dovegreyreader scribbles

One Fine Day by Mollie P-D...

Poor Mollie and how I'd staved off making any comment about that name until the giggles broke out in the back of the class (thanks Rhys) in comments last week and that was it, we were all done for and with huge apologies to Mollie P-D but it did seem best to clear the air before heading into her tour de force, One Fine Day. I'd love to hear your thoughts in comments too if anyone else has read along.
My second hand copy incidentally revealed something I have never seen before, at some time in its previous life it had fallen prey to a real bookworm which had eaten through almost from cover to cover.
Through the year I have been adding to a growing stack of reading in readiness for this year's Remembrance Reading through November. Last year the Great War, which flagged up a lesser known but wonderful discovery for me and many of you too I think, A Dance for the Moon by Richard Burns  and my thanks to Mike Petty for that suggestion. This year World War II will take centre stage and as the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of that war approaches I had been turning my thoughts to that day, September 3rd 1939.
A steady stream of books have been arriving and no final reading choices made yet, but One Fine Day has been a perfect companion read to The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters and with its setting in that immediate post-war era, offered a clear focus, gently dissecting and examining and all contemporaneously too. First published in 1947, so hardly time for the weeds to colonise the bomb sites, let alone time for a writer to digest and analyze as perfectly as Mollie P-D does, quite what the six years of conflict had meant for life in rural England. One Fine Day has been a wonderful beginning to this reading journey and a fascinating biography of  Mollie P-D's father here offers further interesting insights into quite where her melancholy sensitivities to the hostilities of war may have originated.
Mollie P-D's regular wartime columns for the New Yorker perhaps honed her observations even more keenly, making those subtle and less subtle shifts more readily identifiable as she creates the archetypal middle class Heriot family, parents Stephen and Laura and daughter Victoria.
I wondered about the symbolism of that surname and wasn't disappointed when I discovered the meaning,

'a customary tribute of goods or chattels to the lord of the fee, paid on the decease of a tenant.'

Enough significance there as the book gently elaborates what has been sacrificed, the price that has been paid, that demise of the old way of life.
Everyone is given ample opportunity to express their dismay and uncertainty within this strange new world . Apart, the family all have a deep appreciation of each other, together life seems fraught with daily annoyances and tensions as they all come to terms with change and a life without the help they've been used to. That 'help' in the shape of the working classes has worries, anxieties and solutions of its own and Mollie P-D works hard to reveal those insecurities of class, albeit from the gradually descending but still lofty perspective of  those supposedly higher up the echelons.
National security and freedom may have been the initial outcome of the victory, but insecurity and entrapment are writ large across this new and uncertain world that pervades, as the struggles are revealed.
The Cranmers, the family in the big house are selling out and moving into lesser quarters, the Heriots will hang on but it will be tough and it will be different, Stephen at one point even has to contemplate the heinous task of washing-up, anathema to his pre-war self. Meanwhile, hints that Laura had in some ways covertly relished the war for the company, the respite from the 'common round, the horribly trivial task' and the camaraderie.
'Men must fight, women must sew,' might have been the early motto but in rapid order 'women had fought too. They had flown aeroplanes, they had been bombed on gun sites, they had struggled in the dreadful equality of icy water among drowning men.'
The plot is deceptively slight, this is just one fine day, but a book about so much more than I suspect one read or a few shared thoughts like this can possibly do justice to, as everyone has to re-envision the world that they knew. Laura's spontaneous afternoon walk up to Barrow Down in the midst of a sultry, sweltering post-war summer rates amongst the best descriptive writing of its kind. Hear the bees, sense and smell those milky flowers, feel that stillness; tranquillity in stark contrast to what has gone before as Laura recalls a wartime picnic and the almost commonplace sight

'...before anyone had bitten into the birthday icing the sky was cluttered with machine-gun fire, high, seemingly harmless, until down came the planes, turning, groaning, bellowing in their agony, as the black smoke puffed out...The noise died away...They gathered up the sandwich papers and brushed away crumbs. What a nice birthday, said Mark.'

As Laura surveys the land set out before her, how subtly and cleverly Mollie P-D returns her women to their feminised pre-wartime role with her descriptions,

'The country was tumbled out before her like the contents of a lady's workbox, spools of green and silver and pale yellow, ribbed squares of crimson, a stab of silver, a round, polished gleam of mother of pearl.'

Except we and Laura know, things cannot and will not ever be the same again,

'It was all bathed in magic light, the wonderful transforming light in which known things look suddenly new.'

For Laura the future is daunting, she will become one of those 'slaves of the turned-back fresh linen', there will be no maid to do this in future, there will be little time for leisurely walks up Barrow Down.
Stephen likewise has to reimagine his world and as Laura sleeps up on Barrow Down in the heat of the afternoon it dawns on him too

'And now the strings had been dropped, they all lay helpless as abandoned marionettes with nobody to twitch them.'

Whilst Victoria steps willingly and unassumingly into the new feminine role somehow now assigned, but borne of that women's wartime spirit too, as she cooks an ad hoc dinner in Laura's absence setting it on the table for her father,

'She had the flushed and triumphant air all women wear when meeting the sudden emergency, as though drawing from it a mysterious source of pleasure'

Happily it's not perfect and in this new and imperfect world less will have to suffice

'You won't have potatoes ' she said ' I'm afraid there wasn't time.'

Another decade or so and perhaps Stephen will be cooking it himself which suggests I move on a few years with my next Middlebrow-of-the-Month.
Several years ago I wrote a piece about Elizabeth Taylor for newbooks magazine and in the course of researching that I discovered Slipstream, the biography of Elizabeth Jane Howard who cites her favourite book by Elizabeth Taylor and I've been meaning to pick it up ever since, so with a fair wind and sail I'll be back on September 30th with my thoughts on In a Summer Season and you'd be very welcome to join me if you fancy a read of that too.
 

Fibrefest 2009

The possible upshot of knitting up a flat-pack desk is a dodgy back and bending down to tie a shoelace was the final straw that pinged it etc, so my excursion to FibreFest was sadly curtailed by the fact that I really needed to lie on the ground and do my curl-ups and then flip onto my front and do my cobra extensions and really this wouldn't have looked right at all.
The event located at Coldharbour Mill at Uffculme in Devon, a spinning mill fed by a little Mill on the Floss-like stream and powered by a huge water wheel and, if I'd been up to a tour, I think a fascinating place.
Everywhere was heaving with knitting fanatics and the marketplace was an endless ocean of colour, with that soft damp tang of wool and the background hum of much oohhing and aahhhing and I could have happily lost myself in there for several hours emerging wool-rich and cash-deprived, but it was not to be.
I managed one complete circuit but realised, when someone bumped into me, that things on the back front were worse than I had feared and those little muscles that on a normal day you don't even know you have were seizing up rapidly. Without barging and bending capabilities I was not going to get near a skein of wool either and with a ninety minute drive home to consider I decided to cut my losses, trudge carefully back to the Fiesta, lodged in a very distant and largely uphill and very tussocky field and make a graceful retreat.
All the way home I dreamed of a bag of frozen peas and, bent double out of the car and hobbling in the door and to the freezer, was very disappointed to find someone had eaten them and I was going to have make do with a pack of sausages instead.
No worries, I wedged them (wrapped) onto the lumbar spine and they were nicely defrosted in time for tea.
By this time my top half was two inches NNW of my lower half and when I tried to walk forwards it took some time for the rest of me to catch up which caused the usual amount of hilarity here but grateful thanks to the Kayaker for the loan of his back support.
Let's say I looked a bit unusual for a while, but was miraculously almost pain free, correctly aligned  and upright by Monday thanks to those sausages....pork and apple, which proved  considerably cheaper than several painful sessions at the osteopath which I had envisaged.
But I did get a look around, the sheep were lovely and in the end it's probably a good thing I had back issues because heaven knows what I might have brought home.
These are those sort of poodle-like sheep that look as if they've been knitted up once already
Frogged and ready to go and would look gorgeous in the garden, just nibbling away at the grass and you feel like you could almost nip out and drop a spindle off them whenever you felt like it.
The Alpaca was very chatty too, we conversed.

The Desk

Last week started in a very energetic fashion for Devon as Offspringette and I headed out to help furnish her with teacher training equipment, i.e. a desk, chair, printer, clothes suitable for looking like you're in control of the classroom hordes as opposed to being one of them etc.
I was providing the wheels so we scoured Plymouth City boundaries and beyond thoroughly, and I really do mean completely and utterly, to find a desk that would suit (corner fitting, curved at front, nice-ish looking but within budget) so we actually never got as far as clothes.
Don't flat pack things look lovely when they are all made up in the shop?
Bookhound insists that the word Ikea is a Swedish suicide cry and a danger to health; presenting him with a flat-pack 'anything' does nothing for the entente cordiale around here, it's best to flee at dawn and return after sunset.
Anyway, we saw the desk and knew it was perfect; pine, curved to fit a corner, nice drawer pack, would fit the space perfectly, Offspringette can look out of her window and glimpse Plymouth Hoe and the sea beyond and write teacher-ly essays and even better the shop agreed it wouldn't fit in the Fiesta so they would deliver it within the hour.
We picked up a flat-pack chair from somewhere else and decided we'd be fine with the construction, what's all this fuss about a few bits of wood.
We dashed back to the house and decided to cast on and knit up the computer chair as a preliminary to the big one.
Emptied all the bits out...no screws.
Not even a sniff of one, nada.
Typical Britain we thought, here we go.
Phoned the shop and quite honestly I think it's rather a daft idea to sell chairs with the screws already screwed into the relevant holes so you've got to go through all the bother of looking stupid on the phone and then having to unscrew them all to screw them back up again.
Well, I suppose it gave them a laugh until closing time, but the chair then went together in a jiffy and we were on a roll.
True to their word the desk arrived and we emptied out the bits in systematic fashion...many hundreds of them because drawers have runners and then there were these wooden peg things and complicated invisible screw fixings. Then of course 'corner' means things at right angles and left angles, like shelves underneath for printers and well, how many fixings do you think it takes to assemble a corner desk?
Let me tell you it's easily into three figures.
But the instructions had helpfully numbered every part so of course this was going to be Build-a-Desk-by-Numbers, just follow the pattern. We'd just find the numbered pieces and knit it all together, except the pieces aren't numbered at all, that would be far too stupidly helpful.
The diagrammatic calculation in pictures on the box declared 1 person + 1 screwdriver + 2 hours = 1 desk.
This was going to be a walk in the park ... 2 people + 2 screwdrivers + I hour =  1 desk
Well...er not quite..2 people + 2 screwdrivers + half a pine forest + hundreds of screws + a little bit of bad language + several cups of tea + several re-makes + 3 hours = 1 desk + 3 drawers still waiting to be made.
Getting dark and time for mother to call it a day and head home.
This grainy picture has come over the mobile as proof, the drawers it would seem are now done, just look what we made!

Bringing in the sheaves...

...well not yet, but soon we hope because last year was a complete disaster for the harvest around here.
Rain, more rain and then some extra rain meant the wheat (or might it be barley) lay ruined in the fields long after the next crop should have been planted.
How uplifting it has been through a damp, dreary August to read of those hot, shimmering summer days in One Fine Day

'...it had seemed there was not a breath of air, the heavy trees were billowing feather-beds in which even the birds were languidly silent.'
Fingers crossed for this year's harvest, things were looking fine but it's all gone a bit pear-shaped this last week. Machinery out in the fields grass-cutting long into the night to try and beat the dregs of the hurricane that had been forecast ( correctly) and Bookhound's had a digger to play with for the week too so rain was inevitable...every day...torrential
The digger has been ostensibly brought in to sort out something called a soak-away which is an intrinsic part of something else called a Klargester, which does us instead of mains drainage and to put it bluntly the soak-away was not doing what it said on the tin, bit of 'backing up' going on and I won't explain any further.
We worked out it may all have been installed thirty years ago so no wonder it was a bit clogged, but the quote of £2,800 to reconnoitre and repair seemed a bit steep when we could sit Bookhound on one of his most favourite toys 24/7 for £150.
Lo, seven foot down there were the broken pipes and behold we now seem to have a soak-away that is soaking away.
But while there's a digger here why not re-landscape the garden?
Like we did the last time we had a digger in?
And the time before that?
Move that bank away from the damp end of the house?
Flatten that bit and raise that bit up?
Because last time we raised that bit and flattened that bit and it hasn't really worked
Make a nice seating area round the back of the summerhouse to enjoy that lovely view?
So now we have the Somme going on outside but as we always say, it'll be lovely when it's done and the neighbours have shown a keen interest as usual.
Meanwhile we can but hope the harvest will be safely gathered in because I have friends who are married to farmers and they tell me there's nothing more dismal than a depressed farmer trying to dry out his wheat... Well no more dismal perhaps than a very muddy man sitting on a digger in the pouring rain and the unwelcome discovery that the main pipe bringing water from the bore hole to the house didn't seem to be where Bookhound thought he'd left it underground fifteen years ago and it burst forth its contents to prove it. We sort of laughed a bit...but not much because we hadn't even filled the kettle, but no worries 'twas soon mended.
Oh yes, and another thing, did I mention I was watching the blackberry crop along the lane all ripening nicely, fruit plumping up ready to pick?
Well, the hedge trimmer came along all day yesterday and mashed them all to a pulp.
Ah yes, let us remember anew Lucy Yates's wise words in The Country Housewife's Book

'Country life makes many claims on the industry and the attention of those who live it; hardly a day, may pass but what has its trials. It makes its own peculiar demands on those who would find out its resources, and it provides work for every hour for the industrious...'

Happy Bank Holiday weekend everyone, I'll be knitting and reading how about you?

Middlebrow

It was good to meet up with Nicola Beauman on my recent Port Eliot adventure and we had a wonderful chat about Elizabeth Taylor, the trials and tribulations of biography, forthcoming Persephone Books (I am very excited about the short stories of Irene Nemirovsky next year) why the rain in Cornwall can be so particularly wet and has to have howling gales mixed in and the whole cluttered, loaded and (to me), wildly misrepresented term that is 'middlebrow'.
Not perhaps a good word to describe what emerges as such powerful fiction by women writers and we agreed that I had taken my lead from several people. Virginia Woolf who seems to have started it all, Nicola Humble who picked it up and ran with it in her excellent book The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s to 1950s - Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism and finally a book I bought a while ago America the Middlebrow - Women's Novels, Progressivism and Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars by Jaime Harker.
This latter was expensive as I recall but does offer an in-depth look at Dorothy Canfield Fisher who I was chasing at the time. I was hoping it might be possible to crack into American equivalents and make some good comparisons with the English novels...that'll be in my next life given the number of reading projects I seem to have stacking up in my mind and on every available surface at the moment.
I keep thinking of a trail and then I slowly start knitting up a pile of books that fit the theme and I add more and more as I come across them.
There's the Mary Shelley trail
There's the Madness Trail
The French Revolution Trail
The Africa Trail
The New Zealand Trail (the Kayaker heads off there for a year working and traveling as soon as he's back from paddling the White Nile...sorry NZ it's your turn)
The Team Ulysses Trail
The Jean Rhys Trail
But back to  Middlebrow-a-Month and the thorny issue of definition.
Jaime Harker defines it as

'an invective that dismissed writing that is neither trash nor art, but somewhere uncomfortably inbetween. Depending on the context, middlebrow can arguably mean middle class, effeminate, polluted by commerce, mediocre or sentimental and the term emerged to describe book clubs and their readers, particularly the Book of the Month Club feared by critics to be a 'devolution of the book industry into conveyor belt culture'.

Readers had become sufficiently passive as to allow a group of experts to decide their reading for them, instead of relying on their individual taste, literature would be corrupted and become another commodity. Middlebrow, Harker goes on to argue, became a pejorative term which transformed a demographic - middle class - into a quality - a blend of mediocrity, greed and sentimentality.
The term effectively became an insult.
Shall we all just pack up and go home?
But I wonder if we are slowly turning round the good old stout and sturdy ship that is Middlebrow and gradually refashioning the term into something renewed, reinvigorated and less derogatory?
Is that possible?
It's been interesting to ponder all this as I've read and loved One Fine Day by Mollie Panter Downes as my August Middlebrow-a-Month, a treat to fall back on in amongst all the Bookerthon reading and as much of a challenge as anything else I've read of late, thoughts on that next Monday as promised.

The Great Western Beach by Emma Smith

Another book I am very late getting to, but possibly that's because I have made Emma Smith's The Great Western Beach - A Memoir of a Cornish Childhood Between the Wars last for many months.
Emma Smith (Elspeth Hallsmith) a writer I first met via her novel The Far Cry and now that I've read this memoir there is much to revisit in that book and perhaps see with fresh eyes. I clearly remember young Teresa  whisked on board ship to India by a distant father she barely knows, all to avoid the clutches of her mother and now I suspect Emma Smith's portrayal of Teresa may reflect some of those childhood anxieties recounted in The Great Western Beach.
Born in Newquay in 1923, Elspeth is the third child of Guthrie and Janet Hallsmith, whose lives must already have been tested to the limits with the arrival of twins, Pam and Jim. Guthrie is a distinguished and decorated Great War veteran whose status has slipped considerably with his return to civilian life and a lowly banking job. This dent to his pride and the emotional damage of the war (my assumption because this is never clearly stated and he may have been obnoxious even without a war) leave wife Janet with little choice but to do her absolute placatory best to keep the peace and to keep Guth's unpredictable mood swings under control. Largely this is all to no avail and it is in this world of fear and anxiety, a life ruled by a bad-tempered man with a slick line in emotional and physical abuse, that the family try and live as normal a life as possible. Dictates of social class prevail, the family have a loyal housemaid Lucy, and there is much to mystify young Elspeth as she grows up along with the ultimate fear of the strap.
It is the strap, and the fact that is regularly used on her siblings but not on her, that keeps young Elspeth in a permanent state of anxiety as she tries constantly to be good and to endear herself to her father at all times. The eventual discovery that she has only ever pretended to love him came as no surprise as I read and makes the choice of a father-daughter relationship in her novel The Far Cry an interesting one. I shall  reread and be searching, though probably misguidedly, for an author subliminally re-imagining a different sort of childhood for herself.

'The policy I adopted thereafter of unquestioning obedience has enabled me to evade the punishment I live still, perpetually in fear of evoking. For I have seen and heard what can happen - what does happen sometimes to the Twins.'

Whilst Pam emerges defiant and fiesty from the encounter, poor Jim is cowed and timorous and I can only begin to imagine what baggage the Hallsmith children may have carried into adulthood as a result of this fear.
But thankfully there is a shining beacon of joy in the life of the Hallsmith family; their location and the idyllic days spent picnicking and playing on the Great Western Beach, swimming in the sea and generally, but for their overbearing father, this would have been a truly perfect childhood.
Newquay, a Cornish town now sadly in the headlines daily down here for its rather family-unfriendly nightlife and vast quantities of alcohol-induced mayhem, but 'twas not ever thus; we regularly holidayed there in the 1960s and there was no mayhem that I can recall.
Life in 1920's Newquay was ordered,calm and pleasurable. There were social events, visiting and the tennis club to be enjoyed, dance classes and daily lessons with a local teacher, friendships to be forged amongst the children, a life by the sea to be enjoyed. Despite the fact that Guthrie forbade the girls to have dolls or books, refused to allow them to believe in Father Christmas and generally prided himself on bursting every bubble of happiness that may appear, young Elspeth takes it all in her stride and stores up much in her imagination and her memory, finding pleasure and mystery in equal measure in her day to day life.

'Nevertheless, I intend, if possible, to stay clear of all this unhappiness at home, my mother's weeping and my father's black moods. I don't want to be sad myself. I want to be happy; and today I am. Today, therefore, is a day I mean to remember, to hang on to as tightly as I'm hanging on to Robert's arm, so that it will last, and the memory be like an illustration, a picture in a book, of what happiness feels like, of what it is.'

I want to say all good things must come to an end, except there is much that is not good in Elspeth's young life, but the Great Western Beach has provided security and comfort through very difficult times and to a child who knows no different this will all feel normal, yet it is with a heavy heart that a twelve-year old Elspeth must leave the place of her childhood. Guth's promotion in the Bank takes them off to live in an unnamed village on the edge of Dartmoor, some ten miles from Plymouth (where I wonder, though I'm not sure ever a Cathedral city as cited in the book, unless the Blitz flattened something I don't know about.)

'I am collecting a place, attempting by concentration of memory, to capture somewhere I love - Porth - and so to preserve it inside my head forever.'

And how remarkably Emma Smith has done that, retrieving those memories over seventy years later as if yesterday. It has to be a huge achievement to write a child's voice memoir like this, without investing it with the wisdom and hindsight of adulthood. Even better not a hint of sliding down that slippery slope into Misery Memoir , which incidentally I see Waterstone's has now rechristened Painful Lives.
Emma Smith has written the most remarkable book indeed and how sorry I was to eventually turn that final page and when I read the Afterword, well I felt so attached to Family Hallsmith I could have wept for them...

'O my parents, my poor tragic parents - my good and beautiful, brave, dramatic, unperceptive mother; my disappointed, embittered, angry, lonely, talented father...'

People arriving...

I seem to have a growing number of literary people arriving in the post at the moment.
Enticing biographies that feed nicely into that endless fascination about people's lives, often lives I know little or nothing about but I can see vast new reading trails opening alongside these as I browse, so I thought I'd share a few and see if you have any reading suggestions to go with them.

Why This World A Biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser, published by Haus.
I have managed to find and read just one book by Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star, the author who ' looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf ', which, though making no assumptions or judgments, is probably the right way round to be. One of the most popular but least understood of modern Latin American writers, according to the press release and little understood here by me because the books are almost impossible to lay hands on.
Clarice Lispector born in 1920 in post-World War 1 Ukraine and
'driven to Brazil by the pogroms that killed her mother and ruined her father. Despite this, she triumphed over her origins to become, virtually from adolescence. a person whose beauty, genius and eccentricity intrigued all of Brazil's writers and artists.'
What as piqued my interest further is reading Clarice described as the true heir to Kafka.
Now Kafka is one of those writers who strangely terrifies me.
Is he another who has been swept into the upper reading echelons in my sub-conscious and really not for me to meddle with because I wouldn't understand a word?
Except that a lovely set of the new Oxford World's Classics editions of The Castle, Metamorphosis and The Trial arrived a while back and I had marked Kafka up for a foray, just to see if I could cope.
Any thoughts on Kafka reading out there?
Shall I?

Knut Hamsun Dreamer and Dissenter by Ingar Sletten Kolloen published by Yale University Press in late September.
However long have I been meaning to read Knut Hamsun and never quite got there so perhaps now's the moment.
The 150th anniversary of his birth in Jotunheimen in deepest Norway and obviously there are going to be both highs and lows in this book, the Nobel Prize in 1920 and blatant collaboration with the fascists during the German occupation of Norway and a refusal to renounce Nazi sympathies make controversy inevitable. Kolloen traces the roots of those sympathies back to Hamsun's earliest days as he attempts to shine some light on this 'irrational, eccentric, strange and compelling - a man uncomfortable in his own time.'
I also think it might be interesting to read the life before the novels for once, an opportunity to approach a writer's life with no preconceptions.
I shall seek out more of Knut Hamsun's writing but where to start, any suggestions?

The Last Englishman The Double Life of Arthur Ransome by Roland Chambers, published by Faber
Good, someone I do know of, but still not a great deal about and admittedly more Swallows and Amazons than the love affair with Leon Trotsky's private secretary or his life as a controversial English journalist. Apparently Ransome escaped accusations of treason by the merest squeak for his ardent defence of Bolshevism.
'Ransome's triumph was to erase the entire episode from the public consciousness, just as he erased all uncomfortable episodes, including his relationship with his only daughter.'
This makes me think I should elevate Swallows and Amazons into Inner Child reading before I tackle this biography, I may never look on it in the same light again.

This all set me thinking about more people I'd really like to see thudding through the letterbox one day, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Penelope Fitzgerald, I have no idea whether someone somewhere could be writing them but I do hope so.

Not Untrue and Not Unkind by Ed O'Loughlin

Some novels throw into sharp relief just how much you don't know and obviously fiction is not a completely reliable source for upgrading or verifying those things unknown.
I might have been none the wiser as I opened Not Untrue and Not Unkind by Ed O'Loughlin for the second time of asking had I not recently embarked on a reading of  two books on contemporary Africa in order to be stealing a march on next month's Endsleigh Salon bookish theme.
But I was also reading Africa because the Kayaker returns to Uganda in a few week's time to paddle the White Nile again and there's nothing like someones else's preparations for visiting these places to arouse that interest from the relative safety of the armchair, while they dash around getting malaria tablets and looking up the symptoms of bilharzia.
The books I had just started reading because they happened to be on my shelves were Africa, Altered States, Ordinary Miracles by Richard Dowden and The Strategy of Antelopes - Rwanda After the Genocide by Jean Hatzfeld. Both by journalists with vast experience of the continent, its people, its politics and its unrest and a fount of knowledge on the history, whilst both demonstrating an unerring affinity with their role as journalists and a deep love and respect for a continent I know I misunderstand.
I think I might be Richard Dowden's ideal reader, the one with  'no sense of ordinary Africa' and little working knowledge beyond what I read in the media about the real Africa beyond  'the sick starving child and men with guns'.
I was the blank slate wiped and waiting to be rewritten and Richard Dowden got there first. He had already alerted me to the impact of the media and the ambiguous and often harmful input of the aid agencies,

'The aid industry too has an interest in maintaining the image of Africans as hopeless victims of endless wars and persistent famines.However well-intentioned their motives may once have been, aid agencies have helped create the single, distressing image of Africa.'

and he'd also elaborated in detail on the difficulties of reporting from war zones, in this case Rwanda during the genocide,

'I wait for the rush of adrenalin that comes with hitting the keys when you start a big story. Nothing happens, I feel numb. I light a cigarette and start again. Then have another cigarette, and then a beer. Time is ticking away. Nothing is happening. Images but no focus. No words. The mechanism in my brain that changes images into words is jammed. I begin to panic. The deadline is near...'I do not want to tell you what I saw today..I stare at the words and realize this is the story...'

So when I read of very similar moments in Not Untrue Not Unkind it was clear this was also a book steeped in factual experience and I might have been expecting too much.
Ed O'Loughlin was indeed an African correspondent for some years and the novel follows the press pack and their frenzied trail around the beleagured war zones of Africa in an effort to scoop the news-worthy story first.
Narrated by a washed up and obviously damaged newspaper editor in a northern UK city, whose Africa days are over but who may never leave behind the consequences or the traumatic memories of that time, an emotional miasma seems to fog Owen Simmons's life and therefore his narration of this book.
Africa and those around him mediated through the eyes of a damaged man seemingly devoid of real emotional responses and the other members of the press core therefore assume a sort of remoteness and emotional sterility too, whilst those same eyes largely ignore the beauty of this war-torn country.
The focus is on successive atrocities, often very confusing and chaotic; was it Rwanda, Congo, Sierra Leone, or all of them, I was easily confused and with Owen's inability to offer me any lasting sense of place through his jaded eyes no one has any redeeming or likeable features either. Perhaps this was the plan, a means of demonstrating to me just how compassion fatigue, with its continual exposure to violence and atrocity, numbs the soul and depletes any flame of inner humanity to the barest flicker.
The flickers of humanity are there but they seem few and far between.
If that was all the intention it certainly did the trick, but also had the rather numbing effect of distancing me from the whole too, this is what I call an arm's-length read, I just never came close to feeling much even when successive atrocities and escalating violence seemed set to outdo each other in revulsion, but then I thought perhaps that's what I was supposed to feel, to know what it's like to disengage from my surroundings in order to protect what I have left?
Boundaries in place as a sort of foil to post-traumatic stress?
Who can know?
I'm not quite sure what I've just read because if that was the intention then this book is extremely clever but I also have a feeling that perhaps I'm looking too hard for positive and redeeming features in a book that ultimately didn't quite live up to my early expectations?
I feel detached and generally unenthused by it and it's unusual for me to bring news of that here but this is the Booker after all and might this be the book required to fill the 'gritty war and violence' slot on the long list? 
Because unless James Scudamore's Heliopolis goes there, this is the only one.
Of course this book might also just have come along at exactly the wrong moment for me and I may be able to lay the blame for that squarely at the feet of  Richard Dowden and Jean Hatzfeld who had already demonstrated that the perception of Africa as revealed in Not Untrue and Not Unkind might be becoming predictable, cliched and urgently needs amending.
Back where I started, novels might not be the best way forward for me right now in my search for the real Africa from my armchair.
Perhaps it's right to leave the final words to the inestimable Chinua Achebe whose Foreword to Richard Dowden's book sets out a clear agenda, which in fairness and with apologies to Ed O'Loughlin may not have been his first or even last intention with this novel.
The unfortunate thing is that it became mine as I read and it remained sadly unfulfilled.

'The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, towards a deeper understanding of foreign peoples, cultures and situations.'

and the winners are...

Apologies for the delay, I seem to have been watching athletics and knitting to the exclusion of all else this week and Rocky's been dozing by the du Mauriers as usual.
But we've caught up with Mrs Glosser's Random Number Generator and ourselves today and the winners are...

The Three of Us by Julia Blackburn

6 Helen Poole
7 Simon S
32 Sharon Walling

How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall

1 Flossie T
56 Irene
62 Kat

More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea by Tom Reynolds

13 Pippa Hennessey
15 Mary McCartney
29 Caroline

If you could all e mail me at dovegreyreader at gmaildotcom with addresses and it really helps if you add the title of the book you've won in the subject line or I get confused and then this happens...
A couple of people have e mailed to say their books hadn't arrived  and my apologies, in the mayhem of broadbandless week I've completely forgotten who you are, so could you email me again.
Please never feel you are being a nuisance in asking where missing books are, I never mind getting back to publishers and sorting it because I know how disappointing it can be not to hear that promised thud on the doormat, so always let me know.

Preserved

Casting around for something to preserve, anything really, now that I've dusted off the maslin pan (love the name) because it's a real pain to try and get it back in the cupboard, I suddenly remembered those blackberries I had picked last autumn.
Having just finished NHS work I sort of fell into a stupor of Rocky-like proportions and preserving anything was beyond me, so I had shoved them in the freezer and there they were awaiting their moment. Spiced Bramble Jelly it was, which leaves the kitchen looking like an abbatoir and is very berry intensive, just two jars to show for all that effort, but two very delicious jars they are.
I've been along the lane to check out this year's crop because there can be no such slacking now and everything's coming along nicely.
It's been a funny year for the lane since resurfacing back in early June, because in their wisdom, South West Highways saw the need to massacre the hedge back to its roots and back to the earth in places, just as the birds were nesting and the wildflowers were approaching their peak. We protested in vain and too late, the damage was done and you wonder quite how that is allowed to happen in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty where you can't breathe without permission. With the massacre went all the colour and the bird life and we have been left waiting for something to reappear.
Despite its late reawakening I sense definite tinges of Autumn out there.
  

The Natural Fibre Company - Part Two

So while I'm at FibreFest today, where were we on our trip around The Natural Fibre Company?
Ah yes, things were getting very technical, Sue tells me this is the most treasured and useful piece of equipment in the whole building.

The loom, Sue explained, is a recent venture but a scarcity of weavers able to work these and virtually no training opportunities make this a dying craft which feels nothing short of a tragedy, especially when you consider the heritage and history of weaving in this country.
But there's my winter knitting project sorted.
I bought the wool for this jacket, 50% Jacob wool with mohair and I'm beside myself with excitement at the mere thought of getting this gorgeous bit of sheep and goat on the Lantern Moons, but at the moment I'm just stroking it and bonding....well I was.
Somehow I couldn't resist sneaking it on the needles just  'to see'.
It's years since I've knitted something as fresh off the sheep as this, last episode was some Herdwick wool that left me with beautiful soft hands from the oil in the wool. Here's that feeling again as this slips through the fingers and I settle into a lovely springy offset rib which I've never done before. Having ascertained that I'm a cack-handed peasant knitter rather than a refined sitting room knitter, rib always comes out slightly awry off my needles, but I'm liking this a lot.

The Snow Geese by William Fiennes

Did I say Ronald Blythe today?
Sorry, wrong, thought I'd stay with the animal theme going on lately, first red dogs, then hares, now The Snow Geese. This is the most incredible book of them all though and one I’ve had to make last because, by his own admission, William Fiennes is no Barbara Cartland when it comes to producing books, two in seven years.
I'm a bit upset that I'll be past sixty (deo volente) by the time the third one arrives but if I get as old as Barbara Cartland that'll be another five books to look forward to from Will, so mustn't grumble.
Having loved everything about The Music Room I wasn’t too sure how that could be surpassed and I’m not sure it has, these books just weigh equally on the balance registering superb.
Taken seriously ill in his mid-twenties and debilitated from several rounds of major abdominal surgery (forget my keyholes, we must be talking letter boxes) William Fiennes found himself back in his childhood bedroom at the castle and returned once more to the state of a child dependent upon his parents for care as he recovered.
Coming across an old childhood copy of Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose was the inspiration for a journey to emotional recovery once physically healed. William Fiennes set off on his own odyssey to follow the migration trail of the snow goose from its winter sojourn in the American south to summer breeding grounds on Baffin Island in the far north of Canada.
The plan was to journey with the birds, by Greyhound, by train however, but along the way there were people to meet, strangers who become friends and traveling companions thus providing the perfect medium for memoir writing. Except something else Will mentioned at Dartington was that some books need to be released from genres, to be allowed to stand alone and be what they want to be, this is much more than memoir. He also revealed that this book is often misfiled in bookshops under ‘Pet Care.’
Often effaced from the encounter and certainly offering no opinions or judgments on the people he met, William Fiennes allows us to get to know them as if meeting them ourselves.
At Dartington, someone asked the question,

‘What did you think about the Americans that you met in The Snow Geese?’

and William replied that he felt blessed by the encounters as may anyone who reads this book.
Who can forget the ex-nun forced by the Mother Superior to sleep with any item they broke and finding herself in bed with a statue of St Joseph, accidentally toppled...at least you have a man in your bed the others griped. Or the sock knitting Viking or Marshall the ex-hobo riding the Hudson Bay Railway for old times’ sake, (times being nineteen) or Ruth the quilter.
I might not have spotted it but Will did reveal that whilst The Music Room had settled into a quartet, The Snow Geese settled into a gentle and rhythmical octet of storytelling , eight alternating parts, journey – sojourn and finally a homecoming for both the geese as they arrive in Foxe Land and for Will as he contemplates what home means

‘Not all returns are retreats, and if I wanted to go home, it wasn’t a dream of escape, it was because love can’t exist without the pain of separation, and so much of what I loved was there.’

Homesickness designated a name in 1688 and termed nostalgia, now of course meaning something quite different but then recognised as

‘continues sadness, meditation only on the Fatherland, disturbed sleep...decrease of strength, hunger, thirst, senses diminished...palpitations of the heart, frequent sighs, also stupidity of the mind.’

And genuinely believed at that time only to afflict the Swiss and connected to the descent from high alpine meadows to the lowlands. One little person came immediately to mind, though Will doesn’t mention her, but it’s Johanna Spyri’s Heidi of course and how ill she became when sent from her Alpine home to Frankfurt to be a companion to Clara.
The writing is exquisitely beautiful, I took this journey too though was thankful to bypass the actual moment when, sporting a parka that felt like ‘wearing a bungalow’, Will faced up to the inevitable meal that was likely to be served up as he travels with the hunters out to track the plentiful and nicely plump snow geese to their breeding grounds.
This is a book to treasure and read again and again, especially perhaps when the logistics of actually doing a journey defeat you yet perhaps you still have that yearning to travel somewhere, so it was a natural progression for me to access the Inner Child and read and love Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose all over again too.
Beautiful, all utterly heart-stoppingly beautiful.

 

The Roger Deakin Shelf

I have RevCheryl, a regular visitor here and more recently to Devon, to thank for any suggestion of such a thing as a Roger Deakin Shelf and I think this all evolved after I may have mentioned either Notes From Walnut Tree Farm or something similar.
On the subject of Rev Cheryl I am very excited and grateful to have been invited up to the Parish and thence to Ely Cathedral to hear Margaret Atwood speak about The Year of the Flood on September 7th, the day of the book's UK publication and I'm hoping my copy will arrive any day soon. I'd love to have read it before I go and of course I'll be in the signing queue.
I think I may also get to step inside the wonderful Topping & Company Booksellers  whilst I'm in the vicinity which is a treat I can hardly breath for thinking about.
I love the idea that these Roger Deakin-like books deserve a special place together in the midst of thousands of other books, a small oasis of calm to return to as if touching base with something important.
I think that 'something important' will be different for every single one of us.
For me, I can't tell by the look or the title of a book, it's all about the mood and feeling I have as I read, as I turn the final page and as I put the book down do I have that pang of regret over finishing it or having to cut off my reading. A sense of huge gain but a little sense of loss too, that I've had that first exhilarating read-through experience and discovered something special and that can never quite be repeated in exactly the same way. The books have an indefinable grace and a blessing about them and I suspect we each know it when we find them.
But it can of course all be repeated as often as I want and each return will connect me back to those first revelations, that elusive reading mood that defines these books and thus the book gains its place on that shelf.
In fact it hasn't quite been a real shelf because the books in question seemed to be all over the house, some by the bed, some by my desk, some on one of my reading tables by a sofa because I never quite know when the moment may come upon me and an RDS book will become instantly required reading, and so I thought it would be good to gather them in and do a little inventory and I've set up a virtual Roger Deakin Shelf over here<<<<<<
Suddenly seeing them together and they do exude a power that may well mean little to others.
Several of the books are still unfinished because it's not a race to get onto the RDS shelf. I pick them up and just know they belong there and will be reading just a few chapters at a time, The Great Western Beach by Emma Smith is one. I've just finished it but have made it last months and my thoughts about that soon. Currently I've loved it more than I can find the right words to express, perhaps for its child's eye view of Cornwall and life between the wars in a place I vaguely knew as a child too. It's a beautiful book with an innocence yet an unguarded wisdom to it, what a child sees but can't interpret, which is exactly what I love child's voice to be.
The English Year by Steve Roud is another treasure and a lovely book to pick up any day of the year and be instantly linked back to ancient tradition and always good to see where there's a bun race going on (Sandwich funnily enough) or when Plague Sunday is (last Sunday in August).
More about my new discovery, the inestimable Ronald Blythe and The Bookman's Tale tomorrow and I'm wondering what else you may add to a shelf like this, I'd love some more suggestions.

Red Dog, Red Dog by Patrick Lane

I always sit up and pay attention to Canadian literature as you know and I'm wondering whether news of the Book Depository setting up shop in the US will make it any easier to lay hands on that gold dust across the border.
It's a nightmare here in the UK and I can't keep on suggesting that my children go to Canada to work just to get my hands on the books, or 'selling' pictures from the scribbles to Canadian TV programmes in exchange for others I'm desperate to read. That was Gil Adamson's The Outlander long before it was published here, and on that subject, I hear film rights to that book have been optioned.
Giller Prize short-listed Red Dog, Red Dog by Patrick Lane built up a steady head of steam as the Booker long list announcement approached, with several of us giving it a seat on our own selection stack and I can only think that one of the panel was perhaps a stalwart of the Canine Defence League and ruled it out for reasons of cruelty to dogs, or perhaps cruelty to children, or cruelty to wives or daughters or rabbits or pheasants or trout because everything gets a walloping, a whipping or is skinned somehow somewhere along the way.
My early thoughts on the book here.
So that's your public health warning for Red Dog, Red Dog.
You know me, cast-iron stomach and I can cope with violence in fiction if it serves a purpose and reflects the realities of life. I've worked with enough victims of violence to know it happens and fiction requires that reality, but I'll often bail out of a book if it all gets too much or I think I'm not in a safe authorial pair of hands, so something good kept me reading here through the travails of Family Stark, 'a blight on the face of the earth', an insular, deeply damaged and dysfunctional family.

'Mother always said that they were a family and to her that meant the Starks looked after their own. What happened in the family stayed in the family.'

Brothers Eddie and Tom, now in their twenties, sons of  alcoholic and violent father Elmer and down-trodden mother Lilian and all scraping a living out of virtually nothing against a backdrop of a small community and Eddie's large drug habit. As different as children can possibly be and for me this was one of the fascinations that kept me reading. Eddy spiraling out of control in a small-town community doesn't go unnoticed, the reflective and ever-loyal Tom listens and wait and tries to make sense of the life he has been given.
A lethal mix of poverty, madness and loneliness, blended with revenge, feuds and vendettas up in the backwoods of Canada in the grip of the 1950s depression and partly narrated by one of Eddie and Tom's dead baby sisters, all enough to give the book a gently, innocent, slightly surreal and ghostly point of view for a while before it merges seamlessly into the third person.
The death of the babies incidentally a quiet and thought-provoking sadness that could have kept me awake at night had I allowed it to, but I read it in the context of the whole and found it offered keen insights into Mother of the Starks that explained a great deal for me later in the book. There is much left unsaid and much for a reader to add here, and we might all add something different I suspect.
By now you may have gathered rightly that this is a tough, uncompromising book with few glimmers of joy.
One advantage of taking The Canadian Review of Books is for the reviews (obviously) and having gathered my own disparate thoughts together I've just read Marion Fraser's piece on Red Dog, Red Dog subtitled,

'Tender insight makes this tale of family cruelty bearable.'

I had written something very similar in the book as I read because I wasn't sure how I was sticking with it. It's a book that held a deep and inexplicable power to silence me as I withheld judgments on all this savagery and cruelty (repeat warning, if you adore dogs you might wince a bit...make that a lot) because somehow it's entirely possible to see beyond it.
This is life borne of desperation amongst a group of people in sad decline, tied to a way of life that demands they fit in and as Tom listens to his mother,

'You had to watch a long time to see through her words. You'd listen to her read aloud and then you'd read between the lines to find the story beneath her story, the one she'd hidden.'

I was doing exactly the same as I read this book.
Books written by poets often win me over unwittingly, they definitely do something out of the ordinary and this one is no exception, so when I then read more about Patrick Lane's life, the brutality of his childhood and his lifelong drug habit, his entry into rehab ten years ago, emerging to write an apparently beautiful memoir To Everything There is a Season documenting his first sober year in the last 45, I think I appreciated Red Dog, Red Dog even more.
How well that now chimes with Joan's comment on Monday's post on J.M.Coetzee's Summertime  just how much does our knowledge about an author's life influence our reading of their books?

The Natural Fibre Company - Part One

It's August so I think we're allowed to play with wool on a weekday especially as it's Fibrefest this weekend, which is not as it may seem an All-Bran convention, more an All-Wool bonanza happening here in Devon.
Also wall to wall World Athletics from Berlin is giving me plenty of knitting time so my Knit-a-Poem letter 'O' was finished (after much headaching, a bit of tutting and a great big phew) alongside Usain Bolt's amazing lope down the 100 metres and Jessica Ennis's brilliant heptathlon gold.
I think I've already mentioned my recent visit to the Natural Fibre Company, home of Blacker's Designs over in Launceston, the tour from sheep to skein and how fascinating it all was.
This is a small company which has relocated to the South West and very proud we should be of the fact too and how surprised I was to find all this on the doorstep.
Small sheep herders...tiny shepherds...people with little flocks can bring their fleeces here, Sue assesses for quality and hey presto eventually it will come out the other end, Lantern Moon-ready.
My thanks to Sue Blacker for showing me round and explaining everything and in fact so mesmerised was I that words failed me at the sight of all these fleeces emerging as balls of wool. There is a strange and symmetrical beauty to the process, so for once I'll be quiet and let the sheep do the talking today and another day because it'll take us two posts to get right round.
Starting with slightly more than three bags full.
    Things get very technical next so perhaps we'll save that bit for later in the week and you will see the most prized piece of equipment in the building.

Summertime by J.M. Coetzee - Bookerthon 2009

How terrifying could this be?
Sharing thoughts about Summertime, the latest book from the great J.M.Coetzee, Nobel Prize winner, author of many prize-winning books including two previous Bookers. Famously a reclusive man of few words, alleged to go to dinner parties and not utter a single one, whilst colleagues who have worked with him claim only to have seen him laugh once.
Actually all that came from the notoriously unreliable Wikipaedia which Sarah Waters informed us, at Port Eliot, she regularly reads to find out all the things she didn't know about herself.
But worse than this is the fact that I'm going to have to own up to never having read a single Coetzee novel before this one; I can hardly bear to admit that I have never opened Disgrace because quite shockingly I don't like the picture of the dog on the cover ...this is really getting much worse by the minute.
I do have Elizabeth Costello and Foe but I haven't read those either.
Except I can also try and ignore all that because this lack might ultimately work to my advantage.
I have no Coetzee baseline to work from, no sense of awe that may hinder my thinking, no preconceptions, no bench mark to fulfill, no previous to make comparisons with, in the same way that I was also able to read Colm Toibin's Brooklyn.
Many who have read The Master find Brooklyn wanting...I haven't, so I didn't.
Though this is a novel it's all a bit of a confusing one and I think I have become completely tangled up in the perimeter fence and hardly made it into the real essence of Summertime.
A writer writing a novel about a writer researching and writing a biography of a writer who happens to be the writer of this novel.
Are you keeping up?
It's a bit like trying to pin down infinity or split the atom in your head.
Plus the subject doesn't come out of this at all well.
J.M Coetzee is so hard on himself it will be left to any biographers that do eventually tread this path to find us some redeeming qualities in the man, because Coetzee finds none to speak of within himself. The fictional biographer's information gathering ranges from the subjective to the patently unreliable, even the fictional author's notebooks and undated fragments, which all perhaps serves as an exercise in flagging up the pitfalls, even the follies of biography.
The deceased and fictional Coetzee variously described by those that knew him as prickly, opinionated, incompetent, ridiculous, spineless, humourless and generally perhaps a waste of space.

'In laughing he comes bottom of the class. A gloomy fellow: that must be how the world sees him, when it sees him at all. A gloomy fellow; a wet blanket; a stick in the mud.'

Someone's clearly been reading Wikipaedia.
Summertime the third in a series of books, a sequel to Boyhood and Youth and all three subtitled Scenes from Provincial Life which all makes me think of Middlemarch and its Study of Provincial Life, except this is Cape Province, now the Western Cape in South Africa and the place where Coetzee spent much of his early life. The period covered by this book sees him living with his ailing father and not yet a successful writer.
So is this flat-out, complete, self-effacing, modesty coupled with honesty and openess?
If this is autobiography concealed as fiction, how on earth am I supposed to interpret it?
Am I to read this as a fictional version of the truth of Coetzee's life or forget that and read it as a novel?
It becomes nigh on impossible to disentangle these thoughts and that could be what makes this book rise head and shoulders above any ordinary novel about a 'real' person.
The late Coetzee's biographer interviews various women and family who have known him and what emerges is a picture of a passionless, hopelessly serious man refracted through the lens of his failures, because lucky in both life and love it would seem he was not.

'Coetzees don't have plans, they don't have ambitions, they only have idle longings.'

Persuading one of his lovers to 'co-ordinate our activities' to the slow movement of the Schubert string quintet results in dismal but rather amusing failure and clearly a misuse of the Adagio when the Scherzo might have worked better.
If the inference of the title Summertime is that these are the best years of a life then current speculation about what may be yet to come in this series is right to be a little worried for what might follow in any further volumes.
To say this book pushes the boundaries of fiction way out into uncharted territory feels about right for me; my head is still spinning as I try to fathom the mysteries of the genre, no wonder it's a Booker contender. Though even that notion is subverted within the book when Sophie, an academic and former work colleague is interviewed,

'I would say that his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight. Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me that mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy. Too lacking in passion...'

So is the book a very clever smokescreen, the anti-radar chaff scattered to keep the enemy off the tail?
Is Coetzee firing a 'don't-mess-with-me' shot across the bows of future biographers?
Or is it all a conceit too far?
You'll have to read the proper reviews to find that out and to my knowledge there aren't many of them out there yet, but I do know that as I read, my thought processes were turning cartwheels, paroxysms of complete confusion yet delight as Coetzee manipulated and controlled in the cleverest of ways, kept wandering unbidden into his own book, into his own life and I kept thinking is this really you... is this a version of you...what do you want from me as a reader?
Nor do I think I've solved the conundrum yet, but as the would-be biographer says

'A great writer becomes the property of all of us.'

I wondered is this Coetzee laying out the terms of that possession?

But as Hermione Lee suggests as a possible definition in her excellent new OUP Very Short Introduction to Biography

'Biography is the story of a person told by someone else.'

So you see, I have gone round in endless and ever-decreasing circles with Mr Coetzee.
I don't really have a clue and I can't wait to read what the literary critics make of this one, though for me Summertime is an amazingly clever book, an enduringly, circuitously fascinating novel that I will dwell on for a long time to come, perhaps even unravel much of the essence and fallibility of biography and how it can so easily become a fiction, a story, in the process.
It's on my shortlist and just elaborating those thoughts here has moved me towards seeing this book as a real contender for the 2009 Man Booker crown which I'd already given to Wolf Hall...or The Children's Book...or The Glass Room... or Love and Summer...or...
And there are even moments to smile over,

'I wouldn't know how to write a best-seller,' he says. 'I don't know enough about people and their fantasy lives. Anyway, I wasn't destined for that fate.'
    'What fate?'
    'The fate of being a rich and successful writer.'

Team Ulysses - Camp Two

Doesn't the 16th come round quickly when you're having fun...are you still there Team Ulysses?
So how's everyone doing this month?
Perhaps because I'm still at low altitude this hardly feels like a mountain at all at the moment, more like a relaxing stroll up a gentle incline. Though I am prepared for that to change.
Ulysses, the impossible book suddenly seems possible and all those tensions and anxieties that walked into those pages with me have dissipated as I realise how much I am enjoying the reading and looking forward to picking the book up, making myself put it down when I could easily carry on reading.
I started off on the two pages a day plan which fell by the wayside for reasons of flow.
I just didn't want to stop after two pages and if I did I ended up reading from the start again just to get into the swing of things. Effectively I'd be able to say I'd read Ulysses thirty times or so but decided that would impress no one I know in the slightest.
So I sat down and read this sixty or so pages in one sitting, read a great deal out loud and I loved it.
It's been wonderful to finally meet the famous Leopold Bloom and start travelling around Dublin with him, see the city through his eyes and pitch up to various events in his company. Being a non-lover of kidneys, I couldn't share in his delight at the breakfast treat but I thought the trips to the privy and the funeral were incredible, littered with comedy and often laugh-out-loud funny.
Little sayings are starting to stick in my mind and I'm wondering if these are some of the moments that so many Ulysses-lovers mention, the quotables,
'The Irishman's house is his coffin'
'Out of the frying pan of life into the fire of purgatory.'
And what about the drunk in the cemetery looking at the statue!
Alongside this month's pages I've been reading Frank Delaney's James Joyce's Odyssey - A Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses which has maps and photographs, all invaluable to someone like me who knows woefully little verging on zilch about the city, the people or its history.
I'm really starting to get a feel for the book now.
Another book I plan to dip into with next month's reading is Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation - A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties by Noel Riley Fitch. Sylvia Beach of course, the owner of the legendary Shakespeare & Co bookshop and the publisher of Ulysses.
It was lovely to meet up with RevCheryl who ventured down to Devon on holiday last week. The wool shops are cleared out and she's perused those shelves you can see with a notebook in hand, but we did pause and draw breath to huddle over a copy of Ulysses and agree how much we were enjoying it, both the discipline of the regular reading and the book itself.
We even had one or two ideas about what we could read next year, once we've conquered Ulysses on Bloomsday 2010.
I've floated the idea of The Tale of Genji as a masterpiece of Japanese literature that would certainly open some new reading trails, and team-reading it here is about the only chance I think I have of conquering it, but we have plenty of time to think about that.
Meanwhile I can't wait to hear what you are all thinking about Ulysses now we are at Camp Two and please don't worry if you're elsewhere in the book or not even in it at all and just spectating our ascent. Fore or aft, it doesn't matter in the slightest, everyone needs to do this in their own way if at all.
I'm wondering is anyone reading the footnotes? I'm skimming them now, but only quickly.
Is anyone managing to follow the Odyssey theme? All beyond me I'm afraid but I should think if you know that territory this could be fascinating and this could well be something I start to delve into eventually. It's becoming a regular reference in so much of my reading lately and the more that happens the less I can ignore it.
On that note does anyone else feel that they are probably missing acres of significant allusions but they don't really worry about that right now?
Does the language and the writing feel like a window onto one great, big huge writer's mind?
I'm feeling slightly in awe of James Joyce as I read. Where on earth did all this come from?
Is anyone else smiling secretly as they read?
Both because it's genuinely funny but perhaps because you also feel a teeny tiny weeny bit smug that you're finally actually really 'reading Ulysses.'
Me too, which usually means I'm about to fall flat on my face but at least we're all in it together.

Okehampton Show

Now don't worry, no need to fret that you completely forgot it was Okehampton Show on Thursday because you were too busy reading Ulysses before Camp Two tomorrow. I sent the boys along to get them all out from under my feet and said 'take pictures' which they did.
Beautiful day, and a good old-fashioned rural agricultural show, very 'All Creatures Great and Small' and  set against that wonderful Dartmoor backdrop and even a Gaze-Bo sighting.

And here's a selection of what they went to look at including a Yoda-like goat which seems to be wearing a carpet and I'm afraid I have to tell you that in amongst this lot is the poor unfortunate species of animal that ended up roasted and eaten (well, a slice of)  between a bread roll or two before they came home.
I'll let you guess and no it's not the man leading the cow and the pygmy goats and the 'pygmy' ponies were safe too.

Guardian - Not the Booker

Hot on the heels of the nation's honesty being tested to the limits over not trying to get hold of Tamiflu from the Swinfluenza helpline until you really actually have the symptoms, comes the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize public vote.
I love the Guardian Blog, it's the place to go if you're feeling in the mood for watching a bit of online slaughter discontent, hell hath no fury like an irate Grauniad commenter. I suspect The Guardian probably employ an in-house counsellor to help their bloggers through it all, access to a special counselling suite thrown in, with soft furnishings and nice soothing pictures of pudgy puppies and fluffy kittens on the wall.
So I've been following Not the Booker with great interest and plenty of rolling on the floor laughing, which I'm probably not supposed to be doing, but it's all hilarious.
In fact it's all as good as Eurovision with Sam Jordison filling the compere's slot with much patience and good humour .
Forget the £50,000 prize money for the real thing, this is a much bigger prize.
This is all being fought to the death for the ultimate accolade, a Guardian coffee mug and welcome to the world of writing and publishing red in tooth and claw.
Suggestions for a longlist came in very democratically, nice and politely, forming an orderly queue. Decisions were made and things narrowed down considerably to a Not the Booker Dozen x 3 + 7 = 46 books (possibly, better check, you know me and maths).
So perhaps a long list I'll pass on this time round.
Then the shortlist voting began along with all the shenanigans, block voting, publishers doing some leaning, authors announcing their inclusion on websites and encouraging all their fans to vote and all sort of legal because there weren't many rules beyond one person - one vote.
I can only imagine the sweat is pouring and the gin bottle is doing the rounds very regularly at Guardian HQ as they work through the logistics of it all.
In fact I can almost see them looking incredulously at the screen as a run of block votes come in at five second intervals for another book few people may have heard of.
Then someone comes on and says 'Oi that's not fair' or words to that effect, because no slither of a hint of injustice or malpractice has ever been known to sneak its way unnoticed past a Guardian commentor.
Interestingly I think most people have decided to give the outsiders a chance and though many of us have already decided what we'd like to win the real thing and have placed our bets, Not the Booker has offered a real chance to bypass the big names and give the outsiders a run on the gallops.
I fully expect a really worthwhile people's choice reading list to emerge eventually and I've already picked up a few front-runners.
My longlist to shortlist choice was The Tin-Kin by Eleanor Thom because I thought she'd be thrilled with that wee mug and for goodness' sake don't all rush over and choose it as well or I'll be accused of rigging the vote, but why not wander in and add your vote to your real favourite and join in the mayhem.
I've written about 11 of them here and with another 35 to choose from there might just be one in there you like.

An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay

Sometimes a book comes along that seems to sit really comfortably with my reading mood, slots in perfectly and, when I'm often eagerly asked by those who have sent me books whether I've read them yet, I try and explain that timing is everything. I always know when I'm reading a 'right' book at the 'wrong' time and I don't despair or discard these days, just shelve and wonder when its moment will come.
All I knew of An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay was that it had won the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers but as soon as I started reading I knew the reading planets had conveniently converged and I was engrossed.
Even sufficiently impressed to wish it into a precious Booker long list place, to no avail.
The second book this week to begin with an ending, the funeral of celebrated artist Jennet Mallow and in that way that often happens I  launched headlong into the book and had quite forgotten when the reveal about authorship is repeated towards the end that this had been hinted at on the very first page. The decision by 'someone' to write this biography albeit fictional was quickly lost on me as I was rapidly absorbed into the life and art of Jennet.
There are many themes competing for a reader's attention but the central conflict of Jennet's art and creativity versus the demands of motherhood takes centre stage,

'responsibility to the people she had brought into the world or truth to her vocation?'

Married to the philandering David, the epitome of the egocentric artist frequently 'danced away by sirens' in the shape of women, alcohol and drugs, with the occasional successful exhibition to keep him in the public consciousness, Jennet's talent becomes stifled and shackled by the arrival of children.
One of the many triumphs and successes for me in An Equal Stillness were these children, like shadows in the background of Jennet's life and particularly Vanessa, the pale, frail wraith-like child, the ever-present and ghostly reminder of all Jennet's supposed maternal failings. The children are obstacles to her creativity and edged to the periphery of the narrative, yet as a reader I knew they were there and it could only be a matter of time before they were given a voice and had their say. As Jennet falls into guilt not love and carries the dead weight of her family, the tortured soul becomes increasingly apparent in her work.

'She was on her own but encumbered by her millstones, and unlike the great artists of the past, almost all of them male, she had no choice but to shoulder them, to drag them with her into the material of art. She used to dream of alchemy, but that was in another time. She did not imagine then the rawness of the stuff she would have to transmute later into gold.'

Another triumph for me was the sense of place coupled with the art and the progression of Jennet's painting as it reflected her passage through life.
Spain with its light and warmth, St Ives with its pure, clear brightness, London and a sense of imprisonment and entrapment and the moors of the north, a wilderness, 'compelling, austere and remote'. I know, all predictable analogies waiting to be explored, yet dabbed and daubed into the descriptions of the paintings and real enough to touch. Somehow the art flowed right on in and blended so well into the narrative I could have been walking through an exhibition and gazing at Jennet's paintings, seeing the filaments of gauze veil with which she overlaid some of her work, as if making me see it as she had; art with obstacles to the gaze obscuring the depths of the meaning and all conveyed through the medium of beautiful prose.

'Painters convey the souls of the long dead across the bridge of years to a hundred thousand watchers who knew nothing of them.'

Francesca Kay's richness and depth of language like perfectly measured brush strokes.
Not really knowing enough about them I ignored any similarities to the lives of real artists, though the ghosts of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson and their triplets have to be stalking these pages somewhere, but that didn't feel relevant or necessary to my enjoyment of An Equal Stillness.
I've been reading wall-to-wall contemporary fiction of late with only the occasional intermission and sadly not a single media-savvy chimpanzee, or multitudes of machete-laden civil wars with accompanying blood, gore and writhing maggots in sight to earn An Equal Stillness that Booker long list place I'd hoped for, but occasionally a book just sparkles and dazzles in its own right regardless and this one did just that for me.
Sometimes a person has to work with what they are given, achieve that impossible balance and constantly reweigh and redistribute those elements of life which threaten to tip the balance too far one way or the other, Jennet's life reflecting the pull of creativity against the gravity of responsibility, a constant reappraisal of duty and truth to self,

'And everything is still, the slack tide poised, the sawy of the sea suspended, the air unmoving as if the whole world were holding its breath. Air and water in an equal stillness, sharing with each other the same scantness of colour, the same palely blue-tinged milky light.'

Hilary Mantel & Sunday Confessions...on a Thursday

Countless books arrive here each week as you know but I do still buy a few (oh alright, a lot) and I met a blog friend (who can identify herself in comments if she wishes...waving at Carol) at Port Eliot who said she really missed Sunday Confessions because it made her feel so much better about her own book buying habit, so perhaps I’ll start owning up again.
Last week, eager to get my hands on Me Cheeta I ordered a copy from Amazon and then needed to spend 6p more to get free postage. 6p, I ask you, but I perused my lists and came up with Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety.
This was on the assumption that if our ‘ilary could hand-hold me through the Tudors she was equally capable of guiding me through the French Revolution of which I think I know less than I did about Thomas Cromwell.
I love it when that parcel arrives and when this great big book clunked onto the table I was more than excited.
Does everyone else get the new-book excitement?
I pick it up and I don’t actually want to put it down.
I want to start it that very minute.
I want it with me everywhere I go and but for the fact this one is 870 pages I would have done just that.
I perhaps daren’t venture into 1780's Paris until I’ve conquered the Booker long list but I have a feeling I can see autumn reading trails opening before my very eyes.
I’d already lined up a return to some American women writers I haven’t really explored like Willa Cather and more Dawn Powell, but now I’m fancying a bit of French Revolution too because I have never managed to get further than page twenty of A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens either so might that be possible if I get my guillotine eye in?
I can hardly sit still for the thought of all the new and uncharted territory I’m about to discover and of course I can tricoteuse my way nicely through it all so all reading suggestions welcome.
Is there a record of what was being knitted alongside the guillotine?
Was it socks, stockings?
Perhaps I’ll knit some Revolution Socks to accompany.
Quite a few other new additions in recent weeks too.
From the second-hand book stall at Port Eliot, Sylvia Pankhurst, Artist and Crusader by Richard Pankhurst, revealing the much-forgotten side of the militant suffragette, that of the accomplished artist and all nicely illustrated and revealed by her only child.
Dashing off next to the annual Book Sale over at Launceston and a church hall stacked out with boxes and boxes of books all at 30p each. Rummaging began and I found a few to add to the shelves.
Babel Tower by A.S.Byatt, (30p for an ominously brand new hardback) The Careful Use of Compliments by Alexander McCall Smith, and a spare copy of Room for a Single Lady by Clare Boylan. This latter is one of my many favourite books so will be good to pass onto a friend or perhaps one of you if you are visiting down this way.
and then a book I’m afraid I couldn’t possibly leave behind,

‘She couldn’t even see the gazebo until she was halfway up the path. She couldn’t see it clearly then. It was just a shadow against the shadowy hedge...’

Bit like ours really.

