dovegreyreader scribbles

In a Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor

Two things come to mind as I start to think about In a Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor, my Middlebrow-a-Month for September, though I'm fast thinking I want this slot in my reading to be able to embrace way beyond those perceived limitations of the word 'middlebrow'.
I do see that the word has its limitations, so I'm going to see where each book leads and just follow where it suggests with my next choice...except the book is still most likely to be found in what I have always called Middlebrow Corner, just over my left shoulder here.

It's a bit of a higgledy-piggledy hotch potch but I know what's there...Viragos, Women's Press, LitCrit on fiction by women, the Nun's section is over here too and behind the glass doors my accumulation of old books, bottles of ink, plenty of Richmal Crompton, Barbara Pym, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth von Arnim et al. plus some conkers from Oscar Wilde's grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris....and I don't know why those are there.
But none of that is in the least connected to the 'two things that come to mind'.
The first is how difficult it can be to read a book when packed in like a sardine on a crowded train and thus how good the book needs to be for me to manage to read any of it, and secondly, or is it thirdly, how I really should have written my thoughts down the moment I arrived back from Cambridge. I finished the book on the journey home between Taunton and Tiverton Parkway, nearly forgot to get off the train at Exeter because I was so stunned by the ending, and that was all three weeks ago now.

But In a Summer Season has lingered and I have had plenty of time to think about the book that many cite as their favourite Elizabeth Taylor novel.
Robert Liddell's book, Elizabeth and Ivy, his memoir of the friendship and correspondence between himself, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Elizabeth Taylor offers plenty of insights and it's a book I return to frequently for another point of view on Elizabeth Taylor. Robert Liddell calls this a novel full of 'minor felicities' suggesting that 'the background tells more than the people or the happenings'.

The widowed Kate Heron, wealthy and attractive with one teenage and one almost-adult child has met has married the hapless Dermot and gained in the process, Edwina, the mother-in-law she may have preferred to manage without. They live in prime Elizabeth Taylor commuter-belt country and both Kate and Dermot feel duty-bound to slot into the roles dictated by society, he that of the commuting wage- earner, she that of the stay-at-home housewife who dutifully cooks the evening meal and adores her new husband. And despite the disparaging opinions of Aunt Ethel, the resident cello-playing spinster aunt, adore him Kate does, all a bit awkward and improper for a 40-something widow in the early 1960s; this often regarded as Elizabeth Taylor's most sensuous novel set against that rare but appropriate phenomenon, the scorching hot English summer.
But there are plenty of other satellite relationships to observe in this book and how well Elizabeth Taylor pins them down and so often with that wry, understated humour.
Little mention of any grief for the loss of her father, but Kate's daughter Lou and her teenage crush on the parish curate seems to speak silent volumes about much more than just adolescence, as Lou willingly sacrifices her afternoon to help sort the old shoes for the parish jumble sale just in case Father Blizzard should stop by.
Son Tom, not much younger than Dermot, in the employ of his grandfather and embarking on his fledgling relationships with women.
Aunt Ethel's copious letter-writing, full of salacious details about Kate and Dermot, to her best friend Gertrude, who occasionally migrates to London from her rural bird sanctuary and calls in to visit Ethel,

'My oldest friend...we were in Holloway Prison together, years and years ago...it must be important business to drag her away from her shags and gannets. She worships birds, many an injured gull she's given houseroom to.'

The return of Charles and Araminta, the husband and daughter of Kate's best friend who had died the year before.
The wonderful housekeeper Mrs Meacock, fresh from the employ of an American family and prone to add pineapple to every dish, but also gathering together the material together for a book of her own ' Five Thousand and One Witty and Humorous Sayings.'
It's well known that Elizabeth Taylor used to walk along to her village pub for an early-evening drink alone and it's not difficult to imagine how much people-watching she must have indulged in.
So many avenues are created, so many vantage points from which to observe Kate and Dermot whilst exploring those frailties of human nature of which Elizabeth Taylor seemed only too aware.
Published in 1961, In a Summer Season must surely have been a step or two ahead of the moment. Of course step-families were nothing new, but I saw this book as perhaps one of those early attempts at a fictional representation of the tricky subject of what is now known as 'the blended family', and with it a woman's attempt to do that blending and much against the social mores of the time; to remain a mother to her two teenage children whilst being the the new and desirable wife to the much younger husband, just a few years older than her own son.

Of course we do now have a definitive book on Elizabeth Taylor. Nicola Beauman offers some fascinating insights and parallels from Elizabeth's life, which are then woven into the content of In a Summer Season, in her recent biography The Other Elizabeth Taylor . I'm not going to spill those beans but I knew Nicola's book was going to become a sort of vade mecum as I read more of Elizabeth Taylor's fiction and I wasn't mistaken.
I did not see that ending coming, but perhaps knowing what was happening in Elizabeth Taylor's life as she was writing this book, I should have done, and not a word more.
It's all there waiting for you to discover for yourselves if you haven't done so already and I don't think you'll be disappointed.
So decisions, decisions, where does this book lead me for October's read?
Well I go to the corner behind my desk and flick through a few books waiting for a link, a connecting sign because I've now decided it can be very tenuous indeed,

'I wonder if you could let me have anything for the jumble sale on Saturday? I asked quickly. 'Old clothes, shoes or anything?'
'Oh I've always got lots of junk. It will be a good chance to get rid of it, ' said Helena without looking up from her writing. I'll look out some things this evening.'
'I've got a pair of shoes and a suit that the moth got' said Rocky with a glance at his wife...'

Barbara Pym's Excellent Women wins so we'll reconvene on Halloween and if you want to read along through October too you would be very welcome to join me.

Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill

Well I think I've already committed several cardinal sins according to the gospel of Susan Hill's latest book, a memoir of her reading life, Howards End is on the Landing.

1. I've stamped my name in the front of the book, I do it inside every book I write about on here.
2. I've read the book in three days.
3. It will go in a place on my shelves especially reserved for books about books and reading.
4. I will always know where to find it.

Plus point in my favour that may well negate those sins of commission is that I have scribbled all over it and that is very much the done thing.
First things very much first though and I think we do have to drink in the beauty of that cover yet again before we turn the first page. I did for at least a week, this one is going to look stunning in the bookshops.

Susan Hill has created between the covers of one book an idyll, a beautifully atmospheric rural setting within which to reflect on that wealth of memories about her reading life woven in amongst all those literary encounters that have blessed (mostly) that life along the way. As Susan wanders around the elm staircases in the home she shares with the SP (Stanley Wells, the Shakespeare Professor) and dogs and cats with names like Orlando, and studies the bookshelves various on an autumn afternoon, the stage is set for all those old favourites to emerge.
Slowly the books bought and not read also reveal themselves and the decision is made to take a year out from the book-buying habit, leave off all but essential internet use for a while, hunker down and revisit all those old favourites in a bid to rediscover those past pleasures.
Well I'm green with envy at the decision already...my willpower to turn my back on the world of contemporary fiction is almost non-existent. I'm in the midst of a post-Booker reactionary phase but it won't last too long, that I know.
Susan's list of literary encounters is a Who's Who of the latter half of the twentieth century literary scene and the names are legion from those days when initials said plenty, C.P.Snow, T.S.Eliot, E.M.Forster, W.H.Auden and V.S.Naipaul and alongside the likes of Ian Fleming spied across the room at a party sporting
'the craggy remains of such mesmerising good looks'.
There are some deeply moving encounters too.
Iris Murdoch tragically diminished by her final illness looking with 'troubled, puzzled eyes'.
Elizabeth Bowen met and known through a correspondence.
Arnold Wesker, for whose children a young Susan had been the babysitter. 
Roald Dahl grumpy but with reason it would seem.
Susan receiving awards on behalf of a frail and ageing Charles Causley, 'never vain, never anything but young in heart and spirit', by all accounts a very lovely man.
Even I would have braved a trip to the Venom Clinic where Susan happened to be waiting just as Bruce Chatwin was wheeled past, his adonis-like features and piercing blue eyes still just evident in his AIDS-ravaged frame.
These but a handful of the literary meetings recalled and recounted that make reading this book such a complete pleasure. There is something about having these legendary authors placed in the real world like this, observed about their daily round, that brings the book vibrantly to life.
Along the way wonderful personal observations about a childhood steeped in libraries, books and poetry, school detentions and loving the poetry learnt by heart meted out as punishment, reading habits establishing a reading life that may well continue to induce that state of greenish envy.
Envy if like me you think you may have also loved to have spent a life writing and being immersed in books and publishing, and somehow a different path mapped itself out for you. Susan carved hers out successfully from a very early age with a dedication and commitment that I personally think has kept her at the top of her writing game ever since. We do chat on the phone occasionally so I'm always careful to tell Susan that a new book is showing promise and that she must stick at this because it will come good for her one day, but that's only because we can't have authors getting too big for their boots and because I do know she has a well-honed sense of humour. Susan's books have been earning their place on my shelves for many years and I suspect at least one of them would make it into my Final Forty.
The Final Forty, the books that Susan eventually decides she can't live without, make for an eclectic list and what a challenge it would be to read them all. I suspect the online list that starts doing that can't be far off and there's an irony to that suggestion now I think about it with the gestation of Howards End is on the Landing during Susan's reduced-internet year.
I've only read about fourteen of them and unwittingly had several lined up, Elizabeth Bowen shot across my radar on that recent trip to Cambridge and Susan offers plenty of good reasons for readers to explore much more of her list.

Those who read this book will concur with many if not all of the reading and bookish sentiments expressed but our lists will all certainly be very different .
Published in a fortnight or so, Susan will be talking about the book at the Cheltenham Literary Festival on October 14th and will be seated in the dovegreyreader asks...virtual armchair soon too.
Tomorrow we divert to Middlebrow-a-Month day, but more thoughts on Thursday because of course I had the Howards End is on the Landing Walk to think about it all some more.

Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig

I guess it's going to happen soon.
My supply of available novels in translation by Stefan Zweig will dry up and I'll be bereft and just have to read those I have over again. I've already read several twice but my ongoing read of Stefan Zweig's autobiography is just making me hungry or as A.S.Byatt says, greedy for more.
Burning Secret published originally in 1913 as Brennendes Geheimnis but more recently in an English translation by Anthea Bell by Pushkin Press and in one of those delicious 'little' editions they have made their own and with some contemporaneous artwork on the cover.
This a 1911 painting by Kadinsky.
Three main players, twelve year old Edgar and his mother have left his father behind and are holidaying alone at the Austrian resort of Semmering up in the mountains when their close-knit bond is interrupted by the arrival of the gregarious pleasure-seeking Baron,

'He knew that if he was to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box.'

The huntsman with a strategy best defines the lady-killer Baron and in his sights, Edgar's mother. Befriended by the Baron, it is some time before the naive Edgar realises the true motives behind the Baron's effusive interest. Once the truth starts to dawn Edgar is invaded by new and previously unknown emotions, new behaviours,

'Once he might perhaps have been naughty in order to annoy her, but you learn a lot when you hate and you learn it fast.'

For a brilliant delineation of the mind of a child on the brink of adulthood, look no further. Edgar does not yet possess the guile of an adult, he is readily duped and when the Baron's duplicity becomes apparent his reactions hover in that no-man's land between childhood and adolescence. Acting on impulse and with no thought for the consequences, Edgar's impetuousness will lead to him learning the first of many lessons in that heady land of adulthood,

'Dimly he felt that the secret was the bolt on the door of childhood, and once he had shot back the bolt and conquered the secret it would mean he was a grown up, a man at long last.'

Stefan Zweig has that happy knack of choosing his locations carefully, here the rarified mountain atmosphere where the air is that little bit thinner, everything is defined more sharply and with crystal clarity. Then he proceeds to examine every nuance with that microscopic lens of his, the glance, the blush , the discomfort, nothing is too minor to be missed, those unspoken moments leading to assumptions, the 'cause' which allows the reader to add the 'effect.'
Why was Edgar's mother so angry to find that, sent to his room from the dinner table they were sharing with the Baron, Edgar has sat and waited for her in her room?
Edgar is completely perplexed at her rage, yet we are not...well I wasn't.
Stefan Zweig doesn't need to say it but I did... what if she had returned to her room 'with company'.
Edgar's mother has lessons to learn too as she approaches that time in a child's life when as a mother you have to stage something of an emotional retreat and let them sort it all out for themselves, let them rewrite that treasured childhood relationship you've had with them, as they become distant and grunt instead of talking. Thankfully the plan is that they return as well-balanced young adults who pat you on the head and willingly come and carry the shopping in from the car or lend you a tenner, but be prepared to be told a few home truths along the way perhaps....you won't wear those Ugg boots outside the house will you and definitely not with a short skirt...but they keep my feet lovely and warm.
I gave them to Offspringette in the end.
Edgar, spotting his mother's weakness for the Baron's advances and sensing a disloyalty to his father, wastes no time in honing his fledgling adolescent emotional skills on her as he advises 'you ought to beware of him',

'It was terrible to her to find an inner voice of her own conscience, separated from herself and disguised as a child, going around masquerading as her own child, warning and deriding her.'

So more wonderful Stefan Zweig.
Every book I read of his touches something special, makes me think and see anew and the very good news is that this November Pushkin Press will be releasing a new edition of the fantastic autobiography The World of Yesterday that I'm slow-reading in the old University of Nebraska edition at the moment.  I'll have to do a halfway post soon because there is so much to say about Stefan Zweig's incredible outlook on his life as it builds slowly and inexorably towards the rise of Hitler and as my November Remembrance Reading is going to be World War II this year it couldn't be more apposite.
Mention and plaudits too for the translation of Burning Secrets by Anthea Bell and eternal gratitude for that intervention and careful mediation that allows me to read and appreciate yet again this amazing writer.

Plus de chaussettes

As suspense grows about which poem we have all been knitting for the Poetry Society's Knit-a-Poem adventure, let's not forget Emily Dickinson's words on the subject, here's 786...

Autumn - overlooked my Knitting -
Dyes - said He - have I -
Could disparage a Flamingo -
Show Me them - said I -

Cochineal - I chose - for deeming

It resemble Thee -

And the little Border - Dusker -
For resembling Me

If you clicked through to that Poetry Society website and scrolled down and saw the pic of people holding letters...well, just look, that could be my O, and if it is let's hope that cast-off (or on) edge has coped with the s-t-r-e-t-c-h..or worse did someone hand it to that man and say
'This one's terrible, way too small, give it a tug would you, we'll never make it fit'
I do hope my O ends up in a nice happy expressive word, I'll be very upset with 'of' or 'on'.
I'm having problems of a bonding nature with the Noro sock yarn that I thought was going to be so delicious but is turning out to be a bit like knitting bobbly cotton and creating a sock that feels like straw, all enough to make me overlook it, but worse is the fact that it knits up so very very slowly. 1 inch per 250 miles or so on a train back from London is chuffing along at knitting steam engine pace.

So in a bad bout of startitis borne of impatience (the very worst variety for someone like me)  I have cast on not one but two pairs of socks recently.
The first in double knit (after some maths to reduce my 60 stitch - 3mm needles standard sock down to a 52 stitch - 3.75mm derivation) using that incredibly beautiful, handspun and natural dyed ball that came with the Little Toller Press books a while ago.
This is wool, silk and  cashmere dyed with cochineal beetle and indigo and as there might not be enough for two whole socks and I want to use little glimmers of it in several projects, I have mixed it in with some Shetland wool that Offspringette had brought back from her rolling summer sojourn in those parts.
It had started as an offhand remark...oh if you happen to pass a wool shop...which became ...keep an eye out for a wool shop, which ended up as...when you find me a wool shop which you surely will in Shetland of all places pleeeeeease choose and send some, which bless her she did, from Jamieson's in Lerwick and in gorgeous colours too.

Hand dyed wool on the ball gives little clue as to how it will knit and it's been a row by row surprise to see how the Little Toller wool builds up. It's soft and warm to work with, slides gently through the fingers unlike the Noro which feels a bit rough and ready. I'm not sure why I'm carrying on with it other than the fact Noro's expensive and I've started so I might as well finish, eventually.
I'm loving these colours and I decided things were getting far too predictable with my sock-knitting so I slotted in a bit of a pattern which I'll have forgotten how to do by sock two so I might as well mix the colours up a bit too and make them really quirky.

So with that sock nicely established I then I decided to go even bigger and even quicker, so more maths, 36 stitches - 6mm and a chance to use up the leftovers from the Noro Kochoran gilet (that of the duff ribbing which I'm getting used to now) and hey presto, a lovely warm woolly sock in an afternoon.More exciting things to come no doubt and just call me daring and adventurous because I'm going to cross the border and venture along to a Cornish knitting group soon, I'll keep you posted.

Thank you...

My thanks for all the lovely good wishes and thank you too for the cards and wonderful gifts of books that have arrived, never coals to Newcastle as one of you thought, it will be really lovely to read some of your favourites, you are all so very kind.
I wonder if Margaret in Kent could e mail me.
The package addressed to me at The Long Cottage on a Hill near Milton Abbot arrived safely this morning (bless Jim the Postie) and I have got all my Margarets muddled up but would of course like to write and thank you.
Today, lunch at Cranks in Dartington and a wander around Totnes, home and the first fire about to be lit to test the chimney and burn in the newly painted stove.
More harbingers, my Strictly Come Dancing knitting is in progress, that lovely Manos del Uruguay wool from my last trip to Spin a Yarn, big needles and a pattern I should be able to manage with only 50% concentration

There should be a jumper to show for it by Christmas surely.

Harbingers

There are a few sure and certain signs that autumn is here and winter seems very likely to follow and I expect you all have your own harbingers, but here are just a couple of ours...
We open the curtains one morning and see this.

It leaves me speechless for a minute before I nearly break a leg to go and find my camera, because it doesn't stay like this for very long, the mist rises in layers off the River Tamar which is over there somewhere and the trees seem to hover  and float as they slowly emerge.
It's pure Tamar Valley magic.

But beauty must be contrasted with reality so this happens too...

This year no Mac the Vac coming to sweep our two chimneys (imagine the eighty-two at Port Eliot) because Bookhound has finally bought his own set of brushes again. Years ago we lent the last lot to someone who wanted to unblock their drains and, like us perhaps they twizzled them the wrong way and alas, the rods came undone, but we certainly never saw them again, perhaps a good thing.
So I run outside and wait for this...

And that's the bottom-up chimney (if you get my drift) done at the far end of the house, where you're best advised not to set foot if you are older than about thirty (like us) and hate mess and kayaks in the sitting room, and Bookhound then moved onto the top-down chimney.

'This one's a lot easier' he called as he climbed the ladder and I then watched through half-shut eyes as he manoeuvred himself onto the roof to start the sweeping.
'Not from where I'm standing it isn't ' I suggested helpfully whilst thinking those Cox's Orange Pippins are looking nice on the end wall.
' ...are you sure you're alright... it'll be me has to look after you when you....'

At this point I left and just waited for the thud (it has happened before) which thankfully didn't happen.
Next time I went out I was told very nicely to just go away and leave him alone because the brush seemed to have gone round the bend in the flue and was stuck and he was very embarrassed...
It's out now and so is the soot...a lot of it.
There's one last sure and certain harbinger of autumn, but when the Gamekeeper expressed incredulity with guffawing mixed in at how old I was going to be today...
Mistake.
'You can work it out' I said, warming to my cause,

'You were twenty-four last week and I was thirty-one and fifty-one weeks old when I wrecked my body yet again to give you the gift of life having only had a hospital dinner and a Mars Bar to eat that day and then no pain relief I might add and you had huge feet even then and while we're about it I gave you the most perfect set of teeth in this family (no fillings) and a jolly decent liver in the process which was really very nice of me and don't think when yours packs up that you're having a spare lobe of mine because we've just been in there and ploughed through all the empties to get to the chimney and ..'... more guffawing and a pat on the head.
Anyway I decided I'd keep quiet about what else it is today.

Outre de avec leurs têtes

Blame babelfish right now for all translations in this post and I've added a bit of emotional colour today as well.
France has taken a hold over my reading in recent weeks and so I was vert avec envie when news came through of the latest seventh edition of the online LitMag Five Dials from Hamish Hamilton and with it news that chaud sur ses talons would be edition number eight,  the Paris edition and to let me know that they have all trolled off to Paris to launch it in the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop today.
'Combien beau' I said, through les dents grincees avec la grimace fixe, 'j'espere que vous avez un temps superbe.':-)
I keep adding more and more books to the pile to read, ostensibly in preparation for my assault on A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel.

It's no secret that I loved Wolf Hall and the way that Hilary Mantel hand-held me through the Tudors, and no secret either that it threw up shamefully great big gaping holes in my knowledge of Tudor history little supplemented since reading Jean Plaidy in the 4th form in 1969. In many ways that lack worked in my favour because I came to the book with no pre-conceived ideas about anyone, not even Thomas More, so I was up for Hilary's revisionist approach and her attempt to enable a reader to see these characters we thought we knew in a different light.
Writing in the latest edition of the London Review of Books about Eamon Duffy's Fires of Faith - Catholic England Under Mary Tudor (which I have and will now definitely read eventually), Hilary Mantel makes an interesting observation,

'It is perhaps hard for historians to accept that, despite the recent popularity of factual history on screen, their close and canny arguments have less immediate influence on popular perception than the novels of Philippa Gregory and interminable, incoherent TV series The Tudors.'

then adding,

'It is likely that a British audience will resist Jonathan Rhys Meyer's portrayal of Henry VIII as camp, weedy and short. But they will believe anything else: that Thomas More was a martyr for freedom of conscience, that Anne Boleyn was a witch, and that the monasteries were dissolved be men on horseback who rode in mob-handed and decapitated monks with battle-axes.'

Well gullible old me might, all you history buffs out there will probably take a much more considered view, but Hilary Mantel makes a salient point about Eamon Duffy's approach to Mary Tudor's reign which I suspect could equally apply to Wolf Hall

'Among historians, Duffy himself has changed the orthodoxy, undermined the old narrative;'

and I couldn't resist sharing this lovely bit of pure Mantel,

as for popular preferences, they always favour the picturesque, and the papists have all the best costumes.'

So whilst lack of some background knowledge may be a bonus, when it comes to the French Revolution, I can't even hide behind the words 'lack of some' because we're on the brink of a complete and bottomless chasm of confusion.
When I was in the 4th form nothing by Jean Plaidy on the French Revolution ever came my way, too many brides of Henry to read up on (and a fat lot of anything useful I seem to have remembered)  and nor have I ever hit it off with A Tale of Two Cities. None of it was deemed essential reading for 1970's nursing studies where I was too busy perfecting my envelope corners and my aseptic technique and making sure all the wheels on the beds faced the same way.
Why?...because the Bishop was visiting, little had changed since Cardinal Wolsey's day I suppose.
So all I can lay claim to on the French Revolution is a terrible soup of guillotines, tricoteuses and Madame Lafarge knitting, some barricades and Les Miserables, a  lot of let them eat cake and that's about it, and I've never felt the need to improve on that until now for which I blame Hilary Mantel.
So I looked at The Place of Greater Safety and decided that this time, despite the all-powerful summons of the big new unread book by a writer I consider to be a very safe pair of authorial hands, I didn't want to dive in and be Confused of Devon for the first 300 pages again and sit here feeling like a lemon syllabub while the court gavotted around me. If Wolf Hall had a cast of about a hundred, this one seems to have the entire population of Paris waiting in the wings, but this time I'd at least know my way around 18th century Paris and know my Estates General from my Robespierre.
So I've been slowly Dancing to the Precipice with Lucie Tour du Pin and can't recommend this one highly enough.

I am indeed living proof that you need no previous knowledge of the French Revolution to very quickly imagine yourself into Lucie's delicate and kind but confident and self-assured dancing shoes and in the hands of Caroline Moorehead expect a very readable book. Much more on it eventually but it's not a book to rush....I think something nasty is about to befall Marie Antoinette...
French Tales,  from OUP, a lovely selection of short stories edited by Helen Constantine, is giving me a fine feel for the country, and there is nothing like a jolly good Zola, The Belly of Paris this time, for really getting to grips with the city's atmosphere...other than a trip to the Shakespeare & Co bookshop, that is.
Even better, was it Amanda (Craig) or Adele (Geras) who recommended Sally Gardener's The Red Necklace and The Silver Blade in comments here?
Thank you.

They both have quotes of praise inside the book and what better way to gather in that essential feel for the time than with a children's book. With the focus on action, unusual characters and fine sense of place all to fire up a child's imagination with a little bit of magic thrown in, and with the first sentences of each chapter printed in that yet to be invented Farrow & Ball shade Rouge de Guillotine, well I've just woven myself willingly into the world Sally has created.
Hopefully just a small leap now across that yawning chasm flowing with guillotine soup into the grown-up world waiting for me in A Place of Greater Safety.

The Shoes

For those who have asked me about the shoes today, here's a slightly better picture.

No code numbers in them, bought at least ten years ago and reduced in a sale, which makes me think perhaps Brasher don't make these any more.
Worn to distraction, bit battered and scuffed but more comfortable for me than walking boots  and every bit as waterproof.
Now I'll admit, fashion guru that I am, I even wear them with woolly tights and those socks and a mid-calf length denim skirt in the depths of winter...I really do give you permission to cross the road and walk on if you see me out anywhere.

The My Antonia Walk

My breathing is shocking.
I mean it goes in and out alright, but having just joined this community choir I really need to improve on it. It's fifteen years since I left a church choir and  I haven't really sung with the express intention of anyone hearing me since.
This is very different to church singing, more of the Rhythm of Life, Chicago, Les Miserables, Some Enchanted Evening variety and I'm loving every minute. Someone commended my sight read rendition of I Had a Dream last practice and I sort of nodded appreciatively before whispering ' Susan Boyle'.
But breathing and being able to properly and deeply is everything, and it's no good thinking that walking round the house in a pair of fit-flops is going to do any good. This needs action, so to help things along I have decided (again, after the last time I decided this) to make brisk walking an intrinsic rather than an intermittent aspect of my life.
This sauntering fifty yards along the lane and home has to be extended.
I only have to go out of the gate and keep going after all, no excuse and there's nothing like it for thinking time which has been at a premium Chez dovegrey in recent weeks. Calm has now descended since the Kayaker headed off for Africa and The While Nile paddling expedition.
So the house is quiet and I decided that as an incentive to myself I'd pledge an excursion in with each book I finished.
Finish book...offer it a thinking walk, hour or so out, hour home to ponder its merits and so I've been on three walks lately and set off on the My Antonia walk last weekend.
It was on with the world's most comfortable pair of Brasher walking shoes which have gone a rich, deep, ripe conker colour after about ten years of wear and polish, and they never let my feet down with a pair of SmartWool socks inside. If ever you meet me in London forget any hint of a fashion icon, I'll be wearing my sad but glove-like Brashers.

But I was also wearing a new base layer which had come highly recommended by Offspringette after her recent marathon trip on wheels around Scotland.
They're meant for extreme sporty people but we can all pretend.
An Icebreaker, made from pure New Zealand merino wool, soft next to the skin and nice enough to wear as a single layer too, keeps you magically warm and cool at the same time, just like the sheep and I'm testing out my lovely bright cerise pink one before I invest in more because they're quite expensive.
My rationale is quality lasts.
Being a person who can't bear to be cold I bypassed the lesser range and went for the 260 for very cold conditions one and so I sweltered oddly even wearing it on its own.
You're hot but you're not if you see what I mean.
Even better each garment has something called a BaaCode (get it?) which you type into the website and the source of your wool is traced back to the sheep on the station in New Zealand.
Yes really, how exciting is that....there was some derision and disbelief here but I'm quite convinced I've really met my sheep now, New Zealanders wouldn't fib.
Here's my sheep farmer  at Glen Orkney on South Island, seems like a nice chap and look, there's my sheep...well I can't see the pink one but it'll be there somewhere.
I'd gone walking without a map but it's not that difficult to get a general sense of direction because you rarely lose sight of home wherever you walk around here... forty minutes out and chez dovegrey the little white dot in the middle, with a lovely view of those four now-harvested fields we walked up a while ago (sorry, you'll have to rummage, it's in that Country Life tag somewhere)  to the Bluebell Woods at the top and, far into the distance on the left, you can see way down into Cornwall.

I had a chat with some sheep about their antipodean kindred spirits turning themselves selflessly into baselayers for people like me in Devon and then hopped over a stile and along a public footpath across more fields.

By the time I came to this improvised cattle trough my Icebreaker was doing every degree of its 260 best and I could have happily plunged in. But there was evidence of recent cattle activity and I get a bit nervous of herds of cattle in fields because they love to make friends, all at once and at about 90mph, so moved swiftly on.

So home again eventually and with my head teeming with those My Antonia thoughts, about the prairies of Nebraska, the whole notion of lifelong friendship and memory, loyalty and what is real happiness about and so much more and it all felt really good.
Happiness for now though was a shower because by this time I'd lost about half a liquid stone, followed by a pot of tea and another good book...leading to the Howards End is on the Landing Walk.

My Ántonia by Willa Cather

When I opened the envelope from The Reader and saw My Ántonia by Willa Cather, well my heart went zing zing zing (sorry I've joined a community choir, it's having a bit of a knock-on effect) and leaped along with prairie joy as I quickly sorted out that long accent on the Á when you pronounce Ántonia. So no ImoGen moments of eighteen years duration, and please do drink in the beauty of that accent, it took me about three hours to sneak it under the typepad wire and place it there.
I'm new to Willa Cather, always meant to but never seem to have got around to her. I knew of the rift in her friendship with Dorothy Canfield Fisher after my DCF reading trail last year but not a lot more so this is where Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers is now regularly earning its keep. Something now tells me that My Ántonia may have been a good book to start with for its semi-autobiographical content.
Know Nebraska life and I sense I start to know Willa Cather and for anyone like me who doesn't quite know, to the exact latitude, where it is...

I'm not sure I've read a writer recently who does people and place quite as astutely as Willa Cather. The prairies and the people of Nebraska an unknown quantity for me until I read this book, it's hard to describe without going all purple prose on you, but I may as well have laid on the land and listened to its beating heart, because with passages like this I've definitely been there and shared it all

'I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun or air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.'

Through the eyes of Jim Burden, looking back on his own life and Ántonia 's from the moment they both arrive on the prairies from afar. Ántonia Shimerda as a fourteen-year old immigrant with her family from Bohemia, Jim as a ten-year old orphan, on his way to live with his farming grandparents and reading the Life of Jesse James on the train from Virginia .

'the only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.'

Jim and Ántonia may grow up in the same environment but their homes are vastly different. One most likely to generate warmth, happiness and an adult with a clear sense of all this, the other more inclined to sorrow and hardship, and as I read on and Jim and Ántonia's childhood friendship moves into an adult companionship, I readily sensed the point A.S.Byatt makes in her chapter on Willa Cather in her book of selected writings Passions of the Mind.

'She wove prose like a huge intricate cloth, covered with local detail, yet flowing in large loops and coils and connections.'

A.S.Byatt elaborates on the whole notion of the university educated Willa Cather, with her formidable intellect, turning her literary attentions to the

'new unformed or formless American subjects, the settlers and pioneers with their unrecorded lives and their diverse heritages.'

A.S.Byatt then pointed me towards another book gathering shelf-dust, Literary Women by Ellen Moers, wherein Willa Cather gets a good airing and for me, a newcomer to the prairie, this jumped out at me,

'Cather's greatness resides not in her womanliness as a writer but in the bardic role she played in the history of the prairie land. "The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman" : no line she wrote can more justly be quoted in tribute to her work.'

Early in the book, so hardly a spoiler, it is revealed that Jim is writing this account having just made contact with Ántonia again after a gap of many years. Jim is the youngest and the dilemma is will Ántonia always see him as a child and I don't want to give away an ounce more plot, which slightly limits what I can say, but if you haven't read the book I don't want to spoil those moments of wondering that might happen for you, as they happened for me.
What I can say is that everyone will have their own versions of happiness, their own definitions and Willa Cather left this reader in little doubt as to whose was greater by the end of the book and in terms of possession, who does the Ántonia of My Ántonia truly belong to?
There are plenty of choices to consider.
It is all a beautifully elegiac tribute to people and relationships, the joys and tragedies often dealt with quite matter-of-factly, as they had to be in this harsh landscape pioneered just a few years earlier. Assumptions are nicely subvertes and all life is captured, pickled and preserved here, births, deaths, suicides, knitted socks as gifts and a Christmas scene which deserves to go in anyone's personal anthology of must-read Christmas extracts.

'During the week before Christmas, Jake was the most important person of our household, for he was to go into town and do all our Christmas shopping. But on the twenty-first of December the snow began to fall. The flakes came down so thickly that...'

as Grandfather gently intones the Christmas day readings and prayers for his snowbound family you can feel the atmosphere

'He had the gift of simple and moving expression. Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use.'

Along with Betjeman's 'The bells of waiting Advent ring, the tortoise stove is lit again,' and that lovely carol singing chapter in Under the Greenwood Tree, and Little Women's 'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents, grumbled Jo, lying on the rug', chapter XI of My Ántonia is a winner.
So what will my verdict be for The Reader?
I can give it anything from 5* 'one of the best books I've read' to 0* 'don't bother'. but sorry, that would all be telling, they've already been kind enough to let me give the game away about which book it will be, you'll have to wait until the next edition of the magazine to find out the rest.
Scroll down to the next post for the chance to win one of six copies of My Ántonia, if like me you haven't read it you might not want to miss it and my thanks to The Reader for finally ensuring that I didn't.

Prize draw copies of My Antonia by Willa Cather

Names in comments to win one of six copies of My Antonia by Willa Cather (worldwide) in the very perfectly lovely gorgeous Oxford World's Classics edition and the prairie cat, who is hiding from this very confusing prairie dog,

will oblige in the choosing of eventually.

So can we help...

I received this e mail about an hour ago, my visitors are very well-read I said, someone will know because actually I don't...

Do you have a service where people with failing memories give some vague clues about a book they once read a review of but can not now recall? For example last summer (2008) there were a number of reviews of a collection of short stories by a north American female writer, reasonably well known over there, less so over here. All I can recall is that the word 'DOG' was in the title?
No I am not getting confused with Alice Munro....

Over to you...

Readers Connect and old friends

Every three months I look forward to the arrival of a surprise copy of an Oxford World's Classic which I then read, write fifty words on and rate from 0-5* for The Reader Magazine. A voracious new reader joined us regulars on the Readers Connect slot last month and I'm quite honoured to be sharing a page with no less than... no, you'll have to read on to find out who.
My love of The Reader goes back some years now, it's now on Issue 35 and I discovered it on Issue 11 and I'm not sure why I have two 18s.
I was looking at that first edition to see what might have impressed me back in Winter 2002 and actually it was all of it. This perfect, compact, bag-sized treasure horde of literary writing.
I'd just finished that seemingly endless six years of the Open University literature degree and I was  trying to turn my back ever so slightly on the literary higher ground of theory and analysis which at that time I quite thought had ruined me reading pleasure for ever. I didn't seem able to pick up a book without looking for the narrative voice or the hidden ideology or then running up a quick post-colonial analysis and then revising that with a feminist reading and life didn't seem complete without writing 'Bahktin argues that...' at least ten times a week and it was all bugging me...what on earth had I done this for?
Enter The Reader, intelligent writing but not 'in your face - over your head' stuff, accessible, sufficient depth to set me thinking and actually using those literary skills if I wanted to, but I'd still be enjoying it if I didn't. That sounds like completely muddled thinking now so you can just see how far off the beaten track I've gone since those days of clarity and precision.
I was delighted when The Reader asked if I would participate in their Reader's Connect project and they have sent me some very interesting challenges. Last edition I had to brace and confess publicly to disastrous failure with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and I had fared little better with Rudyard Kipling's Kim last year. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte was a huge success and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf also set me right for an annual read ever thereafter (which was a good thing because lo, Virginia Woolf is the mystery reader who joined our happy reading band last edition, we now have to mind our Ps and Qs) and so I was really hoping to be able to boast of success with whatever came next.
Equally interesting has been that gradual changeover to the newer Oxford World's Classics covers from the old and I have to say much-loved editions here.
How well I remember the excitement of meeting the OUP team at Oxford HQ in the run up to the launch at the Oxford LitFest and getting a first glimpse of what was coming, and how well I remember my pang of uncertainty and asking weakly for reassurance that the feel of the book would be the same, because the paper does have a 'feel' and it matters (well to me anyway).
That was all about the familiarity of old friends I think.
The Open University use a lot of these editions as set texts, and over the six years I became used to the style, the layout, the footnotes, the bibliography, the chronology of the author's life, and don't ask how many hours I spent gazing at the covers when I really should have been reading. I only have to glimpse the well-creased spines now and my lasting bond with them all is apparent and when I went to find them there they were, some of my old friends sitting on the shelf.

Now I'm starting to feel a bit like Susan Hill because I've just finished her latest book, Howards End is on the Landing A Year of Reading From Home, and Susan does a lot of wandering about her shelves looking for books and seizing on them like long lost friends too. This might be the time to admit that I have seen these very shelves, even browsed them a bit myself, who knows might even have put a book back in the wrong place when Susan wasn't looking, and not a word of a lie it really is the ...er...disorganised chaos of a bibliophiles heaven that she describes and no, I wasn't the person who offered to sort them out for her, I have enough trouble with my own but the book is sheer magic, more about it soon.
Talking of book covers, I think this one might be near-perfect.

But compare new to old Oxford World's Classics and see that actually they do know best, they were right and somehow they have retained the integrity of the artwork in with the new design, I love those eyes winking at me from the shelf, saying come on then, give us a read, so it's all to my readerly satisfaction.

and then when you see the covers...

But what of the latest book to arrive from The Reader?
More on that tomorrow and there will be six prize draw copies of whatever it is from OUP too.

dovegreyreader asks... Fay Weldon

Fay, we've kept them guessing all weekend and what a pleasure it is to have you seated in the 'dovegreyreader asks...' virtual armchair. I wonder if you could talk us through where Chalcot Crescent came from, what compelled you to write it and does this quote from Frances really speak for you,
'I have always used fiction to get to the heart of the matter, to discover what it is I know. It is up to the facility analysts, when they finally get around to reading this text, to decide what is memoir, what is fact, what is truth (Pilate-like I wash my hands) or some embroidery of the truth.'

How I came to write Chalcot Crescent makes  a long story.  Do you really want it? Stories about publishing are always interesting to writers, editors,  agents and publishers but I’m never sure about readers. Their concern, quite rightly,  is the finished book. But you have me seated in a chair , and asked me a question so I reply. I seldom volunteer information, but if people ask me questions I reply and reply and can’t stop. I always speak the truth but claim I tell lies so I can deny anything I have said afterwards, if people choose to use what I said as evidence against me, which quite often happens.
But here it is for what it’s worth: and  it’s in second draft – that is to say it is written down not spoken, the latter being  first draft stuff -   so I can’t even disclaim it. And it is a tale, I’m afraid,  of authorial delinquency.
Novel writing – I wrote the first in 1967 – used to be such a simple process.  You wrote a  novel and gave the finished MSS to a publisher and  if he liked it he would print it and give it to a bookseller who would be pleased to put it on his shelves (along with all your back list) and people would come in and buy. The editor was a person who saw the book through the production process in-house, and would not dream of making a comment other than point out the odd spelling mistake or inconsistency.
But the process is no longer simple; the art form grew into an industry and no one but me seems to feel ashamed of thus describing it.  The writer provides the raw material, but others refine it, process it and package it to suit the readership.  The writer is marketed as a personality, the book as of a  particular genre. The writer, guided by the editor,  provides a synopsis, on the strength of which he( more often these days she)  is commissioned, and given an advance to go away and write what is calculated to sell. The jacket will be designed on the strength of the synopsis.
All would be well except that  writers write novels out of both  left and  right brain joined in a marriage of equals,  and writing a synopsis is a left brain activity only, born out of reason, self-interest and common sense,  and the more you stick to the synopsis when you write, ironing out the entertaining follies of the right brain, the more boring your  book becomes. I have gone on strike and am never going to write another synopsis before I have written the entire book and can then  describe it. 
For any synopsis can sound good, if it has a what-if  theme, a beginning, and an end. This  kind, though persuasive, won’t have a middle – the  ‘what if’s’ having emerged in the first chapter – and what else is there to do but invent incident. 
Then you’re in trouble.    
In the middle of 2007  I gave the publishers one such  synopsis, too  persuasive for my own good. They accepted it with enthusiasm. For gloomy months I  stared at the page. I would write a line or two and then start  playing Pharoah. The editor’s title ‘What Made Her Run’ left  me feeling hopeless. It was my fault. I had given them a domestic tale about a family riven by run-away wives – surely  a genetic trait. By the beginning of 2009 the novel had its jacket – tormented girl; leaning against wall (sales said this was bound to sell) – but where were all the words that were meant to be in the middle? Somewhere stuck  in my head. So one day in January I just I gave up and wrote  an entirely other novel I didn’t know I wanted to write in ten weeks non stop, about a house I’d lived in twenty five years back, with my unborn sister Frances as its protagonist.  80,000 words of a Dystopia with jokes. Set in 2012 when we’re all living on National Meat Loaf laced with SRRI’s, suitable for vegetarians.
Chaos built up around me as I wrote in the form of scrumpled, shoddy bits of paper, dirty washing,  littered desk and unanswered e-mails. This is a good sign, though distasteful at the time.  Something real is going on.

It ended up as the novel you have been so kind about, Chalcot Crescent so unexpected it put my publishers into shock and they rejected it.
But  Corvus   picked it up within hours and published it within months,  with a jacket that fitted the text and did not put me into chick lit, where for years I have been cornered,  driving my readers  reasonably to claim for damages under the Trades Description Act. .
And yes, what Frances says in Chalcot Crescent speaks from my heart. Frances is an alternative version of me, but more unscrupulous than me and a mother of daughters not sons. 'I have always used fiction to get to the heart of the matter,’ she says, ‘to discover what it is I know. It is up to the facility analysts, when they finally get around to reading this text, to decide what is memoir, what is fact, what is truth (Pilate-like I wash my hands) or some embroidery of the truth.' The ‘facility analysts’ are the interrogators of NUG, the National Unity Government, who are reading Frances’s manuscripts and trying to decide to eliminate her, because she speaks the truth, or turn her into a national treasure, because she writes fiction..

Fay, I think you'll always be treasured for all your books, but is there one that feels most special, and if so why?

Puffball is special because it is about the birth of one of my children. I have four boys. My eldest son  is a musician and turned it into a kind of opera with speech not singing:  and my second son is a film maker and he turned it into a film directed by Nicolas Roeg. I discourage them from reading anything I write – who wants a writer for a mother -  but they somehow got hold of this one. We work on it together but never discuss it, just accept it as a given.

I'm really sorry but we are terribly nosy here and love to know about a writer's writing day, so can you tell us about that and what the process involves for you? We are always very impressed with news of special writing socks / jumpers/ trousers, fountain pens and ink but really how the writing happens and whether the dishwasher needs to be empty first etc.

The south west wind blows really cold into my office windows: it is an old house and  we are on top of a hill. So I have taken to writing down in the basement on the laptop in winter where it’s warm, if haunted, and  someone gave me some black woolen mittens with bright bobbles on the knuckles for which I am very grateful. I like it down there with the cobwebs and the bobbles dancing as I  type.

I'm now adding an extra degree of inquisition because I think we'd really love to know what writers do when they don't write, what interests you and fills your non-writing days?

What do I do when I don’t write?  I teach. I am a Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University
It’s meant to be one day a week but always  stretches to more. Teaching  students  who volunteer to learn  is a delight. You just tell them what you never knew you knew, and warn them about the problems they are going to run into if they’re not careful, and incidentally teach yourself by analyzing what it is you do yourself.  Otherwise I just assume I am writing all day, when  not sleeping or eating or going to the dentist.  If my head gets too tired I rest it  playing  old fashioned  empire building computer games. Chalcot Crescent was written with the help of Pharaoh. I go abroad when publishers ask me to,  and talking has to take  the place of writing.  Next week I go to Mantua for three days for an Italian translation  of  Puffball: in October I go to Norway to open a conference on the changing face  of copyright . This is frightening, but I am only really there for light relief.

Who must we read? Which authors and books would you urge us not to miss?

Sadie Jones’s Small Wars, just out,  is really good.

 

  

 

and the winners are...

