dovegreyreader scribbles

The Children's Book goes to Pot

When is a book a pot?
So with The Children's Book wedged firmly in my mind's eye, stuck there good and proper as I browsed in the Craft Gallery in town this week, there it was.
A little Raku pot just 4" x 3" but in the colour, and it whispered those immortal words of purchase to me as I gazed.
It needed a home and yes, after a quick assessment, I was up for it.
Of course I don't strictly need a little Raku pot, but as you know I have a well-attuned addiction to this colour which is a worry because I'll buy anything if it's in that range, even show me a turquoise horse galloping round a field and I'd put in an offer and be organizing a matching stable block in the garden.
So this pot is now grazing quietly on my desk looking perfectly lovely gorgeous and will be a permanent reminder me of that reading experience.
Things could have been much worse.
I can argue that this is a prudent compromise given that I could have been on the lookout for the Rene Lalique brooch on the cover of the book but now won't bother.
I didn't know much about Raku but I do now.
This pot, made by Cornish potter Ben McManigan, was by all accounts rapidly fired to 1060 deg C and whilst red hot was placed in sawdust where it was then allowed to burn.
The pot was then rapidly cooled by spraying water on it, then cleaned with warm water and allowed to dry naturally which creates particular colours and textures depending on the chemical components of the hand made glaze.
In the words of A.S.Byatt's master potter, Benedict Fludd,

' We are chemists - we must know metals and ores, temperatures and binding elements, weights and measures...we are like alchemists of old - we employ fire, smoke, crucibles...to make our vessels...those containers necessary for daily functions, food and drink - which can be lovely, however plain, graceful, however simple...'

Oh yes, sometimes a book is a whole lot more than just a book.

Menabilly's Secret Garden

Today would have been my Mum's birthday and, as it was my Mum who taught and inspired me to sew, it seems fitting that today's post is a needlework one.
The intricate way that books speak to other parts of my life never ceases to astonish me and I hope I'm not alone with this little foible, somehow I think my synapses must be completely tangled when reading a book makes me want to walk to the fabrics and create something out of the image that book has placed in my mind's eye. I never know when it will happen either but something twangs big time and that's it I'm done for and must stitch.
They say you stitch what is happening in your life into your quilting, I'd add that I stitch my reading in too and every so often a book has that power to inspire.
 I have no idea what the lasting relic will be from A.S.Byatt's The Children's Book other than the fact that there will definitely be one, something will be made eventually that reflects the iridescence of a book that has invaded my every sense. I'm already on the alert for fabrics that reflect that shimmering Art Nouveau world, the pots, the dragonflies, the swathes of light and colour...the turquoises and midnight blues, the lapis lazuli with gold, the Gustav Klimt glow, all images that gather to exert that sheer force of creativity that floods out of some books and I will know them when I see them, the colours are now very firmly fixed.
Likewise for Justine Picardie's book Daphne last year.
The colour used on the cover seemed to need a Farrow & Ball name, Menabilly Red or something and I had searched to no avail to find the exact fabric with that tone of red with a tinge of brown but surely there's a pinkish edge in there too. No matter because I bumped into a quilting-reading friend recently who came to the Port Eliot dovegreyreader event last year and she greeted me with
'I've found it, the exact colour, I'll send it to you'
and the next thing a piece of fabric arrived in the post from her, and find it she has.
It's near perfect.
So while I wait for The Children's Book creation to ferment into being but still needing to make something, anything, I hopped to my table and put together my belated homage to Daphne.

Not wishing to over-reach myself I wanted just a single block and after a great deal of searching found the very aptly named Secret Garden, now Menabilly's Secret Garden using a liberal amount of quilter's license and a chance to do some hand-piecing which I so rarely do these days.
It's so long since I've reached for the pencil mug (this my treasured Emma Bridgewater, bought in St Ives, handle fell off two days later, too far to take it back and get a new one) then templated, drawn and scissor-cut with a 1/4 inch seam allowance. I'd quite forgotten how soothing it is to leave behind the lightening speed of the rotary cutter and the whizz of the Bernina - job done in thirty minutes, and revert to the time-honoured basics of hand sewing and be happy for it to take months.
Even seemed like a good time to clear out the sewing box too.
Things are progressing and now it comes back to me, there's an element of holding your nerve involved with hand-piecing and quarter inch seam allowances cut by eye, because it looks like it'll never fit together but somehow, with a bit of tweaking and pulling it always does in the end.

 

First rule when sitting in the garden on a sunny day...

...don't leave your dog ...
and your glasses...
unattended.
Fortunately the contents were delicately eviscerated and discarded prior to consumption.

The Loft and an apology

I'm always making reference to the disaster area that is the loft here and this keeps happening.
I read a book and some big past association thing happens and I just have to go up there and find the object of association packed away in a trunk, some relic from the past which suddenly earns its rightful place in the present. 
It was always a mistake to ensure that if we were building new bits onto the house that the loft would be readily accessible. It's the easiest ascent we've ever had, a mere hillock compared to an Everest after some of the killers of the past; no more tricky traverse from the plank balanced on a landing windowsill; no more abseiling through fresh air on descent and waving your foot around to find the top of a rickety step ladder.
By comparison you just blink at this loft hatch and the spring-loaded ladder miraculously drops down and you're up there in a nano second.
Consequently so is every bit of clutter you can't quite bear to throw out and this week thoughts of heading aloft are all down to my new best friend.
I was telling you that A.S.Byatt and I are now good friends after years of indifference and The Children's Book has now been a part of my life for four whole weeks, that's a great big reading chunk to give any writer here and I've hardly been able to pick up anything else. Some good books have fallen by the wayside and now's the time to apologise to those authors who'd written great books that I was loving but which have been sacrificed to the all-consuming demands of this read. I can usually juggle several books with ease but not with this one.
Claire Peate, I'm so sorry, please just go and knock on A.S.B's door and have it out with her because I was really loving your book Headhunters published by Honno Press. It's very well written, wry and funny and digs way beneath the conceits of the established Church and the powers that be everywhere else too. I was three-quarters through then I diverted, dealt with life events and was then blasted out of the water by A.S.B's writing and themes and I just couldn't get back.
I do think that sometimes when life throws you off-balance there's a safety and comfort in having just one great big fat book by your side that works for you, embraces you and wraps your mind in that warm blanket of words, drags you in and diverts you from reality the minute you open it.
Cue that piece in the Guardian this week. Life is apparently too short for the big book, see what Normblog suggests. He's just so sensible.
I've lost the momentum with Jude Morgan's Passion again as well which feels like a heinous crime given that I now love his writing style, he's sat in the dovegreyreader asks... armchair and eaten a virtual scone with clotted cream and I am desperate to read more. On the back of that I was gathering a good head of steam for looking at Mary Wollstonecraft too, Letters written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Janet Todd's Death and the Maidens.
The timing was just all wrong, but I'll be back.
I think I've managed to scratch my way back into The Professor by Charlotte Bronte and late night reading of The Great Western Beach by Emma Smith has also survived. It's an absorbing memoir of a 1920's Cornish childhood in Newquay made whole for me by that sense of a known place.
In fact things aren't all bad because I have much to report on the Jean Rhys front too.
But what of the loft and A.S.Byatt?
The Children's Book has elevated all manner of things into my consciousness and Bookhound barely raised an eyebrow (because he's used to this) when a propos of nothing that had gone before in the conversation, I raised my head from the book and said,
'We'll have to get the box of puppets out of the loft.'
This a picture I took walking through Angouleme in France last year.
If you've read the book you'll know the loose connection, but more about the book itself on Monday, quite why it's worked for me when I know it hasn't worked for others, and the puppets, the pottery, oh the whole lot to follow.
It's just been the very best reading experience I could have wished for over the last four weeks.

The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight by Gina Ochsner

I'd already defined and hopefully side-stepped the inherent dangers of slogging through prizelist reading when I embarked on this year's Orange longlist journey and I suspect if this prize behaves itself (as in no more gimmicks re media-attractive judges for me to sulk over) I will earmark it again for a regular annual read.
But this is prizelist reading so I was therefore up for whatever The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight by Gina Ochsner was going to throw at me and I was instantly and strangely quite smitten from the first page.
Truth be told I was very relieved to escape from the world of the slave narrative to a latter-day Russia, the northern town of Perm in the Urals to be exact and the fifth coldest town in Russia. Except on reflection if this book hadn't been so quirky, wry and funny perhaps it was a slave narrative of another sort.
Meeting the residents of a run-down apartment block with one latrine shared between them all was quite an experience and in the hands of Gina Ochsner no wonder this book got off to such a flyingly readable start.
Moments of great hilarity as a cast of wonderful characters are gathered, introduced and firmly established for the reader to love for their struggles and failings in a system where if you  'scratch a Russian and you'll find a Tatar' and the pervasive influence of Lenin 'like a yeast constantly reasserting itself.'
'Because everybody's sorrow wore the same clothes, knotted and threaded he same way, they all understood what they were working for.'
But the ideals have crumbled and with it for the residents of the apartment, so has the fabric of their lives and their homes. Living and working in near poverty and squalor you know to be worried for somone like Tanya whose mother has disappeared into the Gulag.
Poor Tanya with her 'unfortunate dentition' and 'big thighs' living with the oppressive negativity of her grandmother has taken its toll,

'Her trouble: she did not yet possess a fully inflatable super-buoyant self-esteem'

and she's most certainly going to need this and more if she's to achieve her ambition of becoming a stewardess with Aeroflot with its

'thoroughly established reputation of aviation disaster.'

For a start Tanya has a weight issue, hips a little too wide to cope with svelte aisle walking, so she can but dream as she whiles away the hours along with several of the residents who work for the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum of Art and Anthropology.Work being the operative word because wages seem to be a thing of the past and all the exhibits are fakes anyway, made of foam or anything else that comes to hand and will do to knock up a replica Mig fighter jet or something.
When the Americans of Russian Extraction for the Causes of Beautification arrive to assess the museum for grant status you can only begin to imagine the mayhem.
Woven in moments of surreal and ghost-laden magical realism which seems to blend into the old Russia, the Russia of tradition, of oral story-telling, myth and fable

'...tradition was not some silly ritual or toneless chant, but one woman after another, a mother singing into the ear of her daughter the words and the melody of an ancient unbroken song, which Tanya was learning, almost always sounded like suffering.'

and there's even some knitting.
I was quite relieved to spot this, how good to know that despite the deprivation the indigenous crafts continue in the hands of translator Olga who eyes up Chief Editor Kaminski's comb-over and thinks it would knit up into a nice tea cosy.
Even I hadn't thought of that.
I had elevated this book to my shortlist on the risky basis of half a read and in the end I think it might not have made it on a full read. But it was a good book, an unusual one and one I'm very pleased to have read, anyone who loves anything with that Russian flavour will enjoy this one for its difference and otherness.
By now you can probably tell that I'm finding it hard to pin down the essence of this really unusual book and on final analysis perhaps I'm not supposed to be doing that at all,

'Language was, after all, just word-shaped stains, simply another way people hide themselves from one another, one more way to evade and osbcure the truth.'

Endsleigh Salon update - The Impossible Book

It's hard to imagine you could spend a really good evening discussing your 'Impossible Book' having forced yourself to face your own nemesis and pick up a book you have struggled with for years, but as always The Endsleigh salonistas came good and had all flogged through and even, in some cases succeeded in conquering their betes noire...bete noires?...betes noires?...a book that is particularly disliked or that is to be avoided.
What a surprising selection too, some books which many had loved in the past but others had loathed.
Thankfully success first off for the reader of Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie which got us off to a good start because the book had plenty of support from devotees in the room.
Failure for The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, and interestingly at the defining page sixty nine, too much early despair at poor Maggie's lot, discouraged ...might try again but will probably start half way through the book.
Success thanks to a degree of reader perseverance for Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife and much debate about how many of us had whizzed through Northern Lights and then come unstuck with the differing pace of the second in the trilogy. Yes, slower, repetitive and less continuity but vital to the trilogy was the verdict of the successful trilogians in the room (don't shoot me, Pullmanites out there, I am but the messenger).
Quite a conquest next because our resident 'Loather of All Things Henry' had actually almost finished (and assured us she would) The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James and much helpful advice about How to Read Henry ensued. Little and often seems to be the verdict and eventually you really don't notice that the 'little and often' piece you've just read had no full stop in sight.
Hats off to our newest member who is now not our newest member because we had another newer one, who had tackled The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Green in an effort to become a Quantum Physicist in the space of four weeks. By this time I'm really impressed  with all this gritted teeth and dogged determination flying round the room. It's another few pages at a time book that has been surprisingly understandable and revealing. We expect her to have split the atom by next month, she was about halfway there.
Next, well we were holding our breath, would The Time Traveller's Wife's most vehement critic have succeeded ?
To her and our utter amazement and I think cheers and a little round of applause, the answer was 'Yes!'
In fact to her chagrin she had struggled to find fault with it, tried hard to be hyper-critical and trash it, but just couldn't.
Pride was swallowed in great big gulps...'there there' we said 'more tea?'
The key apparently is to dive in and just go with the flow. Like my failure with The Secret History by Donna Tartt on an excruciatingly hot holiday in Barcelona (left it behind in a hotel on Las Ramblas) about seven years before I finally bought another copy, read it and loved it, The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger had also been a swelteringly hot holiday reading failure much better suited to a wet and windy Sunday afternoon in Devon.
The Kite Runner was next and Khaled Hosseini got a very great bit thumbs down from its reader, so big I don't have space to recount the vexed criticism and puckered brow, there seemed to be little support for the book in the room either. I too was a Kite Runner failure many years ago so could sympathise with yet another well-placed 'there there' and 'more tea?'
The reader of Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach reported success of a sort, having passed the point of surrender first time round, the book hooked and kept her reading from about a third through, much debate about what you should eat with fried tulip.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon from our newest new member and there was a definite ambivalence surrounding the book despite its best seller list fame. We wondered whether the next book from Zafon, due out soon, will generate the same interest and my copy has just arrived so we'll see...it would of course help if I'd read the first one if I want to compare and contrast wouldn't it?
My own offering was Fugitive Pieces by Ann Michaels and I will write more fully about it soon.
I had called a halt about twenty pages from the end...well actually I'd sat down to finish it that afternoon and fallen asleep instead, which I suspect was my own way of avoiding any further harrowing detail at a time when I seemed to have enough real-life stuff to deal with.
I had failed with this book on numerous occasions and I think this time I may have succeeded. For me it was in no way a book to read cover to cover like a novel, I read it as the  'Pieces' dictated and over a period of several weeks and it worked, so much to reflect on and I'm not sure I gave a good account of exactly what those reflections are because it still hasn't really sunk in fully, so I will go back to it and then come back here with my thoughts when they finally surface.
Next month it is with some relief and a sense of uplifting joy after this month that we are doing 'Letters' and really looking forward to it.

