Tuesday Morning

You can tell it's September, all of a sudden. Soon as you wake up.

The squirrels are up on the horse chestnut trees, hoying down the conkers as hard they can, trying to smash them on the tarmac. There were mothers and kids yesterday morning, stopping on their way to school to watch. Only a couple of weeks ago we were having bbqs in the gardens up and down our street, salads and sticky bits of chicken and fizzy pink wine. Now it's stews with pearl barley and Sunday night serials on the telly.

I'm reading 'Dead Until Dark', the first of the Charlaine Harris books for our Book Club. I can't believe I haven't read the series before, having heard so much about it. It's my suggestion for our little group, since I feel I ought to get to it. It's in the paranormal mystery / spooky romance / cosy detective /comic gothic genre I like to think of myself as working in.

I like it, I think. It's a little harder-edged than I expected, maybe. At least in terms of some of the slightly gruesome bits. I'm not sure I like Sookie as much as I should. She's forever telling us what she's wearing and how marvellous she is. She's a little prim, too, in places - and just a touch superior. I read an interesting piece on the TV series based on this, in the new issue of 'Deathray'. They were talking about the Civil Rights dimension to this and the various things that vampirism is used as a metaphor for - race, sexuality, gender, religion, the whole kaboodle. The reviewer pointed out the blind spot in these books, though... in that a vampire such as the romantic lead, Bill, has in fact has a very dodgy, murderous past.

All the blood-letting and swapping and so on leaves me a bit queasy, too. It just gets all so complicated. Not as crazily involved as it does in the increasingly bonkers Anne Rice novels. But the mystical stuff tends to come in a bit too much in some of these vampire things.

I'm thinking about the way vampirism might work because of my drafting Brenda Book Five at the moment and Whitby's having something of a nasty infestation because of the return of a certain gentleman friend of Effie's.

So - vampires and autumn and twilight mornings in South Manchester. And already it's time to start going to meetings at the university and talking about marking and papers and seminars and so on. Where did that summer go? It's the same question every year. This year it's with an extra, horrible poignancy though, since the summer was the whole of Barrie-the-visiting-cat's lifetime.

Last night, late on, Fester (not known for his sociability or love of other cats) went padding about on the terrace and lay by the spot near the sun lounger where we found Barrie's body. He was reconstructing the story, it seemed, twitching his nose. He was like some kind of melancholy detective, trying to understand.