Plymouth Pyrotechnics

This is how good I am to you all...to save you the bother of trekking up to Plymouth Hoe on this overcast  evening for the second night of the British Firework Championships, thanks to the Kayaker and the shared camera you can sit at home and go 'oooohhhhh' and 'wowwwwww' over last night's pyrotechnics.
Stop laughing in Sydney, we do our best without that nice bridge :-)

The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna

Commenting on the contentious subject of negative book reviews on blogs elsewhere this week, someone remarked that if I put up a negative post about a book (I had clarified that I don't presume to do reviews, far too subjective and emotional here for that and you all know my position ad nauseum on being the wrong reader for a book ) it would probably send them rushing off to buy it because they'd be bound to love it. From that I could only draw the inference that they assume we share wildly differing reading tastes, which is fine, but who can know what my reading tastes are because I'm not even sure I know that myself now.
How can you pin it down in that way because over the last three plus years, and over 500 books scribbled about later, I think I've forgotten where my comfort zone was and writing the scribbles makes me range far and wide in an attempt to close no doors, so sometimes a really unusual book finds its way onto my reading pile.
In fact can you believe it, I actually put them there myself because I’m always grateful for that deviation from the path of true comprehension. There is something quite unfettered and refreshing about reading something I don’t quite grasp immediately if I feel brave enough to persevere.
To be beguiled and slightly mystified by a book's purpose, to turn the final page and start thinking ‘what on earth was that about’ all feels good for the vitality of a reading life like mine, keeps it sparky, edgy, unsettled and on its toes.
So I was up for The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna and published by Peter Owen.
I'll admit I was sold on the cover for a start because I do like hares.
Who can resist that dear little hare peeking its head snugly out of a man’s jacket as if it belonged there and by page ten it does belong there and you don’t want it anywhere else, certainly not leaping through a field or anything.
Discovering that the author Arto Passilinna has been ‘amusing Finns for thirty years and readers in twenty-five languages...’

Writing ‘comedy highlighted with deadpan...’

And that the French have made this book into a cult all added to the mystique and then you wonder what sort of a sense of humour you’re likely to possess when you live ninety miles north of the Arctic Circle, surely you must have something special to share?
Here beginneth bizarre but if can enter into the spirit of the thing it might help.
Jaded journalist Vatanen, wearying of city life hits a hare whilst driving out on a country road. Leaving his car ticking over and a colleague sitting within, Vatanen hot foots into the forest after the injured hare and in a fit of guilt and wild abandon decides to throw in the towel on his life to date, job, marriage the lot and take to the wilds of Finland with the hare for company.
There follows a series of unlikely adventures and disasters including being arrested for being in possession of a hare, a forest fire, a lot of alcohol and a very Mary Shelley-like final bear hunt that reminded me of a latter-day chase across the ice after Viktor's Frankensteinian monster.
Whether it's the luck of the hare, or is it Vatanen's, but neither seem to be the harbingers of good fortune. As Vatanen discovers, ‘loving animals can be a heavy load’ and one of frequent and hilarious moments when the inevitable hare droppings cause much human mayhem as they end up variously in a pocket, a pulpit and a bowl of soup.
Fable or fairy tale I’m sure The Year of the Hare must be an allegory for something, if only ways to box and cox with the ordinariness of everyday life, and could readily be invested with acres of diffuse and meaningful interpretations.
I did get as far as checking out the symbolism of the hare in my trusty dictionary and discovered the usual things about moon deity, fertility, rebirth, rejuvenation, resurrection, intuition, light in darkness and much about trickster tendencies.
The trickster reference rang a bell that had already chimed, because I had followed that line of enquiry when I came across Vatanen and the hare’s encounter with a raven, all reminiscent of my recent Ted Hughes - Baskin foray.
Then I stumbled across the Chinese zodiac and the Year of the Hare's significance,

'Persons born in the Year of the Hare are talented and ambitious. They are popular with anybody and good entertainers which often makes them the centre of attention. Even though they are liked they are rather pessimistic, insecure and are afraid of changes. They almost never lose their temper and are very good-natured.

Somehow that made more sense than anything in relation to this amazing little book, this hare most certainly takes centre stage and Vatanen is nothing if not insecure.
Finally I said whoaaa and stopped myself, because this felt like a book I didn’t actually want to be too clever about understanding.
It’s just a fabulously weird, whacky and original read not least because by page twenty there really seems nothing unusual about a man loping around a forest with a hare tucked in his jacket and if I saw such a thing tomorrow in the village I wouldn’t be in the least bit perturbed.
In fact, this is Devon and saying that reminds of children walking in the door from school with baby rabbits they'd found in the lane and tucked inside their blazers and me screeching,

'Take them back, they're full of fleas..and then wash your hands...and put your blazer on a hot wash...with biological soap powder...and empty the pockets first...'

Kill-joy mother that I was.
Long may books like this leap onto my reading stack. and sit there waiting patiently for that bizarre reading moment to come along because it always will and it never fails.

Endsleigh Salon - July and we have a Guest Author to visit

I’m so far behind with my reportage of recent Salon events it'll be Christmas soon, so I must catch up before we gather this evening for our theme of 'Wish You Were Here / Glad You're Not Here'. It seemed quite apt and catchy for the holiday season and wide open to multifarious bookish interpretations, so I can't wait to see the salonistas' selections.
Mine's a secret because some of the salonistas read this and it completely kills my flourish and display moment...oh yes, we saw that on your blog.
So, July saw a gathering with a difference because we had a Guest Author visiting.
Except first we had to do a quick whizz round with our books, because to go to the Endsleigh Salon without a book is a sin, so we each took along a Great Read and had sixty seconds to sell it, thus achieving in half an hour or so what usually takes us three or more.
Here's the list and I didn't write my own choice down, so now I can't for the life of me remember what my highly memorable Great Read was, might have been The Fall by Simon Mawer, if not it should have been.
As you can see I have some catching up to do, some great new reading for me here.

When Will There Be Good News - Kate Atkinson
The Behaviour of Moths - Poppy Adams
The Long Winded Lady - Maeve Brennan
The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid
An Expert in Murder - Nicola Upson
I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith
Have the Men Had Enough - Margaret Forster
Into Danger - Kate Adie
The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennet
The Reader - Bernard Schlink
Sophie's Secret - Suzanna Kearsley
Diary of a Provincial Lady - E.M.Delafield
Easy Silence - Angela Huth
The Rapture - Liz Jensen
The Tortoise and The Hare - Elizabeth Jenkins

So to our first ever Guest Author and what a wonderful evening we had with Amanda Craig, author and children's literature reviewer for The Times, who also contributed those last two book suggestions.
We talked in depth about Hearts and Minds with Amanda, about life in London versus life in Devon about the characters, the plotting and the actual writing of the book and we learnt a huge amount about the sheer grit and determination that went into completing this novel.
Then we moved onto the literary world at large, the review pages and the state of literary criticism and reviewing today, what we look for and expect to find in book reviews, how long does a review take to write, what might make us want to read the book, how exactly are the reviews commissioned and written,  why we read them, whose opinions can we trust, what we'd like to see more of, what disappoints us, even more to the point who disappoints us as readers and book buyers and consumers.
At this point I'm sorry to disappoint but I can report no more, not a word because we all took the pledge of secrecy and confidentiality, no names, no pack drill but we know a whole lot more about it all...oh yes all of it, everything and our thanks to Amanda for being so honest with us.
Assuming the grown-up responsibility for the bouquet of flowers for the Guest Author, I had decided that this was Tuesday and they'd likely be wilting by Thursday, so had taken a unilateral decision to blue-sky think the gift to its limits of originality and we sent Amanda home with a pair of Tamar Valley apple trees from the neighbouring Endsleigh Gardens Nursery instead.
Now I hadn't really thought beyond what an original idea it was, so the logistics, sensible things like getting them in a little saloon car, had by-passed me in my enthusiasm for the task. We'd delivered them to the hotel earlier in the day in the back of the Land Rover and truly the warning signs were there as they hung off the back and out of the sides, but that night, in a howling gale (the one that did for the Gaze-Bo) pouring rain and pitch darkness, it was indeed confirmed that they would not be fitting in the back of my Fiesta in a hurry either.
Thankfully the night porter at the hotel baby sat them until we sorted it all out the next day and I gather they are now planted in Amanda's beautiful Devon garden as a permanent reminder of an evening in the Salon. We hope as she crunches into those succulent apples in years to come she will forever recall what a pleasant and very pleasurable book-loving evening we all spent together.
So tonight's theme, Wish You Were Here / Glad You're Not Here, coming up - September - Africa, October - Scandal and more great evenings next year. I'm really looking forward to Plague & Pestilence and Back to the Land plus of course I'm already making headway with October 2010 The Book You Should Read Before You Die (how goes it Team Ulysses, Base Camp Two this Sunday, I'm bivouacked and just settling in)
But what on earth would you all take along for any of those themes?

Love and Summer by William Trevor - Bookerthon 2009

Mood might be everything when I pick up a book like Love and Summer, because to move from the rush of life and settle into the slow, measured pace of Irish life as portrayed by William Trevor demands that the foot comes right off the accelerator and I move ahead at walking pace. Anita Brookner requires likewise, I’m reading Strangers and there is absolutely no point in rushing headlong into an Anita Brookner either.
By page twenty I’ve usually realised the error of my ways, know the book is a 'stayer' and I start again.
It's summer in Rathmoye, veiled allusions to troubled pasts, and a stylish young stranger flaunting a ‘jaunty green-and-blue-striped tie’ cycles into town, reading The Beautiful and the Damned and snapping away with an old Leica camera (not all at once). It can only hint at what might lie beneath as the scene is appropriately set for an Irish novel by opening with a funeral. Thinking back to The Gathering et al, the Irish seem to do funerals better than most and Mrs Connulty’s is no exception; reputed to have owned half the town and when that town only briefly draws its blinds and closes it shops to pay its last respects there is much to be read into that limited gesture.
As events of the present slowly allow the past to be exhumed, William Trevor’s characters gradually took shape and wriggled right into my consciousness as I became increasingly immersed in this unique little microcosm of human frailty. By this time I might just have been awaiting a degree of Irish predictability in plot and character but somehow the book happily subverted all my assumptions.
Ellie the foundling who leaves the care of the nuns to become a housekeeper

‘sent into the employ of a haunted man.’

And by the time this book begins reader she has married him; the gruff but gentle and tragically widowed farmer Dillahan, a solid but ultimately fragile man who may break at any time; the Connulty twins, brother and sister who now inherit all the family interests on the death of their mother and through these characters alone a wonderful delineation of how death’s sting can go either way.
Might it set you free or might it entrap you forever?
The irony is not lost that following the death of her mother, the razor sharp, calm as ice, Miss Connulty (she who has no first name) now manages a boarding house full of male lodgers. Her barely repressed anger and my early character assassinations all tempered considerably by the eventual discovery of the tragedy that has shaped her life and all revealed in what I suspect may be William Trevor’s well-honed powers of understatement.
Gaps and silences left for this reader to fill with vats full of compassion when the truth emerges.
Talking of truth, William Trevor uses a wonderful expression ... ‘blemished truth.’
Blemished such a perfect word to describe all these lives, tainted by grief, guilt, heartbreak, gossip, rumour  and the past seeping in around the edges to stain the present. When Ellie falls for the enigmatic stranger Florian Kilderry many eyes are watching her and waiting to write their own script for her in the light of their own personal griefs and tragedies.
I'm afraid my expectations for Irish writing are hopelessly and perhaps stereo-typically governed, much like we always know their entry for Eurovision will be sweetly lyrical and tuneful and not a completely off the wall ear-bashing and I can only apologise to all those cutting-edge Irish writers who may be out there pushing the envelope.
Writers like John McGahern and Sebastian Barry, Anne Enright and Deirdre Madden lead me willingly into those acres of green, lush, lyrical poetic prose and how completely William Trevor fulfilled and exceeded those expectations with Love and Summer.
Then I discover that he lives in Devon, so perhaps our verdant pastures offer a little inspiration and to know that at eighty-one William Trevor is still writing like this makes me think our water must suit him too.
This proved to be one achingly beautiful read for me, utterly absorbing and an ending that quietly took my breath away as the tangles of misunderstanding and interpretation surrounding these lives unravelled and rewove themselves into a future that would suffice for everyone...well almost everyone, there must always be some disappointments and discontent in life.
I was totally immersed and in many ways saw the book within its Booker context as a sort of reverse foil for Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, where Eilis’s Irish qualities are transported to New York, lush pastures becoming city pavements, but Toibin's prose no less lyrical and shall we add limpid (surely there are some words that are compulsory when talking Booker ) for that.
So what mighty horns of a cleft stick of a dilemma I’m now facing here in Devon and miles away from any Booker frenzy.
There is no doubt in my mind at this stage that I will want both Brooklyn and Love and Summer on my shortlist.
Then I've just finished J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime and once I've got my head and my thoughts around it that might need to be there too.
But I already had four certainties comfortably seated around their tables at the grand dinner...

Journey's end

Just a quick update to let you know that Offspringette completed her charity skate-journey this week and here's the beach at Berwick.
Over 500 miles done, many right foot shoes worn out so now a cupboard full of left ones, soles of feet very sore, met some amazing people along the way and heading nicely towards the £1500 total for Help For Heroes.
Negotiated Edinburgh and then Glasgow to see the old workplace and caught up with friends along the way too before heading off to the border.
Many thanks to everyone here who has chipped in and supported the cause, you've all been very kind and generous but never was a person so delighted to see England apparently.

