dovegreyreader scribbles

What Good are the Arts?

Anyone who has followed the debate on here about poor George Steiner's weariness of the western novel might have detected that I'm a staunch supporter of the novel per se, in all its forms, for good or ill, for better for worse, and for many reasons. Foremost perhaps because I'm not an expert, I'm not an arbiter of taste, unless you are weaning your baby that is, in which case I'd advise savoury tastes before sweet and the current evidence suggests waiting until they are six months old.
I have long felt there are as many readers for books as there are books available. Just because I'm not the right reader for a book (to snaffle Sandra at Bookworld's thinking) doesn't mean that there aren't another zillion out there who are exactly the right readers for it.
Tired narrative for me might be exciting and exhilarating for another, who's to judge? It is one great big circular debate.
For reasons various I've been pounding through John Carey's What Good are the Arts?
The last book I read by John Carey had a profound effect on my reading life to the extent that I could say it created a major turning point, confirmed what I had always felt but never quite had the courage to articulate with any confidence. The Intellectuals and The Masses : Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 opened new trails of thought back in 2000 when I was about to embark on my year of studying modern literature.
Had all this really come about as a means of excluding the masses from culture?
Were the masses, the philistine hordes, in fact a metaphor for the unknowable and invisible?
I'm of good philistine horde stock, the nearest we got to the nineteenth-century intelligentsia was as ostlers for the Rothschilds, probably horse thieves before that which explains my love-hate thing with Equus Maximus so this was all relevant. I had a memorable year of reading with all this in mind as I tackled head on for the first time the likes of E.M.Forster, Graham Greene, T.S.Eliot, Virginia Woolf et al. I  came to some interesting conclusions of my own, many of which were slowly simmered and stewed and then cemented into the foundations for the thinking behind dgr scribbles.
So I was expecting no less of a challenge to my thinking with What Good are the Arts? My version a recent edition with an added postscript from John Carey, who in the aftermath of initial publication, found himself deeply into what we might now term Archbishop territory. Misinterpreted, misquoted and generally with the literary equivalent of the Synod incandescent with rage and baying for professorial blood.
The exploration is fascinating and on the surface a seemingly simple task , do the Arts do us any good?
The methodology becomes quite complex and I almost suspect that even John Carey didn't realise quite what a maze he was traversing until he found himself slap bang in the middle of it. But though the argument often became quite convuluted for me, John Carey as you'd expect, hacks his way out the other side.
We lost each other on several occasions when I was convinced we should head one way through the maze and he steadfastly moved on in the opposite direction.It was of course me who hit the blind alleys and the dead ends and John who was carrying the picnic and had eaten all the egg sandwiches before I arrived.
But the book merits perseverance to the second section where John Carey argues 'The Case for Literature' and why he sees it as 'superior to the other arts, and can do things they cannot do.' He is keen to acknowledge and emphasise, on the back of the first half of the book, the seeming contradiction.

'...all judgements made in this part, including the judgement of what 'literature' is, are entirely subjective.'

Then proceeding to a subjective definition of literature,

'...writing that I want to remember - not for its content alone...but for itself : those particular words in that particular order. Like all criticism of art or literature my judgements are camouflaged autobiography, arising from a lifetime's encounters with words and people that are mostly too complicated to unravel.'

You see that's exactly what I think, and perhaps what many of you think too, in which case there are treasures to be unearthed for one and all in this book.
What I now think of happily as Carey-isms abound,how about this,

'Literature gives you ideas to think with. It stocks your mind. It does not indoctrinate, because diversity, counter-argument, reappraisal and qualification are its essence. But it supplies the materials for thought...it encourages questioning and self-questioning.'

or this

'Poetic ideas do not tell you what the truth is, they make you feel what it would be like to know it.'

I've taken all these out of the context and barely touched on the full argument, but I hope it may be enough to point you in the direction of this amazingly thought-provoking book. My copy of The Intellectuals and the Masses is itself a tatty, well-thumbed philistine-like mass of luminous highlighter pen markings, from the days when I used such things and life in my forties demanded it.
Now I'm into my fifties it all feels a bit less urgent, less strident, the gentler 4B pencil does very nicely, but it's been working overtime on What Good are the Arts?

Ice Land

There's nothing like a good dose of Nordic saga to take me off to Planet Escape, throw in some mythological improbabilities that successfully suspend my disbelief and I'm in reading heaven. If a book manages to scoop me up and take me with it, the reading experience is like no other.
I know plenty couldn't see the point of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, but I could and did and from the minute the gargoyles started talking in York Minister I was away with the faeries.
Likewise Ice Land by Betsy Tobin published by Short Books has done exactly the same. Surprisingly The Daily Telegraph rarely seems to review books I've read these days except for this one and Sinclair McKay makes a good point. When a writer sets off into this territory it really can all go horribly wrong very quickly

'...hit one wrong note...and the whole thing could collapse into Python...any hint of stiltedness in the dialogue, the game could well have been up.'

Perhaps it is also dependent on the exact reading mood being in place when you turn the first page?
Short Books, having turned their hand to a fiction list, have made a strong start with Betsy Tobin, an American who deserted the Mid-West for England in 1989 and has two other novels to her name.
Set in 1000 AD, Freya is the mythical woman, blessed with the cloak of feathers granting the powers of flight who must search for the Brisingamen, a gold necklace of profound and stunning beauty.To take possession she must sell herself to the four dwarf brothers who have made the necklace.
This storytelling weaves intricately around the life and loves of Fulla, a young woman raised by her grandfather, whose quest for happiness must pass through trials aplenty before it is fulfilled and the whole is set against the turbulent backdrop of a land beset by geological upheaval alongside an ongoing spiritual upheaval. Traditional worship of the gods challenged by the arrival of Christianity and the zealous use of violence to coerce a bemused conversion. In the end Betsy Tobin tells us the pragmatic Icelandic people, realising the inevitability make an outwardly peaceful transition whilst continuing to practice their own beliefs behind closed doors.
If that all sounds a bit sparse I can only apologise because unusually I didn't stop to make a single note or underlining as I read. Normally I've got quotes and thoughts bursting off a blank page at the front but not here. I just picked the book up, jumped in and read it right through, carried along on that wave of ancient Nordic storytelling that kept me immersed in the spell until I had turned the final page. If I'd stopped to analyse it all I think the magic might have dissipated and somehow I couldn't bear the thought, this was one of those pure cover-to-cover reading experiences.
There's an interesting few pages of author's note at the end which credits sources and inspiration for the book including Ragnorak, the prophecy of creation and destruction which underpins the myths and and almost certainly the unusual and destructive geology of Iceland. I'm almost persuaded I should go off in search of the original Icelandic Sagas because it's difficult not to be infected by Betsy Tobin's love and enthusiasm for her subject but let's not get too carried away, perhaps I'm happy to settle for a novel that writes of and around them so well and carefully does all that work of imagination and interpretation for me.
A good read and one to just settle down and enjoy whilst looking very carefully at that amazing cover design each time you pick the book up, the longer I looked the more I saw.

Jungfrau - Dymphna Cusack

It hardly seems like cricket to wave a book at everyone and then say how brilliant it is knowing that there seem only to be about six copies available in the world. Add this to the list and start hunting at jumble sales, charity shops and library catalogues ( not necessarily in that order ) for Dymphna Cusack.
I had to buy my copy of Jungfrau published in 1936, from a second-hand bookseller in Australia (if you do find a copy check it's not Jonathon Hardy's stage adaptation, there are a few of those around ) and Perry Middlemiss had given me enough information here to know that I had to read it.
Was it only a few weeks ago I was bemoaning the lack of tell-it-like-it-was 1930's fiction and then along comes Dymphna.
There is an excellent introduction by Florence James in my 1989 Penguin Australian Women's Library edition and Florence encapsulates Dymphna's writing thus,

'she had peeled off the conventional romantic wraps of the women characters in the middle-class English fiction that filled the bookshops of Australian cities.'

Eve, Marc and Thea are three friends living in Sydney in the 1930's.Eve is an obstetrician, recently returned to her Catholic faith with a focused devotion, Marc a social worker, humanist and pragmatic, lives life to the full and Thea a teacher, the fragile, vulnerable butterfly of the three, uncertain about life or her place in it.
Eve and Marc are daily faced with the grim realities of life, Thea evades them. Here's Eve on her ward rounds,

'Looking down on the face of the dying woman, Eve noticed the lines of utter weariness imprinted there...all this rot about reality, this frenzied escape into abstractions, had curiously little to do with life as she knew it...Here was reality.Tortured bodies, tired minds, birth and death. Nothing vague about this; no escaping from facts; no sheltering behind fancies.'

When Thea begins an affair with the married Professor Glover who is suffering from

'a case of fifty-itis and the nearest girl'

Eve and Marc look on helplessly as events spiral ever downwards.

here's the first diversion because as critic Stuart Howard wrote at the time,

'the world knows Australia as a land of gum trees and sheep, convicts and cattle, sundowners and flies. It is doubtful however whether an overseas student of our literature would even suspect that a very large percentage of the country's population eats, dreams, succeeds or fails in cities larger than most of those in Europe or America.'

New perspectives then on the risks Dymphna Cusack took in deserting safe fictional territory for the harsh realities of Jungfrau. The book certainly met with shock and disapproval despite its second place in the Sydney Bulletin's annual novel competition and despite receiving high praise from serious critics.
Stuart Howard again,

'Fifty years hence, the publication of a novel such as ...Jungfrau will not be of such importance as it is today, Australians will no longer regard with a sense of shock, any book which deals with contemporary city life.'

Tackling as it does a broad range of the social dilemmas of the 1930's from illegitimacy, frequent childbearing, deprivation, abortion and much more you can see that this is a book that would even today sit uncomfortably with current endeavours at republishing fiction from this time. But if we want a complete and honest picture of life as it was then, I hope someone somewhere does something with Jungfrau soon. It is part of the jigsaw and there are currently large gaps.
Dymphna Cusack was often labelled as a writer of 'social documentary' but I agree with Florence James, this should not detract from her skill as a novelist.
The book is by turns breathtaking and shocking as the limitations on women's lives are exposed. Despite their seeming independence the options are limited and I don't think I'm adding a spoiler if I tell you that when Thea inevitably becomes pregnant the options become even fewer.The friendship of the three is tested to its limits and each of them has to reflect on their position in life.
There are plenty of five-star cut glass moments, especially when you consider this is 1936, here a conversation between Marc and Thea

"Being a modern woman nowadays is no sinecure, believe me, however pleasant it seemed in anticipation. Men aren't contented with us unless we combine about fifteen qualities that a century ago would have been farmed out among fifteen women.They expect you to soothe and comfort, and still to have a mind of your own; bear their children and keep figures like Greta Garbo at the same time; be all intellectual while retaining a schoolgirl complexion and a movie-magazine face, and cook their dinners before we go out to look the perfect dancing partner. Last century a man may have expected all those things, but he collected them from his wife, his mistress, a devoted aunt, and grandmother as well as the barmaid at the local pub; and didn't expect one unfortunate to be all of them."
"I wonder if we're any happier," Thea murmured, "or whether it was better that way?"
"We're probably no happier but we find life more exciting now; and whether it's better or not, the fact remains that we don't choose our own fate."

As the story unfolded I was indeed completely engrossed and the final third of the book makes for some of the most chillingly compelling, challenging and difficult reading even now, seventy years on. Stark and disturbing in its impact still. I was also bowled over by the excellent character device utilised by Dymphna Cusack to play out the final few chapters, the character as both herself and an onlooker to herself and it works par excellence.
Last words to Florence James who sums the book up well

'Jungfrau may show its period petticoats from time to time but let that be part of your enjoyment. Let it take you back to the Australia of the 1930's and you will find it hard to put down.'

I just hope anyone who wants to can find a copy to pick up in the first place.

Little Monsters

Little Monsters has been sitting on the shelf for months in proof copy, but it took a tempting review over at John Self's Asylum and the arrival of an actual published version of the book to chivy me into action.
I wonder whether we all have a strange affinity for people born in the same year as ourselves, or is it just me, being grateful to find yet another Coronation year baby out there? Charles Lambert also born in 1953, so give or take the odd detail, he probably knew and experienced life pretty much as I did in those semi-austere monochrome post-war years, replete with the novelty of a new young monarch on the throne, parents who had lived through a war and boiled mince,mash and carrots for lunch every Saturday.
There were tiny little pointers in this book that told me so.
One brief reference to that delicious orange juice we all used to get a spoonful of to stop us getting scurvy and then I remind myself of how equally delicious I found cod liver oil until I realised what it was.
Young teenager Carol, having witnessed her father killing her mother is whisked off to live with her Aunt Margot in the pub and as if the life she's been living hasn't been bad enough here things get a whole lot worse. Unwanted, lonely and hopelessly lost Carol presents as the saddest of children as she struggles to come to terms with half-known truths and unspoken disgrace.

'Sometimes I think there is only one authentic loss, and the rest, the other deaths and departures, are echoes of it: we learn how to deal with loss just once, then apply what we have learnt until it becomes a sort of skill. But if this is true, it must be the nature of the first loss that determines how we handle later ones, and this is what frightens me. Because to lose your parents as I did is to know not only grief but shame.'

It is only the friendship of the honorary Uncle Jozef exiled during the war from his native Poland and the love-hate friendship of cousin Nicholas that partially redeems a desperate situation.
With such a flimsy emotional scaffolding on which to balance and support her adult self there is much to be explored here. How events impact on the rest of her life and affect the judgements Carol makes in years to come is all played out with remarkable agility by Charles Lambert in a narrative that shuttles between Derbyshire and Italy and across time spanning the 1950's to the 1990's.
I often wonder whether writers actually write two stories and then do a whole lot of cutting and pasting to mix it all up?
I expect someone will stop by and put me out of my misery.
Your heart semi-bleeds for Carol as she attempts an act of redemption later in life but with an act of seeming kindness so acutely misplaced that you can only watch and wait.
I say semi-bleeds because I didn't quite warm to Carol as much as I probably should have done given her circumstances. Intentional or not there was something inevitably detached and arm's-length about her adult self, perhaps that was at Carol's instigation, or was I just looking too hard for evidence to back up my psychoanalytical predictions?
There is a slow drip drip of facts hinted at, often just a single word but laden with significance for the plot, words like 'prison' and 'marriage'. It's a bit of a narrative relay as one strand of the plot catches up with another and thankfully Charles Lambert doesn't drop the baton here in fact I think most of the time he follows his own advice,

'Detail renders visible...excess of detail though can have the opposite effect. If detail renders visible, too much detail can reduce visibility to indifference. It levels everything, cuts everything down to size.'

There was nothing indifferent about Little Monsters.

The Return of the Narrative.

If I knew who George Steiner was without having to look him up I would probably have taken his verdict more seriously but I had more urgent matters on my mind.
The Guardian was ferried to my bedside on Saturday morning along with the shockingly devastating news that our village shop with in-house butcher's department is closing down this week.The little Post Office is separate and will stay, but for how long?
Can you believe it? We'll have to completely rethink our bread / milk / egg / bacon buying strategy along with the zillion other things we nip the three miles up there for. The end of an era as Bookhound can no longer leap into the shop and sing the first line of a cheery song to Jan behind the counter. Tradition has it that she always sings the next line back, no matter how full the shop, it's been their little game for fifteen years, life in the village will most definitely not be the same.
But back to George Steiner and a little piece in The Guardian Review recounting a most interesting evening which seems to have been had by all at the Royal Society of Literature in London where George was speaking on the subject of taboo. From what I could gather from the piece which was just the bare bones of the evening, the merest flavour of the event, George Steiner now feels that virtually no subject is taboo and as a result,

'The western novel - British in particular - is in dire straits...now that anything can be said, fiction is in deep trouble...I believe the narrative form is very very tired.'

Poets are apparently the answer with the

'power of the metaphor located in constraint.'

Now I've probably diluted the hint of a flavour of the debate into the merest dash of bland colour but I can only hope and imagine the ensuing argument was fearsome with outgoing President of the Royal Society, Maggie Gee, apparently challenging this 'sweeping damnation.' We all know it, poetry often the best form for saying the unsayable but now if as it seems nothing is unsayable, fiction will just have to embrace and cope and from where I'm sitting it does.
But what's 'tired' ?
I struggled to identify 'tired'.
Tricky if not risky to pin down this hint of a gist of an event that has thrown up such a controversial statement and I hadn't been there to hear it in the context of what went before or after. Every chance I'd bark up the wrong tree and miss the point completely and who do I think I am anyway, George Steiner's probably a god.
But, who dares wins, I examined my current reading in the light of George's observations and came to my own conclusion that finally, at long last we do have fiction that can and does talk about everything and it's having a fair old crack at it.
Hallelujah!
New fiction that explores, examines and exposes, teaches, warns and consoles, giving me deeper and more detailed insights than ever before in this one lifetime of reading. Words on the page leading me into previously uncharted territory, walking me out the other side with my mind buzzing, thoughts racing, more to consider than I ever imagined possible.
Isn't that good enough?
Should I be expecting more?
Perhaps my horizons aren't broad enough to offer a considered opinion but like many others I'm reading what's out there and it doesn't disappoint.
Some do it in exciting and innovative ways, In Search of Adam by Caroline Smailes comes to mind, others invigorate my reading, invest their narrative with super-charged energy often subtly discharged but job done. Crusaders by Richard Kelly, Anne Enright's The Gathering; Black Dirt and Devotion from Nell Leyshon. Rosalind Belben, Our Horses in Egypt, despite its 1* reader review in newbooksmag and the suggestion that it was a book beyond the scope of the average reader, a book that tested narrative form to its limits and still I'm thinking about it even now, weeks on. First novels full of promise for the future, like Charles Lambert's Little Monsters which I'll share thoughts on here tomorrow.
Then what about Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson?
British as they come, there's a book, like it or not (I loved it), that pushed the boundaries of taboo; Amelie Nothomb, oh heck, Belgian, never mind, endlessly and spiritedly reinvents ways of telling, I could go on for hours.
Uppermost in my mind at the moment a book I'm halfway through, The Rowing Lesson by Anne Landsman. Oh dear, not British either but here's a bench mark book to be going on with, nothing tired or weary about this one. Anne Landsman has taken a firm grip on the throat of her narrative and is shaking it about fit to pop its eyes out.
Simultaneously I have another Ann in progress, er, American again, Ann Patchett's novel Run. Heaven's above though, it's beautifully written, hidden depths making  it a page-turning cracker
No, the novel does not feel tired here, perhaps it has a little rest occasionally, but nothing terminal. Maybe I've over-simplified and misinterpreted George Steiner's erudite literary argument but his world all too depressing to contemplate really, as is the closing of the village shop .

Sunday Salon - Help with Henning request

Fifty Crime Writers to Read Before You Die in the Telegraph Review this weekend and surprisingly I've read quite a few. I don't go overboard on crime but they weave in and out of the general reading, and I have been meaning to read Henning Mankell for ever and now the time has come.
Except there are hundreds of them and as I trust your judgement entirely please could all you Kurt Wallander aficionados out there give me a clue about which one to read first ?
Then the next...and the next, so that I have some idea before Kenneth Branagh fills his shoes.

Sunday Salon

It's 1.15pm and if I don't get out of bed soon there won't be much point.
I don't know why a week's annual leave is the cue for the first streaming cold since the last one also when I was on annual leave about a year ago, but it always happens. I think work holds your mind and body in a sort of balanced tension and the minute you let in some slack your immune system just says, 'thanks very much we've been waiting for this' and heads off to be challenged and do its thing.It's all good for you in the end.
Coffee arrived a while ago and some of those Choco-Leibniz biscuits which just insist that you nibble the chocolate off around the edges first. Anyway I'll live but my body said 'stay here under this lovely warm duvet with a cat curled up at your feet and bask' so I've had a glorious snuffly, sneezy morning reading three novels which I have in simultaneous progress.
My favourite way to read.
The Journal of Dora Damage by Belinda Starling, page-turning Victorian pastiche set in the fascinating world of book binding and I'm reading with that faint tinge of sadness having discovered that Belinda Starling died some weeks after undergoing routine surgery just four days after she finished this book and leaving two small children.
How I missed Anne Patchett's Bel Canto I have no idea, but her latest Run is near perfection. An unlikely accident throws together two families with unguessed connections and I am doing that best of things when you have a triple read going on, putting the book down at the most involving moments so that you can't wait to get back to it.
Finally The Rowing Lesson by Ann Landsman,  this is even more unputdownable as a daughter sits at the bedside of her dying father in the Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town, imagining his life as a son, a doctor and a father in the most vivid detail. Thus far he's a brash, not altogether likeable character so she's struggling to tell it like it really was. I expect developments and some mitigating circumstances.
More about all of these soon.
Now it's 1.36pm so I think I really had better shift.

Sunday Salon - Cowslip heaven

" I must go seek some dewdrops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear"

A different Sunday Salon post today, books feature eventually and that was the only quote I could find on cowslips so it will have to do. There's nothing like catching up with a good friend and heading off to Cowslip Workshops over at Launceston for lunch and a browse in what has to be...yes I'm going to say it the best and most idyllic patchwork shop in The Entire UK...no, let's not mess about, say The World.
Now that a beautiful restaurant has been added the visit can take all day once you've had coffee, browsed the shop, had lunch and a debate about projects then gone back into the shop and firmed up the fabric choices and indeed we took a long four hours over it all on Friday.
Cowslip is set on a working organic farm so we drove around the boxes of leeks just harvested, past the newborn lambs, parked up and let the inspiration begin to flow and there is no doubt it always does. I had put a ridiculous embargo on all fabric purchasing and starting of new projects pending a bottleneck of unfinished wall-hangings and quilts waiting to be quilted. Add to that enough fabric in the stash to carpet the earth twice over with some left for most of the moon including double-lining all craters and there was absolutely no need for me to buy anything.
Except all quilting and no planning or piecing makes dgr a dull seamstress and so needs must.
Books and reading always inspire my needlework and it was obvious that with my current Thomas Hardy phase in full bloom the sight of these fabrics would bring on a relapse over the embargo. Doesn't that bookish writing plus oak leaf and acorn and the brown bark fabric just firmly declare Under the Greenwood Tree meets Gabriel Oak?
Well it did to me in a flash too. This also takes me quite a way outside my colour comfort zone of teal / yellow ochre / deep burgundy. I am a complete stranger to the brown and green corner at Cowslip but my stalwart friend edged me over there and saved me from myself when I panicked a bit and had added in something a bit too bright and garish.
I haven't a clue what I'll be making but I expect a week off work will allow my creativity to surface from the depths and make itself known. It always twitters away in the background but a good long run of freedom and it rushes forth like a mad torrent. There'll be steam coming off the Bernina e'er long.
I'm also planning a little piece of Celtic hand-applique and quilting to celebrate my reading of John O'Donohue's Anam Cara but more of that (with explanation for those who think Celtic quilting is about football) in another post, though you'll be delighted to know I thought ahead and stocked up for that project too...and one or two others.
Lest there be any doubt as to the benefits

"Useful and ornamental needlework, knitting and netting are capable of being made, not only sources of personal gratification, but of high moral benefit, and the means of developing in surpassing loveliness and grace, some of the highest and noblest feelings of the soul."
Author unknown, from The Ladies' WorkTable Book, 1845

So that's alright then.

The return of the native.

No not more Thomas Hardy, just the Kayaker home from Africa this week and good to see he did a bit of perch fishing while he was there. Plans to travel to friends in Tanzania by bus cut short by the unpredictable situation in the region and the difficulties of travelling anywhere fast by land with a kayak in tow. I'm hoping the cold may have killed off any wandering ants or termites in the luggage which did hold a peculiar smell all of its own. Each river returned from exudes a particular tang enhanced by longevity of wetness of gear. As always the experience has been memorable and Africa and the people amazing.

The White Nile has been done and the film footage is enough to make you part company with excess body fluids, the river looks HUGE even on a TV screen.

The boy has also done good and bought me the most inspired, special and useful gift, hand-carved by a very very clever man in the Ugandan town of Jinja.

At last...

Hallelujah!
At last a Top Fifty Books Ever list where I have read nearly all of them. At least I must have been well-read once upon a time, only about three or four that I've missed and funnily enough one of those is number six.
I bet plenty of you have read all fifty.

The Time-Torn Specialist Community Public Health Nurse

It had seemed like a really good idea to book for this series of "Great Writers" Talks at Peninsular Arts down in Plymouth. Head off across the edge of Dartmoor after work for a bit of cultural improvement on a Wednesday evening which is when my weekend begins after my three working days.
Except the first talk this week coincided with my last working day before a week's annual leave.
I can't decide which is worse, that day when you rush around doing about three days work in one in order to get out of the office, thus feeling far more in need of a break than you realised, or the day you go back and face it all again and the benefits of the break dissipate by 9.30am. I had visits to do, newborn baby hearing screens to do, records to write up, phone calls to make, letters to write, appointments to make for the week I get back, GP's to catch and speak to, social workers to catch and speak to, the Mother's Union are giving away free holidays so I had to be a travel agent and find people who wanted them by next week's closing date, oh yes and filing, shredding, hand over the caseload to a colleague and so it went on and on and on...this is boring, everyone has their own version of this problem, but at this rate I'd be lucky to stay awake more than five minutes in a comfortable, warm, people-filled lecture theatre.
Suffice it to say I was late leaving but relieved to finally divert my mobile onto the office answerphone and walk to the white board in reception and ceremoniously write up HV A/L BACK 03/03/08. The angels were looking down on me as I threw the car into the luckiest parking space in Plymouth almost opposite the venue, rushed in and there was Claire Tomalin sitting looking calm and serene in readiness for what proved to be a compelling and fascinating talk on her book Thomas Hardy, the Time-Torn Man.
It worked like a dream, the rigours of the day faded and I was transported to Dorset and most specifically to the poetry of Thomas Hardy which I have largely ignored, but which Claire Tomalin presented as Hardy's forte and the foundation for his gifted prose. I sat there picturing my virtually unopened edition of  Thomas Hardy : Selected Poetry and Non-Fictional Prose edited by Peter Widdowson on the shelf and determined to pick it up when I got home. Claire Tomalin's love of Hardy's poetry evident and infectious as she read several to us.
Included in those several, The Voice

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first when our day was fair.

And the whole room as of one was intently focused on the great sadness and guilt that Hardy felt after Emma's death.
There was a detailed and interesting look at Thomas Hardy's early life and that of his family and Claire Tomalin skilfully traced many of Hardy's attributes back to his parents and grandparents. I am enjoying The Mayor of Casterbridge so much that it's impossible to imagine another Hardy to better this one and now I'm wondering if there is a DVD of the old TV series which I may have watched but can barely remember.
A quick trip to Amazon and there it is.
Then I'm thinking perhaps we can squeeze in a trip to Hardy's cottage at Bockhampton  as soon as it opens next month, because actually I'm on annual leave again. Suddenly I want to read, watch and see it all.
Meanwhile it is clear there is a real thirst for these events in Plymouth, the lecture theatre was packed, standing room only and a queue of ticketless people hoping to squeeze in.
Next week Professor Sally Ledger on Dickens and the People. I can hardly wait.

As Good as a Yarn With You

In the preamble leading up to and into my visit to Australia from the armchair I have been delving into the lives of Australian women writers. I've had The Little Company by Eleanor Dark on my shelf for years and then my interest turned to Miles Franklin and I bought a copy of My Brilliant Career. Then don't ask me how I came across it, but I discovered a book of letters between six Australian women writers from the years 1930 to 1957 and I had to have it. Thanks to Kenny's Bookshop in Galway who have often turned up with the unusual books over the years.
I had a great Mitford letter reading fest last year what with Decca, The Letters of Jessica Mitford and then The Mitfords, Letters Between Sisters and it was definitely the scope and fascination of the second volume with its variety of writers that appealed.
As Good as a Yarn With You edited by Carole Ferrier and published in 1992 by Cambridge University Press is a collection of correspondence between Miles Franklin, Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark.
I'd only heard of two but as I read on, how well I feel I know all these women now,

'Each of the women was centrally engaged with the social and political issues of her time, and these letters appear as a continuing dialogue, written through the Depression with all its struggles and militancy, the nationalism and chauvinism of the Second World War and the conservatism of the Cold War.'

They do indeed read as a narrative of the times capturing the essence of women's lives in all their complexity as clashes between the private and the public spheres constantly emerge, here Susannah Prichard to Miles Franklin,

'Sometimes I'm sure I work harder than any body in the world. And at so many different sorts of jobs - keeping house for my beautiful son who is grown-up now, cooking, sweeping, washing, mending etc, organisational work and lectures and somewhere inbetween I've got to find time to write and earn my living. All this,most of the time, with ehad and heart too weary for words and the terrible pressure of financial anxieties never growing less.'

The friends also critique each other's writing honestly and with a frankness that is often quite astonishing. Marjorie Barnard takes no prisoners as she tells Eleanor Dark exactly what she sees as the flaws in The Little Company.

'I read it with a sort of perturbation...I feel the book as a whole remains unconsummated, Virgin. As if ideas and feelings had been set side by side but had never fused. Flower without fruit...I think the real trouble is in the characters...impossible to care enough for them to really care what happens to them...they are credible but not warm...'

and so it goes on, none of the friends liked it , must all have wrecked Eleanor's day and it's quite some while before there's another letter from Eleanor to Marjorie but of course the friendship survives.
I've read it again somewhere recently, books of letters are nearing their end, the demise is almost upon us and e mails with their clipped language will surely be a poor substitute. Few of us now give time to writing letters any more and that makes the reading of volumes like this even more poignant.
The women share their moments of grief and depression, joy and happiness and in doing so have provided the rest of us with a real insight into their lives.
I used to have stacks of penfriends when I was younger, Monique who lived in Montbard in France, Christine from Ripon in the UK and one in India who lived on Chandni Chowk Street in Delhi and, shame on me, I can't even remember her name now, but how I wish I'd kept her letters. In many ways perhaps this blog is ' as good as a yarn with you' but it's no substitute for a letter, perhaps we should instigate National Letter Writing Week before it's too late?
Write a Friend a Letter? WAFAL?...waffle who cares, a letter's a letter and becoming a rare thing these days.

Under the Greenwood Tree

My list of Thomas Hardy's read to date is woefully sparse and it was all holding so much promise when I picked up Thomas Hardy The Time Torn Man by Claire Tomalin last year (or was it the year before?)
The trouble was I started this in the wake of finishing England's Mistress by Kate Williams thinking I was into a biography phase and should go with the flow, only to find that Thomas didn't quite carry the allure and fascination of Emma Hamilton.Then I picked up A Pair of Blue Eyes for some good local Thomas Hardy reading and made even less progress, so project temporarily abandoned pending more auspicious alignment of the reading planets.
Nothing more auspicious than going off to hear Claire Tomalin speak at Peninsular Arts this evening after work. That's if I remember to turn left towards Plymouth and not right towards home at the roundabout, I will be wearing post-it notes saying THOMAS HARDY all day.
Under the Greenwood Tree has been a great re-entry and I now feel quietly steeped in Thomas Hardy. I have revelled in the bucolic hilarity of the disbanding of Mellstock Village Church Quire to make way for a new-fangled harmonium, and bemoaned along with everyone else that Thomas Hardy chose not to follow this plot line through. Preferring instead to place village schoolmistress Fancy Day and her romantic involvements centre stage, Hardy had me laughing like a gawkhammer to begin with, whilst I finished the book having mumbudgetedly enjoyed a good read. There's a really helpful dialect glossary at the end of the book which has added some good new words to my daily conversation, and now I know what a dumbledore really is I can tell you that we've got loads in the garden at the moment, and they don't have white beards or wear wizard hats.
Claire Tomalin makes interesting observations about Under the Greenwood Tree.

'You are charmed on condition that you accept Hardy's condescension towards his characters. His villagers are drawn sympathetically but as simpletons. He is tender towards them and gives them beautifully turned rustic dialogue, but he invites us to smile with him at their simplicity. They are comical without knowing they are.'

True indeed but nothing can detract from the joy of this book. I'm going to be adding it to my list of books to read extracts from at Christmas because it has one of the best, funniest, most atmospheric descriptions of a nineteenth century village celebration of the festival that you could ever wish to read.
It's books like this that also remind me it will soon be the day that I head off for that first spring 'traypse and wamble' along the lanes and over the way to the village of Sydenham Dameral. Here are last year's pictures of the tiniest church but one which always feels so like those described by George Eliot in Adam Bede and Thomas Hardy here.
I am also reliably informed by them as know that I absolutely must but MUST read The Mayor of Casterbridge next, so I have made a start and they are right.

Hubbub : Filth, Noise & Stench in England

I think it was a fairly safe bet that I'd wallow in Hubbub : Filth, Noise & Stench in England by Emily Cockayne and soon to be published in paperback by Yale University Press. As a latter-day professional descendant of the Manchester Ladies Sanitary Reform Association of 1862 it was only to be expected.
This book is indeed only for those who are strong of stomach as you are lead squelching and sloughing off back through hygiene in pre-industrial revolution England, this is bath time, the launderette and supermarket shopping as Hogarth and Pepys would have known it.
Where to begin?
Well I started at the beginning and was dragged in as Emily Cockayne escorted me from Ugly, to Itchy, Mouldy and Noisy and thence to Grotty, Busy, Dirty and Gloomy. All makes me want to sing Heigh-Ho and write the Christmas panto for the Environmental Health Department now I read the chapter headings back. It's a classification that works well and I was knee deep by the time I reached Itchy.
I had for example never heard of psorophthalmy, have you?
It's eyebrow dandruff apparently and it drove them nuts in the 1650's, along with all manner of untreatable nasties that would have us trotting off for a prescription these days.
Intestinal parasites?
Did you know one chap had three hundred large worms at one time?
I won't go into how we know that but we do. All the norm as were fleas, bed bugs...bedding was rarely washed. For city dwellers it was enough hassle to find water to wash yourself, let alone the stream and the rocks to sort out the bedding. Quick rub down with a pig-bristle brush to dislodge the lice seems to be the format for daily ablutions.
On top of that rotting teeth, stinking breath and wigs that seemed ready to walk of their own accord must have made everyone seem very attractive. Absolutely everything stank to high heaven all the time.
Emily Cockayne has produced a strangely compelling book which I just keep coming back to time and again for a bit more on how terrible it all was. I'm not sure why I need to know but I do and here is that rare creature, a completely readable reference book. If you thought the high society Assembly Room balls were sweet and lovely affairs think again, here's an account of just such an event in Bath

'Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours, arising from putrid gums, imposthumated lungs, sour flatulencies, rank armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues, plasters, assafoetida drops, musk, hartshorn and sal volatile; besides a thousand frowzy streams, which I could not analyse.'

There was good reason for Mr Darcy jumping in that lake and now we know it.
The research feels impeccable and thorough and the detail is fascinating , the sort of thing that has you reading out loud to anyone nearby
Did you know umbrellas were black because....
Did you know you had legal recompense if the contents of a chamber pot were tipped on you head?
I've done with Ugly and Itchy and now I'm onto Mouldy and having passed through the realms of putrid meat we're now onto fish and for someone who doesn't eat fish and can't bear the smell of fish my senses are reeling from it all. Suddenly I realise how long it must have taken for any food to reach any market beyond say a ten mile radius of capture so the chances of it turning up fresh are remote.

'Just a few hours separated meat that was stale from that only fit for dogs...butchers were known to inflate meat with their breath...others stuffed rags into cavities to bulk out a carcass.'

Enough to turn the strongest carnivore into a vegetarian but Emily Cockayne offers sound advice on judging the quality of eighteenth-century foods.

'We cannot apply modern shrink-wrapped standards...as E.P.Thompson warned us, we must guard against the 'enormous condescension of posterity' '

Not a book to be rushed, hardly one to be savoured actually, but I'm enjoying it immensely and still have Gloomy, Grotty, Busy, Noisy and Dirty to look forward to. I can hardly wait and of course will share the juicy bits with you.
In the mean time I'll let you guess, from Smollett's description, what London commodity this might be,

'the produce of faded cabbage leaves and sour draff, lowered within hot water frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings, discharged from doors and windows, spittle snot, and tobacco-quids from foot passengers, overflowings from mud-carts, spatterings from coach wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for joke's sake, the spewing of infants...and finally the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture...'

Beautiful Bloggers

Oh yes, second place out of "an estimated field of 50 million', Sally Z you were right, the hat may have let me down!

Amongst Women - John McGahern

John McGahern sadly only came to my attention as a novelist of stunning depth and quality after his death.My introduction came last year with The Barracks, a novel that crept under my skin and lives with me still. In time honoured fashion I quickly ordered another, That They May Face the Rising Sun, knowing that I could elevate John McGahern into my top flight authors stack and would eventually read them all.
Then as usual nothing happened, shelved the book and forgot about it.
That is until an online list chose Amongst Women as its  Book of the Month for February and suddenly I remembered John McGahern all over again.
I was surprised to find similarities in plot device, woman marries into ready-made family as step-mother to growing children, someone goes off to train as a nurse at The London Hospital but there the similarities ended, almost.
Almost, except yet again I am swept away by the power of the Irish writers I have read of late, thinking in particular of Anne Enright's The Gathering for last year's Booker Prize and the fascination for those of us not part of one, of the large and devoutly Catholic Irish family.
In my ignorance I probably tend to lean towards the ridiculous notion that everyone in Ireland is part of one of these, in the same way that perhaps people think everyone who lives in Devon is a farmer. Of course it's not true but the way that the form allows for the exploration of the characters is matchless.
Fictionally on offer the tightly regimented and disciplined home, the communal kneeling and recitation of the evening rosary, usually a black sheep in the midst hinted at obliquely, the deaths left unreferenced and unexplained, perhaps a political past to contend with. Countless different characters all reacting in their own way to the restrictions and oppressions of a life in Amongst Women ruled by the widowed patriarch Moran as he decides to marry again.
Immersion in these novels becomes total as the words wrap themselves around in that lyrical Irish way, the story gently unfolds, yet gentle belies a fury simmering beneath the surface, well-concealed, often unspoken but always evident. Here it is the family's fear of Moran, their endless endeavours to please and appease a man who has ruled with a rod of iron. The atmosphere often so suffocating and laden with trepidation that I was as glad as everyone else in the family to get out in the fields, breathe deeply and cut hay for three days.

'Beneath all differences was the belief that the whole house was essentially one. Together they were one world and could take on the world. Deprived of this sense they were nothing, scattered individual things. They would put up with anything in order to have this sense of belonging. They would never let it go. No one could be allowed to walk out easily.'

The arrival of a step-mother Rose, becomes a catalyst for some free expression and the family moves on in ways previously impossible as Rose soaks up a great deal of Moran's ill-tempered nature,

'His moods were as changeable as the moods in the long day of a child and Rose could follow them now even better than they.'

But there are gaps and silences aplenty and much left unexplained or barely hinted at as I turned the final page. Sometimes we expect answers and reasons for everything in life,
What has happened in Moran's past to make him as he was?
Why did he find men, and his sons in particular so threatening?
Occasionally I caught a glimpse of the man Moran knew he ought to be, or was trying to be

'It was like grasping water to think how quickly the years had passed here. They were nearly gone. It was in the nature of things and yet it brought a sense of betrayal and anger, of never having understood anything much...He continued walking the fields like a man trying to see.'

But sometimes those questions are best left unanswered and I have done a lot of  'well it could've been because of...' thinking since I finished reading thus doubling the impact of a book which could have been five hundred pages long. I wouldn't have complained, but I wouldn't have felt nearly so satisfied with the read.
It is truly impossible to fault John McGahern's writing.

and the winner is...

Sunday Salon

Light years ago I bought the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy by Sigrid Undset in the certain knowledge that at £10 for these three lovely U.S. editions it would be a crime to leave them behind in the bookshop but also that I would read them one day for sure.
I've had an exciting Nordic excursion over the last few days thanks to Ice Land by Betsy Tobin (more on that soon) and so, despite the fact I'm supposed to be on my way to Australia from the armchair, I've slotted in a detour to fourteenth century Norway.
I think once you get the language into your head it's fine and because I've recently been visiting an Icelandic family at work I am suddenly completely au fait with the patronymic 'father's first name-dottir' surname for a girl and 'father's first name -son' for a boy and have been busy explaining it to everyone else. I actually only know because Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indridason explains it all so well in his books.
So it was off to the Nordic department and Kristin Lavransdatter : 1 - The Bridal Wreath is in its very early stages and already feels right for the moment. Kristin is seven years old and already a beautiful little girl currenty riding pillion on her father Lavrans' horse as they travel up into the mountains. Out of habit I tend to take the first few chapters of any book very very slowly, re-reading them if necessary; setting the scene and the history properly feels crucial to an appreciation of this mammoth work with all its complexities of genealogy and geography. I need to get it set out right in my mind from the off,

'When the lands and goods of Ivar Gjesling the younger of Sundbu, were divided after his death in 1306, his lands in Sil of Gudbrandsal fell to his daughter Ragnfrid and her husband Lavrans Bjorgulfson.Up to then they lived on Lavran's manor of Skog at Follo, near Oslo; but now they moved up to Jorundgaard at the top of the open lands of Sil.'

Yes indeed I need to concentrate.
I shall have to do some background reading on Sigrid Undset because I know nothing and she sounds fascinating. A Norwegian born in Denmark in 1881, died in 1949, worked with the Norwegian underground during the Second World War, this book was published in 1923 and Undset was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928.
That sounds like one very interesting life and I think I'm in for a great read, amazing how a book can sit there for years biding its time.
Any Lavrandsdatter/Undset fans out there?

Rocky in training

In preparation for the Grand Prize Peter Carey Book Draw we took Rocky out on the gallops for some fresh air to wake him up a bit.
The minute you put these on

the cats seems to know and as you wander off down the lane they trail along behind you for fear of missing out on something.
We spotted the first butterfly of the year, or is it left over from last year?

The snowdrops are everywhere

And Rocky had a real good scratch in readiness...

Alert, sleek, supple, every sense honed to the peak of perfection, the draw is imminent, he's just having his high-calorie carbo and glucose loaded dinner and then we must let him focus. (crikey I hope Linda in Ireland isn't reading this)

All in good time

I'll rise and shine eventually and partake of The Sunday Salon which, after just two weeks of attendance, I am really starting to look forward to.

More tattle...

Oh lookee here, as if the day hasn't been exciting enough, I mean I've spent the afternoon trying to make my scanner speak to my new computer when it doesn't want to talk Windows "Flipping Screens" Vista, how exciting is that?
But me old mucker NHS Blog Doctor has nominated dgr scribbles for his utterly non-pc Beautiful Bloggers competition and lest there should be any doubt, that's me third one down, don't laugh, thirty-two years ago, Great Ormond Street staff nurse regalia, starched up to the eyeballs and with a waistline to die for and a neat pageboy haircut.
I do still have that belt somewhere and, well, it would probably get two thirds round with assistance and a lot of persuasion.

The cat's leg, my skirt and a vacuum cleaner.

You'll be pleased to know that the final instalment of The Saga of Tess's Extortionately Expensive Leg can I hope now been written.
The ten days was up and the stitches had to come out. After much prevarication we eventually wrapped her in a towel whilst bringing to mind other cats we know. Thinking that this would be akin to fifteen rounds with the lions of Longleat crossed with the Beast of Bodmin we had first fortified ourselves with a large cafetiere of coffee.It was thus a pleasant surprise to find that Tess lay as meek as a lamb and purred contentedly while I snipped and slipped out eight stitches. We'd set up like Emergency Ward 10 (remember that?) and it all came back to me in a flash.
Cut between the knot and the skin so you don't pull the external bit of stitch through the wound and increase risk of infection, remove alternate stitches in case of gaping wound and hey presto it was done and off she went. We divested the kitchen of the cage, the nice soft plump convalescent pillow and litter tray, turfed Tess out in the garden and, thanks to a week of bright sunny weather and an abundance of baby rabbits, all cats have taken to fetching take-aways and sunbathing outside again and all memories of a strange unfeline week are erased.
That would have been the only significant event of the week had I not awarded myself a very rare errand day in town and caught up on all those tasks that have been waiting. I usually leave all this to Bookhound because when you've worked as I have in and around the town for so long you know 99.9% of the people and it can take forever to walk 20 yards.
We have been blessed with our very own branch of Fat Face which is, to those not in the know, a nice clothing shop for Bright Young Things where it is even possible to occasionally find something for a Woman of a Certain Age. In amongst the slouchy umbilical-revealing baggy trousers and the skinny wafer thin jumpers and those smocky-style tops (I just can't bear to go back to 1973) I had found a very nice skirt before Christmas. Warm, weighty, lined fabric, nice length and style and one of the metal press stud fasteners holding the belt in place fell off about the third time I wore it.
I was aggrieved and have spent an age trying to hammer it back on, press it back on, wish it back on, anything to keep the skirt because I love it. To no avail and finally I took it back to the shop for a refund this week.
Nice young girl who quickly assumed the mantle of Spanish Inquisitor, fixed gaze, direct eye contact and quizzed me fiercely on how exactly I'd washed the skirt because I must have been a bit harsh on it.
At this point I'm wracking my brains and wishing I had X ray eyes to see the label.
Did it say Hand Wash Only?
No surely not, I always check and never buy anything that says something so stupid.
No, it's only been washed once, then I take a calculated risk and add on a 30 degree wool wash - slow spin - wouldn't dream of tumble-drying it, all to be on the safe side.
More close examination,
Honestly, I love the skirt and I've tried to mend it but I can't.
More close examination.
I'll have to go and speak to my manager (disappears through doors...reappears)
Do you have a receipt?
Aha, here we go, no not on me.
In that case you'll have to choose something else.
There's nothing I want so I'd really like a refund.
I'll have to go and speak to my manager ( disappears through doors, reappears and has long conversation with boyfriend who has called in with a cup of coffee)
No we can't do that without a receipt, you can have gift vouchers.
Well I'd really prefer a refund, plus... time to bring on that old chestnut...the goods are not of merchantable quality.
I'll have to go and speak to my manager (disappears through doors...reappears)
She says if you had gift vouchers you could give them to all your friends as presents.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall at Fat Face staff training in Conflict Resolution.
Eventually I ring Bookhound back at Mission Control to check bank statements to prove I didn't buy the skirt in the sale and am therefore not trying to diddle the shop out of money. He goes one step better and miraculously finds the receipt in what is usefully termed the Receipt Drawer but actually resembles a very disorganised and overfull paper recycling depot. That's no good over the phone, so the skirt refund will be resolved next trip into town.
Then feeling completely flushed with inefficiency and smarting at allegations of harsh treatment of my clothes with added hints of dishonesty, I settle for a simple task and head off to get more bags for the vacuum cleaner.
Well, which sort do you want, we have 343 different types in stock.
I start trying to recognise it from the pictures on the bags and give up after five, clearly I haven't used it in a while.
Once again I ring Bookhound, can you go and look at the cleaner and tell me which make and model it is. I'm quite relieved that he does actually have to go and look and doesn't just recite it to me there and then, that would have been too much to bear.

A perfect day

I can't believe the sort of day I've had today, if I throw a deep vein thrombosis the fault will be entirely mine.
Nor can I complain about it being dull and dismal down here because the West Country has just had an unbroken run of bright sunny days when it's almost been, well, hot. Enough to make silly people cast off their thermal vests, but not me of course.
Today however dawned freezing, overcast and grey because it's my day off, so no big rush to step out of bed and so I didn't.
Breakfast arrived, read quite a bit more of Jungfrau by Dymphna Cusack. This is one big startling 1930's read by an Australian woman writer and I will have plenty to say about it when finished. If I was looking for true to reality 1930's fiction and then this is one.
The post arrived and with it some nice book parcels.
I opened one book, Ice Land by Betsy Tobin published by Short Books, except it's quite long and suddenly I was reading exactly the right book for the day. Set in 1000 AD, "infused with the rich history and mythology of Iceland".
Still in bed but in Iceland, coffee arrived and then, needing a rest from ancient Norse adventure, I opened the other book from Short Books, Benny & Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti. Set in the here and now, this has been a best-seller in Sweden and after thirty pages I can see exactly why.
Finally the thing that got me out of bed was a very strange multiple and ongoing pattering noise in the lane underneath the bedroom window. There's always a chance this is an unsolicited break-out or a controlled one but someone's forgotten to shut the gates and the multiple pattering veers into the garden.The lane was chock solid with sheep on the move, the gates were shut and there were shepherd-like people fore and aft, so no worries.
Now it's 5pm, the quietest of country days here, perhaps three cars have gone past all day and two of those were ours. I just made it out of bed in time for lunch and then managed to stagger to the sofa, woodburner humming away nicely and set off for Iceland again, and that's where I've spent the afternoon inbetween some therapeutic dozing.
Now I might nip back to Sweden.
Sometimes you just need a day like this.

The Hour of the Star - Clarice Lispector

Looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf
Thus is the twenty-four year old Jewish Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector described soon after writing her first novel Near to the Wild Heart published in 1944.
It's taken quite a while for The Hour of the Star to sink in, settle down and for any thoughts to rise to the surface. I think it was the comparisons to Kafka that delayed me.
I'd already confessed to knowing diddly squat about Kafka and somehow thought that the emphasis everywhere on this aspect of Clarice Lispector's writing and my inability to make Kafkaesque connections beyond existential goings-on and didn't a man wake up and think he was a cockroach or something, well, somehow it all seemed to prohibit comment.
Then by accident I was browsing a book of essays by John Fowles, Wormwood, and I came across his thoughts on Kafka and I felt a whole lot better. John Fowles had studied Kafka at Oxford twenty years previously but now couldn't recall a word of it. Interestingly and off at a tangent he also identifies other authors who have been given 'adjectival value', among them Trollope, Hardy, and James and usually in the context of intense focus on limited areas of human experience or feeling.
That somehow focused my thinking on Clarice Lispector and the scary word Kafka was banished.
Taking as her subject Macabea, a girl from the slums of Rio de Janeiro who moves to the city to work as typist, Clarice Lispector, from the perspective of a male narrator, proceeds to construct her character before the eyes of her reader.

'It is my intention, as I suggested earlier to write with ever greater simplicity. Besides the material at my disposal is all too sparse and mundane, I possess a few details about my characters and those details are not very revealing; details that stem from me only to return to me; the craft of carpentery.'

Constantly reminded of the process as it is happening makes for unusual reading and a strange suspense as you wonder quite what Macabea's character or life will be invested with next.Hovering with indecision is common as Clarice Lispector plays out authorial thoughts mediated through her narrator and all in front of her reader.

'I suspect that this lengthy preamble is intended to conceal the poverty of my story, for I am apprehensive. Before this typist entered my life, I was a reasonably contented chap despite my limited success as a writer. Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting.'

It's often almost impossible to unravel Clarice Lispector from her unnamed male protagonist or from Macabea and so as I read I was constantly asking myself questions and realised I was most certainly reading a book that stripped bare to the bones the art of fiction, a point neatly made by translator Giovanni Pontiero in his afterword,

'Her asides to the reader, as distractions, uncertainties and obstacles interrupt the creative process, underline the attendant problems as the writer struggles for direction and clarification.'