This evening I will mostly be...

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

It was January 1st 2005 and my book of choice was Simon Mawer's The Fall because my reading journal tells me so. Just looking at that book again reminds of that glorious day spent reading one of the most unputdownable novels of that year.
Life events have dictated that my reading of The Glass Room by Simon Mawer has been an entirely different reading experience; a fractured start-stop-sleep-start-gap-stop-start so we can but hope that the reveals from the book have distilled into something equally pure and clear.
You see already I can't stop myself locking into the leitmotif that Simon Mawer utilises to the full around the title of his book. If ever a book cover and a title set me up with expectations The Glass Room  was the one and I gave it careful thought before I read, what were my expectations? The novel is loosely based around an actual house, the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, in today's Czech Republic.
I jotted down some obvious words,
transparency
light, lightness, bright, brightness
lives on display
openness
unoppressive
goldfish bowl
stone-throwing (as in people in glass houses shouldn't...)
I guess every reader who comes to this book would compile a different list, but it was quite an interesting exercise.
The beautiful modernist cover art titled The Architect by Roger de La Fresnaye was already distorting my image and my perceptions.
The Glass Room itself becomes 230msq of central motif set in the beautiful 1930's architect-designed hillside home of Liesel and Viktor Landauer. Czech car magnate Viktor has money to spend and this house will be the zenith of modern taste, the architect will 'design you a life' he tells Liesel as they contemplate plans, a house of light, beams of horizontal and parallel lines and a symmetry with nature.
The opulence of the onyx wall strategically positioned by architect Rainer von Abt to capture the burnished rays of the setting sun and the vast and retractable wall of glass that allows for that illusion of upward movement when it snows, this is a house designed to maximise every natural feature.
Whilst the house gestates,

'like contemplating a skeleton and trying to work out how the person would have looked',

Liesel's first baby does likewise, developing into the 'indefinable quality of grace and softness' that will be their daughter Ottilie.
War will intervene and with it will come the nightmare that is the legacy of Viktor's Jewish heritage. Life has become exceedingly complex for Viktor, he cares about too many people and the journey into exile reflects the tangled web that he must try and protect, they have money but will it be enough.
The house meanwhile stands resolute and firm in its foundations, refusing to shatter and will pass from Czech to Nazi to Soviet hands finally returning to the newly created Czechoslovakia and down the years the Glass Room does indeed become the place of revelation, of truths told, of honesty and transparency, of lovers' trysts, frequently a place of safety and security,

' The house has become a refuge for them, the Glass Room, that least fortress-like of constructions, bringing the consolation of reason and calm, while outside the confines of their particular lives, the world is crumbling.'

Likewise all is not light and bright, there will be sinister overtones to the architect's measurements and symmetry too during Nazi occupation.
Whilst the post-war mirroring of pre-war events may have stretched my incredulity a fraction beyond its comfort zone, I was nevertheless impressed all over again by Simon Mawer's writing and by a book that in the end offered that holistic reading experience.

'...the shutter of the photographer's camera makes that repeated mechanical sound, that unlocking and locking of doors of light to send momentary images from the present into the light of the future.'

I can't think of a better way to describe that essence of a book that makes me use other senses and allows me to capture those images in my mind's eye to keep, because for me the visuals of the architectural plans, the orthographic drawings (thank you to Bookhound for that) preceding each section led me through to the book's conclusion and towards one of those moments when you turn a page and something 'big' happens, something seems to join up.
The elevations are slightly confusing, is that the front, the back, the left side?
Well, they were for me, Bookhound being a technical drawing person looked and had it all mapped out right away, but I just couldn't decide which bit of the house I was looking at until I reached  the final drawing (an isometric one I'm informed, there's a difference apparently) which somehow felt like that skeleton now fleshed out.
I had my bearings, a perspective on the house and with it a sense of completeness and now I can't resist sharing a picture of the actual Villa Tugendhat.
There is a simultaneous conclusion for Liesel too, now blind but returning to her home from exile (don't worry you know this will happen on page one)

'Warped, distorted, refracted by the prism of recollection, this is the place that lives in her memory. She was here.'

 I feel as if I've been there too.

Happy Whitsun

It's Whitsun Bank Holiday here in the UK so I think we all deserve another day off, some lazy reading and hopefully some garden time. I've taken the book off its cushion and am deeply and very happily immersed in The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, so that's me sorted for the day, and as for the evening...well I'll have to confess, I didn't mean to start watching Britain's Got Talent, but how could I not?
Couldn't miss Susan Boyle for a start, but was also worried that the chap who swings dustbins from his earlobes might get through and be considered a fine example of British talent. Our national reputation's down the pan as it is and if the Queen had to watch that at the Royal Variety Show I think it just might put the lid on it. But secretly I'm watching because I absolutely have to see Stavros Flatly, the Greek father and son doing Riverdance one more time.
There is actually also a form of madness going on in the garden at the moment.
A combination of cold winter, early warmth, lots of rain and recent chilliness and the whole thing's gone to wilderness in the month we've had our backs turned.
On a good day it's not exactly the National Collection of anything beyond weeds but we have lost a few long-standing shrubs and trees this Winter. The shade loving clematis Niobe is no more, the willow tree is as dead as a dodo, the columbines have all disappeared and something else large and shrubby with a label on that we can't read looks quite prehistoric and unlikely to recover.
But other things have gone for profusion as if to make up for the deficit, anything yellow seems to be happy, witness the grinning Laburnum tree.
and the smiling buttercups
And this brings me onto the subject of the annual 'meadow' mowing. Each year we let most of the garden grow wild (this is easy) and all we have to do is decide the course of the path and mow it. This year's course has been plotted and commenced,
and the invasion of these is imminent, we think we're in for our biggest proliferation ever.
I'll keep you informed.
Meanwhile the whole place is just a-humming with these.

And look, we just caught the wren flying in to feed her chirpy-chirpy cheeping babies in their nest squat on the verandah. The House Martins are gathering and looking menacing, there's much indignant twittering up on the telephone wires about calling in the loan, getting the boys in and repossessing their property.
We are very nervous indeed for the welfare of little Family Troglodytes.
 

...you're sure of a nice surprise.

There is a fabulous and deafening silence when you reach the woods, the hush of that muffled secluded world that insists you take no notice of what's happening outside and just listen to the birds and the rustling mulch of leaves underfoot and snuffling dogs. It became that place that children usually only dream of finding these days and ours could hardly believe their luck at the ages of twelve, eleven and nine when we first moved here. Raised on a diet of free-spirited imaginary adventure a la Famous Five and much-tramping and splashing across Dartmoor, suddenly it all had the makings for real and on their doorstep. Old enough to go off and explore on their own with food and supplies, it was here and hereabouts that they made the dens and camps which had the local gamekeeper almost apoplectic at the thought he'd got squatters.
To this day they all still love cooking on a Trangia in preference to an Aga, sleeping in a tent and generally roughing it and carrying their world in a backpack. We have to thank Bookhound for encouraging those skills rather than their mother who likes her hot water and electricity near to hand at all times. I blame that 1979 pre-children weekend of the Fastnet disaster, coincidentally spent by us out camping on Dartmoor at what was to be the start of a holiday trek with the dog along the Two Moors Way.
Terrifying weather, massive electrical storms all night, drenched to the bone and huge buffalo-like cattle trying to take shelter in what was left of our tent. We walked off the moors and dripped our sorry way home the next day, the dog's collar even went rusty and I was definitely heard to mutter 'I will never go camping again' and I haven't.
Kit Hill enjoying a glorious day in the distance, that monument now sadly festooned with mobile phone technology and I'm wondering whether someone's having a laugh when I discover Kit Hill is a Marilyn. A term coined ironically for hills of at least 150m to match the Scottish Munroes.
So we strolled back down through those four fields to home.
The little Methodist chapel in the distance and the Cornish side of the Tamar Valley over the way, we caught a glimpse of the gas lorry trundling along the lane to home and knew it would be pumping pound notes into the underground tank by the time we got there, and it was, lots of them.
I think you'll also easily spot Ben in this picture, if one dog's rolled the others won't be out-smelt.

If we go up to the woods today...

I finally made it up to the woods yesterday and just in time to catch the bluebells before they fade for another year, so taking a left out of the front gate and along our little lane which is about to be re-surfaced. Don't ask about the days of preparatory patching work recently which made it inaccessible and laden with wet sloshy tar and chippings.
This was followed swiftly a few days later by the annual scraping and mud removing team who had obviously not spoken to the tar and chippings team.
We watched and wondered and even asked as all the tar and chippings were dug up, scraped off and removed.
Then we rang the council and asked if they'd meant to do that, no that was a 'communication error', so the tar and chippings team had to come back and redo the whole lot. Is it any wonder other hazardous byways lie potholed and neglected when we are getting all this attention in triplicate.
We await the big resurfacing day with some trepidation and we'll be the last to know when it's happening, we'll just wake up one day and be trapped.
Along the way glimpses for you of what's seeding, flowering and leafing.
Walking about fifty yards along the lane until we come to what is fondly known as The Cut.
This is where we are heading
So here's the dovegreyreader earth view.
If you can spot us as the white house just below and left of centre then perhaps you can locate The Cut one field to the right and leading north alongside four fields to the woods which are there, top right of centre.

This is a magical, dappled route up to the woods, occasionally frequented by horseriders but mostly us and there's Very Obedient Dog Sticks pleading for the limelight to be his today.
Bookhound had told me that the wrens would dart across the path from their nests and lo that is exactly what happened, but for once we saw the exact spot it had come from and there it was, the entrance to the little feathered nest. We didn't linger.
Just to the right edge of the woodland and hiding beneath all this inconspicuous growth is something of great importance, the underground reservoir for our spring water supply.
This is piped down to us but first it feeds every cattle trough on the way down through those four fields (and sometimes we think to Land's End and back) before it reaches us, so the cows get preference. We only needed that to fail once to realise we'd need something better so we have a bore hole with an electric pump too. There's nothing worse than discovering that cows drink fifty gallons a day each or something, you start to hate them with a vengeance when your taps run dry. And yes we have been known to hook up to a cattle trough pipe for bath water before now.
Here's star dog and you need to know that but a minute after this appealing picture he was busy rolling around in something nasty and we were instantly very grateful that he lives in an outdoor kennel.
We'll get to the woods tomorrow.


  

The Compassionate Mind

We are all thankfully on the mend, in fact I was mended enough to manage a day trip to Oxford this week  for a meeting with my new (since January) employers and part of that involved a basic introduction to the principles of The Compassionate Mind.
This is a book by psychologist Paul Gilbert which I had heard about in odd ways, overheard someone ordering a copy in the local bookshop, ear-wigged the discussion about it and thought it all sounded interesting and now thanks to publishers Constable I have my own copy.

'Compassion and particularly compassion towards oneself can have a significant impact on our wellbeing and mental health. Developing our sense of compassion can affect many areas of our lives...Professor Paul Gilbert explores how our minds have developed to survive in dangerous and threatening environments by becoming sensitive and quick to react to perceived threats. This can sometimes lead to problems in how we respond to life's challenges and scientific evidence has demonstrated that compassion towards oneself and others can lead to an increased sense of happiness and wellbeing - particularly valuable when we are feeling stressed. Based on evolutionary research and scientific studies of how the brain processes emotional information, this compassionate approach offers an appealing alternative to the traditional western view of compassion, which sometimes sees it as a sign of weakness and can encourage self-criticism and a hard-nosed drive to achieve."

I tend to avoid mumbo-jumbo psychobabble books but this is far removed from it, extensive scientific research to back up the methods and this looks like a fascinating therapeutic approach.Books like this have applications to both life and reading and I have a feeling, given the recession and recent public events here in the UK with several MPs now on suicide watch, that the Compassionate Mind should and perhaps might need to be in the ascendant.
I was secretly worried when I emerged from the NHS last October that I might also have had a touch of compassion fatigue. I really couldn't see how I would ever want to help anyone ever again if I'm completely honest, but thankfully I was wrong.
What I actually had was a massive bout of NHS fatigue, easily corrected by two months of reclusive sleeping, knitting and reading and thankfully my new job, which involves mostly grief and loss work, has restored that faith in my own compassionate mind because I think I'd have been horrified to find that the last few years in the NHS had wiped and destroyed it.
So my other treat this week was to take the Tinker (father of dgr for any newcomers) out yesterday on his first walk down to town to test out his new spark plugs. He has a double pacemaker so will be able to walk twice as fast as anyone else when he's up to speed, but just six days in we wanted a gentle walk to exorcise the ghosts of that spot where he was taken ill and had thought he might not get home, and so arm in arm we set off at a leisurely pace.
'There,' I said ' that was alright,'
as we passed the spot and we strolled down into town and along the little back lane that leads to the Church. It's a bit of a pot-holed and stony throughway in places and you have to watch your step.
To our collective horrors as we rounded the bend there was an old man lying on the ground, blood everywhere, shopping and stick gone flying as he'd tripped over and smashed his face.
Oh dear, Lord love us, now I'd got two of them to think about, please don't ask me what was going on with my threat perception, I haven't read the book yet.
The Tinker was there twice as fast as me given his double sparkos.
'DON'T LIFT HIM, just talk to him ' I said as I dashed to the cafe at the top of the lane to get help, a chair, an ambulance, a maxillo-facial surgeon, the complete cast of Casualty (pleeeeease let them all be sitting in Cafe Liaison).
They weren't but the cafe staff were lovely.
'Could you call an ambulance please' I asked quietly as I explained calmly what had happened...
No...no, I didn't really, that's what I'd like to have done but actually I garbled out,
'Quick call an ambulance an old man's fallen and he's lying on the ground and he's really confused and he's got a white stick and his shopping's all over the place and I've got my Dad out there and he's only just had a pacemaker fitted and it's a double one and this is his first walk out after the operation and I've just had an operation too and I can't lift anything and there's blood everywhere and we need a chair and....someone come and help please.'
I really should have sent back my registration under the 'Call Yourself a Nurse? I Don't Think So' clause...yes there's my inner critic.
Bless the lady behind the counter doing the washing up, off with the Marigolds and out there offering him a drink.
'NO DON'T GIVE HIM A DRINK he might need an anaesthetic'
That's it, I'm alright now I'm obviously in nurse-mode, I know what I'm doing.
Spoke calmly to the man in ambulance control as he told me the ambulance was on its way, asked me the questions
'Yes GCS satisfactory, patient is conscious, breathing, airway clear...no we won't give him anything to drink, no we won't be de-fibbing at this stage, might have sustained a sub-dural haematoma, no I don't suspect a pleural effusion, no signs of damage to spleen but yes you might need to ready an operating theatre in case and could you get X ray on stand by...'
Well that's almost like it was.
With that we heard the nee-naw, the green liveried salvation arrived and eventually the Tinker and I wished the gentleman well and strolled on.
What is it that is so heart-rending about the sight of an old person alone who has fallen?
I think we probably imagine that person to be ourselves or our own loved ones and it all triggers the compassionate response to helplessness which hopefully never dims no matter how much it's tested and I dearly hope that the gentleman is alright. He managed to tell us he was eighty-seven and there's nothing like a fall at that age (because I suppose this is 'fall' not 'trip' territory we're in) to clout your confidence.
I've also since phoned the council about the condition of the lane, quite lethal for a public right of way and incredibly it's been that way for years.
'Is it a trip hazard?' they asked me...'have you witnessed an incident?'
Well, my threat perception was well-honed by now so I gave them chapter and verse plus consequences and shall be watching that space for imminent re-surfacing.
In the end it all felt like a good test of both compassion and the pacemaker so we treated ourselves to coffee and cake in the lovely Brown's Hotel as we walked back up the hill and the Tinker was barely out of breath,amazing.

