:

-- Another couple of Book notes posts emerged. Eclectic though they are, I like doing these collections of news items relating to books I've read. They're slowly building up into a kind of personal database of my reading life. ("Database" might be too kind a word. "Tangled web" might be more accurate.)

-- I ended up reading two things this month purely because their authors had died very recently: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (a Canadian who came to live in the Isle of Man -- who knew?); and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (an Iranian who went to live in France). The former was frothy and fun; the latter (the first in a series of four graphic novels) was moving without becoming heavy.


-- I've had a bit of a Frida Kahlo season... This post is a composite of thoughts on a doco and a couple of related books. She sure had an interesting life... Despite (or because of?) that prior interest, I seemed to enjoy Frida, a biographical novel by Claire Berest, way less than everyone else...

-- The Joyce Girl, on the other hand, by Annabel Abbs, was also a biographical novel (about James Joyce's daughter, Lucia), and I found it very enjoyable (although you have to be careful, as always with these things, to keep reminding yourself it's a NOVEL, not a biography...)

-- Also in the "enjoyed less than everyone else" category was Ben Lerner's Transcription. I dunno... It just felt like hard work (and I think I'm still allergic to covid plots).

-- Only one revisit this month, and that was The Picture of Dorian Gray. It didn't upend me in the way it did when I first read it (in my very early twenties), but it's still a very powerful book.


-- Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story I read in the company of Henry Eliot's book group. Sometimes my delayed posting works in my favour, because by the time I'd got round to writing about it, I'd also read 1913, by Florian Illies, which shed a lot of light on the tumultuous era that Schnitzler was describing (when dream interpretation, of course, was all the rage).

-- I really liked Little Boy Lost, by Marghanita Laski, which was set in the aftermath of WWII. OK, there was one plot point that I found a bit creaky, but otherwise it handled with admirable briskness a situation (a missing child) that could have become cloyingly sentimental.

-- Favourite book this month, though, has to be James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain. It's one of those novels that really repays being HEARD, and it's a gut-wrenching account of what it means to grow up with a particular amalgam of religion, ethnicity, history, and economics. Another of those books that reminds me how lucky I was...

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Movies I liked:

-- The Teachers' Lounge (2023, by Ilker Catak -- when things start to slide in a complex educational context, how do you stop them?)

-- Denmark (2019, by Adrian Shergold -- would a poverty-stricken Welshman really be better off in a Danish jail?)


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Links I liked:

-- Manya Koetse got loads of flak for this piece, but she's just trying to say that not everything in Europe is fabulous, just as not everything in China is awful... The heading: Look Only at the Ugly Sides, and You Won’t See China. So true.

-- This is from Lucy Fuggle's Life With Books, and although it came out a couple of months ago, I only recently stumbled across it. The post is by-lined: "Simple pleasures + good books = what makes life lovely." I couldn't agree more... It also includes lots of good book recommendations, chosen because they remind her "of something wonderful in life".

-- Dense Discovery draws our attention to an article by Oliver Burkeman, in which he tries to reassure us that the current world situation is not as bad as most of us are making it out to be, and our pessimism is simply due to our presentism (aka "temporal chauvinism": "the feeling that the time you’re living in now is the most significant or terrifying one ever -- simply because it’s the one you happen to be around to experience"). I like Burkeman's work, and really enjoyed Four Thousand Weeks, but in this instance, I think he's wrong... I'm not a presentist (I spent half my academic life warning students against this cognitive bias). But I think we're in genuinely uncharted territory on two key fronts: We're struggling in our efforts to deal with unprecedented man-made climate change; and AI is not just one more technological innovation, but rather something uniquely, all-encompassingly menacing. Not to mention the current quality of US leadership, which (even with some corkers to compare it to) seems to be plumbing the depths... Read the article, but don't relax...



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Plans I like:

Having ended every month so far this year here on the Isle of Man, we're looking to shake things up very soon. The end of July (all being well) should find us in England, on the first stage of a little journey that will take us on to Wales and Ireland.

And... we finally took the plunge, and booked a trip back to our second home, Kuching! That should happen in October. Fingers crossed! It will be for a shorter time than we'd originally envisaged (before a certain president set in motion yet another plan to upend the world). But still, we're mightily looking forward to it.

PT is very happy here on her little Island. Life is satisfying in a way that's hard to sum up (because it's such a mixture of the practical and the emotional).

But there's still a Kuching-shaped gap in my life that is definitely going to need to be filled up on a regular basis. So I can't wait for the first replenishing tankful. I already get quite excited every time I think about it!

Meanwhile, though, I'm very happy to be enjoying the Manx summer, and making the most of the flowers: