Wolf Hall and Troppo

(The following was first published in September 2024)

Hi folks! Hope you're well. 🖋️

I've had a crazy week. I learned to use an angle grinder. I strapped a bunch of old CDs to my bike helmet, in the hope that the Chili Peppers would protect me from magpies (they did not). I wrote about murder, but not as much as I should.

Today I want to tell you about one of my favourite TV shows, a book I'm really digging, and a launch party for a friend of mine. Before we get started, please enjoy this random photo from my camera roll.

Reader, I purchased them. 😎

I hardly ever watch season 2 of anything...

...but there's a lot to like about Troppo. Josh Pyke's swampy soundtrack. The glistening cinematography. The irresistibly creepy performance by Simon Lyndon.

I especially love how carefully Yolanda Ramke's scripts balance the viewer's knowledge against that of the characters. Often the audience is shown something important--a burning corpse falling out of the sky, a boy wrapped in a blanket after a boat crash--and it takes Amanda and Ted a while to catch up. But Amanda and Ted also know things that we don't, which is the source of a different kind of tension.

Nothing is filler. Every scene has a purpose. Watching last night, Venetia and I both gasped out loud in unison, and had a good old laugh at each other. This is a show that rewards your attention.

Disclosures: Candice Fox provided a cover quote for one of my books, Zindzi Okenyo is one of the narrators of Kill Your Husbands, and I once said something pretty embarrassing to Josh Pyke's wife at a party.

OK, I'm a bit late to the party on this one.

Here's a list of things I have little interest in:

• History

• Royalty

• England

• Unnecessarily opaque prose

• Books where every single character is named Thomas, Anne or Mary

I know I should care about these things, for the record. Reading about them, though, makes me feel like I'm back in high school. My eyes glaze over. I start waiting for a bell I haven't heard in 20 years.

But in Wolf Hall, Mantel writes so beautifully that it's impossible not to be drawn in. Every paragraph has a shining thread of wisdom pulled through it. I would read about finance if she was writing it.

Actually, she often is:

He tells Richard, you know, a thousand pounds isn't much when you have a cardinal to move. Richard asks, ‘How much of your own money is sunk in this enterprise?’

Some debts should never be tallied, he says. ‘I myself, I know what is owed me, but by God I know what I owe.’

I'm reading the book on Kindle, and I've had to stop highlighting passages, because the situation was becoming untenable. One disadvantage, though, is that all the characters have Wikipedia pages. Whenever I highlight a name (usually Thomas) to work out who someone is, my screen fills up with spoilers about their eventual execution.

That's all for today, folks! Stay awesome.