Content warning for horror topics, death and the like.

I read a lot of zombie stories. (Actually, I read quite a lot of horror, and have a definite preference for post-apocalyptic maybe dystopia, of which many zombie stories are in the same kind of neighbourhood.) In common with a lot of other horror, the zombies are rarely the point and their origin is often incidental. I did read one recently that had s slightly different germ, and that made me think of all the different ways I've seen writers enlighten the living dead.

Not identifying particular works, lest these count as spoilers, but I can think of:

• Someone gets infected with rabies, then also with plague. The two combine.
• Science produces artificial viruses to try and cure cancer and the common cold. The two combine.
• Science attempts to produce a super-soldier serum. Produces zombie-like people instead.
• Science attempts to keep the consciousness of a condemned criminal active as punishment.
• Science wants to make something that was dead be alive again, for the craic.
• Science produces a weapon of mass destruction that turns people into zombie-like beings.
• Science reanimates the dead as cheap labour that can be coerced into doing jobs no-one else wants.
• Science is trying to make monsters as weapons.
• Cell phones turn people into zombies. Not a lot of sub to the text.
• Novel virus appearing out of nature.
• I know of at least three different Cordyceps-based zombie plagues.
• A fragment of the brain of an ancient, Cthulhu-like cosmic entity animates an undead army. A big undead army.
• Magic reanimates the dead as cheap labour that can be coerced into doing jobs no-one else wants.
• And I'm sure there are more that I've forgotten for now.

I won't claim that many (any?) of these make actual sense...

We spent a couple of days in York at the start of the week.

The weather was pretty poor for most of the time we were there, so the most York thing we did was walk round the city walls on Wednesday morning before we left.

And that was fine. While it is a lovely place to visit, the main thing was to spend a bit of time together and relax. We enjoyed good food, read books, played some card games together and rested. Controversially, we had denied the boys' request to bring games consoles or laptops with us. That might have ended up being a mistake if we'd been away for longer, but for a trip that was just under 48 hours away from home it worked well for us all.

A while back I stopped recording star ratings for books in Goodreads or for movies in Letterboxd.

I realised a few things:

• That picking a number on a scale is pretty arbitrary and is as much a reflection of my state of mind when tapping the button as it is of what I actually think of the book/movie.
• What I think of something is far from a measure of its objective good- or badness.
• No-one, least of all the author of a book, needs to know what rating I picked for it. There's no joy in telling someone I don't like something they made. It doesn't benefit them and it doesn't benefit me.

Of course I'm still happily to tell someone all about something I loved, and why. That's always a particular pleasure.

We took a trip out to Nostell Priory for a look at the kitchen garden while the boys went for a tear through the parkland on the bikes. It was the first properly nice day out this year.

I've had a blog for more than twenty years, but posting to it has been a bit off-and-on for the last ten of those.

Somewhere along the way I made myself too much of a hump to get over to publish a post. It's technically a faff, and it's psychologically too much of a thing.

Maybe here I can get back to quick, easy blogging the way I used to enjoy it.