Richard Yates’ Cold Spring Harbour isn’t up there with The Easter Parade of Revolutionary Road but it’s good enough. Mainly interesting to me in terms of its setting; civilian life during wartime. In that respect it makes an interesting point of comaprison to Patrick Hamiltion’s Slaves of Solitude (which I really love). Both novels deal with those left ouside the war (the second) and both novels have a strong line in excrutiating mealtime chat but where Hamiltion, for all his tendency to melodrama, has plenty of time for his characters Yates is kind of perfunctory in the treatment of his. The inhabitants of the old Long Island town often felt to me more like pieces to be moved around in the service of his point than actual people to care about or empathise. Both books also deal with what these days we’d probably call toxic masculinity, its effect on both men and women. However unlike Hamilton’s warm portrayal of Enid Roach in Slaves… and unlike Yates’ own The Easter Parade which deals with similar themes here he doesn’t appear to have a great deal of empathy for the women of Cold Spring Harbour which for me made the slim volume feel a bit unlevened.

In non reading news I re-did my homepage, upgrading it from a kind of anonymous professional information holding page to include some links to pages hosted on this domain. Nothing particularly exciting though. I’m sticking with the slightly agro blue and red colour scheme for most pages as it’s a good way to make the whole thing look distinctive and more or less coherent without having to put much thought into it.

Played Zombie Kidz Evolution with the (non-zombie) kids. It’a like a super stripped down co-op game where you have to defend a school against zombies. It’s also a stripped down legacy game so as you win more rules and variants are unlocked. It’s good fun pretty easy for us as a seasoned Pandemic team but the missions allow you to stretch yourself and the 15 minute play time (more like 10 in practice) means you can breeze through the early stages quickly unlocking more interesting mechanics. Recomended, only £17 too, bargain.