The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt - Orange 2009

More Orange longlist reading, The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt and I think for me this was a book of three thirds.
Or perhaps that's because I read it in three longish sittings separated by a couple of days and each time it felt as if I was picking up a different book. I couldn't quite get back into my stride quickly and felt as I was starting over as I picked up the threads again.
Add into that the fact that I'm the person who decided to listen to The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger on an iPod shuffle and inadvertently pressed the shuffle button and listening chaos ensued (though many said it hardly mattered and should have worked as a book just the same). It's all left me with a bit of a phobia about time travel books because I can't quite get my head around people being here last week when actually it's next week really, so they're not actually dead because the accident that happened this week hasn't happened yet because they are still in last week but you know they are going to be dead soon.
See, it's complicated isn't it and I need these things explaining very clearly, like Michael J.Fox does in Back to the Future.
However I gamely reached the end albeit in a slight state of unknowing with a book that has nonetheless proved to be a fascinating blend of fact, fiction, history and dare I say, science fiction surrounding the weird and wonderful life of Nikola Tesla the acknowledged father of radio and AC electricity.
Most people would credit Edison and Marconi with both of those inventions however it was Tesla's chaotically eccentric genius that came up with the ideas but sadly not the business acumen ever to convert the ideas into money. I suspect if anyone had ever sat Tesla down and suggested he did the Belbin Team Roles test it would have become abundantly clear that he was not a Completer-Finisher.

'It's carrying your idea to fruition that is your stumbling block. And the world requires proof of genius inventions.'

And then a trip to the behavioural psychologist would have planted him firmly somewhere along the autistic spectrum, definitely towards the high-functioning Aspergers end,

'Most often I would avoid anything as social as this supper. Society is best kept at a distance, like a guiding star, far off and easy to ignore.'

But this is the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, autism wouldn't become a recognised condition until 1943, strangely the year of Tesla's death. As it is this brilliant genius and inventor of so much, faded into eccentric poverty and obscurity and with little recognition for his life's work and it is this period of Tesla's life that forms the main focus of this book.
I'm making an assumption of faction, historical veracity mixed in with fictional events and once I twigged who 'Sam' was I realised that Tesla had some very influential friends...but then I got confused perhaps this was the Sam who had written this book...

'Are you ready Sam? Enough paper? Pens? Fine. We can start with the darkness.'

It's all complicated and kept me on my toes.
Samantha Hunt also adds in a fictional sub-plot surrounding the family of Louisa a chambermaid at the New Yorker Hotel where Tesla sees out his days and this is where the time travel started to confuse little old me. The scientists and physicists among you will relish this book and though I'm not raving about it, I don't want to damn it with faint praise either because all credit to Samantha Hunt for tackling such a huge subject with such vivid imagination and clever writing, keeping me there and interested to the final page.
The book certainly deserving of Orange shortlist recognition in that case for the sheer scope of its vision and inventiveness.
I know a great deal more than when I started that's for sure in fact I could probably knock up a death ray with a few bits from our kitchen drawer. You know, the one where you put everything you don't quite know where else to put,
Ours is the third one along and it's a vampire's haversack of  chaos, in fact on reflection I think there's a little bit of the Tesla in all of us.

dovegreyreader asks... Jude Morgan

Well I'm not sure how we've managed this given that Jude Morgan doesn't 'do' e mail, but we have persuaded this most reticent of writers to sit in the armchair for just a few minutes to offer us some insights into the book that took my breath away yesterday, The Taste of Sorrow. I'm very grateful to Jude for responding so gamely because this insatiable reader just had to know.

Jude, I have been completely steam-rollered by The Taste of Sorrow, I can't stop thinking about it and yet I thought I knew my Brontes inside out. Can you tell us just how you've managed this? The process of taking something familiar to many but making it so refreshingly new and vibrant?
 
The answer to this is, with great difficulty!
It was precisely that question of the familiarity of the Brontes’ lives that posed the challenge in writing a novel about them. Part of the answer was perhaps to go back to sources, try to forget what I knew (or thought I knew) about them and study their lives as if it was an entirely new experience – above all, trying to clear away the legend and myth that has grown up about them. My own conviction about the Brontes was that they were not these fey ‘children of the moors’ who somehow happened to write great novels. They were very driven, very conscious as artists. In terms of narrative style I wanted above all not to try and reproduce a nineteenth-century style – you can’t compete with the Brontes! – but to give a contemporary feel without any anachronism. And above all to strive for empathy, to subsume yourself as a writer in the consciousness of these living characters.

I'm really sorry but we are desperately inquisitive here at dovegreyreader scribbles, can you tell us about your writing day, must the dog be walked and the dripping tap sorted first, computer or pen (biro, fountain, fancy ink...we need to know), Balzacian white robe and lashings of black coffee, dedicated writing space, desk, view from window, special writing jumper (you'd be surprised what writers have revealed to us and please don't worry, we won't tell anyone!)

My writing day is more likely to be a writing night or small hours, with a lively five year old at home, other work, teaching etc. And I’ve developed the habit of writing draft in a notebook whenever possible – college coffee break, on the train…But I have a nice traditional book-lined study when I can get to it, and there writing straight on to the computer is the norm. Classical music on headphones sometimes.

3. Who and which books must we read, who are the greatest writing influences on you?

Hilary Mantel is my favourite contemporary author and her historical novel A Place of Greater Safety opened my eyes to the idea that historical novels needn’t be plush and stately but could be sharp and edgy. Before that, I think Mary Renault was a great historical novelist who as a critic said seemed almost ‘clarivoyant’ in her sense of period. The greatest single influence on me is Dickens, for fiction that is always vibrantly dramatized, alive, attuned to rhythms of language, always communicating.

The prize draw for three copies of The Taste of Sorrow is still open here.

The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan

'All overgrown by cunning moss,
All interspersed with weed,
The little cage of "Currer Bell"
In quiet "Haworth" laid.'

My desk reading this year is The Poems of Emily Dickinson, a beautiful hardback edition propped on a book rest to my left hand and there for the browsing while I wait for the computer to do something or I might just stop what I'm doing, rest my chin on my hand on my elbow and immerse myself completely. A stop and stare moment which I think Emily Dickinson would have appreciated, turning over a page every few days and all the while discovering that Emily really had a message for just about every situation.
So 146, the Brontes and there I was in the aftermath of the final page of Jude Morgan's forthcoming novel The Taste of Sorrow and feeling quite bereft of a book that took me hostage keeping me Bronte-bound for the duration.
Anyone who may question the need for another Bronte book can just keep on asking and I will keep on saying I think this could be the one we've been waiting for.
Jude Morgan has remained true to historical events, so faction rules but be reassured, if you know little you'll know it all by the end and anyone who knows their Parsonage from their Personage will still settle down comfortably into this and safely get busy investing emotion and passion into the Bronte lives as never before. Expect the characters and personalities to blossom on the page as if they were old friends that you thought you knew well, but now it's as if they've been to visit for a few weeks. Unlike Johnson's three day-old fish they don't stink, you really don't want these guests to leave, even Branwell feels welcome.
Poor poor Branwell, brilliantly and sympathetically portrayed with his innate fear of growing up, of manhood and responsibility, of having to make his way in the world,

'the king who never seems to come into his kingdom'

His final decline and passing taking a huge toll on the family because on Branwell's shoulders rested the unfulfilled hopes of his father and sisters.
Then the fiesty Emily, the distant, detached, remote free spirit (I'd have her and Branwell on the autistic spectrum...that's half the nineteenth century I've diagnosed recently, but Branwell tirelessly lining up all those soldiers time and again, it's obvious)
Meek, unassuming, self-effacing Anne but so perceptive of those around her, and of course Charlotte, constantly struggling to acknowledge her true feelings

'like a hot, heavy dish righteously burning her fingers'

and of course happiness always came at the cost of overwhelming guilt,

'like an accusation of some small, slinking crime.'

Patrick Bronte the broodingly serious and emotionally constrained father, the Haworth incumbent so brilliantly caring of his parish yet lost when finding himself in such personal and emotionally over-wrought territory, not quite knowing what is expected of him as he grieves behind that closed study door for the loss of his family one by one.
Jude Morgan brings the entire cast to centre stage and under a new and revealing spotlight clearly demonstrates the effects of early grief and loss on the Bronte family, firstly their mother, then Maria and Elizabeth. Suddenly that sense that of course this cannot possibly be ignored, pervaded my understanding of the Brontes and revealed new insights. From being a child who was happily wedged in the midst of a happy brood of siblings suddenly Charlotte is thrust onto the periphery to become the oldest,

'torn from the warmth of the middle, exposed.'

the most responsible, the one who must protect the others, care for her father and that responsibility weighs heavily.
There are moments of pure literary genius in the writing when these disparate souls in a form of stream of consciousness think as one, but actually you are reading an expression of the individual hopes and fears of all four siblings. It's hard to describe how cleverly this is done but it's a wonderful melding of their close-knit yet vastly differing personalities.
I'm also secretly hoping that someone's thinking about optioning the film rights as a result because, as I read, I couldn't recall a decent film of the Brontes but knew that in this book I was reading the perfect account. I suppose Kiera will have to be in it somehow, probably stick-thin consumptive Emily and give us a good death scene. In fact obviously just about everyone gets a death scene though I was thankful by the end that Charlotte's was left to an Author's Note and my imagination because I'm not sure I could have borne the grief of another one.
Oh yes it's all there and, though many who read The Taste of Sorrow will know it all down to every last detail, I for one knew that I had never read it written quite like this before.
How difficult it must be to make something so familiar to many feel so refreshingly vibrant and renewed and I suspect also equally alluring to those who come to the Brontes with no knowledge of the detail.
Nor does it take a Mystic Meg to predict a Bronte reading revival on the back of this book. I couldn't wait to pick up something, nay anything Bronte-related and with those memories of  the sisters reading Charlotte's words so firmly fixed in my mind it was The Professor for me,

'Anne finds the Brussels part fascinating: just occasionally as she reads out Charlotte catches in Emily's eye a peculiar sceptical look, as if she were hearing a particularly elaborate lie. Which of course is what fiction is.'

I wish Jude Morgan so much success with this book, it really is a masterpiece.

PS Don't miss the next short post below for the new arrangement regarding prize draw copies.

The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan - prize draw copies

Names in comments here and three prize draw copies of The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan are waiting for three very lucky winners. Vying for the position of housekeeper Tabby in the Bronte household, our own mackerel version will put on his apron and bonnet, point the Haworth paw and choose.

Knit-a-Poem

The Tinker is home today and sends thanks for all your good wishes, and my grateful thanks to Thelma for sending a link to The Poetry Society Knit-a-Poem project.
Don' t panic, you won't have to knit Hiawatha or The Prelude in its entirety, just one letter towards the world's first knitted poem to be revealed at the end of the year and all to help celebrate the society's centenary.
I've registered by e mail and am just hoping I don't get landed with 'S' or 'B', a nice easy 'I' would be good.
Now I'm trying to think which poem it might be and not a single 'sleep which knits up the sleeve of ravelled care' woolly sort of line comes to mind.
Any suggestions?