We have six lucky winners who will each receive that lovely brace of The Snow Geese and The Music Room by Willaim Fiennes and currently typepad has removed all my 'text editing tools' so mes apologies, no hyperlinks links and no picture of Rocky working in close partnership with a new online random number generator (www.random.org and apparently it's more really random than anything else we've tried) having got heartily fed up with Mrs Glosser tickling him under the chin which he doesn't like.
Check back on the post if you are uncertain whether it's you or not by clicking on September 14th on the calendar over here >>>>>> and send addresses to dovegreyreader at gmail dot com and lovely things will happen eventually.

14 Henrietta
20 Harriet Devine
22 Karin
49 Joanna D
55 Marion Webb
70 Anmaru

I'm also waiting to hear from Flossie T and Kat who may have missed the news that they have both won a copy of How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall...Irene your copy will be on its way very soon!

Meme and a bit of guesswork...

Behind the scenes, Typepad, who I pay monthly for this reasonably glitch-free blog space (not knowing when I set it up three years ago that there were some good free blog providers out there) works away at improvements and frequently sends messages urging me to try something new, which I usually ignore.
Now it seems they have forced my hand and finally insisted I move over to the new software for something called my dashboard from where I control operations and I am all at sixes and sevens. After three and a bit years I could do it all in my sleep (but didn't) and now my beloved compose screen is all different, the photo-text-wrapping button won't work, the list of posts and the draft/ published symbols have changed format and half your comments aren't coming through to my email, the potential for gaffes is enormous; none of which is of any interest to all of you but it feels as if I've moved house.
Apologies if any furniture seems to be in the wrong place, just give it a week and I'll have forgotten what the old dashboard looked like and discovered all the helpful improvements I'm sure, but meanwhile I found this meme at Harriet's who I think found it at Cornflower.
It all kept me up very late one night.

"Using only books you have read this year, answer these questions.  Try not to repeat a book title.  It's a lot harder than you think!"

Describe yourself:  Walking a Literary Labyrinth - Nancy Malone

How do you feel: The Days of Grace by Catherine Hall

Describe where you currently live: An Equal Stillness - Francesca Kay

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Brooklyn - Colm Toibin

Your favorite form of transportation: The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight - Gina Ochsner

Your best friend is: A Most Wanted Man - John le Carre

You and your friends are: All My Friends Are Superheroes - Andrew Kaufman

What's the weather like: Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

You fear:  The Taste of Sorrow - Jude Morgan

What is the best advice you have to give:  If the Spirit Moves You - Justine Picardie

Thought for the day:  Delete This At Your Peril - Bob Servant

How I would like to die:  Reading in Bed - Steven Gilbar

My soul's present condition: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie - Alan Bradbury

And now for something completely different, can you guess who will be our guest in the virtual armchair for dovegreyreaders asks... tomorrow?

The Year of the Flood according to RevCheryl

So the plan was that RevCheryl was going to this event at Ely Cathedral and I would be stuck down here in Devon completely green with very un-Christian envy, but the next best thing would be that RevCheryl had kindly agreed to write a guest post on the event for me. In the end I went too as I think you may have gathered by now and even made good friends with Amy the vicar's adorable little dog seen here with her owner. But I still asked RevCheryl to write up her thoughts on it all and here they are, and I have been instructed that under no circumstances was I to edit out the bits about me...so I haven't.
Here is RevCheryl Unedited.

Living close by what must be one of the country’s finest independent bookshop, Topping & Co, I am privileged to go to many writer events. When I read that Margaret Atwood was coming, my days of being a huge fan ( when I wasn’t such a weary feminist and she was writing books like ‘Bodily Harm’) had long past. But who passes up the opportunity to see and hear a novelist as prestigious as Atwood, especially when she is coming ALL THE WAY FROM CANADA- not me.
So I got my ticket early and began to dutifully think about reading some of the many Atwood novels I had never got round to reading, the pile was big, I wanted to read the Booker long-list, and I quickly narrowed my Atwood reading down to one book-‘Oryx and Crake’. It languished on my ‘to-be read’ pile for a while, and then one day, idly, I picked it up and started reading. Immediately I was drawn into this book as into few others- the story of how Jimmy became Snowman and how the monumental stupidity and arrogance of humanity finally brought us to a place of such dystopian bleakness held my attention completely.
Meanwhile, a certain delightful picture on a certain blog and descriptions not just of books but of book shopping, knitting shops and quilting treats had led me to chose Devon as my holiday destination where I was invited to meet Dovegreyreader face to face. You will not be surprised to learn that she is as warm, generous and passionate about books and people in real life as she is on the blog; and, knowing what a big Atwood fan she is, I invited her to join me at the Atwood event in Ely. By this time I was agog to read ‘The Year of the Flood’ myself and raced through it before Lynne arrived.
It was my absolute pleasure to accompany her round the bookshops of Cambridge and Ely culminating in a visit to Toppings. The only danger was that I seemed to be buying an awful lot of books myself! Nine in 24 hours is good going, even for me, but all of us who read her blog are familiar with the way that DGR’s enthusiasm for a book is infectious, and that effect is even more potent in the flesh. As we wandered around, our only worry was whether we might giggle at the event; as some of the reports had suggested there might be an unintentional humour, especially to the singing of the gardener hymns.
Also we began to worry that Margaret Atwood might turn out to be all sly cleverness and no wisdom or human compassion at all- why for instance was she insisting that these events take place in churches? Was this a dig by an acknowledged atheist at religion and all its trappings?
By the time we were finishing supper Ely High Street was already filling up with people who had the unmistakable look of serious cultural junkies, all heading in the direction of the cathedral. It was a good job that my friend and colleague Pauline had already arrived and secured us seats in the second row of the transept and even more fortunate that this turned out to be the side of the stage on which Ms. Atwood sat. 
Much to our relief the hymns sounded much better when you concentrated on the music and didn’t try to distinguish all the words, and in her interview at the end of the evening Margaret Atwood made the fair point that all hymns have some words and phrases that sound bizarre and silly to those not part of the faith.
By the end of the evening I was converted back into an Atwood fan and look forward to wrestling with her work some more. It’s not that I have become uncritical, but her sincerity was unquestionable, and I came away feeling a great deal of liking and respect for her and her desire to make the rest of us think and act with less stupidity and arrogance towards our planet and its rich life.
  ‘The Year of the Flood’ itself reads like a second book in a trilogy. The ending is a cliffhanger and it lacks the clear narrative drive of ‘Oryx and Crake’. But there are lots of good things in it and it invites us to question ourselves on many themes- never a bad thing in my opinion. Read it, but read ‘Oryx and Crake’ first is my advice.
Finally, I know another story about a flood in which the dove brings back hope as an olive branch in its beak. For many of us, the community of bookish delight, which DGR has invited us into and made so safe and welcoming a place, has given us hope and a renewed pleasure and passion for our reading and even for our lives, perhaps at time when things seem bleak and barren. Long may the wind lift up her wings and other trite clichés.

The Year of the Flood - The Event

So there I was, a bit worried about The Year of the Flood event, especially given that I was traveling halfway across the country to be there. A mere 188 miles Exeter to Cambridge as the crow flies apparently, but in the absence of a First Great Western Crow I had gone the long way round; sardined on a train, into and across London and out again, all to get my book signed by the real hand holding a real pen.
Nothing electronically fandangled from the other side of the Atlantic for my book.
It could all have gone horribly wrong and the event had suffered very mixed reviews, some fairly cynical verging on derisory and I'll admit to being faint of heart and fearful of a fit of the giggles once the hymn-singing started. These are an intrinsic and, as it transpired, very clever aspect of the book, but until you grasp the essence and purpose they do read slightly All Things Bright & Beautiful and I thought I wasn't going to cope too well with hymns about moles and bees.
Suffice it to say..well no...I'm going to leave the excellent explanations we were given to my expert adviser in all things hymny and churchified... RevCheryl, who will share her insights on the book, the event and her seemingly white-knuckle experience of going book-shopping with me on here tomorrow.
In fact this event, and every one we were assured would be slightly different, was a triumph to my mind, thanks in no small part to the setting but also the organisation and participation of Toppings & Co. the Ely bookshop. The music and the choir (several bookshop staff) were excellent, the actors, who weren't actors (bookshop staff again) read brilliantly, Margaret Atwood narrated and they all just pulled it off.
I think I only laughed when I was meant to.
The masterstroke in the performance being that subtle build up of the book's tension with the well-chosen extracts which actually had me on the edge of my seat (and I'd read the book), and then the clever cut off point...'well I guess you'll have to read the book to find out what happens next.'
This is certainly a new and far more interesting way to promote a book than author reads extract / author answers questions. It takes time and imagination to prepare and no shortage of flair to present well, but imagine this approach for some of those Booker shortlisters? Coetzee? Wolf Hall?
So how many writers could guarantee to pack out a Cathedral this size?
Margaret Atwood, diminutive and perfectly deadpan in her delivery but very funny with it (though I did keep worrying she was going to step backwards off that stage) and the book-signing queue must have stretched the length of the nave.
Towards the end I thought I heard panicky PR people whispering to sound engineers behind me, it was running late, there wouldn't be time for her to sign the books... sorry, over my dead body was Margaret Atwood leaving that Cathedral without signing my book.
Shamefully I was prepared to behave badly in a Cathedral that much was immediately evident, and I can only apologise to the people I may have left trampled in my wake as I fair flew across that transept to the signing queue...I've read the book, this is survival of the fittest I've been trained for after all.
Can you begin to imagine what I was like in the milk queue at school? Speed was of the essence if you were going to get a bottle with a coloured top and not a plain silver one.
It was a great comfort to see that RevCheryl wasn't far behind.
Margaret Atwood knew me from Twitter where I 'follow' her and where dovegreyreader is tweeted when I remember to tick the box and we had a brief exchange about all that, though I was a bit stupidly dumbstruck which is very unusual for me, but perhaps I was also a mite relieved that she hadn't taken me to one side and whispered menacingly
' now just you look here, only my best friends call me Peggy ... alright'.
This event all part of a three month long tour to promote The Year of the Flood and so far it looks as if Peggy is having a jolly good time and I would add it was worth every single mile that I traversed England to actually be there and my thanks again to RevCheryl for her enabling hospitality.
An interesting question and answer session at the end included a tactful, verging on cheeky enquiry from the Topping's compere about the possibility of a third book to accompany this one along with Oryx and Crake and given that Margaret Atwood approaches her seventieth birthday...' what you mean as I creep towards the grave' she quipped.
Tomorrow RevCheryl's take on the event and that will be us over our bout of dovegreyreader hyperAtwooditis here as we await whatever comes next.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

So, I've been to the event and have much to tell you about that, but what did I make of the book? Well this post is going to be divided up into three parts because otherwise it will be three miles long.
If you've read the entire Margaret Atwood oeuvre from The Edible Woman onwards then it's always just a joy to have another one to read... even if it turns out to be an anthology of Margaret's shopping lists... which it didn't.
All this Atwooditis could easily obscure the book itself and though The Year of the Flood is not my absolute favourite of the fourteen that I've read it quickly became a page-turner.
I turned to Coral Howells's excellent book Margaret Atwood to refresh my thinking on this aspect of Margaret Atwood's writing; the speculative fiction which reflects those political, social and environmental concerns which perhaps don't prey as heavily on the mind as they might and which Margaret Atwood has for some years now made it her writerly business to bring to centre stage.
As she made very clear, and in the nicest possible way at the Ely event, we'll all be moaning plenty when we don't have air to breathe.
It's a worry.
The dystopian novels send out those warning signals, the

'definitive moments after which things will never be the same again'

and with it comes the exploration of  possible consequences, explored so astutely in The Handmaid's Tale.
That was the one that shocked me to the core, there are very few books I've read three times but that one I have, the last occasion happened to be for a book group that met on 9/13 just two days after that fateful day and discussions that evening remain etched in my memory.
Oryx and Crake likewise adds to that bleakness but somehow The Year of the Flood deals with all this slightly differently because I actually smiled...dare I confess that whilst I saw the serious side to the book, and plenty of it is quite grotesque, I also laughed...a great deal.
Now I'm not sure if I was supposed to because I don't recall laughing much at the other two dystopian worlds, but this one has just travelled so far out into the realms of imagination you couldn't help but marvel at the very imagination that had constructed it.
I'd love to know how it's done, do Family Atwood sit around the breakfast table throwing out possible names for things, the CorpSeCorps for the dodgy law enforcers, AnooYoo for the health spa, it's all relentlessly clever.
As always there is that sandal-shod foot planted firmly in the known world thus giving huge credibility to Margaret Atwood's constructed one as she explores the consequences of those themes previously explored, the quasi-religious cults, this time God's Gardeners challenged by the extremist sects, the violence and the sheer guts (often literally) and determination required to survive it all.
Blended into the whole are two very different women and Margaret Atwood gave an interesting response to questions posed at the end of the event about her return to women narrators...having been asked for many years why her fiction didn't feature male narrators and having explored that for the first time in Oryx and Crake, she was then repeatedly asked why she'd chosen a male narrator for that book.
It seems even famous writers can't win sometimes.
Toby and Ren, two very different women and both bringing what they have to offer to this new world of constant menace and danger.
Toby, isolated, emotionally detached, self-reliant, self-contained, seemingly unchanged by threat or circumstance, versatile, resourceful both capable and adaptable...the archetypal Darwinian 'survival of the fittest'.
Ren, the little Jenny Wren-like girl, a delicate, fragile moth-like creature, emotional, sensitive, biddable but also remarkably resilient.
As I read I couldn't help reflecting on what exactly was going on here, was the book carrying me along on that tide of adulation...the  'I'll love anything Margaret writes' wave or was I feeling just a little bit queasy about all this bizarre quasi-religious content and those moments when I felt the book strayed slightly into the realms of farce.
In the end I came to the self-comforting conclusion that Margaret Atwood had changed tack slightly, chosen a different way to convey her message, this possibly one of the most reader-friendly of her books. I suspect it will have wide appeal, you won't have to be a Margaret Atwood devotee to read it, enjoy it and perhaps hear something of its environmental message....but perhaps true Atwood devotees might be a bit disappointed.
Was I a bit disappointed ?
I was a bit of a doubter that's for sure and set off for Ely feeling very nervous.
In fact, having read the book, The Year of the Flood event was now starting to worry me stupid... there are some writers I feel I can trust implicitly and Margaret Atwood is one, surely she wasn't about to let me down?
More of that tomorrow to be followed by RevCheryl's fascinating take on it all.

