Holiday books and a bumpy landing

We flew from Antigua to London overnight on Friday. The flight was slightly delayed on arrival at Gatwick due to snow showers. This amused the passengers somewhat given that we left the searing heat of the Caribbean just eight hours earlier.

On the flight I watched three films: (1) The monuments men (a bit unintentionally Indiana Jones like) with Mr hazelh; (2) Testament of youth (I cried so much that I had to ask Mr hazelh to open the overhead locker to get an extra supply of tissues out of our hand luggage); and (3) Men, women and children (interesting to someone whose area of research is social informatics, but not a terribly good film). We also tried to watch Boyhood but the first 40 minutes or so were so tedious that we gave up on it. We have no idea why it has received so many Oscar nominations.

We had a short wait at Gatwick for our flight up to Scotland. The last stage of the journey will be memorable for the rather frightening aborted landing in Edinburgh. The plane touched down, bounced, then suddenly jolted upwards once more. The pilot explained a couple of minutes later that he quickly decided to take off again because the wind had thrown us off course as we touched down. Had he tried to keep us on the runway we would not have had enough tarmac to effect a safe landing.

We managed to stay awake until about 8:30pm, thus clocking up about 36 hours awake.

My blip is of the five books that I read on holiday. I enjoyed them all, but I liked A man of parts best. It's about HG Wells. I knew very little about him before I read this so all the scandal associated with Wells was quite a revelation to me. I enjoyed March for what it taught me about slavery and the civil war, although it felt a bit strange to be reading it surrounded by the descendants of slaves. Lewycka annoyed me a bit because I didn't think that the plot was sufficiently tied up at the end, and the author seemed to suffer from unconscious bias in her portrayal of women in the workplace (all "girls"). I love David Mitchell, but I could quite happily have done without the mystical element of The Bone Clocks (although admittedly this would mean a substantially different book). I haven't quite finished The accidental, but so far so good.