A View From the Foothills by Chris Mullin

Have no fear, I will leave political blogging firmly where it belongs here, but given the current furore surrounding 'sloppy accounting' procedures, a defence I think we may all feel tempted to employ... Your Honour, in future, I couldn't resist sharing my thoughts on A View From the Foothills, The Diaries of Chris Mullin.
Chris Mullin, MP for Sunderland South, a Labour back bencher who found himself anointed into junior minister-dom by Tony Blair back in 1999 and well placed to document it all.
The inter-departmental pistols at dawn about preferred office space.
The minister's car fiasco...paying thousands for a chauffeur driven car to carry red boxes even if you have no need of it.
The back room manipulation by bleep...don't for one minute think it's chance who you see walking through the door of Number 10 smiling jauntily or glowering with gravitas to camera, it's done under orders and to be seen.
So there was me loving this book with a sort of gasp-inducing incredulity and laughing my hand-knitted socks off at John Prescott's louch and languid attendance heading up departmental meetings in his slippers(or mis-matching shoes) slouched in an armchair holding court and spinning public opinion for all he was worth. Then the expenses debacle struck and I had to stop reading because suddenly this wasn't funny any more, it was sick-making, because Chris Mullin's diaries somehow give quiet, thoughtful and understated voice to every ill that we now know to be sadly true about Westminster.
I suspect Mullin C. (and countless others, yes really) are good apples, I can't bring myself to look at his expenses and discover he's not, because his personal beliefs and principles shine through in his diaries. His own self-effacing manner and refusal to be compromised or conned by those above him speak of an inner strength and integrity that we need by the barrow-load right now.
I don't think I could bear to find that I'd been deceived.
Please God he hasn't had his moat dredged or his 'modest chandeliers' installed on the taxpayer .
Chris Mullin dispenses respect where he feels it's due and is scrupulously fair, working very hard to see the good side of the likes of Two-Jags John (...or was it three? Or should it now be Two-Loo-Seats John?) whilst discreetly outing those who he feels fall below the mark,

'Most people like John and want him to do well....there is a general recognition that, under that volcanic exterior, there lurks a decent human being. At the same time there is a barely concealed contempt among both civil servants and ministers for his absolute lack of management skills, his inability to see the wood for the trees and his flat refusal to listen to anything anyone is telling him.Deep down I am sure he, too, realises he is out of his depth. That accounts for the tantrums. It was the same with Neil Kinnock, who is much nicer now he is back in a job he can do'

From the 200 pages I've read so far it's clear that Chris Mullin found the shambolic shenanigans of Whitehall ridiculous often verging on the ludicrous, couldn't quite see how as a man of principle he'd been trapped into conforming to it all and tried his best not to, choosing instead to steer a level-headed straight and steady course through, make a difference where he knew he could and often very much against the prevailing tide.
It all reinforces for me, mrs ordinary tax-paying jo public, just how important it is that we know we do have the voice of integrity in there somewhere.
The media has been almost too depressing to watch as the swords to fall on get bigger and sharper and, as dearest Ann Widdecombe says, repentant MPs are queuing up to be seen wearing the hairiest of hairshirts to atone for their sins, which was the only prompt Bookhound needed.
Joking apart, it's nigh on impossible not to tar the whole rotten lot with the same brush but something stops me. Reading these diaries will both dash your hopes yet also restore a modicum of credibility, if only in a handful of our elected representatives. We need more Anns (Ann, you can't possibly retire, we need you for PM, or Speaker or something) and Chriss because in the days and weeks to come, whilst the silt of deceit settles to the bottom, the consequences if figures of honour, trust and integrity don't rise up to the surface and make themselves known to us all very quickly seem far too terrifying to contemplate.
I was browsing Ann Widdecombe's website and came across the Archbishop Derek Warlock Memorial Lecture that she gave on the subject of Faith in Politics; as I read, out jumped this nugget of wisdom,

'Certainly trust has disappeared between people and politicians. Everyone thinks we tell lies all the time and that is one of the reasons why so many people have stopped voting. They think politicians are corrupt, sleazy and in it for themselves. Those who are driven by faith must also be driven by truth.
Our ancestors had a much used word: honour. It is honour which has all but disappeared as a concept to be cherished. A well ordered society should be founded on honour.'

Finally, to end with a smile because heaven knows we could all use one, I can't resist sharing this little anecdote from Chris Mullin about The Man (Tony Blair) who on this occasion back in 1999 was taking a computer course.

'Students are apparently tested repeatedly to see how they are getting on and Tony kept failing. He noticed that the young man at the neighbouring terminal was getting extremely agitated.
'Am I making you nervous?' he asked.
'No,' the lad replied.
'What's the matter then?'
'It's because you keep failing these tests and I keep passing - and I've been unemployed for 18 months and you're the Prime Minister.'

Surgical knitting

What a great opportunity surgical intervention offers to one's knitting life.
Isn't this what knitters wish for occasionally?
A quick and time-limited bout of semi-immobility?
You're supposed to rest and everyone around you is definitely giving the impression that it's fine to do so, you can't get to a wool shop to buy more wool to start more things that will remain unfinished, so you must look to the stash and thence to the UFOs (unfinished objects) and perhaps do some completer-finishing.
First I proceeded to the successful completion of the Noro Kureyon gilet-waistcoat affair, you might have caught a glimpse last Sunday but here it is my latest robe of glory.
Far in excess of satisfactory to the point where I'm feeling a bit smug about this one, I love it for its mismatchedness, it fits nicely, I found some neat little buttons and I'm going to bind the rib faux-pas debacle with velvet (thank you for that wonderful idea whoever it was out there who suggested it) and this wool is dreamily soft and quick to knit up.
I then reverted to the stash and wasted an inordinate amount of precious time getting my tricoteurial come-uppance before I realized that buying this wool online, 500gms for £12 was always going to end in tears. In fact you can see that I actually kidded myself it would be better on a second attempt on smaller needles when of course it was all hopeless.
Pure wool supposedly (but I have my doubts) lovely colour, indigo flecked, but thin and substanceless in my hand and thinner and even more lacklustre as I knitted...twice.
I'm not even sure what I thought I was knitting. I blame the combined effects of a visit to the Kingdom of Anaesthesia with a browse through the new Rowan Alpine pattern book and a sudden penchant for sleeveless knitting which gains the finished object so much faster,
It was not to be and nor am I sure what kept me knitting when it was so obvious the thing, whatever it was, was a complete disaster until eventually I ceremoniously ripped it off the needles and then wondered anyway about the logistics of that collar which involves a 258 stitch rib with a complex degree of shaping difficulty built in.
So I settled back into the Baby Llama jumper now onto sleeves and which rates as the softest most rewarding wool it has ever been my privilege to cast onto a set of needles, the colour and texture all perfect and this picture doesn't really do the depth of this blue any favours, it really is delicious.
Of course no bout of knitting complete without some more socks and the new Noro sock wool, slow to reveal its secrets but I'm sure they are there.
Incidentally, does anyone else use the wool from the centre of the ball rather than the outside?
Don't ask me why I did but I wish I hadn't.

and the winners are...

We've been dealing with the backlog of prize draws and Rocky's now settled down to a snooze with one of his ladies so thought a picture of Little & Large would reassure Cat Lover Anon that there has been no lasting damage from the week's activities.
Ever the gentleman, you can see who's taking up all the cushion space.
So, here goes, the five winners of a copy of  The Personal Life of Rachel Dupree by Ann Weisgarber are
Susan W (1)
Betty (10)
Marte (28)
Maria (45)
Jeniwren (25)

Winners of the three copies of The Spare Room by Helen Garner
Sue Jones (5)
Helen Poole (11)
Jane (23)

Winners of the three copies of If I Stay by Gayle Forman
Carol Norton (4)
Dot (13)
Alice (36)

And from the staggering 93 entries for Hearts and Minds by Amanda Craig
Serenknitity (15)
Sue A (35)
Eva (82)

So here's the form.
Check it's really you against your comment number in the original post link and because Typepad no longer seem to store e mail addresses if the winners could e mail names and addresses to me at dovegreyreader at gmail dot com and put winner and the title in the subject line, that will help me cut and paste the right name into the right e mail to the right publishers who will be sending the books out. Many thanks also to Picador who kindly resent out copies of Esther's Inheritance by Sandor Marai this week as one hadn't arrived, if you ended up with a duplicate please feel free to find it a good home.
Also to let you know about a new housekeeping arrangement in place from Monday for prize draw copies after an excellent suggestion from Distracted of Delaware, who felt that the deluge of entries for a prize draw here often detracted from the flow of book comment and discussion and with the 93 entries for Amanda Craig's book I can see the dilemma.
Something I hadn't realised, so prize draws will be announced under a short separate post beneath the actual book post and for pointing it out Erika is going to be a Prefect and hand out the milk at break time in future and please, please if anything else annoys anyone do let me know, if I can do anything about it I certainly will and I might give you a Prefect's badge too.

The Vets.

I've had another of those Vet conversations this week.
You know the ones where I always feel as if I'm asking to do something terribly illegal like refuse the blood test on the pre-operative cat to discover if it has renal failure. Then whilst trapped in the building I won't be able to refuse the thrice weekly haemodialysis suggestion, or whatever else is on the cards for aged renally-compromised felines these days. Tess, sister of Rocky, did indeed survive that £240.05p's-worth of tiny lump removal and with her kidneys in fine fettle, (touch wood) all without the £35 blood test and we have of course been cleaning her teeth twice a day as advised...
Before I go any further can the Cat-Loving Anon person who emailed me copiously as a result of that post telling me how cruel I was just stop reading this right now.
I decided to stick to a phone call this time and to a new vet's surgery which has opened not five minutes from home. This would offer huge advantages over the crating up of Rocky and the yowling twenty mile plus round-trip in the car in the failing Trago Mills cheap and cheerful cat box tied up with bailer twine.
Rocky may look god-like and gorgeous but he is averse to intervention of any description. The whiff of the vet word is just not in the Rockster's vocabulary and as all we needed was his usual small dog-sized prescription for flea stuff and wormer I thought this would be easy, I'd just ring.
We need to be a step ahead so we get in the meds, suit up in plate armour with gauntlets and jump him while he's eating, dose him up and squirt the stuff on the back of his neck and the floor and Bookhound, pin him down and force a tablet down (Rocky not Bookhound) and then we retreat fast.
To the Cat-Loving Anon person...I did warn you.
It's not pretty and Rocky's a twitchy eater for a few days but it's all infinitely preferable to the Battle of the Cat Box.
So I rang the new vets and said we'd very much like to register all our animals with them, three each of dog, cat and ferret variety.They were all very fit and healthy because they live outdoors a lot, had no need of Well-Dog, Well-Cat or Well-Ferret checks, their cholesterol was bound to be within normal limits, we know that Rocky's body mass index is registering obese but it's not our fault that he's currently on feeds of two-hourly fresh rabbit and I didn't want or need to bring them in, but please could I have our usual summer sorting out stuff for the cats.
"Well we need to see the cat."
"But I really don't need to bring him in, it's only fleas and wormer, and transporting him is a logistical and traumatic nightmare too far because I'm a bit up to my eyes at the moment....but don't get me wrong I really do care about my cat."
Remembering the last time when I thought a Cat Protection Order felt imminent.
"No we can't prescribe without seeing the cat."
Of course, it was obvious, they thought I was lying about having a cat.
I was trying to procure drugs illegally, snorting imidacloprid, addicted to Milbemax broad-spectrum wormer, perhaps I was even dealing in the stuff, can't be too careful these days.
So I proceeded to explain that right now getting into the surgery wasn't really an option and actually not necessary (thinking of the £30 a minute 'looking-at animal' metre racking up from the minute you walk in the door) couldn't I have the stuff anyway and I'd definitely bring him in next time he was ill. He has had it every year for fourteen years and it saves things getting worse and then us having to bring him in for steroid injections. (£50 a minute 'procedure in progress' metre racking up, plus use of swab, syringe, needle, contents, replacement of vet's fingers, mopping up and making good of surgery building, fixtures and fittings etc)
"Well if he's so difficult why don't you bring in one of your other cats?"
"But I don't understand" I said "you'd be seeing the wrong cat."
"It doesn't matter which cat we see, we just have to see a cat by law."
"But they're all the same, just like every other cat, fluffy and with four legs and you wouldn't be seeing the one you need to see."
"It doesn't matter we just have to see a cat."
"Well, do you have one there already that I could borrow for five minutes?"
In fairness the vet did say there would be no charge for the laying on of eyes and to be honest I should have known better, I am a registered Nurse Prescriber after all and I wouldn't give anything out on the phone either. If someone ever rang and asked me for flea stuff and wormer for their baby I always said,
"No I'm sorry I really need to see the baby first",
though if  things were awkward about getting the baby in the Trago Mills box I must admit I didn't then say,
"Well just bring in any one of your babies."
No, in fact thinking about it (vets please note) I'd probably go and do a free home visit, sit and discuss all their troubles and prescribe accordingly.
So in the end I gave up, the new vet doesn't have our nine-animal trade as yet and we drove a quiet and catless twenty mile round trip to the other vets to pick up £50-worth (!) of the usual.

Tinker and Fowey update

Just a very quick update for all the Tinker (father of dgr) followers out there, he has had his new spark plugs installed today, told the surgeon he hoped he was getting a new pacemaker and not some eBay refurbished thing just because he was 84 and is now very pleased to have a pulse worth taking again and will hopefully be home over the weekend.
It was also lovely to get back down to Fowey this afternoon to meet and hear Amanda Craig talking about Hearts and Minds. The wind was whistling around the marquee, the guy ropes strained and clanked, the roof was billowing and at one point I quite thought I was tea-running on board the Cutty Sark.
A great event and some good questions about the book and its themes.One in particular about trust which exercised all our imaginations given the current atmosphere of mistrust now prevailing in this country towards those in whom we had all placed ours.
Thank you also to the very kind person who sent me an e mail saying how refreshing it was to hear about the Tinker's honesty after a week when dishonesty and deceit seem to have been the norm.
Hasn't it made for depressing reading, bless her, we'll only have Ann Widdecombe left soon...Ann for P.M. I say, our Ann would get it all sorted.