Team Ulysses - Camp Three...do ptake some ptarmigan

Happy Ulysses Day everyone and hard to believe we've now been reading Ulysses for three months and I have actually stuck to my sixty or so pages a month. I didn't like to tell you as we sat at base camp that I might be tempted to race ahead to the summit and would have to resist.
In fact I'd hate to be ordered to read Ulysses fast. Sixty pages a month feels like just the right amount, usually without pressure and surprisingly pleasurable reading though I'll admit this month's been a bit busier than many, but I'm up to the end of Lestrygonians with Scylla and Charybdis to follow.
I feel as if I'm in my stride with Leopold Bloom now, sort of tagging alongside and really starting to grasp his stream of consciousness...'stream of life' and follow some, though be no means all, of those seemingly unconnected, often throwaway thoughts that he has.
I also began to wonder whether some of those phrases that have entered the vernacular may have had their origins with James Joyce. 'Bitten off more than he can chew' came to mind in this month's reading and strangely, because I might have thought this as I picked the book up back in June. Except I looked it up and that's a phrase that seems to have originated in the US in the 1880s to do with plug tobacco. But in searching I came across this interesting pictorial approach to Ulysses.
Alongside my Ulyssesian reading I've been browsing some of the books on my desk, usually collected writings of authors various, and checking indexes for references to James Joyce because just about everyone has something to say about him.
George Orwell in a talk broadcast in 1942, sets up an unlikely yet fascinating comparison between Ulysses and John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga. Both books,

 'cover an enormous canvas and get the spirit and social history of a whole epoch between the covers of a book...The Man of Property may not seem to us now a very profound criticism of society, but it seemed so to its contemporaries'

Orwell goes on to shape his comparison focusing on Joyce's interest in

'mere words, the sounds and the associations of words, even the pattern of words on the paper,' *

and I must admit this is something that really becomes apparent when I read Ulysses out loud, which I do quite a lot...I'm seriously tempted to buy an unabridged audio version eventually. I have a feeling it would make for quite lyrical, almost mesmerising listening.
But an even better anecdote came to light as I read The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig's autobiography (which I can't recommend highly enough for more reasons than I have space for here but I'll come back to them.)
Stefan Zweig met James Joyce in Zurich soon after the Great War.
Yet to become an exile himself, Zweig was nevertheless deeply moved by those he met who were without a country and uncertain quite where they belonged, and none more so than James Joyce. Describing him as compact, somber man, not prone to high spirits or laughter, in fact 'testy', led Zweig to conclude that Joyce's irritation led to the turmoil that in turn fuelled his creativity.

' A young man with a little brown beard, with keen eyes behind strikingly thick lenses sat, alone in a corner of the Cafe Odeon; they told me he was a highly gifted English author. When I became acquainted with James Joyce... he harshly rejected all association with England. He was Irish. True he wrote in English but did not think in English, and didn't want to think in English...'I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in tradition.'

Stefan Zweig goes on to describe Joyce's phenomenal knowledge of languages and his power with words and whilst all this is probably grist to the academic Joycean mill it was new knowledge for me.
I have come to Ulysses with very little background and few pre-conceptions about Joyce the man, and nor have I set out to read everything written about him, in the hope that glimmers of light would emerge when they felt like it. Thus Stefan Zweig's meeting offers me some unique insights and perhaps explains why James Joyce is so keen to subvert what had gone before and push the boundaries of language to its extremes.
I'm wondering how you are all doing and do hope I'm not on a solo climb or I shall start to wobble a bit.

* My Country Right or Left 1940 - 1943  Volume II Essays, Journalism & Letters

  George Orwell

Exile by Padraic O'Conaire

In with The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasalinna from Peter Owen Books came another enticingly unusual read, Exile by Padraic O'Conaire, translated from Irish by Gearailt Mac Eoin.
The cover immediately reminded me of Eleanor Thom's The Tin Kin (which incidentally has deservedly made the shortlist of the Guardian's Not the Booker ) and my expectations of gipsy horse rustling slightly subverted with the discovery that the main man in this novel quickly gets run over by a car and loses both an arm, a leg and his good looks in the process, perhaps horse riding might be out of the equation. But I had made other interestingly prejudicial assumptions and those have since been exposed in my post-novel explorations.
Exile recounts the life of this crippled and lonely Irishman exiled from his homeland in London with £250 compensation in his pocket from the accident and suddenly more fair-weather friends than he had dreamed possible.
Once the money has drizzled away leaving just the empty bottles as a reminder, Michael hits the depths of despair wandering from one down and out experience to another, amongst other things as a  circus freak, engaged to another circus freak, the Fat Lady.  Michael's eventual demise eerily foreshadowing Padraic O'Conaire's, can he possibly have imagined that his own would be so similar.
I knew nothing about O'Conaire but feeling that Team Ulysses affinity with Irish literature and a sense of exile that I'm starting to find therin, I was intrigued to know more.
Born in Galway in 1882 and orphaned at the age of eight, Padriac O'Conaire appears to have fallen on his feet with adoption by a well-to-do uncle who gave him an education he was unlikely to have received otherwise, culminating in attendance at Blackrock College in Dublin. Emigrating to London in 1889 and securing a job with the Board of Education must have offered sufficient stability because marriage and children followed.
For reasons I haven't been able to discover O'Conaire deserted his family and returned to Ireland in 1914, eventually dying alone and destitute in Dublin in 1928. Apart from the clothes he stood up in, in his possession just a pipe, a piece of tobacco, an apple and a pocket knife.
Yet Padraic O'Conaire left a legacy of 26 books, 473 stories, 237 essays and 6 plays and I'll wager I'm not the only one who may not have heard of him. Written in Irish and it would seem very little as yet translated into English so lets hope Gearailt Mac Eoin, who translated Exile, is lining up some more.
This delightfully evocative statue to Padraic O'Conaire's memory can be found in Eyre Square in Galway.
I've read elsewhere of O'Conaire's skill in telling the simple story to demonstrate great and universal truths and it was easy to get a real sense of that as I read Exile and indulged in some lengthy after-book thinking . Unusual, slightly ambiguous and eccentric, yet compelling reading for all that and apparently a fine example of the first modernist novel to emerge from Ireland.
There is a helpful essay by Angela Bourke on Padraic O'Conaire here which thankfully explained much that I hadn't been aware of as I read, but which made sense later. Revealing a great deal about the plight of the Irishman abroad in the early twentieth century and this is where those early and slightly judgmental assumptions of mine were neatly exposed. Often doing the most dangerous jobs, stigmatised by country of origin, language, accent and prey to discrimination and assumptions of inferiority, but the Irish also representative of an unspoken danger because of that difference.
In creating a character as 'different' as Michael, Padraic O'Conaire covers all those great and universal truths and more, adding in the prejudices and stigma of physical disability and facial disfigurement which become an even greater burden, and an added complication as initial displays of sympathy are seemingly rejected and shunned as unwanted pity by Michael.
There is much more here that I've missed I feel sure, so a little book of which I knew nothing has provided one of those unique reading moments, plenty to discover for the first time, more to be revealed on a second read and I wonder where all Padraic O'Conair's writing is?
Who holds the archives and when and how can we read more?
But that sets us up nicely for some more of the Irish tomorrow as Team Ulysses reach Camp Three.

dovegreyreader asks... William Fiennes

A real treat in store today, and my thanks to William Fiennes as he settles down in the virtual armchair, and I suggest you might want to settle down too with a nice cup of coffee and a pile of biscuits to just enjoy this and be ready for a great reading list at the end. (The Escher print, by the way, was my bookmark whilst reading The Snow Geese.)

William, a very warm welcome to the virtual armchair and now that I've read both The Music Room and The Snow Geese I feel as if I have journeyed with you through two very important times in your life. I wonder if you could talk us through where the books came from, what compelled you to write them ...in fact can you tell us everything as usual, you know us here.

I don't know if I'd have written The Snow Geese if I hadn't fallen ill. I'd had Crohn's Disease since I was eighteen or nineteen, when I spent a year teaching in the north-east of Brazil, and the symptoms had flared and receded in phases all through my time at university. And things got pretty bad again in my mid-twenties, when I was studying as a postgraduate at Oxford, doing an M.Phil and then starting a D.Phil, my head full of English sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. But then came hospital, surgery, complications, and a long convalescent period at home, at the house I'd grown up in, a place I loved above all others, where my sense of belonging was unambiguous.
So I thought a lot in those days about the idea of home, the idea of return, the power of that longing to find our place in the world, to belong in where we are, or in what we do, or what we love. And I thought about how our longing for the familiar, the known, exists alongside our appetite for the new, the undiscovered, and how we all have to negotiate a way through those contrary impulses.
At the same time, I was getting more and more excited about natural history.
I'd always been an outdoorsy person, a walker, but now I wanted to know the names of things - birds, trees, plants - and I was reading lots of books about evolution and ecology, books by Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley, Richard Fortey, Jonathan Weiner, Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard. And sitting outside our house each evening, watching the swifts scream overhead on their exhilarating vespers flights. And dreaming of a return to health, independence, freedom of movement.
And then coming across Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose, which got me curious about geese, and imagining a journey, an adventure, a quest...
So now I can see how the book was born out of the confluence of several different streams of thought and experience - home, illness, recovery, poems, nature, science, love of language, and a great longing to drink down the world in gulps after such a period of deprivation. But it was only really when I started writing that I began to think I'd found a form in which to convey such ideas - a sort of poetic form, in which the images would do most of the talking... 

I don't need to tell you, Lynne, that it took me a long time to get from The Snow Geese to The Music Room... That gap wasn't for want of trying. I started about three other books - novels - but gave them up, despairing. I don't mean to sound grandiose, but to me there was a sense of rightness about The Snow Geese, as if there'd been a hole in the universe the exact size of that book, waiting to be filled. Perhaps many writers feel that about their first book, I don't know. But nothing I tried afterwards had anything like that feeling of necessity. They say that everybody has one book in them, and I thought that maybe The Snow Geese was mine; I started thinking about alternative careers, and even applied for a couple of proper jobs...
What was I thinking?!
I was a bit lost, really. Then I suppose I recognised that the problem with those abandoned books was that I didn't really care enough: nothing was at stake; nothing seemed to matter. Of course, this may just have been a failure of imagination on my part... But I wanted to write out of strong feeling. So I asked myself what I did care about. And immediately that took me to my brother Richard, and the way my parents had looked after him, and the strange magical scenes of my childhood... I didn't think I was writing anything like a "family history" or "memoir" - it felt much closer to a poem, or a song, or a novel in which everything happened to be true, and which also happened to introduce you to the history of neuroscience, and the principles behind our understanding of the brain... As with The Snow Geese, I didn't really think about the question of genre. I just wanted each book to be as perfectly itself as it could be. And again I hoped that the images would do the talking - that the right images would have more power than any amount of explanation or commentary. At first it came in a bit of rush, but then I got all knotted-up with fears - that it was too tender, too personal; or that nobody would be interested; or that it was really embarrassing to admit we lived in such a big house... And of course I worried that it might be painful for my family to relive some of those moments, even though I was writing from love, and, despite everything, in celebration. But as I went on, I began to realise that I wasn't just writing about Richard, or about our particular experience. The moated island was a microcosm, a little world, in which love and beauty and wonder coexisted with difficulty and violence and loss. So there was a vision of life, inside that ring of water. And at the heart of it was care - of parents for their children; of people for the places they live in. So my desire to sing a little bit about my brother led into these wider currents...

We love to know about a writer's writing day because we're completely inquisitive here too so can you tell us about that and what the process involves for you?

Well, I wish I could say that I was supremely disciplined and single-minded about the whole thing. I know that I've been most productive, and had my best periods with both books, when I've settled into quite strict routines, the structure of one day identical to the one before... Ideally I want to have the same breakfast, the same lunch every day; I want to work all morning; in the afternoon I want to walk or swim; I want to have tea and cake, and then I want to work again as it gets dark... I've had periods like that, and they've been really exciting and fulfilling. But too often my life's been too unsettled, or I've been too ready to prevaricate and dither, or I've been too frightened of the empty page, or simply too lazy to pitch myself into that fruitful pattern... Both my books have involved a lot of time in libraries, learning about ornithology or the history of nostalgia or neuroscience or epilepsy, and over the last ten years I've spent months in the Bodleian in Oxford, or the British Library, the London Library, the Wellcome Institute, or the neurology library in Queen's Square, following some thread of curiosity that seems part of the book's larger inquiry... I dream of having my own study, and one day I'd like to turn the attic of my small house into the perfect writer's room (the kind they feature in the Review section of The Guardian on Saturdays...), but for now I have to make do with the kitchen table, or desks in those libraries if I'm getting cabin fever... And once I get into a piece of writing I can sit hunched over my computer for hours, nothing moving but my hands on the keyboard, and I end up with all sorts of aches in my shoulders and down my legs, and because I sit so still I get really cold, and in my dream attic study I'm going to have some kind of brilliant high-tech underfloor heating... I always have a notebook on the go - not quite a diary or journal or commonplace book or image-cache but a mixture of all those things - but otherwise I tend to write directly onto the laptop, in part because most of my writing is rewriting: I go over things again and again; I love what Tobias Wolff calls "living at the level of the sentence" - the whole business of tweaking, planing, whittling and rejigging until the rhythm of the phrase, paragraph, passage or chapter sounds satisfying and somehow inevitable to the inner ear... And then I give about two days a week to teaching, and time to First Story, and I listen to lots of music and fantasize about being a musician, and I go for lots of walks, and I watch a lot of films, and (don't tell anyone) I really like TV, and then of course I want to read good books, and all of this is more of a disruption to that ideal writing day... But I think some of this belongs to the next question...

I'm now adding an extra degree of inquisition because I think we'd like to know what writers do when they don't write, what interests you and fills your non-writing days?

For a while now I've been Writer-in-Residence at the American School in London: I teach there every Tuesday afternoon. And I'm Director of the charity First Story (www.firststory.co.uk), which I set up with a teacher called Katie Waldegrave in 2007. Katie was teaching at Cranford Community College in Hounslow, and when she heard about my job at ASL she invited me to come to Cranford to do a similar thing. I started visiting the school every Wednesday afternoon, running a creative-writing class for about fourteen sixth-formers. I enjoyed it so much, and the students seemed to get so much out of it - not just in terms of their literacy skills, but also their self-esteem and self-confidence - that Katie and I thought that we should try and spread the idea to other schools.
We focus on "challenging" secondary schools - schools with at least 30% of students eligible for free school meals, and/or less than 25% getting five A-C grades at GCSE - and this year First Story has arranged and paid for fourteen writers to work as writers-in-residence in fourteen different schools in London and Oxford. The student writers give readings of their stories and poems, and at the end of the year we help them publish their work in anthologies - proper books that they can give to their friends and families, and that the students and their schools can be proud of. I used to do quite a lot of journalism - mostly book reviews and travel pieces - but for the last few years that other portion of my working life has been almost entirely taken up with school things.
Teaching full-time would knock me out, but I find the amount I do very rewarding. And I suppose it answers to some appetite in me to be doing something alongside writing, and to be working with other people, getting out of the house, engaging with the world. A sort of counterpose, as a yoga teacher might say, to writing's necessary inwardness and solitude. I'm remembering that passage in The Music Room where I talk about the rooks and the herons that haunt the moat, and how they seem to suggest two different modes of being - the rooks talkative and gregarious, the heron solitary and contemplative. I've always wanted to have room in my life for both those birds.