Our green and pleasant land

Sorry to be so English and talk about the weather but do you remember that summer we had?
It went on for about two weeks, all lovely and hot but fly-ridden here (are we never satisfied) and though cows look gorgeous in the front field, you can't have cows without flies, so I turned to The Country Housewife's Book by Lucy.H.Yates.
I had said I was going to live the Lucy Way and Lucy suggests bringing elder branches into the house to fend off the flies. The other options were saucers of milk and Formaldehyde which seemed like a recipe for a well-preserved but possibly dead cat, or liberally sprinkling sand and sawdust with paraffin, which seemed like a problem if we had ball lightening roll through the house.
This might seem like an improbability I know, but you can't be too sure, funnier things have happened, like the bolt of lightening down the phone cable years ago which took the box off the wall and burnt the carpet.
Then I just plain ignored Lucy's next suggestion as impossible,

'In houses where Vacuum Cleaners are freely used flies have little chance to settle and deposit their eggs..'

The elder branches might have worked, we weren't sure because we were all driven out into the garden by the smell of them, not unlike incontinent cats, so didn't notice if there were any flies indoors or not.
As Lucy says

'Country life makes many claims on the industry and the attention of those who live it; hardly a day may pass but what has its trials'

Well we know that for sure after this week, but we mustn't dwell on it and there are many advantages.
This little piece of England is where we keep the logs.
Stacked outside for a while, chopped and then stowed in the log shed and suddenly this lot sprouted in the ground in front.
A beautiful bed of succulent mint appeared from nowhere as mint does.
Every year I say I'm going to make mint sauce and every year I turn my back, it's gone over and the moment is lost.
No moments lost this year.

It's shamefully so long since I've had the urge to use the food processor I had a job to find it, but I did, it whizzed up the leaves nicely, the vinegar and sugar boiled and in it all went and that smell of summer lingered for ages.
This is better than the smell of kippers which, having cancelled his holiday in the Isle of Man earlier this year, the Tinker still arranged to have posted to Bookhound as is the tradition.
I'm afraid I made him cook them in the garden.

Buckland Abbey

We had a fine mid-summer jolly over to Buckland Abbey backalong as we say down here.
Buckland Abbey not to be confused with Buckfast Abbey of the monks, bees and tonic wine (known as Bucky on the streets of Glasgow I'm reliably informed )
Buckland Abbey lies on the edge of the village of Buckland Monachorum, where Bookhound and I lived in those ancient days of yore when health visitors were sometimes lucky enough to be offered an unfurnished house with the job. I think it's entirely possible to trace our love of rural living to that 1978 move from Plymouth city, with all our worldly goods including a very 1970s rubber plant and a Swiss cheese plant plus the dog all packed in the back of a Renault 5.
Buckland Abbey, one of the few dissolution monasteries left standing in the South West and later the home of Sir Francis Drake, now a National Trust property and a few weeks ago the venue for a Summer Craft Fair.
I was trying to think why I always walk towards any National Trust property with a slight tinge of guilt and apprehension and now I know why.
Bless them, I know all the gatekeepers and reception people are volunteers and they do a wonderful job but there's that moment and it happens every time.
'Would you be interested in joining today, becoming a member?'
and the leaflet is thrust into your hand.
And you mumble apologetically that you don't want to thank you.
There's then a slightly harder direct-gaze sell which you listen to politely until eventually you can't stop yourself and out it comes,
'No I'm really sorry but we did that all thirty years ago, we've seen everywhere down here ten times.'
And you feel wretched because they look at you with a sort of mortified, deeply hurt but slightly disparaging glance before suggesting, 
'Never mind, perhaps next time you visit?'
Inwardly you imagine them to be shrugging off your crassness and lack of refinement and casting you as 'one of those who don't care about our heritage' and you slope off and walk on in feeling like a heel, like a free-loader.
Before setting off for a soothing stroll around the grounds to look at the craft stalls, we headed straight for the refectory and the cream tea just to assuage our guilt and pour some of our hard-earned cash into the NT coffers somehow. Then we met the Green Man ten foot tall and wishing us 'the blessings of summer' in a rather sinister voice which hinted that word had already reached him that we'd declined to join, so we went and hid in the tithe barn with its spectacular roof and myriad craft stalls, watched the spinner spinning and then said hello to a pair of bald and rather twitchy, nervous alpacas who clearly hadn't joined up either.
 
 

Day Seven and a half...

...in the Broadband House and there is glee amongst the housemates, though I think you might all be bored into a coma with this saga.
They kissed and hugged the BT engineer who was on his way to collect a Long Service award and most deserving he is of it too, in fact give him several and an extra two weeks holiday and slap a load more on his pension.
The housemates would like to share a little bit of internetty wisdom with the outside world.
When India are following their flow chart and send you off to press that little button on your Netgear router with a biro to reset it, think very carefully before rushing to do this.
In fact perhaps go into your router by typing that ISP thingy into your address bar (something which the housemates are now very au fait with) and write down those settings, because though the housemates have no recollection of doing anything other than buying the thing and plugging it in and saying
'Oh look it's magic...we have broadband.'
they must have performed some sort of installation ceremony, a blessing of the router now long forgotten.
Apparently those numbers are different to the auto-settings and if you want BT broadband to work when it returns after an 'outage' and probably every other sort of broadband, those auto-numbers are different and have to be right...not wrong.
But all this will be a thing of the past when the new BT home hub with matching phone arrive next week as a welcome gift to the housemates for setting up a new account with BT, even though they have been devoted customers of BT for some 33 years.
They might just let sleeping routers lie and keep it all in the box.

Day Seven...

...in the Broadbandless House and there is much concern amongst the housemates that yesterday's British Telecom engineering expedition failed to reach base camp and may have lost their way.
It would seem that agreeing to a newly negotiated contract with BT whilst the housemates had them over the rack as it were may well have backfired.
India had cancelled the engineering expedition and informed the housemates when they rang to express concern over the welfare of the BT engineers,
'Many thanks for signing up for BT Broadband, may we welcome you as customers, your new broadband connection will be live next Wednesday.'
'Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...' the housemates were heard to wail as one.
'Do you think you could just check our line please.'
'There is a fault on your line'
'It's definitely not our router is it?'
'No, there is a fault on your line, the engineer will call tomorrow.'
That's today and yet again one of the housemates has leapt over the wall and sits in the internet cafe nursing a much bigger pot of tea and very great big piece of coffee and walnut cake for comfort in times of trial.
If you hear a news flash declaring a state of emergency in rural Devon because a BT engineer is being held hostage, please forgive us won't you.

Day Six...

...in the Broadbandless House and the housemates are beginning to forget what life with broadband was like. Copious conversations with the impeccably polite entire Indian sub-continent continue and the housemates are making many new and lasting friends amongst them all.
It is Day Four of the rescue expedition and today the BT engineers will return to base camp at the village exchange yet again and set out on their perilous mission yet again to cover the three miles pole-to-pole across fields, over hedges, through forests, traversing mires and bogs, scaling mountains and confronting many demons and monsters eating grass, as they attempt a valiant rescue of the Broadbandless House from its silence.
Meanwhile one of the housemates has escaped over the perimeter fence and finds herself comfortably seated in a cafe with a wireless signal and has indulged in a strawberry smoothie and a chocolate brownie for comfort and solace in times of trial and would like to wish Offspringette a very happy birthday to you...twenty-eight years ago today...oh my word.

The Deakin Way.

'This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose...'

I'd have thought to wait until the autumn to quote this poem by Ted Hughes which I had read in my recent little sojourn in his company last week. It says so perfectly what we feel like on those mornings later in the year after a weather-beaten night, but it's all been very St Swithun's-appropriate lately and stormy with it.
We've had branches down blocking the lane and resting precariously on the phone lines for a while, but ever-vigilant Bookhound had the resulting log harvest safely gathered in once Highways had been and carved up the debris.
It would also have been good to have gathered the Gaze-Bo in safely too.
If only we had added storms + a Do-it-All structure together and come up with 'Let's get that in the shed pronto', but it was too late. It was Endsleigh Salon night and I had gifts of apple trees for our guest writer to think about and somehow the welfare of the Gaze-Bo was forgotten with predictable consequences.
I'm still reading Notes From Walnut Tree Farm contemporaneously through the year so our days are mirroring Roger Deakin's nicely (and Roger would have had no truck with a Do-It-All Gaze-Bo, his would have been living and growing) and perhaps we'd better live the Deakin Way because he gave me a good idea.
It is always possible to read Roger and find wisdom in a single sentence and be entirely happy with a compromise because he hates neatness too; so between us we can come up with something rural and in keeping.
Things like Roger doesn't mow his grass because all the blueness will go. In his case germander speedwell, in our case creaminess and clover.
So far beyond the point of planting, our Vegetable Garden has for this year been declared a guilt-assuaging Nature Garden (as if the rest of it isn't already) to attract bees and butterflies and things which chirrup, which basically means we'll just let another bit go wild, hack a path through and stare at it some more.

Early July and Roger's idea,

'I find that in the recent rain the seed pods of the common vetch have all burst open, revealing what at first glance I take to be jay feathers, but found were the striped insides of the seed pods.
I encourage them because of their beauty but also because they fix nitrogen back into the soil...the rain has softened them, then the sun has blackened and hardened them...'

So in between the deluges I'm out there in the lane looking and as sure as seed follows pod, there they are, in their millions.
I shall be scattering appropriately.

Day Four...

Day Four in the Broadbandless House and tempers are fraying.
Housemates have now clocked up 10 hours on the phone to India and entertained two days-worth of engineers. Well one day of the wrong engineers and today the right engineer up poles in the pouring rain.
So the line fault is sorted but still no internet access.
The housemates weep when the engineer tells them that despite the router flashing all the right lights it must be broken.
Finally, as one housemate is released to drive into Plymouth to buy a new router, news comes in from India.
The housemates are comforted to know they are not alone; BT have a major 'outage' issue and 60% of their broadband subscribers across the UK seemingly have no internet access.
The Plymouth-bound housemate is diverted at the pass and is now safely back in the Broadbandless House.
Apologies if you are one of the 324 people who have e mailed the housemate who is now curled up with a good book yet again, she will be catching up soon hopefully...

dovegreyreader asks...Tom Reynolds

Tom, I'm wondering if you can tell us quite how Blood Sweat and Tea came about, why you decided to start a blog, how it became a book ...yes in fact please do tell us how a blog becomes a book:-) how you write about your day without upsetting the 'organisation' (!) and what you want your readers to know and learn as they read, in fact anything you can tell us about it all.

Well, I'd like to mainly blame joey devilla I'd been reading his blog for a bit and it came to his birthday.  At this birthday he had a Jacuzzi on a truck delivered and had scantily clad women using it.  My thoughts on reading this was mostly 'how can I get a piece of *that* action?'.  So I started blogging, fully expecting to get bored and give it up within about six weeks.  Somehow, through comments and the burning desire that is still unfulfilled of having a Jacuzzi at my birthday party, I find myself still blogging.
As I kept writing I was discovered by Jane Perrone of the Guardian - this then led to a few more newspapers and even the BBC profiling me as one of these new-fangled blogger types, and I was noticed by a number of publishers who all came knocking at my door.  Turning down the 'big boys' I went instead with a spunky little start-up, 'The Friday Project' and so the book was born.
Later, of course, The Friday Project would be bought by Harper, so I ended up working with the big boys anyway.
I doubt that any of this had anything to do with any sort of writing 'skill', and more to do with what I was writing about.  In those days writing about the work ambulance staff do was fairly rare, especially from a normal member of staff.  I found my niche and have ruthlessly exploited it...
I think I've managed to avoid annoying the LAS (London Ambulance Service) by maintaining the confidentiality of my patients and by not being too negative.  It's true that I do take swings at various silly things that I come across but I do try to remain somewhat positive about what I think would be good changes to make.
The LAS communications department keeps an eye on what I write and I suspect they like it that I can write about things without them having to put an official seal of approval on it.  For example, I can whinge about frequent callers a lot more than the LAS can through official PR channels.
I think that they realise what the views of a frontline member of staff can do to humanise the service and explain that we don't just deal with heart attacks and car crashes.  At least I hope so, I'd hate to return to station and find my P45 waiting for me.
Really I just want people to think a little about the work that the ambulance service does, something that acts as an antidote to the TV dramas that seem to think that we fly around wearing our underpants on the outside of our trousers and shout 'C'mon Bob! You can make it!' to every cardiac arrest that we go to. I'd also like people to maybe take a bit of interest in the hidden folk that you don't think about normally - the alcoholics and the junkies and, most importantly, the elderly and vulnerable.

