This is the latest I've ever posted a review of the month... It's now 7 August, a full week after the month in question ended...

Only July events are included (to justify the pseudo-date at the top, which is there because otherwise I'll get terminally confused at some point in the future). But inevitably, they're July events with a week's August hindsight... Ahhh... Cheating, cheating...

TL;DR: It was a fantastic month. Really. It was a little hectic at times. We'd forgotten the logistics involved in simultaneously getting ourselves ready to travel, and the little house ready to receive visitors. But still, fantastic.

For the last few days, we've been away, travelling to Liverpool (always a fun place to visit), and then on to Derbyshire, from which point we radiated out for the first in a series of 88th birthday lunches, plus a reunion lunch in Holmfirth (that's where the picture at the top comes from) with some friends from our New Zealand days (isn't it wonderful when you just slide back into a friendship, even though you've not seen each other for 16 years...?).



But for most of the month we were still on the Island, where there was lots to do. There were public events, like the World Tin Bath Championships and Tynwald Day; and there were personal celebrations, like our 39th wedding anniversary.


But the exceptionally fine weather (too fine, to be honest, as rain was very much needed by the time we left) gave extra pep to routine Douglas walks; fired up the garden; and encouraged various other expeditions, including a farewell-for-the-moment trip to Peel.





Outranking even all this very good stuff were the three sections of the Millennium Way that we walked during the course of the month: Crosby to The Bungalow; The Bungalow to Ramsey; and Crosby to Ballasalla. These were all splendid walks on so many levels: The scenery was fantastic; likewise the accompanying birds, bees, and butterflies; and though we met hardly anyone while we were walking, we had lots of interesting conversations with the people we encountered at the various transition points.




***

Very active months are usually bad Velvet Cushion months, and such has indeed been the case.

-- I was a bit mehh about Mexican Gothic (Silvia Moreno-Garcia), Stowaways (Andre Aciman), and Real Tigers (Mick Herron), but in all these instances I'm very much on the wrong side of the critical divide, as they have many enthusiastic fans.

But there have been some real stars:

-- Without Simon Haisell's book club (Footnotes & Tangents) I'm unlikely to have chosen The Inheritors by William Golding, or to have stuck with it even if I had. But as a tragic vision of how a band of homo neanderthalensis might have lived, communicated, and thought, and how they might have been affected by an encounter with the "smarter" homo sapiens, it's well, well worth the effort. (And I 100-per cent recommend that book group.)




-- I enjoyed Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton (an object lesson in how to want something and end up with nothing); and Charles Dicken's Barnaby Rudge (surprisingly contemporary in its depiction of the way people get sucked into sectarian violence).

-- And I really, really enjoyed Francoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse (a re-read, but I appreciated it so much more, 50 years later!); and Beryl Bainbridge's The Dressmaker (if you like your social history and family psychology laced with a piquant dash of the gothic, this is for you...)



***

Not all months can be good months. All the more reason to savour the ones that go very, very well... And if your month has been horrid, to hang on in there until the tide turns...