Shower Thought

Plenty of interesting after-thoughts have simmered since I finished Amanda Craig's Hearts and Minds and then considered all the arcs and sparks across to Stella Duffy's The Room of Lost Things.
Occasionally books will do this, it might be weeks later that a fleeting thought ties in and having met Stella earlier in the week I'm now looking forward to hearing Amanda talk about her book at Fowey this afternoon.
Why the Raymond Williams theory of 'knowable communities' should come to me in the shower I don't really know, but it did and in relation to the 'unknowable community' that people like me who don't live there often think of as London. I dug out the old textbooks and found the explanation advanced by Raymond Williams in relation to the nineteenth century novel and the country and the city, and it seemed to fit my thinking. I even got that old study buzz back for a few minutes, decided that under no circumstances do I need to go back to studying no matter how much I love the thought, and carried on pondering Hearts and Minds/ The Room of Lost Things.
However I can sadly sort of feel myself wanting to answer that spoof exam question I suggested.
Apropos of that thinking it all tied in with a recent event because several weeks ago the Tinker came upon a wodge of cash on the pavement.
£100 to be exact, neatly folded and neatly dropped by some poor hapless shopper he assumed.
Being the Tinker he walked it round to the Police Station and handed it in, leaving all his details as required. When the policeman said it would be his if left unclaimed the Tinker suggested, in his own inimitable style, that he'd really rather they put it in the Police Orphans fund and gave them all a nice Christmas party and that we thought was the end of that.
Well not quite.
Imagine his surprise when he received a letter of effusive thanks but a week later from the hapless but now very grateful shopper who had dropped it, turned the house upside down looking for it, retraced her steps and as a last resort had gone to the Police Station just in case.
Madam, they told her, if you are going to lose £100 there is no better place than Tavistock to do so.
Imagine my surprise when I then read the letter to discover it was from the community nurse I had shared an office with for the last five years. Goodness have she and I shared some fraught moments in that time.
Yes, I can verify, that was very hard-earned cash indeed.
It used to be a mystery to our little brood of rurally-raised children, on those occasions when we would spend a few days in London, that all these people on the street didn't actually know each other. When lives glance off other lives in rural Devon chances are you know the people, where they live, the family, the children were probably at school together, who's married to whom and all compounded by my own role as a Health Visitor here for so long. Few friends of our children, now twenty-somethings walk through the door here without telling me that they have apparently lain on my baby scales and their mum sends her best wishes. I'll often remember them for their sleep issues, their tantrums or their potty training nightmares and hilarious conversations will ensue.
Walking along the street can take hours because this community is so knowable for us.
There's a strange sense of security in that and it felt like one of many defining features of Hearts and Minds for me, all those lives orbiting very closely, almost touching but not knowing each other and the portrayal of London in this book certainly exudes that lack of security and safety.
Stella Duffy on the other hand has created quite a different London in The Room of Lost Things, a knowable community in the midst of a city and one with a sense of caring and compassion. Then I reflect back on Hearts and Minds and find compassion there too and so my thinking just kept going round, back and forth on these two contemporary city novels.
I'm just not quite sure where we stand over the dropped £100 in London though...
In any case it was just a shower-thought that wasn't going to go very far and fortunately I quickly recovered from that little pine for the realms of literary theory so it hasn't sent me dashing off to sign up for an MA, but it has made me appreciate all over again the awesome power of the novel to make me consider so much that I may not have noticed immediately I have turned the final page.
If there are writers reading this who need a bit of encouragement, then know it to be true, you are doing something very unique and important and I have to add what an amazing place the shower can be for just thinking.

Flying in from Stateside

Plenty of books arriving here and many as the result of e mails asking if I'd be interested to see them, and three of US origin in the last few days. At this point please can I say I am terribly behind with my thank you emails for books received and can I send my apologies to anyone who has sent a book recently and not heard from me. I'm sure it's arrived, we couldn't see Jim's head for the stack yesterday but it still feels very rude and impolite not to acknowledge.
We've been Tinker visiting daily (he is father of dgr not the dog, for all those who have been very kindly enquiring and I do agree, it can be very odd suddenly falling into the dovegreyreader world as many have done this week) and then I get home and seem to fall asleep. The Tinker's had a few ups and downs this week, we still await the pacemaker and can only assume they are building a special go-faster one perhaps with a remote control etc. Needless to say he's chipper and being a very patient patient whilst also thanking Sony for the invention of his beloved e reader which is making day and night Dickens reading possible, currently Oliver Twist. We even did a clever exchange yesterday, my fully-charged one for his flat-as-a-pancake one so that I could bring it home to recharge.
But back to book arrivals and who knows where that 'thank you so much for contacting me...yes please' reply leads and there was one book I was ecstatic to receive, a proof copy of Libby Cone's War on the Margins, the Nazi occupation of Jersey and the subsequent Jewish persecution, to be published by Duckworth in July. Written about here last year as a result of one of those 'would you be interested...yes please' e mail exchanges, noticed by publishers and soon to be on the shelves here in the UK. I wish Libby so much success with this book, it's been very exciting to follow the progress and my e mails back to Libby just got bigger in font and brasher in colour as events unfolded so to hold the book is a joy, more big-brash-font emails ensued.
Next an absolutely enormous 4lb tome arrived air mail from New York, An American Experience - Adeline Moses Loeb (1876-1953) and Her Early Jewish Ancestors.
I'd said yes to this for the same simple reason that I'd said yes to Libby's book, I never say no to anything about Jewish history. My recent experience of reading Plumes by Sarah Abrevaya Stein was enough confirmation if it were needed that for me, Jewish history and heritage is an endlessly fascinating and informative reading subject. Who'd have thought ostriches could be so interesting after all.
It was no hardship to prop the 4lb book on a pillow and browse the life and history of eight generations of this incredible family through the eyes of the descendants, of whom there are  hundreds. The family tree enclosed is vast and clearly a huge amount of research has taken place to document and preserve this family's history; life in the South at the time of the Civil War and thence to New York. All peppered with memories and recollections of day to day events, whilst there, overseeing everything, the most stunning portrait of Adeline painted by the English artist G.L.Brockhurst (1890-1978). Part of Augustus John's circle and famous in his day for portraits of Wallis Simpson, Marlene Dietrich and Merle Oberon, Gerald Brockhurst's forte seems to have been the portraiture of women, the Oxford DNB describing him as 'a portraitist of rare power and vision.'
Rarely does a portrait seem to say quite so much with the eyes and the demeanour, but as the book slid out of the package I was completely intrigued because there is something utterly transfixing about Adeline's direct gaze and expressive eyes that drew me in and kept me there. The deportment suggestive of grace and propriety, the eyes reflecting an innate sympathy and understanding.
If a portrait ever has the power to say 'please listen to what I have to tell you' I think this one does. I doubt an artist could paint such qualities if they weren't somehow radiating from the subject and as I browsed this book I knew I was holding a fitting legacy to a family steeped in pride for its country and heritage, Adeline would doubtless have been delighted.
Adeline Moses Loeb's portrait now hangs on the third floor of the Fraunces Tavern Museum at 54 Pearl Street, close to Wall Street in lower Manhattan.
Did I know it was here that General George Washington bade a tearful farewell to his officers back in 1783 after the British had left the city?
Well no I did not, but I discover this was our final trouncing at the end of the American Revolution. I see we're lending the museum one of our Magna Cartas later this year so all must be forgiven.
The next parcel held the lives of yet another American family, this time the Carnegies, Songs of Three Islands A Memoir, by Millicent Monks, a personal tale of motherhood and mental illness in an iconic American family. I rarely say no to books about childhood, motherhood or mental illness either, all such great levellers no matter the wealth and status of the subjects, always revealing a new perspective to explore and I know little if nothing about Family Carnegie beyond the existence of the Hall. I have much to discover with this book.
Never a very dull moment as they say.

Blonde Roots by Bernadine Evaristo

I'd heard of Bernadine Evaristo from the pages of Mslexia but read none until the Orange longlist brought Blonde Roots to my attention.
I think I mentioned the run of US, Deep South, Northern Badlands reading that this list has catapulted me into and if I'm honest I'm all done in with reading slave narratives and racism after this year's Orange. It's such important reading and I feel rightly battered and bruised by it all because it makes for such harrowing reading, I have a few more lined up which I'll get to eventually but if you think you might have the energy to tackle just one slave narrative perhaps consider Blonde Roots. It really is the very cleverest slant on what is becoming a familiar fictional subject, one that bears telling and re-telling, but finding fresh ways of doing so are becoming increasingly elusive.
Turn the tables and imagine the transatlantic slave trade in reverse, Africans are the masters and Europeans their slaves and so you have the premise for a book that, despite its incredibly serious subject matter, manages to defamiliarise the familiar and force a complete reconsideration.
With that comes an overwhelming sense of shame and suddenly a book that brings new meaning to the 'walk a mile in their shoes' thinking and just quite how Bernadine Evaristo has managed this is astonishing; an imagination so vivid that I fell into step with the book and just marveled at every twist and turn on the page.
Expect to have to suspend disbelief and then just wade in, I sort of knew where I was but felt constantly  discombobulated and off-balance at the same time and be under no illusion, Bernadine Evaristo does not spare her white slaves from the horrors and the violence, it's stomach-churning-eyes-shut reading at times.
The UK is no longer the mighty Empire, but according to the map which also disorientates and confuses from the off, a little tiny insignificant island off the shores of Aphrika and called the UK of Great Ambossa (think about it) with the capital Londolo. This somehow served to demonstrate a key theme surrounding the whole sense of displacement and loss, that unbelonging to a homeland endured by the slaves. I was suddenly made to think about it, how did you know where on earth (literally) you were going when you were incarcerated on a ship and transported?
Young Doris Scagglethorpe soon to be renamed Omorenomwara is captured form the Cabbage Coast of Europa and transported to the capital of Ambossa, Londono
Places like To Ten Ha Ma, m'Aidura Valley, Wata Lo , the Temz sound familiar don't they?
Lulled along by the cleverness there are regular high voltage shocks administered as the realities of the slave trade are described in detail, the capture, the journey on the ships, the punishments, the hardship and when Doris eventually ends up in the West Japanese Islands of the coast of Amarika as punishment for ...I won't tell you what, things get much much worse, put to work in the sugar plantations true degradation awaits. But there is also love and hope, and dreams of the future and there is humour in adversity which never goes amiss here as you know.
This writing reminds me of those early days of reading Margaret Atwood, the thrill of the 'different'.
I clearly remember that buzz when I first read The Handmaid's Tale, the way a writer can take a known world, perhaps a familiar history and make it unknown, yet still somehow knowable and recognizable (are you with me there?) The writerly ingredients and techniques that Bernadine Evaristo combines here, fact, fiction, anger and indignation, love and loss, satire and a huge dose of wit and humour give shape and form to one of the most intriguingly clever books on this year's Orange longlist and I can't hide my disappointment at its omission from the shortlist... so I won't...I really was disappointed this one didn't make the cut.
The vibrant and exciting writing talent that abounds in Blonde Roots really deserves recognition and I shall be looking out for much more from Bernadine Evaristo, each time hopefully knowing I'm likely to get an extraordinary reading experience.

dgr asks...Amanda Craig

My sincere thanks to Amanda Craig for submitting to the virtual cream tea and the glow of the standard lamp today and in case you missed it the draw for free copies of Hearts and Minds is open for just a little bit longer here. 

"An astutely portrayed cast of characters tell this story and slowly this becomes a book of both contrasts and similarities, everyone's under an exacting pressure and many and varied are the forms of slavery and entrapment; to work, to a lifestyle, to a master, to a mistress, to a past life, to a dream, to money, to poverty, to misguided values and Amanda Craig has rolled out a great big canvas on which to explore them all."
Amanda, can you talk us through that canvas, where the book began, your vision for it, the how and why?

I suppose H&M began when I heard about 9/11 at the school gates, and a white-faced mother said, "You realise that London is going to be next, don't you?" I'd been thinking about writing about all the immigrants I saw in my daily life - I had a Kosovan cleaning lady; the man who swept my street was Albanian; I kept chatting to Polish waitresses in my local cafe; I knew that much of my food was being picked by immigrants, and so on. So then I began to think about the fear that these people, who were making British life a good deal easier, would arouse if we had a terrorist attack. Because I live near King's Cross, it was logical to think of a bomb there. But then....7/7 happened, and for weeks and months I could hear sirens racing up and down York Way, just up the road. It was a dire time to live in London. People kept getting on the Tube and bus, and wondering whether they were going to be blown up, but in this wonderful British way refusing to stop using public transport.  Yet apart from the blown up bus, the carnage was all kept underground, out of sight, unlike the flashy cinematic attack on the Twin Towers. So I knew that I wanted to write about a terrorist attempt that was almost hidden. I talked to someone who trained police how to react in a bomb attempt, and he told me, long before it became public knowledge,  there had been over 30 foiled attempts.

By  2003, however, I had become seriously ill. I was rushed to hospital with acute appendicitis, discovered to have quite advanced thyroid cancer and then, a couple of years later, endometriosis. My novel kept being put back because I was too ill to write (though I still managed to keep up writing for the Sunday Times for the first year). But the good thing was that, being so dependent on doctors, Third World nurses, Eastern European au pairs, Muslim mini-cab drivers etc as all my normal work as a mother and housewife was outsourced, I learnt a great deal more about this underworld. When I became better, I interviewed real-life victims of torture - with whom I made contact through the Medical Foundation, PEN and the charity Women for Refugee Women. I also interviewed teenaged prostitutes. They were drug addicts; the youngest was fourteen. I wanted to get a feel for their lives to create Anna, my trafficked Ukrainian. They were happy (as long as I paid them) to talk in a warm cafe near King's Cross. They weren't trafficked, but said they knew girls who were - and in fact no sooner did I finish my novel than I saw three Eastern Europeans working the street just around the corner. 

I had what you might call an embarrassment of riches as far as stories about suffering was concerned. But I also wanted to reflect the hope, luck and kindness many of these people experienced in this country, and in London - which can be so hard and cruel, yet also so transformative. There is a real-life Job who helped a trafficked woman escape from the brothel where she was kept prisoner, just by giving her money. There are people like Katie who find it in themselves to do something amazing to help another person in dire distress. I want to emphasise that although parts of my characters' story are dark, the good do end happily and the bad are punished. I believe in love and kindness as a force for good in the world; I am against the kind of novel that emphasises hopelessness as the only truth about the human condition.

Very few of the stories I put in my novel are made up; it's how I deepened them and linked them that was the tricky part. I knew that there would be a love story about how a depressed American woman working in London gets a new man in love with her - Katie is there partly to provide comedy - but I had no idea how to link in my absurd political magazine, the Rambler, where she works with the main plot until quite late on. The detective story took longest to get right. I knew there had to be one because of the architectonic Victorian novel structure, but I also knew that I didn’t want to have the police involved. Having Polly find out what happened to her missing au pair seems obvious now, but it wasn’t for about three years.  We had a serial killer decapitating his victims into the canal just down the road. If you live in London there is just so much stuff. That's why I am fed up with historical fiction. The way we live right now is what's really interesting, exciting and urgent. 

I really groped my way forward over the seven years Hearts and Minds took to write. One thing I did discover was that if I kept each chapter to no more than 2000 words (six pages) then it kept up a kind of steady beat of tension. Once I found that, and switched viewpoints in each chapter, I found I had a kind of dance between my five main characters. I think of it now as a piece of music.