It's very strange. I just know I've read a really unusual and interesting book but beyond that I can't quite define it. There is more Clarice Lispector to read and and I'm onto it, others are reading her around the blogworld and so expect some good reviews to appear  but all in all what a great reading discovery, last words to Clarice who somehow reduces this whole writing caper down to the lowest yet most important common denominator,

'Remember that, no matter what I write, my basic material is the word. So this story will consist of words that form phrases from which there emanates a secret meaning that exceeds both words and phrases.'

I think I've been Lispectored, which probably sounds better than being Trolloped.

 

If You Awaken Love

Finishing up my Levantine reading gradually, in fact quite slowly because I've enjoyed the stay so much.Barely scraped the surface I know but I have the inkling of a feel for the countries and the merest hint about literary output but all enough to have made its mark and I will surely recognise the place when I return, which I certainly will.
I've had quite a run of Jewish-Israeli reading and If You Awaken Love by Emuna Elon published by Toby Press fits snugly into this category.
Emuna Elon was born in Jerusalem in 1955 and has lived in the settlement of Beit-El since 1982. Married with six children this is her first novel.
If like me you wanted to get a real feel for the Jewish Orthodox faith and its implications for day to day living this book more than satisfies the need. I tend to dislike glossaries in books, much preferring the writing to somehow provide me with a reasoned guess at a meaning, but in this case I make an exception. The glossary has answered every unknown I have ever had about Judaism from tefillin and phylacteries to kugel.
Devoutly orthodox Shlomtzion and Yair have been sweethearts since childhood. Feeling certain that their life together is willed by God, they expect spiritual approval and permission for their engagement to be a formality when they seek it from the Rosh Yeshiva. Heartbroken when permission is denied the young couple split and whilst Yair continues to live in Jerusalem and follow the Orthodox faith, Shlomtzion flees both her homeland and her faith eventually settling in New York.
Haunted by the break up, years later the couple's paths are destined to cross again in the most unlikely way.
Whilst being a close and detailed account of Shlomotzion's life blighted by love and sorrow, the life, the land, the faith and the politics weave in and out of this story too. Beautifully written and translated from Hebrew by David Hazony, and I have emerged furnished with what feels like a balanced view on life in Israel.
Through the vehicle of what is ostensibly a love story, Emuna Elon traverses the tricky historical period from the Six Day War to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin with a surprisingly even-handed approach for one who lives in a settlement, presenting the arguments on both the Jewish and the Palestinian sides through several of her characters. Extremist views are carefully leavened (probably the wrong word in the circumstances but describes perfectly) with arguments for peace. Whilst the emphasis is determinedly and inevitably Israeli she doesn't let this cloud her judgement and I sensed Emuna Elon striving hard for balance and pragmatism in her approach.
But really I have to add, what do I know?
This is such difficult political territory and, current reading aside, I knew precious little about it beyond that provided by the media here in the UK, barely enough to form an opinion one way or the other . Returning to the sources of the conflict albeit via fiction has been both informative and enlightening and I feel I have certainly gleaned a greater understanding of why this is all such a powder keg.
But underneath it all that awareness remains, that same human condition, the soul that struggles to survive and grow no matter where you place it.

The Mark on the Wall

My short story progress towards The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald has been rudely interrupted by none other than Virginia Woolf.
Just butted her way in and insisted I listened to what she had to say.
Having mentioned the short story "Kew Gardens" and found my copy of Virginia Woolf's The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction I  had little choice. I re-read "Kew Gardens" and was immediately connected to the very essence of Virginia Woolf's writing and I wanted more.
The short story providing the perfect form within which Virginia Woolf could explore that literary equivalent of the painterly, colourful artistic style favoured by the women artists. In "Kew Gardens" fusing it with nature in her descriptions of the minutiae of the flowerbeds.

'The light fell either upon the smooth grey back of a pebble, or the shell of a snail with its brown circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red,blue and yellow...'

The sentences adapted to take the natural shape of thought processes without distorting or crushing them and what results is beautifully vivid and descriptive writing.No requirement to provide an outcome or give meaning to an experience, no dependence on causality or a need for effect, quite literally nothing happens, yet everything happens. Characters brought to life by detail not by incident and formidably brave writing for a woman in the face of the male-dominated world of traditional storytelling. Resisting and rewriting the rules.
Through an intensity of focused thought, Virginia Woolf continues to open new doors to new territory for this reader that may just never have been traversed before. I don't think I'd ever considered a piece of furniture in quite such a detailed way until I read "The Mark on the Wall", taking its source back to its origins as wood (someone needs to update and write the Ikea version)

'Wood is a pleasant thing to think about...I like to think about the tree itself, first the close dry sensation of being wood...on winter's nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon the earth that goes tumbling, tumbling all night long.'

Then once the tree is felled by a storm,

'Even so life isn't done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree.'

This book is a little feast of such moments and in the short story you don't miss them, impossible to gloss over. "An Unwritten Novel" offers the Woolfian detailed eye on a train journey, likewise "The Shooting Party" imagines the significant events that may have led to the opening gambit of the story

'She got in and put her suitcase on the rack, and the brace of pheasants on top of it.'

A story just one page long entitled "Monday or Tuesday" and here's the first line

'Lazy and indifferent, shaking space easily from his wings, knowing his way, the heron passes over the church beneath the sky. White and distant, absorbed in itself...'

Perfectly describes the flight of a heron, I shall never look on one again without watching him shake the space from his wings.
Virginia Woolf herself knew she had indeed hit the mother-lode with these and was mining a rich writing seam,

'I shall never forget the day I wrote "The Mark on the Wall" - all in a flash, as if flying, after being kept stone breaking for months. "The Unwritten Novel" was the great discovery, however. That - again in one second - showed me how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it...I saw, branching out of the tunnel I made, when I discovered that method of approach, Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway etc - How I trembled with excitement.'

This is a tiny book, barely 100 pages, easy to overlook it on the shelves as I have for years, now it's deservedly had its moment and I feel fortified yet again by my short story a day.

Devotion - Nell Leyshon

My thoughts on Nell Leyshon's latest novel Devotion have walked on over to the Picador blog for any Leyshon fans out there who might be interested.

The Bethlehem Murders

Big thanks to Herschelian who comments here and who recommended this book for a good novel that would also furnish an even greater understanding of life and the political situation in Palestine. I bought a copy in an instant, and The Bethlehem Murders by Matt Rees has certainly lived up to Herschelian's billing.
Omar Yussef, teacher at the local refugee camp has always insisted that the children in his charge see every side to the political situation and when a former pupil is wrongly framed for murder Omar feels a responsibility to investigate.
A plot with all manner of twists, turns and deceits but what I gained most was a truly genuine feel for the unpredictability and the inherent dangers of day to day life in Palestine.Difficult to imagine from rural Devon it has to be said.
It's emotive to say 'this stricken country' but so true. Every life is expendable to the Martyrs Brigades, no one is safe, lawlessness and protection rackets abound and violent power struggles are inevitable.The fears this engenders are rife throughout the book. Everyone but everyone feels they belong in Bethlehem, Christians, Muslims and Jews and they will all be staking a claim to possess it,

' ...here in Palestine change is always for the worse...even to change a situation of hatred they make more hatred. Love is not an option, It's the choice of an idiot who wants to end with nothing, robbed and abused and humiliated...everyone's convinced that the only way to alter the bad relations...is to wipe out the other side. To kill them all.'

Omar Yussef must have been reading my thoughts on Nightingale by Peter Dorward a few weeks ago.

'...Omar Yussef read an arrogance in him of the kind that the young so often wore these days, full of the sense that their elders had failed to fight hard enough for the freedom of Palestine, convinced that they would be the ones to make the great sacrifices that would liberate the land.'

I suffered with early confusion over names but that was down to my unfamiliarity with the language rather than any fault of the author, once I understood how Omar Yussif could also be Abu Ramiz I was fine.
Expect any historical notions about the birthplace of Jesus, Bethlehem, Manger Square and the Church of the Nativity, to be dispelled and replaced by a 21st century perspective on a place where conflict is  perpetrated daily in the name of religion.
Cosy this is not, violent it is, but Matt Rees has been a journalist in the Middle East for ten years, he knows his stuff and though this is fiction and not a text book, books like this really don't allow anyone to bury their head in the sand a minute longer. Like Crusaders, avoid reading it if you absolutely can't bear the thought, but if you do you will find out what's really going on, and any arachnophobes might struggle with that cover too.
Thanks Herschelian for a book I feel very glad to have read.
Leading on from this I knew there was another book that I had to read immediately. A Little Piece of Ground by Elizabeth Laird, the story of Karim, a young boy living under curfew in Ramallah and here's what Michael Morpurgo had to say about it

' We are apt to see events in Palestine and Israel as television drama; violent and repetitive. We are distant from it.But in this book we are taken into Ramallah, we live there, no longer mere observers, but involved as we should be. A fine and daring book.'

I heard Elizabeth Laird speaking on this book several years ago.Yes, this was at the legendary Children's Literature conference where Philip Pullman stood next to me in the lunch queue and asked me what was in the salad (chick peas...sorry 100th time I've told you that but us mere mortals must clutch at these moments) and Neil Gaiman sat next to me and I'd never heard of him. Heaven knows what Elizabeth Laird said, I can't remember, but I was impressed enough to buy a copy of the book and fortunately tucked inside it I've kept a transcript of her talk, how lucky is that?

Roll up...roll up...free prize book draw

So having fortuitously ended up with two copies of His Illegal Self I think a Prize Draw is called for.
Just add your name in comments here if you'd like to be entered and we'll draw the winner at the weekend.
I'll be sure to send the one I haven't scribbled in and as always, anywhere in the world is fine, you know Hilary in the village Post Office loves a challenge.

His Illegal Self - Peter Carey

I've had a very strange on, then consistently off affair with the writing of Peter Carey for years now.
On, when I suddenly dragged my reading up by the boot laces back in the late 1980's, the days of small children and decided that by reading Booker Prize list books I was perhaps going some way to negating the ongoing effects of Topsy and Tim go to the Park/ the Dentist/ School/ the Zoo etc.
My first read of 1989 was Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey, and though it was all a bit of an odd blur and I'm not that sure I really followed it, I felt like a grown-up again and just assumed that literature had moved on since I'd last read anything worthwhile.
Then I moved into seriously  'off' mode with Peter Carey and didn't pick up another until Theft, A Love Story and the Bookerthon 2006. I struggled with the book, especially the UPPER CASE, dismissed it as Booker frippery and said so and then nailed my colours firmly, but wrongly as always, to the mast of Carry Me Down by M.J.Hyland.
So along came not one but two copies of His Illegal Self (roll up later today for a free prize draw for the spare one) and cynical old me wasn't going to be impressed by a name, or browbeaten by a reputation, or even charmed by a cover bearing a beatific child fixing me with a penetratingly angelic gaze, just daring me to dislike the book...go on, just you dare...is he about to cry?
I've heard wind of the reviews, and there would seem to be slapdown mutterings and chunnerings afoot and the ones I've skimmed are not favourable and give away just about every plot detail, but really I might just as well say Booker and His Illegal Self in the same sentence and get that bit over with first.You don't need to be Einstein to come up with the formula, Carey + New Novel = Booker
Except that I think, in fact I'm going to be brave and say it, if this book makes it through it will deserve to be there.
There's no doubt about it, Peter Carey writes well and truly out of the box, probably pushes the envelope too, whatever that means, and it's an unusal ride but I never got left behind. I like books that take you forward in a state of blind unknowing and then explain how you got there later, and in the case of a book that circles around the life of a child, that's completely legitimate and representative of this child's life.
We unwittingly do it to children all the time and I was left in no doubt how Che was feeling as I too struggled to know where I was or what was going on or what he should do.
Seven-year old Che, the son of political activists, suddenly finds himself jettisoned from his privileged and sheltered life as Jay living in New York with his wealthy maternal grandmother. He only knows snippets of his background but has dreamt of the moment when his renegade parents will break him out and claim him. He thinks it has happened when he suddenly finds himself in the company of Dial, someone he thinks he recognises, and before he knows it he's on the other side of the world, living in a hippy commune in Queensland, Australia.
There how about that for a quick resume of the action?
Peter Carey has chosen the age of his child protagonist well, seven the perfect age for all things to be possible, life's straightforward in that can-be-done sort of way, making Che's craving and seeking of the truth all the more poignant. He struggles desperately to make sense of what has happened in an effort to map and pin down his already confused identity back into some semblance of order. Uprooted he clings to every last bit of emotional flotsam that might just lead him back to safer, known territory and I was with him every inch of the way. I made as many wrong assumptions as Che did, clung onto all his hopes, shared all his fears, loved the kitten in his pocket as much as he did.
When Che wanted out so did I.
When Che wanted in so did I.
I was less enamoured with Dial's life, her seeming stupidity, less sympathetic to her cause but I think that was Peter Carey's intention, this is a book ostensibly about a child.
The adult world mediated through the eyes of a child never fails to impress me if it's done well, and for all the Carey style that many, including me, may have baulked at in the past, I think he does do it well. Tragedy, fear, misunderstanding, misplaced hopes, and adults all acting impulsively in the supposed best interests of a child whilst the child acts on instinct, it's all here and I couldn't put the book down.
It's a jittery, jumpy read, bit like all the jungle bugs and bats, flits all over the place, never seems to settle into a flow but that's Che's life and in the end those things didn't matter, because what did matter was that central to His Illegal Self for this reader was Che, a little boy who

...did cry, secretly, mourning everything he lost, all the cold empty hollows, the marrow stolen from his bones'

then as Dial hugs him,

'she could feel his frailty, his beating small boy heart'

and I felt his beating small boy heart too.