Who must we read? Which authors and books would you urge us not to miss?

It's a wonderful question to be asked, because you know it's been asked out of love for something and you can answer it out of love for the same thing... Chekhov's stories are a sort of holy book for me. Try the recent OUP selection called About Love, edited and translated by Rosamund Bartlett, or Granta's The Essential Tales of Chekhov, selected and introduced by Richard Ford. And Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. And War and Peace: I used a bread-knife to slice the Penguin Classics paperback into four sections and then it was much less intimidating... Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March. George Eliot's Middlemarch. I go back to all of these. The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard. Desperate Characters by Paula Fox. Cloudstreet by Tim Winton. Les Murray's verse novel, Fredy Neptune. Lorrie Moore's stories. Seamus Heaney's poems and essays and the thrilling autobiography-in-conversations called Stepping Stones. The Iliad and The Odyssey in the translations by Robert Fagles. John Cheever's stories, especially "Goodbye, My Brother" and "Torch Song" and "The Swimmer" and "A Vision of the World", and his extraordinary Journals... Poems by Ted Hughes, Paul Farley, Don Paterson... Cosmicomics and The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. The Sportswriter and Independence Day by Richard Ford. The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Primo Levi. Tobias Wolff. James Salter's Burning the Days. John Updike's Rabbit novels, with Nicholson Baker's U & I as a spritzy chaser. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. Edward Hoagland's essays. Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. Moby-Dick - one of the books that made me want to be a writer. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. And not forgetting the wonderful essays by Joseph Mitchell, hard to get hold of in the UK, but collected in a Vintage (US) paperback called Up in the Old Hotel. He is one of my heroes. Oh dear - I know that as soon as I dispatch this list to you I'll think of a dozen other things I should have added to it. But I hope this will do for starters...

You said a book every seven years...can we know, will I really be sixty (and a bit...) before the next one?

Did I really say that? Perhaps it was just a way of protecting myself... I do remember saying, at Dartington, that I'd learned I wasn't exactly Barbara Cartland... But I do hope it won't be as long as seven years... Because although I find the task of writing quite hard (run through with fear and anxiety, so that the whole enterprise can feel at times little more than an arena for self-criticism, etc) I really like the having written - I mean, I'm glad that those two books exist; I love feeling the miraculous leap of images from mind to mind that books make possible... Oh but I shouldn't pretend I don't relish moments in the actual writing, when some figure of comparison flies in out of nowhere, and the right combination of words makes both the language and the thing it's describing new somehow... And something to do with salvaging and consecration... But one of my problems is that I'm not very good at making things up; I'm not a natural yarn-spinner; I don't have a story-tap I can turn on and off at will - so instead I seem to have to wait for a book to float up in the sort of confluence of streams I was talking about earlier... Right now I do have an idea, a project, but already I'm aware that it's unlikely I'll be able to write something as whole-hearted - as Rich - as The Music Room. Or The Snow Geese, for that matter. So it'll just have to be different. And actually I'm quite looking forward to finding out how it's going to be different...

Prize draw copies of The Snow Geese and The Music Room by William Fiennes

Picador have very kindly offered a brace of William's books to six lucky winners worldwide so copies of The Snow Geese and The Music Room ready and waiting, names in comments and Rocky, whose body language this week tells us he is either playing dead or now preparing for his fifteenth autumn baking slowly in front of the Aga, will oblige and choose the winners in due course.

Sunday Confessions on a Sunday

It was obvious I couldn't go near a steady succession of bookshops and not buy at least one book, so by the time I reached Topping & Co in Ely in the company of RevCheryl, who is a regular, almost part-of-the-furniture customer, I was really a lost cause.
In the run up to Ely we'd done a raid on Heffers, Oxfam and The Haunted Bookshop in Cambridge where I was delighted to finally lay hands on a copy of a book I had been on the lookout for, more on that another day because it needs space of its own.
Heffers yielded a couple of books transferred to my possession by and about an author I have been meaning to investigate for some time and can't put off much longer, Elizabeth Bowen.
I love books of essays, they offer a real insight into a writer's thinking and everyone including A.S.Byatt seems to see Elizabeth Bowen's writing as quite a challenge; A.S.Byatt suggesting in her introduction to The House in Paris, that Bowen learned much from Henry James and Virginia Woolf, writing 'with a harshness that is unusual and pleasing ', making this 'a very elegant and a very melodramatic novel.' Paris is just where my reading is right now, currently very deeply embedded in the mire and slush of the 18th century streets in the run up to the Revolution, so I think this one will fit that Parisian reading trail nicely too. The joy of reading around a place is the ability to travel to and fro in time too, so I'm bound to add some more Emile Zola while I'm there and who knows what else.
RevCheryl also had a pile of books to pass onto me, urging me to read Siri Hustvedt
and also suggesting that my reading journey is incomplete without having at least tried Margery Allingham.
On to Topping & Co at Ely (and by now forgetting that I have to carry all these books home on the train) the bookshop with the stock to make you really really swoon and drool. I had quite thought bookshops just didn't even try to stock like this anymore in the face of internet competition, but that all seems to have passed Toppings by.
This bit of the shop might look empty but this was 10pm, after the event. In the afternoon it was fair buzzing with activity as everyone geared up for that evening's Year of the Flood extravaganza with Margaret Atwood and you could feel the tension and anticipation mounting, yet still customers were offered complimentary pots of Earl Grey tea (this IS my type of bookshop) and encouraged to sit and browse the books in a quiet corner, on window seats or scattered book-laden tables, and it wasn't in the least bit difficult to find three books I really couldn't live without a minute longer.
What better place than Ely to buy Roger Deakin's Waterlog - A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain.
To Siberia by Per Petterson caught my eye in the certain knowledge that having enjoyed Out Stealing Horses and In the Wake, I'd probably enjoy this one too.
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose has been on my must-have list too, a book that takes you into literature and its masters for an in-depth look at just how that sleight of pen happens.
So then you hit that moment when you try to pack your bag for home and realise what you've done.

Ways With Wool

'Twas an unusually glorious day to enjoy Dartmoor and we haven't had many of those this summer, plus it's daft to take to the roads in August anyway so September is a good time to catch up with our travels.
So we made the pilgrimage to Bovey Tracey because I hadn't been to the new version of Spin-A-Yarn , bigger shop, more stock to be explored and stroked, plus I've hardly used my Loyalty Card discount yet.
Ashburton on the way home as usual for a browse around the bookshop and the antique shops.
Lunch at The Devon Guild of Craftsmen at Bovey where the Summer Exhibition was still on display, which marginally assuaged my disappointment at missing the Henry VIII one at The British Library by one day. I had a couple of hours to use at Kings Cross when I stopped off in London on my way back from Cambridge, but The British Library is great at any time and even better they have lockers for storing luggage for a returnable £1.
Now I saw this at FibreFest whilst nursing the acute back  and was in no mood to ponder its merits then, feeling like death as I was, but it was interesting to see this felted shroud close up with inbuilt wicker casket for a fully green passing.
I guess it would be nice and warm.
Then onto some jolly pottery, this shade of turquoise still defies description and a decent photograph, it's far more iridescent than this.
Crossing Dartmoor on the way home, road deserted, when a slightly out of place motorcade with police motorbike escort passed us at the Pixie Shop.
'That was Charles' said Bookhound and he was right.
Prince Charles had been visiting his Duchy yesterday so hopefully he stopped and bought Camilla a pixie for the garden at Highgrove which surely needs one.
Anyway, Bookhound was thrilled with his anniversary gift, some wool for me to knit me a jumper (because for some reason he has declined all offers of handknits since that 'his and hers' hooded jacket moment) and I couldn't wait to get home and get winding it off the skeins.
Manos del Uruguay, Wool Clasica, handspun, kettle-dyed (Colour 7073) from the non-profit women's cooperative bringing economic and social opportunities to rural women in Uruguay.
Can't you just see it, that 'lustrous feel of the handspun wool. Dyed over wood fires the marbleized striated yarn emerges, sometimes subtly, often dramatic, giving the effect of several colours on one single strand'.
Now being a Ravelry addict too, I've got to go and enter it on my Projects section. I'm Tamarsocks in case anyone wants to be my dovegreyknitters Ravelry friend.
This wool is a sumptuously deep shade of indigo, nice and chunky, will hopefully knit up quickly on 5 - 6mm needles through a few evenings of Strictly or X Factor (I've yet to decide where my loyalties lie now they've set up the big clash) and to an easy pattern I've had waiting around for ages.
Also waiting in the wings, some wool that I happened to spy in Ely for what will now, without a doubt, have to be my zany Year of the Flood socks
This is Regia Brasil Color Shade 5478 and I can see how nicely this will sprout into some God's Gardeners' foot coverings.
Finally the Noro socks are going well after initial disappointments with the rather coarse thinness of the wool and the shades emerging from this new-fangled method of starting from the centre of the ball, when I'd bought it for those I could see on the outside. It dawned on me that I could actually start the second sock from the outside of the ball and yes, they'll look completely different but that's the joy of homespun socks and also the joy of anything Noro.

9/11

I've been holding off for a long time but have had this week marked as a reading watershed, back home after a visit to Cambridge, some outstanding reads finally finished, Booker selection back on the shelves and so now I'm definitely allowed some French Revolution.
Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety has been the most irresistible of temptations, but before opening I thought I'd just have a glimpse and a reconnaissance of a book that Erika had recommended and which has just arrived, Dancing to the Precipice - Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution by Caroline Moorehead. Lucie a diarist and by all accounts a remarkable primary source for much that went on, observer, commentator and participant, happily for us (but perhaps not for her) in the right place at the right time as the heads rolled.
Much more about the book when I've made inroads but thus far I'm very impressed, and something that always appeals in books like this is the setting of the historical context with mention of other contemporaneous events. So Lucie's birth coincided with the opening of Beaumarchais's new play Les Deux Amis, the paper had a long article about the eclipse of the sun along with debate about the new smallpox inoculation, James Cook had discovered Australia and plotted the transit of Venus on the way back, harvests were bad and the economy was faltering.
So, whilst never forgetting what today's date has since come to signify, I thought what a jolly good idea, I'll thieve that and do 1976 for reasons soon to become apparent.
Living in London the year of the scorchio summer, the drought, night duty at Great Ormond Street and sitting out on the balconies feeding babies at 3am because it was too hot inside, nursing finals, tap dancing to Lullaby of Broadway, Brotherhood of Man won Eurovision (forget the song it was because they pulled those skirts off...errata...wrong, B of M kept their skirts on!) , the UK ended the Cod War with Iceland (2009, first find your cod) the first ever outbreak of Legionnaire's disease followed by the first known case of Ebola virus, Big Ben suffered metal fatigue and stopped chiming, the chimpanzee became an endangered species, Microsoft was officially registered as a company and on September 11th, the last fine Saturday, Bookhound and I plighted our troth.
Here we go again...he'd have got less for murder, he says it every year and heaven knows how many times I've been near to committing it, though I'm currently holding off because he hasn't finished landscaping the garden yet.
Thirty-three years ago today and please do note my 1976 pageboy haircut and the guipure lace Juliet cap and know also that the wedding gifts were acceptable in any brown and orange colour combination and we were especially pleased with the Ali Baba linen basket and the Russell Hobbs automatic kettle, both the height of domestic fashion. We had no need of cutlery because we had saved up our Green Shield stamps for that and twenty books had gained us a complete set.

The Ship of the Fens with a Canadian passenger on board

I don't know the Fens that well, better since I've been reading Roger Deakin, but still not that well; so much so that slow-flowing rivers which deceive the eye to the point where any movement seems imperceptible come as quite a surprise to me.
We are used after all to living 'twixt the Tavy, the second fastest flowing river in the country, with its rolling, peaty tumble down from Dartmoor and the Tamar, saving us from Trelawney's Army across the border, a wide river which can get a fair lick on when it puts its mind to it.
The gentle River Cam was quite a revelation.

It hardly seems to flow anywhere, perfect stillness and walking alongside gives that sense of pensive relaxation that the Tavy doesn't quite seem to yield.
The Tavy always makes me want to walk fast to keep up.
Lovely to see a familiar Cambridge sight and again I thought of a punt on the Tavy, and how you'd likely be across the Atlantic before you'd even picked up the pole.
Later in the day and off to Ely to hear Margaret Atwood in the cathedral and The Year of the Flood event (more on that soon) but if there's one thing I love besides actually seeing and hearing a writer who is one of my heroes, then it has to be a jolly good cathedral and the Ship of the Fens was no disappointment.
My camera not up to getting it all into one shot but this is one stunning edifice in all its magnificent glory.
A pewless cathedral making it ideal for a wide range of events beyond those it was designed for, and the hassocks seemed to represent every village in the diocese and I just happened to catch sight of this one.
Believer or non- I don't see how anyone can fail to be moved by a nave the size and height of this one, that first glimpse quite took my breath away.
But look again at the exterior shot and that pinnacled dome at the far end towards the chancel.
The low performance stage was sited right beneath that and we were seated not twelve feet from it (which was no mean achievement given that the Cathedral seemed packed to the rafters)
I glanced up at that octagonal dome, was mesmerised and continued to be so.
It's almost impossible to convey the height of this but it is quite stunning and how my little Olympus 6.0 megapixel camera managed this on its 'Available Light' setting with no flash I have no idea because it seemed about two miles up.
Just to prove that Margaret Atwood was really there...

and so was the elusive RevCheryl.
and so was I, behind the camera and yes we got our books signed and our free book bags.

Ears on Wheels - The Outcast by Sadie Jones

Another good thing about a week spent to-ing and fro-ing to Dartington back when it was summer was the chance to listen to a complete audio book.
I suspect many of you will have read this one and it all has me wondering how different the listening experience might be for such a harrowing book.
Set partly in the mid-1950's, the book opens as Lewis Aldridge is returning home at the age of nineteen following a prison sentence of unknown origin and there is a scattering of clues in this early part, little indicators of what might have happened as someone called Alice greets him at the door of his home and his father, seething with anger drives him to the local church to show him how it looks now.
It is with flashbacks to a decade earlier that the gaps are filled as seven-year old Lewis goes to the station with his unconventional mother to meet his father Gilbert who has just been de-mobbed. Gilbert the epitome of the stiff-upper lipped returning father who jumps right back into his middle-class life as he knew it, paying scant attention to his adoring but slightly confused son who has been used to his mother's complete attention and very demonstrative love in his father's absence.
Giving you no more than the blurb, events quickly spiral into tragedy and Lewis must live with a lifetime of grief and misunderstanding following his mother's tragic death. Off to boarding school and living with a father who is colder than a fish in the holidays, Lewis gets none of the support he needs and craves, and turns in on himself.
Sadie Jones then proceeds to delineate very powerfully quite how a disturbed and emotionally deprived childhood can translate into an adolescence and young adulthood of turmoil and trauma but with a glimmer of hope. Perhaps there is some truth in that old adage, give me the child until the age of seven and I will give you the man and just perhaps that early and wonderfully positive parenting experience in Lewis's life, that emotional foundation will be sufficient to help him find the resilience he needs to survive.
I am left with a wealth of images, a firm grasp of the story and the nuances, and in a way that I think I may not have gained from reading. There is a thread of abuse weaving through this book, alcohol, emotional abuse, shocking stomach churning violence towards children, self-harming, events which have the power to shock now but perhaps were open to less public approbation back in the 1950s. Events that were often clouded in the mists of shame and the mores of social class, all jockeying for position and finding their level  in those post-war years so astutely exposed by Sarah Waters in The Little Stranger.
It's how things were and nothing was said but I often find it very hard to read, yet listening as you drive doesn't allow you to dwell on it, on to the next disc, more horses and foals in the road, that feeling of journeying forward by both road and book, making The Outcast a brilliant listen that I can really recommend.
A book I am now looking forward to even more than I was, to be published in October by Yale University Press, Demobbed, Coming Home After World War Two by Alan Allport.