As you know we are devil for the detail here so I'm afraid we need the lowdown on your writing day. Must the windows be sparkling and the dog groomed before you can settle to write; computer, vintage Remington or Pukka Pad (pencil or fountain pen? If roller-ball please don't tell us, we don't like those), special writing jumper or ahem woolly socks (be truthful now, we won't tell anyone)

My working day is bounded by three things, getting the children to school and back, and walking the dog and cooking supper.

We get up at 6.45 in order for my daughter to get the school bus from Highgate to North London Collegiate (a fiercely feminist intellectual day school for girls.) The first forty minutes of each day in term time are pretty much as described in my novel, except that unlike Polly I have a lovely husband who lays the table before going to work at 7.15. He’s a high-powered economist in the City (and no, not the kind responsible for the recession, though he saw it coming long before most) who doesn’t reappear until 8.30. I stopped having an au pair three years ago, as soon as I was mended enough to bend at the waist...so it’s me rushing around and finding kit at the last moment.

The really nice bit of my day is walking son and dog round Hampstead Heath, testing him on Latin and Greek before he goes to Highgate school while dreaming about whatever book I’m writing. Even in winter, before dawn, the Heath is what keeps me sane – it’s a bit of almost-countryside, full of woods, birds, bluebells etc but with a nice cafe and the wonderful art collection (Vermeer, Rembrandt) at Kenwood House as well. On the drive home, I listen to either Radio Three or the Today programme, switching between stations if irritated.

I’d rather do anything than write, so when back I do about an hour of housework, read the paper, try not to eat a second breakfast, open emails, and then by 10 am start working. Once a month I meet up with one of my best friends, also a novelist, at a cafe called Kalender and we talk ferociously about writing over coffee. I write on a lap-top with a curvy keyboard – which is what you need if you have RSI – but I also write with a Waterman fountain pen. I dread getting arthritis, so take cod liver oil and glucosamine...it seems to help, like stretching and swimming. But writing always takes a physical toll of my hands.

One other thing I do is take notes when people ring me up. If I’m having an interesting conversation or hear a phrase that sounds good, I instantly write it down. I also keep a diary every day. Sometimes it’s just about the weather, occasionally it’s about politics or personal preoccupations but mostly it’s about other people – their problems, quirks, virtues, failings, hopes, blind spots, charms etc. I try to see people in the round, always, and to find patterns in behaviour. Some quirks and remarks do find their way into novels, but not whole people. I was extremely upset twelve years ago to be threatened with a libel case by an old boyfriend over a novel called A Vicious Circle, which had Penguin drop the book just before publication (it was then published by Fourth Estate for a much bigger advance). I create my characters for years before writing them; they live in a kind of parallel universe to this one.

I write 10-1, 2-3.30; collect my son and walk the dog on the way, then 4.30-6.30. Over lunch, I read through some of the 100 children’s books that get sent to me each week for the Times, and choose what to review. It’s a responsibility I take very seriously because I think children deserve only the best, and yet it’s often hard to select because we’re living through an extraordinary flowering of children’s literature.

My most precious piece of equipment in writing apart from my lap-top and pen are a pair of thick, green, hairy, thermal socks from M&S. Writing is a bit like falling asleep - you can’t do it if your feet aren’t warm! I also swear by Twinings ginger and lemon tea, and a handful of Brazil nuts when stuck. When really stuck, a whole bar of Divine milk chocolate is essential.

I write in a small moss-green study overlooking the top bit of my garden, so I can only see lime trees and three huge abutilon bushes which have violet flowers coincidentally the same colour as my blinds and bookcases. On the wall in front of me is a Keep Calm and Carry On poster, and a calendar from a children’s publisher. I’ve also got a collection of eight framed engravings by Gustav Dore of fairytale scenes (bought very cheaply twenty years ago in Madrid). The one I most want by him I don’t have, which is Little Red Riding Hood talking to the Wolf; but I’ve got various others, like Cinderella being fitted with the glass slipper, Bluebeard’s wife opening his treasure chamber and Puss in Boots telling lies to peasants, and tricking the ogre. I love Puss in Boots more than any other fairy-tale character because he’s a liar who makes his lies come true – which is what novelists do, in a way.

At the end of the day, it’s all family stuff – cooking, getting my children wound down and my husband perked up, running baths for them, watching a bit of TV and then getting everyone to sleep by 10.30. My daughter is doing GCSEs and insomniac, so on a bad night she’s creaking overhead until 2 am. My dog (Lucky, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel of exquisite beauty and  temperament) is very good at knowing just when to defuse stress with a full session of tickling, massaging and comforting. Lots of writers suffer from depression, and keep cats, which I think makes depression worse (because cats are the only creatures more self-centred than authors); dogs make you much more active and cheerful. The only thing is, they do snore.

Who must we read? Your greatest literary influences?

Reading: Anything that interests, moves, excites, amuses or instructs, I suppose. Read newspapers! Not to read one is to miss out on all the small and fascinating stories as well as the big, boring ones from TV. Read anything that makes you more thoughtful, kinder, brighter, braver and more able to enjoy life. Newspapers have a vile, seedy, spiteful side, but they are also our best weapon against sluggishness and thuggery.

My main influences as a novelist are probably Dickens, Balzac, Trollope, Austen and George Eliot, with a bit of Mrs Gaskell and Gissing too. EM Forster, Angela Carter and Alison Lurie are all well up there, but so are a host of other writers. I love classic detective stories (Conan Doyle, Walter Moseley, Ross Macdonald, Barbara Vine, PD James); I also love good SF (Ursula le Guin, Robert Heinlen and a lot of newer ones writing for teens like Neil Shusterman), and popular science (Matt Ridley, Steve Jones, Richard Dawkins). I love romantic comedies (PG Wodehouse, Eva Ibbotson and Stella Gibbons). I adore children’s books, from picture books (Sendak, Burningham, Quentin Blake) to novels (Sally Gardner, Michelle Paver, Philip Pullman, Anthony Horowitz). I re-read fairy-tales often, and among my most precious collections are the Andrew Lang colour fairy-tale books still printed by Dover; I will read almost anything by or about Shakespeare; I love certain poets, especially Keats. If I could go back in time and save just one person with antibiotics, it would be Keats, because I’m sure that he would eventually have written novels, and great ones. 

If I Stay by Gayle Forman and prize draw copies

Trying to decide what to read in the run up to something that you're strangely looking forward to for the sorting out aspect yet simultaneously dreading, leaves a real dilemma of choices. I'd probably be best staying well away from anything traumatic or hospital-y, stick to nice comforting, happy, jolly reading that would bathe my sub-sub-conscious in warm soothing waters ready for that visit under anaesthesia.
So please don't ask me why I picked up If I Stay by Gayle Forman.
But how glad I am that I did.
I read some of the publicity blurb beforehand...children's book... sensational and hotly contested rights auction...sold in eighteen countries... feature film rights acquired by the company that have produced Twilight and same director already signed up. You and I both know we've been disappointed by such triumphant fanfares in the past so my hopes weren't that high.
I didn't read all the information that came in the press release and I am so delighted I didn't. If you feel up to the ride and can possibly just ignore any plot details you hear about this book and read it 'cold' you may well have a similar and untainted reading experience to mine. The cover details very cleverly don't give too much away either so I had no idea what was about to happen and this added hugely to the impact of a book that is being lauded as another...well I'm not going to tell you that either because that would also give everything away, but it is and I think actually better than...
I'll give you the merest hint of a plot. Mia is the seventeen-year old daughter of hippy rock dude parents who've had to shrug off the trappings of that life to settle down into parenthood; thankfully they only shrug off the outward visible signs because the inward signs suggest they are just the same free-spirited beings they ever were. It all comes as quite a surprise when Mia shuns the rock world for the classical, the cello and an application to study at the Juilliard in New York.
That's all I'm going to tell you and I can see I'm painting myself into a corner here, not leaving that much to say beyond the fact that the meeting I had with Mia, her parents and her younger brother Teddy and her bigger 'family' rates as one of those exceptional reading experiences of recent months and yet again I was shamelessly blinking away the tears by the end.
If I Stay should be sad but it's not, I went through the mill a bit as I read but closed the book filled with optimism and a sense of real old fashioned yet unsentimental comfort and joy. If you read elsewhere that it is a

' gripping, heartrending and ultimately life-affirming novel about the power of love and loss,'

then believe it, because it is indeed that and some.
Reading more about New York-based Gayle Forman (who I see from her blog is book touring in the UK this week, I don't usually plan things this well) I was interested to see that this book evolved from real-life events which struck close to home, allowing her to find a voice for her emotions, a chance to consider some of the choices that become available when life bowls you that great big googly. Building resilience can be a slow and difficult process but an essential one if you're going to be able to withstand the next knock and the one after that, writing it all down often such a useful way through the mire.
I've tried desperately hard to give nothing away when actually there is so much more I want to say about If I Stay, the writing, the voice, the events and just how astutely Gayle Forman constructs this book by... and how by using...and the characters who come to life when...and the whole wonderfully explored question of what makes a family and...but I've stopped myself because I'm desperate for anyone who reads this post and then decides to chance this book to be able to approach If I Stay just as I did, with no real clue about what was coming next.
If someone tries to tell you any more about it just do that la-la-la and stop up your ears thing.
I'd also then have to urge you not to Google it either because there are some reviews out there that sadly tell all down to every last plot detail. Just read this book before the hype machine cranks up if you possibly can, get it from the library, or nip out and meet Gayle Forman if she's coming to a bookshop near you, and please could you say hi and thank her for a great book from me.
I can at least help out three of you anyway, names in comments because there are three copies of If I Stay by Gayle Forman ready and waiting and no messing about dressing up, Rocky will choose the winners very quickly and get the books dispatched from the publishers in double quick time, hopefully before the beans are spilt and the magic is spoilt, then once you've read it you'll just have to pledge to keep the If I Stay secrets too.

Sunday in Fowey - The Daphne du Maurier Festival

Thank you so much for all your kind wishes, the Tinker sends his gratitude and says how lovely it is to know you are all thinking of him.
Of course if you're going to do anything like this then Friday is not a good day to expect action so we hope for news of procedure schedule tomorrow.
Meanwhile he's been moved to the very swish new cardiac unit where we left him this afternoon inhaling the free oxygen, still talking fondly of the roast beef he'd had for dinner and figuring out his bedside internet and TV console and with that twinkle of nice new gadgetry to play with in his eye.
This morning however we ventured down to Fowey to catch the Virago event at the Du Maurier Literary Festival.
The sun always seems to shine in Fowey, the skies dazzle, the water shimmers and it was lovely to meet up with Justine Picardie again and Stella Duffy for the first time. Lisa Appignanesi author of Mad, Bad and Sad was the other member of the panel and I also met the wondrous Sophie from Virago. Sophie kindly keeps me informed about new books, never refuses my prize draw requests on your behalf and sends out books around the world to the winners.
There was a big hiccup with the book supply (Waterstone's) which sadly meant no copies of Justine's, Stella's or Lisa's books for sale and signing (which is surely the cue for Bookends the local independent bookshop run so diligently by Anne and David Willmore to have a book-selling presence at the event?) so it was a good thing I'd taken my annotated Stellas for a signature or she might just have squeamed 'til she was sthick.
We averted a scene anyway and waved The Room of Lost Things around so people knew what to go looking for (down in Bookends) and of course Stella laughed.
More about the event soon which was a celebration and panel discussion of the recent Virago publication of Breaking Point, a collection of some of Daphne du Maurier's darker short stories.
I hope to be back in Fowey on Friday to meet up with Amanda Craig and hear her talking about Hearts and Minds and Amanda does 'dovegreyreader asks...' this week too.
Meanwhile a few pictures of the day for you, some Cornish bright and light, me waiting for food (ignore my bruised post-op drip hand, and concentrate on catching a glimpse of the completed Noro Kureyon jacket) and what happens when you get home after an exhausting day, fancy eating crumpets and honey (because now you can) put them in the Aga for a few minutes to warm and remember them two hours later.

Tiptoe through the bluebells

I'm still not good for uphill walking so I suggested to Bookhound that he needed a rest from nursing and cooking duties and perhaps, would he mind taking a walk up to survey the bluebell woods for me, take the camera, nab me some shots etc.
Things are coming along nicely it seems and hopefully I'll get up there on a nice sunny evening next week, meanwhile here are a few angles and a dog called Ben,
 

The Tinker's Ticker

Doth it never rain but it poureth forth multitudinous hospital visits?
So my first real proper trip out today, with proper walking, was back to Derriford to visit the Tinker who was whisked into hospital yesterday with a pulse rate below thirty that none of us really felt was compatible with staying upright, but somehow he was.
Needless to say he walked onto the ward and they haven't let him leave his bed since.
His electrical circuits are shorting out and have gone haywire so he's going to be fitted with a pacemaker imminently and was this afternoon wondering whether this will mean he gets a better TV signal and will he set the alarm off every time he goes in W.H.Smiths. His face lit up when I handed over his e reader with the 100 books and then we wondered whether he'd now get interference on that.
In fact his friend Podge (seated) already has a pacemaker so we think it's a clear case of gizmo envy.
We must sound like the family who never take anything seriously and though we do always see the funny side of things (the Tinker and Bookhound already busy discussing the cartoon potential) I know you will all understand that being helpless to assist or be there I was actually beside myself yesterday. I surrendered to that inevitable bout of post-operative weeping while Nurse Bookhound valiantly dashed back and forth in Carry On mode between his patients.
Hattie Jacques would have been proud of him.
A.S.Byatt, my new best friend, saw me through the day and I am very grateful to her all over again for The Children's Book which is a novel of such glittering and dazzling brilliance I have to keep remembering to breath while I'm reading.
The Tinker meanwhile is also convinced that when they are running out of blood upstairs they are nipping down and taking another armful of his to help out, we aren't out of the woods yet but we are all still smiling bravely.

