At the End he was Nobody, but at the Beginning he was known as Mr Y

Ariel has read all but the last chapter of the book (minus the page that was torn out of course).  Mr Y has gone to the Goose Fair and whilst taking in the sideshows, he comes across a ‘doctor’ who gives him a strange elixir to drink.  Upon drinking this he finds himself in a place where he can enter the minds of other people (a bit reminiscent of Being John Malkovich?).  Once he returns to reality he is standing alone, it is late, dark and the fairground has packed up.  He cannot get this experience out of his mind and he burrows into various books trying to discover what the elixir could have contained.  Mr Y has an ulterior motive you see…… he is in the drapery business and his competitor, who is up to date with the modern methods of production, is rapidly putting him out of business.  Mr Y wants to enter this mans mind, find his inner most secrets and blackmail him.  Desperate to obtain the formula he finds the fair which has since moved on and speaks with a fortune teller whom he has been told is the doctor’s wife.  At first she denies this, but the doctor appears because he has read the mind of Mr Y and knows what he wants.  The price is thirty pounds – all that Mr Y possesses.  He refuses and leaves, but the next day returns with the thirty pounds hidden in his shoe.  Because the next page of the book is torn out, Ariel is left wondering what happened at this second meeting as the following page states that this was the beginning of the Mr Y’s downfall.

Back in the real world, Ariel has been informed that she must share her office at the University with a couple of ‘refugees’ from the collapsed Newton Building.  Ariel isn’t terribly happy with this news, as the office is her warm refuge from her cold empty flat, plus she needs to hack into her mentor’s computer to see if he kept notes on The End of Mr Y so that she can find out what was on the missing page……… You know, I would not have thought this novel would be as good as it is considering the author’s first name is Scarlett, which put me off several times when picking this up off the library shelf, plus the blurb on the back doesn’t do it any justice. I only selected it in the end as I had very little to choose from.

In The Book of the Dead our dapper pommie Egyptologist Wicherley appears to have been taken over by some entity…… he had been asked to go into the exhibit by Menzies (Head of Anthropology) in the wee hours of the morning…… I think Menzies might actually be our bad guy Diogenese because early on in the book Menzies killed a woman in her hospital bed (she was a survivor from the 2^nd book of the Pendergast trilogy).

The Time Traveller’s Wife, I’m taking very slowly – when you get chapters headed Henry is 36 and 9, or Henry is 15 and 15 you can’t rush through it! It has yet to completely grab me, so it’s just my pick up put down book for now.

I have also just started listening to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix whilst working on my own in the office.  Up to chapter five and it’s so nice to be back.

It was a glorious morning this morning, spring is on its way.  Mind you we don’t really get spring.  It’s a flick of the switch – winter or summer, like our evenings… no dusk; it’s either light or dark!!  Anyway, I digress; I just wanted to share this photo which I took on my back deck whilst feeding my little darlings (Black Death and Big Red) about 7am this morning as the hot air balloons flew over.  If you are wondering on the names, it’s just their nicknames.  Black Death is actually Tenshi, and Big Red is Missey.  Tenshi actually lives up to her nickname; she also gets called Pestilence and Spawn of Satan, but I love her all the same.

Missey & Tenshi