'Returning soldiers faced both practical and psychological problems, from reasserting their place in the family home to rejoining a much-altered labour force. Civilians worried that their homecoming heroes had been barbarised by their experiences and would bring crime and violence back from the battlefield. 'Problem veterans' preoccupied the entire country. Alan Allport draws on their personal letters and diaries, on newspapers, reports, novels and films to illuminate the darker side of the homecoming experience for ex-servicemen, their families and society at large - a gripping story that's in danger of being lost to national memory.'

I have my name on a copy of Demobbed, but if you've missed The Outcast as I had, it would make an excellent book to read or listen too in advance if you wanted to gauge and get a feel for that degree of life-difficulty faced by both the returning men and their families and I have Sadie Jones's second novel Small Wars sitting here ready and waiting.
I must also credit Dan Stevens for the most excellent reading of this one.
Easy to forget the poor person sitting there spouting into a microphone for six hours, but he did every voice quite brilliantly and differently, a completely convincing interpretation of Sadie Jones's narrative, making this a real pleasure to listen to.

Bookerthon 2009 - the shortlist

Oh, well this has been a nigh on impossible decision and a Bookerthon full of rewarding reading with just three books I haven't written about for various reasons.
The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey which for thin-skinned personal reasons sadly hits too near to home and my mum and I have found it very difficult to read. In the end I decided I didn't need to feel that upset by a book I was supposed to be reading for pleasure, but I do wish it every success.
Me Cheeta by James Lever which I haven't clicked with at all and am assured by everyone else that I must have had a humour by-pass moment. Well yes, it was funny in places but repeatedly so and the joke wore thin and in the end I was ...well bored and not laughing and skimming and eventually I gave up so who knows what I missed. I do however appreciate that it gave the Booker judges a great deal of amusement, reading bits out to each other and creasing up with laughter and it's nice to think they were being happy judges.
I also have to apologise for not getting far enough into Heliopolis by James Scudamore before its place in the reading pile was usurped by the the great Atwood, which was on that September 6th - Ely Cathedral deadline.
In the end I've had to rent my garments asunder, tear out my hair and stab myself in the heart to force a decision between myself and myself and take out a couple of books I have loved to make way for a couple I have loved slightly less, but for literary merit I felt they had to be there.
If it's any consolation I shall be thrilled to be proved wrong and find, when I return from Cambridge this afternoon, that The Glass Room by Simon Mawer or The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters or How To Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall have made it onto the shortlist, though hopefully not at the expense of...see it's an impossible Booker year and we don't say that very often.
My £10 is already on one of these so that could all go pear-shaped too, judges do your worst.

The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

I think Bookhound and I might, in sum total, have spent longer debating the cover of The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds than I have spent reading it, and that's been long enough.
Now if I'm honest this has been another difficult book to 'get into' and I had tried twice earlier this year and failed which perhaps might have been an obvious clue to its Booker long list inclusion. Eventually I took myself off with the book, a pot of tea and a Do Not Disturb sign as I determined to make progress.
The 1840s and Northamptonshire 'peasant poet' John Clare, of whom I confess I knew very little indeed,(though he does have his own blog ) is committed to High Beach private asylum in Epping Forest on the outskirts of London, under the care of the forward-thinking Dr Matthew Allen. Early success I discover has provided John Clare with unaccustomed wealth rapidly dissipated, with the help of the wrong company, into alcoholic fumes.
Dr Allen is a man harboring a past and many demons of his own, but his ideas for nursing mental health patients is way ahead of his time with listening therapies and a sadly doomed occupational therapy programme with its planned provision of wood-carving work for the in-patients.
John Clare's condition fluctuates from reasonably rational to completely insane as, deprived of his freedom and incarcerated apart from the source of his inspiration, namely the world at large, he descends into madness and falls victim to the old fashioned methods employed at the Lodge, an annex for the most disturbed patients.
In strolls a young Alfred Tennyson becoming a regular visitor to his brother Septimus, also an inmate. Unwittingly flaunting his freedom to roam in the outside world yet hardly seeming to appreciate it as we know John Clare might and rather unwisely investing heavily in Matthew Allen's ill-thought out wood-carving venture, Tennyson, soon revealed as a melancholic seems equally imprisoned by his depression.
Slowly the many forms of imprisonment take shape amongst the other characters in Adam Foulds's novel too.
Meanwhile John Clare is convinced he's Lord Byron and it really is downhill all the way once that happens to anyone in the 1840s surely.
Plenty of other inmates to ponder but also Hannah, Dr Allen's daughter effectively imprisoned in the asylum, which also serves as the family home, by her own inability to catch a marriageable man and becoming preoccupied with this to the exclusion of all else. Setting her cap at Tennyson was doomed to...well, I won't tell you but I'm sure his wife was called Emily.
That blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction seems to be a recurring feature in this year's Booker long list.
Given any opportunity, John Clare seeks nature at every turn,

'Watching this, being there, given time, the world revealed itself in silence, coming to him. Gently it breathed around him its atmosphere: vulnerable, benign, full of secrets, his. A lost thing returning. How it waited for him in eternity and almost knew him. He'd known and sung it all his life. Perception of it now, amid all his truancy and suffering, made his eyes thicken with warm tears.'

There was much I had to sit and read twice because this is a carefully crafted book, on reflection beautifully written and to really absorb and fathom the sheer depths of that takes time and effort. Adam Foulds clearly has the knack of the poetic, limpid prose so beloved by Booker judges and also by me sometimes but as I turned the final page I'll admit I had a bit of a 'so what was that all about moment' and the book has sat fermenting random thoughts at my right hand for over two weeks.
It just hadn't moved me as much as I thought it would and I was stymied, but also keen not to rush my thinking, not to allow my thoughts to be harried and cajoled into something half-coherent (it could have been much worse than this) for the sake of any Bookerthon schedule and producing something here.
I've stared at the cover some more, picked up and browsed Bedlam, London and Its Mad by Catharine Arnold while I awaited enlightenment, debated issues of  truth and reality versus fiction with myself and eventually I've come to the conclusion that this is a much better book than I had initially thought.
It  took a brief sojourn in the company of Ronald Blythe's The Bookman's Tale on Sunday morning for me to realise that; arriving as I did at one of those scales-drop-from-eyes moments and with it a sudden inrush of understanding about John Clare, about this book, about what Adam Foulds was doing and I rushed off, picked it up again and felt as if I was reading a different book.
I can't be sure but this might have been heavily influenced by Ronald Blyth informing me that Ted Hughes had read The Nightingale's Nest in his resonant, accented yet dulcet and mellifluously sensual tones (ahem...my assumption) at the unveiling of a tablet to John Clare in Westminster Abbey,

Up this green woodland-ride let’s softly rove,
And list the nightingale - she dwells just here.
Hush ! let the wood-gate softly clap, for fear
The noise might drive her from her home of love ;
For here I’ve heard her many a merry year -
At morn, at eve, nay, all the live-long day,
As though she lived on song...

Now I know, I know, novels should stand alone, ought to say just what they have to say and that's that, be judged on those merits alone, but who wants to read like that all the time?
Besides I'm not reviewing. Much of what I want and try to do here is to engage emotionally with what I've read and sometimes that means allowing a book time to tell me what it's doing, a second chance, a third chance even to work some magic, and the reading coincidences that have followed that final turn of the page with this one have been astonishing.
Suddenly John Clare is everywhere I look.
Without that self-induced phase of Keatsian negative capability I'd have missed a trick here and you will have to draw your own conclusions about what that might mean for Booker success or otherwise for The Quickening Maze. It's certainly echoed and resonated much in my mind and now I know a second full read would work well, a third even better perhaps, a first barely touches the sides. Booker long listers require that longevity to make it through to short listing and I have a feeling this one just might.
We got there in the end and it was all enough to make me explore some more of John Clare's poetry too, I'm quite taken with it and will definitely read some more and with apologies to John Clare for the third stanza...

The evening comes in with the wishes of love,
And the shepherd he looks on the flowers,
And thinks who would praise the soft song of the dove,
And meet joy in these dew-falling hours.

For Nature is love, and finds haunts for true love,
Where nothing can hear or intrude;
It hides from the eagle and joins with the dove,
In beautiful green solitude.

The hour comes in with the wishes of the dove
And the books they look on from the table
And thinks the dove, coo, it's time to decide
What's going to be on my Booker shortlist...

The Results

The nail-biting tension finally got the better of us and we trekked up to the Village Hall at about 4pm.
You sort of want to look but you don't want to, but anyway we did and it's been a year of glorious 2nds.
Firstly the Handmade Article
One more addition to the table after I'd 'staged' mine and left, and it happened to be a beautifully knitted Kaffe Fasset jumper which took Ist, so I don't feel too bad about hogging all the table space and there was a lovely comment about my wool and a happy silence about the knots.
Over to Jam where we scored the anticipated nul points alongside all those W.I. experts but we will be eating it for tea just the same.
Then the photos.
Rocky suitably unimpressed to have been unplaced and, adding to the insult, losing out to something feathered, an ostrich in fact which took Ist in the Portrait of an Animal section, though his chagrin somewhat assuaged with Bookhound's 2nd prize for his foal. That ostrich incidentally also winning the cup for Best Exhibit in the photo section but, as Bookhound pointed out to me, it was clearly used to being photographed and posing, whereas he had been struggling under very tricky circumstances in a freezing cold barn up at the farm with a new-born foal that wouldn't keep still.
My shot for the Garden class also nabbed a 2nd. The winner was commended for their eye-catching feature of a nicely placed bridge so I've put in an order for one of those ready for next year's picture.
As predicted there are some seriously serious and good photographers in the village and the same names cropped up again and again, so we feel quite pleased with our taking part.
After a few years when the Village Show nearly died from apathy and lack of interest it's been good to witness a resurgence. Local potter and artist Jennie Hale was giving a painting demonstration, lots of children joining in and Jennie had her original and very beautiful nature diaries , published in 2007 as The Nature Diary of an Artist, there for us to look at and browse.
But the tables always look so quaint, and the atmosphere in the hall when the Village, old and new, turns out is always warm and buzzing with chatter. Jim the Postie was there and he and I listened in to a real expert giving away all his tips about grooming onions for display; the answer might lie in the soil for a while but eventually it's all down to lifting them three weeks before the show and then lashings of talcum powder apparently.
And what would it all be without the children's entries, the miniature gardens (this one won first prize) and the Funny Face cakes.
Returning at 6pm to find that my two £1 strips of raffle tickets had netted three bottles of local cider and four free cups of coffee at Costa (The Year of the Flood...Happicuppa coffee chain = public enemy number one, Margaret Atwood would be appalled) was a bonus, and finally, what a good thing Mr Spur asked for our sage advice about his choice of carrots.

The Staging

So we played it canny this year.
Usually Bookhound nips up to the Village Hall at 8am and gets our exhibits 'staged' (actually he's never known that that is what he's doing) but this year due to a delay in sorting out the cleaning of the jar of jam (noooooo not white spirit...no meths anywhere, so in the end lighter fuel) we didn't get there until half an hour before the cut off point of 12 midday.
Good chance to clock the opposition and I'll admit my jar of jam is feeling very nervous in amongst all those.
But I thought I'd offset it quite nicely there, slightly set back and with a 'plain label' as per the rules which obviously no one else takes any notice of. Whipped out a little cloth and gave it a final buff up and wished it luck and went off to 'stage' the photos.
To my dismay, someone came along when my back was turned and organised them all into neat rows.
I just think the drama of the pose has been lost and if there's a fingerprint on that jar I'll be....
Onto the photos and look who we've entered in Portrait of an Animal...
Forget that budgie, it's not ours, but there's Rocky and a ferret.
I have a feeling Bookhound's foal will steal the show, I'll show you that later.
We had a wander round and marveled at the pure, wonderful village-ness of it all, as a retired local farmer we know asked us, in broad Devon accent, which of his carrots we thought he should display... as if we'd know better than he.
Anyway we reckoned these two.
The beans were pretty incredible
and we really should have had the courage to put some of our apples in...next year.
Not quite a level playing field in the Handmade Article class but perhaps I'll win something for 'item taking up most table space.'
If you'd seen me trying to tie in loose ends and conceal the knots at 10 am this morning you'd have laughed and I fully expect to be 'found out' in judges comments.
More later when the hall re-opens at 3.30pm.

Inner Child - September

Lest we forget, it's also Inner Child reading this weekend and the arrival of Roland Chambers's biography of Arthur Ransome seemed like the clearest sign possible that I should perhaps finally be remedying a childhood omission.
I have never read Swallows and Amazons.
I suspect I was far too wrapped up in wanting to get a tuck box and be away to Malory Towers to play lacrosse, or be off on a Malcolm Saville Lone Pine adventure to be worrying about getting wet and tramping about in the Lake District.
Now I'm overcoming heaven knows what after all your dire appraisals to even open it, but I've paid for it...
Bookhound read and loved Swallows and Amazons through a bout of chickenpox, so his library copy probably had to be fumigated, but he recalls total immersion in Arthur Ransome's world because he was a fisherboy who spent many hours messing about on rivers and boats.
Amongst Bookhound's most favourite of books now, a signed copy of  Arthur Ransome's Rod and Line, a little anthology of his collected writings for the Manchester Guardian,

'There seems to be a mistaken idea that the centre of the town is some Town Hall, or Public Library, or Square decorated with political gods in stone or bronze, when, if the truth were known, the whole town is grouped about some little shop where a man will find, in the window, boots and pike tackle, Mayflies and flat irons, and behind the counter a fisherman like himself.'