You're my favourites

Quite excited to make the printed page this week and thanks to an eagle-eyed blog visitor who saw it and sent me this week's copy of Time Out magazine. Delighted they've picked up on my most erudite and intelligent quote of the week too.
Now of course I'm insanely jealous of what's on in London again.

Sunday Salon

Sunday Salon and having finished the latest from Peter Carey, His Illegal Self, this morning, I've come over all Hardy-esque in an attempt to shake off the mosquitoes and ticks from the hippie commune in Queensland. I'll let all thoughts on Peter Carey simmer and settle while I get in the mood for Claire Tomalin's up-coming talk at Peninsular Arts on Thomas Hardy, The Time-Torn Man.
The sun is shining and I have made a fine start on Under the Greenwood Tree. It's actually easier to list the Hardy's I have read rather than the ones I haven't, and how and why I've left this one quite so long I've no idea.
I am laughing and loving every word of the bucolic, rural living of the Mellstock Parish Choir. The Christmas Party at the Tranters has had me in fits, not least the dancing Mrs Crumpler

'a heavy woman, who, for some reason which nobody ever thought worth enquiry, danced in a clean apron, moved so slowly through the figure that her feet were never seen - conveying to imaginative minds the idea that she rolled on castors.'

I'm so glad I picked this one up and not Jude the Obscure and everyone, well two people this morning have told me The Mayor of Casterbridge is Hardy at his best and I haven't read that one either.

A host of harbingers

Taking full advantage of the sunshine,out for a stroll and a few more harbingers sighted

a solitary primrose and a solitary periwinkle

a single bumble bee feasting on a snowdrop

The lichen on the apple trees suddenly in stark relief until the leaves and blossom appear

The willow tree is waking up

Whilst Bookhound is falling asleep in the sun, this the most reliable of all harbingers.

Flipping screens, flipping hair and flipping cats.

There comes a time when you just have to give in and go and buy a new one.
Nothing that wrong with my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop from which every single trusty post and pic on this blog has ever emerged, in fact I am very fond of it, but if you have a dodgy neck laptops are very bad news.
When I was in mid-very-bad-neck problem a few years ago and presented at the physio department for treatment there was one of those bulldog-chewing-wasp grimaces as I confessed to using a laptop.
Much tutting and tsking and to be honest they are right. You can't elevate the screen to eye height without also lifting your arms to eye height and though I set my chair almost to the floor and seem to be just peeking over the edge of my table it hasn't helped the State of the Neck.
Bookhound went off to throw some money at PC World on my behalf and we justified it all on the basis that if the cat's leg is currently valued at £240.05p then my neck is also worth something too. Just wanted the cheapest one, an oblong purring box thing that you switch on, an oojermaflip with letters on to type with and a great big glass thing that you look at. With such a level of technical expertise available there wasn't much point in me going.
Now I'm completely reorganised except I have Windows Vista and I'm having to learn to handle all this acrobatic flipping of screens into 3D orbit, but I'm no longer craning my neck forwards to peer at a small screen.
Then, in no way connected, there also comes a time when you have to go and have your hair cut.
This is really worse than the dentist if you have thin unimpressive hair like mine. Hairdressers like a bit of a challenge and my hair presents nil, you see their faces drop as I walk in.
Many years ago I was actually turned away from the Jingles Hairdressing Training School in London where we all used to go for cheap haircuts. Jingles was (and may still be?) a top salon and even the students were brilliant.
My hair was apparently unexciting, only fit for a pageboy cut (ah, remember those?) which would offer nothing of interest to a student's portfolio.
I only survived the humiliation of this with my trendily coiffeured flatmates because one of them was rejected by the Blood Transfusion service as 'not having enough haemoglobin', while the rest of us seemed to be overloaded with the stuff and proudly flaunted our little blue books.
This week I'd gone to find a new "stylist" because I think often a change is good and I was talked into layers. But my hair is too fine for layers I protested, no, it will "give your hair movement" I was assured. And "let's get rid of all this weight at the back"  as the hair is picked up, examined with that look of disdain and dropped.
We avoided all talk of highlights because it's doing all that without any chemical assistance whatsoever and I watched as alarming lengths of hair disappeared. Now I just have thin, shorter boring hair instead of thicker, longer boring hair but I suppose change is good and I can't see the back anyway so that's not my problem.
I should give you an update on the cat with the expensive leg too.
Tess took to the kitchen, the crate and the litter tray as to the manor born. She has rediscovered her indoor cat and hordes of wild rabbits begging to be caught wouldn't drag her out of that cat flap now. The other felines have not looked on this seemingly unwarranted indulgence kindly and have been doing their best to sneak into the crate when it's open in the hope they'll be shut in too.
The litter tray has also proved a popular attraction during one of the wettest weeks in history and all in all the previously unnoticed daily rhythm and routine of feline existence has been thoroughly disturbed and they are all out of kilter with the world they know.
Today Bookhound and I plan to put our glasses on, pin Tess down and remove stitches from a clean and well- healed leg. I've located a pair of tiny, angled very sharp scissors in the flyfishing cabinet which will do nicely.Then I plan to toss my head so that my hair moves (because now I can), do some mapping of the route to the cat flap and there will be some evictions from the house.
Bookhound can stay.

ShortStoryLand

The quest was on to see what was lurking on the shelves to feed the ongoing short story habit and as I prowled around a surprising number came to light.

A little Pushkin Press edition with just two, The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant and The Pearls by Isak Dinesen.I need no persuasion to pick up a Pushkin, this one's nicely silver
According to my journal it's eighteen years since I first read Secret Villages by Douglas Dunn so before it re-emerges word perfect in my long-term memory I will read it again. This book did the rounds of quite a few of us who had small children at the time and were craving something other than Topsy & Tim on the reading list. We all nudged each other's reading along into new post-natal territory fearing the death of the brain cells if we didn't get a grip.
Likewise Katherine Mansfield and The Garden Party, long overdue a revisit.
Essential Kit by Linda Leatherbarrow published by Maia Press and bought in response to my initial enthusiasm for all things Maia and has remained unread.This garnered good reviews at the time as I recall.
Then over to the middlebrow shelves though why I have housed Elizabeth Taylor over there I'm not sure, but The Devastating Boys looks like a fine collection with another Paul Bailey introduction and as I haven't read any of her short stories Elizabeth makes the cut.
One or two Hemingway short stories read down the years but I must grasp the nettle so The Snows of Kilimanjaro it is.
Thence across to my US women writers shelves to see what's on offer. I'm hankerign after a return to Dawn Powell after finding several extracts from her diaries in my daily read of The Assassin's Cloak but I don't have any of her short stories. Did she actually write any? But there was Kate Chopin's Bayou Folk which will do very nicely for now.
Finally in this trawl Hotel of the Saints by Ursula Hegi. I bought this one in that great flurry that happens when you read one book that you love by an author so you dash out and buy the rest, but the moment has often passed by the time the books arrive. I read Stones From the River and then needed everything Ursula Hegi had written but nothing quite managed to grab my attention.
Ninety-six short stories in that lot which should keep me going into May, but being an indecisive Libran now I can't quite make up my mind whether to read volume by volume to get a real feel for each writer or swip and swap each day to ring the changes. Nothing would have induced me to interrupt Balancing on the Edge of the World by Elizabeth Baines until I'd read them all, so it will be interesting to see how this selection shapes up.

The blog debate

I do love reading about the ongoing blog debate, criticism versus yammering, it all reminds me of the old skill-mix nettle that has had to be grasped in the NHS, and I had agreed to write something for a piece over at the excellent Vulpes Libris blog , except that work got in the way and I was too late with my thoughts.
It is well worth a read, a balanced and informative post and with some wise words from literary editors and authors who certainly see that, though we might all be offering something different, we are really all on the same side and always have been.

Bog Child

I had heard of Siobhan Dowd but sadly only via the news of her tragically early death from cancer last year. Beyond the usual detached sadness you feel when you hear of the death of a young writer I didn't think too much more until a copy of Bog Child published by David Fickling arrived.
I'm keeping children's literature high up my reading agenda again having lapsed in recent months and allowing the grown-up stuff to push it aside but it adds something special to the reading broth and I have quite a few in the queue.
Bog Child wasn't going to let me go after the first twenty sample pages and I just carried on, in fact couldn't and didn't want to stop.
Whilst out digging for peat eighteen-year old Fergus and his Uncle find a body in the peat bog. This is 1980's Ireland at the height of the troubles, the provos, the bombs and the prison hunger strikes and all this weaves in with the story of Mel, the bog child's life. To reveal any more would be to ruin the little revelations that make this story so good, so that's all you're getting of the this-happened-then-that-happened which I don't do a great deal of at the best of times.
So easy to give away something seemingly insignificant which then detracts wholesale from the enjoyment of a book.For goodness' sake tell me if I do.
With two narratives running side by side there's a great danger with a book like this that you end up with too much of the story you don't want too much of, and not enough of the one that has really grabbed your attention but I was completely satisfied with the balance that Siobhan Dowd achieved here. Mel's story gradually revealed but it doesn't smother that of Fergus and his family, just complements it perfectly.
Themes of struggle and sacrifice, love and conflict connect both and with it that little sense that in many ways plus ca change.
Exquisite writing with a very matter of fact Irish lilt to the vernacular which constantly reminded me where I was and a definitive fictional account of  recent history that still may not have made much of an appearance in children's literature, I'm not sure.
But now for the sadness because here's a writer I would strive to read all there is and ever will be, but we will only have what has already been written by Siobhan Dowd and just one more book after this one. Solace of the Road will be published in 2009 and already available A Swift Pure Cry and The London Eye Mystery.
But Bog Child is published today and I hope there's a launch going on somewhere with an accordion playing because for sure, having read about Siobhan's life, she will be dancing and singing to it wherever she is.
One of those books you feel very privileged to have read and if it doesn't win prizes then I'm a leprechaun.
There is also a newly established Siobhan Dowd Trust which will endeavour to help disadvantaged children improve their skills and experience the joys of reading, offering financial support to a wide range of children including I'm pleased to say those with special needs.I have applied successfully in the past to the excellent Roald Dahl Foundation for grants for children who fit their very strict criteria and it is trust funds like this which can make a huge difference. Sometimes all a family needs is a few hundred pounds for something that will vastly improve their lives and there are fewer and fewer places to find that now without jumping through more hoops than many of them have the energy to do.
The Siobhan Dowd Trust a lasting legacy to a very gifted writer and final words to David Fickling,

' Siobhan was a person of immense humanity warmth and ability, just coming into the full measure of her talent. She made words sing for her. She had been waiting all her life to write as she had now been writing. We are lucky to have four brilliant books, and we cannot help thinking that is not enough.'

