Rae of Light

Hello to my regular subscribers and a very warm welcome to any newbies. Here in the UK it’s the start of the summer holidays and usually I’m looking forward to it as much as the students I teach. This year however I find myself feeling restless, wanting another project to take on. I’ve been trawling through college courses but am still to settle on the right one. I guess the last 11 weeks spent on my stained and fused glass course has awoken the dormant artist. But top of my list of things to do still remains read read read. Both the balcony and garden are up for the task so it’s down to me to do the rest. That’s if I can get my local library authority to keep all my reservations headed my way in a timely fashion. Some of you may well be heading into your summer break too and I thought I’d offer up some suggestions for excellent summer reads. My top 3 so far this year are: Fledgling – Octavia Butler Sister Mine – Nalo Hopkinson Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fin...

I’m back from my summer holiday and it was a corker. The villa, up in the hills of an area called Teramala in the Sant’Elena quarter, was comfy and had more or less all the comforts of home. It was of course a fair ways away from the centre of things in Cagliari (a good hour away by bus and they’re not frequent. Nor do Sardinian bus timetables and arrivals of said bus bear any relation to each other.) Somehow, when you’re on holiday in sunny foreign parts where rain is a word scarcely used, this does not irk you as it would if you were here in Blighty. The views from the villa were spectacular. And I’m not exaggerating. Cagliari itself, though hilly (9 of them to be exact) is easy to get around and the food splendid wherever you go. Even the tiniest supermarket has a plethora of cheeses and cold meats to choose from with tons of farm produce in the fruit and veg aisles. The buses, though erratic on the outskirts, were pretty reliable in the city itself and the price of ticket...