The review is a day late, because our travel yesterday -- from Denby in Derbyshire to The Lhen in the Isle of Man -- took rather longer than we expected, and by the time we'd arrived, all we wanted to do was go to bed with a hot cup of tea and a book.

Busy day. Which has been typical of the month, actually. September has been a real doozy. All good. But exhausting. We feel as though we've been steaming along energetically, and yet never quite catching up.

So...

September started in Sarawak. And the big news there was that we moved out of our flat in Kuching.




Then we headed to England, where we worked our way slowly up to Derbyshire, visiting friends and family en route. (If you're interested in checking out the itinerary, start here, in Oxford, and work your way through expeditions around Newtown Common; a visit to Hanbury Hall in Worcestershire; the journey from Hadzor to Denby; a little excursion to Derby; and several enjoyable days pottering around Denby itself.)





And yesterday, as noted, we arrived on the Isle of Man.

We've stayed in some cool places on this trip so far. A resort-like hotel near KL airport; a cosy little hut in the woods near Newbury; the old dairy of a converted farm complex in Denby... But the cottage we're inhabiting at the moment I just adore...



It's called Yn Thie Thooit (Manx for The Thatched House); it's owned by Manx National Heritage; it's one of only 23 thatched buildings remaining on the Island; and it dates back at least to the 1860s. It would traditionally have been thatched with "bent" (marram grass sourced from the local shoreline). Working this grass is a labour-intensive process, however, and for environmental reasons, it's best preserved in situ. So the house is now thatched with straw.

It's the kind of dwelling that would have featured in the Manx folk tales I grew up with (Fairy Tales from the Isle of Man, by Dora Broome, was one of the first books I ever owned, and the story of the Glashtyn, a shape-shifting creature who drags unsuspecting folks off into the sea still gives me a little shudder).


I talked here about my evolving relationship with this little piece of the world. And really, it touches my soul in a quite unique way. I can't account for it rationally; Nigel finds it incomprehensible. But no other place makes me go all gooey-eyed in the way this one does.

The where-to-be problem has featured already in my moving-out post, and I really feel ever more acutely the desire to be everywhere...

I love touching base with folks in England. The Isle of Man tugs insistently at my heartstrings. But I'm also looking forward, later in the year (international politics permitting), to being on the road for a few months. (And a propos of travel, I was interested to read recently that it helps guard against ageing... I'd always thought so...) Yet, mixed in with all this, I also really miss Kuching, and friends in Sarawak. It's confusing.

Moving on...


The month has been so full, and has gone so quickly, that its first book, On Beauty, another fabulous novel by the brilliant Zadie Smith, seems like a lifetime ago.

The crazy schedule has called for a fair amount of light reading. Two more of Richard Osman's socially observant mystery novels: The Bullet That Missed (not such a fan of this one); and The Last Devil To Die (where he's totally back on form, but you'll need tissues...). And two by Dorothy L. Sayers (also socially observant mystery novels, actually, but roughly a century earlier): Whose Body?; and Strong Poison (she's controversial, Sayers, but there's more good than bad in the stories, in my opinion). Kind of half-way between spy story and literary fiction was Kate Atkinson's Transcription (enjoyable, but ever so slightly unsatisfying).

In the more heavyweight category was Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson (although heavyweight is surely the wrong word for a story that oozes satirical wit and playful language); Wilkie Collins's Armadale (a wonderfully readable 19th-century melodrama, although I have to deduct points because he was very nasty about the Isle of Man); a collection of short pieces, by a miscellany of writers, called A Cage Went in Search of a Bird (the subtitle -- Ten Kafkaesque Stories -- is a bit of a give-away that I'm still on my Kafka kick); and The Last September, an atmospheric, elegiac novel by Elizabeth Bowen, set in 1920s County Cork.

Oh, and there was another episode of Book notes, on writing and memory.


So that was September. The plan is to spend most of October on the Island, and then head back to Derbyshire for a couple of weeks before looping through some of the islands of southern Europe. Given the increasing chaos in the world, you wonder whether there's any point in having plans. But we'll see...