Crusaders

Put the kettle on, you'll need a pot of tea to get though this.
So I did have the stamina to reach the other end of 540 pages of twentieth-century life, the paint slapped on that huge canvas in all its glorious, gory and gut-wrenching detail, and my immediate feeling is one of sheer relief that authors like Richard Kelly are having the courage to write books like Crusaders.
On the critical front the tendency is to go for the jugular with long books and immediately decide that we could have done without half of it. Which half of Crusaders I'm not entirely sure because it all contributed to the essential whole for me.
I'm sure critics will reveal the literary flaws in the writing, perhaps criticise the non-linear narrative which hops all over the place (but I liked that) and possibly mock the perceived failed ambition of a book that tries to do so much. Then the critical attention usually turns to the violence and that's often defined as gratuitous and thereby excessive. Well if a definiton of gratuitous is 'being without apparent reason, cause or justification' then sadly that's exactly what violence is. Often the first phone call I receive on a Monday morning will be from the WPC from the Domestic Violence Team recounting the weekend's incidents of 'gratuitous' violence.That's life.
But I'm going to ignore all that, none of it jumped out and bit me or detracted from what felt like a sheer, good honest attempt at a fictional representation of life out there.
Yes, it's fiction but it boils down to Real People living Real Lives and real lives are like this.Richard Kelly (I'm bored with the T in the middle) has gutted it, skinned it and pinned it out and you can examine every last detail, uncomfortable though that might be.
Just to recap, the Revd John Gore sent out to plant an Anglican church in a run-down area of Newcastle in the 1980's, change is rife both in the church and in the world beyond as Old Labour must relinquish its grip and make way for New and for many it's all a threat too far to the life they may loath but can't face the uncertainty of leaving behind.
The church becomes the focal point for local gangmeister Steve Coulson and his mob and there are genuinely darkly funny moments as he supplies a pool table to double as an altar at Sunday services and patrols the aisles to keep order, while single mum Libby fixes her gaze on John as the new man in her life.The invasion of the local evangelical wing to liven things up a bit will appeal to many but equally cause many old fashioned lapsed Anglicans like me to cringe with embarrassment and affirm why so many of us fled the ranks of organised religion and may never return.
Hopelessly naive and gullible, yet with best if undefined intentions at heart, John is drawn into the seemingly unsavoury world that he has been sent to transform, manipulated on all sides and soon up to his dog-collared neck in trouble.Out of his depth and completely unsupported by any form of useful diocesan back-up, John ploughs onwards regardless, deeper and deeper into the mire.
Eventually I was rationing my reading because I didn't want the book to end, nor could I quite predict how it would end. But once I turned the final page I was sure of several things.
At risk of repeating myself I have to say it again, even the most ordinary of lives are fascinating, which on reflection might be why I've done the job I've done for so long. In an average day I might meet and listen to twenty or more people telling me about their extraordinary lives. I'm never bored and there is much to hearten even given the direst set of circumstances and people usually find this for themselves without me finding it for them.
I never cease to be amazed at what people cope with on a daily basis, none of which ever finds its way here because of course I am bound by confidentiality, but often it's heartbreakingly sad. People everywhere are trying desperately and often with the odds stacked mountaineously and horrifically against them, to keep their heads above water whilst their feet are firmly trapped in the mud.
Choices are few verging on nil and Richard Kelly knows this too.
Good honest, tell-it-like-it-is books like Crusaders need to be written in every era.
I will often indulge a passion for the so-called middlebrow writing of the 1930's and 40's, but how true and representative of life is what I read?
It's a simplistic argument probably explained by great social complexities but few seem to demonstrate with complete honesty how terrible life was for so many then?
Do we really see what life was like for the disadvantaged?
Is social injustice ever clearly defined? I actually want to know everything, not just the nice hot water bottle cosy bits.
I'm currently searching for books that do recount that time honestly and would welcome your suggestions because surely they must be out there? Rosamund Lehmann comes close with some of her short stories but there must be others.
If you read Crusaders, yes it might make you feel very uncomfortable indeed, there's violence and prostitution, drug abuse, gang warfare and bits of brain liberally smattered around Pizza Hut, but this is truth writ large on the page and it recounts an aspect of 20th century life as it really was and still is with very big warts and all, whether we like it or not.
I doubt the 1930's was much different in its own way we just don't get to read about it that often.
If you don't like the thought of all that, 'tis fine , the answer is easy, don't read Crusaders .No one will think any the worse of you, but if you do read it I'd love to know what you think.
Fiction or fact, I personally feel history requires big honest courageous books like this, they have their place and as to whether it's the Great British Novel of the Decade, well I couldn't possibly comment because I haven't read all the others yet.

The Battle for Gullywith

I'm in trouble with the Tinker that's for sure.
He's been desperate to read The Battle for Gullywith, looked all crestfallen when I called in without the book yesterday, and I said he couldn't have it until I'd written about it and I've been a week letting the whole experience simmer down enough to write sensibly, without going into useless over-gush, some hope.
My proof copy arrived weeks ago and I had to choose my moment carefully and plan accordingly because I wanted to try the impossible and read it like a child.
Do you remember those days when you'd get back from the library on a Saturday morning?
The Tinker used to take me to Mitcham Library every single week without fail. We'd walk miles from one side of town to the other to get there, through Fair Green and up past the swimming baths towards Tooting and if I could get double the books I would. Then,on Saturday afternoon. once I'd been out for a spin on my roller skates, swapped Judy and Bunty comics with my best  friend Ann and while Grandstand and then the wrestling was on the TV downstairs, I'd curl up on my bed and read the morning's spoils.
I knew that Family Pack at MeandMyBigMouth had read The Battle for Gullywith in instalments because they test-ran the book and were all biting their nails just hanging around the inbox waiting for each chapter to be written and arrive by e mail, so I didn't let myself gallop on too fast.
It was an effort but it paid off. I wish I'd been as clever as Martha Pack and had that tortoise idea because it's a cracker and Susan has done something very clever with it.
Most people will have read the early chapters on Susan's blog as the book was being written and so will be familiar with Oliver and his family moving to the strange and remote Gullywith Farm, but what follows is one great big adventure with all those wonderful twists and turns and magical things that can and should happen in a children's story. Great flights of the imagination are entirely possible as Oliver finds himself halfway between reality and something quite extraordinary as he meets the mysterious Nonny Dreever who lives in a house that I can't wait to see someone paint a picture of.
The battle must be fought and won and Oliver and friends don't shirk the challenge, I was quietly spellbound (for a 54yr.old) by the journey on the sleigh train to the Midwinter Revel, a trip to the strangest bookshop in the world, the maps and the game.It all added up to a very special read and as for the tortoises, well bless the wise clever little creatures.
Oliver is one of those normal children living the sort of childhood any child would wish for; freedom, adventure and impossible happenings all offer the happiest of escapes for young imaginations and I suspect The Battle For Gullywith will do for today's children what The Magic Faraway Tree did for all us children of the 1950's and I'm assured by my youthful work colleague, what The Owl Service by Alan Garner did for the children of the 1960's.
In the wake of The Battle for Gullywith I predict a huge upsurge in the popularity of the tortoise, the nation will adore them once more. We loved them when we were children, every home had one (except ours, we had a budgie called Sparky) and they were always going missing or dying in hibernation.
Signs on lamposts offering a 2/6d reward for the return of Slowcoach from number 28.
Tortoises now very expensive and come with certificates and all sorts these days, so much less common in the average garden than they used to be.
I also predict Gullywith Games, Nonney Dreever house make-overs, a welcome down-turn in the sale of flowery wellies and the person who invented them will be rightly turned to stone and look out for Torboats on a lake near you, it's all only a matter of time.
In the bookshops in April and now I'm off to get my badge, my club membership card and that signed, gold edged certificate and if it's a fake printed signature I take it all back.
Oh yes and I'd better drop the book into you know who.
PS Happy Birthday to the author...and she might just kill me for mentioning that.

Books to Talk About

Congratulations to Angela Young and Pauline Rowson who both stop by here (and to anyone else who does but I don't know you) for making the Books to Talk About shortlist for World Book Day on March 6th.
Here's the final list

Steve Aylett, Lint (SnowBooks)
Priya Basil, Ishq & Mushq (Transworld)
Jenny Downham, Before I Die (RHCB)
Eliza Graham, Playing with the Moon (Pan Macmillan)
Joshilyn Jackson, Gods In Alabama (Hodder)
Candi Miller, Salt & Honey (Legend Press)
Pauline Rowson, In Cold Daylight (Rowmark)
Rupert Thomson, Death of a Murderer (Bloomsbury)
Jonathan Trigell, Boy A (Serpent's Tail)
Angela Young, Speaking of Love (Beautiful Books)

I am also thrilled to see Salt and Honey by Candi Miller on the list too, my thoughts here.
I'm off to take part in a Literary Quiz at the library on World Book Day this year, anyone else doing anything special? Wendy are you dressing up as a duck again? I never could persuade the format of that picture to post on here which is quite a shame.

Balancing on the Edge of the World

Whilst I imagine Richard T.Kelly slapping the paint on that great big Crusaders canvas, creating a huge panoramic vista of 21st century life, I envisage Elizabeth Baines hunched over a magnifying glass, the finest, most delicate of brushes in her hand, painting exquisite little miniatures, and there you have the essence of her short story collection Balancing on the Edge of the World published by Salt.
The slimmest of volumes and alternating my reading of that with the heavyweight Crusaders I've inadvertently given myself the most illuminating of reading experiences, the words on the page have certainly worked their magic this last week.
Fourteen short stories and the prescription was one per day, apply slowly and liberally, allow to soak in, complete the course in a fortnight. I adjusted the script slightly because I'm a nurse prescriber so I'm allowed, a further dose may be taken if necessary within twelve hours.Then just to really nail this thing I added a repeat dose after six hours, often re-reading the previous story.
So I cheated, well I couldn't help it.
Suddenly my focus was narrowed down and my concentration total as I watched. Reading as an onlooker is such a treat and Elizabeth Baines positions the fulcrum of each story with absolute precision and then, with the most feather-weight whispers, proceeds to tip the balance of power first one way then the next. The whispers often so slight that I was often listening too loudly to hear them if that make sense.
Lives often teetering on the edge, some pulling back from the brink in the space of a few words so easily glossed over and the essence missed.I slowed to the ponderous and thoughtful pace of that snail in Virginia Woolf's Kew Gardens.
But this year I have pledged a daily visit to ShortStoryLand and I'm now perfectly at home in what has often seemed like a foreign country, a place where I've so often felt a bit cheated out of that full length novella.
Mea Culpa and now I'm really starting to sense what I may have been missing.
Looking back the first story in Balancing on the Edge of the World really does seem a lifetime ago, yet it's only nine days but in that time Elizabeth Baines has led me through a myriad of seemingly ordinary moments and invested them with extraordinary power.
Take Compass and Torch.
A young boy is off on a camping trip with his estranged father leaving his mother and step-father at home.In just six pages I had learnt more about the vulnerability of a child's emotion in a situation like this than any full length novel. Seriously, I still wonder how a man getting out of his car and opening a gate onto the moors can be of such significance, but on his success at doing it properly, timing the swing so the gate stays, rest all this little boy's hopes in his dad being the man he desperately wants him to be, and him trying so hard to be the son he thinks his dad might want him to be.
A dad who gets things right.
A son who is straining with all his might to be loveable and wanted.
I defy anyone not to well up as this boy tries to interest his dad in the things which matter to him.
Then pace your way slowly through the myriad lives as you meet the humiliated wife who gets her revenge, the writer desperate for recognition, the confident and assured teenage boy about to be changed forever, the children of the divorcing parents, the depressed mother, the one page story that perfectly defines the dilemma of 21st century parenting and know that you will have met a great cross section of life today.
It is the microscopic quality of Elizabeth Baines' eye that make each and every one of these stories so special. I read Compass and Torch early one morning and went off to work pondering the hidden depths of that single story as it popped into my mind constantly throughout the day.
I have now scoured my shelves for unread short story collections because I'll panic if I don't have another 336 to see me through the year. I'll share my ongoing selections later this week.
Meanwhile can you believe I have never read The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald?
Elizabeth Baines may feel slightly nervous sandwiched inbetween Grace Paley and Penelope Fitzgerald in my short story-a-day reading, but be assured, she has nothing to fear whatsoever.

Sunday Salon

The afternoon certainly held up to the promise of the morning with rain in sheets and us wondering whether we really should be trying to harness and store this water somehow for something.
Another seventy pages of I Saw You by Julie Parsons has me deeper and deeper into the intrigue, there has been one of those fortuitous meetings of characters that will join the circle and bring everyone, both dead and alive, from their own trajectories into the same orbit and I expect the action to hot up considerably.
That's often a point when I will perversely put a book down, leaving it at a place where I'm drooling to get back to it.
Lurking in the shadows has been The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector and, having read about twenty pages I knew this was a book I needed to read in one sitting if I was going to get anything from it and so I picked that up next and have just finished it. My mind is awash with the strange and bewildering read I have just had as Clarice Lispector creates her character from nothing before the reader's eyes and starts to build up a story that she constantly informs and suggests to the reader could go many ways. This is a writer bravely and candidly offering all her uncertainties for public consumption as she searches for her direction and  transforms reality however she wishes.Less than a hundred pages long but an intense and concentrated lesson in the Art of Fiction.
I wouldn't even pretend to pronounce because I know diddly squat about Kafka, but apparently this is ranked alongside him for existential expertise.
I have been completely ambushed by this one, wasn't sure what to expect but having turned the final page I know I will be thinking about it for days before I write a word about it here.
I want to read much more by and about Clarice Lispector and I think she's going to come highly recommended once I fathom the hidden depths of what she's actually doing.

Sunday Salon

Having missed out on the predicted snow yet again this week woke up to a howling hoolie of a gale and rainstorm and couldn't think of a good reason to get up other than to find some breakfast and a bucket of tea and take it back to bed, which I did.
Despite having lots of good books on the go I fancied something new and different and set about reading a "chilling dark novel of love, revenge and atonement' by Julie Parsons, I Saw You. If it was no good I had plenty of others lined up but after seventy-six pages I was gripped.
Interweaving unexplained deaths, old murder cases, thwarted love and dissenting step-children plus a retired policeman twiddling his thumbs and you have a perfect recipe for a page-turner which was exactly what I was looking for.
It's very well-written, perfectly measured and paced, and all sufficiently complex to keep me guessing, surmising and chasing the red herrings which I'm sure are in there whilst watching the personalities flesh out nicely. Meanwhile the gagged, chained and bound alleged murderer is left to do quite the opposite, locked in a barn to die a slow and tortuous death on page one.
The cover is reminding me of both A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly and Altered Land by Jules Hardy and a few others springing to mind as I write.
Now I'm rushing to do all those things that have to be done on a Sunday before I join all the other Sunday Salon readers worldwide (check them out on the link over here <<<<<) and get stuck into my book properly. An afternoon by the fire, though I see Susan has bagged the best sofa already, Ruth is curled up over there in the corner bemoaning stickers that aren't stickers on books any more, Harriet's got a real stack of books on the go and Ann's talking about storytelling par excellence.
More later when someone wheels in the coffee and walnut cake and I can drag myself away.

