Katie Butcher

Nigel and I are enjoying a nice quiet Christmas at my parents house in Calpe in Spain. We flew over on Saturday morning and will be here for nearly two weeks. I’d been so busy trying to sort out all the Christmas presents and cards before we came away I couldn’t believe there was still over a week to go until Christmas by the time we left, as it seemed like it’d been ‘nearly Christmas’ for absolutely ages in the UK. Christmas isn’t anywhere near as ‘in your face’ over here and I quite like that. Some people have a few lights up and I’ve seen a few dodgy ‘Father Christmas’ stuffed things hanging from apartment balconies but nothing too over the top. When you go shopping the you don’t have ‘Slade’ and the like driving you insane on loudspeakers, which is good, or marketing displays to make you feel guilty for not spending a fortune on everybody you know.

So I’ve been having a good time doing, well, not a lot really. I’ve been sleeping and reading lots, and I’m getting the hang of ‘Su Doku’. Mainly, I’m putting my feet up and having a break from things like cooking, making sandwiches, going to work, going Morrisons shopping (which would have been a particularly horrendous chore this week I would imagine) and all that kind of stuff. Lovely.

For Nigel’s birthday I arranged for us to have a skiing lesson at Xscape real snow slope in Castleford. I can’t remember totally how I got the idea as I booked it back in August but I wanted us to do something a bit different that we would both enjoy.

To make a bit more of the outing to ‘Xscape’ I booked a room at ‘The Tulip Inn’ next door to the leisure complex, so that we could have a meal and a drink afterwards, and not bother to have to drive back.

The lesson was due to start at 3:45pm. We check in our hotel at about 3:00pm and wandered over to Xscape. We had to hire some clothing (£5 extra) and collect some skis and boots. By the time we’d done all that it was time to start the lesson. There were 10 of us all together on the ‘Beginners Double Lesson’. We learnt how to put the skis on and stand up in them. At first I found that quite hard – well harder than I thought it would be – it feels totally weird at first. Moving on in the lesson we learnt the ’snow plough’ and went down a shallow ‘learners’ slope. I fell on my bum the first time down the slope, but I knew where I’d gone wrong and got the hang of it quite quickly for further go’s. We learnt how we could control our speed and stop using the ‘snow plough’. Towards the end of the lesson we started covering ‘snow plough turns’ where you put more pressure on one leg and reduce it in the other to enable you to turn as you slide down.

Although I really enjoyed it, I had just about had enough by the time we finished 2 hours later. The boots weren’t particularly comfortable and I was starting to get cramp in my feet (I must have been using muscles I don’t normally use).

After wandering around Xscape we headed back to the hotel and got changed. We then went back to Xscape and had a drink in an Australian themed bar – it was just starting to get busy with the Saturday night crowds. All the restaurants turned out to be noisy and busy too, so after further wandering we returned to the hotel and got a meal in their restaurant instead. There were only two other people so it was quiet and they were playing relaxing easy-listening Christmas music which was more the atmosphere we preferred. Following the meal we bought a bottle of wine and sat in the lounge area and talked before heading back to our room about 11:30pm.

We checked out at 11:00am the next morning and after a quick look around Junction 32 shopping village, we drove back to Bradford.

Overall, an enjoyable weekend.

I’ve recently finished reading ‘The Poison Principle: A Memoir of Family Secrets and Literary Poisonings’ by Gail Bell. Gail’s grandfather was rumoured to have murdered his two eldest sons by poisoning in 1927 and this book covers her hunt to find out what really happened. This main theme is just a small part of the book though as the story is intertwined with lots of anecdotes about poisonings and poisoners as well as information about poisons (such as strychnine and arsenic) and how they affect the body.

This book was really interesting. It was fascinating learning how poisons have been used in literature (e.g Madame Bovary) and through history (e.g Cleopatra and Dr. Crippen). Gail Bell (who herself is actually a qualified pharmacist) sometimes wrote in a way so that you couldn’t help feeling a little sympathy for some of the poisoners; the down-trodden Victorian wife with a mean drunken husband where all she can see to escape from him is to slip some of the poisonous Monkshood plant in with his cabbage, for example. The writing was a little chaotic in places, it didn’t always seem to flow between subjects terribly smoothly. It was extremely well researched – you can get a feel for the hours and hours Gail Bell must have spent reading and researching the subject. I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone interested in science – particularly chemistry, toxicology or medicine but also good for anyone who just likes a mystery story. When it comes to finding out the truth about the Grandfather and the poisonings of his sons, this book has a fairly suprising ending.