Vintage knitting

There was a day of electrical work about to happen and a lot that needed lifting, sliding, shifting and clearing out and we decided to get it done pre-operatively while we could.
Cupboards that it really couldn't be legal to open the door and force one more thing into.
Did a tent really need to be taking up the whole of the top shelf of the airing cupboard when we have a complete sprawling estate of men's sheds for such things?
Did the same airing cupboard also really need to contain every towel we've ever owned since the brown and orange wedding present ones 'just in case someone's going to the beach.'
The Kayaker's been away for months now, his belongings haven't, we could shift him to new space.
Our house is an unusual one because it is two old farm cottages made into one and both separated by very thick stone walls. Whoever did the twinning (not us) decided to save the bother of knocking through upstairs and just leave the two staircases, bathrooms, fireplaces everything in place at opposite ends of the house. This has real advantages when raising a family of teenagers and boomerang twenty-somethings because they can have one end of the house to themselves. The advantages are less obvious when it comes to shifting furniture around, or moving beds, so Bookhound and I had one of those hilarious days of shifting large things around tight corners and walking miles and miles up and down staircases and up to sheds to get things in the right place.
But there are also bonuses.
I have been driving everyone insane in the quest to find my knitting patterns, a lifetime's worth safely stashed in a concertina folder and missing for the last two years. The loft has been emptied twice over to no avail because they had to be here somewhere and I knew I was right, they were, but just not in the loft. They'd fallen down the back of the drawer of the divan base in my old sewing room, a heavy clunk as Bookhound lifted and shifted and eureka.
Sadly there was another six hours of shifting and moving to do before I could justifiably settle down and nostalge but once I did there it was, my knitting life in pictures before me.
The Patons Fiona Twiggy mini-jumper circa 1968ish. We all knitted this in 8ozs of Fiona wool which I'm sure was acrylic and bobbled like crazy within a matter of weeks.
 

The still unfinished skinny rib jumper and yes, I used to wear my hair like that too.
The Sirdar Norsgarn tunic hoody knitted on night duty.
The Wendy Marina Tanktop knitted in these exact shades of blue, 1974 whilst I was working in Theatres (not during operations obviously), and somewhere I have the Butterick pattern for that identical blouse with the wide collar, the flouncy sleeeves and little gathers at the shoulder, bees knees me.
The jumper I knitted for Bookhound.
But now the piece de resistance, the Paton's Husky Hoody circa 1977. I know I made one for me in these exact colours, but in the recesses of my mind a recollection of such deep embarrassment lurked, one that I had obviously tried to block out, but the evidence was in front of me, I'd ringed all the bigger size instructions, surely I didn't...he'd never have agreed.
Bookhound confirms it was truly so, yes we had his and hers, just like this.

Me and A.S.Byatt are friends at last (or should that be A.S.Byatt and I?)

'An illusion is a complicated thing, and an audience is a complicated creature. Both need to be brought from flyaway parts to a smooth composite whole.'

Forgive me for ever saying that I have struggled with the writing of A.S.Byatt because I knew the minute I read this line in The Children's Book that we are now going to be friends for ever, not Twittering on Facebook or ringing each other up or doing birthdays or anything, but I am that 'complicated creature' for whom the A.S.Byatt reading moment has arrived at long last.
Yes, I am now part of that 'smooth composite whole.'
I did once struggle it's true and the encounter had left its indelible mark, a fear of repeated failure even. I can actually pin it down to my first assault on an A.S.Byatt novel in 1988, but that's when my brain was reduced to a mushed up bowl of Milupa Oat & Apple cereal. It did me no favours in my quest to become well-read. I can cite mitigating circumstances, my powers of concentration would have been sapped, decidedly compromised by the previous seven years existing on about three hours sleep a week and all that repetitive Harrington terry towelling nappy-folding and Lego building whilst reading Topsy and Tim.
So back in 1988 as the government was kindly paying me money for the privilege of donating my body to gravity I'd at least spend the Child Benefit on Literary Fiction and try and pull up my reading socks. I mashed the double buggy and the walking child in through the door of the bookshop, parked up and bought a load of books that looked 'improving' without the first clue about what that might be. Mary Wesley (all of them) Ian McEwan (The Child In Time) Alice Walker (The Colour Purple). I'd snuck in The Shell Seekers by Rosamund Pilcher for some normality and balance to the project and then rashly added in  The Game by  A.S.Byatt which obviously looked very improving at the time,

'Cassandra is an Oxford don, Julia her sister, a best-selling novelist. They share a set of disturbing memories, memories of strange childhood game and of Simon...years later Simon re-enters their lives via a television programme on snakes..'

I might be sagging in all directions but I could only be a better person after reading that surely?
I'd also signed up for an English Literature evening class and the set book was The Secret Self, that anthology of short stories by women and I could see new reading vistas beckoning. Had I been able to stay awake who knows what further benefits may have accrued.
I remember reading The Game and thinking 'well I wonder what that was all about then' followed by a brief but failed encounter with Possession in 1990 and again in 2007 and I felt sure A.S.Byatt and I were never going to be friends.
That's until The Children's Book.
I feel as if I'm wading through delicious reading honey at the moment, I have to keep pinching myself, there's Wolf Hall and The Little Stranger waiting, I've just read The Glass Room, Hearts and Minds and The Taste of Sorrow, all fabulous reads, have we ever had a better year for great books. I'm trying not to think about next year being a bit of a reading anti-climax after these heady days of May 2009.
I'm snail's pacing through The Children's Book, I can't bear to gorge on this, it's a feast to be savoured and will take several weeks of careful deliberate reading but it's quite awesome so far. I can't wait to pick it up and get back to the lives of the Arts & Crafts families living in rural Sussex at the turn of the century and that dragonfly cover is immaculate. I was just bound to love it surrounded as I am by all my dragonfly images here.
Just In case you are wondering, the jug is one of Scotland-based Maureen Minchin's treasures, the picture is by Nicky Dillerstone of Grimsby and the tile is by the matchless Penny Simpson  of Moretonhampstead.
So The Children's Book is creating and surrounding me with something quite extraordinary, above and beyond the average reading experience. It's all such pitch perfect atmosphere and characterization and though I often find the embedded fairytale in fiction quite problematic, purely because I see the italics and groan because I'm warm and comfortable and reluctant to embark on the diversion, yet here we are loving it. A.S.Byatt has me eating out of her hand...oh good, more italics, because the diversions are exquisitely written and I can revel in their essential nature to the whole.
There was no trouble with the bookmark either, in fact I was spoilt for choice but opted for  C.F.A. Voysey's wallpaper design 'Owls'.
As A.S.Byatt says 'words have their own life' and in this instance a profound imagery of their own too, The Children's Book is a book that is making me see as much as read, goodness yes, what a rich and satisfying 'life' this one is proving to be.
Friends for ever now, me and A.S.Byatt and I.

Hearts and Minds by Amanda Craig and prize draw copies (worldwide)

So I pick up a book, open it and read it.
Well not quite because inbetween the picking up and the opening there is an inordinate amount of time spent choosing a bookmark, and I need to know that this isn't just a foible of mine...do you all do this?
I mean how awful it would be to have the wrong bookmark for the book, I'd just not be able to sleep for the incongruence of the thing.
It's all a delicate mess waiting to happen but for my recent read of Amanda Craig's latest novel Hearts and Minds I turned to the Margaret Calkin James selection.
Quite by chance I decided that this one would do nicely, the book was about London after all.
By page two bodies are being deposited on the Heath so I knew I was warm with my bookmark choice and things could proceed.
Hampstead Heath and indeed Kenwood do feature large and as a unique contrast to elsewhere in London,

'Here it is scented with early spring flowers; over in Hackney it's hot chip oil.'

Well proceed things most certainly did and at a rattling pace too, this became my unputdownable book of the moment and I had a few '1.30am and still reading' nights with this one.
The lives of a cross-section of twenty-first century Londoners are shaken out and pegged on the line in full view of the neighbours and in that way that can only make you think as you read, here but for the Boz drawings is the Dickensian novel of our time. If anyone needs to know in a hundred years time what London might have been like in the Noughties they could do no better than read The Room of Lost Things by Stella Duffy and Hearts and Minds by Amanda Craig and they'll have it sorted. Two contrasting perspectives, both exceptional social novels of today, in fact you can just imagine the OU exam question now,

"The London of the early twenty-first century was both sordid and violent yet vibrant and multicultural, how could these disparate and seemingly dissident and conflicting levels of society coexist comfortably in an area of just 659 square miles without recourse to civil war. Discuss with careful analysis of two contemporaneous texts of your choice."

An astutely portrayed cast of characters tell this story and slowly Hearts and Minds becomes a book of both contrasts and similarities because everyone's under pressure and many and varied are the forms of slavery and entrapment; to work, to a lifestyle, to a master, to a mistress, to a past life, to a dream, to money, to poverty, to misguided values and Amanda Craig has rolled out a great big canvas on which to explore them all. That veil between sorrow and misery and happiness and contentment far thinner than ever before in this version of London, 'the city of work not play', the city where for so many it seems like 'nobody knows or cares'.
Polly the immigration lawyer, divorced from the cash-rich, emotion-poor husband, trying to hold down a job and raise two children in the Farrow & Ball painted house with the potted olive tree but on just the wrong side of Islington. For all her principles Polly is one of the many thousands who have to turn a blind eye and rely on illegal immigrants for the support to keep their Smeg fridges filled and their children cared for and it is this sub-strata that is so astutely exposed and examined by Amanda Craig,

'glimpses of all the lives happening in other houses...so many lives all going on, not quite touching, all so different yet...linked by place and time.'

It's true when you live in Devon you don't really pay too much attention to this sort of thing so it was all quite an education to read about the trafficking of the Ukranian girls to work in sexual slavery, fifteen year-old Anna that 'shattered creature' finding herself  imprisoned and put to work at Poshlust.
Job the black school teacher who has fled persecution in Zimbabwe and scrapes a living as a cab driver.
Ian the white school teacher from South Africa where he is no longer able to find work, jobs now designated for the black population and so he finds himself in a London sink comprehensive just inches away from special measures where crowd control is the extent of his working day.
Job invested with the solemn wisdom of his namesake doesn't take long to put his finger on the deep malaise,

'It is what the white man has given them, this great longing, this curiosity and thirst to learn more; but here in the white man's own country, children have lost it.'

and somehow Amanda Craig touches on the reality and the truth of this and you really do want to weep.
Just like you'd weep for portrayals of little boys being abducted by gangs of pickpockets and taken out on thieving trips by rough men with pit bull terriers who then murder their girlfriends and come to a sticky end themselves.
The lives touch and glance off each other, intricate plot threads lead all over the capital, a wonderful one woven around a London magazine called The Rambler, lots of almost-but-not-quite recognisable characters cleverly constructed to entertain and inform, and in essence I think that is what Hearts and Minds achieves in full measure.The whole rapidly becoming a beautifully written and quite mesmerising page-turner.
Contemporaneous detail added hugely to my enjoyment and if only we'd thought to ask Amanda Craig we'd have known all about the credit crunch coming because hints of financial collapse are cleverly and clearly foretold in this book.
As usual you don't have to take my word for it, three copies of Hearts and Minds ready and waiting to go to three lucky winners worldwide and The Artful Dodger will of course do his stuff. I'm also very excited because Amanda Craig will be submitting to the gentle glow of the standard lamp and we'll be forcing a virtual cream tea on her as she settles into the plumped up cushions of the 'dovegreyreader asks...' armchair any day now.

East Fortune by James Runcie

'You should always speak the truth but the truth need not be spoken' has become one of my quotes of the year. It's a little circular mandala of confusion if you consider it too deeply but it occurs at a pivotal point in James Runcie's book and I've not forgotten it.
It was reading a piece by James Runcie on living up to parental expectations that made me lift East Fortune, his latest novel, off the shelf in the first place. That doesn't get a book opened mind you, it took the Amazonian  onslaught of the Orange Prize longlist to make me do that.
I'm sure there are arguments abounding still about differences between male and female writers and I often wonder if given all these books anonymously, would I have been able to tell the gender of the writer? But in any case I like to think I achieve some balance to my reading (even when I don't) and so it was James Runcie's allotted task.
There can't be that many children who have grown up in the See of Canterbury as the offspring of the Archbishop and inevitably it must have offered a slightly out-of-the-ordinary upbringing, but James Runcie makes one very general point,

'You are always a child to your parents...When I go home I don't feel like a novelist who is pushing 50. Instead I feel like a child. Parents do this to you. No matter how old or successful you might like to think you are, your parents still see you as the boy who always ate his ice-cream too fast...'

Reflecting now on East Fortune (and woe is me,some four weeks after I had finished it, blame the Orange) I can see how this thinking is one of the foundations of a book where the three Henderson brothers return to their parents and their childhood home for the annual summer gathering.
No matter that Jack the academic, the quiet, withdrawn brother is now well into middle-age, has split up from his wife, is superfluous to his daughters, and by the fourth page has unfortunately killed a young man who has leapt in front of his car.
Or that Douglas the television producer is busy conducting clandestine meetings with a work colleague involving flights of fancy on the Eurostar to catch his lover in Paris for a lunch meeting,
Or that supposedly happily married and successful Angus is suddenly ejected from his safe job into the unknown territory of unemployment at the age fifty-four.
Walk up the drive to their home at East Fortune and these men become children again as their father Ian busies himself with the family's very own annual amateur Shakespeare production alongside their mother Elizabeth

'checking that the cutlery was properly aligned and that the seating arrangement conformed to the plan she had drawn up that morning.'

All their childhood traits persisting into middle age come to the fore and all roads seem to lead back to the family. Just how such edifices evolve, develop and survive seemed to me the fine balancing point of this great read.

'They had laughed and they had been happy; confident and free to say whatever they wanted. They were protected from the world by family and companionship.'

Don't for one minute think that the Henderson women don't feature because they most certainly do and James Runcie uses this opportunity to bring a number of unusual female characters into this family bastion of tradition and respectability. These are characters that flow off the page and into the imagination with a real economy of words; Victoria Hislop wanted another 200 pages and though I know what she means I'm also very happy with the less is more that I've been given, it all makes this book clever beyond measure
The increasing years, that undefined moment when a 'trip' becomes a 'fall' (yes, when is that exactly? It would be nice to know, asking Google just gets me 'foliage vacations' in Maine) means that at some stage this family is inevitably going to suffer the loss of one of its parents. When that happens there are some wonderful reflections on the past to be explored and futures to be imagined and James Runcie works these into the whole exceptionally well; defying any descent into sentimentality there are some moments of  true poignancy.

'But they had survived, and Elizabeth had loved them throughout their lives. She had even learned not to show that love too strongly; just in case it alarmed them.'