Sunday Confessions

There's every chance if I've bought an unusual book that it's Mark Thwaite's fault entirely.
I nip over to Ready Steady Book or The Book Depository and there it is, a tempting little morsel on a writer I think I've heard of subliminally here and there but never properly.
I explore and the buttons are pressed in a flash. I envisage someone dashing off to pack up my book that very minute because they seem to arrive very fast.
In recent weeks the name has been Marguerite Duras,

'one of the leading intellectuals and novelists of post-war France.Throughout her life and to her dying breath, this astonishing woman never ceased to embrace national and international fame.Undoubtedly, she owed her success to her obstinacy to be and remain herself, come what may and be her own person.'

I'll quickly gloss over my ignorance, I'm sure I'd heard of her really.
Wartime Notebooks contains exactly that, the four notebooks that Marguerite Duras has kept in a blue closet in her country home in France, her writing from 1943 to 1949 including first drafts and the true stories behind several of her most famous works.
How exactly I've missed a 'major European writer' hardly matters now that I have this volume and one of her novels The Lover. This won the Prix Goncourt and is a story of an unconventional love affair between a young girl and and the son of a wealthy Chinese family.This slight little book gets mixed reader reviews from 'perverted' to 'exquisite' and when that happens the only course of action is to read and find out for myself.
How I heard about Clarice Lispector I have no idea, but I was checking out authors for my travels and had her lined up for Brazil. The greatest writer of the twentieth century for French feminist writer and literary critic Helene Cixous (how that name takes me back, Helene Sicksue  when we all struggled to understand her thinking) so I ordered The Hour of the Star published by Carcanet to make a start.
I didn't mean to go to Brazil just yet but then, in that blogendipitous way these things happen, I heard Clarice Lispector mentioned again this week over at The Complete Review and a link to this article.They've been meaning to read her too and this little book is more than intriguing so a minor diversion in progress.More self-reflexive authorial intrusion but of the highest quality as life is breathed into a character from nothing.
Finally I always listen to Terry Wogan as I drive to work and, one day back in early January, the interlude Pause for Thought was given by Father Brian D'arcy with a warm and heartfelt tribute to the Irish poet John O'Donohue who had died in his sleep at the age of 53. Father Brian also read out one of John's Gaelic blessings from his latest book Benedictus.
John O' Who?
I am always captivated by the idea of a poet who returns to Celtic spirituality, Kenneth Steven is another who has embraced this deeply quiet and gentle form in his anthologies Columba and Iona published by Saint Andrew Press, but I had never heard of John O'Donohue.Yet he had written a best-selling book Anam Cara and if Father Brian rates him then he's good, solid and sound.By all accounts an articulate philosopher with a razor-sharp intellect that he could use to convey his thoughts in a lyrical, accessible and informing way. I needed to discover more.
Somehow Celtic spirituality transcends boundaries and can appeal to even the most secular of thinkers like me. It seems to connect with the very basics of human existence and touching base occasionally is never time wasted according to John O'Donohue,

'...not a world of clear boundaries; persons and things were never placed in bleak isolation from each other. Everything was connected and there was a lovely sense of the fluent flow of presences in and out of each other...the homeland of the inspirational and the unexpected.'

On the other hand I'll switch off if it's too ethereal, mawkishly sentimental, wishy-washy or embarrassingly half-baked so was delighted to find John O'Donohue's book Eternal Echoes - Celtic Reflections for £3 in Totnes last week and again the chance to find out for myself what I may have missed.
I quite like this already,

' Each soul is a different shape.No one feels your life as you do; no one experiences things the way you do. Your life is a totally unique story and only you really know it from within. No one knows what your experience is like. The experience of each of us is opaque and inaccessible to outsiders.'

There's plenty more to qualify and enlarge on that statement but it's all robust and grounded enough to keep me interested and I have Anam Cara and Benedictus on the way. Then I feel a big Celtic phase coming on and with it that need I always have to link reading into crafts. Perhaps it's a good time to start thinking about making that little piece of Celtic applique patchwork with its eternal woven knots, interlocking  curves and curlicues, no beginning and no end.
Sunday Salon reading news later.

A day at the vets...if you hate cats, skip this one

I think we are reasonably sensible level-headed cat owners, so when sister of Rocky, Tess (second right) had to go in to the vets to have a lump removed from her leg this week it seemed quite straightforward.The last animal we took in to have a lump removed was Offspringette's hamster Chippy and that cost £23 about fifteen years ago.
Somehow I had landed the early morning delivery to the vets on my way to work.
The ten mile car journey can only be described as average as yet again I ponder the folly of the cheap cat box tied up with baler twine and a yowling bouncing cat that even Terry Wogan couldn't drown out.
Safely into the vets and then had to run the gauntlet of the very young veterinary nurses.
Now if any veterinary nurses read this blog, you are all lovely but there's been a noticeable power shift.
But firstly, let me digress to ask all of you cat owners out there, do you all clean your cat's teeth?
I do hope so and perhaps you could tell me how.
Is it an Oral B electric toothbrush I should get? Would the double headed one with super-sonic rotation be best? Is Colgate alright? What about Listerine mouthwash? Should we be encouraging them to use that?
Right carrying on.
Firstly there was a bit of a defensive stand-off over my polite refusal of the £35 pre-op blood tests to detect renal problems.Pressure selling doesn't come close

'No we don't want that thanks, you've already told us her teeth are a disgrace and you'll be cleaning those while she's under anaesthetic, plus the removal of the lump so that's probably enough.'(ie money)

'You really should have the blood test.'

'Well she's thirteen, she's fit as a fiddle, don't most cats get renal problems eventually, we'll leave it today thanks'

'Ah well now's exactly the right time to have it done, the anaesthetic could make it much worse.'

Despite my professional background and years of training in the wisdom of early intervention and preventive medicine now I can feel myself taking up the entrenched and blinkered position, digging my heels in.I'm receiving an object lesson in exactly how coercion alienates people.

'But she'd be ill so we'd know then anyway.'

'You're really not being very sensible, that's why we recommend it, then we can treat her renal problems.'

In my mind I'm working out a low protein, low sodium diet and the cost of haemodialysis four times a week for a cat.

'But she's an outdoor cat, we don't fuss over them, we really don't need to know that today'

At this point there was a noticeable cool prickling of the young veterinary nurse's hackles,

'So are you saying if she gets renal problems you won't treat her?'

I realised we were approaching the point of no return, Cat Abuse territory and a Cat Protection meeting pending, so I quickly and firmly changed the subject.

'No blood test thank you, but could you possibly give me an estimate for the cost of the operation please?'

'No, we can't say, it depends on how long it takes.'

'So not even a ball-park minimum figure?'

'No sorry, sign the consent, ring at 1pm and we'll tell you when you can collect her'

I'm clearly in disgrace, a negligent and thoughtless pet owner because I won't do what I'm told and she has no more time for me.
Does this have NHS parallels I wonder?
I ring at 1pm and Tess is fine, do I want the lump sent off for pathology...I'm frightened to ask how much that would be, probably £100 minimum so I declined.This is probably already going to be a week's salary and in any case, what's the point in knowing? I'm tempted to ask whether she's  gone into post-operative renal failure but I don't.
We'll find out eventually.
So on my way home from work I remember to collect Tess having had post-it notes stuck on me all day saying CAT and everyone at the surgery instructed to sat CAT to me every time they saw me, which they did.
There she was waiting in the cheap old Trago Mills cat box held together with baler twine, little hoarse pathetic yowl.
Young veterinary nurse again,

' That'll be £240.05p please.'

Oooohhh r-i-g-h-t, yeeeees inflation times ten, hadn't taken that into account.

'Now she mustn't go outside for ten days.
She mustn't run, jump or climb.
She mustn't get the wound dirty.
She mustn't do any heavy lifting.
She mustn't chew her leg.
She mustn't do the Times crossword.
She mustn't go swimming.
She mustn't do a big shop at Tesco's.
She mustn't cross her legs.
She must come back in two days for a check up and ten days to have the stitches removed.'

The list was endless and I felt quite fragile.Then the vet apparated to add drama and up the fear factor by telling me it had been nip and tuck closing the wound so take very good care of it, if it splits we're in trouble...now I'm a wreck, that's probably about £500 worth of trouble.
So HOW are we going to keep a cat indoors that lives outdoors? For ten days???
Escape through the cat flap was obvious and rapid and I won't apportion blame but at least I knew the kitchen door should have been closed before the cat box was opened and please please don't dob us in to the vets.
The bandage was off by the time Tess returned two hours later. Please don't tell them that either.
Now esconced in a dog crate in the kitchen with a litter tray which she's staring at in bemused fashion and howling for all she's worth, of course we can let her out every so often but doors are opening and closing here all day long, the great escape is inevitable.
I sense it's going to be a very long ten days indeed.

Ebury Press

Having a wander around the blogs I stumbled across another publishing house dipping their toes tentatively into the world of blogging and I remember how scary it was too. You might want to check out the Ebury Press blog and this competition to win a hamper of fifteen books. Just e mail them a picture of your reading/book space and you are in with a chance.
Cameras to bookcases and reading chairs everyone, it just wouldn't be cricket for me to enter and not tell the rest of you about it:-)

Peninsular Arts

I've always moaned about the dearth of cultural events down here in the West Country. Well, alright it's not strictly true, we do have Ways With Words, but you can expect to have to travel miles to find any other events through the year.The exciting talks seem to be centred on the big cities up country and London in particular and it does my already uncertain place in heaven no good whatsoever to read something like the London Review Bookshop programme or get an invite to a Pen Pushers party. I am a vivid and emerald shade of green with envy at what is on offer for all you Londoners, does anyone else get these great pangs of covetousness or is it just me?
But then I tell myself I can't have it all, because we do enjoy nice scenery.
Now however I think I must start to lay that grievance to rest and use it no more because we have a growing number of events of our own.
Plymouth has, since the days of dispatching the Pilgrim Fathers and providing a green for Drake's bowls, been a nautical and garrison city with a grand reputation for all things maritime. As a port with a huge natural harbour, the city revels in its proximity to water, shipping lanes and fish, waving goodbye to Cook and Darwin on their voyages of discovery, welcoming Pocahontas when she arrived, Napoleon passed by on his way to exile on St Helena and the survivors of the sinking of the Titanic first set foot on dry land in Plymouth with much relief, and probably didn't mind at all about the marauding seagulls pinching their fish and chips(thanks to Wikipedia for all that, I didn't have a clue) Scott of the Antarctic should really be called Scott of Devonport because he was born in the city, that I did know because we've seen his skis in the city museum and everywhere you turn there is Scott this and Scott that.
But to my knowledge there has been a limited literary tradition, please correct me if I'm wrong and little arts development beyond the Theatre Royal, but that could all changing.
Years ago the Polytechnic became a University and seems to have finally shaken off that legacy of inferior status which followed those upgrades.
The stunning new Roland Levinsky arts building seemed to pop up out of nowhere, suddenly we came off the main city roundabout one day and there it was, all new and unwrapped. Named after the late and much-respected Vice-Chancellor of the university Professor Roland Levinsky who died in a tragic freak accident on New Year's Day 2007. His name one I remember from his days as a bone-marrow transplant pioneer at Great Ormond Street back in the 1970's and this building is a superb memorial to his vision for a university where the arts and the sciences spoke to each other.
From that has developed Peninsular Arts and a vibrant programme of art exhibitions, music in performance, drama and best of all for me a series of talks entitled Great Writers.Timed perfectly at 6.30pm on a weekday evening for me to drive just ten miles in straight from work as I'm already halfway there.Hopefully any worrying issues about staying awake after a day spent nurturing the health of the nation will be confounded by the fascinating speakers on offer.
I've booked tickets for three talks so far and they gleam like little beacons on the dark mid-winter horizon.
Claire Tomalin will talk about Thomas Hardy in February and I'm already planning a return to Hardy before I go. Both the biography which I read in part and a novel or two which will fit in nicely with the Endsleigh Salon Classics read.Except I've been left with Jude the Obscure which is not heartening for February, so I've sent out an emergency request for The Woodlanders or Under the Greenwood Tree instead.
Then Professor Sally Ledger talking on 'Dickens and the People' looking at how Dickens' fiction and journalism were rooted in the popular radical culture of the 19th-century.I might have finished Bleak House by next Christmas in time to start my next Dickens of a Christmas read which might be a re-read of my one Dickens success Our Mutual Friend. Possibly a bit early to decide.
Finally the SP himself, Professor Stanley Wells talking on 'Is it True What They Say About Shakespeare?' and apparently if I tell him I'm the daughter of the Tinker, Mrs SP tells me he might know who I am.