We are hopelessly inquisitive here and love to know about your writing day which I'm thinking must also be your working day, so is it a notebook in amongst the resus equipment, OK defibbing now, stand clear and jotting down a few things, are you thinking about how it will write up as you work, has it changed the way you see your working day?

After a job I might jot down a sentence of two in my iPhone or notebook - nothing too detailed but just something to jog my memory when I get home.  For example I might write 'NOF on floor - staff try to pick up' to remind me of the little old lady who broke her hip falling from bed and must have been in awful agony when the nursing home staff tried picking her up to put her back to bed.  I can then spin off from there.
Other times a job stays with me until the end of a shift until I can put finger to keyboard and offload it from my brain.  A classic example of that would be elder abuse, I can't sleep until I've  written about it.
My crewmate (who is a saint) somehow manages to put up with me when I start talking about how the last job will make a good blogpost.
What writing has done is make me a better practitioner - take for example the alcoholic patient.  You can only write about going to an alcoholic so many times before it gets stale, so what you find yourself doing is writing about their family, or you take a look at the place in which they live, or they way in which they get their alcohol, or why they started drinking, or the attitudes of different staff towards them, or...  Well you see my point.  By looking at people in all these different ways it lets me be more thoughtful about them, their families and the problems that they have.  All of which are good things.
That and of course the worldwide fame has meant that I can't be beating up annoying patients and pushing them out the back of a moving ambulance anymore, after all someone might notice.  However when I'm running short on interesting stories to write about I do have to start pushing people in front of cars and off tall buildings, just for something interesting to write about.*

*Dear Boss - this is an attempt at humour, I don't really do this. Honest. Despite the rumours that you may have heard.

Are you a reader and if so who do you read and who should we read?

I try to read as much as possible, although that isn't as much as I'd like - As my real life is quite full enough of tragedy and real life I like to avoid that in the books that I read.  I'm a huge fan of good SF, so I read things by Charles Stross, Neal Stephenson, Warren Ellis and Cory Doctorow but I will read pretty much anything that is put in front of me.  Besides recommending my own books *ahem* can I also suggest 'Blue Lights and Long Nights' by Les Pringle about his experiences in the ambulance service in the 70's and 'Six Months in Sudan' by James Maskalyk about a MSF doctor which is what I'm reading at the moment.
What I am doing at the moment is picking books that are available in e-book format, I have limited space in my flat so being able to read things from my Sony Reader is a real space-saver.  Sadly it would seem that publishers seem to be ignoring non-American markets for their e-books, what they really need to realise is that it is a global market now and restricting sales of books based on where you live is an easy way to lose money.

Tom, I hate to do this because I know people are always dialling 999 needlessly, but could you just check Rocky over for signs of life while you're here? I'm a bit concerned about his GCS, (Glasgow Coma Scale) he's been like that for about 3 mths.

I don't know how to break it to you but I think Rocky is a catnip addict, it's the glassy stare and slight drool that gives it away.  I recommend rehab...

More Blood More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea by Tom Reynolds

It's now feeling like quite a while since I was employed by the NHS, so long that I'm almost starting to feel normal. Nine months to be exact, a whole gestation's - worth into my new unfettered life (and though I'm still working as a health visitor it's not for the NHS)  but it's even longer since I worked in a hospital, and light years since I did that long stint of night duty in Casualty (as we used to call it, but now rebranded A&E) at the London Hospital (now rebranded the Royal London) in Whitechapel. I loved working in casualty.
Lots of drama and plenty of nights when it all got a bit violent and we'd all be locked in the office while someone rampaged and flung the chairs around and we'd call the police to sort it and come out when they had.
So now with a few degrees of separation between us I can look back fondly on the old Organisation and even read books about it all and not have a conniption. In fact I quite like a bit of medical reading these days and so when Tom Reynolds's sequel to Blood, Sweat and Tea arrived and very neatly called More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea (why mess with success) I hid it.
I hid it because the last one came back in 2006 and was whisked off by the Kayaker and his mates and hasn't been seen since. Half of them went off to train as para-medics and the rest kept paddling those big rivers just while they waited to see how the mates got on.

I actually caught a glimpse of Tom Reynolds on Breakfast TV a few weeks ago. Kate Silverton almost needed resuscitation at Tom's suggestion that people really did call an ambulance because they had a verruca and I think it was a close call for the defib.
Kate, you might recall, the one whose hair I had envied and instructed my hairdresser accordingly, but three re-incarnations and a lot of wax later I've sensibly reverted to type, along with an acceptance that I lack the bone structure plus I must have at least twenty years on her.
Anyway Tom is really Brian Kellett, an emergency medical technician with the London Ambulance Service whose blog on day to day life 'neath the blueys and the sirens, Random Acts of Reality, not only didn't get him the sack but actually got him a book deal with Scott Pack at The Friday Project (now part of Harper Collins) and this second volume carries on in the vein (sorry) of the first.
Tom's patch is East London so it's going to be gritty stuff, lots of fourth floor flats, drug addicts, old ladies tripping over pavements, paperwork, cardiac arrests, feral teenagers,dodgy nursing homes and a wonderfully readable mixture of comedy and sadness, much despair at a bureaucratic system that creaks and some jaw-dropping moments of public arrogance that quite defy description.
We used to think we were out on the front line as health visitors, in an out of people's homes often at some of the most stressful times in their lives, but I think Tom and Co. are even further out there and with high expectations resting on their shoulders. This is often compounded by the fact that a high proportion of us watch  E.R. or Casualty and Holby City and  therefore assume we know what the ambulance crews do...you know Josh and all those miracles he used to work?
If the building collapsed (when didn't it)  forget risk-assessment, Josh was pushing everyone aside to get in there.
Blazing factory ? No worries send in Super-Josh?
Imminent birth of octuplets in a shopping centre? Josh is your man.
So to set the record straight I dialled 999, made up some story about a cat having been asleep for three months and requested that Tom Reynolds attend the 'dovegreyreader asks...' armchair immediately. It was an emergency, no time to waste and he very kindly blue-lighted in to answer our questions and tell it like it really is and you won't want to miss Tom's responses tomorrow, including his verdict on the Rockster.
He's right, how can I have missed it all these years?

Prize draw copies of More Blood More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea

Names in comments and prize draw copies of More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea by Tom Reynolds will be blue-lighting their way to three lucky winners worldwide, as long as we can rouse the Rockster from that coma.

Apologies...

...for the radio silence this end meaning no replies in comments.
We are broadband-less because apparently there isn't enough electricity to go round and as we're at the end of the line we just get the dregs of the signal and the voltage is too low to sustain our upstream but our downstream's fine...yes it does sound medical and no I don't understand it either.
I don't want to even think about the hours spent on the phone to India trying to sort it out, though they have been the soul of patience with us as we fumble around testing connections and doing a lot of something called 'pinging'.
So I've nipped over to the Tinker's just to let you know that normal service will be resumed as soon as BT have a mind to come and investigate.
My money's on rain water in the box on the telegraph pole yet again.
A post should appear as usual tomorrow thanks to auto-typepad technology and hopefully I won't be too far behind it and catching up.

Knitty news

So many books in the way we haven't done knitting here for ages, but my Knit-a-Poem letter has arrived and I have been allocated an intermediate 'O', having decided not to be a clever clogs and ask for an advanced letter and end up with an 'S' or a 'W'.
For anyone who might have missed this, the Poetry Society are knitting a poem to mark their centenary. Well they're not knitting it exactly, we are, as in hundreds of us.
Lots of 12" squares with letters, dark on light background and plenty of plain spacer squares.
I've made a start and of course ignored all warnings about tangled woven webs of wool that happen round the back of multi-colour work, carried on regardless and had something akin to the school maypole gone horribly wrong going on before I called a halt.
Found the Fair-Isle wool bobbins, wound some wool on and my word, doesn't that make it easier.
I've done Fair-Isle in the past but not much intarsia and there's a subtle difference in thinking ahead to where you want your wool to be on the following row and then doing a bit a of judicious weaving round the back to have it ready and waiting when you get there, plus remembering to wind it round as you knit from one colour to the next so you don't have an 'O' surrounded by doily-like holes.
Their must have been a huge amount of behind-the-scenes work to set this up and the Facebook is showing some fantastic completed letters for the yet to be announced poem and my thanks to Curzon who thinks it's bound to be 'O For the Wings of a Dove' but I have my doubts. I've got a few weeks before the deadline and having got my eye in I should be done in time, but will have to hope my 'O' blends in with the whole and isn't scrutinised too closely and let's just hope no one ever ever looks at the back.
I shouldn't have been trying to watch that programme about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood while I was doing it.
Meanwhile I labour on up the final sleeve of the baby llama jumper (wool that is, not for a baby llama) and have forbidden myself even to sniff the wool that I have ready and waiting for my autumn knitting project, but it's pure Jacob with 50% mohair and I went to the mill to buy it and had a guided tour from sheep to skein while I was there, more about The Natural Fibre Company and Blacker Designs very soon.
On another exciting knitting note, it's the Yarn Harlot and Co's long-awaited Sock Summit in Portland, Oregon coming up this week. Short of beaming myself across and reconstituting at the other end, I shall be there in spirit only and having a Sock Base Camp of my own here with a motley variety of half-mades to finish, but we are in luck because I am dispatching an envoy to report back on our behalf.
By chance and good fortune someone in Canada e mailed me about some books and happened to mention they were going.
'You're GOING!!!...to the REAL THING...' I gasped electronically.
If anyone thinks that should have really been a bit of a 'so what' moment and what's so great about a Sock Summit, you have to know that when online booking opened, servers crashed into oblivion as upwards of thirty thousand knitters around the world tried to register simultaneously.
This event is huge.
There was a best-forgotten moment of unashamed envy that someone else was going and I wasn't before I pulled myself together and realised this could be turned to our complete advantage, so my thanks to Aimee who is going to report on the Sock Summit for us with pics... mmm yes, pics of the wool market stalls and socks and dpns and more socks and wool and all things knitty and nice.
Meanwhile Devon fights back... FibreFest coming up at Coldharbour Mill very soon and I will definitely be there.

It's a beautiful moon.

Bookhound often calls it the parish lantern but I think the rest of us might know it as the moon and occasionally it does something quite special in our outdoor planetarium.
No light pollution but our own to contend with and so a while ago I took out the posh camera, the one I'm holding hostage, to see what it could do. My trusty little Olympus All-Weather 600 sees me through day to day pictures for here, and you all know by now that all I do is point and press, so what I see is what you see, blurry bits and all, but it has all made me a much more observant person than I ever was, for which I thank you.
I'm not sure I'd be quite such an assiduous snapper were it not for the scribbles.
So, it's midnight and I'm out on the verandah in the pitch dark clicking away at the parish lantern.
Rocky is indignant that I've disturbed his night time prowling and for a minute I wonder what it might be that's padding across the gravel and I'm quite relieved it's him.
Owls are hooting and there are all sorts of weird and wonderful noises in the front field.
The swallows were still snuggled up with their babies in the nest and just fluttering a fraction over my head and there were some very odd scratching and scuffling noises going on beneath the verandah decking which was all a bit distracting.
After about fifty rubbish shots, showing two moons and clouds that looked like an ante-natal ultra-sound scan, I went in and found the tripod and things improved considerably.
Then there was nothing for it but to get out one of our favourite children's books and read it.
I Want To See The Moon by Louis Baum and illustrated by Niki Daly was published in 1984 and our copy is held together by sellotape.
The pages are faintly sticky and very finger-worn because it has been read countless times to wakeful children, and in the intervening years I see the book has become an out of print rarity, which is sad because it's a thing of quiet and peaceful beauty that would still make lovely childhood reading.
This is the olden days, all long before the Baby Whisperer or Gina Ford, way before the invention of controlled crying or the disappearing chair methods of trying to get wakeful children back to sleep. There's an acceptance of occasional wakefulness and a lovely Dad involved in these pages.
Toby can't get to sleep so his Dad goes in to see him and by the time you see the first page Toby has dropped that teddy and is leaning over the side pointing at it and declaring 'I want to see the moon'.
He is then walked round the house in any number of diversionary tactics because surely he doesn't mean it.
He gets a clean nappy, a glass of water, a piggyback, a story, builds a castle, drinks some warm milk but each picture shows that recalcitrant body language of the thwarted toddler...
...until in the end he and his Dad go into the garden to look at the moon
The moon hides behind the clouds for a while, sneaks out a bit and back in again and then
'There's the moon!' said Toby
'It's a beautiful moon' said Daddy.
'Beautiful moon' said Toby.
'Good-night, moon,' said Toby.
And ever thereafter when we see the parish lantern one or other of us will recite these lines which have entered into family folklore.
Bookhound was away, so I had to make do.
'It's a beautiful moon, Rocky'....