For the Henderson sons that moment when they finally do become the 'older generation'  and the responsibility passes into their hands,

'It was his turn now; his mother had made that clear. He had to hold the family together.'

So I sat down to write about East Fortune with a bit of a heavy, heartsink feeling about me, four plus weeks since I'd read it, what on earth would I make of it so long after the turning of the final page beyond a few lines. In the end so much had settled into my memory it only took a tiny stir of the bottom of the pond for the essence to rise to the surface and flood my mind again, the sign of a very good book I think and perhaps final words to the Hendersons,

'His mother and father seemed always to have known that the truth did not always reveal the most about a life. Perhaps they had recognised that it was not so much their lives as the stories they made of them that mattered.'

dgr asks...Helen Garner - The Spare Room and prize draw copies ( UK only)

I am really delighted to welcome Helen Garner to the 'dovegreyreader asks...' armchair and the gentle light of the standard lamp to answer our usual three questions about her book The Spare Room which I enjoyed so much last year and published in paperback this week by Canongate. We've done another plump up of the cushions and the virtual Devon cream tea is to hand and so now over to Helen.

Helen, you once suggested an image for writing that sits very comfortably with us here at dovegreyreader,

"like trying to make a patchwork quilt look seamless. A novel is made up scraps of our own lives and bits of other people's, and things we think of in the middle of the night and whole notebooks full of randomly collected details."

and I wonder if you could talk about this in relation to the writing of The Spare Room. Where did you find the fabrics and how did you piece together this wonderful book?

A friend whom I dearly loved did come to stay with me while she underwent alternative treatments for terminal cancer. I do live next door to my daughter and her family. The real-life clinic to which my friend entrusted her body did turn out to be an outfit of the most bare-faced shonkiness. The treatments were useless. She refused to acknowledge this and I tried to force her to. The deepest parts of our characters clashed. Our friendship began to crack under the strain. I couldn’t last the distance. My friend died.
So the fabrics of the story come from actual experience. I didn’t know what sort of quilt I was going to be able to stitch together, but I knew that if I didn’t make something out of it, I was going to go crazy.
My first few books, in the 1970s and 80s, had been novels or short stories. But then for twelve years or so I was married to another novelist. Gradually, and unconsciously, I shifted off our dangerous common turf into non-fiction. I enjoyed this. It seemed to suit me, and I had some success at it.
 I thought I could write The Spare Room as straight memoir, giving everyone their own real-life names and sticking to the dates and the literal development of events. But as soon as I sat down to start, it became disobedient. It had a life of its own, and it went bounding away from me.
The quilt metaphor has got left behind!
The shackles of non-fiction, which had been clamped round my ankles for fifteen years, fell off with a clang. I saw that if I thought of it as a novel, I would be free to compress the story, and trim away what was inessential. I would be able to create scenes about religion and psychology and their comfort, or their failure to comfort. I could bring to it any amount of material that had been haunting me in other contexts for years. In short, I could tell this story any way I damn well liked.
I gave the narrator my own first name for one major reason: my fantasy of myself as a decent person took a terrible battering while I was trying to care for my friend, and I’ve tried hard not to sentimentalise this, or to go easy on myself. I wanted to own up to the unattractive effects of caring for a dying person, the unheroic resentments, the impatience and anger, the bossiness and the bullying. I hope that in reality I’m slightly nicer than the Helen in the book. She’s a monster of anger at times. There’s a lot of the Head Prefect in Helen. Awful. The real Nicola would laugh about her, I know -- she was such a funny woman. Before our friendship turned into a power struggle, we were always staggering about in fits of laughter. I wanted to get that side of us into the story, and I think I did. The worst thing about someone you love dying is that once they’re gone, the language of laughter you created together is now spoken by only one person in the world -- you.
It took me about nine months, that wonderfully symbolic number, to write the book. Strangely I remember it as a calm and very happy time, though I spent a fair bit of it lying on the carpet in my workroom bawling till my nose went red. But now I don’t only miss the real Nicola. I miss the Nicola in the book as well. I’ve lost both of them. Even that sad thought makes me laugh, when I’m not crying over it. It reminds me of how I felt watching that movie Tootsie, where Dustin Hoffman plays a man disguised as a woman. When the trick is discovered and Tootsie no longer exists, I remember how empty I felt, even though it was only a story. As if anything is ever ‘only a story’!

We are hopelessly inquisitive here and we love to know all the details about your writing day, must the dog be walked and the taps polished before you can sit down, pen (fountain or biro ) or computer, special desk, special room, special place?

I never understand how anyone can work at home. There are so many worthy displacement activities available. You put on a load of washing, which means that in half an hour you have to get up from the desk to hang it on the line. On the way along the hall you see dust and can’t go back to work till you’ve run the vacuum cleaner over the carpet. And there’s that packet of biscuits that will go stale if you don’t finish them today, etc. So I rent an office in an old building two suburbs away. I can pedal over there in about 20 minutes, or take the tram if I’m lazy. I try to get here by 10am. It’s a small, quite shabby room without a view. Table, chair, lamp, bookshelf, sky-blue filing cabinet. Computer, printer. No phone, no internet. Mat, pillow, cotton blanket for a nap after lunch. Jug to make me drink more water. A lot of pencils. A mechanical sharpener. Dictionary. Thesaurus. Scissors. Hand cream. No one else has ever come here and I hope no one ever will. Sometimes I go for months without working, and of course even when I don’t use the space I have to keep forking out the rent; but just thinking that the office exists makes the rest of my life possible.

Finally, who must we read, your favourite authors and books, those greatest influences.

I’m not sure why I can never pull together a convincing answer to this question. But here’s what comes to mind right now:

Everything by Janet Malcolm. But particularly The Journalist and the Murderer,
Everything by Gitta Sereny.
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
Raymond Carver: Collected Stories
Henry Handel Richardson: The Getting of Wisdom
Marion Milner (aka Joanna Field): An Experiment in Leisure
William Thackeray: The Rose and the Ring
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
Elizabeth Jolley: My Father’s Moon

My sincere and grateful thanks to Helen for such a fascinating dovegreyreader asks... and names in comments because there are three prize draw copies of the new paperback edition of The Spare Room ready and waiting for three lucky winners (apologies, UK only)

 

Brontemania

'The first requirement for myth status is a story that is so compelling in its original form that it is endlessly reinterpreted according to the tastes and concerns of each contemporary society and the literary genre which captures them.'

Wise words from Patricia Ingham in her book The Brontes for the Oxford World's Classics - Authors in Context series and I've read most of it recently and browsed a pile of other Bronte books, all to help me cope with that bereft feeling as I turned the final page of Jude Morgan's forthcoming book The Taste of Sorrow. My thoughts on that very soon when I've recovered and can speak slightly less hysterically of its manifold virtues.
While I'm on the subject of Jude Morgan I've just made a start on his previous novel, Passion. What a truly astonishing writer he is and who knows what reading trails that book will open up, but meanwhile I've now got a really bad bout of Brontemania to contend with. I know for a fact that I can buy into the Bronte myth with great ease, can't we all  and if you can't you might just want to skip this.
The whole Haworth - Parsonage - windswept moorland - lonely sisters - drunken brother scenario never ceases to draw me in, though I've stopped short of joining The Bronte Society, but it's been a close run thing during previous exacerbations.
We've been on the pilgrimage too, 2005 to be exact.
there's me outside patiently waiting my turn.
This was a hot July day almost everywhere else  in the country except Haworth, where the wind whistled and we froze but so easy to feel the myth every which way you turned.

But thankfully there is so much more to explore than the homage to Haworth and the myth and whenever it happens I don't want to waste an ounce of the energy that Brontemania creates, so with a fair chunk of Sally Shuttleworth's excellent Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology under my belt and Lisa Appignanesi's Mad, Bad and Sad to hand as well, I'm reading The Professor and will hopefully calm down a bit.
Talking of epidemics which the world seems to be right now, it's been fascinating to explore the issues of mental illness and cultural pressures that prevailed back in the nineteenth century when, though it might not have been Swinfluenza, a fear of insanity was equally at epidemic proportions, as Sally Shuttleworth comments,

"...where no physical symptoms might arise to give lie to professional judgement, and fear of the disease might itself be the source of infection.'

and with it the underlying message that self-control was the only available preventative measure. Beyond that the only people who could monitor the progress of insanity were the physicians with their apparent ability to somehow 'gaze into the recesses of the soul' and diagnose, and alongside that came their powers of forcible commital to an insane asylum if required.
I've barely scratched the surface of all this with some embryonic thinking, and my coverage here is simplistic at best, but thanks to Sally Shuttleworth I'm interested now to see how Charlotte Bronte writes this power of the penetrating gaze into her fiction. How the secrets of one lie in the hands of another,

'To enter into the hidden secrets of another is to rob them of control : knowledge becomes absolute power.'

and in Sally Shuttleworth's words how those secrets then display

'...the glittering eye of insanity'.

Of course when you've been on the Haworth pilgrimage trail there's only one place to go next, just a few miles down one hill and up another.
But that's another reading trail entirely and this one's enough for now.

 

The Blessed Hours of Anaesthesia.

"Do you read much?" the nurse had asked me at my pre-op check a few weeks ago.
"The thing is we need you here by 7am, starved since midnight but we might not 'do you' until 4pm, a book might help pass the time."
Nine ravenous hours of waiting and thinking about it all, this would all need to be mind over matter, calm and careful military planning, in fact a schedule, that's what I needed.

7am - 8am : Settle in and knit, watch everyone else in day surgery waiting area (like an airport lounge minus Borders & Starbucks) and try and decide what they are having done, while they do the same to me.

8am - 9am : Read some of Book One.

9am - 10am : Knit some more of the new and therefore exciting Noro socks with iPod playing soothing Joni-wish-I-had-a-river-I-could-skate-away-on-Mitchell.

10am - 11am : Read some of Book Two.

11am -12 md : More sock knitting more Joni-I-could-drink-a-case-of-you-Mitchell

12md - 1pm : More of Book One etc

So I had a bag packed to the gunwales and nine hours of pre-operative play scheme organised, all to take my mind off the matter in hand as we joined the worryingly long queue of ready-starved, nervous-looking day cases waiting for the ward to open.
My heart sank, it was indeed going to be a long day but undaunted I settled into a chair and embarked immediately on Hour One. I was really looking forward to Hour Two as well because I'd made a good start with Book One The Children's Book by A.S.Byatt.
All jettisoned into oblivion when my name was called at 7.10am to be told I was first on the list.
"First on the list ????
But hold on, I've got nine hours of activities planned here...books, knitting..."
To no avail, fetching flight garment donned, passport checked, ticket checked, luggage checked in and spirited off to the ward where I'd land...did you pack this yourself...any liquids...sharp objects (uergh knitting needles). Then a quick chat with the pilot and the engineer about the flight path, previous flying experiences, possible turbulence and adverse conditions, birds in the engines, diversions, hidden metalwork, hazards on landing that sort of thing and before you could say "Z victor one to control tower, do you receive me" there I was taxied out to the runway outside Theatre 14 by a very nice nurse called Gladys and waiting to take off.
I'd just watched the news and heard that Swinfluenza had hit Devon so glancing at a stack of theatre supplies I couldn't help noticing 'Made in Mexico' stamped across the boxes.
I spent a happy few distracted minutes wondering how long viral droplet infection could survive on an intermediate host and realised this knowledge was by now too far down to retrieve.
Next thing the anaesthetist was telling me a terrible joke...
'Why did the banana go to the doctor's?"
"Erm, well I'm not really sure"
"Because it wasn't peeling too well!"
This completely took my mind off any thoughts of asking whether he'd been sure to check the tubing was on the machine the right way round or was the surgeon in there washing his hands thoroughly, and to be honest I think they took one look and thought let's get this one under quick before she starts.
And that was that, those blessed hours of anaesthesia.
Two hours later I'm waking up and tentatively searching for the damage...four keyholes?
Well I suppose one each for the knife and fork, the periscope's got to go in somewhere and then there has to be an exit strategy.
Oddly (though possibly not, given what's been pumped into the veins) I then felt surprisingly high, mostly at the thought of no more of that miserable fat-free diet I feel as if I've been on forever.
"Could you pass me that A.S.Byatt book please?"
Well it seemed worth a try. Over-ambitious it has to be said, but I did manage quite a bit of Book Two Lesley Blanche's Journey Into the Mind's Eye before the euphoria wore off and everything else set in.
No slacking with day surgery.
First signs of life and you're dressed and in the chair and just to make sure you're on-message, the bed's stripped in case you're tempted to get back in. Then you have about four hours to wait while they make sure you're not haemorrhaging for England or anything and in which to eat a biscuit if you truly want to get out. This procedure notorious for the post-op nausea, so whilst the broken noses and limb-settings were woofing down cheese and pickle sandwiches within ten minutes and going home, it did indeed take me four hours to force feed one digestive biscuit, crumb by wretched crumb.
Filled to the rafters with enough drugs to Lucy me up with the diamonds I even walked to the car and having fallen into bed and slept and read and slept it all off for a couple of days here I am, sore but good to go albeit very slowly for a couple of weeks.
I also think siestas should make a comeback here in the UK, mine will.
Bless Derriford Hospital, they often get a terrible press locally but I couldn't fault them; excellent nursing, meticulous infection-control procedures, sent me home with enough substantial pain relief to flatten the town which, thanks I think to an excellent surgeon, I haven't needed beyond the usual.
Bless Nurse Bookhound too who has been running the Convalescent Unit with a very assertive Hattie-Jacques-like manner. His aseptic technique may be ready for assessment within the week, just a little quibble about sorting his patient before he attends to the ferrets in future.
And bless all of you for your lovely kind messages and e mails all so very much appreciated.
There might be the odd interlude but I think we're back on dovegreyreader schedule here tomorrow.

Intermission 3

The espaliered Cox's Orange Pippin, planted twelve years ago in memory of my mum now gives us a wonderful display of blossom and will crop profusely in the Autumn, all the other apple trees are doing likewise.

Intermission 2

How can something that is such a nuisance look quite so stunning? This little colony have spent the winter clustered around the roots of the wisteria which, thanks to a normal cold winter and no deep late frosts to kill the buds, is flowering on time and normally. Usually it has to start over twice and never quite manages to flower as it should.