New in August

The monthly challenge:

• Read a new author, or just a book I’ve been meaning to for years
• Try a new ingredient/food/recipe
• Explore a new place
• Something knittingly new

My new author for August was Frances Brody, and I have now read four of her detective novels featuring Kate Shackleton. I enjoyed them, although there were a few anachronisms (they are set in the early 1920s) that bothered me a bit. Kate is a widow - possibly, her husband was missing declared dead in the war but she has not yet accepted that he is dead and continues to search for him. She was also adopted as a baby, so as well as having murders to solve, there is the potential for her past family, and maybe her husband, to mix things up.

My new food was smoothies. I have drunk smoothies in the past, but in August I started making myself a fresh smoothie every morning in the hope of improving my basic health level with an intake of lots of nutrients - that way I get the benefits of more fruit than I would manage to eat in the day. There is a huge difference between homemade and what you can buy in the supermarket, and I don't think I'll ever buy a carton of smoothie again! I've found that if I start with a smoothie in the morning, I'm more likely to make better food choices throughout the day. My husband has jumped on board with this and tends to appear in the ktichen when he hears the blender going, so now I have to share them - even telling him I'd put spinach in it wasn't enough to put him off!

My new place wasn't so much fun. A very precious person was admitted to the Teenage Cancer Unit at University Collegel London Hospital towards the end of August and I visited her there.

I didn't manage knittingly newness. I was so tired most of the month (one of the reasons for starting the smoothies) that I couldn't do much more than garter stitch a lot of the time. The beneficiaries of this were my mitred-square blankets, which are coming on nicely.