Lucas has left the building

Oh, my very favourite part of winter, Saturday morning sport. This past weekend was, in fact, the second week of winter sports. I missed the first week while I was visiting family. I did keep in touch via Textie to discover that Toby had scored three out of six goals and that they won six/one. Jossie, who had a fun season with not a lot of winning last year, lost her first game but her playing had improved significantly. This last weekend I was able to see Jossie play in person. This year the two different games at two different venues are timed much better so that Andrew is able to get up early and take Toby to soccer, enjoying the frost, mud and wind all by himself while we sleep in, and is back in plenty of time for me to then take Jossie to netball where I'll be buffeted by the vicious wind while trying to soak up some warmth from the  pale sunlight.

In a reversal of fortunes, Toby played an older, bigger team and lost, and Jossie had a very exciting win. Admittedly, I didn't actually watch every minute - it is still sport after all. I did some texting and finished Heart of Darkness. The tea I brought from home was most welcome as it was freezing.

I read Heart of Darkness for my very first book club meeting! Yes, I have finally, after four years of running a service to book clubs through the library, joined a club for myself. It is made up largely of library and ex-library staff and one male library user and Sonya Gee who works at the ABC. I am pleased to have read Heart of Darkness and it was a great book to discuss in a book club, but I wouldn't say that I enjoyed it exactly. We had our meeting today and it was so much fun. We had some great discussion and it didn't matter one bit that none of us loved the book and more than one didn't manage to finish it (at least one had a very good excuse :) For next month we are reading Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let me Go. I am the only one who has read this before (a number of members had read Heart of Darkness at school) and I loved it so am keen to see what the others think. Wagga's cinema has Water for Elephants and a 3D Justin Bieber movie but is not showing Never let Me Go....... not impressed.

After our sporting morning Andrew headed out on his bike, Jossie went to a friend's for a sleep-over and Bethany, Toby and I rode up to Steve and Jane's for Mackenzie's second birthday. I thought riding would be a great thing to do. It turns out that Bethany is not at all cut out for a long incline, however slight, and we very nearly turned around and went home.

The cake made it all worth while.

I got a big shock to see our godson Andrew next to Bethany. He is three months younger!

Now, to Saturday night and Spooks. Wow. Spooks has always been a bit different. I watched the first seven seasons on DVD from the library and my friend Margot recommended the first season saying she had never been so shocked by a television show. SPOILER ALERT. I think it was the second show in that first season and a main character had her hand pushed into a deep fryer. I was thinking "That's what Margot was talking about! It might be OK, you can live with a very burnt hand, can't you?" when the bad man pushed her head in. Whoa, you can't live after that! Very bad things can happen to very main characters at any time. Adam was blown up in the first episode of one season. It isn't the same all the time either, while some of them die, others retire. Tom was our favourite but I have liked all of the main characters. I cried a lot when Danny died. The season playing on TV at the moment is the ninth season and they have done something completely different. I kept thinking that it was going to be very difficult to make Lucas North OK again, that he was doing things that I would find it very hard to excuse. On Saturday night he went all the way bad! At least we got to see Malcolm again. I am going to have to remove Richard Armitage's face from Mr Thornton when I read North and South because he is ceasing to be appealing! Do I get too involved? Don't answer that.