Me, well perhaps I'd prefer a bookshop, but this was 1929, things were different though I'll admit that the fisherman in this family remains completely enamored if we do happen to stumble upon a lone fishing shop on our travels. Like I need many pairs of knitting needles and a great deal of wool to allow for choice when the knitting muse strikes, he needs a fishing rod and a different reel wound with different line for every occasion it would seem...though they do all look the same to me.
In the end I ordered that lovely hardback copy of Swallows and Amazons with the original cover, just because I had to and I'll be reading this over this weekend and probably beyond or might it all strike that duffer note? I guess if Mollie Panter - Downes caused trouble then I won't be alone in giggling at a poor child blessed with the name of Titty.
More from the village show later no doubt, but whilst we await the judges' deliberations on my jam...I can hear it now...'do try to be more careful, rather too many pips per cubic inch' ... is anyone else Inner Child reading too?

Jam and Jerusalem

I'll admit to being a very recent convert to the TV programme Jam and Jerusalem, in fact just this new series and mainly because I was wedged and propped upright on the sofa, nursing the freezer blocks on my lumbar spine and the remote control was on the other side of the room.
The athletics had finished, surprisingly we hadn't dropped the baton and my baby llama jumper was nearing completion but things were tense. The pattern just didn't seem to be allowing enough stitches for the neck to fit over my head and I was on my third round of unpicking - re-picking up - re-knitting , the neckband was getting increasingly ragged and the needles were getting bigger and bigger. In the end I carried on, cast off using a telegraph pole and it will still have to be a stylish neck with buttons because it wasn't going to withstand a fourth attempt.
It was all too much effort to get up so I just kept watching Jam and Jerusalem and really enjoyed it. Sue Johnston brings something remarkable to anything she stars in and there were some moments of pure Devon comedy.
But it's the village show here this weekend and as I'd been hobbling along to Boots on my way back from FibreFest to try and find a back support last week I had met a friend, a midwife I used to work with, who also deals with the show entries.
'Get home and get some ice on that' she said so I did, but she also pressed the show schedule into my hand.
Incidentally I went into Boots and had to ask where the back supports were, and where do you think?
Yes, that's right, the lowest shelf right on the floor.
'Isn't that a bit self-defeating' I said ' surely you don't sell very many?'
Anyway I perused the schedule and decided the baby llama jumper wasn't going to cut the mustard in the knitting section but we could probably make a concerted effort in the photography classes and I'd just plunge right in with some jam as well.
This is for fun and folly really, 20p per entry and I doubt we can expect to steal the first prize, let alone walk off with the Perpetual Cup for anything this year, there must be as many professional photographers per square foot in the village as there are professional jam-makers. It's the taking part that counts isn't it....of course never forgetting the year the Tinker won Best in Handicrafts with his tapestry the year after I had snatched it for a pair of socks.
I'd already decided I couldn't possibly enter the cheating strawberry jam, the WI judges would spot the Quik-Jel at twenty paces and I'd be publicly shamed, possibly served with a life-time ban or something, so as Bookhound went off to watch Plymouth Argyle lose hopelessly to Sheffield Wednesday (Green Arrmee...seen the advert?)  I set off on a circuit of the back field.
I spent an age watching this butterfly on the way...could this be my entry in Class 85 Photograph Close-Up (Macro)?
I wrestled two pounds of blackberries from the attentions of a million wasps, a few apples off the tree from the attentions of a few million more and hey presto it was jammed in no time, but there are rules to all this.
No manufacturer's names allowed on the jars.
No jam in wrong-shaped old mango chutney jars.
No scum.
Rolling boil and oozing pectin so quickly reached setting point.
Centred my wax discs immediately and perfectly on my perfectly set jam and covered the surface completely ...to prove I understand the principles of preserving.
Cellophane lids on and trimmed.
Jam on top shelf with sign saying 'DO NOT EAT!'
The seeds aren't quite as rife as the picture makes out (lose points for that) it's the light reflecting from my sparkling and luminous preserve, but now apparently I have to polish the jar with methylated spirits and then not get any fingerprints on it at all (more points lost) and the labels must be plain, neat and placed straight and centrally between the seams of the jar. Much to Bookhound's horror, the WI judges will be allowed to dunk a spoon in and eat some, probably all queuing up with their toast and crumpets because we've tested some and it's pure autumn. Too late I discover it's supposed to be filled to within 3mm of the top of the jar, I think I'm on about 5mm...possibly 6, heaven knows how many points lost for that infringement.
In an effort to check out the rules for exhibiting jam I typed 'WI jam' into google and found out about travelling to rock festivals in Wisconsin and how to jam my neighbour's WiFi which all seems a bit easier than this.
Exhibits may be staged from 8am. Staged??? Are there things I don't know about placing a jar of jam on a table?
Live reports of progress over the weekend, it'll be tense.

The Day War Broke Out redux

3rd September 2009 and the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.
It's three years since I posted this story on here so I think there might be a few people who missed it first time round and forgive me anyone else who has read it, but I thought I'd post it again because this was seventy years ago today too and it's one of my favourites of the Tinker's wartime memories recounted in his little book Bugle Boy. (he's that wee one on the left of the three on the cover)
The Tinker (father of dgr) joined the Royal Marines as a Boy Bugler at the age of 14 in May 1939 and within weeks of the outbreak of war he was drafted to the battleship HMS Iron Duke up in Scapa Flow.
In many respects this is a child's eye view of a grown man's war, he noticed the things a 14 year old would, but he was still in the thick of it on active service and so I think he gives it a very special and unique voice.

The day that World War II really did break out is vivid in my memory, not because it was a momentous occasion, but because Hitler really did annoy Herbie Tydd and I that day.
It was a Sunday of course and Sundays meant Church Parade.Those who remember the halcyon days before the war know that Church Parade was a spectacle, the parade ground at Eastney Barracks in Portsmouth would be awash with Marines and the band would be there in full ceremonial dress uniform. After Church the public would flock to watch the band put on a bit of a performance.
Herbie and I had been detailed for the band that day, our very first assignment in full dress uniform.I was in the second row of  side drums, but Herbie, the blue eyed boy, was on tenor drums; a special honour as you got to wear the leopard skin, white kid gauntlets and were able to perform all manner of dextrous movements with the drum sticks, you had to be expert to do that.So there we were,14 years old and bursting with pride, Regimental drums, silver bugles, full dress uniform and white helmets, ready to perform before our very first audience.
We were in Church and about half way through the service when on orderly marched down the aisle and whispered to the Padre who then announced "We are now at war with Germany". He then proceeded to tell us that under the circumstances the rest of the parade would be cancelled and that we should make our way quietly back to barracks to await further orders.
So there! We never did get our debut performing in full dress uniform before an adoring public.The disappointment and chagrin was awful and Herbie and I never ever forgave Mr Chamberlain for that, couldn't he have waited just another couple of hours!
Now I swear this is true, but later that day we had our first wartime directive and it was "to drown all cats". We had two in our block and one had just had kittens, they had to be drowned though, orders is orders. I have never understood the thinking behind that, I believe it was the mistaken thought that we were about to be subjected to immediate air raids and therefore didn't want rabid cats everywhere.
I don't know if that was the true reason, the war was very odd at times.

Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldon

"I'm always concerned when people, finding out that I'm a writer, apologize and say, 'I'm not much of a reader actually. I know I ought but I just don't seem able to find the time' and then go on to tell me how they feel obliged to finish any book they begin. Well, of course, I say, you will be reluctant to open one in the first place, knowing what it might entail. It isn't meant to be like that, I assure them. If you begin a book and you don't like it, just throw it away....you must be prepared to discard...you have my permission, even my encouragement"

I hope you realized that's a quote and not me talking, but oh my word, there is nothing like Fay Weldon to cheer the most dismal of August days in Devon. I heard Fay Weldon interviewed at Dartington back in 2006 and I've never forgotten what she said when asked about her feminist writing back in the 1960s ' I meant what I said...at the time.'
So as the rain lashed down on our Somme-like garden, the wind howled and the weather vane clanked and squealed around on the roof (there it is in more clement times) reminding us that it had done that day and night all last winter, and yet again we'd forgotten to send the agile Kayaker up there with the WD40 while he was home, I spared a little thought for all those happy campers out there and settled down to to read Fay Weldon's latest novel Chalcot Crescent.
What would we do without Fay Weldon?
How would we cope?
Who'd observe it all and cast that just but wildly imaginative and satiric eye over English proceedings quite so efficiently and stop us all taking ourselves and life too seriously ...just for a little while, surely that's essential and allowed, pop a few little controversies out there to be mulled over while they're at it.
I'm hoping that was also the intention of the book because there was a chuckle a page as I read, as Fay Weldon inhabits the life of Frances, 'her never-born younger sister', a deliciously and highly unreliable narrator essentially living Fay's real life. We could almost be back in the land of J.M.Coetzee  for the convolutions of narrative identity but for the fact you'll laugh out loud a whole lot more at Chalcot Crescent than you might over Summertime.
Chalcot Crescent fondly termed a posh ghetto these days and home to the blingerati, cheferati and rockstarati and doubtless a few MPs for good measure, average house price 2.25 million, but glitterati be very afraid for it may not always be thus, just imagine...
The year is 2013 and Frances, (Fay Weldon's real name incidentally is Franklin) now 81, is living on the dregs of her reputation as a copy-writer, novelist and one-time national treasure and in fear of the debt-collectors who are perpetually hammering at the antique door-knocker of her crumbling Primrose Hill home. Reflecting on five decades of history, with each having chosen its own anxiety, offers Frances plenty of past to chew over, how about calling the child in for tea in the 1960s

'Venetia, come in, your avocado is ready.'

But Frances also copes with the present, the NUG (National Unity Government) is in power with its exhortations to the people to Hug the NUG , CiviSecure maintain law and order in their ominous brown shirts, National Meat Loaf is the staple of the dinner table and rumoured to consist of the reconstituted elderly who have become far too much of a nuisance to be of any further use beyond a fritter.
Opening Margaret Atwood's futuristic and dystopian The Year of the Flood next has been a real revelation because there are moments that chime in each book and I have been completely taken with this unwitting foray into the genre that Margaret Atwood prefers to call 'speculative fiction'.
Two writers with abundant and expansive imaginations at work.
Fay Weldon for her part has decided that fat is the new thin,

' the fatter you are the warmer you can keep'

and dairy herds are back in fashion

'...forget dangerous methane-emitting ruminants - we're hungry and if we don't eat, and we don't have jobs, we riot and burn things down and frighten politicians so much they up and go away.'

Life had really never been the same since the 2009 Crunch and the subsequent collapse in the art market,

'When the Crunch hit in 2009, people stopped buying paintings and decided they could as well tear pictures out of old Sunday supplements and bung those up on their walls.'

'the middle-class tax riots of 2011,'

'the Thames Barrier had failed in 2012 and the flooded area had more or less been abandoned

But keeping her extended and fairly extensive family in her sights is also a tall order with a motley crew of ex's, offspring of 50% unknown origins and their own choices in partners too...and their ex's and their offspring of 50% unknown origins. Plots, conspiracies and subterfuge are rife all conducted under the ailing CCTV system and Fay Weldon builds her dystopian malfunctioning society around it all and through Frances's highly dubious vision.
It might all be far-fetched and occasionally hilarious but who can know?
The exploration of the repeating cycles of history were enough to make me stop and think; the age of excess, the collapse, the age of austerity signaling in the repressive regime of a New Republic and then

'some equivalent of Charles II will bring back Nell Gwynn and oranges, the dancing girls and the maypoles and we will all be sexy and happy again. Till the banks collapse or whatever form it takes, and the cycle continues in sackcloth and ashes.'

It seems a cliche to say this is vintage Weldon, but it is. It's that gloriously unabashed, exuberant style that I associate with her; unrestrained, if Fay Weldon wants to say it she will and to hell if it shocks, there's always wisdom but none of it ever flies in your face and slaps you, it's just there to take or leave and I enjoyed every minute.
Final word to that national treasure Frances...or is it Fay?

'I have always used fiction to get to the heart of the matter, to discover what it is I know. It is up to the facility analysts, when they finally get around to reading this text, to decide what is memoir, what is fact, what is truth (Pilate-like I wash my hands) or some embroidery of the truth.'

Sunday Confessions on a Tuesday

Don't you just hate the way these book buying sites control your clicking finger?
So there I was, Laura had talked me out of reading Kafka...what on earth was I thinking, men waking up as cockroaches...did I need that, perhaps not now...then Joan comes along and says I must read him and it's one of the many wonderful things about asking a question of all of you.
I shall be trying Kafka eventually because I want to be able to say Kafkaesque and I can't until I've read him according to Mike.
Mention of Arthur Ransome and Swallows and Amazons (Erika says no) had thrown up one recent but shabby paperback copy here and I knew it was the book to try for my next Inner Child read but I could only read it in hardback with 'that' cover.

Is everyone this fussy?
Finances permitting, does a book have to be just right?
Off to Amazon 'just to see' and luckily there is a hardback edition in print and available so that was easy.
Then your eye wanders over the screen, and drat and double drat, they've flashed up books relevant to your previous purchases.
They saw me coming a mile away when they pasted Stefan Zweig's autobiography right in my eyeline, I am a marketing tool's dream attachment, no messing, no fixing, no lining up the notches and turning clockwise, I just click immediately into place, or my clicking finger does.
'Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, but it was his biographies that expressed his full genius, recreating for his international audience the Elizabethan age, the French Revolution, the great days of voyages and discoveries. In this autobiography he holds the mirror up to his own age, telling the story of a generation that was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history. Zweig attracted to himself the best minds and loftiest souls of his era: Freud, Yeats, Borgese, Pirandello, Gorky, Ravel, Joyce, Toscanini, Jane Addams, Anatole France, and Romain Rolland are but a few of the friends he writes about.'

How could I resist that?
In fact how could I have even waited this long to discover a book by a writer I admire so profoundly and when The World of Yesterday arrived I was dipping into it immediately, it's readable, seems to be wonderfully insightful and self-deprecating, in fact vintage Stefan Zweig, the man I feel  I have come to know through his writing and I'm intrigued to know if this will turn out to be the real man but I've had to force a put-down because...
Not purchased but here thanks to Bloomsbury and I'm already swimming around nicely in The Year of the Flood by my friend Peggy Margaret Atwood.
I think this might be the first novel to emerge since I finished that grand Atwood-athon three years ago, just before I started dovegreyreader, in fact it was Margaret Atwood who led me to Margaret Laurence amongst others who made me start writing all this, blame her. My head was so full of everything I'd read, it just had to spill out somewhere or I'd be in trouble.
Just how does Margaret Atwood do it, is a question I am asking myself over and again as I'm reading and if you enjoyed The Handmaid's Tale and more specifically Oryx and Crake, which I did, I suspect you'll love The Year of the Flood too. Oryx and Crake the book which turned me from an occasional Atwoodian into a devoted one and sent me back to tackle The Blind Assassin again after a failure or two. I hate to admit it but I may have reached that point where I am beyond any attempt at objective,  reasoning or criticism about Margaret Atwood's writing.
I just fall in and wallow around in the deep end loving it, sorry.
Only a six more sleeps until RevCheryl and I pitch up at The Year of the Flood event at Ely Cathedral, expect fulsome accounts and Marg09 is a blogger now too, check this out.