First green, then red

Unexpectedly, the first couple of dark-leaf chilli fruits to set have now also succeeded in ripening, which they do by a curious process; first of all, all the striking dark purple drains out of the fruit, leaving it pale green, and then it starts to go orange! (I actually think they are more attractive in the purple state, but I'm going to have quite a few in that state anyhow :-p)

The plant has put on a big spurt of belated growth and is now really too big for its pot. There are a good dozen red chillies buried inside the Demon Red plant now.

"Last Argument of Kings", Joe Abercrombie

I went to a lot of trouble to get hold of this book, and was very lucky to get it: the copy I found on the branch library shelves was battered with a cracked spine, and had been marked by the librarian "Please withdraw on return" -- fortunately for me, it had presumably been hastily reshelved by an unpaid and untrained volunteer (almost all the librarians having now lost their jobs in order to save the Council money) who had failed to notice this instruction, and I was thus able to find out what happened in the final volume. And it's quite a lot. The death of the King and both his adult heirs, for a start, which throws the normal plotting on the ruling Council into paranoid overdrive, plus the trifling matter of a major invasion during all the in-fighting, while the enemies of the First of the Mages start to catch up with him, and neither they nor he turn out to care much about the collateral damage.... ( Read more... )